IMAGINARICA

Travels through an America of the mind

As published on www.gocray.com a long time ago.


The other night I got to thinking, as I gazed out of my window
into the dusk, over the neon lights of Durban, across the dark Bluff
with its mysterious military base, and up to the sky where another
plane lifted away with a load of London-bound visa applicants.

I got to thinking, here I am living in Africa, but have I ever travelled the Great Rift Valley,
or boated down the Congo, or seen the storms over Virunga?
For my shame, I’ve never even been to the Bluff, two miles away from home.
Instead I have spent much of my life watching Hollywood films,
reading American novels, and listening to ‘The Boss’ tell tales of blue-collar disappointments,
or the Jayhawks evoke golden dusk over telephone wires and corn.
Though I love Africa, most of my memory is replete not with crickets, lions,
black taxis and Kwaito, but with the gangsters, skyscrapers and Thanksgiving holidays
of the distant USA.

In my mind, if not in reality, I know the desert of Nevada and the streets of New York
more intimately than my own nearby Umhlanga, or the informal settlement over the hill from Durban city.

It seems pointless to feel an affinity for places one has never, ever set foot in,
while the sights and sounds of your immediate surroundings seem as
ephemeral as the television that built your (fake) memories.


How is it that I can almost smell the mist over Golden Gate bridge, can almost feel the blistering sun of Death Valley? How can I rememberAmerican places and smells and sights, if I have never been there?I have become a willing victim of American cultural imperialism…and it’s too late to go back. Thanks primarily to Hollywood, I have cobbled together a vast geography in my brain, that all in all, almost adds up to the actual experience of a week in Georgia. If I close my eyes, I can travel for miles, from coast to coast.

My mental America has very little to do with the contrary tableaux that is the actual reality of the place today. I know that the USA is in a flux of change right now, with George Bush at one end, Michael Moore at the other, and a confused, questioning population in between. My mental America is the ideal - as all daydreams must be.

To delve briefly into my box (a U.S. Air Force provisions drop crate, circa 1941) of Imaginarica: *


1981, Cape Town. A little boy is hunched in front of a snowy black and white TV, thrilling to the thunder of hooves, as the Lone Ranger flies across a landscape of dust and cacti, bandits hot on his dust trail.Every week I would ride alongside the masked hero who waved his popping silver gun around with total nonchalance - and never seemed to hit anything.

Back then there was ‘Gunsmoke’. ‘The Big Valley’. ‘Silverado’. I imagined all of these exhilarating adventures unfolding across the plains of a giant, dusty America, maybe in a time before they had greened the land. I actually thought that all of America was a desert. Having seen mainly Westerns, how was I to know otherwise?

'Gunsmoke' seemed to be set in about the middle ages, certainly some long-distant mythical age, rather than the 1800's, as my mother said it was. Or perhaps the west even existed in an age after some cataclysm in the far-flung future (I had read ‘Warday‘ and watched too many episodes of ‘The Ark’...).

I became confused sometimes, as I pored over Louis Lamoure novels I was still too young to read. Did Westerns take place in America or in Mexico - and then what was ‘New’ Mexico? What had happened to the old one? Why were there 'Indians', or redskins, as the cowboys called them, in the desert, but also in the forests and mountains of 'Hiawatha'? Were they the same people as the Indians in India?
Were the mayors of towns still called sheriffs nowadays? I had too many questions.
I couldn't decide whether TV programs were telling me the truth or not.

As I've grown up, some scattered historical foundations have fleshed out my western imagery.



I know that there are large deserts in the regions of Arizona and parts of California (as I saw in ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Mexican’), deserts which extend right down across the border into Mexico. I know that New Mexico is a U.S. state, and that Mexico is independent of the USA.
I know all about the Alamo. The old west had existed all right, though perhaps not quite as I had imagined it.My mental picture of the USA has been growing all my life, but unlike an atlas, it is filled with inaccuracies, thanks to fanciful scriptwriting and Batman comics.



Then there's New York...modern Rome.

Yellow taxicabs. Steam rising from vents in the road. Rollerbladers
with headphones in Central Park. Loonies proclaiming the end of the world.
Newspaper stands. Buildings that scrape the sky. Ice rinks. City
Hall. Madison and 5th. Macy's.
Italians and Greeks, Chinese and Hispanics. Bridges, lots of bridges.
These are the properties I now know to be true of New York.
But the New York of my imagination is another story altogether.
I vividly remember Godzilla plummeting into a dark river (the Hudson?)
like a falling mountain. I remember climbing into a cab at the height of 1984's ghost infestation (if America had a queen, my vote would be for Sigourney Weaver) and having a zombie leer vacuously at me from the driver’s seat.
I saw crack troops jog ominously over the river into midtown during
‘The Siege’ that nearly toppled the status quo.
I even know names like ‘Midtown' or 'Staten Island' -
whereas the average New Yorker probably wouldn't know South Africa's Wilderness, Hogsback or Riviersonderend.
But then, South African movies don't screen around the world.

The New York of my mind is as unreal as it is inspirational, as free of
scars and corruption as a child’s first view of the sea.
It is as inaccurate as some Americans’ view of the Namib desert, yet full of names and places and icons that all add up to a gigantic cultural stew. I remember the gremlins, and a giant gorilla in monotone, and Spider-man swinging through rain-slicked concrete canyons.
For me, though, the memory of this great city that most stands out would have to be a simple one:

Autumn leaves falling like rain onto an avenue in Central Park where Tom and Penelope laughed under a vanilla sky, themselves living in a dream that felt all too real.

Talking of dreams, I had this one last week... I was walking down a two-lane blacktop in a gentle drizzle, through a haven of tranquillity. Some tiny town in...New England? White picket fences, huge front yards, rusty Ford trucks in the 'yard', and little mailboxes with red flags on them. The road was ‘Sorority Avenue.' What a place. So alien to an African. I vowed, when I awoke, that one day I would simply have to find and walk down that road, in the rain.
Just be there, for a moment. If, that is, it actually existed. It had felt real to me.

Another time, I dreamed I was standing outside a roadside diner
somewhere in Ohio. Just standing there, thinking ‘wow, I’m actually in America.
I’m really here. I made it.’
I was looking at faded poster advertising a Johnny Cash gig in Cincinnati. When I awoke, it was with a sense of loss. I had been there, dammit. Funnily enough, I noticed later that my bed was smattered with soil, the kind you might find on the fringes of a small town in Ohio. Or maybe I had walked it into the house before bedtime.

These travel dreams are so vivid, I can't tell you. I think if I ever did land in America, I'd experience profound disorientation; the feeling that I am dreaming and need to wake up.
It's as if I never actually need to fly there, since, in my head, I have already seen about twenty states. In one long dream I had, I spent two weeks in a condo just off Venice Beach, crashing house parties with Jim Morrisson.

I'm fascinated by America's wide-open spaces, as well as the cities.
There must be vast tracts of unexplored wilderness in that huge puzzle
map of the States that hangs lopsidedly off my mental wall. I’d like to see the Grand Canyon. Montana.
The Great Lakes. Alaskan wolves in the wild.

I often think, what does it really look like as you drive North out of Seattle?
What is the quality of the air in Chicago? In Maine, how does it feel to sit with your legs dangling off one of
those flaking white wooden jetties, gazing out over the fishing boats that have carried fathers and sons? If you were in Maine, could you locate a small twilight town called Derry, where the mayor (sheriff, what have you) sported a badge saying S.King?
Of course I'm being flippant; I'm making believe.

The America my mind wanders through is inaccurate in so many ways.
I have probably put all the state lines in the wrong place. My New York
is way too big and I just know that I forgot to include a whole bunch of one-horse towns in Texas.

What astounds me about Imaginarica is that I must share it with millions of Laps, Nepalese, Swedes and Kenyans. There is no other country in the world that has been so over-exposed in popular media. Hollywood truly is the dream works.
I imagine that, in my sleep, all the people I come across in my America are others from far away, who have watched so many American movies that, like me, they now have a huge country growing in their heads, one they can visit almost at will.

Think how different everything would be if "Gone with the wind" had been set during the Russian Revolution. Or if Superman was an Australian superhero, famed since 1939 as the guardian of …Perth?? What I mean is, imagine the world, if America was simply a small country south of Canada, Russia ruled the globe culturally, and Hollywood was instead Moscowland.

Imagine if Brad Pitt was a Bollywood screen idol, or everyone on earth watched Chinese movies. Think how different the world might be if so many of us foreigners were not, of our own free will, Americanised?
In the last decades of the 20th Century and the early years of this one, America has colonized the world from within its own borders.
The knowledge is quite jarring, because unless American cultural dominance is eternal (and what is?) then one day, in a few centuries, we might well be speaking Mandarin Chinese - should China be a world power at that time. Would Thai Bo be the new baseball? Will millions glorify Shanghai streets and Beijing girls and live the Asian dream?

Right now, at this moment in history, America is the fantasy to millions, and myself merely a dreamer, deluded into travelling without moving the bizzaro world of Imaginarica. I know the real America is up there somewhere on the top of the globe, a gigantic, all-powerful, imperfect land in motion. But sometimes I think about flying up, over the Atlantic, west from Ireland, cruising for miles and finding...nothing. Perhaps discovering that America was after all nothing but a mental construct, and that the Atlantic simply met the Pacific in a swirl of deep-ocean currents.

I continue to mull over mythical America just as perhaps, thousands of years ago, a beet farmer in the North of Europe might have pondered on mighty far-off Rome.

Maybe I’ll never actually go to the States, you know. After all, the actual reality of it might be too much to assimilate. If America wasn't like the land I had visited in thousands of movies, I might have some sort of fit, or cognitive dissonance, and be found one day by the LAPD, drooling and wandering the back lot of a K-mart in Philly.

No, it's safer to keep cruising alongside ‘Frisco bay in a blue Pontiac, a young Brooke Shields at my side, with The Boss singing about glory days. Yeah, I know. That's just make believe.

But you know, isn't that what the American dream is all about? To many like me, around the planet, America is a dream.


* Imaginarica:
Seemingly authentic memories of geographic locations, which one has not visited in reality.

Just good friends

Because my wife and I are such ardent animal lovers and because we rent a small one bedroom apartment in a trendy block, where you can’t fit so much as a Basil plant on the balcony – let alone a pet – we often venture out to meet and interact with animals wherever we can. In our time we’ve tried to tame seagulls, starlings, hornbills and doves. During the recent Hermanus Whale Festival, I briefly befriended a dassie mother and child on the rocks. We’ve visited The World of Birds an abnormally high number of times and (here comes our dirty little secret)
we have a habit of coveting other people’s pets.

We’re not proud of it, but there it is. On three occasions, we’ve befriended neighbours’ cats to such an extent that they actually ended up spending more time with us than at home. Of course, the velvet cushion, cat nip and little tuna biscuit treats probably didn’t hurt. Various owners would appear at our door during the 8 ‘o clock news and ask pointedly if we might have seen their cat.

One set of neighbours even moved away suddenly, forlorn tabby cat meowing farewell to us from a cardboard box. I’m not saying we were the cause of their move, but they certainly didn’t leave a forwarding address. I bet the cat would have, if it could.

Recently though, we’ve stumbled on the most golden opportunity yet, for those suffering from pet envy. While following an irritated dove down Cape Town’s Hof Street, we ended up in De Waal Park; a verdant, well-kept giant green square where dogs of all breeds bring their owners on a Sunday afternoon, to frolic, mingle and wee on the numerous handy trees (the dogs that is – not the owners). Here, loosely congregating around a large central fountain, were all the dogs we had made wish lists about owning. Here was a staffie, who threw himself at us with characteristic abandon and bit my wrist in a friendly manner. There, a small black fur ball that looked like a shrunken, dyed Ewok. Best of all were the two golden retrievers who came and leaned against our legs in a nonchalant fashion. Big, ambling, shaggy, licky dogs. This was happiness.

Still, we needed to be careful. I could already see one or two of the dogs’ owners eyeing us every now and then – us with no apparent dog in tow. We retreated behind a fir tree and decided to move to a different part of the park – you couldn’t linger too long in one place, for fear of arousing suspicion. During our meander,
we came across a little Alsatian cross Jack Russell – some 50 metres from his likely owners. I made dog-calling noises (how do you write those?) and opened my arms in a friendly manner. He stared. He goggled. He barked. Then he ran as fast as his little legs could carry him, clearly wise to our interloper status.

Next time, we agreed, we’d bring a fake wooden dog, on wheels, and pull it around with us on a leash. And a tennis ball; we needed a ball. All dog people had balls. Soon, we’d be ‘in the mix’, chatting with other dog people, and getting to know their pets every Sunday afternoon. I got the idea from the wooden horse of Troy…but then, we too were deceivers of a sort, admittedly. Not that we’d ever, ever steal anyone’s best friend, of course – we were harmless, really. Hearts in the right places etc. etc. We only wanted other peoples’ best friends to be our best friends too. Unfortunately, owners who were amenable to ‘sharing’ their pets were rather slim on the ground. We decided to make good our exit, before the alert went out that there were two non-dog owners in De Waal Park, lurking on the fringes of the obedience training session.

On the way home we stopped only to speak to a dusty black and white tomcat on a street corner in Gardens, while his owners peered at us through the front windows. Happily, when we got home to our designery block, inhabited largely by the latte set, we found two more cats – resident cats, even. Someone must have just moved in with them. Unfortunately, they appeared to be Siamese – a rather wiggy breed,
in my experience. I approached one on my haunches, as it sat munching quietly on some grass. I reached out a hand to ruffle its ears – and it turned into a hissing, hovering ball with four beclawed legs glinting like razor blades in the sunlight, before shooting off into the flower beds.

A setback, then. Most likely an alert had gone out on www.fbi.cat, the international website dedicated to keeping tabs on what the media were now dubbing pet whisperers. Pet whisperers, like us, apparently already numbered in the thousands (and growing). Young, otherwise normal couples who worked in the rat race, they usually lived in compact urban clusters sans garden access, and simply had a deep yearning for the halcyon days of childhood, when they used to roll around with the muddy dogs in mom’s herb garden, long after being summoned to bath. Anyway, it was clear that for now, we’d have to lie low. We tramped up to our flat and plonked ourselves in front of the TV. Maybe there was a Lassie movie SABC2; that always raised our spirits. Then I noticed two little brown geckos, ‘parking off’ in the corner of the lounge ceiling. Geckos, I thought. They were new. I looked at my wife.
We both looked up at the ceiling. Our own little, resident (possibly mating) pair of geckos. Could they…could they be tamed?

YOUR STARS

Your stars for this month
Trust me, I’m an expert!*

Note: Due to an unexpected ice fog over much of the Northern Hemisphere, the influence of Venus is somewhat diminished at this time. A severe solar flare is responsible for the fact that star signs for those in the Knysna/Wilderness region should at this time be read in the inverse (e.g. "You will have a good day today" should now read as "You will have the worst day you've had all year").

VIRGO
AUG 24 - SEPT 22

If you go near horses this month, you will upset them and they will attempt to bite or kick you. You are under the impression that your jokes are amusing. In fact, you are boring everybody. Quit your job at once and begin preparing for an unassisted solo voyage across the Pacific Ocean. You will meet a person who will tell you the secret formula for eternal life, if you say to them these words:
"The weather in Chile is a rare topic of conversation." You will step on the last existing member of a 1mm-high humanoid race, without them ever having being discovered by science.


LIBRA
SEPT 23 - OCT 23

Baked beans, alarm clocks and green clothes are to be avoided at this point.You will miss out on dying in a four car pile-up on the weekend, due to deciding to stop and see if the latest issue of your favourite magazine is on the stands (it won't be; you will be disappointed, without realizing that your life has in fact just been saved). Something in your car will break...one of the little plastic-y bits that has no actual name. Mind your head when you pick it up off the floor, or you'll bang the steering wheel.
You will be unable to stop humming Pink Floyd's "Shine on you crazy diamond" for seven days.

SCORPIO
OCT 24 - NOV 22

You will astral travel by mistake, after a dodgy Calamari and Courgette dinner, and find yourself in Barcelona. No one will be able to help you due to your invisibility. You will be sucked into a Boeing 747 jet engine and blown through the atmosphere as ghost particles until (most of) you drifts to earth one mile from your home. What luck. By this stage, your body will have been declared 'dead through natural causes" and handed over for organ donation. Oh well. You will wander the earth as a ghost for seven years until you find a spirit-compatible grasshopper, and become it.
You will then be sucked into a lawnmower.

SAGITTARIUS
NOV 23 - DEC 21

You will develop an irrational fear of National Geographic magazine. Two years of intensive counseling, and tentative encounters with "mock" National Geographics made out of cardboard will slowly cure you of your neurosis. On the day of your last therapy session, you will walk out of the counselor’s office, and be crushed by a falling tower of 500 back issues of Life magazine, which an old lady had been collecting on her balcony three floors up. Such a waste, to have lived in fear of the wrong magazine all that time.












CAPRICORN
DEC 22 - JAN 19

If you touch anything of the colour blue, you will fall prey to either tick bite fever or an unshakeable belief that you are the next American president (50/50 potential outcome). For one week, speak only in words beginning with "r" or "a". In the following week, make all decisions with the roll of a pair of dice (e.g. even number, I become vegetarian, odd number I draw my life savings and book a holiday to Mexico). While you are driving along the freeway one night, a UFO will hover three miles above your car, debate whether to abduct you or not, and then instead abduct a used car salesman from Reading, Berkshire, England. His family will sell their house and buy a yacht to sail the world, only to sink with all hands lost off Belize in 2011.


AQUARIUS
JAN 20 - FEB 18

The next time you get up, the risk of stubbing your toe will be 87%.
You will lose three socks in the laundry, but remain unaware of this fact. These socks will have been sucked into a one-foot wide black hole behind the fridge, which is how all lost socks disappear in the wash. The FBI currently has you under surveillance, suspecting you to be an exotic animals peddler. They do not realize that your flat mate is in fact not a Bhutan striped orangutan, but rather a scruffy Nirvana obsessive who refuses to believe the 90's were rubbish. If you smile, the world will smile with you.











PISCES
FEB 19 - MAR 20

Take the star sign for Scorpio and read it backwards from last word to first. This is your reading, however, also be aware that you will have the ability to fly for exactly seven minutes, so make sure you do so when the time arrives, because this will never happen to you again.

ARIES
MARCH 21 - APRIL 20

The force is strong within this one. Due to the influence of Mars and the fact that you quit smoking recently, you pick fights with every second person you meet. This causes an insurance assessor you phone to resign her job and become an international animal rights campaigner. When you are 72 you decide to trek through the mountains of Vietnam, where you discover this woman living with a pack of gibbons, which she has taught to be telephone insurance assessors. They all work for a telecomm concern from Arizona,
via satellite hook-up. You step into a time portal on the way down into Cambodia, and wind up in the middle ages, where you killed by a Spaniard's arrow.

TAURUS
APRIL 21 - MAY 20

For one month you will be living one minute in the future. This means that you will know everything that is about to happen and will therefore irritate people who talk to you, save a brown dog from being run over, and manage to break up with your partner moments before they dump you.
The coin you swallowed at age six will jam an artery in your leg, necessitating emergency surgery. You will fall in love with the night nurse on duty, who will confess that they stole millions through stock investment fraud in the 80's, and turn themselves in for ten years' imprisonment.
You may or may not wait for them.

GEMINI
MAY 21 - JUNE 21

The third largest diamond in the world is buried in your back yard.
However, due to that mole problem you've been meaning to see to for weeks, the diamond falls through several feet of loosened soil, and will only be discovered in the year 2891, by which time the world economy will have collapsed, thus rendering the diamond worthless. You will grow three centimeters taller overnight, which then subconsciously makes the hottie in your office fancy you that little bit more.
You will embark on a lunchtime liaison in the stocks rooms, be discovered, and summarily dismissed.


CANCER
JUNE 22 - JULY 22

If you enter the national lottery exactly two hours after the next time your dog barks at a passing car, your chances of winning will increase by a factor of 20. An airline stewardess on Iberian Airlines will have a long complicated dream in which you feature, and for the next ten years wonder how she can have a dream about somebody she's never meet. You will meet, when you travel to Austria in 2008, however your hair will be completely different, you'll be suffering from flu, and as a result she won't recognize you. Your dancing ability is much approved in this phase; make use of it.



LEO
JULY 23 - AUG 23

You will rescue a lost, injured homing pigeon in the former employ of the SADF. However, it will be eaten by a neighbor’s cat, which means the message about that small African country with plans to invade Australia will never arrive in London. As a result, world history will change irrevocably.
A butterfly will flap its wings in Argentina; ultimately setting in motion a hurricane that will destroy your new garden gnome retail store in two years' time. It is suggested you develop your unused talent for the cello, so that you can survive as a busker once this happens. You will lose the ability to blink for six days; eye drops are recommended.



* Never said it. Always read the small print! And don’t believe anyone ever.

My Latest Book Review: THE ROAD

THE ROAD

by Cormac McCarthy




A retching, sickly man and his fearful young son walk an empty freeway from a horrific past to an unknowable future. Burnt out cars, skeletal trees and the smoke-enshrouded ruins of cities form their scenery. This is the underworld brought to life and father and son have become "each the other's world entire."

For those unfamiliar with Cormac McCarthy’s sparse style, archaic phrasing (he revives words long dead and buried, like ‘roofingtin’; ‘illcarved’) and wild America landscapes, The Road might prove frustratingly inconclusive – you can’t classify it. It’s not a sci-fi, although it is a future-set tale of survival – two refugees following a road through a post-apocalyptic hell.
We aren’t told how things came to be this way; only that one night there was a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” That’s as much as you’re going to get by way of explanation. Plot is less important; the characters’ reactions to their circumstances are what matter. In fact, the vagueness of it all is what unsettles the reader as much as the characters.
As father and son make their way, for no apparent reason, to the coast, they must scrounge for every morsel and fight off characters more desperate than themselves.

This theme of characters often as lost as the reader might feel, began in 1985 with Blood Meridian, a violent retelling of the Davy Crockett legend; it continued in the nightmarish The Orchard Keeper, then traveled on into McCarthy’s breakthrough Border Trilogy – which led to a film version of All The Pretty Horses. After that, this underground author gained notoriety and his next release, In the Country of Old Men, was snapped up for movie rights before it hit the shelves. A more accessible thriller of sorts, it disappointed some who had followed McCarthy’s slow, non-conformist journey from cult author to Oprah guest. In The Road he reverts to form, with the power to communicate in one sparse sentence what lesser writers take pages to do.

The Road has a sense of timelessness – mythological, almost – grounded firmly in the landscapes his characters traverse. In a story that might as easily have been set in the Dark Ages, events unfold with a directness and honesty that moves - without relying on sentimentality.

McCarthy still remains, and covets, the loner character – a figure so isolated in his fictional world that only the reader is looking out for him. In The Road, it is this empathic force that could leave you with a lump in your throat and most surprisingly, given the bleakness of the story as a whole – a sense of hope for humanity.