The French Lieutenant's Woman
Full fathom five thy father lies; | Of his bones are coral made; | Those are pearls that were his eyes: | Nothing of him that doth fade | But doth suffer a sea-change | Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare | The Tempest
Before walking up Eagle's Nest, we stopped off in Kalk Bay. It's not exactly on the way, but something continues — after many years — to draw me to this place. In these pictures, I find myself; not, I hasten to add, in the way the Mystic Bourgeoisie do so, but in memories of long ago and far away. The night after cropping the picture below, I recalled one of my earliest memories and perhaps my reason for making it. The picture above reminds me of the first halfway decent creative writing essay I knocked out, at age 11 or 12. Generally, it would seem, everything has its origin in something else, usually something close to home. We make of these things what we do.
The Scend of the Sea
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, | Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell | And the profit and loss. | A current under sea | Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell | He passed the stages of his age and youth | Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew | O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, | Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
T.S. Eliot | The Wasteland
But for someone who enjoys being certain of where he's coming from, I too frequently find only ambiguity. It's an occupational hazard, I guess. The picture below is of Lebanon, for some or other obscure reason. Oh yeah, the juxtaposition of wealth and creased-and-calloused harbour-hand clutter reminds me — probably for some other obscure reason — of those who ponder Israel's onslaught on its northern neighbour. Much as I ignore Fisk's barracking of Hisbollah (he doesn't explain his dislike of them or his blaming them for the present war), I don't really find the need to explain my interpretation of it as the U.S. facing up to Iran.
If I do so, it's because I have time on my hands. Looking at local history, the last time a superpower took on local militia — towards the end of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th centuries, Britain (based in the Cape Colony) squared up to the Boers ensconced in the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics. The Boers, sitting on the world's largest deposits of diamonds and gold, formed a real and imminent threat to the British and, by logical (albeit British) extension, the world.
Revisiting Axel Heyst
I must go down to the sea again | To the lonely sea and the sky. | I left my shoes and socks there | I wonder if they're dry?
Spike Milligan | Pie Tray in Motion
The Brits tried regime change through the Jameson Raid as far back as 1895 but, like the Yanks forever after, they fucked up. Painting the boers terrorists guilty of human rights' violations, they forced the Anglo-Boer war [note: follow the link to Wikipedia; it gives a good synopsis]. After being hammered by the boers for four years, the Poms resorted to massacre, torture, concentration camps, and a scorched earth policy reducing the boers' infrastructure to nothing. (It does sound familiar, doesn't it?)
Out of this, they fashioned a media-friendly victory back home and wangled their way to a decades-long dominance of the gold and diamond industries.
Politically, things didn't work out too well for the superpower. Ostensibly, the boers lost the war. Yet, in 1910, what we today know as South Africa became the self-governing Union of South Africa. It took close on fifty years for South Africa to opt out of the commonwealth, declaring itself a republic. We then started the fight for democracy. Through preceding centuries, apartheid had flourished below the fold.
My point is that, besides these things taking time, the Anglo Boer War — in which tens of thousands died, was fought mainly in the Northern Cape (South Africa's Lebanon) and areas far from those under immediate dispute. And the dispute centered on resources.
All the rest boils down to fishermen and fat cats, tourists and locals, haves and have nots. We are Phlebus, the coral, the French Lieutenant's Woman, the lost ship, Axel Heyst, and the Snakes on a Plane. Like Sylvia Plath's Mushrooms, we're everywhere — speaking a language we no longer hear. Our foot has always been in the door. Trust me on this.
