I want to start with a tulip. Then I’ll move onto the water lilies floating aimlessly on the surface of a pond. But let me get back to the tulip.
It was a bright, saffron yellow colour and you fastened it to my collar with a safety pin. You even thought of bringing a safety pin! My mother wasn’t impressed. She believed that, when it came to flowers, yellow signified disdain. Reds, pinks, whites and all hues in between were perfectly fine, but yellow was the wrong colour if you wanted to make a good first impression on my mother. She didn’t say anything to you, though. She just watched us take off in your car (would you believe I don’t remember what colour your car was, back in those days?) and she waved us goodbye with teeth clenched behind her smile. Later that night, after you delivered me home, safe, sound and still a virgin, I pressed the tulip, which was already languishing, between the pages of the phone book. Let’s move onto the water lilies. It’s a fine summer’s day, a lazy Saturday, two years after that first date. The dry tulip, together with the dry yellow roses and daffodils that came later, is now living – or should I say perpetually dying – between the leaves of my journal. My mother continues to believe that your preference for yellow is a bad omen; if you hold me in such contempt now, what will it be like after we get married, after we have children, after we become as used to each other as one does to wearing a pair of old, faded jeans? She never voices any of these concerns to you, though. She only brings them up with me, usually when we are alone in the sewing room, as she struggles in vain to teach me the art of dressmaking, to prepare me for married life. Much as I try to please her, my patterns are always crooked and my stitches uneven. To her despair, I am not nearly as interested in crafts as I am in numbers, and she blames that on you too, on the formulae you share with me, the theories you propagate, about measured risk-taking, about odds and percentages, about everything in life being subject to the laws of arithmetic. She must be right, because when you produce the ring out of your pocket this particular Saturday, and kneel down next to the pond, and ask me the question I never thought you’d ask, I answer you with another question: ‘What would you say are the odds of me saying yes?’ ‘I’d say ninety-nine to one,’ you answer confidently. To your disbelief, I snatch the ring from your fingers and cast it into the murky pond. ‘Ha! What do you think are the odds of you finding that ring in the pond?’ I ask, but you are too stunned to reply. You stand up slowly, and stare hopelessly at the pond. ‘Perhaps one in a million,’ you manage to mumble when you find your voice. ‘Have you any idea,’ you then say, striving to sound measured, ‘how many months’ salary I spent on that ring?’ And with that, you turn on your heels and walk away. Later, when I tell my mother, she insists on walking with me to the pond. ‘The problem with that boy,’ she says as we approach, ‘is that he only believes in numbers, and there are times in life one needs to believe in miracles.’ And I watch my mother, my old, big fleshy mother, strip down to her undergarments and disappear in the green, cloudy water. She emerges at the centre, among the water lilies. There, resting on one of the leaves, catching the light of the dying sun, is the ring. Image credit: Robert Gavila http://www.gavila.com/artist/Photos/Photos.html
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Recently a friend invited me to her grandson’s christening. It had been a long time since I attended a mass, and I found the sermon extremely stimulating, although not necessarily from a faith perspective. The priest started by showing the infamous ‘selfie’ that President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt took of themselves at Nelson Mandela’s Memorial service (photo credit: AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT/Getty Images). Even on that solemn occasion, they couldn’t help themselves and succumbed to the temptation of taking a selfie. And they were caught in the act, by another camera!
The priest then showed a ‘selfie’ he took of himself at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He said that the ‘selfie’ is our modern way of showing the world that “I was there”, with that famous person, or at that famous place, and I have the photo to prove it. It is our way of ‘witnessing’ events, landmarks, encounters, and, more often than not, trivial moments in our lives. Before the invention of cameras, and more recently, digital cameras, people documented their encounters, travels and experiences by writing them down. The priest referred to the gospels, particularly the gospels written by John and Matthew, who were two of the twelve apostles*, and as such witnessed first-hand the life and deeds of Jesus, the most famous and enduring ‘celebrity’ of all. The gospel writers couldn’t take ‘selfies’ of themselves with Christ, so they wrote everything they saw to document it, and their stories spread like lightening – or in modern terms, they went ‘viral’. Nowadays, with everybody carrying a camera in their pocket, selfies and photographs documenting our lives minute by minute are overloading the media landscape. Facebook posts that don’t include a picture, don’t receive as many ‘likes’. Images are much more likely to be re-twitted than plain text. Media releases with photographs have a much higher chance of being published. We live in a visual era, and words without pictures are often overlooked. People take thousands of photographs of their every trip or special occasion, but how often do they look at, or even download those pictures? When I travelled to Europe in 2003 – still in my 'pre-digital' age – I took a grand total of 144 photographs: six rolls of 24. Nowadays that is a laughable quantity for a three-week tour, but when I returned home and developed the rolls I could hardly remember what photo was taken where. Fortunately, I had taken a comprehensive travel diary as well, describing the places, their history, the people I met at every stop, and other interesting facts. I was able to marry the words and the pictures and the resulting illustrated story was much more detailed and effective in conveying my adventures than the digital photo albums I produce these days, which have a one-line caption per photo and sometimes not even that. A few months ago I was driving back home after work and I witnessed the most incredible rainbow. I thought of taking a photo, but my phone was in my bag and thankfully for the other motorists, I am not very good at multitasking when driving. I felt frustrated at first, but then realised that sometimes we miss the moment by trying to capture it with a camera. I captured it with my eyes, committed it to my memory, and that was enough. I still remember the highlight of my first trip to Adelaide, South Australia, in 2001. In my diary, I recorded Womadelaide (the music festival at the botanical gardens) as one of the highlights; also the day tour to Hahndorf and Victor Harbour, and a cruise down the Murray River. But the biggest highlight of that trip didn't cost a cent: it was the sunset over West Beach on the night of our arrival. It was a hot afternoon and we walked to the beach to cool down. While we were there, the cloudy sky turned into an incredible canvas with a mixture of colours, textures and shapes in constant motion. The sea became a liquid mirror of the sky, reflecting the silver, blue and pink hues of the clouds, and the effect of the sun setting over the water was nothing short of miraculous. People quickly began to arrive, sensing that something momentous was taking place; some of them were even carrying champagne bottles and glasses. We all stood there, in awe, clinking glasses and taking in the landscape with jaws dropped. I cursed myself for not having my camera with me (pre-digital / smart phone era), but then again, a photo would have never paid this moment justice, so I wrote it all down as soon as we returned to our hotel. We went back to the beach at the same time the next day hoping to repeat the experience, with some friends who joined us in the morning, but unfortunately for them the sunset was nothing more than ordinary. Thirteen years later, I don’t remember much about the Hahndorf and Victor Habour excursions or the cruise on the Murray, even though I took copious pictures of those places. But when I read my travel diary, I can instantly recall that sunset, which remains in my mind as one of the most spectacular I have ever seen. To be able to conjure a visual image like that, after all these years, by painting it with words, demonstrates – to me – the supremacy of words against pictures. It might take an hour to write a thousand words (as it did to write this 1000-word blog post), and less than a second to take a picture, but it is time well spent. * Mark and Luke, who wrote the other two gospels, were not part of the twelve apostles – in fact Luke joined the Christian movement after Jesus died; but they researched their stories by interviewing sources who had met and been close to their subject. Why do we write?
Because we have stories to tell, messages to communicate, lessons to impart to others? Because we ‘hear voices’? (As in the voices of characters who are trying to get out of our heads and into the world) Because it’s therapeutic, soothing and fulfilling; a way of working things out, of giving shape to our thoughts, our fears and our dreams? For me, it’s all of the above, and more. - Flash Fiction by Bel Vidal - Last Valentine’s day, while sweeping the platforms at the railway station just before the end of my shift, I couldn’t help but notice this gorgeous guy sitting on one of the benches. He was wearing a business suit, silk tie and shiny black shoes, and was holding a bouquet of red roses. He’d been there for a while but didn’t get on any of the trains. He just sat there waiting for his girl to arrive, and she never did. “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” (Life Magazine’s motto, as featured in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) The Secret Life of Walter Mitty had a production budget of 90 million USD, and as such it is packed with special effects and breathtaking scenery filmed in remote locations. But the story goes beyond that. It explores the purpose of life (a subject too vast to be tackled here) and the power of imagination, which is the subject of this blog post. |
Midnight MusingsAuthorBel Vidal - Débutante novelist (author of Exuberance), blogger, Archives
December 2023
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