kagablog

i’m feeling slightly overcome after watching the film “disgrace”…and having now created the appropriate conditions: fire lit, gorecki’s sorrows begun, the red wine opened, i’ve set the scene for the romantic spirit, the tragedy…because within it’s despair, the byron and blake of the film course through, that solitude of the romantics…

but mainly after the film, i was struck dumb by the country, by this place i’m living in…and wondering why i don’t write more about it…what world is it i’m living in?…there’s this world out there which everyone and the mail and guardian seems to know about and keeps talking about…but it’s as much my reality as hollywood is the real of america…there’s this vast discrepancy between my life and experience of living in “a country” and that story told publicly by others, the media, the novelists, the documentary movie makers & etc – it seems like another place…or maybe the past or the future…like a rumour…some already distant landscape…

the movie is set supposedly in grahamstown, but it isn’t…i sit there in the grahamstown cinema watching this lie, this american playing the stoic south african…and it seems so real and heart rending, and he’s so honest (is john c, and maybe also john m) about his own fuckedupness and inability to feel and to relate and his staunch moralism and rationalism and yet one admires his cold gaze, his unsentimental appraisal…

but i’m so completely removed from this kind of writing, this kind of life…and yet i think then – what is my scene…?…where is my writing coming from? all of coetzee’s books are so rooted in his context…even now writing so authentically about australia since moving there, but my words are so rootless, my writing is so candyflossed, intangible, without awareness of my surroundings…i’m up in the air man, i put on a play set in prague about a therapist? come on dude – what the fuck?…perhaps it’s true what louise says, that i’m operating largely in terms of ignorance, all the time, unaware of my surroundings, not in contact with the world, a kind of sloppiness of consciousness…what is it i’ve been doing all this time?

the movie made me think of how fugard and coetzee have made this country and it’s pains and paradoxes so central to their work, whereas i have a hard time getting out of my mind, i mean, of actually conceiving of a world out there… where is that world?…that world of the “picture portrait of south africa” and what it seems like objectified from the outside?…impossible to put it together with what it’s like “from the inside”…and yet – what inside?…what is “this country” like from the inside? there’s no country here at all, man….i have to do some marking tomorrow and prepare my classes for monday, that’s this country…my wife forbids me to give money to the mad beggar woman when she bangs on the door at night..