Tuesday, July 27, 2010

From the Cape to the Point ...


Cold Fire ...

I've had a camera – in one form or another – for more than three years now. A Canon A520 was swiftly replaced by the mighty S3 IS and, a year ago – after two years of heavy work, it gave way to the Nikon D60, a DSLR without auto-bracketing or intervalometer. These cameras, and the pictures they've taken, have taught me much and stand to teach me far more than I can imagine right now – not all of it about photography.

I've been fiddling with images over the past couple of weeks; making photographs. In the processing, a couple of lived truths have coalesced to realised thought.

First, a generic image, direct from the camera, is raw material for many more. No iteration of one picture is merely a copy – it is another photograph altogether. Secondly, these photographs bring themselves into being. All I can do is try to draw them out. I cannot make a photograph that does not reside in the material given me, but I can make countless with that which is there. What I draw out or 'extrude' is up to me, my native imagination, my ill-informed knowledge of what is possible, and my hammer-and-chisel skills on decidedly unremarkable computing equipment.



Suburban Warfare ...

Despite having accumulated tens of thousands of images, I'm driven to go out and take more as I find new ways of building, making, expressing, framing, or bringing photographs into being. A vast, unfathomable reservoir of possible photographs grows way beyond my capacity to process it. My filing is up to shite and I'm clueless as to how I get from A to B. I've no idea what informs my approach to each picture other than a vague restlessness to move it towards what I feel it to be. That state of being is extremely subjective – and dependent on space, time, place, and where my head is at as it juggles and shifts shades of light through trial and error.
Convergence ...
I have ascertained what others like to see, and am pleased that they occasionally do so. (I'll be forever indebted to colleagues for their criticism, advice, and feedback.) Frequently though, I find myself wondering at the bland perfection of a picture well received. I've a feeling I like to get my pictorial hands dirty rather than aim for qualified or restrictive conformity.

As for processing, there comes a time to stop. Either the image is made to the best of my ability or I have failed to make anything of it. It is either a photograph or it is not and I'm the arbiter of my success or lack thereof. I'm comfortable with what I see or I'm not; rested in its finality or dissatisfied with elements of it, ready to let it be or content to let it revert to raw material I can revisit. For a graphic illiterate, this is a fascinating education in what motivates me, in what I see and feel, and in what I choose to communicate or keep hidden – for much of the content of my galleries is decoy material, written off but not removed, the trappings of a former self left to mislead.



Into the sun ...
Finally, and I guess most importantly for this dilatory blog, Mike Golby's Cape Point has grown geographically from where I took that first shot of the caverns beneath Cape Point's cold sea cliffs – and decided to follow the lens to the chill tunnels leading into the rock, to encompass the Cape Peninsula or anywhere else I might find myself with my camera. It's a qualitative shift from chronicling images of a place to trying, wherever I find myself, to discern the photograph in what I see.

I guess I should now admit it – photography's becoming something of a hobby for me. And yep, I will grow out of the D60, move on to more advanced cameras and better lenses, and – one day – get that shot I'm looking for.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Cape Point: Good Friday ...

The coastal road ...


Three trees outside Simonstown ...


Cape of Good Hope ...


Sun over Smitswinkelvlakte ...


Towards Olifantsbos, Sirkelsvlei, the Krom River, and Bonteberg

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Against the wind ...



Light ...

The Phyllisia, an unprepossessing wreck off Bobbejaanshoek since 1968, is not all that far from the dunes at Platboom. Reaching the end of the dunes, you walk north across sandy marshland past Potbank to the boulder-strewn coast skirting Bloubergstrand – under the ominous shadow of Groot Blouberg, to Gifkommetjie.

This particular stretch is home to myriad gulls, cormorants, Sacred Ibis, oyster catchers, hawks and crows. At low tide, the coast is more forgiving than at Blouberg and a short walk beneath Kommetjieberg takes you to the wreck. It's pretty pointless picking your way across the rocks of the two bays preceding Hoek van Bobbejaan so, at Blouberg, make sure you find the hiker's path leading through the marshes. Table Mountain National Park makes the walk a doddle with a path comprising boulders carefully positioned for walkers with short legs.


Cloud ...

If you're unfit, I'd strongly advise against doing what I did on Monday. Finding an old track leading inland at Bloubergstrand, I followed it, figuring it might skirt Rondeheuwel and drop me on the road leading down to Platboom. Well, it did and it didn't. About halfway up Rondeheuwel I looked back and reckoned Blouberg to be a long way back and the coast leading to Platboom both far off and a long way down.

So I forged on.

There's something about long, sandy gradients. They're hell on the legs and the track, which meanders up the hill, did become a drag. With insufficient variety in the fynbos and limited water, I had no idea where the trail would end. I walked up between Rondeheuwel and the hillock overlooking Platboom and sat down to consider the wisdom of spontaneity in the company of three grysbok. I'd added several kilometres to my walk and was on a path that could see me wandering the Smitswinkelvlakte till sunset.

As it turned out, I didn't needn't have worried. I left the buck, strolled over the hill and walked slap bang into Dias’s Cross and the road a kilometre up from Platboom.


Wind ...

The following day, a south-easter howled in off the sea but I was still able to spend most of my time mucking about in the dunes. They're a constant reminder of the ever-changing coast. Four or five years ago, when summer's wind started a cycle of three-month blows and winter delivered a series of heavy tides, the back of the dunes were blasted out and spread towards Potbank. On the other side of the point, beneath the lighthouse, the beach slid into the sea – leaving only rocks and exposure to the tides.

I sense change in the wind. The dunes are growing again and we might, in a couple of years, see the point's beaches raised a few metres.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Walking ...


Savannah ...

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word form sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honourable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
“When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.

“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me Lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.”
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least,—and it is commonly more than that,—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbours who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and housebred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing—and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works—for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilisation and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market—man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, me- thinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD

Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan –
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone,
Close to the bone
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you might be.
What king Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.


Kilimanjaro ...

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle,—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. “The world ends there,” say they; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” It is unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize historyand study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,—which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,—that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,—affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and if I were a broker I should probably take that disturbance into account.
“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar,
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says: “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World…. The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “From what part of the world have you come?” As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.” To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World…. The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.

Linnæus said long ago, “Nescio quæ facies læta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants;” and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanæ bestiæ, African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man—as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of læta and glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered? To Americans I hardly need to say,
“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vineclad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of to-day and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.


Tundra ...

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitæ in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odour of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man—a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.” Ben Jonson exclaims,
“How near to good is what is fair!”
So I would say,
“How near to good is what is wild!”
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there—the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box; even graveled walks—to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—“Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded…. In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say: “On reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould,—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilised nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrowbones.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,—“Leave all hope, ye that enter,”—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included—breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, her wild man, a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct. The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Platte, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.


Fynbos ...

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says—“The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole—Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame: and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge—Gramática parda, tawny grammar—a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will can Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers,—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance some times is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: [Greek],—“You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing.” say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist.—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto wariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.
“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world [Greek], Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.


Riverine ...

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin—China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!

We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three-score years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court-week,—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had even seen the like before, but wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has even seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,”—and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

Henry David Thoreau

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Topological Sorrows

Perspectives on a Changing Way of Life in Oral Histories from the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill Areas

Silke Heiss University of Cape Town

from African Studies, Vol 60: Issue 1, 2001



Bonteberg ...

This paper emerged out of six months of oral history research conducted for the University of Cape Town Western Cape Oral History Project between May and October 1995. Interviews were held with a variety of people whose lives were, or had been, in some way or another connected with the natural environment in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 1). Material was gathered with the intention of comparing various perceptions of, and modes of articulating, the natural environment. Differences in language, class, education and occupation, race, age, and gender among a total of 28 interviewees thus affected the analysis.

Broadly speaking, three basic types of articulation suggested themselves in the interviews: performative (or oral-gestural), descriptive (or literary), and finally, utterances which situated themselves ‘between’ these two by superimposing aspects of both. Interestingly, it was in this third, intermediary category that nostalgia for a ‘lost space’ was most apparent. Interests which recalled the natural environment as physical space and food resource, on the one hand, and as visual space and leisure resource, on the other, emerged as perhaps the most compelling aspect of the comparison. The above three types of discourse were, furthermore, grounded in the interviews, which ranged from marginalised subsistence to upper-middle-class professional lives. ‘Between’ these extremes were to be found, again, semi-subsistence, working-class/lower-middle-class existences, whose statements on the natural environment portrayed it as both a food and leisure resource, as well as physical and visual space. This shift in focus possibly demands more input on questions of memory and nostalgia, that is to say, the apprehension of vanished lives in vanished landscapes which formed the bulk of the interview material.

The paper provides, firstly, an overview of the common geographical space in question. Secondly, theoretical background to the topic, research methodology and sample are briefly discussed. Finally, interview material is explored in detail by juxtaposing perceptions of changing ways of life in the abovementioned cross-section of interviewees.

The Common Space


North to Slangkop ...

The interviewees mentioned in this paper have led significant portions of their lives in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 2). Of these, the Cape of Good Hope enjoys greater international status in terms of its historical and strategic importance on the sea route to the east, as well as, more recently, ranking highly as a tourist destination (Winberg 1991). The purchase of some of the farmlands on the southern portions of the Peninsula by the Cape Divisional Council during the late 1920s and 1930s led to the establishment in 1939 of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve (Odden and Lee:n.d.). From its southernmost tip at Cape Point, the Reserve stretches northwards covering an area of 7 750 hectares to its boundary which spans Smitswinkel Bay on the east coast to Schuster’s Bay on the west (see Map 2).

In terms of its physical proximity to the Reserve, Red Hill could easily — at least conceptually — be included within the bounds of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. Individuals who have resided eastwards near the Klawer Valley area (reserved for military purposes) as well as at Bothakamp, Maylands and Brooklands to the north (see Map 2) also consider themselves to have lived at Red Hill. While Red Hill itself is therefore just a 255,6m peak north-west of Simon’s Town, the Red Hill area as a whole denotes a range of former farms and military camps on the northern, southern and south-western slopes of Red Hill ‘behind’ Simon’s Town (Burman 1962:137).

Although uninhabited today, there is evidence that scattered fishing colonies lived within the Cape of Good Hope area during the present century. In the early 1940s they were compelled to leave so that game could be introduced into the newly declared Nature Reserve. By way of contrast — probably because of its proximity to Simon’s Town — Red Hill was and remains populated by peri-urban communities closely related by class and kin, some of whose history at Red Hill goes back at least a hundred years (Leatt 1967:4; West 1967:9). For most of this century, Red Hill was populated by a predominantly coloured community of about 500 men, women, and children (Leatt 1967:1). In the late 1960s the enforcement of the Group Areas Act in the Simon’s Town District dispersed the community across the greater Cape Town area, although many of its members remain relatively close by, living in the formerly coloured township of Ocean View.

Ironically, although the coloured families were moved out of what then became a ‘white area’, Red Hill today supports a thriving settlement of about 150 or more black ‘squatter ’ families, many of whom appear to be from Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape. Moreover, a preponderance of undeveloped and largely uninhabited land distinguishes the area. The narrow Peninsula is embraced by both the Atlantic and Indian oceans which have provided both recreational as well as full-time fishermen with substantial seafood resources over the centuries (Hallinan 1992:85; Kirkaldy 1988:19) . Some ex-Red Hill residents felt that the proximity of the sea was an ‘invitation ’ of sorts to go fishing:
…we used to [fish] for fun. Where we stayed [Red Hill Farm] actually we could see Olifantsbos [see Map 2] — you know just that little bay there, and we could see from our back door if it was high tide or low tide, like the rocks sort of showed — that’s low tide, then we knew, okay we can go now for whatever [crayfish, mussels, limpets]. (Erica Williams, nee Jurgens)
The use of the sea for food emerged as a dominant theme in many of the interviews, and to this day it remains an integral part of many Peninsula inhabitants ’ lives. Furthermore, the Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope areas support much of the unique Cape fynbos — the name given to a diversity of shrub-like plants with 5 800 species peculiar to the southern and south-western Cape (see Cowling 1992; Cowling and Richardson 1995). Fynbos is of poor grazing quality and the Cape soils in this region have little agricultural value, but there is evidence of the use of fynbos for food and medicine among the original inhabitants of the region (Smith 1966). Traditions of the medicinal as well as decorative use of a large variety of fynbos shrubs emerge in the testimony of a number of individuals interviewed (Cowling and Richardson 1995:13) . In addition, since the establishment of the Cape Colony in 1952, when European settlers began introducing alien plants, fynbos has been invaded by some of these species, which include pines, wattles and hakeas.

The region is also hampered by the problems of extremely scant water resources compared with those of greater Cape Town. A number of natural springs in the Brooklands area have been sufficient to support no more than a few smallholdings, and most of the area’s rivers dry up during the hot, windy Cape summer (Burman 1962). The winter months at Red Hill and the Cape of Good Hope typically consist of torrential downpours, fogs and north-westerly gales, and many of the interviewees’ memories restricted themselves quite unconsciously to the summer months with their long twilight hours.

The focus of the project was to explore aspects of discourse in oral history interviews and, in particular, discourse on life in the natural — that is, ‘undeveloped ’ — environments of the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill. It was therefore necessary to interview individuals whose life histories were inseparable from their existence on this strip of ‘undeveloped’ land and its surrounding waters.

As Smith (1984) has shown, industrial development in the twentieth century has effectively urbanised the countryside in material as well as ideological ways. The continuity between so-called rural and urban landscapes in the Southern Peninsula is in any case immediately evident in that former (coloured) Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope inhabitants were more often than not employed by the Navy Dockyard or the Simon’s Town Municipality — in the case of the men — while some of the women worked as domestic servants or flower sellers in Simon’s Town. Moreover, it will become clear that none of the interviewees are unaffected by the natural environment in this area, which has not only use but also exchange value. This is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the ‘impure’ and precarious semi-subsistence life-styles which many former Red Hill inhabitants led on ‘undeveloped ’, but nevertheless rented, land.

Theory and Method


Tussock marshes and reed beds ...

This paper responds to a general concern prevalent among local oral historians. The study of discourse in local oral history research has been, it appears, somewhat delayed in favour of transcribing ‘information’ transmitted by interviewees who have been called ‘informants’. Minkley and Rassool (1995:6–7,8) and Hofmeyr (1993) accuse South African oral history of having neglected discourse and language in analysis of oral testimonies (for similar comments about oral history outside South Africa see Tonkin 1992). This particular research project leans towards a conception of language as a transparent medium, and is thus attuned specifically to literary theory and techniques of textual analysis.

Existing studies on perceptions and articulations of the natural environment occupy the domain of a distinctly non-oral discourse. Notable texts in this area have located themselves within fields of representation (mainly writing and painting) where the natural environment is emphasised as a cultural concept rather than as a material object, and these have given rise to a number of theoretical works on nature as transmitting ideological value (Cosgrove 1984; Bunn 1993).

Wilson (1992) and Bramwell (1989) may be said to have extended the literature on nature and perception by means of practical assessments of the ideological value of nature in contemporary economic and political spheres — a task which Smith (1984) explored ten years before in his attempt to explain the process of what he terms ‘uneven development ’. Smith returns to orthodox Marxism to offer a broad theoretical framework within which one may position oral history material and explicate the social and historical processes involved in the “production of nature”. Unusual recent works on the natural environment are Hamilton-Paterson (1992) and Schama (1995). These books contain an unexpected mingling of discourses. Numerous scientific and historical passages interweave with semi-fictional or even mythical narratives, autobiography, anecdotes, written in an easily digested journalistic style.

In direct response to such written texts it seemed fruitful to find local voices and to hear what they had to say about the natural environment of the areas which had been integral to their everyday lives. The ‘open interview’ method associated with qualitative research formed the basis of the interviews. Most interviews began with an initial open-ended question (for example, “Could you tell me about your experiences at Red Hill/the Cape of Good Hope?”), and avoided direct or probing questions. Interviews tended to follow the chaotic, disjointed movements of live conversation which suited the project’s intention to gather undirected oral text. Interviewees were therefore given an often largely undefined space in which to speak, which accounts for repetition, pauses, factual vagueness and a relative lack of specific dates and place names in the interviews. It also accounts for reams of linguistically analysable oral text. A process of interviewee selection, primarily from suggestions by interviewees, drew from contacts between workers, landowners, environmentalists and families in the Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope areas.

Perceptions of Change


Perception ...

Perceptions themselves, as well as the ways in which they are expressed, are intimately connected with the different social classes to which individuals belong. More specifically, perceptions may be correlated to the experiences or actions within a particular social class. What complicated matters was the extent to which different group relationships with the natural environment not only diverged from, but also overlapped with, one another.

While the descendants of the subsistence fisherfolk represent an economically marginalised sector, there is evidence of some wage-labour in addition to informal economic activity such as fish and wood-selling. Wood-selling also formed a part of the livelihood of some of the poorer former Red Hill inhabitants . Moreover, most of the latter community were wage-labourers employed by the provincial government or the municipality , many supplementing their income with the sale of their own vegetables, eggs, meat and milk, derived from what was mainly subsistence existence at Red Hill (West 1967:27). Employment in the Reserve was related to race, social class and gender. Thus, prime leadership positions, such as rangers, were held exclusively by white males; secondary positions, for example, supervisors, drivers and storemen, by coloured workers. The lower positions were filled by inexperienced or young coloured workers, as well as by an increasing number of black labourers from the Eastern Cape.

Shifts within individuals lives from one type of activity to another — if not from one social class to another — can be seen most starkly in two interviews with descendants of fishing communities at the Cape of Good Hope. They are Dorothy Layters and her sister Sarah Klein, nee Layters. The Layters’ father had been a blacksmith from George, in the southern Cape, who had arrived in Simon’s Town looking for work. When his family joined him in 1916, they rented a small, whitewashed stone house in Baskloof where Dorothy Layters was born six years later. Soon afterwards, the family moved to another house situated in a pine forest on the banks of the Kromrivier, on a piece of land then belonging to a man by the name of De Villiers, where they initially supplemented their income by selling fish.

Layters states that her family originally lived in this virtually deserted area just above Die Mond (see Map 2). Around 1940 she moved away from her mother who, along with the only other two tenants in the area, was forced to leave the house herself a year later as result of the ground having been declared a Nature Reserve — “die diere-besigheid [the animal-business]”, as she calls it. Finally, in 1947 Dorothy Layters settled in Elsiesrivier at Red Hill — not to be confused with the Elsies River in Glencairn Valley — where she lived for twenty years.

In 1967, as a result of the Group Areas Act, Layters was one of the first to be moved to a house she was able to buy in Ocean View. (The entire community was moved gradually over a period of about 6 years.) Confrontation with the authorities over the sub-letting of her house in Ocean View, however, eventually forced Layters back to Red Hill Farm in 1991, where she currently pays a nominal rent from her meagre monthly pension for two tiny stables which are her living quarters. In contrast, all the other members of the former Red Hill community interviewed have remained in the suburban environment of Ocean View.


... shapes reality

Layters thus has a past which includes informal economic activity and wage labour (she has a brief history of charing). She has rented as well as owned property; she is familiar with an existence which is dependant on the sea for food while inhabiting small dwellings on expanses of largely unoccupied land; and she is acquainted with circumstances within a relatively fast-developing suburban environment such as Ocean View. Moreover, male members of her family have engaged in subsistence farming as well as farm labour in the Smitswinkel Bay, Perdekloof and Baskloof areas.

Layters’s earliest memories are linked to the Cape of Good Hope area — she and her sister were the sole representatives in this study of the former fishing community at the Kromrivier area. She says that: “Toe ek my oe¨ oopmaak toe is dit daar, daar agter, Nooi weet — by die see? [When I opened my eyes it was there, back there, you know, Nooi — by the sea?]”1 During the 1920s and 1930s the rent was fifteen shillings per month for their flat-roofed dwelling. While he worked as a blacksmith in Simon’s Town, Layters’ father had built a boat enabling the family to ‘trek-fish’ (trawl in a drag-net) in the Cape Point area to supplement their livelihood. In addition, Layters’ mother acquired a few donkeys for carrying bundles of chopped wood to be sold in Simon’s Town, thus supplementing the family’s income. Layters says that, “My Ma het Witsand toe gegaan, daar naby Kommetjie, haal jy kreef. Inkoop. En dan het hulle verkoop in die baai, en hout gemaak [My mother went to Witsand [on the coast, south-west of where Ocean View is today], there near Kommetjie, you get crayfish to buy. And then they sold them in the bay [False Bay], and we made [chopped] wood].”

It is not clear how many people there were in the Kromrivier fishing colony; Layters claims that her mother had had eighteen children, but many of these died before the family moved from George. Layters also indicates that she had several brothers but there was “Oom [Uncle] Pieterse”, Carl and Japie Booysen, and she recalls that: “Soos ons al kom is hulle besig met die trek, gaan net uit, die net uit [As we came they were busy with the trekking, the net went out, the net out].”

The community appears also to have been augmented by individuals who lost their jobs, like Sarah Klein’s first husband, who joined and assisted with fishing. Somewhere between 1922 and 1930 Layters’ father is said to have decided to stop working as a blacksmith because he could not drive. There are already the outlines of two basic perceptions of the natural environment. In the first case there is the sea as a food resource:

My Ma was in die boot! [Gestures] Sy vang haar vis, en sy haal-trawl kreef met daardie [My mother was in the boat! [Gestures] She catches her fish, and she catch-trawls crayfish with those nets].” This memory of food-orientated experience is associated with plenitude: “Jene, Nooi, die see is vol vis en vol kos en vol kos. [Hell, Nooi, the sea is full of fish, and full of food, and full of food].” The perception of the sea and the natural environment in general as an unending food resource — “Die vis kan tog nie verdwyn nie man! [After all, the fish cannot disappear!]” — finds echoes in the testimony of the Red Hill residents. Mr Lotter says: “Kyk jy het aartappels geplant, jy het uie geplant, mielies, boontjies, ertjies, komkommer … marrows, rooibeet … kool [Look, you planted potatoes, you planted onions, maize, beans, peas, cucumbers … marrows, beetroot … cabbage].”

Pampoen en ertjies! Wortels! [Pumpkins and peas! Carrots!]” exclaims Layters when remembering her brother’s and brother-in-law’s farm labour at Perdekloof. The perception that the environment is a plentiful food resource is not limited to those who earned their living from it, but surfaces also in the stories told by John Hare. In the early 1920s his grandfather and great uncle used to hunt for food, but also caught crayfish — “Because in those days already there were crayfish reserves down off the coast”, and “There was a place at Brightwater where they found a little stream, and there was kelp … in which they found crayfish.” The way that food is described by Layters and Hare is to a large extent gender-specific. Layters’ testimony is unusual in that the domain of hunting and fishing is traditionally male. In her case, the perception of nature as a plentiful food resource is inseparable from human labour: “Dis van jonk af swaar …2 Daai skuit het heeldag in die water gele, Nooi weet, in die see, en hulle kom wal toe, hier voor sonsak, dan is daai skuit mos dan swaar, Nooi, daai planke is mos swaar, Nooi … Ek moet hom dra, Nooi [It’s hard from a young age … That boat lay in the water for the whole day, you know, in the sea, and they’re coming towards the shore, here, before sunset, then that boat is heavy, Nooi, those planks are heavy, after all, Nooi … I have to lug it, Nooi].” This may be compared to the following from Lotter: “Ek en my ooms en my broer het daardie grond bewerk. Nie met ‘n ploeg of iets nie, maar met die hand. Maar ek praat nou nie van ‘n stukkie ground, ek praat nou van groot gronde [My uncles and my brother and I worked that ground. Not with a plough or anything, but by hand. But now I’m not talking about a bit of land, I’m talking about huge areas of land].”

The above quotations encourage one to uncover a second type of articulation, namely, the natural environment as space (implied by the mention of the sea by Layters, and made more explicit in the “groot gronde [large areas of land]” in the quotation from Lotter). This spatial delineation of the environment is palpable in repeated expressions of physical movement: “Die loopery! [All the walking!].” The need to cover large distances on foot was not limited to life at Kromrivier. At Red Hill, too, the Levendals said, “Ver stap en lang pale gaan saag [Going far to saw long logs of wood]”, and two cousins from the Red Hill settlement remember that:

OL: Dan klim ons sommer — ek en sy — ons — ek en Julie — ons klim sommer in die boom en dan saag ons droog hout daar uit die boom uit -
JY: Uit die boom uit -
OL: Op die boom met die saag.
OL: Then we would simply climb — she and I — we — Julie and myself — we would simply climb into the tree and saw dry wood out from the tree -
JY: Out from the tree -
OL: On the tree with the saw.

The spaciality of the natural environment is, moreover, communicated as a physical positioning of the body within space, made explicit by prepositions such as in, op and uit. This seems to solicit concepts of openness and freedom: “[Dit] was nie toegekamp op daai tyd nie. Dit was oop gewees [It was not fenced at that time. It was open],” declares Layters, “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees [At that time everything [the fish] was so nice and free].” The connection between the ideas of space, physical movement and freedom is summarised in the interview with members of the Levendal family: “So het ons gelewe in Red Hill. Vry! Vry! Ek sal seˆ vry. Want as ons net so ‘n entjie uit die huis uitstap, so ‘n entjie stap, dan is ons in die veld [That is how we lived at Red Hill. Free! Free! I shall say free. Because if we just walked a little way out of the house, just a little way, then we were in the veld].”

An expression of the way in which the physical body is positioned within a spatial environment that makes it both possible and necessary to move is the following quotation from Layters:
En toe het ons ook gaat vishaal, Nooi. Daar. [Unclear] En die eerste keer wat ons moet deurgaan in daai vlak is Leier-Verloor. … Hoor die naam ook, Nooi. Dan gaan jy nou daardeur, dan kom jy anderkant, dan sien jy die pad, die main pad wat Cape Point toe gaan, daar gaan jy af na Hare toe … Gaan ons duskant deur, daai vlak deur — die tweede land was gewees ‘n Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei … Daar is ook groot waterskilpatte … so uit, met die koppies steek so uit die water — … Kom ons net weer deur. Try om die kort pad te loop, vat om …

And then we also went to catch fish, Nooi. There. [Unclear] And first we had to cross that plain, Leier-Verloor [Lost-our-Leader — see Map 2]. Listen, too, to the name, Nooi. Then you go through there, then you come out on the other side, then you see the path, the main path leading to Cape Point, you go down there towards the Hares … We go through on this side, through the plain — the second stretch was [called] Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei [see Map 2] … There are also large turtles … out like this, with their little heads sticking out of the water like this — … Again we just go through. Try to walk around the short path, take it round …
The above quotation is repeated below, accentuating the verbal expression of spatial experience. The words in bold signify physical movement — that is, a perception of the natural environment as concrete space.
En toe het ons ook gaat vishaal Nooi. Daar. [Unclear] En die eerste keer wat ons moet deurgaan in daai vlak is Leier-Verloor. … Hoor die naam ook, Nooi. Dan gaan jy nou daardeur, dan kom jy anderkant, dan sien jy die pad, die main pad wat Cape Point toe gaan, daar gaan jy af na Hare toe … Gaan ons duskant deur, daai vlak deur — die tweede land was gewees ‘n Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei… Daar is ook groot waterskilpatte …so uit, met die koppies steek so uit die water — … Kom ons net weer deur. Try om die kort pad te loop, vat om …
The perceptions of the natural environment firstly as food, and secondly as physical space, may be contrasted with nature as food for the eyes, rather than for the stomach, which is in turn linked to an absence of bodily movement and, by implication, of labour. The connection is described by John Hare:
I’ve had an incredibly fortunate background in that I have been privileged enough to be able to enjoy nature without being dependant upon nature economically. …So there I’m able to sit back and look at nature as almost a leisure cushion around me. (My emphasis)

King of the Hill ...

In 1927, when Layters was five, Hare’s grandfather and great-uncle, Percy and William Hare, bought Brightwater on the west coast of the Cape of Good Hope. For Hare, therefore, nature was a space which was possible to experience in an optic way, that is, without moving the physical body — “We’re sitting in an environment which allows us to sit back and view nature as a movie.” Where there is an absence of human labour, experience seems to become vicarious — nature becomes “a movie”. Furthermore, Hare’s evidence significantly employs the present simple tense. This is used not only to express events happening in the present (now), but also to express general (timeless) states of affairs — for example, we “sit back and view nature as a movie”. The present simple tense may also be employed, however, to narrate past events — at such times it is termed the present historic tense. It is this latter tense which Layters’s testimony (in the English translation) employs above. The use of the present simple tense in Hare’s remark indicates that there is a connection between the experience of nature “as a movie” and a timelessness, or sequencelessness, possible only in terms of sightseeing, rather than in terms of actively earning one’s living (Wilson 1992:20). None the less, when Hare casts his mind back to his boyhood days, when “we went down for the school holidays at Christmas time each year … and we’d stay for — for about three weeks”, there would at first glance appear to be an awareness of physical space, as well as a primary experience of food:
[I]n that bush was built [our] cottage. And there were tunnels and passages in the bush, and there were — there were almost like galleries in the bush … And if we had people down there, we used to have sheep on the spit, and pig on the spit, in the bush … and we had hurricane lanterns hanging in the bushes, it was the most magic environment.
The above quotation shows, however, that it was not the natural environment in which Hare found himself that provided the food. Notwithstanding Hare’s insistence that “we lived on crayfish and harders and Steenbras and Hottentot”,3 his recollections rather incorporate the meat which used to be transported to the family’s house at Brightwater on the roof of the lorry in which the family used to drive to the Reserve each year. Furthermore, although Hare’s memory as expressed above employs spatial nouns such as “tunnels”, “passages” and “galleries”, the quotation re-creates a picture — that is, it is the eye alone, rather than the total body, which moves, and the discourse therefore articulates exclusively optic, or visual experience, rather than total physical experience. Hare’s discourse describes rather than performs. This is borne out by his use of the past tense, which suggests an observer’s consciousness . Hare’s being highly literate — while Layters is illiterate — contributes to the ‘descriptiveness’ of his discourse, the ‘performative’ nature of Layters’s speech, on the other hand, enhances hers.4 For the holiday child, space is a spectacle which may be said to alienate the tangible space upon which it depends. Unlike the Layters family, Hare did not earn his living by labour or physically necessary actions: “I’ve been fortunate enough to open a tin for my food, and I don’t have to go and chop down a tree before [I make a fire].”

Hare’s verbal portrait is further framed by the final flourish of “it was the most magic environment.” In this way, the past is held as by a photograph and the memory appears more like a dream — indeed, as “magic” — than a tangible moment whose possibility has passed. In Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ discourse, on the other hand, concepts of plenitude and freedom arise from the labour on which the direct producer depends, and this is re-enacted by means of words and gestures imported into the present from the past. Where there is no such re-enactment, Layters’s memories become nostalgic articulations of a landscape that has disappeared — as in: “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees” [At that time everything [the fish] was so wonderfully free]”, and “Daai jare kan ek sommer ‘n klomp afgehaal het, skulp — daardie tamatieskulp, by die frikkadel-maak, alles hier. Ek het sommer blikke afgehaal daai tyd, Nooi (my emphasis). [In those years I could simply take a whole lot, mussels — those limpets, to make fish-cakes, everything was there. I took whole tins-full [from the rocks] at that time, Nooi]” (frikkadel is more usually the name of a flattened meatball).

By comparison with Layters’ testimony, if nostalgia can be said to be present in the interview with Hare, it takes the form of what might be described as childhood reminiscences, a painless type of romanticisation. This is, surely, not only because the Hare family continues to frequent their private property within the official confines of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. It must also be a result of the area always having been a holiday home to Hare. In contrast, Layters’ exclusion from the Reserve amounted to an exclusion from her former home.5

A more outspoken nostalgia certainly emerged from the interviews with the former Red Hill population. The conditions of possibility for nostalgia may therefore be said to involve a more costly recognition of the impossibility of returning, or regaining, home.


Towards Cape Point ...

The Cape of Good Hope was to be home to the Layters family for only another ten years, as in the late 1920s George Smith, the owner of Smith’s Farm, expressed his willingness to sell his land for an official Nature Reserve. At this time the Cape Times columnist Henry Hope and the entomologist Sidney Skaife were campaigning for land to be bought either by the government or the Cape Town City Council (Skaife 1963:52; Odden and Lee:n.d.). It is tempting to relate this sudden bustle around the Cape of Good Hope to the government ’s decision to nationalise Game Reserves in 1926 — a decision in its turn linked to the growth and development of South African cities, including Cape Town. During this time, writes Jane Carruthers, national parks “had a cultural function in that they indicated a growing romantic attachment to wildlife among whites”, a development linked to increased industrialisation, urbanisation and forms of labour amongst the white middle class (1993:6). Hare points out somewhat satirically:
…people had the perception that a Reserve should be a game reserve, and that …a game reserve should have big spotted creatures and striped creatures and huge things that make huge piles of poo and eat … a huge quantity of bush each day.
The idea of a game reserve is of course strongly tied to the experience of the natural environment in terms of the sense of sight, with its accompanying  ‘reading’ of nature “as a movie” from within the confines of a car. In this context it is interesting to find that Gerald Wright, who worked at the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve for almost thirty years, confesses that: “We’re … to blame for getting across the idea that if you go to a nature reserve or a game reserve, the big thing is to see big Animals.”

Even more interesting is Wright’s contention that South African game rangers were eventually able, albeit only in the 1970s and 1980s, to articulate the idea that the physical body may position itself inside the environment itself — a possibility echoed in the testimony of Red Hill inhabitants analysed above: “Hang on fellows, you know, we don’t only have the big and hairies. We have everything around us. Let’s teach people to look down, look left, look right, look up.”

One could attribute this shift in perception to a more sensitive appreciation for nature in the late 1960s, but it is probably easier to argue that the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve was at this stage conceived of as a quiet park on the fringes of the metropole, able to offer a true ‘getaway’ experience. Material conditions in Layters’ and the Red Hill residents’ lives, on the other hand, made it imperative to “look down, look left”. Human labour in its interaction with nature did not ‘getaway’ but literally had to ‘get in’. The river, for example, was needed to wash clothes. Layters says: “Ek het sommer binne-in die river gestaan en was — wasgoed [I just stood right in the river and washed — washing].”

Pine-tufts, which were cleaned with stones first, needed to be gathered for scrubbing the washing: “Daai met die lang bol wat die outydse mense ook maar hulle wasgoed mee gewas het — daai mannetjie … Hulle het gevryf die wasgoed soos ‘n borsel wat ook skrap [Those with the long tuft which people also did their washing with in the past — that male one … They scrubbed their washing [with it] like a scrubbing-brush].”

The use of surrounding vegetation was not limited to everyday tasks. Layters also recalls her mother’s treatment of wounds with tobacco leaves:
“Ek het amper nou maar my duim ook hier afgesaag, en die saag het uitgespring — sprei die bloed so, toe het my ma van die twak om — so draai blaretwak — dat die bloed nou net so — weg is [I also almost sawed off my thumb, and the saw slipped — the blood was dripping, so my mother put some tobacco — tobacco leaves around — so that the blood was — just gone].”
Another ‘natural’ home remedy is described by Herbert Lotter: “As jy jou nou miskien ongelukkig gesny het daar aan ‘n glas of iets — en dan het jy die spinnerak gevat … En dit help nou in die plek sit — en die bloed te stop [If you cut yourself, perhaps on a piece of glass or something — then you took spiderwebs … And it helps to put it in the place — and stop the blood].”

As already mentioned, both alien and indigenous vegetation was used as food or medicine by several people interviewed. Remedies included honeybush tea (harvested and sold on a limited scale in the southern Cape to this day), and varieties of buchu leaves, wild garlic, kruidjie-roer-my-nie (touch-me-not), wilde-als, klipdagga, kattekruie and bluegum (the latter currently targeted by alien-vegetation removal teams in the Peninsula). Moreover, flowers were picked mainly by women for decorative purposes. “Jy het presies geweet,” as Lotter said, “verskillende blomme, bome, plante. Jy het presies geweet in watter tyd van die jaar sal jy daardie blousel kry, en daardie plante sal kry. … So ek meen, die natuur was deel van jou lewe gewees [You knew exactly the different types of flowers, trees, plants. You knew exactly in what season you’ll get this bloom, and those plants … So I mean, nature was part of your life].” Some flowers (such as some species of Afrikaner Daisy) could be located only by their scent. Flowers supplemented incomes, being arranged in colourful mixtures of homegrown garden varieties and wild fynbos and taken down to Simon’s Town where they had been ordered. This flower-picking tradition has apparently not ceased — in many of the interviews a vase of wild fynbos blooms in season stood on some little table.

Topological Sorrow?


Hard spaces ...

By comparison with much of Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ testimony, Hare’s and Wright’s utterances possess a somewhat formal (more literary), if not detached, quality. At certain times, however, this remote quality emerges also in the testimony of some of the former Red Hill inhabitants . The labour of walking in the veld in order to find wood, quoted earlier, is abstracted or formalised. In the following quotation, while it does not quite create a ‘picture’ along the lines of Hare’s composition, physical gesture is nevertheless ‘alienated ’ — that is, removed from its originary spatial and temporal determinants. The Levendals said: “Ons was als versorg, ja — … ons was nooit sonder hout nie, want ons — we were always in advance with wood, want hulle het nooit opgehou om hout te kap, om dit te saag en te kap, en op te stoor in die stoorkamertjies in [We always had provisions, yes — … we were never without wood — we were always in advance with wood, because they never stopped chopping wood, sawing and chopping it, and storing it in the store-rooms].”

The above descriptive generalisation conceals beneath an expression of timelessness (“they never stopped chopping wood”), a pendulum which wavers between past and present, settling neither for a final ‘verbal portrait ’ or description (which aims to transport the listener back into the past), nor for a re-enactment or performance of original gestures (which ‘import’ the past into the present). This ‘pendulum’ seems to articulate the unresolved state in which many former Red Hill residents find themselves today: namely, hankering for their lost home at Red Hill, on the one hand, while on the other hand acknowledging the impossibility of returning. Lotter said, “Ek dink dit het my moed gebreek toe ons in Ocean View kom om tuin te maak — want daar wat ek nie lus gekry nie [I think when we came to Ocean View it broke my will to do gardening — because I didn’t feel like it then].”

The quality of uncertainty in the interviews with former Red Hill residents also manifests itself in explicit comparisons between past and present lives. While labour necessitated free physical movement at Red Hill, former inhabitants have since had to accommodate themselves and live with a sense of indignation. Mrs Levendal said, “Hulle was in niemand se pad gewees nie! [They were in nobody’s way!]” In terms of Proclamation 63 of 1967 Simon’s Town was finally declared a white area. Some doubt has existed as to whether everyone was moved under the Group Areas Act — some had to leave to make way for a dam to be built at Brooklands. The dam has, however, never been built, and most people declare that “We just got our letters at that time. … there were several meetings — nothing materialised, so — we had no backing — so we just had to take our bags and go” (Jurgens).

As mentioned earlier, there are dissenting voices who claim that residents were not forced to move: “Hulle was gretig om hier to kom woon het! [They were eager to come and live here!” (Lotter). When probed, this same voice elaborated the contradictions around the nostalgia for Red Hill:
Kyk, in een sin was jy uitgeforseer. Maar nie op ‘n … mate dat seˆ jy baklei daarteen — nee … En die lewe gaan swaar nog, jy verstaan dit met ons, as jy seˆ, kyk, jy moet net werk, kom jy gaan nou water dra en jy gaan houtkap en al dit. So mense het gesien — dit gaat ‘n beter lewe wees. … [En] waar sou ons kinders vandag gewees het?

Look, in one sense you were forced out. But not in a …way which said you’re fighting against it — no …. And life is still hard, you understand, with us, if you say, look, you must just work, come you’ll carry water now and you’re going to chop wood and everything. So people say — it would be a better life. … [And] where would our children have been today?
Many former residents echo the acknowledgement that an effective shift in social classes took place. Moving back to their former home environment would now be costly and physically strenuous. Furthermore, descendants of former residents are now familiar with modern conveniences available in Ocean View. (Red Hill lacks municipal facilities to this day). The move from Red Hill therefore also entailed a move from former semi-peasant to suburban, lowermiddle-class existence. In this context, the pain of homesickness — “Daar is nie salf om in te smeer nie vir die groot wond wat agtergebly het in ons [There is no balm to spread on the great wound that has remained in us]” (Mrs Levendal) — is romanticised as delight in a glorious past:

OL: Ons het wonderlik groot geword! Ek prys net die Here vandag dat ons kan sit en -
JY: Ons kan dit hou [onthou]!
OL: En vir u alles vertel hoe ons groot geword het.
OL: We grew up wonderfully! I praise the Lord that today we can sit and -
JY: We can keep [remember] it!
OL: And tell you everything about how we grew up.

The bygone days at Red Hill are recalled as days of social harmony with clean air, physical exercise, good health and plentiful food. None the less, testimonies swing from one extreme — for example: “Daar is niks smaak aan vandag se hoenders [There’s no taste in today’s chickens]” (Mrs Levendal) — to the other:
"No ways shall I eat something like that [chicken] again! [Laughter] … I mean, just to think of it now, you know — makes you quite sick, you know. …Growing up with these things, having it almost as pets, and now you’ve got to slaughter, and kill them to eat them! (Jurgens)

In contradistinction to Layters’ navigation of various forms of labour and patterns of life, the former Red Hill inhabitants ’ shift to a suburban lifestyle is complete. Moreover, Layters’ narrations do not glorify the past. “Ek kan onthou, daai drewe,” she says, merely asking, “Waar kry jy dit nou? [I can remember those crayfish. Where can you get them now?].” The difference between Layters’ and former Red Hill inhabitants ’ nostalgia may therefore be said to lie in the sublimation, or glorification, in the utterances of the latter. By way of example, both Dora Layters and Olga Levendal fondly remember the highly nutritious fatty food supplied by nature in the past. Layters says: “Ek dink dis ‘n halfbottel visolie wat daar in [die geelbek] is — nei! dis sy eie vet by die kop! [I think it’s half a bottle of fish oil that’s in [the Cape Salmon] — no! It’s his own fat from his head!]” Mrs Levendal, on the other hand, remembers the “dikmelk” (lit. ‘thick milk’). She explains:
Nou as ‘n koei ‘n kalf het — so twee, drie dae daarna — dan — hulle roep dit beesmelk — dis so ‘n dik melk, dit is nog nie skoon as dit gekook is. Nou as daardie melk gekook is — aah! Dan is dit net so stukke botter — dit was heerlik! O!

Now when a cow calves — about two, three days after that, then — they call it beesmelk — it’s a thick milk, it’s not yet clean if you boil it. Now if you boil that milk — aah! Then it’s just pieces of butter — it was delicious! Oh!
Mrs Levendal’s words are interesting because at first glance they appear simply to re-enact the original gesture of drinking and tasting the milk. However, as the interviewer is made to visualise the pieces of butter swimming in the milk, the performative exclamations serve to glorify this past way of life. Layters’ nostalgia for the fat fish of yester-year seems verbally scant by comparison: “Dik visse daai jare gewees. Die mense vang nie meer daai visse nie, ek weet nie waar daai vis is nie, Nooi [Fat fish in those years. People don’t catch fish like that any more, I don’t know where those fish are].” Whereas in the quotation by Layters the fish are unambiguously gone, Mrs Levendal’s testimony again leans towards a quality of ‘always-ness’. This ‘always-ness’ may be connected to the fact that Red Hill residents generally remember their previous existence in terms of repetition, regularity and order:
Ons beeste het dan soggens gaan ek ‘ie beeste melk … dan gaan hulle veld toe … toe wat ek weer vanaand kom hulle kry. Ons koop ‘ie voere, en kry hulle voer, en dan — dit is nie ver wat ons loop om hulle te gaan haal nie, en dan bring ‘le weer in ‘ie kraal in die aand, en dan word hulle weer gemelk, en so gaan ‘t weer, elke dag (Mitchell)

Our cattle — then in the mornings I’d go and milk the cattle… then they wander into the veld … then in the evenings I round them up again. We buy fodder and they are fed, and then — we don’t have to walk far to get them, and then we take them back into the enclosure in the evenings, and then they are milked again, and so it continues every day.
This regularity and order was dictated by the constraints of school and work — “My grandfather used to get up early in the mornings and used to feed [and] milk the cows before he went to work” (Jurgens). The days of the week were set aside for different tasks which were linked to life in Simon’s Town: “Ja, my mother — they used to send in their order to the shopkeeper on a Monday and then it gets delivered on a Wednesday” (Jurgens).

Then, on Fridays “My mother used to go down … to buy the weekend meat, that was Friday night, Saturday and Sunday roast, whatever. Always used to be roast that time, was no other thing but roast.… Roast and puddings!” (Jurgens). The importance of the Sunday meal echoes the importance of meals on ‘big days’ such as Easter and Christmas, which were times of copious amounts of food. The significance of festive occasions is linked to Christian traditions at Red Hill in the 1950s and 1960s. “Daardie tyd het ons nog middagkerk gehad,” recalls Lotter, “daar was nie ‘n Sondag wat verbygaan nie — jy mo`et kerk toe gaan [At that time we still had afternoon church, there wasn’t a Sunday that passed — you had to go to church].” These routines were unaffected by the weather; indeed, they were insisted upon despite the weather: “Dit maak nou nie saak of die son skyn nie, as dit ree¨n, as dit storm en die wind waai nie — maar kerk toe sal jy moet gaan [It doesn’t matter whether the sun is shining, whether it’s raining or storming and the wind is blowing — but you’ve got to go to church]” (Lotter).

In contrast to Layters’ testimony, therefore, where weekends or holidays are scarcely mentioned, the routine of the week at Red Hill was directly affected by the men’s formal work-hours, church and school: “Naweke was die so wonderlik vir ons. Dan is al die familie bymekaar [Weekends were so wonderful for us. Then the whole family would be together]” (Mrs Levendal). Furthermore, there are echoes of Hare’s reminiscences of his “magic” leisure-days at Brightwater over the Christmas holiday period in utterances such as:
En dan hier — net so voor Kersfees — en dan word dan ‘n vark geslag, hoenders word geslag, ‘n — sommer ‘n hele bees — by Higgins — daar by hulle in die tuin was so ‘n groot wilgeboom wat so oor die pit — the well — by die pit gehang het

And then here — just before Christmas — then they slaughter a whole pig, chickens are slaughtered, a — a whole ox, just like that — at Higgins — there where they had such a big willow tree hanging over the well like that — over the well]. (Mrs Levendal)
Unlike Hare’s reminiscence, however, the above shows a consciousness of physical space which arises directly from human labour. Although the routine of, say, school at Red Hill may have created a leisure space in the form of weekends, it did — at least as late as the 1950s — also involve physical work: “Die skool het eintlik ‘n groot grond gehad daar, daar het ons tuine gemaak. Elkeen het sy eie tuintjie gehad en — dit is part van jou skool [The school actually owned a large piece of land there, which we tended. Each one had his or her own little garden and — it was part of your school-work]” (Lotter). Not only that, but Lotter also recalls that, “Dan moet jy nou-nou houtkap vir die onderwyser ook”, and “Ek was nog ‘n kind, ek moet nog pype goed aangedra het vir die … vloere en goed. So eintlik dit was ook van ons — vir ons handewerk in skool gewees, gehelp met daardie geboue [You would also have to quickly chop some wood for the teacher … I was still a child, I had to help carry pipes and things for the… floors and stuff. So actually our handiwork was also in that school, we helped with those buildings].”


Where the Layters' lived ...

The transition of the Red Hill community from a semi-rural to a more (sub)urbanised consciousness with its ability to articulate ‘pictures’ of the past appears to have developed gradually before the community was relocated. The physical actions attached to the demands of food and shelter were progressively pushed to the margins of daily existence:
“Nou na werksure, hier onder af, kom hy op, dan kom hy werk hy nou in die tuin. Miskien nou soos maanskynaande, dan werk die ou tot hier twaalfuur, Pa, dan moet my Ma skree: ‘Hendrik! Hendrik! Kom huistoe!’ [Now after work, down here, he comes up, then he comes and works in the garden. Maybe now on moonlit nights, then the old man works in the garden till twelve, my father, then my mother has to shout: ‘Hendrik! Hendrik! Come home!’]” (Page).
In the same way as Hare’s testimony, many of the former residents ’ memories are thus ‘held’ in mid-motion in a zone of eternal Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and so on, after work or school, as seemingly timeless habits are described: “Saterdags was onse dag gewees. Dan maak ek musiek vir die mense. Een vir die gitar en die piano accordion, dan loop ons af in die pad en dan kom die mense van orals [Saturday was our day. Then I make music for people. One for the guitar and the piano accordion, then we walk down the road and then people come from everywhere]” (Mr Levendal).

Like Hare’s “magic environment”, Leonard Levendal’s phrase “dan kom die mense van orals [then people come from everywhere]” positions the mind, rather than the body, in an environment no longer concrete but imaginary, playing out before the mind’s eye a moving strip of dreamlike images. Moreover, physically impossible actions — such as people coming from everywhere — are expansions of original gestures (“loop ons af in die pad [we walk down the road]”). As suggested earlier, nostalgia involves the cognition of the impossibility (in the present) of gestures performed in the past. Such gestures become vulnerable to forgetfulness. In former Red Hill residents ’ testimony the forgetfulness of the body is sublimated as a formal (literary) — that is, non-performative — utterance: “So lank soos ek lewe sal ek nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie, en hoe ons opgegroei het daar as kinders nie [As long as I live I shall never ever be able to forget that time, and how we grew up there as children]” (Mr Levendal).

The appeal to memory in the above quotation is interesting if compared to claims that former members of the community may try to create a “prentjie wat nie daar is nie [a picture which is not there]” (Lotter). A “picture” which, it is implied, has forgotten the burden of carrying the physical body, and the quantities of water, wood and food it requires for its subsistence, through physical space. There is also evidence that gangs started to develop at Red Hill during the 1960s and 1970s, bearing names such as Bronkbokkies (Bronco jeans) derived from American cultural influences (Lotter).

The Levendals’ story is fascinating for what it reveals about the discourse of nostalgia. In the absence of a verbal demonstration of original, concrete gestures, Mr Levendal’s exclamation thrusts an unperformed, yet represented, or symbolised, past — “hoe ons opgegroei het [how we grew up]” — beyond the present into the future: “ek [sal] nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie [I will never ever be able to forget that time]”. This is nostalgia: an articulation of a future that has already arrived. Here, an unforgettable life has already been converted into representatives — magical images, evocative symbols and dreams — which, while they rehearse the past’s gestures, betray its physical intensity. Julie Yon articulates this process in the following moving utterance:
You know, one day Mrs Kilday told me in church: “You know, Julie, I had a dream I’m feeding pigs.” So I said, “Here in Ocean View?” “Nee,” se sy, se vir my, “Nee, daar in Red Hill.” Ek sien nog die mooi pink — the creepers she had there. With pink flowers hanging down where she did her washing. Sy seˆ vir my, “En ek sien nog my mooi pink blomme so afhang, en ek voer die varke, en dis Red Hill”. Sy seˆ vir my, “Ek het nog nooit gedroom van Ocean View nie, dis Red Hill!” And you can go to anybody that comes from Red Hill — many of them will tell you, “I had a dream”, but I’ve never dreamt about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill.

You know, one day Mrs Kilday told me in church: “You know, Julie, I had a dream I’m feeding the pigs.” So I said, “Here in Ocean View?” “No,” she says, she says to me, “No, there at Red Hill.” I still see the beautiful pink — the creepers she had there. With pink flowers hanging down where she did her washing. She says to me, “And I still see my beautiful pink flowers hanging down like that, and I’m feeding the pigs, and it’s Red Hill.” She says to me, “I have never dreamed about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill!” And you can go to anybody that comes from Red Hill — many of them will tell you, “I had a dream, but I’ve never dreamt about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill”.
If one washes away the dust of regret from phrases such as “ek sien nog [I still see]” in the quotation above, one may see, glittering beneath this dust, an image of Red Hill whose potatoes, beans, cabbage, wood and flowers have turned into “gold”: “They took our gold from us! That I can say … They took our gold from us. That was a golden place” (Mrs Levendal). The term “gold” for a past life on a past land is revealing, not only in that Olga Levendal stands to gain some form of monetary compensation for the expropriation of her land by the Simon’s Town Municipality in 1971 (see Whisson 1972:15–17, for a discussion of perceptions of the pre-apartheid era as a ‘Golden Age’ among the coloureds in the Cape). It is also significant because the natural environment, which had previously been articulated in terms of its use-value (as a food resource and as a space for free movement), is here converted into a term whose significance is precisely its exchange value.

Former Red Hill residents’ testimony thus wavers incessantly between the specific recounting of physical labour and a more removed, increasingly optic, or descriptive, consciousness. The process of converting the former into the latter produces, it seems, an excess of affect which expresses itself as a glorifying nostalgia. Concrete physical motion, it appears, is exchanged for its representation as emotion in the form of image.

Former Red Hill residents’ descriptions of how they made use of the natural environment therefore occupy an intermediate ground which is rooted in their social strata, both past and present. At either extreme one may position the articulations of Layters and Hare. Mostly, Layters communicated a memory of the body, often physically re-enacted in the presence of the interviewer and her tape recorder. For example, the following ‘performance’ of the process of bringing a geelbek (Cape Salmon) on board the boat — even as transcribed here merely in written words — retains aspects of physical intensity: “Nou kry jy die wat diekant vang, vang diekant — bring hom uit — en die wat diekant vang — as hy vas is — ja hoe? Waar kom jy? Vat hom net met die kierie! [Now you get those that catch this side, they catch this side — bring him out — and those that catch that side — if he’s hooked — yes, huh? Where are you? Hit him with the stick!]” (Layters).

A comparable, but very different, intensity may be perceived in Hare’s interview. Nestling in “the leisure cushion” of his holiday house at Brightwater, Hare’s discourse is devoid of performative elements; yet it is driven by the eloquence of what one may be permitted to call an ocular passion: “The immense power of nature to create a spectacle,” he says, has produced “the most stunning views in the world … to take your breath away.” The wide variety of utterances about the natural environment reverberates in compelling alternations of concord and disunity — where the overwhelming “mystical, spiritual power” (Hare) of nature (as seen by some), is of no consequence (as articulated by others). The fifteen mussels one is allowed to remove nowadays from the Cape of Good Hope area, declares Layters scornfully, “soos die opgemaal is — dis nog nie eers ‘n frikkadel nie [once it’s minced — it’s not even enough for one fish-cake].” The oral histories selected and presented should likewise be seen as a small contribution to existing records of utterances about society’s inescapable relationship to nature.


Bonteberg Peak ...

Notes
  1. The word Nooi is probably best translated as ‘Miss’. However, ‘Miss’ fails to connote the aspect of endearment or familiarity which is present in Nooi. Layters’ use of Nooi in this context is indicative of the extent to which she considers herself to be my senior.
  2. The interviews for this project offered much in the way of interesting material on parent-child relationships, an analysis of which unfortunately falls outside the scope of this paper.
  3. Harders, Steenbras and Hottentot are types of fish. The name ‘Hottentot’ is a derogatory reference to the original Cape inhabitants the Khoi, and in this context apparently derives from the fact that these fish were easily caught in great numbers along Peninsula shores.
  4. It is relevant to note here the respective etymologies of the words ‘describe’ and ‘perform’. The root of ‘describe’ is the Latin scribere (to write), which, in conjunction with the prefix de- means literally ‘to write down’. The word ‘perform’, on the other hand, is derived from the old French word parfournir, which literally means ‘to furnish’, that is, ‘to provide form’, and today still denotes physical action and gesture.
  5. Once again a note concerning etymological origins is useful here. The word ‘nostalgia’ is the Latin for ‘homesick,’ deriving from two Greek words combining the meanings ‘return home’ and ‘pain’. In the context of this paper, the concept of ‘home’ should be taken to indicate the places which Layters and the former Red Hill population inhabited as residents, rather than only as temporary, if repeated, holiday-makers like the Hares. Incidentally, the word ‘inhabit’ derives from the verb habere (to have), while the root of ‘resident’ is sedere (to settle).



In memoriam ...

References
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Horns of history ...

Interviews
Places and dates are given; transcripts are lodged in the Western Cape Oral History Project Archive.

Hare, John, b.1947. University of Cape Town, 12 May 1995.
Jurgens: Two sisters were interviewed and are both referenced under Jurgens in the text. They are: Constance, Dorothy, b.1952, and Williams, Erica, b.1946, both nee Jurgens. Ocean View, 21 June 1995.
Layters, Dorothy, b.1929, and Klein, Sarah, b.1905. Red Hill, 23 May (Layters 1), and 29 May 1995 (Layters 2).
Levendal, Leonard, b.1929 and Levendal, Olga, b.1937 (husband and wife), and Yon, Julie nee Levendal, b.1942. Ocean View, 1 Aug. 1995.
Lotter, Herbert, b.1948. Ocean View, 7 Aug. 1995.
Mitchell, John, b.1931. Klaasjagersberg, Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve, 3 May 1995.
Page, Millicent, b.1949. Wildschutsbrand, 23 May 1995.
Wright, Gerald, b.1939. Helderberg Nature Reserve, Somerset West, 24 May 1995.