A fear of genies

To pick up from my last post (except that it's more laying the foundation than picking up), a while ago I kept running into djinns or genies. Genies are frightening creatures. They seem to me to be a manifestation of our wills - but more precisely our inability to impose our will on the world. The line drawn between us and the world, the frontline of a battle. Even as a child I suspected that these creatures were a symbol of frustration and thus they became for me a harbinger of news I did not want to hear.

I encountered my first of these genies in a tiny book of fairytales by AS Byatt called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (see the author's commentary on the book and fairytales here). I bought this book a couple of years ago, when I was working at the magazine and had taken a day's sick leave. Although I had sinusitis and felt like death warmed up, a day off was a luxury, it literally felt luxurious. (I didn't realise it then but I was very unhappy and would only get unhappier.) Anyway, I decided to rent a DVD and I stopped in at one of my usual secondhand bookshops while I was in the shopping centre. It was winter but one of those true Joburg winter mornings when the frost lingers at the edges of things, sharpening the sunshine so that everything looks new. The morning felt like magic. Browsing the beginning of the fiction section, tucked into a narrow passage, I saw a tiny hardback volume crouched among bent and bunched spines. Its rich green and black cover was wrapped in plastic. I opened it and smelt its pages and then I bought it. It was, I suppose, my clouded glass bottle. When I came to Cape Town, I brought it with me, and when I finally read it a few weeks ago, it was to reassure myself. Byatt's prose has a way of both grounding me and binding me to another, beautiful world, a world of words and symbolism and magic and meaning. Her prose makes me both happy and sad.

My encounter with the djinns this time around was still awkward. Although I had had my suspicions when I was a child, as an adult I was so conscious of the frustrations that knot together to form a creature that grants wishes and as he does so injects your deepest desires with spite. Whether being aware of this makes the djinns more or less frightening I'm not sure. But my fear of these creatures is luxurious and poetic, and has far fewer thorns than the reality I inhabit.