Scudding Cloud
I’ve started to dream about blue skies.
Not Karoo blue sky, not West Coast blue sky, not East Coast blue sky, not even Free State blue sky or the blue skies of the Eastern Cape highlands. My dreams are all about Jozi blue skies. It’s a special thing, this Highveld blue sky.
Sitting at over 1700m above sea level, with an official population estimate around six- million human-shaped beings; there’s likely a lot more than that number of people stuffed into what is quickly becoming a derelict city. This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s studied economics or environmental sciences. Johannesburg was formed as a mining village. And in modern economics, once a mine has been stripped bare; the money and her people, move on. Human settlements built around mines tend to be temporary in nature.
‘But Jozi’s been here for over a hundred years already, that’s’ a BS theory’, says the teenager who studies neither economics nor environmental sciences. Visiting relative raises her eye’s over her ‘like how they make tea in Durban” cup at the casual use of BS but quickly goes back to her pinging phone. She tells me later, ‘It’s odd being only a year older than the teenager in numbers but through family, being essentially his aunt. I don’t know if I should box his ears at the regular and casual swearing or box your ears for that’
‘Ha, not my ears, I’m only an occasional visitor here, the teenager’s casual adoption of what some might consider vulgar language has likely very little to do with me’
‘Au contraire dear uncle, but it does, because you are the only other adult around that drops BS, FFS and the range of rude, impolite and sometimes downright vulgar words into conversations on a regular basis,’ she says; most politely.
Being chided by younger relatives is a humbling experience I think. ‘Stuff that, it’s humbling, regardless of who’s doing the chiding’ is what comes out of my mouth and visiting relative almost falls off the kitchen stool with laughter. ‘I rest my case’ she says and I get on my own case about how I ended up so casually peppering everything I say with words, phrases and terms that according to visiting relative, ‘don’t belong in polite conversation.’
Later that week I am still working this thing over in my head when I happen upon a call with the dervish. She is patient as ever, as I get this whole story out along with my current state of pondering. We exchange other news about the admin of life and the experiences of engaging with the systemic. ‘It’s becoming almost another kind of small talk’ I blurt out as we close off the entirely uninteresting happenings of engaging in the systemic. ‘I agree, it seems to me that it no longer raises such fire and ire as it did in the past; is that true?’
I smile at the use of fire and ire, the dervish never fails to use and make me see language with fresh eyes again. You really should write, I say. She turns fully towards the camera and says; ‘Why? I already have you to do that for me. Without all the drama that seems to accompany writing and writers everywhere. The odd and strange needs, the often conflicting if not conflicted people that hide under the persona and now the dark murmurings about AI and how it affects this whole tribe of people that seem to occupy far too much space in modern pop culture.’
‘I disagree about the amount of space they hold in modern pop culture.’ I chime in; ‘that honour belongs to politics.’
‘Touche’ she says ‘and that is itself a warning to the collective and individual that wears the writer cloak. That your collective, publicly perceived characteristics now sits so close to the collective known as politicians should be a shoal of herrings passing before your eyes.’
But what is it about the humans amongst us that seek to follow a path that essentially places them not in the flow of the stream but as Gibran says; watchers of the flow on the shore? Her eyes betray a flash of recognition before she quotes the actual words with a smile:
“Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing … And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.”
A few days later visiting relative has unvisited and as I get on with putting this down in writing, I smile at AI insisting ‘fire and ire’ be changed to become ‘fire and ice’ to better suit its binary limitations. Outside, it’s still all grey filling the sky over the treetops.
The teenager rolls up unannounced and after the initial tender greetings, immediately spills: ‘I don’t subscribe to visiting relatives ideas about what is acceptable as forms of exchange between us.’
I look away from the sky and add: ‘much less her judgement.’
Teenager smiles.
We both return our gaze to the sky. There is a crack in the scudding grey clouds and as we stand looking up, a patch of Highveld blue sky opens up far above.
Scudding Cloud is the reminder that existence is time as much as it is space and the often vexed negotiations thereof.
© Oppi Stoep, 2023 by Jesh Baker
