Miles and miles lost to ourselves in sideways glances from bouncing buses. Good years of good lives spent watching and smiling beyond our greasy half-reflections. I’ve been bored, I’ve felt profound. I’ve been a dozen different doppelgängers in a thousand running landscapes and zip flipping paint on bare black roads. Read the rest of this entry »
Unplugging the little white earplugs, I’m assaulted by the airport. It beats down on me with announcement, badly covered music and self-important conversations. Airport announcements always given in that ‘this is important’ voice that never comes through clearly. Or perhaps the private-school accented announcer has a mouthful of marbles. Or marshmallows. Or a deformity.
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It’s late and my eyes burn a little. My clock says its sometime after midnight. It feels like it’s always sometime past midnight, but there are journal articles to be read. Things to learn. It’s the third week into my Masters in Media Studies at Rhodes. I’m almost halfway through the readings for the semester so far. One journal article at a time. In the background of the otherwise quiet room, Satellite by BT is playing softly.
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[Sketched on the back of a napkin at many thousands of feet somewhere between Kampala and Kigali]
With the passing of the Great Ruler, it came to be that his eldest son – long spoken of fondly throughout the kingdom – would ascend to his throne. A date was fixed for his royal coronation, and word of the new ruler-to-be began to spread slowly through the land through the merchants and musicians and other sorts of folk who live, in part, through stories and gossip with those they meet along their travels.
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It’s night. It’s late and there is much to do tomorrow. Life and adventure wait on the other side of sunrise and it’s been a while since I wrote from the heart. So here is something to say I remember.
‘Today is gonna be the day…”
A sign slicing by reports only four hundred kilometres until Johannesburg, before being lost behind me. Lost in the dead flat Free State fields. I’m not checking the mirror today. There’s enough behind me.
One block left in the journalism syllabus for the year. An elective we could choose out of a range covering everything from photojournalism to long-form writing. I had intended so absolutely to dedicate my energies to photojournalism – yet swapped in a moment’s delicious decision to writing. It felt right. It felt explosion-in-your-heart, down-to-your-stomach-beautiful-moment perfect. Meant to be. Monday’s writing assignment? Why I write.
Bodhisatta (n): In the Pali canon, the Bodhissata Siddhartha Gotama is described thus:
Before my awakening, when I was an unawakened Bodhisatta, being subject myself to birth, sought what was likewise subject to birth. Being subject myself to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement, I sought happiness in what was likewise subject to illness… death… sorrow… defilement.
Those first blank pages are intimidating. Judgmental. As though the entire book might be spoiled with the careless stroke of a pen. As with any superstition, I don’t believe it. Not rationally anyway. But I go and buy six of my favourite pens. Just in case. Don’t go to the ball without a tuxedo, y’know?
Fingers press the stories insistently into the keyboard. Sometimes gently, or sarcastically, or desperately weaving something that happened into a wordpicture that my smile – or yours – will find in some time hence. Sometimes finding a story is hard. Sometimes finding it is easy, but recalling it is harder. Memory fades and few stories remain untarnished under time’s gentle and persistent breath. Other times they are as close as the ring that brushes the space bar. A gentle discomfort whose value keeps it close.
Away from telling stories for a second, and on to asking questions of travel writing. Stylistically and storytellingly (yes, that is a word now) At Matador, the question occasionally pops up as to what makes for honest, compelling travel writing – the stuff that makes you read to the end, leaves an impression and makes you want to do something, change something, see things differently? In journ. class, particularly the literary style course, there are questions of how to make a story which is more than simply a recounting of events, how to connect a story so that it engages, moves the reader. For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts on what can work.