﻿<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?><Search><pages Count="24"><page Index="1" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[In a different register]]></page><page Index="2" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[First Printed 4 November 2014 Copyright © 2014 R. KearneyAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission in writing from the author.Grateful acknowledgement is made to Philip Boxer for permission to copy liberally from his works and for the insight they have enabled.Note on the Cover: Prior to marrying my father my mother had been a concert pianist in the making and my childhood was permeated with the most sublime live piano music. The photo is of my father as a small boy. He was my first love and the photo captures something of the man he was to become. In a different register points to the evolutionary trajectory my life took which is the theme of the Trilogy.Wherever I have used the work of another author substantially the reference has been given.The Cycling of the Question of Being: Volume I: In a Different Register R. Kearney © 2014 ISBN 978-0-620-62815-0 Print]]></page><page Index="3" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[THE CYCLING OF THE QUESTION OF BEINGThe Magdalene“The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the Universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.”Pierre Teillard de ChardinDedicated to J With Utmost Gratitude.I have followed the practice of calling outstanding historical characters and people whose work I refer to whether it be text or visual, by their real names and of giving fictional names to others. If in any other instance, however, some people resemble real ones, with the same or similar name, this is wholly accidental and I apologize in advance. On the whole historical events have been followed and local customs described as faithfully as possible. Where ever I have used the work of another author substantially I have given the reference.]]></page><page Index="4" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[VOLUME I – IN A DIFFERENT REGISTERIf you meet the Christ on the road, kill Him. But first you must meet Him.Dedicated to my Father from whom I inherited a passion for the ultimate. Chopin Ballade Op 1 no 23 Ronan O’horahttp://alanrusbridger.com/playitagain/ballade/listen-to-the-balladeThe Context of the Trilogy: The Cycling of the Question of BeingVol I Vol II Vol IIIIn a Different Register Animus MundiHagia Sophia]]></page><page Index="5" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[I knew him before I met him, said Mary. Meeting was a mere formality.In illo tempore, he was just a name on a schedule of presenters. Having too many preordained seminars to attend I chose to follow up on him after the conference. A maths forum was convened to discuss some of his research toward the end of the first University term. On my arrival in a fairly large classroom I noticed him sitting alone, to the side at the front, a man who then in 1979 appeared indefinable. Young, but how old? The room started filling up. That must be him, I thought. I can’t even remember what he was wearing. Clearly at home, leaning back in his chair surveying the academics from time to time but at other times appearing elsewhere. He differed from the others in seeming contained. A noisy camaraderie was hushed when someone stood up, explained why we were here and then, ‘over to you’. J stayed sitting and conducted the conversation from there. The casual way he commanded the situation from his humble chair to the side was compelling. I never understood a word of it. I gleaned a quote for my data bank of impressive phrases: ‘fuzzy logic’. Afterwards I inevitably fulfilled my mission of making contact regardless by telling J of BMR’s need for his work and wondering if he could help. Possibly. Why not meet in the New Year for lunch to discuss it.It all begins with a conversationSpeaking of ‘in illo tempore’, Mary said, it was the autumn of 1977 when I undertook a form of self- imposed exile. In 1976 the repressive regime in South Africa had reached new heights. Looking out of a third floor window I watched the school children laughing and jostling each other as they paraded down Adderley Street as if setting off on a school picnic. The high wail of sirens and a mass arrival of police vans and military Hippos carved their way into the suddenly alarmed phalanx which splintered. Children running everywhere. Some picked up rocks assaulting the armoured machinery with bare hands. Others bolted into the shops. Black baton wielding Police after them. Shopkeepers began to slam down iron grilles to protect their windows and the crowd from surging into the only escape hatches. Tear gas, screams, glass shattering, the smack of gunshot, here, below my office from which I could see Table Mountain and when the North-Wester blows the cloud table cloth billowing down over it in never ending preparation for a banquet.That was when I decided to leave. It had been coming for some time. From the frying pan into the fire I headed for South America. I went to Rio de Janeiro partly for reasons unknown to me. It may have been that I had been there before and in many ways, other than the language difficulty, it was like South Africa: a repetition compulsion. Canada was worse: from the fire into bland nirvana: a perversion of desire. I arrived in destitute state in London and spent the next fourteen months acquiring the necessities of domicile – papers, work, dingy, one roomed place to stay behind Marylebone Station. The first job took me around the country from Sunday afternoon to Saturday morning when there was just enough time to do the laundry, buy some groceries, wash my hair, find a patch of sun – or shelter from the cold gloom, the eternal cold gloom - in which to watch the world go by or read The Times, clean the uncleanable grime of cooker and cracked ceramic bath, pack standard issue and then set off again. A matter of keeping body and soul together.Then a lucky break. A position of Training and Development Manager for BMR, a large multinational. By 1979 I was on the conference circuit. This time to Newbury in the south where unbeknown to me the trajectory of my life was about to shift tangentially.On the wheel of existence one must start somewhere, with something that happened ‘in illo tempore’, said Mary. It all begins with a conversation. Letters, photographs, books, she waved around the room. The record of a life, Albert, evidence to give an account of it, witness to its singularity. Your life story begins at the moment when you discover you are in the wrong family.I think that by the time of these photos I had already moved from Innocent to Orphan. Seabold wrote that old photographs always seem to have an appeal written into them, that you should tell the story about them. See the patterns, the reflections in the water, she said.]]></page><page Index="6" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[She said the photos were taken not far from where we met for the first time in the Kalk Bay bookshop after our long correspondence on Realism following my lecture series. She reminisced: You were standing diffident, absorbed by a book to the centre-right. Oh hullo, you said, glancing at me sideways when I came up to you. We went to a restaurant overlooking the Bay. That day I was flustered because I had locked the keys in the car and had to ask you to take me home to get the spare. I imagined that you would think it a ruse for something more intimate. I saw the whole incident of you being The Professor, the keys, the car, the struggle to gain access to my house, the physical discomfort of needing to relieve myself, the embarrassment of it all, feeling I had to abruptly cut off any offer of help from you and yet sensing the overture of a touch I longed for, as an action replay of significant aspects of my life, a symbolic representation much as a dream reveals so much in one small complete vignette that has layers of meaning. I had two recurring dreams from probably the age I am in the photos: There is black man trying to get into the house through my bedroom window. My room is as it always is in the darkness with the Blue Gum Tree in the unkempt tumble of a vacant plot behind the house silhouetted against the night sky. I keep my eyes riveted on the window in terror waiting for the moment he will enter but I always wake up before he does. In the other: I am floating in a clear sky suspended under a vaguely anthropomorphic cloud. It is claustrophobic.As you can see, Albert, I have returned to my roots. My grandmother played the organ at Holy Trinity in St James. In his old age whenever we passed that church my father would say, that is the church where your grandmother played the organ. On cold winter mornings she would warm her hands in hot water before she went off to practice. I was actually born in Johannesburg, next greatest city after Paris, at the Queen Victoria under the sign of Virgo, which has the hieroglyphShe pointed to it on the back of one of the photos.She showed me a studio one of her mother as a baby perched on an animal skin]]></page><page Index="7" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[Mother and Maternal Grandmother “To Uncle from Frances (eight months old)”My mother often called me Tokkie, short for Tok-tokkie which is a long legged shiny-black African beetle that makes a tapping noise to attract attention. But a ‘Tokoloshe’ is a skelm or trickster: To terrorise the powers that be, the tokoloshe emerges from obscurity. My little Tokkie.” she would say. It was endearing, sounded like sweetheart, not really like ‘little naughty one’. But I was that. Always up to mischief and later somewhat of a wheeler dealer. So I suppose I ended up associating it with something endearing about being a Tokoloshe. A personal template for a life? Here is one of my father as a baby with his grandmother.Father and Grandmother “Dear Mother - taken 1st week in Feb. 1904. Died 28 Feb. 1904”These photos make me feel like part of history. All the photos of a life time kept in an old carved wooden Kist that gives off the fading smell of sandal wood. A gift from Martha, my sister Martha. Five and a bit years older than I. Even as a young child I can remember lying on the grass looking up at the sky with a sense of longing, a sense of wonder at what might be out there. It seemed to beckon without letting on to what it was calling.]]></page><page Index="8" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[My father habitually brought home anecdotes from duties quotidian. When he was in his eighties he sat down on a bus next to a small boy wearing a SACS school uniform in Newlands. I used to go to SACS when it was still in Sea Point, he told the boy. Oh, said the boy, you must be in the history books. I’m beginning to feel that way myself, said Mary. I like this one. My parents look like a couple and there is my sister, my sister Martha as a baby, with them: The perfect trio, an embryonic triumvirate.The TriumvirateHere’s another one of my sister, my Big Sister Martha and I together. It looks as if even then I didn’t relish the idea.What could be more of a sign for Mary thanVirgo linked as it is to Pisces, the fish? Martha, her sister Martha, too was Pisces.                  ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞After that meeting with destiny in the Maths seminar, I went to the South of France on my own for Christmas, said Mary. I wanted to visit the Camargue. It was a distinct pull, something more than the wildness and the white horses that had always captured my imagination. My mother had sent me dried fruit and a Christmas cake baked in August to give it time to cure – reminders of home. Her love-]]></page><page Index="9" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[gestures let me know that I was remembered no matter where I was in the world. Like the bouquet of flowers and a welcoming note in that flowing script of hers when I arrived to take up residence at Rhodes University. It is only now, in old age, said Mary that I realise what a constant presence she was, that subliminally I knew she was always there for me. I realise now how churlishly I took it for granted. Marseille was another grey city, a sea port with all the history of the Mediterranean written on her face. The cake was my Christmas lunch. I sat huddled over a radiator in the cheap hotel room picking out the nuts and eating it crumb by lonely crumb. I cried with homesickness remembering how it had made me angry when I was leaving that my mother had said I would return one day. I thought of how in the summer heat Martha, my sister Martha, and my parents would be sitting at a ridiculously laden table when no one was hungry, with the sun sparkling on the sea calling everyone for a swim. No doubt they would be talking about me. Romanticising where I might be and what I might be doing. There would be the usual jokes, the familiar smells, the family-ness of it all. At Christmas only family, no matter how myopic, or perhaps because myopic, makes it Christmas. I tried to call home but couldn’t get through. Next day I picked myself up and hired a car. I drove along the coast with the waves breaking onto shoreline craggy rocks and Bonsai-weathered trees, a lonely reminder of home. I have no idea why, but the name Languedoc had a romantic connotation: troubadours and courtly love. Mine was a picture of country living and bonhomie where people get along and the life is simple but wholesome. That Christmas the Camargue was a different story. As far as the eye could see a vast tract of water ways and marshland lay under snow. Not a horse to be seen. I drove and drove enjoying the open space so unlike the cosy hills of England, the barrenness a balm to the loneliness within. Memories of being between water and sky in the Okavango with Matt. Then suddenly three horses under the dry trees. They lift their heads to look at me. A desire is met. My heart expands. Once more I am at home on the earth, I belong and I linger in gratitude for that long look that said: I see you. Sakubona! Ewe, Sakubona!Those faces bring with them a breeding that is redolent with some of the oldest cultures in the world – Celts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Franks ....... They have existed here in the ‘wild’ since prehistoric times and their origins are shrouded in mystery. They have adapted to living in a watery habitat and thrive in sea water, often being called "the horse of the sea." Horses are one of my first loves. My heart tightens with wonder when I see that exquisite form in plenary motion. To fly over the earth in harmony with such great power, sensitivity and intelligence is to be in the province of the Gods.Hunger took over and I realised that I had not even had breakfast. Visions of fried eggs on toast became more and more compelling. Despite school French and a year in Switzerland when I was eighteen I couldn’t remember what ‘fried egg’ was. The best I could do was ‘boiled’. So the plan was ‘deux oeufs bouillir avec le pain grillé’. I followed a sign to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the 'Saint Marys of the Sea'. Very soon I came across a Boulangerie on a corner of its narrow streets and jumble of red-roofed buildings. It had a couple of small round iron tables and there was the smell of coffee. Not a soul in sight. When someone appeared I delivered my prepared speech of ‘deux oeufs bouillir avec le pain grille, s’il vous plait.’ The man looked puzzled. Didn’t they know about boiled eggs? I tried again with some elaboration. Finally he gave me a laconic nod. I sat down. I looked around the]]></page><page Index="10" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[sparse shop and through the glass to infrequent passers-by. After about twenty minutes I wondered what could take a three minute boiled egg so long. Eventually two eggs, loose on a saucer, appeared, no egg cup and toast on a separate plate. What to do. I used the knife to chop off the top. The egg ran out all liquid. It was almost raw. Dismayed I called the man and asked if he could cook the other one a bit more. It duly arrived. But no teaspoon. Please could I have a teaspoon. He sighed and brought one. No salt. Nothing is worse than a boiled egg without salt so I risked his ire. I’m sure that by the time I left he was pleased to see the back of me. But don’t the French eat boiled eggs? I have since discovered that a boiled egg is an ‘oeuf a la coque’ - an egg in the shell - but no wonder some of these cultural differences might become the basis for war.My first port of call was the tourism office in the Rue Van-Gogh. Any places worth visiting? L’eglise. And the connection to Van-Gogh? In Arles, ’e painted nearly tree hundred paintings, some de Saintes- Maries-de-la-Mer. Where can I see them? ‘Eh, dommage, most in museums around world.’ Good excuse to travel then!Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries, 1888Not surprising van Gogh wanted to paint here where the human and natural harmonise with visceral passion. “Mélancolique étendue dans une immensité déchirée, tout naît et tout périt sans cesse dans un son sourd des vagues qui baignent son rivage ensoleillé ......1 The very words are music to the soul.Given the weather I chose to go to the church Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer. I was amazed to find that I was on a pilgrim route, the Via Tolosana which led through Arles and crossed the Pyrenees to join other routes at Puenta-la-Reina. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was popular as a stopping point for pilgrims to St Jacques-de-Compostella, where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims believed they were going to visit the remains of St James. Had never thought of him in Spain before. They believed he had been miraculously carried to the Atlantic coast of Spain in a floating stone boat without sails or oars. Imagination in top form! The burial place of his mother, Mary Salomé in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was a stopover for pilgrims.It seems they only bothered to build a Church around the ninth century when coastal towns needed to defend themselves of seaward threats from pirates and invasions. They needed not so much a church as a look-out tower and defensible position. Religion was ever adroit in warfare. Inside, Saint Sara, a rather improbable looking figure, was dressed in pink! Come to think of it, I wonder what colours were worn by women in Jesus’ day. Pink? They even claim to possess relics of Sainte Marie Jacobé and Sainte Mary Salomé, in the crypt. The story became more and more curious for someone like myself who knew little of the history of saints. Although my father was a Catholic he converted to1Melancholy stretches in a torn immensity, all is born and all dies without ceasing in the dull sound of waves that bathe its sun lit shores. A land in constant contrast. ......a limitless horizon that reveals beyond the pleasure of the eye, an intense life.” Mistral]]></page><page Index="11" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[evangelical Protestantism when I was quite young. He was a mild sort, my father. Perhaps the passion behind his conversion was what attracted my mother to him. While baptised Catholic I escaped the ‘give me a child until it is seven’ rule.According to French legend, after the crucifixion of Jesus, Mary Jacobé, the sister of Mary, Jesus' mother - a person supposedly invented by the Roman Church to explain biblical mentions of other children born of the "Virgin" Mary - was supposedly with Mary Salome and Mary Magdalene when they set sail from Alexandria, Egypt, with their uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Another story is that they were expelled from Jerusalem around the year forty and cast away in a boat without sail, oars or supplies, drifted across the Mediterranean until it arrived off the coast of what is now France, at a sort of fortress named Oppidum-Râ. The place became known as Notre-Dame-de-Ratis (Râ becoming Ratis, or boat – ‘Our Lady of the boat’). In another story the refugees included Lazarus, his two sisters and Sara. The name was later changed to Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer, and then to Les Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer in 1838. If the stories seem confusing, said Mary, they are. There’s an exquisite painting by Giotto of the miraculous arrival of Lazarus and his sisters in Marseilles.Giotto di Bondone c 1320 - The Miraculous Arrival of Lazarus and His Sisters in MarseillesWhat stories fire our imagination now, Albert? Mary told me she remembered the wonder of Sputnik as a teenager. Personally I thought seeing our blue planet from outer space must have trumped everything in the imagination of us all. I wonder what Giotto would have made of Sputnik, she mused.The group from the Holy Land supposedly built a small oratory to the Virgin. Then while Mary Magdalene went to Ste-Baume and Martha went to Tarascon, Marie Salome, Marie Jacobe and Sara remained in the Camargue, and were later buried in the oratory. The tomb of these three saints became places of pilgrimage, especially for gypsies and have been for the past nineteen centuries. Another of my loves, Albert. Gypsies. No wonder the pull to the Camargue was so strong. I had known about the horses but not sure I knew Gypsies were associated with the Camargue. Their free form, abandon, ‘up-yours’ to conventional society, passion .......... Oh, they’re my tribe alright. I am forever mesmerised by Bizet’s Carmen and identify with her utterly although my interpretation of the psychological drama, spiritual import even, has changed over the years. She is a free woman, her own woman, one in herself. The archetypal resonances have taken over from merely a story of wild and passionate romantic love. Did you ever see Elina Garança as Carmen and Roberto Alagna as Don José, Albert? I’m sure it would heat even your cold blood! She was right, Opera was not for me.]]></page><page Index="12" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[New York Metropolitan OperaSara became the patron saint of the Gypsies. She is also known as Sara-la-Kali or dark-skinned Saint Sara which resonates with a Black Madonna tradition. Some gypsies that throng to worship her in Spring each May believe her to have been a powerful Egyptian queen who welcomed tired travellers from the Holy Land. Others think she may have been an ancient pagan goddess or a black Egyptian woman who was a servant to the Marys. Did you know that Gitan is the French for Gypsy? From Egiptano or gitano for short in Spanish. They are a homeless and wandering people. Far flung they gather from the four corners to Sainte-Maries. It is a time of reunion, visiting friends and relatives and most children are baptized in the church of the Saintes. They settle in the streets, squares or on the sea. Here they are at home. Foremost it is a religious festival, filled with fervour in honour of Saint Sara – Holy Sara the Black. They celebrate Mass, bringing out the relics of the Marys and the statue of Saint Sara dressed in colourful robes and jewellery from the crypt of the church: Proclaiming miraculous healings, protection from misfortune and parading down to bless the sea.The procession returns to the church overflowing with joy and exuberant cheering. The ringing of church bells slides easily into wild revelry – the tempestuous pulsating flamenco rhythms calling everyone to the dance, to the feast and the Gardien equestrian games with the Camargue horses. Oh yes, absolutely my kind of festival. An untameable reel of the sacred, the sensual and the abandoned. It seemed a far cry from the austerity of that mid-Winter Christmas in the Camargue.Inside the Church there is a non-Christian altar dating from the fourth century BCE. The place already had a strong pagan religious tradition and there was precedent for a connection to Egypt and other cultures. Once a sacred site of the Celtic threefold water goddess, the holy spring was known as Oppidum Priscum Ra. Superseded by a Roman temple dedicated to Mithras in the 4th century BCE. The oppidum or fortress where the Marys landed was once dedicated to Ra, the Egyptian sun god. Residues remain. The Emperor Constantine banned the veneration of Sara but her cult persisted and she was linked to Aphrodite who was said to have risen from sea foam on a scallop shell – forever commemorated in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.]]></page><page Index="13" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[The link between the religious imagination and mythology comes easily in this place but Botticelli’s Venus was a delicate renaissance from the Middle Age depiction of the Virgin Mary of abiding angelic smile and demurely covered head. If I have to choose, Albert, give me Carmen.From the Sainte-Maries I meandered back to Marseille. The Languedoc region was in the eighth century primarily a Jewish kingdom. King Guilhelm de Toulouse de Gellone had established a Judaic Academy there more than four centuries earlier. Languedoc was not officially part of France at that time. Culturally it had more in common with Spain and flourished educationally, in the arts and commercially. Courtly love and poetry were extolled in a society of wealth and luxury. Philosophy and religious life were given free reign and religious tolerance practised. Judaism, a Gnostic form of Christianity and Islam co-existed comfortably, a thoroughly inter-religious pot-pourri. That is until the Albigensian crusades and the witch hunts of the medieval period.I seemed to have had an idyllic picture of Languedoc without knowing any of its subsequent religio- political history, said Mary. I had never heard of the genocide of the Cathars. Having begun to hear the story in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer I gleaned bits and pieces about the ‘foul leprosy of the South’ as I rambled about the region quite randomly. The Roman Church feared the infection of heresy might spread elsewhere in Europe. France had long since envied the Languedoc and joined forces with the Pope to obtain it. In Albi I found that in 1165 an ecclesiastical council condemned the heretics who became known as the Albigensians and in other places, Cathars. It seems the objection to them lay in their belief in the equality of the sexes, reincarnation, and their denial of the validity of clerical hierarchy or the necessity of an ordained intermediary between God and human beings. For them faith was not based on Church dogma but on direct, immediate ‘knowing’, an inner state of consciousness apprehended at first hand. This ‘gnosis’ or ‘direct’ knowledge took precedence over creed and dogma. Despite these differences most Cathars were not unduly fanatic and the Languedoc enjoyed a culture which was as creative and intelligent as it was tolerant and adhered to a life of devotion and simplicity. In 1209 the Pope called a Crusade ordering some 30,000 knights and foot soldiers into Languedoc. They wore a cross on their tunics and their reward was remission of sins and penances, an assured place in Heaven and all the booty one could plunder. The whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed and cities razed. In Beziers alone at least 15,000 men, women and children were slaughtered, many in the sanctuary of the church itself. When an officer inquired of the pope’s representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, ‘Kill them all. God will recognise His own.’ After Beziers they stormed through the whole area leaving a trail of devastation. Many people were burned alive at the stake. Pope Innocent III was informed that ‘neither, age nor sex nor status was spared’ in pursuit of Rome’s decree. The Albigensian Crusade lasted for nearly forty years. By the time the Crusade was over, the Languedoc had been utterly laid to waste and plunged back into the barbarity of the rest of Europe. The whole area was annexed by the French crown.]]></page><page Index="14" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[All this, about which I knew nothing, said Mary, came to me as a revelation about my Christian Heritage. I was not unfamiliar with this kind of violence in South Africa. Jo! That was a heavy trip.She shared her heaviness with an old man at the Pension in Marseille. Why not go to the chapel in Vence above Nice, he said. It is named after you – it is the Chapel of the Rosary - designed by Henri Matisse. You will find healing there, balm from our Lady of sorrows. He was wrong, of course, to confuse me with the Virgin Mary, but never the less I went. Vence is a market town but the haunt of artists and writers. Even Dante included the Lord of Vence in his Paradiso. I headed straight for the Chapelle Matisse about ten minutes out of Vence across the bridge over the River Foux. Because the chapel is small I was immediately drawn into an oasis of light cast by the stain glass window of the Tree of Life. The mosaic of blue and yellow light permeates the simplicity of the interior where every item is the creation of Matisse. Here was a good place to seek absolution for the continuing inhumanity of man to man throughout the centuries both in Europe and the place she called ‘home’.                         ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞Back in London, said Mary, I met J at the massive wooden door of the College front entrance. An eagle crest emblazoned the centre of a curved wrought iron motto. The quick handshake and ‘good to see you’ was followed by, ‘This way to the dining room’. It was a huge institutional room with many white clothed tables each replete with crude bottle of tap water. A canteen ran down one side. Hair- netted ladies in uniform stood waiting to serve from steaming bain-marie.J chose one end of a long table with a number of places taken. We emptied our trays. It was the first time I really noticed his face. Pale. Perfect symmetry. Long nose. Broad expressive mouth, well-bred ‘English’. “There was a programme on South Africa on the tele last night”, said J. “I especially watched it so that I might get to know a bit about you”. Deflecting but relishing the personal tendril, I launched into an expose of the political scene unfolding there. Worse than when I had left. The townships were on fire. The custom of neck-lacing suspected but not proven traitors with blazing car tyres had started. Hippos roamed with young SANDF joy riders ruling the waves. Anyone black could be stopped, interrogated, anywhere, anytime. On any pretext doors could be battered down and all the occupants searched, shredded, on whim. Houses were bulldozed. Forced removals to windswept barren plains on the outskirts of the cities multiplied. Enforcement of the barbaric, if not ludicrous, Immorality Act whereby the sexual act between couples of different race was deemed not only illegal]]></page><page Index="15" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[and therefore punishable but a heinous offence to some morally preoccupied God. The most vociferous proponent of which being, of course, the very white male who covertly desired black women and secretly indulged their fantasies.News images of violent confrontation between the State and an un-enfranchised black majority (forced to carry, even to the toilet, the humiliating ‘dom pas’ without which jail was immediate) flashed across the world.Mary told me that she could not remember him telling her anything about himself. He may have said he was married, had a child. He suggested they go to his office. A mess of papers everywhere and books piled anywhere on ceiling high bookshelves. Dirty cups littered the small table and the waste bin was full to overflowing. An architect’s slanted work board occupied one corner. A white board above it with blue and black diagrams and equations looked serious. A standard desk stood between the expansive, full length windows, admitting welcome pale sunlight. They overlooked a car park shrubbed along the walls overhung by Willow and beyond large Ash, Birch and Elder stretching into the recesses of the city. Until the Norman Conquest, a squirrel could cross England from the Severn to the Wash without putting foot to the ground. Much of the population lived in clearings, surrounded by the menacing forest, a place of wild beasts and wilder men. The trees themselves sighed or whispered together, roared mightily during the autumn gales or stood silent in the snow. The mockery their longevity made of the life-span of mere man, was lost on modernity.Coffee? I looked at the cups dubiously. J moved over to a basin in the corner to wash two, leaving the rest as they were.He leaned back in a swivel chair at the architects desk: Where shall we begin? You asked about my work in BMR, she said. Tell me about the company. Large multinational, long history, struggling with culture change in the light of computers being a new product. Mary said J turned the conversation from BMR to her personally explaining that his current work was looking at a mathematical model for how people construe their reality. Shall we try it? She accepted with alacrity. Tell me about experiences in your life which have been significant to you, he said.She told him of the night sailing to South America when the dolphin sent streams of fluorescent green through the water and showers of luminous drops flying as they leapt in arcs around the boat. She told him of the time in Brazil when a tropical storm burst over the forested cliff face to which her small hut clung and suddenly the heavens opened to engulf her in a numinous presence letting her know that all is well with the world and is held in the embrace of a benevolent God. That was indeed a revelation as up to that time her God was a malevolent puppeteer who cunningly engineered pleasure only to dash one to the ground in despair at the hopelessness of it all.She told him of the time she had attempted suicide by swimming out into the vast rollers of the Atlantic off Llandudno in the Cape, only to be washed back up onto huge granite boulders like a grounded porpoise gasping for air, too weak to attempt any such further madness. Then there was the time she attempted suicide after Matt had left her a note saying that he was off to Canada for good: ‘our then shall be some darkness during which fingers are without hands; and i have no you and all trees are (any more than each leafless) its silent in forevering snow’.2 She had ended up in Groote Schuur Hospital with a gashed head and a missing tooth because they had forgotten to strap her down properly when using the stomach pump. She had fallen against the metal cabinet at the side of the stretcher. Without asking her permission, the psychiatrist had interviewed her not only with students present but they were colleagues of Matt. Once you are out of here we must arrange psychiatric help for you, he said. Furious at the necessity of returning to life and the indignity of being a ‘case’ for gawping medical students she let him have it: I think you should know that psychiatrists in particular and the medical profession in general are a useless bunch and when I leave this hospital I will not be having anything further to do with any of you. (In fact her sister, her sister Martha, was a doctor and2e.e. cummings]]></page><page Index="16" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[she had always felt put out that these imbeciles were held in such high public regard and seemed to enjoy all the advantages of conforming to a doltish society. Banks fell over themselves to foster the profession’s business. Why even when her losskop sister, her sister Martha arrived late at the airport she was regally escorted across the tarmac to the waiting ‘plane.) After she was discharged from hospital, she said, her mother appeared like a ghost out of the corner of her darkened flat whose curtains had been drawn closed. How had she known? Her mother asked in a voice with death in it whether she was alright. Yes, fine thanks, said Mary. Sometimes there is a gulf that nothing can span. She told J that while with this same love of her life, she had been adamant about not having children. After he left, she often wondered if one of the reasons might not have been her dogmatic and unilateral decision not to have children. He wanted them. She considered it a cruel and thoughtless imposition to bring children into an arbitrary world of God’s broken promises and inequitable dealings. She wasn’t taking that one on. Another possible reason for his leaving may have been her preoccupation with suicide. He hated it. He was a doctor, after all: Supposedly a preserver of life with the sensibility of a poet in his genes. They had met through the arrival of a mutual friend on the old Union Castle Passenger Liner from England. Waiting for the boat to dock, she had seen the void of existence in his eyes - that vast, unknown emptiness of infinity. From that moment she loved him.And then there was sailing to South America with Matt, on Klaraborg: A hundred foot Swedish, gaff- rigged dowager built around the mid-1860ties. The bowsprit was fifteen feet. A net hung under it, slung like a hammock to be cradled and dunked in the South Atlantic to the up-down, up-down swish of the sea.KlaraborgKlaraborg boasted a Jack Russel, a canary in a cage that swung violently above the saloon table but was brought on deck when the wind was sweet and two patchy grey and white kittens. As Table Mountain receded from sight one fell overboard. It was my first lesson in the ways of the sea, Mary said. No one suggested trying to rescue it as the wake of the boat folded it in behind us. The fifteen crew comprised the Swedish Skipper – a lean, blue eyed Viking rake - his equally Swedish svelte, blond sister and her also naked golden boy of five who switched fluently between Swedish, English, Russian and Italian. They say children learn languages easily at that age. As for the rest of us, we were a rough-tumble of mixed nationality, seven men, five women.On board was the first time she tried Ganja and was entranced to see wind-spirits flowing over the deck, then up through the sails out to sea. Perhaps it was because of having being becalmed for days on a flat blue sea which stretched to every horizon of empty blue sky with the claque, claque, claque of listless sails, that we ran out of provisions ten days before sighting the Brazilian coast. The crayfish pots on the anchor at Dassen Island and the Benito slaughtered at St. Helena supplemented the exhausted provisions. Things turned nasty between the male crew and the skipper on account of the Benito for breakfast, Benito for lunch and Benito for supper with only one variation – boiled – sans alcohol or cigarettes to assuage the pangs. But they all knew that only he could pull them through in a storm. While for the most part seemingly absent, he had an uncanny knack of appearing on deck, at any time of the day or night, when the wind changed. A tall, blond, God, he barely spoke at all. True to form, in St Helena he cuckolded a South African on his way to the Mediterranean by stealing his]]></page><page Index="17" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[wife’s heart and sailing over the horizon with her to South America. Then there were sixteen – the additional one in the Skipper’s cabin. It didn’t last for long and the women on the yacht vindictively hoped that her husband would refuse to take her back when she finally went the way of previous women. Of course his only woman was Klaraborg herself to whom he was faithful to the end.Matt had gone off to Peru with Paul on some precipitous Andean descent to a tributary of the Amazon supposedly to take them through seldom navigated waters of the Indian, while she stayed on in Rio. Mary said she unaccountably found herself as ‘The English Governess’ with the celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Morado, who bred monstrously large cross Weimarana-German Mastiff who only roamed the property at night under the surveillance of a security guard. He was the president of Museu d’Arte Moderna in Parque do Flamengo. The Belgian ambassador’s son maintained that plastic surgery was his secret longing to be a great artist. He also told her that her ‘Englishness’ added status to the household. Relinquishing a pariah South African for a pseudo-English status was gratifying. A martial arts teacher arrived each morning to give o Doutor a work out in the Pagoda high up on stilts in a miniature forest. On some weekends we would travel to his island, one of the Ilha Angra dos Reis south of Rio. On others, we went to his mountain lodge beyond Teresopolis - a rambling beauty draped in forest and waterfalls with the aura of forgotten magic swirling through the trees. Matt wrote repeatedly begging her to meet him in Lima. Since she was desperately wanted, she took her time; lingering over the taste of Europe in Buenos Aires which even extended to a night out at the Opera and savouring the four day ride on the only peasant-packed train to La Paz. Who can forget the Andes? The Lake of the Sun God Titicaca. The jagged peaks of Machu Picchu dissolving in the eternal mists of the Urubamba Valley, the haunting sound of ‘El Condor Passé’ and building blocks of stone weighing fifty tons or more marking palaces, baths, temples, tombs, storage rooms, in this sacred valley of the Incas. She arrived in Lima to find an emaciated, disturbed and impenetrable Matt. All he could say was: it is over. He would give no reason. What was there to do but to leave. I went home via Manaus, Brasilia, and Salvador, arriving in Cape Town after some months to find that Matt had gone to Bulawayo to do a locum. He asked me to come up and see him. I did a few times but never got to the bottom of it and he never told me what had happened in Peru. A year had passed when suddenly I received a letter from him saying that he was immigrating to Canada. He wrote me a poem: Love is more than twenty moons over the mountains .......... And I knew he was referring to the Hottentots Holland across False Bay. On summer nights enter-twined on our perch high on the Constantia ridge above Kirstenbosch we would gaze across at the rising moon.One of my earliest memories, she told J, was that at age three my porcelain doll was smashed. It used to reside on top of the cupboard with the identical one that her sister, her sister Martha had. As she pulled it down it fell on the floor and the face shattered. No amount of tears could put dolly together again, nor could tears manipulate her sister into giving up her own intact doll. Neither could she persuade mummy or daddy to get another one or to put pressure on her sister to give in to her pleas. It was a significant moment of truth. In later years it seemed symbolic of the differences between her sister, her sister Martha and herself.Another significant moment of truth was the day her dog died. Smokey was the forerunner of many companion dogs who saw her through the loneliness of being five years younger than her sister, her sister Martha and having a mother who was away at work during the day. She had a black nanny and there was John the large black gardener. Actually Majola was his name. But the tactile comfort and ever ready ear of Smokey were a balm for her solitude. She must have been about four when her father said that he had something to tell her: ‘why don’t we take a little walk at the top of the garden’. They strolled near the dam. It must have been difficult for him. Smokey ..., Smokey ..... he isn’t around anymore. There was a car accident. Instantly breathless, then like some wounded bird her heart flapped with a wild pain. Whatever he said, she got what he meant. It was fortunate that after that I had other beloved dogs, said Mary. But I knew it would never be for ever.Talking of the gardener reminded her of the time he had invited her to his room. (Actually she used to like to go to his room and he didn’t invite her, but she always said that he invited her, even to herself, because that sounded better and didn’t make her culpable for what happened). She used to talk to him and ask him questions. One day when he was changing, pointing between his legs she asked: Can I]]></page><page Index="18" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[look at it ............. can I touch it. Yes. It was reluctant. As she stroked, he seemed to like it. A white liquid began to come out. He jumped up: If you tell your parents about this I will kill them. Of course she never did - never could - tell them, but the complicit secrecy was exciting and left a residue of pending curiosity and terrain to be explored.Indelibly copied on her memory was the time standing holding her nanny’s hand outside the Post Office. Suddenly there was the explosive shouting of men and two white Post Office officials came out pushing a black man in a scintillating white shirt. They shoved him to the ground and began to kick him around the parking lot like a football. As they left him there the blood began to ooze out over the shirt and she heard his groans as her nanny harried her away. How can anyone say they never knew? A gnawing pain began to dog her. Not always honourably. Like the time in a cafe. A black man stood servile to one side while white after white after white was served. Eventually the cafe owner turned to ask her what she wanted. She knew she should say the black man had been there a long time, that it was his turn. She didn’t. For this and other sins of commission and omission she felt shame. How can anyone say they were not responsible? (All those who had taken some responsibility had had to pay a heavy price. Those who had not paid the price had not taken responsibility. Even after it was over they denied it.)She told him of how in 1976 she had watched black school children from her third storey office window in Adderley Street. Later the Argus showed pictures of children wounded with grape shot and shop owners complained about the damage to their shop fronts. That was when I left, Mary said. I ended up in London after having tried Brazil, the Caribbean (those islands that would have me anyway, since I was South African) the States and Canada. One has to stop somewhere and say: Thus far ..... Nothing is going to be perfect and home is not an option, so make the best of the loneliness, the ugliness of cement and dirt against an endless backdrop of grey: And a telephone system that defies the sanity of someone used to a slim Cape Town directory with telephone numbers referencing actual people. At least I obtained a work permit on account of an Irish grandfather.Shame. A complex mixture of betrayal and anger. Like the fact that her father never made it in the world of men. The world where men are successful and make money. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the material world. He lived in and for and through God alone. That no one else did, isolated him from family and friends alike. Even church acquaintances were less radical in their total dedication to God’s way. The irony was that he worked for the Bank. (In those days one belonged to The Company). He must have been the only person in the history of The Standard Bank of South Africa who asked for a demotion from sub-accountant back to being a humble teller as he had no interest in climbing the corporate ladder. He left management of the world to his wife. Thus when his wife turned fifty and decided on an about turn from being Superwoman running a home and a major corporation’s managing director (and that was in the days before Sputniks, remember), to becoming a submissive ‘wife’, obedient to God’s will, he failed to ensure a house in which to live while they waited to move to Cape Town. His daughter was in a rage at his insouciance (‘Reliance on God’, he called it), which for her demonstrated clearly his failure as a man. She stormed into the dark, monolithic Bank - bastion of the nation’s wealth - and went up to the open, wood-panelled, teller’s cubical where he stood counting money on the broad wooden counter over which customers would pass the time of day exchanging pleasantries. Loudly she poured forth a tirade of her grievances regarding his incompetence: How can you do nothing about finding a place for you wife? What are you doing about it? You can’t live in a bus shelter. It was to her credit that even as she did it she felt a certain grief that she should so humiliate him in public.Yet she was more like him than her mother. She had a passionate single mindedness for Truth. Since God’s Word - The Book - was his primary source of fact, it was hardly surprising that one of her favourite proofs about anything and everything was: The Book says ............. Of course she didn’t mean the Bible, as he did, but expert intellectual opinion, of which she was an inveterate consumer in the form of books.]]></page><page Index="19" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[She passionately loved him when she was three but aunt Judith, the same one that called her ‘Hedgehog’ because, she said, she was prickly, always winging about her food, shed doubt on his already over scrupulous code of conduct by suggesting that it was unseemly, perhaps even deleterious for the child, that there should be overly much sitting in his lap or curling up beside him in bed. Forthwith he terminated all physical contact. Her mother told her that she had been an affectionate child but from that day it ceased. From that day, well into her twenties, she never cried. Not once. A further sense of abandonment was the result of being hospitalised for scarlet fever. Of course they visited and spoiled her, but why had they taken her away from them, why did they leave her there? The one unalloyed expression of joy she could not contain was on the arrival of Chris her deaf cousin for weekends. His mother, her father’s sister, Emily, had died soon after child birth. Mary’s mother had taken on the additional six month old Christopher and his two brothers, Mark and Samuel, when Mary was about a year old. Overnight her mother had five children ranging from six months to six years old. No doubt her father became a surrogate mother. Come to think of it, Aunt Judith too might have been prickly if at the age of one year she had suddenly had to share everything, especially Mother’s attention, with four others. A game with Chris had been doctors and nurses. More often than not he was the patient lying on covers behind the sofa in the sun porch at the back of the house while she very professionally took charge. Eventually her beloved twin-soul Chris had to go to St Vincent’s boarding school for the deaf making the weeks long and a weekend without him, longer. The other two boys left after several years when their father remarried.As violently as she and her father clashed so, indestructibly she adored him. How could she not, when he might unexpectedly bring her a pair of little white embroidered gloves, of the most exquisite fabric and design, which belied his innocence of the high life. Or anticipating a child’s love of the spectacular, he might thrust a packet of fireworks into her hands as she sat alone on the step outside at Guy Fawkes. There was the strange habit of the two of them going on holiday together while her sister went with her mother elsewhere. Holidays were the occasion of unpredictable hikes along the Cape coast, exploring the rock pools of Baines Kloof, surfing the waves at Muizenberg. A time of communing by camp fires or imbibing the history of cities. Her father loved history. He loved Shakespeare. He loved London. She had long since tasted London before ever she set eyes on it.MuizenbergPerhaps for the same reason, at six and a half she had been sent to stay with the Church Pastor and his wife while her parents went ‘overseas’ to England for some months. Upholders of the faith, Uncle Ted was a mild, absent and to be invoked authority while Aunty Evelyn, a good-looking, God fearing large and buxom figure supporting a tight black bun in the nape of her neck, set out to convert the heathen,]]></page><page Index="20" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[especially children in her charge, through rigorous inculcation of the fear of God. Paul, the eldest boy taught her Hebrew and chess. Much to his parents chagrin, long before he reached the age of discernment he turned to Judaism. During the Apartheid era he mysteriously disappeared and later still, shame enshrouded whispered rumours had it that he had gone to Israel and become a Rabbinic scholar.It was a time of misery. Her mother had always said that her imagination would be her downfall and she was proved right. The Pastors’ children teased her mercilessly on account of her believing their stories: Hordes of giant ants lurked under her bed in wait for her to fall asleep so that they could come and eat her. Tormented by day in anticipation, by night she would at last fall asleep exhausted, only to wake up with a start, to feel the beginnings of their predatory activity on her toes. Her anguished screams would bring everyone running only to be reprimanded by Aunty Evelyn to not be a silly little girl. She was even more terrified by this God-fearing, imposing figure of a woman. But worse to come, Paul took on the role of School Principal while she, Helen and Grace were pupils. Paul commanded morning assembly: ‘Shut your eyes while I will open with prayer’. (He was after all a good pastor’s son) There was a long silence. With the interminable passing of the time she ventured to peep to see what was going on. Her eyes met Paul’s who was gazing at her steadily waiting for this delicious, to be expected, moment. With a roar of victory he shouted: You have opened your eyes at PRAYER! A never to be forgiven sin worthy of hell fire and damnation. Father must know about this. Telling father meant that father would tell The Father and all three of them would figure out a punishment befitting the crime. For days, for weeks, she waited to know what unbearable cross she was going to have to bear, but no news ever came. Had she known it, the tension she lived under was more than enough punishment for all her sins put together.Her parents came back having resolved to stay together but at what cost to both of them no one will ever know. Her father was devoted to her mother and only her, all his life. But she, poor woman, wanted too much. The pristine cloister was not for her. Even more she wanted things for her children which only she could provide. They lived in incompatible worlds until at the age of fifty she realised that she hadn’t gotten far in terms of happiness so perhaps it was time to turn to her Christian duty and pay more attention to the will of God.Mary told J that it seemed that more and more, as she grew older, there was the constant limiting of any life other than that which could be construed to be the will of God by her father. Of course this precluded ballet, boyfriends, make up, ‘trousers’ (the Biblical prohibition of women wearing men’s clothing), parties, dancing, movies, sport on Sundays ............... the list was inexhaustible. It was left to her mother to socialise her and give her a taste for ‘the world’. Contrary to her husbands’ forebodings, she took her daughter to a movie for the first time when she was eleven because she thought Mary might become an alien to her classmates. Television, another possible field of contestation, was non-existent in South Africa for years after it was second nature to the rest of the world. The Government feared its racial contaminating influence on the population – rightly so! At twelve, her mother gave her an Elvis record which she played unremittingly so long as her father was out of earshot. She was almost thrown out of the house at seventeen because she had brought home the Sunday Times. ‘Not under my roof’ said her father and gave her a clear choice: ‘Either you do not read the Sunday paper in my house or you must go’. Period. Family prayers morning and evening, Church twice on Sundays, were de rigueur. Little matter that to her embarrassment her friends would have to wait for her at the bottom of the steps to the kitchen, while these unutterably archaic family rituals were engaged.But Music was her mother’s real gift to her. Rustle of Spring, A Mozart Piano Concerto, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, A Bach Prelude, all the depth and agony of a life pouring through the notes as her mother’s hands stormed and trickled over the keyboard. On summer evenings, there was too, the lilting joy of being young and in love, as ‘Ramona’ or ‘I’ll be loving you, Always’, wafted through the lounge windows and mingled with the smell of the Syringa blossom.]]></page><page Index="21" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[Quite contrarily, after her first year at university and much begging and pleading, her parents allowed her to take up the offer of a distant relative to become the English Governess at a Swiss Finishing School. It took a virtual vow to return to South Africa and complete her degree for them to agree. Her spirit took wings during that year and she wrote to her father about London being ‘the best place in the whole world’. ‘The best in the whole world’ was a family in-joke, but of course it was a toss-up with Paris where she risked descending to the fires of hell going to the Folies Bergère by choice. She was more overcome by the spectacle than the free display of flesh. Her innocence was such that in Brussels she thought it odd that all along one street women sat on display in strange attire in the bay windows signing to each other now and then. For some reason they resented her loitering about and motioned to her vigorously to leave. In Scotland she sat next to a man on a bus trip back to London. Surreptitiously, under the blankets passengers had been given against the cold, he fondled her hand for a while then attempted to get her to masturbate him. Mary laughed self-congratulatory ‘I shook him off vigorously’. On another occasion in Lausanne a man sat down on the park bench she was sitting on. He struck up a conversation. After a while he said “Donc, comment vous me trouve?’ OK, I replied nonchalantly. Sérieusement, he said, do I please you? I burst out laughing. Hardly the way to entice a man: That is, if you wanted him. But infinitely more worth exploring than God.By the age of twenty-one, Mary was the confirmed black sheep of the family and her parents prayed every day for the salvation of her soul, while her sister, her sister Martha met all their expectations through being a committed Christian and achieving professional and social status as a doctor. In order to satisfy her father’s command that there be ‘no alcohol ‘under my roof’, Mary celebrated her twenty-first birthday at a restaurant sans famille. She told J that she thought she must have been about twenty-two when she was in residence at Rhodes University that she had her first kiss: It was on a walk up the river that Peter took me in his arms: As our lips met I let out a shriek. Heaven only knows what transgression I thought was being committed. To his credit Peter got over it rapidly and we subsequently explored all the permutations of kissing strictly above the neck only! She was teaching at the University of Cape Town when she met Tim who was a Master’s student. He always claimed it was she who had rekindled his love of opera and introduced him to Wagner in the many hours of lying on the mohair carpet in her sister Martha’s flat where she warded off his advances. After a career move to Johannesburg at the age of twenty four she decided that if she was going to commit suicide she might as well find out what sex was like before she died. She executed her plan when she flew down to be with Tim over a long weekend. Afterwards there was blood on the sheet. In surprise and unfeigned innocence she claimed not to be menstruating. Tim was shocked to discover she was a virgin as he had always seen her as sooooooooooooo sophisticated. She wondered if that was part of the reason Tim stayed in touch with her thereafter: That he seemed to feel some responsibility for her wellbeing, for having ‘deflowered’ her. It is consoling that a man should have such sensibility. Not only that but a brilliant philosophic mind and a quirky sense of humour. He won a bursary to study in England. They carried on a correspondence for five years before they met up again in London. Taking an instant dislike to each other, nothing either did could improve matters. After they parted he wrote: ‘Since we have corresponded for five years I can see no reason to allow a mere two weeks of dissatisfaction on sight to hinder us from continuing our most amicable correspondence. I therefore propose that we press on regardless.’ Which he did. We continued to write for another several years, said Mary, before meeting up again when our mutual pleasure in each other’s company and the plenitude of London’s galleries, the Proms, last minute seats at the theatre, each with our nose in a book at Picolos or watching the ducks sail by in Regent’s Park on summer afternoons, spilled over into an everlasting bond. Out of sheer curiosity, whimsical Tim once hid himself at the National Gallery in London where they were to meet, to watch how men responded to her as she wondered around waiting for him. He said men lingered around where she was standing although she seemed oblivious of their interest and more taken by the paintings than their attention. We once met in winter Paris, in a café next to Notre Dame and ordered Brandy to dull the misery of life – where else but in Paris. We drowned our sorrows little realising that neither had we specified the Brandy nor had we checked its price which by the end of the grey afternoon added considerably to our sorrow. When she met Matt shortly after the abandoned leap into the underworld of sex with Tim – or so she thought at the time - she half wished that Matt had been the first one. Her sister, her sister Martha, on the other]]></page><page Index="22" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[hand, seemed to be unlucky in love and ascribed to her sister the status of ‘femme fatale’, which Mary thought was hardly the case, but we all have our projections, n’est pas?The era of Tim was the time of lecturing at ‘Varsity and parties and hot-pants. She was persuaded by Sally her flat mate to accompany her in mid-summer madness to the Fish River Canyon in her Renault 4 – you remember the toy box-like ones with a u-shape gear stick protruding from the middle of the dashboard. Those Renaults were ideal for desert conditions. It was nicknamed Amigo Fiel – faithful friend - in Colombia. After that trip, said Mary, my first car was a Renault 4, what else? I have a photo of the two of us lying toe to toe on a dusty road from nowhere to nowhere across an even more barren landscape.The heat rose off the desert like a barbeque. The silence was palpable with the sound of the wind arriving and passing into the emptiness. The same emptiness she once saw in Matt’s eyes. Nothing moved. At night they lay under the stars. Only in Africa can one see the stars as they must be seen. One time she and Matt went to the Okavango swamps. As they lay close in the sleeping bag listening to the night sounds they heard an animal sniffing its way around the bushes near by: Now all the fingers of this tree (darling) have hands, and all the hands have people; and more each particular person is (my love) alive than every world can understand now you are and i am now and we’re a mystery which will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before – and shining this our now must come to then ...3 The next morning, the lion spoor let them know who it had been. Herds of at least three hundred elephant would come down to the river. Mud baths were the order of the day. Africa was in her blood and nothing would eradicate it, ever.She fell silent. Silence.She could have continued forever. He listened, such listening as his enveloped them in such a silence that at last she was able to hear her own selfEventually J said: “Tell me in a word or a phrase, what it was that you were valuing in each of these experiences? For example, when your doll broke, what did that signify for you?Unfair discriminationAnd the dolphins in the South Atlantic?Radiant alivenessWhat about Okavango?Oh, that was the eternal soul of Africa - ‘origins’ Smokey’s death?Gone foreverMajolo’s bedroom?3e e cummings.]]></page><page Index="23" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[Secret intimacyThe Brazil forest-hut experience of God? All is well and all shall be wellMatt’s eyes?The unfathomable emptiness of eternity The Post Office incident?Man’s inhumanity to manSailing on the Klaraborg?Light, Motion.... BeautyMachu Picchu?Haunting mystery.Your mother’s music?Divine LoveAdderley Street 1976?Lord have MercyAnd so it went, the eliciting of the innermost patterning of her life. He delved into recesses of meaning making we extrude from experience and from whence our deepest sources of passion for life, call us, drive us, destroy us.Tea before we go on? J asked, then explained: The next bit is a systematic and tedious comparative rating of your experiences against your subjective valuations of them. This shows the undifferentiated similarities of significance. After tea J showed her what he wanted and then gave it to her for home work. Let me have the data when you are finished and I’ll let you know when I’m ready for us to continue. It all sounded rather mysterious.The data was crunched by a mathematical program and the computer printouts fed back what seemed like a mind-mirror, a gestalt of her world view and its patterns. One of the managers in BMR later called it Analysis by computer! By which he meant Psychoanalysis. It was that and more, said Mary. Not that it gave any answers but that it was a tool to probe deeper.Working together with J on the data made apparent the polarities with which she habitually dichotomised life into networks of similarity and ever more fine distinctions of difference through which she construed the world. Glimmerings of awareness grew of the subjective predetermining symbolic mind-set. As J gathered her to an ever finer one-pointed awareness, the deepest layers of psychic split emerged until finally the ghost of the ‘self’ that she had run from all her life caught up with her and J said: “ Who? makes the rules.” At this her mind went into a dizzy spin and in terror she backed off. J tried again. “Who makes the rules?” She baulked and he could get no further. An impasse.“Let’s leave it at that for now”, he said.She fled from his office in confusion and at a pitch of intensity that she had never before experienced. “Who makes the rules?” That night she could not sleep for asking of the question: “Who am I?” “Who makes the rules?” She peered at the computer printouts endlessly as if they might yield some secret answer. Day and night, back and forth, back and forth I haggled. Every breath breathed the question. For two days I lived this frenzy of concentration in the question, when suddenly it was as if a curtain parted and I knew.... ...........beyond a shadow of a doubt I knew ....... soft as butterfly sneezes, as sudden as mid-summer night breezes, I knew. I had found myself. And it was why I was here. God smiled, the dust in the sun-lit air smiled, Life undulated, rising and falling, rising and falling, quickening to cosmic orgasm as I sat in utter stillness. Wave upon wave of bliss moved every particle of life and somehow J and I were moving to this same rhythm.I am floating in a clear sky suspended under a vaguely human cloud like a man, which weighs lightly on my pubis. It is dreamy, erotic.]]></page><page Index="24" isMAC="true"><![CDATA[In the days that followed, she would grab huge sheets of paper as a flood of revelation poured out onto it the origins of life, creation, the cycles of existence. Numerical formulae synchronous with patterns in nature flashed into her mind, insights about death, the secrets of the ages came unbidden. Poetry poured from her. Like the mind of God, the whole universe seemed laid out before her.]]></page></pages></Search>