RIP Harry Kalmer

Gentle, funny, fierce.

A generous friend and a wonderful writer.

In around 2011, visiting with his wife Sanpad, Harry told me and Heidi, over a glass of wine, that he was doing an MA in creative writing at Stellenbosch. Marlene van Niekerk and Willem Anker were in charge. It sounded wonderful and I wondered if they'd take an Englishman. Harry said he thought they would. He made inquiries. He opened a door for me and The Book of War was the result. He was generous like that. Generous to other writers, which not necessarily an easy thing for a writer to be.

Last year he won the Sunday Times Literary Award for the English version of his MA novel, A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg. Not long after, he learned that he had cancer. He was fierce about the Oncologist who gave him the news. About the way he did it. A deep anger hit the consonants of the word, kanker. Kanker ouboet. Kanker.

I told him that, when I was around twenty, my mother said she was dying and I said: no you not, Mom. I told him that I owed a karmic debt for that denial. Harry said he was happy to take advantage of it.

So we talked about dying, tried to. It doesn't help much. We go through that door alone. We were working writers, earned our living of it, it was one of our connections. We could complain and laugh together about the unglamorous realities. I tried it a few times but Harry was no longer interested. A least you not dying, he said.

Second last time I saw him, he was lying on a couch in the sun in he and Sanpad's house in Observatory. I read something for him, a Japanese short story. He got this idea of having a series of readings. His friends reading to him in that sunny room. I agreed that it could be a lovely film. He got excited. Got up even. And then he went back to sitting, hunched forward over a hot water bottle. He apologized for the posture, said it worried some people.

I mentioned that the only thought I’d had, in terms of bringing something to read, was the first scene with the Judge in Blood Meridian. The scene with the Reverend Green in the tent in the rain. Where the Judge accuses the Reverend of bestiality. Harry laughed. It wasn’t something he would have chosen. But he remembered the scene in detail from times I’d told him about it. Even quoted from it. “With a goat.”

We laughed.

The last time I saw him, he had moved permanently to his and Sanpad's bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and he did a strange thing. He sat up straight and opened his arms wide. He tilted his head back. His eyes rolled up and he fell slowly on onto the pillows. I was frightened. I thought: he's dying, Sanpad should be here. Harry sat up again. I told him my fear. He said, me too. And then, but that doesn't mean you have to put on the fake worried look.

He was trying to ease the moment, I think. Lighten it.

I will miss him. His sharpness, his quirk. His courage in the face of death.

He leaves Sanpad, a fine tall son, Daniel, and a beautiful daughter, Jana. They kept him company every step of the way. Right up to the door.

He leaves a large body of plays to be performed, books to be read.

May God, or whatever means the good, bless you, Harry Kalmer. May God, or whatever means the good, bless you and keep you and make her face to shine upon you and give you peace.

This night and for ever more.

Bandiet - Rest in Peace, Hugh Lewin

This piece was first published by Style Magazine in 1996.

One morning in 1983 I woke up with a Security Policeman in my room. I was sharing a house in Mons Rd in Bellevue East with my friend the painter, Carl Becker, and a beautiful young woman, since emigrated to Australia, Carol Constancin.

The Security Policeman was bearded and casually dressed. He demeanour was relaxed, even warm. He seemed pleasantly surprised at the tastefulness of my quarters. The empty whisky bottle was placed just so on the rat-arsed Persian rug. The packet of Camels somehow highlighted the Becker etching on the mantelpiece. He spoke without looking at me.

"Where's Keith?"

"Huh?"

Keith was Carol's lover. But I was trying to figure out who the hell my visitor was. Had I met him during the course of some revelry and then forgotten all? But the previous night had been abstemious. The whisky was demolished two days previously.

"Where's Carol?"

"Isn't she in her room?"

"No."

I could only presume that he was a friend of hers.

"Where's Keith?"

"I don't know."

"What's your name?

"James."

"James who?"

"James Whyle."

"Thanks." He smiled pleasantly, left the room. I went back to sleep.

 Keith worked for the South African Students Press Union. (SASPU.) The union put out a newspaper advocating obscure, evil notions like democracy. Keith knew the Branch were after him. He laid low for a few days and then decided to give himself up. He went round to John Voster Square on a Friday afternoon and handed himself in.

Look, its really busy, they said, can you come back on Monday.

He did and they locked him up for many months.

It was around that time someone slipped me a battered, banned, coverless copy of Hugh Lewin's Bandiet. I devoured it. The book told tales that we weren't allowed to hear. Stories that were the opposite of what was coming out of Cliff Saunders' mouth on the television during the eight o'clock news.

 Hugh Lewin was in Pretoria Central, right next to gallows, when he first read Herman Charles Bosman's Cold Stone Jug. Bosman had been in Central for killing his step-brother, Lewin was in for blowing up electricity pylons. Sentences and 40 years separated the prisoners. Other than that nothing had changed. The men in married quarters still grasped each other in the darkness. Dagga and tobacco were still the currency. The place still had a spooky evil feel whenever there was a hanging.

 Lewin was there when they hanged the man he knew as Deysel, a rare white among the many blacks who occupied the cells of the condemned. Lewin sat in his cell and listened to the special programme that the secretary of the entertainment committee played over the loud speakers the night before Deysel stepped into the void. The secretary played Home on the Range, and Don't Fence Me In, and finally, at the end of the programme, I'll see You in my Dreams.

Lewin heard horrible stories about hangings in Central. Stories about the noose sticking and taking someone's face off, dropping him maimed and alive onto the sawdust covered concrete. Stories of women strapped between their legs because of the way the blood would gush from them. One dark, shivery morning he heard a woman sobbing as she was taken, straight-jacketed, to the gallows. She didn't go well, they told him afterwards.

Lewin was picked up after the Rivonia trial. His organization, the African Resistance Movement (A.R.M.) had ceased sabotage for the duration. The plan was that when government had locked up the Rivonia men, A.R.M. would ride again, showing the state that the forces of resistance were still alive. Blowing up electricity pylons. Not harming any people. Just a signal really: You haven't stamped us out. They never got a chance to do it.

Adrian Leftwitch, who had been Lewin's best man, and who had recruited Lewin into A.R.M., was picked up. He talked. Leftwitch, who always insisted that members keep no records, had not followed his own orders. The Branch knew a lot about A.R.M. After twelve hours of interrogation, Lewin also talked. But he talked selectively, only confirming information the police already had. They threw him in a cell and forgot about him.

 Then a bomb went off on Johannesburg Station.

Tonight, the interrogators told Lewin, we'll kill you.

They pulled off his glasses and started beating him. Close, personal stuff, using bare fists. When he fell over they kicked him upright again. To stop the beating, Lewin gave them what he though was the name of a further A.R.M. member: John Harris. But John Harris was the station bomber. He was already in the building.

 It was a busy night. Next door, Lewin's flat mate, John Loyd was been interrogated. Later he would turn state witness. A man with bloody hands came into the room.

That Harris, he said, another one who wouldn't talk without a lawyer.

And then, says Lewin, he wiped the blood off his fists and laughed. A couple of hours later John Harris jaw was broken. Four months later, John Loyd's evidence put a noose round his neck. The word in Central was that he went well.

It was the beginning of a seven year education for Lewin. Its lessons were simple. Hanging doesn't work and prison makes criminals. Survival in prison demands that you lie and cheat and steal. The Government was taking one out of four black South Africans, jailing them for pass offences, and training them in criminality.

But the people Lewin was in with did not end up criminals. For most of the seven years he was part of an elite company. Bram Fischer was Afrikaans aristocracy. Dennis Godlberg was a civil engineer. Jock Strachan was the prisoners' hero. On his release he published an expose of prison conditions, which improved dramatically as a result. Irritated, the security police framed him and put him back inside.

 No, the people Lewin was in with were not criminals. They were middle class whites, intellectuals. They studied through UNISA and staged classic plays. They had acted because they had faith that a better future was possible, and they suffered for their faith. In the early stages their isolation was almost complete. Outside the world continued, their children died, their wives made lives in England. They were adrift in the wash of history.

At the end of the seventies John Lloyd, flat mate turned state witness, re-emerged as chairman of the Anti-Apartheid group in Exeter, England. At the time of writing (1996) the Labour Party executive is deciding whether he should be allowed to stand under their banner. He claims that the ANC have effectively given him amnesty. Lewin feels he should face the Truth Commission before he makes such claims.

If A.R.M. had been as efficient as the ANC, says Lewin,  he would have been dead a long time ago. Despite his protestations, an old Bandiet anger burns against the men who shopped him.

The past is relentless. It seeps into the present like water finding its way to the sea. Marius Schoon, a fellow prisoner, is suing Craig Williamson, the fat spy who admitted responsibility for the murder of Schoon's wife and child.

Lewin is back in South Africa now, teaching journalism. He has never again been a member of a political organization. He came back as soon as he could. He was always coming back. He only blew up the pylons because he loved the place. He seems a quiet, methodical man. But every now and then he uses a word like ouens, a bit of Bandiet-speak, a hint that a middle-class boy was changed by years in prison, a sign that history lives.

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SAPPEUR FIJN AND THE COW

LYING ON ARMY beds in an army tent in the showgrounds in Bloemfontein, they hear the cow: mnooooo. And fall from their beds, laughing

            Nooit, he didn't. He didn't.

            He did. He did, ek se. Fijn did it.

            Fuck. He must have stood on a bucket.

            Sappeur Fijn is short and stocky with sly slant eyes and a sailors' swagger. Sappeur Fijn likes to leave the big generator loose in the back of the Bedford. When Fijn breaks hard at a robot, the generator rumbles forward under the force of its inertia, and the inertia of the taxpayers who paid for it, and commits suicide against the cab. When we unpack for the shows, Sappeur Fijn throws things as far and hard as possible of the back of the Bedford in the hope that they'll break and the Minori will have to say, ag nee fokkit man Fijn, wattie fok doen jy.

            Sappeur Fijn gets letters which he claims are from a girl and smirks and sniggers over them before fucking the tangled gritty pile of pipes which leans up against the water-purification system. In so far as I fear Sappeur Fijn I believe I should bend over whenever I see him in a baboon's gesture of sexual submission. Sappeur Fijn is a member of the Engineers, the Genieschool of the Suid-Afrikaanse Weermag. Sappeur Fijn is a soldier who works night and day to protect us from the dark ruthless AK-47 bearing terrorists who are fighting night and day to become voting South Africans like Sappeur Fijn. At the Bloemfontein showgrounds Sappeur Fijn greases his hair back and drinks and drinks and offers girls ice-creams in a smarmy deviant unsettling manner which makes the girls suspicious and scared so that they giggle and refuse the ice-creams. Then Sappeur Fijn disappears.

            The lieutenant is tall and ginger and worried. He wears a neat ginger moustache and gold-rimmed spectacles. It worries the lieutenant when Pike and Donaldson give black power salutes when they drive past black people in the Bedford. The lieutenant is tremendously fit and worried and proud of his two stars which are a commission from the State President who had to resign because he lied to the taxpayers who paid for the lieutenant's training. The lieutenant once smoked a joint at a party at the university where he became an architect and he enjoys talking to Pike and Donaldson who are graduate engineers with strange ideas and no rank. It worries the lieutenant when Pike and Donaldson say they would shoot better if they painted the State President's face over the faces of the dark cut out monsters they use as targets on the shooting range.

            In Bloemfontein the lieutenant is worried because the corporal drank a third of a gallon bottle of Tassenburg which Pike and Donaldson claim they found at a hotdog stand and took the section into town in the Bedford and drove over a Porche and damaged the Bedford's bumper. The lieutenant is worried and ginger and scared about what the major will say when he arrives to inspect the exhibition and finds that the Bedford is damaged and that the lieutenant has lost Sappeur Fijn. The lieutenant wants to phone his mother, but he doesn't. He goes round to see the MPs.

            More Sersant, says the lieutenant. Hey jy iets van Sappeur Fijn gehoor.

            O, says the MP sergeant. Daai ou wattie koei genaai het.

            It's already six years ago that these things happened. In those days they weren't sending soldiers into the townships. In those days the border was pretty much on the border of the country. Now the border goes all over the place, sometimes straight through the middle of families. Which is, I suppose, what civil war is all about.

            Sappeur Fijn was charged and found innocent in a civilian court. I don't know what the charge was. I saw him in camp afterwards and he told me that his defence when like this:

            I was too drunk to get it up, so I couldn't have fucked the cow.

            I heard later that Fijn was killed in a motor accident in Welkom. I've no idea what happened to the lieutenant, but the cow gave birth to a roaring monster, half man, half beast, who shrieks and jabbers over my shoulder when I watch the news on TV.

***

Sappeur Fijn and the Cow was first published in Forces Favourites, TAURUS, 1987.

It was republished in  The Penguin Book of Contemporary South African Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1993

The Excavations - Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll

25

 Uruk at Play

ON THE EVE of the equinox, the Partner gave Hob a pair of loose trousers and a shirt of fine white cloth and a pair of soft NanoHide loafers and told him to have fun and be careful and remember that his chip knew the way home and when Hob had left he addressed himself to the properties of the stone.

            Hob went out onto the street as the day was fading from the dome in a lurid mockery of the sunset outside. The lights came on among the trees and cybertabs appeared about the square and flashed their messages of endorsement for NektaPop and Grownston Flooring and Ghandi Cottons. The squares were crowded with youths and girls and older persons also and some were dressed extravagantly in the costumes of times and peoples past and many were masked. Hob sat on a bench on the pavement and he watched the people throng about and in half an hour he counted four who were dressed in imitation of himself as he had appeared on the tab. The people spoke and laughed and drank at the tables outside the eating places and it was not long before Hob was noticed for the very normality of his garb.

            Dude, you look so like that bushman guy.

            The youth who spoke was accompanied by two girls. He had a dark and chiselled face and he wore the costume of a pirate on the Spanish Main in days of old. He sported a thin and expressive moustache upon his upper lip and it served to emphasize the wryness of his smile.

            Like who?

            That bushman guy on the tab. That like, wasted those outsiders. Harvesters. What's your name? Have some of this.

            What is it?

            Hash. It's like, organic.

            Hob stared at the thin silver cylinder which was offered. A tendril of steam drifted from it. It carried a sweet peppery fragrance to the perceptive nostril.

            We'll call him San, said the girl with dark hair. She had a round face and the nails at the end of her plump fingers were painted red.

            Professor Dzugashvili will be totes impressed.

            She turned to her companion.

            He's super cute. Don't you think?

            The blonde girl nodded and smiled at Hob. A lithe figure with a wide mouth and eyes like a cat.

            Where's your girlfriend, she said. You must have a girlfriend somewhere.

            Her shirt hung open a little and Hob glimpsed her breast and he saw that her nipple was pierced with a silver stud.

            Don't stare San, said the dark girl. You'll get warts.

            Sorry, said Hob. He lifted the silver cylinder to his lips as he had seen the youth do and he inhaled.

            Do you know, said the blonde girl, that it actually means thief? San? It's actually a Khoi word for thief or vagabond.

            They study anthropology, said the pirate. With Professor Dzugashvili. It's incredibly boring.

            Which are you San, said the blonde girl. Thief, or vagabond?

            Vagabond, said Hob.

            Are you really, said the dark girl.

            She looked at her friend.

            I bet he's an accountant. You are, aren't you, San. A pretty accountant. You work in logistics. In the fresh produce segment.

            Someone, said the pirate, has to bring in the asparagus. Or what are we to eat with our Pinot Gris?

            What do you do really, San, said the blonde girl. Do you sit around all day, doing data capture in a virtual office?

            I work for COOL, said Hob. Why is the ground so far away?

            That would be the hash, said the pirate. Okay, he said. Drink. Who's got units ?

            There came a silence. A little hiatus in the throng and the dark girl sighed.

            I have, said Hob.

            The pirate assumed a careful yet hopeful demeanour.

            How many?

            I think… fifteen thousand, said Hob. I'm very thirsty.

            The pirate stared at him.

            Fifteen thousand?

            I think so. Something like that.

            Dude, said the pirate. You're like, the mother lode.

            We like you, San, said the dark girl. We like you a lot.

            The youth led them to a square and they found a table and sat and a waiter came to them and put menus down.

            Who's paying, he said.

            He is, said the dark haired girl. And she pointed at Hob. He works for COOL.

            We like him, said the blond girl. She smiled at the waiter. I want a double vodka. Stols. Do you have Stols?

            Yes, said the waiter.

            With cranberry NektaPop

            Two of those, said the dark girl.

            And we'll have beer, said the pirate. Ur Ale.

            He smiled at the dark girl.

            Because Sumerians did it first.

            The waiter took a tablet from his pocket and held it out to Hob.

            Chip, he said.

            Hob put his thump on the flashing square and the tablet beeped and the waiter looked at it and nodded and went away to get the drinks and the silver cylinder passed once more about the circle.

            You have to admit, said the pirate, that this is some good shit.

            My name's Cass, said the blonde girl. It's short for Cassandra.

            She leant forward and she smiled and she touched Hob upon his cheek with the backs of her fingers.

            You're hot, she said. What's your real name?

            Who needs names, said the pirate. On a night like this.

            He looked at Hob.

            You going to the conception?

            The big…

            Shindig, said the youth.

            You have to come with us, San, said Cassandra. It's going to be epic. Come cut a caper.

            I've never been outside, said the dark girl.

            Neither have I, said blonde Cassandra. It's my first time.

Ryk Hattingh - Rest in Peace, Live in Ecstasy.

Something was happening in Yeoville in Johannesburg in the eighties. A tribe was emerging. I thought of them as good whites that wanted to stay. They rode a new spirit, and James Phillips, rather than Nadine Gordimer or Andre Brink, was its voice. Like any good tribe, it had to have its entertainers and artists and I was happy to be one of them. As was Ryk Hattingh.

I met Ryk when an Aeroplanes member, Robert Muirhead, noted that I wrote some poetry and told me about a gig at Wits University where poets would be reading. Robert was part of the organizing committee and invited me to participate.

I’m not sure who was on the bill. Performance is a selfish state of mind and most of the time I was meant to be listening I was going through my own show in my own head. But the voice of Don Mattera managed to shatter my self-obsession. He read from a book he was working on, telling tales of growing up in Doornfontein, one of those areas of central Johannesburg that stayed racially mixed longer than most. Mattera told of the Italian and Xhosa strands of his family, and how the cultures mixed, just like the juices mixed when his grandfather pressed the grapes with his feet in the back yard, or the grain mixed when his grandmother pounded the maize. And he told of how the bulldozers came and his family’s life was demolished, and they had to start again from scratch in Soweto.

Then it was my turn.

Beetle beats its own rhythm,

Coming home, for the night.

Talks of supper, mother’s cooking,

Says that things will be alright.

Has a fish upon the bumper,

And a little shark behind.

In a time of plague and stoning,

Bringing father from the grind.

In the street stands mother waiting,

Holding baby by the gate.

Sun sinks red on Brixton Tower,

TV News will seal our fate.

On the screen the politician;

Loud his voice in his defence,

But our moral theoretician

Relies on simple common sense.

Writes a letter to the army:

Refuse to go, religious grounds.

Does the dishes, makes the coffee,

Tries to still the baying hound.

It wasn’t much, but it had its pulse and I beat it out slow and steady. There was a silence when I finished, and then Mattera’s voice, rich and growly as a township sax, belting out his appreciation. It was a great gig, and afterwards a tall, dark, beak nosed, bearded, Christ-like figure strode towards me and said:

“I live in Yeoville. Where do you live?”

“Yeoville.”

“I live in Natal St. Where do you live?”

“Natal St.”

“Andrew Ryk Hitchcock Hattingh,” he said, offering his hand. “You must come for tea. And dagga.” And he gave me his address.

Ryk lived in a flat that looked south over the park next to Sylvia’s Pass where it winds down Observatory Ridge and into the valley towards Doornfontein where Don Mattera’s house was bulldozed by apartheid machines. I walked up the next day and knocked on the door and Ryk opened it. He made tea, and then a joint and we started talking. He was working on a book. It was about a fire, and the reptile brain that lives in the core of our consciousness. The fire took place in the Knysna forest. Then a baby was born dead in the silent trees and a marriage broke up and Ryk came to Johannesburg and commenced to write.

We took to meeting daily, telling our stories and reading each other what we were working on. We didn’t criticize each other’s work. We had similar instincts about rhythm and the spoken word and when either of us read we knew that we were on the same path. They were a pure and fine and cultured gift, those mornings of talk and reading aloud.

Ryk and I started performing together at little left wing gigs organized by outfits like the End Conscription Campaign (ECC). We’d read snippets, alternating to form a conversation, in English and Afrikaans. The conversations were about history and growing up in South Africa. They were about politics and sex. We were both fascinated by sex, and soon enough a name suggested itself: ‘n Gesprek Tussen Twee Cuntos in a Land of Despair. A “gesprek”, is “a discussion”, and “cuntos”, well, there’s a South African street word, “ou” pronounced “oh”, meaning dude, chap, person.

I learnt great lessons from Ryk. Afrikaans had been abysmally taught at school. In the broader world it was the language of hectoring politicians, a tool of oppression. In the army I had got a glimpse of its power as a medium of insult. There was an Elizabethan earthiness to it that undermined the politicians’ attempts to sanitize and control. And now, working and playing with Ryk, I found that Afrikaans could be beautiful and subversive.

The ECC organized a gig at the Oxford Hotel, since demolished, in Rosebank. It gathered together shows and performers that were appearing in town. Radical shows like Mathew Krause’s Famous Dead Man, about Verwoed and the man who assassinated him. Famous Dead Man featured an enormous turd in the colours of the apartheid flag. (This rang a chord. In Kroonstad I had stood at attention on the parade ground, listening to speeches about God and Patriotism, and imagined shitting on that flag.) They were shows that happened largely below press level because they were giving the finger to the border war and conscription and the whole mess, and were essentially illegal. When we arrived for the Oxford gig, we found that the hotel had been decorated with graffiti. Hammers and sickles, painted by fascists, adorned it like flowers. The place was being watched, and I was glad that I had chosen to wear shoes that offered good traction on tar.

On the bright side, the right wing had done some effective publicity for us and the venue was packed. The audience hung on every word, and the Weekly Mail gave the show serious attention. It felt like something was happening. The ECC had gathered around its issue a larger grouping, writers, actors, dancers and musicians, a loose affiliation of the angry. We might not have represented the broad mass of the people that took part in the Defiance Campaign, but we were most certainly defiant. The EEC, however, chickened out. The next gig took place deep in the safety of Wits University, and with little publicity. I arrived early to find a couple international news crews considering whether to set up their cameras. Within half an hour they judged the event irrelevant and departed.

Ryk and I had some adventures with our little show. Our last gig was a trip to the Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts. I drove down with my friend the painter, Carl Becker, in a 3-litre Cortina pick-up that belonged to Carl's uncle. On the back was the Aeroplane's sound system. Also travelling were actors Nicky Rebelo and David Butler. They were part of a team adding value to the Aeroplanes’ act. Between sets the actors would get on stage, the dancers would stop dancing, fill up their glasses and sit on the floor. And Nicky, myself and others would perform sketches like Nicky’s piece about the insane Reconnaissance Commandos called Buks and Rooker:

BUKS. Remember Pyp.

ROOKER. Pyp Terreblanche! Used to drink a bottle of Tequila and smack his head against a tree!

BUKS. Dead.

ROOKER. (Beat.) Is it?

BUKS. Stood on a land mine in Ondongwa.

Everyone that Buks and Rooker talked about was dead:

BUKS. Remember Shorty.

ROOKER. That bastard. He stole my other piece of chicken.

BUKS. Dead.

ROOKER. (Beat.) Is it?

BUKS. They took him out with an AK in Katlehong.

Buks and Rooker were maniacs from the war zone who went around slaughtering black people. They referred to women in genitally specific terms:

BUKS. So what are you doing here?

ROOKER. (Beat.) Checking out the poes.

Carl and I used the mountain route past Clocolan and Wepener on our night drive to Grahamstown. Each of those Free State towns was divided in two: one little town for whites, and one little township for blacks. The townships were surrounded by lights, like soccer stadiums. The lights had been installed so that the police or the army could go in there at night and see what they were doing.

A refined state of emergency had just been declared and there were many roadblocks. They were big roadblocks with lots of vehicles and army and police personnel. When they stopped us in the darkness they’d shine their torches in our faces and wave us on when they saw we were white.

There was trouble as soon as we hit Grahamstown because the ECC, banned under the new emergency, had distributed leaflets at the Goodwood Hotel where we were playing. By distributing leaflets at the Aeroplanes gig the ECC were letting their supporters know that they were still around. The manager felt that supporting banned organizations and inviting the attentions of the Grahamstown Security Branch might be bad for his standing in the local business community. He gave us a lot of flack and the gig started on an edgy, wired, note.

It wasn't the best we ever did and after two or three sets we'd go up to Cathcart Arms and drink. We drank consistently and hard for eight days. By ten in the morning Carl and I would be in the Cathcart having a beer to take the edge of the hangover. At around five or six we'd acknowledge that the beer wasn't working and order three tequilas each.

We tended not to see many shows but some Aeroplanes and camp followers did come and see Ryk and I perform 'n Gesprek Tussen Twee Cuntos in a Land of Despair. They were among the few. The show was too strange and raw for any general audience of that time. But if we played, sometimes, to audiences of five, or even three, it did nothing to lessen the intensity of the experience. Each time, an accumulation of drink and emotion and worry about the country lead us into a cathartic relationship with our audience.

We'd meet before readings in the 1840 Settler's Monument foyer. A generous part timer ran the bar. He sold his tequila for regular prices in glasses twice the normal size. It was irresistible. The spirit would ease its warmth into our hearts and we'd feel those accumulations of anger and love that were our relationship with our tribe and country squirt into our blood streams from the motherland gland. That's what it felt like anyway.

There was a snippet that Ryk used in the show, and it has stayed with me ever since. Ek wil leef, he would proclaim, met twee foote of the aarde and my kop teen die hemel vas, ek wil leef met 'n ereksie, eksie-perfeksie, altyd amper daar, nooit nie sommer net kom nie.

It is impossible to get the buoyancy of those lines into English. Afrikaans is just better for saying what Ryk meant. But now that he is gone, I will use them to try and say goodbye.

May your dead heart live, Andrew Ryk HitchcockHattingh, with two feet on the ground and your head tight against heaven. May you live with an erection, ecstatic perfection, always almost there. Never just coming.

   

   

The Excavations and Thomas Campbell's Big Theory of Everything - #MTB

In Chapter 33 of The Excavations, the Partner, as he and Jack Delfan wait for Hob to return from the Schrödinger Plains, wonders if organic life represents the attempt of the universe to understand itself.

I've got no idea how I came by that thought, but it's interesting to hear maverick physicist, Thomas Campbell, expound on a related idea. The universe CANNOT be physical, Campbell explains. The twin slit, and like experiments, PROVE this. Science proves, but cannot accept, that the physical world is an illusion. We live in interaction, the theory goes, with a larger consciousness. And that larger consciousness is bent, as the Partner intuits, on understanding and self-improvement …

The video is long, but worth staying with. And, for some reason, it made me smile throughout.



#Clifi #SciFi #MBT

Extract from Chapter 1 - The Creed, in which a son is delivered to Jack Delfan

For Those in the Past in the World Above

The Excavations

"A biblical comedy, a millennial carnival, a strange dispatch from beyond the rapture."

"A crazy-ass futuristic book."

Jack Delfan is an unwitting Noah who has turned his back on the world of men. He lives in an oil tanker in a sea of sand. He believes in digging. When a son, Hob, is delivered to him, Delfan teaches the boy how to use a spade and read the book. Delfan is a difficult father and refuses to tell Hob who his mother is. Then the Gcwi come.

Hob and the Gcwi set out on a quest to find Hob's mother. It is a journey that is destined to break Hob's heart. There are times when a broken heart is what it takes.

The Excavations is coming of age tale which delves into the history of the world, and into its future. It is an allegory, a prophecy of what will come if we fail to confront climate change and imploding capitalism.

delve (v.)

From old English delfan "to dig"

From Proto-Indo-European root dhelbh - source also of Lithuanian delba "crowbar," Russian dolbit, Czech dlabati, Polish dłubać "to chisel".

Related: Delved; delving.

Can also be an instruction:

Delve.

Dig.

Excavate.

delve (v.)

From old English delfan "to dig"

From Proto-Indo-European root dhelbh - source also of Lithuanian delba "crowbar," Russian dolbit, 

Czech dlabati, Polish dłubać "to chisel;" Russian dolotó, Czech dlato, Polish dłuto "chisel").

Related: Delved; delving.

Can also be an instruction:

Delve.

Dig.

Excavate.

IT WAS GCUMM who saw the traveller first.

8

The Lost Commons

IT WAS GCUMM who saw the traveller first. Some minutes later Hob saw him also as he came over a dune, a minute and ambiguous figure that shifted and dissolved and formed again in the heat haze. Hob rang the bell five times and twenty minutes later they heard Jack Delfan cursing as he climbed the shaft. He emerged and came to Hob and Hob pointed.

            There he is. Just like she said.

            Delfan looked at Hob and then he looked at the crone who sat with the girl in the shade. He squinted at the horizon for some time and then he went to the drum and filled a bottle of water and picked up the .577 Westley Richards where it leant against the trunk of the rapture tree and he walked out to meet the stranger.

            Delfan came over the crest of a dune and found the man just below the summit on the further side. He was dressed in tattered stained military solartect and he was crawling on his hands and knees.

            I have tried, said Jack Delfan, to vanish from your world.

            Please, said the man. Just some water.

            A lean dark face with a fine nose upon it like a ship's keel. A full mouth and sensual, if soured a little by over-activity of the brain. Which took place behind the high and noble façade of the forehead.

            Here, said Delfan. And he offered the water and the fugitive took it and knelt back on his heels and drank.

            Thank you, he said.

            Delfan nodded.

            Do you have more? Can I fill my containers? Please. I am pursued.

            Jack Delfan stood tall above him. The .577 hanging easy in his right hand.

            You be a deserter?

            No.

            That be military gear.

            I took it off a corpse.

            Hm.

            There are many dead.

            Jack Delfan taking his time to think about that.

            So what are you? Tinker, tailor? Hm? Murderer? Thief? Rapist?

            No.

            Spy?

            No.

            What then?

            I wrote something. It went viral.

            I thought they'd stopped that.

            They would if they could.

            A hairy eyebrow lifting on the upper slopes of the patriarchal visage.

            What said you?

            I suggested that as the secretariat extracted total disclosure from citizens, that as the mechanics of the system demanded that in order to live, to exchange units for food, the motherdrive knew everything about us, down to the weight and consistency of our morning stool, and I say that literally, because in the sanctum's the plumbing now has native intelligence installed as a matter of course, I suggested that, as this was the case, the Protector's financial dealings should be open to public scrutiny. In fact, I insisted that this was the one privacy that all citizens must cede. That all transactions be disclosed and publicly accessible. Economic justice demands economic transparency. Is it too much to ask that the rich tell us what they earn? We already know that the poor earn nothing.

            Delfan stared aghast.

            They'd film a man's arse while he was at stool?

            They have the legal right to uptake all relevant information.

            What is relevant about the consistency of my turd? Thanks to the beans I push them out silky smooth every morning in foot long lengths. And that is nobody's business but my own.

            Delfan roaring at the fugitive as though that unfortunate man was personally responsible for the outrage.

            What do they want to examine your evacuations for? What perversions of the mind can lead them to this?

            To get medical treatment you have to be part of World Aid. And World Aid say they are in the business of risk. They prefer to spot a problem early. You get a message on your tablet. Suspected cancer of bowel. Please contact your designated medi-provider. And if you want to do that you'd better be clocking in regular to the labour pool and have units to spare on your chip. Which is not easy since the secretariat pirated the blockchain and the currency went to shit.

            He lifted his thumb to show a crude stitched scar down the pad of it.

            A comrade cut it out. But they were getting heartbeat, aspiration, temperature. Rumour is, they've been sequencing our DNA for years. Helps them track us down when we don't pay the interest on our debts.

            Usurers.

            The one percent are usurers. The rest of us are debt slaves. Capital has stolen the commons.

            They'll be charging us for sunlight next.

            With automatic deductions for both heat and light, separately accounted. It is being discussed.

            Jack Delfan nodding slowly. Lifting his thumb to show his own scar.

            The fugitive smiled then and rose and offered his right hand and Jack Delfan took it and the fugitive winced a little at the strength of his grip.

            Come, said the patriarch. I can offer shade, water and little food.

            They'll be coming after me, said the fugitive.

            I know.

            So the fugitive followed Jack Delfan to shade of the rapture tree where he was recruited with fresh water from the lake and tins of beans and corn and even Qhilika.