The Caffres say the day does not break twice. There are no new beginnings. But there are places that have not seen me. As soon as I settle down on the wagon chest, a wind escapes me. I swallow deep; I feel dizzy. How it stinks, the blockage that made a responsible citizen of me. I erupt: it is exhilaration. I crack the whip. The oxen come into motion. We trudge through the kloofs towards the open spaces. My view shall no longer be occluded by mountains and by trees. My eyes are seeking an uninterrupted prospect; I want to see the earth unfolding to the horizon. A landscape that you cannot fence in, cannot break up into smaller divisions, cannot divide up into manageable gobbets of sense. An expanse in which you can’t make yourself at home. I’m letting go, I grow smaller in a breadth that grows greater. I want to range far until I become a dot and vanish.
The last stars are still hanging in the sky when the sun starts showing itself. The paper flower drops from my chest. I squash a last termite underfoot. I hand the whip to Maria next to me on the wagon chest. I fold open the paper. It’s a last map. Or, at least, parts of the scrawlings look like little bits of map. The folds of Toktokkie’s flower draw new boundary lines on the ink lines. I fold in the four corners, trying to reassemble the flower. When the points meet in the middle, I see a meticulous map of Swellendam. Like the wanderer’s first maps, fine and precise. I fold the corners over once more. The surface now much smaller, with a next map appearing, this one of the whole Colony. Once more I force the corners together, decipher the traveller’s last riddle. Now I see the whole of Africa. It becomes more difficult to fold in the corners. The scrap of paper gets smaller and my hands struggle to hold it. After the next folding over there is a small terrestrial globe. When I fold the corners in once more, the little block of paper now almost as thick as it is wide, a tiny die lies in my hand, on each face the dotted stars of the firmament.
1814 –
1
Beyond the border of the Colony everything is always only outside. Even in your wagon tent at night the dew and wind shudder through the chinks, the cold cuts all the way into your rheumatic bones. Nothing can be stitched up close enough to keep the outside out. After a few weeks you smell like the veldt, you curl up at night like an animal. If you sit on horseback for long enough, you sometimes hear sounds streaming over your lips from deep down in your throat. On the trek time functions differently. Yesterday is just as clear and impossible as tomorrow. Today an infinite succession of fainting spells, flashes and compulsions. The force of the world obliterates you.
Look into the compound eye of the fly on my arm. The whip cracks; the fly zooms away over the plains. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Your books, reader, speak of a primal bang, that first crack of the whip, the first wrathful bellow. See, a jagged lightning bolt; the zigzag route of a fly; the world appears.
The first crack of the whip, and the cosmic oxen lurch forth into the furthest reaches. Things start stirring. Dense and warm and close beyond all measure, with lightning-swift expansion and cooling down. The cosmos explodes out and open.
Elementary particles start burgeoning. Sweltering; the particles buzz unpredictably. That which is and that which is not collide ceaselessly until there is more that is than what is not. More dust than nothing. The Transorangia or the beginning of time? You might well ask.
Criss-cross through time and space, Fly. Look with all your eyes. Make your lenses arc into infinity. The whole conglomeration grows older and colder. Flitter your wings until you become a blur of motion. Can you feel things starting to attract one another? How glutinous gravity descends on creation? How it wants to put an end to all the flying around? Your wings grow sticky and heavy as you acquire mass. Gaseous clouds congeal and become stars and constellations and milky ways. Be careful where you flutter, the universe is filling up.
Everything was closer together in the past. Close to the hearth of the universe it is colder and slower. I see you smirk: the universe or old Coenraad Buys? But see out there at the extremities! There the cosmos itself scatters. Flitter your wings! Far away from where things float loose and lone, far beyond the silt of gravity, stars shoot apart. The farther away, the faster they shoot. They tear away from one another because the distance between them expands. The space, the nothing, between them grows, without the stars themselves moving. Sometimes it is distance that moves, not us. Fly away, impossible Fly!
And God said: Let there be light! and there was light. You, Fly, speed through time, faster than light, but we here on the wagon, our light is not fast enough to catch up with that which is ever shooting faster and further away from us. The future we will never see. And also the light of primal things has not reached us yet. Heavenly fires long since extinguished will still shine forth tonight. We live in the light of dead stars.
You glide forth, but slower; movement becomes more arduous. The primal bang and everything fires up, but ever since then everything is a tying up, tidying up and dividing up. Shoot into a rocky crevice. See how things down here mutter and sputter until they grow gravid. Whoosh up, away from the iron core, up from out of the molten magma, through the melting amniotic fluid of fire, the semi-stone semi-flame slowly solidifying, away, upwards, through time and rock formations. Shoot over the waters, the substratum that arises from under you and dries out, over sand and stones, over the earth’s crust where continents slowly tear apart and collide.
See, everything finds its place and name. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. The pinnacle of the Great Tying-up: the organisation of organs into organisms. Ha! The particles and gases congeal into creatures, later mutate into humanoids. The life that chains you to the soil, so fast that you no longer want to let go. Your wings carry you further through time until you have to dodge rocks fatally plummeting to earth. Ice and dust fall into the sea from the backs of meteorites and the spark of life flames up. The tails of creatures start to twitch. In that small warm puddle full of salt and light and currents God breathes his breath into us. His breath stinks of ammonia.
Everything that lives and breathes is a stranger on this blue clod. Earth tolerates life, but she did not give birth to it. No wonder you can’t settle down. No wonder you never feel at home. No wonder you’re forever wanting to fly up and away. Go then, ascend and survey the wide expanses: you’ll find no fatherland. There are tracks in the sand and stories about the tracks and for the rest only longing and wind.
Careful, old Fly: God – or the focking governor, through whichever of your multiple eyes you care to look – sets nets around the chaos. The compressed nothing has exploded in time and space and ever since God and governor have tried to reclaim every cubic foot and moment. If you want to get away from gravity, you must trek across the Gariep. Not even the gulls can get airborne in the Cape any longer. Begone, World!
See, a fly settles on the third-last ox. The whip cracks. Fly across the Gariep.
Shoot through the eighteenth century, across the rust-brown plains beyond the Great River. Sheer across the vague spider’s web of light in the night. Little clusters of people around fires; the fires far apart. Sometimes knotted together like the nodes in shallow roots. Nomads extend themselves across the plains, they cling to openness.