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.

The secret to Nanowrimo

"If you're not making mistakes, it's a mistake." Miles Davis

Who doesn't like a quote that unfolds the mysteries of life for you? Just like SparkNotes. And who doesn't like pithy epigrams, like: You have to fail before you succeed.

Ultimately, these cheat sheets are not helpful. (Prepare yourself for the insightful comment.) As any first-year philosophy lecture on epistemology will tell you, you can know something without understanding it. In other words, knowledge is not enough. (Also, SparkNotes is notoriously unreliable, perhaps to trick you into failing?)

This year is my third year signing up for Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month. (The link is in a nifty list somewhere over here <---.) People from around the world sign up and create a profile. From the 1st to the 30th of November, you try to write 50 000 words, in other words (punnage), a novel.

Don't bother to work it out: to finish on time you have to write 1 667 words per day. If you can write 500 words in half an hour (which takes practice), that means one and a half hours out of your day. Most of us can barely find half an hour for lunch, so this hour and a half is mythical.

Except, that depends: how badly do you want to be a writer? If not very or you're still thinking about it, give it a try. The experience is a good way to find out what your priorities are and how to manage your time. But you won't make it more than a week.

If your answer is a fire in your chest, then let me tell you about Years 1 and 2 before I tell you about 3 (although, really, the whole story's over there -----> in two nifty buttons above my reading lists).

In Year 1, I made it a week. By then I was something like 10 000 words below target and I hated the wretched piece of writing and I was so tired I swear my eyeballs were sagging. In Year 2, I made it three days. I started writing something very intelligent about illusion and hope and belief, and ended up with something that sounded like Twilight where the vampire's just some mute emo kid.

Granted, I later wove the first page of the aborted novel into my real novel.

Year 3 and I'm on target! (Ok, that's a bit of a lie: I went out last night instead of writing but plan to - will - make it up today.) I want this. So badly it burns like fire in my chest. I will wake up early, go to sleep late; I will not sleep for the last 72 hours and take leave; I will finish this year and, damn it, I will finish my real novel before my 30th birthday (in three months).

But I could not make it if I had not failed twice. In failing, I learnt how fast your motivation drops as soon as you fall a bit behind, that you cannot achieve something like this (without self-destructing) if you cannot sort out the rest of your life, and that I am first and foremost a writer, not a publisher.

I dreamt of being a writer when I was still a 'lightie' (also a ballerina, marine biologist and archaeologist). After an(other) aborted attempt at becoming a graphic designer, I realised that books were It. So I studied language, media and literature and became an editor, a copywriter and a publisher.

In the last year, almost every dream I have nurtured has unfolded: a home I love, a career, a growing zoo, friends, a sense of calm and perspective. There are two left: buying my home and finishing my novel. And I intend to accomplish the second one first.

I want the cover of my book to have this feeling

From the Book Cover Archive:

Top 10 authors I'd love to meet

While I researching the previous post I found this: Top Ten Authors I'd Love to Meet. I can't resist. But I'm not going to tell you why - I leave it open to interpretation (by my hypothetical readers who may or may not be simulations blah blah blah you get it by now).

1. AS Byatt

2. Haruki Murukami

3. William Faulkner

4. Virginia Woolf

5. Philip K Dick

6. David Mitchell (I'd also give LIMBS to have his talent)

7. Czeslaw Milosz

8. Italo Calvino

9. Umberto Eco

10. Milan Kundera

Maybe this list is obvious, maybe weighted with modern authors; maybe it doesn't take into account enough genres. (If so, I'd give another limb to meet Christopher Nolan.) Who cares - it's my list! You don't like it? Go make your own.

A brief (incomplete) history of revolution

What do The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, the Communist Manifesto and the recent Wall Street sit-ins have in common? (Actually, that should be obvious, and if not, read one or both and you'll get it.) I was reading The Dispossessed and the Communist Manifesto (I always read one fiction and one non-fiction book at the same time) at the same time as the sit-ins began.

It seemed as though history (and literature) was repeating itself. I was born in the early eighties and grew up in the nineties, when a popular culture rebellion gave way to an intellectual cynicism. I tend to view any group gathering with caution (and perhaps some degree of apathy), because the efforts of decades of Russian revolution, the hippies' campaigns of non-violence (and socialist-inspired and Epicurean free love) and the more sinister rebellions of punk culture and similar obnoxious groups, came to nothing. They all collapsed into their own centres and dispersed.

I've also read enough dystopian novels to know better.

The weak point of any such collective action is that eventually it matures into sets of rules and hierarchies - becomes a system. Those rules and hierarchies become ends in themselves, and all those naive (also hopeful) values are absorbed and become means to those ends. The followers become disillusioned and are not replaced by enough new recruits to keep the movement going. If it doesn't develop, it becomes static and eventually peters out.

The version of the Communist Manifesto I was reading was The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings, which presents the writings of influential philosophers in chronological order, so that you can trace the seeds of socialism. (This was where I met Bakunin, who dipped me into anarchism.) The speeches of the leaders (and followers, who often take up their phrases as mottos, without always knowing what they mean) were less coherent paraphrases of these writings! Did they know? Were they philosophy drop-outs who didn't have the patience to delve deeper? Or did they intentionally use and abuse these phrases to hook followers and confuse their opponents?

This last is a strategy recommended by Leon Trotsky. But if these political philosophers had delved deeper, they would have found that this is Stage 1 of Trotsky's map for rebellion. The second is to link those mottos to concrete action. Even if those actions are extreme. Because they're linked to what has become a value system, the actions seem necessary. Voile, you've accomplished a coup without much (only necessary?) violence and so swiftly that the collective has no time to question it until they're already implicated.

What does The Dispossessed have to do with this? Hey, I'm not giving you all the answers! Read it and see what you think. And, while you're at it, try Woman on the Edge of Time by Madge Piercy.

Just a glimpse

Normally, I don't like taking or sharing photographs - why replace the moment with a record of it? Isn't that the function of memory? Granted, memories shift every time you recall - or don't - recall them, but isn't that the fun of it - that your memory is actually dependant on the present and the present's plan's for the future? That it captures who you are, now and then? Yes, yes, all representation is subject to interpretation blah blah. But to some degree, a photo is static. If a doorway is blue, it will always be blue - well, until the photo fades - when your memory can repaint it brown or red...

Representations will always be less than experience (says the woman who doubts everything, who lives almost entirely in her head, and who thinks we could be simulations and still be happy - which is actually compatible if you think about it).

Having said this, here is a glimpse into my life, of literature and writing:

My writing and reading spot. A wild garden, a filled-in well, sunlight and a blanket.

The reads sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for the perfect moment to be read. Every book has a perfect moment and I can tell you exactly when and where and why I adopted every one of them.

Non-existence and why it doesn't really matter

Does this blog exist? Of course it exists, as data made out of 1s and 0s, and I see it and I read it, and if I show it to people, they can confirm that they see it and read it. No, it's not tangible, you leapfrog ahead, because by now you know where I'm going with this (and if it's just me reading this, then that really is redundant). So let's just leave it there, because we're like dogs chasing our tails here and surely there is something more important to talk about.

I'll give you that one. My mind is doing somersaults lately and I'm starting to feel a bit queasy.

I've been listening to a podcast about language and non-existence (oh and here she goes again), which also features dogs chasing their tail - it was all very interesting, but really it doesn't change the fact that we talk about non-existent things every day (and there is the option that nothing we talk about exists - just an option) and never question the truth of these statements, because that's how language works.

Words are reassuring because they are arbitrary. A table could be called a gloop and it would still be a table (given that there is a table there, of course). Words are used to talk about non-existent things and to lie and to be sarcastic - and we usually understand what the other person means (depending on our shared cultural capital, but the point still holds).

Despite what people think, words have no necessary relationship with truth. (And this is where I deviate from all these philosophers who chase each other's tails over this.) My perspective is predictable, I know, but hear me out.

Words are used at our whim. If you are honest, your words will be honest, but there's really no guarantee even of this. The layers below consciousness are tricksy things, bent on protecting us from ourselves, which often means determining what we perceive and how, and then allowing our consciousness to cobble together a view of the world. Which we express in words that these layers have smoothed out for us.

Ah, the shifting landscape of paranoia. Twice shy and all that. No one's fooling me a second time. Which really only means the shadowy 'they' have won, but really they win either way, which is kind of my point.

Literature banks on the arbitrary nature of words. It creates fictional worlds melted together with autobiography and real settings and even real people and events, to illuminate some aspect of the human condition. But it never pretends to harness truth to its cowboy belt - and if you think it does, that's all on you. Every sentence is mediated with "I think" and "Maybe" and "Have you considered whether...", and of course "If we do this, what will happen?" At most, it asks you to think about yourself and understand how those layers and layers think they're protecting us and whether they are.

The fickleness of words is the only grip I have in this world, precisely because they never lie to me. I never have to consider whether they are real or true or false, because it's on me and my relationship with shared meaning. My truth is how I perceive the world, but that doesn't make it authoritative; really, pretending it is would be like coming in last in a race and getting a conciliatory medal.

Having ranted to an audience that may or may not exist, I plan to curl up next a fire with my book, which is really all the security I need in this shifting world of meaning.