My mother assured me that 27 is a difficult age...So did the recent death of Amy Winehouse. And for all those who found it necessary to pass criticisms on her music in conjunction with her lifestyle (as if possessing an opinion on the one entitled you to an opinion on the other), may I suggest that she's somewhere afloat the groove of some jazz-swag giving you the middle finger right now.
Anyway as the saying goes, everyone, or at least the people my mother knows, hit 27 and become afflicted by the nagging question, "But what does it all mean???" like some irritating first year philosophy student who spends more time liberating the mind with shrooms than books and whose favourite form of punctuation is the ellipsis (probably to be succeeded in later years by the semi-colon as the grammatical mark of preference). And I, like all these other 27-year-olds out there to be sure, try to banish the stupid ellipses-besotted fool to his/her mother's basement. (Forgive me here as my simile becomes a little undone by the question of gender, for what form of gender might a question adopt?)
Maybe the question is not 'What does it all mean?' though.
Just a thought.
Sometimes the question feels a lot more like 'Who the bloody hell are you?!'
And it's angry and a little confused, like it's come home to find you gallavanting with its missis and prancing around in its initialled house-slippers feeding bits of kibble to the family dog. (This is me trying to avoid determining the gender of a question. As far as the question is concerned, it is a private matter and I wish to respect its wishes.) And confronted by the genderless, angry and confused question (by now in bold italics, no less!!), you stammer that honestly, you have no idea and you're very sorry for ingratiating yourself with its dog under false pretences. You only meant to make a friend and dogs are said to be such loyal companions. But 'Who the bloody hell are you?!!'' (and by now, only further fortified by an added exclamation mark) is unimpressed and tempted to call security. So you fling the initialled slippers (which you thought bore your own confounded initials anyway!) from your guilty feet, mouth an apology to missis and dog and make an undigified run for it, barefoot.
In a wine-induced haze afterwards, you think to yourself, Surely, was that not your missis, your dog, your slippers? How could it be you had wandered so into the house of that gender-non-disclosed question, unknowing?!
So, I've been thinking to myself, and dusting off those shelves with all those many selves, trying to piece together the clues that might make the question less formidable, that might help to remove one exclamation mark, then another, and so on and so forth, till I can switch the remaining pronoun of 'you' to 'I' and hopefully find myself closer to some answers (or, if not that, then at least closer to some more useful questions in a small and unintimidating font).
When it may feel like we're stuck in the 27-year-old's quagmire, it's nice to know there are smaller, more useful questions out there. (Quagmire... Such a great word, I just had to use it again. Quagmire. And again.) And sometimes, comfortingly, they can creep up on us totally unrequested. You can be lying in the sun, minding your own business with a library book. This is what happened to me today, pausing and reading over a line in Devil's Valley by Andre Brink. It felt like a clue, no two ways about it. More than that, it felt like a reminder of myself. I was reminded of one of those many selves from some dusty shelf, a self that marvels at words, at how they are able to constellate our experiences, or perhaps more modestly, my experiences:
They were chatting quietly, outlined against the stars splashed across the sky like spilt milk over which it was useless to cry.
(Brink 2000:129)
Maybe not everybody works this way, but in my mini quest I am grateful for the words of Samantha Vice (see links in my last blog post). And I am grateful for South African writers, and for a world of writers after that, who bring a feeling of 'I' back into focus. I might even take a page from bell hooks and lowercase it occasionally: i. Maybe then the 27-year-old's question(s) will be more hospitable in the future.
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