Category: Post Untitled, volume one

TUESDAY, 13 APRIL 2004

Some things you think; others you just know.

In February, I talked about commitment to a money project in a way I’m usually only committed to a literary project. For six of the last seven weeks of my earthly existence, this has been exactly what I have made myself guilty of.

However, it has become increasingly clear that the project I am working on is quite possibly not just weeks away from positive cash flow. I can, therefore, not continue to work on it like a psychotic robot at the expense of anything else.

It should come as no surprise that I did not merely think I ought to pay attention again to some of my other projects; I knew it.

For the record, it must be mentioned that the idea of maintaining a domestic situation in Taiwan is currently experiencing a period of renewed tolerance among the “people”. (We know, however, how quickly the atmosphere of tolerance can change in this area – one moment the Chief Advocate for Staying in Taiwan is happily stumbling to his bicycle with bags full of breakfast cereal, and the next moment he is pedalling for all he’s worth to get away from a small but hostile crowd armed with stones and broken bottles.) To put repatriation plans on long-term ice, however, will once again fuel impatience, frustration and despair … in such a way that one starts to wonder if totally different future plans share a single internal root!

Are there alternatives between these two extreme options? Is there an alternative idea-logic to offer the citizens of my internal republic other than Return to the Country of My Birth despite the Consequences, on the one hand, and Too Much Uncertainty and Effort so Let’s Just Stay in Taiwan on the other? Is it time for the Writer, the Student and that other guy (the one who has to make money) to storm the towns, the cities, the plains and the coffee shops with the manifesto of a New Idea? Is it time for a Third Force?

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MONDAY, 12 APRIL 2004

Pale: Sometimes it feels as if everything is in vain, that I only believe in good things and hope for a better day because … the alternative is too terrible. At the end there is only one thing that makes life worthwhile and that is love. Without love you have nothing, not a damn thing, not so much as a dust particle in your eye to annoy you and work up a bit of emotion. All you have is negative space, negative emotion that always threatens to collapse in on itself. One step forward, a hundred steps back …

descendant

jog through nettle bushes
role like the wind
I am nature, and I’m fire
and its child, and that of light

yet I find too little
late at night and in the morning
that is sure, and anchored
to which I can tie my faith and hope

love must surely then
be the sole remaining answer
we are after all more than spirit
we are also naked skin and flesh

so roll on closer like a tumbleweed
touch my face and feel the wind
I am the fire, the earth
I am like oxygen and soil

because I, like you, are descended from the darkness
but call the light my father and my mother
born from primal shame
I will follow my salvation till the end

I still live behind my barricades; I just keep myself busy with more productive things these days.

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MONDAY, 12 APRIL 2004

I have this nagging suspicion that I am my own greatest hero, the guy who keeps storming forward even though the battle has already been decided. (I know how to continue functioning.)

1) If you don’t get pulled to the ground, you remain standing.

2) If you are not kept standing, you fall down.

* * *

I know how to be “normal” – how to function in the environment in which I find myself without unnecessarily undermining my chances of survival.

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I feel like a stranger to myself. In order to write this piece, I had to change the font to one that I haven’t used in weeks, a title had to be conjured up, the change from English to Afrikaans … and the nagging suspicion that I’ve been dragging a certain storyline for way too long behind me, like one would drag along dozens of boxes filled with personal junk for reasons only you could possibly understand, and at a daily growing price.

But let me start. As always it’s going well. (Does paper blush when a writer lies?) A million hours ago, I came up with an idea for an experiment. (Why, incidentally, can’t a sheet of typing paper be round? If I just stare at the screen, will symbols appear on “Microsoft Word Document1” that will correspond with my thoughts? If I spit on the screen, will it form curse words?) This experiment was to be called, the Commercial Dictatorship – a time when I, the Writer, was supposed to be Teacher/Businessman/Entrepreneur for the most significant portions of every day and night for a three-month period. The idea was that I should chase after insane children at least eight hours a day shouting “ABC! ABC!” (whilst whispering “fuck off” behind my mask at every motorist and pedestrian that stares at me on the road, or who dares to turn in front of me on my creaking, yellow bicycle). Deals also had to be made, partnerships had to be worked out, and sweaty fingers had to count moist banknotes over crumpled ketchup-stained junk food wrappings on a daily basis, with the smoke of a fast-burning white paper cigarette stinging my already bloodshot eyes to such a degree that I can no longer decipher my own handwriting when I desperately try to scribble a note reminding myself about my faith in an “extraordinary life”.

Prosperous is the Writer-Entrepreneur who once again found reason enough to not leave his apartment more often to make more money! For the last 44 days of the so-called Commercial Dictatorship I, in all my identities, have been filling the chair behind my Toshiba 2180CDT, working on what I have finally started to call “[…]”, the first book and forerunner in the “[…]” series.

[…].

The plan is also to start a book business (on paper, so to speak), and then to publish different versions of the book in partnership with local publishers so I will not as I solemnly promised return to South Africa on Friday, June 4th. Tea anyone? Coffee?

It’s not like I haven’t been writing during these past seven weeks. The Temporary Commercial Constitution forbade me to spend time behind the computer with anything other than a commercial project, although pen and paper could still be used for free expression.

And freely I expressed myself, pages and pages and pages full of words between work on the language book, the translation of about 2000 words, sentence patterns, expressions, cheap video CDs …

I mention this to explain why this computer-typed piece feels slightly strange under the fingers, and to the eye, because it feels as if I am telling myself things I have known for some time whilst ignoring other things that have dominated my handwritten notes.

Also important to mention: another twelve-month cycle has almost been completed since my last trip to South Africa, and “holiday” plans are increasingly taking the lead in the contemplation of my immediate future.

I have also managed to explain to my parents and my older sister the inevitable consequences of my business ideas, and they believe respectively that I still want to eventually return to South Africa and that I am still planning to visit England soon.

Since my last official piece of creative writing I have also devised a new phrase, and have already recited it several times:

“When are you coming back?”

“As soon as possible.”

“When are you coming to visit us?”

“As soon as possible.”

“When are you going to stuff your junk in boxes and start acting on your promises, like a decent person?”

“As soon as possible …”

There’s one problem, though. My younger sister refuses to be so quickly persuaded by my clever explanations. She laid out, last weekend, not just that she misses me and our older sister or how much, but exactly why. It was a container ship full of reasons, properly contemplated beforehand and thoroughly explained, as if it were me speaking; as if she was quoting my own sentiments word-for-word.

I felt guilty.

I am currently working on a few projects – and that is at least supposed to read like an original statement, not like a piece of regurgitated earlier text. There’s the Big Money Project which I’ve already mentioned, and the Great Literary Project of which this update is but a small fragment. Then yesterday – while I was busy in the bathroom – I thought of an inexpensive way to get a few copies of my first volume of poetry in the hands of friends and immediate family (who know I won’t be able to stop them from using the paper to light barbeque fires after a superficial attempt at trying to make sense of my melancholy rhymes). This resulted in me last night once again drawing red lines across poetry that only last year I considered being reasonably okay, and I am hoping that apart from my other jobs I will also be able to spend time on this one and self-publish the collection in pseudo book form hopefully by the end of June.

My mastery of the Chinese language, now already in its fifth year, is the remaining current project. Here, I can report that I can now read Chinese better than I speak it, and even when I make an attempt at verbal communication, people don’t frantically rush themselves to the nearest Tao priest for an exorcism anymore.

My range of personal relationships still does not extend much further than the occasional chat with some female coffee shop friends. My romantic connection to the Tea Lady of Zhongshan Road is also still stuck in the conceptual phase. (I have devised an evil plan to get her to marry me, though – think Marilyn Monroe and Willy Loman, never mind Arthur Miller.)

I also still mix four kinds of cereals for breakfast every morning; still drink my coffee black and bitter; still buy and watch lots of cheap VCDs, and I continue to pen more and more notes on faith in a better tomorrow as a deliberate and sincere attempt to make life worth living today, despite the fact that one knows it often does not work out the way you thought it would.

So everything is still in working condition, even if the machine isn’t always in the best of shapes. Until another piece of text brings us together again …

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FRIDAY, 9 APRIL 2004

I often feel like a fraud when I am on the phone. I’m aware of the fact that I try to be friendly and pleasant, and to not give the other person offence – unless of course it is light-hearted and entertaining.

This is not who I am. How do I know this? Because I live with myself between telephone conversations, and I know the act I perform on the phone is only because I am lonely and I don’t want to alienate people at the moment.

The truth is that it is counter-productive. If you are friendly and pleasant on the phone, people expect you to be so in actual appearances, and if you are not, then you end up alienating them anyways.

I hate this kind of deceptive role-playing. If your social face is more in line with your sometimes unpleasant private face, people will respect you anyway for your honesty, even if it is sometimes a little blunt. More overall respect for you as a person is usually the result.

Each of us has a private face and a social face. It is our own responsibility to ensure that after a conversation with someone else the private face does not look the social face in … well, in the face and ask “Who the hell was that?”

This entry represents the necessary evolution of identity that is always on the cards.

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