Category: Post Untitled, volume three

MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2008

There is true love, and there is sexual attraction. There is love that lasts a lifetime, and there are sparks of sexual desire. Sometimes you feel sexually attracted to a person, you take a chance, and you enjoy it for as long as it lasts. If you stay together, the sexual attraction must eventually be augmented with something more substantial, namely love – the kind that can last a lifetime, until long after the sparks have cooled down and you occasionally catch yourself wondering what it would be like with someone else.

A man is madly in love with a woman. The woman regards the man a pleasant enough fellow: he is kind, he can have conversations about interesting things, but that’s where it stops for her. She wonders if a person can force a heart that doesn’t want to beat faster. She thinks about sexual desire, for example, that is after all an honest physical response to someone’s presence.

The woman pictures for herself a very specific life with the man, should she choose to be with him – a life where things would always be like they are now: he loves her, she pulls back. Five years later: he’s still crazy about her, she’s still distant. Twenty years later: he still loves her; she cares about him but she doesn’t reciprocate his warmth, and occasionally she thinks back to an affair she had two decades earlier with a guy that looked like a movie star.

Reality looks slightly different in many cases, though: the man is currently at X+20, and the woman is at X+2; after two years, he is at X+15, and she is at X+7; after ten years, she cannot imagine a life without him; he still loves her very much – he still brings her breakfast in bed on Sundays, but sparks from his side don’t set the wallpaper on fire anymore. That is how life sometimes is, in a nutshell.

Of course, things could turn out completely different between the woman and the man who doesn’t look like a movie star. His torch may start showing signs of dimming after a few years, and he may start looking at other women just as the women in his life increasingly wants to be closer to him. This is also how life sometimes works out, in a different nutshell.

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THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2008

Browsing through the book, Die Prosa van die Tweede Afrikaanse Beweging [The Prose of the Second Afrikaans Movement], first published in 1922, I found the text quoted below. You sometimes get the idea amongst Afrikaans people that they think progressive ideas about Afrikaans culture and literature did not see daylight in South Africa before the sixties or even as late as the late eighties. That this text dates from the early 1920s will therefore come as a surprise to some people (I know I was pleasantly surprised).

“Also amongst our own artists, there are those who anxiously want to expunge all foreign influences; these are people who seek their strength in a cramped, suffocating isolation. They hope to build up in this way a pure form of Afrikaans art, free from all bastard elements. We have to struggle forth on our own thorny road because our circumstances are apparently completely different from those in the older culture countries. That this approach is wholly wrong is proved at once by the fact that our best artists have created their most masterful work precisely under the influence of foreign elements. The true artist does not allow himself to be mongrelised by a foreign culture. He borrows from it that which is of service to the full deployment of his spirit, and transforms and processes the foreign ingredients into a pure national artwork. A nation that cannot stand his man against foreign influences is ruined, as is the artist. But rightfully we can demand of him that he broadens our scope and brings us into intimate contact with art from other countries as well. Isolation in the literary arena would mean cultural drought; it would lead to endless regurgitation. Let our artists therefore take full liberty in enriching their spirits from all corners of the globe. If they are man enough, their autonomy will not suffer, and our art will retain its national character. In any case no Chinese wall around South Africa!”

Source: Die Prosa van die Tweede Afrikaanse Beweging, by Pieter Cornelis Schoonees (1922) [The Prose of the Second Afrikaans Movement]

Well, there are some references that make it clear it was not written in the last decade, but the call itself to not be afraid of “foreign influences” but to use it to make your own art and literature better, more fully deployed, as the text says, is clear enough.

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SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2008

“Somebody let off firecrackers in the street, then you became disoriented and fell out the window. Then I grabbed your arm, steadied myself against the window frame and pulled you back. Then I scolded you.” ~ the dream Natasja told me about this morning that she had had last night.

TUESDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2008

I fill my notebooks and type stuff on the computer to create evidence of my existence. My writings are proof that I am alive, and have been alive all this time.

WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2008

I am getting a little tired of struggling every day and every night to pull a miracle from my computer. It feels as if I am confronted with a choice: take it easy, or keep pushing until I die, or until I drop dead.

If I consider it superficially, or if I want to be propagandistic about it, I would have to say, then I choose to keep pushing until I die, or until I drop dead (or until I succeed; I forgot to add that to the original set of possibilities … we do after all strive for something). But I would like to know exactly what it means to “take it easy”. Does it mean give up and become a couch potato? Does it mean spending your days and nights watching TV until you are forced to sell your couch and TV for food?

Can you take it easy and just maybe get more done – and just maybe live longer and be happier?

MONDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2008

[Excerpt from an e-mail to a friend]

You ask whether everything is going to work out “right”. I’m old enough to know things don’t always work out exactly the way we wanted. We hope and believe – in a better tomorrow, that things will work out, that the future will be fantastic … but everyone knows that faith and hope often end in disillusionment, and without a little luck every now and then our daily efforts wouldn’t take us nearly as far as we would like to believe they should.

What’s going to happen next is that you are going to go on struggling for everything that’s important to you, from serving a cause greater than yourself to fulfilling your potential. That is what will happen next.

Will things work out? You’re probably not going to have as many interesting experiences in the next few months as you have had in the past almost six months – or perhaps you are going to have even more interesting experiences. The immediate future might not bring as many interesting characters – but maybe other interesting characters.

Believe in yourself. Believe in what you do. Fight on. And forget about “everything”, the perfect life, and believing that something will always smile back at the end. As long as you remain on your feet, you’re still in the game – and if you stumble, you get back up.

If life is a struggle for something better, and for all that we can be, you already have more than enough tools, knowledge, experience, enthusiasm, vitality and tricks up your sleeve to see the fight to the end.

That is the best I can offer in terms of advice.

WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2008

I always want to do more, while less is in many cases better.

WEDNESDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2008

How does evolution work? What mechanisms generate small changes that lead to a creature hunting, eating, swimming and climbing trees in a different manner after a thousand generations than its ancestors from a thousand generations earlier?

Answer: I don’t know.

Another question: What is 15,384,523 multiplied by 27,947,238?

Answer: That I also do not know. But someone can locate a big enough calculator, punch in the right numbers and give me the answer. And he or she will be right! It will be the real, true, accurate answer!

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TUESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2008

I recently had a thought about [a gambling-related activity with which I thought I could make money]. I guess I can make money with it in the long-term, but I have a problem with the amount of time I spend on it, and I have a problem with what it does to my mind. If I end an hour with more money than what I started with, I am ecstatic; if I end up with less money, I am not so much unhappy, but let’s just say a general sense of happiness and well-being is completely absent.

After drawing a comparison between that and anything that requires creativity – can be a poem or an article for a web page, I mumbled in the direction of the refrigerator: “It is too important.”

To end an hour’s activity with a profit is simply too important. I follow my strategy and go through the steps with the thought in the back of mind that I just have to make 1000% (that’s right, one thousand percent) profit within four to six weeks then everything is hunky-dory and I can go on vacation. Then after an hour I walk back to the kitchen with less money in my account, disappointed, a little angry, and increasingly uncertain. “Will it work?” I’ll mutter to myself.

I put everything on the table. I risk my health, my happiness and well-being, a trip to my own country to see my family, my hope, my … faith – on the outcome of an hour’s activities that are supposed to make money.

This piece is starting to look like a confession, so let me make it clear: I do not gamble – not with cents, and not with dollars. I carefully work things out. I go in for profit, not for entertainment.

Nevertheless, to win is too important. Losing also weighs too heavy on my mind. Can the situation be saved? Or should I steer clear of anything where I win or lose because in both cases my blood pressure threatens to go through the roof?

Then again, everything that raises my blood pressure? What is left? Reading? Definitely out! I get all worked up and discuss everything with myself out loud. Movies, TV? Same story. Going on vacation to see my family? Problematic – there’s the stress of saying goodbye. Teaching English? There’s the noise, and the insolence of some of the kids … oh my goodness! Is this check mate?

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2008

In Korea, I had the insight that I hate to lose, because I expect to win. What inspired this insight was the severe distress I used to suffer when I lost an arcade game like Daytona USA or Soul Edge against someone. A similar thing rears its head nowadays with games on my computer like Pacman, Tetris, and FreeCell.

Why is it so important for me to win? It certainly confirms that I was right about something, but why is it so important to be right?

Is the problem an exaggerated sense of self-worth? Do I constantly need confirmation of my value as a person because uncertainty about it lurks just beneath the surface?

Am I doomed to be forever tossed between an exaggerated self-esteem, an insatiable need for confirmation of my value as a person (as manifested in the need to be right), and looming uncertainty about my own value and the accompanying anxiety, while existing in a reality in which everyone sometimes wins and sometimes loses, where everyone is sometimes right and sometimes wrong?

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THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2008

Why I do what I do: a conversation with myself on the way to the 7-Eleven late last night

Reason one: Distrust, since the age of fourteen, in an adult life of get a job, get married, get a loan to buy a house, get a loan to buy a car, have children, then the economy turns bad or some other fuck-up that makes you lose your job, you get desperate, you borrow more money, you move to another city, you trade in the car for an old wreck, you explain your situation to friends and relatives and strangers, you get even more desperate until you get to the point where you are willing to call anyone “boss” or do anything for a paycheck.

Reason two: Even when I was supposed to get ready for a career, interests like history and religion weighed heavier than subjects like personnel management or marketing.

Reason three: Like millions of other people I, too, have been given a gift, and I’ll be damned if I do not apply my life to something better than a mediocre existence.

MONDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2008

We often hear ourselves and other people say things like, “My life should be better,” “X should actually be Y,” “A should be B.” You also regularly remind yourself that life hardly ever works out the way we want. You do your best, and you try to be happy with what you have. Yet you keep striving for a better life, to make things better.

Most of us know that life is a struggle – for a higher level of existence. Sometimes you succeed, and your life is better from that day on. Sometimes you struggle for what feels like an eternity, and you barely remain standing. But – and I know I have used this image more than a few times, but here it is again – if you are not down for the count, you’re still standing. And as long as you remain standing, you struggle on.

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