#15

Robben Island (2005)

I can see the island from here. White sunlight beams through the open window, accompanying the cool Atlantic sea air in a complement of warmth and cold to choose from. Warmth and cold dapple through and onto me like the colours of a spotted dog. The mix self-regulates, and renders itself pleasurable.

On some mornings the island is barely visible.  The air thickens around it forming a laced veil which deceives the mind into recognizing it as some distant section of the peninsula.  Could this be why it fades from memory so easily?  Because it is always elusive; sometimes there, sometimes not. It blends with the background, seemingly indistinct from the sea.

In the mind there is a conscious distinction between past and present but subconsciously and unconsciously we brush up against our personal past with every experience we have.  Every experience teases out our experiences of the past and we live out the past in the present in this way.  On a personal level we are indivisible from the past and manifest this past in present experience as a means of confronting the demons which the self must conquer in order to actualise itself.

 

Similarly, as a society, we are indivisible from our past, from generations of experiences, so we play out ancient dramas in the present.  While conceptually we imagine a past from which we neatly divide ourselves, the emotional state of a society or individual brings the past into the present as if time were irrelevant.  Tempers run hot over centuries, long trends and the scars of yesterday remain with us, supported and reinforced by emotional transfer from one generation to the next.

Scientifically, we love the idea of chronology, placing one event next to the other, creating discreteness between events in time so that we may reason the distance between us and the past.  Emotionally though, we are bound to our most significant experiences and events, the ones which had more impact, and can draw up into our experience of the present in a single breath.

What if then, in the emotional world, time is not absolute and neither is space?  What if all history is constantly superimposed in the present; through cycles which both individuals and mankind are bound to? A constant recycling of the past with every moment, where nothing is discrete and separate but everything continues; sometimes contiguous, sometimes non-linear, jumbled up, collapsing time and space?

 

What if every moment in the past were as relevant as if it occurred only yesterday?  Would that not explain the world we see today?  How can something as significant as the island so easily disappear from memory?  When Leopold’s ghost still haunts the Congo today, how can we forget our past in just fifteen years?

Is it more that we have become distracted, that consciously our avoidance and obsession with material gain, power and entry into the ‘new world’ of commerce and democracy has blinded us to the fact that we still rub up against our not too distant past with every new step we take into this ‘new’ future; where the poor are still hungry and the rich still greedy?"

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# 14

That meeting point ...

That meeting point, between literature and philosophy, began to occupy my every waking moment. Soon, it had arrested me entirely, and I could no longer stop myself from writing. I felt I had to write myself in to that interface, that meeting point.

There are rhythms that emerge when writing. Words, ideas, senses and emotions combine, dissolve, disperse and recombine. Meaning is transmitted in the interplay. The quest of writing is finding the words that unlock meaning. Writing is modelling and remodelling how words come together; about finding the combination that unlocks meaning, and gives expression to, or transmits sense and emotion the most aptly or accurately.

The interface is a place of discovery, a place of surprise, emergence. There is a chemistry between words and ideas that hosts the potential to yield unpredictable outcomes when philosophy meets literature. And as I wrote and rewrote with devotion, that chemistry became the sea in which life began to swim in me again.

At the interface I could dance. I could sketch and feint my way around the edges, dip into the abyss and return. The writing – or rather, the process of it – acted as a lifeline. I could plunge into the depths and be ensured of return.

I had already answered the question of what would ensue if I became lost in the deep, but I came to find it irresistible. For madness does not exist alone; it exists in combination, and the cocktail was a mix of the terrifying, the exciting, the mundane, the banal, and the enduring. To be at the edge of chaos, and to be able to pass into and out of it, made me feel powerful again.

My fears and anxieties retreated when I enacted the dance, and life flowed palpably within me during the moments of engagement. But perhaps the greatest awareness that grew within me, was the reality of infinity; that it was not just abstraction, but real, and that everything depended upon it. That without it there could be no existence; no finite, no real. These things possessed each other, and co-evolved to make things as they were. From this there was, and could be no escape.

The asymptotic was undeniably palpable. It resided in every judgement, every observation, every measurement – and yes – every emotion. Everything that we experienced was approximation. It is all we are capable of. We are always at the edges, always caught in cycles. It is in this sense that our existence embraces the infinite.

Nothing as absence – in its absolute sense – cannot exist without the infinite. They are a complex duality. There is noise in silence as much as there is silence in noise.

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