Three Strange Angels

Death, A Self-Portrait (Part Two)

2012-11-27T10:17:58+02:00

I smelled her in the car park next to the buildings and on that small patch of grass I gingerly walked across to get to her. But when they opened the door I smelled her more.

On Sunday she lay panting in my arms.

On Monday she was in a sterile ward.

On Tuesday we were laughing: "I though I was going to die," she said. I smiled back at her, but the grin was all for me.

On Wednesday her bed was empty. Pulled up and folded down into sharp edges. "TB and HIV is a killer combination," the doctor said.

And on Thursday I smelled her as I walked across the grass that kept my car from the mortuary. Before they opened the door I smelled her, and she smelled sweet in that way that bodies do when decomposition is delicate, held in check by cold.

But when they opened the door, the air became thick with the sickly smell of loss. Even then I didn't understand she was dead.

Prompted by Death: A Self-Portrait (Wellcome Collection), assembled by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer based in Chicago, US.

Photograph by Andrew Stawarz on Flickr.

Death, A Self-Portrait (Part One)

2012-11-26T12:07:55+02:00

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.]

"What I have lived for"

2012-03-27T15:18:54+02:00

On the 25th of July in 1956, Bertrand Russell sat down to pen the prologue to his autobiography by hand. He called this piece "What I have lived for".

The text for this piece to be found in the front of the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell reads as follows:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Contempt in the act of speaking*

2011-12-22T00:50:22+02:00

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)

2011-08-31T00:03:14+02:00

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)

2011-01-07T13:28:42+02:00

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:

2010-09-19T11:36:32+02:00

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.

2010-09-19T11:14:35+02:00

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...

2010-07-31T10:31:45+02:00

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)

2010-03-17T09:20:52+02:00

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).