Category: Personal Agenda, Book One

SATURDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2001

People respect power.

People respect financial power, that everyone knows, but they also respect the power of other abilities: the ability to attract other people to them, the ability to fix a car, the ability to manipulate a musical instrument in a masterful way, just to name a few.

Take, for example, the talented guitar player who can entertain friend or stranger for hours on end with his melodies. It is possible that this guy may not be extremely interested in making money. Let’s say except for the part-time work he does during the day (which impresses no one), he also plays in bars and coffee shops a few nights of the week. He makes enough money to pay for his sparse apartment, and he can afford the most essential groceries (and every now and then new guitar strings). This guy will probably never be rich. His intention is to entertain or inspire people with his music, no matter how small or how big the audience is. That the respect that will come his way will multiply if he can play guitar well and make lots of money doing it, is to some extent irrelevant. People will respect him for being able to do something that most people can not do – to press and pull guitar strings in such a way as to fill the air with enjoyable sounds.

What sort of ability commands respect from people? For one, the sort of ability that another person has desired to master for a long time, but one they have not been able to master. To then see someone else who has mastered that very same ability be rewarded with other people’s respect, will intensify their desire to claim the power of that ability for themselves.

Respect determines your place in society. To not be respected means that you will be treated as a zero on the proverbial contract. On the other hand, to be respected for something for which you want to be respected, means that people will want to associate with you. When people see that others want to associate with you, you will usually be treated with more respect, which in turn will strengthen your sense of self-worth and belonging. Not to be respected reduces your sense of self-worth. This reduced sense of self-worth then increases the likelihood that your public appearance will make a weak impression on people, in which case people will find even less reason to respect you. These unflattering appearances also have the undesirable effect that you feel even less that you belong somewhere, which will undermine your self-esteem even further. That the cycle is vicious, is fairly clear.

People respect power – the ability to do something they, themselves, want to do, but which they have not mastered yet, or one they believe they never will master. This is an insight that has haunted me for years. It is indeed one of the most valuable lessons I have learned during the past more than a decade of my adult existence.

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“You play out your happiness on a piano that is not infinite.” (from The Legend of 1900)

FRIDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2000

(It’s been three months since my last essay.)

It is not always easy to sit still, think for a while, and then destroy the freshness of a blank piece of paper in an attempt to summarise where, at a particular time, your life is at. Until recently, to escape the effort such a Wider View required, I would have turned on the TV that couldn’t pick up a signal anymore and played Super Mario until the end of frustration. Then I bought my fourth Pearl Jam album. Three days later I bought myself an electric guitar. And a few weeks after that a keyboard. A recorder and two harmonicas followed over the next few months. Now when my conscience calls for a renewed climb to the hill above my life – to see which way the wind blows, to be able to say, “Okay, that’s where I stand,” I look the other way, grab a guitar, and try some new chords. The time has, however, come.

It is the eighth of December. There are three weeks to go before Christmas, and then another few weeks before the winter holidays. More than two months have already passed since I was supposed to have had a complete physical, mental and spiritual breakdown, according to a forecast I had made early September. I’m doing okay, despite the fact that there is still no one with whom I could share the good things of life.

But … EXILE! The past few weeks have been very informative as far as this theme goes. For the sake of clarification, it can be mentioned that the idea’s origin – in my particular case – lies in Korea, when I said I was in economic exile, away from the pressures of conventional middle-class life in the Republic of My Birth. I also said that I would lift my exile when I am sufficiently empowered to live on my own terms in South Africa. I finally returned after two years, not because I had been sufficiently empowered but because I was dying of loneliness. I had a few ideas about what I wanted to do – hardly watertight, but like the movie said on the plane on the way back, a good idea today is better than no idea yesterday (or something like that).

Almost two years have passed since I came to Taiwan, and, as the title of this piece indicates, these are not the first words I have written on the topic of exile. I usually try not take seriously Sunday Blues-inspired ideas about the lifting of my exile if they don’t hold up until at least Monday night, but in the past few weeks the blues-inspired ideas have reached a certain maturity (I am after all writing this essay on a Friday).

[…]

A few months ago I started propagating the belief that the life we as expat teachers lead in Taiwan is conducive to us deceiving ourselves. What do I mean? As a foreign English teacher in Taiwan you can make good money without having to work yourself to death. You stay in a spacious apartment; you have a few luxuries that make your life comfortable; you can afford to treat yourself to things like Japanese sunglasses and American trainers; and you live an exotic life in the Far East (exotic compared to the life with which I grew up anyway in a sort of middle-class suburban area). But none of these things make you happy when that primordial need to belong somewhere is not fulfilled. So you think you’re okay until you wake up one Sunday morning with a hangover of yet another Saturday night you spent on your own (to spend the evening with other foreigners is about the same as giving candy to a hungry child). By Sunday night you once again realise that you have made yourself very comfortable in a place where you don’t really belong. To make yourself feel better you drive to the nearest music shop to buy more CDs, just to hear Bob Dylan preaching to you that you shouldn’t confuse paradise with that “home across the road” [from “Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”].

This brought me to the point where I wanted to throw a new belief into the wind: that I would never feel I belong here – with the exception if I marry a Taiwanese woman, which would make the place personal to such an extent that it could compete with the land of my birth.

In the absence of any meaningful relationship with a woman from this country it was inevitable that I would return to some old questions: What exactly am I doing here? Am I going to stay here for the rest of my life? If not, will I return to South Africa? If some good reasons may be found why I should go back, then when? The main question that then comes to mind is exactly what I will do when I get back.

It may have value to remind myself (and perhaps the reader) of the reasons I decided in November 1998, despite what I had said in May of that year, to pack my things again and head back East. I enjoyed being with my own people, seeing my family every few weeks, and going out with women with whom I could carry on a proper conversation. Why was I willing to give these things up again? I was living in the servant’s quarters of a friend’s backyard; all my furniture was made of discarded planks; my mattress consisted of two pieces of sponge I had cello-taped together; I didn’t have a car; I was earning R2,600 per month of which I had to pay R2,000 to cover my student debt, and I was working in an administrative capacity at the company of the aforementioned friend who was so kind to allow me to live rent-free on his property. There were certainly other options, but my ambitions and my personal politics were such that returning to Asia seemed to be the only real solution.

What I have done here in the past two years, was much, much more than I thought I would do. The original idea was to make money, and to pay off my debt. At some point I was supposed to return to South Africa, buy a house, and sit on the porch flipping off passers-by. I wanted to be free and independent.

It didn’t take me long before I realised that I had to qualify these goals. To be free and independent, so I reckoned, could also imply that no one really mattered to me: No wife, no children, no obligations or responsibilities.

A clearer formulation looked like this: to have the freedom to choose what I want to do and keep myself mainly busy with that activity; to be independent of bosses and businesses and institutions that want to dictate how I should look, what I should say and how I should spend much of my day – just because I rely on the money they channel to my bank account at the end of each month.

Seeing that I’m not quite in a position to start flipping people off, it can be said with relative certainty that I am currently trapped between my ambitious goals and my actual situation.

Two solutions exist for this dilemma. One is a well-known fantasy: the countless millions you can call your own when you win the British Lottery. The other solution is to seek tools with which you can actively bring about independence of your economic masters. In my case it boils down to a great extent to possessing a good computer.

To have in your possession all the tools you need and to make regular use of it does, of course, not necessarily pay the rent at the end of the month. Initial capital is essential. It is for this reason that I continue to leave my apartment every day to provide a service for which there is a need in this place, namely English lessons offered by an actual speaker of the language (which amounts in most cases to a different skin colour, and sometimes different coloured eyes than all the local English teachers who are sometimes more capable of offering the same service).

One thing is important to mention in this review of my noble struggle for independence – I don’t intend anymore to accumulate enough money to buy a house and spend the rest of my days playing tunes to pedestrians walking by. The idea is to rather use these tools I have gathered to earn a regular income. This process of making Creative Works my income-generating business has already begun.

[…]

[In the rest of the piece I tried to explain the principles of using your creativity to generate an income. I got bogged down in long sentences that didn’t quite say what I wanted to say, and the process came to an abrupt halt in the middle of one of these sentences. The idea and the argument behind it do, however, continue in other writings.]

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SUNDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER 2000

Qwert yuio plkj hgfdsa zxcv bnmn …

I wish it could have worked like that. Unfortunately, for the umpteenth time in my life I’m forced to employ the vocabulary of an actual language to express my feelings, and to use the limbs called fingers to set down words on paper so I, and perhaps you, can see how I feel.

I do it in the language known to the world as Afrikaans. I can do it in a different language, but it would have the same effect. Someone else will look at it and say: I think I understand.

Right now, you are on the other side of this text. I hope the process works as it should.

How do I feel? Anxious and lonely. Anxious because, oddly, I still believe in the god my parents presented to me with good intentions; the god about whom I learned that he was like a good father – the best of fathers any child can ever hope to have.

Then, in my early twenties, the suspicion took root in my mind that this god had been made up by people, like the golden calf the Israelites had made while Moses was on the mountain. I became convinced that people created this God of Words over the course of centuries for the same reasons the people of ancient Israel made the golden calf: They wanted a god they could see, whom they could worship, before whom they could lay down sacrifices. The god with whom Moses went to confer in the Bible story was too far – too far, too invisible, too mysterious, too untouchable. The God of Words, like the golden calf, is not mysterious. He is called mysterious, but only because it is a characteristic that people like to ascribe to their god. How can a god be mysterious if the people who call him mysterious also claim to know what he thinks and know what he has done and what he will do? (“But we know nothing of these things,” people will say with indignation. “We don’t know what God thinks! We don’t know what He will do! We don’t know a fraction of all He has ever done, and we can never understand His plans, or His intentions!”) This God of Words can also be felt. In the right circumstances, it must be added, which usually takes place in churches with plenty of instruments on stage, and a preacher who walks around with a microphone in his hand. (“Oh no,” people will say, “you can feel God in the privacy of your room, too.”) And, like the golden calf, this God of Words can be made content, and his favour can be curried for your cause by the magical power of a series of rituals. You can sing and fall down, and clasp your hands together, or do Bible study, or say long prayers, and so on, and so on. And the aggrieved will accuse me on every point that I distort everything, and that I clearly don’t know the first thing about their god, and may they pray for me, right now, I don’t even have to close my eyes.

What all of this boils down to is that I no longer believe in the God of Words. I have spelt out the case in my own version of an official declaration. And I felt better afterwards because words can make something look so official.

As time went by, though, I realised that you don’t get rid of youthful beliefs that easily. I don’t believe in the detail anymore – the Personal Salvation doctrine is one example. But every now and then, in a quiet moment, I have this vision of the god I don’t believe in anymore: an all-powerful king sitting on his golden throne, staring at me in pensive silence. I will know the way he looks at me is not that of a loving father figure. This figure will not utter a single word, but I’ll have a good sense of what he’s thinking: that I just have to wait – my day will come. “Then we’ll see who’s boss. Then we’ll see what you do with your well-thought out arguments. You want to criticise me? Because I didn’t do what? Because I said I’d do what? Who do you think you are?” And I will swallow my words, and become acutely aware of the fact that it’s all true. Who am I, after all, to stand before this majestic figure and throw around allegations? I’d want to turn around and sneak away, but he would lift his finger ever so slightly, say something that I wouldn’t be able to decipher, and the next moment I will find myself in a terrible pool of everlasting fire.

So much for my arguments.

Loneliness: theologians of a certain mindset might say that this being alone – this is my hell. To which I will reply that I felt alone even when I still believed in the God of Words!

Punishment hell or just everyday hell, by now I’m tired of this loneliness business. I believe that if a man just had someone in his life, that this person could tell him that he need not worry, and her hands on any of several places on his body would convince him it was true. It would be all that would matter.

Still, as things stood yesterday, and the countless days and nights before, I am alone. In a different time of my life I would have been praying hard every day for this god to send me someone to make the waking hours better, and to let me sleep better at night. Since faith is a requirement for someone to apply this method to find redemption from his personal hell, I am left with something much more ordinary: “Hello, my name is Brand” – or the more desperate, “Former believer now in hell of loneliness looking for someone in a similar position.”

To be in a relationship with someone means you belong somewhere. You’ll be missed if you fail to come home at the end of a day. Commitment to someone else should also be conducive to keeping your mind away from eternal damnation. And this kind of companionship can also lead to satisfying one of our strongest desires – the desire to perpetuate life. To go through the proper procedure, and then after a long wait to hold a third person in your hands – that is not you, and not the other partner in the relationship, but a separate living entity. And you will stare at this miniature version of a human being and you’ll know, you were part of a process that has given life.

Bottom line: I can think of plenty of good reasons I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Enough for now. Did I manage to communicate with the limited medium of words what I feel on this Sunday night? Does it matter? The reason I started typing in the first place was because I was a little anxious, and to a greater extent felt alone. The process of choosing words and arranging them in sentences was what had real value in the end. As is usual with these things, I feel a little better.

Why does it matter that you, the reader, understand how I feel? It will only matter if you could convince me that I no longer have to fear the god in which I no longer believe. And if you know a kind woman with an open mind that’s been hoping she could meet someone who will save her from her own hell of a lonely existence, that will be an especially happy coincidence.

Few things are ever so simple, so qwert yuio plkj! Or, so it is …

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WEDNESDAY, 16 AUGUST 2000

“There’s so many things going on at the moment in my life, but how do you express that in an email? There are big things that happen to a person, as in your case, and you simply express them as facts …

What matters is that it’s going well. I wish sometimes we could take a walk on the beach, so I could try to explain my life in a way that would make it easier for you to say, ‘I know what you mean.’

I might take a train this weekend to the other side of the island. Or maybe I’ll stay at home. Maybe I’ll have a date, or maybe not.

I don’t know how to write a normal letter anymore. And I think maybe I want to lose my ability to communicate in a normal, understandable way.

I think I’m getting increasingly alienated from places that are familiar to me, and to some extent that’s how I want it … and not want it.

I always said I was born a normal guy who just wanted the usual things and who would have been satisfied with less. But my life has made other turns and now I’m stuck between the trunk and the bark. I want everything, and I know I may end up with nothing. I’d have to either continue with my life and the highway I’m on, or I’d have to make a turn at some stage and hope it works out.

It may not be too late to say, ‘It’s really all very simple. Just do this and that, and then everything will be as you thought it would be ten years ago.’

I need a beacon, someone to serve as a lighthouse to show the way back to the harbour every time I made my rounds in the storm.

This might look like a cue for someone to drop a point about religion, but that’s not good enough.

I can even choose to delete this text, and to write things about my life that are more understandable and more according to the convention. But you know me better than that. And you always write back!

And to think you only wanted to hear if all was well, and if I was eating regularly …”

~ From an e-mail to a friend

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SATURDAY, 5 AUGUST 2000

The poem, like a note in a journal, is to me a reference point. It describes how I got where I am today; how it happened that I am what I am, at this particular moment of my life.

As long as I have a pen and a piece of paper I can give expression to who I am, at a certain time, in a particular context, and therefore know that I’m alive.

I am also aware that every day is a continuation of one life, and that this life includes everything that has ever been recorded – in notebooks, on scraps of paper, on the back of telephone bills, and things that happened but that remained unexpressed or unrecorded.

All the verses and stories about love, faith and hope, and about disappointments, doubt and despair, eventually lead to the most important of all knowledge: the knowledge of who I am.

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