Saturday, 31 August 2024

The Hierophany of Love

 You are the blood of me, the harvest of my dreams. 

- Sade

Before love's lingual inauguration in their lives, 

Two hands, hardly able to cradle the cheek of doting parents,

Secretly reached for each other and have since never let go.


When hearts are being excavated of all romantic illusions

And the soteriology of love meant a man hanging on a tree

The two hands press hard as a tower that refuses to fall 


When weighty waiting has frayed the nerves of many men

And the closing of the circle is but a quantum leap 

The hands (w)ring each other of impatience in a soul tie


When wrists are slit in a tepid desperation for release

Bloodied bathwater now a covenant with and libation to God

The fingers intertwined against the anguish of the unrequited 


When Eros stumbles and fumbles, an amorous haemorrhage

And the hearts of human arteries don't give second chances 

Undeterred by amputation, those arms reach for stumps


When mother tongues are loosed from lips by great distances

The trespass of time zones disrupts love's circadian rhythm

The two diasporic arms, in solidarity, point to the mother land


When ducking and weaving the reaper's stainless-steel scythe 

And melting under a connection that reaves of head and life

Two bereaved hands reach across the veil closing the great divide 

  

Friday, 30 August 2024

Re-rout(root)-ing

 "After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. 

- Wallace Stevens 


Am I fit to cluster with others around the tribal drum

That used to bring me into seance with myself

With this European language that has scrambled 

For the territory of my mental African map 

And colonised it for all my resources


Will the drum revivify or repudiate 

Instilling a trepidation for a fire that throws me back

Into the shadows like a lone hungry wolf 

Will the crocodile slit its crystal ball of an eye open

In recognition when I chant "kwena" 

Or will it drag me under and choke me in the silt 

Accusing me of being an imposter


Am I too existentially burdened

For this psychic levitation?

Too entrenched with the education for the hypnotic 

Rhythm and flame to lull me into a reverie

And out of a self that has taken modernity 

Far into the great indifferent Kalahari Desert


Have I become a paradox like Laplace's Mecanique Celeste 

And carry an ambiguity of the Sphinx or Ananta

That my forebears are unable to make head or tail of

Can the stars provide the carbon strength 

To prise open an old connection sealed mechanically 

By the civilizing agenda that places in highest esteem

Heady IQ over the grand bodily rootedness of a baobab 


Take up an eloquence that I have long envied

In the touching and rumbling cadence

Of the verbal fencing with sheathed swords 

That is Stone Seate and Tumelo Kepadisa

I have been given a moiety of a culture  

Only to have erroneously homogenized 

Into one talent, the parable takes a dark turn 


How do I retrace my steps to a primordial 

Order of things without disappearing into 

The yawning vastness like de Saint-Exupery 

Throwing out baby, bathwater and tub

Will my tongue wrap itself around a surname

That is a flowing river in the sub-Saharan

Or will it squeeze too tightly leaving

A lineage lifeless and with lungs floating on the surface 



Tuesday, 27 August 2024

My solitude is not confining

 Also, there were needs in me that were bigger and, in the demands they made upon me and the direction they were giving to my life, they were more totalitarian than my needs for company and intimacy. They were needs that required solitude, more of it than I could ever legitimately expect to find within marriage. 

- John Moriarty 

I have become William James' folded page

Creased and creased again by solitude

In the face of most people I come across

I collapse and fold back into myself 

Defiant to a politeness that has become tyrannical

Pressing even harder on the edges of the fold 

Razor sharp to careless digits none the wiser

And to those who get too close, uninvited

I am animal after all, swearing by boundaries 

I own up to the solipsism in my peace

How do I begin to let go of its allure

When this peace has lived up to its name?

I sleep and wake to a self undisturbed

Even though life teems beyond self-preservation

There are difficulties in relinquishing

A peace that has been so good to me

On occasion, I leave the hole to sip the batswana air

that is Ramothibe Pooe and Katlego Letlonkane

And settle back into cozy and warm-lit rooms 

Aureated by candles, music, and literature

Companions that are more than I deserve

Earthly pleasures that have made a Christian of me

Surely, this is the work of grace, Lord I am not worthy

My name is a black-knee'd kneel of gratitude 

To God for the great minds who bear His image

Who've built libraries and record stores within me

And have garlanded my exteriors with Japanese Maples

Such plenitude, what more could a simple spirit ask for?

I have been passed over and dispossessed by a loneliness

That has taken hold of the souls of many others

And here I sit in front of a blank page, spared and intact

I can't shake the feeling that I should be craving 

To have my peace disturbed and interrupted

That particular desire is foreign to me  

I've lost it in my folds, with this effortless poem

Being all the energy I can dedicate to its search

My morning caffeine-induced rituals with humble baristas

Suffice to affirm my personhood in this strong city

I have no want

To work, to eat, to sleep, to be woken up by weavers

I have no want

To sing, to dance, to read, to write, to pray, to inspire

I have no want


And if I were to one day wake up to a dreaded diagnosis

Disclosing the number of days left to delight in life

I would go about tomorrow's business as I have gone about it today

I would be unruffled and undis-eased

My spirit is full, and the taps of heaven dismiss droughts

Through the gift of a solitude that has not been confining







 

 

Monday, 26 August 2024

No Longer Recognizable

'Will we lift the stones without being ready for the snake underneath?'

- John Moriarty


On the other side of the wound that is a reverse herald

there lies a dehydrated dragon on a bed of pennies

on the outskirts of a deserted city in ruins

whose crown has taken to conspiring with rust 

undoing promethean metallurgical achievement 


It is desolated and extinguished without purpose or pride

and its dragon talk is all huff, puff, and smoke screens

it has hung up its wings like a bird on an island without predators

forgetting that those wings were not for fleeing but for majestic pursuit


Not a single scale on its now soft body intimates at insurrection

which once had the chins of children quivering and warriors charmed

it could rouse pandemonium with a shadow that eclipsed the moon

if only it could remember that it once had Vesuvius for a heart


The fair maiden whose beauty once offered consolatory hope of braver times

has grown old in her youth and become despondent

she's given into Stockholm's and chains herself, willingly, up at night

on a diet of twelve pomegranate seeds a year, she knows no sun


The cat and the mouse no longer play the cat and mouse games that kept the globe spinning

he's dying and she's dying too passing what's left of their vitality between them 

like the single eye and tooth the graiai shared or the needle between two junkies

they've grown grey with addiction of self-pity, who is chasing the dragon now?    

  

Saturday, 24 August 2024

No Way Back

"But I could tell Death, I have loved you and so I am deeper than scythes." 

- John Moriarty  


On the other side of this bloody gaping wound 

Which cast 'us' asunder into a 'you' and 'me' 

I feel blindly robbed of an anthropology

Unable to find my way around the person I used to be


What is the alchemical recipe from who I used to be to who I now am?

From which forest can the ingredients for the tremendous be foraged?

And at what personal cost? What bears and barriers lie in wait? 

Are there dangers hidden in retracing steps that turn flesh into pillars of salt?  


Answer me, so that I may remember Eden

And my place under the shade of an unassuming tree

Without instructions, pitfalls and repercussions this time

Point me to where it is buried, and I'll unearth it


The gates to the old me are locked from the inside

All I carry with in my pockets are memories of me with you

Memories too large to fit into keyholes 

And whose strength lies in coupling not cutting ties and locks 


I am ill-equipped to dig up a cogent and coherent history for myself 

Out of this stupendous dereliction 

Before you, there was a secular dispersion

After you, well, I am (w)holy congregated

Thursday, 22 August 2024

Cartesian Cogitation

'It had never occurred to them that intelligence as intellectually conscripted as theirs could be an eclipse' 

- John Moriarty 


I found arguments and debates easy to climb

and symbols like the hostile sheer face of an ice mountain 

difficult to pick at with an axe

heaving myself across precipitous edges 

dropping myths accidentally down into labyrinths

threatening precipitation, strong winds and avalanches 

of traditions and known ways of life 

on top of muted metaphors 

flattening them into meaningless words 

with the wisdom squeezed out of them

condensating into rivers other people step over 

in search of more life and, dare I say, more living

Tuesday, 20 August 2024

Kathodos

Life here, with the things of earth, is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing
- Plotinus

With the gathering of rainclouds and the resurrection of petrichor from shallow graves
I dragged my leaden heart and limbs into the clearing of the forest
And waited for the downpour's denouement and my own kathodos 
By the fistfuls, the rain came down hard pummelling my sides and kneading my flesh
I turned the other cheek and bared my ribs for it to break
Caged within the hope that this is what a heavenly scrubbing entailed
I was wet, I was assaulted, and yet I remained unwashed

I could hear the thunder in me moving my entrails out of the way
for my anger to storm in and cause a scene
The lightning coiled in my hair like snakes with anticipatory and agitated forked tongues
ready to strike, lash out, sense the direction from which disappointments come 
and swallow them whole, only to regurgitate them whole again 
covered with a slippery intestinal film making them hard to grasp

I bellowed, summoning crows to murder and frightening falcons out of solitude
I bared teeth, knuckle, claw, eyeball and snarled 
The wind siphoned all the breath from my body and my legs gave way beneath me
My strings have been severed with a blunt blade, bone by intractable bone, I fell apart
Prone, and my face caked with mud, I spitted muffled obscenities into Chthon 
Flickering the lights of hades with my belaboured breath 
The lotus in me summoned the little strength I could harness to flip myself over 
I am all ark, wet and undrowned, wooden with soul unsplintered

The smell of filth stretches itself out languidly on my upper lip
wrapping itself in a blanket made of the hair in my nostrils
Fat maggots feed off the rot within me of the things I should have discarded a long time ago
I've let my body be a landfill of things supressed and repressed and they are growing legs
I have to remind myself daily that I am all ark, all second chance, and not all coffin
That I keep the deluge out, and surf it, I am too titanic for the bottom of the ocean

I took the dirt and chalked my hands, preparing to lift the heavy off me and power clean
To snatch the bar of divine soap and fight for my cleansing
To empty myself into the earth and fertilize the ground, I would wrestle for this blessing 
I would limp, oedipally, out of the clearing, sodden and with a broken ankle
But like Jacob who stole Esau's birthright, I would leave, steeled, and with a different name 

Katharos. 

 
 
 

Monday, 19 August 2024

From Nostos by John Moriarty

But I could tell Death

I have loved you and so 

I am deeper than scythes

I could even tell Christ

Although I am all body

All second-hand head

I'm a Christian again

But I have opened my mind

I have opened my gates

Long ago, to God's horses 

Thursday, 15 August 2024

Tides by Bonobo (feat. Jamila Woods)

We cloud people, we live in gray
What we don't need release in rain
We cloud people, we never stay
We hold our freedom like a plane

We won't be dry soon
Here come the tides
You move when I do
You'll never be mine

We won't be dry soon
Here come the tides
You move when I do
You'll never be mine

I'm not supposed to feel, I'm not supposed to miss
How am I supposed to heal? How am I supposed to fit?
A little awkward then a little oxygen
I let you get away, I held the ocean in
We cloud people, we live in gray
If you love me, let me float away


Having and Being

 The meaning of man's life, as we have seen, is not measured by what he has, but by what he is. No matter how many possessions we have amassed, how much wealth we have accrued, how respected and secure our position is in society, how numerous the pieces of information we have accumulated, in moments of lucidity we may still abruptly perceive the dreadful futility of it all, the overwhelming emptiness and pointlessness of such a life. — Stephen Batchelor



Have you ever come across people who confidently say, “I don’t value buying things but having experiences?” With hints of indignation, they place spending money on experiences somewhat morally higher than spending all their money on a PJ, Lambo or yacht. As you can clearly see, I do not fall into this cohort, as all the things that come immediately to mind when I think of lavish spending have to do with transportation: land, air and sea. But if I spend a little more time on the subject, I can surely think of a few other expensive things that the rich spend their money on. Wine? The only thing I know when it comes to wine, is that the older, the better, the pricier. I am also a teetotaller so even that knowledge comes second hand. I’ve recently heard of the elaborate affair involved for women who desire to get their beautifully manicured hands on a Hermes bag. To be honest it sounds exhausting. Yes, you guessed it, I don’t own an expensive purse. Give me a cheap tote bag and I am good to go. I am clearly ill equipped to offer any real knowledge on how the rich dispose of their money, but I was only making a point here. 


The “spending money on experiences” types would scoff at all this unbridled acquisition. Who needs closets full of bags and shoes bearing French names, cellars stacked to the ceiling with wine from Cape Town or garages, hangars, and harbours full of fancy means of transportation when you can just go skiing in the alps with loved ones or travel the world eating food from Michelin star restaurants? The misconception here is that buying things and experiencing them are different, that one is less crass and less cultured than the other. The sentiment is that the “nouveau riche” are ostentatious in their spending whizzing by in canary yellow and flaming red cars whose upwards opening doors are designed to draw attention. Meanwhile old money is more comfortable in its skin and uses money to experience the best that life has to offer. These are two sides of the same coin, because they operate from the “having mode” as opposed to the “being mode.” They are driven by the same underlying desire, even though they present differently. We can have experiences just as we can have things. Fundamentally, the difference lies in how things or experiences affect our being, and that ability makes all the difference. 


It was Byung Chul Han who once made the distinction between “sight” and “site”. Travel can offer both of these to us, but our attunement to the particular mode we are moving from will decide whether travel becomes about sightseeing or site-seeing. To sight see is to consume different sights, without any of it changing us in any meaningful way. To site-see is to experience a reorientation of sorts, to be undone, rearranged and put together again. Travel can mean pilgrimage, or it can mean an itinerary with items that need to be crossed off a list: been there, done that, got the t-shirt vibes. It is why in the case of pilgrimage, many can travel to the same place annually, Mecca or Moria, and encounter themselves in these places differently to the previous years. 


In Balenciaga: The Master of Us All, Mary Blume opens us up to the life of someone who I think was a great artist in his time. While Balenciaga has been reduced to a rather indiscreet label on a pricey item of clothing, this was not what Cristóbal Balenciaga stood for and as Blume writes, when he died, “he expressed, vainly, the wish that his name die, too.” In the beginning, a Balenciaga was not a shirt, shoe or accessory, it was an elegant, hand sewn dress. It was not just a dress that made the woman wearing it the centre of attention, but it affected women in a more profound way:

A deeply observant Catholic, [Balenciaga] had a feeling for ritual and for the large gesture. He despised useless detail; he spoke little. From this there grew a public image of finicky austerity and frequent descriptions of his fashion house as a monastery or church. Exaggerated, and yet his clothes had what only can be called a mystical, even a moral, effect on some of his high-stepping clients. Diana Vreeland found biblical implications in the harmony of his clothes: “women are suddenly feeling perfectly at one with creation.” Mrs. Paul (“Bunny”) Mellon said his dresses gave her courage, Gloria Guinness wondered whether she was good enough to wear them, and Claudia Heard de Osborne in Texas declared that she wanted to be buried in a favourite Balenciaga so that she would be properly dressed when she met Cristóbal in heaven. Pauline de Rothschild, who was dressed by Balenciaga for twenty-three years, said, “I knew and loved other dressmakers and understood them, but the mysteries were Balenciaga’s.” ... His technique was inimitable. Only a few years ago in London, a seamstress working on a dress for a Balenciaga exhibition noticed that the apparently straight seam of a narrow dress was, when examined from the inside, intricately curved to suit the client’s less than slim body.


The way that Balenciaga approached making dresses was worship and the very act of putting a needle to fabric glorified God. This had an impact on the women who wore the dresses and somehow a piece of fabric could reach deep down into their souls and bring something of their best to the light. While Balenciaga’s were not cheap, the price tag was not the priority as it is now. Now when you buy a Balenciaga, you are buying a name, not a product. Therefore, the product, which was made with very little effort, care and intention lacks the magical power to shake us up. It is just another item of clothing we use to confer our status upon the world. The item becomes preoccupied with externalities, arresting the gaze of others, and does nothing to change how we see ourselves in ways that matter. 


Blume shares how a Balenciaga was passed down from one generation to another like an heirloom. Even here, there is something deeper to the dress than just how much it had cost or even the fact that it was a Balenciaga. There is an emphasis on connection, a way of solidifying generational ties. A reminder of belonging and home. The material objects we purchase can touch us on different levels of existence or they can not touch us at all. They can impact our very beings or temporarily assuage our “having” itch until it flares up again seeking release through another purchase. The hedonic gods are insatiable creatures. 

 

On being harder to kill

When the Buttery Bros (Marsten Sawyers and Heber Cannon) are about to take on a gruelling CrossFit workout, they always say that the workout is going to make them harder to kill which has viewers cracking a smile. It is funny because it is absurd. One bullet to the heart will stop it even if you’ve spent hours working on your aerobic capacity on the rower. It is also funny because there is some truth to it. Working out makes you harder to kill when it comes to a lot of diseases such as heart disease, or even depression. In many ways human beings are simultaneously easier and harder to kill than ever before. I think this translates to the things we buy; they make us harder to kill. 


Karl Marx used the term “commodity fetishization” to sum up our consumption patterns. The word fetish has taken on a different meaning to what it initially meant. Immediately when I think of a fetish, I think of feet and how there are men out there who have a thing for beautiful feet and are, on any occasion, ready and willing to put a non-related person’s toes in their mouth. Just gross! When I was a toddler, my mom’s main job was making sure that I was not putting things that didn’t belong in my mouth into it, and now as an adult I am just laying my mom’s hard work to waste by putting other people’s feet in my mouth? I don’t think so. Others may think of other kinds of sexual kinks, I’ll spare you, but it really gets weird. In Fully Alive, Elizabeth Oldfield describes how a fetish was originally something that offered us some sort of protection like an amulet. With that insight, I can see how the things we buy may offer us protection. Food, shelter and clothing protect us from starvation, predators and the elements respectively. Once these primary needs have been satisfied, we still buy more stuff. This means the things we buy still serve a purpose, but the nature of this protection has changed. While this protection used to be physical, it has now moved to the existential. The things we buy protect us from the loss of social status, alienation and other existential threats. I think they protect us from non-being in all its iterations including not mattering or being seen. When you are panhandling or are homeless, you cease to exist in important ways. People pretend not to see you or wish you were not there. The space your body takes up is a nuisance. 


I used to patronize the Starbucks in Parkhurst and there were three homeless and harmless guys in the area, namely James, Etienne and Karabo. Last year, the shops on 4th avenue decided to contribute towards adding more security to the already highly securitized area. On any given day, at least six different security company vehicles can be seen driving up and down the avenue. One morning, making my way to Starbucks, I noticed that there were baton-carrying men stationed at every second corner on 4th and I also noticed that I didn’t see Etienne, James and Karabo that day. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. The uniformed men at the corners were placed there to keep the James’ of this world away so that they don't ruin the Parkhurst aesthetic. This series of events illustrated the point that being wealthy protects you from being shooed away the way those three homeless men were. Having money and material possessions makes you less dismissible and more seen. The longer you can keep people’s eyes locked on you, the more you matter. It is as if our parade of material wealth is a way to keep people locked in on us long enough for us to show them who we are beyond what we have. 


Another salient way that we are harder to kill is that material wealth makes us more robust. When the winds of misfortune blow in our direction, then we don’t lose our balance. When you have two cars, and one of them decides to start giving you problems, you have another one to rely on. This is an example of robustness at its simplest. There are just more options available for solving a problem that arises. Even very big problems are not catastrophic. If money becomes tight, then there are still ways to downsize without being plunged into poverty. This buffer is protective in really good ways, but it can be maladaptive in that it can trap us and steer us away from what’s truly important. We can get trapped in harder-to-kill mode that we forget the reason we are staying alive in the first place. Surely not for material accumulation but to connect deeply, to grow in wisdom and to be as Oldfield described fully alive.

On beauty

In John Vervaeke’s lecture titled Why Beauty is Deeply Implicit Throughout Stoicism, he speaks about how we have reduced beauty to smoothness and perfection. Think of the sleekness of an iPhone or the perfectly contoured face. This is what beauty has become. Vervaeke explains how beauty historically has not just been about the things that are easy on the eye but things that had something terrifying to them. As Vervaeke puts it, beauty has the ability to destroy or crush us, but it chooses not to. The things that we deem beautiful are not things that threaten to destroy us, in fact quite the contrary, they make us feel comfortable. They make us feel like what 2000 thread count linen feels against our skin. In fact, the beautiful now makes us settle more deeply into our couch. We have tamed the beautiful and in doing so we have severed the bridge between us and the experiences which pull us into a deeper reality. The superficiality of our beauty means that we are far removed from any true encounter because we have also severed ourselves from truth and goodness. D.C. Schindler, who is just one of my favourite contemporary thinkers, writes about what he describes as “the primacy of beauty, the centrality of goodness and ultimacy of truth.” He links the three transcendentals in a way that makes so much sense to me. Beauty, with its primacy, is the gateway to the other transcendentals. It is accessible to everyone and lets down its hair so we can climb up the tower walls towards goodness and truth. And now we have been so caught up in the shiny shampooed locks that we have forgotten that they were just a ladder, and that beauty was not the end of the story. 


The terrible yet magnificent aspect of beauty is what draws us in. Most people who can differentiate between joy and happiness know that joy has a gravity to it. As Oldfield writes, “Joy is not a shallow shiny thing. It always seems to stay threaded, like an umbilical cord, to something sorrowful, but it is good.” This reminds me of a conversation that takes place in C.S Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. As Lucy begins to wrap her little brain around the reality of Aslan, she asks: “Is He safe?” To which Mr Beaver replies, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? Course He isn’t safe, but He is good.” Then Mr Tumnus adds, “He is wild, you know. Not a tame lion.” Beauty, epitomized by Aslan, is wild and unsafe. The majestic Aslan strikes fear in each and every one of our hearts, but this fear is stilled because he is good. We have to live with the knowledge that we stand to be taken down with one swipe of his paw. Yet, we can still walk beside him because we also know that he is good. While we do not take Aslan for granted, we are comforted by him. These are the paradoxical responses which beauty evokes. It is hardly pleasant or comforting in some easy-to-dismiss way. There is nothing safe about beauty as there is nothing quite safe about reality. This insistence we place on the smoothness of things, is a thief in the night, robbing us of true encounters with reality. Reality becomes short wavelengths of light which are bounced off the surface of our lives, never reaching the subcutaneous tissue like red light. This taming, of which we are completely complicit, leaves us with a daguerreotype of beauty, an image of it that looks like beauty but on closer inspection, bears a deep emptiness. While the image of beauty may smile at us, there is no joy gleaming from behind its eyes. 


On the difficult

I completely believe in 10-minute abs. I swear by them. They work. Just as long as you do them every day, a couple of times a day, for uhm ever. Cue Kanye West, “Forever ever? Ever ever?” Yes, forever ever. As anyone with well-defined abs will tell you, the war against belly fat is a war of attrition. Take your eyes off the ball with a few slices of banana bread from Bootleggers and watch your abs throw peace signs in your general direction as they prepare for a winter of indefinite hibernation. It’s at this point where you grab an oversized t-shirt, which was always waiting for you from the top of the pile, and you go about your life. Getting and maintaining abs is a lot of work. If it was easy, we would all have them because they just look great. As it is, for most people, the juice is not worth the squeeze. The easy things come with one press of a button on an app and ta-da, whatever it is, is on your doorstep faster than you can say 10-minute abs. 


While convenience is pretty great, we have turned it into a high priest. Before we sacrifice our time towards any activity, it makes its way through this high priest’s hands. In one of his Like Stories of Old videos, Tom van der Linden quotes author Cormac McCarthy as he explains how the days of us getting through literary tomes are in our past:

The indulgent 800-page book that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby Dick, go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.


Van der Linden does not quite agree with McCarthy but as someone who reads a lot, I have observed this trend in myself. Last year I received a copy of The Constant Gardener by le Carre, and I still haven’t moved past the first page. I genuinely think it will be one of the few books that I own that I will never read. The font is devastatingly small and there are so many pages. I find it overwhelming to even settle into it. As someone who has relished reading Tolstoy, I wonder if the convenience bug has bitten me? 


Co-host of Podcast and Chill, Sol Phenduka says that when he finds out that a Netflix show he is interested in watching has only six episodes, then he gets, as he so eloquently puts it, a hard on. With the advent of Tik Tok, we are primed for the consumption of shorter content. Reading is something that we can’t do while we are doing something else. We can listen to an audiobook while driving or running a few errands. Listening to a book and reading are not the same thing. Yet, while I won’t sit down to read le Carre, I have no qualms with reading one book after another back-to-back. So, it is not so much a matter of the time spent reading, but it has more to do with the level of difficulty involved. I bought Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning and I am not even halfway through it. It is so dense and difficult that I take breaks from the book often and return to it after a couple of months. I can follow along to everything that he writes but digesting and synthesizing it is another story altogether. Some days I will take a day to digest a single paragraph. 


The difficult things require effort and time, but they also make the most impact. “Difficulty… obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting. The less time we take over something, the easier we find something to resolve, map and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have” (Williams). Our becoming relies heavily on the difficult. Giving birth to ourselves again and again is not without labour pains. It is in the birth canal where we can begin to get glimpses of what we are really made of. Williams writes that the difficult impose a discipline on us as we come to terms with the fact that there is still much, we have to do. They also impose humility on us, if impose is the right word to use here, for the same reason. The real work begins when we realize how little we actually know. When we start talking about discipline and humility, we are operating in the being mode. There is something happening to us as we embark on these processes. On the other side of the difficult, is always something that can never be taken away from us because it does not reside in the having mode where that particular insecurity has a home.

On people

One of the most frustrating things about other people is that we can’t control them. You marry someone and remain faithful to them, and alas they cheat on you. You tell your child to not do something, and they go right ahead and do it. People will go on and do what they want to do anyway. As a matter of fact. In a previous essay, Red Flags, I wrote about Martin Buber’s I/thou which reminds us that people are beyond our objectification of them. They can’t be controlled and manipulated, or at least they shouldn’t be. History is bathed in the blood of the consequences that follow when we embark on paths that have to do with controlling others. Williams drew me to a different perspective on this. For him, there is a part of every human being that cannot be touched: “There is always something about the other person that’s to do with what I can’t see, and that can’t be mastered.” For Williams, this untouchable part of people is the part of them that is linked to the eternal i.e. God.


In an episode of Big Bang Theory, when the girls are in conversation, Amy Farrah Fowler (played by Mayim Bialik) discusses how the first-time a (married) couple has sex is important as it establishes the power dynamic between the couple. As always, there is something that is revelatory about comedy, and I think this view of sex holds in modern- day society. Instead of a disclosure, sex has become a subjugation. Perhaps it has always been, but I feel it more ardently now and I don’t think the rise of sexual proclivities such as BDSM is a mere coincidence. There has also been a rise in body count talk where people, women especially, need to disclose the number of sexual partners they have had in the past. We live in unprecedented times where sex is a mere click away, and even the medium through which sex is acquired is telling. Williams writes, “the ideal relationship to our environment is control, moving towards a perfect static situation where we nothing to lose, to fear or to gain.” The medium through which sex is obtained is a reverberation of this control, chance encounters are full of uncertainty. This way we control as much of the sexual encounter as we can. Of course, try as we may, we can’t control everything. An encounter with other people, whether sexual or not, requires an openness and vulnerability. Women, being the physically weaker sex, bear this vulnerability with more anxiety. Men have their own vulnerabilities that are tied to sexual performance and the nagging feeling of not measuring up, phallically. There is also the anxiety of having to experience a lot of rejection from women who swiped left to your right. Personally, I am not built for these Tinder times. 


Of course, most men turn to porn which has its own set of problems. Poet Audre Lorde writes that porn “emphasizes sensation without feeling,” and I think this extends to dating app culture as well. Casual sex is all about sensation, not about catching feelings. If we are not swinging in the direction of meaningless sex, we swing to the other extreme where body count matters. Both of these are expressions of control: it’s either we hold so much control that we are unaffected by sex with strangers, or we try to exercise so much control by needing to know the exact number of sexual partners. Both of these are instances of hypo and hyper sexualization, which happens when sex is removed from specific contexts. 


A particular instance of an episode from the TV show Uzalo has always remained with me. I am not even sure which of the characters were involved but it was what was said and how it was said that made it unforgettable. It was an interaction that took place between two rivals, where, at the time, the one guy had just married his wife, and he was very happy about this. With the smuggest look on his face, the other guy says that he knows his rival’s wife. Like know know. Like Biblically. The way he delivered the line made me temporarily suspend every feminist bone in my body and question my own sexual decisions. It still makes me a little bit comfortable, to be honest, for something so private like sex to be spoken of in the marketplace. Privacy aside, the reason that this comment would hit home is because we, men particularly, will reduce the knowledge of the personhood of a woman to the fact that he has slept with her. He would not even know her last name but definitely, the fact she had sex with him is all there is to know about her. When we reduce sex to pleasure or the proverbial notch on the belt, then we get stuck in the having mode, closing ourselves off from deeper intimacy. It is, therefore, so easy to cast each other aside and be dismissive of each other as well. When we play a part in the dehumanization (by objectification) of each other, we essentially close off all avenues to be deeply known ourselves. While objectification is harmful for various reasons, it is most harmful for the one who objectifies because through the process he denies aspects of his own personhood. If sex is merely expedient, the collaborative nature of sex, does not make exceptions to whom this expediency affects. All become objects of sexual gratification, and no one is spared.   Williams writes that there are three aspects to knowledge: attention, attunement and atonement. Attention refers to a highly developed capacity to not just absorb something but to, in turn, be absorbed by it. Attunement is the awareness of how we react, adjust, and resonate with the stimuli that we are being exposed to and atonement (at-one-ment) is the capacity of being at one with the stimuli and environment. “It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. (Lorde)” How many of us see sex as something igniting the aspirational within us, and something that honours and builds self-respect? Which in turns esteems and edifies the other? As it's currently set up, the most we can hope for is a little bit of sweaty ephemeral fun in the sack and that’s that. Oldfield shared a quote from the online magazine Feeld which saddens me but also reflects our general outlook when it comes to sex, “For single people casual sex is not a glib life-style choice but a serious attempt to be happy within a specific reality. This was one way to make my unwanted future tolerable to at least make it interesting for myself.” Sex has now been relegated to distraction, something we can do on a Friday evening, to fritter time away. Alternatively, it has become a way of numbing our Stacie Orrico impulses, those feelings that creep up and tell us that surely, “there’s gotta be more to life” because sex has surely become “another temporary high”. Oldfield’s Fully Alive was inspired by St. Irenaeus who wrote that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Sex is one of the fundamental ways that we can tap into this aliveness. It has the power to bring all we have to bear on the world, and it also has the power to make us feel small and insignificant as though we were just another body in space.  


It is through attention, attunement and atonement that we can begin to truly know ourselves and the other. When the sexual encounter moves past merely gaining sexual satisfaction but entering spaces of being truly absorbed by the other, to be seen and felt and held then we can begin to make room for the magical. Attunement speaks to the sensitivity we have to the other; not focusing solely on our own needs but also the needs of the person we have decided to share a bed with. In particular, needs beyond the physical body but an all-encompassing approach to the needs of the person in their entire personhood. One of the ways that we know we have knowledge instead of information is because information only becomes knowledge once, we have begun the process of inhabiting that information. It is through understanding and application (with our bodies and not just our minds) that we can begin to know. We become one with this information and it becomes a part of us. This is the Biblical knowing. Unfortunately, this knowing requires a time investment, “wham bam thank you ma’am” just won’t cut it. I mean, Socratic self- knowledge is a life-long effort, what then can be said of the effort of truly knowing the other?   


I was watching the Flagrant Podcast on YouTube and Lil’ Yachty was a guest on the show. One of the questions that he was asked was whether he would prefer a woman who was a virgin or who had a body count of 100, and he replied that he would choose the latter. Then he substantiated his choice with something to the effect of virgins are hard work and you would have to teach her everything. And who, in 2024, has the time to be developing a sexual relationship with someone from scratch? I think this response exposes the performative lens through which he views sex and the ‘bang-for-buck’ approach we have when it comes to time. A lay should be an easy and pleasurable investment because who has the time? Right?


What pops up to me is that dealing with a virgin is laden with uncertainty. We have to relinquish control so that we can give ourselves time to figure the sexual act out. We want to approach sexual encounters with preformed answers, not questions. We don’t want to make any sort of accommodation for the possibility of not knowing what to do. A virgin, in these times, is a surprise and in environments characterized by control, a surprise is always bad news. “The best place to be is a place where you can never be surprised. We want to control what’s strange, and we want to control what doesn’t fall under our immediate power. We’re uneasy with limits, of whatever kind, reminds us that there are some things that are just going to be strange and difficult wherever we are and however hard we work at them” (Williams). 


Our metaphors in language are so much more powerful than we give them credit for, and it is easy to miss out on the incredible gifts they continuously offer us. When someone gets control of things, we say that they are on top of it. Makes us think that Amy Farrah Fowler may have been on to something and pointed out how we may have taken this metaphor a little too far. Without sounding too corny and skating on cringe territory, there is a marked difference between having sex and making love. Sex offers an opportunity to co-create with another, to be in our element as those created in the image of God and make something life-alteringly beautiful or it could just be another way to display our sense of control, whatever that’s really worth.       

On silence

As someone who spends most of the day in my own company, I am extremely comfortable with silence. My favourite time of the day is the few hours before dawn. There is just nothing that compares to this stillness. The darkness has gathered herself into a sprawling black silk gown and has come to dance before the constellation with my little soul bearing witness to such an extravagant affair. Silence is the only appropriate response and the only sounds that reach her listening ears. Any words would detract and distract from the wonder. It’s at these times of the day when I feel most myself, before the light pours in and the world demands its daily pound of flesh. It’s in these precious moments where I can just bask in being and just be, unencumbered and unneeding. 


Silence during the day takes me back to the early hours of the day when I am reminded that silence came first and will, ultimately, have the last word. Therefore, I am completely accustomed to the silence. Most of us are really uncomfortable with the silence and we are prone to want to fill it as quickly as we can. In a way, as long as silence is not silencing, it fills a room. Silencing, the act of preventing another from speaking, empties a space. It creates a void, yet silence without any perversion is expansive. It takes up space like a pregnant pause. Something new is about to be born except silence denies us orientation. Words, even empty Donald Trump and Dr. Fauci type of words, orient us. We know who is speaking, we understand the language these words are being delivered in and we know how to respond. Situation under control. When someone falls silent in a conversation, we are assailed by so much uncertainty, it becomes unbearable. We have no way of handling it because we don’t know where it begins or ends. Williams writes that these moments of silence, which bely any sort of reining in, are so great for us. “They’re important for our humanity in general because we habitually live in a world where the ‘right thing’ to do with critical moments is to stop them being critical. The right thing to do with a wild animal is to tame it, so to speak, and the right thing to do with any ‘wild’ experience is to work out what I can do with it, what I can make of it, and, in short, domesticate it.” Silence is wild, but it is good. If we learn to enjoy it like Depeche Mode sings then its mystery may have its way with us and like meditators, come out different when the silence gives way to words. 


There was a time when communication was not cheap. Even if it was cheap, the price of a stamp let's say, there was a time penalty associated with communication across geographical distances. In a way, you had to think very carefully with regards to the message you wanted to send. Now, with the introduction of email and instant text, we send so many messages in one day without much pause or deliberation. We don’t have the silence needed to ingest the information that we are receiving, nor do we have any sort of time needed to formulate proper responses. I think most of the texting or emailing we do during the day is a way to pass away the hours, a way of filling the space with words which straitjackets the possibility of meaning making of any kind. With the advent of social media platforms, there is now a proliferation of bullshit where words are used performatively. When I post a comment on a social media platform, because I know that the eyes of other people are watching, I will perform for those eyes. Whether I am consciously aware of this or not, there is a performative element. The nature of social media commenting is also something that happens rather quickly. People comment as soon as possible because who cares about a comment that comes in when a week has already passed. We run into the problem of then feeling we need to comment without having given our comment sufficient thought. There is also the misperception that silence on social media platforms equals insignificance. If you are silent, then you are irrelevant and what you say doesn't really matter anyway. In a strange way, we have accomplished the opposite of silencing, we have produced what I want to refer to as wording. For the sake of our own significance, we are compelled to speak, even if our speech is essentially meaningless. We don’t even stop to question the suspicion of needing to comment on things we know nothing about? There are a lot of things that I come across that I feel are ngaphezu kwami (above my level of understanding) and I let these things alone and perhaps, if I am interested, take in what those in the know make of it. There are also things to which I feel very strongly about and yet don’t think my commenting on them will make much of a difference. I silence my need to flex and look impressive in the eyes of others, which is where it usually stems from for me personally, and just watch as the impulse melts away. To be honest, not much will have changed in the external environment, the world will keep spinning. However, something will have changed within me as, in the silence, I loosen the grip on the validation of others. In the silence, my being has a space to breathe and contend with a few things about itself. 


We used to think that the quietest person in the room was the one we should be watching out for. The one who knew the most but was comfortable with letting others take the main stage. Now, it's the loudest person who fills the screen, because that is how we stand out. Being outstanding may be legit if we are vying for the spotlight but the silence may legitimize our extraordinariness. It may excavate parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed, moving us from the ordinary into the extraordinary in the process. It is on the fractal shorelines of silence where our being is heightened, and wild hearts are let loose. The silence begets the extraordinary in life which begets the extraordinary within us.  Williams continues, “There’s something so alarming about not being able to make this ordinary. And yet for us to grow, we need to learn how to cope with the extra-ordinary and to be ready all the time to keep moving. And this is just what you have to say about humanity.” You can’t have the extraordinary, you have to walk the path to become extraordinary.