Tag: plans

Reason for uncertainty, and a new mantra

THURSDAY, 10 JULY 2003

I’ve identified a weakness in my future plans. Financially it can work, but there is an uncertainty that shines through in my idea to perhaps set up home in Bronkhorstspruit, and then to return to Taiwan for a few months.

In my usual scientific way, I worked out that it had to do with identity. I know who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life. As long as I stay in Taiwan, this is all possible. As soon as I set up home in Bronkhorstspruit, so I reckon, I’ll be a little uncertain about whether who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life is still going to be so anchored in External Reality.

I took a nap, and the message came through: Be who you are – a writer.

The uncertainty disappeared almost immediately, like a playground bully would vanish when his victim’s older, bigger brother arrives on the scene.

The reason for the uncertainty is that I have a terrifying anxiety to live an aimless, meaningless existence. Just living in Bronkhorstspruit and making “enough” money is not good enough for me. In Taiwan I’m a teacher, a writer, and a student. If I make it clear to myself that I will continue to be a writer in Bronkhorstspruit, then I am saying that I will also there know who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life. And there it will also be rooted in external reality.

* * *

I look through my old photos (1990, 1991, 1997), and I read through old journals (1996, 1997) and I begin to wonder: Have I at least done something with my life in the past seven years, and perhaps more specifically the last four and a half years?

The answer is: “Yes.” (I asked a similar question a few days ago, so fortunately I already knew the answer.) I have learned over the past seven years who I am, how I want to live, and what I want out of life (thanks to Steven Burgess and his book SA Tribes: Who we are, how we live and what we want from life in the new South Africa for this line I recite like a mantra these days). I also specifically worked on being a writer for the past five years, not merely wanting to become one.

______________________

The poet learns to be smart

[The next piece was initially recorded in my notebook on the weekend of Friday, 27 June to Sunday, 29 June 2003, in my favourite place in this region, Hong Kong.

There was a problem with the booking of my flight between Hong Kong and Johannesburg. I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday morning at eleven o’ clock, but because I immediately had to meet an old friend at the airport, I didn’t confirm my flight to Johannesburg later that evening.

After brunch in the city my friend had to rush back to the airport. I walked around for the rest of the day and enjoyed myself thoroughly. At around nine o’clock in the evening back at the airport, a lady at the check-in counter courteously informed me that they were overbooked. She further explained that I had no choice but to wait for the next flight – which would only depart on Sunday night.

At first, I was taken aback. I had only had two hours sleep the previous night, and I was exhausted from all the walking around that afternoon and early evening. The lady assured me that they would provide a room in a good hotel, and a limousine that would take me directly to my lodgings for the weekend. And if I still thought about writing angry letters to the airline, they also conveniently had HK$2,500 on hand with which I could amuse myself (a sum of money roughly equal to so many South African rand, or about USD300).

I said I was very angry because it was my birthday on Sunday, and what now? But the fun I had had during one day in Hong Kong weighed heavily on my mind, and who was I to be rude when a big corporation wanted to pay me to spend an extra two days in one of my favourite cities? I said, okay fine, get my bags and show me where to get that limo.

I started writing the following note shortly after my registration at the counter for which I truly thought was going to be a long, luxurious car that would transport me to the hotel.]

SUNDAY, 29 JUNE 2003

I find myself in one of those absurd situations where I, the “poor white” poet, has to be treated like I’m rich and important. All the parties, myself included, are somewhat confused.

“But everyone can see there’s a tear in his shirt,” I imagine the young lady whispering to her colleague.

“I know. Shush …” the older man probably replies.

Telephonic confirmation is made in hushed tones. Sweat is wiped from a brow. Eventually everyone realises the unpleasantness simply has to be endured.

“Please come with me … sir,” the man with the sweaty brow reluctantly commands.

The Poor White Poet hesitates for a moment, first heads in the wrong direction, and is then called to a row of comfortable red chairs. An orange sticker is stuffed in his hand. He correctly interprets the label as a badge indicating his new status as someone who should be treated like other people who spend time at luxury hotels. He plasters it on his light blue “Tokyo III” shirt. It keeps peeling off. The other stickered individuals are several chairs removed from the poet. He speculates that it may be because of the small tear in his shirt, and doesn’t immediately consider the possibility that, after a day’s walking around in hot, humid Hong Kong, he no longer smells of the cologne he had so arrogantly sprayed under his arms that morning.

After fifteen minutes, the man who had given them the stickers approaches again. “This way please,” he friendly winks to the waiting group. This time the Poor White Poet walks out in front. Then he remembers the deodorant spray he had thrown in his bookbag and is suddenly annoyed with himself for making notes rather than refreshing himself.

Over the next two days the poet wised up to one important thing: One learns. In fact, the whole fancy hotel business, like the fancy restaurant business and certainly all the parts of a luxurious life are a game. You can figure out the rules and tricks of a complex video game and master it to some extent after a few practice runs. Even more so with the fancy business.

It’s about confidence. The more you are exposed to situations where you have to make certain “movements”, like in a video game, the more you learn to do it right. And the more you learn, the fewer mistakes you make. And the fewer mistakes you make, the more your confidence increases – and the less your sensibility becomes to being a stranger in an environment where you don’t really belong.

——————–

[After two days and three nights the poet reached the town of which he had been dreaming for months – Bronkhorstspruit, fifty kilometres north of Pretoria. Forgotten were the months of adolescent humiliations and growing pains (have I mentioned that he had spent his primary school days here?). The school where he was prefect in his day, looks different, smaller. The Vetkoek Corner is still on the corner, but with a different name. The town seems generally shitty, but there was a joy to being back. And it was winter, the man’s favourite season. Dead yellow grass, a chill in the late afternoon air, and the smell of coal all overwhelmed the senses with a bashful question: “Welcome home?”]

______________________

The question remains …

WEDNESDAY, 18 JUNE 2003

I want to go back to South Africa. If it’s within the next six months, great. If it only happens three years from now, then I accept it. However, it’s important to know where you’re going. And to know this, and to know why you want to go there, it is important to know where you come from.

I know the answers to these questions. I know them a lot better now than six, and three, and two months ago. I thus know where I’m going, where I want to be – not only in terms of geographical location, but also in terms of the Great Hierarchy, and why specifically I want to be there.

I still have a question, though: What do you do when you’re alone?

Most people want to be surrounded by family and friends and be close to a person with whom they have an intimate relationship. I am no different. But what do you do if you find yourself in a situation where your immediate family are thousands of kilometres away, where you have increasingly alienated yourself from people you used to call friends, and no one is waiting for you at home with whom you could enjoy a cup of tea and discuss the day’s events? Perhaps this situation is the result of circumstances beyond your control, or maybe you yourself are fully responsible for it. (If the latter is the case, it doesn’t mean it’s not for good reasons.)

The question remains: What do you do if it is only you, and you don’t want it to irreparably cripple your moral or your mental health?

______________________

Pale-beard on the Trans-Mongolia

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2003

What would an exile piece be if I don’t spoil it with some or other plan that is totally unworkable?

I was thinking of everything that was said in the last few days and weeks, and I thought: Well, back I shall go, armed with the fantastic piece of insight that I shouldn’t expect an invitation to a middle-class tea party. As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t intend to hang around in backyard sheds again, and if I am forced to go to dinner with people at a fancy restaurant, I will absolutely insist on paying for my own garlic bread and cheap beer.

The bureaucratic decisions of exactly when and where depend, as always, on the amount of local currency that I would be able to brandish on the day of my arrival.

Furthermore, to be a “poor white” is one thing; to be a “poor white” who still drags around student loans like so many sins of an irresponsible youth is something else. That is just looking for trouble, and you don’t even need to recite the dogma of personal politics for support.

Except for this responsibility that has to be carried to its very end, there are other matters to consider. One of these is age. If I, say at the end of next year (2004), again roll up my bedding and pack my boxes, I will be a few months older than 33. Fair enough, one will have embedded in your mind important insights about your own life. But such a person might be tempted to wish he could have had these answers to some important questions a few years ago (inexcusably greedy, I know).

What will make a man feel better, however, if you stare the fact in the face that you will hit sixty if you take an overextended nap one afternoon, is experiences. To know you didn’t spend eight years in the Far East, but the only pictures that adorn your refrigerator are those of you sitting at your computer – that you had to take yourself, and dozens of photos of how your living room had changed over the years.

What experiences would I like to throw on the scale that age so disgustingly forces to one side?

To be precise, a nearly 15,000-kilometer train journey that will start in Hong Kong and end in London. Cities that hold honorary positions on many travellers’ Where’s Where will be checked off. Except for the beginning and the end, there are places like Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Ulaanbaatar, Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, if possible, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam –to name just a few possibilities.

There are the pictures – that will stay in your head until you are senile one day – of vast plains, mountains, rivers, and small towns. Then there are the Chinese cities where revolutions where settled, Russian cities where revolutions began and ended, Eastern European cities … where one can take photos of yourself in front of beautiful old buildings, and Western European cities that everyone ought to see at least once in their lives. And at the end of this train trip awaits your older sister in London with (hopefully) the first new-born in the family in almost 26 years.

Eventually you arrive back in South Africa with a shabby beard to show that you didn’t have to shave for two months, and hundreds of photos you can hang on your wall in the shed in the backyard. Then you can … wait, shed in the backyard?!

Essential to mention is that you will once again have to go back to Taiwan to go collect rent money for a two bedroom apartment for when you eventually will return to the Republic of your birth forever – and hopefully this time you save enough money to also be able to afford a few luxuries such as a radio, a fan for the summer, and of course a fridge for the photos. After this renewed period of necessary exile, you will again be a year or three older, the beard will be getting paler, and although you’d be able to recite Tang Dynasty poetry in your sleep, you will probably yearn to rather be telling stories to your own children – who would not even have been born yet.

Which brings me to the end of yet another part of this piece of writing. I have to go to bed so I can get up before lunch to pay the travel agent a visit. I am after all a man who is going back to South Africa in two weeks’ time – for three weeks.

______________________

Vision of the future, possibility one

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2003

Brand Smit lives in 273 Blue Stone Road. He is married to Elsa Kleynhans (now June it was seven years). They have two children: Marie is five and a half, and Ben is three. Brand works at a local newspaper as a sub-editor. They bought the house in Blue Stone three years ago from a work contact of Elsa’s brother (just before little Ben’s birth). It’s a nice house with a small garden and a tree in the backyard. Brand often says he bought the house because there wasn’t too much lawn to mow. Then Elsa would add, “And you liked the study.”

Last December the family went to Sodwana, and Brand swore never again. The children fell ill from drinking the tap water, and he and Elsa did not have a single night’s rest for a full week. Brand initially said they were going to stay home this December, but he and Elsa have talked about it again. They now plan to visit family of Elsa’s on the West Coast.

Every now and then Brand talks about his years in Asia. Elsa always listens patiently. Sometimes, like last April, someone whom he had befriended in Taiwan would pay them a visit. They would talk late into the night about this and that, about typhoons, pollution, epidemics, English classes, and Chinese.

Brand still remembers a few Chinese words, and he reckons if he ever had to go back to Taiwan or China, he would again pick up the language. In the bathroom (the one next to the guestroom) hangs a scroll of bamboo paper with large Chinese characters. If a guest uses the bathroom, Brand always hopes they ask him what the words mean. He usually goes on about it until Elsa reminds him that not everyone is interested in Oriental languages.

Brand turned forty last year, and as a gift to himself bought a book on Confucius. The book is on a side table in the living room next to his chair, but he has only read the first few pages.

He still writes, but most of the time it’s just material for the newspaper. He once wrote an article for a national magazine and was very excited about what he felt might become a new source of regular income. That was three years ago.

Brand loves his wife, and he’s devoted to his children. He hopes Marie will become an architect or a vet. Although it’s still too early to say, he believes little Ben may have it in him to become a writer. He says it to anyone who wants to hear, and looks embarrassed every time Elsa responds with, “Let the child become his own man.” All he then says before he starts talking about something else is that he can see it in the boy’s eyes. A writer, or perhaps a psychologist.

______________________