{30}

                                  One moment

                                                like now

                one day at a time

                                                one lifetime

                like death

                                in the twitch of a smile

                                                                                and then next time

{31}

Triumph of spirit.  Some suggest that God puts evil in the world to test us - to give us obstacles to overcome.  God then in a sense is the devil's one and only true advocate.

But, the only limitations are those in us personally, the only evil is that inherent in our own mis-understandings.  Evil is in us, but it is not an insidious demonic supernatural force, rather it has been given another name, which in many ways makes it much more difficult to overcome:  It is called ignorance.

It is so easy to take all the frustrated ignorance of an unexplored negative emotion in life, and write it away to some mythical being called Satan... or The System.  This way we remove from ourselves the responsibility for ourselves, and the responsibility for others as well.

For another's failing is just as much my failing for not being able to help prevent that failing.  No one is guilty, and no-one is innocent.  We all partake equally in responsibility, and our shame is shared with all... shared with all;  and so too our glory.  The Xhosa word for this all-embracing transcendental compassion is Ubuntu, and it has no English correlation.

White South African males had a different set of values imparted by Western society. . .

{32}

For over two decades, every school-going white South African male underwent ritualised physical abuse in the form of corporal punishment.  In many cases this was on a weekly or even daily basis. It continued for years on end in the guise of the South African National schools system.  In addition, the last five years of this involved para-military training with live ammunition from the age of as young as twelve.  After which, on the threat of imprisonment or execution, came a minimum of four years conscription in the South African Defence Force.  For many the term was much longer.  Some endured as much as sixteen years of conscription.  Of those that survived, no-one made it through without some form of wound or scar.  And in the same sinister fashion, the popular viewpoint is to now try and say that this was in some macabre way... a privilege?

{33}

There was of course the urban legend of the guy who got conscripted, and whenever he was marching and saw a piece of paper lying on the ground, he would break rank, pick it up, look at it and throw it away before joining his troop again.  In fact whenever he saw a piece of paper no matter where he was, he would stop doing whatever he was doing, pick it up immediately, look at it, and then throw it away again.  Any piece of paper, anytime, anywhere.  He was especially vociferous in the official office of an officer, where he often got sent after the more conventional punishments failed to reform his peculiar behaviour.

He would viciously attack piles of paper, throwing them in all directions, after looking at them all, each and every one.  Eventually this could not be tolerated, as it persisted even after a lengthy spell in the detention barracks.  He was given a dishonourable discharge, which when it arrived, he looked up at his C.O. and said to him with a grimacing grin on his face:  “Aah, now this is what I've been looking for all this time.”

?

{34}

However, some military manoeuvres are cunningly thwarted. . .

Plain clothes.

Undercover. 

Three very normal looking men in a plain white car. 

But secretly. . . undercover.

We are the Illicit Narcotics Police !!!

Put a gun to your head ‘cause you’re puffin’ the dread. . .

Young Rastaman, innocently standing on the lawn, admiring the greenery.

His mother stands with her watering can, watering the flowers on the other side of the garden.  She is unseen by the three undercover narcs, as they crouch behind the bushy hedge.  Sneaking along with trained CIA skill. 

“This is mission. . .
 Alpha-Bravo-Foxtrot-Zulu-Zulu-Gamma-Bullshit-zero-zero-Delta. Over. Roger.”

As she turns to water the roses, she notices the three of them crouching. . .

“Hello there, can I help you? What on earth are you doing?”

(‘...dammit... whosaidthat?... ‘)

(‘... shhh!...’)

(‘... don’t tell Me to shhh, you bladdy...’   “SHHHHHHH!!! h!”)

(‘... oh fuck, its his MOTHER... run for it!  RUN for it!!  Its his MOTHER!)
(‘oh f. . . Back to the car go! Go ! GO!...’)

She stares after them, curiously.  Then turns to her son, who is still admiring the succulence of the  glistening, newly watered plants.

“Bobby ?”

“Yes ma...”

“Who are those odd men?”

“Which ones ma?”

“There they go, driving away in a big hurry.”

“Ummm.. . I. . .uh, , , I Dunno ma.”

?

{35}

Carolina was a sculptress at the art school that Leon attended.  An excellent artist, she was a well shaped piece of work herself.  Slim, with beautiful elfin features, and long brown hair down to her perfect carved curve of hips.  Olive-green sang the still dreams of her eyes.  One day she told her friend Danny, who was disillusioned with the human race and especially the local excuse for academia:  “You know, there is something really beautiful about being human”.  A week later, after having grown her straight lengths of silk for seven years, she shaved it all off.

After this her stone-carving became more difficult as she began suffering from the twitches.  Before long, her fantastic talent was useless, her twitches became so bad that she would shatter any piece of stone her hands touched.  She was smoking upwards of 30 cigarettes a day.  Smoking, twitching, trying to sculpt;  shaking, and then cracking the stone once more, ruining a whole week's work.  A little later, Danny was supposed to go and visit her, but did not.  The next day he was told that Carolina had attempted suicide at the time when he was invited to visit.  She did it Japanese style, with a serrated bread-knife.  Wham!  Straight in her belly.  The doctors said she was extremely lucky.  (?)

After that she twitched like someone being constantly shocked by 220 volts.  A pained expression became permanently imprinted on her face.  How do these things happen?  How can someone despair to that extent so suddenly?  Especially people who seem to be under no immediate duress at all, people who are intelligent, and able to understand the complex nature of many types of intricate knowledges.  Its like there is a disease that permeates thru the social fabric, contagious as the common cold;  just as common, but oh, so, so much more cold.

Cornered

                a small dirty child

                a spiteful grimace or smile
                eyes that watch - darting
                from the thick darkness to the shadows
                with a crazed bestial sway

                The floor creeps with dust
                ashes claw the cobwebs

                A half-heard wail
                hangs on rubbled walls
                and scuttles for a hole
                to escape through

                or hide in
                for eternity

                then reflect

                a jewel of sunlight
                for a moment

{36}

Alice was the Queen of punk.  She had a constantly changing hairstyle, one day short and white/silver, another day red;  sometimes a Mohecan, and just for kicks, she would sometimes shave her head completely.  She wore black clothes often enough like the others of her tribe.  She had  University degrees complete with distinctions, but just hung around the University, working as a barmaid, stimulating the pleasure centres of her brain as good and hard as she could, until they were exhausted and happiness eluded her like all things pursued to readily.

There were some people who thought her pleasure seeking was a little more than controversial, for Alice was a “cutter”.  She took great glee in using a razor blade to lacerate herself with.  “Cutter's” are relatively common amongst the alternative crowd.  People who for some reason distance themselves from society and from social nicety.  People, who before they are out of their teens, are filled

with hatred and cynicism at what deal they have been dealt, whether from child-abuse, rape, mental abuse from family, teachers or generally from the violent and oppressive practices of Draconian military-based socio-political-religious systems.  The types of causes are only surpassed in their variety by the variance of symptom.  People

rationalise the existence of such creatures by using superstitious beliefs like labelling them as Alcoholics, Satanists, or drug-addicts, or just plain “evil.”

But the drugs, the pain, and the angst are symptoms.  Symptoms of a variety of dehumanising practices such as violent punishment of a multitude of varieties, and just general abuse from institutional Autocrats, most often those placed in positions of ‘care’ over the person.

But abuse is strange, in some it inspires pain and the further repetition of abuse with the abused becoming the abuser, so that they at least know that as long as they're doing the hurting, they are not the ones being hurt.  The roles seem more permanent and real than do the people that inhabit these ragged costumes;  then die, and pass on the pattern of misery.

Others internalise the pain - blaming themselves - owning the pain - thriving on it.  Many people said that Alice was just seeking attention, some said she just wanted to commit suicide, but didn't have the guts to do it.  Whatever the case, she was in and out of the mental hospital;  sometimes treated just for cuts after a friend found her in a blood red bath, other times for stomach pumps from drug overdoses.  Someone said that she had just been raped for the seventh time.  Despite all this, there still remained an air of dignity about her:  the status, at least in her mind, of being the most fucked-up person around.  In the midst of all hell's torture, minor cuts can feel like pleasure because they distract one momentarily from the real pain.

{37}

                Only chile, Lonely chile
                Out on a highway stormway
                Do you wanna go out to limbo?               

                Broken chile, Frozen chile
                While our dark ways both sway
                The adventure’s flown south of limbo

                Spirit chile
                Angel chile

                Within your own sight glee

                Living chile
                Loving chile

                Glisten madness moistens
                And you’re free.

{37}

Marvin the Falcon was a strange dark creature, half hippie, half punk, and more than half-way odd.  He had two halves to his face, one side smiling the other scowling, and a scraggly beard.  He embraced the dark-side of Wicca, hissing at the sign of a crucifix whenever he saw it.  Dazzling a green stare that looks straight thru to your gizzards, and makes the hairs on your back stand up like a frightened black cat.  He had long strands of dark hair, and always wore the same black pants, thin over his skin-tight body.

Alice enticed Marvin to her bed by offering him LSD.  The LSD concerned was so hallucinogenic that  it was itself illusionary.  Conned and disappointed, he left the next day;  and the day following, he heard that she had been thrown in the 'bin for another suicide attempt.  This time she had been found in a pool of blood on the shoddy kitchen floor.  He went to visit her to cheer her up, and their love-affair started that way.  But the first time he saw her naked in the light, he got something that gave a fright to even his well-chilled soul.

Despite her not-always-appealing hairstyles, Alice was damn good looking.  (Rumours have it she was once a bimbo as a teenager;  before the first rape.)  She had that Auschwitz type of attractiveness about her:  what appeared to be a well-trimmed untanned body and sunken holes around her eyes.  But once the outer layer of clothes were shed, and her vampire-white skin was revealed, all Marvin could see from breasts to thighs, were furrow upon furrow, ridges and crevasses, of scars.  Hundreds of them, all self-inflicted, resembling the rivers on a map, with deep lines and rough hills of scar tissue separating them.  A thousand stories, each scar a legacy of pain;  mutilated ecstasy, battle-worn terrain.

The way she saw it was quite simple:  Sometimes the pain that bore down on you was so bad, not physical pain, but in your mind;  not really hurting, but just assaulting you, tiring you out;  unanswered paradoxes;  just a hard blackness;  and you can only turn it off by numbing your mind, with drugs or booze;  but sometimes the pills and booze are not enough, so you try smoking a million cigarettes.  Shit, you're smoking one now, but the moment you exhale, you crave more, until eventually you just freak and something snaps. . .

Marvin and Alice had a (very enjoyable) pastime, they used to take glass bottles to some unused building somewhere and just smash them - smash like the hiss of white noise on a short wave band on a stereo - smash! shatters! pure entropy. 

That would make them both feel good, but sometimes the spiritual dirt would swamp her thru the ether;  wave after wave;  the millions of dead soldiers that to this world cling with their anguish and scowls;  the souls of the tormented:  dead souls who refuse to die;  ghosts of those who cling to the false identity of their wasted lives;  stagnant creatures who refuse to acknowledge the wonders of chaos and change, evolution of spirit and the beauty of natural fearless death.

And Alice, Marvin (how many others? ? ? more than we know ) with etheric eye straining to open to the ether:  plane of mind, place of emotion, sentience;  key to the secrets of the soul.  But this hallowed ground of subtlety is defiled by selfishness and greed, and this is why many contacts beyond the material world are often dangerous, for this is wild unclaimed land that has grown with us.  Often only seen by Seekers of the Old Religions, and for many millennia lying unseen by most.  Wars, genocides, torturing and other atrocities of recent years have filled it with a tightly woven web of pain-debris and suffering that effects us, in every day life, and closes us from our own spiritual and emotional nature.

Some are called Healers or Sensitives who see with the Eye Etheric onto the Ethereal plane, and suffer all the more than those who leave their Eye closed.  These are the casualties on the front-line of the war against ignorance and darkness:  those who dare stare the fear of insanity in the face, win or lose;  rather than be greyed to the material mechanical conformity of repetitive everyday drudgery, and soullessness.

Alice was such a casualty, the spiritual pain now lay enshrouded over her, and her will could only buckle, so she had to bare the pain herself, bring it back down onto the material world from whence it orginated.

Bare it tangibly, so that she could feel it in the flesh;  feel that sweet burning sensation on your skin as you draw the blade slowly, slowly, slowly, right the way across your quivering belly. . .

You wonder if you have pressed into your skin hard enough, because you feel no pain and there is no blood, so you try again.  This time much harder, but the first time was enough, because now two rows of those first beads of bright red life appear where the edge has sliced.

Beautiful tiny red bubbles popping up all the way along the first cut, and then the second one opens, and the lining of white fat underneath is revealed.  Wow, that was actually quite deep, because now the blood is flowing like the river Jordan.  But your mind is appeased, like something has lifted off your back, and you can sigh in the comfort of physical pain.

You can sigh with relief, like rains after a drought, or sleep at the end of the night, floods of relief washing through you;  blood flowing like piss.  Or you've just come out of an hour and a half of root canal treatment at the dentist, and now all that is left is numb.  Sure, now the physical pain starts, that dull throbbing where the blood is gushing, so smooth and red and bubbly to clot, and you feel a little weaker, but that dark presence has gone, the blackness lifted;  and this red pain is a mild nuisance compared to the writhing of your soul earlier.  Now all you want to do is sleep, and sleep forever-sleep, not try and answer unanswerable questions about your supposedly needing reasons to be someone or do something, or have answers for something that is actually not anything at all. . .

{39}

Line, upon rank, upon legion of ghosts, march to their eternal battleground.  Forever consumed in their lost attempt at conquering their own shadows.  Like crazed hounds spinning after their tail; or mesmerised moths with doom and destruction as their delight and gloomy agony.  Deep within the Astral shades these Souls grasp and clutch for their illusionary victory.  Their death-lust even outlasts their life’s memories, for perhaps it is in the belief that they will be heroes that they go to their agonising afterlife.  With dreams of an hero-feast and grateful maidens, willing to offer themselves in gratification before their mighty weapons.  Perhaps.  The lucky ones may get away with this excuse.

The rest of them are merely a well bred concoction of sheep, lemming, and piranha.  But the souls of these dead soldiers forever haunt the living with their spite.  Possessing those they can, infesting their minds with the love of anguish and pain, cleansing them in their own blood river of regret.

The reality of the Twentieth Century just seems lost on some people.  After going through (amongst countless others) World War One, World War Two, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you would think people would WAKE-UP? 

?

{40}

Marvin ditched the army by going insane for a while.  In Joseph Heller's ‘Catch-22’, set during World War II, the catch is that you can only leave the army if you are insane.  However, if you are insane then you obviously wouldn't want to leave the army, as an insane person would surely find a place as crazy as the army quite acceptable.  Either way, you were screwed.

By 1992, the military mind had advanced somewhat.  Now you could actually leave the army if you were insane.  So those like Marvin who left or avoided the army, could only prove their sanity by proving that they were insane.  This was whilst likewise unavoidably proving that those 'sane' people in the army were actually completely  insane.

Marvin admitted himself to the mental asylum because the world had gone insane.  He had to do this of course, because he was actually quite sane.  After much arguing, Marvin had simply concluded:

‘The person who cuts my hair will be slaughtered.
And those that give him the orders will be slaughtered.
And so will all their relatives.
And anyone who was even friendly with them.
I will make it my life ambition to exterminate them all.

And the one who cuts my hair will die first so that his Soul follows me around for the rest of my life watching what misery he has unleashed.’ 

After Marvin had explained this to the Psychologist, having been in the loony-bin for a week, he was exempted from the army.  Though the form officially said that the military exemption was because of ‘medical reasons’.  Marvin was as fit and strong as a Rhinoceros on steroids. 

That might have been the real reason for his exemption.

It could be said that by going insane, Marvin played his role in turning the world a little saner.  The twist turned a little more surreal when, while Marvin was inside the 'bin, it was announced that good ol' Nelson Mandela was to be released from his prison, and the ANC was unbanned. Political instability replaced political turmoil in South Africa.  An old Conservative Afrikaner woman entered the asylum the day after these events.  Her husband had blown his own head off at the shock of the news.  She had lost control of all her bodily functions.  Sad in one sense, yet try and picture it:

'Koos, Koos, those bladdy Commie's and Kaffirs are going to take over the Vaderland, what are we going to do?'

'Whaaat? Over my dead body...'

bang.

o gat, nou het ek myself gekak.

Anyhow, a bit worried about all the drugs that might be administered to him, Marvin told the Doctor that he didn't do drugs, so he didn't want any of their brightly coloured pills.  As far as Marvin was concerned, drug experimentation was fine as long as it is self-administered.  Prescribing and selling the latest very-expensive psycho-active chemicals to others... well that was drug-pushing wasn't it?

Marvin took the opportunity to detoxify his body from all the alcohol,  ephedrine, amphetamine, strychnine and many other ‘naturally’ occurring drugs in his environment that he had been experimenting with under his own good conscience.  One's drug habits should be purely a matter of personal taste.  Like everything else one consumes.

Marvin first met Negos in the loony-bin.  Negos was from a wealthy Xhosa family.  He had been sent to the mental asylum by his family because he had a different lifestyle.  He refused to use electricity or plastic. He never ate meat, and would get very agitated and angry whenever he saw meat.  Whenever people ate meat he would try and stop them.  He was always smoking ntsangu.  He would rant at them about their evil ways with bulging bloodshot eyes and uncut hair.  He had also given up wearing clothes, preferring just a hemp sack, with holes in it for his arms.  And he had even given away all his expensive shoes.

Nekos had managed to sneak some herbs into the loony-bin, and he shared it with Marvin on the night before the day Marvin was to leave. The common outlaw bond that some strangers share.  Knowing that you are united by your enemy.  How come it causes some bonds to bind more powerful than before?  How come it makes others weak?  What makes one person thrive under duress.  What makes the other crumble.

By the time Marvin got out of the 'bin, his body was rip and raring to go:  So him and Leon get a couple of six-packs of beer, a bottle of wine, a packet of slimming tablets, and a large stash of grass.  Mixed together in generous amounts in the space of a couple of hours, and voila: not just a cocktail, more like a peacock-tail. (two of them).  After this celebration of the cerebral fluid, Marvin goes to the local pub where he meets Carolina.  There, he alternates between standing, running around, chattering in a voice far too quick for anyone to make sense of, and hanging onto Carolina when the sea-sickness arrives.  The buildings turn to jelly, and start  to sway at him, trying to knock him over.  Marvin eyes them dubiously from under one eye, and then closes the other to avoid the double vision.

Wibbly-wobbly doorways, people standing at 45 degrees. “Hey Carolina, why do you look so elongated... your nose is sticking in my eye... jees - look how many nose-hairs you've got.  Right!  Stand up straight.  Uh-oh, here it comes. . .”  Marvin’s barf rains down into a flower bed.  Somebody tells Carolina that she had better take Marvin home.  Green-faced, bleary-eyed puke-lips Marvin.  Oh how Gross!  She takes him home anyway.

By the time they get to her house, the slimming tablets have won their battle over the alcohol, and Marvin is jumping around, sitting with both legs up on the chair, then standing on the table and yelling incoherently.  He stops, drops his mouth silently open, and looks at Carolina.  He pounces.  She squeals as he lands on her.

He pulls at her clothes, fumbling, groping in the sweat; clawing at her in the midsummer's heat.  Eventually he loses patience with the clothes, and seeing as though the blouse is Indian cotton, and soaked in sweat, it is easy to rip.  So too are her black stockings, soon shred from their tight fitted thighs.

By the time her body has been mostly revealed by his frantic rippings, she has also skilfully removed his clothes.  Sex like a sauna, so much hot slippery wet skin, and the air hangs heavy like a soggy blanket over them.  The ephedrine in the slimming tablets does the rest.  By now she is on top of him, the last few rags of her clothing still clinging wetly to her body.  Skin, sliding like rubber.  Tits, floppy and wet with perspiration; bam-wam, thumping, speeding, gyrating, grinding - mist - hazes - blackout.

Not too long afterwards Marvin comes around again, finding himself naked, lying on the floor next to the bed.  Carolina lay on the uncovered and soiled mattress watching him, her breasts flopping obscurely to one side.  Marvin groans, stands up, stumbles outside the door, and pukes.  Again.

His silhouetted form hanging itself on the door-frame, long dark hair, scraggly strands dripping off his bowed head.  He turns and looks at Carolina.  The now half-healed scar like a neat mountain range across her belly.  Her twitching hands fumble for a cigarette from a crushed packet, and she lights the elongated limp smoke with a shaking match.

Her body is thin too, even thinner than his.  Ribs protruding around the smallness of her unperky breasts, which had begun to notice gravity in recent years.  Her hip bones jutted out from her waist.

“No!” she says suddenly as he reaches to where his skin-tight pants have landed, “Don't go!”

He does not turn back to look at her, slipping his feet into his untied boots, then leaves soundlessly, as a shadow in the dark-light.

{41}

Led Zeppelin shakes the window frames as a violent sunset oozes thru the window on the other side of an enormous red kitchen.  The immensity of red and light moves Marvin’s feet, so he leaps around the room, sort of dancing at first;  but then turning around, and around, spinning on the same spot, faster and faster.  Longer and wider, until it feels like it will never stop...

A vortex pulls him around;  the walls just flash past so quickly that they blur into something else;  a vision of primeval tunnel;  turning, spinning past a sink, door, cupboard;  unable to stop, the force pulls like a twig in a hurricane;  sink-door-cupboard;  sink-door-cupboard;  sinkdoorcupboard;  sinkdoorcupboardsinkdoorcupboard;  staccato like the stagger of a strobe-light.  Pulsing faster, faster-fasterfasterf...

Close your eyes;  no more;  the spin is gone; don't slow down your spin, or you'll fall;  fall;  so, got to keep going faster - yet faster... now in stasis... spinning so fast so its like you're not spinning at all,

                                just standing there with your eyes closed

Dare to open your eyes?

Just vague slits at first, and now a dull red glow, but still the room.  Spinning.  Look up and notice the red light glowing in the roof.  Strange how the filament is clean white.  Another place, another time, another face, some more wine.  Still in space spinning, aiming for grace, hopeful winning.  Launched towards the Divine, pursuit of the Goddess, lustful chase...

Led Zeppelin.  The essence of sublime.