Early summer is starting to brew up a green foliage broth in Shanghai. I often stop and gape at the sea-storm green hues in the plane and bamboo trees now soaring up like Moses’ parted sea on the street-sides. Soon, many streets in Shanghai will be luminous, green tunnels.
In a wet wind licking at their elven, pointy faces, the leaves crowd and whisper, staring down at us, then separate crackingly, then shyly hug one another again, their rustle-language shimmering at me, come on, enjoy us while you can, qiutian, autumn, will come… the Mandarin word qiu so like their word for smoke … imagine simmering leaves preparing to be piled and burned, that remembered tang of smoke, sharp, searing, evoking giggling childhood tumbles through leaf-thickets …
Ach, I despair. Lovingly despair in celebration of that despair. Words will never match the thing. Again and again the poet in me holds up the word-candles to the twinkling mystery of things, especially petals, their loveliness deepened by their ephemerality. And those veined serrations, sparkling, luminous with ancient sunlight, bursting greenly from the candelabra of stems in summer? Humbly call them … leaves.
And in this world where there is still so much to celebrate we have discrimination and intimidation.
I went on a sales course once in Scotland where the English training director, Steve, really had it in for South Africans. There were only three of us on the high-powered course, the other two were British. We were being trained to get businesses to change their BT telephone service platform to the wholesale platform afforded by Steve’s company.
Lie #1: We had to dress like “engineers”, different from SA’s understanding of the word. In the UK engineers were people who did building utility maintenance and wore blue uniforms, boots and utility belts. They seemed to have an almost lower-class status. We had to go from business to business and ask if people had received …
Lie #2: A fictional letter to their company about the good news for their company, a large cut in the cost of their phone bills. This was a way of getting the boss’s attention and it worked. Just sign here please and within days, sir, you will be on the much cheaper platform, more or less wholesale (or so I dimly remember, this goes back more than four years).
Needless to say I did not get the job as I am not one for lying. It makes my heroic or ennobling and enabling archetypes clash, causing a psychological short-circuit, weakening my energy levels and sense of fidelity with my self, as Jung might say.
The sales training was held in a castle near Edinburgh and Steve made a point of arriving there most days in his own personal helicopter which he loved to brag about.
He ranted and raved at me as a South African, as my training room role-play gift for the gab and ability to turn questions into reasons to buy the product faltered as I hated lying. Piercing, black-eyed Steve made the following observations within the space of five minutes. His eyes truly glittered like a snake’s as the venom poured out:
“Principles of sales: the customer always lies, or is never completely truthful.”
“You South Africans are so fucking anal retentive, unable to lighten up and make honest observations. We British are cynical but generous, light-hearted, open and honest.”
I did not have the temerity to point out to him the blatant contradiction between statement one and statement two, and statement two’s contradiction of his general philosophy on sales training. This is because Steve did intimidate me and I was desperate for a job in England. I also began to realise the man had serious psychological problems.
The human brain is like a sponge; it sucks up whatever is fed to it. Eventually you begin to believe your own lies. Steve did and thus regressed from being human and being able to overcome his endless discriminations and his disrespect for people. If you lie to people to make money out of people, that means you don’t respect people, period. He used countless examples from his sales life such as selling cars to people. He would wangle the car keys out of customers (the old car was the deposit on the next car and an enormous symbol of trust in the purchasing process) and promise he would have the car of their choice ready that afternoon or by the next day. He then frantically got the sourcing staff to track down the vehicle the customers wanted.
Steve was seldom able to produce exactly what was promised to the customer but still sold them a car, because of his — boy did he take pride in this — ability to manipulate them step by step into getting into another vehicle, often not of their choice. I never once heard him talk about service to customers, which I have always been strong on. He struck me as a deeply unhappy man in denial of that unhappiness. On the weekend our sales training continued in the mornings and he took sales staff on rides in his pet toy, the helicopter in the afternoon. It struck me that he had no life outside of the company, no friends.
To state the obvious, people who discriminate and intimidate endlessly are stuck in their growth. They are unable to see the wonderful humanity in people, affirm them, acknowledge the astonishment of life as everything has become untruthful to them, a ghostly, lifeless Plato’s Cave of sorts.
Ach, this blog is getting too touchy feely maybe. I definitely want to look at Plato’s Cave in the next blog, and the question, “is the idea of being human defined by ourr ability, unlike animals, to believe in something, which perhaps makes a falsity of the phenomenon believed in? This is suggested by the title of this favourite Wallace Stevens poem, Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself, a title I find most hauntingly profound. Note the sheer celebration of life in this poem, something our Steve above would be incapable of seeing, I think.
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow …
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache …
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
A prince with dignity and determination
Prince Ngarambe’s goals are to become Rwanda’s first transgender model and to uplift the country’s youth
The EFF’s principles are unshakeable
Unlike the ANC, the core values of the freedom fighters do not change with each leader it elects
