End Resilience
Years ago, when I wore younger skin I got to share some random airtime with another human. It was one of those art-farty fair type things with the cream of society hobnobbing and deal making and doing whatever it is that the rich and privileged do at the events staged for them. Not that regular folk were absent, in fact there were a bunch of regular middle class people there — there has to be to make the charade seem accessible and attainable to the majority of people, who will never access nor ever attain any semblance of the wealth — sorry art — on display. But back to the human who drew my attention with the emptiness in her eyes and the general sense that she was while present physically in this lofty space, her heart and mind were clearly elsewhere — and she was there too, looking at and for herself. That resonated — because despite any appearances that I had made it or had arrived — I was at that point just as ardently seeking my own heart and mind — wherever I thought it might be hidden. Of course, it never was where I thought it was — and to this day, it remains a mystery to me that we spend so much time doing things that matter so little to the actual experience of being trapped in this human form. I have at least learnt enough to know that what I have always been seeking, is already present but that’s a blog and two-week silent retreat for another day.
On this day, we are gathered here my dearly beloved readers to bury this dear old friend and trope called resilience. Bury him deep so that not even Lara Croft can unearth and parade him around like a badge of honour anymore. I am done with resilience — it only exists because the default conditions under which we exist are heinously anti-human. And having developed resilience and nurtured and practiced so much resilience in my life over the past decades, I am done with this thing that only exists because our day-to-day lives are tropes — still I get labeled the misanthrope. I am in wonder at how we humans forget our form does not determine our being and we behave like the silly, mindless tropes of class and especially in the holy land, race categorisations — which are themselves made up from the days when Pa was the boss and everyone else just said ja-baas. Nee, dankie — you can keep your tropes. And especially this resilience trope. It’s not welcome here anymore. Instead spend your resilience practising time dismantling the hierarchies that make it necessary to practice resilience.
But to that other not-trope of the not-lost but seeking soul, seeking and being present while she sought and our all too brief encounter. In the midst of a busy fair, with so much going on that needed at least some of my attention that I did not attend to the heart of the matter and listen, nor she speak freely of what ailed her, what had happened to bring that deer-in-headlights stare into daily life. I could venture no more than affected joviality while all I wanted was to just sit quietly in a park, next to a brook, babbling past. To breathe in deeply of what science calls volatile organic compounds while the real volatiles are the people naming intricately regulated natural phenomena as volatile.
To share silence and listen to it breathe in a little patch of its own wonder just outside the buzzing El Dorado of this age of humanity. To feel nothing but the tension between us stretched out tautly, like a tightrope and then imperceptibly relaxed until it forms a hammock we snuggle up in with a book and a warm throw that has a story of its own to tell. To hear all we would say, without telling it all, without words needed to share how traumatic it was to experience that madness and to know we had felt more than understood each other. That we had connected and not just spoken, that we have met and not just touched hands politely across the yawning chasm of our human existences. Despite our class differences, we were both mere serving wenches at the fair; she because it was rebellion and me because I needed to pay rent and eat.
We felt and knew something more was there and we sat down quietly to give it space to unfurl gently and show us its own markings written with our blood before we knew we were destined to end up here — in this space, doing this thing to satisfy these material needs while yearning for that thing nothing could satisfy except each other; shorn of the baseness of our tethered forms and free to lift away. The connection was a mere wisp through which flowed all the being and meaning that no bond of skin, bone, flesh, paper or man-made conventions could match. A strand of a spider’s web in a hurricane, a drop of water in a tsunami, the whisper of a leaf falling in an autumn forest. That this one, sparse, fragile, gentle, tender wordless connection could encapsulate more than all the books, films, poems and stories that human existence tells us, is the stuff the connection is made of. To feel in an instant what a lifetime of shared living under written contract could never muster. The feel of the moment; the fragrance of a frangipani, endlessly repeating itself over and over in the world and connecting and reconnecting us to the experiences of feeling and seeing this not-lost but seeking soul standing there in the midst of a busy fair — looking at you, asking herself why — she felt something she did not even understand, only that she knows she wanted more of, but what she did not even know. Of herself reflected and the negative of herself and the positive of herself in another light and the missing bits of herself in that moment and the found bits of herself in another.
The tender fragility of being present in a breath and the assuredness of an endless journey, in every day — to places that can only come into existence when dreamed into life together with their separate parts mingling into what was unknown a moment before and is now the familiar warm blanket draped over us as we hang suspended in this hammock, the blaze of the fire now a glow and the Milky Way parading her magnificence above. On this little hillock in the wide spaces of the Karoo night — ohh, but wait, we’re still just here in this magical backyard garden in a golden city on a wintery night. Then, she exhales — the sound reaching me like the blast of air when the freezer door opens. We stand up together and walk away from the spot in the park by the little brook and into the hubbub of being people working at a very posh fair. Not lost, just seeking, what can only be found not with eyes, but maybe with a bruised and tender heart. And for that, not an ounce of resilience is required.
End Resilience is a delicately fictionalised take on real events from another age of being a serving wench — ohh wait.
© Jesh Baker 2023 for Oppi Stoep
