Category: Post Untitled, volume two

FRIDAY, 11 FEBRUARY 2005

09:03/03:27

I just thought: I live and think and work (meaning write) in a brilliant teacup. My world must be almost perfect to be conducive to the kind of thinking I surrender my mind to and the kind of material I produce.

Fine if it is so, if a certain environment and other related factors are important to make certain things possible. I am just wondering what I would have done if a part of my life had been lived on the kitchen table, outside the enabling boundaries of my beautiful teacup. (Do I need to remind myself that monasteries are not exactly oversized coffee mugs or Taiwanese hot pots?)

Two articles I read in the Time magazine are what inspired this thought. One was about all rights being suspended in Nepal – including the right to express what you think, the right to criticise the government, and the right to privacy. I wondered: Could I survive in such a situation? The second article referred to Shanghai’s mostly Western businessmen in the nineteenth century – all the wheeling and dealing, greasing of palms, etcetera. Again I wondered: Could I survive in that kind of world?

Do these uncertainties really have any value, or are they just interesting speculations?

Point remains: monasteries are also teacup environments that are conducive to significant results. Plus, I don’t exactly live and work in a monastery.

05:33

The land of my birth is spotted.

Date: 11 February 2005

Day: Friday

Time: 05:34

Location: Seat 29K on a Boeing 747 at a height of 11,887 meters above sea level

Clothing: Black jeans, a green short-sleeved shirt I’ve been wearing since yesterday morning, (clean) blue socks, 2002 Merrells

Emotion: Neutral excited. It was a bloody long journey, and I was bored most of the time, although the Time magazine did help. I have been sitting in a very narrow space for almost ten hours, and I have an emergency situation developing because of all the rich foods I’ve been eating the last eight hours. I am almost constantly thinking of a certain female character with whom I have spent a lot of time the past few weeks. I am also thinking of my parents, my two sisters, their firstborn children …

15:53

One Greek salad, one pasta salad, half a potato salad, half a pecan pie, and two cups of green tea later (oh, and a three-hour nap and a hot bath): It was a bit of a shock to my inner organisation to be alone in Melville, the battlefield from where I had retreated just in time, seriously wounded and injured a few years ago. It is also amusing to appear as “Brand (you know? [X])”.

On the subject of people who have children in the conscious or unconscious hope that it will give meaning to their lives, the next piece of advice to myself: consider the possibility that there are aspects of the matter that I (still) do not understand. Maybe this – to hold your own child in your arms – is the element that unlocks great things, beautiful things, in some people. (And in other peoples’ cases, it might be something else.)

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THURSDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2005

I wanted to wait for the flying machine to ascend into the air again, but a few points need to be made before I forget something.

1. Exactly one year ago I contemplated most sincerely the idea of returning to South Africa by the end of February [2004]. The fact that it is again the month of February, exactly a year later, and that I am sitting on a plane on a runway on the island of Borneo is therefore a golden opportunity to wonder whether I made the right decision a year ago. I can certainly say that I do not know what could have happened, had I pushed through my “March revolution”. What I can do is safely affirm the opinion for the record that the past twelve months in Taiwan have been good – in some ways much better than one could have imagined in your most optimistic outlook. My life is still in Taiwan; the people who have mattered to me the longest, who in some cases had known my name even before I uttered the pronoun “I”, are still at the southern tip of Africa. That is why I am sitting on this aircraft right now, in a window seat, with the Southeast Asian morning sun that is warming up my right arm. Just over five months since I have last seen my family, I am again going “home” – for two weeks.

2. As I shuffled through the airport terminal at Kota Kinabalu on the way to the smoker’s corner, I could not help but observe dozens of other people. A nasty thought once again grabbed hold of my mind: I have a pathological fear of boredom.

3. Point of Power: Reckoned this morning at Kaohsiung airport that every person has a central point of power. Everything you do, where you do it, how you conduct your daily life, with whom you share your existence, and how you choose to apply your life will either strengthen this point, or weaken it.

[02/06/15: Think of your existence as an ointment or a salve, or something similar. If you are “Tiger Balm”, you are wasting your life if you apply yourself to a piece of wood. Apply yourself to an insect bite, and you are on the right track – the correct application of a very specific value.]

* * *

(Twenty-four minutes past four according to the electronic alarm clock on top of the TV in Room 533, at the Allson Klana Hotel outside Kuala Lumpur.)

Sometimes, in the bathroom mirror of a room in a transit hotel in an unfamiliar city in a country not my own, I see myself as I “truly” am: stripped of the clothes in which I appear, alone.

(On the dressing table are my camera, my notebook, my passport and a plane ticket to the country where I was born, and back to the country where I now live a fairly decent life.)

Sometimes I see myself as I appear: alone in a hotel room, in a foreign country, on my way.

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TUESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2005

08:57

Two thoughts:

1. John X was not necessarily “put on earth” to fulfil a certain purpose, but he was born with the ability to fulfil a certain purpose – in the same way a woman is born with the ability to get pregnant and give birth, something that is closely associated with a certain role that has to be fulfilled, or a purpose that has to be served.

2. A totalitarian state says: Surrender to the state, and the state will give you an identity with a strong nationalistic character, something bigger than yourself you can identify with and where you will find a home where you will feel you belong, and many ways in which you can regularly confirm membership.

14:32

To be GIVEN the ability to serve a certain purpose, and the FREE WILL to do so or not.

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TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2005

Sexual orientation is an excellent illustration of something you have been given, and then self-observation, observation of the views and so-called values of the community (regarding what you are observing in yourself), and self-definition – that goes along with self-acceptance, with the definition part that is almost a formality (perhaps labelling would be a more accurate term in this case), or … acceptance, and appropriate self-definition …

WEDNESDAY, 2 FEBRUARY 2005

I just watched the movie “187” again. Two comments …

Firstly, gang culture is built on two principles – respect and fear. The teacher (Samuel L. Jackson) shows the gang leader at the end of the movie that he (the teacher) does not respect him (the gang leader), that he does not fear him, and that he is willing to pay the price for disrespect, namely death.

Note two: The social misery, and the culture in which many inner-city youths grow up, confirms the value of leaving the area that was given to you if it is not conducive to a good life.

“Not everyone can leave,” you might say.

“What is the alternative?” will be my answer.

Plus, I am not necessarily talking about staying away forever. I am talking about removing yourself possibly only temporarily from the environment that has arrested your growth and development, confronting your given self, finding your “core self”, defining a self with a vision in which you can believe, and starting the process of becoming this person. Then, with the passing of time, you can always return to be what you have become, in the place where you originally came from.

FRIDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2005

The book People in Context has the following to say about self-discovery and acceptance: “[You can] can extend an authentic and warm invitation to authenticity and warmth in another person in a companionship that creates a safe, non-threatening space for the fearless discovery of who I am and who you are …”*

[Almost as if the cosmos is saying to me, “You think of yourself and your life in a certain way, and now you have the opportunity to be with someone. Here is the bridge to that life.”]

* My own translation from the Afrikaans text

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MONDAY, 31 JANUARY 2005

I suspect, and have also suspected this in the past, that I get bored with the very idea of something.

One example: I notice in the English textbook I am currently using with a group of twelve-year-old students a picture of a family in a backyard. They’re busy barbequing. I look at the adults and think, “How fucking boring …”

The problem is, this boredom with the very idea of something registers as a serious thought in my mind, and it is included in my official Thoughts On Topic X!

I think I have been on a bitter campaign against things for a long time – in some cases nothing more than luck that I think I had missed out on earlier, or things that could have made me happy that had lost its glamour because I almost always associate it with anxiety and uncertainty.

I think it is just my inner nature – which is essentially good – that has prevented me from venting my feelings in other ways.

Which brings me back to the question of “inner nature” and/or “core personality”: they are givens, are they not? And crucial in the manufacturing of end result, right? How guilty then is Given, and how guilty Free Will?

[…]

I was just lying in bed. I was aware of my body. I was also aware of the idea that I was aware of my body. I could also remember that I have been aware of my body at other times, earlier times. I could also remember that I had also then thought, or knew, that I was aware of my body.

Consciousness develops; it is not just suddenly there. Yet, there must be a critical moment – a watershed moment in the development of self-consciousness.

Certainly there can be no doubt that a foetus has a consciousness after thirty weeks or so. The consciousness of the foetus and that of the new-born baby (including the first few months) is, however, unique in the history of the person’s consciousness: it is wordless.

Difference between wordless consciousness and consciousness where language comes into play …

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