Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 18 JANUARY 2006

A strange sensation hit me tonight after my tutoring session: envy. Stranger still was the person about whom I felt envious: Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the “Buddha”.

The sensation stemmed from a conversation I had had with a student in her mid-thirties whom I meet twice weekly for an English class. At one point during our session, she told me about the new religion espoused by her ex-husband. I said it sounded like a particular truth, rather than a universal truth.

“Universal truth?” she inquired.

“Yes,” I replied, “something that no person can deny.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe you can answer that question.” (She is after all the student.)

“Love,” she tentatively replied. “All people believe in love.”

“Love is a virtue,” I corrected her, “not really a truth.”

After about a minute, during which she mostly talked about something else, I was ready with an answer. “People are born. People die. Those are examples of universal truths that no one can deny.”

A comment from her about Buddhism reminded me of a tenet of that religion which I have always considered to have a universal value. “All suffering is caused by desire,” I recited. “That could also count as a universal truth.”

Conscientious as she is, she wrote it down in her notebook. “What do you think of that?” she asked.

“I think it’s not that simple,” I answered. “Say I want to assist someone in need and act on this desire, but suffer painful consequences because of my assistance, where did I go wrong? Should I not have helped the person in need? Am I being punished because of my benevolence?”

“The Buddha said …” she responded, but I couldn’t quite follow the rest of what she was trying to say (she has a tendency to correct herself several times in the course of a sentence, and I started thinking about my dinner that would soon follow).

“That’s interesting,” I said when she stopped talking.

The session ended shortly after our conversation about the Buddha. As I was exiting the classroom, the sensation I interpreted as envy hit my consciousness. “There’s no doubt that the Buddha was much wiser than I am, and certainly a lot smarter,” I thought out loud. “If I could disappear for a few years into the jungle, and grow my beard and hair and never brush my teeth – who knows what a person can come up with?”

On the way back from the vegetables and meat place, I continued my train of thought. “Maybe I should read up about this man, the Buddha, and about the ideas he has given the world.”

The reason I want to learn more about the Buddha is not to ultimately present myself to the world as a Buddhist. My identity, as I know myself at this stage of my life and as I present myself to people is adequate. I have no need to say “I am …” and then to complete the sentence with reference to some or other religion. Religion for millions of people is an irreplaceable determinant of identity. Religious people also claim that the religions they adhere to are the carriers of universal truths – when in fact they are the carriers of a significant amount of cultural taboos, preferences, prejudices and rules that are presented as “truths”. For many people, however, the search for an identity is more important than truth. Religion X then becomes the truth for Person Y because he is a follower of Religion X, instead of him being a follower of Religion X because, as he might explain, “After careful consideration and years of study, I have found this religion to provide the most comprehensive understanding of life as I know it, and is therefore worthy of my adherence to its beliefs.”

Nevertheless, the reason I want to read more about Mr Gautama is because I am curious to know what ideas a man comes up with if he spends years living in a jungle, with little or no contact with other people. How would your understanding of life and human existence change if you lived in the bush alone for months at a time, never shaving, never brushing your teeth, never washing, never laundering your clothes, sleeping on the ground, drinking water from a river, getting sick but not going to the doctor, developing a toothache but not going to the dentist; if you ate leaves and roots and fruit, and no meat, and you spent your days and nights mostly sitting under a tree contemplating questions concerning human existence?

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Some time ago I asked: Desert or City? Appear or Disappear? Considering where I come from and the world I am familiar with, I chose City, and therefore to appear, rather than to disappear like a modern ascetic to contemplate in silence and in my own time human existence.

I also said, if I choose City, if I choose to appear as the person that I had discovered in my head and in my body, and as the person I defined myself to be and whom I choose to be, I can no longer do so alone. I need a partner, I noted down in some journal.

A few weeks after writing the above thoughts, I met a young woman. Within a few months we discovered that we see things in each other that we had not been able to see in other people we had met up to that point in our lives. We also believed we could find something in each other that neither of us had found in another person.

Thus my life was to continue in the City, and my appearance as “Brand Smit” was indefinitely renewed.

Still I wonder: What would a person discover if they enter the wilderness for any length of time, without the comfort of a dentist or a doctor, or the luxury of running water and a flush toilet and toilet paper, or the entertainment provided by TV, or the internet, or newspapers and books, or friends, or movie theatres? Indeed, what would you find without love – if you have a vague idea how to find what you cannot necessarily articulate?

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MONDAY, 16 JANUARY 2006

I stand behind my computer every day, and as I reach the end of another page full of text, or the end of a chapter, or the end of a poem, or a lesson of some textbook, I remind myself not to become too excited: there are after all hundreds of pages of text that still need to be reviewed, and there are more than a dozen notebooks with written material that still needs to be typed. Then it would certainly be good if I can review my poems “one final time”, and there are half a dozen textbook ideas that I still want to work on, or that has to be completed, and short stories, and greeting cards and calendars and translations of completed Afrikaans text and translations of material that still has to be typed and processed … That the projects that will be listed in this document are both monsters and the foundation on which I build my future is by now old news in the life of Brand Smit.

This afternoon I confronted myself with a question: When did this happen? When did it happen that I overwhelmed myself to this degree with what I so lovingly refer to as my “projects”? Five years ago, I had vague ideas of a collection of poetry and a book about my opinions on the human experience on this planet; there were also language textbooks I wanted to write because … well, because it was possible, and because I thought some of my ideas for textbooks were better than some of the books I had to use. Then, in 2001, I decided to trim down my teaching schedule and use the extra time to work on projects I had been talking about for a long time. That year I completed my first textbook, Countries of the World – which is supposed to be the first book in a series of four or five. By the end of 2001, I had also started working on a phonics book for young learners. Lists of words and phrases for my Chinese studies had also been compiled by the second half of 2001, which formed the basis of another project that I feverishly started working on at the beginning of 2004. Material that eventually became “Personal Agenda, Book One” had been gathering dust for years before I finally started the editing process at the beginning of 2003. By the time I had completed Book One (June 2003), I knew I was working on a project that would surpass all others in importance. I continued writing essays and notes that could become Books Two and Three and Four and Five and so on. I had also been trying my hand at poetry since the mid-nineties, and every couple of months had seen some new titles, or edited or rewritten versions of older attempts. Meanwhile, I had also written a few short stories. I had also thought of a series of stories for young learners with a focus on vocabulary and comprehension questions one day and as a matter of course I had to immediately start working on it. In between I came up with a series of greeting cards, and since I have always had a slight obsession with dates, why not also a range of unconventional calendars? And in the meantime, I am writing and typing my fingers numb on Books Four, Five, Six …

So it came that I started drawing up a list this afternoon, Monday, 16 January 2006, to once again – for the sake of alleviating anxiety and possibly to work up some motivation – review my ideas of the last five years, to see exactly what it is I am doing and to see where I am hopefully heading.

My hope has always been that I will be able to finish off the proverbial everything within the much vaunted “next six months”, regardless of the number of hours in a typical day, and regardless of my human limitations. So I thought: It has taken me five years to come up with this list of projects, and to have done the work that has so far been completed. Would it be inappropriate to think that it will take me another five years to complete everything? It is true that it is a lot of work. It is true that I work alone on every single project. It is true that it is a broad range of projects: there are essays about personal politics and religious beliefs combined with social criticism and the occasional everyday event; language textbooks for a spectrum of students ranging from young learners to adults who want to expand their language skills and knowledge of the world to people who say, “Give me everything I need to know. I’ll do it in my own time”; there is poetry that expresses how I experience life; and there are giant calendars that reduce daily life to small squares on the wall. It is also possible that the seeds of long-term financial independence have already been planted. So what if another five years pass before the last item is crossed out on the current list? What I don’t complete during the next six months will be completed in the six months after that, and what is not completed over those six months, will be completed in the following six, and then the six months after that – until each and every textbook has been written and published, and each and every poem has been reviewed ad nauseam, and every opinion has been polished to a sparkling finish, and a stack of books can be placed on the table that all say: This is how I see life.

And at the end I will still disappear into the nothingness – the paper all the textbooks were printed on eventually recycled for other uses; all the copies of my poetry collection packed away in boxes; Books One all the way up to Seven … bundled together with other old books on dusty shelves. But at least I will be able to say: I didn’t give up. I said I think it can be done in a different way than what had been prescribed, and it took me five years, or ten, but “financial independence through creativity” has been victorious!

Everything comes down to this: Brand Smit has chosen his profession. He has chosen not to become a human resources manager, a preacher or a psychologist – he has decided to become a master of projects. The main reason why he decided to become a master of projects is because he had felt from an early age that he had do something with his life. Leaving behind his twenties in notebooks and attempts at poetry he also became convinced of the fact that he had something to say. To say what he wants to say, he needs to spend his days and nights in a particular way. And to live a life that is conducive to the work he feels the need to do, this he knows and understands, he has to earn money in ways that do not appear in a high school guidance teacher’s career book. Thus: Projects.

Until as recently as this afternoon I thought of my projects as work that I had started years ago that I have yet to complete. This has led to me viewing myself as someone who is behind with his work, someone who is still busy with work that he should have been done with months ago – even three or four years ago in some cases. That changes today.

Some of the projects I have started in the last five years are commercial in nature, others are more personal. Some projects have already been completed; most have not. The work on the unfinished projects continues, and will continue until it has been completed, even if it takes me another six months … or another five years. The list is long enough.

The list: […]

It is today (already) Tuesday, 17 January 2006 (00:12), the seventh anniversary of the day I arrived on this island. Seven years and still counting – until it is no longer conducive.

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