Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2005

I’m standing outside, on the corner of the house, smoking my first cigarette of the day and drinking a cup of black Nescafé Classic. It’s Monday, 21 February 2005. It’s raining, softly but consistently. The sky is overcast, and it’s cooler than yesterday and the day before, and the whole of last week. “At least my scalp won’t get another tan,” I think before throwing the last bit of coffee on the wet grass.

My older sister and her firstborn are flying to Dubai tonight and after a few days’ visit with friends, further on to London. All of us, this everyone knows, are going to be somewhat gloomy the rest of the day. My younger sister, with her two-week-old little human, will continue with her new life in their home on the other side of town. I will be visiting them tonight, and tomorrow, and then Wednesday I will return to my parents’ place. Thursday I will go to Johannesburg, and Friday I fly to Malaysia. I will stroll around in the airport complex outside Kuala Lumpur for five hours before flying to Kota Kinabalu, where I will disembark for a smoke break. An hour later we’ll continue our journey around the curve that separates Southeast Asia from Northeast Asia before we land in the southern Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung.

But for now, it’s raining – in Bronkhorstspruit.

* * *

I am sitting on the yellow bedspread on the bed in the guest room. I can hear my father talking to his grandson; I can hear an Afrikaans radio host on the radio in the room next door; I can hear the young welder in the backyard earning his bread and butter.

Within a minute or two I will stop writing, put away my notebook, and join the people – my family – in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then I will make a pot of green tea, and then go outside to smoke my second cigarette of the day, under the awning on the one corner of the house, with the rain falling softly on the green grass in front of me.

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FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2005

I have never been so bored while on a visit to my homeland. I feel slightly guilty about it … but then I remind myself that emotional needs which are satisfied by seeing one’s family are not to be confused with the need for intellectual stimulation.

I also realised that I project my own feelings on other people in the place where I find myself. I might say, “Look how boring all those people are! They sit in cars, walk in and out of shops, walk up and down the streets …” Then I realise, as I am insulting the villagers, I’m basically describing myself: I am sitting in a car, walking in and out of stores, walking up and down the street.

* * *

Thought inspired by my browsing through a magazine last night: my South Africa comprises Johannesburg, Bronkhorstspruit, Pretoria, Stellenbosch and maybe Vryheid and Pongola. There are places in this country of my birth which I have never even heard of let alone visited: places like Grootmier [Big Ant], Kleinmier [Small Ant], Middelmier [Middle Ant]; places where people speak Afrikaans, and where the children call the adults “Uncle” and “Auntie”. It’s a world I still want to discover – the isolated places, towns with dusty main streets, hamlets where people live lives that are at the same time familiar yet also stranger to me than the life of the average Taiwanese person in Taiwan.

SATURDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2005

This past week I have again been confronted with a few things: estrangement – never a pleasant experience, especially not if you are the one who has become the stranger to the people you love the most; boredom; residential areas where the layout and structures provide no inspiration; commercial areas where people meet on a daily basis to do business and buy things and enjoy meals, which, like the residential areas, don’t stir up an inkling of enthusiasm or inspiration; standards that dictate that to be considered successful at 34 you’d have to own property, and a car, and a TV and other furniture, and at least be married but preferably have also brought forth some descendants (“because what type of success can you be if you’re alone?”). Finally, I have been confronted with stories of murder, manslaughter, heart attacks, cancer, stroke, and several other diseases and disorders that remind you, in case you dared for a moment to forget, how vulnerable your existence is.

Well, what more can one say? It is 00:21. I’m going to bed now. Tomorrow … is just a short journey away.

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THURSDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2005

10:20

If I travel by train from Moscow to Paris and I stay a day or two in Berlin, it will be incorrect to say that my trip has stagnated. My journey is still in progress; I am merely spending a day or two in a place between starting point and destination.

If I travel by train from Moscow to Paris and I stop for a day or two in Berlin, it will also be incorrect to say that my final destination – Paris – does not exist because I have not yet reached it. Paris – my destination – is not going to come into existence as my train draws closer to that spot on the map. The place to which I have been travelling since the train pulled out of the station in Moscow has existed from the beginning of my journey. As I spend time in one place or the other my final destination already exists.

The destination exists independently of me – it is there, long before I reach it, long before I first observe the city on the horizon, long before I walk the streets of my destination, and breathe its air.

11:59

I am sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car, on a bare piece of grassland known as My Sister and Brother-in-law’s Smallholding outside Bronkhorstspruit.

My brother-in-law explains about a swimming pool, four bedrooms, a pond and trees that will cast long shadows in a decade or so over dogs and children and grandparents sitting around a barbeque fire, having a good time.

I find it quite interesting. With folded arms I make a comment about “believing in things you cannot yet see” while my brother-in-law brings down a pickaxe from high above his head on a piece of turf where a tree will live out its existence.

I find the time and the place where this series of moments of my life plays out acceptable in terms of significance and entertainment value.

I also know that if I am still sitting here sixty minutes from now, in the passenger seat of a parked car in the African sun, I will become restless … and not quite as pleased with the value and entertainment of the series of moments that will then be my life.

“Short-term gratifications,” I say to myself, and turn the volume on the car audio system up a few notches.

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TUESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2005

1. Starting a relationship is a creative process. It is organic, take-it-as-it-comes, not a step-by-step, just-follow-the-dotted-line-for-desired-outcome process.

2. One must, at the beginning, be prepared to lose the person, however unpleasant that may sound. The reason is simple: If you’re not willing to lose someone at the start, you will a) not be yourself, b) appear desperate, and c) force the process; virtually all of which will doom the endeavour to failure anyway.

* * *

Two days ago I thought about how comfortable or relatively more relaxed I usually feel in the company of [my younger sister’s former in-laws], people my parents’ age, whom I have known for a few years but with whom I have no emotional connection.

I realised that it probably has to do with the fact that they have no prior knowledge of me – what they see now, is what they have always seen. My own parents knew me as a new-born, as a seven-year-old boy, a twelve-year-old preteen, a sixteen-year-old teenager, and as a young man of twenty … They know the person I am now is not the person I have always been.

It also occurred to me that my mother has a bigger problem than anyone else in the family with the discrepancy between the earlier version of me and the person I currently am. She is still holding onto a romantic image of me when I was at my most beautiful, so to speak – maybe about twelve years old, clean face, quiet, on my knees praying every night before bedtime, the first signs of religious dedication, the idea that I might become a minister one day.

My father, on the other hand, doesn’t have a romantic image of me as a young boy. Although he loved me, he saw me as clumsy and incompetent to overcome even the smallest technological challenge; plus, I had little interest in how a car engine worked. His view of me, now, is actually more positive – that of an intelligent man, someone with an interest in the Greater Questions of Life.

So, on the one hand my mother, who still hopes that I might return somewhat to the romantic image of her “beautiful son”. And on the other hand my father, who readily accepts me as I am now, since it is somewhat of an improvement from my childhood.

Then a thought kicked me in the face late this afternoon: I am also guilty of this romantic idea business. Ten years ago my younger sister appeared to me differently than she does now – she was a rebel, ready to take on the world … and yet vulnerable and fragile. Now, ten years later, she is a mother, a partner in a marriage, and a valuable administrator of my parents’ business. But without really noticing it, I have been slightly disappointed all this time, because “What happened to the rebel?”

Family is not just people who lived together for many years, and who call each other from time to time to hear if everything’s still okay. Family – and in this case I mean parents and siblings – are people you should allow to constantly grow in your own eyes. That is how relationships are kept alive, and real.

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MONDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2005

What I have BECOME is for the people I love a closed book. And it would simply have been an extremely useful and accurate metaphor were it not for the fact that it is also literally true.

* * *

It is not about love, it is about appearing. And, like many things in life, it is not a problem … until it becomes one.

My parents and my two sisters appear to me as they see themselves – they appear to me as who and what they are, in their own eyes. I appear to my family not as I see myself, but as they see me by default. In the absence of data on who and what I have become, they stand in relation to me in a way that is acceptable to them, in a manner that enables them at the end of the day to say, “We know him. He’s our brother (or son).”

What I have become, and therefore what I am, is endured as a result of old data (and possibly for the sake of maintaining the memories from which the old data is compiled), and because of manifestations of who I am in speech and action that are reminiscent of who I used to be; manifestations that are consistent with an earlier image of me (or that is supposed to be me) that they still adhere to.

As with a book that cannot be flipped open by the author and forced in the face of the reader, so it is with what we become. We must be “read”. And, like a book rich in contradictions, clever metaphors and a developed, fuller character, this takes time.

I will stand with my arms open ready to embrace them when my family reach out to me again in their own time.

* * *

Why, would someone ask, would your family reach out to you? Because they have lost me. How did they lose me? By not recognising and accepting the person I have become, but only enduring me because I remind them of a manifestation of myself that they can relate to more easily.

I still believe that my family loves me. Acceptance, however, requires tolerance, an open mind, and the ability to look someone you love in the eyes and admit that the person has become something you do not understand, but to also understand that you do not suddenly become a stranger in their eyes.

[03/06/15: This estrangement of one family member from other members of the family with whom he had previously had close ties may be due to, among other things, sexual orientation, change in religious affiliation, or a change in political beliefs. In my case it is mostly about change in religious affiliation, and a generally more humanistic outlook on life and humanity.]

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