A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

17/10/07

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Everyone’s perpetually searching for meaning in this indecipherable world. Some choose science, some love, others religion. I’ve chosen words.” D

Being a writer isn’t easy. You can read many of the extensive biographies compiled on the lives of those whose art affected people in certain ways, other than superficially. Kafka died overworked and penniless. Keats coughed himself to death. Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Shelley probably did too. Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out. So did Hemingway, so did… You get the point. Many don’t see writing as a serious vocation, some to such an extent that at times I question whether I am in fact a writer or a drifter (a euphemism for ‘fuck-up’ used by the rest of society). It was funny listening to my parents give me a lecture the other day, telling me that they were proud of my achievements, and would be of my future, “which is questionable in any event”. I love that. My own parents having enough surety to tell me that their son’s future was “questionable”. It must be this writer thing.

I think about it often… it’s probably led to this uncertainty of the future and indifferent swagger in the path of the present. I’ve been a writer (or at least understood the world in a writerly way) for as long as I can remember.

Scribbling sonnets in sunlight outside my grandparents’ house, penning poetry in primary school, writing raps on the bus, painting pieces on city walls.

But writing can do only so much, the rest is up to you.

Sometimes I don’t feel like myself as others, most of the time I don’t feel like myself as myself. Maybe it’s this interminable quest to understand a world where words fail its majesty, maybe it’s all just bullshit and I’m thinking too hard. Either way, one thing’s for sure…

This world is too fucked-up to understand, too amazing to appreciate.

And yet within this boundless expanse where hopes and dreams, heartache and destiny, halos and devils, hedonism and decrepitude, hunger and drunkenness all recklessly intersect, meaning alludes us. We could go on searching, the haunting search for why we stand, not how or where, and we’d hardly make any progress, lying to ourselves that we’re almost there.

Existentialism aside, writing, in its endless uncertainty, presents us with the pieces of the puzzle. It’s just our job to put them together. I’m halfway there. Save a seat for me next to Tolkien.

[D]

Final Destination

11/03/05

Final Destination

I know I'm supposed to update this column every week but I got caught up in the maelstrom of life unable to swim away from the whirlpool our daily lives suck us into. Naah, I was just busy, but I don't think I'm going to be able to update the column every week, maybe as often as I can sounds better. Yesterday something really freaky happened to me, it was fucking weird. So this tale's gonna make up the column for today.

I was on my way home from university yesterday, on the monotonous route I travel everyday when all of a sudden the monotone was broken with some live accident action right in front of me. A huge streetlight (those massive highway types) had fallen across the highway onto a car. You would think that on Durban roads, with all the ramshackle taxis and sketchy souped-up car attempts, the streetlights would be the sturdiest things on the road. But alas it was not to be. I was in the second car behind the unfortunate one when I saw the street light collapsing right before my very eyes. It all happened in slow motion, in that moment it took an eternity for the street light to hit the car, floating in mid-air, but as it struck the car it was as if time carried on from where it had stopped. Wham! The pole crashed into the car (just to give you an idea of how huge the pole was, it stretched across three lanes of the highway and even went onto the other side). The impact of the pole caused the car to stop dead in its tracks. It was as if a kid had jumped onto a radio control car crushing the bonnet and stopping the vehicle. The back of the car looked fine but when I saw the front of it I was completely shocked. The entire roof had caved into the car, the windscreen was mangled into the dashboard and the bonnet was flattened. The driver of the car looked pretty much unscathed to me, so I thought that he had miraculously escaped unhurt, but when we got a bit closer I saw his arms covered in blood and glass bits, and I saw him pulling out glass shards from his face and head, it was insane. Then I realised that if I had been thirty seconds earlier it would've been me pulling glass shards out of my face and head. Damn. Mini epiphany - I also realised that every now and then you've got to step away from the chaos of life and take some time for the subtleties and finer details in life. After all the entire earth is made up of atoms and molecules, so the little things in life really do count. Maybe the 'Big Guy' was teaching me a lesson today (by dealing that poor dude with a small country's worth of bad karma) or maybe its just the Grim Reaper saying, "You're next in line, buddy." If I don't update the site again, you'll know it was the latter.

Peace out y'all. Drive safely and watch out for those darn highway street lights, you never know...

P.S - This morning I went past the accident scene and the pole had actually crushed all the tar surrounding it and was, in fact, inside the road. Wonder how that dude is?


Sombre Situation, Macabre Mood