South Africa: Disorientation

“I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,To stop in company with rest at evening is enough,

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough…”

W. Whitman, American Poet

It began with a 15 hour plane flight, followed by a baffling customs encounter, followed by a two hour plane flight, followed by something like sleep. “Jet lag” is woefully inefficient. This is obliteration, a scrambling of all things familiar, devastation of righteous and wholesome thinking. I am only an animal now. I stalk the streets with naked feet, eating as I go. I snort and growl. The sky is unfamiliar. I wait for the moon and greet it with a lonesome howl.

The itinerary is incomprehensibly dense, defying all but the vaguest of appreciations, obscuring everything with a hasty whipping fog of discoveries and revelations. It is a rushed meal where tasting (let alone savoring) is impossible. One can only chew, swallow, and repeat, struggling against the suffocation of the next inevitable bite, nodding, smiling, “Yes, this is delicious, thank you”, teary-eyed with desperation and vague understanding. 

Our guides repeatedly ask if there are any questions. We are lousy with questions but it does not matter. There is so much more to do. And we are late.

Day 1: Arrive, depart, logistics, pick-up, dinner. It is a carnival. We are performing without knowing, singed and suffering under the stage lights. I try and hold all these new things at arms length, eager to examine and investigate but, alas, there is no time. We are late. I snap some photographs and try not to fall asleep.

Day 2: Pick-up, welcome, depart, lunch, shopping, return, leave, football, dinner, sleep. It is an elaborate dance and we do not know the steps. We gyrate like idiots, feigning enjoyment and awareness. Everything is new and beautiful – we would be fools not to smile, to arch our backs, to grin with wetted lips and pretend to belong. It is polite, after all. We are but guests here. And we must keep up. We are late. I pry my eyes open and snap more photographs.

Day 3: Depart, briefing, lunch, depart, return, leave, dinner, return. The sun looms, a grinning oppressor seeking out our hopes and smothering them with kindness, patrolling the flat sapphire sky. I pause to drop anchor and consider this gift but it is impossible. There is so much more to see and do. And we must hurry. We are late, you see.

Day 4: Depart, tour, lunch, leave, walk, return, pick-up, briefing, leave, dinner, sleep. My tongue is a disobedient interloper, swollen, ignorant, helpless. I am stifled, buried in an ocean of newness. I should get this. I should understand. I should be grateful. But time is short. Wonder and beauty are streaked, ruined, unrecognizably smeared in my memory. I cannot tell. I cannot say. It doesn't matter. There is so much left to do. I snap more photographs so I can remember, and then off we go. We are late.

Day 5: I am become dust, obscured and rendered irrelevant by the whirlwind of this, my “life changing experience”. It is a rushed cold burn. It is a hectic staccato poem. I mingle and am lost to the schedule, the meetings, the seeings, the informings, the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunities. I am perpetual and perpendicular and perpetually perpendicular. I am wide asleep. I don't know where I am or what is happening, but isn't this beautiful? Isn't this incredible? I snap more photographs and try not to fall awake.

The days carry on like this: always coming, always going, always eyes wide open. We are run about, bombarded with beauty and horror and hope and destitution and destiny and love. And then we rest, but only just enough to be able to do it all again. 

It is this again and again and again. The days' names are dissolved and washed away by this waterfall of rituals. I do not know what day it is because it does not matter. We are worshiping at the alter of the Church of Routine. It is necessary and taxing. It is exhausting.

This is exploring and discovering South Africa.

This is the real Cape Town.

This is almost more than I can bear.

I have become numb to wonder, immune to grandeur. I am steeped in them, buried and drowning at once. They are everywhere and everything, commonplace. I find myself longing for the mundane, the ordinary. I yearn for boredom.

This is ennui by way of over-stimulation.

I fear my dreams will soon turn against me and I'll only see Cape Town in my sleep. Each night, I lay in a stranger's bed, lost in another man's country, gripping my pillow to my chest as if the effort might stop the world from spinning long enough for me to get my bearings. 

I strain my ears for familiar sounds, praying that maybe the faintest echo of the sounds of my home still linger in the cup of my ear. I squint and it's almost as if I'm home again, as if I've only turned a corner and had a look at things from a different angle, as if I only need double back and I'll be home again.

This is not true, but I will it to be so, against hope, against reason.

Day X: Routine and ritual call me to board the bus. I am powerless to resist. I have lost my way. I have surrendered. I have closed my eyes. And then, ever so ordinarily, our bus crests a hill, and to our left, the mountain greets us, broad-shouldered and regal, the sun a glowing pendant resting on it's chest. I have no choice but to open my eyes and see this.

“The anchor is your burden” it says. “Let go.”

And though my heart cries out like a starving child, though my hands and feet feel useless and unfamiliar here, though I want nothing more than to fight, to resist, to overcome the newness, I loose my grip in spite of my fear, contrary to my instincts. I obey and let go.

And everything is beautiful again.