Assorted Notes

FRIDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2014

One morning when I was five years old, I sat in a tree in our front yard waiting for the kindergarten bus to pick me up. My mother was in the kitchen making me a sandwich. The next moment the bus stopped in front of our house. I jumped out of the tree, opened the garden gate, and got into the bus.

As the bus was pulling away, I saw my mother standing in the front door with my sandwich in her hands.

It broke my heart. Years later I told her how deeply it affected me.

I am now 43. This morning I made myself a sandwich, kissed my wife goodbye, and cycled to the subway station.

While waiting for the train, I put the plastic bag with my sandwich on a bench. I reminded myself not to forget the bag (I easily get lost in conversation with myself).

That’s when I remembered the incident with my mother and the sandwich when I was five.

I wondered how I would have felt if my wife had made me the sandwich and I forgot the sandwich on the bench.

To my great pleasure, I realised it would have been deeply upsetting.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2014

This morning at the tea shop I met an elderly gentleman from some Western country. (He was wearing a sleeveless vest, so his pink shoulders revealed his geographic origin from quite some distance.) After he subtly flirted in English with the owner of the business and with her mother, he turned to me.

“Are you an English teacher?” he inquired friendly enough.

On my confirmation, he noted that almost all the foreigners he meets seem to be teachers.

“There are some engineers as well,” I informed him.

When I left the shop, I couldn’t help but shake my head to the strangeness of the question.

Imagine the first question someone asks you is, “Do you make money by cooking food in a restaurant?” Or, “Do you make money fixing cars?” Or perhaps, “Do you make money by representing people in lawsuits?”

I find it most curious that people consider it normal when they first meet you to ask, for all practical purposes, “How do you make money?”

Would it be rude to ask, “What’s it to you?”

Of course I understand why people ask each other these types of questions. You have limited opportunity to identify someone as friend, enemy or neutral; how someone makes money is admittedly an easy start. (As if anyone would admit they steal cars or rob banks to put food on the table.)

Nevertheless, I would have enjoyed giving the man a breakdown of my writing projects that don’t make much money but that holds a lot of value to me, and even of other ways I do make money, but that can’t be expressed in one-word labels such as “English teacher” or “engineer”.

It would also have been good to mention that many Westerners only work as English teachers in Taiwan to be able to travel or to be able to spend time on their music, or on other artistic ambitions.

When he asked me if I taught at the local primary school, a few blocks from the tea shop, I said no, I work at a language centre in the commercial district.

“It’s just a part-time job,” I added, “but it keeps me alive.”

______________________

MONDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2014

This morning it occurred to me that the site medium.com has become an exclusive platform for writers in their twenties.

Five seconds later I changed my opinion. “Bullshit,” I said to myself. “It’s like saying books have become the exclusive domain of young people because many people in their twenties write books.”

“You have to stand up to be counted,” I reminded myself. Or rather, you have to stand up to stand a chance of being counted.

If you hide in a dark corner, you won’t be counted.

If you camouflage yourself, nobody is going to notice you.

If you lie flat on your stomach, behind a bush, you will be ignored.

Is it important to be counted?

Fact is, many people are happy enough to live their lives without being recognised as anything more than mere mortals.

But, if you want to be recognised by at least a few people for something you say or do, especially if you regard what you say or do as having value, then you’d better get to your feet.

______________________

SUNDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2014

A digital video clip consists of millions of bits of data, but these bits of data move so fast and are grouped in such a way that the illusion is created of moving images – that makes sense, and that is familiar to the viewer to some extent.

Consciousness of self is perhaps something similar. There is no fixed point that can be isolated as “the self”. The awareness that you are a person with a core personality that remains more or less the same is an illusion created by constantly changing consciousnesses. However, these consciousnesses replace one another so quickly – like the bits of data of a digital video clip – that for all intents and purposes it feels as if you possess a single consciousness-of-self.

[This idea was inspired by something I read in the book, Guide to Philosophy, by C.E.M. Joad.]

———–

On WEDNESDAY, 19 JUNE 2013 I read what the Scottish philosopher David Hume said about cause.

My conclusion that day: “The good news … no, the bad news is you don’t really exist. The good news is it doesn’t really matter, because you believe you exist, and in the strange way that experiences are seen as truth, your daily experiences confirm your belief that you do, in fact, exist.”

______________________

SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER 2014

Some white Afrikaners are of the opinion that they should never have given up their political power, and that fellow Afrikaners who were of the opinion two or three decades ago that apartheid was an unjust system and that South Africa had to become a multi-party democracy were “traitors to their own people”.

The only people who won’t acknowledge the current government’s corruption probably have their own snouts in the trough, but to jump to the conclusion that the previous regime should never have ended because the current government is corrupt is to deceive yourself and to expose yourself as intellectually lazy or dishonest, or both.

Apartheid and everything it meant in practice had to be terminated because it was immoral, and because it corrupts the oppressor’s and exploiter’s being to the core to oppress and exploit other people.

It was also to everybody’s advantage to end apartheid with a relatively peaceful political settlement, because if it did not end in this way it would have had to be defeated in a struggle that would have been bloodier and more violent than it had been up until 1994, in which the white Afrikaner would have lost more than just political power.

The current group of politicians who abuse their positions of power to rob the state and to deceive the public ought to be criticised as a matter of principle. It is the civic duty of South Africans of all colours and political affiliation to criticise incompetence, corruption and other cases of wicked behaviour. Yet, some white Afrikaners find it strange that people who preached a few decades ago that apartheid had to end now also complain about the ANC government. “Isn’t this what you wanted!” they write in the comment sections of articles on the internet.

What “they” wanted – these liberals and progressives of twenty or thirty years ago – was for a morally unjustifiable system of repression to end, because it was immoral, and because it would have corrupted the white Afrikaner to the core – in fact, the moral cancer had already permeated deeply in many cases.

What these liberal and progressive people still want is a non-racial, democratic republic. To blame them for the government in 2014 being corrupt and incompetent because two or three decades ago they said apartheid had to end, and may even have worked towards this goal, is to bark up the wrong tree.

______________________