Category: Personal Agenda, Book Two

Establishment of the Anti-Futility League

THURSDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2003

Is there something like an Anti-Futility League? If not, I call it to life at this very moment. Our motto will be straightforward: “What’s the point?” The league will be an exercise in meaningful endeavour – a deliberate attack on futility. (The thought did occur to me recently that this material I am working on might be just a useless enterprise. Who really cares if I know my own true name? Who cares if I see meaning in my life, and whether or not I fill my days with meaningful activities?)

We all have groups to which we belong – or most of us do, anyway. Most people like to be part of something, so now there’s a group of which you as a reader can be a proud member! We can even have name cards printed and give everyone a special number.

Membership would be free for the first million members; then we may start charging a small annual fee. One rule will be that everyone except poor artists must bring cake and tea to meetings, and preferably enough of both so that the artists can fill their plastic bags and empty bottles after the meeting.

Perhaps we should be a secret organisation, with cells that can infiltrate communities around the world! Then we can write a manifesto, and in fifty years take over Russia, or Cuba, or Mpumalanga. We can also launch protests against useless organisations and institutions, like publishers who are just interested in profit. We can even train missionaries to go from door to door …

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If the perception is disturbed

THURSDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2003

When a person’s perception of where he belongs is disturbed, the subconscious activates a process to neutralise the disturbance. This process would include certain actions being undertaken to confirm the person’s identity, and with that his sense of where he belongs.

My situation the last few weeks serves as a fine example. I was suddenly forced to take my things and go after having lived in an apartment for almost five years. This experience – which included packing all my belongings into boxes, stripping the walls of images and other paraphernalia of my existence, and me living between the boxes and the bare walls for about a week – slightly disturbed my sense of my place in the world. Without consciously thinking about taking steps to alleviate this disturbance, I started writing with unprecedented urgency every time I took a break from the packing. In doing so, I actively confirmed the part of my identity that I regard as fundamental to my existence. (Important to note that I expect a return to normal output the moment my sense of where I belong is restored.)

This might imply that a more ideal existence – which, for the sake of argument, can be defined as a situation where most of my needs are met on a fairly regular basis – would not be conducive to maintaining an above-average pace in my writing. This could of course also be applied to other people and the creative work they do, although it would depend on the type of creative work they keep themselves busy with.

The question may be asked what is more important: regular satisfaction of all your needs – and the happy result of a more ideal existence, or a certain pace in the production of creative works? One might even wonder what difference regular satisfaction of all your needs will have on the quality and inspiration of your creative work.

How important is it in the end to be creative? And if it comes down to it, is it more important than being “happy”?

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The (real) value of money

MONDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2003

Many people want to be rich for the comfort and security it provides. Many people also want to be rich because they think it will make them feel important, and appear more important to others.

Financial wealth is also conducive to the average person, whose life is anchored in the ever-changing cultural quagmire of the socio-economic middle class, being more confident of his or her identity. Money enables a person to acquire the badges the individual needs in order to appear to the world in a certain way. In this way, the individual can tell other people: “This is who I (think I) am, who I want to be, and how I would like to be seen. Here is the visible evidence.”

Wealth is thus seen (perhaps unknowingly) as an easy way to define identity, and continually confirm it – especially by people who do not have a lot of money, and who spend a significant amount of time in environments where money plays a prominent role in the development and display of identity.

… and an academic note

The above is what can be called an “answer” in the way I described a few pieces back. In this case, the initial questions would be: Why do so many people want to be rich? Is it just about the security of knowing you will have enough to eat today, and tomorrow, and possibly even next month? Or are we also driven by other instincts or motivations?

Most of my so-called answers are nothing more than personal theories. My method is also not terribly scientific. For example, I’ll think: “It appears to me that [Person X] is still not convinced of her own identity.”

Then, in the specified case, I’ll continue dusting or wiping away stains on the floor until the next thought enters my mind: “Strange, she’s always been overly attracted to money.”

Then, as I’m standing there with a cleaning cloth and a bottle of lighter fluid in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, the moment of insight strikes: “Is the one thing possibly connected to the other?”

With the latter, I’ll have formulated a QUESTION. Upon identifying the most reasonable and likely ANSWER, I can formulate a THEORY.

Then I will sit down at the dressing table, open my notebook and write something like: “Many people want to be rich for the comfort and security it provides. Many people also want to be rich because they think it will make them feel important …”

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Money and art

SATURDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2003

I have no problem exchanging art for money. If an artist earns a million rand with his art, good for him. It’s much better than having to earn that money by spending a lifetime making permanent butt impressions on office chairs.

I also have no problem with having my own writing published. My point is simply that I don’t want to be dictated by so-called market forces what and how I write – which certainly is a departure from my earlier attitude of think like a businessman, create like an artist.

What this means is that I’d rather not be dependent on my writing for food and rent money. If I do finally manage to produce something that a magazine deems fit to publish, fair and well; then I won’t have to sell so many of my hours to some business that month. However, what I produce from the anguish and ecstasy of my reality experience is too important for me to see it become just another product to be weighed on the scale of the Great Industrial Machine, like fruit or firewood or souvenirs at a tourist spot.

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(Initially about) The fauna and flora of Taiwan

SATURDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2003

Taiwan has many beautiful flowers, and bees too. There are also trees, and every now and then one sees mountains. The air is quite dirty, though. There are also many dogs roaming the streets that bark at people with long noses. Some of the dogs are green.

What really bothers me about this story is … why am I so desperate for answers? Why do I have so many questions? Is it because of my education – religious environment where one was regularly preached to by those who were supposed to know? And if you didn’t know, you could go to hell! I mean, no one could ever use it as an excuse that they didn’t know! You were either one of the lucky ones who knew, and therefore could go to heaven, or you didn’t know, and was therefore temporarily condemned to eternal torment in Satan’s hell. I say “temporarily condemned” because there was always the possibility that you could acquire the necessary knowledge before you breathed your last, and as one of those who then knew, you could enter eternal utopia – not because you were a good person, or because you died while saving your neighbour from drowning, but because you knew!

(I promise I’ll come back to the fauna and flora.)

Round about ten years ago I wasn’t sure of what I knew anymore. I panicked for understandable reasons. I had to start from the beginning to sort out what I knew, because even though I was no longer sure about heaven or hell, I still thought you were in quite a predicament if you didn’t know certain things.

This resulted in me not following the conventional priorities over the past ten years of someone with my socio-cultural background and tertiary education. I decided that I couldn’t give immediate attention to such mundane things as financial wealth, position and status in the community, and whether or not I might end up in the madhouse one day. All I knew was that I didn’t know.

I met many others who apparently knew, or just pretended they knew, or for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, did not care whether or not they knew. I, on the other hand, was in a position where everything I had known had lost credibility. I therefore had to postpone all conventional priorities until the day of liberation when I could finally announce that, after years of uncertainty, I finally knew again.

Very soon I was confronted with a harsh reality. Banks that are so kind to lend money to ignorant young students, grocery stores, and the owners of rooms and apartments simply refuse to wait for payment until you know or understand what you believe is necessary to know or understand. Everyone wants money now, whether you know what you need to know, or not.

That’s how I ended up in Northeast Asia. Here I am able to earn money without pretending I have the type of “knowledge” I previously possessed. Here it is good enough that you look different, that you come from another part of the planet, and of course that you can speak English. What a paradise! I’ve been wandering around for years in this part of the world in my apparently endless quest for answers.

To not acknowledge that there are advantages to ignorance would make me a liar, though. One advantage is that one can reflect your ignorance in your appearance. Indulge yourself a bit by standing on a sidewalk in the town centre and staring at passers-by. I surmise that the well-dressed pedestrians with clean-shaven legs and faces can explain in well-articulated sentences what they know. The other part of the crowd, those with furry legs and cheeks and dressed in old jeans and dirty T-shirts, will probably fail to explain what they don’t know in long boring monologues.

Now, here’s where ignorance comes in handy: If you find yourself in this second group, and people look at you and think you look like a homeless person, you can simply drop your shoulders and tell them you know how you look, but it’s because you don’t know! In some cases, they’ll understand, and they will sympathise. Other people – who one can only conclude have always known – will not understand and will probably never have any sympathy.

There is a third group: Characters who don the fashionable uniforms of people who have answers to key questions and who therefore know, but who stare uncomfortably at the ceiling when they are required to make a definite statement in this direction or the other.

By the way, the factor of financial resources, which allow people to buy a pre-assembled and pre-packaged uniform that would give them the appearance that they possess all the important pieces of information can never be underestimated. The same is true for community. If everyone in your group wears the same uniforms and recites the same rhymes, the likelihood is slim that anyone in the room will ask awkward questions – except of course if one with a dirty beard and a T-shirt that advertises shoe polish stumbles into the coffee shop, and accidentally plonks down at the wrong table.

* * *

A more liberal attitude towards your appearance, and other advantages of living in the Far East such as eating Chinese takeaways every day, cannot be overlooked. I nevertheless look forward to the day when I had gathered enough knowledge to again be able to proclaim: “I know.”

There are always alternatives. I can say that I give up or try to convince myself that I don’t care anymore. This could just make it possible to use my time and energy to pursue wealth and material comfort, although it would surely require a transformation of incredible dimensions. The odds are always that I would be confronted later in my life with the fact that, despite appearances, I still don’t know. For me this is a great dilemma.

As I already mentioned, the grocery store, the bank and the landlord don’t really care whether I know or not. As long as I continue to stuff cash in their hands, they remain polite. This is not a desirable situation for the long term. I must either quickly get to the point where I can declare convincingly enough that I possess the most important knowledge (and that I therefore know), or I need to get my hands on more money I can legally call my own. In the latter case, I would be able to buy more time in order to formulate questions better, and to find an appropriate set of answers.

The ideal result is that, without blinking an eye or staring at the clouds, I can declare that indeed, after years of ignorance, I know again – though it would not necessarily be the same as what others think they know. I would again be able to grow my beard, and I wouldn’t feel compelled to dress in a more or less fashionable way, even if I could afford it. Why? If people then comment on my appearance, and speculate about my ignorance, I would be able to straighten my shoulders with a renewed sense of pride, and politely inform them that I might look like a homeless person, but I know.

Now, about those green dogs …

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