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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THURSDAY, 8 APRIL 2004
Our physical birth arrives months after a microscopic beginning. Shortly after our birth we become aware of things around us. We become aware of the difference between objects, and the distinction between living and non-living things. Some time later we become aware of the category “human” – and that this label is also attached metaphorically speaking to our foreheads.
A few other insights penetrate our consciousness: each person is physically detachable from their environment, and also from other people (that is, a free entity, not connected to something like the leg of a table is connected to the rest of that piece of furniture); some objects are more important than others (a TV is more important than a spoon); and the hierarchy that exists between different creatures (a human is more important than a dog), and also among people (a strong man is treated with more respect than a little girl, and everyone is more important than the homeless guy).
With the passage of time, our awareness of ourselves intensifies. We realise that we, like other people, have somewhat unique physical features and characteristics, and that we have the ability to make choices regarding our speech, appearance and behaviour. We also learn that all of these things affect how other people in the environment react to our presence. We learn that names are necessary and that we have to constantly identify ourselves to others.
It soon becomes clear that we must also identify ourselves, to ourselves: “I exist, but I do not exist as the lawnmower; I am a man, but I am not the neighbour.” Because these statements are never sufficient, the particularities have to be explained, so to speak, in more detail.
We also learn to define our own identity (or to describe it), to make the process by which we identify ourselves to others, easier. The latter is done with two considerations in mind: 1) our need to confirm our own uniqueness, and 2) we must simultaneously ensure we are not too unique, because that might undermine the fulfilment of another deep-seated need, namely the need for companionship and belonging.
You need to be convinced of your own name and personal identity so that you can function as the separate entity that you are. Yet we also need to be “one” with others “like us” which again influences the process of defining and identifying.
So, in order to function as the separate entity of which you are aware you are, you need to define yourself in terms of your environment – to a large extent in negative terms: “I am not a table; I am not a dog; I am not a homeless person.” You also need to identify yourself to others and to yourself – again there are both positive and negative elements to this identification: “I am fat, not thin; I am academically inclined, not athletic; I prefer heavy metal to superficial pop.”
Ultimately, after years of functioning and defining and identifying our person to others and to ourselves, only the results stay behind from what and who we were – the final products of our blood and sweat, all our efforts and failures and successes, after we once again become part of the Great Invisibility one by one.
I got up 45 minutes ago with the idea that we appear out of nothing, that we become aware of the fact that we are something among other things, and that we must eventually define ourselves as a specific someone so that we can, as I wrote between sips of black coffee and bites of mixed cereals, function as a separate Something and Someone.
[And just to make sure I understand it correctly, here it comes again.]
After we are born we become aware of the fact that we are something among other things and someone among other someones, and that it is expected of us to function as the something that we are (don’t act as if you’re a table or a pet) and also to function as someone.
Superficially, who we are is harder to define than what we are, and the process takes much longer. Ultimately we need to be a separate somebody just as we need to be a separate something, and because we cannot be a different somebody every day, we need fairly constant identity.
It is now 10:56. I can now start my day. Many of these things have been said earlier, but to have said it in this way, on this specific day, gives today a particular quality. It also gives me a little result to leave behind …
* * *
By the way, result is tremendously important for “evangelical” Christians. They expect to be rewarded for their “faith” in the life that follows this earthly existence.
I wonder how many people will still go to church every week and say the things that they say, if they learn from a source that they regard as credible that the results of their lives stay behind in this world, that they cannot take it with them as testimonials for a world and a life that comes after this one.
“Evangelical” Christians are actually good business people. (There is, incidentally, an interesting historical relationship between capitalism and Protestantism.) They say, “I give this, believe that, and do these things, then I get those things, right?” and the ministers and pastors keenly nod their heads (more “believers”). If the potential “Christian” is then satisfied that he or she understands the matter correctly, only then will they say, “Right, count me in. Where do I sign? What should I do or say?”
It would be interesting to know how much people’s attitudes towards their religion will change if they must learn from a reliable source that they have misunderstood it all this time: that an earthly life that glorifies God is the beginning and the end; that it is simply better than an earthly existence where God was not glorified; that it gives you a more fulfilling life while you are on this cosmic speck of dust; when you physically expire, you are dead, and that no further reward awaits you.
I can’t make a definitive statement to this side or the other on what happens after you die. I am merely expressing curiosity about the motivations of some people, and what their response would be if it would appear that certain things are not the way they have always believed.
* * *
One final note: you must function as the something you are – it will not work if you try to operate as a bread toaster or a fridge. You should also function as the someone you are … but here it gets complicated, because who are you? You should, therefore, initially not attempt to function as someone you are not. In the earliest phase of your life you just know you are not your dad or your grandmother or your sister, so you know it will not do to attempt being one of these other someones (even though you may try to emulate their behaviour or their way of speaking or doing things).
To put if differently, initially you just know you are not someone else. You may know you prefer dogs to cats or that you like chocolate flavoured cereal, but we continually seek more information about ourselves, in order to identify ourselves better, and preferably in the positive sense, “I am …” rather than the negative, “I am not …”
You often find yourself saying the same thing over and over, revisiting certain themes a dozen times. At the end, it is not only what is said or written, but how. Many of the things that I wrote this morning have been touched upon in earlier notes, but this morning’s formulation has a remarkable simplicity.
Two points in our lives: What Was Before Us, and What Will Be After Us, and then of course there’s the in-between What and Who We Are. What remains are the results of the latter.
Are these results good or are they bad? Why is it important?
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MONDAY, 5 APRIL 2004
I was at the “Bread of Life Church” in Kaohsiung last night. At first I thought it would feel like it had felt Saturday night when I took a different route home and ended up on a dark, deserted road in an industrial area. That feeling was fresh on my mind on the way to the church. I thought I was again going to find myself in a place where I don’t belong.
After 45 minutes I walked out and … I was disappointed. Disappointed in the so-called sermon that consisted mainly of a pseudo-science/history lecture to “prove” that Christ had really died. The what-it-means part was finally introduced with, “Just a few final words …” (or something similar).
I was also reminded that people “do church” on Sunday night, like other people (or the same people) “do sport” on a Saturday. It was a social event with the added benefit of religious identity confirmation.
I could not help but look at the people, at the “pastor” with his microphone and the paraphernalia of “Christianity” and come the conclusion that the Church of Christ had been hijacked by people who do not understand half of their own so-called faith.
This is a critical accusation, and I am aware of the fact that I only spent 45 minutes in the “community of the faithful”.
A question does come to mind: If this is what I think, do I have a responsibility to share my opinion – in the written word and in private conversation, or should I keep it to myself and say, “Let the people continue to do church in peace and confirm their identities”?
Responsibility to whom? As usual, I am not sure. All I know – and I am, after all, not a complete stranger to the whole church business – is that something was not right at that gathering.
* * *
The emphasis on “evidence” in the lecture last night made me think the pastor assumed he was “preaching” to a group of doubters for whom believing was not enough; as if he knew the people had to dip their fingers in the wounds of Christ before they could believe.
* * *
It may seem odd to many believers to point this out, but one does get the idea that for many “Christians” the Christian religion is about correct action and reward – do this, get this. What should be done for the reward is that the person should “believe” in God. Of course, as soon as this becomes a prerequisite for salvation, it literally becomes a matter of life and death to define correct beliefs, and equally important, to define heretical beliefs. And once you have established the borderline between correct beliefs and incorrect beliefs, it is open season on those heretics who are “led astray”, who “follow the wrong path”, who are not “true believers, like us”.
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