Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 31 OCTOBER 2001

The plan

I stay in Taiwan, provisionally until the end of next year.

The immediate benefits

[…]

What are the long-term benefits?

[…]

The third factor

A third but no less important factor that also had to be taken into account was maintaining maximum productivity with my writing (and other projects). It is this issue on which I want to focus for the moment.

I am not and have never been destined to be the head of any company. I was born a creator – it’s in my blood, and it’s in my brain. It is the one thing I cannot deny without causing myself some serious personal problems.

The world in which I grew up, where my values were formed, and from which most of the people hail with whom I socialise reward people for their choice to earn money in conventional ways – which contribute to the maintenance and strengthening of the economic and political order of the day. Personal success is measured, and the amount of respect you receive is determined, by the value of your labour in this system. A man can compose the most complex and beautiful music since Amadeus Mozart, but if he has to beg for money for a cup of coffee and sleep on a friend’s living room floor, he will be considered a failure.

In this world, people are distinguished by a series of badges – nationality, socio-economic background, race, religion, political beliefs, status symbols, behaviour and dress, to name a few examples. Another badge, which overlaps with the aforementioned items, is career. A lawyer, for example, is treated at first glance with more respect than a street sweeper, a bank manager with more respect than a kindergarten teacher.

My older sister graduated with a qualification that, after getting some appropriate experience, gave her the right to introduce herself as a “Chartered Accountant”. My one friend is a certified “Landscape Architect”. After five years of tertiary education I faced the world as a qualified “High School Teacher”.

Being a teacher – even in a subject like History for which I’ve always had a strong affinity – has, however, never been the answer I wanted to give to the question of how I want to spend at least eight hours per day, year in and year out.

What to do now?

By the beginning of 1996 I had racked up thousands of rand’s worth of student loan debt. I also needed to buy a new shirt every now and then, maybe once every two years a new pair of shoes, and maybe once a year a new CD. And I had to eat and live somewhere. I didn’t want to start a career as a “High School Teacher”. I definitely did not want to be an “Administrative Clerk” in an office, and I didn’t want any job where I would have been forced to do what others ordered me to do for eight plus hours each day. But money had to be earned.

Going to Korea enabled me to win some time. I could taste a little adventure by living in a foreign country while generating an income, without too many people asking me what I wanted to do with my life – or what I was doing with it. After two years in Korea I was filled with a desire to commit to something, and to belong somewhere.

Back in South Africa, I was again faced with the problem of what badge I would carry in an environment where people regarded profession as a primary indicator of who you are, and how they should behave towards you.

An ambition had started growing in my head years previously: To be a writer. It wasn’t just a badge with which I was comfortable; it represented how I wanted to spend my time. By the end of 1998, the idea occurred to me that writing could be more than just something I was interested in – it could be my career!

Being a writer by profession is, however, more complex than becoming a Chartered Accountant. To become a CA, you have to spend the better part of at least four years behind your books to obtain the appropriate tertiary qualification. Then you need to write some exams, and do an internship somewhere. After this lengthy process, you will have earned the right to call yourself a full-fledged “CA” in polite company.

The Road to becoming a Chartered Accountant is known to me, who have never harboured an ambition to become one. Why do I know this? Because it has been formally laid out – and of course I saw the markers as my own sister progressed along the way.

The Road to the Honour of Calling Yourself a Full-time Writer is much less formal. There’s no degree you can earn that can be neatly framed that will tell all interested parties “This guy is a writer.” You can’t shatter your nerves for months on end studying for a difficult exam, after which a Board of Writers will officially welcome you as one of them.

There is, in the end, only one thing you can do to legitimately wear the Badge of the Writer: write. Fill pages with your writing; fill notebooks with your writing. Develop ideas; read, think and write. Write poetry, short stories, articles, essays and letters. Write rubbish, and write good stuff. Write about life. Write about death. Write about people, animals, institutions and nature. Write about mountains, cars, cows and flowers. Write about love and hate. Write about towns. Write about cities. Write about gutters and write about palaces. And in between all the writing, send what you think is good enough to publishers. Learn how to submit manuscripts. Discover in what type of material publishers or publications are interested. Be creative, but learn the habits of a professional labourer. Be an artist, but also know that you need to buy your own food and blankets.

Final thought

We are sometimes easily seduced by the image of the bohemian artist – who refuses to dirty his hands with something as vulgar as money, who never compromises his art for the sake of financial reward, who stumbles hungry and dirty and tired through the streets in old, tattered clothes, and who scribbles words on discarded sheets of office paper that will only after an untimely death be hailed as “Brilliant!”

Fortunate is the artist who has rich parents that still give him or her spending money even when they’re in their forties, or who has a friend or loved one who takes care of them so they needn’t be interrupted in their artistic creations, or who doesn’t want to buy a new pair of pants or a dress or a new pair of shoes out of their own pocket from time to time.

Verily, verily, fortunate is the artist – or writer – who doesn’t have any student loans to pay back …

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TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST 2001

In the Middle Ages and antiquity, how did the powers of the day retain the labourers who worked their land?

Slavery was one way. Feudalism entailed a relationship between the landowner and the ones who worked the soil where the latter were forced to work in exchange for the landowner’s protection. There was also indentured servitude. With all these systems the labourers were tied to the land where their labour was required by laws that favoured the landowner, and by measures such as tax, which kept the tillers of the land poor and dependent on their masters.

How are people today bound to the “land” where their labour or service is required? By amongst other things cheap credit and long-term pay-back options: monthly income minus payments on products that are already in use – like a new living room set, or a car, that leaves the average citizen with insufficient money to “get away”.

Of course, many do get away, and many never fall in. There are drop-outs, criminals, and people who wander around in other countries for years earning money in any way they can. As long as a certain percentage of the population can be bound to the “land”, though, the rest can be written off – or used at a later stage, like the drop-out who becomes a musician or a writer and who then provides entertainment or comfort for those in bondage.

It is important to note that this situation is fluid. People make their own choices at the end of the day. So I’m not implying large-scale manipulation, or sinister behind-closed-doors planning … no wait, manipulation does occur. As many people as possible have to be reached, and “turned” …

~ From the Purple Notebook

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THURSDAY, 5 JULY 2001

I almost killed myself last night with a toy gun.

For the past three days, I’ve been camping out on my living room floor, with one eye on the TV and the other on my book on the history of the KGB. The whole purpose of this exercise was an attempt to make crucial decisions about my life, and a possible future. At one stage I stretched out to a small cabinet – conveniently accessible from a seated position – to get a packet of headache tablets. Searching for the tablets, my fingers touched the toy gun I had acquired a few months ago in a moment of boredom. The motivation behind the purchase was to amuse myself – to try and shoot small holes in a few items in my apartment, whenever my grey matter reached boiling point. The headache tablets were required for this very reason.

An hour or two after I had discovered the toy, my older sister telephoned from London. Within the first few seconds of the conversation I mentioned, to her annoyance, that I always think of her when I try to sort out what the next step in my life ought to be. She had no blotch of idle months on her professional reputation, I reminded her; she had made the right decisions at the right times, and her life in the last half decade had shown a steady upward curve. Compared with her relatively straight path to success, I have taken a more uncharted route.

Wise as she is, she advised me not to waste time brooding over the past, and to not concern myself too much about “bad decisions” I have taken over the years. I sensed a younger-brother-who-have-messed-up-and-older-sister-who-tries–to-show-him-the-way argument. The result was inevitable: I had to defend my seeming lack of direction.

And that’s exactly what it is – apparent lack of direction. I’m convinced there has been a purpose behind everything in my life to this point. I explained to her that I needed the last five years to sort out what life is about, what I wanted to do with my life, and perhaps most importantly, how to reconcile the latter with the necessity of a regular income.

Our conversation was cut short when she had to answer another call (she was calling from her office). I spent the next five minutes in deep contemplation about the middle class ideology that dictates that any person older than 24 who are not making money, must necessarily be classified as a “loser”.

But I know better than to underestimate the intelligence of middle class citizens, or their ability to tolerate divergent views on life. For example, they don’t expect everybody to work in an office – they’re not that narrow-minded! They do after all have their heroes who are rock stars and writers and actors. Of course, most of these people make money, and in some cases lots of it. So much more reason to idealise them.

When my sister phoned back, I wasted no time proceeding with the defence of my unique perspective on life. She confessed to being a little confused, but also demonstrated sincere sympathy. “Why don’t you come to England?” she finally offered her standard advice of many years. I explained that I am currently working on a master plan, that I’m contemplating returning to South Africa at the end of the year, and that I need to make decisions on these issues before I can consider something like a holiday. Whether she realised that I was intentionally being vague and that I tried to create the impression of being someone who knows where he will be at his next birthday, I can’t say.

The conversation started to wind down. We expressed the mutual hope that everything will go well with the other and said goodbye. I kept staring at the floor, with no particular thoughts to entertain or comfort myself.

The next moment light from the TV reflected on the toy pistol. To demonstrate displeasure about my eternal confusion, I picked up the toy, pressed the cold plastic barrel against my sweating forehead and pulled the trigger. Nothing, as I expected. I walked over to the cabinet and managed to extract a few of the hard plastic pellets from the cluttered drawer, excited over the distraction a duel with the cereal box will provide. In an attempt to extricate the magazine, I accidentally pulled the trigger.

To my surprise and shock – considering that I had pressed the thing against my forehead just seconds before, a barrage of pellets exploded from the barrel. In a scene reminiscent of a Wild West shootout the pellets first hit the hot water geyser, a few metres from where I was standing, transfixed, and then they ricochet into the bathroom. After several bounces, the pellets came to rest in the bathtub.

“I could have killed myself,” I mumbled nervously at my reflection in the mirror.

A few moments later I came to my senses. What was really the possibility that a small, hard plastic pellet could go through my scalp and penetrate my skull to entrench itself in my confused brain? The reasonable conclusion was then made that I could have hurt myself, but that fatal consequences were unlikely.

It was only about an hour later that I thought of the short news story that might have appeared in a local newspaper, had I ended up in a hospital to have a small plastic pellet surgically removed from my forehead: “A thirty-year-old man unsuccessfully attempted suicide late last night with a toy pistol, after a telephone conversation with his career-oriented older sister. A small plastic pellet got stuck in his forehead because of the attempt, and the man was admitted to the emergency room shortly after to have it removed. A nurse said that while he was in a stable condition, the physical and emotional scars from the incident would probably be visible until he hit his midlife crisis in a decade or so.”

Convinced that I had been given a second chance, I threw the toy gun back in the drawer, and there and then swore off violence as a way of finding my way in life. I collected the scattered remains of the almost cursed pellets, and while doing so I could swear I heard the cereal box moving out ever so slightly from behind the coffee bottle.

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MONDAY, 18 JUNE 2001

My strategy for the card game “Hearts” is on the face of it inconsistent with the goal of the game. It looks as if I am heading for self-destruction – just for the sake of entertaining myself while the other players are playing a serious game. By the time the others realise that I am winning a game in which they did not see me as a serious competitor it’s too late. Their attempts to save their positions are already doomed, and I’m on the way to a brilliant victory, achieved in an unorthodox manner.

However, it should be noted that I do not follow this unconventional strategy with each round. Once I see I am not going to win a specific round playing my way, I change my strategy. So, I am pragmatic enough not to defeat my real purpose for the sake of being different.

This approach to the game takes guts, and almost excessive levels of confidence. You also have to accept that you will lose from time to time, and that such results should be treated with as much grace as a victory.

At the end it can be said that a victory achieved in your own way and against the expectations of the other players is much more fulfilling than merely winning the game according to both the spoken and unspoken rules and conventions.

If, however, you lose time and again by following your own unorthodox methods, it is usually a good idea to reconsider your primary goal, as well as your methods. The illusion of self-destruction is after all – and this should never be forgotten – supposed to be only an illusion.

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