Three Strange Angels

Contempt in the act of speaking*

Nobody reads anymore.
Have you noticed that? 
Perhaps it is because there is too much to read.

If you go to Gutenburg you can download books in Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. There are also books in Mayan and Middle English. 

I didn’t know people still spoke Mayan.

Although people speak. A lot. Have you noticed that?

Did you ever know someone who speaks and speaks and speaks? Like an unstoppable wind that passes through a crevice and collects pitch from sharp edges. Or a toilet roll that trips down a flight of stairs and just keeps on rolling, making more mess as it unwinds.

There’s a theory that sound waves don't dissipate - they travel the world and get dispersed, lose energy, become barely audible. But never disappear completely. 

Like a bad memory that begs to be forgotten or those copper coins that collect at the bottom of your purse.

But where was I?

No one reads. Everyone talks. Hardly anyone really listens.

Imagine if things were different.

If most people read and everyone listened with their ears, hearts and minds wide open.

How do you think it would change the world?

*From Friedrich Nietzsche, who once said: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” 

 

Borders (I)

I am on the outside

Of the border of your being

On that path away

From secret conversations

In a boundaryless country

Where absolute freedom

Kept me tied

To you.

 

As I look back, see the fray

Of an unravelled friendship

I want to go back

On a road that takes me forward.

 

Huis toe Jo (Ek miss you hundreds)

You’re the marmite to my zaamie, howzit to my chana and the Jack to my Parow. The flip to my flop, you were with me when Chuck Norris was still a tjop. At the Milky Lane in Hillbrow when they served waffles way past 12 after nights up Northcliff Hill. You saw me red eyed, down and out, out and out, inside out. I crashed your pozzy, I crashed your Volksie, I crashed your ankle and you still liked me lank. You shared my dreams, my befokte schemes. Dried my snot and trane after each fong kong oke broke my heart. When I’m with you I feel kiff, zef, lekker… like I’m betters, the biscuit, the blits in witblits. Sonder jou is alles maar blerry bleak. Like I’m Ninja without his Yo-landi, chips that aren’t slap, bunny chow without bread, a warm Black Label. My heart feels colder and more empty than die Voortrekker Monument. You’re the Blk to my Jks, the zol in my rizzler, the Klippies to my coke, the haw that precedes my wena. Without you I’m just a shongo with no lolo, a solitary toyi, that buntu with no u. Gooi my a luck Jo. Here’s the 411. I’m finish and klaar with pulling an Mbeki. I love you my chommie. Come home.

Apple:

This morning was no different
- salted wind met sprained metal,
moistened breath sliced by hard edges.

But saline dew softened the unrelenting
iron with reddish-brown blisters.

The man walked through the junkyard
- again reminded of his life,
the corrosion of time, and carelessness.

Around his worn hands curled soft fingers.
His daughter looked up at him,
and he saw hope in her eyes,
remembered why he called her “Apple”.

She, the seed of beauty in his life.

(For my teacher Ramon, who reminds me to write.)

On writing.

Tell the truth.

Could I curl the four corners of this white page to hide myself within them? Like a sterile cocoon I’d be snow blind and unable to see what lives beyond.

There’s no retreating from virginal paper. Crisp. White. Open. It waits for you. Like creditors you haven’t paid, promises never kept or the lies you told yourself to feel better about not writing.

Your deception may be good enough for others, but not the blank sheet. You cannot fool the unborn with smart words, a quick turn of phrase or other pretenses. Here you meet each other on equal terms.

Naked. Vulnerable. Alone.

My Albert Camus moment...

I awoke alone this morning save for a single thought. A simple epiphany.

I have imagination and because of that I will never be truly alone.

A gnosis that revealed the communion in solitude through creativity. In creating and in writing there is always another. An invention, a character, a word, a metaphor, the search for the perfect sentence or an  idea to keep me company and offer meaning.

The Plague of Plato’s Ghost (I)

She woke up this morning to find Plato was living inside her head. She asked him what he was doing there but he just looked at her and said: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Not that it was anything unusual.

It was like this every single morning.

And more recently every morning she’d get angry. Rebellious. Start arguing: “You’d think after living in my head for so long at the very least you’d try to get to know me. If you did you’d know that compassion is my default position. Kindness is the lens through which I see the world. Jesus Christ, what oh what do you do between these injunctions” These flat-line announcements that drone through the waiting room of what is the airport that is my life?”

No response.

She never got any response.

Just the morning ritual of an impartial enjoinder.

They began on the 26th of June 2001 when she was finishing her anchovy toast and tea and had started thinking about brushing her teeth.

There was no trumpet call. No arrival of a flock of circling birds. No lightning in the sky. No declarative signal summonsing attention. Just the statement uttered in third person. In a voice distinctively apart from her own or any that she recognised. A strange voice that over the months and years had become all too familiar.

She remembered that first missive well. Seven words. Simple words. Not one of them longer than two beats.

Noun. Verb. Adjective. Pronoun. Adverb. Preposition. Noun.

The sentence began and ended with the name of a thing. Two things that stood in stark contrast to each other: Courage. Fear.

She remembered well what he had said in her head. It was such a significant event that those words carried weight. May have well been engraved on her bones:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

At first those words became her religion. She wrote them down in note books. On serviettes in restaurants. On wallpaper; and shelving paper; and on the slim edges of newspaper in pencil. On beautiful parchment with an ink bleeding nib that tore into the paper with such passion that she missed the whisper of the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

So obsessed was she with those seven words that everything else became oblivious to her as she scrambled for etymological dictionaries, encyclopaedias, biographies and other important books with some strange understanding that she needed knowledge, more and more knowledge to deconstruct those seven simple words in order to find meaning.

She missed a month of Plato’s missives in her search.

And then the meaning came to her.

And the meaning was clear.

And it was straightforward.

It was:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

(To be continued).

You do not have to be good

The poetry of Mary Oliver enables me to see the world anew.

Reflecting on the 'apologies' of John Mayer and Tiger Woods I wonder how much of those events of self denial, self admonishment and self loathing were inspired by neediness, the desire for acceptance and the want to be liked?

In my mind truth was sacrificed on the altar of commerce and media acceptance/popularity by both Mayer and Woods.

By stark contrast Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver's words are a war cry for truth and liberation. They are a song celebrating the beautiful complexity of what it is to be fully human:

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
From "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

>here<

I want to live in the spaces between your heart beat. Where your mind sleeps and thoughts fall like heavy pennies in still crimson oceans made soft by an absent moon. I will lie in the fronds of your mind’s eye, a reflection of a reflection. A memory not yet made. As you sleep, I will sleep. Curled up inside of you. In that softness the world will never find. When you need to touch my skin, gently call to me. So I can escape like a sigh. Or a tear that once rolled down your cheek and into your mouth.

- Photography by Pinkmango77 @ DeviantArt

My father’s laughing heart

I grew up believing that I would be Oriana Fallaci but perhaps that's because her name is so delicious, particularly when you say it again and again and again. Out loud or just quietly in your mind.

I'm more Bukowski than Neruda, but has to do with my father - the man with a beautiful mind who when sober would read Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Thanks to him I grew up on a diet of robotics, artificial intelligence, black holes, reason, poetry, science and thinking. The kind of thinking that saved me the days my mother was emotionally fraught.

“What the hell does that have to do with Bukowski?” you could ask.

Well.

If you want to understand. You must read Bukowski’s “Laughing Heart”:

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

My father’s name was Charles. A name I have come to think of as gorgeous. Charles Dickens. Charles Darwin. Charles Thomas Bolton. And of course Charles Bukowski. But I love this name because it belonged to my father first. The man who never made it out. None of us do. But he was beaten by life. Died broken in a bed in my house early one morning. Just before the sun arrived. Beaten, but like Bukowski, not without beauty.

For a long time I found my life disturbing, so I avoided it or viewed it with abstract scepticism like one would sitting in the back row of a Fellini movie, not knowing what the hell was going on. Thinking it fascinating and incredibly interesting.

I'm more in the movie now, but I think that has to do with the fact that the more I read Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Bertrand Russell the more I realise that 'oh fuck!'  This actually might be it. The darkness is coming. How can I create more light?

Let me get it before I'm gone forever. Now I try. I really try. And I'm happier for it. If happiness as an abstract concept can be plausible or real. It's such a mercurial beast. A bit like a cat that never comes when called. Rubs herself up against your legs every now and again.

I might be trying to get it because of my own Bukowski. The broken man with the beautiful mind. In my imagination he sitting in the back row. Watching the film. But he gets it now. Because he wants to. Because that’s me in the movie and he loves me. More than is bearable. He loves me. And heart achingly he wants it to be better for me than it was for him. So he’s cheering me on and he’s saying:

“you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.”