Feeding Fears

 

We decimate things at our whim. The leaves from the three arbutus trees bothered both of us. He was out there, too frequently, with his broom and long handled dustpan, clearing his cobble-paved driveway, his immaculately swept pathways, his manicured flower beds. On the other hand, once in a long while, I cleared the fallen leaves on my side with my noisy battery-powered blower, and stuffed the fragmented offal into a black bag, ready for the garbage. Both of us were bothered by the fallen leaves, he much more than my little bit. And right from the start, when I first called the property mine, he’d let me know that he ‘feared that those trees would have to come down, someday’. After all, with that smaller one on my property line, and the two larger ones within his, they obscured my view, but not his.

Birds frequented them. Spring-time Robins. Summer-time Northern flickers. Winter-time Chickadees. Autumn Sparrows. And even resting hummingbirds. But the live leaves, bristling and waving, sometimes hid the birds’ flittings from us. Then too, the wide-spread branches reached up into the sky, a good fifteen feet high, and their rake did impede our ocean view. We’d see so much more of The Strait were they to come down. But I was most reluctant. Trees scrub the sky clean. Trees give life. Trees take decades to grow. Trees take precedence over our own preferences, surely?

But that neighbour also had a magnificent and deeply green and very tall Deodara tree. At some fifty feet in height, and at least twelve feet wide, it not only blocked some of our own vista, but also dropped its messy pine needles atop his other neighbor’s glass-top greenhouse. “For years now,” he uttered, uncertainly, “I’ve been meaning to cut down this tree, much as I don’t want to.”

Thing is, for most of us, excising the detritus of our lives, let alone the obvious, is a difficult thing to do. All over the yards through our very human existence there are the discards and rotten boats and rusted trucks and the heaps of rubbish that clutter our lives. There is the obvious. There is the dubious. There is the valuable, (which may not be useful.) And then there’s junk.

So too for our fears. We indeed have fear for a reason. It serves us. It can ensure that we are safe. But then too, our whole lives become conditioned to fear; fear that we are insufficient; fear that we do not measure up; fear that we do not have the latest; do not have the best; do not have what he or she has; and we can fear that we are not as worthy as any other. We do not wish to be called ‘cheap’. And so, commercialism feeds on our fears. So too do our politicians. So too do even our friends and families and neighbours. One ‘needs’ to ‘measure up’.

And so, we can hack away at the tall poppies within us. We can topple the evolving trees that may grow up from inside us, and we can scare away the birds of our thoughts that may choose otherwise to roost. We take on the constructs of others before us; we can adopt their religions; we often adopt their political stripes; we do sing beside their flags; and we follow the queues that would lead us to the troughs of acceptability, lest, like an escaped prisoner hurrying away from the ubiquitous wall, the spotlight falls on us, and we are arrested, recaptured, or shot.

Those trees on our property lines came down. All four of them. The sky grew bigger. But did our worldview? Did we really contribute to the health of the whole? Did we really gain in our yard’s value so that some future person may benefit, let alone ourselves? And do the birds now merely find some other resting place; just as does one’s own thoughts, when there simply is too much of the mind’s fluttering of fallen leaves with which to contend?

The trees were mulched. All four of them. Like letters of the alphabet in scrabble, their sense was reduced to nothing. And the snarl of chainsaws and growling augers eventually left too. So too did the birds. (But at least that awful volume of leaves shall no more be a bother, eh?)

Of Ethics and Integrity

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical lodge within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through the ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved. Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character, or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. Yet let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. At our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become embarrassingly unearthed.

Untimely Unearthed

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical entity within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through our own ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved? Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character; or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. So then let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. And surely, at our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become unnecessarily and embarrassingly unearthed.

Ekphrastic Expositions

 

Ekphrasis? One explains things from one’s own point of view. We expound with emotion, with insight, with knowledge, and even with a pleasurable amount of guesswork. So too do we live in the canvas of our lives. So too do we build upon our perceptions. And the original work, the poem, the painting, the photograph that we expound upon, given the creative springboard that gives rise to our own voice, is as ancient an ekphrastic exposition of our minds as would be a gift from a Greek muse.

Ekphrasis? It’s the big words that can be off-putting. The very chiaroscuro of our elucidations can be too much of a juxtaposition, and without a ready mental formula to deduce what is being read, or heard, the brain gives up. The ears tune out. We get bored. Why not just be simple? Collectively, we feel little responsibility toward assimilating every new concept. It is the rare individual, here and there, who wishes to ‘know everything.’ There simply is too much. Yet inherent to the ‘dumbing down’ of society, as we eschew big words for little ones, and as we hook into Hemingwayesque pithy pronouncements, such as those anchored in the sea of an Old Man, over a predilection for Victorianesque prolific phrasing, such as those surrurating amongst the shifting sands of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is that the vitality and richness of a living language stalls. Keep it simple. Do not ask me to look up a word. Make your references clear. Do not ask me to look up a Title. Make your references obvious. Do not ask me to read for too long, listen for too long, watch for too long, sit for too long, converse for too long, or think for too long; I just want to scroll at my phone. Its screen does not challenge me to stick to something, unless it interests me. I can flick through stuff. I can text without worry about correct grammar. My auto type will correct spellings, most Lee. So what if it makes miss steaks.

The argument for clear articulation is a double-edged sword. Ekphrasis, at best, explores one’s thinking under the Damoclean concept of evolving spiritually, responsibly. But in conspiring freely, our self-awareness by contrast becomes a consummate concentration, enslaving us to self-centricity, egoism, and independent connection. Huh? Yes, we can connect with others across the globe, but at large we get to say what we want, independently, even irresponsibly, and indubitably self-serving. Our every action, however, impinges on all, not just around us.

Chiaroscuro? Day and night have their smudging hours. The middle ground of left and right is where action yields to compromise, to complicity, to compassion. Integration, by degrees, becomes a fuller acceptance. How to accommodate that our own throne of responsibility, which is the human condition, is to be under that sword of Damocles, where every thought, and action, can be questioned, usurped, overturned? Very few things in our world are absolutely and totally and inalterably ‘right’. We are, as a species, too easily fragmented, dissociative, warmongering, and contentious to be lumped into a wholesome group, such as those with the collective brain of termites, or bees, or butterflies. Our metamorphosis is generally individualized, and random, and even a choice, or not. Yet still, mankind evolves more by accident than by design, however much an individual’s chosen cultural group, or not, may control our thinking. At issue is the meaning behind ‘mankind’s evolving.’ Unless we are entirely given to all of us simultaneously becoming loving and compassionate towards each other, as a species, we remain primitive, collectively speaking. And therein lies the rub; integration, fully, would have one accept ‘all’.

Ekphrasis, then, is a Greek word meaning, ‘exploring with a detailed description’. But it is not about the selfies we take with our cell phones, or where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what’s on our plate. It is rather about the degree of our sensibility of our responsibility toward The Whole. It is not about moralizing and controlling; it is about understanding. It is, after all, about one for all, and all for one.

Graduated Grades Theory

 

Hereby initiated, coined, theorized, full integration is not easy. There is no ultimate graduation. Individualized and abstract, the variegated shafts of the Grade Theory curriculum are neither predetermined, nor predestined. Attainments within any given Grade Level, and even from one Grade to another, are perhaps gradual, or perhaps in paradigmatic leaps. As such, insights and apprehensions are exciting, or subtle, or blends of both. And one may graduate from Grade Two to Grade Five, predominantly, or regress back down a single shaft to Grade One, at any age, or at any stage of one’s progress.

Put simply, a lifetime is seen in terms of passing through natural grades of maturation and comprehension, where predominant behavioral traits sustain one at any given Grade Level, while one may have perceptions and insights pertaining to all grade levels simultaneously. We may well attain levels of expertise in our differentiated curriculums, beyond our age group, that are observable, yet we can evidently still be out of our depth in foreign, unfamiliar, or challenging fields. Some will find such challenges invigorating. Others will baulk and retreat to their own comfort zones. Idiomatic, particularized, and empowering, we prefer the stance from which we may hold court, intellectually, spiritually, morally, physically, emotionally, and even politically.

Integration is not easily attained. Each model of mankind, however simplistic or complex, is perceived as a progress through levels of comprehension and attainment that determine one’s predominant proclivities, or behaviours. From Adler; within Graves; through Maslow; to Jung; we apprehend their integrative contentions, perhaps with sincere interest, but easily may forget the particulars of their curriculum, suggestions, or esoteric challenges. We generally are on our own pathway. Sometimes, we adhere to the group. Sometimes, we stick to our own beliefs. Sometimes we agree, disagree, vote, disavow, and absorb. Yet all along the months and years of one’s life, integration keeps challenging our humanity with its endlessness of more and more.

Being human, evidently, is a complex state. One is assailed by variability. Choices determine pathways, constraints, attainments, and patterns of behaviour. And behavioral patterns in turn become one’s predominant proclivities. Grade Theory is not about a naturally chronological maturation; it is about one’s endemic comprehension, absorption, integration, perception, and apprehension of the largely individualized curriculum inherent to one’s awareness. We take on the habits and customs of our forefathers, our tribe, our family, our friends, our school, our church, our political affiliations, our country’s cares, and our national identity. We can become racist, xenophobic, polarizing, and entrenched. Indeed, integration, full integration, absolute compassion, complete love, and utter understanding is not easily attained. Rather, we have glimpses and insights and momentary practices of them. We are, necessarily, self-protective, lest we find ourselves entirely dissipating into the morass of mankind, devoid of our own ego, smudged beyond our own boundaries, bereft of the curriculum vitae of our individual identity.

There are adults still in Grade Seven who realize Ph.D. aspects in themselves. There are post-doctorates who still need to perfect some Grade Three concepts. Being ontological does not make one epistemological. Meaning making is not always rational. To accept that each of us is highly differentiated in potential, yet sometimes may ‘naturally’ be graded and grouped, can be bristling to some. Yet to absorb, accept, include, and love everything and everybody, now there’s the rub. The Grade Theory, in conception, is hereby intended to help. Integration, after all, is all.

The Plight of Pranks

 

The belligerent banging at our cabin door penetrated my deep sleep. It was an anxious, agitated, ugly sound. Instantly, there’s a sea-dread in the dead of the night. Muffled shouts erupted in the corridor, and then the distinct, “Wake up! Get up. Get out,” urgency of it assailed me. Outside the porthole, it was pitch black. I was on the top bunk. My wife was below. And no sooner had I tossed aside the bedding, and leapt down, than my ankles were in cold water! A certain panic arose. We both scrambled to the door, and as we yanked it open, gushes of deepening water swirled and sloshed and gurgled into our space, quickly rising to our knees. The corridor lights showed the water to be an ugly rusted brown, and it reeked. I waded back into the cabin to pluck at our already floating suitcases, since they had been packed and now waited only for our early arrival at Southampton docks, but a ship’s officer barked: “Leave that! We’ll retrieve your luggage. Go! Go! All passengers, go up to the lounge!”

The lounge? That might’ve been my first indication that things were not too drastic. After all, we were not being called to the lifeboats. Yet still, the ship was listing, astoundingly, and the water grew yet more voluminous as we struggled up our short corridor, of about four cabins’ worth of noisy people to either side, to join up with the jostling passengers, almost all in pajamas and night gowns, crowding at the T junction to the main C deck starboard passageway. At the closed-up corner cabin a purser kept vaingloriously banging on its door, and shouting alarms, but then we all sloshed on past, heading for the stairs. Still, some of us had to duck our heads down from the malodorous spray of the overhead sprinklers. Several of them, it was apparent, were spewing out this putrid smelling water as quickly as possible.

We straggled into the lounge, all of us looking dishevelled, and somewhat distraught. The ship’s personnel found us blankets, and pillows, and organized hot beverages. “Your luggage will be waiting for you,” they promised. And then it struck me. My artwork! Twenty years’ worth of sketches and water-colours and even an oil painting or two, all rolled together and left standing in the cabin closet, alongside my suitcase, with my brand new pair of shoes waiting on the floor. I had to get that roll of paintings!

“You! Where do you think you’re going?” A ship’s officer called out. I baulked. "Just got to rescue my artwork, Sir,” I tried. His finger shook. “Oh no you’re not. No one goes downstairs until we’ve found out exactly what the problem is, and that everything is secure. You stay here!”

Well, that’s how come, as I write, nearly 50 years later, I have so little of my formative work. But there were yet more dire consequences as a result of that sad evening aboard the last voyage of the Edinburgh Castle, on the 11th April, 1976. Indeed, we all might still go on learning from them.

As part of a Facebook group, called Union Castle Line Ex-Passengers, which I joined just last month, Pauline Hollis wrote: “I remember that well. The crew were throwing anything they could over the side. We saved a bag of the large Lego blocks. I seem to remember a stowaway and a breakdown somewhere between Cape Town and Southampton.”

Yes. In fact, back then Ian Pursch was the purser, and (his) Paula (not Ms. Hollis), was a junior purser too. They became friends of ours. We toured Scotland together. (My wife and I waited for them in London while they went on the last voyage, sans passengers, to the Edinburgh Castle’s sad grave.) But so too had someone else met her death on the last voyage of the Edinburgh. We learned that an old Scottish woman, the one in that corner cabin, hoping to make it back to her homeland after being in Africa all her life, had died of a heart attack. She never made it home. And as for the reason? Some partying prankster, on that final night of the long voyage, had held a match up to a sprinkler. And yes, when we docked at Southampton, the ship’s flag was at half-mast. One plays pranks, but there are consequences. And one sails, but all our journeys do come to their end.

van Niekerk's Veracity

 

“I just wanted you to know I’m OK. I’m here, just letting you know,” he said last night, etched clear as a Zoom projection onto my white board in the university classroom. The other students, in their ranks up the rake of the auditorium seats, wondered how I might respond. John’s image, as a full-grown teenager with his black hair and chiselled chin, his strong brown eyes, and his swimmer’s fit physique, clad in a white shirt tucked into jeans, stood in front of a background of bright green trees.  Was he at the nearby Magnolia Dell? He was bunking, and we both knew it, but now he was contacting me, just to let me know that all was well. An intrusion on my visceral lecture about Dynamic Integration, I but briefly paused while I took in the alert senses of my students as to whatever I might say.

The thing is, the truth about one’s life gets tangled. We attempt to place happenstances precisely, but as we grow older the timelines overlap, and we can search for connections by which to slot in the particular events that demarcate our passage of time. Just when John had got up and left the classroom was not clear to me. (Is not clear to me.) Why I should be an old man, still lecturing, and he but a teenager, when he’d always been a constant friend in my own youth, was perhaps subconsciously understood, even while I was dreaming. Lucid dreaming, it is called. We know we’re dreaming. We can even direct our dreams. We can face into our fears. We can determine if we should give in to temptation. We can even be compassionate toward ourselves, and others, and we can awake with a sense of having washed away at our ‘dirty laundry’. There’s power in dreaming. We are not necessarily just ‘led by the nose’.

But the intrusion that John made into my classroom happened without my having beckoned it. Or did I not? Just yesterday I’d re-read the three-page story of John (on p. 303, of 50 Years On... Pretoria Boys High Class of 1970, Our Stories), and I felt sad that we had but one indistinct picture of him. Then too, I was reflecting on the great privilege of often being a guest at John’s parents’ house, in the prestigious neighbourhood of Waterkloof Ridge. Back in the late 60’s, a maid, a cook-boy (who was really a full-fledged man), and a chauffeur, as well as a constant gardener, complemented the house-hold staff. John appreciated them all. Laundry was always washed and ironed the same day. And the table was set for dinner guests, or luncheon guests, with crystal and... well, one gets the picture.

Thing is, almost 60 years later, just last night, I’d dreamed about John for the first time, (far as I can recall.) We never re-connected after High School. Conscription into the South African Army boiled my soul. I wanted nothing to do with my past. And whatever old school friends I had, I lost them all. But not in memory. My affection for friends stayed the same. It was just the detachment I threw around each of the people I’d befriended, so long ago, cordoning each off, like icons in the desktop of one’s computer screen, each with a program that goes unused, until one clicks it, (at times ineffectually,) open. (It’s a habit practiced, yet still too long.)

Well, John’s message has me deeply affected. It’s as if I’d been re-assured from another realm. Then again, quite aware of the synaptic gap that inhabits every one of our neuronal interactions, I’m much given to understanding the creative impulses inherent to the artistic, as well as the phenomenological bent, of those such as myself, who also are easily given toward making things ontological. ... Huh?

That’s part of the complexity of one’s thought processes, in dreaming. (Sometimes, even in daydreaming, complexity creeps in.) We make of our moments a kaleidoscope of meanings. And then we can conjure that which has some sort of sensibility to it all, for ourselves. Epistemology aside, we are, essentially, quite imaginative beings.

As for what my response was: “Thanks, John. Good of you to let us know you’re Ok. Communication is everything.”  And he disappeared. And then, John’s classmates smiled.

So, it goes. Such are dreams. And I wonder, shall we ever ‘meet’ again?

(cover designed by Justin Neway)

50 Years On... Pretoria Boys High Class of 1970: Our Stories : Pretoria Boys High, The Class of 1970 at: Amazon.ca: Books