The ocean world is like one enormous, voluptuous wilde tannie siren calling us through the eons to get down and boogie at the beach.
One laser-sharp image has punched through this technological smog.
On Saturday morning, at Orient Beach, after the parkrun and a bibbering-jibbering 12∞C 3km “parkswim” I was lurking with Hetty, the 1200GSA adventure motorcycle near the lifesavers shack.
It’s that time of day I love when all organised sporting and cultural gatherings have come, done their thing, packed up and left.
It’s a spit-second of great nihilistic emptiness or a vast expanse of reckoning, a moment of life on Earth that is less noisy, less cluttered, simply less of us and more of what has existed for more than four billion years, this sand, sea and sky.
It’s quite a test of character to stand in natural quietude and let your thoughts and feelings spill out everywhere because there is no-one there to witness it.
You are all alone, something our anglers, walkers, divers, swimmers, paddlers, sailors, surfers and the like do all the time.
Yes, there is also wonderful sociability — tea, rusks and chatter in the parking lot at Reef, or Gonubie — but the essence to be savoured is of being at one with what remains of the wild Earth and our wild natures.
Technically, what we are experiencing is a brain blast of our naturally-produced anandamide molecule, (N-arachidonoylethanolamine), a neurotransmitter which releases a feeling of joy in the body.
In Sanskrit, the word for joy and happiness is “ananda” but in post-modern times our anandamide — hopefully released by your journey into the last remains of nature — is known as “the bliss molecule”.
Today, that burning ember of recognition arrives in a posh SUV, not flashy but quietly meneer.
Out hops a man in a swim wetsuit. He opens the boot and lifts out, with one hand only, a sweet, hardy-looking kid’s mountain bike.
Into view comes this bouncy boy, aged 10 or 11, but he is already wearing a high-tech bucket-style mountain bike helmet.
This laaitie literally grabs the bike, leaps on and pedals off with great vigour towards the vintage, faded colonial antee, Orient Pier.
The ballie zips up, and gets out onto the sand running up and down, warming up for his lifeguard accompanied swim and that half Ironman event we used to have but has since relocated to Mossel Bay.
At one point, he is jogging in silhouette and behind him his son working hard to keep up with dad on the sand.
It is such a fabulous image, and only those who have lived through apartheid and post-democracy can appreciate that the runner, the biker, the two other people using their phones to take selfies, and the lifeguard are all African.
I grew up on these beaches, I lived in the white apartheid bubble. I lived outside it too, and it was a punishing existence.
But here we are 56 years later, and what was once a shoal of white people slathered in factor three sunscreen occupying the sands, is now a fully integrated non-racial African scene.
I hold that moment dear. Others might not get it — you have to have lived through it all to get the full, satisfying impact of this simple dad-and-son interaction.
At some point, I comment to the dad that his son looks like he wants to race too.
“He will be, soon,” he responds.
My next out-of-mind and body experience also takes me by surprise.
The friend and I are headed to the Guild, I am told. One of our swimming group, Janine, is going to be on the stage playing her string instrument.
It’s the weirdest time of the week, a Monday night, but we are all invited to “Come Together” to a “Beatles string octet” where we will “experience the music of The Beatles in a completely new way”.
Now a trip to the Guild starts off with having to extricate yourself from a web of apathy and excuses, general social sloth dressed up in reasons to not go.
But the moment you cross that line and get off your imaginary or real bed, the fever of real art in a real theatre starts to percolate.
By the time we have entered the red-carpeted foyer and dived in and dibbsed the best seats in the house, and are seated peering through the curtained-framed black stage, I am feeling transported. It’s all a-go-go!
There is a simple set — eight chairs in a rectangle in which we, the audience are the fourth line.
For the record, the Beatles were radical in East London.
That song, Come Together, was a signature for our lives down at the beach and was a groove in the heads of many of us as we danced around those massive bombs rolling in from the outside at the Reef.
But hold! Where am I really to be having so many escapist thoughts?
The Guild Theatre was built in 1962 on this somewhat typical basis: the community found R6.8m (today’s prices), national government gave R5.9m and our local city council loaned us a matching R5.9m for the build — the more things change, the less things change.
So people, this is our community space, paid for by us, our own dough and the money we stump up for our government.
It is our launching pad to the otherworld, of arts and pure pleasure, pure, organically-made, dopamine — our homemade bliss molecule.
And that is what happened. The massive time and energy spent by musos Jacques du Plessis with Wendy Benito assisting in rearranging, and re-magining the music of the global giants, for four violins, two violas and two cellos was transformed into a soaring experience which, I venture, all music-lovers around the world would have relished as much as we did.
There was something eerie and witty about having AI Paul McCartney’s narrative filling the auditorium space with telling us how sound becomes colour, of rock n roll being painted in classical textures and how we are entering the whole realm of the sonic symphonic.
It was utter fabulosity, and the three-quarter full house had no qualms — in a city whose theatre-going audiences are notoriously shy and geknyp — in getting up on their hind legs and giving their artists a proper, belting ovation.
People, you close your eyes, you savour the experience, you get over the little you and let the big you rise, with hands clanging noisily and yells of “Yaaahhhh!” and “More!” Like you do when the Boks score on television.
The start of Yesterday was like slow honey rising and falling, and if anything, I wished they had slowed it down even more just to draw out the gorgeousness of the first F major home key and then on to McCartney’s searingly melancholic E minor seventh chord start as he sings Yesterday.
And then off it goes to A7, a secondary dominant which pulls the harmony towards the minor territory. You know, the sweet sad stuff we need to work our way through this k*k world.
But really, all I wanted was at some point there to be the drop made famous by the house of Budda-Bar in Paris and for the stage to explode into a massive fusion of amapiano, or kwaito, or some dubstep, electronic lounge, downtempo, organic deep house, Afro trap, hip-hop, gqom, and contemporary jazz.
That is in my dreams, but tonight our musical champions have led us from our dull horrible world of war, extraction, dispossession, gas lighting, all the modern demons made infamous by the 1597 King James VI-funded and commissioned work, Daemonology, which led to 87,000 independent-minded women being burned at the stake.
Tonight we are free and flying. All our troubles seem so far away.
- All gratitude to Onaipo Productions’ Jonathan Buitendag, Janine Lochrenberg, Waldo Wentzel, Dalena Mostert, Charlie Krull and Jacques and Wendy.
A Deloris recipe for your fridge:
Nations Championship: Springbok games. Kickoffs in SA time:
Saturday November 7 vs Italy, 1.40pm
Friday November 13 vs France 10.10pm
Saturday November 21 vs Ireland 6.40pm
Finals weekend: November 27 and 29 is non-stop north-south hemisphere playoffs up to the grand finale on Sunday November 29 at 6.40pm.
Will it mentally so that we shall be there!
