Assorted Notes

THURSDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2005

I wanted to wait for the flying machine to ascend into the air again, but a few points need to be made before I forget something.

1. Exactly one year ago I contemplated most sincerely the idea of returning to South Africa by the end of February [2004]. The fact that it is again the month of February, exactly a year later, and that I am sitting on a plane on a runway on the island of Borneo is therefore a golden opportunity to wonder whether I made the right decision a year ago. I can certainly say that I do not know what could have happened, had I pushed through my “March revolution”. What I can do is safely affirm the opinion for the record that the past twelve months in Taiwan have been good – in some ways much better than one could have imagined in your most optimistic outlook. My life is still in Taiwan; the people who have mattered to me the longest, who in some cases had known my name even before I uttered the pronoun “I”, are still at the southern tip of Africa. That is why I am sitting on this aircraft right now, in a window seat, with the Southeast Asian morning sun that is warming up my right arm. Just over five months since I have last seen my family, I am again going “home” – for two weeks.

2. As I shuffled through the airport terminal at Kota Kinabalu on the way to the smoker’s corner, I could not help but observe dozens of other people. A nasty thought once again grabbed hold of my mind: I have a pathological fear of boredom.

3. Point of Power: Reckoned this morning at Kaohsiung airport that every person has a central point of power. Everything you do, where you do it, how you conduct your daily life, with whom you share your existence, and how you choose to apply your life will either strengthen this point, or weaken it.

[02/06/15: Think of your existence as an ointment or a salve, or something similar. If you are “Tiger Balm”, you are wasting your life if you apply yourself to a piece of wood. Apply yourself to an insect bite, and you are on the right track – the correct application of a very specific value.]

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(Twenty-four minutes past four according to the electronic alarm clock on top of the TV in Room 533, at the Allson Klana Hotel outside Kuala Lumpur.)

Sometimes, in the bathroom mirror of a room in a transit hotel in an unfamiliar city in a country not my own, I see myself as I “truly” am: stripped of the clothes in which I appear, alone.

(On the dressing table are my camera, my notebook, my passport and a plane ticket to the country where I was born, and back to the country where I now live a fairly decent life.)

Sometimes I see myself as I appear: alone in a hotel room, in a foreign country, on my way.

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TUESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2005

08:57

Two thoughts:

1. John X was not necessarily “put on earth” to fulfil a certain purpose, but he was born with the ability to fulfil a certain purpose – in the same way a woman is born with the ability to get pregnant and give birth, something that is closely associated with a certain role that has to be fulfilled, or a purpose that has to be served.

2. A totalitarian state says: Surrender to the state, and the state will give you an identity with a strong nationalistic character, something bigger than yourself you can identify with and where you will find a home where you will feel you belong, and many ways in which you can regularly confirm membership.

14:32

To be GIVEN the ability to serve a certain purpose, and the FREE WILL to do so or not.

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TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2005

Sexual orientation is an excellent illustration of something you have been given, and then self-observation, observation of the views and so-called values of the community (regarding what you are observing in yourself), and self-definition – that goes along with self-acceptance, with the definition part that is almost a formality (perhaps labelling would be a more accurate term in this case), or … acceptance, and appropriate self-definition …

WEDNESDAY, 2 FEBRUARY 2005

I just watched the movie “187” again. Two comments …

Firstly, gang culture is built on two principles – respect and fear. The teacher (Samuel L. Jackson) shows the gang leader at the end of the movie that he (the teacher) does not respect him (the gang leader), that he does not fear him, and that he is willing to pay the price for disrespect, namely death.

Note two: The social misery, and the culture in which many inner-city youths grow up, confirms the value of leaving the area that was given to you if it is not conducive to a good life.

“Not everyone can leave,” you might say.

“What is the alternative?” will be my answer.

Plus, I am not necessarily talking about staying away forever. I am talking about removing yourself possibly only temporarily from the environment that has arrested your growth and development, confronting your given self, finding your “core self”, defining a self with a vision in which you can believe, and starting the process of becoming this person. Then, with the passing of time, you can always return to be what you have become, in the place where you originally came from.

FRIDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2005

The book People in Context has the following to say about self-discovery and acceptance: “[You can] can extend an authentic and warm invitation to authenticity and warmth in another person in a companionship that creates a safe, non-threatening space for the fearless discovery of who I am and who you are …”*

[Almost as if the cosmos is saying to me, “You think of yourself and your life in a certain way, and now you have the opportunity to be with someone. Here is the bridge to that life.”]

* My own translation from the Afrikaans text

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MONDAY, 31 JANUARY 2005

I suspect, and have also suspected this in the past, that I get bored with the very idea of something.

One example: I notice in the English textbook I am currently using with a group of twelve-year-old students a picture of a family in a backyard. They’re busy barbequing. I look at the adults and think, “How fucking boring …”

The problem is, this boredom with the very idea of something registers as a serious thought in my mind, and it is included in my official Thoughts On Topic X!

I think I have been on a bitter campaign against things for a long time – in some cases nothing more than luck that I think I had missed out on earlier, or things that could have made me happy that had lost its glamour because I almost always associate it with anxiety and uncertainty.

I think it is just my inner nature – which is essentially good – that has prevented me from venting my feelings in other ways.

Which brings me back to the question of “inner nature” and/or “core personality”: they are givens, are they not? And crucial in the manufacturing of end result, right? How guilty then is Given, and how guilty Free Will?

[…]

I was just lying in bed. I was aware of my body. I was also aware of the idea that I was aware of my body. I could also remember that I have been aware of my body at other times, earlier times. I could also remember that I had also then thought, or knew, that I was aware of my body.

Consciousness develops; it is not just suddenly there. Yet, there must be a critical moment – a watershed moment in the development of self-consciousness.

Certainly there can be no doubt that a foetus has a consciousness after thirty weeks or so. The consciousness of the foetus and that of the new-born baby (including the first few months) is, however, unique in the history of the person’s consciousness: it is wordless.

Difference between wordless consciousness and consciousness where language comes into play …

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FRIDAY, 21 JANUARY 2005

It’s Friday morning. I made breakfast, sat down on the couch, turned on the TV, went through the channels and … Notting Hill, with William Thacker walking through the market, the starting credits still rolling.

Then I realised: this is my movie metaphor. I am the guy with the book business that doesn’t actually make money – but it’s my life, and she is the star.

“And miracles,” like the one woman said at dinner, “do happen.”

SATURDAY, 22 JANUARY 2005

00:42

First something exists, and then you find words to express it. Existence precedes language and specific vocabulary.

Question: What exists that we haven’t been able to label with vocabulary? What exists that has not appeared to us?

Language is essential to understanding, in order to “see” or “hear” something. If something does appear in our vision or is picked up by our hearing but we lack the appropriate vocabulary, these things are often ignored or dismissed as useless – as noise around things which do make sense because we already know what to call them or how to describe them.

02:45

The repatriation theme in “Personal Agenda” is about it being necessary sometimes to leave the Source, and why it can be important to return after years outside the Source – even why it can be justified to not necessarily return “permanently”.

* * *

From an article about Nawal El Saadawi in the China Post of 18 January 2005 entitled, “Egyptian secular writer battles religious state”: “I’m still living in exile because I cannot speak, I cannot work, I cannot have my potential here.”

09:21

I am on a dangerous frequency! Yesterday afternoon I almost knocked my shoulder out of its socket because I wasn’t focused on the mechanics of getting out of my trousers – and ended up storming my bedroom wall with my trousers around my ankles.

Now I stand here with a sore foot and a swollen big toe because last night I lost my rhythm coming down the stairs and reckoned, “Never mind, there’s only a few steps left,” and jumped.

This morning I was thinking of this frequency thing while frenetically looking for my keys … only to find I had already put them in my jacket pocket.

I know on what frequency I am, and that it is dangerous is not debatable. I am intoxicated; intoxicated with an idea …

12:53

I am intoxicated with an idea; that is true. It is also true that this idea has to do with a certain young woman’s existence. It can also be said that if this young woman does not contemplate similar thoughts on a specific Writer of Notes, this specific writer will compose a poem of grief and sorrow, solemnly burn it, and then go to sleep after such a miserable day … to get up the next morning and have breakfast with his usual and unquenchable Faith – and shall one dare to say, Hope? – in the Irreplaceable Third One.

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