Three Strange Angels

Death, A Self-Portrait (Part One)

The first meeting I had with death was on a rugby field at my primary school.

It was a dry winter’s morning and my father was there. I was not alone but it was Sunday and the school was strangely noiseless and abandoned. My father was tall, I was small and we strode two figures across dry grass while he struggled to evict the words from his craw. His father, my darling grampie was dead.

I didn’t know ‘dead’ then as I understand it now, with its spectacular forever gone and never to be seen again connotations. At this time, death is the end of brain function and life and neurons firing in a miraculous and spectacular way that signals a beautifully bespoke and singularly rare is no more. The end.

That first death brought its own sweet pain with the news that made me feel deceptively alive, and which defined each element of that morning so that it became easy to remember because of its stark vividness.

The delicious news of death brought the whole world alive, until the experience of expiration set in and I began to understand that I would never see, I would never hear, I would never touch again. That the afternoons spent in the cabin of a Dazzle Datsun in the Southdale car wash with its whipping nylon threads beating down on the roof were gone. Singing on stage in front of brass fluted organ pipes that silently witnessed a small girl serenading an old man was gone. Taking heaping spoons of condensed milk that had thickened over time from a can from a man who never bought milk because he had no fridge were gone.

Gone.

As a child I learned that gone meant coming back. Dad went to work and was gone. But at night he’d return.

Gone. This was forever gone and never to be seen again gone. This was sitting on the playground in the midst of yells and screams and laughter looking at my father’s footprints across that grass and wondering if like my grandfather one day he too would be gone.

I came to learn there was a new meaning to that word which was final and could not be negotiated with no matter how much you begged and pleaded and wished and willed.

Death was a gone where there was no coming back. Except in memory. Except in imagination. And those other places that grow like flowering, invisible bruises waiting to be touched.

 

[In response to ‘Death: A self-portrait’ by Richard Harris.]

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.

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.

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).

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.”

 

Vanity publishing and the death of reason

Sean Hughes picked a scab from his nose. Rolled it into a little ball and then looked at it. Half blood. Half dried mucous, a touch of sweat.

“I am not even worthy of being a piece of dried phlegm in my own nose,” he thought feeling miserable. The rent was due. His stomach was grumbling. His dick was flaccid. He couldn’t write.

Hours passed and he sat looking at the blankness. Empty wall. Clean page. The virgin Moleskin book the girl once gave him. She fucked him because he had said he was a writer. A published poet. A real author.

He was a liar and he knew it. The truth? He wrote a couple of poems and a short story that had been printed in some vanity publications. The ones where you have to buy the book to get a printed copy of your poem or story. Annuals of effluence with apt titles like: “An Autumn of Literary Seasons” or “The Shorties – flash fiction from first time writers.’ When he read the crap that was published alongside his writing he blushed, gagged and wondered whether someone could actually die laughing. It would be a good way to go.

He paged through the empty Moleskin and thought about the girl. He fucked her because she was there. Because he could. So he could pour some of the hate and self loathing normally reserved for himself into her. Afterward she wanted to cuddle. He picked at a cigarette, played with a box of matches, and told her to get out. She told him he was a nihilist cunt, so he started flicking lit matches at her as she scrabbled to pick up her clothing, tears streaming down her cheek. One flaming match struck her partly naked back just before she could close the door and leave. Her back was beautiful, lean and tanned. The minute she left Hughes wondered whether he’d feel remorseful about he way he’d let her go.

He scratched his thigh. Stood naked in front of the mirror, looked at his cock and then sat at his desk.

Nothing.  Just that empty Moleskin book. The one he despised because those books looked so pretentious. He wondered what Nietzsche would think.

“Ha fucken ha. Maybe I should create a whole range of plastic bangles that read: ‘What would Nietzsche do?’ A homage to that master philosopher and his definitive thinking on mortality. Mementos that would celebrate the power of thought and show the middle finger to religion. That would fight for the right to reason. The might of intellectual freedom. The freedom of thinking. Because no one thinks anymore. No one wants real freedom. Not really. They want Jesus. Eyes upturned in pain. Bleeding and dying. Nailed to a cross. But no one wants to take responsibility for their own lives. Why should they when every last bit of evil they do can be blamed on some other fucker? Any other fucker but them. Ignoramuses.”

It was then that Hughes realised that he wasn’t thinking. He was thinking about thinking, not really engaged in true thought. Hughes started feeling sorry that he had been such a cunt to the girl. Maybe if he dedicated his first best selling novel to her, she’d forgive him and come back so he could fuck her again. He typed furiously for at least the next half an hour. Then with some degree of satisfaction looked back at what he had written with a wry smile:

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live….”