Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE 2005

Why do I write? Why am I sitting on a train? Why do I clip my nails, eat breakfast, put bags of garbage in the corner of my kitchen, move my furniture around, hang pictures on my walls, look at the number on the scale, remind myself that I must go for a haircut later this afternoon, and try to be friendly and polite?

Because … seriously? Because? Better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier … better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier … better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier! Cheap train, express – a track remains a track!

Boxes full of junk that can’t be discarded, wet towels, new bedding to replace torn sheets and old pillow cases, people that rush around you making a noise in your ears, eating and drinking and smiling and buying and eating and rushing around and sitting and sleeping and buying and eating and drinking and rushing around and lying and talking and eating and drinking and sleeping and buying and making a noise and rushing around and eating and sleeping and sitting and talking … Sex and death, and in between people try to convince themselves that other things are also important.

Art, entertainment, garbage, people and trains and flowers, cigarettes and vegetable soup … Oh god! Please do not let this be my final entry!

* * *

Truth and lies. Am I on the train?

(It is 15:37.) No.

Sometimes I die in the truth and am born again in the lie. Sometimes the lie is more important than the truth. Sometimes the lie has more value than the truth.

Before the word “truth” came into existence, the truth had already existed. What we call the truth is thus more or less accurate; it corresponds more or less to the real truth; it strikes the bull’s-eye more or less.

Am I on the train?

(It is 15:42.) Yes.

What is the point? My environment has changed. According to a pre-arranged plan I took an action, and my truth changed. At 15:37 the truth was that I was not on the train. At 15:42 the truth was exactly the opposite – I was on the train.

One can be smart and ask for a proper definition of “train”. Or you can debate the correct use of the preposition “on”. “On” would strictly speaking mean on top of the train, on the roof. You have after all entered the train. It is therefore more correct to say that you are “in” the train, right?

No degree of semantic mudslinging will however change the truth that my truth changed between 15:37 and 15:42.

THURSDAY, 30 JUNE 2005

Yesterday I passed a bulldozer that had been loaded on a truck. For a moment I was deeply impressed with the machine, all the tubes and arms and steel and dry mud bearing witness to a hard day’s work. I realised I did not know the person who had designed the machine. I knew absolutely nothing about him or her! The thought did not upset me too much though, because I could make the reasonable assumption that the machine had in fact been designed, and that it had been designed by a person, and that this person actually exists, or had existed at some point.

I then realised that I had no idea of the people who had built the machine …

* * *

Do I live in a time of war or peace? I myself have never been involved in a war. I have never seen war first-hand. Most of the people I know and with whom I have contact on a daily basis have also never seen or experienced war. It therefore appears to be a reasonable assumption that I live in a time of peace. Yet, I see footage of war on TV. I have also met people who had experienced war first-hand, although they had experienced it years before our paths crossed.

The point of this piece of text is neither war nor peace – it is to illustrate a phenomenon common in human communication. A question is asked, and without much hesitation we usually continue to provide the most appropriate response. But was the question a reasonable one? What assumptions were made that the person who is supposed to provide an answer would not necessarily agree with if they had to think about it for a while? Were there implications inherent to the question that the responder would not be in accord with had they realised it? For example, what is “war”? How does the interviewer define a “time of peace”? What answer would be correct? Would opinion outweigh factual accuracy in this case? What would be a reasonable opinion and what sophistry?

Questions and answers (or opinion) are ways in which we collect information about ourselves, the environment we inhabit, the time in which we live, and the people with whom we share the environment. Questions, or how the question is asked, sometimes influence the answer – or how the questions are answered.

Last sentence: information is important; information is gathered by asking questions; accurate, sensible and reasonable answers are the most common result of well-formulated, reasonable and meaningful questions.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE 2005

After years of thinking about himself and about life, a man has decided who he wants to be, where he wants to live and in what style, how much money he can be content with, and so on.

Then he meets a woman and they start a relationship. During the course of several months he spends with her, he forms an idea of what her vision looks like of a nice house. Some aspects correspond with his ideas. Other items he regards as perhaps too conspicuously “bourgeois”. He has also developed over the years an aversion to decor that seems to have been selected from a catalogue, and he is reminded of a Fight Club quote: “Flipping through catalogues, deciding which coffee table defines me the best.”

This man is comfortable making a political argument out of a coffee table. Still, he loves the woman, and her vision of a nice house … is beautiful, stylish, aesthetically pleasing and warm. His question to himself: Should he admit that her suggestions of how to turn an apartment into a home are not in conflict with his basic idea of a pleasant living space that pre-dates her presence in his life, or should he continue to defend his vision of an intellectual’s lair to the last coffee table splinter because he would die of embarrassment if any other armchair revolutionary should express the opinion that he turned bourgeois the moment he lost his heart to a woman?

What is under discussion here is identity. Who and what you are in the environment where and at the time when your existence plays out find expression in your address, your clothes, your furniture, your mode of transportation and the ornaments and wall hangings in your living room. If any of these expressions of your who-and-what changes, what does it say about who and what you are, or have become, or is becoming? (And any reader who feels that a coffee table is just a damn coffee table obviously has not contemplated the finer points of existence.)

People change, everybody knows that. One enters into a relationship with someone special, and your existence is transformed overnight (and over the course of months), from single amateur academic/writer to … amateur academic/writer in a meaningful relationship with a beautiful woman who does not like broken toilet seats and second-hand couches with piles of newspapers under a sheet to prevent anyone from falling in.

Relationships, compromise, politics, coffee tables … whatever. Let the shopping begin!

______________________

TUESDAY, 28 JUNE 2005

A phrase frequently heard around barbeque fires, on porches or balconies, next to a table in a restaurant or a counter in a bar or other places where middle class mid-twenties spend their time, is this: “I now know what is important in life. I know what I want out of life.”

I am in no position to question what is important to them or what they want from life. The temptation does however exist to ask them: What was your process? In what way did you go about working out what is important to you, or what you want? Did you lie awake nights contemplating the possibilities? Did you spend years weighing the possibilities and mulling it over? Did you spend months? Weeks, perhaps? Did it your hit you one morning on the way to work? Was it something someone said at a barbecue, or on TV or in a movie, or at the office, or on campus one day? Did you follow a thorough process of elimination where you considered a dozen, or at least half a dozen possibilities, with all the possible pluses of every possibility weighed against all the disadvantages and all the possible risks? Whose tracks did you consciously or unconsciously follow? Why those particular tracks? What needs do you hope to fulfil with your ultimate choice of what is important to you, a young adult? What goals will be fulfilled in the pursuit of what you want out of life? What is important to your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your cousins? Is there a correlation between what is important to you and what you want out of life and what they want and what is important to them? If you want to follow a different path, what are your reasons, your motivations? If you want to pursue a similar path, what do you think would be the reasons for that? And now that we are on this line of questioning, what was important to your parents, or your aunts and uncles? Did they pursue similar things to what you now want to pursue for the next forty or so years of your life? Is or were they happy with their choices? For what reasons would you think were they happy with their choices? Did they regret some things? What are these things? Are there dreams or ambitions that you have already written off as unrealistic and unrealisable? How much regret will you have in ten or twenty years about the things that you considered unattainable in your mid-twenties? What will compensate you for the dreams and ambitions that you would never pursue?

These are but a few questions for which you can pinch off an hour or so if you have the time – if you find yourself in a place where you know no one, where for the moment there will be no familiar voices to echo your own, or to talk you down, or to offer support.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2005

Several thoughts are standing in line for a piece of paper […] I find myself developing a hang-up regarding credibility. I can lay hundreds of pages of text on the table, but … until now nothing has been published! […] Something must be done!

Paper is paper; ink is ink; and as I sit here in my grey shorts and grey T-shirt on the red chair at the desk in the kitchen with the blue fan making a noise and the rain dripping outside, feelings are feelings. And as it is, one is not always successful in your attempts to try and explain to your future self, on paper, in ink, exactly how you felt at that moment.

So what I feel is frustration … no, impatience, because I can see the finish line, or the destination about which I have prophesied for so long. I see it because it is close. The problem is that I don’t run straight at it. I shuffle at a half centimetre per hour, going from left to right and right to left, then I do a somersault, walk back to the beginning before I realise I have to turn around, then I trip over my trousers, shuffle forward at one centimetre per hour for two hours, fall asleep from boredom and lose my way again … and so I keep on going.

I need, for the sake of credibility, to produce, with official verification of success.

THURSDAY, 16 JUNE 2005

Rain – continuously for five days, endless laundry, dirty dishes, credibility as a writer and an entrepreneur, and a new question: Am I a little embarrassed about the effect that an intimate relationship has on me? It affects what I say and how I say it; that I am apologetic and what I am apologetic about; and it makes me appear to someone in a way I previously only appeared to myself – meaning financial status, my status as an unpublished writer, the fact that I work on many so-called money projects … that make no money at all.

Another question (an essential one): Do I feel as good about myself in an intimate relationship as I felt on my own?

As I was writing down the question, I realised it was loaded with misunderstanding and unspoken detail. Was I always happy on my own? Did I expect to be happy in a relationship at all times? The answer to both questions is no.

Here is my advice to myself: An intimate relationship is an environment where you are once again confronted with yourself – an environment which differs in crucial ways from the one in which you were on your own. It provides you with a new mirror in which you see yourself. It is an environment where conflict, both large and small, makes a regular appearance. A relationship is also a process in which you have to again define yourself – who you are, what you are, where your place in the world is, your ideal role, your relative value as a human being (and as a possible role player), your strengths and your weaknesses, what the future may hold for you, how much money you need to not only survive but to be who you want to be and do what you want to do.

Like the environment of the Desert (celibacy and loneliness), this environment and the accompanying process are also both constructive and destructive, both positive and negative; sometimes it leads to an awareness of happiness, sometimes to frustration; sometimes it leads to a decrease in positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, sometimes it confirms your existing positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, and sometimes it is conducive to a strengthening of the latter.

An intimate relationship is a living environment where patience, love and mutual acceptance will lead to fulfilment of much more than just physical needs. In the ideal situation it will lead to a richer experience of being human. Of course, an intimate relationship can also lead to pain, disappointment and frustration. It is an environment where high value should be placed on honesty and sincerity. It is a process that must be cherished, even if you have to occasionally endure the less pleasant aspects that will be part of any situation where two people are in regular and intimate fellowship.

SUNDAY, 26 JUNE 2005

Says a Christian character in a movie to another character: “Jesus will save us.”

“I don’t believe that,” the other guy replies.

“Your beliefs have no bearing on the facts,” the Christian character responds.

MONDAY, 27 JUNE 2005

01:22

A random search through old boxes, old junk and scraps of paper that went AWOL years ago leads me to realise once more that I did not come into existence yesterday. I have come a long way.

17:58

How does one think? We speak in sounds and read visual representations of the sounds – but how do we think? What are the words in your head?

______________________

THURSDAY, 9 JUNE 2005

13:43

People in a movie on TV are fleeing from a gigantic snake, and hide behind a wall.

Moral of the story? If you do not appear, your chances of survival are sometimes better.

16:25

Where am I? Where I have been for the past few years – on my way to the same destinations.

What do I think about? Same as before: Where do we come from? What are we? Is there anything we should do? If so, what?

FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2005

10:18

No longer my Place in the Sun, but my Piece of the Puzzle.

* * *

There are people who will look at a comprehensive account of how humans function – all the psychology, all the choices you have to make that amounts to you being you. They will look at it and say, “Fair enough. But please take the report back. I am a businessman (or a colonel in the army, or an English teacher) – that’s good enough for me. I don’t need to know or understand all that other clever stuff.” Or: “I understand how the brain works, how the psyche works, but I am 100% committed to my role, my position and my work. I don’t need any more than that.”

17:31

She is tense about going home. She is looking forward to seeing her family, but you know how it is with these things – she knows who she had been in her general behaviour, her attitude towards people and things, what she had been doing with her life, and where she was headed when she last appeared to her family. It is now a year later. She is still the same person … or is she? She has seen things, experienced things, entered into relationships with people whom her family has never met. She has done things that no one in her family has ever done, and in places where her family has never been. She has been confronted with issues, and with herself, in ways she had never before experienced. Do these things change the way she thinks about herself? Have these experiences changed her in ways that will make her not be the person who her family expects by default? Will she feel slightly uncomfortable among people she loves, people whom she has known all her life? Will she feel a little alienated from the environment where she will spend three weeks of her vacation?

These are questions that she may not consciously think about. Does she nevertheless feel the uncertainty? I believe she does.

SUNDAY, 12 JUNE 2005

I am in the living room watching Proof of Life. [N] is still sleeping. I have to hold myself back from bothering her – to talk to her, to start spending another day with her. Last night we told each other stories from our youth – first kisses, moving house, friends, my embarrassments in Stellenbosch [first few months when I “rented” a room from a family in their home but could not actually pay the rent, and so on]. Sometimes I have to remind myself (and I am reminded as I read through my notebooks) that there was a time in my life – as recently as a year ago, when I thought I was going to be on my own until I … was much older. Unless, so I had thought, a miracle happened.

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