Proof of Life
No, for none of the reasons we are trained into thinking we should be grateful for — we should be grateful.
September 2021; Durban, South Africa
It’s the wee hours of the morning. It’s properly chilly, dark and the wind occasionally shifts and carries the faint whiff of unburnt diesel from the neighbours (thankfully almost silent) generator. There’s no load shedding as the local power company calls it — I’ve just turned on the kitchen lights before stepping out on the balcony — but this neighbour is almost always running the generator. Likely he’s got a massive herbal grow facility tucked away under the house or something equally dodgy going on.
The horizon is the same inkinesss all the way up to the line of ships lights in the outer anchorages of the city’s port. Once the busiest in the hemisphere, it’s slowly but steadily losing ground to other emerging ports in the South, some would say this is due to mismanagement and incompetence and likely there’s that too but also let’s not forget the world as we all know and co-create it; is properly changing. At snails pace admittedly but I’ve never met a snail that was lost — so we’re doing all right by that reckoning.
This sea-change as some might call it means that the routes that have served lumbering hulks of modern cargo ships for a century are going to change too. And this might affect my birth city’s status as the busiest port in the hemisphere. Which is a obsession of rabid capitalism — this uber-ness, this biggest, busiest, most profitable, most what what who even gives a fuck except those still sitting there trading futures on commodities they don’t even own, with money that comes from other people — mostly working people’s pensions and taxes via government bailouts when the poo hits the fan.
This is the little crowd of cats that determine what a kilogram of sugar costs in the shops. This coterie of ivy league and old school moneyed and generally white-male privileged (read dating all the way back to slavery & colonialism) bunch — and of course their obedient house servants in a range of hues and sometimes even gender — because representation matters; while they maintain their places in their self-created pecking order by posting these Sunaks (and their ilk) at the front doors of their barricaded privileges.
But I digress — the sky is inky and these ships with their twinkling night-time lighting look like fairy jewels on the horizon between the surging liquorice of the water below and the stardust of the milky way above. It’s the kind of magical beauty that snuggles up inside you and stays there forever — no matter where the path and the journey may take you.
I can’t help smiling to myself and saying a prayer of thanks for the journey that has brought me here to this quiet, cold, astonishingly beautiful two-am view of the milky way over the sea, from a sheltered balcony, in a little village on the periphery of Durban; in this holy land; while a pandemic rages and cavalier capitalists shoot all their guns on the dying body of our current economic system. And the planet too.
Because it won’t be long before we have space bros like we got tech bros the last time round. We’re out of here bro — I’m telling you, the moon, the international space station (it’s going private bro, we’re building a little gated community up there).
Ja, that’s where we at; but this view — this silence and it’s thundering pendulums of crashing waves; of wind whipping gently about, salt spray in the air and a beautifully roasted blend gently percolating up in the Bialetti. Not a peep from a single bird, not a car, not even a footfall on the street below. A silence and stillness that rivals a winter Karoo night all around and then this pounding thunder as a breaker reaches the end of it’s ride on this shore below. And all above paved with a billion gems of every size, the sheer magnificence of our own little milky way.
A Dervish once reminded me that every breath we take is a testament to the existence of the great being — that each breath is not merely literally life-giving but also proof of life — what it looks like when G-d posts a selfie. And here stands this puny human shaped thing holding my being in it’s ageing, dying form and my mind trapped in seeing my being through these eyes that have always been a bit weak — trying to digest the meaning contained in knowing that every single breath I take is a miraculous thing because it is. Not because I stopped breathing on my own a while back and had to be brought back; not because there was that gun stuck against my temple with a very willing finger on the trigger; not because there was that growth that could have been that horrible thing; not because so many younger, fitter, richer, more handsome and better bred ones in the family have succumbed and I am still here. No, for none of the reasons we are trained into thinking we should be grateful for — we should be grateful, said the dervish.
I’m still working out her guidance — but standing on this spot of ground — my pied on this terre, looking at this magnificence unfold and manifest before me, I’m inclined to believe a little more; to feel this belief bubbling up inside me. I share this revelation with the dervish a few weeks later over a coffee on her balcony.
Her response? Great, that’s well done — now can you feel that belief here and now in this moment — in this dusty, hazy, warm day, the wind absent, this mass of humanity a floor below — the stench of the outdoor toilet that the boundary fence has become, strong in our noses. Can you believe in the hope of a secure day, enough meet your needs and pay your black tax and not feel financially insecure — in all this real life chaos — happening right now to so many of us — in this moment — in this madness, in these fears, in this pain and anxiety, in this messy, dirty, untidy, chaotic daily life of being human at the end of a era of humanity, can you feel that belief bubbling up inside you like you did that magnificent early morning?
I stare at her.
In a bit, she stands up, signalling the end of our time and says “bring me some more of this very nice coffee when you do”.
Proof of Life is a lightly fictionalised account of events and any similarities to people, dead or alive is entirely unintentional. Except the Dervish, she’s as real as they come, just ask Keanu.
© Jesh Baker 2021 All Rights Reserved
