In political circles these past few days – somewhat directionlessly – much energy was spent on weighing the Budget. We tuned in to the usual drone of words and phrases, the same as last year’s and those of years before – by economic “experts” and “analysts”, and university professors at large. Simultaneously there was a fuss about this or that political personage calling another a cockroach!
Away from this unseemly political hoo-ha, I suggest we devote some good time thinking about on the notion of direction – a most important idea in life.
As I write, we see from our windows the fire on our Peninsula’s mountains, raging – ranging from the south, through Ou Kaapse Weg, Tokai, Constantia, through Noordhoek, Chapman’s Peak and Hout Bay, northward in the direction of Kirstenbosch, and we hope that the wind will blow in a direction favourable for us here below the mountains.
Importantly, we have prayerful thoughts for the brave bodies who are battling the fire, that they should succeed bringing it to an end, without mishap.
I have three stories to tell concerning direction.
The first, light-heartedly, is this. Many years ago in Wellington where I was born, there were three alleenlopers(bachelors): Dirk Tafelstert, Damon Mafoeta, and Klaas van Toera. If these are not fascinatingly engaging names and nicknames, I’ll eat my hat! My Islamic-born mother told me this: A Scheherazade of sorts, she was not only a comely woman, but an inveterate storyteller – priceless. I was already at university and appreciated her effort in so far as, youthfully ambitious, I had started to catalogue reminiscences.
Damon Mafoeta got it in his head to buy a motorcycle – which, as far as possessions went, made him feel one up on his friends Dirk and Klaas. In those days Front Street in Wellington was still a gravel road. Damon lived in the vicinity.
Unfortunately, he had never had lessons in driving a motorbike! He was a flamboyant show-off chancer. So what happened one day was this: He brought out the bike, mounted, grabbed the handlebars, his arms grandiosely outstretched. He had got to know (he thought), by watching other bikers, the business of turning and twisting the handles – throttle (if I’m right, Damon didn’t know in any case) under the right palm, clutch under the left. The engine actually started, and the machine thundered under him. And, despite himself, he was off, kicking up Front Street’s gravel. People stared amazed, fearing for Damon, knowing that he was no master at this art, and that the motorbike was just a toy for him.
What they dreaded, happened. Damon took corners dangerously, found himself riding around in wildly wide circles, over and over again appearing on Front Street’s dust. Then terror struck his heart, and he screamed at the bystanders: “How can I stop? Ek kan nie stop nie, man! Help!” All this to the glee of bystanders.
Then a bold voice of compassion – it was his friend Dirk Tafelstert’s – was heard above the commotion. “Damon, as jy wil stop, hou rivier toe! If you want to stop, ride to the river, ride into the sand!” And Klaas van Toera shouted supportively: “ Ry man, ry!” The river was the Berg River which flows by Wellington. (It was all a matter of direction!)
Damon heeded the advice. What else could he do? And it worked, not tragically, only disastrously. He was thrown off the vehicle, and he and it together plunged into the riverbank. The machine was a “write-off”. In passing, my insurance company tells me the correct wording here is – as when I forward them a claim – “no longer a commercially viable entity”.
Damon himself was not quite no longer commercially viable, but he was sorrowfully covered in sand and badly bruised – a humiliated man.
When at last the battered Damon came walking up Front Street to get home, people, truly concerned, asked him: “ Is jy ôlraait, Damon? Are you okay?”, to which he responded, tremulously and dejectedly, and angry with himself: “Ja!”, meaning that he had listened to their advice and the direction they had advised him to take…
He never rode again.
But his story lives, and his name – and, through it, that of his friends, Klaas van Toera and Dirk Tafelstert.
My second story concerning direction – more serious – is that of Qiliang (as if Damon’s story isn’t serious).
In my little book of Chinese fables, there is the story of Qiliang, titled The wrong direction. Qiliang was on the road, travelling, for it was a time of war, “the Prince of Wei (having) decided to invade Handan, the capital of the state of Zhao”. People were anxiously moving this way and that, to avoid the violence.
Qiliang encountered a stranger at Taihang. The man told him that he was going to Chu. This confused Qiliang, because Chu lay to the south, and the stranger was going north, in the wrong direction. Qiliang mentioned his surprise. But the stranger thought otherwise, himself looking surprised: “But surely, everything is all right,” he said. “Look, I’ve got very good horses.” Qiliang said: “But, friend, Chu lies to the south, that way.” He pointed. The stranger insisted that it did not matter: “I’ve got plenty of money.” Qiliang tried again, saying, in desperation, that Chu lies to the south. But the stranger kept up his entreaty, now almost screaming, that he had an expert charioteer!
Qiliang gave up. All right he said. You’ll just get farther and farther away from Chu. And so they parted, the one northward, the other southward.
Qiliang journeyed on, thoughtfully as always. He was beginning to doubt himself. Perhaps, he mused slowly, perhaps that man had a point. After all, the earth is round, so is there a wrong direction? (Qiliang mused, even more thoughtfully, wasn’t he perhaps going the wrong way?)
My third, and most serious reflection, involves Dava Sobel’s enthralling writing (two of her exciting books are with me as I write: The Planets and A More Perfect Heaven).
She confirms the roundness of our world! The planets, she writes, “speak an ancient dialect of myth” – myth, without which good storytelling and, in fact, meaningful human existence is impossible. Richard Dawkins underscores the point in his noteworthy text The Magic of Reality: “Reality is (supposedly) everything that exists,” he says. “That sounds straightforward… Actually, it isn’t. There are various problems… What (for instance) about stars, which are so far away that, by the time their light reaches us and we can see them, they may have fizzled out?”
I have even more questions – intriguing and frustrating: Just when, from wherever, does light start “travelling”? What does “travelling” mean in this context? When does an arrival of it happen? And then, what? Where to does the light, travelling, go farther?
All this coming and going, this taking of direction this way and that, is a making of reality – and is far from easy to fathom. Steeped as I now am in my immediate, literal awareness of fire (on our mountains), and mediately of water (the Berg River’s of my mother’s story), I cannot help thinking of Heraclitus. The ancient great Greek ponderer imaged the human soul as a clean rising flame upward (for flames are not necessarily destructive); and he also imaged a river’s water, wisely, as flowing in one direction, not ever returning, so that one can step into its water only once. And hopefully make the most of it!
If my association of thoughts appears cryptic, I am consoled by the fact that things happened likewise to others, Copernicus for instance (in whom Galileo believed).
Copernicus’s ideas went even beyond enigma, to sheer outrageous novelty in his time: they ran completely upstream, against the current of commonality. Sobel points out that he withheld his ideas for a long time, for fear he would be thought of as “mad”. His thinking, of course, was vindicated afterward, over and over. (Copernicus’s ideas – lest anyone forgets – centred around the thought that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the central point of what we call reality.)
And so, as Dava Sobel describes, the endless universe surrounds us. It is truly difficult to word this. Van Wyk Louw has bravely tried his hand at a clarification in his poem Inferno(I translate) –
I’ve heard a sadly sobering word:
That all the stars will flee away
out of this snug community
of Milky Way and bright day,
circling wide and ever wider
into the darkness far outside,
that lies beyond: wrathful,
rebelling against togetherness…
But the situation is even more complex. Our “Milky Way” is but one of any number of galaxies, this again within any number of universes, in which stars – and, in their turn, galaxies and universes themselves – travel away from each other at intoxicating speeds: Wheels within wheels within wheels...
So, if Dava Sobel speaks of the universe “surrounding” us, what can it mean in the face of the fact that any one vantage point is as good (or bad) as any one other, and we are directed and counter-directed willy-nilly, which way to go. And Who or What does the directing?
Damon Mafoeta’s crisis was a simple affair: There was the river; even Qiliang’s frustration was easy to handle. But the overall question as to where we, from day to day, at any moment, find ourselves in God’s world, is of another order.
It seems there is only one way of coming to terms with this situation, so as to shed our feeling of being hopelessly lost in the world: It is to put our faith firmly in values of a high order, values of a stature almost beyond ordinary goodness. (I have Nietzsche in mind.) Thus one can break out of a sense of waywardness like that of the “hapless, hapless wanderer” ( arme, arme Wanndersman), to quote from a poem by the “philosopher with a hammer”.
The lesson to be learnt from all this is that sound direction in life is something to be worked out in morality, a matter of a “genealogy of morals” ( Genealogie der Moral). Heading for the river was not the solution to Damon Mafoeta’s problem: Morally, he never should have bought a motorbike. The stranger on the way to Chu had not to put his faith in lots of money and the like: Morally, he should instead have acquired a realistic knowledge of the lay of the road.
And it is permissible for moral consciousness to persuade us that the universe is not set up to obstruct, but instead to advance, our well-being, and our human virtue of compassion.