An Undocumented Life Is Not Worth Living
My English Traits, Chapter 14 - Pietermaritzburg, Part One
“I don't think we're alike at all, Mr. White.” – Gus, Breaking Bad
I’ve never been to Lubbock, Texas. Visiting it wasn’t on my bucket list even before I discovered that an American online poll had voted it the most boring town in the USA.
Yet it feels as if I’ve been there often; as if I have memories of it, very textured and very specific, with a very specific set of emotions attached to them—as if Lubbock, Texas, has been the consistent location of years and years of a certain recurring dream.
I can see Lubbock now. There’s a white church on the left and a gun shop on the right. There’s a CLOSED sign on the door of the diner. There’s a ragged knot of Mexicans sitting on the curb in the shade of a billboard advertising Coors Light. There are empty acres of baking asphalt outside the strip mall. In the near foreground there’s a shopping trolley with a broken wheel. The barely audible strains of a country song seem to be coming from the radio of that black pickup parked outside the liquor store.
In the wide, flat suburbs, one or two bungalows are distinguished from the others by persistent sprinklers defending their front lawns from the encroaching desert. A woman opens a window.
I can’t help feeling that something is going to go down here pretty soon. My hunch is not to expect a happy ending.
I spent six years of my life in Pietermaritzburg. In Maritzburg. But the city that was the backdrop to three formative years at Merchiston and those three seminal student years at the University of Natal, PMB, has all but disappeared, as if it had never been more than a painted picture on canvas flats, and silent stagehands had long ago removed the props that sustained the illusion of it.
Only a handful of my boarding school memories are set in the Merchiston of Pietermaritzburg in the early 1960’s. The rest are located in an English boarding school sometime between the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, a composite of Rugby or Eton welded together from the boarding school tropes of English literature: the arbitrary canings and the awful food, the cold showers and the muddy sports, the dashing prefects and the bullied fags, the homoerotic worship of muscular fly-halves, the unchristian hypocrisy of the Christianity that was the only option on the spiritual menu.
“That first night at school, hard bed, hard words, strange boys bullying, and laughing, and jarring you with their hateful merriment — as for the first night at a strange school, we most of us remember what that is. And the first is not the worst, my boys, there’s the rub.”
This wasn’t me remembering my first night at Merchiston in 1961. It was William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair, remembering his first night at Charterhouse in 1822.
They are the deeply personal, often shameful, and wholly universal memories of most young boys and girls at any English boarding school, anywhere. They are circumscribed by the walls and fences that divide incarceration from the boundless freedoms of out-of-bounds. And they are centuries out of date.
There are two things and two things only that English boarding schools are designed to teach. The first is how not to give a Teutonic toss about anyone whose parents don’t have more money than yours do. The second is to replace your foolish feelings of sympathy for other human beings with a sadistic delight in the physical punishment and emotional humiliation of them.
Forget history, geography, and maths. These are the foundational lessons upon which to build an empire.
Or, as Boris Johnson called them, “…the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America.”
True. But American kids grow up with The Catcher in the Rye. English kids grow up with Harry Potter. The first is about coming of age. The second is about never growing up.
Merchiston, Estcourt, Michaelhouse, Hilton, or Eton. The names melt into one. It’s the composite boarding school of Lindsay Anderson’s if…, the film that the actual Charterhouse refused to be the location of. And I’m right there on the rooftop with Mick Travis, and I have the gym teacher lined up in the sight of my automatic rifle. A very specific one.
Memories are the scars of the mind. Some hurt more than others. Through the haze of the years it’s difficult to know which of the original wounds were self-inflicted, and which are legacies of one of the most brutalising institutions of my English inheritance.
As with the school, so with the city. My memories may not be my own.
There was a time in my student years when I knew every turn of every one of Pietermaritzburg’s roads, and its every shop on its every street, and its every bar in its every hotel.
With enough mental effort I can recall some of the concrete details of the time and place: the gloom of St Saviour’s, the bright, bitter taste of nasturtium leaves plucked from the pavement one Saturday in crocodile-file on the way to the rugby fields on the banks of the brown Msunduzi, the lilac carpet of jacaranda petals crushed by the cars passing the gates of the university, the peppered mushrooms on toast that Dave Agar and I would treat ourselves to every Saturday morning in a little café just off Commercial Road, the juicy burgers and fat slap-chips you could get after midnight from an itinerant stall behind the City Hall when you had the munchies and everything else was closed.
The rest of the city has become a vague sprawl across the hot valley that reveals itself below when you emerge from the wet mists of Hilton.
Now Pietermaritzburg has slipped away. I remember the soundtrack better than I remember the pictures. I can hear Deep Purple, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Neil Young, but I can’t see the places where I heard them first. I remember what I read more clearly than what I observed. My body is in some memorable beds, but my head is in the 17th century Boston of The Scarlet Letter, at sea with Ishmael, or in the English Midlands of Middlemarch.
All the Young Dudes is the theme song of Little Dorrit.
There’s nothing to grasp; nothing to hold onto. It has no reality because its reality was never affirmed for me in film or fiction. It’s less substantial than the mystical Lourenco Marques we imagined as the coolest place on earth.
The tropes that make up my picture of Lubbock are readily retrievable. They lie scattered over the surface of the layers of sediment laid down in my memory by a lifetime of film, television, advertising, news, and literature set in small towns in America’s hot southern states, as easy to find as shells on the beaches of Ballito Bay.
The discomfiting mental phenomenon of it is that I can see Lubbock in a way that I can no longer see Pietermaritzburg; and I can see Lubbock without the mental effort I need to exert to see Pietermaritzburg; and the consequence of this ease of recollection — because it is a re-collection — is that an unvisited town in America feels more real, more visible, and more substantial than the capital city of my youth.
Fifty years before we started paying more attention to the recorded image of a tropical beach than to the physical presence of the same tropical beach, Siegfried Kracauer, the German sociologist and cultural critic, observed that photographs were beginning to do the work of memory: that the mechanism by which we store our past experiences, and which we’ve relied on for so long to shape the retrospective narratives of our individual lives, was becoming obsolete in the way that digital photography made Kodak obsolete.
In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 1960, he goes even further, arguing, as the title suggests, that the recording of an experience redeems that experience from meaninglessness, and that film in particular, because it captures visual and audio experience in real time, has a peculiarly powerful redemptive function — and that conversely, then, by implication, an experience un-filmed or un-recorded is as lost, is as non-material, as Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling unheard and unseen in a faraway forest.
Kracauer, who once had Theodore Adorno as a pupil, was a cineaste, an old-fashioned purist who believed film and television were two distinctly different kinds of medium, with different purposes and altogether different aesthetics. I understand where he was coming from. In those days we watched films the way he did, in rooms darkened for purpose of heightening the illusion, as if they were places of worship.
We no longer care about such fine distinctions. We can watch the beginning of a film in a cinema, the middle of it on a desktop and the end of it on the phone in our pocket without feeling cheated.
Sixty years ago Kracauer’s theory would have been of interest to a handful of academics. Now we know instinctively what he means. We are all cameramen, photographers, writers and producers, and the film that matters to us most is the one that each of us is making about our individual lives: the one that began with a montage of baby photographs in the family album, that came alive on shaky VHS, that shared its teenage anxieties on Bebo, that went viral on YouTube, that graduated to Instagram, that will grow old on Facebook, that will spend its dotage blogging in the wilderness, and that will end not with a bang but a tweet.
Socrates said an unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Now it’s an undocumented life that isn’t worth living: as if every moment that passes by unrecorded is stripped of meaning and lost to the void, and we must live with the anxiety of knowing that there is not enough media in all the world to redeem the complexity of a single day from the chaos of insignificance.
No, we can no longer rely on three pounds of squidgy organic matter to save us from existential oblivion. If we are to endure at all it will have to be as terabytes in an air-conditioned server farm sixty miles south of Lubbock, Texas.
Tropes become tropes through repetition. Repetition breeds familiarity. Familiarity used to breed contempt. Now, in the behavioural economy, it’s the gold out of which the coins of attention are minted.
New York isn’t just a city. It’s a thousand films and ten thousand songs. Long before we glimpse the outline of Manhattan through the windscreen of the airport cab we know everything about it except its smell. Whether we’ve been there are not, Paris, France, feels like a rendezvous with a long-lost lover. Ry Cooder’s sublime score makes the one-horse town of Paris, Texas, feel like a destination worth going out of our way to visit.
The content of cinema and music, literature, theatre, and television, and all of social media—artistically noteworthy or not, brilliant or execrable in execution—bestows a prestige, a value, and a feeling of worth on mundane things and forgettable places, on unfamiliar dogs and cats, on familiar and unfamiliar faces. This mechanism that ascribes a measure of value to all things animal, vegetable and mineral is the same mechanism we can’t help using to measure the value of our lives — the mechanism which is now the decisive factor in so many young suicides.
The currency of familiarity is no longer an abstraction. Its value used to be determined by a complex algorithm of clicks, views, likes, bounces, comments, and shares. Since 2007 it has been measured in nanoseconds of attention, or the universally recognised Kardashian Standard.
The advantage of the Kardashian system over the old-fashioned system of dollars and cents is that it measures the fluctuating value of everything on the planet and the universe beyond, past and present, living and dead. In real time.
Our attention spans are as fickle and forgetful as the news cycle. The value of names, faces, events, and places rise and fall in rhythms of interest, surprise, shock, outrage, acceptance, and boredom. Yesterday it was Will Smith, today it’s nuclear obliteration. Soon time will change that too, which is why a currency is called a currency.
Below the poverty line, floating meaninglessly in sub-Kardashian oblivion, are the objects, subjects, ideas, notions, names, and places that aren’t recognised by Spellcheck.
It’s a trivial thing, a measurement of nothing but the accumulated number of clicks or queries required for a word to register in Microsoft’s dumb neo-cortex. We know and accept that it has an American bias, an English language bias, and a culturally Western bias. We know that it’s a passive recipient: that it’s not an active agent searching for words of significance, not some sort of St Peter dividing the sheep from the goats at the gates of digital heaven.
But we feel its effect, nevertheless. And the more we use Microsoft Word, and the more personal the subject of our composition, the more conscious we become of its determining presence. It’s a cold intelligence passing instant judgement on the validity of every proper noun. It’s unapologetic about its decisiveness. It doesn’t have the old-fashioned search engine’s courtesy of enquiring whether we really meant what we typed into its blank field. Spellcheck says bluntly, “I do not recognise this name, this person, this place, this town, this city, this capitalised thing.” But we feel it saying, “You have made a mistake.” And when we try again it says, “What you are saying is nonsense, it is meaningless, it doesn’t exist.”
Our Maritzburg, the Pietermaritzburg of the Afrikaners abbreviated and mispronounced to serve as the capital of old English Natal, doesn’t exist.
I could turn it off, of course. But I want to fight it. I want to tell it again and again that the towns and cities and landmarks on the geographical map of my childhood matter — have always mattered, still matter, will always matter. To me they matter. It was Maritzburg to me.
Adding them to “my dictionary” is not an answer, it’s a capitulation. I want to see those red underlines everywhere on every page. I want them to stand like flags of victory, pyrrhic or not, marking every single one of my raids on oblivion.
As with all of today’s conflicts the battleground is epistemic, a war between what we know we know and what others think we need to know. It was ever thus in the world of politics and geo-politics. The difference today is only that you can smell the gas.
But the battle between who we think we are, as individuals, and what others would have us believe we are, is the more fractious and the more bitterly fought.
We pay a high price for constructing our personal identities. We pay it in the guilt we feel at separating our individual selves from the broader, more comfortable, identity of home and family; in that necessary and necessarily painful wrench away from brother and sister, from mother and father; and then from classmate, school, team, gang, town, city, county, and province. We carve it out of work, mobility, property, and money. Those of us who feel we have something new to bring to the world have to carve it out of the granite of society’s indifference.
Not all of us achieve that. Most of us will stop somewhere on the journey between. But to go beyond that, to let go of culture and country, is something different. Because to go further would be to sever personal identity at its root, to come face to face with insubstantiality, with what George Lukács called transcendental homelessness, which locates our identity everywhere and nowhere.
So now, in the brutal economy of the Kardashian system, we feel the absence of digital recognition as an absence of affirmation, an omission of acknowledgement, an erosion of personal value, and, hence, as a loss of the identity we’ve paid so much for. It’s a casual dismissal, a careless turn of the world’s cold shoulder, but it’s felt as an emptying, as a hollowing out. It’s deeply private, and profoundly existential.
Which explains that sudden frisson of validation we feel when the author of the novel we’re reading happens to mention the name of our hometown, or when the camera of the movie we’re watching captures in passing a familiar coffee shop on the familiar street of a familiar city. We know it’s irrational. The coffee shop was there before it was filmed and it’s still there now. But because you sat in that corner and drank that latte and looked out of that window at that self-same street, you feel instantly exalted, as if some invisible deity had swooped down to bless you and validate you; and that shiver of excitement is her caress on your cheek with perfumed fingers.
H.G. Wells’s time-traveller flees south from the unrecognisable ruins of London in search of a familiar landmark. He climbs a hill in the hope that the view from the top will give him his bearings. With that same sudden thrill of recognition he knows he is standing on the crest of Coombe Hill, and I share it vicariously because Coombe Hill is half a mile from where I am reading in bed, my head propped up by a comfy pillow.
At the end of 2012 the survivors on the great boats that have rescued them from the apocalyptic flood see salvation on the horizon in the form of a mountain range standing proud above the waters. The title tells the rest of the audience that these are the mountains of the Drakensberg. It tells me that the evening sun is slanting across Drakesleigh’s veranda, and that Wendy the Rhodesian Ridgeback is stretched out at my father’s feet, one eye watching his every move, one ear listening to his every breath; and the little ones have gathered around my mother for a story as bottle caps pop in the background and boerewors blisters on the braai; and we are all there, and all of us will always be there.
I may be an outlier, the exception that doesn’t prove the rule, but I suspect that the more remote we are from the production centres of contemporary culture, from New York, London, and Hollywood, from the catwalks of Paris, from the design studios of Milan, from Tokyo cool and Silicon Valley, from the East Coast authors and the Nashville songwriters, the more desperately we long for public acknowledgments of our existence and public affirmations of our value. And as long as the will-o’-the-wisp of personal glory remains elusive we will seek out its ineffable grace in the light of its reflections, the intensity of which we can measure precisely in the degrees that separate us from the luminous object. It’s experienced as the lure of bright lights, and its apotheosis comes as a selfie with George Clooney.
The bright lights of Hillbrow inspired me to pack a mattress, a deckchair, and a clean pair of socks into my Datsun 1200 bakkie and head for Johannesburg. But I remember it also as an escape, the relief of seeing Mooi River in my rear-view mirror, of putting the lowlands of Ladysmith and Estcourt behind me as I climbed Van Reenen’s Pass.
But maybe I was just more desperate than most, less secure in my identity, more needy for recognition, more susceptible to doubt. Because I did push on past the limits of culture and country, and I lost myself in Sao Paulo and Houston and Copenhagen and Hong Kong, and I made Karine and my children homeless in Mexico City and London. Now my Englishness smirks back at me in the mirror, and English tastes bitter in my mouth.
I don't think we're alike at all, Mr. White
Fifty years before we learned how to translate the tawdry reality of our everyday lives into a glamorous showcase of our private and public assets, Adorno captured the problem beautifully:
“In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.”
The painted dreams of American films and English novels cheated me out of the certain happiness of home. Or maybe I’m just now learning the truth of another of Adorno’s precepts: “To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.”