A helpless world of idiots

Last night the south-easter continued raging, torrenting thick and turbulent cloud over The Mountain and into the City Bowl.

So much so that it prevented the 16-deck 93‚000-ton cruise ship MSC Musica from docking from Thursday until early this Saturday morning - when the Cape Doctor halted as suddenly as it had started.

Cape Town Magazine explains to the uninitiated that the up to 160 km/h speeding Cape Doctor is the local name for the strong [read ferocious!] south-eastern wind – also known as South-Easter - that blows from False Bay and funnels through to Cape Town and Blouberg.
Then the sun finally set behind the basin between the edge of Table Mountain, on the corner where the cable car trundled 4 million visitors up and down its predominantly quartzitic sandstone 'wall' - laid down between 510 and 400 million years ago, it is the hardest, and the most erosion-resistant layer of the Cape Supergroup - and Lion's Head.

It was a glorious sunset, unreservedly impossible to capture by camera as usual, despite that, I never stop trying.

I'm reading, or rather I'm being swept along by, or, perhaps, devouring better describes it(?) Henry Miller's 1941 Greek travelogue 'The Colossus of Maroussi', which I found in the chilly, mostly neglected basement of the University of Cape Town's Main Library a week ago.

His description of a Greek a sunset is much better than both my attempt or, a thousand photographs:

"We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots."

This morning the scene from my 'deck' is a starkly different one, so much so that I draw what flimsy excuses I have for curtains: calico drops.

Woodstock's subdued in ugly, bleak sunshine. The traffic on Lower Main is also subdued, sporadic. A dog barks half-heartedly. Bleak, barren, dishevelled. It's ingloriously rundown. The rusted corrugated iron roofs are like the deep red-soil gashes of some of my favourite places in the north of the country. There, on the other side of Pretoria, and in the deep bushveld of the Northern Province.

Saturday morning books & blues

I begin this year, putting down on a virtual page of an electronic notebook, with three pointers - actually far more than mere pointers for me - that have serendipitously crossed my path and shortcircuited a lay line in my mind:

* Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
- Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis

Why the above triggers me is because, in all honesty, I have hardly ever dared to write about what really interests me, presses me; perhaps it's because, firstly, I don't have balls... and, secondly, because of my mom and dad still being alive. I certainly hope, and fear, that freedom will only come when they die.

* Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them.

- Henri Nouwen 

With reading Nouwen's words above (I'm ploughing through his works, as well as a biography about him) I'm struck by the realisation that my lifespan consists of layers upon layers of automatic behaviour that I no longer even interrogate-analyse; it's empty - and energy- and emotion-sucking - actions in perpetual scan/search mode, but never ever finding satisfaction, except momentarily, and mostly sexual. But, nevertheless, empty. And meaningless. Surely, by now, surely, I can intellectually acknowledge that I'm quite simply wasting my time, that it's going nowhere. And never will.

* I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity. 

- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

While 'in public' I will almost definitely argue that I don't need an excuse for being who I am, I do know that - naturally, like for most of us mortals - that my upbringing, my school education and growing up in the apartheid state fucked me up six-nil. Nevertheless, while I take full responsibility for who I am and where I find myself, it's good to know that despite an implanted chip that tries it's damndest to programme me into conformity, I am anything but a conformist.