Assorted Notes

SATURDAY, 5 MARCH 2005

If you want to hold something in your hands forever and it slips through your fingers, are your hands ever the same afterwards? Or does it leave behind, not so much a scar, but something beautiful that will remind you of the wonder you had wanted to hold onto so tightly?

WEDNESDAY, 9 MARCH 2005

01:51

John the Desert Walker stumbles into the wilderness. He has been there before. He has a rough map in his head. But wilderness, this he knows, is not desert. And desert … is certainly not the wilderness.

21:49

The career I have defined for myself or that I have chosen from the many possibilities I have been confronted with since it dawned on me that I, too, had to become a working adult at some point, was that of poet.

Not few are the people who have commented on this. “Poet?” they dryly ask. “You do know that you will never live above the poverty line, don’t you!”

It is true that over the years I have become aware of the fact that the world in which I have to fight for my place in the sun does not reward “poets” with permanent employment, financial security, a regular income, a company car or medical aid. I therefore had to slightly broaden my chosen path so I can, besides writing poetry, also employ other genres to criticise in fine detail the world where I cannot enjoy the same compensations for my career as a dentist, a street sweeper, or a bank clerk.

THURSDAY, 10 MARCH 2005

You only exist until you are born.

Or: Some people exist only as that which he or she has been given plus the results of their choices up to a point – the result of introspection, of knowledge attained about themselves, of confronting themselves, observing themselves and of defining who and what they want to be. If this process is of a certain quality and if they spend enough time on it, the moment when that point is reached can for all practical purposes be regarded as the Moment of Birth.

FRIDAY, 11 MARCH 2005

Many things in my way – scars, fears, insecurities, past experiences that have caused measures to rise like forts in the desert … everything is remembered, yet abandoned because of one thing – if you believe again, despite fears and insecurities, you know that you allow yourself to live.

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FRIDAY, 4 MARCH 2005

Tragedies such as the mass murder the Nazi’s perpetrated against the Jews and other minority groups reminds one of the hopeless suffering some people had to endure in the last months, and sometimes years, of their lives.

It places the themes I touch upon every now and then in a certain perspective – identity, consciousness, environments that are conducive to certain ends, etcetera. How important are these themes in the face of the tragedies that have swept people’s lives away, and that still destroy people on a daily basis? I mean is it not true that these tragedies are on a more primitive level of human experience than “identity, consciousness and environments that are conducive”?

Still, one can also say if an issue like identity, for example, is approached in a reasonable manner, if answers are sought in a process that is characterised by critical thinking, it will ultimately lessen the possibility of man-made tragedies, won’t it?

There is also the simple truth that intellectuals who became victims of tragedies like the Holocaust would have reflected upon exactly the kinds of themes that people ponder in more peaceful times. Topics about which I think so deeply that appear almost frivolous when I consider that people elsewhere in the world are at that very moment struggling for primitive survival are exactly the topics that would have been relevant for these intellectuals, were it not that the Sea of Time had cast them on the Coast of Tragedies.

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MONDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2005

I’m standing outside, on the corner of the house, smoking my first cigarette of the day and drinking a cup of black Nescafé Classic. It’s Monday, 21 February 2005. It’s raining, softly but consistently. The sky is overcast, and it’s cooler than yesterday and the day before, and the whole of last week. “At least my scalp won’t get another tan,” I think before throwing the last bit of coffee on the wet grass.

My older sister and her firstborn are flying to Dubai tonight and after a few days’ visit with friends, further on to London. All of us, this everyone knows, are going to be somewhat gloomy the rest of the day. My younger sister, with her two-week-old little human, will continue with her new life in their home on the other side of town. I will be visiting them tonight, and tomorrow, and then Wednesday I will return to my parents’ place. Thursday I will go to Johannesburg, and Friday I fly to Malaysia. I will stroll around in the airport complex outside Kuala Lumpur for five hours before flying to Kota Kinabalu, where I will disembark for a smoke break. An hour later we’ll continue our journey around the curve that separates Southeast Asia from Northeast Asia before we land in the southern Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung.

But for now, it’s raining – in Bronkhorstspruit.

* * *

I am sitting on the yellow bedspread on the bed in the guest room. I can hear my father talking to his grandson; I can hear an Afrikaans radio host on the radio in the room next door; I can hear the young welder in the backyard earning his bread and butter.

Within a minute or two I will stop writing, put away my notebook, and join the people – my family – in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then I will make a pot of green tea, and then go outside to smoke my second cigarette of the day, under the awning on the one corner of the house, with the rain falling softly on the green grass in front of me.

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FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2005

I have never been so bored while on a visit to my homeland. I feel slightly guilty about it … but then I remind myself that emotional needs which are satisfied by seeing one’s family are not to be confused with the need for intellectual stimulation.

I also realised that I project my own feelings on other people in the place where I find myself. I might say, “Look how boring all those people are! They sit in cars, walk in and out of shops, walk up and down the streets …” Then I realise, as I am insulting the villagers, I’m basically describing myself: I am sitting in a car, walking in and out of stores, walking up and down the street.

* * *

Thought inspired by my browsing through a magazine last night: my South Africa comprises Johannesburg, Bronkhorstspruit, Pretoria, Stellenbosch and maybe Vryheid and Pongola. There are places in this country of my birth which I have never even heard of let alone visited: places like Grootmier [Big Ant], Kleinmier [Small Ant], Middelmier [Middle Ant]; places where people speak Afrikaans, and where the children call the adults “Uncle” and “Auntie”. It’s a world I still want to discover – the isolated places, towns with dusty main streets, hamlets where people live lives that are at the same time familiar yet also stranger to me than the life of the average Taiwanese person in Taiwan.

SATURDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2005

This past week I have again been confronted with a few things: estrangement – never a pleasant experience, especially not if you are the one who has become the stranger to the people you love the most; boredom; residential areas where the layout and structures provide no inspiration; commercial areas where people meet on a daily basis to do business and buy things and enjoy meals, which, like the residential areas, don’t stir up an inkling of enthusiasm or inspiration; standards that dictate that to be considered successful at 34 you’d have to own property, and a car, and a TV and other furniture, and at least be married but preferably have also brought forth some descendants (“because what type of success can you be if you’re alone?”). Finally, I have been confronted with stories of murder, manslaughter, heart attacks, cancer, stroke, and several other diseases and disorders that remind you, in case you dared for a moment to forget, how vulnerable your existence is.

Well, what more can one say? It is 00:21. I’m going to bed now. Tomorrow … is just a short journey away.

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THURSDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2005

10:20

If I travel by train from Moscow to Paris and I stay a day or two in Berlin, it will be incorrect to say that my trip has stagnated. My journey is still in progress; I am merely spending a day or two in a place between starting point and destination.

If I travel by train from Moscow to Paris and I stop for a day or two in Berlin, it will also be incorrect to say that my final destination – Paris – does not exist because I have not yet reached it. Paris – my destination – is not going to come into existence as my train draws closer to that spot on the map. The place to which I have been travelling since the train pulled out of the station in Moscow has existed from the beginning of my journey. As I spend time in one place or the other my final destination already exists.

The destination exists independently of me – it is there, long before I reach it, long before I first observe the city on the horizon, long before I walk the streets of my destination, and breathe its air.

11:59

I am sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car, on a bare piece of grassland known as My Sister and Brother-in-law’s Smallholding outside Bronkhorstspruit.

My brother-in-law explains about a swimming pool, four bedrooms, a pond and trees that will cast long shadows in a decade or so over dogs and children and grandparents sitting around a barbeque fire, having a good time.

I find it quite interesting. With folded arms I make a comment about “believing in things you cannot yet see” while my brother-in-law brings down a pickaxe from high above his head on a piece of turf where a tree will live out its existence.

I find the time and the place where this series of moments of my life plays out acceptable in terms of significance and entertainment value.

I also know that if I am still sitting here sixty minutes from now, in the passenger seat of a parked car in the African sun, I will become restless … and not quite as pleased with the value and entertainment of the series of moments that will then be my life.

“Short-term gratifications,” I say to myself, and turn the volume on the car audio system up a few notches.

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