'Truth is like the sun.
You can shut it out for a time
but it ain't going away.'
Elvis Presley said that. Or so I read in a music magazine.
'Tis strange, but true;
Lord Byron
Here is a strange but true tale possessing the fantastic elements of fairytale.
It tells of a young girl caught in the bright, sticky funfair of life.
Like Alice, she had tried to think sanely and make sense of White Rabbits always hurrying to nowhere significant; Cheshire cats, obscure & smug, irrational Red Queens shouting, 'Off with their heads!' But Alice's world was just a dream & she knew that ours, unfortunately, is not.
Raging, she beat her hands against the kings & queens & jacks, calling them liars, until the whole artifice came tumbling down & all that remained was the terrible truth.
Through the streets of Cape Town city, past Bo Kaap, walks a girl wearing a sky-blue satin dress. A ballroom dress, voluptuous, such as one might see in a fancy-dress shop or pick up at a faux-antique thrift store. Diamante necklace & earrings glint defiantly in the high hot sun.
The asphalt pavements are patterned with butts & pale blotches of chewing gum. A rich tang of whiskey & urine rises up from steamy corners.
She keeps her gaze on the azure arc beyond and begins the steep climb uphill that eventually dips into Ocean View Drive.
She walks past all the dolly houses - 'little boxes on the hillside...made of ticky-tacky' - past concrete apartment blocks that glare with square steel eyes. She will come soon to the water's edge, sit and sift sand. Find smooth shells to turn over in her hands. Spin subliminal dreams to the eternal rhythm of the waves.
When the mood takes her, she runs up mountains, eats an entire chocolate cake with her hands. She does not plan, manage or measure. A creature of instinct & whim, her mercurial spirit seeks the centrifugal energy in living things. The wind, the ocean, the silent inscrutable moon & stars shuddering in black mystery; these are kindred spirits.
She has read, of c, 'The Way of Tao'. With typical Western awe. This is her language, her magic. Any belief system organized & imposed is immediately rejected. Violently. Why, she wrote in a matric poem, would you, God, want me on my knees in a house called church? You don't, of course. They do. Those foolish men culling foolish acolytes to their cause. Goody-goody two shoes i'll not be. i'll run run run like the gingerbread man. Yo, Big God, you can't catch me. Yet she reads a little book she found in some secondhand shop, 'The Imitation of Christ' in a poky apartment with iron burglar bars that make her see, at last, that the world is truly insane. Bars to stop people coming in to steal, rape & destroy? That little christ book seems like light in the dark, a haven of holy peace.
Drifters & vagrants sit on benches looking out at the sea with glassy eyes. They have nothing better to do. Responsible people sit for some moments, sigh, return to their duties. But she sits at the sea too often. On benches, on rocks, at the water's edge. Gazing out as if waiting for some cosmic revelation.
And one day it comes. A Face in the clouds, not as a painting, living, but no angel. The Face of a man, the Face of God. But angels faces she sees too, at other times, full of beauty & great love. Looking at her with
sad remonstration.
She sees also the unmistakable eyes of Christ on her bathroom wall and the lesser eyes of his followers. She does not believe in religious mumbo-jumbo but who can mistake those eyes? And one night, caught in the grip of insomnia, she watches herself gyrate with the diabolical shadow of the devil on her cupboard door.
At the Psychiatric Day Hospital in Observatory, she writes it all down on the form. She is Alice falling down the black hole, no longer sure of what is real, clutching at bottles marked 'Life'. The others - all adolescents - have lost themselves as she has; drug addicts, anorexics, depressives. She, those adult gargoyles say, is hostile, has delusions of grandeur. They never did ask about the visions. Or the long lonely boarding school corridors. Or the gun in its shiny silken bag & the crimson stain, that day, in her mother's hair.
She leaves that place the way she came in. Falling.
'God is an all-pervasive, impersonal spirit'.
She writes this in her journal. The mystical experiences keep coming.
It is dusk. She is lying on grass at Camps Bay beach, looking up at the moon between trees. And then that - one can only call it Heavenly - Presence. Like in those religious paintings, Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam', with God on a cloud, touching the tip of the human hand with His own.
The natural world - trees moving in wind, clouds scudding across sky - is suddenly, radiantly transformed. As if she is in some holy fresco. This is not a random moment of wannabe mysticism. Divine Love, ineffably tender, enfolds her. She is swathed in a peace so utterly perfect that she whimpers aloud.
One does not talk of such things. At 19. One talks of music pop stars make & lip gloss & when was your first time? One scarcely knows one is seeking, one hardly knows one is lost. And she, typical western adolescent, must find herself by losing all she thinks she's expected to be; by breaking all the shackles that bind her to the material world.
She (typical western adolescent!) leaves Africa behind for other lands. A child with the world a kaleidoscope in her hands. Her destination: Israel. Not because she is Jewish. She is no Zionist; she is a member of nothing, belongs to no-one but herself. Thank you, Ayn Rand, for confirming that I am the Fountainhead. I Am. Only one thing I am as utterly certain of as you, ms Rand. We are not sinners needing a Saviour.
So now she is in this ancient land. She, with mystic instinct, senses God. Here, here is God. In ancient olive trees, footprints on stony earth. Still Christ fills her consciousness. Christ the shepherd, mystical flock. She is enamoured with Jesus but hates him with the same breath. Gentle Jesus meek and mild. Wishy-washy worm of mankind dying on that repungent cross. Impotent & spineless god! Bah! Stuff & nonsense! That Bible drivel, that book concocted by men mad, probably, as Hitler. The opium of the masses.
At the day hospital they had had art therapy. Heavy-browed adults went around with frowns, interpreting their collages with incisive eyes. Her My Life collage had little mice holding balloons and a picture of the bleeding heart of jesus at the top. The mice were people like her mother, who held onto an empty promise of eternity because they found the world we live in too much to bear. They asked what does this mean and you mumbled from a volcano of frustration and they criticized you for not sharing. Did they not hear her silent screams to the so-called God?
But now in Old Jerusalem on Christmas Eve. Yerushalayim shel zahav. Jerusalem of gold. Where the Jewish Quarter, sitting like ancient prophet bent & broken-hearted, is juxtaposed with tall tower topped with a cross that peaks triumphantly into a star-laden sky.
Crowds of people around her, chattering, festive. Why are they not looking up to that huge star hanging so low in the sky? It seems so near; she could climb to the top of the spire & touch it with her fingers. She can barely tear her eyes from its massive, brilliant blaze. But the crowd move past her as if she is some invisible spectre and they the serious pilgrims, engaged in proper study of ancient sites, stone tombs.
One night, in her friend's flat in Haifa where she is staying, she weeps as never before. It's not a red-eyed, snotty kind of crying. She rocks & sobs from her inner core, for reasons she does not fully understand. A moving deep from within wounded wells. As the dark waters of chaos were moved by the hovering Spirit, stirred & churned in their depths to a great new beginning.
