kagablog

When Stockhausen was 20, he wasn’t sure what he was going to be. If anything, he suspected he might become a writer, and he even spent one summer break writing a novel about the life of Humayun, the Mughal Emperor. Less than two weeks into the writing process, with the set of brass balls only Stockhausen could possess, he sent some samples of his writing, including a few poems to Hesse, who had won the Nobel Prize just three years earlier. Accompanying the samples was a six-page handwritten letter which is a stunning revelation of Stockhausen’s frame of mind:

Dear Mr. Hesse,

That I finally worked up so much courage to choose this means in order to speak to you, I will perhaps come to understand one day later in life, and I believe—were I to gaze into a mirror, it would be found out—that my cheeks are burned scarlet, as though they had been whipped. It may be shame, desperate shame, or a clattering fragmentation of an unconsciously confident, trusting naivete, of a salvaged, forgivable boyish atmosphere. Forgive me nothing, not even the salutation “dear sir,” if you deem it to be immature impertinence. I cannot help but become calmer, once having taken the fatal step.

Why I wanted to write you, I have known at no point in time more exactly, to tell the truth. It may be that I could tell this unfathomable thing to my mother, but she has passed on; I do not even know whether she would have summoned up an understanding for my idle prattling—if so, it would have been for the first time: Where are the dead, who would understand us best? Though she did not relish all this, [she] must really have been very wise, as she voiced the opinion one night in the year 1933: in the loft is Heaven, in the cellar, Hell; at that time I had counted almost five yearly cycles—yet now I no longer know whether Heaven is not Hell and that time is not timelessness. However, this worries me less (I am certainly too stupid, to recognize despairingly that one cannot know anything); what torments much more is the certainty of still not being accepted, of being smiled at, of being absolutely misunderstood. And my father just didn’t understand it at all, as I believed him to know. Might it perhaps be different now, if he were not rotting in some moldy wartime hole in the ground? So there remains the sieved coagulation of people, whom I allowed to force themselves on me yesterday and aforetimes—they have all had enough of associating with each other, just as have I with any of them.

This is the letter of a boy who has lost everything and had nothing come along to fill the void. The mental distress that Stockhausen is under is starkly clear, and in August of 1949, he wasn’t so much reaching out to the Nobel laureate for writing tips as he was searching for a father figure, someone to help him finish the job of forming his personality:

forgive me, if in relation to liberty I cast you in a special role and begged something of you—it is the happiest feeling, the most beautiful experience of all mysteries: ‘that love is woven through everything,’ if one can ask a great man for something. In the distance the ‘ability’ is given to me, you have called me with your thoughts…I write down for you now some of my ungainly, most secret endeavours; please, grant me also this impossible effort and say just one word, if they withstand your examination.

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Music student in Cologne

Earlier in the letter, he explains that Hesse’s works seem to him like “thought-islands” which rise up above their author. This is an early iteration of a concept that would be so fundamental to Stockhausen’s work: that his music is greater than its composer and originates from a higher source.

We will unfold this concept in other discussions. However, as we bring this brief survey of Stockhausen’s career to a close, we are only further compelled to look at the way in which Hesse responded to the young composer.

First off, he dismissed out of hand the idea of reading Stockhausen’s writing samples. He wrote, “I am 72 years old, have had eye trouble for years, and am overloaded every day to the point of exhaustion. As for reading manuscripts, this is out of the question.”

But to this sprawling, desperate letter from a completely unknown student, he wrote a generous, deeply empathetic one-and-a-half page reply:

It will be best if I say to you in plain words how your letter has pleased me.

What has pleased me is your gift, it promises something: it is not that of a man of letters but that of a poet.

What has also pleased me is the sincerity with which you seek to make clear to yourself and to me the problems of your life and of your generation. Together with that gift, it is something positive and beautiful.

…What has not pleased me…is much about the tone of your letter which reminds me of what the foreigner imagines as “German youth”: something extravagant and enamored of pain and desperation, “Faustian” and therefore philosophically Existential, which we foreigners don’t think much of. This youth, intoxicated with tragedy and greatness, was once, when he roamed about with backpack and guitar, half comical and half charming. Soon afterwards, however, he became excellently adapted to warfare: conquering, torturing, and other activities, which we likewise do not think much of.

Something else about your letter which does not please me has more to do with the universal—that which you have in common with your generation—than with the individual. It would make me happy therefore if you would direct all your energy to shaping and bringing to maturity that which is individual, unique, and beautiful in you, and to diminishing as much as possible the other, collective thing, or at least to distrust it; it is a dowry without much value.”

With pinpoint precision, Hesse dissects not only the issues that Stockhausen faces in forging an identity in the wake of so much loss but all of post-war Germany. Hesse has little tolerance for self-pity. One of the masters in The Glass Bead Game is blacklisted from giving private lessons to pupils because he has a tendency towards melancholy (maybe even thoughts of suicide). Such indulgences must be avoided in Hesse’s world view, and certainly cannot be passed on to students!

But the real kernel of truth that shaped Stockhausen in that letter is Hesse’s urging to cast off any sense of the universal, any sense that he shares a common lot with the rest of his generation. Instead, he pushes Stockhausen to focus on what sets him apart, what makes him an individual voice, and if there is one singular trait of Stockhausen’s writing, it is the uniqueness of his voice.

For the next year, the two stayed in correspondence. Stockhausen openly referred to Hesse as his teacher at one point, and after he had submitted some of his poems to a publisher in October of 1949, Hesse sent him a remonstrance via postcard:

It does not please me that you want to earn money right away with your manuscripts. You have the good fortune to be able to do this with music and thus keep your poetical activities away from this area. If music is more sacred for you than poetry, perhaps then you can earn your bread by writing for newspapers, etc., but that means at the same time a farewell to poetry.

In 1950, the following year, the spiral of Stockhausen’s life work would begin.

The farewell to his teacher came on September 22, of that year. He apologizes for his “helpless bawling”, and he thanks Hesse for helping him to form his personality, the same personality which would be such an elemental force in shaping so much of 20th century culture.

Stockhausen uses another metaphor of organic growth to describe the transformation that Hesse cultivated. He compares his newly formed personality to a crystal, formed from the salt of his tears:

“I stumbled over it, when I stole secretly into my garden, whereas my foot stepped nimbly over the other stones…

…Very, very dear do I hold the great, crystalline stone today. You have thrown it to me, and it has blossomed like an eternal rose. Thanks be to you, and thanks be to the God of grace, who let me stumble over it.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne Studio

the site in quetion is at http://www.analogartsensemble.net/labels/Karlheinz%20Stockhausen.html

245

The human soul is so inevitably the victim of pain that it suffers the pain of the painful surprise even with things it should have expected.

A man who has always spoken of fickleness and unfaithfulness as perfectly normal behaviour in women will feel all the devastation of the sad surprise when he discovers that his sweetheart has been cheating on him, exactly as if he’d always held up female fidelity and constancy as a dogma or a rightful expectation.

Another man, convinced that everything is hollow and empty, will feel like he’s been struck by lightning when he learns that what he writes is considered worthless, or that his efforts to educate people are in vain, or that it’s impossible to communicate his emotion.

We need not suppose that those who have experienced these and similar disasters were insincere in what they said or wrote, even if the disasters they suffered were foreseeable in their words. The sincerity of intellectual affirmation has nothing to do with the naturalness of spontaneous emotion. Strangely or not, it seems the soul may be given such surprises merely so that it won’t lack pain, so that it will still know disgrace, so that it will have its fair share of grief in life.

We are all equal in our capacity for error and suffering. Only those who don’t feel don’t experience pain; and the highest, most notable and most prudent men are those who experience and suffer precisely what they foresaw and what they disdained. This is what is known as Life.

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As the road unwound through the night, I found my mind returning to Soledad and the unusual circumstances of our first meeting. I had been performing a Sunday recital in the white pavilions along the Corniche. In fact, the pavilion in which I had been scheduled to play was a the end of the boardwalk and flanked by small seaside rides and amusement park sideshows. I was due to perform a recital of several sixteenth century madrigals, following a string quartet of dubious reputation. In fact, the string quartet carried with them a reputation of wild onstage antics and sometimes their recitals were often known to end in sheer chaos, with people stripping and leaping about whilst chairs were thrown through windows into the street. It was difficult to understand the effect they seemed to have on audiences, particularly since their entire repertoire consisted of Schubert. Nevertheless, the quartet seemed primed to throw the entire boardwalk into disarray with their latest interpretation of ‘Death and the Maiden’. I was therefore understandably surprised when they elected to play a piece from Tchaikofsky’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’, a piece which had been originally written for an orchestra no less. They seemed to have gone to great pains to adapt the score to sit comfortably with their four instruments. Nevertheless, it was as if some element of previous vitality had become lost in the translation, and their performance emerged muddled and jarring. Perhaps it was their need to be experimental that led them to obsess over the technicalities of the piece. That overwhelming need to shrug off and rise above the typecasting that inevitably comes with any form of success. Whatever the urge was, it had evidently led them further and further away from the kernel of intensity that was firing their music from the very beginning. Perhaps they would have naturally weaned themselves off Schubert, eventually, with time and grace, but now it was apparent that a winning formula had been irreparably tampered with. The eager crowds of young street punks sat waiting for the music that had inspired them so, but it never came. The cellist gesticulated just as wildly before with his glittery pink instrument, but no amount of hip gyration and glitter could save them from the slow spiral down into mediocrity. The spiky pink and black haired audience of young, wild teens began to almost visibly deflate, like a helium balloon after a few days in captivity. What was once bright, vivid and colourful was now flaccid and boring. The young punks drifted off into the seaside rides in dribs and drabs, kicking popcorn at the occasional seagull. Very soon the audience consisted of only three old ladies, a dwarf from one of the sideshow tents, evidently on a smoke break, and a young girl in the back row. She sat slightly stooped and wore chunky black sunglasses behind a long fall of straight, nut coloured hair. Something in her manner suggested a young fawn among trees, inquisitive and alert, able to dash away at the slightest disturbance. She sat with her coffee coloured legs crossed, an air of distraction about her, staring out to sea as her hair gusted uncontrollably in the breezes. It was a marvellous day as I recall. Bright bottle-green surf broke against the pier in fresh flashes of spray while speckled dolphins sported amongst the breakers. The sunlight was dappling in vivid patterns through the funfair rides and along the striped awnings of ice-cream vendors while gulls ducked and wheeled, squabbling over fishermen’s scraps. Behind the audience, passers-by shot at rows of motorised ducks and threw coconuts at tin bulls-eyes. The quartet finished up with a half-hearted flourish, gazing dismally out at the empty seats. One of the old women began to clap in a lacklustre fashion. But the sound was barely audible above the cries of the gulls and the general hubbub. I felt a stab of sympathy for the viola player as he furiously wiped the dramatic white and black stage paint from his weeping face. Within minutes they had vacated the stage and a bald man in a white suit had stepped up to the lectern to announce me. I noticed the girl snap to attention as my name was spoken over the loudspeaker and realised with a start that she had come to see me perform. I was surprised that anyone had even been aware of my performance, as my name was not even on the bill. I had, in fact, only taken the gig in order to be photographed on the Corniche by the well known photographer, Ishioko Onda. Genevieve had dealt with the booking arrangements and had suppressed the fact that I was playing in accordance to the photographer’s wish to have the audience minimal and accidental. My following was quite strong in the city and Ishioko wanted to present an unusual perspective on my usual performance style. Perhaps this was the reason why she had instructed me to wear a polar bear suit. I had resisted at first, but Genevieve plied me with numerous magazine articles citing Ishioko’s world renown genius until I finally relented. The fact that none of my regular audience would see me in the ridiculous get-up had finally helped me to make my decision. Now, as I watched the girl settle into her seat in preparation for my performance, I began to feel self conscious and slightly uncomfortable in the soft, white fur. I looked up to see Ishioko waving maniacally from the top of the Ferris Wheel. She had set up her equipment in one of the flowerbud shaped capsules and bribed the operator to keep her at the top of the Wheel until I was well into my piece. I began to regret the whole venture, but decided to simply forge ahead since it was too late to alter the events as they stood. I shrugged off Hans, who clambered into my velvet lined guitar case to wait for me. I shot him a painful look as I checked the tuning on my instrument. He merely chewed languidly on a banana, looking back at me as if to say; ‘Just what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ I gathered up my fortitude and took to the stage. I heard muted applause and looked up to see the girl clapping softly. One or two if the duck shooters had also recognized me and were also smiling and pointing. I soberly took my seat and breathed in deeply, allowing my training to wash over me. I remembered the words of my teacher, the great Don Mox Riviera; ‘Become your audience, and then become the stage, let their passions shape your own until the entire theatre is of one single, unified passion.’ I let my mind flow out into the sea and the carnival rides and began to realise in fact, how appropriate my polar bear apparel was. I closed my eyes, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze and let my consciousness flow outwards into the eternal. Then I began to play. The intricate, flowering arabesques of music coiled upward from the strings, rising into the microphone like some delicate fragrance, to be magnified luminescently into the air via the enormous public address system. I felt myself relaxing into the dense, stately atmospheres of the first piece, my fingers exploring the outer reaches of vast celestial emotions, tantalizingly glimpsed through the lacy veil of graceful and repetitive time signatures. I was well into the second stanza when the coconut struck my head. I was so shocked by the blow that I rose, dropping my instrument and clawing at the white furry ears of my mask. I staggered backward into the stage cloth in agony as a whine of feedback erupted through the speaker systems. Unfortunately the drapery at the back of the stage was merely there in order to block off the sea view. And as the stage was raised, there was nothing whatsoever to prevent me from toppling off the end of the pier and into the ocean. I felt a brief moment of vertigo before plunging into the icy emerald surge. I opened my eyes to a salty blur as noise dubbed out into a muted crashing. The sound briefly re-instated itself as my head was tossed above the chop of the waterline. I glimpsed the flurry of many faces along the promenade, bending over the rails to witness my plight. The sun hazed white and I caught a flash of a figure leaping gracefully into the swell. Then I was plunged underwater again. The coconut had dazed me sufficiently so that I was unable to function properly, my arms flapping white, blurry fur as I struggled against the riptide. As I sank, I felt a slender arm wrap around my shoulders and my face was wreathed in a silky blossom of brown hair. The hair lulled me into momentary blindness and I felt a powerful kick toward the glittering membrane of light which marbled down from above. We rose quickly, emerging on the back of a long green curve. The arm relaxed somewhat and I felt a leg curl quickly around my waist. An enthusiastic cheer had gone up somewhere in the world above and my shaking vision crashed around the edge of the pier. People blurred in and out of focus. I even glimpsed the tiny figure of Ishioko Onda, standing at the pinnacle of the Ferris Wheel’s arch, snapping away frantically. The curve of water began to flex like a bicep, trawling us heavily upward. I craned myself around to look upon the face of my rescuer and found my nose snubbing against the girl’s. Her nut coloured hair was plastered back to reveal eyes the exact same hue and intensity of the water. She was laughing against the bright cadence of refracted light, the sun dancing in flecks along her small teeth. A vague smattering of pale freckles, made visible only by our close proximity danced along the bridge of her nose. Her body was pliant in my arms, and it moved comfortably with the water, eel-like in its supple muscularity.

“How destiny moves us all in it’s great game of chess!” she exclaimed happily.

“Yes,” I coughed through a mouthful of brine. “But who is destiny playing chess against?”

We abruptly reached the crest of the wave and I became aware of the fact that we were towering precariously over a churning trough. I felt the girl’s arms and legs tighten around me and prepared to hold my breath against the forthcoming plunge. Just then a dolphin’s tail flicked out of the spume and knocked me unconscious.

I awoke muzzilly in the back of a speeding van. I was lying on a stretcher and a bald woman in a white nurse’s uniform was taking a blood sample from my arm while the van jumped and rattled. There was something strange, even untoward about the nurse’s uniform and I tried to put my finger on what it was. I soon realised that the uniform was plastic, a cheap costume from some disreputable shop. I tried to sit up but then realised that I was being held down by an enormous tattooed man in a black poloneck and mirrored sunglasses. I was about to panic when I glimpsed the girl who had rescued me, sitting against the side of the van, wrapped in a towel. She saw that I was awake and came up to me with a warm smile.

“How are you feeling?” she asked softly, taking my hand.

“I’m…I’m feeling…I’m…fine,” I replied woozily. “What’s going on?”

“We were lucky that this ambulance was loitering near the pier,” the girl said. “They are checking you for shock and cranial damage.”

I noticed that the ‘nurse’ was massaging my kidneys with a look of spidery intensity. I looked up at the enormous tattooed man and then turned to the girl.

“This doesn’t look like an ambulance?” I whispered to her.

“Oh don’t worry,” the girl reassured me. “This is the private ambulance of a reclusive millionaire who happened to be on the esplanade when you fell. He recognised you when we were washed up on the beach and graciously ordered his staff to transport you to the clinic.”

“Ah, I see,” I said.

The girl squeezed my fingers and smiled sweetly down on me. I stared up into her sparkling green eyes and suddenly felt a familiar and horrifying paralysis beginning to settle down on me.

‘Oh God no!’ I thought to myself desperately. ‘Please God not now! Not like this!’

But it was too late, I could feel the terrible smile fixing across my face as the girl frowned at me in bewildered concern. I could feel my back and legs stiffening like an ironing board, my eyes flicking from side to side.

“He’s going into shock!” the nurse cried in a strange accent.

I suddenly felt the enormous man’s hands release me and tear open my polar bear suit as the nurse placed two cold, jelly covered metal instruments over my clenched chest. Within moments I was being electrocuted savagely. My debilitation must have received some inordinate shock, because when the current left my body, I could feel the muscles along my entire length beginning to miraculously relax. There was a brief moment when I felt control returning to me, then the girl once again took my hand and I looked up into her eyes and felt the affliction returning with a vengeance. The nurse suddenly came into view, waving large syringe filled with blue liquid.

‘Muscle relaxant!’ she yelled in her curiously baritone voice, plunging the needle deep into my thigh. Once again, I felt my infernal condition reel under this medical onslaught. But the smile, that horrible lingering rictus, still remained, attatched to my face like a parasite. Once again, I felt all hands leave me and the cold steel press to my chest. The current passed through me in violent networks, scouring the last vestiges of neurological trauma from me in a blaze of fiery glory. I stuttered my eyes open in amazement and the horrific smile melted from my face like candy beneath a blowtorch. The deluge passed and I was blinking up into the girl’s eyes in glorious freedom.

“I’m cured..” I rasped to her.

She began to smile as my recovery became obvious. The woman in the nurse uniform gave me a small plastic cup of water and I sucked it down. As soon as I was done, the enormous man once again restrained me. I turned my head to face him.

“I’m fine now thank you,” I said into his mirrored sunglasses.

Curiously, he looked to the girl as though she were in command of this entire situation. I saw her nod affirmatively to him in response to his questioning look. The man released me as the bald woman passed a huge beeping instrument over my face and chest, scanning for something.

“I’m really allright now,” I said to her as she moved the blinking instrument back and forth over my prostrate form. “Could you take us back to the Corniche please?”

She also looked up at the girl for confirmation of my request. The girl brushed wet locks of hair from her face and replied to the nurse in some foreign language.

“Are you diabetic?” the nurse asked me suddenly.

“No, but I’m really worried about my iguana…Could we..”

“Do you smoke?”

“No, I don’t smoke..”

“Suffer from high cholesterol? Neurological dysfunctions? Candida? Haemophilia? Porphyries?”

“No! No, nothing. I’m quite healthy.”

She nodded, transcribing everything onto tiny computer which hummed beneath the stretcher. I sat up shakily and saw that the floor of the van was covered, ankle deep, in plastic lobsters. The van was slowing now and very soon, we had come to a complete standstill. The huge man moved to the back of the van and threw open the doors. Sunlight gushed in, and I was suddenly aware of how dark it had been in the back. The girl walked into the bright glare, pulling me by the hand. I followed, stumbling slightly in my sodden polar bear costume. We emerged into a dingy alleyway, crowded with garbage dumpsters and similar detritus. I looked at the girl whose hand I held, and for a moment couldn’t believe what was happening. It was as if the poles had miraculously swapped. I was cured of my paralysing affliction! In her long, white toga-like towel, the girl had the appearance of some flighty goddess from mythology. I even saw that she wore long, strappy Grecian sandals which effectively completed this image. I was about to ask her name when the black van screeched off down the alley, spilling plastic lobsters in every direction.

“My name is Soledad Evora,” she said with a smile.

“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance,” I replied. “I’m…”

“Oh, I know who you are,” she beamed, leading me out of the alleyway and into the sunshine. We emerged onto a crowded thoroughfare and were suddenly were engulfed by pedestrians, pushing and shoving in every possible direction. I looked up and saw that we were merely a stone’s throw away from the Corniche. Soledad pulled me off the curb and we hurriedly crossed a busy tramline as cars whizzed noisily past us. People were staring at my wet polar outfit in outrage.

“Ignore them!” Soledad called over her shoulder. “Fashion is the front-line of tyranny.”

I stumbled in her wake as she pulled me down a flight of stairs. Within moments I found myself comfortably installed in a small seaside cafe while Soledad ordered two espressos. When the portly waiter had left, she leaned back in her cane chair and observed me, her head framed against the backdrop of the sunny waves.

“I never realised that dolphins could be so clumsy,” she chuckled.

“People often stereotype dolphins as these man-loving cartoon creatures,” I nodded. “When really they are savage creatures who have been known to attack sharks.”

“A friend of mine had once swum too far out to sea,” she mused, gazing introspectively out at the horizon. “A current had pulled her uncontrollably out, until the land was not visible to her anymore. She was understandably panicked and began screaming and crying out there in the blue. A pack of dolphins came, encircled her protectively and then guided her gently back to shore. These are not the actions of insensitive creatures.”

“Don’t armed guards escort you off private property at gunpoint?”

She laughed outrageously and two steaming espresso’s materialized, almost by magic.

“This cynicism does not fit the luminous melodies you so pour casually out of your instrument,” she smiled slyly.

“The cynicism will fade with the bruise.”

I suddenly noticed the delicious aroma of the coffee and lifted the small white china cup

between thumb and forefinger. I savoured the sharp shafts of scalding steam and allowed myself a tiny sip. Satisfaction blossomed immediately against the sodden pain.

“Tell me Miss Evora,” I began.

“I pulled you out of the sea,” She reminded me graciously. “The least you can do is call me Soledad,”

She wasn’t aware of it, but she had pulled me out of far more than that. I struggled not to show my buoyant sense of jubilation at the death of my affliction, fearful that my disproportionate exuberance might seem strange and inexplicable to her.

“Thank you Soledad,” I said most sincerely, then paused, returning to my original tack.

“Did you perhaps happen to notice who threw that coconut?”

“Actually, no,” she frowned. “It simply seemed to sail out of the funfair rides.”

“I see,” I murmured, taking another draught of the revitalizing espresso.

“But why bother with such unfortunate details,” she said, lifting her small white cup to her lips. “The culprit was probably some inebriated oaf, best to forget about the whole thing.”

“You’re probably right,” I concurred. “Still, it is somewhat of a mystery.”

“Mystery is our only defence against mediocrity,” she said keenly.

I raised an eyebrow, struck by the thought processes which would lead to such a remark.

“You seem to be very sure of your ground,” I said. “Are you perhaps studying Philosophy under the legendary Professor Mongholla?”

“No, I’m a waitress at the Heartstring Noodle Bar,”

I must have looked perplexed, for she continued in earnest.

“You see, I view most institutes of higher learning as rather intricate and expensive slaughterhouses.”

“Slaughterhouses!” I replied, befuddled. “Why, what is it that is being slaughtered?”

“One’s soul of course,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“One’s mind is curtailed and slowly, within set parameters, manufactured into a cog,” she explained patiently. “A cog made to standards, built to fit the machinations of what people call society.”

“What about the one’s who refuse to be shaped, the one’s who rebel?” I asked, thinking of Federico.

“They are simply cogs of a different sort,” she answered. “You will find that society is often defined most clearly by those who seek to uproot it.”

“…Anti-cogs?”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, but our society, for example, is in such turmoil following the recent coup, surely all the qualities learned in such institutions will come to the fore in reshaping our conditions after the storm has passed?”

“Yes, they will re-shape it,” she answered matter-of-factly. “They will re-shape it into an upgraded version of what came before, because that corrupted model of existence is all they ever dared to know. And it will lead to all too familiar dysfunctions. Voids will occur in the fabric of society, voids which will be filled by the same old problems, leading to the same old coup de tat’s.”

“So you are a revolutionary!”

“Revolution indicates a full circle,” she smiled behind her cup. “And what use is a serpent which eats its own tail?”

“You astonish me Soledad,” I stated rather blatantly.

She leaned back, holding her cup with all her fingers, as though cradling an egg.

“That is a good start.” she replied seriously.

I watched as she drained her espresso in one swift gulp, and suddenly remembered that I ought to be returning to the pier sometime soon. Ishioko would no doubt be arguing with fairground officials and telephoning Genevieve with all sorts of garbled stories. The event organisers would be informing the coastguard. All manner of strange hell might have already broken loose. And what of poor Hans? I looked up, reluctant to part with Soledad but mindful of my responsibilities. I was about to say something when Soledad spoke.

“I really would like to stay longer, even stroll back to the pavilion with you,” she said. “But I’m afraid, I really must be getting back to my work now.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Is it close by? Would you be requiring a cab?”

She glanced up at me at these questions, a strange and unfathomable look surfacing in her eyes. Then her cheerful demeanour reasserted itself, erasing all traces of the former distance.

“No, that’s allright,” she smiled.

A quizzical frown suddenly struck her face as she quested in the depths of her towel.

“Oh dear,” she murmured. “I seem to have lost my purse in the ocean.”

“Don’t worry,” I said pleasantly, happy to be able to do something for her. “It will be my pleasure.”

But when I withdrew my dripping wallet, I found that all my money had transformed into a briny, slushy paste.

“Oh dear,” I echoed.

I signalled the waiter over and was about to explain our situation when the maitre de, a short, red faced man, scuttled over to our table. He brushed the waiter aside as if he were a spot of lint, and smiled sickeningly down at us.

“Monsieur /////,” he oozed. “On behalf, of the establishment, we would like to welcome you. I can assure you that we are all avid admirers of the flamenco tradition and see you as a notable addition to such a distinguished legacy of music.”

I bowed my head graciously to the red jowled gentleman, attempting to appear as formal as one could in a wet polar bear suit. I could see the waiters all smiling and whispering amongst themselves in the background.

“Thank you,” I said solemnly. “Though unfortunately I must bring to your attention the fact that…”

“Pardon me for interrupting Monsieur////,” the maitre de cut in nervously. “But before you go on, might I add that I have come here with a request from all the staff.”

I paused, slightly annoyed for having been interrupted during such an embarrassing admittal.

“And what might that be? ” I asked.

“Well, we were wondering if you might not consider taking the stage and performing a short rendition of Carulli’s Overture?” he paused and cleared his throat. “We would of course be willing to waive your bill.”

I looked at Soledad, who raised her eyebrows.

“I would like to oblige you, ” I replied in earnest. “But am I to take it that you would like me to perform what is essentially a complete sonata movement, without having practiced it for several months and without my instrument?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he grinned bashfully, indicating a weatherbeaten stage in the darkest corner of the cafe.

“But I cannot possibly perform without an instrument,” I protested.

I observed as one of the waiters produced a lime green ukulele and waved it encouragingly in my direction.

“You see sir,” the maitre de flourished. “We have thought of everything.”

I rose unsteadily and accepted the proffered instrument to a small flurry of applause.

“Could I interest you instead in a short study by Carcassi?” I ventured helplessly.

231

One of the soul’s great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it’s finished, that it’s not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done. But to write a work, knowing beforehand that it’s bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it’s flawed and imperfect - this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation. Not only am I dissatisfied with the poems I write now; I also know that I’ll be dissatisfied with the poems I write in the future. I know it philosophically and in my flesh, through a hazy, gladiolated foreglimpse.

So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven’t learned to pracitse completely the renunciation that I preach. I haven’t been able to give up my inclination to poetry and prose. I have to write, as if I were carrying out a punishment. And the greatest punishment is to know that whatever I write will be futile, flawed and uncertain.

I wrote my first poems when I was still a child. Though dreadful, they seemed perfect to me. I’ll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work. What I write today is much better. It’s even better than what some of the best writers write. But it’s infinitely inferior to what I for some reason feel I could - or perhaps should - write. I weep over those first dreadful poems as over a dead child, a dead son, a last hope that has vanished.

Mark this child. She is small and white. She sits within a room within a house of many rooms. Outside sway trees upon the rags of roads and blackened paths beyond nurse yet the putrid fruit of men. Her mother lies in wait upon the fire, though in truth the night sweats foul and sweet. They wait to hear of news of war; their father promised to return. I am small and meek, he thinks, and thereby dares to dodge the concern of larger men. But his skin will betray him.

The girl looks on, already now too thin. She will not see her father again. Her mother is already lost, for the canker within her has begun its work in earnest. Years from now it will cause her to see devils and death upon the faces of her kin, even as her body turns foul and pestilent. As the moths gather, the mother creeps to the window and claps her hands to the frame, over and again a dull beat, her wails rising and circling above their heads. But though the girl crouches on the ground, fists raised against those murderous cries, the sounds of this night will stay with her. They have lost everything. The cool white rooms, the swollen bougainvilleas. Blacks floating through the hallways, hovering in doorways, deferent and silent. Darkness on the edge of their eyes. A raw unspoken agony. A lone man scuttles from shadow to shadow, pursued by the coming night while all hide behind walls under bushes, a terrible fear beating within.

Two year later she is in another land, secured within the vice of the white man. She is taken in by a family of flat blue eyes. They pity her. Her country has failed to sustain the dream of cool white rooms, swollen bougainvilleas, raw unspoken agony. Six months in a room in a courtyard behind the house proper. She comes out once a day to pick at the food they set out for her and unfold a worn note upon the creaking kitchen table. Crooking further the bended line of her shoulders, she sounds nothing save for a high keening. They cannot understand her weird bird speech and she teaches herself painfully in fierce solitude from scraps of writing found places and the gestures of others. In the gathering desk, she binds her breasts, puts a heavy jacket on; dressed as a boy to drink amongst the men. With her flat chest and circumspect ways they take her for a nestling grown old before its years, pitiful and unthreatening. For the girl says little to avoid notice, her speech marked irrevocably by the flutterings of another tongue. She keeps a screwdriver on her and one night sticks it in a man, through the kidneys as he relieves himself, twisting once to make sure it will not be withdrawn. He falls to the floor, blood spreading darkly against the back of his shirt. The girl’s face impassive while she lifts his wallet. The device learnt from hearsaying thieves upon the crowded trains between the townships and the mines.

She stays within the city, moving from room to room. She works as a driver, once as a teacher to children terrified into silence by her minatory hold. A month and she is on the move again. She works for wages and when none is to be found she works the bars, wing-closed and then a composed unfolding of death.

These are the months when the city calls to itself and hears no answering voice save that of the wind, which runs the streets, trapped by the tall buildings. As if it too would run from this place. In the early dark she comes back to that week’s sleeping place, her thin shadow stretched into the night, twisting along the lines cast upon the ground by the telephone poles. As if it sought to bind itself and her to this stead. She cooks herself what meagre stuff she might, and if she may, falls to sleep with the knowledge of the pulsing dreamless sky above.

One of these sightless days finds her in yet another stained room amongst men drinking. This time she is a cleaner off work, thinned by a day spent scrubbing scratched floors, chemicals rising so thick her mind can’t stand straight and she loses hours over a bucket of dirty water.
You ever dream of water?
He asked it like he was asking to spend the night with her. The girl turned to the man who spoke. What are you doing here father? This is no place for old men.
You just might be right. His brown face crinkled. No place for old men or leprous girl-children.
He shifted himself. Slowly reached for his cigarettes. Turned a little and a straggling woman stirred into focus. Me and her, we’re going to find water, clean and blue.
The woman beside him turns, holds herself up. She raises an invisible umbrella, bows her head once, dark eyes for a moment unkennelled.
We’re going home. They came again, this time with their guns and their tanks. They told us it was not safe for us to stay here. Lepers live across the valley. They tore it down and burned it all. To protect us from the lepers, to protect us from ourselves. There’s nothing left, so we’re going back, to the sea. Been dreaming of water so long.
She spits at him. Ammonia clouds her vision and burns her mouth. What do I care father?
You, child, are going to help us. The old woman turns to him, a secret smile on her face. He nods. The girl slides a little. I told you so you could understand why we would do this to you. A privilege.
The old couple get up slowly, the man folding her wallet into himself.
I understand, she sneers. Some kinds dream of dirt, the kind you can let run through your fingers; others dream of far off places, far off people. She can no longer sit straight. But tell me, did water ever dream of us? Fools. Where is home if it doesn’t long for us as much as we long for it? Where is home.

Some take comfort from the faceless dark, profit from the quiet it affords them to act on their heart’s outbeatings. But how dark it was that night, how bright her eyes, how heavy the proof demanded of her.

Afcadio Hearn
(Koizumi Yakumo)

More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, in the Straits of Shimonoseki, was fought the last battle of the long contest between the Heike, or Taira clan, and the Genji, or Minamoto clan. There the Heike perished utterly, with their women and children, and their infant emperor likewise — now remembered as Antoku Tenno. And that sea and shore have been haunted for seven hundred years… Elsewhere I told you about the strange crabs found there, called Heike crabs, which have human faces on their backs, and are said to be the spirits of the Heike warriors [1]. But there are many strange things to be seen and heard along that coast. On dark nights thousands of ghostly fires hover about the beach, or flit above the waves,– pale lights which the fishermen call Oni-bi, or demon-fires; and, whenever the winds are up, a sound of great shouting comes from that sea, like a clamor of battle.

In former years the Heike were much more restless than they now are. They would rise about ships passing in the night, and try to sink them; and at all times they would watch for swimmers, to pull them down. It was in order to appease those dead that the Buddhist temple, Amidaji, was built at Akamagaseki [2]. A cemetery also was made close by, near the beach; and within it were set up monuments inscribed with the names of the drowned emperor and of his great vassals; and Buddhist services were regularly performed there, on behalf of the spirits of them. After the temple had been built, and the tombs erected, the Heike gave less trouble than before; but they continued to do queer things at intervals,– proving that they had not found the perfect peace.

Some centuries ago there lived at Akamagaseki a blind man named Hoichi, who was famed for his skill in recitation and in playing upon the biwa [3]. >From childhood he had been trained to recite and to play; and while yet a lad he had surpassed his teachers. As a professional biwa-hoshi he became famous chiefly by his recitations of the history of the Heike and the Genji; and it is said that when he sang the song of the battle of Dan-no-ura “even the goblins [kijin] could not refrain from tears.”

At the outset of his career, Hoichi was very poor; but he found a good friend to help him. The priest of the Amidaji was fond of poetry and music; and he often invited Hoichi to the temple, to play and recite. Afterwards, being much impressed by the wonderful skill of the lad, the priest proposed that Hoichi should make the temple his home; and this offer was gratefully accepted. Hoichi was given a room in the temple-building; and, in return for food and lodging, he was required only to gratify the priest with a musical performance on certain evenings, when otherwise disengaged.

One summer night the priest was called away, to perform a Buddhist service at the house of a dead parishioner; and he went there with his acolyte, leaving Hoichi alone in the temple. It was a hot night; and the blind man sought to cool himself on the verandah before his sleeping-room. The verandah overlooked a small garden in the rear of the Amidaji. There Hoichi waited for the priest’s return, and tried to relieve his solitude by practicing upon his biwa. Midnight passed; and the priest did not appear. But the atmosphere was still too warm for comfort within doors; and Hoichi remained outside. At last he heard steps approaching from the back gate. Somebody crossed the garden, advanced to the verandah, and halted directly in front of him — but it was not the priest. A deep voice called the blind man’s name — abruptly and unceremoniously, in the manner of a samurai summoning an inferior:–

“Hoichi!”

“Hai!” (1) answered the blind man, frightened by the menace in the voice,– “I am blind! — I cannot know who calls!”

“There is nothing to fear,” the stranger exclaimed, speaking more gently. “I am stopping near this temple, and have been sent to you with a message. My present lord, a person of exceedingly high rank, is now staying in Akamagaseki, with many noble attendants. He wished to view the scene of the battle of Dan-no-ura; and to-day he visited that place. Having heard of your skill in reciting the story of the battle, he now desires to hear your performance: so you will take your biwa and come with me at once to the house where the august assembly is waiting.”

In those times, the order of a samurai was not to be lightly disobeyed. Hoichi donned his sandals, took his biwa, and went away with the stranger, who guided him deftly, but obliged him to walk very fast. The hand that guided was iron; and the clank of the warrior’s stride proved him fully armed,– probably some palace-guard on duty. Hoichi’s first alarm was over: he began to imagine himself in good luck; — for, remembering the retainer’s assurance about a “person of exceedingly high rank,” he thought that the lord who wished to hear the recitation could not be less than a daimyo of the first class. Presently the samurai halted; and Hoichi became aware that they had arrived at a large gateway; — and he wondered, for he could not remember any large gate in that part of the town, except the main gate of the Amidaji. “Kaimon!” [4] the samurai called,– and there was a sound of unbarring; and the twain passed on. They traversed a space of garden, and halted again before some entrance; and the retainer cried in a loud voice, “Within there! I have brought Hoichi.” Then came sounds of feet hurrying, and screens sliding, and rain-doors opening, and voices of womeni n converse. By the language of the women Hoichi knew them to be domestics in some noble household; but he could not imagine to what place he had been conducted. Little time was allowed him for conjecture. After he had been helped to mount several stone steps, upon the last of which he was told to leave his sandals, a woman’s hand guided him along interminable reaches of polished planking, and round pillared angles too many to remember, and over widths amazing of matted floor,– into the middle of some vast apartment. There he thought that many great people were assembled: the sound of the rustling of silk was like the sound of leaves in a forest. He heard also a great humming of voices,– talking in undertones; and the speech was the speech of courts.

Hoichi was told to put himself at ease, and he found a kneeling-cushion ready for him. After having taken his place upon it, and tuned his instrument, the voice of a woman — whom he divined to be the Rojo, or matron in charge of the female service — addressed him, saying,–

“It is now required that the history of the Heike be recited, to the accompaniment of the biwa.”

Now the entire recital would have required a time of many nights: therefore Hoichi ventured a question:–

“As the whole of the story is not soon told, what portion is it augustly desired that I now recite?”

The woman’s voice made answer:–

“Recite the story of the battle at Dan-no-ura,– for the pity of it is the most deep.” [5]

Then Hoichi lifted up his voice, and chanted the chant of the fight on the bitter sea,– wonderfully making his biwa to sound like the straining of oars and the rushing of ships, the whirr and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, the plunging of slain in the flood. And to left and right of him, in the pauses of his playing, he could hear voices murmuring praise: “How marvelous an artist!” — “Never in our own province was playing heard like this!” — “Not in all the empire is there another singer like Hoichi!” Then fresh courage came to him, and he played and sang yet better than before; and a hush of wonder deepened about him. But when at last he came to tell the fate of the fair and helpless,– the piteous perishing of the women and children,– and the death-leap of Nii-no-Ama, with the imperial infant in her arms,– then all the listeners uttered together one long, long shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the violence and grief that he had made. For much time the sobbing and the wailing continued. But gradually the sounds of lamentation died away; and again, in the great stillness that followed, Hoichi heard the voice of the woman whom he supposed to be the Rojo.

She said:–

“Although we had been assured that you were a very skillful player upon the biwa, and without an equal in recitative, we did not know that any one could be so skillful as you have proved yourself to-night. Our lord has been pleased to say that he intends to bestow upon you a fitting reward. But he desires that you shall perform before him once every night for the next six nights — after which time he will probably make his august return-journey. To-morrow night, therefore, you are to come here at the same hour. The retainer who to-night conducted you will be sent for you… There is another matter about which I have been ordered to inform you. It is required that you shall speak to no one of your visits here, during the time of our lord’s august sojourn at Akamagaseki. As he is traveling incognito, [6] he commands that no mention of these things be made… You are now free to go back to your temple.”

After Hoichi had duly expressed his thanks, a woman’s hand conducted him to the entrance of the house, where the same retainer, who had before guided him, was waiting to take him home. The retainer led him to the verandah at the rear of the temple, and there bade him farewell.

It was almost dawn when Hoichi returned; but his absence from the temple had not been observed,– as the priest, coming back at a very late hour, had supposed him asleep. During the day Hoichi was able to take some rest; and he said nothing about his strange adventure. In the middle of the following night the samurai again came for him, and led him to the august assembly, where he gave another recitation with the same success that had attended his previous performance. But during this second visit his absence from the temple was accidentally discovered; and after his return in the morning he was summoned to the presence of the priest, who said to him, in a tone of kindly reproach:–

“We have been very anxious about you, friend Hoichi. To go out, blind and alone, at so late an hour, is dangerous. Why did you go without telling us? I could have ordered a servant to accompany you. And where have you been?”

Hoichi answered, evasively,–

“Pardon me kind friend! I had to attend to some private business; and I could not arrange the matter at any other hour.”

The priest was surprised, rather than pained, by Hoichi’s reticence: he felt it to be unnatural, and suspected something wrong. He feared that the blind lad had been bewitched or deluded by some evil spirits. He did not ask any more questions; but he privately instructed the men-servants of the temple to keep watch upon Hoichi’s movements, and to follow him in case that he should again leave the temple after dark.

On the very next night, Hoichi was seen to leave the temple; and the servants immediately lighted their lanterns, and followed after him. But it was a rainy night, and very dark; and before the temple-folks could get to the roadway, Hoichi had disappeared. Evidently he had walked very fast,– a strange thing, considering his blindness; for the road was in a bad condition. The men hurried through the streets, making inquiries at every house which Hoichi was accustomed to visit; but nobody could give them any news of him. At last, as they were returning to the temple by way of the shore, they were startled by the sound of a biwa, furiously played, in the cemetery of the Amidaji. Except for some ghostly fires — such as usually flitted there on dark nights — all was blackness in that direction. But the men at once hastened to the cemetery; and there, by the help of their lanterns, they discovered Hoichi,– sitting alone in the rain before the memorial tomb of Antoku Tenno, making his biwa resound, and loudly chanting the chant of the battle of Dan-no-ura. And behind him, and about him, and everywhere above the tombs, the fires of the dead were burning, like candles. Never before had so great a host of Oni-bi appeared in the sight of mortal man…

“Hoichi San! — Hoichi San!” the servants cried,– “you are bewitched!… Hoichi San!”

But the blind man did not seem to hear. Strenuously he made his biwa to rattle and ring and clang; — more and more wildly he chanted the chant of the battle of Dan-no-ura. They caught hold of him; — they shouted into his ear,–

“Hoichi San! — Hoichi San! — come home with us at once!”

Reprovingly he spoke to them:–

“To interrupt me in such a manner, before this august assembly, will not be tolerated.”

Whereat, in spite of the weirdness of the thing, the servants could not help laughing. Sure that he had been bewitched, they now seized him, and pulled him up on his feet, and by main force hurried him back to the temple,– where he was immediately relieved of his wet clothes, by order of the priest. Then the priest insisted upon a full explanation of his friend’s astonishing behavior.

Hoichi long hesitated to speak. But at last, finding that his conduct had really alarmed and angered the good priest, he decided to abandon his reserve; and he related everything that had happened from the time of first visit of the samurai.

The priest said:–

“Hoichi, my poor friend, you are now in great danger! How unfortunate that you did not tell me all this before! Your wonderful skill in music has indeed brought you into strange trouble. By this time you must be aware that you have not been visiting any house whatever, but have been passing your nights in the cemetery, among the tombs of the Heike; — and it was before the memorial-tomb of Antoku Tenno that our people to-night found you, sitting in the rain. All that you have been imagining was illusion — except the calling of the dead. By once obeying them, you have put yourself in their power. If you obey them again, after what has already occurred, they will tear you in pieces. But they would have destroyed you, sooner or later, in any event… Now I shall not be able to remain with you to-night: I am called away to perform another service. But, before I go, it will be necessary to protect your body by writing holy texts upon it.”

Before sundown the priest and his acolyte stripped Hoichi: then, with their writing-brushes, they traced upon his breast and back, head and face and neck, limbs and hands and feet,– even upon the soles of his feet, and upon all parts of his body,– the text of the holy sutra called Hannya-Shin-Kyo. [7] When this had been done, the priest instructed Hoichi, saying:–

“To-night, as soon as I go away, you must seat yourself on the verandah, and wait. You will be called. But, whatever may happen, do not answer, and do not move. Say nothing and sit still — as if meditating. If you stir, or make any noise, you will be torn asunder. Do not get frightened; and do not think of calling for help — because no help could save you. If you do exactly as I tell you, the danger will pass, and you will have nothing more to fear.”

After dark the priest and the acolyte went away; and Hoichi seated himself on the verandah, according to the instructions given him. He laid his biwa on the planking beside him, and, assuming the attitude of meditation, remained quite still,– taking care not to cough, or to breathe audibly. For hours he stayed thus.

Then, from the roadway, he heard the steps coming. They passed the gate, crossed the garden, approached the verandah, stopped — directly in front of him.

“Hoichi!” the deep voice called. But the blind man held his breath, and sat motionless.

“Hoichi!” grimly called the voice a second time. Then a third time — savagely:–

“Hoichi!”

Hoichi remained as still as a stone,– and the voice grumbled:–

“No answer! — that won’t do!… Must see where the fellow is.”…

There was a noise of heavy feet mounting upon the verandah. The feet approached deliberately,– halted beside him. Then, for long minutes,– during which Hoichi felt his whole body shake to the beating of his heart,– there was dead silence.

At last the gruff voice muttered close to him:–

“Here is the biwa; but of the biwa-player I see — only two ears!… So that explains why he did not answer: he had no mouth to answer with — there is nothing left of him but his ears… Now to my lord those ears I will take — in proof that the august commands have been obeyed, so far as was possible”…

At that instant Hoichi felt his ears gripped by fingers of iron, and torn off! Great as the pain was, he gave no cry. The heavy footfalls receded along the verandah,– descended into the garden,– passed out to the roadway,– ceased. From either side of his head, the blind man felt a thick warm trickling; but he dared not lift his hands…

Before sunrise the priest came back. He hastened at once to the verandah in the rear, stepped and slipped upon something clammy, and uttered a cry of horror; — for he say, by the light of his lantern, that the clamminess was blood. But he perceived Hoichi sitting there, in the attitude of meditation — with the blood still oozing from his wounds.

“My poor Hoichi!” cried the startled priest,– “what is this?… You have been hurt?

At the sound of his friend’s voice, the blind man felt safe. He burst out sobbing, and tearfully told his adventure of the night.

“Poor, poor Hoichi!” the priest exclaimed,– “all my fault! — my very grievous fault!… Everywhere upon your body the holy texts had been written — except upon your ears! I trusted my acolyte to do that part of the work; and it was very, very wrong of me not to have made sure that he had done it!… Well, the matter cannot now be helped; — we can only try to heal your hurts as soon as possible… Cheer up, friend! — the danger is now well over. You will never again be troubled by those visitors.”

With the aid of a good doctor, Hoichi soon recovered from his injuries. The story of his strange adventure spread far and wide, and soon made him famous. Many noble persons went to Akamagaseki to hear him recite; and large presents of money were given to him,– so that he became a wealthy man… But from the time of his adventure, he was known only by the appellation of Mimi-nashi-Hoichi: “Hoichi-the-Earless.”

***

NB: Afcadio Hearn was an American of Irish-Greek descent. He went to Japan and became a naturalized Japanese citizen. He married a woman of Samurai lineage, and adopted her family name “Koizumi.” He died of heart failure in Japan. He is regarded as a giant of Japanese literature.

Until the man you love has slapped you to the floor you just don’t know what it takes to get up and start picking up the dropped stitches of your life. But getting up is not always the smart option. The second blow is much harder, causing a plug of mucus and blood to shoot out of her right nostril. Right nostril. Means he’s using his left hand. ‘Always the gentleman,’ she thinks, and an irrational giggle bubbles up in her throat.

Still, it is enough to buckle her knees and make her fall down helplessly, stupidly; hitting her head on the floor. She gets up again, more slowly and warily this time, and suddenly both of the boys are in the room. They are in their pajamas, their hair dishevelled and their faces showing uncomprehending panic. Both are crying and screaming: ‘No, Daddy, no, please don’t hit Mummy!’ He backs off a little; nostrils flaring, breath coming fast and his eyes slightly unfocused. His mouth curls as he says, ‘You’re scaring the children. Go and wash your face, you stupid bitch.’

She walks to the bathroom like an automaton, flashes of the blow exploding behind her eyes in a womb-red starburst. At a sound behind she turns quickly to see Peter lurching down the passage towards her. She shrinks back against the wall as he thrusts his face close to hers and hisses, ‘Always have to make a scene, don’t you? Fucking drama queen!’ She feels his spittle on her face and smells his breath, rank with brandy and venom. She drops her eyes and holds the gagging down until she hears their bedroom door slam, then she stumbles into the bathroom and throws up into the basin until her diaphragm aches and there is nothing left but dry retching.

She rinses her mouth and face with cold water and only then looks up into the mirror. The side of her face shows a faint handprint, and her right eye is starting to swell. Her jaw hurts, but her teeth all feel firm. She’s washed all the blood from her nostril, but it still feels congested. Theo’s face appears behind hers, eyes still and dark in his pale face. Luke is clinging to his leg, his small face contorted as he cries soundlessly. ‘Oh, my boys, I’m so sorry,’ she says, crouching down to put her arms around both of them. Theo stands stiffly, but she can feel him trembling. Luke flings his arms around her neck, nearly choking her as she breathes in his warm smell and the saltiness of sweat and tears.

He clings to her like an orphaned chimpanzee as she carries him to bed, Theo following silently behind. Soothing words and a back rub soon has Luke breathing peacefully, but she can feel Theo’s eyes on her in the duskiness of their nightlight. She sits down on his bed and reaches out to smooth his hair, but he turns his face away towards the wall. ‘Sometimes grown-ups fight,’ she whispers. ‘Remember when you and Michael had that fight at school and the next day you were friends again?’
He nods slightly, then shakes his head.
‘It’s not the same,’ he says, the anger in his voice muffled by his pillow.

A breeze is picking up outside, relieving the pressing heat of the day. In the moonlight the Karoo koppies, so dull by day, look almost beautiful. The grass is cool underfoot as she walks down to the stream where the tall poplars are whispering. A bat suddenly swoops down low over her; she startles and ducks involuntarily. Behind her she hears a soft thud as a ripe pear falls down. ‘Help me,’ she asks, looking up into the sky. ‘Grant me strength, please.’ All she sees is the great expanse of night sky and the stars twinkling coldly, immeasurably far away. She doesn’t think that anyone has heard. From across the stream a donkey starts to bray loudly and abruptly. The sounds are like great gut-tearing sobs. She briskly rubs the goose bumps from her arms and turns back home.

***

She wakes to the sound of whispering outside the bedroom door. As she strains to make sense of the sounds, flashes of memory from the previous night jolt her upright. Peter lies sprawled across the bed, still fully dressed, breathing stertorously. The door swings open slowly and Theo enters first, carrying a tray with great concentration. Luke pushes past him and leaps into her lap, shouting ‘Happy birthday, Mummy, happy, happy!’ Peter jerks awake and assesses the situation through bloodshot eyes. Mumbling something, he makes his way unsteadily to the bathroom.

‘Happy birthday, Mom,’ says Theo. ‘I made breakfast for you.’
‘I helped! I picked the flowers!’ Luke adds indignantly.
‘Thank you, my darlings,’ she says. ‘It looks lovely.’
The toast had been burnt and scraped and thickly smeared with butter. She takes an enthusiastic bite under their watchful eyes. ‘Mmm-mmm,’ she manages before taking a big sip of mahogany-coloured tea. It is lukewarm and very sweet.
‘I used two bags,’ Theo says uncertainly.
‘It’s just perfect,’ she smiles. ‘And look at the beautiful flowers!’
Luke had picked daisies, kakiebos and a few ragged hibiscus; the stems all of different lengths, they’d been stuck haphazardly into a jam jar.

‘And look what else I got!’ Luke dashes into the passage and returns with an ice-cream container. He thrusts it close to her face. ‘A zillion grasshops!’ he announces triumphantly. She recoils from the sight of the insects swarming over each other and the scraping sounds of their futile efforts to scramble up the sides of the container.
‘That’s nice, sweetheart,’ she says faintly, ‘but I think you should put them back.’
Luke pulls a stubborn face.
‘I’ll help you,’ Theo says quickly. ‘Come, mom wants to get dressed.’
He gives her a conspiratorial look over his shoulder as he ushers Luke out, and she mouths ‘Thank you’ at him.

Peter steps from the shower, billowing steam. ‘Jesus,’ he says as he catches sight of her face in the mirror.
‘I can patch it,’ she says, ‘but you’ll have to cancel Camille’s and the babysitter.’
‘But I booked a table two months ago,’ he says wheedlingly. ‘And you’ve always wanted to go there. I did it especially for you.’
‘I’m not going, Peter,’ says Olivia. ‘Not now, and not like this.’ She dries her face and looks at him in the mirror, her eye throbbing. ‘We can rather take the boys to the Spur.’
‘I’ll stop drinking,’ he mutters. He swallows hard and then starts to cry. She turns, and he leans heavily against her, the basin cold against her lower back.
‘God help me,’ he sobs. ‘I don’t know what gets into me.’
She looks up at the ceiling as she strokes his wet hair. ‘Shh…’ she says. ‘Shh…’

***

Her mother phones just after lunchtime.
‘And how is the birthday girl?’ she asks indulgently.
‘I’m just fine, Ma. It’s a lovely day here. Think I’ve got a few new wrinkles, though.’
‘Nonsense,’ her mother tuts. ‘All set for tonight? I’m so glad you’re getting out for a change, and that you finally have a chance to wear that beautiful dress.’
Olivia detects a movement at the end of the passage. Their bedroom door is opening stealthily. She takes a deep breath.
‘Actually, we’ve had to cancel. The babysitter has flu.’
She holds the phone away from her ear for her mother’s protesting wail. ‘Oh no, darling!
If you’d let me know earlier I could have driven over and spent the night.’
‘Ma, it’s fine, really. We’re taking the boys to the Spur. They’ll love it.’
Her mother sighs. ‘Well, make sure that you take a rain check on Camille’s. And tell Peter to drive carefully. Watch out for kudu.’
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘I can hear your eyes rolling! Happy birthday, darling. God bless.’

***

Luke is riding horsy on the back of the vinyl-covered banquette. He proudly clutches his new balloon, hastily procured when the first one popped, causing a torrent of grief.
Theo is intently colouring a picture of a cute Native American boy on horseback, taking great pains with the rainbow plumage of the headdress. Olivia smiles at them, then says,
‘They’ll be getting tired soon. We should go.’
Peter motions to the waiter. ‘There’s just one more thing,’ he says.

Suddenly the table is surrounded by waiters and kitchen staff, smiling and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the accompaniment of Stevie Wonder. A spotty waiter with a bobbing Adam’s apple carefully places a sundae glass full of chocolate mousse and viciously whipped cream in front of her. A cake candle and a sparkler have been stuck into it. Theo and Luke are transfixed by the hissing, darting stars of light.

‘Make a wish, Mummy,’ Theo says quietly. He looks at her with dark, compelling eyes.
‘Make a good wish.’
Olivia looks around the table at her family. Three pairs of eyes are fixed on her.
Peter’s show hope, and a shadow of fear.
Theo’s are deep pools, the flame of the candle leaping in his pupils.
Luke’s eyes are feverish with excitement. He jumps up and down, clapping his hands and crows, ‘And you can’t tell anyone!’

She closes her eyes and leans forward to blow out the flame.

227

I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse. The second reason applies to everyone, however, and I don’t think it’s just a shadow or disguised form of the first. It’s worth looking at in some detail, for it touches on the essence of all art’s value.

I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of metre, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammelled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking. … I’m convinced that in a perfect, civilized world there would be no other art but prose.

…

225

…

I feel and forget. A nostalgia - the same one that everyone feels for everything - invades me as if it were an opium in the cold air. I have an inner, pseudo-ecstacy that comes from seeing.

…

So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel - to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness inmy external self-awareness.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison - since you’re infinite there’s no escaping you!

221

I’ve always ben an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

If it weren’t for my continuous dreaming, my perpetual state of alienation, I could very well call myself a realist - someone, that is, for whom the outer world is an independent nation. But I prefer not to give myself a name, to be somewhat mysterious about what I am and to be impishly unpredictable even to myself.

…

Once upon a time, in a distant land, lived the much feared and majestic Spider God. It’s abode was a towering glass castle which overlooked an ancient forest. This vast and dark woodland bordered the edge of a land of glaciers. None had ventured far into this barren territory and next to nothing was known of it’s chartless ice. The glass castle itself was completely transparent. In fact it was possible for passers by to look upon it and see the Spider God moving within it’s many towers and chambers - like a drop of ink within a bottle. A small hamlet lay in the wood. This village was within feudal boundaries of the castle and the villagers paid tribute to the Spider as a God. in return the Spider God protected the village, upheld law and order and devoured any predators who might diminish the woodland game.

In appearance the Spider God’s girth comparable to that of an elephant, although it’s multitudinous arms gave it a much greater span. In addition to it’s formidable size it also boasted two enormous white angel’s wings and a crystal crown to mark it’s sovereignty. It was in fact not uncommon, whilst wandering the woods, to glance up every now and then and glimpse the Spider God swooping over the trees, carrying out inexplicable personal errands in the deep forest.

In terms of tributes to the strange God, the most taxing by far was the bi-annual offering of a specially selected village maiden to the Spider God. Needless to say, none of the maidens were all to keen to be offered up and many fled into the woods before they came of age. These girls were sometimes hunted for sport by the villagers who saw their betrayal of tradition as heresy, something which would bring bad fortune if allowed. As a result, many young girls were treated with suspicion and contempt until they had passed their first selection trial, which happened at the age of eighteen. The girls would be tested for fitness and then made to draw lots out of a sacred tree stump. One would be singled out and held in a special enclosure built into the top of a towering, ancient tree. At sunset on the appointed day of tribute, the Spider God would come flying out of it’s glass castle and swoop low over the trees. It would flap mightily above the tree, it’s great white wings billowing and buffeting the foliage while the village elders wailed and moaned in supplication. After the ceremony the Spider God would nimbly gather up the girl in it’s furry, black legs and return to the transparent towers of its abode. The young maiden would then be put to work as a maid and ordered to clean the glass castle. She would be placed in a strict hierarchy, under the instruction of a descending lineage of former maids. The maiden would be paid for her toil in silver and allocated a chamber in the basement quarters of the castle. The more maids would be well cared for. Especially the elder ones who were given comfortable lodgings in cottages outside the crystalline border walls. It was said that these elderly ladies were regularly visited by travelers and respectful villagers seeking counsel for a variety of minor ailments. This tradition of maids and maidens had continued for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. No-one in living memory could even recall mention of a time when the Spider God was not among them. It was simply understood to be the way things were. The villagers themselves saw the maiden arrangement as agreeable. Families were in fact more than willing to offer up their daughters into service, as a position in the crystal realm of the Spider God was looked upon as a great honour. Some of the young girls who were taken to the castle agreed with this. Others rebelled and attempted to escape into the forested regions. The escapees were ruthlessly hunted and accused of the highest possible heresy. If apprehended these escapees were ritually maimed and exiled into the land of glaciers. The Spider God itself played no further role in the tradition, other than it’s biannual collection of fresh maidens. There was after all, no shortage of service, and therefore no reason to intervene.

Now something came to happen which forever altered the arrangement of the villagers and the Spider God. It was announced that the God would be taking a bride. This was reported via the speaker of the Spider God; an ex maid turned vizier who purportedly conversed with the God and had thusly assumed an oracular function. The response to her announcement was that of enormous shock. After all, who would consent to marry such a being - a deity at that? The answer came as a surprise. The vizier let it become known that in one of it’s many long distance journeys, the Spider God had discovered a kingdom hidden deep within the land of glaciers. This secret kingdom was unknown to even the oldest of the forest dwellers. Nothing of it existed in history, memory or fable. The vizier in fact reported that none but the God itself had journeyed to this place from the forest regions. From her communications with the Spider God it was gleaned that the structures of the kingdom were carved completely from ice. The centre point of this frozen metropolis was a vast palace, fashioned out of a glacial peak, similar in appearance to the glass castle. Perhaps this synchronicity was one of the reasons why the Spider God had deigned to marry a princess of the icy keep. No-one knew of how or why the marriage came to be arranged and many tales and rumours circulated. Yet despite this gossip, preparations were carried out. And on the appointed day, the Spider God flew into the land of glaciers to fetch his bride. The God was absent for over three months and it became obvious to the village folk just how deep within the waste the kingdom of ice lay. When the Spider God eventually returned it carried beneath it a traveling cage, fashioned of gold and lined with plush white velvet. Within this structure, enthroned upon a soft couch was a pale fur laden woman with slanted violet eyes.

The Spider Queen turned out to be a terrifying mistress. After the wedding she took up quarters in the topmost tower and experienced regular conjugal visits by the Spider God. Purple velvet was hung so that none may disturb the privacy of their couplings. In appearance, the Spider Queen was extremely tall and lean. Yet despite her slenderness she was possessed of terrible strength. She was never seen to smile and her face seemed mask-like. Her skin was glassy and pale. Her slanted inhuman eyes gave one the impression of being lit by internal fires of the queerest lavender hue. Her straight black hair always hung down like a flag, making a pale stripe of her face. She would beat maids for no apparent reason. One she threw from a window on a whim. This poor girl was lacerated beyond description after striking so many of the glass rooftops throughout her descent. Her decimated corpse left crimson trails along the outer walls which were very difficult to remove. Birds and insects collected at the stains, lending them an even more gruesome aspect. The maids and maidens looked upon these markings with fear and dread whenever they passed. The Spider God seemed oblivious to his bride’s ill treatment of the castle staff. It’s inhumanity seemed to suddenly stand out, in harsh contrast to the ways of the village. All the previous nobility associated with it now lay in question - especially when placed in the context of the Ice Queen. There were mutterings and there were murmurs. When the third maid died, the Queen was already pregnant with the heir of the Spider God. None spoke of the couplings in the tower, practices which seemed incredibly unnatural and violent. The belly of the Queen swelled to such an abominable size that she had to be carried about in a palanquin hefted by six strong lads. She took to drinking blood to assuage her maternal cravings. Many animals were caught and delivered alive to her for consumption. Children began to disappear from the outlying areas of the village and more and more chambers became obscured behind luscious purple curtains. By now the rumors had reached a pitch of extreme virulence. It was decided that something had to be done.

Now amongst the various duties of the castle staff were several positions which were avoided at all costs. One of these odious tasks involved the regular milking of the Spider God’s mandibles. It was known that the venom of the Spider God had a vast array of practical and medicinal applications. It was also known that the God produced an excess of venom, the surfeit of which was gathered by the appointed milkmaid and distributed to all the elderly ladies outside the castle walls. Very few of these matrons were directly involved in the conspiracy which was brewing. The conspiracy against the Ice Queen had been maintained within a tiny circle of village elders and key members of the castle staff. These members included a quantity of maids who were not in favour of the Queen and actively sought her downfall. Many of the maids, particularly the elderly ones, felt that to plot against the Queen was an act of heresy against their God. It was only the brutality of the Queen and the disappearance of the children that kept them silent. Their faith tortured them and some even took their own lives or escaped quietly into the forest, never to return. It was in this climate of dissent and trouble that a plan was hatched to do away with the tyrannical Monarch.

The milkmaid at the time was a middle aged woman who was fiercely opposed to the Queen. Much of this had to do with the disappearance of one of her little nieces. It was she who came up with the idea to poison the Queen with a dose of the Spider God’s venom. So one afternoon, in the large, circular milking chamber, she prepared the bath of strange salts which promoted the activity of the Spider God’s poison glands. She donned the bizarre, all-covering habit of woven and oiled Spider’s silk which prevented exposure to the viscous fluid and awaited the arrival of the God. It was conjectured that the Spider, being a God, would suspect devious activity and smite the milkmaid before she could act. But this in fact was not the case. The Spider God simply squatted in it’s bath, as mindlessly as it always had, while the maid rubbed and massaged it’s mouthparts, carefully collecting the greenish white secretions which issued forth in great cupfuls.

Delivery of the poison into the body of the Queen was the first major obstacle to greet the conspirators. Her pregnancy diet was by now a carefully maintained secret. Even her devouring of live animals had ceased dramatically since the children had begun to disappear. The conspirators were at an impasse until one day a woodcutter was apprehended in the act of seizing a wandering child. The kidnapper was immediately taken to a secluded mill and subjected to strenuous questioning. Under pressure he confessed to the villagers that he was in the employ of the Queen’s handmaid. He was ordered to steal a child every two weeks or face the seizure and subsequent death of his entire family. Out of love for his wife and children he had done the bidding of the Ice Queen and kept his terrible secret. Now, freed of his terrible burden this burly man broke down and wept like all the terrified little ones he had stolen. The conspirators offered the woodcutter an option: offer his youngest child to the Queen and be pardoned, or witness the death of his family at the hands of the Queen once her bidding was seen to be ignored. Left with no choice, the woodcutter consented to this terrible price.

The next problem was to introduce the poison into the hapless infant. This had to be done so that the child was unaffected and the power of the venom undiminished. It was vital that the poison pass into the Queen in an untampered form. It was the baker who seized upon an idea. He claimed to know an old sweet maker who at one stage had been so adept at creating candies and confection that his wares were voraciously sought after by the traveling merchants. These exquisite creations fetched exorbitant prices in the distant cities which the merchants spoke of. The sweet maker had by now grown old and retired to a cottage in the deep wood. Despite his reclusive nature he was aware of the plight of the village children and had pledged to help, even if it meant the sacrifice of another little one. The task was put to him to contain a large quantity of the poison within several candy capsules and determine the exact rate of the sweet’s dissolution. The shell’s rate of digestion would allow the conspirators to know exactly when the poison would be released. The milk-maid surreptitiously delivered the venom to the sweet maker one night in the woods. She asked him not to touch the liquid and provided him with a pair of mittens fashioned out of the Spider God’s web. These, she explained, would allow him to handle the liquid without fear of poisoning.

When the sweets had been prepared the woodcutter was asked to feed them to his child and deliver the young one to crystal castle. The woeful woodcutter fed the candies to his child under the watchful supervision of the conspirators. A sleeping potion was then administered to the child. The woodcutter then carried the doomed infant to the crystal keep as the sun was sinking low. He came back some hours later shaking and trembling. He reported that the work was done and that he had seen the Queen devour the child before his very eyes. He broke down completely and thereafter collapsed into a sleep which lasted two whole days and nights.

In the hours of pre-dawn screams were heard issuing from the Queen’s high tower. These horrifying utterances were followed by great chaos in the castle. The Spider God could be seen scaling the side of the tower in an effort to reach it’s bride as hastily as possible. It was flapping its wings like some wounded bird, scrabbling and chittering. The terrible screaming was punctuated by enormous blows against the glass of the Queen’s chamber. In her agonies she beat the walls so that they cracked and clouded. Maids rushed about like terrified ants as the villagers waited breathlessly for news. The Queen was reported dead in the late afternoon. Some say that before her death she endured a forced birth and that her inhuman child was taken into the wasteland by some of the Spider God’s closest priestesses. It was said that the priestesses were attempting to return the offspring to the city in the ice. The castle itself was thrown into tumult as the Spider God went mad with grief. It destroyed the tower and scuttled about the castle emitting high pitched shrieks and whistles. The population watched in fear as their deity behaved in an increasingly insane fashion, smashing itself against walls and clumsily crushing any who stood in its path. It soon became obvious that the Spider God blamed itself for the death of the Queen. Perhaps it felt that it had accidently bitten her in its sleep. Whatever the case the God seemed inconsolable. A night of terror passed which saw mass destruction and fires. By dawn the Spider God was seen to be knitting a haphazard nest of webs at the top of the topmost tower. It appeared to have reverted entirely to an animal state. Towards noon it tumbled from the tower, purposefully tangled in it’s own web. The strands were gathered around it’s head. These caught tightly halfway down the side of the battlements, breaking the connection between its head and thorax. The hanged God dangled from its own castle, quivering and leaking. After a few hours it lay still and was not seen to move again.

For some days the villagers watched the massive carcass swing in the winds, expecting some form of unholy resurrection. But after a few weeks, when flies and scavengers had thoroughly plundered the corpse it was soon understood that the Spider God was truly dead and gone. An atmosphere of drunken celebration entered into the villagers. They felt freed from a yoke which had bound them for longer than any could remember. All order broke down as the merriments ensued. Duties were forgotten and a sort of chaos reigned. The villagers swarmed the castle and invaded each room, ransacking what was formerly seen as sacred. The dancing and drinking continued for many days beneath the body of the hanged God, degenerating into utter lawlessness.

After a year the body of the Spider God was hollowed out entirely, leaving a glassy husk. The wings were severed and the feathers and bones sold to passing merchants. The translucent shell of the God, freed of the burden of its wings, rattled in the winds. It rustled against the castle in a rotted cradle of web. The villagers had by now occupied the castle. Their disorder could be seen clogging the once pristine chambers, turning the translucency of the keep brown with grime and overpopulation. The former maids were enslaved, raped and used as labour. A dingy shantytown now collared the battlements, spilling out recklessly into the woods. Without the rulings of the Spider God, the forest for many leagues was quickly damaged by the effluvium of the settlement. The governing of the villagers had fallen to a handful of robber barons who imposed strange taxes and demands upon the rapidly growing population. Disease and violence ran rife in and around the fallen house of the Spider God. Sordid carnivals of poverty and vice were enacted daily within it’s halls. And every day, more people died.

After several years the bounty of the surrounding woods was almost entirely depleted. Trash and squalor extended far into the ravaged woodland. The population gradually left the damaged and derelict castle. They departed in straggling caravans, settling in a not too distant valley. The glass castle was left in ruins, surrounded by barren desecration and overhung by the translucent shell of its previous tenant. The glaciers were said to reclaim it all when the age of great blizzards increased the borders of the ice. The forest was eventually covered in an impenetrable blanket of snow. This stretched from horizon to horizon in unbroken vistas of whiteness.

215

I have the most conflicting opinions, the most divergent beliefs. For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life. I don’t know the gestures for any real act….

I never learned how to exist.

I obtain everything I want, as long as it’s inside me.

I’d like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you’ve traversed a sensual nightmare.

What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.

Why should I look at twilights if I have within me thousands of diverse twilights - including some that aren’t twilights - and if, besides seeing them inside me, I myself am them, on the inside and the outside?

(part one)

It took some time to overcome the crippling fear. Each time I left my body I became painfully aware of its vulnerability. I had a friend once who also used to leave his body. We met from time to time in the library, the small one near the park. You may not know this library. In a way it was hardly a library at all, more an enormous car garage packed with mouldy boxes of books. The place had a specific smell as well. A smell you couldn’t quite place, one which had nothing to do with tattered books or the large succulent leaves pressed like palms against the misted windows. It was always cold in there. No-one was ever in attendace. Once I saw someone who seemed to be in charge, but when I approached them they merely pulled on a raincoat and faded away into the park. I don’t know how my friend and I came to meet there. I think that we met once in a disturbing dream and somehow arranged to continue the association in reality. Or perhaps that was simply the plot of some faded yellow paperback I found in the library one slow afternoon. My memory isn’t what it used to be. I keep making assumptions and seeing juxtapositions in random objects and situations. It’s the dreams and habitual migration from my body. It’s the books which don’t seem quite real and the way my phone rings in the middle of the night. I answer it sometimes. And its almost as if I can hear a voice on the other end; a tiny voice occluded and obscured by static, like a crossed line out there in the ocean. Someone who isn’t talking to me at all. The line always goes dead after a few minutes and the phone doesn’t ring for days. It’s hardly surprising. I mean I’ve been using another phone for months now. I stopped using the other one because the video camera in it’s hood died when I tried to film an owl flying across the park. I can still hear the owls at night. The ring like distant telephones in the fuzzy heads of dark trees. I’m quite alone these days. The camera is broken but all the telephonic functions are still in operation.

But I digress. I digress. I was in fact speaking about the crippling fear, the one I had come to associate with out-of-body activity. This fear found it’s source in my friend. More particularly in a story he had once told me. You see he and I were at the library, smoking cigarettes in the large ferns which huddle coldly outside the garage door. It was winter and a light, freezing rain was dappling the heavy trees and distant swan pond. He was speaking about leaving his body. He told me that once he was feeling particularly adventurous. In fact he was feeling so adventurous he decided to leave his room. Previously he’d only floated about like a jellyfish, examining his sleeping self and details of the subtly shifting room. I could never tell whether he was lying or not, but somehow enjoyed the stories all the same. Perhaps he’d never left his body at all. Perhaps he was just some stranger I met in the park, another lunatic whose phone rang in the middle of the night. It was just like him to expand on a concept which I’d introduced into the conversation, slowly annexing it, cultivating it until it seemed as though it had originated with him. These flamboyant expansions of his would multiply bacteriologically over the original story and pretty soon it was all he could ever talk about. I didn’t even know his name. The library was close to the hospital so there was a strong chance that there was something wrong with him. Though I don’t know much about hospitals. Whether or not they would allow lunatics out like this was quite beyond my realm of speculation. Perhaps he was sane, merely haunted, humoring my peculiar state of mind out of boredom. But again, I digress.

He had decided to leave his room, via the window. He told me that he sort of swam across to the curtains. A form of ex corpus movement which I understood, having experienced it first hand. He described the bright, shifting lights which were circulating beyond the gauzy drapes of the window. He said that they were moving around like searchlights across water. Far from evoking fear, they seemed to instead create a sort of fascination, like a light at the far end of a dark cave, something you naturally wanted to investigate. So he melted through the curtains into the wave-forms of the light, expecting to find a hallucinogenic view of his garden, the familiar scape of trees, chimneys and tiled rooftops. He was instead greeted by an unfamiliar vista, a white tundra not unlike what you would expect to find in the Arctic Circle. He told me that he even experienced a sort of coldness there. His first sensation of temperature in an out-of-body state. I smoked my hand rolled cigarette and listened to all of this, attempting to discern the lies from the truths. It was night across the tundra and the white plains sang out evenly in all directions. Across the sky shifted the nebulae of what appeared to be the Aurora Borealis. He claimed to have drifted for hours across that stellar waste, utterly raptured by the enormous formations which constantly shifted their glowing plumes, like milk mixing against the pure blackness of the sky. The sheer beauty of this alien firmament eventually caused him to lose track of himself and his situation. After awhile he suddenly began to get a panicky sensation, a sort of prickly sensation around his throat and face which he interpreted as a sign to return to his body. Of course he had lost track of the portal he had crossed through. He couldn’t even remember whether it was a window he was supposed to be searching for. All he could see was trackless snow stretching off for miles in all directions. In a fever of panic he began to ’swim’ desperately through the frigid air, searching here and there for the entrance to his room. At length he saw a fluttering of curtains, far out across the featureless waste. A small square of fabric billowing red against the horizon. As he approached it he could immediately sense that something was very wrong. He passed through the drapery in a state of psychic exhaustion. The sight which greeted him was far from pleasant. Glutinous snow had billowed in through the window, coating everything like pale scum at the bottom of a pond. An infestation of whiteness which seemed to be slowly erasing his room and all that lay within it. But this wasn’t the worst of it. A thin, naked man with blue skin and a pendulous pot belly was squatting over his body and attempting to claw open his mouth with a pair of long, boneless fingers. Stricken with fear, my friend flew to the bed and began to wrestle the blue man away from his inert body. He told me that the man was hairless and slippery, like a frog. He was also possessed of enormous strength and inhuman flexibility. My friend understood that the blue man was attempting to crawl into and seize control of his body. An action which would leave him stranded alone on the shore of a far world. Considering the situation, my friend fought with every ounce of strength he had, battling to wrest the tentacular blue fingers from his sleeping body’s mouth. The pair strained against one another like that for what seemed like hours before my friend was able to awaken, shaking and sweating in the darkness of his room.

Ever since I heard this story I have been stricken with a crippling fear of being out of myself for too long. I tried to avoid leaving my body, but there is little control with things like that. Who knows when a traveling-fugue may come, blowing me out of myself like a cloud of seeds from a dandelion. But this was almost a year ago. Now it is winter again and the world is still and I am less afraid. It snowed again last night and the park outside was a silent wonderland of blurry shapes. I ventured out at three o’clock in the morning and even the owls were quiet. The whole world seemed wrapped up in a blanket, lost in the intoxicating dream of itself. I went to sleep in the blackness of pre-dawn and left my body without premeditation. I recall floating above myself with a sense of playful, underwater ease, feeling somehow safe for the first time in months. At times I would circulate like a breeze beside the large windows which overlooked the park at night. I was severely tempted to venture out into that wonderland, in my astral form. But I managed to resist the urge well enough and soon slid back down into the feverish kaleidoscope of billowing dreams.

My fear was closely tied to the appearances of my friend. Perhaps this was a co-incidence. But when I had experienced the greatest periods of fear, I would always see him down in the park or en route to the library. He was always wearing a suit, the colour of which I could never place when asked to recall. When peace reigned in my life he would never really be around. Occasionally I saw others in the library, but no-one seemed to know my friend so I never enquired as to his whereabouts. Though after the pleasant experience of vacating my body during the snowfall, I decided to seek him out and relate my newfound feelings of ease concerning the subject of psychic projection. Perhaps the conversation might lighten the mood of our previous astral anecdotes. I went down to the library, my boots crunching in the hard snow. Snow was rare in these parts and it had already begun to melt into long swords of wilting whiteness. The gutters were black with it’s passage. Soon the world would return back to the way it had always been and my mood of lightness would dissipate. But for now I was still in another realm, as though I hadn’t quite returned to myself.

When I arrived at the library, the garage door was up and the familiar subaqueous light filtered through the many plants clustered up against the windows. The long linoleum tables were arranged in even rows on the raw concrete, receding into gloom. I wandered between the tables, absently picking at soft, worn paperbacks, drifting into the further regions of the library. I would always randomly open the books I chose, softly bury my face in their aged paper and breathe in the fragrance of the book. For a moment the smell would transport me to another place, as though the entire history of the book’s travels were contained in it’s fragrance. I had even ceased to look at the covers or skim the text. Now it was only the aroma of a book that seemed to matter to me. It also helped to mask the pervasive and yet somehow indescribable scent of the library, which had nothing to with the books, plants, tables or raw concrete and engine oil. I was in the process of sampling various literary perfumes when the title of a book caught my eye. It was an old hardcover edition, probably from the Victorian era. The book was bound in hard cloth which was inlaid with curious patterns, not unlike the Norse swirls you will see on ancient relics from Scandinavia. The title of the book was: ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God’. I was curiously drawn to this book and was about to pick it up when I noticed another person in the library with me. I looked up and saw an old, hunched woman perusing some dusty magazines in an old cardboard box. She had her back to me and her long, stringy hair hung down her back in colourless strands. A floral print dress from a bygone decade sat awkwardly upon her shoulders. Usually I would not approach another person in the library, but due to my light mood and the dreaminess of the day I decided to ask her if she perhaps knew my friend. I circled the long table, forced into an irregular orbit which took me some distance away from her before I was able to close the gap. She still had her back to me when I finally drew close to her.

“Excuse me,” I murmured, clearing my throat.

She seemed quite shocked to hear another voice and turned abruptly. I caught a glimpse of rheumy eyes and a toothless, hanging mouth.

“I was looking for a friend of mine…”

“I don’t know anything!” she almost shrieked, her voice resonating strangely in the confined space.

I was taken aback by her outburst and must have retreated a step or two. She immediately returned to a sort of ovine docility, peering at me with her goggling eyes.

“Why don’t you try the library notice board,” she ventured in a confused tone, returning to her outdated periodicals.

Somehow this statement disturbed me more than her scream. The notion that the library had a notice board was somehow unnatural and uncanny to me. I had never seen one. Come to think of it, as far as I knew, I was the only person who referred to this place as a library. It was almost a private joke which my friend probably mimicked in conversation.

“Where can i find this notice board?” I asked her coldly.

She vaguely indicated the narrow mouth of a passage, partially hidden between an pile of dusty trunks and an old tool shelf. This discovery also surprised me, as I was fairly certain that the garage door was the only way in or out of the library. I thanked her and approached the entrance to the passage, circumventing several long tables in endless figure eight loops.

The passage was something of a service shaft, lit by naked bulbs. These dangled at irregular intervals down a seemingly endless corridor. I say ’seemingly endless’ because the shaft tilted upward somewhere along it’s length. This, and the featureless repetition of the corridor, gave one the impression of those infinity mirrors you sometimes see in hotel elevators. The indefinable smell of the library was strongest here. The air was also very still and undisturbed, noticeably colder, almost pressurized. I drifted into the passage feeling my ears pop slightly. I drew my coat around me, moving from pool to pool of yellow light, losing myself a little in the slices of dimness between. After about ten meters or so I noticed a previously unnoticed tunnel leading off to my right. It was a short little run-off from the passage, terminating in a wall upon which was fixed an old cork backed notice board. The board was illuminated by a tired old lampshade and some dog eared notices hung drearily from it. Sparing a glance down at the endless passage I entered the short shaft and approached the board. The notices seemed relatively arbitrary upon first inspection, pinned to the cork with brassy old drawing pins. One of the notices offered lessons in dead languages, for academic purposes no doubt. Another was an advertisement by a local piano and harp tuner. This was pinned beside a one-room vacancy note. I scanned across these suburban pamphlets until my eyes stopped short on a photocopied picture of my friend’s face. The caption’ HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” was printed above the grainy monochrome photograph. Below was a telephone number with an unusual foreign dialing code. No other information was available. I stared at the picture. His dot matrix eyes hovered above a frozen smile. In this instance it seemed the sort of face you glimpse in ancient periodicals and newsreels, the forgotten face of a stranger. This new development perplexed me utterly. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the melting snow in a sort of daze, drinking coffee out of paper cups and pondering the fate of my friend. I returned home when it was dark and dialed the number on the phone I had stopped using. Outside the owls had started up again.

After dialing, there were long periods of broken silence. I think this was due to the unusual dialing code and the number of connections which would have to be made in order to place my call. The line hiccuped, went dead and then became swamped by analog noise and intermittent beeping. These interruptions were further enhanced by long periods of blankness in between. At one stage a tape-recorded operator message began repeating an urgent message in some indecipherable language. I waited patiently and eventually the phone at the other end began to ring. I waited by the windows, gazing out into the darkness of the park. Somebody answered and almost instantly hung up. I put the phone down and smoked a cigarette on the tiny balcony, listening to the birds. Late that night my phone began to pulse quietly. I was so used to the anonymous calls that I had left it permanently on silent.

“Hello?” I answered, my voice breaking the stillness of the night.

A girl’s tiny voice spoke, after a lengthy pause.

“Hello,” the voice whispered, through a wash of static. “Who is this?”

“I’m calling about the poster you put up in the library,” I explained.

“What library?” she murmured in a dense, angular accent which sounded vaguely Eastern European.

It seemed as though she had freshly awakened from a deep sleep. I almost apologized for rousing her when I remembered that it was in fact she who had called.

“I’m not sure,” I floundered. “It’s just that the person you are trying to get in touch with happens to be a friend of mine.”

“Oh, I think I know what you mean,” she replied, seeming to stretch and half yawn.

“The only problem is that I’m also trying to get in touch with him,” I said.

There was a long pause. I thought that for a moment that the line had gone dead.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” she replied vaguely. “I thought I heard a noise.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this and hesitated for a moment before responding.

“A noise?”

“I think it’s alright now…”

I heard a scuffling, then subsequent footsteps. The acoustics changed as she moved from a confined space to a much larger one.

“I’ve gone outside,” she stated quietly.

I could hear her monophonic footsteps, trudging through dense snow.

“Are you in danger?” I asked, unsure of my ground.

“I think its alright now,” she repeated more decisively.

I thought that I should attempt to broach the subject once more.

“About the poster…”

“Oh yes,” she sighed, her voice obliterated for a moment by a fluff of wind distortion. “Have you seen him?”

“No,” I answered. “I was hoping you could perhaps give me some information…Who he is exactly, his work, that sort of thing.”

More scufflings filtered through. Then the acoustics changed again. She seemed to enter another space.

“I’m in the big tent now,” she said quietly.

“The tent?” I frowned. “What tent?”

“The tent outside,” she replied quietly.

“Where are you exactly?…If you don’t mind me asking that is.”

She stopped walking and there was a loud creaking of wood. I could tell that she had either sat or lay down on something.

“A house some distance outside Lujavri,” she replied incoherently. “It’s an old, rundown place, there are noises.”

“Where is Lujavri?” I asked, mispronouncing the name despite my best effort.

“It’s a village in Murmansk Oblast district on Kola Peninsula. Lujavri is the old Sami name, Russians call it something else.”

“You are in Russia?”

“Yes.”

“How far is the village?”

“Quite far.”

“Are you Russian?”

“No, I don’t like Russia so much. I’m staying at this house for awhile, but I can’t leave the grounds.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I wish I could get out.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Everyone else has left and I can’t leave the house untended. Also its very very cold outside. Very far to walk anywhere. I’m stuck here till someone comes.”

“That sounds terrible. How long have you been marooned there?”

She paused for a long time, seeming to forget my question.

“Long time,” she eventually breathed.

I could hear her scuffling around.

“It’s lonely here.” she mumbled vaguely. “All the trees are dead.”

“Why are you looking for…” I paused, remembering that I did not yet know my friend’s name. “Why are you looking for the man in the poster?”

“He’s a some sort of travel agent,” she replied. “He’s supposed to book me a trip, supposed to get me out of here.”

“Oh right I see, when last did you hear from him?”

“Long time now.”

There was another long, yet not uncomfortable silence. The sort of silence you expect to interrupt a conversation in the middle of the night. It was after all quite nice to talk to someone else at this ungodly hour. The nights can be so long.

“I’m lying down now,” she whispered.

“In the tent?”

“It’s a very large tent, almost a…how do you say? Marquee”

“Why is there a marquee outside the house?”

“It’s traditional in this part of the world. It’s an old house, has old customs.”

“I see, it must be cold in there.”

“It is. Very cold.”

“Why don’t you go back inside?”

“Cold there too. Sick of being locked up. So bored.”

“Doesn’t the place have heating?”

“It’s a very old house. But I don’t mind the cold so much. I come from a very cold place.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I’ve never left Arctic Circle.”

“Your English is very good for someone who has never left the Arctic Circle.”

She sighed dolefully.

“I listen to radio. I read. English not so hard. There are harder languages. Dead languages much harder.”

This seemed to chime a faint bell in me, something which made me doubt her claims.

“You know I saw a notice up for a dead language tutor, on the notice board in the library,” I said. “Did you see it when you put up your poster?”

This elicited a giggle.

“I’ve never been to this library you keep talking about,” she smiled.

“How do you suppose your poster got up there?”

“I gave plenty of posters to my friends, the ones that travelled out before me,” she explained. “They must be trying to help me.”

I began to feel bad for mistrusting her. Her situation sounded far from enviable.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“It’s nice to talk to someone.” she said quietly. “I phone my friends a lot, but they have all moved on in their new lives. They don’t always like to talk to someone who…someone who stayed behind.”

“Someone will come, they won’t leave you there forever.”

“I hope not. It’s so cold.”

“Maybe you should go back inside.”

She suddenly breathed in a sort of fright.

“What is it?” I whispered nervously.

“I thought I heard that sound again…” she breathed after awhile.

“What does it sound like?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Is it an animal do you think? Are you in the wilderness?”

“There are no animals here.”

“What do you think it could be?”

There was another substantial pause.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said in a somewhat bored fashion.

We stayed silent for a little while.

“I could go to sleep right now,” she mumbled.

“Maybe you should,” I replied. “But go inside first, you’ll freeze out there.”

“It’s a good tent. Woven in the old way.”

“Don’t risk it. Go sleep in a bed or something.”

She was quiet and I could hear the wind flapping the tent.

“You’re nice,” she said.

We sat in silence. I heard her get up. A flapping sound and then trudging noises.

“I’m going back,” she announced.

“That’s good.”

I listened to the crunch of her many irregular footfalls. A door opened and space shrank. I could discern her footfalls, echoing as though in a large space.

“How big is the house?” I asked.

“Many rooms.”

“And your food situation?”

“There are stores, but eating same things all the time…Makes me sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

I could hear her mounting a staircase. Various creaks of wood came through and I somehow got a sense of the age of the place.

“You said this friend of ours is a travel agent,” I mused. “Does he perhaps have an office?”

“I have address.”

“Send it to me, I’ll go down there and ask him to get in contact with you.”

“My friends say he’s no more there. They stick up posters saying ‘Have you seen this man’.”

“Doesn’t matter, maybe there’s still something there which would lead me to him.”

“You are nice to help me.”

“I also want to find him.”

She lapsed back into quietness. I realized she was still climbing the staircase. Heavy, pendulous steps filtered through the tiny receiver.

“High stairs,” I mentioned. “How many floors?”

“Many,” she answered.

“Where are you going?”

“Just walking. Walk all night sometimes. Can’t sleep.”

She eventually detached from the staircase and I could hear her shambling through a succession of empty sounding chambers. Some seemed constricted, others enormous.

“I should go,” I eventually said, growing weary of listening to her wander aimlessly about.

“Stay.”

“I have to sleep,” I complained politely.

A long pause.

“Ok.”

I stood up and ambled into the sunken kitchen. I switched on the kettle. She was still walking around, opening doors and clumping down passages, showing no sign of leaving voluntarily.

“How long till dawn?” I eventually asked in an attempt to break the silence.

“It’s winter now,” she stated flatly.

“Winter?” I frowned, pouring hot water into a cup.

“This is polar night,” she muttered. “There will be no sun for some weeks.”

A that point the dreariness of her situation began to depress me intensely.

“I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll take a look at his address and call you after, ok?”

I waited for a response.

“So cold,” she whispered.

“Bye,” I murmured and quickly hung up.

A few minutes later she sent me the address. I noticed that it had begun to snow again, but somehow I could not bring myself to venture out. The atmosphere had lost all it’s previous sense of wonder.

Later that night I blew out of my body. I saw myself sleeping, huddled and dim below. I could feel the snow drifting outside, floating down through space in curtains of obliterating white. For some reason, I don’t know why, I let myself be drawn out into these. I passed through the watery meniscus of the window, out into a measureless whiteness. The sleepy trees of the park were gone. Instead I saw a flat expanse, stretching out endlessly. A velvet black sky yawned above this all, icy and immense. I expected to feel fear, but somehow didn’t. I began to spool out into the tundra, slowly at first and then gradually gathering momentum. Soon I was skimming along at a fine speed. For a long time, there was precious little to focus on save the great erasure of whiteness. But after a time I discerned a monolithic structure, approaching from the soft horizon. I slowed and was greeted by the rambling silhouette of a shadow saturated house. The ancient gables were rotted and decayed. Vast, angular supports hunched beneath the sprawling bulk of the place. In fact, the entire structure seemed to sag like a pile of dust laden cobwebs. Even the time bleached wood had something of the greyness of ancient webs. I glimpsed shattered roofing cascading down in many improbable angles. A multitude of dark windows winked throughout my aerial passage. I felt my flight describe a long loop, viewing the shapeless leviathan from a revolving perspective as I drew down. The walls and eaves rose up to meet me like the prow of some majestic shipwreck, and I was sucked neatly into an open window. Musty darkness enveloped me at a great velocity. My eyes seemed to adjust and I witnessed myself being whisked down dim, wide passages. Faded wallpaper flashed by, blurring like the down of doves. Some light penetrated the structure through tall windows, but this was not sufficient to fully illuminate the interior. Shadows brooded in gauzy masses, spilling this way and that, looming and receding, taking up entire chambers. I was sucked through a succession of rooms, curiously devoid of furnishings and adornment. High, vaulted ceilings arced and diminished as I traced a flight across the silty dust of untrodden floorboards. Carpeting disintegrated, abandoned chairs lay scattered like the husks of long-dead insects, drapery hung heavy as carved wood. I passed through empty ballrooms and beneath chandeliers which dangled like dried flower pods. I could then sense myself beginning to slow. I was in a passage, coasting along at a weak ebb. I sensed a presence and immediately discerned a thin shape hunched at the end of the corridor. The figure was seated on the floor, its back turned to me. It appeared to be speaking on an antiquated telephone, yet no sound penetrated my sphere of being. All I could hear was the numb beat of my sleeping heart and the throb of a distant, vast wind. I drew closer, like a mote of dust, and the figure seemed to freeze as though sensing my presence. It rose on thin legs and the image of the house shimmered. I was following this figure down passages and into the snow outside. I saw a vision of strange structures cascading in a lopsided fashion behind the house. These towering, shambling constructions appeared to fashioned of thick sheets and pennants of some fibrous material. They billowed and breathed like lungs in the polar winds, creating strange sagging forms against the landscape of ice. As I drew closer I saw that the material was a dense and sticky weave of silken threads which glistened vaguely in the crystal light. The form of the structure was impossible to follow and chaotic openings led into its interior much like the aorta of some unfathomable organ. I fluttered through one of these membranous portals and found myself in the atriums of a strangely biological interior. The walls heaved like sails, creating a flexible cathedral of pulsing spaces and long winding tracts. I spotted the figure far below me, squatted like an insect in a nest-like configuration of the organic weave. I drew closer and again the figure seemed to somehow hear me approaching. The tiny pale face glanced around and withdrew into the glutinous mesh. The figure was soon obscured from view. We remained like that for awhile before I sensed it returning to the house. A sort of wind at once gathered me and sucked me back into the cavernous chambers and passages of the gloomy house. I could not tell how long I was blown down depressing corridors and featureless cul-de-sacs. I eventually crested the verge of an enormous wooden staircase which tumbled down like a world of broken pianos. This case lilied open into a long hall lined with more towering windows. Panes had collapsed throughout many of these monumental frames and the snow had invaded, covering all the withered tapestries and long tables in a glutinous film of paleness. At the far end, beneath a nave-like structure, beside an enormous dead fireplace was a squatted shape. I coasted slowly over the tables, making out the thin limbs of the figure I had followed earlier. I could now make out the facial characteristics and general features of the phantom. Her scratched knees were drawn up beneath angular shoulders and I saw that she was watching intently as I approached. The eyes of this figure had an Oriental, almost mongoloid slant to them. It was difficult to imagine eyes like these having lids, so flush were they with the surface of the skin. The hair which curtained her stare was was fine and black, sighing like damaged silk against bluish-white cheeks. Large petal-like lips lay curled, slightly ajar, as though steadily drawing in breath. A suction was being created. A gravitational inflow which was reeling me in toward her like steam toward a tiny vent. I came to within an arms length of her and stopped dead as the suction ceased. I wafted insubstantially, gazing into her unblinking, insectile eyes. I observed, somewhat mesmerised, as she drew a long fingered hand to her cracked lips. Her mouth opened to meet it and I noticed that she had been sucking at something. I had been aware of this but not acknowledged it until now. At first I took it to be a strand of hair, but now I saw that it was in fact a slender cord, worn loosely about her neck. The cord emerged slowly, in black coils from between her long teeth. A tiny talisman had been attached to it, and this was gradually revealed. She regurgitated it and held it out to me on an upturned palm. I peered in close to see a tiny glass spider sitting upon her hand. There was a tiny black shape within the spider, like the smoky smears you sometimes see in crystals. I was on the verge of recognizing it’s form when she touched my cheek lightly. Her hands had been drawing toward me all this time without my noticing. The glass spider had been left suspended like a mote of dust in the freezing air, completely captivating my attention. The fingertips on my face were surprisingly warm and seemed to melt right through me. The contact of flesh jolted me intensely, though not unpleasantly. It was a lot like stepping into a bath of warm, revitalizing water. An ocean of mental static charged and retracted, fuzzing my vision at the edges. I could sense her lips scraping mine before I woke. The breath which seeped from between them was scalding. An intense aroma fountained in it’s flow, waking me instantly.

It was uncommon to snap out of an astral fugue. Usually one would drift back to their body, re-amalgamate into the well of sleep and then awaken naturally. Now I clattered up in my bed like a string drawn puppet, lit by the white light of dawn, dazed and panicky. I did not feel properly hinged to myself and when I glanced out of the window it seemed to me as though I were still dreaming. I washed my face in cold water before brewing some tea. The snowfall had increased, blurring the world outside to an absurd degree. Shapes had been nullified and softened to an atmosphere of absurd vacancy. My thoughts returned to the strange out-of-body encounter I had just experienced. I felt an unexpected emotional twinge at the memory of the girl. I could not describe this sensation. It was almost nostalgic in its intensity, somewhat melancholic. A wave of sadness and longing which repulsed me. I could not concentrate properly. I took a shower, dressed and set out to investigate the address which had been given me.

I had not been into the city for months, perhaps years. Everything seemed unfamiliar. This feeling was compounded by the overwhelming rifts of snow which feathered down from an insubstantial sky. People staggered through these falls and flurries, bundled beyond all recognition. All the faces I saw were swaddled so heavily in scarves and mufflers that there was an impenetrable sense of anonymity about all the figures I saw. A silent cloud of plastic erasers was slowly rubbing out the pencilled outlines of the world, leaving messy, ruined paper in its wake. I blundered through all this, catching the occasional fridge-like bus. I finally found myself on a dismal downtown boulevard. The address corresponded to a mangy alleyway some distance down its cluttered length. Franchises were squashed into the thin channel like crates of rotting fruit. The alley branched off a main road and seemed to collect detritus like a drain. I saw a slender barber shop lit with white neon. Beside it, farther in, was an antiquated laundromat filled with steaming machines. A large man was getting his hair cut by the old barber and several neighborhood women sat about, smoking cigarettes, waiting for their washing to dry. I picked my way through the passage, skirting enormous garbage skips and a multitude of squashed boxes. I soon neared the terminus of the alleyway; a wall of defaced brickwork from a previous era. Opposite a tangled profusion of plumbing was a plate glass window with a sign that read ‘Blue Man Travel’. A ridiculous cartoon of a blue and grinning man was painted beneath this, touting a thumbs up and comic strip grin. The paint had flaked over the years, giving the character a faded appearance. Yet despite it’s absurdity, the name and picture still uncapped a fresh vein of fear in me. Had it all been a joke at my expense? Was the blue man of ‘my friend’s’ story merely an allusion to this pathetic cartoon? Some idle invention born out of boredom and the need to patronize an astrally-obsessed stranger? I felt like a fool. But still the fear did not diminish. I stepped closer to the glass. It was dim within. They were obviously closed. Tedious pamphlets advertised desert wastelands, ruins and other innocuous locales. Some bleak photos of arctic tundras which wafted ridiculously above balloon-font vacation blurbs and exclamation marks. I cupped my hand to the glass to see these pictures a little clearer. But despite my efforts I could not recognize any of the names or places mentioned. Even the ruins seemed unfamiliar, despite their obvious grandeur which prompted a vague sense of recognition. Blurry snapshots of vast pyramids and vine engorged temples sunk in steaming jungles lined the walls. I saw a vista which looked like the surface of the moon. I tried the door but it was locked. A heavy old chain held it in place. No-one had been in here for weeks, possibly months. No opening times were advertised. I uselessly contemplated throwing a brick through the glass before departing.

I decided to pass by the library. Perhaps I was delaying going home. For some reason I was resisting the urge to phone the stranded girl. Deep down, I wanted to call and tell her everything. But I could not understand why this urge was so inexplicably strong. The terrible neediness of her situation had somehow infected my reality, invoking a peculiar mixture of concern and revulsion. My mental state was utterly unbalanced. Perhaps I had not re-entered my body properly. It felt like parts of me were still hanging out, buffeting crazily in the wind. The utter self imposed isolation of my situation was not in any way helping. There was a deep emotional satisfaction to the form of contact I had experienced in the dream house. Something which ran contrary to the very nature of my native reality. I wafted through the library feeling like something of a phantom. It was in this unmoored state that I came across the book which had caught my attention the following day; the slim volume entitled ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God.’ The synchronicity of its title wearied me more than I could explain. I picked up the volume, dropping some coins into the void it had created between the other books. Then I drifted back out into the world of white.

I entered the nullifying scape of the winter park. Swans circled like plumes of smoke across the partially frozen ponds. Here and there, ice cracked like glass, forming and re-forming. The far-off honking of geese echoed mournfully over the frost blasted trees. I found a bench in a wedding cake grove, dusted off the icing and sat down to read. As soon as I opened the book an intense aroma drifted from the stained, yellow pages, momentarily transporting me into a peculiar reverie. It was a little like breathing in the vapour of pure emotion and almost left me in tears. All at once the scalding heat of her breath seemed to recall itself to my mouth and I was vaguely dizzy with the memory of the smell. A smell which was identical to this more faded version. It was an acrid, organic fragrance, something like the aroma you experience when you cut a bird open. This mixed with crushed flowers, burning lemon and the stench emitted by large quantities of rain soaked paper. I shook my head and turned to the first page, determined to resist the cloying feelings which now plagued me. Emotions which I was sure were not my own. The book was inexplicably populated by a vast majority of blank pages. However, within the central nexus of it, surrounded by the wasteland of unmarked paper was the fable entitled ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God.’ The ink in which it was scribed was hand-quilled, and it was from this tight, swirling script that the overpowering scent emerged. Perhaps it was not ink after all, but some bodily fluid saturated with essential oils. Whatever the case, I opted to think upon it no more. Without further ado, I began to read.

There’s this big guy in front of me. He’s about three or four years older than me and he’s going to win the cross-country race. So I cut across a field instead of running around it, which puts me in front. He screams at me: “Davey! Hey, Davey! You cheat! Davey!” but I ignore him and we enter the earthern oval which has the parents inside it with me gloriously in the lead. He pounds along behind me, catching up all the way, but I’m too far in front and win. He’s out of breath and gasping to the teachers that I cheated, but he’s one of those throwbacks who were kept in junior school forever because he kept failing (but he sure as hell boosts the rugby team) and no-one really like him or wants to believe him anyway, so I’m declared the winner of the race. It’s the last time I ever win anything, because straight after that I am pitted against the best cross-country racers from the other schools in the area, and I realize if I win the next race, which is unlikely since I won’t be able to cheat, I will have to compete in local, then provincial, and then who knows, at national level, all for the glory of the school, my parents, my country and everyone except, I reason, myself.

So I stopped competing and became the most useless teenagers any parent could not wish to have. I filled every available time period, be it break or before sport or after or between prep (I was at boarding school) or before going to bed with having cigarettes, reading Asterix and Obelix comics and later, smoking joints and that great Cape Coloured invention, the pipe, a broke-off neck of a bottle filled with marijuana, and occasionally with a ‘cream’ of Mandrax. Holiday times consisted of stealing cars, smashing post boxes, breaking off car aerials, stabbing tyres with knives, tossing stones through any window myself and my mates thought was too big, racing around on 50cc motorbikes stoned out of our heads, driving through stop streets when you couldn’t see who was coming across them, sniffing spray n cook, pursuing horrified straight teenage girls … and endless hours on empty plots getting wasted on whatever myself and my mates could afford or steal or bum.

Unsurprisingly, I did not obtain a university exemption in my finals and it was the army for me, but my call-up was only in June, so I had six months before I went to fight for white privileges, which I filled with ever more drug consumption between trying to hold down a job at a hospital. I was out every night getting high until three in the morning and had to be up at six to take the train to work. I was drawing and cutting and pasting on an artist’s easel which was stacked at 45 degrees, a very convenient angle to pass out on, which I did almost every day until I finally got fired by my totally disgusted boss.

It was somewhere in this foggy period that my drug buddy and I decided we should go and ‘score’ and ‘arm’ of weed from Crossroads township, because the tiny packets we were buying were just too expensive and didn’t last long enough. We divided this in half and I returned home and opened my stash upon my bed. I took out a bit and smoked it and went for a very satisfied walk. Meanwhile, my parents returned home and my mother, who never usually went into my bedroom, went in to put a shirt on my bed, which she had bought as a present for her errant son. Not knowing what the mass of green stuff was, which was about twice the size of a soccer ball, she called my father, an ex-cop, who identified it immediately as ‘drugs’. When I got home they were cramming my hard-won weed into the bin, which really pissed me off. I was so far from normalcy that I didn’t even think about how upset my folks were, I just wanted my weed back. Evidence of how fucked my mind was emerged clearly the next morning, when my sister raced into my bedroom to tell me that my father was having a heart-attack. I had gone out on my usual binge, smoking my buddy’s stash, the night before, and I could see no reason why I should get out of bed. My sister managed to get my father to hospital, where he underwent a double bypass. Half of his heart had died, but he was such a fit old bugger that the other half kept going. Later I went to visit him in hospital and he asked me if I knew what I was doing, so I wrote out a thesis on marijuana to prove that I did – how it cures glaucoma and reduces nausea for cancer patients and things like that – all the positives, as well as the negatives, such as that it can produce real psychosis.

My father has since died, bless his soul. It took me 30 years to give up cigarettes. I still smoke marijuana, but in really tiny, respectful amounts. I got three degrees when I finally got to university. Now my teenage son is struggling to find the required motivation to do his assignments, and I don’t know what to say to him; that it’s not for us that he must do them, its for himself?

213

Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I’m watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I’m watching is me.

In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can’t recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I’ve now awoken, as of from someone else’s sleep.

I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can’t remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I’ve learned in the intervening years. I see I’m the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I’ve greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now.

There’s a mystery here that discredits and disturbs me.

Just the other day I was bowled over by a short piece I wrote ages ago. I’m quite certain that the special care I take with language goes back only a few years, but in one of my drawers I found this much older piece of writing in which that same care was clearly evident. I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.

I let my mind wander, and I’m sure that what I’m writing I’ve already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis - another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life…

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

dis.grace is a hybrid art project that digitally re-appropriates South African author JM Coetzee’s controversial Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in a complex global, postcolonial world.

The work literally translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image to create a new book, a visual text that is rewritten through the eyes of a global, digital popular culture.

Situated consciously within the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, dis.grace exposes the struggle for primacy between the written word and the image, the page and the screen. It questions the disgraced Western literary parameters of “white writing” considering its history of ideologically objectification and predation, while at the same time exploring the amnesia and historical self-invention that seem to form the basis of the decolonized, post-apartheid mind.

the disgrace website is here

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself.

To have no opinion is to exist.

To have every opinion is to be a poet.

209

To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

When I act with others, there’s at least one thing I lose - acting alone.

When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closer to God, for they want to exist.

As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity ….. Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and utterly on behalf of some objective.

The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.

…

What do others have to do with the universe that’s in me?

BOOK SA’s Ben Williams chaired a panel of what he termed “web artists”, writers who use the web in wierd interesting, and sometimes just brilliant ways, at the FLF today. Out of the session, Williams drew three words, one from each writer which can be used to describe the effect of the internet on writers and writing: violation, communication, and introspection.

Aryan Kaganof, whose blog Kagablog is packed with material from all over identified the ability of the internet to create writers out of readers. Lauren Beukes, whose book Moxyland has been “translated” into Ebook format by Electric Book Works, furthered this with a description of the kind of reciprocity/mutual feedback that the internet is able to facilitate.

Finally, the audience was wowed by a presentation by the writer and artist Stacy Hardy. Hardy, who is involved in the production of the literary magazine Chimurenga, has “translated” JM Coetzee’s Disgrace into images word-for-word using Google Image Search. Does Google not then allow us to be more clever?

BOOK SA will follow-up with Hardy to bring you a more in-depth treatment of her conceptually brilliant work.

this article by sophy first appeared on book.co.za

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

t.s. eliot

208

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself - not to be disturbed - and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.

If, for moral reasons, I don’t do good to others, neither do I expect others to do good to me. When I get sick, what I hate most is if someone should feel obliged to take care of me, something I’d loathe doing for another. I’ve never visited a sick friend. And whenever I’ve been sick and had visitors, I’ve always felt their presence as a bother, an insult, an unwarranted violation of my wilful privacy.

—

I’ve never loved anyone. The most that I’ve loved are my sensations - states of conscious seeing, impressions gathered by intently hearing, and aromas through which the modesty of the outer world speaks to me of things from the past (so easily remembered by their smells), giving me a reality and an emotion that go beyond the simple fact of bread being baked inside the bakery, as on that remote afternoon when I was coming back from the funeral of my uncle who so loved me, and I felt a kind of sweet relief about I’m not sure what.

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing - just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.

“Hier skud ek die nipples van Afrika/ Met Afrikaanse lyrics op die maksimum/ Hie’s vir jou aanlokkend!/ Staan op en wapper soos/ My rhyme storm as ek die Kaapse Dokter personify”.
-Jitsvinger, Kaapse Dokter

At the thought of Afrikaans music, what imagery comes to mind? I would assume you are thinking of Patricia Lewis and her hair implants, Bokjol Treffers Sewe, or Johan Stemmet’s multi-coloured waistcoats wiggling on our screens on SABC 2. With the recent creation of the Afrikaans indie rock subculture a la Fokofpolisiekar, you may be thinking of skinny jeans, hipster haircuts and slick videos. However, there is a side to the Afrikaans language, the creole birth and coloured connection that has been overlooked in our collective South African consciousness. Out of this side of Afrikaans has grown a new genre, Afrikaans hip hop. From the early days of Prophets of da City’s first album to Brasse Vannie Kaap’s boundary breaking shows, to exciting artists like Jitsvinger today; Afrikaans hip hop is making its mark on South Africa’s musical scene. But is it being given the coverage it deserves? Where does Afrikaans hip hop fit into our complex cultural landscape? The role of the Khoi, the Malay and other native populations in forging the language has been systematically excluded from our history books. Similarly, Afrikaans hip hop has traditionally been excluded from the mainstream Afrikaans Music scene.

The history of Afrikaans goes back to the 18th century. Cape Town’s port- city status made it a melting pot of people and influences, thanks to the inter-continental slave trade and the Dutch East India Company. Afrikaans developed as a bridging language to ease communication between the indigenous people, imported slaves and their masters. But contempt was expressed for this new language by both the Boers (who spoke “High” Afrikaans and Dutch) and the English upper classes who referred to Afrikaans as ‘Bastard Dutch’ and as a ‘mongrel language’ reserved for communicating with the slaves and lower classes.

So what makes an Afrikaner? We know now that in the mid 19th century, emancipated slaves, and slaves born in the Cape Colony were known as Afrikaners, whereas the settlers of Dutch descent referred to themselves as ‘Boere’, ‘Christene’ and ‘Nederlanders’. The myth that Afrikaans is a West European language was born in 1875 with the forced Europeanization of Afrikaans that started as an ideological project by the group “Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners” (The association of True Afrikaners). This group sought to nationalize the language after it was found that fewer people of Dutch descent were speaking pure Dutch, and were speaking Afrikaans in increasing numbers.

While Afrikaans’ Dutch heritage cannot be denied, it must be acknowledged that it was shaped and molded away from Dutch by the Khoi and Malay slaves. Words central to the Afrikaans language like ‘eitsa’, ‘eina’, ‘ai’, ‘kamtig’, and ‘arrie’ are Khoi-derived words, while ‘nooi’, ‘baadjie’, ‘bladsy’, ‘baklei’ and ‘kapok’ are derived from Malay languages. Perhaps most significantly, the ‘dubbele nie’ or the double negative, a language rule distinct to Afrikaans, is inherited from the Khoi.

The nationalisation of Afrikaans in 1875 meant that history books omitted the Creole formation of the language, and the Creole Afrikaner identity was stolen and altered to mean something different. The term Afrikaner soon became a name for the “white” Afrikaans speaking people of Dutch descent. Soon Afrikaans, originally a language of the free slaves and the Khoi inhabitants of the Cape, became a tool used by the oppressor.

Fastforward to 1976: youths were massacred during the Soweto Uprising, after protests against the Nationalist Government policy which demanded that all black pupils were to receive compulsory instruction in Afrikaans for all subjects, despite it rarely being the first language of black families. The language had by then become a symbol of Apartheid’s white rule and oppression. The irony is that while black students in Soweto were protesting against the use of Afrikaans as the language of instruction, Afrikaans-speaking coloured youth joined in the fight against the government, and used their Afrikaans to mobilize communities to fight against the injustices of the day. Members of the UDF, Ashley Kriel, Allan Boesak and Cheryl Carolus come to mind as some of the youth who were at the forefront of resistance politics in Cape Town in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Today in 2009 there are not many signs of the coloured Afrikaans in mainstream media with the exception of patronizing TV commercials or articles in the local Cape Town tabloid - ‘Die Son’. It seems that the version of Afrikaans spoken in the coloured community is seen as a colloquial version of ‘pure’ Afrikaans and is almost always represented as being comical and never taken seriously. Afrikaans Hip hop is a genre challenging these misconceptions, and the main players in the movement are actively trying to reclaim and evolve the language and its identity.

Hip hop, like Afrikaans, was born of a creole, mixed history. Hip hop in the United States is influenced by the griot music and storytelling traditions of West Africa. Other influences include African American blues and jazz music while a Jamaican DJ, Kool Herc is credited with being the godfather of hip hop.

Hip hoppers in Cape Town have been active in the movement since 1982, when B-boying (break dancing) and graffiti became popular after films like Break and Beatstreet became popular. The first recorded Afrikaans hip hop song, Dallah Flet, was recorded in 1990 by hip hop pioneers Prophets of da City, including in its line- up, the enigmatic DJ Ready D. The album was named Our World, and while the rest of the songs were in English, it was a first for South Africa nonetheless; being the first South African hip hop album ever recorded and released.

Prophets of da City thus paved the way for many others to come, including Brasse Vannie Kaap (BVK), the seminal Afrikaans hip hop group (also including Ready D), that would cross the colour divide and perform at rock (and thus “white”) festivals such as Oppikoppi during the 2000 to 2002 period. They would perform to predominantly white audiences, gaining instant popularity and generating interest from a generation of Afrikaners who were rethinking what it meant to be white, Afrikaans, and South African. BVK thus became the poster child for a “coloured” identity that white people could identify with. Their ability to cross boundaries through Afrikaans also spilled onto the small screen, on SABC 2’s flagship Afrikaans soap opera, Sewende Laan. We must keep in mind that it would be short-sighted to suggest that this was merely crossing boundaries. BVK used Afrikaans as a tool, as a way to publicly reclaim Afrikaans back from its national reputation as the language of systemic oppression, to the language of the people, of all who spoke it, and created it.

BVK were starting to scratch at the surface of Afrikaner identity itself. Was there now a space for coloured people to be considered as Afrikaners, or was this just too presumptuous? Jitsvinger says this about Afrikaans and identity: “Language forms part of an individual’s cultural heritage which, in my case, also forms part of our oral tradition. For me language calculates a cultural society’s position in the entire universe through sound formulation and vibration…oppression divides.” When thinking along these lines, is it not absurd to divide “white” Afrikaners and coloured Afrikaans speakers? In his essay on Cape Town as a creolised city, Creole Cape Town, Jeremy Cronin mentions what modern science is now confirming: that we are all “coloured”. We are all the carriers of a mixed masala genetic code; everyone is essentially “mixed race”. He also muses on the impact of Thabo Mbeki changing the title of his historic I am an African speech to I am a coloured.

Today, Afrikaans hip hop has gone from strength to strength. MC’s are popping up from Manenberg to Muizenberg, from Kuilsriver to Kraaifontein. MC’s such as Jitsvinger, Terror MC, Jaak, Lee-Ursus, and the Cape Awake collective have put their Afrikaans identity and heritage before any Americanisation or Afro American ebonics, and thus are “keeping it real” in the truest sense. Jitsvinger in particular mentions the Khoi influence on Afrikaans at his shows. He has worked with a group focused on Khoi culture through music, The Khoi Khollektif, and has toured with the Official Khoisan praise poet Jethro Louw aka Tanneman !Xam. At his shows, Jits makes a point of educating the audience on the history of Afrikaans and of “coloured” people as the descendants of the Khoi; and as a result, the “first nation of people” of the continent. In this sense he is practicing one of the oldest of African traditions: Oral storytelling.

Under the wing of hip hop, one can’t help but feel that Afrikaans is in good hands. At a recent parkjam on a basketball court in Gugulethu, one of Cape Town’s oldest townships and where the audience was predominantly black and mostly Xhosa, Jits was on the bill. The line- up of rappers was a long one, and as the sun started to set behind Table Mountain, visitors from outside the neighbourhood slowly started to filter out. The MC of the event, Koriander, called up the next act. “Put your hands together for Jitsvinger!” As he finished, a lanky coloured man made his way through the crowd, his head and shoulders sticking out above the people surrounding him. He grabbed the mic, and like the captain of a ship addressing his crew, he told the audience: “Guys, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to rap in Afrikaans. When I say daai’s die move, you say maak ‘it aan. Make it on. Make it happen.” Soon everyone in the audience was rapping along in unison. “Daai’s die move, maak ‘it aan!” After his 30 minute set was done and he had handed the mic back, the MC exclaimed: “Damn! He makes Afrikaans sound like it was invented by a black man!”

From The Life of Henry Fuckit, 1950-2015

It was clear from the outset that the relationship between Henry Fuckit and Alfred Whitehead was going to be similar to the relationship between a grit of sand and an oyster. The constant nagging irritation would result in a many-layered product greatly adding to the value of the sand but being of doubtful benefit to the shellfish. Innumerable conversations were to take place in that office on the second floor, most of them centred on the subject of Time, and The Passage of Time.

Alf Whitehead:
You do understand the theory of Relativity, don’t you?

Henry:
Of course. Both. My grandfather was doorman at the Savoy in London back in nineteen-voetsak and he opened a door for Albert Einstein. It was a momentous moment, not for my grandfather, who didn’t know a slide rule from an anal thermometer, but for Herr Egghead. Just imagine the implications if my grandfather had not opened that door.

AW:
Somebody else would have opened it. Or he would have opened it himself.

Henry:
Precisely. You come up with two possibilities without even thinking about it. If we accept the possibility of my grandfather not opening the door as he was required to then the ENTIRE HISTORY OF SCIENCE could have been altered. No. THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD FROM THAT MOMENT.

AW:
Oh for goodness sake! You’re trying to tie my testicles in a knot. You know perfectly well that once the moving finger has written etcetera, etcetera. I wish you wouldn’t introduce any of your degenerate relations into serious conversation.

Henry:
Yah, but haven’t you heard about South Africa’s secret space project? At this very moment a spaceship…

AW:
PLEASE!! (Shouts in a frantic whisper, face contorted in alarm. Puts finger to lips and goes to window. Leans out then quickly pulls back.) Just as I thought, you bloody fool. You know their rules about discussing secret projects. They’re always trying to catch terrorists and communists, and spies and rooinek traitors. Hand me that hook. (Henry hands him the six-foot window opener standing in corner of room. Leans out and pulls. A scream is heard simultaneously with a clattering and bumping sound.) That’ll teach them. Bloody Ape disguised as a Monkey window cleaner. Now where were we? Alright, but keep your voice down.

Henry:
They’ve launched a spaceship with one person on board: twenty year old Shadrach. His twin brother Meshach they’ve got in a cage at Apollofontein. The craft will progressively accelerate until it reaches a velocity of 372 000 miles per second. That’s really fucking fast. Initially they aimed at Alpha Crucis, the brightest star in Crux Australis, but then chickened out and are now headed for the middle of the Coalsack Nebula for fear of hitting something. The spaceship will travel for half a year and then do a U-turn and come back to earth. Obviously when it gets back after a year Meshach will celebrate his twenty-first birthday with a double helping of putu and five gallons of skokiaan. But Shadrach, South Africa’s first astronaut and the world’s first time traveller, will find that he’s only eleven years old. He will have shrunk in stature, his big manly voice will have turned again to childish treble and his foreskin will have regenerated to its undiminished proportion and elasticity. Our top scientists recently gained access to a special version of the Special Theory of Relativity and have come up with their own conclusion. They talk about contracting time. If this experiment is successful the world will sit up and realise that we’re not just a bunch of fascist shitheads with brains the size of peas.

AW:
I see. Mmm. Yes, it makes sense. The implications boggle the credulity. Our leaders could remain young forever. Just a little sabbatical, a time trip, and the years would fall away.

Henry:
For the select few it would mean immortality. Only one problem though.

AW:
What’s that?

Henry:
The K factor. Heard the one about the Englishman, the German, the Japanese and the Kaffir? They’re each given three iron balls and told to do something with them. I forget how it goes exactly… Anyway the other three do something or other each… I think the Englishman balances one on top of the other and the Jap copies him and the German… Anyway. But the Kaffir - this is where we get the K factor - the Kaffir loses one and breaks the other two.

AW:
Yes I’ve heard it several times, in different versions in both official languages and yours is far and away the poorest rendition. I don’t see any profit in trivializing a serious discussion with badly told jokes of dubious wit.

Henry:
Do you think humour and science are incompatible? I suppose you must, from the disapproving way you tighten your lips in imitation of a cat’s anus. The point is the South African astronaut is BLACK and brilliantly imaginative and with a sense of humour light years beyond the grasp of the bush professors on the ground at Appollofontein. ANYTHING MIGHT HAPPEN.

AW:
This might or might not be true. You know that I suspect you of being a bloody liar. A bloody wisecrack. Be that as it may. I can elevate myself above the slings and arrows of swinish pricks. My thoughts dwell in the realms of metaphysics and pure science. Let us resume the discussion having, in a spirit of magnanimity, wiped your filthy slate clean on the strict understanding that you refrain from all further attempts at levity or frivolity. I am your senior in years, position, wisdom and decency. Kindly refer to me as Mr Whitehead and not Alf, Alfred or Fred. Are we in agreement?

Henry:
Yah sure. Anything to make you feel good. Mr Whitehead. Sir. Just call me Fuckit.

AW:
Very well then. That seems to have cleared the air a bit. Now let us discuss The Measurement of Time, a subject of central importance to each and every member of civilian staff working in this Dockyard. Damn the imposition! (Annoyance at the phone ringing on his desk.) You answer it. If it’s anything to do with work tell them I’m in the midst of a total re-inventorization of screws, brass, self-tapping, and can’t possibly be disturbed.

(Henry picks up phone. Speaks slowly and clearly.)

Henry:
Central Store. Assistant Stores officer Henry Fuckit at your service. Good day. Sentrale Stoor. Assistent Stoor beampte Hendrik Fokdit op jou diens. Goeie dag… Oh, hello… Yes Madam. He’s just been in conference with the Admiral but I can see if he’s available… Yes… okay… I’ve got it. I’ll make sure he gets the message immediately. Thank you. Goodbye. (Replaces phone).

AW:
My wife?

Henry:
Yes. She says don’t forget to make the copies of her knitting patterns and also have you phoned your sister in Canada to find out whether they received the photographs.

AW:
Damn it! I’d clean forgotten the copies.

Henry:
She also said you have a head like a sieve. Mr Whitehead. Sir.

AW:
Ahem. Yes, well that’s… No damn business to… as we were saying. Thank you for the message. As we were saying, The Measurement of Time goes back to time immemorial. Our first thinking ancestors became aware that the sun comes up and the sun goes down, the sun comes up and the sun goes down, the sun comes up and the sun goes down. Yes, and it was the movement of the sun, or shall we say the APPARENT movement of the sun, for as you might know the sun does not move about the earth but the earth rotates on its axis and gives the false impression of the sun being in motion about us, east to west, when in fact it is we who are moving west to east. The appearance of the sun moving across the sky having made man aware of the passage of time. The first clock was the sun in the sky and days were regulated accordingly. Now we are at present talking in terms of SOLAR time which I will define in precise and cogent phraseology as time measured by the Earth’s daily rotation relative to the Sun resulting in Apparent Solar time which is the time indicated by a sundial marking the position of the Sun relative to the meridian upon which the sundial is located. So far so good and all reasonable and within the grasp of the meanest intelligence. Now the motion of the Sun relative to the stars is not uniform; neither is the orbit of the Earth truly circular but indeed elliptical, both of which factors having resulted in variations in Apparent Solar Time during the course of one year. To remove these damnably irritating little discrepancies we have devised Mean Solar Time which I will now endeavour to explain but require you to sharpen your concentration and to hang upon each and every word in order not to render the time and effort I am expending in elucidation totally null and void. (Henry slaps face and pinches ear lobes.) These variations are corrected by turning our gaze from the Sun to the stars in order to obtain Sidereal Time, Sidereal Time being measured again in accordance with the rotation of the Earth but this time relative to the stars and not the Sun. Unfortunately matters are complicated by the fact that a Sidereal Day is four minutes shorter than a Mean Solar Day and a mathematical formula beyond your grasp must be applied via Sidereal Time to Apparent Solar Time in order to arrive at Mean Solar Time. Yes?

Henry:
Two questions. First, if there’s a four-minute difference between the two systems what’s to stop them going completely out of synch after a few years; and second…

AW:
Enough! If you wish to ask questions you may submit them in writing. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Now the Mean Solar Day is divided as follows: one Mean Solar Day equals twenty four Mean Solar Hours; one Mean Solar Hour equals sixty Mean Solar Minutes; one Mean Solar Minute equals sixty Mean Solar Seconds and, ipso facto, one Mean Solar Day comprises 86 400 Mean Solar Seconds. The Mean Solar Day is reckoned to begin at midnight and run through twenty four hours, or to comprise two twelve hour portions, one from midnight to noon and the other from noon to midnight. In the twenty-four-hour system the hours and minutes are given as a four-digit number. For example 0028 means twenty-eight minutes past midnight and 1240 means forty minutes past noon. But, and here we encounter a problem of disastrous proportions, 2400 of September 30 is the same as 0000 of September 31. Now in the twelve-hour system…

Henry:
Excuse me.

AW:
Damn it! I said no questions.

Henry:
This isn’t a question, it’s a point of order. Thirty days hath September.

AW:
What? For God’s sake don’t be so bloody pedantic. The twelve-hour system has twelve hours from midnight to noon designated ante meridian, and twelve hours from noon to midnight designated post meridian. However an even more serious ambiguity arises. 12 AM and 12 PM are mutually indistinguishable unless one adds the word ‘noon’ or ‘midnight’ to 12. I shall now proceed to discuss in some detail Greenwich Mean Time, Ephemeris Time, Co-ordinated Universal Time, and the Rolls Royce in time, Atomic Time. Now GMT or Greenwich…

Henry:
Please! For Christ’s sake, this is INKRREDIBLY boring.

AW:
Boring? BORING? Understand me correctly: do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that you find the most important aspect of your life BORING? I can only put this down to subhuman intelligence. Also you are new here. You are immature, you have not learned. I pity you. You are defenceless. Arm yourself before it is too late. How are you to cope with the years of emptiness that lie ahead? You speak of boredom? Every day of every week of every month of every year will be a nightmare of choking black boredom. Addiction, insanity, suicide. That is what awaits the man not equipped to deal with time.

Henry:
Alright, alright. Tell me about Atomic Time.

AW:
Atomic Time? Very well then but heed my warning. I see danger in your path. There is something amoral and reckless about you. And you are coarse. Be that as it may, you have been warned. Atomic Time. Yes, now Atomic Time is pure and beautiful and the contemplation of its crisp precision never fails to uplift my spirits and help me place one foot in front of the other. Unlike Solar Time and Sidereal Time and Ephemeris Time, which are dynamical and involve the motion of bodies such as Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars and Satellites, Atomic Time is measured by cycles of electromagnetic radiation. There are some fifty-one Atomic Clocks scattered about the world and one of them right here in Simonstown Dockyard. They are all independent but regularly compare recordings and it is conservatively estimated that after a period of three thousand years between them there will be a combined difference in readings of less than one second. This is what makes life tolerable, knowing that every instant of our day is determined and there can be no doubt about the order of each individual succession, in the progress from seven thirty to four thirty, of thirty two thousand four hundred seconds. (Long pause in which they regard each other.)

Henry:
Boss?

AW:
Yes. And don’t call me ‘Boss’.

Henry:
Don’t take offence but can I ask you a personal question?

AW:
Certainly not. I don’t want any of your bloody insulting rubbish.

Henry:
It helps to pass some of those dreary seconds. Alright. How about showing me the Atomic Clock?

AW:
Not now. All in good time.

Ian Martin’s controversial novel Pop-splat is now available from http://www.pop-splat.co.za