No.40 - Forests and the imagination

Most of my life I have been a forest boy.  On my mother’s wildlife sanctuary in eastern Zimbabwe I ran barefoot through squishy bogs sheltered by massive albizias and cussonias and figs; every year I return there to climb my favourite strangler-fig bridge.  I was early made aware of the complex ecosystem that prevailed there – from the moths to the bats, from the somango monkeys to the mongooses, from the snails to the eagles.  I learned to evaluate these interconnections for their place in the system, not for their human use.  My mother would point out a fallen Rhoicissus fruit, bitten once by a monkey and discarded.

 “People say, ‘Look how wasteful they are’, and hate monkeys for it.  But look at what’s happening to the fruit.  Some of the seeds have been ingested by the somango, to be defecated – planted – further off.  A bushbuck has come along and nibbled a bit more of it; they’d never get this food without the monkeys.  Nor would these tiny fruit-flies, which are food for someone else; nor would these chongololos.  As it rots, it adds unique nutrition to this forest soil.  What’s wasted?? Nothing!”

And we’d lift handfuls of that clean, black, fragrant, light, leafy soil to our nostrils: there is no other smell quite like it. It’s very light, almost airy; even the biggest trees that come down are mostly light, rotting quickly, recycling into new growth quickly.  Cut away that growth, remove the perpetual leaf-fall and the perennial mist that aids decay, or the bushpig- and hornbill-droppings that enrich, and this soil runs out of nutrients in two seasons.

Humans have been confronted with this lesson for thousands of years, but have apparently not learned it.

The hillsides enclosing the Mediterranean were once heavily forested – but as Pliny described the environs of Athens in the Critias in the fourth century BC:

In comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body ... all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.  But in the primitive state of the country, its high mountains were high hills covered with soil ... and there was abundance of wood in the mountains.

Where did the wood all go?  To make ships for Athenian navies.  This did not change down the centuries.  In his wonderful book, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the imagination (2016), British nature-writer Richard Mabey notes how English oak forests were decimated to make English warships.  Similarly, in Landscape & Memory (1995), Simon Schama, whose Polish-Jewish great-grandfather was a lumberman, chronicles how, as Poland was successively occupied by German and Russian invaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Bialowieza forests were plundered on a massive scale: in the years of the First World War alone, 5 percent vanished, 5 million cubic metres of wood shipped to Germany, and no small proportion reduced to “walls of fire” by heavy artillery.

Manufacturing massed weapons of war is a long way from cutting clearings in forests for early human settlements, as Robert Pogue Harrison has related in my favourite of all forest-y books, Forests: The shadow of civilisation (1992).  For millennia, Harrison shows, forest was what people carved civilisation out of, and therefore began to distance themselves from it.  It was seen as dark, threatening, dangerous.  But that’s only one side of it: forests have always simultaneously been resources, not just for wood, but for fruits, clothing materials, a pharmacopeia of balms, as well as the richest imaginable source of cultural imaginings: forest is epic and fecund with mystery, always has been, from Gilgamesh to the Brothers Grimm and beyond.

Having explored swathes of this extraordinary cultural landscape, Harrison concludes:

As the order of [human] institutions follows its course, or as huts give way to villages and then to cities and finally to cosmopolitan academies, the forests move further and further away from the centre of the clearings.  At the centre one eventually forgets that one is dwelling in a clearing.  The wider the circle of the clearing, the more the centre is nowhere ...  The global problem of deforestation provokes unlikely reactions of concern these days among city dwellers, not only because of the enormity of the scale but also because in the depths of cultural memory forests remain the correlate of human transcendence.  We call it the loss of nature, or the loss of wildlife habitat, or the loss of biodiversity, but underlying the ecological concern is perhaps a much deeper apprehension about the disappearance of boundaries...

In other words, the ecological crisis of deforestation – one of the major drivers of global climate change – a form of change without boundaries – is also a profound crisis of the human ‘imagination of belonging’.

‘Climate change’, precisely because it is so nebulous, is easily derided and even denied by ignoramuses like Donald Trump.  Better to confront them with less ambiguous evidence from lower orders of change, where things are visible and measurable.  Such people often seem to think that natural bounties will somehow last forever, when all the evidence is to the contrary.  Ask the passenger pigeon – or, in our own time, the bluefin tuna, which is almost gone.  It is now estimated that the planet has lost half its non-human species in just the last 40 years.  Sixty percent of simians, our closest relatives, are now critically endangered. A large portion of that loss is due to the destruction of tropical forests, the last land repositories of great biodiversity.

There is little sign of the trend slowing.  Don’t believe that the Congolese or the Indonesian forests are somehow endless: one of the most heart-breaking things I have seen recently is footage of desolate orang-outans clinging to single trees, all that’s left of their great rich forest habitats, ploughed down and burned out for the sake of palm-oil plantations.  Don’t believe that the Amazon jungle is somehow immune to depredation: a fifth of it is already gone to cattle-ranchers and miners and subsistence settlers and unnatural fire.  The Brazilian government plans no less than fifty dams on Amazonian rivers to supply humans with electricity.  As if dams have not been proven again and again to be short-lived and ecologically catastrophic – they will, if they go ahead, very likely precipitate the demise of the Amazonian climatic ‘lung’.

European invaders of North America believed that the timber resources of that vast continent were essentially infinite.  One of America’s finest novelists, Annie Proulx, has chronicled the progression of American lumbering in her latest magisterial novel, Barkskins (2016).  It is an epic, fascinating and depressing story – and not only because of Proulx’s genius for polishing off her characters in ever more imaginative ways.  She describes the appalling conditions and perils of woodcutters in Quebec and Maine in the seventeenth century, the retreat of the forests before new swathes of white settlers and ever-more efficient machineries, as demand for timber for warships, then railway ties, then housing, then paper, mushroomed.  The forest wasn’t inexhaustible after all; the ecological damage was profound and irreversible.  Even in the nineteenth century, as one of Proulx’s characters comes in from Germany with ideas of replanting and sustainability, he is derided.  One of her last, twentieth-century characters, in contrast, studies both forest ecologies and the indigenous knowledges of the Mi’qmak peoples who were all but obliterated along with the rich matrix of their habitat.

The advent of the ecological sciences, little more than a century old, seems as helpless as Romantic poetry to stem the tsunami of commercial exploitation, driven by myopic profiteers who simply couldn’t give a shit.  Indeed, Robert Harrison regards the academies with disdain, as iconic of our furthest imaginative remove from the realities of forest-dwelling.  More subtly, people’s aesthetics can shift: George Monbiot, in his defiantly forward-looking book Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (2013), laments how the open spaciousness of his native Welsh Cambrian Mountains are today defended as a great last “wilderness”, even though in fact they have long been comprehensively denuded of forest and biodiversity by woodcutters and sheep-farmers: “Whenever I venture into the Cambrian Desert I almost lose the will to live.  It is like a land in perpetual winter.”

As I drove through the dustbowl of the Free State in December, I thought about how we in South Africa have also denuded vast territories for agriculture.  Instead of living in clearings in forests, we now fight to preserve tiny patches of forest – a mere 7 percent of what we had a century ago – in the midst of species-poor modified countryside that we too often have come to accept, even aesthetically admire, as ‘natural’.  We have, in short, become numb to loss.

In a thousand different ways, as all these wonderful books suggest, reforestation is one vital component of a restoration of our own humanity, our human sense of belonging.

As for me, it’s the first necessary step just to go down the hill to my local forest fragment, climb a wild plum with the cat, and breathe in through every pore the canopy’s colours and smells and infinitude of sounds...

*******

No 39 - Zimbabwe despatch: A walk through town

Pic: @kpczim

“I’ll walk home from here,” I say to my hostess.  She cocks her head at great steaming thunderheads looming over  Cecil Kop, rubs her throat in the morning humidity.  But okay.

            We’re in the middle of town, in one of the cul-de-sacs off the main street, which has lately been commandeered by a particular group of street- sellers – those who are making a few hard-won dollars from second-hand clothing.  Not the ultra-trashy, ‘zhing-zhong’ Chinese goods that have flooded most markets and destroyed Zimbabwe’s once-flourishing clothing industry, but clothes donated to charities in Mozambique, sold on in huge bales at US$250 a pop, smuggled across, or rather ‘negotiated’ through the nearby border post.  Now they lie in semi-chaotic piles on the sun-crazed tarmac, the vendors bawling their specialties and hoping the summer rain will hold off.  Here a heap of handbags and backpacks, there tiny-tots’ T-shirts, here packs of brand-new socks, there rows of sometimes slightly bent-looking shoes (one of each so you can’t run off with a pair). 

            My elegantly-built hostess likes rummaging through skeins of gossamery dresses and shifts and tops whose relevance to Africa has to be seriously questioned – but with a cry of triumph she comes up with a vivid Ralph Lauren dress, probably worn once by some Parisian deb and discarded: it fits her perfectly.  $4.  For my part, I score a couple of cool cotton shirts, one Malaysian, one English-made, and a pair of comfy Australian bush shorts with lots of pockets, just the way I like ‘em.  All in near-perfect condition: $2 apiece.  The insane profligacy of the developed nations meets the ingenuities of local economy.

            Not that these vendors are quite the impoverished who might benefit most.  My hostess chats amiably with some she knows well, not from the market but from her educational projects: these are teachers boosting their meagre government salaries during the school holidays, working ‘under’ another tier of entrepreneurs who actually get the bulk deliveries into the country, making middle-man (or often woman) profits that way.  We exchange our increasingly grubby and worn US dollar notes, getting a bit of change in the new so-called “bond notes”.  I ask some of the sales people what they think of them, and get that characteristic Shona clicking expression of doubt, if not disgust, “N-tskh-aahh”.  The notes are ostensibly backed by dollar reserves in the Reserve Bank, but if so how come there’s a shortage – or gold, but mining has died or been colonised by the Chinese and the Russians, so no one believes that.  The startlingly crisp bond notes  are ostensibly equivalent to the dollar, but within two days of their issue a fortnight ago they were being traded at alternative rates: they too are short in supply.

            In the main street, as I walk back across town, queues have built up at the ATMs: the amount of money one can draw at a time has been abruptly raised, possibly with Christmas in mind, but it’s still pretty meagre.  And the banks – some totally new, this year’s mushrooms and probably about as reliable as the sundry quasi-religious “prophets of profit” gulling the gullible everywhere – quickly run out of ready cash.  I go in to Barclays to see if I can draw some cash on my Visa card: No, that is no longer allowed.  So how am I supposed to get cash and spend my lovely tourist dollars?  Shrug: “You can swipe.”  That’s all very well at certain petrol stations and South African-based supermarkets, but most of the economy is cash-based – and the word is, or the fear is, that the “swipe” will soon not be allowed either.  Then what?  People are steeling themselves glumly for a repeat of the hyperinflationary madness of 2008, and all its ghastly consequences.

           

Pic: @kpczim

I am struck by how shabby this once-neat little town has become: the same tottering traffic-lights, sometimes on, sometimes blank, more potholes, fewer buildings being repainted.  Many firms and shops have closed up (more than 260 businesses have died this year): what used to be a gift shop is now Western Union (also backed up with queues of unusually quiet people hoping for money sent in from relatives outside the country); a long-standing restaurant is boarded up; a pharmacy next door briefly opened and then closed again.  What used to be my favourite bookshop now sells hair extensions, adorned with big flashy photographic panels of shiny grinning models.  The only shop in town selling books now is a narrow gloomy nook with a few dozen school text books (the same ones I taught from in the late 1980s) and some battered black-spined Penguin classics.  This government has comprehensively destroyed the public’s access to reading matter other than newspapers, whose literary quality is negligible.

            As always, street-corner vendors sell those papers, government mouthpieces alongside ‘opposition’ rags whose persistent vilification of Mugabe and ZANU-PF is tolerated as a sham of free speech: the government clearly doesn’t give a toss.  Though there is much trumpeting of the apparent in-fighting, the so-called G40 group against Lacoste (because its leader Emmerson Mnangagwa is known as ‘The Crocodile’).  It seems no less a mess than the equally split and hapless opposition. 

            As I walk on up the main street, the sultriness grows beneath the vividly clashing scarlet blossoms of the flame trees and the mauve jacarandas that line many streets – many of these trees must be older than I am.  When I lived here I didn’t think of the place as “tropical”, but after the thorny thickets of the Eastern Cape and the dust-storms of the drought-stricken Free State, it feels incredibly lush and steamy, uncut grass billowing into the edges of the minor side-roads, the hills dark blue-grey with shadows of approaching storm-clouds, promising the sudden warm runnels of drain-water I used to splash along as a barefoot child.

            I do not see another white person walking, just one or two passing in cars.  Being white here, whatever the luxury in which some continue to exist, is to be an irrelevance.  Rather like the old-age home in which my mother now lives, the community seems no less culturally closeted than it was in the 1970s: you relate to Shona folk largely in the form of aides, nurses, gate guards, gardeners, shop assistants, bureaucrats.  My hosts are seen as unusual in that they actually socialise with Shonas as parents and colleagues, and send their son to a school in which he is the solitary white boy in his year– with no ill effects whatever, so far as one can tell.  The alternative is – as many families do, white and black – to board the kid out to one of the ferociously expensive elite schools, whose obsession with sport is a constant topic of conversation.

           

From the old-age home I cut through a back street now all but impassable for potholes, even for my bakkie: only a skeleton of main thoroughfares is ever attended to nowadays.  I keep my eye open for a marvellous perky little caterpillar I’d seen earlier in the day: black hooped with yellow with two rear ‘antennae’ which bobbled along in charmingly comical fashion.  I’d debated briefly whether to lift it into the grass, but few people and almost no vehicles passed here; now, to my utter dismay, I find it half squashed.  I touch it; those little antennae quiver upwards.  Sick at heart, I kill it off.  A tiny thing, but it seems to me iconic of the whole mindless destructiveness of the natural world being carried out by humans everywhere: in Zimbabwe, the unchecked denudation of woodland to supply the drying-sheds of ‘emergent’ tobacco farmers, or the poisoning of a herd of cattle by arsenic leakage from an unregulated gold mine.

            I take a short-cut across the golf-course, which is obsessively maintained in the face of all economic challenges, the fairways fringed by dark dense alluring belts of indigenous forest harbouring melodious birds – Whyte’s barbets and Gorgeous bush-shrikes and clicking Puffbacks – and also an offputting ground-covering of human litter.

            At a street corner, shaded by jacarandas and figs, sits Tinashe at his little mobile stall, selling eggs and chips and single cigarettes that he gets wholesale and sells on for a small profit.  Friendly and chatty, he’s been installed here for a couple of years now.  He too is suspicious of the bond notes, and is hoarding dollars as much as he can: no use putting them in the bank.  Most people agree with him.  He is unconvinced the elections of 2018 are going to produce any benefits, but there is always that Shona laugh and little shrug that expresses hope: Well, maybe...

            I walk on, past a garden-plant nursery that seems still to flourish, a huge rain-puddle that no longer drains off the street, an ancient blue bus that has been broken down on an awkward corner for five days now, a man who in the absence of municipal attention has taken it on himself to fill some potholes with earth in the hope of a handout from motorists.  There does seem a surprising number of pristine 4x4s and double-cabs on the streets, in between the ageing smoking skedonks; I wonder if they care, shuttered like all suburbanites behind their rumbling automatic gates, their lawn-mowers and their outraged dogs.

            I am not far from my lodgings; I am drenched in summer sweat; a wind picks up; thunder humbles the hills; big lovely fat drops of rain spatter through the jacarandas; clutching their babies to their bellies, vervet monkeys run, and so do I...

           

*******

IMITHI: Grahamstown's Tree Memory Project

 If water is our life-blood, 
plants are our very flesh.

Over millions of years plants have created the atmosphere we breathe; the soils from which we harvest food; and the fossil fuels on which our present economy runs.  Without plants, without trees, we are dead.  It’s that simple, and no exaggeration.  Yet fossil fuels and arable soils and water-generating ecosystems are all under huge stress from human activity.  Trees are being cut down at terrifying rates globally, un-homing orang-utans and gorillas and butterflies, lemurs and wolves and owls, as well as age-old human communities from the Amazon to Myanmar.

We may feel we can’t do much about the destruction of forests in New Guinea or Brazil, but we can do something in Grahamstown.  We can write about, document, record the memories of local trees that once graced our streets or hills or gardens.  We can try to preserve the trees we still possess.  And we can try to take the long view and try to plant new trees that in a hundred or two hundred years will be places in which ecosystems can thrive and great-grandchildren can play and new cultural meanings can be forged.

Makana's Kop: Impression (c) Dan Wylie

Trees carry meanings and memories. 

Trees are havens in which we hid or cried or shared secrets or companionship.  They housed other mammals or intriguing birds or threatening insects.  They heaved up our houses’ foundations or suffused our mornings with beauty or yielded sweet or bitter fruits that became who we are.  They are scented with seasonal weathers and ghosts.  Our town is dominated at one end by the grove on Makana’s Kop, with all the cultural weight of those who are buried there; and at the other by the Botanical Gardens, with its quilt of foreign trees at once imperial and beautiful, both alien and educative.

Our relationship to trees is not always just beauty and benefit.  They break walls and harbour venomous snakes.  Some alien species are astoundingly lovely, but others are ecologically damaging and have to be rooted out.  But overall, remember – without trees, we’re dead, and so are a zillion other species, upon every one of which a functioning ecosystem may depend.  Dead simple.

So here is the call.  Send in your memories of trees.

You may know of and direct us to photographs or paintings of Grahamstown’s now-forgotten and vanished trees of the past.  You may know of old travelogues, or letters, poems or stories.  You may have photos or paintings or drawings of trees you once played in, or planted, or cut down, or that still exist, on your street or in your back yard.  Certain trees may commemorate or recall specific individuals or events.  Write down what you know and remember, and send it in.  Anything.  It doesn’t have to be literary or polished.  Be sentimental, or scientific, or angry. The more specific your information – the precise location, the species, the exact time or age – the more useful it may be.  Take more photos.  Get your kids and students doing projects.  Let’s think afresh about our trees.  Let’s think about what we can leave behind, not just for tomorrow, or next year, but for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years.

We don’t know what we’ll do with it yet.  The Facebook page is just a start.  In time we can start compiling and correlating and mapping and sifting it all into something that will find its own shape.  It’s for everyone to participate in.  Just keep it to Grahamstown-Rhini and its immediate surrounds for now!

Send what you have to the
              Imithi facebook page

or to Dan Wylie at d.wylie@ru.ac.za, 

or mail to Dan Wylie, Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

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No.37 - Mike Skinner: Elegy for a friend

Mike has crossed the border
from which there is no return

Mike Skinner and I were the same age, both originally from Bulawayo, both incorrigible bachelors, and of similar build.  We shared for some years a passion for the slightly mad activity of rock-climbing, until for some reason he more or less abandoned that for the slightly madder activity of para-sailing.  For both of us Rhodes and Grahamstown had become our second home.

Mike loved the desert, drawn repeatedly to the Kalahari.  I never got to join him there; but we did climb many local crags, and the Compassberg, and Mary near Tarkastad; and we 4x4’d with John McKinnell through mountainous Lesotho.   He and I shared one particularly memorable desert adventure – a trip to Namibia, with our friend Nikki.  We visited Ais-Ais and Sossusvlei and Windhoek, then headed north for even drier regions.  We camped one night in the lee of the massif of the Brandberg, and Mikey decided to bake some bread, from scratch.  This poem relates what happened:

BREAD OF LIFE

The night of the Brandberg closes about us,

warm as fur.  Our fire, fading on the sand, feels

like the centre of life.  Mike rakes away the coals

and unearths the pot beneath them

where the bread’s been invisibly baking.

He lifts the heavy lid, shines the torch in.

There is no bread.  Nothing.  A black iron hole

swallowing our astonishment.

We do find it after some seconds –

so puffed up with exuberant yeasty life

it was stuck to the lid itself.

But now there really is no loaf:

death has lifted its lid on a hollow

black as an impenetrable hunger.

Whatever else we might cherish and taste,

that is a loaf from which we cannot eat again.

Mikey has the best view of all now.

We went on then to climb the famous Spitzkoppe, spectacularly shaped in yellowing colours but made of ghastly decomposing granite chutes that skinned our knees.  Then it was on to the petroglyph galleries of Twyfelfontein, and the strangely pristine coastal town of Swakopmund – where we found that the police were looking for us.  Or, specifically, looking for Mike: his father had been shot in a house break-in in Bulawayo.  We raced him back to Windhoek to catch a plane home – then Nikki and I continued the holiday in Mike’s white Toyota 4x4.  We felt weird, vaguely guilty, and bereft of Mike’s robust pragmatism, mechanical acumen, and genial quietness.  But it was what Mike wanted us to do.

Mike at Twyfelfontein

He was always so: unfailingly selfless, gently uncomplicated, keeping any distress close to himself.  He could express robust criticism of the world’s miscreants, including whoever killed his father, but there wasn’t a mean fibre in his body.  He was a man of parts – he could play the piano, cook, build stuff with meticulous care, run his pharmaceutical unit – but was not one for introspection, or saying much about his inner self, or imposing on one for help.

I saw relatively little of him these last couple of years, though most recently I think he was grateful that he and I could share some illness stories – rather as we had periodically commiserated over our expanding middle-aged bellies.  He would shrug and monosyllabically profess his positivity and hand it all over to God, blinking his eyes like a slightly nervous raccoon and grinning shyly with his small teeth.  I told him to call me, any time, for anything, but he did not – and suddenly it was too late. 

I am so grateful for having known him, knowing I could do no better than to judge my own life-decisions by the single criterion: would Mikey Skinner have approved?

ELEGY FOR MIKEY

I am cutting out alien trees

halfway down the hill

when the phone call comes.

A knot in my stomach has been waiting.

Our lovely Mike is gone.

So blessed in his modesty and quiet

almost none of us even knew he was ill.

Our lovely Mikey is gone.

The cellphone sits like a hollow in my hand.

The sun is a hollow in the low sky.

I think of the world that Mike has left:

our campuses afire, Somalia starving,

Syria ruined, etcetera, etcetera.

Spitzkoppe

Sometimes it seems it’s not Death

that is so intractable and opaque

but Life itself.  I should have

spent more time with him.  I should,

I should... But Mikey is gone.

And now we can only

leave the lopped branches of guilt

to lie where they fall, and try to love

whoever we can, when we can,

as much as we can, for as long

as time is running in our veins.

*****

No.36 - "Teaching" - what IS that exactly?

Here we are, on yet another “march”.  This one is supposedly a national gesture by academics to the South African government to do something more positive about the university fees crisis.  We are so bad at this.  We are less robust or organised than French farmers.  We don’t aspire to the spine-tingling song-and-dance choreography of COSATU workers.  And we’re far less scary than the actually quite small bunch of campus protesters who manage by manipulative violence, childish vandalism, and disgusting online bullying, to bring the legitimate work of thousands almost to a halt.  Tripping along behind it all is a potentially very positive re-examination of what we fundamentally do – this thing called “teaching”.

I estimate that less than a third of all the university’s staff are present at this demonstration.  Some wear their archaic remnants of mediaeval “academic dress” and wave placards with sundry uncoordinated messages: Mathematics For All; 1.5% Its Not Much (no apostrophe).  Some of us make ours up on the trot with koki pen on coloured card.  What shall I say: Zuma: Show Leadership For Once in Your Miserable Life, or Take a Breath: Think This Through?  Should it be Yes We Can! or In Your Dreams, Chinas? 

Eventually I scribble Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.  It’s a quotation from Ursula le Guin’s otherworldly novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which I happen to be presenting to our first-years at the moment.  The words are part of the protagonist Genly Ai’s explanation of the values of the Ekumen, the interplanetary trade organisation of which he is a solitary envoy.  The Ekumen (cf. ecumenical) is a kind of hybrid of the UN and the Internet.  It espouses, alongside voluntary trade alliances between diverse peoples scattered across space,

Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life.  The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God.  Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.

There can hardly be a better definition of what I think “teaching” is about, or rather education (Latin e + ducere: to lead out and away).  In amongst the entangled drives, the obscure agendas, and the inflated rhetoric of the demonstrations, there is frequent recurrence of the phrase “quality education”, but little discussion that I can see of what precisely “quality” might mean.  Mostly it seems something of an afterthought to “free”.  One can be sure that curiosity, adventure and delight are unlikely to be uppermost in anyone’s mind.  As Genly Ai ruefully notes, this is “not the tongue spoken by those who rule men, the kings, conquerors, dictators, generals” – or even, it might be added, democratic bureaucracies.  I can’t quite see what’s driving the idiocy of violent campus protests, but I’m pretty certain it’s ultimately about power.  And power always deploys simplification and exclusionary consolidation, not the enhancement of complexity and harmony.

The rhetoric of the disarrayed tentacles of the FeesMustFall-type campaigners – at least some of whose desires I and my colleagues in principle support – often intersects with broader calls for “transformation” and “decolonisation”.  Several seminars, a couple of conferences, and various books later, I still have no idea what “transformation” might actually mean or entail, let alone how “it” might be implemented; asking the question usually provokes an outburst of backward-looking invective directed at the legacy of apartheid.  The overcoming of that quite specific historical crime gets conflated with a much looser call for “decolonisation”.  This seems to me about as attainable as a reversible orgasm, or equivalent to trying to fit a rotted leg back onto an amputee a decade after the injury. 

If one cannot waltz backwards through history, towards a utopia that never existed, one can only try to invent new legs for the old stump, and limp or segue onwards.  That process requires innovation, a willingness to explore diverse possibilities; it requires breaking new grounds, whatever traditions might be summonsed in support; and it requires the optimistic mind-set of loving what one is building, rather than the destructive myopia of the merely angry.  Curiosity, adventure, delight.

Have to adore that cover...

As it happens I am also exploring, with another class, Dante’s fourteenth-century epic of pilgrimage and redemption, the Divine Comedy.  And I’ve serendipitously discovered Alberto Manguel’s new book, Curiosity (2015).  Manguel is one of those polymathic European scholars who can convey massive learning with lucid panache and wholly refreshing approaches; I loved his earlier book A History of Reading.   In Curiosity he uses Dante’s great poem as a central thread on which to hang a series of meditations on the nature of curiosity itself – essentially, why we ask the kinds of questions about life that we do.  Manguel is so widely-read that in a page or two he can elucidate the ideas of three European philosophers you’ve never even heard of; but his definition of curiosity is straightforward enough.  The path of questioning can be a thorny one:

The great quest which begins in the middle of our life [like Dante’s poetic pilgrimage] and ends with the vision of a truth that cannot be put into words is fraught with endless distractions, side paths, recollections, intellectual and material obstacles, and dangerous errors, as well as with errors that, for all their appearance of falsity, are true. Concentration or distraction, asking in order to know why or in order to know how, questioning within the limits of what a society considers permissible or seeking answers outside those limits: these dichotomies, always latent in the phenomenon of curiosity, simultaneously hamper and drive forward every one of our quests.  What persists, however, even when we surrender to insurmountable obstacles, and even when we fail in spite of enduring courage and best intentions, is the impulse to seek, as Dante tells us...

Education, for me, is nothing other than providing for the student the matrix within which this negotiation can flourish.  Students always falter, to differing degrees, and so do we; and so we ideally try to provide the grounds on which to pick ourselves up again, and start questioning afresh.  Some crises can be good for this process, even when, as now, the nature of the matrix itself comes under scrutiny.  But as the present upheaval shows, individual responses can be highly idiosyncratic – and, contra the normative intolerances of varieties of group-speak, they ought to be.  Dealing with, stimulating, enhancing, and above all tolerating such idiosyncrasies and complexities in the teaching-learning situation is a process unsuited to the recent drive towards tertiary education’s so-called “massification” – another term of ideologically-impelled, self-disabling and self-contradictory vacuity.

George Steiner is another multilingual European scholar of awe-inspiring breadth and breathtaking richness of expression (not to be confused with Rudolph Steiner, the anthroposophist educator).  Steiner (George) has argued throughout his wonderful book, Lessons of the Masters (2003), that it is not the levelling of opportunity for all that makes for effective education, but the particularities of a master-disciple relationship.  No matter what "transformations" or "decolonisations" or curricula reforms occur, this remains the core.  My own master-mentor, the late Don Maclennan, introduced me to Steiner maybe thirty years ago, in the form of Steiner’s huge and enthralling book on translation, After Babel.  I have since read much of him, another kind of master-teacher.  I am always captivated if frequently left behind, though it would be hard to specify just what all Steiner’s effects on me are or will be.

In any case, Steiner shows, those effects are intrinsically fraught and unpredictable, and ought to be.  The exchange between mentor and acolyte ideally passes through stages of adoration and mimicry, followed by challenge, and ultimately supersession.  The ideal master produces not a clone, but a skilled escapee, even a betrayer.  At times, it is hard to say which is the master and which the pupil.  “The pulse of teaching is persuasion,” Steiner writes.  “The teacher solicits attention, agreement and, optimally, collaborative dissent.”  Crucially, it is not in the muffling anonymity of the lecture theatre, nor in the boiled-down study-notes posted on the internet chat-rooms, but in the eyeball-to-eyeball interchange, the oral Socratic dialogue, where the most fruitful, quality education occurs. 

One might say that whoever grasps Socrates’ [pedagogical] intention is made an autodidact, especially in ethics.  For Socrates himself professes ignorance; the wisdom attributed to him ... consists only in his clear perception of his own unknowing.

This wavering, unmeasurable, fabulous energy – in which I exhilarate daily, often at the hands of students clearly cleverer than me – largely escapes the purview of the “decolonisation” activists; it baffles modern managers; and it frightens governments.  It is why the Athenians forced Socrates to swallow hemlock, why Stalin murdered the finest poets, even why the God-bound Dante condemns Odysseus to the Inferno – because he dared explore too far, and only for himself and its own sake.  But where would we be without curiosity about the darkness?

In The Left Hand of Darkness, a mystical character named Faxe the Weaver is key: I take him to be closest to Ursula le Guin’s own voice. Echoing Socrates, he says:

“The unknown, ... the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on.  Ignorance is the ground of thought.  Unproof is the ground of action.  If it were proven that there is no God, there would be no religion. ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Worth recalling, as we mill about and wave our imploring or angry placards for the photo-ops, looking for silver linings in the chaos.

*****

No 35 - Protestations of beauty

What is being born beneath our noses?

Campus has seemed quiet today but there is an undercurrent of nervy potential for disruption and confrontation, so in caution we have been sent home.  I mark a few draft essays from students who are trying to hold their work together; check over a couple of journal articles that have been sent to me for review, sign yet another petition to government to do something swift and creative about the fees issue.  Should I then feel guilty that I take a bit of time to work some recalcitrant acrylic paint across the surface of a canvas?

I think not.  It was something of a mantra during the apartheid years: How can one write poems about flowers when people are suffering and dying in the streets?  But it’s precisely at times of human turmoil that I think it most important to try to produce even one article of beauty – a poem, a song, a painting – something that will outlast and eventually outshine our moments of madness and gloom.  Most important, too, to take a moment just to appreciate the astonishing beauties that reveal themselves to the attentive eye just metres from one’s back door.

Even the tiniest people have their bevy of servants and friends

This is not a cop-out.  It is not a sign of indifference to human plights.  Rather, it is an amplification of one’s awareness, a sharpening by contrast.  For me, it is itself a protest.  It is a protest against crassness and trampling boots.  It is an antidote to blinkered selfishness.  It is a reminder that ours are not the only lives, that we live within and by virtue of symbioses wider and subtler than the merely human.  It is a kind of humility, a slitting open of ideological arrogance.  It is to live out the best in us, to enjoin ourselves to create of every social interaction a thing of beauty, too.

The critic Jonathan Bate writes to this effect: “To miniaturise the world is to dwell better within it.”  Notice what is normally beneath notice.  I blithely walk in and out of my back door several times a day.  But adventures happen just a metre or two away.  After all, this is the spot I once found the cat in wary conversation with a rather handsome Night adder.  And not a fortnight later I found her, in exactly the same spot, in wary conversation with a rather handsome legevaan, roaring like a passing jet liner. 

And what if I pause, and bend, and look even more closely? 

At the corner of the wall a string of glossy ants bustle up and down, their every social interaction a thing of comradeship and beauty.  

And on the rippled glass of the door, a moth rests, a powdered fragment of moon, the lightest breath of a fine idea.

Raindrops line up along flower-stems like beauty queens, transparent rosaries, each one a tremulous prayer to transience.

Flowers smaller than a child’s fingernail, when magnified, unfold galactic complexities, a purple richer than royalty.

Trapdoors spiders lurk in their gossamer architectures, though not for us.  Only when the nuclear holocaust has passed, will they truly emerge and gobble up all our pretensions.

Ferns growing out of a wall-crack.  I hear the words of a friend: Get those things out, you have to preserve the integrity of the infrastructure!  But the fern is the infrastructure of life itself.

The trick is this: to bring the given into aesthetic conversation with the created: the heron imagined in a burned branch, the heartfelt rosary of heart-shaped shells, a yin-yang mandala meditated out of broken glass cleared from the forest.

****

Make it beautiful; make the beauty count.

******

No.34 - Student protests and feline philosophy

It’s all rather surreal.  In between spasms and pockets of activity, campus is eerily quiet.  I emerge from a class with a radically diminished and subdued group of students to find that the police have been stunning protesters with rubber bullets.  It’s all over; the only evidence is the platoon of cops gathered at their truck down the street, and paramedics closing their ambulance doors on someone injured and bumping off across the lawns. 

It’s surreal participating in a march intended to show solidarity between students, academics and management, to present a petition to the ANC authorities.  We all want better funding for tertiary education.  Scarlet and black academic gowns stir with conversation and uneasy jokes.  But where are the students?  A certain suspicion develops as the march moves slowly off in the direction of the Town Hall.  A student organiser, after a struggle to get the bullhorn to work, encourages us to shed academic dress and to dance and sing, “or even just hum”.   There is, apparently, only one approved way to protest – that stamping, singing mode that to outsiders makes anger look rather enjoyable.  After less than a hundred metres the little coterie is enveloped by a swarm of running, shoving youngsters, from who knows where?  Some are certainly not university students.  A bald-headed man, who may or may not be from one of the several ‘factions’ making their presence felt, brings the thing to a halt, engages in vigorous discussion with the Vice Chancellor, shouts hoarsely that he is “boycotting this march” – which to my mind means he ought to go home.  No one can hear what he’s saying.  I can’t see this march getting anywhere, so having shown my solidarity with its very reasonable requests, I leave it and go home.

The cat greets me, stretching and mewing.  She wants to play and go for a walk.  I take her advice and join her and blow off a little frustration, uprooting alien saplings on the forest slopes.

Life is very clean and straightforward for a cat.  If it’s not a direct physical threat, to be avoided or fought, or if it’s not edible, she just ... chills. She somehow manages to be preternaturally alert and meditative at the same time.  I’m convinced there’s a lesson to be learned there.

Meanwhile my stomach churns and my sleep is broken.  A sweet and earnest team of Department of Health statistics-gatherers comes round and informs me my blood pressure is a bit high.  It’s as if my innards are directly mimicking the chaos in my professional world.  That turmoil is following some numbingly predictable trajectories; clearly key actors have learned nothing from history.

History, ironically, is not on the side of a favourable outcome of the fees upheaval.  The protesters – meaning that minority of people, who may or may not in individual cases be students, who promote a more or less confrontational approach to the fees problem – are generating an energy which is temporarily gratifying for them but undermines everyone else.  They seem intent on an anarchic and prolonged closure of the universities, in service of an unattainable goal.  Look back at Kampala, Harare, Kinshasa, and any number of other cases: prolonged and repeated closures have a predictable outcome.  Established academics leave; richer students leave; funding diminishes further; infrastructure erodes; publications dry up; research shrivels; a machinery of mediocrity grinds despondently on; both national and international recognition vanishes, as degrees lose quality and kudos.

So why do these protesters persist?  Conspiracy theorists revel in rumours that ‘third forces’ are at play, powers that actually want the fees issue to fail, and the universities to fail.  Anti-government forces that want the ANC to be seen to fail?  Or the ANC itself, which would love to see these troublesome intellectuals and uppity youths disempowered?  Who knows?  Mixed and leaderless movements disable negotiations.  We want unity on this, but unity entails compromise; in democracies finding compromises and forging lasting solutions takes patience – and protesters making demands are by definition neither compromising nor patient.  So it goes on.  Anger gets misdirected.  Enemies are made precisely where allies are needed.  Self-defence is turned into racism.  Disagreement, even over minor tactics, is twisted into disloyalty.  The rule of constitutional law is howled down as oppression. Managements issue sensible but ineffectual generalisations.  Social media bristles with viral lies and distortions and snatches of cell-phone footage, with unpredictable effects.  (We are, the Economist claims, in an era of "post-truth politics", a seriously frightening idea.)  Sundry “causes” intermingle, not all amenable to tactics inherited from the struggles of the apartheid years.  The government shows an astonishing and depressing lack of urgency and leadership, despite a plethora of interesting and possibly quite viable ideas flowering in the papers and chat-groups.

I watch the cat on the hill-slope.  For a long time she just settles and sits. My tree-pulling is of no interest.  She is entirely self-contained.  Yet her ears are flickering and listening constantly.  Finally a scent or a rustle too subtle for human senses attracts her, and she begins to stalk.  She is utterly focused.  I call to her but there is no response.  When you stalk, stalk.  Very Zen.

In my university context, what am I focused on?  In amongst the mush of administration, committee duties, and of course protests, what is the task?  It seems very clear to me.  I am here to improve my students’ skills.  That is my job, and it is the only thing that university can uniquely provide students, in service of making them maximally functional citizens.  It is irrelevant to me where the student’s fee-money comes from: a parent, a bank, a scholarship, the taxpayer, herself.  The skills still need to be taught and acquired.

I am under no illusion that this is in itself a simple thing.  Literary skills are multiple and complex – more than just reading and writing.  They are perception and argumentation.  They are about values and ambitions and cultural predispositions.  And things that get in the way of teaching the skills are also multiple and complex: they can take the form of a student’s psychological breakdown, or a hangover, or an unfruitful university policy, or an ignorant political decree from the Department of Labour, or a student's apathy.  Or protesters hounding a lecturer out of the classroom.

 

Very Zen cat

Nevertheless, this one goal in my teaching life helps ground me, and helps direct my responses to situations as they arise.  Things only happen one at a time, so I try to deal with them one at a time.  My focus helps me decide what I can influence and what I can’t.  When something is beyond me, I remind myself of the cat.  I remind myself of my self-sufficiency.  I sit still.  I leave the impossible situation behind me for the moment and turn to do something else: pull up a Port Jackson wattle, make something beautiful that might just outlast the fracas of the day, and might even outlast me.  Cuddle the cat.  She likes that, the rich simplicity of touch.  Nothing she does or says is not the truth.  I can pluck ticks off her eyelids.  She knows what I’m doing, and trusts me completely, even when it stings.

Ah, truth and trust.  We humans are so bad at those.

*****