Words are good servants but bad masters.
Aldous Huxley
When I look at the part of my life that lies on the wrong side of the arrow of time, I see a long sherry trifle pudding that stretches out behind and away from me, hiding its head in an unremembered land beyond the horizon.
Some pictures from a fantastically enjoyable hike, the Whale Trail in the De Hoop nature reserve.
sometimes I close my eyes and charge raggedly over open ground,
swaddled in gentle air
that is torn by the song of leaden hornets
and ripped by orange tongued serpents of black smoke.
It is a rather beautiful myth that Eskimos have multiple words for snow. It is a great explanatory device that helps us to understand that there may be many more subtle variants of the same object or experience than our language would suggest, or that we may at first surmise. For example, there are many more kinds of Eskimo than we commonly have words for: Aleut, Sirenik, Yup’ik, Qawiaraq, Malimiutun, Inuinnaqtun, Natsilik, Kivalliq, and Aivilik to name a few.
Tambo looked at the dusty red soil that flowed between the government houses, and he thought about the colour red. He remembered the grand velvety richness of the cover of the little red book his father had proudly brought back with him from his training in Angola, and he remembered the sadly worn red in his mothers eyes when she explained that his father would never be coming home again.
It seemed such a simple thing. I spoke to him, he to me, and then he died. There was no great pealing of bells, nor the stirring bellow of a legion of trumpets. Just a gentle sigh, a mist into which he slowly tipped. Slowly at first like a newly felled oak, then gathering speed and momentum to crash into a little metal closet at the foot of his bed.
I never knew him well; we had exchanged only the curtest of greetings. We were in the same place through circumstance. Not the cosmos-grand-design kind of circumstance, but rather that, which is dictated by the frustrated impotence of old men. Men who went home to wizened wives practicing repulsed celibacy. Refilling the wells of their silent resentment each evening, they irrigated their flowers of death, sending young men to kill and die.