Two thoughts – End contemplation III

SATURDAY, 1 MAY 2004

Two thoughts

We, human beings have this amazing capacity of knowing we are going to die yet we continue combing our hair, brushing our teeth, eating our breakfast and going to work … in the face of this terrible knowledge! How do we do it?

Many people spend their days collecting things – material possessions – that they cannot take with them when their physical existence reaches its end. I spend my days collecting words that I can leave behind.

End contemplation III

And what happened? I got my just rewards for thoughts about personal happiness and for the killing of a proud, brave cockroach just before going to bed – I dreamed about death all night!

Got up with difficulty at nine o’clock, and went to buy breakfast. Sun was shining nicely as I was riding through the morning market crowd. “That’s what you get when you think you’re happier these days – and when you step on a cockroach,” I thought.

Then, around the next corner, a Hallelujah chorus waited in anticipation, with a neon board announcing another bit of truth on my path to enlightenment: “We must strive to be happy exactly because death is on our case every single day.”

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(Initially) Powerless Friday

FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2004

It is Friday morning at 10:09 and the power just went out. Spaces that severely affect perception of reality, and spaces that alter mood. As part of my Anti-Futility League program I am going to organise a National Beard Month, during which men – and women if they want to – will refrain from shaving for a month. Now that I think about it, an anti-lawnmower movement also sounds like a great idea. One of the reasons I am always attracted to ambitious plans is because the “story” is so much better, and the inspirational value so much more than playing it safe. Music sometimes also affect your experience of reality to a great extent.

the power is out, so I’ll write a poem

a few more poems inside of me
or would I be breaking rules this way
if I should throw a cluster of thoughts together
without waiting on the usual desert or abyss

happiness is bread and butter
love – my unborn son and daughter
ignorance and knowledge, and knowledge is my friend
hope – the master I would like to serve

inspiration is then called with the deepest of sincerity
better rhyming structure would be welcome too …

science, one

this morning the headlines broke
at last! death is to be feared no more
our own flesh we now can choose
to freeze, to live on at a later stage

science, two

life is like science
love one plus one
grief a smaller figure, dear
if you should go, leaving me alone

we count what’s good together
subtract the negative, my love
because mathematically it is still too rare
to bring together all essential elements

a good life is like science
friendship, love, hate as little
as possible for a hopeful start, even if
the end confuses – with loss, and sometimes little gained

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The rebels start arguing – but it’s just the quiet before the storm

THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2004

Why would I want to take a four-month working holiday rather than to go back “permanently”? What would be the advantages of a four-month vacation over full repatriation?

The topic of “going home” is by now as loaded as a sty full of pig shit – I can hardly put my foot in this or that direction or I step in something. Brave, and full of audacious courage I will, however, once again try to say something about this thorny issue.

To pack all my boxes, drag them one by one to the post office, save a few thousand rand, throw away half of my clothes and drape the other half over my body for a fifteen-hour flight so I can pack my luggage full of CDs, VCDs, photo albums and books to then arrive in the Highveld with big ambitions is, in a word, romantic.

Now, this would have been fatal criticism of the Full Repatriation idea were it not for the fact that it is precisely such romantic, irresponsible ideas that fill me with revolutionary fervour. But I do need to face a nasty reality: We eagerly cultivate caricatures of ourselves that make us look better in our own eyes than the fallible and sometimes unromantic, everything-but-hero figures that we are in actual fact.

Am I desperate to believe that I can be the irresponsible, romantic revolutionary, not only in the eyes of other people or as a character in my own book, but so that I could have more respect for myself? Do I not know all too well that the real me is much closer to the image of the Careful Bureaucrat than to that of the Revolutionary Hero?

I will be possessed with zeal and passion if I could actually climb on a roof like a mad hero figure and shout: “I am going home! With absolutely no money! I am going to publish my own poetry and throw middle fingers to all the suckers in the street below!” For weeks I will be writing Pieces Where All The Words Start With Capital Letters. I will quote Lenin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx.

And then my last night in Kaohsiung will arrive. I will be lying on a mattress staring at the ceiling in an empty apartment until long after midnight. I will tip the ash of my cigarettes into an empty Coke can. The next morning – before a possessed taxi driver rushes me to the airport – I will go to McDonald’s for one last breakfast, and smile glumly as the girl, oblivious to reality, greets me in English, “C-U A-gain …”

At that moment I will comprehend the reality of my situation. My time of dabbling in the remotest corners of the planet will be over. It will be time to face my enemy. And the Red Hero won’t be anywhere to be found inside my head to give me a little courage.

Am I a sucker for my own propaganda speeches? Am I desperate to formulate fantastic plans because they are so NOT mediocre? Do I sometimes feel so depressed about my life in Taiwan that I entertain myself almost into the abyss with plans that are actually not really that great?

Where does one draw the line between being responsible to yourself on the one hand, to confront your own true character and your own fears and to recognise them regardless of how embarrassing it is, and on the other hand to do things on occasion in the belief that they will work out well?

I don’t require guarantees that everything will work out exactly as I expect. I am not afraid to suffer a little. And I am really not bothered with middle class comfort or esteem. But I sometimes lose my biggest partner in life, namely the ability to motivate myself, when I overplay my hand. Once the desire to disappear has taken root inside my mind, the desire to creep into the darkest of corners where no one can bear witness to my embarrassment, I find it difficult to think of anything else.

If I end up in a situation in South Africa where I have to explain myself (“The plan sounded so great in my living room in Taiwan”), if I have to defend my decisions, and my beliefs and my actions all the time, there won’t be much time for social criticism, and not a whole lot of energy or motivation to criticise what I am so eager to criticise right here and now, sitting in my “headquarters” in a much safer environment.

I therefore ask again, what is the difference between, a) to leave all my stuff where it is, go to South Africa for two months, check things out without ignoring long-standing insecurities, and then to come back to Taiwan for a few months; and b) to pack all my stuff and without first sorting out the proverbial name or place to start a life in my own country that I will be able to maintain and hold till death do us part?

The next question: What qualifies as a radical but irresponsible plan? Answer: Any of my plans from the past few months qualify as just that – a plan that says that I have to go back with what I have, in the belief that “things will work out”.

Did things work out in the first of my radical, irresponsible plans when I went to Cape Town in 1991? My personal dogma dictates a positive answer, but the truth is not so simple. Or should the mere fact that I eventually did graduate from my favourite university cast aside all other considerations?

Did my decision to leave Korea in 1998, and more specifically to go and look for a possible future in Johannesburg work out? Should it once again be good enough that I didn’t spend one night in the streets, or that I never needed to scrape leftover food from trash cans? If these are the only requirements for a plan to work, then, hell, I can go back tomorrow (or “late June”).

If my requirements are a bit more sophisticated, I must necessarily come to the conclusion that going back to South Africa did not work out in 1998. Why not? Because I didn’t know how I was going to earn a living, I didn’t have enough money to cover my own needs for more than two months, and I did not have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. (I did have a pretty good idea though what I did not want to do with my life.) When I started working in Johannesburg after two months of loafing around, I did so in the good faith that things will work out all right. It did not. The work was boring. I had no money to buy proper groceries. I had no money for social drinks. I didn’t have a car. I had to get up at six o’clock in the morning to ride a bicycle to work. I was stuck with a toothache for weeks because I couldn’t afford to go to the dentist. And did I mention that the work was boring? The reality of those few months in Johannesburg has been one of the main factors that has kept me stuck in Taiwan for more than five years.

Of course much has changed since the first time I repatriated myself back to my own country. Not only did I sort out what I want to do with my life, I am already doing it. I am also really not concerned with the farce of middle class esteem – and I understand the reasons for it. Furthermore, I am working on several creative and business projects where I can suspend my work here on a Thursday night to continue on Saturday afternoon in Bronkhorstspruit as if I were just watching TV for two days. Finally, I know who I am, and I have the (literary) documents to prove it.

What is the problem then? What are the reasons for my reluctance to again take a chance on a radical, irresponsible plan?

Like everyone I have fears, the kinds of things that I sweep under the rug with my ambitious portraits of Revolutionary Caricatures I try to sell myself on. I am just a man; the Red Hero is much more than that. I am afraid that things might not work out; the Red Hero doesn’t give a shit. I am afraid of running out of money, and I have to once again become a guest in the homes of friends or relatives; the Red Hero reminds me that I would be a guest with a dirty beard that flies like a freedom flag in the afternoon breeze, and that poems “really look a lot better on toilet paper than in those fancy notebooks that you love so much”.

My greatest fear is not that I will again be unsure of who I am or about my value in the Greater Scheme of Things. My biggest fear is not that people will stare at me in the supermarket and think I am homeless. My greatest fear is to lose my self-respect, and that happens when you cannot take care of yourself. And what do you need to make sure you can at least take care of your own needs? Money. Enough of it.

This brings me back to the unanswered main question of this piece: What is the difference between a working holiday on the one hand, and on the other to Return Like a Hero to the Land of My Birth? The difference is money. With the latter option it is of the utmost importance to have sufficient funds for at least a few months in order to give the endeavour a reasonable chance of success. A working holiday, on the other hand, is lighter on the mind, and lighter on the wallet. I can enjoy the pleasures of my family’s company for more than the duration of a normal holiday, but with the peace of mind that if my backside begins to itch, it does not have to sour relationships nor influence my morale to such an extent that I would want to throw the Red Hero in front of an oncoming truck. Less cash will also be needed to finance a working holiday than will be the case with full repatriation.

The intelligent reader might by now be wondering what a “working holiday” will entail. In short, this means that all my possessions will remain in Taiwan, and I will travel to South Africa to go on holiday in the first place, and in the second place to earn money while I am on vacation.

The curious – and responsible – reader might want to know how I would make money for only two or three months at a time before I again take to the skies. Suffice it to say that there is an answer to this question – and it does not involve any illegal or immoral activities, just for the record.

Another question might be how it will affect me if a so-called working holiday works out better than I had thought, and I begin to wish I had not left all my books and bedding in Taiwan. If that happens … well, then I can return to Taiwan with the passion of a revolutionary hero, start packing the minute I enter my apartment, and for the last few months sleep on my boxes until the Glorious Final Return to My Homeland.

A few days ago I referred in a notebook to the struggle between the working holiday idea and full repatriation as a struggle between two opposing ideologies, two different plans, two different lifestyles, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. I also thought it represented a breakdown of the “Rebel forces” into factions of Left and Right. The latter is saying, “Compromise”. The former is saying, “No compromise. Go back, fight the good fight, carve out a niche, nurture and maintain what is good.”

I shamelessly tried to manipulate myself to go for the “brave” option, to not be afraid of unpleasant consequences, to not compromise like a coward with fancy ideas like “working holidays”.

What can I say now? The red hero is a sissy …

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Original start of the FINAL CHAPTER

MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2004

[I started filling an electronic document with text that would become the FINAL CHAPTER on this Monday at the end of April 2004. The following paragraphs – that touch on an old theme – were thus the original beginning of what I thought would be the last piece of the “Personal Agenda” project.]

The idea of “exile” is still a useful concept to explain – to myself more than to any reader of this text – what I have been doing for the last 10 years of my life.

I recently thought that my exile had in fact started when I returned from a five-week trip to Europe in 1995. From the day I again put my feet on South African soil, I distanced myself – sometimes subconsciously, sometimes deliberately – from the world around me. A case of, “I’m not really here. I’m actually on my way somewhere else …”

In 1995 I realised that the time I had been fearing for years had finally arrived. I had to start making more money than I had earned with part-time work as a student, because I had entered the post-university world of responsible adults. I also knew that my struggle was elementary: it was either make money or sleep on the street.

To complicate things even more, I suffered from the somewhat arrogant belief that I was “special”, that to “simply” pursue a conventional life would mean that I will miss the true purpose of my life.

Two years in Korea and more than five years in Taiwan was how I tried to be responsible without getting caught up in the so-called rat race – or my own over-simplified view of it, and at the same time to make an attempt at sorting out exactly what the purpose and meaning of my life was, or what it was supposed to be.

It has been a long journey; not as long or as arduous as our former legendary president, but long enough in my own book – so to speak.

What is this book for which you, the reader, is sacrificing so many hours of entertainment? Is it worth reading about my search for identity? Is it interesting to read about plans that have absolutely no value for any person outside my intimate inner circle?

This book is ultimately a small window on the life of just another human-animal, in more respects like you as you may be willing to admit in broad daylight. It is a story that deals with one person’s search for identity, his place in the world, and what is important to him.

If I had not written this book, the world would most probably still have been exactly the same as it is now. No earth-shattering discoveries were made. No bizarre anecdotes were told that could have added a little entertainment. In more sombre moments one can even go so far as to say that this entire project has been a complete waste of time – in the Greater Scheme of Things.

The truth, however, is that our daily lives sometimes feels far removed from the Greater Scheme of Things. We live in the world of sour milk and screaming children and superficial pop music. We live in a world where criminals get away with their criminal acts, where people carefully assemble houses of cards that could be destroyed by a chilly breeze the moment they look the other way to watch the sun go down. It is in this world where I have been writing for the past 10 years, and it is in this world where I have to find my salvation.

Is my book important? Yes, because I think it is important.

Do you think this book is important? Because I do not intend to butter my bread with money I earn from this material I can honestly say that it does not matter what anyone thinks of it. It has been written. It can be read. It is more important than a Korean recipe book in the average South African kitchen, but less important than the Bible. If anything can have value depending on the person or the situation, then anything that anyone writes about his or her own life can also have value.

So it is with this literary project.

I do sit with new questions at the end that I [initially] thought I was not going to address in this final chapter [but which have already been mentioned in several notes]. These questions are related to issues that I have thought I had resolved for myself over the years, but which have slipped back through the window in the middle of the night with frightening new formulations.

How, to take one example, does one define the “self”? Do you “find” yourself, or you decide who you want to be, and then become it?

How do I define concepts such as “home” and “place” used so often in these pages, words one always assumes everyone understands in the same way?

And seeing that we are talking about this, what should one do with the idea that the framework and limitations of language are of utmost importance in philosophical issues? Does it mean “I” am much more a product of my cultural heritage and much more dependent on the Afrikaans and English language communities than I have previously thought? Certainly one can have a sense of “self” without language, can’t you? But can you give expression to your self-awareness if you have never mastered a language, if you have never been part of a community that agrees on the meaning of the sounds that make up a language?

What is a human being then but a highly developed mammal?

And why, incidentally, is it important to be more than just another mammal? I mean, rather a mammal than a reptile, right? Or am I being snobbish?

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I own seven pairs of underwear …

SUNDAY, 25 APRIL 2004

Statement: I needed a place, a home, in order to know who I am.

Presumption: Maybe you also need possessions to be able to say who you are – like a collection of nearly 200 movies that say, “I like movies,” or that can confirm what you claim you are, or what you like.

Question: Is the ideal to be able to say and to know who you are without a place of your own and without possessions?

Follow-up Question: What else defines identity? Relationships, how you spend your time each day, what you do for money, what you believe in, the topics you prefer to discuss in social conversations …

The above leads to an interesting question: If you have no home, no possessions, neither friend nor family, you do not do much while you are awake, you do nothing to make money, you hold no religious beliefs and you never have conversations or respond to what other people say, then who are you? What are you?

If you find yourself in an urban environment, you have no cash or credit, no place of your own, no income, and you just do enough on a daily basis to stay physically alive, in practice, it boils down you eating from garbage cans (which means you’re a “bum”), or begging for food (a “beggar”), and that you sleep wherever you can find some protection from the elements (again a “homeless bum”).

So, if you do not have a home, no possessions, no relationships with anyone, you believe in nothing, the only effort you put in is to find some edible scraps of food and a few sips of drinkable fluid once or twice a day before you again lie down in any place where you can stretch out your body, you do nothing for money, and you never talk or respond when someone talks to you, your identity is automatically defined by all of the above, and the community takes it upon themselves to define you accordingly.

In most cases, the result will be that you will be called a “homeless bum”, and will be accepted as such in and by the community. Because you have thus failed to define yourself in a similar fashion to how most other people define themselves – that is, by placing yourself within familiar categories and by using elements of identity familiar to most people in the community, you will be placed on the lowest rung of the social order.

Can one then come to another conclusion other than to infer that home, possessions, relationships, beliefs, activities (creative and otherwise), and words and reactions are necessary for us to be able to know who we are, and to present ourselves in a recognisable and comprehensible manner to the community in whose midst we find ourselves?

Who am I, then? Let’s see: Possession-wise, I am the proud owner of seven of pairs of underwear, two trousers, a few shirts and a pair of sneakers, a few pieces of furniture, a computer, a notebook and five pens (two blue pens, two black and a red one); I live in my living room; I dream of a relationship with Marilyn Monroe’s Taiwanese cousin; I have no faith in dogmatic religion; I write books that will never make money; I only respond when someone talks nonsense, and don’t say much otherwise …

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