CAREFUL CONFESSIONS

I tried my hand at a story writing contest for a national short story contest…Kwani eat your heart out!

“Loneliness,” he replied with a disaffected shrug; as much dis-affectation as a fifty-one-year old priest could manage. But it was too simplistic, true but simplistic. It was loneliness unlike any other he had read of before. It was more than haunting, worse than abject

He hated Nairobi in April. It was everything a city should be, perhaps more so. Cold, impersonal like a rich man’s handshake. He sat shuffling a few photos in his large hands his mind wondering on and off to the morning call. He hated mobile phones; any and all gadgetry that was awash in the market nowadays and he’d only got one at the volunteer Matron, Edna’s insistence. For emergencies. But almost out of insolence it rang incessantly, extravagantly and hysterically.

The weather made him pensive. He hated that too.

Pacing the narrow space spared by the cheap sparce furnishing of his meager office, he could imagine the man to whom the voice over the telephone belonged. It was sonorous and clinical. It doled out de riguer wishes of good health and congratulations on his well merited award without the slightest inclination to sincerity. It wasn’t distinctive, except it made suggestions in the peremptory tone of a thirty five-ish over-achiever pumped with ambition strong coffee and yesterday’s liquor.

He’d heard intermittent shuffling and the monotonous buzz of a slow news day over unsettling silence which the voice tried to fill with short hollow laughs that he resolutely refused to join.

There was something superior about it, about the way it sounded out that word, “sir” as to leave no doubt if its European inflicted education.  About the slightly condescending way it put the word “well” before “sir”.

“My name is Albert. Albert Duma. It started and paused momentarily. I write for the daily express.” It paused again this time well-meaningfully for his benefit. Waiting for a friendly quip from him about having read one of his articles. It was a curious thing to him; the human propensity for lying and the commensurate need to be lied to.

“I don’t read the gossip pages,” he replied.

“I’m a journalist,” the voice sounded martyred.

“Same difference.”

“Well sir, I suppose,” it conceded with a resigned laugh: quicker than he’d anticipated.

Albert Duma had called to warn him of their interview, alert him on the possible questions. He didn’t believe in “spontaneous eloquence”; he crisply informed him.

It was Sunday and the outside was lending itself to a precarious and gloomy grayness that saw many reluctant to leave the warmth of each other to hazard any potential precipitation. It made him long for a sunset he had seen on a bus out of Limuru, once. It made him wonder about the voice and his reticence towards it. It made him accept the other man’s suggested meeting date with gruff friendliness.

 

“My earliest memory is of shearing sheep as a young boy in my grandfather’s mountain farm. I was born in a farming village in Vent, Tyrol-“

“Austria.”

The older man laughed indulgently, “You read up on me?”

“You’d be insulted if I hadn’t”

He regarded him a bit and after what seemed like mental note taking he retrieved an old Bible from one of the two shelves peopled with books on philosophy and theology and bibles, variedly sized and colored. He took out four photographs and spread them out on a mahogany table decadently out of place in the frugal office. A donation no doubt from a penitent well-to-do West side city dweller looking for bloodless redemption.

“You want the truth I suppose, not a story.”

“I am a journalist” the bespectacled Albert Duma restated, he was thirty four.

The musty smell of age that he loved so much spread from the old bible across the room. He opened his arms expressing, partly in resignation and partly to gesture him to pick up a photo.

Two were monochromes, two in colour. The oldest, older than himself was the only thing that had come to him in the old Bible was his family heirloom. It and the other black and white picture which was fairly recent; this of himself on a July 7^th protest march in the 1990s evoqued wistful nostalgia in him. The protest photo was a courtesy of the photojournalist who had taken it. It was signed and dated at back.

The two colored ones were of equal and immensurable importance. One, a scenic vista was his own effort and the other a gift at his request from the unusually lovely and intent doe-eyed girl who was its only subject. By far the most visually rewarding. She must have been twenty three in the photo but with hair held back and her face devoid of make-up yet lit magnificently, she didn’t look a day over eighteen.

With calculating discretion and restrained curiosity, he chose the older monochrome. It was dog – eared. The adolescent wisdom to preserve it had come too late. It was of a young man, badly out of focus. It must have been shot by a giggling girl or a nervous young woman lying on the grass that made the back: either way his mother. The young man of the photo had jet black hair cut even tastelessly at shoulder length. His hands supporting him from the back as he sat were cut out midlength as was his lower body.

“Your father?”

It was the closest he had ever been to him.

“They died soon after his picture was taken.” It had been handed to him at twelve by his steel faced grand father and effusive grandmother. They are with God now …and so was but he had never been with them. He’d spent most of his life pouring over it; trying to decipher some subliminal message or discover a forgotten memory. With childish reverence at first, then adolescent resentment, youthful disaffectation and now wistful sentimentalism.

At twenty six, he had been the spitting image of the photo despite colorful efforts on his part to thwart a genetically foregone conclusion. At times he felt a nostalgia for something familiar and unknown. At times it was a warm emptiness. He’d often wondered about the other darkness where his father was and such musing developed unusual precocities in him as a child. Mysticism and religious ardour.

“Is that why you became a priest?”

“Yes and No”

Vent was really as rural and insufferable as it sounded. Its somnolent charms did little for him. There had been no still, small voice in the mountains but a consuming desire for meaning. But he took a rather lofty view to his occupation. He’d wanted to change the world and back then he had a flair for the dramatic. He envisioned himself a custodian of humanity’s humanity. He had had hopelessly rudimentary conception of evil, perhaps he still did. It was to him something insidious; an entity with physical manifestation. He thought of borders like geographical semantics, and at twenty he considered himself a citizen of the world.  So why not Africa? Why not Kenya? Why not Kibera, Nairobi Kenya?

In this way, to his cost, he couldn’t argue to be any better than the many back packing, demin-sporting. “Friends of Africa” Yet white guilt was lost on him. He could claim to be different on that regard. He had come in search of adventure and as Kafka had once eloquently echoed in him a “concern” for “higher things” A feeling that he was at the front for something, and in that way, yes, unwittingly championing the white man’s burden.

He had been born in the compunctious shadow of the third Reich but his motives were also self serving. And that was the extent of his heroism, if there had been any at all. He’d set up a health clinic, for which he sourced funds and workers. He’d also set up a church done good deeds for which he was slated to receive a presidential award.

“Yet all this wasn’t enough. You engaged in politics…”

“Engaged is too committal a word,” he protested highly.

“You are an activist.”

He had been the golden white boy of the tumultuous late 80s and 90s that the opposition dressed in African regalia and neatly presented to the West, to solicit funds, and no move. He got up to gaze disinterestedly out the window.

“You believed -”

“It was easy to believe back then …in everything. Anything.” He began and ended with a good natured laugh. He thought of politics much like a Salvationism; the religion of the poor, only politics was a false religion.

They had all blindly wanted change back then, and they hadn’t been specific.

“Do you feel betrayed by them, the politicos?”

‘Yes, if you can forgive the paradox.” After a silence he started abruptly, and quietly, more to himself. “You know I was there at Saba Saba, there in ’92 and before…there in ’07. They chopped off a boy’s ear right in front of me.” Maybe to show that they weren’t afraid of his skin. Angry, poor, poisoned machete-wielding youth. He covered his eyes with his hands as if trying to relieve himself of the memory, and not.

“These people are no better.’ Albert said in idle commentary but it was the superior voice he heard.

‘They’re no worse. Either.’ He didn’t think poverty and inhumanity to the synonymous nor was poverty an excuse to be inhumane. No, there was tenderness here but it was fated to die a quick death from a familiarity with the course landscape, like excess harvest that rots away in the granary.

“You’d been summoned to State House once by Moi…’ At the very height of the reformed chatter. He had wild fantasies of martyrdom in a darkly lit, unswept corner of a chamber at Nyayo house but his fears had flattered him greatly then.

“You know the old man is everything they say he is.” There was a hushed smile in his voice and grudging respect that betrayed themselves, and him.

“They say a lot of things.” The young man replied blandly, wishing to leave no doubt as to his unconflicting loyalties where tyrants were concerned.

“He’s a lot of things.”

“So there was a girl…” he begun brightly and conversationally, trying not to look too curious, too scandalized, too blazé all at once and failing. He was somewhat mollified that she was a girl, not a boy. And he didn’t like what that said about his morality. It could be bought. And he could see it gazing into the old priests face, the same liquid eyes and soft face that ended expectedly in a double chin. Distant echoes of the old photo. His body too that had increased somewhat in girth had the same lean and slender build.

“Unofficially… yes.” He was gruff and somber and inwardly he wondered at the ease with which a sinner’s sin rolled off his tongue. Still he didn’t feel repentant. He felt old and he blamed her for that.

“Why?” Albert asked a bit stupidly.

“Loneliness,” he replied with a disaffected shrug; as much dis-affectation as a fifty-one-year old priest could manage. But it was too simplistic, true but simplistic. It was loneliness unlike any other he had read of before. It was more than haunting, worse than abject. It martyred him every night. It was a crippling eternal hunger or disease. It made him lie in a foetal position motionless in bed stuck within himself; stuck outside. Or prostrate on the cold cement floor blinking into the darkness to discern the strange and hostile forms that the heavy blackness gave to his chair, his lamp, his table and his life. On other nights he walked streets that were as empty as himself, looking into windows and catching the limp eyes of mannequins through the displays. Looking at the distant, unchanging horizon and the low, inconstant moon. Or sitting up alert at daybreak listening to the light play of footfalls form the rain’s innumerable feet over his iron roofs.

He was alone…not lonely, wasn’t that how irrationalized his life? Cost to self; the essence of sacrifice…and he suffered. On some days he dismissed strangers at the start of the impersonal handshakes, on others, often on others; he made it his business to be in the middle of the crowd so that he brush shoulders with them or touch a hem and be healed.

No, it had not been the manly desire for a woman. He was seeking something slightly lower than God; turbulence, a conditional love or a mortality of soul, fever or a scent lingering on the sheets. His vocation allowed him curious opportunities to thrust himself into the lives of others. But it was such hygienic contact…and they always left. Maybe it was a need to be more than the habitual detached observer. A desire not just to be admired as a hero but loved as a man. A selfish need to win a heart, chain it to himself and yes…to be worshipped.

It was then that she had arrived. At that age when he was old enough to know that it wouldn’t last and older still as to want to believe that it could.

He was forty two then and even then he had been too young for him. Kasanza. She came back to him now like a distant memory of madness. She was beautiful. It was still the greatest thing a woman could be. And having possessed her, he knew intimately about the other worlds he’d abjured. You couldn’t tell from the picture how long her hair was, held back in a tight bun it was. And sitting up on his sofa, perusing one of his thick philosophy books, her thick hair down …she looked ridiculously young.

He caught whiffs of her from hushed whispers in the wind, the Kenyan love for gossip being what it was. She’d married or eloped with a young accountant and relocated to Mombasa or Voi. Somewhere remote and unreachable.

“Do you regret your vows?”

“Old men shouldn’t hope for love; chaste affection at best or tolerance, not love.” For a while he was vacant.

“Do you feel Kenyan?”

“I don’t know, what are the symptoms?” It was his first half-hearted attempt at humour and he was rewarded with a serious, gummy smile for his troubles. He had been in Nairobi over a couple of decades, he still couldn’t claim it. The city. He hated the cruelty relentless pace of life, the night sound still as foreign to him as at arrival. Distant sirens, distant music, distant gunshots …like hazy memories of a bad cinema production. Nevertheless something started in him here. He felt himself in Nairobi a part of the four million souls circling each other, looking for connection, money, meaning. In some respect it had changed. The sky line was under the constant attack of Babel-minded constructors, fresh paint over old signs, rushed recarpeting of pot-holes which the rain merrily washed off. Yet in some respects, it hadn’t. The rhythm was perennial. But he was an anachronist and he saw everything as it was; as he was. He could feel the burgeoning of hope, good in the city as in himself. “This is Nairobi.”

He pointed towards the shot of a panoramic view. Albert nodded agreeably, unconvinced.

He had stumbled on woods on one of those moist, uneventful Tuesdays of January. A happy accident on a whimsical detour ten years ago. They were still  untouched, still untamed, still made him nostalgic for the little forest near his maternal old father’s country house in the mountain region, which seemed to him now, a middle aged man, a magical childhood fantasy. He remembered running through the little forest of his youth laced with heavy, ethereal mist, through closely spaced conifers his happy feet cutting through pretty weeds and undergrowth. Fluttering, curious and happy. Full lungs and sweaty palms; it was the only conception of freedom his little mind could understand then and even now, feeling older than his fifty one years he found himself no wiser.

They were about sixty kilometers west of the city. To get there he had to get off the highway, travel up a dusty murram road and climb up a gentle incline carpeted with Napier grass and dotted with lemon green shrubs like an artistic after thought of nature. The woods broke abruptly reveal a clearing, circular and with a Mugumo tree at the center. He panted more getting to then than he had the first time. He never allowed himself fatalistic moments that he could feel the sunset of days, of years…of life.

The clearing was covered with a prefusion of wild flowers like a dust of European spring spread out. There were the usual creatures of small forest; lizards moving in fast paced semi leaps over rocks, ants in single files to crimson anthills. The Columbus monkeys that patronize his little paradise refused to scurry in panic at his surprise arrivals perhaps out of reticence on familiarity. He fed them macadamia nuts from petrol station en route. He often went there when he wanted to be a boy. And he was determined with that intractability of age, even through the melodrama of it, to die there.

“I am this mud.” He was part of the muck and the mafia, the stagnant sewage and flying toilets. Life was hard but bearable. He paid protection money to the local gang Siafu or Mungiki for the clinic; they were gentle to an old priest but persuasive. He was part of the narrative. An everyday man. He wasn’t black or born here but that didn’t weigh heavily on him. The lion’s story should be taken with as much pinch of salt as the hunter’s, he thought.

“Are you seeking absolution through public plagellation?”

Redemption. If he believed and hoped it for others he could believe it for himself. He subconsciously rubbed the beads of his crucifix.

“Do you accept the president’s award?”

“Yes”

He had finished reading a glowing tribute to tirelessly dedicated friend of Africa by Albert Duma in the Daily express. Albert Duma had defended the phrasing as honest but admitted to its less than good taste. The voice over the phone was still superior, still clinical, still sonorous but familiar.

“You didn’t write the truth?”

“The public doesn’t need to be entertained as much as you think. God knows the country doesn’t need another scandal”

“Was that all?”

He paused for a while. “A feel good story is what the public needs”

“You don’t sound like a gossip writer.”

The journalist laughed and the old .priest felt compelled to join in.

POETIC REASONS

Poetry was born with two sisters, language and emotion. Conjoined triplets.  Her spirit is made of wind. She travels the world barefoot with the trees and whispers in the ears of men the meaning of things. Silly things like love and flowers, and great things like the sea and living. But she can’t leave her sisters because she is really their heart. She can’t travel far often she has sons who tell us about her message.

Poetry is what in  a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails wrinkle, makes you want to do this or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss is forever shared and forever your own.’                                                                                   -Dylan.

Yeah…what he said. She had many great sons, some greater than others but her greatest emissary was Ricardo Neftali Reyes, known to you as Pablo Neruda. In him, she was reborn. And in her others too; Bukowski, Qabbani, Hikmet and countless others who as ‘priests of the invisible’ also sought to free their mother from the harsh rules of those who proclaimed themselves her heirs but really wanted to enslave her. She can never die, not while there are those who know what flowers and love, and the sea and living mean.

PABLO NERUDA

Body of a woman, white hills,

white thighs,

You look like a world lying in surrender,

My rough peasant’s body digs

into you,

and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth…

Body of a woman, I sonnet

I love Neruda. He is the absolute poet of my soul. He is earnest and unabashed in the way he celebrates sex and sensuality. How he tangles metaphors to explain his love for a woman and his land in a way that is subtle and seamless. They are the same to him.

Here I love you.

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.

The moon glows like phosphorus on the vagrant waters….sometimes,

I get up early and even my soul is wet…

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain,

I love you still among these cold things…

Here I love you

He whispers about the loneliness and the grief of a love lost to him.

Tonight, I can write the saddest lines,

write for example, ‘the night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance’…I loved her

And sometimes she loved me too…

To think I don’t have her, to feel that I have lost her,

to hear the immense night more immense without her and

the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

I don’t love her, that is certain, but how I loved her…love is brief

forgetting lasts so long…

I can write the saddest lines

He resounds; he magnifies and quietly thrills with words, only words. You can be very big or very small in his poetry. I won’t tell you. I’ll show you.

And it was at that age…

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know,

I don’t know where it came, from winter or

a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no they were not voices,

They were not words, nor silence,

but from a street I was

summoned.

From the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

or returning alone, there I was without a face

And it touched me.

I did not know what to say,

my mouth

had no way

with names

My eyes were blind,

and something started in

my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way

deciphering

that fire,

And I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance,

pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows

nothing,

and suddenly I saw,

the heaves unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and

flowers,

the winding night, the

universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void, likeness ,image of mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

Poetry

 

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, my Hank. Poet of the low-lifes of which I am one. His drunken, rambling and haunted poetry has led many to argue that his wasn’t poetry at all. And what do I know about rules, iambic pentameters, rhyme….I know nothing of rules except how to break them. I know nothing except that he moves me.

 

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling

 beads

In black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

 like that

or knew

my name

could never die,

in the common verity of dying,

And I pick up her lovely dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak to all the gods,

Jewish gods and Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in a gravy of two

 gone quite mad,

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, humming bird chance.

I lean upon this,

I lean on all this,

and I know her dress upon my arm

but

they will not give her back to me.

For Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough.

 

I almost cannot resist adding ‘freedom’ which is a personal favourite of mine. Bukowski was the quintessential tortured artist…who bleeds for love.

 

He drank wine all night of

The 28^th,

and he kept thinking of her,

the way she talked and walked and loved,

the way she told him things that seemed true,

but were not,

and he knew the colour of each of her dresses and her shoes,

he knew the stock and curve of each heel,

as well as the leg shaped by it,

And she was out again and when he came home and

 she’d come back with that

special stink again

And she did.

She came in at 3 am in the morning

Filthy like a dung eating swine,

And he took out a butcher’s

 knife,

And she screamed

backing into the rooming house wall,

Still pretty somehow

in spite of  love’s reek

and he finished the glass of wine,

that yellow dress,

his favourite,

And she screamed again,

and he took up the knife

and unhooked his belt,

and tore away the cloth before her,

and cut off his balls.

And carried them in his hands,

like apricots.

and flushed them down the toilet bowl,

And she kept screaming

 as the room became red,

GOD! O GOD!

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!

And he sat there holding three towels, between his legs

Not caring whether she left or stayed

Wore yellow or green or anything at all.

And one hand holding,

 and one hand lifting,

 he poured another wine.

Freedom

 

Another favourite of mine is NIZAR QABBANI a Middle Eastern poet whose sensual poetry eventually became lyricised as music.

My letters to you,

are greater and more important

than both of  us

they are the only documents

 Where people will discover your beauty,

and my madness.

Light is more important than the lantern

Every time I kiss you

After a long separation,

I feel,

I am putting a hurried love letter,

In a red mailbox.

Every time I kiss you

 

While I don’t think poetry can be compartmentalized in any other way than style. ANTONIO JACINTO, a liberation fighter in Angola is a great African poet. He speaks of his poetry as being alive walking in the streets.  A letter to the contract worker is especially moving and the infusion of native language with English is especially rewarding. He is touted as the greatest Lusophone poet in Africa. Will there ever be another like him…I doubt it.

 

I wanted to write you a letter,

 my love,

A letter to tell of this longing

 to see you and

this fear,

of losing you,

Of this thing which goes deeper than I want,

I feel a nameless pain that surrounds me,

like a sorrow

wrapped around my life.

 

I wanted to write you a letter my love,

A letter of intimate secrets of you,

A letter of memories of you,

Of your lips as red as the tacula fruit

Of your hair as dark as the diloa fish

Of your eyes as gentle as the macongue

Of your breasts firm….your caresses,

better than I find down here…I wanted to write

you a letter my love, but oh my love, I cannot understand
why it is, why it is, why it is, my dear
that you cannot read
and I – oh the hopelessness! -cannot write!

 

Read some poetry.

 

PATTERNS

 

People grow, yes of course but…do they change? Fundamentally I mean. A son of Hamas crossing over to the Mosaad is romantic, and predictable. A mantra can be changed but, not a soccer team.

Do the habits of life change? Those things that make your life distinctly yours. Pathology…hard-wiring. I mean when you lose all your memories, hallowed wealth of all your over glorified experiences…what remains, is it a constant? Is there a subsisting feeling that we are the same person always? Predictable. Do our souls have signatures? How would you know what to carry to a desert? A bottle of mineral water and a Bible…am religious only at weddings and funerals. I’ve never been to a wedding. One burial.

I ask only because I find myself abhorrently flippant about things. Small things like coffee or tea to big things like money…or meaning. Is who we are something as casual as destiny or is it organic, susceptible to everyday whims.

At twenty-two, the most priceless thing I own is my life, still. In the morning when I wake up I cling to it but as the day spends…it matters less. Jazz to rock, Ella Fitzgerald any day to the Sex Pistols. Vanilla to Chocolate. Thomas Hardy to any sort of objective reality…

If we change, and everything changes, what keeps?

Begin with an individual and before you know it, you’ll find that you’ve created a type- Fitzgerald, not the singer. Do clichés, stereotypes apply?

I don’t believe in blanket statements, organised religion, translated poetry or in death.  I believe in the unattainables. True love, perfect  happiness or at least moments of it, world peace, trickle-down economy…you know, the ones that people feel ungrudgingly charitable about. They are willing to believe it for others but not themselves.

I don’t believe in simplicity either. As a style of fashion, a dress sense…yes but not as a principle for living. I don’t believe that life is simplistic. I don’t believe that anything in life is simplistic. Just think, today a planet might roll off into space, a prince might marry a waitress. It takes ‘surprise and wild connections’ doesn’t it.

And I want something from life. It was promised to me long ago. Am not sure what it is yet but it’s out there in the world, floating around in the stars. Shapeless, nameless and undefined but sometimes I feel that the Sun knows it, and the and the leaves outside my window. And they feel me moving.

Are these the necessities of my nature?  Does everyone have these compulsions, inclinations, leanings that are distinct, seamless, yours.

Do you know enough about yourself to say that you would be that self if you had been born say, to a different social class, height range, skin colour, gender, body type? White and charmed,  rich and disaffected, leggy, an overweight child with abandonment issues.

You have you own thumb print, custom made quirky ears. But are you distinct? Would you be the person that you are in a tsunami? In Mars? Would you be that person when no one was looking. Do you know your face enough to point it out of a crowd? I don’t think I know enough about the world to comment on its affairs. I like tea though. I like my tea leaves at the bottom of my cup.

Rules for writing: one or two things about one or two things

Now while I may not be in the shortlist for a Pulitzer, a Cane, a Booker, heck a local neighbourhood book club prize…I feel compelled nonetheless to jot down a few pearls of wisdom. My brother reminds me that life expectancy in  Kenya being what it is, I may already  have peaked in a small way and to an unsuspecting world. I refuse to be bitter, and in solidarity with my ‘rising above’…

1.       A spade by any other name is just a spade. Call it a spade and move on.

2.       Have someone who calls you on occasion to remind you to tell you to write. I have someone…J

3.       Listen to people, let them take you into their confidence; promise not to tell a soul. Then in the middle of a sleepless night, go to a typewriter or notepad and take into yours.

4.       If you’re black and you can help it, don’t write about racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism…all the ‘isms’. Don’t dwell. God knows Ngugi wa Thiong’o does enough of that…even gone to daring lengths of making it his niche. Negritude died of natural causes, namely the annoying discovery by free Africans that there were worse things than being black. Being poor for example, ignorant and poor. If you’re young you weren’t enslaved, if you’re old you’ve accepted how the world works. It’s like Ali Mazrui says,’…humanity over Africanity…’.   Write about humanity. Fighting for the world is unlike any other war waged. You cannot choose a part of it to fight for. You have to fight for all the world or none of it at all. So write about universal themes like hope, love, the conflicts of the soul, the good fight, sprinkle some blood and grit in it. If you can’t help it, I leave you to your devices but have the good grace to be transcendental.

5.       Listen to good music- good music has a very narrow definition thanks to the Justin Biebers of this world. I say jazz and classical and maybe cabaret…and definitely the rain. Anything with duende as Lorca aptly put it. Stupid id unfortunately pernicious. Drink wine, take walks by the sea or live somewhere where you can always hears sounds (not noise), read poetry. C’est-a-dire…feed your soul because your writing feeds off of it.

6.       Don’t choose sides. Take stands. Whether for your craft or life in general. Don’t be amoral, ambivalent or dishonest. Care. Christian rhetoric questions often how a believer can love an invisible God before loving their neighbor. Well how can you ask the world to care for your fictional creations when you don’t care for them yourself….

7.       In the immortal words of Hank, Charles Bukowski, ‘….if it doesn’t come bursting out of you, in spite of everything. Don’t do it.’ Go into poultry or beekeeping or be a critic. Don’t let me dissuade you…ignore me and run with it.

8.       If it goes away, go after it and get it back. Go to India and bathe seven times in the Ganges or come here to Kenya and watch the wildebeests crossing the Mara or run naked dans les rues.

9.       Don’t wait for praise. It’s poisonous even harming. When it comes, think of trees. How poets and farmers and lovers think that trees are so beautiful, how ecologists and ministers praise trees but they don’t sway with an extra spring in their bend. If it doesn’t work, think how trees are cut down for such praise to be documented.

10.   Write. Don’t stop for air. Don’t stop for red lights

Letters to freedom: from juba with love

‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ well in the 21^st Century; liberty is a kind of death. For example sixty women are raped daily in the Congo in search of this liberty; there are more than 300,000 child soldiers in the vanguard for liberty; boatloads die in canoes en route to Europe on the promise of liberty. No, liberty is a kind of death.

What is it worth? What is freedom worth? Not much if Nazim Hikmet is anyone to go by. And he is. ‘…you are free to slave for others/ free to make the rich richer…you have the freedom to become an airbase/ free to be arrested, imprisoned  or even hanged/ there is no need to choose freedom, you are free/ but this kind of freedom is a sad state of affairs under the stars.’

What it means? At one point in time it meant America. Before that Paris. Today it is a hyphenate and an ideal: self-determination. Here there are no degrees, only absolutes. And in a world that doesn’t really believe in them…well, we cannot stop doing a good thing merely because it is a paradox.

And for me, it’s Paris still in a sense. I let my handkerchief fall into the sea once while I was crossing the ferry. I want to have a home by the sea because…I want my children to know what it means. What the sea means. The quest for freedom is the search for meaning and the meaning of life is what cheapens death. We need that. I need that. Take a penknife, carve your name on a tree or in the world. Freedom is one of the fundamentals of existence.

To ponder freedom we have to look at it from the point of those who have none. The oppressed, the warring, the suicidal and insane. Even those fighting invisible demons. Jean Amery says for example with the sad wisdom of a professional concentration camper of Auschwitz: ‘we emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out and disoriented- and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still, today, we speak it with discomfort and with no real trust in its validity.’ Amery and counterpart Primo Levi both committed suicide. There are those who can never be free.

Freedom has never been a Kenyan preoccupation. Kenyans abhor thought. Besides the occasion never really arose to ponder it. It was always for the others; the Somali, the Rwandans, the Congolese to explain to explain why they were only subhuman. Why they were broken and chained. Why they weren’t free in that way that could only be described as Kenyan.

Space? Wind in your hair? Freedom is an aspiration of the soul. It means, ‘living beyond a yes or no’ of another. It is also the feeling that in some way, metaphysically significant, you are a part of the world, that your existence means something and is secure. Political theorists posit a social contract. A bundle of rights and expectations that man has of society. Though life never really promises you anything, it subtly build up these expectations in you. They grow in and on you. The feeling that the world wants you as a part of it. In  essence what Amery calls ‘trust in the world’. Freedom is the permission to feel real and present in the world. It encompasses the search for truth, beauty and purpose.

My heart flies to Egypt from Tunis, to Libya, to Bahrain, to Yemen in days of anger, of fury, of violence…of rage. Know these stories by heart of men who pledged their lives to each other and died clutching at a piece of earth.

But freedom is not an end in itself. According to Dostoevsky, a man as long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than to find as quickly as possible, someone to worship.

Freedom is not even something you have to believe in it is something you have to practice, to become. You don’t have to choose freedom…you are free.

WHAT JOHNSON MAINA MEANS TO ME

Johnson Maina. Familiar? Probably not. It may help if you sound it out. But it won’t. Shot dead at seventy on the 17^th, on Waiyaki way. You mustn’t remember. It’s okay, I didn’t either. He was shot in front of his daughter and they let him bleed out. Please say his name. We’ll say it together so that we don’t forget.

Life has no definition even in this century, yet it is in this century that the fear and wanton destruction of it thrive most. Life is still what it was in Olduvai Gorge yet…was it easier to pick up a blunt object and kill in the evolutionary name of ‘’ survival of the species’’. Did existence mean more when it was just cryptically, per Nabokov ‘’…a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’’ and no more

Or is it modernity and science that have made life less. The very possibility of finding life on other planets could alter its meaning here. We don’t die as much as we used to. Six billion and some.. many die and many more live. A baby is born for every second of the day in India, in Africa six thousand die of AIDs to match. It sounds almost normal, and it is. Life and death have no meaning for society, they retain the initial surprise element on an individual level but there is a sense of collective normalised detachment. This is the era that has complacently witnessed two genocides, in that Swiss-neutral non-engaged manner we love so much. This is also the dawn of stem cell research. We can clone the dead. We are demystifying life. We can imitate it, replicate it and even create it.

What does it mean to make something of life? To die unknown. Take Johnson for example who came to me on the evening news as a cautionary tale on protests and trigger-happy policemen and may even live perhaps to be some kind of perverse anecdote. He was a hawker and perhaps there be more bleeding hearts if some upper-west side fake Hyacinth Bucket type had been downed. Albert Camus applauds this with tickled nihilism: ‘’We always exaggerate the importance of an individual life, so many people do not know what to do with their own that it is not completely immoral to take it from them.’’ We are all whiny selfish bastards at heart, we want our presence here to stand for something. I personally want it to rain on that day…God’s tears shed in grief. I want it to thunder, earth to register its protest and disdain. The sun will not shine and if it does, if it must it shall turn the evening sky an unnatural crimson . isn’t this how we, I flatteringly imagine our death?

Well, get over it. The meaning of life is that it ends , Kafka or Stendhal? Existentialism 101. This is what I hate about my generation. We don’t have a sense of history. We are not at the front for anything that matters. Nazim Hikmet urges us to take living so seriously that ‘’you can die for people/ even people whose faces you’ve never seen/ even though you know that living is the most real/ the most beautiful thing’’ and it is.

Perhaps this is impossible in this age of the ‘disposable’. We know too much about life, not what is positively by way of definition but its nature: how we can lengthen it, how to make it more, how we can end it…cleanly, painlessly. And knowing scars us in a way that we cannot truly understand until we know. It makes us, per Coleridge, ‘’sadder and wiser men’’.

Here’s the greatest thing about living for me, that each day life offers us the ability to make our faith grow by acting on it. We can live faith, deepen it. Yet faith comes with a cost- suffering, which without faith isn’t really tested. It doesn’t walk over live coals or on water and is therefore useless. And thus in a way, to live more is to suffer. To live more is to bleed. We can go out on an adventure in search of our humanity, forge our own heroes from our own imperfect selves, an when we find it- coming face to face with the sea or else in a fire- we stand in the world, and in a sense for it and we see what it all means, what it’s really about.

Life is bigger than us. Posterity will study us in awe or shame: question our values, what we stood for, what we died for. Here we are actively and casually writing history…

And in comes Abubakar, a tour driver in my French class who promises to quit smoking when I warn him of death. It slips out, not accidentally but in passing that his 13-year-old girl died, the way a private man’s griefs slip out. A while back, he adds in musical Swahili. His brows fall somewhat and then rise in genuine laughter at my crestfallen face. ‘’C’est la vie,’’ he adds in prettily accented French. It’s not fatalism. It’s because ‘’although you fear death/ you don’t believe in it/ because living…weighs heavier.’’- Nazim Hikmet.

The dead are still very much so, yet we must welcome grief, search it within ourselves, because it shows us how plainly and truly we feel it in our soul. A remorse for any death is in its own way a celebration.

RETHINKING ISLAM: dispatches from the Kenyan left

The faces of Islam: does it have any, can it have one?

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Having attended an Islamic school during my very important formative years, I’m free of those unique suspicions that plague any red-blooded anti-Muslim or the paranoia of American neo-conservatives in D.C over people blowing themselves up like Christmas trees.

Perhaps, there’s been too much a sensationalization of Islam and its attendant splinter groups, largely owing of course to ‘sexed-up dossiers’ on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Why should a bearded Arab with TNT scare us more than a cleanly shaven anti-abortion crusader willing to blow up an abortion clinic? Or a pathological moralist who walks into a gay bar and shoots down every drag queen in sight. This is fundamentalism too. Christian fundamentalism.

So what is fundamentalism? According to terribly over simplistic terms of conventional wisdom, it is taking religion too seriously. To some an affront to the West’s insistent paternal surrogacy of Israel, a defiance to imperialism. And yet to others a frenzied spiritualism that pitts itself as a bulwark against new age pluralism perceived as a threat to age old Muslim values. A panicked reaction perhaps? It is also a sociopath’s religion. I don’t know a God who revels in chaos, or one who would want us to blindly follow it. It is also known for its ‘back to basics’ approach, its commitment to the unquestionably absolute truth of doctrine, scripture and clerics.

Submission to the will of God, by all means yes. Islam also preaches a society ‘Ummathan wasathan’ – a society of equilibriums, no extremes.

I remember the day after 9/11. Remember walking into a class full of head-scarved jubilation, like a maniac dance for death. ‘People died,’ I protested refusing to join the mirth. The Americans deserved it, came the stage managed reply. Like listening to an angry answering machine. I could brush away this brand of zealotry because I knew had they been there…they too would have wept. There’s nothing jubilant about death, even an American death.

I remember also Kawithar, my desk mate in class 3 pleading with me to convert to Islam because she feared for the eternal damnation of my Kaafir soul. I laughed and was touched and left the moral of the story for another day. Belief is potent and it can also be the devil. But just because we believe different things, doesn’t mean we’re so. If we tickle them, do they not laugh? Kawithar laughed. I remember also alighting once from a bus in Mombasa and a man in a Kanzu walking up to me unprompted to welcome me to the city. These are the face of Islam for me. They are benevolent faces and my first instinctive pulls of kindness have Islamic influences in them. As do my earliest memories…I knew how to recite Arabic prayer before any whole Psalm. I celebrated Milad-An-Nabi more heartily than Christmas. (My protestant church a bit fuzzy on the precise date; they’re not wild about the 25^th)

And it is in deference of this memories, or defence of them that I ask simply for your outrage. Delayed though it be. To Kenyans being shipped off secretly to third countries, tortured and denied counsel. All in contravention not just rafts of domestic and international laws, but the simple dictates of human dignity.

When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. Since September 11^th there has been a prodding of Islam, an intensive interrogation of it. Once thought distant and exotic, it is now seemingly expansive and potent. Militant piety, radicalism, Islamic fervour…is this the problem or is it the nature of religious thought and belief to justify some acts. A holy war that writes God’s name in blood, that sees murder as the ultimate act of supplication. Yes, the road to the 72 virgins is paved with roadside bombs.

Bred in the Middle East, who really fed this monster? According to deeply reliable ‘sources’ it’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost. America, an empire creating its own realities and boogie men, shipped fundamentalist literature to Afghanistan, an anti-communist outpost to stop the Red Army. And they did.

In Kenya, the face of Islam is changing too. The tussle between politics and religion is not something we want to massage, but here, constitutional forums that have displayed deep-seated biases, in a subliminally polarising environment dim the hopes of a moderate Islam. And with a warring Somalia, a coastline full of jihadist sympathisers, a Government that has to play to the West to keep afloat and the emergence of Muslim Block, Islamic fundamentalism is not about to go gently into that good night.

Perhaps fanaticism is some indispensable feature of not just religion but human culture. Ideally, everyone wants a democratically submissive Islam but this is hardly rational since God is neither. And from a Pragmatic point of view Muslims everywhere must be suffering from some peer pressure of sorts to join the cause. Yet in every case where religion presents itself as the seeming enemy, neither it nor God are in question. Every day it is our humanity that is called to question. The Muslim story is also part of the Kenyan story.

NAIROBI

At about 1660 metres above the sea, my first thoughts on Nairobi are that it is a city, in Robert Browning’s words ‘crowded with culture’. This largely owing to the daily busloads of rustics and aliens- charming in the independence heydays but now almost menacing to town planners and slum upgrading committees. It is an intricate tangle of concrete, lives and aspirations.

It has none of the indolent charm of Mombasa, or the boisterous ease of the Lake side. Its pace of life is cruelly relentless and there’s a mechanical thoughtlessness to it that is part of its innate draw. Just as Caesar’s Rome, it is ‘a mad man’s dream’, and just like London in the sixties, it is a happening place, the city with some swing. And in its own fluttering way is to me as ‘eternal’ as Borges’s Buenos Aires.
But as with every city, there are many things not to like…with Nairobi more than most. It is a city always awake and so it has no dreamers. No Meryon walks here and life is all the more colourless for it.  Every city that has a soul needs an artist who dies hungry on its streets for the sake of his art. A visionary, to capture its spiritual structure, or a poet to give it a conscience. And there are the usual hazards of an existence in the bloodiest century. A disintegration of romantic African notions of communal living equals a society in urgent need of a tune-up, community wise. From my bed at night once, I could hear distant gunshots like hazy memories of a bad Hollywood production. Distant sirens, distant music,distant madness.

For a first timer, it can be a cold and impersonal handshake, yet Nairobi never quite lets you alone. You are always in the middle of something here; running battles between police and hawkers, student protest, muck, mud, mafia…every struggle in the wind. You don’t come here to get away but to throw yourself into something. In Nairobi you are both at the edge of the world and at its centre. Away from it, walking in streets other than its own, your mental footsteps never change.  Reticence is in its own way a mark of every son of soil.

Nevertheless, something starts in you in Nairobi. And what I do love about it is its wildly intoxicating sense of upward mobility. Everyone who comes here is chasing the sun, and Nairobi is their imaginary friend. Everything…everyone matters. Over four million souls inhabit this city, circling each other looking for a connection, money…meaning. Like a living, brittle experiment.  You must look out for the scrawny street boy sniffing glue and extorting motorists along Tom Mboya for he is tomorrow’s violent car jacker. The Kibera kid in a dilapidated school will sooner live behind mortgaged walls and every on-campus small-time will graduate to be a big-money demagogue on the national stage. Vertical heights…it’s the message the city subliminally channels. You can be, not better, but more. You can always be more, always have more. For every moral code is a wad of cash that can afford you a guiltless conscience.

A walk through the city is a walk through life; reflections, ironies, contrast and paradox. In a Nairobi minute, a whole scenery changes. At the chemist, across the street, up a muddy footpath or on the wrong corner turn you meet a different destiny than the last.  Across Parklands watching the lives and sights of the bourgeoisie- opulent patios and lemon green lawns or through the crummy alleys of Eastland, the roads spotted with tarmac, it’s impossible not to feel the divorce from the fairytale. In the town centre, Asians come to the entrance of their shops and stare out suspiciously into the world.  The pavements crowded with the very youthful who believe in anything and nothing.The west side, where the wine is expensive and the cars imported is the playground of the deliciously rich, living off family crime or profits of a protestant work ethic of prior generations lost on posterity. . .littered with trendy clubs, haunts of the young and restless, high-end dress shops and exotic restaurants patronised by well-to-do non –Kenyans. The liquor is never cheap  and always hard to pronounce. In Buruburu, the devil winks at orgies. The money’s illicit and so are the women. No, Nairobi’s night life is not for the faint-hearted. The west despises the east and the east resents the west, well within their rights. Discrimination against the rich is the most socially accepted form of discrimination.

Much like Athens, where  every old Greek looked to, Nairobi is fast becoming the pilgrimage site for many wild hearts and lost souls; Somali refugees escaping hostilities back home building a nest in Eastleigh, small time crooks seeking to make it bigger and badder and provincials seeking the city of lights. And each wants Nairobi’s story to be told side by side with theirs.
At 101, Nairobi is a young a young girl with an old heart who has walked in the sun too long and never fallen in love; survived a fire, war, bombing and every other  kind of death. Born of mud and swamp from its epic days as Masai grazing land, no less triumphant then dotted with Manyattas, and peopled with their birthright, it now has marble aspirations.

Now, pondering its founding…there’s nothing romantic or especially distinct about it. A colonial port, one among thousands established on the continent. But its hopes and aspirations perhaps a tad flattering to itself, are as towering as any other.
Nairobi’s story never ends, and since stories grow with time no doubt this one will. And now mine can’t be told without it.

Why I blog

To the satyr Pan, life is a never-ending search for new and powerful experiences. After more than eight hundred years of travel and adventure, Pan has explored Greece and beyond, seeking adventure, knowledge, and challenge.

Why I blog? I don’t know. Not entirely. Maybe I’ve given into the narcissism of this age. The most trivial moments of my life documented in size 12 New Roman on the net gives such an uber posh…significance. My thoughts given lead above all else. But perhaps this is too generic to be the real answer.

Maybe writing accords me the privilege of holidaying from my life. Maybe it is the camaraderie of being in this exclusive and rather curious occupation of writing. The search for the great novel…every writer’s predilection. The stopping at time to throw yourself in this imaginary world which at times is the only real thing. The love for the people you create. It makes you prod those who are really real. Makes you cold and cynical at times. There is a piece of ice in every writer’s heart, say Nabokov. And it rings true. But man is just man in the end…no better no worse.

Perhaps anonymity gives me Dutch courage. I can be honest with the world and myself…behind a mask. Shedding inhibitions and all that poetic mush.
Or maybe I need an audience. A cat would be, while serving the purpose, unresponsive which while charming in its own way, gets old fast. A man would be a catastrophic defeating of the purpose.

One in every two Kenyans will suffer from mental illness. Whatever ‘’it’’ is, I can’t be sure that I’m not losing it. Maybe I already have. There are such days when I’m sure that I am mad and others when I feel certain that I am Hamlet and the world is going mad in some insidiously orchestrated and nonchalant way. And all these are good days. Maybe writing is therapeutic, makes me lucid.

Maybe I have lofty aspirations of being a voice. Not a black voice, because we have “overcome”. Nor a female voice nor a young voice nor African or ethnic, simply human. I wanted to speak for Jonathan Nkosi and the Jews, the Serbs and the refugees and the girl in a thatch hut with an empty stomach and a heart full of dreams and the boy on the plains tending cattle. And her heart and his cattle must be exchanged, each for each. At the next rains.

Maybe writing is the only way I know to extend myself to the world…I don’t know any other way. I write therefore I am? Perhaps it is all these things and something above and beyond them. I grow up every time I write. And I reach for Charles Bukowski and Borges and Shakespeare and Hardy and Dylan and all these men that I have secretly and diligently loved.

And I can’t help but write. I can’t. About pedestrians on pavements as my bus pulls off the roadside. About Elizabeth in the AIDs wing who has buried two sons, mourned a husband, lost a daughter, and raised two grand kids…she has been wounded by life and hurt by the sun. And she smiles and isn’t ready to give anything back. Because she takes life as it is meant to be taken…seriously. As if she had read Nazim Hikmet’s soul word for word. For she knows, none so well, that she’s going to die. Not just that she may die or can die but that she will die. Soon. But she still makes a case for a loving god in her wretchedness, and she isn’t angered by our youth or good health…a sort of anger-inspiring oddity in the AIDs ward where a young girl of sixteen looks almost forty, creased and emaciated and stuck in this state by her paralysis. There is no bitterness in her at all. Elizabeth lives ‘’beyond the walls’’

I write because I can. Because I must tell it all. Because all of this will fade. It is also purely selfish, merely that it pleases me. Or maybe I too, like Fitzgerald, am a moralist who wants to preach and condescend to the world.

Life’s most unspeakable cruelty is that it urges us on. It demands to be lived. Like a slave master who feeds slaves on a slave ship. We need a break from this paradox. That isn’t to say that a paradox isn’t a good thing.

And I must tell you about the madman I saw on the streets. Dry cracked skin from an overexposure to the elements, muddied tattered clothes. He stood before a small group at a bus stop and came to a pool of rainwater by it. After a somewhat casual examination, circling it as if looking for something in it, he bent down and drank it. And no one so much as blinked.

When you’re young you want to save the world. As you grow up that goes away maybe from the realization that there are six billion of us with equally well meaning intentions, and this proves …chaotic or retrogressive. The horror of each moment fades and we live in this permanent ‘’There-go-I-but-for-the-grace-of-God’’ trance. A passiveness that entails a dedication to the few incidental ideals of life. Mechanical living.

I need to be horrified not for the man, but for the moment. And I need you to be horrified with me. I need company in my misery and blindness.
I must tell you about Christine Samba, a girl in my year who died not from a robber’s bullet but… (wretched irony) under police fire. A bullet to the neck at eighteen, trying to save her family. ‘’Old hand bury the dead’’. Death is at time without meaning, yes of course but can it be pointless as well? You must know about her as I did. Know that she liked reading novels, a staunch catholic, hated her hips…was pretty as a picture. You must remember her when I forget. I write because I do not want to forget these faces.

Maybe I do, against my own better judgment want to save the world. One sentence after the next. Vain ambition. Presumptuous, pompous and silly but true. Frighteningly true.

I must also tell you silly things. Like there’s nothing like the smell of rain on dry earth. That no one should die before seeing the sun set over Limuru…so lovely it makes you think of God. And that I will never be twenty again walking the streets at night on a Good Friday, my waist clasped in huge firm hands. Carefree. What else is life about? His name is Kenneth, and he’s perfect…’like the weather’. And that I pity those who fear the sun’s darkening embrace. For I would not give up this black skin of mine for forty acres or a mule.

So here we all are in this moment capsule of living and I must tell you that nothing has been surrendered. Nothing taken. And I’m not sure to what extent that is a victory. I have danced the Salome dance. I have shed the seven veils. There have been no hopes for a prize…because the prize is living. If I have failed at being human it is because that failure is a prerequisite for this condition. The Human condition. If I have lied, cheated, stolen or bled…it is because these were necessary. Simply it is that I write, not to be alone

Risqué, risqué!

 

All my life I’ve played by the rules. I’ve poured libation to the ancestors before I drank, in a figurative sense. I’ve brushed my teeth after every meal, said grace before each. I’ve believed in God. Prayed to him. I won’t cheapen this by making it about agnosticism. It isn’t.  Atheism has lost its sex appeal for me anyway. It is myself that I’m doubting. My look-right-left-and-right-again-before-you-cross-the-road self. My calculated-risks-leave-no-shoe-string-untied self. I’ve never really…dared.

At a few breathes past 21, give or take a million, it’s that time of day to decide whether to grow into your mother or no. Whether to aim for the safety net and all that the above does appertain or to just dare. Two roads diverge in yellow wood…

Am Mikhail Lermontov’s Circassian Novice, leaving my monastery for the first time, breaking free, seeking the outside…the validity of being. And freedom. Fearing to lose my way or to die in the monastery. Or his Demon, feeling the bubbling of hope for redemption within myself, the instincts for good…again. Wary of the kiss that can poison this hope, feeling the tantalizing draw of new beginnings. I feel like Caesar, awed to silence by the Sphinx, feeling restless within myself for the conquest of a new world after Rome. Ready to be the plaything of fate. Or Galileo ready to chant, ‘eppur si mouve’ to the dissenting flat-earth men. Seeking completeness in the round.

I want to see what’s beyond the horizon. Want also, someday, to toast to a life well lived. That means I must actively go out of my way to seek complications now…a broken heart, financial ruin, bodily discomfort. Risk, risk, risqué!

‘Those who cling to life die, those who defy death live’ says Daisetz Suzuki. I am ready, not to die…God no, but to lose that part of me that is afraid to. Two decades under the sun…I should know more, should be more myself. I want to take a stab at life, to map out a whole existence.

Why don’t I? Why don’t we?

Let’s buy Swiss watches and think we can control time and blame the weatherman when it rains. Let’s take charge of our lives right down to the itch on our backs a breath away from arm’s reach. Let’s play by the rules with Catholic prudence…or let’s not. Let’s live noisily and br azenly. Let’s wake up laughing. Let’s be penitent sinners who love their sins, every sacrilegious one and love even more being sorry for them.

Let’s try to save the world and fail and then try to save ourselves. Let’s pray to God for a good God.

Let’s try to mould our children with our own defective hands…like taking a picture in the rain. Let’s have red wine for breakfast. Let’s let ourselves go…lose ourselves completely. Let’s read the Bible reflectively and the Quran contemplatively. Let’s find a Guru and a Mantra and a Chi. Let’s find an oracle.

Let’s trust everything from the sand beneath our feet to the man with whiskers who smiles always. Let’s get rid of the tiresome wheel and the restrictive box. Let’s go back to the beginning. Build Babel. Let’s stomp on the earth that forms us. Let’s fall in love; you and I. Let’s ache and be pained by it. Let’s make a pact and promise each other forever. Let’s make our own luck. Let’s do it all…from the sublime to the absurd.

I want to go away, just my heart and I, to a place that has no assurances.  Because everything will vanish…I must do it all, everything that matters. I want to bask in the sensations of living. To discover the things that I love while I can still desire them. It’s my turn now. It has to be.

There are no assurances in life and that’s half its charm. But life always goes on unheeding and there’s some tragedy in that. The sky will fall and the sun will still rise. I think too much, I think. That’s not half as pompous as it sounds. I overanalyse situations, try to wrestle some inner meaning even from the most mindless of things. Why does an ant run frantically to save its life? It has neither a lover nor a kingdom nor a history. Its pedantry…a fascination with detail. And it takes the fun out of living. If only there was a way of being sure of things. It’s easy I know…you chose the things you are uncertain of  and you leave them for philosophers. You cling to the rest.

I’ve played by the rules all my life…so why must I always lose?