I LOVE YOU, WE SAID
Chapter 13: Spiritual Fire
A serialised novel
I tried out for the high school shooting team and got in.
Competed in athletics events and did well until I pulled a hamstring and developed a chronic problem with it and retired from the long jump.
It was in class — German, Afrikaans, English and Art — that I found my niche. Seated alone outside on a wooden chair in the wind-blown autumn schoolyard I made a sketch of a naked tree, rendering its bark as armour plating, the happiness of doing things differently boiling in my blood. In truth it had been a mistake, someone had knocked my sketching arm and I’d made the best of the hard near gouge in the page by turning it into the edge of a metal plate, riveted apocalyptically to the tree, and repeating the motif.
My armoured tree didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t art; packaging it as art was a conceit, a cleverness, detestable and self-serving and dishonest. But the skill level was good and privately I liked it, like a true fraud. My art wasn’t creation, it was a knack for finishing, polishing, hiding the nature of things.
I needn’t have worried. Nobody remarked on the imagery or even the proficiency of the drawing. My teacher did not ask about the meaning of an armour-plated tree. If she realised, she didn’t care. The drawing ended up in my end-of-year tube of send-home art and lay unopened for years in my mother’s house until it was lost between moves.
I was impatient to know the nature of genius, to know if perhaps I had it, but I found no resonance in my circles or academic environment. My mother didn’t wield her influence again to encourage me to carry on with art, and so I took it as a sign not to. I wanted to but didn’t — because I wanted to. It was too important. Finding out for sure that I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be would have been devastating. Instead, I pinned my hopes on writing, which, as it turns out, one can spend many more years on suspecting you’re not good enough, only to find out that indeed you aren’t, when it’s much too late to stop.
At fourteen, I began to write constantly. I felt charged with the sensory universe, flooded with empathic consciousness. My poems came in droves; one was of a bull’s struggle in a flooding river, silent, furious and wide-eyed, succumbing to the water, the vision an apostasy, an outpouring of hatred of power and tyranny. Others were of the sun, alien tongues, funereal spirits, the Son of man. I wrote my poems on the pages of an A5 notebook, black with red spine. I was confused about the nature and meaning of my scribbling but filled the notebook with it that year and five more throughout the rest of my high school career. I lost them all, one by inexplicable one, these unrepeatable feats of clarion writing, all but a few remembered phrases. The natural (though vague and affected) writing of teenagers burns out; it is a brief spiritual fire. On losing innocence later on, on writing to be read, my flair retreated — returning on occasion, tantalisingly, but always retreating again. The gem, the germ, the fire… It was small and intense, and it left.
During all the confusion and turbulence of high school, the delusions of grandeur and tragic misunderstanding, one small event stopped me dead in my tracks, giving me a breathtakingly simple and penetrating model of the meaning of my life and placing me achingly within reach of immediacy. A teacher told us a story about her two brothers: the first a gifted achiever, the second a tireless student of life who took notes — in church, while watching television, at intersections in his car on the way to work.
It was fantastic symbolism, allegorical and inspiring and clear. What had happened to them? Did the natural fulfil his potential? Or did he slide into surprised, wounded obscurity? Did the raging, serious student (wild-haired, desperately working) burn himself out? Were they the same, two sides of the individuation through which we are separated from the whole? Did he get waylaid by irrelevances? Which one was I? I had never had to work hard at achieving good marks or accolades. I couldn’t bear half-hearted work, but I knew, on hearing this, that I wasn’t wringing the very sap out of life. I had lost years of unused time and opportunity. How noble it was, how perceptive, to live one’s life furiously! One had to be an achiever and work hard. You had to note down and study the madness and the structures and results and misery, to learn; and then let the brain come by its leaps of understanding — and again, record those realisations and formulations, lest the mind disengage again in its quest to laugh, joyously, tearfully. No innate ability is fully realised if its host languishes. And no studious hack who refuses entry into the sublime does anything but repeat himself.
But I didn’t ask these questions. I lost much through childish complacency, I realised years later, faced with the problems of writing. Countless insights, unrecorded, gone forever. Countless experiences, unprocessed, lost. There’s more, but that’s the shape of it.
A teenager debuted with a volume of poetry that shocked me with its depth and strangeness, its difficult perceptions, its phenomenal eloquence. The girl was sixteen, only two years older than me.
I had heard of Transvaal children. Their matric marks were legendary; some took up to ten subjects and earned distinctions in all of them. This girl was in the mould of that strange, terrible race of achievers in my own country. She had written a book! I had never thought of writing a book. The idea of multiple distinctions paled in comparison to the possibility of writing such indelible words. Her colourless, wide eyes and superbly unaffected, serious young girl’s face looked out at me with something I did not understand. As adults we believe we have the experience to discern the attitude and emotions and even situation of someone from their photographs. We can do no such thing. But then, too, all I wanted was to be able to see behind those eyes.
Later on, I heard of her early marriage in her university years, and of her politicisation and her habit, people said, of using haughty, overly correct Afrikaans phrases. It was clear to them that she had distanced herself from them and despised them and that she deserved the same scorn.
But I didn’t think she despised them, even if they deserved it. She had the courage to admit the injustice of South Africa at its historical nadir in the mid-eighties, to say it out loud, even if it was in departure, and especially in the bitter throes of it. If it hurt someone and made it seem as if she despised them, perhaps it was inevitable. Their — our — cause was a lost one, and the way we had been taught was doomed. We were doomed, said her face.
Or perhaps she did despise them, as we despise those we love the most when they allow themselves to die. Why did she have to follow their ideas when she had such wonders of language and thought in her head? I loved her, for the detestation or accusation or braveness or sadness in her eyes, and the miracle that was her mind.
These were the formative women of my life: the high school poet and accidental radical; the almost-sweetheart from my youth with the pretty mouth and matter-of-fact intellect; beautiful Tersia, whom I had failed. Each had the key to the door inside me, and perhaps one of them had been right for me. But I had chosen them for their inaccessibility, and when they proved to be as specified, discarded them. Nobody unlocked my heart; nobody held me and made me whole, nobody needed to, and I remained afraid.
I should have had the honesty to look one of them, Tersia perhaps, in the eye, for whatever her gaze held; affirmation of an us, accusation of the vulnerable, something totally beyond me. I should have had the courage to let the truth lodge forever in my heart, to guide or destroy me. But I didn’t.
I got very drunk on the night of my high school matric farewell on sour-tasting, frothy Carling Black Label, staggering amid other drunk teenagers in the veld outside the town at our after-party, spitting and swallowing the foam welling up in my throat from too many beers, drunk too fast. I sat down and rested my head on my knees. A blonde girl I hadn’t seen before, from a neighbouring town or a different school or grade, came to sit with me.
‘Hi,’ she said. I stared at her. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. I considered her.
‘I’m dying,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Dying,’ I said. I felt cruel.
‘Can I hug you?’ I nodded and hung my head, considering my death. We kissed desperately, holding onto each other.
I had to leave. But Lottie, my ride, was weeping the tears of tremendous loss. He was being helped into his car by some of his friends. When they tried to console him, he threw his keys away into the night, sat down and wept bitterly once more.
Lift-less I considered my death again. It was bullshit, I guessed. My mouth was glazed with blonde girl’s kisses, my lips crushed and swollen. She wanted my address, to write to me. It was beautiful. I wanted nothing more than to press my mouth into hers again and breathe in her sweetness, but as I leaned in, I thought I saw a flicker of boredom and impatience on her face. Some kind of cynicism at work. What was she up to? She wanted it, but not really. What was it to her? A kiss, but not just a kiss. Something more. Inducement to a contract, that’s what it felt like. A co-dependent bond, not a healthful adventure. More was expected. Perhaps that’s what all relationships were, comfort and protection in return for her friendly charms and favours. It was all so very calculating and indiscriminate; she might have chosen anyone for our little tryst, but I was the one who sat alone and apart. Who’s to say that love, by her definition, wouldn’t end as easily as it began? I was expected to sign an unspoken accord, an agreement to call sex love when in fact it was barter. It was banal and crude, and my virginal, pious, fucked-drunk eighteen-year-old mind inferred it all from a sweet young girl’s innocent gesture.
Thus decided about women, I put my school years behind me and turned my eyes on Stellenbosch University, where the next year I enrolled for legal studies and changed everything about myself and had my heart broken properly.
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