Another Day

After a nice slow start, I’m wandering around the garden in the early morning taking pictures with my pinhole camera. I meet Chookie who has been swimming.

She asks me what I think about it so far, and I tell her about the way I felt strange the day before in the car. We talk about perceptions a bit. Chookie tells me how when, many years ago as a teenager, she went to Britain and was surprised to see white men cleaning floors and digging roads. As I said we don’t see our own culture. We don’t blink at the idea.

She tells me how she used to protest against apartheid when she was a student, and how she railed against the machinery of apartheid. Now that apartheid has gone it is only the beginning of a new process. A process of adjustment and re-positioning.

Perhaps it’s a bit like a plumbed system that has been blocked for years with huge pressures building up over the years. The release of the blockage causes waves of high and low pressure all over the system which will take years to equalize.

Chookie talks about education, and how the big mass of the population needs to be educated and skillful and thinking. Now she is telling me about corruption the political system in South Africa, and it’s hard for me to keep up with all the names and parties and factions. I can tell she is not happy with the way things are. Aniother country in search of CHANGE.

I have seen on the internet that there is an exhibition called TRANSIT and the Goethe Institute, so we decide to go and see, stopping off at a gallery on the way. No Louis today, just Me, Mum and Chookie.

The gallery is really beautifully done, the building is airy and has windows in the ceiling letting in light. The trees grow out of the floor and up through openings in the building, very beautiful slim trees with bark that flakes of to make a beautiful pattern of light and dark brown.

One painting grabs me, but I’m afraid I can’t remember the name of the artist. It showed in the background a kind of mining scene with a tower and sand etc, but this was all very out of focus as if it was a memory, the edges of the picture had a kind of vignette of darker paint as if we were looking back through time. The foreground showed old photos in frames (although of course they were painted) beautifully indistinct and yet believable; a face or a couple or similar, there was also a kind of calendar emerging from the past. There was some kind of switch thing which I couldn’t work out. Maybe it was a timer for blasting or something. . . I don’t know.

There was some very fine sculpture as well. Mum and I were both taken be two figures who wer e reaching out to each other, but in each case the body had been sliced into sections. One section would be realistically and perfectly rendered muscle and flesh and the next section would be rough sharp jagged stone. But each figure was the inverse of the other so where one would have a perfect head the other would have a sharp rough stony head.

Then we drive to the Transit exhibition which showed photos produced by a photographic workshop in Johannesburg; It showed women in transition, bearing the brunt of change, carrying huge burdens on their heads as big fast machines blur past them on the road. Or crowded trains with people huddled together on a long journey from somewhere to somewhere else.
We were on route for another museum, and it was lunch time. Chookie suddenly stopped and changed her mind – we could have lunch here in this park that we were passing. In this very laid back restaurant called Moyu (I think). It suddenly felt more relaxed and easy. Things seemed to free up. Chookie had a flower painted on her forhead, and a beautiful woman washed our hands and sang a song before we ate.

In the evening we went to a restaurant and theatre combined experience. The restaurant was lovely with fantastically friendly waiter, he was a Zulu, and we had a kind of share / pick selection of African dishes and dips and rice. Fantastic.
The show was an African music / dance journey through the ages in South Africa from the traditional (and powerfully primal) drumming and song, through urbanization and ending up in a heady mix of hip hop rap crossed with a beautiful hypnotic set of ryhtms that could come from nowhere else. Amazing dancing as well. I was blown away.
We drive home in the dark and I am still feeling tired, a lot of experiences in one day to process. I could feel my eyes closing in the dark as we drove.
Back in my little cottage, I close the door, set the alarm, close my eyes and think of you. Thousands of miles away, having that life that, doing those things, switching off TVs, loading dishwashers, making tea. I feel a lump in my throat. How will I go to sleep? How will I stay awake? I remember the same feeling when I lay in bed at night art boarding school.
Get out my MP3 player plug it in and fall asleep.