Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 28 MARCH 2005

10:36

I exit the photo shop and walk to my bike. As per routine, I want to put on my face mask. I pat my trousers, look into my book bag, notice it is not hanging on the handlebar. I step back into the store, throw a quick glance over the counter and conclude that I must have lost the mask between the bank and the photo shop. I get on my bike and pedal away.

Over the next two or three minutes I am a functioning organism: I take into account traffic, pedestrians, red lights, green lights; I turn left or right into the correct streets and alleys; I control my speed, pull the brakes when necessary, and stop where I need to. I am also busy with intelligent thought processes: to burn photos from a digital camera onto a CD is unnecessary, so I reckon, because I already have all the photos on my computer; I also remember that the guy said we can just plug the memory card into the computer on his desk, go through the pictures and just mark the ones I want to print out.

Then, suddenly, I realise the mask is pulled over my chin. It was on my face all this time. I was simply unaware of it for the two or three minutes that I was in full human functioning mode.

And so, ladies and gents, it is with many other truths.

[08/06/15: People tend to think that if X is true, or if Y is not true, that they will certainly know it. We do not always realise how fully aware we can be, how awake we can be, and sober, and intelligent, and how we can fully function in complex relationships and situations, and in all this time be totally unaware of a truth that is staring us right in the face. This also applies to religious beliefs. People will believe 100% in something, and think if it were not true, that they would simply “know” it, since they are after all fully aware of things around them, that they are sober and intelligent, and that they successfully function in complex situations every day. “How can I function like I do every day,” they will ask, “and not suspect there’s something wrong?”]

13:55

Two things: How other people see you and how other people see themselves as they think you see them.

14:56

Just remembered the phrase I had wanted to jot down a few days ago: The card is on the table – consider it, reject it, accept it, or criticise it.

15:52

The Great Apostle of Creativity and the Gospel of an Extraordinary Life

TUESDAY, 29 MARCH 2005

15:08

“The price of cornflakes and tomatoes increased in certain supermarkets and smaller shops, but the Biology homework of the ninth-grade students in Kyrgyzstan is less than last week.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Precisely.”

15:10

There have been many times in my life when I have identified problems, analysed them, devised and considered possible solutions, and then, suddenly … the problem is over and done with. Then I usually think: “Well, there you have it.”

15:14

The price of cornflakes and tomatoes, and the ninth-grade students in Kyrgyzstan.

THURSDAY, 31 MARCH 2005

09:49

To brush your teeth is a matter of self-maintenance. You don’t just brush your teeth when you have a problem with your teeth; you do it to avoid problems. So it is with other aspects of your life where self-maintenance should be applied as a precautionary measure, and not as an emergency measure.

It is important to apply the right words to the right processes – same with not calling a tomato a pumpkin.

23:03

If a human life does serve a purpose, does it necessarily imply planning and/or design prior to human existence?

______________________

MONDAY, 21 MARCH 2005

12:32

To be broke, in a new relationship, and to have a serious need for an electric kettle.

17:26

Again, boredom leads to dejection because you feel worthless at that specific moment – or then because you experience the dramatic loss or dramatic reduction of the value of your life at given moments. Do something about it! Fight boredom!

20:56

To be broke (once again) feels like I am still stuck in the clutches of the most powerful force that has made me what I am today. It is one of those experiences that test you, that test your credibility, that give you certainty about whether or not what you say (or write) and what is in fact your life on a daily basis is still authentic and real.

Nevertheless, I hope this is the last time in my life that I have a cash flow problem. I mean, it certainly unleashes some inspiration, but the frustration is very real.

TUESDAY, 22 MARCH 2005

If I were so happy and satisfied with my own company as I always arrogantly maintain then I would be happy and satisfied with my own company when I take short trips. Quite a number of experiences over the years tell a different story.

It can thus be said that I am happy and satisfied with my own company within a particular environment; that is, an environment where I do not need to make any significant appearances, but especially where I can creatively express what I think and feel.

[I do not feel lonely when I am alone, but when I have to appear – then I need a companion, someone to talk to with whom I can share the experience.]

THURSDAY, 24 MARCH 2005

The POINT: you have to buy your own time! You have to basically redeem your own life from the struggle for basic survival and all the unfree appearances it forces on you, or requires from you!

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SATURDAY, 12 MARCH 2005

Some of the thoughts that form in your head that may end up on paper only have value for you, and sometimes only in a particular period of your life. Other thoughts have value and relevance for many more people than just the one who has expressed that particular thought in a certain way. These thoughts, these ideas, are important: the type of ideas that can flow through anyone, out to other people, who pick up on the ideas and make them personal for themselves in their own lives.

WEDNESDAY, 16 MARCH 2005

15:11

From the China Post: “[If you] understand the origin of [your] fear, the origin of [your] status […], [you will] discover that life can be different.”

15:59

So many images, so many words … it’s as if there is [an] [N] conference going on in my head that threatens to degenerate into a bazaar! I do feel every now and then an obsession steadily creeping closer, like old ghosts, to tell her, to show her, who I “really” am.

Of course, she actually does have a fairly good idea who and what I am. My real obsession is the PROCESS that has led to this point. And this process includes loneliness, spending a lot of time on my own, despair, struggle with the legacy of religious beliefs, at times a desperate need for the kind of love you feel on your skin, uncertainty, hopelessness, existential angst, alienation from the country of my birth, my family, and at times even friends I have in this country. This – this is what I want to reveal to her!

FRIDAY, 18 MARCH 2005

09:30

I had a particular view of myself before I met [N.]. This view included that if I had to be happy on my own, that would simply be the way it had to be. (I never accepted that I necessarily had to be alone, but I knew that I was faced with the very real possibility.) My view of myself as an “enlightened individual” also underlined that I did not need intimate confirmation of who and what I thought I was.

And then she arrived.

And then came the idea that to turn back time and again be without her … that it would be difficult.

Likewise, she had a certain view of herself before I made an appearance in her life. This view included that unless a good man crossed paths with hers, she would have had to find happiness on her own. Like me, she certainly hoped that she would not have to be alone for the rest of her life; like me, she knew the possibility kept lingering behind her like a shadow on a sunny, cloudless day. She also increasingly thought of herself as stronger than some of the female characters she had spent time with. That she should not be seen by a man as needy became her own pet obsession.

And then I appeared on her scene. And then she developed feelings for me. And she remembers how she had felt about herself and about men in general before I appeared. And she observes how she feels about me now.

Does the contradiction also cause her some anxiety?

12:18

You meet someone, and soon after you develop a feverish need for her presence in your life. You fall into a state of panic because you know, if this person withdraws, you’ll be in serious trouble. So you find that you surreptitiously start putting safety measures in place, just in case … and in such a way that it doesn’t disturb the process the two of you are actively involved in too much.

What I would like to suggest is simple: Screw the measures. Surrender. Open your heart. And if the process does not lead to the results you had hoped for in your finest moments, you simply pick up the pieces, again – and pieces they will be! But you know you have to do this, because if you don’t stop the surreptitious construction of safety measures, she will quietly start setting up measures of her own. Where does that leave you?

No, damn the measures. Free yourself from fear and uncertainty. Live … and if it doesn’t work out, you will at least know, and remember.

17:23

Last night we were drinking tea in town. I joked that I still feel a bit tense when I am with her.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s just me.”

______________________

SATURDAY, 5 MARCH 2005

If you want to hold something in your hands forever and it slips through your fingers, are your hands ever the same afterwards? Or does it leave behind, not so much a scar, but something beautiful that will remind you of the wonder you had wanted to hold onto so tightly?

WEDNESDAY, 9 MARCH 2005

01:51

John the Desert Walker stumbles into the wilderness. He has been there before. He has a rough map in his head. But wilderness, this he knows, is not desert. And desert … is certainly not the wilderness.

21:49

The career I have defined for myself or that I have chosen from the many possibilities I have been confronted with since it dawned on me that I, too, had to become a working adult at some point, was that of poet.

Not few are the people who have commented on this. “Poet?” they dryly ask. “You do know that you will never live above the poverty line, don’t you!”

It is true that over the years I have become aware of the fact that the world in which I have to fight for my place in the sun does not reward “poets” with permanent employment, financial security, a regular income, a company car or medical aid. I therefore had to slightly broaden my chosen path so I can, besides writing poetry, also employ other genres to criticise in fine detail the world where I cannot enjoy the same compensations for my career as a dentist, a street sweeper, or a bank clerk.

THURSDAY, 10 MARCH 2005

You only exist until you are born.

Or: Some people exist only as that which he or she has been given plus the results of their choices up to a point – the result of introspection, of knowledge attained about themselves, of confronting themselves, observing themselves and of defining who and what they want to be. If this process is of a certain quality and if they spend enough time on it, the moment when that point is reached can for all practical purposes be regarded as the Moment of Birth.

FRIDAY, 11 MARCH 2005

Many things in my way – scars, fears, insecurities, past experiences that have caused measures to rise like forts in the desert … everything is remembered, yet abandoned because of one thing – if you believe again, despite fears and insecurities, you know that you allow yourself to live.

______________________

FRIDAY, 4 MARCH 2005

Tragedies such as the mass murder the Nazi’s perpetrated against the Jews and other minority groups reminds one of the hopeless suffering some people had to endure in the last months, and sometimes years, of their lives.

It places the themes I touch upon every now and then in a certain perspective – identity, consciousness, environments that are conducive to certain ends, etcetera. How important are these themes in the face of the tragedies that have swept people’s lives away, and that still destroy people on a daily basis? I mean is it not true that these tragedies are on a more primitive level of human experience than “identity, consciousness and environments that are conducive”?

Still, one can also say if an issue like identity, for example, is approached in a reasonable manner, if answers are sought in a process that is characterised by critical thinking, it will ultimately lessen the possibility of man-made tragedies, won’t it?

There is also the simple truth that intellectuals who became victims of tragedies like the Holocaust would have reflected upon exactly the kinds of themes that people ponder in more peaceful times. Topics about which I think so deeply that appear almost frivolous when I consider that people elsewhere in the world are at that very moment struggling for primitive survival are exactly the topics that would have been relevant for these intellectuals, were it not that the Sea of Time had cast them on the Coast of Tragedies.

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