DIARY

SHARING SILENCE

They say it used to be a tiny church in the 18th century before what might be an epidemic of Black Death proportions wiped all the parishioners who were so devoted to worshipping they thought that God was a Christian. With hopes of a peaceful life in heaven or sitting on the laps of Abraham they perished one by one and received ceremonial resting places each next to the other. For those whose understanding of scripture was as twisted as their pastors' they entertained hopes of eternal life in the celestial beauty of heaven, while they also thought about resurrection. Who can explain their row of granite decorated resting places if they never thought of long warm hugs after the raptures, immediately after Armageddon. The church building could, in modern rules of occupancy only accommodate roughly thirty one parishioners who'll sing a pledge to God that they will not burst their tonsils and blow off the roof in their African rendition of 'God Save the Queen'.

My own take of what this has turned out to be is fully captured by an old film starring the equally dead River Phoenix entitled 'A River Runs Through It'. And I'm thinking if Phoenix's god was not hidden within the white ashes from a demon crematorium he would've been a parishioner and buried alongside the 95 or so departed souls. A river, which I'm told is called iBhubesi runs through it and in this captivating silence of my innocense I think it flows to the North - not East. Anyway, who told me that rivers need to flow to the East if it's not the Geography teacher who turned out to be a pedophile. He's the same one who told me that the earth was round and figured he deserved a mid-life Achiever Award for reproducing old recycled wisdom that Isaac Newton and friends championed and wrote millions of theories about. The biggest lie he told me was that Neil Armstrong is the first man on the moon. For that I'll never forgive him and wish him eternal hellfire suppose the sulphur in Gehenna cannot turn him into white ash soon, so that another bunch of Phoenixes could snort and die.

This is however not the story of people who die, deservedly or not because they lie. This is the story of the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers, situated in the green hills of the Kwazulu-Natal Mildlands Meander, a place of serene beauty my firist conscious picture was that of a 65-years old cowboy on a brown filly wearing his rugged Levi's jeans, a leather Stetson and a red checked shirt shepherding a herd of 800 sheep. Of this cowboy with a dark black moustache like that of Kid Colt chewing tobacco gums and occasionally sucking on his pipe like the 'Mexican pigs' Kid Colt liked to shoot at with his Colt 45. It was the picture of a sepia Marlboro advertisement on the back cover of a 1984 Scope magazine.

SHARING SILENCE II

They said, from a rather ill-informed position that there were crocodiles in the river. That the reptiles have a healthy appetite for human flesh. That however is not a picture I had of Caversham. I thought Caversham; is the name Scottish, Irish or Welsh? Anyway I didn't think crocodiles and hippoppotamus but rather a fresh idombolo, lasagna, koeksusters and a huge mug of hot higly caffeinated coffee. To retrieve a picture from my memory bank, I though of a 1989 Cadbury chocolate bar TV1 commercial. The one they liked to screen during Sundowner and McGyver. That commercial was so strong one could smell the fresh milk the boy spilled as he rushed for the horse-pulled carriage. It painted a scene of cold nights of camaraderie infront of freshly-stoked fireplaces, in stone-built country houses. Loud discussions over poker games and mugs of hot chocolate circulating amongst the bunch who occasionally sink their teeth on a hot lemon flavoured muffin. Cold nights of oil-powered lanterns and acoustic guitars and young women who could still knit a scarf or a woolen hat. Nights of comic books, when the radio was still a king and sex before marriage an abomination.

The evolved church which grew up to become Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers was in my mind what all these surreal thoughts of childhood nostalgia, of an imaginary French farm epitomized. Our brief was to try and capture silence, bottle it in a glass capsule as if it was captured butterfly and marvel at the beauty, but the river that runs through it seems to have other ideas. While sitting on the edge of a protruding rock is itself poetry in motion, the uniformity between the stones are the closest to population dynamics one can get.

The edge of the rock I'm sitting on resembles the famous one overlooking the Blyde River Canyon and maybe for today iBhubesi is my Blyde River, a river so massive in the 1970s my brother nearly drowned, only to be saved by a miracle. In this moment of internal reflection I'm wondering, why is silence not the equivalent of loneliness? Me and the river we form an orchestra and we sing 'Happy Birthday' to the taste of chocolate cake still lurking in my tongue.

The river makes good music that tempts me to compose a long classical piece to be called 'o tla sala le mang ge ke ile' ('who will stay with you when I'm gone') something an Afro-pop group has tried to remake, but not to the syncy of me and my river. 'Me and my river/ though i swear to god i can't swim/ ain't nobody come between the bond that we share/ we so much bonnie & clyde in pursuit of love/ convert crime to fiction paperbacks sold @ flea markets/ we scream loneliness now we'll share words in the tub' See, silence is golden. I've spent so many hours alone and never tasted loneliness. I truly used that moment to speak to the one person who matters - me. I spoke to myself in muted tones, listened to me and I liked what I heard. My alter-ego begged me to increase the loving. To fall blind to the daggers I saw sharpened by foes. To act as if everybody loves me though they dream of my funeral.

SHARING SILENCE III

One of my few weaknesses that I'm good at hiding has been my deep-rooted obsesssion with spirits, not in the mystical demonic sense but the breath in the lungs, the power of compression. While navigating through the organised morass that is called Caversham I find myself being summoned once again to answer a question, what is the spirit of Caversham? Is it an opportunity to do introspection, not at the expense of extrospection but to help strengthen one's expression? Is it the rainbow family myth that we not only try hard to believe but to live in our own nomadic South African way? Is Caversham a pilgrimage where artists come to appease the spirits of 95 parishioners who had visions of God and Ghandi but only saw one another's skin peel off painfully due to leprosy? Or is it a spiritual retreat for Bhuddist monks who think the Dalai Lama aspires to be the dictator of Tibet? What is the spirit? Maybe it lies in the graves.

I knew I couldn't get any story from the two dogs that seem to be scared of a digital camera one would be forgiven for thinking that one of their kin was shot with a digital camera that turned out to load dog tranquilizers.

17h40; After a quarter day of silence one learns to gain much needed understanding of a new meaning of solitude. While the msot difficult were the first two to three hours, beyond that you feel as though staying forever muted could be the best thing to happen to your brain. It answers many questions like one of the reasons the Creator in any form ceased to directly speak to his creation and decided to provide a set of rules and parables to shepherd their fears through troubled waters. It is granted that there was once a time when he used to talk directly to his artwork, until it developed protest instincts. Then one morning he decided, "thy shall open thine lips when thy miss thine creator but I shan't answer back"

Maybe in signs and not words. Which brings me to the graves. The number of which suggests that the place here is actually a graveyard which tells lots of stories. I fathomed a few between the granite and this is what they said; The Teasdale couple surprisingly both died at age 88, one in 1963 while the wife in 1967. They were both born in June and July respectively, four years apart, and interestingly both died on the month of January. This trivia alone says I should get permission to exhume their remains and try to find out what killed them. Also very funny is that their epitaphs are inter-related, for the man it is engraved, 'Friend of All Men' while for the woman is a banal 'Loved By All'. And their graves are next to each other which suggests a preparation for resurrection than a conduit to the ghetto beyond. One equally dead musician once asked, 'I wonder if heaven's got a ghetto', it sounds like a question that should be asked kneeling infront of the Teasdale tombstones, hoping an apparition will provide answers somewhere in the night.

The second story is equally fascinating and calls for a commission of Inquiry. Harriet and her husband Mr. Wilson were both 80-years od when they died, or otherwise that's what has been inscribed on their marble. They both died in the early 19th century, even though it was nine years apart. They both died before the First and Second World Wars, which makes them real faithful believers of whatever they heard regarding the world and the last days. When the Anglo-Boer War ended they thought nothing worse was going to happen and passed on still thinking it couldn't get worse.

But what I find more trivial is that my own grandmother was born in 1926, is 80-years old and still going strong even though her husband died in 1982 at the age of 60. What made people in those old days of trekking voor die immediately after their spouses if it was not leprosy or Black Death? The Teasdales saw the First and Second World Wars through the eyes of an eternal Afrikan safari than the rubble of Europe. They are most likely to have loved Smuts and felt betrayed when South Afrika left the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1961. The question I'm asking myself as I'm standing infront of their graves is, what would they have thought of what South Afrika has become so many years later? Would they have felt Affirmative Action was reverse apartheid while Job Reservation was an important poor-white problem insurance?

What would their opinions have been on the environment, the spirit and the community that is trying to be reflected by their on small church that has grown not to be a church but a retreat of mental reflection? Could they have reminisced about the outlying green plains of the Scottish countryside with Manors and that daily delivery of fresh pasteurized milk?

SHARING SILENCE IV

It's easy to be nostalgic about lost beauty when what you envisaged as you crossed the boundary turned out to be your worst nightmare. It is sad that man is a virgin only once and ageing is such a high price to pay for maturity. Forget the power of the mind and let's focus on the tangibles. The tangible is my vision of a brown horse at Caversham which I heard going buckwild and later saw on the neighbouring farm, minus the cowboy of course. It is the smell of half-cooked fresh carrots filtering out of the open windows of my cottage as I approach from the side of the river that got me lusting after idombolo and sweet potatoes. That's what I can touch and write long poems in the tradition of nursery rhymes, your 'Baba Black Sheep have you any Wool?'

Reality tends to take a new meaning when you've always thought of silence as an alien intrusion. The returns often outweigh the investment. At this moment I'm thinking, can all these text and pictures make sense to Getaway magazine? Am I becoming a travel writer of serious note? Though I started this morning with a 30-minutes silence and one hundred press-ups I find myself doubting my mental fitness as I struggle to negotiate my sanity past seven o'clock. I'm a newsman and television news are to me what petrol is to automobiles, some voice in the back of my mind says, 'discipline', while I'm thinking 'this is making me a Branch Davidian, the next things I'll be telling my family 'don't call me ever, I'm now a Christian (pun intended)'. I'm thinking this is brainwashing at its best, something I last saw on some late night R16 rated film starring unknowns and set in Waco Texas. Stories about groups of writers, poets, print people, graphic artists and academics who gassed themselves to death over dinner because they felt nothing mattered. While relaxing I could see the headlines on newspapers, gory pictures provided by the Natal Witness, of a group that died, which puzzles the world and television footage of police helicopters and ambulances leaving the farm in a column through the seven kilometre stretch of bundu road. I can also foresee etv's Deborah Patta trying to put together the pieces on 3rd Degree, 'Why Did they Do It?', especially with the credentials most of the people I'm with here have.

That's a joke, but my worst fear is that of 250 anti-terror police officers raiding the farm at night, following months of investigations about it being a training camp for terrorists. "They come here for ideology classes, get their passports faked by a suspect named Gabi and travel to Syria and Somalia for military training", that will be police commissioner Jackie Selebi at a news conference flanked by a representative from the FBI and another from Scotland Yard. All bragging about how they've had the farm under surveillance since 1995. I can do jail time but not as a suspect deported to Guantanamo or some secret gulag in Kazakhstan.

SHARING SILENCE V

Finally, some people say, especially when they talk to me, that silence is to noise what tonic is to gin. One can have a field day playing with these contrasts. I'm told around the same discussions that I should not be lied to that the revolution will not be televised. That as long as it is well shot, edited and packaged in 54-minute documentaries with commercial breaks and experts commentating each scene and scenario it can be televised. 'Look at what they did in Iraq. There were retired US Army Generals in Fox and ABC studios putting names to warships firing cruise missiles from the sea. They told you it was a cruise ship firing a Tomahawk missile that travels hundreds miles and you believed them. If you were the Sheik of some Gulf sheikdom wouldn't you have gotten on the phone the following morning and ordered two cruisers or frigates or destroyers and loaded them with those surface to surface missiles packing a cluster bomb payload?' Of course I would.

And now you wondering what it the point of all this? Get off it, there's no point, it's just dumber and dumber. What this serves to complement is what I mentioned that a revolution can be televised, the same way way for silence to have value one needs the clutter of the tongue against the front teeth. Life wouldn't have value if it wasn't for death. Silence wouldn't have value if it wasn't for noise.

There's a film I once heard of called The Silence of a Lifetime, which I now think was about the river. During Winter the outdoor is so serene one can heart their own hear protesting its enclosure behind the rib cage. On cold winter nights, under warm duvet covers and darkness a lover can share the richness of silence with their lover on the other side of the Vodacom line. There are times when a message on an Inbox folder carries more weight than a sumo wrestler in a ring. That's when people shed tears over nothing because it overwhelms them. Silence becomes such a valuable currency one can take to the bank and deposit in a Current Account.

Every night before I go to sleep I spend some time reflecting. Often I don't like what I see in myself and resort to playing a game on my cellphone which immediately tranquilizes me to comatose. Sometimes I hypnotize myself through a session with the first born of mother earth and collapse into a load of semi-dead beef. Worry no more; I was a cow in my past lifetime and I chowed grass. I guess I used to graze the green hills of Caversham as a Bonsmara that met its death at a Newcastle abattoir. Something in my mind tells me it was at the beginning of the 19th century and I was owned by a family that went by the name Teasdale, that later passed away and was buried at Caversham Farm. And for me, this is the second coming. A stupid man named Frak Nietsze who lived around that time once said that we should endure pain because 'that which does not kill you will make you stronger'. Yesterday was not painful though, even though today I consider myself a survivor. For one, I never spoke to no one on my cellphone and it feels liberating. I shared my silence with the world and they'll know I was here (Caversham)