The cupboard is full: there is me, and a very large sperm whale, a sandstorm, the atoms of a bloodstream, an Italian train station, a group of peasants escaping the plague, some heart-shaped seeds which Nero ate, an ambush of dreamtigers, an architect, a comely prostitute from Victorian England, a sunbird, a lost elephant, new Christmas cards made to look old, two pairs of remarkably dexterous Indian lovers, an empty box of vanilla tea, a fiendishly inventive French pervert and an equally imaginative, but thankfully less demonical Canadian poet. Most important though there is the Silver Man at his door, and his door is not the door to cupboard – his door is open; the cupboard door is closed, locked, as it should be, cupboards are a good way of making the outside world seem more tidy than it really is, and a good place for keeping secret knowledge, and other valuables. Since he so dazzled me with his multiplicity and lightness, for the period of a lifetime, I have sold my hands to the Silver Man, and a couple of his compatriots. There may be no need to renegotiate the contract in the hereafter.

“Friend,” I said to the Silver Man, “this week, you have been giving me nightmares.”

“Is that a complaint? Are they not the most lovely nightmares in the delicate history of torment?”

“Yes, yes! but they are killing: every night when I am, should be, sleeping, I am, instead of resting, reduced to tears of awe.”

First Nightmare

In sleep, I wake to find I’m drinking sand from the beach at Mouille Point, it goes down dry and every glug makes me five-fold more thirstysome, but yet I cannot stop, I’m bewitched and this is not the nightmare, that begins with conviction when I realise, and how I cannot say, but what I know I know with all the certainty of a dreamer in her dream: the sand is not sand, there is something much more to it, something deeply unsettling, and as if to confirm the insanity of it, at that moment the Atlantic rolls right back to Robben Island, leaving me acres more of sand, the die-cut curves of its individual grains glinting in yesterday’s white sun. Oh God, this is not ocean bed, it is a jigsaw puzzle and each grain of sand from the light house to Shackleton’s South Pole is a piece, and I, I! Who loathes jigsaw puzzles! I am charged unquestionably, unquestionably as only unquestionably can be to a dreamer in her dream, I am thus charged with the task of matching up the billion interlocking pieces. My God, my God, and so for a whole night, which may as well be a century, I work my soul ragged and do you know, I actually succeed, but before I can see what this puzzle picture is I have died to make, I wake.

Second Nightmare

This I keep short, for in many respects it was shaped as the first nightmare, save that in sleep I did not wake to find I was drinking an ocean-bed of jigsaw pieces, I woke to find I was drinking needles and the needles were all black, all different sizes, and some tasted of lead, others of ink. Ah, and the sea did not roll back, but all the buildings vanished across the world. There was a qualitative difference to that cursed puzzle, it wasn’t like a kid’s jigsaw, it was more architectural, and yet again, after working all night, I woke before I could see the picture.

Third Nightmare

Again the same, but this time not sand, not needles, but letters of the alphabet, no, let me be absolutely precise: vowels. Vowels! I was drinking vowels, but they were not the ordinary typographer’s A,E,I,O,U, no, these were refugees, they had come from somewhere, they had lives and histories, and very specific places where they had been meaningful, and the horrifying sense of doom I had at their displacement was immense and I knew standing there in that dream with a first mouthful of 6911 E’s, 4889 A’s, 4107 I’s, 4921 O’s and 1785 U’s that if I did not fix the puzzle of these vowels, humanity would lose part of its soul. And this time, I did see the solution, the picture, but it wasn’t a picture as such, it was …

“Let me guess,” said the Silver man: “I’d hazard, your first mouthful of vowels made complete and fathomable, the first five chapters of the English translation of Don Quixote? Furthermore, you may like to know the needles of dream two were not needles, but lines from off the plans of every building large, small, glorious and insignificant, ever built.”

Fourth Nightmare

It was completely different. Two lines, bruised, still optimistic found each other in a white space. There was some fit, common curves, compatible cuts and in a time that seemed like no time, but was a matter of days, the lines were close, too close, and while in Blouberg the waves measured 8 metres high and the boats rocked in Kalk Bay Harbour, the lines did what lines do, and one found the other a surer delight than Silphium.

“This was a nightmare?” the Silver Man asked. “It’s sounding almost sweet. I’ll need a hanky soon.”
“That was only the beginning.”
“Secretum secretorum!”
“Yes, it does come into it. How did you know?”
“I know everything, I even know today it was announced that The Fall has been rescinded.”
“The Fall?”
“Don’t be asinine, there was only one fall in the history of falling called The Fall, and that great fall of falls has been rescinded. In short, there is no longer a line between good and evil, the line has vanished, Lady Lucifer has made apologies for a few millennia of dire misdemeanors, and she has returned to heaven. There are no more devils, and no negatives, so bring the whale and the sunbird, and come out of the cupboard for the atomic structure of the universe is about to change, and it will be a spectacle you should not miss.”

MEMO #5 OF 999

Memo #4 of 999

From Confessions of Appropriation
By Morton Nicoll, 1944

Virtually every Australian is familiar with Tom Roberts’ 1890 masterpiece Shearing the Rams, an impressionistic depiction of the act of shearing, but few know the story of man wielding the shears. Most would be alarmed to learn the hero of the beloved oil painting was not merely an ace at skirting the fleece and a convict shipped from Britain, as were many of the great rousties at the time, but a killer, as brisk and dextrous with knives as he was with shears.

From The Legend of Aridita who had Sheep Shears for Bones
By Antigo Enredo Viciado, 1962

To understand how the woman Aridita came to have sheep shears instead of bones, it is essential to spiral back in Ouspensky’s three dimensional time to an apartment in suburbia. There the chairs were all white and the floor was covered in butterflies, and these creatures with dark red wings and blue wings and some with yellow wings caused a perpetual maddening breeze which made everything go wrong. So it is no surprise Aridita fell pregnant, married the father she did not know, and then on the day they moved into a glass house, with glass stairs and glass beds with glass sheets, she miscarried the child, this before she and the new husband of rich sheep-farming relatives and poor manners could fall in love. Their marriage became an awkward, purposeless thing: he liked beer and golf, and she liked tea and piano playing. He couldn’t abide the scent of woolly piano felt about her, and she loathed the stench of golf ball straw that hung about him. When Aridita fell pregnant again the prospective grand-parents on both sides were relieved and a whole sheep was skirted and roasted to celebrate, and when Aridita miscarried again there was despair all round. After a third attempt to carry a child also failed, and doctors blamed Aridita’s wonky uterus, she was ready to drive a pair of shears through her heart, but she did not because the God of Sheep intervened, and if you could see Aridita you would understand why the God of Sheep was so smitten. He made a deal with Aridita and his side of the deal was to place Aridita’s fertilized egg into the womb of a blind ewe. This he did and the blind ewe carried Aridita’s twins to full term. Now these children, J and L, were perfect, the grandparents on all sides were delighted, and for all the world it seemed Aritida’s life was perfect too, but since it had been a blind ewe who had born the children, and since Aridita’s side of the deal with the God of Sheep was unspeakably evil, Aridita became irrationally consumed with proving herself a good mother. Guilt and worry lodged in her bones. Within two years guilt and worry turned to cancer. Doctors could do nought but point to multiplying dark spots in Aridita’s X-rays. Again she was ready to drive a pair of shears through her heart, but again, the God of Sheep intervened. This time his side of the deal was to give Aridita a new skeleton, and this he did in two winks of an eye.

From Gorgidas the Moustache Twirling Mountebank
By Bella Angelopolous, 1980

“He’d have to swim the Hellespont,” Crista said. Sometimes she wished she was a carnival stripper again, at least up there she knew the men thought of her as an object and likewise she thought of them as objects. Gorgidas had confounded her, first with attention she did not feel she deserved, and then with abandonment she did not feel she deserved. In fact, it was not a swim across a Turkish strait that reunited Crista and Gorgidas, but a pair of Burgon & Ball Red Shank Drummer Boy Sheep Shears, the best-selling shears in the world.

MEMO 3 of 999

“Arare,” said Ginger Ohno, fisherman and card shark. “Made by the Iwachu Company.” He had not yet poured from the cast-iron teapot. “Means ‘hail’ in Japanese.” Ohno held its lithe handle with fingers, which had none of the tapering grace of those of his famous distant uncle, who at that minute was positioned to dance in a recital in the Kanda Kyoritsu Kodo hall in Tokyo.
On a private balcony of the looming ship named Explorer and subtitled ‘Semester At Sea’, a girl was reading a book and drinking Coke-Lite and she did not care much for the Explorer, or her private cabin, or the flat-topped mountain or the blue day, and she certainly did not spend any thoughts on the old Helen Pea and its crew about to drink tea. But in a fish restaurant some cubic gallons of oxygen diagonally away, stood a waiter, a student of three-dimensional computer graphics and he did spot the teapot patterned with a hobnail design. He wondered in the form of numbers at its spout:
{ 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 }
{ 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 }
These all related not so much to the iconic Arare teapot, but to that landmark Utah Teapot.
Regardless of the attention and lack of attention his pot garnered, the distant relative of the ballet dancer Kazuo Ohno tilted the pot in order to pour tea by then well brewed, but what came out?
First something sharp and yellow and long. Ah!
His shipmate squinted. “I’d swear that’s a beak and by the red spot at its top, I’d hazard the beak of a…” He did not have to end the sentence for following on the beak in the good order it should, came a head and then the body of a seagull.
“How the devil did such a plump bird come from that tiny spout?”
“Plump?” said Ohno. “You worry about its plumpness? The question is not how a plump bird came out, but how a bird at all?”
It did not end with a bird though because the gull came knotted up in a long string of lights, old fairy bulbs in blue, green, red, and yellow.
“He has come from the Seapoint promenade!” said a deckhand, also agog. “I swear those there are promenade lights, the festive season lights, the seaside lights.” All hands studied the lights cascading from the cast-iron pot until Ohno realised how the bird was struggling, and so the ballet dancer’s relative fell over himself to catch the bird, to wrap his arms about it. He held the seagull close and was overcome with delight for the beast was fat with smooth feathers and his bird heart beat warmly. Oh and Ho! That was not the end of the strangeness! After the entrails of promenade lights, came bricks, the sand, the railings, a whole heap of running shoes, grass, a putt-putt course with every of its lost balls found, and then by God, the sea, yes the entire ocean – beginning with Three Anchor Bay – came gushing out replete with rocks and weeds and fish and whales – so many kinds of whales, but king among them, Whale Shark, – after them came tankers and yachts, froth and barnacles, rope, bluebottles, used condoms, treasure, translucent octopi, a pound of hellos left unsaid, a Beach Road full of apartment blocks, some dozen dozen cats (including an exotic Bengal belonging to an ornithologist publisher), old arguments, three women in top hats, burnt toast, Coke Lite, a bookshop of broke booksellers, a poet called Creamy, a coffee bar, that ship of American teenagers, then in bronze and very pricey a car hijacking by a famed sculptor, and no, it did not end, soon spluttered forth a whole city complete with crooked politicians, liar Mafiosi, journalists, mountain, peaks, cable car, a string of postcard concubines, a gram of look-the-other-way and even a sky of faraway stars … in fact, when the tea stopped pouring it turned out that instead of the pot holding the tea, the tea was holding the pot. Everything was backwardski, like it is when you look through a prism.
Rim:
{ 102, 103, 104, 105, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 }
Body:
{ 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 }
{ 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32,
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 }
Lid:
{ 96, 96, 96, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100,
101, 101, 101, 101, 0, 1, 2, 3 }
{ 0, 1, 2, 3, 106, 107, 108, 109,
110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117 }
Handle:
{ 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 }
{ 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60,
61, 62, 63, 64, 28, 65, 66, 67 }
Spout:
{ 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 }
{ 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 }

Vertices:

{ 0.2000, 0.0000, 2.70000 }, { 0.2000, -0.1120, 2.70000 },
{ 0.1120, -0.2000, 2.70000 }, { 0.0000, -0.2000, 2.70000 },
{ 1.3375, 0.0000, 2.53125 }, { 1.3375, -0.7490, 2.53125 },
{ 0.7490, -1.3375, 2.53125 }, { 0.0000, -1.3375, 2.53125 },
{ 1.4375, 0.0000, 2.53125 }, { 1.4375, -0.8050, 2.53125 },
{ 0.8050, -1.4375, 2.53125 }, { 0.0000, -1.4375, 2.53125 },
{ 1.5000, 0.0000, 2.40000 }, { 1.5000, -0.8400, 2.40000 },
{ 0.8400, -1.5000, 2.40000 }, { 0.0000, -1.5000, 2.40000 },
{ 1.7500, 0.0000, 1.87500 }, { 1.7500, -0.9800, 1.87500 },
{ 0.9800, -1.7500, 1.87500 }, { 0.0000, -1.7500, 1.87500 },
{ 2.0000, 0.0000, 1.35000 }, { 2.0000, -1.1200, 1.35000 },
{ 1.1200, -2.0000, 1.35000 }, { 0.0000, -2.0000, 1.35000 },
{ 2.0000, 0.0000, 0.90000 }, { 2.0000, -1.1200, 0.90000 },
{ 1.1200, -2.0000, 0.90000 }, { 0.0000, -2.0000, 0.90000 },
{ -2.0000, 0.0000, 0.90000 }, { 2.0000, 0.0000, 0.45000 },
{ 2.0000, -1.1200, 0.45000 }, { 1.1200, -2.0000, 0.45000 },
{ 0.0000, -2.0000, 0.45000 }, { 1.5000, 0.0000, 0.22500 },
{ 1.5000, -0.8400, 0.22500 }, { 0.8400, -1.5000, 0.22500 },
{ 0.0000, -1.5000, 0.22500 }, { 1.5000, 0.0000, 0.15000 },
{ 1.5000, -0.8400, 0.15000 }, { 0.8400, -1.5000, 0.15000 },
{ 0.0000, -1.5000, 0.15000 }, { -1.6000, 0.0000, 2.02500 },
{ -1.6000, -0.3000, 2.02500 }, { -1.5000, -0.3000, 2.25000 },
{ -1.5000, 0.0000, 2.25000 }, { -2.3000, 0.0000, 2.02500 },
{ -2.3000, -0.3000, 2.02500 }, { -2.5000, -0.3000, 2.25000 },
{ -2.5000, 0.0000, 2.25000 }, { -2.7000, 0.0000, 2.02500 },
{ -2.7000, -0.3000, 2.02500 }, { -3.0000, -0.3000, 2.25000 },
{ -3.0000, 0.0000, 2.25000 }, { -2.7000, 0.0000, 1.80000 },
{ -2.7000, -0.3000, 1.80000 }, { -3.0000, -0.3000, 1.80000 },
{ -3.0000, 0.0000, 1.80000 }, { -2.7000, 0.0000, 1.57500 },
{ -2.7000, -0.3000, 1.57500 }, { -3.0000, -0.3000, 1.35000 },
{ -3.0000, 0.0000, 1.35000 }, { -2.5000, 0.0000, 1.12500 },
{ -2.5000, -0.3000, 1.12500 }, { -2.6500, -0.3000, 0.93750 },
{ -2.6500, 0.0000, 0.93750 }, { -2.0000, -0.3000, 0.90000 },
{ -1.9000, -0.3000, 0.60000 }, { -1.9000, 0.0000, 0.60000 },
{ 1.7000, 0.0000, 1.42500 }, { 1.7000, -0.6600, 1.42500 },
{ 1.7000, -0.6600, 0.60000 }, { 1.7000, 0.0000, 0.60000 },
{ 2.6000, 0.0000, 1.42500 }, { 2.6000, -0.6600, 1.42500 },
{ 3.1000, -0.6600, 0.82500 }, { 3.1000, 0.0000, 0.82500 },
{ 2.3000, 0.0000, 2.10000 }, { 2.3000, -0.2500, 2.10000 },
{ 2.4000, -0.2500, 2.02500 }, { 2.4000, 0.0000, 2.02500 },
{ 2.7000, 0.0000, 2.40000 }, { 2.7000, -0.2500, 2.40000 },
{ 3.3000, -0.2500, 2.40000 }, { 3.3000, 0.0000, 2.40000 },
{ 2.8000, 0.0000, 2.47500 }, { 2.8000, -0.2500, 2.47500 },
{ 3.5250, -0.2500, 2.49375 }, { 3.5250, 0.0000, 2.49375 },
{ 2.9000, 0.0000, 2.47500 }, { 2.9000, -0.1500, 2.47500 },
{ 3.4500, -0.1500, 2.51250 }, { 3.4500, 0.0000, 2.51250 },
{ 2.8000, 0.0000, 2.40000 }, { 2.8000, -0.1500, 2.40000 },
{ 3.2000, -0.1500, 2.40000 }, { 3.2000, 0.0000, 2.40000 },
{ 0.0000, 0.0000, 3.15000 }, { 0.8000, 0.0000, 3.15000 },
{ 0.8000, -0.4500, 3.15000 }, { 0.4500, -0.8000, 3.15000 },
{ 0.0000, -0.8000, 3.15000 }, { 0.0000, 0.0000, 2.85000 },
{ 1.4000, 0.0000, 2.40000 }, { 1.4000, -0.7840, 2.40000 },
{ 0.7840, -1.4000, 2.40000 }, { 0.0000, -1.4000, 2.40000 },
{ 0.4000, 0.0000, 2.55000 }, { 0.4000, -0.2240, 2.55000 },
{ 0.2240, -0.4000, 2.55000 }, { 0.0000, -0.4000, 2.55000 },
{ 1.3000, 0.0000, 2.55000 }, { 1.3000, -0.7280, 2.55000 },
{ 0.7280, -1.3000, 2.55000 }, { 0.0000, -1.3000, 2.55000 },
{ 1.3000, 0.0000, 2.40000 }, { 1.3000, -0.7280, 2.40000 },
{ 0.7280, -1.3000, 2.40000 }, { 0.0000, -1.3000, 2.40000 },

MEMO 2 OF 999

MEMO 1 OF 999

ONE
The Extreme Importance of Orangina (et sa pulpe!)

His eyes sparkled, brilliant with emptiness: light, quick, and visible as Calvalcanti who sprang so deftly over a grave and into history.
“We will have macaroni cheese and Orangina,” said the man Janko Fox only ever knew as Mr Macaroni. We will. There was no question in it – like money, power and hustlers, it rung with factyness. We will have macaroni cheese and Orangina. We will. As if they were a string of photos spitting from a photo booth, Mr Macaroni’s words repeated thirty-six times in Janko’s head, and finally and thus absolved of the task of having to peruse a menu and make a decision, Janko was content to do as the other man wished, but all the long time they sat there at the Newport Deli opposite the Moullie Point Lighthouse – at least it was still standing – those words kept spitting out in his thoughts as if from the photo booth.

The men did not speak, although Janko had many questions; they chewed on macaroni cheese washed down with Orangina and such a very length of time went by without words, Janko’s memory of the questions he aimed to pose this fellow of leaky conscience evaporated, while seagulls’ squawked and a nearby table of eaters squawked too, loudly, louder than the gulls, all about fabulous nothings, weightless as feathers detached from their birds. Thus mused (it was only a moment of musing though and did not break the fabulist economy) Janko and he irked himself for being unoriginal, but then consoled himself that no man was actually ever original, though some were arrogant and deluded enough to imagine they were, and beside if an original man was lurking anywhere he’d be a lardy fool, a mountebank, a contrariwise, no-good, squanderer of energy if he went about doing everything again in a new fashion. Janko harboured no patience for fashion, fiction, novelty or novels – he found such constructs windy, vain and futile. Far and wide as Janko could see, there was only truth (the feign of fiction by his estimation was nought, but rouge upon a made-up cheek) and every bit of it was on the surface of things: the universe, a place of all outward action and no inner secrets, could be read like Braille, but only a true idiot savant would believe it; the proudfoot semi-clevers and cloudy-heads would be bogged eternally in a crazy-glue of motivations, reactions, and would cling zealotish to the notion of lies and fiction like Catholics to Mary, Jews to Moses and Muslims to Mohammed.

“I love the orange peel parasol in the Orangina logo,” Mr Macaroni said with startling deep affection in his tone.
It might have been hard for a more moral and philosophical man than Janko to believe Mr Macaroni capable of love, but no, Janko was impressed a person, let alone Mr Macaroni could be so fond of anything. “I don’t much believe in love,” Janko said. “Liking … I can like very well.”
“Like is too insipid for Orangina. It’s an Algerian drink, you know that?”
“I did not.”
The silence between them was comfortable as an old couple married for so many years they no longer need make any attempt to impress, and so were at their most exquisitely banal in each others’ presence. Mr Macaroni sighed as if he sensed some splendiferous artificialness afoot and in response to that sigh, Janko sighed too and said: “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Some people are born guilty, the Catholics for example, but I was born a plagiarist. Andy Warhol is the man who can do ‘Liking’ and not love. I’m just a man who read that and thought it matched quite well with me and so …” He shrugged. “So Orangina is Algerian.”
“As am I.” Mr Macaroni was not Italian, no, he was a Frenchman of Algerian decent, born in the outer banlieus of Paris; the badlands of the city of love.

“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I agree,” Janko said.
Mr Macaroni clicked his fingers to summon a waiter. “Another round of macaroni and Orangina,” he said to the waiter and to Janko he said: “You made a lot up.”
“For the sake of a good story,” Janko said.
“The cover says it is a true story.”
“If you’re able to look properly and think clearly, the outside of a thing never lies … then again the most honest thing I can tell you is I lie often, always, and with abandon.”
“Bah! That is common enough. I’ve never met a man who does not lie in a multitude of ways on a daily basis, but I’ve seldom met one with wit enough to know or admit it.” He held up his bottle of Orangina, equipped with a bending straw, and clinked it against Janko’s bottle. “Saluté! We could consider becoming friends.”
“As you like. I make a poor friend though.”
“Good. So do I.”
“I’m a pathological sulker.”
“And I am self-absorbed, occasionally mean of spirit, needy and ambitious.”
“And I am a candid materialist whose greatest stock of faith is placed in contradiction and the motto: matter is all that matters.”
Mr Macaroni chuckled and after that he was silent all through eating the third serving of macaroni. He would have two more servings before saying:

“Assume nothing. I’m a cloudy-head generalist and a lazy researcher, I know all the bits of truth were out there for me to see, but since I lacked the faculties to make the connections, I winged it with a few true lies.”
Pushing his plate North of his belly, and West of his new friend, Mr Macaroni said: “Now we will go and visit The Shopping Mall Museum and perhaps make some more connections.”
“I’d sooner go surfing or read Moby Dick.” Janko’s lips turned down sourly at the thought of the V&A Shopping Mall Doomsday Museum. “I visited that place too often when researching for the book. At first it held a kind of dreadful fascination – I mean the outrage of it did, but ultimately I got jaded with all those documentaries and gaudy brass plaques with flower tubes in memorial to the person who died here at the Burts Bees lip balm counter and there trying on the latest Crocs or eating sushi at the Fish Market or fitting jeans at Levis or … everything is dusty in there … after trailing around reading all the personal testimonies of Doomsday over and over, it bores me, no, worse, it reviles me immensely, it’s carnivorous tourism at its most foul and today’s Sunday – there’ll be queues to get in and queues for the canteen and children will be scrawtching and the usual mourners wailing. All the families of the dead go on Sundays – it’s a heavy place, such a drag on one’s spirit, such a sinkhole, like a film without any shred of humour. Somebody should stand up and read a parable from Moby Dick: But Oh! Shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe there is a sure delight.”

Everything about him in that peasant black dress is elegant, in particular the way he flicks the dress up from time to time revealing legs, slim and long, clad in stockings with suspenders. Forty characters may sound exhausting and too much like gimcrackery, but soon as he steps out upon the stage, no doubt registers on the authenticity metre, this is no jizz-fest karaoke show, it is a remarkable performance. Besides having fabulous legs, Jeremy Crutchley is as brilliant as a man as he is as a woman, as fine as a German as he is as an American, and as dazzling as a tranny as he is as a Bavarian talk show host. Doug Wright’s one-man play ‘I Am My Own Wife’ about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is a near feat of writing. Its divine and wicked humour offsets much seriousness, as did Wright’s screenplay about the Marquis de Sade (Quills) – what a great relief this Shakespearean balance is in a world of humourless, bestselling, misery memoirs (sometimes fake, but evidently useful bolsters of ailing careers).

Meat/mind/heart/grit with no comedy strikes me as bad as comedy with no meat/mind/heart/grit.

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, transvestite, spy and furniture collector, was no virgin, and I’m no particular fan of idiotic comedies (though even if slightly pressed I’d take them over misery memoirs any day and every day) like that film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but the writer of that film, Judd Apatow, is a monumental success, and I am not, so who I am to call his comedy puerile (or for that matter, who am I to call bestselling misery memoirs, dire, sadly pornographic and unreadable – which I definitely do, for they definitely are, right down to the pathetic blurbs on their glossy covers featuring photographs of wan faces staring out from under Italic titles; my only wish for them is a swift apocalyptic demise; Thomas Hood said it though, wishing has lost its power; oh bother, I thought it’d be different in a warm climate). Not me, but a multitude of somebodies love mis-lit a lot, and a multitude of somebodies love The 40-Year-Old Virgin, again not me, but what I do love is Judd Apatow’s motto, as he calls it in last month’s Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire: Less jizz, more heart.

Jizz! I covet your motto Judd. Admittedly, I’m not sure exactly what this auspicious ‘jizz’ means, but it’s very soundy, and I fancy ‘jizz’ in writing to be karaoke as opposed to authenticity … best I check though…

Okay, it’s minutes later I’m enlightened thanks to Collins Online, Wikipedia, Definition-Of and the Urban Dictionary: ‘jizz’ is an almighty mouthful: an ‘unstable polymorphous word with many orthographic variations’. As a birding term, it’s the vibe of a bird, given off by the bird’s posturing, but the ‘jizz’ of slang is ‘cum’, and strangely too it’s fast foody: an elusive ingredient in Big Macs apparently and also the fizz of shook, the stuff that errupts from a jostled can of Coke.

Entomologically, ‘jizz’ seems on the birding front at least, somehow related to GIS, military surveillance speak for ‘general impression and shape’, though Definition-Of has it as derived from the Latin ‘jacere’ for ‘throw’. There is also the pleasantly defined ‘jizz jazz’ – ‘cheesy jazz music in pornos’.

‘Jizz’ then by a confabulation of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology is (cheesy) froth and posturing – like I thought, Karaoke. Doug Wright gives Charlotte von Mahlsdorf a grand line about Karaoke, but the thing I liked most about the line was the way Jeremy Crutchley, in his priceless rendition of Charlotte pronounced the word ‘karaoke’.

Enough Pangloss, jizz and karaoke already. Here in honour of Jeremy, Doug, Janice (Honeyman, the director of the SA production of IAMOW), Dicky (Longhurst, the designer of the SA Production), Judd and Charlotte are the promised legs:

From ‘The Art of Walking’ in ‘Shandygaff: A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to the Reader.’
By Christopher Morley

Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries!
He is as old as his calves–his garteries….–Meditations of Andrew McGill.
“There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea.”
This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word “walking” occurs in any description of Wordsworth’s existence. De Quincey assures us that the poet’s props were very ill shapen–”they were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs”–but none the less he was princeps arte ambulandi. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic pronouncement: “I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles–a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings.” … Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than a flute: he might have written “The Handy Guide for Beggars” long before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy…One could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though literature were a co-product of legs and head.

From ‘Aaron’s Rod’
By D.H. Lawrence

She wore a wonderful gown of thin blue velvet, of a lovely colour, with some kind of gauzy gold-threaded filament down the sides. It was terribly modern, short, and showed her legs and her shoulders and breast and all her beautiful white arms. Round her throat was a collar of dark-blue sapphires. Her hair was done low, almost to the brows, and heavy, like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. She was most carefully made up–yet with that touch of exaggeration, lips slightly too red, which was quite intentional, and which frightened Aaron. He thought her wonderful, and sinister. She affected him with a touch of horror. She sat down opposite him, and her beautifully shapen legs, in frail, goldish stockings, seemed to glisten metallic naked, thrust from out of the wonderful, wonderful skin, like periwinkle-blue velvet. She had tapestry shoes, blue and gold: and almost one could see her toes: metallic naked. The gold-threaded gauze slipped at her side. Aaron could not help watching the naked-seeming arch of her foot. It was as if she were dusted with dark gold-dust upon her marvellous nudity.
She must have seen his face, seen that he was ebloui.
/…/”Manfredi is just bringing the cocktails. Do you think you’d prefer orange in yours?”
“Ill have mine as you have yours.”
“I don’t take orange in mine. Won’t you smoke?”
The strange, naked, remote-seeming voice! And then the beautiful firm limbs thrust out in that dress, and nakedly dusky as with gold-dust. Her beautiful woman’s legs, slightly glistening, duskily. His one abiding instinct was to touch them, to kiss them. He had never known a woman to exercise such power over him. It was a bare, occult force, something he could not cope with.

From ‘Moby Dick’ [The chapter called: The Spirit-Spout]
By Herman Melville

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her- one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night.

From ‘A Question of Power’
By Bessie Head

Each thing had come to her as a backwash of obscenity. It was the implications in Medusa’s words and gestures that had run along those grooves in her head as though she were saying: ‘Now I know the feeling of deep perversion. It is shameful. It is acts demented people perform in dark, hidden places. It makes on ashamed to have legs.’
/…/
He went with Miss Pink Sugar-Icing for a few nights, but in spite of her wealth and promise of security for his poor relatives, she was very boring. He dropped her abruptly and introduced Miss Pelican-Beak. In every way Pelican-Beak was enchantment. She was gay and carefree, tough, energetic and so athletic she seemed to be a trapeze artist. Her symbol came along with her, the beak of the Pelican bird. It referred to her passageway, which was long and tough like the bird’s beak. This special gift enabled her to make love in all sorts of postures without any danger of internal injury; that is, she could twist her legs above her head, she could twist this way and that, she could do all sorts of things, and, like Miss Sewing-Machine, go the whole night and wake up the next morning with no ill-effects. She had spindly bony knees and elbows, and thrust her elbows out to show that she usually pushed everyone else out of the way. Nothing stood between her and her desires.

From ‘Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse’
By Guy de Maupassant

Every now and then, he cast a glance at the lofty mountains with beclouded summits that shut in Mentone; then, with a very slow movement, he would cross his long legs, so thin that they seemed like two bones, around which fluttered the cloth of his trousers, and he would open a book, always the same book. And then he did not stir any more, but read on, read on with his eye and his mind; all his wasting body seemed to read, all his soul plunged, lost, disappeared, in this book, up to the hour when the cool air made him cough a little. Then, he got up and reentered the hotel.

From ‘Candide’
By Voltaire

“It is demonstrable,” said Master Pangloss, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.”

From ‘Crome Yellow’
By Aldous Huxley

On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic paper: a long man, with a long nose and long,
drooping moustaches and long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat, and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers–legs that bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked.

From ‘Bitches’ Brew’
By Fred Khumalo

Then I spotted her. She was, you see, wearing a tomato red dress that reached just above her knees. Her legs – you didn’t see her legs last night, wow – her legs were milky white. She had on red high-heeled shoes.

From ‘Moby Dick’ [The chapter called: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars]
By Herman Melville

On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.

From ‘King Lear’
By William Shakespeare

FOOL
Ha, ha! he wears cruel garters. Horses are tied
by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by
the loins, and men by the legs: when a man’s
over-lusty at legs, then he wears wooden
nether-stocks.

From ‘The Beautiful and Damned’
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Well, I can’t describe her exactly–except to say that she was beautiful. She was–tremendously alive. She was eating gum-drops.”
“What!”
“It was a sort of attenuated vice. She’s a nervous kind–said she always ate gum-drops at teas because she had to stand around so long in one place.”
“What’d you talk about–Bergson? Bilphism? Whether the one-step is immoral?”
Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways.
“As a matter of fact we did talk on Bilphism. Seems her mother’s a Bilphist. Mostly, though, we talked about legs.”
Anthony rocked in glee.
“My God! Whose legs?”
“Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice bric-à-brac. She aroused a great desire to see them.”
“What is she–a dancer?”
“No, I found she was a cousin of Dick’s.”
Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end like a live thing and dove to the floor.
“Name’s Gloria Gilbert?” he cried.
“Yes. Isn’t she remarkable?”
“I’m sure I don’t know–but for sheer dulness her father–”
“Well,” interrupted Maury with implacable conviction, “her family may be as sad as professional mourners but I’m inclined to think that she’s a quite authentic and original character. The outer signs of the cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that–but different, very emphatically different.”
“Go on, go on!” urged Anthony. “Soon as Dick told me she didn’t have a brain in her head I knew she must be pretty good.”
“Did he say that?”
“Swore to it,” said Anthony with another snorting laugh.
“Well, what he means by brains in a woman is–”
“I know,” interrupted Anthony eagerly, “he means a smattering of literary misinformation.”
“That’s it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it’s a very ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked
about legs. She talked about skin too–her own skin. Always her own. She told me the sort of tan she’d like to get in the summer and how closely she usually approximated it.”
“You sat enraptured by her low alto?”
“By her low alto! No, by tan! I began thinking about tan. I began to think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years ago. I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze, if I remember rightly.”
Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter.
“She’s got you going–oh, Maury! Maury the Connecticut life-saver. The human nutmeg. Extra! Heiress elopes with coast-guard because of his luscious pigmentation! Afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in his family!”
Maury sighed; rising he walked to the window and raised the shade.
“Snowing hard.”
Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer.
“Another winter.” Maury’s voice from the window was almost a whisper. “We’re growing old, Anthony. I’m twenty-seven, by God! Three years to thirty, and then I’m what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man.”
Anthony was silent for a moment.
“You _are_ old, Maury,” he agreed at length. “The first signs of a very dissolute and wabbly senescence–you have spent the afternoon talking about tan and a lady’s legs.”

Refreshing, but anything more than half silent would be apocalyptic. Somebody’s got to speak or sing or make music – there’s a whole catalogue of silences, and one for speaking too and music is a kind of speaking – dancing to silence would be pretty bleak, pathetic really, especially if we’re (and I sure am) going to take the Sheep Man’s advice and dancelikeyourlifedependedonit … in all the cold I left the radio on and the electric blanket at high, wake up in a sweat and have that epiphany of sorts, which somehow seems worth noting down, hehe, but I disturb the cat, who runs away and afterwards I read a few more chapters of Dance Dance Dance. It’s a while before I’m falling asleep again, which is awkward because Lilly Allen is singing loudly from the next room the song with the refrain ‘You never make me scream’ and the banjo is playing and I remember re the catalogue of silences some words on a sign in Tuol Sleng, instruction #7 to prisoners: Do nothing, sit still and wait my orders. If no order, sit still, be quiet. When I ask you to do something do it immediately without protesting… genocide loves silence … So Lilly’s singing and I start seeing the faces of the prisoners. A photograph was taken of every soul as they entered the prison they’d never leave, and as if that isn’t sadness enough, next I see a postcard I bought yesterday at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, ‘Jews of Bedzin, Poland’. The card is full of faces, about a hundred and eighty men, women, children …that takes me back to the grey dogs, with yellow eyes, the dogs at the start of Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about 1982’s Lebanon war. I went to that on Tuesday night … this is no good for sleep … I must sleep, it’s getting on to four, but there’s a distinct lack of silence in my head … I’m back to the catalogue of silences and instead of counting sheep I start to make a catalogue of silences.

Catalogue of Silences:

A
Alla Nazimova Silence – graceful, the silence of movies before sound; Anxious Silence – I admire you so I’m not sure what to say, nervous, out of my depth, I can’t be myself, it’s not good enough; Apocalyptic Silence – when the balance of all things and silence too, tips beyond repair, it’s a universe ending silence, the inverse opposite of the Big Bang; Anorexic Silence – You starve instead of speaking and grow thin of it.
B
Beat Silence – Harold Pinter’s kind of silence; Bleak Silence – it’s the silence of a bedsit in Earls Court or Kennilworth, in it one old man or woman, who is alone on Christmas eating a tin of tuna; Bland Silence – the relationship isn’t working, you can’t even bother to speak anymore, you’re at an over-familiar restaurant, both eating what you always order, Beautiful Silence – of desert, the red dunes in Namibia, it’s the silence of grand spaces, plains, canyons, endless roads from Cape Town to Cairo; Bitch Silence – a mildish form occurs amongst teenage girls, but the worst kind of Bitch Silence is that manipulative silence from a woman who separates a child from a good father in order to force the man to give her money or simply in order to make him suffer. Bar Brawl Silence – very wisely, you don’t want to get hurt for no reason, so you step back and stay silent
C
Cold Silence – the silence between the grave and hell, limbo; Cruel Silence – you could spare a person some sadness by speaking and it would cost you nothing, but being silent gives you a sense of power; Coward’s Silence – you should speak out against some great or small atrocity, but you prefer to save your skin; Comic Silence – that’s about timing; Cat’s Silence – the way they move.
D
Devil’s Silence (Diabolus Silentium) – silent only for the sake of argument or something like that; Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You Silence – nobody calls and the silence makes you feel worthless and you wonder if you made the right choices, but you’ll get over it; Drinkers’ Silence – a bonding silence over a drink; Dark Silence – it’s about depression, a chemically induced silence, very hard to shake until its shaken and when shaken it seems hard to imagine ever feeling so dark
E
Elegant Silence – when there is expression and motion, but no speech, ballet, mime, tango and any time Audrey Hepburn pauses to smoke or just to look; Expedient Silence – the bean-counter’s silence, prudent, self-interested; Eternal Silence – it goes to the stars; Elusive Silence – two people, you’re in a confined space, like a marriage or a car, and all you want is some peace, but the other person keeps talking, Elusive Silence can lead to madness or murder, humour is the only cure.
F
Fool’s Silence – like fool’s gold, it seems beautiful and valuable, but it’s not; Fulsome Silence – content, it’s when somebody you thought you’d lost returns; Fear’s Silence – Sure, it can lead to terrible calamities, but the heart crushed by fear, must be forgiven, because fear’s the impossible enemy, none survive.
G
Grotesque Silence – the silence after genocide, the silence of concentration camps and gas chambers; Great Silence – not good, it’s the end of creativity, writer’s block or even the extremely conservative silence of religions that forbid dancing, or other art; Genuine Silence – when there really is nothing to say, it is perfectly acceptable to choose silence over meaningless chatter or something worse like self-congratulatory banter
H Handsome Silence – particularly in men, particularly in relation to women, a man who knows he has no interest in a woman, and so cuts contact in order not to lead her on, even though it would profit his ego immensely to have the occasional adoring message; handsome silence is the next best option if he has already provided a generous rejection, an honest, but kind, ‘no’ and still the lovelorn woman cannot let him beHellish Silence – waiting to hear; Heartless Silence – unlike cruel silence, the heartless silence is not with malice, simply lack of heart, a genuine affliction, the heartless silent has either as a result of drug use or syndrome, such as Aspergers, no capacity to understand how their silence hurts others
I Iconic Silence – not an especially compassionate silence, a person of elevated stature chooses silence as a form of power, it makes them unapproachable, and enhances their mystique; Internal Silence – it does not exist in life, even with meditation all thoughts cannot be stilled, even a brain with no conscious thoughts is not silent until death.
J
Japanese Silence – suicide, when it is about saving face, preserving honour, and tradition
K
Killing Silence – in relationships, not talking it out, allowing something to fester until it becomes a poison; King’s Silence – execution, named for Henry, but can apply to all manner of tyrants, it is the silencing of opposition in any form be it a wife you no longer want, or a person you deem a threat to your rule
L
Lazy Silence – You could say something, but you just can’t be bothered; Lugubrious Silence – broody and morose, potentially operatic; Lardy Silence – You eat instead of speaking and grow fat of it.
M
Miser’s Silence – the man who thinks himself too good to speak, hordes up his words and thoughts like scrooge … for what Miser? Words are no currency to the dead, soon you will have no mouth to speak, no fingers to write with, and there will be no listeners or readers.
N
Noisy Silence – You’re in a crowd, but nobody is speaking to you, you’re the loner on the fringes, it can even be at a cocktail party, and you can be speaking pleasantries, but saying nothing, so it is the silence of vacant words ; Noble Silence – Not speaking in order to find the peace of not thinking
O
Ostracizing Silence – group cruelty, the tall poppy’s untimely end, you were so brilliant and successful, people were always jealous, and when you fell from grace, the group exiled you, and they relished it
P
Predatory Silence – a killer watching his, her, its prey; Patient Silence – a parent or teacher allowing a child to do something for themselves even though it’s taking time; Profiteer’s Silence – you know something, but say nothing, or get paid to say nothing, inside information, inside trading, deceit, blackmail, you get rich on this silence; Political Silence – it’s all about correctness and keeping your position in the court; Philosophical Silence – the result of excessive thought; Pleasant Silence – when you are so comfortable with a companion you do not have to speak; Plotter’s Silence – a person chooses not to speak yet, they’re biding their time, plotting a best strategy, possibly waiting for more information before committing themselves to a voiced opinion
Q
Quincunxical Silence – in a petty matter, this is a very awkward silence, like on the dice you are the dot in the middle of the other four, and no matter what you say somebody is going to get hurt, somebody is going to get angry, all pointlessly, so you absent yourself and say nothing
R
Readers Silence – a very fine silence punctuated with the sound of turning pages.
S
Sleeper’s Silence – can be so compelling like Eri Asai in After Dark, it’s visible silence, you want to watch; Sulker’s Silence – as long as it doesn’t go on too long, it’s okay, and best to let the sulker sulk (excessive Sulker’s Silence is pathological); Shotgun Silence – an old fashioned kind with a long history, like at shotgun weddings, and nobody wanted to say the bride was pregnant, but nowadays, this kind of silence covers all manner of social embarrassments, which are only embarrassments because of the way certain (often uptight or petty) people look at them
T
Toothsome Silence – when food is so tasty a party of eaters falls into this silence as they eat, until somebody remembers to speak again. Usually the first words uttered after Toothsome Silence are in praise of the meal; Thinkers Silence – admirable, but if it lasts too long it can be anti-social
U
Unhandsome Silence – particularly in men, and especially in relation to vulnerable women, this is a kind of Coward Silence, the man who misleads, leads on purely for the benefit of his little ego; he should just say with generosity:no.
V
Virtuous Silence – overrated; Victim’s Silence – one of the most tragic silences, prevalent among women and children
W
Writer’s Silence/ Worker’s Silence – when you refuse to answer the phone or speak to anyone because you’re writing/ working; Weird Silence – like on the sixteenth floor at the Dolphin Hotel in Dance Dance Dance; Wishful Silence – perhaps the most exquisite of all silences: you’re seeing or experiencing something so breathtaking, there are no words for its loveliness, and all you can do is wish it could go it go on forever, but know it will vanish, and the most important thing is not to panic over the transience, for panic may spoil the Wishful Silence
X –
X Out Silence – the silence of adead man after a contract killing, the mobster’s kind of silence
Y
Yawning Silence – the silence of the unemployed or burnt out, you stay home and stare at a something for extended periods of time because there is nothing else you can do; Your Silence – in human relationships, when one person is silent and another doesn’t understand why, but accepts with silence their silence, the only decent way of respecting the other person’s reasons, so acknowledging the other’s battle, in the sense that everybody is fighting a battle, it is a forgiving silence
Z
Zane Grey Silence – It’s the silence of the old trapper – ‘a far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and the force of the great, lonely hills’, it’s the silence of one who knew ‘progress was great, but nature unspoiled was greater.’ Zealots’ Silence – usually a group silence, among those who cannot question, and take it all on faith, and will kill to silence anyone who disagrees.

Two weeks later, against my father’s best wishes, I arrived in the middle of the night in Tehran. Some minutes before landing, all the women in the plane began to put on their black headscarves, and wipe off their lipstick, and I admit, I felt a nervous, especially because according to my cell phone contract and type, my phone did not work in Iran, so I was to be there for a month, completely out of contact. It was winter, and when I walked across the tarmac to the airport, I saw a mountain covered in snow and shining in the moonlight, and I knew everything would be fine, that I would have safe trip.

Then again, in the airport, passport control was daunting, and I remembered my father asking: “Are you mad? Why on earth, must you go there?”

My reason came to be that I wanted to see the country for myself because I was tired of the very specific view I got on CNN and such channels, but in truth, my original reason was far more whimsical. I had been living in Stellenbosch in a labourer’s cottage on a rose farm that stood to left of a strawberry farm and below a wine farm. Though thin-walled and cold, it was the perfect place to write, and for only R1000 a month I had three tiny rooms, bookshelves, electricity, hot water, peace and a view of the vines from my desk. Somewhere in another country was a man I loved and I thought he loved me back until the end of one long-distance telephone call. It had been a good and unusually lengthy conversation, but finally he had to tell me what he’d probably been wondering how to say throughout: he was going to the Caribbean, sailing, that coming December, and he was taking another woman, his new girlfriend.

Very well, I thought, sod it, I will not be crushed, if he is having an adventure this December, so will I. At the time, I had more books than shelves, so many books were still in boxes. At the top of one box were old school books, including a standard-issue Good News Bible. I took it out, and thought, I’ll close my eyes, turn to any page and point and where my finger lands, that is where I’ll go. Well it landed in the Book of Esther, right there in chapter one, where it says: At that time King Xerxes reigned from his royal throne in the citadel of Susa, and in the third year of his reign he gave a banquet for all his nobles and officials. The military leaders of Persia and Media, the princes, and the nobles of the provinces were present. For a full 180 days he displayed the vast wealth of his kingdom and the splendor and glory of his majesty. . When these days were over, the king gave a banquet, lasting seven days, in the enclosed garden of the king’s palace, for all the people from the least to the greatest, who were in the citadel of Susa. The garden had hangings of white and blue linen, fastened with cords of white linen and purple material to silver rings on marble pillars. There were couches of gold and silver on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl and other costly stones. Wine was served in goblets of gold, each one different from the other, and the royal wine was abundant…”

Splendid, I thought what fine place to visit, I’ll go to Susa, to Xerxes, Emperor of Persia’s palace. I wasn’t sure exactly what Persia would mean this century, some few thousand years later, but as it turned out, Susa was in Iran, very close to the border of Iraq. There was never any question of not going. I had to go to Xerxes palace. So began the preparations.

The blind choice was completely random and I didn’t think so much about the significance of Esther then, but now it seems there could not have been a more fitting book for my finger to find. Esther, the Empress, was a defiant woman, a brilliant woman, an elegant and courageous woman, a role model. Her name means star, and she led me to Iran.

Two extraordinary women of this age, but of utterly different backgrounds, and totally conflicting political views come together in Paris in exile in ‘The Queen and I’. They share one great commonality: their deep affection for a lost homeland, Iran. The women are Farah, Shabanou, Queen, Empress of Iran, and the documentary maker, former communist revolutionary, and anti-royalist Nahid Persson Sarvestani. Initially their interactions are uneasy, but as Nahid gets to know Farah, an unexpected and tentative friendship forms, her documentary develops ‘a mind of its own’ and Nahid, at a point says she has become ‘a Farah follower, but not a Royalist.’
Perhaps the most touching scene in the film is when a friend brings Farah a plant from Iran, and a bag of Iranian soil, and taking the soil in her hands, Farah is more happy than at any other time in all the footage.

Sadly, Sunday was the last screening of ‘The Queen and I’, but it is worth trying to find, and certainly worth visiting the Encounters homepage for schedules and details of the many other fantastic documentaries still showing.

One last thing I thought at the end of this remarkable documentary, was how fortunate I was to have visited Iran (and so too, how strange the loss of one love, led to the discovery of another, greater love: I’ve been in a four-year relationship with Iran ever since, working on a novel, which whether it turns out to be good or not, has meant I live with Iran ever on my mind).

—
In addition to the Queen and I, I’d highly recommend, We Are Iran, by Nasrin Alavi, a book of blogs, published by Portobello Books and available online from Portobello.

‘Alavi mines the rich seam of surreptitious scribbling in modern Iran to produce a powerful picture of popular feeling there. The defiant and optimistic voice that emerges is proudly Iranian, loves western films and scorns the backward, hate-filled religious minority whose rule the writers regard as illegitimate.’
The Sunday Times

‘Nasrin Alavi’s We Are Iran is a fascinating portrait of a young generation trying to reconcile its demand for individual rights with the official ideology of political Islam.’
Pankaj Mishra, New Statesman, Books of the Year, 28 Nov 05

‘This is not the first example of a book made out of blogs… It does, I think, count as the finest so far: an eye-opening collage of extracts from the (roughly) 64,000 Farsi-language bloggers now at work in Iran, threaded by Alavi’s illuminating analysis. Alavi’s theme-by-theme compilation, with the background filled in by her expert commentary, adds up to a vibrant portrait of a dynamic but thwarted nation… Alavi deserves to attract an audience far wider than the usual specialist readership for works on Middle Eastern affairs.’
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘In despotic countries, bloggers have become the new enemy and the new martyrs. One of the most startling and informative books recently published is We Are Iran, the translated voices of witty, fierce, optimistic young Iranian web diarists.’

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Breathtaking

It begins (and ends too) with a paraglider’s view over the Sea Point promenade. So often I’ve watched them, even passed by paragliders gearing up in preparation to jump while I am on my way walking up to the top of Lion’s Head, and though I envy greatly the view those paragliders may have, I know I’ll never do it as long as I am sane and relatively happy because it goes against my nature to throw myself off the side of a cliff. View wise then, until Friday night I didn’t know what I was missing, but thanks to Sea Point Days I do, with feet attached. In the opening images of sea and Sea Point and the pools and the promenade below, there are first in the foreground the dangling feet of a paraglider, and I like to imagine those are the director’s feet because this documentary is openly subjective. In the Q&A following the SA Premiere of Sea Point Days, Francoise Verster, the director, who has lived in Sea Point these last five years, said it was a personal film, perhaps even the most personal film he has yet made. More even than the view of the pools from the sky, it’s the very personal quality of the story (without a particular story) of days in this place, which makes it breathtaking; it’s home. Often books are written and films made here, with the hope (out of necessity, it’s true) of winning foreign audiences and approval, and so the narrative is vaguely distant, like we’re not good enough to speak to directly, but Sea Point Days is so close it felt like it was made for the people who live and swim and walk and work there, here, personal. In response to an audience question, Verster said his happiest time during the making of it, was filming the pool, because he and his crew were in shorts, it was summer and they swam between cuts. The people in the film had names, but names referenced very quickly, too quickly for me, so they were almost nameless, it seemed to me … I wish my memory was better, or that I could write notes better in the dark, or that budget extended to the R150 (a fair and reasonable sum, if you have it) to buy the Sea Point Days DVD on sale outside the cinema, but alas it does not, so much as I would like to know what name [from the long list of acknowledgements at the end, goes with what face because ultimately names are important and make people less strange] I don’t remember the names of any of the many characters Verster meets on camera, except for one, Aubrey, the homeless man. I remember his name because I met him after the show. Anyway if I did know the names I’d be able to add here a more respectable reference, but all I can do is note ‘Love in the water’ was part of a wise pool man’s personal philosophy of life. Verster, at the Q&A, said one of the themes is ‘everybody in the film is trying to make sense of life.’ In his version of life, the wise pool man, not an outwardly sorrowful man at all, said, when the people are gone from the pool and he listens to the water and the waves, there is something so quiet about the sound, it is like crying. I never of though of waves like crying, but sounds sound different to different souls with different pasts and different cares.

Rare

People say Cape Town is ‘cliquey’ and that it’s hard to make new friends here if you’re from out of town, I was born in Cape Town, so I never had that problem, but I do know it’s ‘cliquey’. The promenade and pools used to be whites only. Before the screening started, Verster gave a short speech and noted that Cape Town is [still] the most segregated city in South Africa. I thought things had changed, and that I was more honest with myself, but after he said that, I thought of the suburbs, and the places and the parties and I knew he was right. After the screening, Verster called the Sea Point promenade Cape Town’s equivalent of Central Park, and he said, “The Promenade is special and unique … it’s a public space shared by people from all over Cape Town.” Some audience members questioned whether the film could have been made of Hilbrow, or a street in Durban, but no, Verster was adamant, that in all of South Africa there was no other public space quite like the Sea Point promenade. I’ve always loved the promenade, but now I cherish it even more, and those picketers in the documentary, gathering names for a petition, calling out ‘Sea Front for All’, and trying to prevent developers encroaching on the space, well, bless them, and hear, hear . Sea Front for All.

Sea Point Days is rare because documentaries like this don’t get made, especially not in this country. Why? Because it doesn’t have a point, it looks, and considers. Here again, I fail with remembering names: the panel for the Q&A, was made of Verster, and Steven Markovitz who is the co-founder of the Encounters festival, and a third man. The third man played a crucial role in the creation of the film, I don’t know what his name is, but he said of Sea Point Days: “I love this film because it makes you feel uncomfortable.” In all the beauty, love in the water stuff, life, joy on the promenade etc. there was always a sense of something not right, like in (and unrelated other than that I happen to be reading it at the moment) Murakami’s After Dark, where exquisite Eri Asai sleeps, watched by us, and a camera and a man in another room, time on the clock moves, people eat in the all-night diners, but Eri Asai sleeps and sleeps, and that sense of something isn’t totally right is so compelling, it’s spellbinding. I had that kind of feeling in some parts of Sea Point Days. Back to the third man, he said too: ‘Films don’t have to have a point, but films without a clear on-liner point are hard to sell’, and near impossible to get funding for. From comments between Verster and Markowitz, it was apparent financing the documentary had been a big problem. I thought money always was a big problem, but then again surely for somebody with Verster’s reputation, it shouldn’t have been, or wouldn’t have been if the film had a one-liner point.

Provoking

In many more ways than one, it’s thought provoking.

“It’s a dilemma … a complex situation,” Verster said in response to audience members, particularly those who are members of the yellow bib Community Police Force, who were featured in the film, and reacted on the topic of displacing homeless people in the name of clean streets, good business, and progress. Perhaps one of the most disturbing parts in the film was when a community leader in a suit, instructed police officers to dig out and get rid of the blankets and mats two homeless people had carefully hidden and covered up with sand earlier in the documentary. The community leader in that scene was at Friday evening’s screening, and he stood up and commented that he admired the film, that this was not the cut he had seen, that he preferred the cut he had seen, that the balance wasn’t right, and that the film did not show how much success the Yellow Bibs have had with getting homeless people reintegrated into society.

It reminds me of summers and eating ice-cream at the pavilion

When the lights came on, and the Q&A started, Steven Markovitz, returned to Verster’s opening speech about giving voice to concerns, and segregation in Cape Town society and suburbs, and he asked Verster if, after the filming of Sea Point Days and the remarkable promenade, he was more optimistic about Cape Town.

I wanted Francois Verster to say a resounding ‘yes’, because I find the promenade such a place of happy memories and his film reminded me of childhood, of eating ice-cream in summer at the pavilion and roller-skating, and it brought me even closer to a very recent and particular memory of walking up and down the promenade from Graaf’s pool to the lighthouse, with my dog, Tiger, and a friend, as the sun set. Two hours of promenading, hours as happy as hours can be, gone now, never to be re-created, but the promenade remains.

In truth, the question was something Verster did not answer easily. He skirted it first by saying, ‘The promenade is more mixed now, a whole lot less segregated.’ Markovitz sought a more resounding ‘yes’ and said something along the lines of, ‘so is that a yes, you are more optimistic’. Finally Verster said tentatively, and certainly not in resounding voice: “Optimistic about certain things.” But he did add later, that in the good parts, the happy summer parts, the love in water parts, and such, there was at least the promise of the possibility of happiness.

‘Yes’, quietly resounding, the promenade is a promise of the possibility of happiness.

Encounters is on at the Waterfront Nu Metro for the next two weeks. The web page has reviews and a schedule of the forty featured documentaries, local and international, many award-winning. There is only one more screening of Sea Point Days. That’s on 19th July. I for one, am going to book to see it again.