Postmodern riddles: 2 June 2012

Song of the day: Radiohead- Planet Telex

Amidst trying to secure a place for myself in the post graduate program for Sociology at The University of Stellenbosch (aka going through the motions of mid-year exams) the ultimate epiphany for procrastination has dawned on me, to start a blog-AHA! I aim to interweave my general existential angst/drama with encounters of everyday life as a student and an inhabitant of the beautiful yet neoliberal and politically confused South Africa. Regarding the controversial painting depicting our identity-crisis-stricken president, Mr Jacob Zuma, I see it as quite elegantly done for something so politically controversial. As for his genitalia dangling about in the air? Among the beautiful composition of form and colour I honestly did not immediately see it. As soon as I did I thought it to be quite sexy in a subtle manner (and I know the whole of South-Africa may disagree with me on this).

A daily routine of mine is to read the news on my phone and I wake up feeling excited as to what random radical political or social controversy I will stumble upon as soon as Opera Mini has done loading the page. This is my ritual, one of many even though I am not particularly religious. So the aim of this blog is not purely to bitch and moan about our beloved government that resembles a very good episode of Cheaters or Sister Wives, but to blog blurp about amazing as well as crazy things I have experienced (of which the latter occurs more often than the former).

Happy diamond jubilee to the queen! My father and I calculated last night that this lady who is crowned with such high honour has (on average) met 3.5 Million people during her reign as queen. I asked my father why this is such a wonderful thing and why she is such an amazing person? He answered me by saying that I should put myself in her shoes and imagine what it would be like to live a life like that. I tried to do that and told him that I still could not figure out why this lady is so amazing and deified. Yes she is a queen and has a pretty rad castle and cute dogs, but what has she done exactly that is so worthy of being deified? Maybe this is just a typical postmodern habit, as my news reading ritual. The sacred has been simplified as the world has been shrank by/to URL`s and TV shows depicting ‘real’ people who pay agencies to make them famous. I really do not know, but my aim with this blog is to utter my findings and place it out there (for those who are remotely interested) as I look for the answers in this twilight zone that I like to call my place of existence , Postmodern society, kind of like dubstep- an amalgamation of absolutely freaking everything.

A book that I can recommend for the time being is White Noise by Don DeLillo. I will post a review as soon as I have finished reading the novel in preparation of my anxiety-evoking English exam next week. But thus far I can tell that it is an extremely provocative read as it has caused me to have dreams resembling being on an acid trip and experiencing Armageddon/ zombie apocalypse/ whatever you choose to call the end of the world. It makes for an excellent read before bedtime, causing a detox for the subconscious. For now I have to head back to the whimsical yet dreary anthropological analysis of a book. And yes it can be both; we live in a society where transparent paradoxes are the new truths and art the new ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the new enemy of the arbitrary rulers of this arbitrary world. 

Train(ed) brain: 17 May 2012

The train slid through consecutive suburbs as if imitating a designated moving room flowing across boundaries and over-played political rhetoric.

On the train we are alone. We are together only because the train is so full. you are sitting so close to me too close to me and I admire your strange posture. Is it native or did you have it especially cultivated and did you force your body and your beautiful slinky spine to accustom to it? Another instant culture, a just add hot water identity.

I really don`t know and you know that I would love to. This extended room that is spread out like an elegant dining hall, segregated by the amount of money you have in your pocket or the amount of money you think has earned the right to divulge from your pocket OR rather the amount of risk you believe you are prepared to take.

The ceiling beams with indifferent voyeurism, basking in the glory of its beautiful fluorescent moving stuck up industrial chandelier. A beautifully bland light that sheds light on so much more except on you. You are built and engineered by Intricate webs like the superfluous amount of electrical wires encouraging and enabling the lovely segregated hallway of imagined elegance but pious reliance to move and jolt and move and maybe jolt a bit more than it moves.

The images outside greet me hysterically like an adolescent who had encountered the dubious enlightenment brought on by a binge-of-whatever-your-substance of choice. The incoherent madness greets my eyes and my banal brain battles making the connection and I internalise this as a pull of the operated puppet strings in my chest.

That ominous grey floor and the yellow warning signs always had me fooled. Like a lover so weaved into another`s web. I should have ran for the hills if I weren`t so unfit and distracted on my way up. You have found your way up. Like a natural instinct you follow and you run. The views on the way there, you argue, are absolutely nothing like the views you will see when on the top.

Sage inspired dreams: 7 August 2012

It brings me back to the spontaneous wild fire eroding all fixtures in its path, devouring the fear and posessions of onlookers.

The ocean glanced over in a bout of melancholia as it had no worth in this moment of destruction.

The clouds stared down in an arrogant manner whilst stubbornly moving away as to turn it`s head from the woman begging with her broken baby.

There is a turning point in which each human is stripped of the luxury of having an individual consciousness, a soul or ludicrous vital spirits.

This turning point is the remnants of a beautiful circle, now a vile sphere constantly twirling whilst not making any progress.

Turned into an objective peepshow we fall into categories such as Western, Islam, Student, ill, women, homosexual, patrons, criminals.

Our consciousness becomes separated from our being.

My being is emptied and tattered by seeping holes for classifications to come and visit me whilst everyone is looking.

Instructed I fill the gaps, I colour in the blanks left by whiteness and early twenties.

Home is not a space, a permanent structure of thresholds and symbols of ritualistic habits and relationships.

Home is infinite, moulded by a stream of consciousness and a whimsical rendezvous of emotions.

Poltergeists of Sophia Town:21 November 2012

In my fractured daydreaming I find myself wandering through the tauntingly vibrant streets of Sophiatown. My presence is as translucent as the colour of my skin. I am a post-dated ghost. My thoughts are re-incarcerated by a literary analysis of the stubborn fight for the right to personhood, to man, woman, individual. Not “boy”, “black”, “maid”. These stab the deepest and when I am a young girl and my first friend does not share my translucent skin or my straight hair, the knife`s handle breaks off and something irretrievable remains within me. The knife constantly stabs at me, leaving me restless and angry. It is stabbed and turned frivolously by the poltergeists of Sophiatown as I walk through the pages re-presenting life, as it was lived and felt in Sophiatown.

Images of brightly lit pool halls and buzzing shebeens are conjured up and projected against my walls. I close my eyes and I disappear into the wall to a space where there is no “one” and “other”. There is no us and them.  

Twilight zone: 2 June 2012

Song of the day: Black swan-Thom Yorke

So today a week ago was the big day and I had my wisdom teeth removed. The first thing my hazy eyes were exposed to as I awoke from my twilight sleep was a little bottle containing the root of all pain and discomfort, four very large and taunting wisdom teeth. They were beautiful and I couldn`t believe that they were once a permanent fixture in my mouth. A blurry hand removed the teeth from my view and a euphoric rush took hold of my muddled up brain activity, the long anticipated after effects of sedation. After the whole ”staring into the white bright teeth” episode I couldn`t help but wonder why all Anaesthesiologists are not starry eyed and Milky Way minded sedation junkies. The experience was a very peaceful one as I cannot remember a single cut, pull or drill and had a fridge full of jelly and a handful of pain killers welcoming me at home. Apart from the lovely psychotropics and the soothing jelly, I received a really strong dosage of love and this caused me to have a brief and somewhat rash thought that rang something like this; “maybe there is no metaphysical agenda behind our existence as humans and that we have been given this plain and position of existence so that we can merely understand the beauty and complexities of love and friendship.” Rash yes.

“Trust your struggle, you don’t need a man to justify the existence of sexism and I don’t need white folks to affirm my lived daily reality of racialized sexism. Subjectivity is a powerful place. What happens when the specimen that you have under the magnifying glass speaks back? When the subject of the anthropological study raises their hand in class and says no. Keep speaking out as the experts of your own experiences, tell your truths, step back and allow others whose voices are not often acknowledged take up more space. Know that there are multiple narratives that all exist at the same time, the truth of another should complicate your own, but not invalidate,” ~ Kim Crosby

I saw this quote on Facebook a few days ago and I wished that I had seen it the day I decided to take Social Anthropology. Then again I don`t think anything can prepare one for the Janus-like nature of Anthropology. We are taught to study that which stands out to us, which we find significant to our particular research question. The problem is that the research question is usually discovered whilst writing up the ethnography. Fieldwork feels like being dunked into a stream filled with different narratives and existential frameworks and in the tumbling and gasping for air you will eventually have to reach for one that you can hold onto knowing that you are on solid ground. The point is that it seems as though certain aspects of concentration need to be chosen and elaborated on but these become redundant and in this deconstruction the narratives of the unspoken and the ‘mundane’ become lost and discouraged. An almost activist stand is taken by the anthropologist which rips its counterpart to shreds, which I have a few times witnessed to in fact be some form of activism. There is so much emphasis placed on the phenomenon, geographical location and culture being studied that only a feint background buzz remains, one that meagrely mimics that of individual consciousness; which is in my (undergraduate) opinion the heartbeat of conveying and interpreting understanding. I believe that the exceptional late Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this problem and attempted to rectify it by method of the theory and application of Practical Consciousness.

Contested: 11 March 2013

Song of the day: Jack Johnson-It`s all understood

I feel contested today as I have been feeling every today for the last 2 weeks. What happens when one starts to doubt one`s own intellectual capabilities when it is in fact these capabilities which has to be implemented to obtain your degree. How do I rid myself of the jargon and the lenses I have been equipped with? How do I make this decision and if I do will I continue to feel contested or will I feel free and released? The easiest and most irresponsible manner of dealing with a decision is to simply not make it. However I need to take a step in a direction and unfortunately there is no space for both. My feet feel shackled and I feel stuck as a result of my immense room for movement. 

Inaudible: 21 September 2013

Song of the day: Deftones- Beauty School

The most challenging part of writing is the moment of execution. Inspiration plants a colourful seed that can flourish once nurtured and this experience is the creative moment of conception. Over the last month I have had such difficulty in expressing myself verbally. I am not sure yet whether it is a side effect of taking sleeping medication, but something is screwing with my ability to speak. I often feel that describing what I am feeling and thinking cannot be linked to words. The sensation is strange but enjoyable. I feel a certain extent of separateness from the world as I battle to explicate my experiences within it. As a result of this I have developed a mild social awkwardness yet I have a very interesting and satisfying social life. The last 6 months have proved to be a great challenge and it is evident that my psyche has been slightly altered; however the people in my life have been constant and supportive of the alterations.

6months ago I dropped out of my Honours course. I felt content with my decision and I knew that life was about to become challenging but I had no idea to what extent I would be challenged as I had fallen into the pressure-filled yet comfortable life of a student. I headed back to the soothing Kommetjie and moved in with my parents. 2 days after leaving University I started working at a local restaurant on the beach side.