Sailing To Byzantium

Circe offering the cup to Ulysses [detail]

After much discussion, the buyer decided the price of the gold-enameled bird to be too high. "As authentic as it—and its song—may be, I will not buy it," he said. [1]

The seller, disappointed to lose a sale to so assiduous a collector, pressed him to explain his decision.

"Well," said the buyer. "The bird and its song may outlast me, but they'll certainly not outlive me." [2]

Link: WB Yeats (begotten, born, and died) | Sailing to Byzantium

Low in a vale, but on an open spot, they found the splendid house of Circe, built with hewn and polish’d stones; compass’d she dwelt by lions on all sides and mountain-wolves tamed by herself with drugs of noxious pow’rs. Nor were they mischievous, but as my friends approach’d, arising on their hinder feet, paw’d them in blandishment, and wagg’d the tail. As, when from feast he rises, dogs around their master fawn, accustom’d to receive the sop conciliatory from his hand, around my people, so, those talon’d wolves and lions fawn’d. They, terrified, that troop of savage monsters horrible beheld. And now, before the Goddess’ gates arrived, they heard the voice of Circe singing sweet within, while, busied at the loom, she wove an ample web immortal, such a work transparent, graceful, and of bright design as hands of Goddesses alone produce.

Thus then Polites, Prince of men, the friend highest in my esteem, the rest bespake.

Ye hear the voice, comrades, of one who weaves an ample web within, and at her task so sweetly chaunts that all the marble floor re-echoes; human be she or divine I doubt, but let us call, that we may learn.

He ceas’d; they call’d; soon issuing at the sound, the Goddess open’d wide her splendid gates, and bade them in; they, heedless, all complied, all save Eurylochus, who fear’d a snare. She, introducing them, conducted each to a bright throne, then gave them Pramnian wine, with grated cheese, pure meal, and honey new, but medicated with her pois’nous drugs their food, that in oblivion they might lose the wish of home. She gave them, and they drank. When, smiting each with her enchanting wand, she shut them in her sties. In head, in voice, in body, and in bristles they became all swine, yet intellected as before, and at her hand were dieted alone with acorns, chestnuts, and the cornel-fruit, food grateful ever to the grovelling swine.

William Cowper | The Odyssey of Homer

[1] Sadly, the comments following the post below are based on a shortened version of the Tutor's interpretation of the story. I stand by my interpretation. The bird and its song are authentic, albeit artificial. It is this interpretation that informs the above analysis.
[2] The biographical link leads to a greater understanding of the emphatic nature of Yeats's ultimate decision not to buy.

Authenticity for Dummies

Stare into the abyss—explore your vertiginous freedom...

To go along with this, you have to believe three things, all controversial: (1) that authenticity is a valid idea; (2) that you can argue in reason about ideals and about the conformity of practices to these ideals; and (3) that these arguments can make a difference.

Charles Taylor | The Ethics of Authenticity [See Note below.]

Frank, Tom, AKMA, the Tutor, Jon, and God knows who else have spent quite some time delving into the 5Ws + 1H of "authenticity". While I'm enormously appreciative of their disciplined work, thought, and effort, I'm frequently inclined to throw up my hands, shrug the whole thing off as a semantic exercise and exclaim, "Good grief, man! What you see is what you get."

As illustrated by the above illusion found at David's, no matter how deeply we explore its meaning, its discussion is circular in nature. We always arrive at a point (origin and end) where it's up to us to grant or withhold the imprematur of authenticity. Is the green ball authentic, or not? Do the pink dots disappear, or don't they? More interestingly, how many dots make up the illusion?

To be sure, it is easier to grant others their "revelations" as "true for them" while insisting on one's own as "true for oneself." Such intellectual sluggishness parades as sophistication. But true tolerance does not consist in saying, "You may be right, but let us not make hard demands on ourselves: if you will put your critical intelligence to sleep, I'll put mine to bed, too."

Walter Kaufmann | The Faith of a Heretic

Note: The review of Talor's work pointed to here appears in First Things, edited by Father Richard John Neuhaus and published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life.

The Gonzo Salvage Co.

American gnostic?

Sugarloaf Key, FL The TV is out tonight. The set went black about halfway through "Miami Vice," just as Don Johnson dropped KGB thug with a single 200-yard shot from his high-tech jelly gun.

The storm got serious after that, and the mood in The Keys turned mean. Junk cars crashed in the mango swamps and fishheads whipped on each other with sharkhooks in all-night bars and roadhouses along Highway A1A. These people will tolerate almost anything except being cut off in the middle of "Miami Vice."

On nights like these it is better not to answer the telephone. It can only mean trouble: Some friend has been crushed on the highway by a falling power pole, or it might be the Coast Guard calling to say that your boat was stolen by dope fiends who just called on the radio to say they are sinking somewhere off Sand Key and they've given you as their local credit reference, to pay for the rescue operation.

In my case, it was a just-reported shipwreck involving total strangers. An 88-foot tramp motor-sailor called The Tampa Bay Queen had gone on the reef in Hawk Channel, and all hands had abandoned ship.

There were only three of them, as it turned out. They had all washed ashore on an ice chest, raving incoherently about green sharks and coral heads and their ship breaking up like a matchbox while they screamed for help on a dead radio.

"Why not?" I thought. We are, after all, in The Business—and besides, I had never covered a shipwreck, not even a small one ... and there was also talk about "losing the cargo" and the cruel imperatives of "salvage rights."

None of this talk seemed worth going out in a storm to investigate at the time, but that is not how The Business works. I went out, and not long after midnight found myself huddled with these people in a local motel where they'd been given shelter for the night ... and by dawn I was so deep in the story that I'd hired a 36-foot Cigarette boat to take me and the captain out to his doomed wreck, at first light, so he could recover what was left of it.

"We'll have to move quick," he said, "before the cannibals get there. They'll strip her naked by noon."

The sun came up hot and bright that morning. The storm was over and the chop in the channel was down to 3 feet, which means nothing to a fast Cigarette boat. We were running 40 mph by the time we got out of the bay, and about 40 minutes later we were tying up to the wreck of The Tampa Bay Queen. It was lying on the bottom, tilted over at a 45-degree angle, and the sea had already broken it open.

There was no hope of saving anything except the new nylon sails and the V-8 engine and six nickel-plated brass winches, which the distraught captain said were worth $5,000 each—and maybe the 80-foot teakwood mast, which would fetch about $100 a foot in Key West, and looked like a thing of beauty.

We climbed up the steep rotted deck and the captain set about slashing down the sails with a butcher knife and ordering the first mate to take a hatchet to the winches. "Never mind a screwdriver," he shouted. "Just rip 'em out by the stumps."

The first mate was in no mood to take orders. He had not been paid in three weeks, he said, and he was wearing fancy black leather pilot's boots with elevator heels and slick leather soles, which caused him to constantly lose his footing and go sliding down the deck. We would hear him scream as he went off, and then there would be a splash. I spent most of my time pulling him back up the deck, and finally we lashed him to the mast with a steel safety cable, which allowed him to tend to his work.

By this time I had worked up a serious sweat, and the mystique of this filthy shipwreck had long since worn off. The captain was clearly a swine and the first mate was a middle-aged bellboy from New Jersey and the ship was probably stolen ... But here I was out on the high sea with these people, doing manual labor in the morning and bleeding from every knuckle. It was time, I felt, for a beer.

I was moving crabwise along the deck, homing in on the cooler we'd left in the Cigarette boat, when I saw the scavengers coming in. They had been circling the wreck for a while, two half-naked thugs in a small skiff, and the captain had recognized them instantly.

"God help us now," he muttered "Here they come. These are the ones I was worried about." He looked nervously out at the two burly brutes in the cannibal boat, and he said he could see in their eyes that they were getting ready to board us and claim the whole wreck for themselves.

It won't be much longer," he said. "These bastards are worse than pirates. We may have to fight for it."

I shrugged and moved off toward the beer cooler, at the other end of the wreck. The captain was obviously crazy, and I had lost my feel for The Story. All I wanted was a cold can of beer.

By the time I got to the Cigarette boat, however, the thugs had made their move and were tying up alongside us, grinning like wolves as they crouched between me and the cooler. I stared down at them and swore never again to answer my phone after midnight.


"Was this your boat?" one of them asked. "We heard you whimpering all night on the radio. It was a shame."

The next few minutes were tense, and by the end of that time I had two new partners and my own marine salvage business. The terms of the deal were not complex, and the spirit was deeply humane.

The captain refused to cooperate at first, screeching hoarsely from the other end of the wreck that he had silent partners in Tampa who would soon come back and kill all of us...

But you hear a lot of talk like that in The Keys, so we ignored him and drank all the beer and hammered out a three-way agreement that would give the captain until sundown to take anything he wanted, and after that the wreck would be ours.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

The captain seemed to understand, and so did I. He would be lucky to get back to shore with anything at all, and I had come close to getting my throat slit.

It was almost dark when we dropped him off on the dock, where he quickly sold out to a Cuban for $5,000 in cash. Mother ocean had prevailed once again, and I was now in the marine salvage business.

Guest blogger: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

California Creaming

Gone skatin'.

Broken lines, broken strings, | Broken threads, broken springs, | Broken idols, broken heads, | People sleeping in broken beds. | Ain't no use jiving | Ain't no use joking | Everything is broken.

In as much as bad things happen in threes, so do good things. I have a month's leave (and South Africa's Western Cape gets more sun than California). I've had a wonderful Christmas, and I've been tearing up the tarmac on my good ol' 46" Sector 9 long board. That's kinda where it ends. This morning, having ridden the monster for an hour-and-a-half, and while taking one last, long, slow downhill nearby, carving the road to tarred Champagne, the back wheels slid out on a front turn and I went straight to ground, awkwardly, on the inside of my wrist. Despite Bob's dour outlook, it's probably not broken—having been there and done that, I'm pretty sure of it—but the discomfort is such that I'm typing this wearing a wrist guard. The wrist and thumb are bloody painful and seem intent on staying that way a while. A man should swap boards (skate for key) on long, sunny days like today. Potentially more debilitating, skating's somehow far healthier than keyboarding. Tomorrow, though, and although the weather looks set to be as good as it was today, it appears boards of any type will be out of the question.

Umm... ya' know of any good pain killers?

Seem like every time you stop and turn around | Something else just hit the ground.

Bob Dylan | Everything is Broken

Tasting Ashes

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"We knew ever since the beginning [of the Iraq war] that the Americans would become trapped in a quagmire ... Iraq has become a turning point in the history of the Middle East. ... Iran and other regional states will be able to play an important role in world issues since they provide a huge share of the world's energy needs. We see now that the United States has been defeated."

Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Should Rafsanjani be correct—my questioning his assertions is purely rhetorical, those Americans supporting Congressman John Conyers' moves to have Bush and Cheney censured before their ousting and, I hope, eventual imprisonment, had better get off their asses if they're to avoid cementing Americans' reputations of being a tad behind their best intentions. Loud talk of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan fails to stem news of Taliban moves, backed by Sri Lankan materiel, to force a humiliating retreat from that country.

Frankly, the United States of America looks set to become the only superpower to take on not one, but two, defenceless countries—and lose all three.

My concern is that, faced with ruin—for such humiliation will have devastating economic consequences—the Bush administration will escalate the violence and drag its country ever deeper into the mire (see Targeting Tehran below). Now is the time to use 'em or lose 'em. Wait any longer and they'll destroy you.

Afghanistan's Taliban-led resistance, flush with the money it is milking from the drug trade and secure in links it has established with the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka to tap the international arms market, is preparing to take its war against US-led forces to a new level. Prominent in its new armory are surface-to-air missiles.

Asia Times | Armed and dangerous: Taliban gear up

Note: For an eminently fair and balanced assessment of long-term U.S. global aims, objectives and strategies, read Michel Chossudovsky's The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview, presented at the Perdana Global Peace Forum 2005, Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 14-17 December 2005.

Nuts and dolts...

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance.

"Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?" he asks.

"No", replies the colleague, "but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it."

Attributed to Nils Bohr by whiskey river

Meanwhile, over at Kathryn Cramer's, Googlebombing takes a new and sinister twist.

Amid all the kerfuffle of late regarding Google Earth and its possible threat to the national security of several jittery nations comes an interesting snippet from an email purporting to be from a US Marine who served in Iraq....

The Register | Al-Qaeda probes enemy on Google Earth

For all-encapsulating, pithy comment in the best journalistic tradition on the above subject—deemed worthy of extensive coverage by The New York Times, try net². What the Times fails to do in two pages, Chris Locke does in twelve words.

It is no secret that I take Locke seriously. As you know all too well he freelances, from deep within the Jesus Bunker, as Father Christopher's stenographer. One cannot ignore the import of such a position and I therefore heed his every word. And indeed, it was he who, but a short while ago, alerted me to the "soul-crushingly depressing" power of Demotivators®.

I now have the lot; the book, the videos, the coffee mugs, the stickypads and the lithographs.

You didn't find Dr. Phil, Oprah or Deepak Chopra depressing enough? Try Demotivators® from Despair, Inc.


"It's a blogger's life..."

You won't be disappointed. Without them, I would not be where I am today.

Note: No wonder the Indians are complaining. It seems the U.S. arrogates to itself the determination of international law hiding, as it does, its nuclear-powered, apartheid-governed fifty-first state and forward base in the Middle East, Israel.

It was in the 1990's that the federal government started allowing commercial satellite companies to make and sell high-resolution images, to allow American companies to compete in a growing market.

But a number of security restrictions apply to those companies. For instance, United States law requires that images of Israel shot by American-licensed commercial satellites be made available only at a relatively low resolution. Also, the companies' operating licenses allow the United States government to put any area off limits in the interests of national security.

Unexpected? Hah! Nor is the Times's bland, unquestioning reporting of this small contradiction. It's par for the course.

George Bush's American Apocalypse

"This is the end... click graphic to enlarge"

This is the end, beautiful friend | This is the end, My only friend, the end | Of our elaborate plans, the end | Of everything that stands, the end | No safety or surprise, the end...

"Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny."

This is the second runner-up in the Time 'Photograph of the Year' competition. It's my competition—Time merely presented a selection of photographs—so I get to choose the winners.

The grandeur of these graceful New Orleans waterfront mansions has transmogrified to majestic cataclysm, a boiling tropical inferno shrouded by dense foliage and bowering trees. Framing a fearful symmetry with Falluja, redolent of the destruction of Colonel Kurtz's compound in Apocalypse Now, and measured against the graphic of the monument below, it is rich in symbolism.

To the left, the napalmed water set alight by hues bright as the rising sun, and to the right, a roiling, self-sustaining furnace angrily clouding the sky, devouring and obliterating centuries of history. As U.S. foreign policy slowly, steadily tightens its grip on the world and America, so that country falls prey to its own self-cannibalising feeding frenzy.

Disaster looms large.

And yet, it remains as a movie set in which—and unlike Tehran's bomb-proof, water-washed Azadi Tower celebrating millennia of civilization below—the placid waters will not rise to douse the flames, a fragile culture's fledgling facade will swiftly burn to ashes, and the jungle will soon extinguish all signs of its former existence.

Much as I disagree with Francis Ford Coppola tailoring his movie's end to his audience's taste, it is the director's prerogative to end his film as he chooses. The end of the Great American Movie, scripted by Usama bin Laden, looks set to correct Coppola's deception, i.e. that we might opt for an alternative to war.

On the one hand, Coppola failed his audience (and Joseph Conrad) by omitting from his film the fundamental untruth underlying our social contract. On the other hand, George W. Bush, directed by Bin Laden, looks set to play his part to the end.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

Usama bin Ladin

This is the end | Beautiful friend | This is the end | My only friend, the end | It hurts to set you free | But you’ll never follow me | The end of laughter and soft lies | The end of nights we tried to die | This is the end.

The Doors | The End

Targeting Tehran

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"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous...Having said that, all options are on the table."

George W. Bush, February 2005

With the non-Arabic Kurdish north left to its own devices, the expected Iran-backed SCIRI and DAWA whitewash of the US-enforced Iraqi elections will render an embattled and embittered Sunni minority irrelevant to future neocon plans for the greater Middle East. Iran has already claimed victory in Iraq and, having been drawn to the battlefield, has opened the way for a justifiably upbeat George W. Bush to initiate Phase II of the planned Middle-Eastern oil grab. As William R. Clark points out, the U.S. military is in no condition to take on a country capable of defending itself but, then again, who says the Bush cabal intends taking Iran as it did Iraq? It's a case of "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" Using Dick Cheney's preferred alternative, a nuclear strike, will require only an army of occupation; even for a capital city of twelve million. I've no doubt Bush does intend scaling down his forces in Iraq—harnessing the draft, most vets will be redeployed to Tehran and other major Iranian cities and strategic installations. The primary difference between the Iraqi and the Iranian campaign will be United States' escalation of a regional conflict or skirmish to a global conflagration, destabilizing the world as we know it. The neocons will argue that China, North Korea and every other country with designs on increasingly scarce resources will be put on notice, thereby stabilizing geopolitical fallout in the long term—in America's favour. Face it; the U.S. can do as it pleases. It has a nuclear arsenal second to none and the criminals now charting our global future have no compunction using it. In the interest of American national security, of course.

And, yeah, since when were nuclear weapons anything but tactical?

Nothing Was Delivered

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Come gather 'round people | Wherever you roam | And admit that the waters | Around you have grown | And accept it that soon | You'll be drenched to the bone.| If your time to you | Is worth savin' | Then you better start swimmin' | Or you'll sink like a stone | For the times they are a-changin'.

I seldom read that bastion of American conservatism, Time magazine. A staple when growing up through the apartheid-cocooned Kennedy, 'Nam and Apollo years, it died a slow death. Parents dropped their subscriptions as its irrelevance and insularity grew and, after several years, outdated copies in doctors' waiting rooms gave way to glossy magazines extolling the virtues of the great African outdoors.

As far as I was concerned, it was the thinking man's Reader's Digest. And the less said about that odious publication, the better. Actually, I'll tell you one story of which I'm rather proud. Visited at journalism school one evening by a Reader's Digest editor proudly proclaiming his publication the benchmark of traditional, Christian, and family values, I freaked. Watched from the back of the theatre by my irascible tutor, an imperious man of letters I greatly respect, I tore into the RD guy for a full five minutes. My lecturer smiled and said nothing. The fool from the Reader's Digest made no further inflammatory statements.

Umm... Time. Yes, it differs from Reader's Digest in that it employs people capable of damned good journalism. And it employs damned good photographers. But seldom does the magazine include stunning work in its annual round up. This year, for some reason, and perhaps unwittingly, it's a different story. The pictures shown here—best viewed on the Time Web site—are phenomenal. Open to many types and levels of interpretation, they are stunning works of photographic art. The photograph of a drowned man lying face down in a flooded New Orleans street reflects an international view of the United States. Domestically, I suppose, it could reflect the failure of the United States government to protect its people from even the most common and expected enemy, the weather. It could reflect developers' greed, racism, or even the conscious withholding of aid from poor people living in the world's so-called richest country.

To me, it represents America today, a country that is socially, economically and politically poverty stricken. To a point where it no longer matters.


Click here to enlarge.

The picture immediately above ("Here is your son back | Thanks for the loan") deserves international recognition and the widest exposure. It is awesome in its scope and depth. It is a photograph from the heart of a dead country. Where does one start? The lighted humanity of the three uniformed marines administering to their dead comrade (bending, touching, caring...)? Perpendicular (opposed) to the lines of the flag draping the coffin, the layers above the silver'd belly of the cargo hold—coloured red white and blue—and into which are frozen a multiplicity of waxen, glass-cased faces and attitudes of suited... what? Corporate America? The average citizen? Corpses? Like faded stills, their TV faces caught in subdued perspex, it is they who are trapped mute, dumb, and lifeless in their casket of tubular steel. And yet the hydraulic power of that door is evident; good to disgorge such remains (perhaps processed from the asses six feet above) into perpetuity.

From the livery, I guess this must be American Airlines. It figures.

I have seen the U.S. Constitution and international war crimes laws invoked so many times, I'm able to recite them verbatim. George W. Bush, the 'president' who speaks only to the military audience he commands, rules by martial law. The American people are powerless, reduced to whey-faced complicity in his multifarious crimes.

Illustrating what Robert Fisk calls a "...total failure of the human spirit," Time has published a photograph that should be viewed and considered worldwide. I do not envy my many American friends having to live with the mix of vanity, oppression and death suffusing the carefully conditioned air they now breathe. Their willingness to fight their suffocation is admirable.

Come mothers and fathers | Throughout the land | And don't criticize | What you can't understand | Your sons and your daughters | Are beyond your command | Your old road is | Rapidly agin'. | Please get out of the new one | If you can't lend your hand | For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan | The Times They Are A-Changin'

Due North

Where east meets west

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, | Walkin' a road other men have gone down. | I'm seein' your world of people and things, | Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

It's late, it's hot, I've a cold and my head feels like a pumpkin dropped from a ten-floor building. Yeah, I'm sick and, like BlogFather Chris Locke, that puts me in an ugly mood. Eyes, ears, nose, throat... now I know why they call 'em ENT specialists—I just can't figure out how they get to earn so much if they can't best the common cold. I'm seldom ill and today was a holiday. Go figure. A day off and I'm out of it. And there's a whole lot of other shit in my life, but it can stay there. There's a lot of good stuff too and, I tell you, the upside still beats the downside to hell and gone.

I put up a new picture of a dead ship—for Peter. I'd used the other before and, although I know it's at Agulhas, so what? It's old and I don't do old well. Graceful is not my style. Grow old gracefully? What's that got to do with the price of gefilte fish—gah! Some people might be offended by my focusing on Jewish jokes in the post below, but fuck 'em. I have this thing for Jewish humour. I liked Seinfeld. What more can I say?

I'm 47. Most of the people who frequent this site do so because the type's small and suits their magnifying glasses. The entries are long, so they can read them on the loo. I don't have anything to say, so they go away satisfied that they've seen and missed nothing. In short, they're probably older and wiser than me. Such is the nature of blogging. Buncha old people doodling in code, waiting to lose their hair so they can go back to diapers. Jeez, I told you I was in a bad mood, but I'm outdoing myself here.


Heading south-south west

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song | 'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along. | Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn, | It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

It's Iain's fault, of course. Iain's one of my daughter's friends. He's like a fungus. He grows on you until you realise: "Hey, not only is the guy now living here, but he and I can sit out on the balcony and chew the cud about nothing for three or four hours." Strange kid. When you're in your early twenties you're still a kid, Iain, so shut the fuck up.

And you're strange.

My daughters, bright and attractive girls aged 14 and 20, have the weirdest friends. It's not their fault so, I guess, again, we can blame it on Iain. They're all dropouts and they're all bright. Bright as in innate intelligence. None of them are schooled or, whatever schooling they've had, has been crap. They just tend to see, do and think more than the consumption-crazed kids now taking over the workplace to drive us nuts with their one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down mentalities.

Glued to their iPods and cellphones, they make me sick. Wankers.

Most of my elder daughter's friends have buggered off to Europe to earn some money. We have a 45 percent unemployment rate here and high school won't get you a job. An economy rapidly shrinking to fit the oversized pockets of only the obscenely rich exacerbates the problem. So most, like Iain, end up doing time in some English hole named Grimsby-on-Grime, working on the underground, in pubs, tech firms (we've plenty programmers), or on construction sites.

Others, like Tim and Matt, who you'll meet in a mo', don't. These dopes are somehow attached to what I refer to as The Muizenberg Crowd. The Muizenberg Crowd has always existed. It's an informal club of kids who grow up on the southern peninsula. Others come in from afar. Generally, they're bright, come from fucked-up homes, have one solid albeit whacked-out parent, and are in the shit by age 15. By the time they hit their 20s, they've got it pretty much sorted out.


Going with the flow...

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know | All the things that I'm a-sayin' an' a-many times more. | I'm a-singin' you the song, but I can't sing enough, | 'Cause there's not many men that done the things that you've done.

I've met Tim and Matt only in passing. The former borrowed a couple of Kerouacs from me and the latter, when a friend of my youngest daughter pitched at the door with an 18-year old who'd 'escaped' from rehab with her, put the kid up for, as Iain put it, old times' sake.

Honourable lads.

Tim, from what I know of him, writes. Or he enjoys writing. Something like that. Either way, he also likes to get out and about. He had a plan to cycle through Africa once. Now, the thing about these kids is that, when they get an idea in their heads, they generally do what we used to do at their age, i.e. act on it. So Tim and a buddy set off on their bicycles for Cairo or some place.

His knees gave out at George, the home of former South African president, warlord and closet Nazi, P.W.Botha, a couple of hundred kilometres up the coast.

So what? Life is full of setbacks. What gives me hope for this new generation is that they don't let that sort of shit get in their way. His dreams undimmed, Tim and a guy called Dustin have dropped the bikes and are now hiking through Africa. They're calling their trip Somewhere On The Road. Well, I knew they planned to do it, but Iain, who uses my comment box as an e-mail repository, has given me the link to their site.

Okay, so Tim and Dustin should've used a blog, Hello, Haloscan and Flickr, but there you go. Generally, South Africans know nothing of the Web. Using Google's Remarkable Reader (see Phil Ringnalda's take on existing bugs), they'd have the world traipsing in their footsteps.


"...gone with the wind."

Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too, | An' to all the good people that traveled with you. | Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men | That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

From what I gather, they set off early December to meet Matt at Swellendam, some 250 kilometres up the road. Matt moved there a while ago. God alone knows why. Given Tim's earlier experience with the bicycle, I thought I'd better note their mission before something went amiss. But it seems they're already further than Nature's Valley, some 600 kilometres up the east coast, an immensely positive sign. The problem Capetonians have with hiking south to north is that you have first to go south. Cape Town and, more particularly, Cape Point are not where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meld in a mess of swirling currents and fiercely competing temperatures off unhospitable shores littered with broken-backed ships.

That's Cape Agulhas, a scrubby, windswept cape halfway between Cape Town and George / Knysna. The latter is the start of the Garden Route, a lush, subtropical wonderland on the east coast wherein one is set free to play in the verdant greens and loamy browns of God's backyard. Early morning mists, lazy days, quiet lakes, dense forest, the sound of the early morning woodcutter's axe, the cry of the Knysna loerie (a large, indigenous green bird with lurid red wings), worked-out nineteenth-century gold mines, forest elephant and hillbillies... That sort of shit.

Of course, it's all been destroyed by tourism and development. Japanese consortiums shaping the ecosystem to elegant, curvaceous golf courses. South Africa is an obscenity of wealth living cheek by jowl with mind-numbing poverty and disease. Some of us cling to our foothold in the middle, a step from the slide to penury. My favourite skateboarding hill has been out of commission for a couple of weeks. The only house on the road without a ten-foot wall topped by electric fencing is acquiring its necessary makeover and the road's usually full of cement chips or sand. Our streets are walled canyons and anybody with a car has four or five remote-control devices attached to their key ring. On my mother's street, they have a security guard patrolling 24 hours a day. He has a hut on one of the corners.

These private security companies are paid to protect the police. It costs the taxpayer hundreds of millions each year. But the cops must be protected. Somebody has to collect bribes, beat street kids, and rape unaccompanied women. Besides, for some reason, having a police force gives the wealthy something to bitch about. You know you live in a weird place when, walking around the corner of your workplace building, you almost bump into a hyper-alert guy in battle fatigues, holding an R4 automatic rifle at the ready. "Sorry," you mutter and carry on. Later, in the elevator, you find yourself wondering, "Is there an auto bank on that corner. Huh? I wonder who that guy was."

Does so-called security stop or slow crime? Of course not. All this shit is a sign of just how insecure the rich feel. So, behind their high walls and out of sight of the patrolling security guard, their armed-response alarm systems are cut and they get robbed blind before being shot or having their throats slit. It's a heavy price to pay for a high-rolling lifestyle but, hey, many are willing to fork out. Looking at the flood of out-of-the-box Mercs, BMWs and other exotic cars flooding Cape Town's streets, I see no sign of crime abating.

I dragged myself down to the pharmacy this morning. Being Friday and owned my Muslims, it was closing for a couple of hours. But the pharmacist let me in before he went off to mosque. "Westerners are doomed," he opined. What could I say. The writing's on the wall of every gated suburb in South Africa.


God's backyard...

I'm a-leaving' tomorrow, but I could leave today, | Somewhere down the road someday. | The very last thing that I'd want to do | Is to say I've been hittin' some hard travelin' too.

But one can either dwell on this inequity (iniquity too) or break from it. Tim and Dustin have decided to take a break and leg it north.

"Who's Dustin?" I asked my daughter.

"I dunno," she shrugged. "Some guy he met from the army."

"Whose army?" I asked. "Tim's never been in any army."

Again she shrugged. What is it with these kids? "Dustin was in some army. I think he's been to Iraq."

Well, there I exploded. What the fuck? This kid has been in some army and he's been to Iraq? This sounded like the stuff of a Kathryn Cramer alert. "Is he a fucking mercenary?" I asked her.

"I don't know, dad. I don't even know if it was Iraq. Some country."

One thing about our kids' crappy education. Around 1980, they took all the maps off the walls. I've lived with the result. These kids are like Helen Keller after they moved the furniture. Avid readers they might be, but spatial barriers no longer exist for them. They know nothing of geography in the conventional sense. London is not 'over there'. It's a 14-hour flight.

I don't know Dustin, so I don't know that he has been in some army. He's Tim's travelling companion as they make their way through Africa.

And this is the good part.

I mean, fuck it. These cities. They suck. They suck bigger than a dope fiend will ever suck a white pipe. Out there, all around us, for what seems like infinity—especially when you're in it, is a wide-open land of unimaginable beauty filled with the most remarkable people.

Westerners might be doomed, but South Africa's not. It's heaven and these kids know it and, much as we once did, live it. Tim and Dustin might not get to Cairo (actually, I think they're headed for London). Hell, they might not even get to Johannesburg but, if they do, I hope they make it out of there alive. Either way, they're doing the right thing. Living on the road.

It's the way to go.

I'm going to follow their story for as long as it continues because, hell, who knows, they might eventually get to wherever it is they're going. And it'll be great to have been along for the ride.

So, yeah, thanks for the link, Iain. Like me, Iain is an experienced camper. Around Easter this year, we went up to a campsite in the Winterberg. It's out of the way. Quiet. the middle of nowhere. There, Zonker and I fell for Karina, the girl running the place. A freely spoken twenty-something blonde country girl (she's bloody good looking), she captures the spirit of the place. I call her Karina van die Berge.

Turns out Iain knows her. The punk. Several years ago, he went camping for a week in the Winterberg. He and his friends told their parents they'd be about three days. Five days later, lying like a lizard on a rock, Iain espied a huge bloody Puma helicopter swooping in. It'd come to fetch them. The air force dropped them off at the nearest campsite and there he met Karina.

She must've been only 16 or 17 back then. So what? It still pisses me off.

These kids just don't think. But maybe that's just because I'm 47 and have a cold.

We hitched on to Knysna and got there for lunch. After hours of baking in the sun on the outskirts of town facing two lanes of traffic (probably due to the serial killer in town) we got one of the craziest lifts ever. A red car with surfboards on the roof stopped for us and we squashed into the back seat with bags and a big yellow, leaky coolbox. "Grab a beer and mush this section." Paul, the maniac driver barked as he handed me a bankie.

His equally nutty girlfriend, Leanne, giggled in the passenger seat. Paul lit the bottle neck himself while I held his beer and he overtook cars with his knee. Dustin and I exchanged worried glances which soon turned to nutty grins after the pipe made a few rounds. On the road you have to go with the flow and we had now abandoned all fear and were riding the bucking bronco with everyone else. Dire Straits blasted out the CD player - a rent a car, new two days ago but now with a cracked windscreen and missing number plate.

We went along with them to check out a surf spot (the Wreck) at Robberg - more beers. We arrived at this quiet little beach carpark in Richmanville (rich Vaalies, leopard-print speedos) with the music full-blast, windscreen wipers back and front going off and Paul jerking the car with the brakes, causing us all to headbang.

Insanity!

The looks we got would've loosened the bowels of a full grown bull elephant, but not Paul, no, he had to start ripping off all the fat Dutchman and shouting obcenities at them. To the beach — Paul with surfboard in one arm and coolbox in the other — Leanne topless, tits flapping in the breeze. We managed to lose them in the dunes after more beer and crazy talk. A true mullit, best lift ever!

Bob Dylan | Song to Woody

Zen Judaism

Dean Landsman makes a wonderful Santa Claus. He has something we all need, a Jewish sense of humour. For myself, I enjoy the English love of irony, dry wit and sarcasm. Jewish humour goes further. It reflects these attributes and then some.

Famously, the only people who have no sense of humour at all are the Americans. No wonder the English and Jewish peoples have always laughed at them.

To help our American friends discover their innate ability to laugh at themselves during what I hope will be a peaceful holiday season, I share below a few basic koans well-known to all students of Zen Judaism.

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be here now.
Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip... joy.
With the second... satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a Danish.

Wherever you go, there you are.
Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?

There is no escaping karma.
In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.
And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.



The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight. You'll never meet the
Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following:
Get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Torah says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self."
So, maybe you are off the hook.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain, though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away, yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full Enlightenment.

But, first, a little nosh

Should the graphics accompanying these fundamental truths not amuse you, you're probably a meat-eating, wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, fundamentalist Christian redneck. Intolerant, racist, sexist in the extreme and bigoted to boot, you probably felt it a good thing Tookie Williams got the chop. Never mind. Let me tell you something. Arnie and George W. Bush make one helluva team and are nice guys too.

Note: These great teachings come to us via e-mail from The Jewish Agency for Israel — UK Delegation, proving that even crazed Zionists can have a great sense of humour. The original source details come from an authority as trustworthy as Encyclopaedia Britannica. I thought I might have coined the phrase myself. It just goes to show...

Moving Pictures

On the beach...

Like Peter, I find pictures of ships moving. But there are exceptions. Here's one that's going nowhere.

The secrets of the summer I will keep | The sands of time will blow a mystery | No-one but you and I | Underneath that moonlit sky | Take me back to the place that I know | On the beach...

Chris Rea | On the Beach

Note: If you've yet to do it, do yourself a favour and revel in Peter's freighter trip—for most, a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence of self-chosen adventure. And, if you've salt in your blood and are into a lengthier read, head over to Gordon Coale's and read his grandfather's remarkable memoirs. A history well-worth preserving, war-artist Griff's Story offers insights into the minds and experiences of those who lived and died during the 'war at sea'.

Power Of The Word

You, panther and statue, angel of fruit,
sexual bread shop, monument of wheat,
with throat pierced by the dart
of a sudden word, have fallen into shadows.

Oh deadly and fiery word that arrives
to engrave itself so accurately in marble,
like the rifle that blindly strikes down
the soldier from a distance.

Panther of wheat, you now lie like
a toppled statue on an empty beach.
The sea foam of oblivion washes up around you -
O prone pillars where doves nest!

Blue lightning of the word
has scattered your useless wings and fruit,
and, in shadows, your abandoned body is
a frigid bread shop washed out by the moon.

Jorge Carrera Andrade from Mark Woods

Madmen and Mystics take Jazz to New Highs

Half Moon, House on the Hill, Greenlight Parade, Mishka, Now and Zen and Blue Carnival don't leap to mind when dredging the cranium for pieces of great local jazz. Give them time. Ebrahim Khalil Shihab (Chris Schilder) and ESP haven't been together that long. Sitting at Manenberg's on a wet Sunday evening with Zonker and the prospect of a Jamaican-born British stand-up comic splitting our sides with laughter, the last thing we expected to see was Shihab gliding in on a spiritual cloud with Basil Moses, bowed under his bass, in tow.

The comic had been canned and we were in for some serious sound.

Joined by the leisurely pair of Paul du Preez and Vince Pavitt, ESP warmed themselves to their set in the winter air, the flushed press of the Saturday throng an already discarded memory as they set about illuminating Shihab's vision. It is one traversing heaven and hell, the rhapsodic, mesmerising riffs of the higher self balanced by the deep, often angry and uncompromising discords of moribund mortality.

Jazz is to life what light is to day and Shihab's music is an intense dialogue rescued from intellectual aridity by shared passion. Moses has been thwacking away at his bass for so long and with such focus everybody knows he does not head for the lavatory to do his thinking. Du Preez's imposing bulk and authoritative calm hide a manic mind, constantly moving, always at the edge and, in Pavitt, the band has its thread, his drums framing the canvas on which ESP paint their swirling thoughts for a rapt audience.

In House on the Hill, Shihab revisits his grandparents, exploring with his keyboards the nuances of human interaction. Blue Carnival is a piece of vacillating extremes, ESP whipping the night to a creamed frenzy, and April Lament readily exposes the spiritual character of its creator.

Starting low, the grave sax is contemplative. Picked up by Shihab, it begins to run, push and question, the confused emotions of the intricate keyboards lent temporary succour by the calming restraint of Moses's bass. But the lament breaks like a dam wall breached and Du Preez's saxophone screams in catharsis before achieving a lasting peace, the musicians smiling quietly.

ESP deserve close listening, their music a complex blend of styles and statements. As a group, they're bound for uncertain glory. Perhaps, like the British comedian who failed to pitch, they will be panned by a fickle public. They deserve more.

In need of levity, we left ESP and the quiet set to their muted musings and headed off searching a different jazz reality. We tumbled into the pit of the Long Street Theatre, landing bewildered on a different plane of consciousness. In the black-walled hole peopled by weird, ethereal beings from a multitude of musical cultures and hairstyles, lounging in every crevice or brushing by us on wings of eerie sound, we felt our way through the gloaming towards the shroud of pale mist at the end of a tunnel redolent of J R R Tolkien or Judge Dredd.

The mist was of a cold-coloured light, at once blue, purple, green, and then red. It was out of this pall that the visage of a wild-eyed Frank Paco popped, scything with a controlled and perhaps malignant abandon at his drums glinting in the pervasive, day-glo fog. The apocalyptic sound of great music crackled in my hollow and somewhat numbed skull as a spectre, bent double, became the silhouette of a man who, his trumpet keening at his lips, rose, lifting high as the Grail itself the burnished instrument crying in the delayed wailing of its own echoes, trumpeting in celestial goldensong the birth of the divine.

And at his right hand appeared a dark man, slight yet solid, wielding an instrument as if an axe, from which snapped missives of deep and urgent import, and at his left, a cherub, wan and tousle headed in the innocence of youth, spilling from his keyboards a luminous, incandescent shower of brilliant notes.

This trinity, with the fourth, Mr Paco, the shadow, made itself apparent to me in the timeless vortex into which the pit had dissolved and reconstituted as a moment of lasting lustre. This was Virtual Jazz Reality, a world-class show of musical dexterity and technical resplendence creating an atmosphere subsuming the ego with the sheer splendour of jazz. Experiencing the sound and colour of Ian Smith, Andrew Ford, Frank Paco and Sammy Weber's music is a devastating, perhaps dangerous way of preparing for a mundane Monday.

Take it off. To hell with the consequences and to heaven with the music.

Note A musical interlude. From before the music died...

Shadowlands...

Ophelia... [click to view]

The final difficulty of reading madness [...] is that in the act of doing so, one dissociates oneself from it or associates oneself with it, and in either case becomes disqualified as an interpreter. To read madness sanely is to miss the point; to read madness madly is to have one's point be missed.

Carol Thomas Neely 'Documents in Madness': Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315-38, at 316.

The proximity to my entry on Hamlet of a quotation left by Frank on his blog suggested a probe. It's nagged at me this past week, so I thought I'd better do something about it. What should I do? Blog a response, of course. But what sort of response? Frank's quotation, from an unavailable academic paper, came after my reading of Hamlet, and it irked me at first, because I assumed it to be selectively quoted and, secondly, because Paynter has a habit of chasing up on me. That might, of course, be my imagination, but so what? If it gets me to think more deeply on something, why not? What are friends for? So here we go, then: some scattered thoughts on Ophelia.

Thanks for the above from Neely, Frank. Though it seems it's quoted out of context, let's make a meal of it. And let's do so despite knowing that to swallow facile assumptions can be dangerous. At a deeper level, they have a habit of swallowing those falling for them. At face value, then, Neely's is a glib assumption and it's especially dangerous because its enormous bite possesses bizarre attraction. It's a comfortable, black-and-white, Bush-like statement, attractively and authoritatively worded, putting Ophelia off limits to many keen to explore her world—even to the extent the facile, asinine analyses found on many reputedly reputable Shakespearean sites do so.

In short, and as it stands, it's crap. Who is this woman? Bring her to me and I'll teach her a thing or two. In fact, where's Frank Paynter. I'm sending him to the Tutor's for a spanking. By Captain Blowtorch. Listen, lard head, this woman's a criminal and a plagiarist. I'm willing to bet she gets most of her material from Fred Alan Wolf's Dr. Quantum presents A User's Guide To Your Universe (see MysticBourgeoisie for further details). By indulging quantum semantics, she's carpet-bombed psychiatry with a misguided interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation. This need not be a bad thing in itself, but shrinks give me my drugs.

I'd like them to continue doing so.

Okay, maybe she's not evil. Heisenberg, Bohr and their ilk thought they were on to something, so why shouldn't she? Publication's important to academics and nothing jives up the Shakespeare Quarterly's sales figures like a bit of dissension. What gets up my nose is that she qualifies her chicanery with illogical reasoning. But, what the hell, I'm all for a challenge so let's take her at her word—or the few we have of hers.

First, and although we've no idea of whom Neely's speaking—I trust we're speaking of our Danish delight, Ophelia—let's read Hamlet 'madly', a la Marek. To a degree, I've done so. My post below is, I admit, utterly subjective. I've received no tutoring in the play and am, for the most part, ill educated. So my perceptions of it are as they come to me and they do so in today's world. However, such is the depth and breadth of Shakespeare's vision that I am lost only in so far as space precludes me delving into the countless possibilities opened by each word, sentence, speech, or scene. And, in any event, If my reading or point is missed, Ms. Neely, what of it? It's not Shakespeare's point that's gone AWOL; he certainly doesn't go down the tubes with me.

Secondly, we'll toss Heather Brown's Gender and Identity in Hamlet: A Modern Interpretation of Ophelia and the appropriately named Gabrielle Dane's Reading Ophelia's Madness into the mix. They're dissociated in the extreme: in a Copenhagen rather than a DSM-IV way, I hasten to add. Do they get it wrong? Miss the point? I think not. Ultimately, we end up with a pretty clear, Newtonian picture of Ophelia as an 'in-the-world' person and can say to ourselves, "Alas! Poor Ophelia. We knew her." Initially, Brown cries Woolf:

Woolf's interpretation of history provides a helpful context for understanding Ophelia's character as a "mirror" that serves a critical importance by "reflecting" men. Ophelia's identity essentially rests upon this relationship. Aside from the male characters using Ophelia as a "looking glass"—casting their reflection upon her, showing themselves and the audience their power over her—Ophelia serves no purpose in the play. She is Polonius' pawn, Laertes' chaste sister, and Hamlet's lover. Once these male influences are removed and these descriptions no longer define Ophelia, she loses her identity and becomes mad. Laertes has gone to France, Polonius has been killed and Hamlet has rejected Ophelia, saying "[...] I loved you not./ [...] Get thee to a nunnery" (3.1.129-31). What can the mirror become when it has nothing to reflect? [a]

Unlike Brown's, my reading is horribly subjective, influenced by proximity and association. Because I've lived close to substance abuse and altered states most of my life, let's look at my juxtaposition of the dream I had of my wife with Ophelia's loss of self and descent into madness. What surprised me about the dream was first, its similarity to Ophelia's death or loss of identity and, secondly, the similarity of my wife's and her stories. Narratives. Lives... whatever. Women get screwed in many more ways than we males care to consider. Take a young girl and have a male, a Polonius, Claudius or both, abuse her. Deprive her of a mother by sending her to a boarding school with a twin brother (Laertes) to 'look after her'. Thereafter, dispatch her to a foreign city. Lastly, sit back and watch her disintegrate.

Nine times out of ten, any woman whose being and identity have been so usurped, defined, and proscribed by a social order favouring males, will fall apart mentally and emotionally. The shrinks call it PTSD. If the above scenario doesn't do it, let's knock off Polonius after a goodly time. It'll finish off the job. Ultimately, and whether or not she mirrors another's eminent sanity, you end up with a person who is irretrievably broken. This is not analysis. It is event and consequence. Too frequently we end up with women as swinging trees and fading—or collapsing—stars, playing Eliot's The Hollow Men [c].

To my mind, Brown's assertion that, beyond her role as a mirror "Ophelia serves no purpose in the play," although true, is superficial enough to be specious. Indeed, Ophelia serves only as a mirror but, as a mirror, her role is to reflect rather than flatter those about her. Hers is perhaps the most necessary role, because she allows us to see, in ourselves, the horror of our situation.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, evidenced by Hamlet the Elder—Fortinbras' killer—infecting his son's mind with thoughts of revenge. Ophelia is Old Hamlet's ghost incarnate. Abused, misused, strung out once and worse, she is revenge's collateral damage, a spectral negation of self. In many ways, she mirrors the rot of mankind rather than of the few traipsing the stage. And, perhaps, that is why we'd rather not consider her. Like Ophelia, Denmark has lost its identity. It has a court but, owing to old Hamlet's murder, no king. It has lands, but they mean little. It has ritual, but no justice. It has titular nobles, but their finery is frippery. It is Ophelia who shows us these things.

Through her, Shakespeare offers us insight into the forces that govern the governors. And we are all the king and queens of our own experience.

In Shakespeare's time, royal families were the state as much as the Bush administration is today. Each administration casts its identity on the country it governs and I remember a time, in the not-too-distant past when South Africans believed the myth of Afrikaner dominance. It was a media myth, fuelled by those propagating it and perpetuated by those believing it. But, for both the myth makers and those believing it, it worked.

The mood in Denmark after the king's murder and his wife's adulterous affair and marriage was ugly. Most have not experienced this pervasive ugliness. It is oppressive, and as mythic as it may be, it gives birth to the many real pathologies we see played out on stage. The corruption, greed, double standards, hypocrisy, self-indulgence, and brutality of the Bush administration are no different to that which plagued the Danish court all those centuries ago. All that separates our world from Shakespeare's are the props. And the devil, as they say, will always be found hiding in such small details.

A note on insightful comment on Pinter's Nobel speech from Tom and Jon: Art is politics; politics art—we, lulled to a stupor by our expectation of 'entertainment' (another political 'ploy' playing to our predilection for purely consumptive activities), divorce proceedings from the context in which they take place and need, as Pinter so jarringly does, to be reminded why we read or attend plays in the first place. "Struggle" or "political" theatre has a long tradition (but tends only to be called such when focused on specific issues) and we in South Africa are only now loosing our hold on such protest theatre to explore themes more universal than those proscribed by our apartheid past. The First World, perhaps, is only now entering such a cycle. Perhaps too, Shakespeare, the English language's greatest political playwright, is set to enjoy a renaissance.

I imagine the average patron at a performance of Hamlet. Those representing the 2,000-strong army of young Fortinbras, Hamlet's Norwegian foil, trudge across the stage and exeunt left or right (depending, of course, on whether they are coming or going). To the viewer, or reader, these are soldiers for a day, dressed in period costume and layered in makeup. They serve little purpose but to entertain us or illustrate a point. To Shakespeare, and those who'd read his words, they form the forever army on the march to a mindless and bloody battle with a dumb defender over a meaningless piece of land.

In short, they represent terror's inexorable march back and forth across our psyches. Why have hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and a couple of thousand U.S. troops died in the past three years? Was it worth it? Like most, this is not even questioned by Fortinbras and his latter-day ilk. It is a neat twist that the unthinking but likeable Fortinbras, wedded to Hamlet by circumstance, history, and conquest, takes Denmark at the play's close, avenging his father's death at Old Hamlet's hand in a manner Hamlet the Younger, trapped in a poisoned environment, cannot emulate.

In Fortinbras, revenge lives on in pleasing guise.

Yes, it is probably like this in death's other kingdom. And we cannot offer Ophelia any more than that which she and those about her give to herself. Where Hamlet holds back, she is compliant and pays the price. With her implied rape by Claudius, her fading star implodes and she is reduced to lips that would kiss, but form prayers to broken stone. Hamlet cannot but deal with immediate realities, hence his purported cruelty.

Ophelia, her identity as lost as those who gave her substance, collapses to a singularity, forming a Black Hole that crushes all crossing her event horizon. In life, as in Hamlet, the prince can only bear so much reality. His realization of his impossible situation and array of unenviable choices, lead him to seemingly harsh, precipitous action. Ophelia realizes the consequences of her limp complicity and takes all with her; her grave being the site where truth and consequence have it out.

With no identity to draw upon from the past other than her role as a puppet to males, Ophelia's identity disappears along with the disappearance of male dominance. She does not assert herself as a last-minute feminist hero of the play; instead, Ophelia represents the opposite, demonstrating the consequences of allowing herself to be entirely defined by others as she is unable to recognize herself as an independent human being in their absence. As Carol Thomas Neely writes of Ophelia in 'Documents in Madness': Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture, "The context of her disease, like that of hysteria later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control over women's bodies. [...] The representation of Ophelia implicitly introduces conventions for reading madness as gender-inflicted" (Neely 334). Thus, Ophelia's gender does not "liberate" her as Dane argued but, rather, causes her decline into madness as she is characterized as a "helpless" and "control[led]" woman who has lost even this identity. [a]

Does Dane argue that Ophelia's gender liberates her? Not really.

In her madness, Ophelia provides a singular exposé of society, of the turbulent reality beneath its surface veneer of calm; she touches on the myriad discontents of (her) civilization. Through her convoluted discourse, Ophelia implicitly emphasizes the vacuity of banal pieties, inappropriately muttering certain religious epithets and distorting others—thus, "God yield you" becomes "good dild you," "By Jesus" becomes "By Gis," "for charity" becomes "Saint Charity," and, perhaps most interestingly, "By God" becomes "By Cock" (4.5.42, 58, 61). With her "incoherent" speech, Ophelia reveals the hypocrisies which lurk beneath the surface of the ostensibly placid family unit (the King and Queen's incestuous marriage, Laertes's and Polonius's incestuous urges to extinguish her subjectivity). She condemns the falseness of sexual love (Hamlet's heartless seduction and betrayal, Gertrude's light loyalty). She decries the arbitrariness of political power (a younger brother's "inheritance" of his elder's wife and throne, and his concomitant privilege to banish his rival, Ophelia's lover). And throughout, the madwoman provides her critique in an overdetermined, cryptic patter, which defies exegesis. [b]

That has to be good ol' Neely's influence. It defies 'exegesis', eh? Well, here she goes:

When Claudius attempts to offer his neat interpretation of her remarks, she undermines his presumption, stating, "Pray let's have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say you this" (4.5.46-47), before launching into the Saint Valentine's day song, presumably unrelated to her previous utterances. Resisting appropriation and translation, Ophelia demands finally to "speak" on her own behalf. Through her madness, Joan Montgomery Byles believes, Ophelia finally establishes a real dialogue "with herself but—the listeners, who really listen to her for the first time, are no longer necessary. She needs no reply. She has discovered her own voice, her inner self." [b]

She later hypothesises that Ophelia might have committed suicide, but uses the hypothesis to give an upbeat ending to a strong but depressing dissertation. Black Holes not only attain infinite mass, or heaviness; they radiate their darkness, a cruel end for a once-radiant mirror. Reduced to nothingness, Ophelia's babble explodes with pointed sexual accusation and innuendo, unmasking and devastating those left behind. No talk of her gender saving her there. The basis of Brown's criticism of Dane lies in a footnote to the latter's closing, a footnote stating:

I offer another possible reading, not as a counter-aesthetic but as a hopeful alternative. That is, I offer Ophelia's choice to die as a gesture of resistance against the unnatural constraints binding her. The fact that she might have no other alternative is deeply tragic. But given the wasteland of stifled options stretching before (and behind) Ophelia, I submit that her suicide would be an authentic and courageous act—and ironically, a more rational feat than any of Hamlet's rash deeds. Even as I write these words I realize the danger of causing offense: For too long, dying remained the only art form allowed women; countless artists (male and female) have rendered iconic the female corpse—with Ophelia serving as a sort of ur-corpse, if you will. For me to sketch yet another rendering to add to this deadly tradition would seem counterproductive in the extreme—to my thesis, to feminist goals. Conversely however, I would argue that by implying choice around Ophelia's death, I resist such an iconic reading. Banishing the notion that Ophelia's death was either an accidental drowning or a reckless act of "insane" despair, I afford Ophelia a philosophic centeredness at (her) last: She not only finds a decisive answer to the overwhelming existential question haunting Hamlet, but musters the ability to act on that answer. [b]

While Dane does give Ophelia choice in the matter and "...a philosophic centeredness at (her) last", the poor girl does not find a "...decisive answer to the overwhelming existential question haunting Hamlet". Nor does she muster "...the ability to act on that answer." She either commits suicide or brings on her own murder. Both indicate desperation and hopelessness. Decisions to act are an individual's response to his or her particular situation—to make sense of it—and Hamlet is left to make sense of his situation. Perhaps what Dane really hopes to lend Ophelia is acceptance and perhaps, we can grant her that.

But for the rest, no. While the aetiology is clear, collapsed time does not allow Shakespeare to more clearly show how insidiously and deeply the pathology of Ophelia's descent to madness affects or infects those about her. For whereas most characters' faults and crimes remain obscure and Hamlet's ostensible insanity is merely assumed, Ophelia's is real and immediate, demanding action or inaction as it charts the downward trajectory of all who, in some way, control or manipulate her. She presents, sometimes covertly, dissociation, repression, compulsion and, finally, when the centre can no longer hold (or holds nothing), psychosis.

An extension of Hamlet's father's ghost, she exudes the darkness of which Hamlet is so aware. Lost to herself, she becomes the distillation of others' uses of her and, like a Black Hole, consumes their world. As such, she is central to the tragedy or, if not, plays a larger part than anybody else in bringing it to its conclusion. Why else should the brooding, introspective prince love such a malleable woman unless he sees in her that which he sees all about and within? It is only by rejecting her and the darkness for which she stands that his introspection turns to action without hesitation, albeit action by which he himself is destroyed.

And here we go back to my own, subjective experience of "loss of identity". At the end, the girl is no longer 'at home'. There is 'nobody in'. Through her short-lived life, she has already died a thousand deaths. Consider her environment. Cared for by a family best described as a bunch of vile ghouls, she falls for the man some believe to be the queen's illegitimate son. The former king's a murderer (of Fortinbras the Elder), Gertrude is a soulless adulterer at best and Claudius, the king, is a recidivist pederast and cold-blooded killer. Her father's a self-serving, conscienceless boor and her brother's a narcissistic fool.

Indifference, conspiracy, self-interest and death dressed in courtly civility, form a common language. (Hamlet's greatness lies in his seeing this, and surviving it some twenty or thirty years.) Had Ophelia any redeeming traits, Hamlet saw them and loved her for them. But, by putting the evil machinations of her father and king above herself, she became whatever they chose to make of her and Hamlet had to let go.

Considering Ophelia, others go far further than I but, ultimately, they're stretching credulity as they try to find their way back to a woman destroyed—but not murdered—by her own, albeit trauma-induced, passivity. Ultimately, we are all a means to our own ends. And those means, to a greater or lesser degree, are of our choosing.

There is no pretty ending for Ophelia. By the same token, Dane's resistance of an iconic ending has, over hundreds of years, been shown to be futile. Ophelia reminds me much of Diana, Princess of Wales. Completely at sea, haunted by unknown demons, surrounded by dullards, somewhat dim but awfully conniving, bulimic and promiscuous, the outwardly beautiful princess was always on to a hiding to nothing and a death to match. In scouting graphics of Ophelia, I've come to understand just how Shakespeare's genius has been rendered superfluous to our candyfloss world by well-intentioned fools. While I've no interest in Dane's 'feminist goals', whatever they may be, I do see Ophelia's death translated to a virtual resurrection by predominantly male artists and understand Dane's desire to fight it. Delacroix, the romantic, comes closest to representing the psychotic distress and disarray of the girl's mind as she goes to her watery grave. For the rest, bah humbug.

At the last, we must ask ourselves: are those associated or dissociated from insanity precluded from reading or interpreting it? In as much as we are disqualified from any objective assessment of experience, yes. Also, it's a question of degree; the extent to which we associate with or dissociate from it. If we are to qualify as interpreters of Ophelia's malaise, surely those who can say they have been associated with it—or something like it, i.e. they bring both perspectives to bear, are best suited to doing so? Otherwise, we should refrain from interpretation and, by extension, identification, altogether.

[a] Heather Brown Gender and Identity in Hamlet: A Modern Interpretation of Ophelia
[b] Gabrielle Dane Reading Ophelia's Madness
[c] T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men

Musical accompaniment: Bob Dylan | Idiot Wind

Picture perfect...

Willy Pete

Now I think I know | What you tried to say to me | And how you suffered for your sanity | And how you tried to set them free...

Here's another example of what you can do with a digital camera. It's a picture of a picture.

Neat, eh?

I painted it last night. Outside Ramadi. I call it Willy Pete.

For some reason, I had Don McLean's song on my mind.

Remember him?

Anyway, he's right. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as me.

They would not listen | They're not listening still | Perhaps they never will...

Don McLean | Vincent

Wet wet wet...

"...like Texas."

I feel it in my fingers | I feel it in my toes | Love is all around me | And so the feeling grows...

I'm enjoying having access to Zonker's digital camera. We went out for a surf this morning and he caught quite a good one of me.

I thought I'd share it with you.

We went out at Muizenberg. Around here, it's where everybody learns to surf.

Our waves are kind of like Texas...

...y'know?

It’s written on the wind | It’s everywhere I go, oh yes it is...

Wet Wet Wet | Love Is All Around

Ho ho ho...

How Do You Blog, Babe?

Where we write at night when...

Yeeeah | Yeeeah | Yeeeah | Yeeeah | I walked 47 miles on barbed-wire, | Cobra-snake for a necktie. | Built a house by the roadside, | Made of rattlesnake hide. | Brand new chimney up on top, | Made out of human skulls. | Come on baby take a walk with me, | Tell me how do you blog?

I’m getting some good answers and some good interpretations of what the question "How do you blog?" actually means. But I haven’t heard from you. I don’t know what to say except that your participation is important to me and I will be very proud to be able to weave your answer into the growing tapestry.

[...]

I know you are busy and that this is a particularly busy time of year. That said, I’m still hoping to hear from you soon with your simple answer to the puzzling question: How do you blog?

Frank Paynter

I was going to fob him off with the usual answer; "Why? Who the hell wants to know?" but, for an old curmudgeon, he's pretty good at the 'obsequious thing', eh? Even if it's to the same list as the original mail. So let's give him what we think he wants, my precious-s-s-s... I do so spontaneously, Frank, from within the constraints of long working hours, a slow and expensive connection, and a dysfunctional family setup that saps more than its share of time and energy. Blogging takes more time than most admit, but perhaps I could short-circuit many of my more laborious habits (washing, eating, breathing...). Using my home PC, Blogger, and the world's most expensive hole-in-the-wall connection (56kbps), I write in EditPad Lite, code maually, edit Web-found graphics in a freebie of PaintShopPro and upload to the server using FileZilla.

I generally derive subject matter from a news item or an entry on a blog. Like Brian, "When I start a post I have no idea where I'm headed." (With his post on this topic, Brian becomes the only podcaster I'll listen to. D'ya people all speak funny? No wonder English has gone to the dogs—Matrullo excepted, of course.) Umm, yep, while interesting articles may elicit no response from me, a seemingly inane comment or observation might initiate an essay, a story, a hunt for further articles, or a diatribe. Interestingly, a greater focus on such spontaneity sees me blogging less, for longer, and more for my blogroll and me than any wide audience.

Hence screeds or reports from the Jesus Bunker, the Eternal Mystery of Father Christopher, RageBoy and Christopher Locke (the author guy), surfing safaris up the Zambezi, the Nile, and the mighty Congo River, etc. I have met Kurtz, Saddam and many other interesting people. I have been to Mogadishu, Luanda and Baghdad. I have spoken to George W. Bush and his live-in lover Big Dick and, as a respected member of the Jesus Bunker press corps, I have bedded some of the world's most beautiful women, including Sweet Melinda, Saint Annie, Kate, Carmella, Mother Mary, Sister Jacqueline and Angel (who just got back from the coast)...

By the way, you tell Gary Turner he owes me big. He'd not be MD of that bloody software outfit had I not lent him spine, a huge fucking caber and a great pot of steaming porridge liberally laced with salt...

Perhaps, in my autumn years, I'm moving from Kafka to several millenia after the nuclear winter. It's where all the kids are at these days.


"Canute @ ... damn!"

Tombstone head and a graveyard mind, | Just 22 and I don't mind dying. | Rode around the town with a rattlesnake whip, | Come on baby don't give me no lip. | How do you blog, now? | How do you blog? | How do you blog, child? | I said: How, baby, how do you blog?

Lest it be forgotten, as good things so often are, I blog by the grace and goodwill of others. Blogmother Shelley Powers hosted this site for close on two years, and it cost her... erm, plenty I guess, but at a time when I couldn't afford it, it cost me nothing. Whether Shell likes it or not, this blog's as much hers as anybody else's.

With a domain change from BlogSpot to Shelley and one or two further changes while on her server, I've left a string of dead links and broken sites behind me. I guess the 'hit-and-run domain' suits my style, but it plays havoc with virtual friendships. For Christ's sake... nah, for mine, if you've yet to update your link to this site, do so now...

I'd hate to serve only as a link farm. That's esentially what's happening over at BlogSpot (the other domains are dead). I can't change the template over there. Also, because I'm dealing with autoresponse software, communication with a human being at Blogger is impossible. Strangely, although the page is a shambles, I get many more visitors there than I do here. Hmm...then again, maybe it's not that strange.

But, don't worry, your fifty-sixth link from this domain is safe for now. I'll pull the lot only when feeling particularly bloody minded.

Change that link. Please.

Okay, back to business. The 'how' and 'why' of blogging tend to merge. While most critics decry blogging relationships' validity or depth, they sure as hell beat—in a busy world—that feeling we all sometimes experience, i.e. "Nobody understands me." Published to the Web, everybody is assured somebody out there is likely to recognise themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, in whatever's written. And, yes, scanning the above, I really mean "whatever".

As to style, again somewhat paradoxically given the spontaneous nature of the blogs, I write with difficulty and the greatest circumspection. This need not be a bad thing. Having, over four years, found my intent and focus (voice?), I've come to rely more heavily on that which Anne Mathewson last year called "'invisible threads' and 'sympathetic fibers' - those human connections made along the way." Read that one again. She's not speaking of links. The hyperlink, as David put it, forms the geography of the Web. People, in a very real way, populate it.

Having been through flame wars, misunderstandings, accusations and counter-accusations (I'm a terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic, anti-American, homophobic, red-meat eating Christian fundametalist, sexist and racist), and the back-channelling needed to find common ground, I'll remain forever mindful of what I write. This mindfulness can have surprising results. Loving ambiguity, parallels, allegory and humour as much as I do, I try to write as openly and as 'nakedly' as possible. However, to counter misinterpretation, I've become obscure.

The resulting tension has had some suprising results. It's led me to interesting places and spaces.

Happily, like you Frank, I belong to a circle of people, most of whom have no difficulty deciphering my encoded language. These people comprise my audience, those for and to whom I write, whether they read it or not. And, given their extraordinary intellectual and perceptual powers, I need—while indulging ambiguity—to be as honest as possible.

They smell bullshit at 10,000 miles.

Over the years, I've seen enormous change in both the nature and content of the blogs (the mindless rise of the information cascade, the degeneration to sameness, the dumbing down, aggregation, call it what you will...), as well as the type of relationship enjoyed by those who write together. But 'more of the same' has barely touched the class of 2001/2. Minds hammered to propriety on the anvil of academe continue to rein and lend respectability to unfettered geniuses howling from the hilltops of our broader consciousness.

A hole-in-the-wall blogger who gets by, I'm fortunate to enjoy the company of both.

Night is dark, the sky was blue, | Down the alley the ice wagon flew. | Hit a bump, somebody screamed, | Should'a heard just what I seen. | Do you blog me, babe? | Do you blog her, yeah | Do you blog me, babe? | Do you blog it, yeah | Yeeeeeah...

The Doors | How Do You Blog?