My First Proper Article!!!

Pulling a Rabbit Out of My Hat

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

- Nelson Mandela (quoting from Marianne Williamson’s Return to Love)

With Nelson Mandela Day having just passed I’ve decided to take advice from Boston Legal’s Denny Crane and pull a rabbit out of my hat in order to wow the jury, by which I mean you, dear Reader of a writer fascinated by the dust bunnies under his bed. My aims for this piece are rather ambitious, given that I don’t want it to be overlong. They are as follows: introducing myself (only in my second post, forgive the rudeness) and my column (Lost in the Cosmos), doing something good for change instead of whining, promoting the awesomeness of fantasy and science fiction while I’m at it and, lastly, having a great time doing it. That ladies and gentlemen is my rabbit, which I will now proceed to pull out of my woolly hat.

My name is Nyameko Charles Siboto and I am a bookworm.

When I tell people this they assume that I just read any book that comes my way and in this they are mistaken. I consider myself well-read but I’m actually not when you take into account how much reading material exists in the multiverse! Then again, no one is well-read under those conditions. I am a fan of mythology, horror, superhero graphic novels, fantasy and science fiction. It is in these genres that I am well-read and that I revel. I’m especially a fan of fantasy as I believe that the genre is steeped in great beauty, especially the works of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. I study Literature at the University of Johannesburg and I work there as a tutor, a job that I love immensely (don’t tell my colleagues). People say that I’m an agreeable fellow for the most part but I have days during which I am full of nonsense and annoy people by repeatedly poking them. My dream is to own a beautiful house with a magical garden outside and inside it is filled with books, comfortable armchairs, roaring fireplaces and the pantries (many of these) are filled to bursting with scrumptious food. That is to say, I want to live like a hobbit.

Peter Kreeft, one of the beautiful minds of our time in my opinion, said something along the lines of living life like poetry in one of his talks. I’m sure I don’t know what he means but it’s one of those statements that haunt my thoughts and it refuses to be exorcised. I suspect that it has something to do with my fascination with great beauty, whether it is aesthetic (the beauty of a Helen of Troy) or spiritual (the beauty of a Mother Teresa) and I endeavour to make my life beautiful in all that I do.

That is Charles, to some extent, and it is my hope that we may get to know one another better as we explore the stars and a medieval past that never was together in this column. I would like to be the Virgil and Beatrice to your Dante as I lead you on this epic journey.

Take my hand and hold on tight, we are about to find ourselves Lost in the Cosmos.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore, and persevere for
many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”

- Emerson

This quote says almost everything that I would like to achieve with this column. Lost in the Cosmos wants to show that fantasy and sci-fi are very much like religion and science, their goal is to speculate on the mysteries of the universe and to ask the great questions that have ever haunted human beings from the first time they emerged from their caves and looked upon the tall trees of the great forests, the vast oceans, the majestic sun, the moon and the fiery stars and stood there in fear and trembling, faced with the sense of the numinous. Fantasy and sci-fi show us that the universe, the little portion that we know of it, is howling with holy wildness and that we are part of something substantially bigger than we ordinarily think.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to it; a rabbit being pulled from a woolly hat!

We as South Africans have the bad tendency to whine about everything that goes wrong in this great country of ours instead of going out and doing something good to change the situation. I beg you to go out and to make the remainder of this year a Nelson Mandela one, in honour of the great man and also simply to do something for someone else. To paraphrase Emerson, to leave the world having made one life breathe easier is to have succeeded as a human being. So no matter how small your contribution, it does make a difference. I am going out to Cotlands to play with the children and read to them on my off days to do my little bit for change… and to prostitute fantasy and sci-fi to the younger generation, nerdy whore that I am. :)

The Church's Badassery

'To go against the Church is to go against God.'

I went to go see Priest with Ms J. on Friday and it was so much better than I expected. Then again my expectations were based purely on the theatrical poster; I’d not seen a trailer or heard anything about it beforehand. I actually thought it was based on the Thief video game series. It’s actually, rather loosely, based on a graphic novel series though. Ms J. said let’s go see it and the Beanbag was game.

Now, I rarely like movies (or any other entertainment media) that are set in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future because, to quote my friend, Dave (referring to Fallout 3), “[they] depress me”. Such movies have to be really good for me to put up with and Priest, though it’s not an excellent movie as such, was fun to watch. It has a villain simply referred to as Black Hat in the credits dammit! That’s total badassery. Also, there’s an army of crazy, animalistic vampires (who have no eyes) on a train, hell-bent on the destruction of a totalitarian city run by the Church. The manner in which the Church runs the city is brutal and I’d not like to live there. They do have awesome warrior priests that kick some vampire ass though. You can never go wrong with Holy men and women opening a can righteous ass whupping.

There’s a lot to be said about the big, bad Church... the Big BC as I fondly know it. I’ve always been intrigued by the Church’s rather violent history back in the day (as my tutlings refer to anything that happened more than a decade ago). Rome was badass I tell you! All the ways with which they came up with to kill people would sicken many a serial killer today. On warm summer days I sit on the grass under my favourite tree and wonder what the meeting was like when a handful of respectable Elders of the Church got together and agreed that boiling a guy was the way forward. I can just see them all nodding solemnly in agreement at the suggestion. I’d put my house... wait I don’t have one... I’d put my awesome four-year-old cousin, Lennie, down on a bet that the guy to put that option on the table was one of those Rasputin types that no one seems to know is crazy even though he looks freakin’ crazy!

Maybe I’m just not good at being a Christian but what was up with all that violence!? Am I misreading my Bible? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Jesus is naught but a sweet, gentle lamb. Lord no! He is also a fierce lion that fights for love’s cause, but why did they have to get all creative about torturing and killing people? I’d go with just hanging them or something simple. Even stoning is a quite excessive for my tastes.

Let me end off by playing devil's advocate and directing you to some of the Church's atrocities throughout history.

P.S. The moral of this story is don't mess with warrior priests or the Church, they will kick your ass... and the boil you alive.