New Year’s Resolutions: The Circular Ruins

He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality.

After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree.

Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams–what an incomparable humiliation, what madness!

For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire were destroyed by fire.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

- Jorge-Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

- Albert Einstein


Dear Constant reader of a sporadic writer,

Here we are, a few days into 2010 and many of us are still sticking to our resolutions to lose weight, save money and to spend more time with our families. With schools having just opened many parents are having sleepless nights over finances and semi-independent university students, such as myself, have had one or two nervous breakdowns worrying about registration fees. All-in-all it’s the usual January buzz where people are recovering from crazy holiday spending and realising that we are in deep financial doo-doo. Life goes on though and the ol’ blue ball we live on keeps on spinning, not as a result of money, sex or Hollywood’s version of love but by the grace of God. (How exactly He goes about it a few physicists might be able to tell you because I have no clue.)

I’m very happy to be alive and, as far as I can make out, healthy. I’m not a good person or anything cool like that but I’m sure God is still keeping His eye on me and watching out for me. The plan is to finally escape the circular ruins this year, you know, those pitfalls that too many of us fall into. We all make really cool resolutions to be better people and to save the Earth from that terrible scourge known as global warming for which we are responsible. But, alas, by March many of us have sunk back into misery, sloth, spitefulness and we refuse, kicking and screaming, to just shut up and be happy. We find ourselves in those dreadful circular ruins again.

My approach to life this year is that of a child, to take each day as it comes and to be an everyday hero :) I don’t plan to save the world, I’m not getting a six-pack like Ryk Neethling’s and I don’t have a devious scheme to become a billionaire like Warren Buffet. The plan is simply to be happy.

I plan to read more books and not only fiction, horror, fantasy and sci-fi but other genres in order to expand my horizons. I might even go as far as giving Danielle Steele a try... or not.

Ice-cream! I definitely have to eat more of that, because it makes me absolutely happy. I’m thinking that once a week will do.

God loves trees and He really went all out in making many of them and so I’ll lie under as many as I can. I will be a hobbit. What I should do is lie under trees, reading good books whilst eating ice-cream!

I have to put effort into my book drive this year and actually make it work. I might even get a few sponsors to back me up. Keep an eye out for this one.

I really must stop watching stupid things like South Park on my PC! My brain will rot and start leaking out of my nostrils if I don’t watch out, seriously. Anyone know any good Jewish comedians I can go see?

I’m falling into the bad habit of collecting video games but never getting around to playing them, which is bad, bad, bad! Play more video games Charlie and enjoy the nonsense out of them.

Last year I was a total douche bag of a friend and so this year I plan to be better.

Another thing I’ve been rubbish at is relationships so this year I’m working on being a good boyfriend and to move away from being too self-centred. It’s good to have someone other than myself to think about and whose feelings to take into consideration. Thank you for being in my life Lil’ Girl, I’m absolutely mad about you :)

My little sister has finally made it to High School and it’s about time I’m nicer to her because it’s a heroic thing to do. I can’t be too nice though because as an older brother it’s my job to be a little mean.

I definitely have to call my grandparents more often than I do now. I love those two people desperately and must speak with them more.

Having a crazy family is hard but I must spend more time with them. A little madness has never done anyone I know any harm.

This is a weird one but I have to buy myself a colouring book because being a kid is cool and it’s fun to sit with my cousin Lennie and be rock stars with crayons.

I was planning this one last year and never got around to doing it but I must buy myself a yo-yo and re-master it because it will make all the girls swoon over me.

Last and by no means least is to just sit at Jesus’ feet and be happy.

P.S. I’ll also spend more time blogging than I do on Facebook :)

P.P.S. I pray everyone I know and don’t know has a wonderful life and that joy finds those who refuse to accept happiness and punches them in the face.

The Little Boy Lost

"Father, father, where are you going?
Oh do not walk so fast!
Speak, father, speak to you little boy,
Or else I shall be lost." - William Blake, The Little Boy Lost

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses...
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality! - Percy Bysshe Shelley

You know, having friends is wonderful because they never solve any of your problems. Friends are like physical realisations of the opposite poles of one's mind, they play out the conflict that's taking place in your head and allow you to be an observer of what's going on in your head. Unlike C.S. Lewis I am fortunate not to have been born with a mind that's split perfectly in two, a mind that's an oxymoron (mine's just a plain moron), a mind that is made of two opposing hemispheres: the one shallow and rational and the other filled with magic and stories. My mind is entirely filled with magic and stories. I am not built to be an engineer or a lawyer, but rather a reader and a writer.

I am interested in dusty libraries and old churches. I would love to live in a museum as opposed to a city because there is life... real life in dusty books and old Greek vases. Being the strange being that I am it is logical (what a filthy word) for me to pursue a career in the Classics.

The more reasonable half of my friends, ironically led by a very unreasonable Reuben points out to me that I am a black boy (which is apparently synonymous with a unique sort of poverty that can only be overcome by becoming a lawyer or a doctor) living in a country that does not take kindly to the Classics. The other half of my friends, who believe that I should pursue a career in the Classics, ironically led by a very reasonable Simone, make this simple and undeniably true point: What else can he do with his life? He'd suck at everything else.

This is all very straightforward once you've had your friends enact it. I am not capable of any other career but one that is made up of mythology and literature in some form or the other and so I must become a scholar, forever haunting the halls of academia. I'll take up refuge in some university as an excuse to use their library and use the money they pay me to take cute librarians on dates. This is my idea of an idyllic life. Done. It's over, let's not talk about it anymore, the irrational and mad side (led by the voice of reason herself) wins.

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch

Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. – Stephen King

Dear Reader,

If you are reading this then I am dead.

This is my chilling account of the strange events that have recently befallen me in my room, the one place I always felt safest... my sanctuary from the harsh world. I feel like Frodo at coming home and seeing that evil had managed to make its way to his very doorstep. Going off into some distant land to fight the forces of evil takes courage, but it is not as terrifying as having the darkness invading your home... not as terrifying as that sickening feeling you get knowing that orcs have been rummaging through your underwear drawer.

Of late the dark forces have been trying to kill me! It all started with the unused couch I salvaged from the storeroom – the falling and then later the spiders. As I type this, ironically sitting on the bloodthirsty couch that is the source of all my misery, I keep glancing at a corner in the ceiling where I am sure the spiders have taken up residence. They are led by a huge, old spider, with venom dripping from his fangs, who I have decided is probably named Aragog. He is a monster bred in the depths of the Amazon jungle that have never been touched by sunlight.

Until that fateful day a few weeks back I never paid much attention to the storeroom in the kitchen, all I knew is that it was dusty and seemed to contain tools that no one in my household had much use for. I am the only male in the house and I have no interest in manual labour, which is why I have spent my whole life pretending to be bookish in front of my parents when all I really do is lock myself in my room reading fairy tales or playing video games. I walked by the storeroom on my way to refill my coffee mug on that fateful day, finding the door slightly ajar and because the sun shone through the one grimy window in the room I could make out the couch in a corner. My room, which I refer to as my Potter Closet, is actually the coatroom of the old house in which my family and some other strange people live and everyone saw it fit to put me in the smallest space available and then to make me pay rent for it. As you can imagine my life is a rather harsh one, but that is neither here nor there, what matters is that I will be killed by the evil couch and its arachnid minions soon. Seduced by the idea of more comfortable seating for the people who feel the need to visit me more often that I would prefer I went into the storeroom to investigate. The couch turned out to be an ugly purplish colour and small enough to fit in my Potter Closet. It was perfect! To hell with my guests, I am the only one who will sit in this couch I thought, they can sit on the floor while I pretend to be Morpheus and offer them red jelly beans or blue jelly beans.

With great effort I dragged the couch to my room and immediately used it as my throne and that is where the trouble began. I would be getting out of bed and I would fall and land in an awkward position that the human body is simply not designed to assume. On one occasion I crashed headfirst into my bookcase and almost broke my neck. What really scared me was the fact that every time I fell (which was quite often) I would almost break my neck and it would always be the couch that prevented me from doing so. It was then that I began to see it for what it was... an agent of the Prim – that chaotic soup that conjures all sorts of monsters to create disorder in this world. Oh, Discordia! I was not surprised when the spiders started appearing all over the room. I would wake up in the morning with the evil beasties crawling all over my face or I would be watching movies, sitting on the bloodthirsty couch, and they would shamelessly crawl over me and I bet you they derived sick pleasure from the way I would run around the room screaming like a little girl for a few minutes trying to get them off me. They are just torturing me for the time being, I just know it, and soon a time will come when they decide to strike... I can feel them staring at me from their hole in the ceiling and I hear the menacing creak on the couch every time I shift my weight on it.

The time is coming that one morning (or evening, the time of day really has nothing to do with it) that my parents will find my dead and cold body sprawled on this couch, I just know it. This is why I am telling you my sad tale, dear reader, so that you may remember me when you walk by a dusty storeroom with the door slightly ajar and stay away.

P.S. My mother has told me to stop whining, buy some Doom and to move the couch a bit further back so that I would stop tripping over it.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for my return from the dead and my fight against the zombie spiders armed only with a can of Doom and a lighter.

After awhile she turned to look at him. 'Oh Bobby,' she said.
'We've made such a mess of things, you and me. What are we going to do?'
'The best we can,' he said, still stroking her hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed the palm where her lifeline and heartline tangled briefly before wandering away from each other again. 'The best we can.' – Stephen King, Low Men in Yellow Coats (in Hearts in Atlantis)


Warning: Listening to William Hurt read this in his rich and textured voice is enough to break your heart.

For the last few weeks my life has been like A Series of Unfortunate Events – minus the weird, but undeniably cool, siblings. I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my whole (and quite short) life – what sucks though is the fact that I get no satisfaction from it because most of my work consists of marking first year students’ assignments and tests and I’ve never met people who are as apathetic as the first year students at UJ. Tolkien must have been made of ridiculously tough mental stuff to mark exams for so many years and still be sane at the end of it all... then again students were much brighter back in his day. Perhaps if I continue on this course I’ll get so bored that my mind will be forced to come up with a story so brilliant that it parallels The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to try and stop itself from withering away.

One of my life goals is not to live a mediocre life, so being surrounded by so many students who just don’t give a damn is rather shocking! I struggle (and fail most of the time) to be the best Charlie® I can be every day but these people don’t even seem all that bothered about trying. The whole business makes me think of Jagang’s Imperial Order in Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth novels in which Jagang and his men try to make it seem that people who try to aspire to be better than their fellow men are being full of themselves and selfish. The sad reality is that we live in world where mediocrity is not enough to get you to the top – bearing in mind that my definition of the top is probably drastically different from yours... mine involves a huge library.

Anyhoo, I’m tired and need to be heading to Slumber Land to rest my weary body. In a few hours it’s my birthday and I’m looking forward to being twenty-two – it’s exciting I think, what being a full blown adult person and all.

Good night furry friends :)

rAge

A Life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?

- Dunno

Have I ever told you guys how much I love October? No? Well, it's the coolest month ever because it's the month I was born and it's also the month that my momsicals and jerk of a dad were born. More importantly than my existence being strangely linked to October, it's the month that the really Awesome gaming expo takes place. Imagine this scenario: The Dome in Northgate filled to the brim with the strangest people in the country, people with reflexes faster than any gunslinger ever bred in Gilead. Now imagine these strange creatures walking around gawking at shiny computer bits, scantily clad booth babes (who aren't too sure what you're on about when you ask them about quad core CPUs) and comic books. Some of them might point at random things with wires and fans and start drooling and others will jump up and down at the sight of squiggles on a plasma screen. Now tell me, why on Earth you would be anywhere else (like at a club hitting on hot girls) when you could be hanging with these weird people and having the awesomest time in the history of ever?

Tomorrow it's on! I'm going to rAge to lick a Playstion 3. Happy days.

4 AM in the Morning

Half my life
is in books' written pages
Lived and learned from fools and
from sages - Aerosmith, Dream On

It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep, I’ve been tossing and turning for the last hour... I might as well wake up and do something useful with my life. I’ve considered getting dressed and walking to the nearby pub for a beer or two but people having been getting mugged in the morning on my street of late – and I’m too lazy to actually get dressed. I wonder if that huge bouncer guy at the pub would let me in wearing only boxers and a wrinkled T-shirt...? Probably not. There’s also the fact that I have to be up in a few hours to mark a pile of portfolios and a beer or two (which really means six) wouldn’t go a long way in setting the mood for that sort of thing.

Don’t worry too much about it though, I’ll just sit here for a bit and kick the ol’ bull with you guys. You hear about the clown who assaulted the chicken crossing the road? Well, neither did I, it must have been quite a scene I imagine. What was cool, though, was chatting to one of the crazier (which should be interpreted as meaning über cool in this here instance) tutors at the English Department. We were talking about some of the crazy things she’s done in her life and why she did them. She tells me that at some point she got tired of reading about things and wanted to experience them firsthand. If you want to know what falling in love is like, allow yourself to be swept off of your feet on that euphoric wave of gushy feelings instead of believing what some author (even if they’re really clever) tells you. People like me tend to read about things and then think we’ve done them and thus have the wrong idea about them, which is not good depending on how you’re looking at it. The moral of the story you ask? Books are really awesome but at some point you’ve got to add to the Great Tapestry by actually getting out there and living (whatever that means).

That's my mini-ramble for the morning :) Later.

Bats on the Brian

"'But I don't want to go among mad people' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'Or you wouldn't have come here.'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

"You're in the real world now and the lunatics have taken over the Asylum."
- The Joker, Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth

Okay, I officially have Bats on the brain; the guy is taking over my life and I'm losing the little that remains of my sanity - assuming I was sane to begin with. I've probably played the Arkham Asylum video game demo hundreds of times and I'm rather sad that I won't be able to afford the full version when it comes out on PC later this month. I'll make a plan though, something like stealing my neighbour's cat, Mr Ginger, and selling him. The game is getting rave reviews on consoles and people are even comparing it to BioShock. I just love the Detective Mode and the silent take downs, there's nothing more satisfying than swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle and swooping down and taking out an enemy and then disappearing before his friends see you. You then sit and watch as the villains in the room get nervous wondering who's next and jumping at their own shadows.

I've also just finished reading the graphic novel, Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, which is surprisingly good - I'd go as far as to say that it's even better than The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. I just love how dark it is and how it messes with your mind. If you're into psychology you'll notice some of Carl Jung's archetypes in it and another cool aspect is how The Joker raises the question in the reader's mind: which is the real loony bin, the asylum or the real world? Amadeus Arkham converted his ancestral home into an asylum for the criminally insane because he thought that he could help insane people and thus achieve a triumph of reason over the irrational and other cool stuff like that.

Speaking of The Joker, he's always an interesting character to read about. In Arkham Asylum one of the psychiatrists notes that he cannot be properly defined as insane, she suspects that he is an example of someone with some kind of super-sanity: "A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century." The novel has a very postmodern edge to it and asks whether identity is stable or not. In one scene of the novel one of the asylum's inmates suggests that they take off Bats' mask so they can see who he really is underneath. The Joker intervenes and says that the mask is Bats' real identity. So, you see there's a lot of fun to be had with this novel.

All-in-all, Arkham Asylum is an awesome graphic novel that caters for people interested in exploring the darker corners of the human mind.

Spring Has Sprung

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When [September] is scarcely here

- Emily Dickinson

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

- Emily Dickinson

Ah, 'tis the Spring, it has finally arrived and I feel so gosh-darn good because of it. Winter totally kills my skinny frame and I'm never all that sad to see the bugger go. Spring makes everyone think of the colour green (which is my favourite colour if you're interested in knowing that sort of thing about me) but it makes me think of yellow. For some reason everything that's yellow catches my eye in Spring: take the lemon tree outside my house for instance, it looks so much more beautiful in Spring.

District 9

I was watching some show on TV a few nights ago and they were all hyped up about this movie when I remembered NAG saying something about it... and the fact that Peter Jackson was the Producer didn't hurt in persuading me to go and see it either.

All I can say is Wowzers! This movie is the "fokken" shiz hey! Seriously, who would have thought that aliens landing in Johannesburg could make such a cool story? Blomkamp and his team chucked everything into this movie: that Cloverfield-esque shaky cam/security surveillance cam thing that usually irritates the crap out of me in other movies, documentary style commentary and speculation, lots of violence and gore (always a good thing in movies), playing with the whole apartheid/xenophobia thing in South Africa, shady Nigerians (rather stereotypical but good fun all the same and an Afrikaans guy who says "fokken" a lot. I spent this first half of the movie laughing at how South African the movie was, which is really cool. The second half I spent ogling the cool special effects an just enjoying how the MNU soldiers and Nigerian gangsters explode when they're hit by the alien weapons.

I was asking Lady Leigh of the Meadows how it feels to live in a city that you see getting destroyed in movies when I saw the Millennium Bridge being taken out by Death Eaters in the new Potter movie and now I have some idea: it's kind of worrying. I'm being a chop but the Nigerian gangsters scared the crap out of me - they're so freakin' ruthless hey. People who live in New York must be brave because that place always gets trashed in movies.

All-in-all District 9 is hands-down the best South African movie in the history of the universe! Go see it, whether you like sci-fi or not you will love it. I pinky promise.

P.S. Check out Christopher's blog while you're here.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor, The End

People want some sort of consistency in their lives; they want to live their lives according to a rhythm. Wait a minute! Don’t people want adventure and the excitement that comes with it? I hear you say. They do, but within the bounds of a certain ‘routine’.

The other day I was listening to a talk by Peter Kreeft (I really should find other people to spend hours listening to) in which he says we must live our lives like poetry. This immediately made me think of great people like Ghandi, Mother Teresa and Mandela. Whenever one reads of their lives it always seems very poetic – the pain they felt is described in such beautiful terms that make it seem like theirs was a higher kind of pain and their joy was a nobler sort of joy. Dr Kreeft’s statement has been bothering me for a few weeks now because I can’t seem to fine tune my life to the point that it is poetic. When I feel sad, though, it’s a boring sort of sadness and when I’m happy it seems to be an everyday kind of happiness... nothing to write poetry about because poetry – in my head at least – is vibrant, toxic, dangerous and all kinds of exciting.

What I want is for my inner being to be consistent with my outer being, I want to feel like there is a storm raging inside of me when I argue with someone and I want to feel like my heart is melting when I see my beloved... you know, that Romantic kind of thing the old poets always seem to be on about. I want adventure within a confined sort of space – a taste of the unexpected wrapped in familiar packaging.

I might be generalising but I suspect that most of the human race is like me and Walter Savage (this name is fitting somehow) Landor, we want to look back and be able to say that we lived our lives according to some ideal that made us feel nice and warm or crazy and heated in a poetic kind of way. Daily life in a city doesn’t seem to cater for people want to feel poetic about their lives though, which is why I plan to be a surfer or a tree hugger (which is not a nice thing to call someone I’m told).