On being calm

Focus your eyes on a point in space before them. Do you see that point? It is invisible to everyone. It is there for you, yet does not exist for them. It is beautiful, a thing of mysterious reality. Now hear. Eliminate the foregrounded noise first. Beyond it is a craterous background. Reach beyond even that background. There is silence there; the waves colliding upon you propagate in here. There, however, is beyond those waves. That is where the calm is born.

On bitterness

Bitter is an essence true to form and complete. The flavor is a wall thick. It stops everything from escaping. The finish is long and deep. Exhale to find the heat. And note the resin on the teeth. Departed yet it sticks. It is wood and well. It comes in steps, with each revealing uncharted words and as yet unnamed perfumes. It is darkness in the mouth, desirable for all, never mind the stigma that it awakes.

On a leaf

What manner of thing is it that falls into repose? Sometimes green. Sometimes brown. It finds a range of colors in between. Neither dead or alive, of organic nature but not that alone, it is a thing of life and harbinger of sleep. Stationary at times, it takes less than the motion of a stick to send it flying. In piles higher than the tallest man each one sits upon another, a house of cards comprising a mattress of air into which you, with peals of laughter, could jump. From the branches of the trees to the tilled earth's moist ferment, it surprises with lessons about the seasons, and in absence is felt most of all. A winter for the soul with only a budding promise that soon - soon! - there will be color again.

On the edge of the universe

Of course there is no such thing but because of that we may imagine for a moment an asymptotic sort of place. Here space is very different. The vacuum is thicker than imaginable as it crushes up against the limit of creation. The dimensions collapse into each other. As you float in this place, you lose your own dimensionality. Yet you live through this crushing geometry, which stretches you into the thinnest line and flattens you into invisibility. Your presence is so novel, so unique, to this perimeter, that your very act of perceiving the boundary changes the limits, pushing them yet further away, beyond your mind's ability to reach out and grasp that which is just beyond the other side. Turning away from that inconceivable point of no return, you search in vane for some trace of astronomical light which might mark a road back to galaxies and normal space, if you could but live for all of the infinites it would take to get there. Still only blackness, thick as fur, greets your senses, and were you a bat, you would see nothing here, and were you a radio telescope there would be no signal that you might detect for an observer looking back through the whole of time to see the origin of the cosmos. Yet the temperature is not absolute zero, for you are here, and your non-dimensional existence excites creation, and tickles it into continuing. On and on and on - the void.

On theory and practice

Marx suggested that theory and practice must be united in the new philosophy. Conceptually this thesis is much harder to explain than meets the eye. It is, after all, easy to talk about doing things but quite another matter to do them. Two examples will suffice to show what I mean: love and violence. In both, we have a unification of a state of being (this is the par excellence form of theory) with an embodied, enacted state (the par excellence form of practice). Both self-evidently exist, i.e. they are true to human experience and have no meaning beyond human experience. One can have theories about both, but these are descriptions that lack the essence of the thing itself. Putting it another way, the essence of both arises from precisely their unification. The one without the other is mere kitsch. It is not the real thing. For this reason, love and violence are explosive qualities of being. There are many such qualities. To identify such states in ourselves is to acquire self-knowledge. To do them with exceptionality is to become saintly or monstrous. To live without them, is to not live at all. Whenever we are asked why we do them our answers amount to "because". Wherever such unifications exist in our experience, we meet our essential maker. However we become separated from them is of less consequence than the alienation that flows through that division.

On the rain

Try to hear individual drops of rain in a cloudburst. I find that when I listen deeply into the stillness of the pouring water that I can discover the sound of nameless individuals. They land against my roof, drain through my gutters, and find routes from there into the stuff of life. The rain is the body of all organic things. It is the catalyst of future existence. And yet it is also a drop.   

On playing with the strings of a hoodie

I saw you playing with the strings of my hoodie. Tug. Tug. In that moment I saw the whole of human curiosity reflected in your eight month old face. There the history of science unfolding before me in your look of utter delight at the existence of a soft vertical string, the function and purpose of which to you remained a mystery.

On floating in a pond

Sometimes when you are floating in a pond you will see only lily pads and reeds and wonder about the muck below and recoil. Why? They are natural; they cannot hurt you. And the clouds above you are beautiful. It's warm too. How else could you be floating in a pond?

On leaving things better

Did you come here? Are you leaving? Then your whispers and your labor will remain behind. If things are better than they were, congratulations! If they are less than you had hoped, was it your fault? Can you say, looking firmly at something, "I did that" and let your hand fall upon the rock in the wall or let the tree you planted cast some shade upon your face? Don't worry: in time your meaning for this place will be as water to the stream or rain to the cloud. Time washes away the grime and the paint, and soon, even the tree will be gone. But what is it to you if your work only remains as a whisper of things that were when things are better now?  

On the value of writing bad poetry

There are moments when only rhymes will help you sort through the fervor of your own mind. Write then poetry. You may not be Emily Dickinson.  But you will still feel the plank break, the snow crunch, the rage, the birds fly, and the fog on cats feet. Then you will be alive. Then you will be comforted. When all has turned to shit. Turn to poetry, pen in hand.

On being white in the Apartheid State

I don't believe we go back to normal life. I don't believe that at all. I think we who are repelled by violence feel the claustrophobia of a world closing in around us, squeezing out all air and light, and feel only able to stare in disbelief at the prison keepers who turn off the fans and close further shutters. No. These horrors are our culture; ourselves even. And I think we know it. And I feel nothing but disgust at my own cowardice, my own simple inability to do more than pen sentences, pray (if I could), and ask for help. Each horror is personal. Each one.