In search of my present

There are two perfect Sundays. One: a beautiful sunny day in view of Table Mountain, sitting outside in my own secluded piece of wilderness, writing, thinking, blogging, reading, considering the nature of being and so on, with two cats, a bunny and birds for company. Two: Taal Monument on a sunny afternoon, as above minus the cats and bunny.

Taalmonument is 45 minutes from Cape Town Central, on Paarl Mountain. It is dedicated to language (given that South Africa has 11 official languages). But essentially it is dedicated to one language: Afrikaans. Afrikaans speakers take their culture seriously (not as seriously as the French), but, in my experience, value the idea of culture and language (despite the bad press - it's complicated).

Seen from the highway (as I first did), all you see are two elegant spires rising out of foliage. I assumed it was a church. I had been along that highway, in that direction, many times, but this was the first time I had noticed it.

I have to interrupt myself now. The last hour and a half of my drive to (relocate to) Cape Town was an emotional experience for me, as even routine experiences are, for me. The symbol of this is the Huguenot tunnel. A python of concrete with occasional lights, dull so they reminded me of lanterns, cars winding through its belly. You are spewed out to the left of Paarl Mountain, on the same side as the monument.

Desolation. Relief. Ending. Safety. The present.

There are two other spaces (and I mean that in the philosophical sense, distinguished from place) that have brought me safely into the present: Taal Monument and an MRI scan.

The monument is a cold, textured Modernist structure of edges, curves, hollows and solids. You walk up two or three sets of steps, onto a platform that rises in front of you. Columns on each side of you like eunuchs that push you between two walls into a lipped chamber. The roof mirrors the rise of the platform, reaching higher and higher. You hear a rumble that is echo falling on echo falling on echo of a circle of water and a disguised fountain.

The roof still rises, into an elegant cone: a spire. It sits on a quarter of the circle of water. Lean over and look up and be sucked by the echoes into being-less. The flow of the structure pushes you on and out, through a second set of lips into an amphitheatre. The second spire, narrower than the first, stands behind you, an attendant.

The platform of the amphitheatre rises in a ripple, flat to your left and indented in front of you. Orbs sunk into the concrete at the highest point, bubbles in the ripples, a mirror of the rocks that give Paarl its name (pearl). Over the back wall of the space, you can see a hint of a view. So you are lead forward, climbing the rows of seats, to lord over a valley of winelands, fenced in by mountains in a semicircle and the ocean on the facing them.

That is what my present, my always, looks like.