This house is turning into a hotel December 16, 2009

Says my mother across a table of pretty, colourful plates, and lunch leftovers.

You are never home.
All you want to do is see your friends.

Yes – because when I am home, you’re either out at work/shops, or you’re arguing with me
I keep going out because I breathe easier than living here
Because I have to hide myself from you here
Because you won’t accept my issues, or my lifestyle in their entirety
Because when we speak we misinterpret each other
Because I am not your 12 year old baby
I am your 20 year old daughter
I think and I change my mind
And anyway I’ve never done things right in your opinion
And why should I be untrue to myself to please you?

Secret Medications December 14, 2009

This is how I do things from now.

Two friends of mine have given me various homeopathic remedies for anxiety, which they no longer need.I haven’t gone to doctors, and I’m currently tired of asking my parents for anything more complicated than a lift to the library. Moving back home seems to have rejuvenated me a decade… Suddenly I’m as reliable and independent as a ten year old.

I’m currently trying out some Nervoheel, a homeopathic preparation for nervous tension and general exhaustion, by a company called Heel.

I’ve had about 5 tablets over two days, they seem to be pacifying me without turning me into a boiled cabbage.

Sleeping is still very irritating though – I’m having what a friend of mine calls “lucid dreaming”, which basically feels both like I’m dreaming and I’m awake at the same time. It’s frustrating because I’m too tired to wake out of it, and too awake to fall into deep sleep from it. So when the alarm finally jerks me into total consciousness, I’m tired and grumpy.

Reading is tricky, I have to force myself to focus, and after a bit I can get into it and read properly. I’m constantly busy, listening to music, reading something on the web, watching something, or cleaning, cooking, fixing and changing my bedroom.

I’m going to finish the amount I have, then be clean for a few days, then try the next batch. It is all homeopathic, so I’m not expecting dodgy side effects or withdrawal symptoms. I do feel like I should write about it, because it’s important to me and hey, maybe someone out there surfing the interwebz will find this useful.

Let’s hope this works.

Today I count five long nails. Still restless as a lobster in a pot though.

A lot is changing in my life. I will blog about it when I can articulate it better. At the moment I am breathing, kicking and running. And peeling a lot of stuff off my walls

The Old Adage December 8, 2009

Part 1:

There it is

One more step in my emancipation

In this country you’re either the carrion or the vulture,

Or you get a set of wheels to run over birds with.

So I pat it proudly,

Assuming all the stereotypical qualities of gendered masculine identity:

Rolled up sleeves, angled chin, parted legs and a general corporeality that evokes confidence, precision, and pure balls.

So I stall a few times,

So what.

I’m driving at my own speed, and there’s little anyone’s shiny bumper can do about it.

In this country, my brief history here at least has shown,

That there is no room for hesitation.

Go big, or emigrate.

That’s how we roll here.

We take out knives so we can have bread to cut

We take out insurance so we can have axes to grind

We put up mirrors, look in, and get lost trying to decipher who “we” are.

That’s why I bought the car.

Because I refuse to be a victim any longer.

Because if I have lost the freedom to walk the streets – and it is evident that I have, it is evident in all the bleeding, tearing, festering vaginas, broken wrists, muted children, slashed pockets and gushing wounds of this country-

At least I still have the freedom to find other means, to find an escape route.

That is more than I can say for many other women here, in this country.

Too many women pouring their paychecks into their brothers’ bottles

Too many women feeding their sloth-husbands with money that could have sent a child to school

Too many daughters serving and slaving for a leech-father who will give them nothing but a price tag on their wedding day.

(I’m not quite sure how Part 1 ties to Part 2. Errm.

Some parts are even contradictory. Postmodern non-linearity wins again?)

Part 2:

And up it comes again

The old adage

Stemming from -

Not an ancient Greek

But a white American rapper

The words shoot like lightning bolts into my ears at the age of twelve

(skinny, short, anaemic and suicidal,

twitching in a bed alone

with an expiry date looming above me)

And forever after

((Thud)) into my cortex

Pulsating out from the white vest and silver dog tags

Shaping tattooed arms and throbbing throat veins:

You can do anything you set your mind to, man.

(the spacing really didn’t come out the way I wanted it to I can’t get this html stuff right!!)

A poem: Incision December 7, 2009

The hairs stood on my neck when,

At a jazz recital at half past seven

Tapping my foot quite amicably

And smiling at my singing friend

I heard the unequivocal cry spew out of her mouth,

Breaking dam walls and hearts

Halleluia

Halleluia

She sang

And all pretence was torn

My heart, cut with a precise incision,

Throbbed for its loss.

What can I say? A tough post on the inevitability of death and sickness December 7, 2009

As I grow older – nearly twenty years old now – I am realising that death is coming closer, to me, and to all those around me.

People are dying around me. They’re dying in the cities I fly over, and they’re dying in the city that I live in. While I dance and drink and study and write, people stop breathing. Doctors are not gods. The great postmodern technological era means nothing in the face of death.

Yesterday was a particularly heavy day because it reminded me of the evanescent nature of health and life. Much like on the night – exactly one month ago-  when three men broke into my house and I was woken up by security guards, I am forced to be grateful for that which I have not lost yet. We can thank whatever we want – burglar bars, medicine or Jesus – but the truth is, one day we will all die.

So what do I say to those left behind? What do I say to someone who has lost a friend, unexpectedly, suddenly, whisked out and away like a tablecloth pulled from a table and all the glasses are left clinking, shaking.

We are weak, like thin blades of grass shivering in the wind. And when it rains, it pours, and we are flattened to the earth, we are returned to our beginnings, to the earth from which we came, we are flattened, what are we?

Where do we go? Buried, burnt, swallowed by waters – returned to the elements. In my English course this year, I read a book by Justin Cartwright, about death and nature; the “mineral and geographical facts”, we are as earthly as ants and baboons, and death is but another segment of the cycle of life.

What do I say to my friend who hears death at night, rattling her bones and wanting to claim her, and she pushes on, not eating, not sleeping, sick, improving, weakening, growing and wilting and watching the hours pass, watching the days flicker like a disturbed television on the ceiling above her, her eyes flittering like insects, resting on nothing, there is no rest.

What do you say to that?

What do you say when misery and death stare out at you from a cellphone screen?

I cry. I run my fingers in my hair alone, 800 kilometres away and cry, listening to telephonic sobs and kick the walls, because that is the only contact I can make with anything.

Yesterday, when I come home. I talk and I listen and I hold her and if love is an element like water or fire, I rip out the dam walls and let it flow out.

I make practical suggestions. Money, money is always the problem. And science. You think we know it all? We know a fucking fraction. What do you say to the mysteries of psychology and biology? What do I say?

My English literature books will not be useless. I think of Cartwright and the inevitability of death. I think of Vladislavic` and the unknowability of people. I think of how both writers aim to show that the POINT is to keep trying, even if you know you cannot fight nature, even if you know death wins, even if you know you will always be limited in your understanding of anyone or anything.

The point is to push on, and keep on pushing on. Give all you can, because that is all you can do. You won’t win. But you will have tried. That is all that counts to me.

Final countdown (for real now) November 30, 2009

Seriously, it’s time for wee Marty to go home now.

 

English literature is amazing (go read The Exploded View, by Ivan Vladislavic’) but truly, a 3 hour examination is not the adequate way to express all we have learnt and understood. What do ya know, academia fails, yet again.

 

On the upside, I’ve been night-driving, have discovered that the interior of my car is pretty much a black hole at night, and I nearly gauged my indicator light the other day. The bonding session with the electric gate got a little too intimate too fast. Oh well, this is why I like white cars: when you scratch them, you can just use tippex to cover up

 

Time to ponder the aesthetics of landscape in relation to the unheimlichheid of the white South African male.

 

Toodles

Last week!! November 26, 2009

It seems the last days are always the wackiest.

 

I have a car

I’m almost done with my exams

My friends are relocating, immigrating, graduating.

Sending them off with my love and little else,

Because how do you fit three years into a suitcase?

Or into a sentence, for that matter.

A brief smile, a squeeze on the shoulder, is all I’m capable of.

Before I watch you disappear over the horizon

And hope the clouds keep you safe as you soar across them.

 

There’s hysteria everywhere

Or maybe only in my mind

The walls close in on me

And I sleep because I am tired

But only of my mind, my thoughts, exhausting.

When I lie down I crave rest but my mind pushes on, lonely, cornered, confused.

Every morning I wake up and it’s me again, “les memes limits, les memes pensées” (Schmitt, 1989).

 

Fuckin academia.

A wee update from the wee Marty November 14, 2009

In the land of the academic and the drunk, I am starting to get a leeeeetle bored.

Two exams down, five left.

Would very much like to be DOING things, rather than reading or writing about them.

 

I have settled in my new little place, it’s very sweet and cosy, and SO close to the main city centre (which, by Grahamstown standards, is two roads and a handful of shops).

Living by yourself gets lonely though, and so I find myself constantly seeking coffee with friends, and even now I am seated at a little coffee shop, with a Milo milkshake to my right, and a pile of notes to my left. A little kid is wandering around the place, stopping in front of a mirror to see what the ice-cream looks like when it’s on his tongue.

I’m still ruminating about the break in, at night. I lie there and wonder about all the possibilities. I can’t help it.

 

But things are moving. In a few weeks, one of my coolest guy friends emigrates back to the States. I’m buying his car. I’m moving out of that bladdy digs into my new apartment. I’m completing second year. I’m saying good bye to a few graduates. I’m going back home for two months.

So I remain in motion, although right now I really feel so static. All this paper…Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the right thing, studying all this literature. But I have huge dreams for Drama – just last night I wrote a short play, a monologue I’d like to work on, if my audition into the Contemporary Performance (third year course) next year is successful. Who knows…

 

Life is so murky sometimes.