One Night, On My Way Out of Woodstock

This post first appeared on Art Heat, Monday, July 06, 2009

With a feint painterly breath sitting next to me I drive out of Woodstock, along Lower Main road. As I approach The House of Rasputins I glance into the rear-view mirror and, in the roaring din of headlights, I notice an old white golf being driven by the silhouetted outline of Matthew Blackman. Driving cautiously I sense his imminent impatience, he belts past into oncoming traffic, the engine of his stoic VW speeding him to his fateful destination. He is a syndrome of our times, intoxicated by the glory of our absent pursuits.

Like the Zombie of Sloon standing at the bottom of Commercial Street, in front of a misty Telkom, just short of the now dead Studio 2666, Blackman approaches a seemingly liminal end, and so too, a beginning. Like the end of his night at Whatiftheworld, a new, untold beginning awaits him, at the Kimberly Hotel.


I never ventured that far on this fate-fuelled night. Before the highway bridge I turn up, and instead of driving past the castle, opt for the gentler route, through District Six. I always take this route coming out of Woodstock. For starters the traffic is better towards the end of the day. And at night, the barren landscape of District Six, haunted by Cape Town’s disenfranchised ghosts gives me some comfort, reminding me that all is not well in the province of the Western Cape.


Now we are a fishing village. A town perched at the Southernest tip of Africa, hemmed in by the Atlantic winds that fan us with their bitter gusts. This winter Maggs must have felt that breeze, and cringed at that the cold waters that tide us by. Watching his edited version of The Shipping News I felt these icy gales, and shivered at the drowning Coyle, gasping for air, losing his way to the surface, along the shore of that isolated rock, Newfoundland.

As Maggs’ figures seemed trapped in their own incomprehensibility, Sloon’s find themselves enclosed in their own fictive constructions. They are shrouded by their own axiomatic reliance’s. Similar to the jaded James Bond, tormented by his own inner melancholic apprehension, Sloon’s aim is to exorcise his own ghosts. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Darth Vader stand as spectres, ominously guarding the soul of Sloon in the world beyond, the world before and the world yet to come.

What then will finally keep us together? The bomb, as Alien and Predator suggest? Perhaps here is the living presents link with that other fictive world. That thing that reminds us of our final mortality, of our own making that has the absolute and dreadful power to undo.

On the edge of town now I feel a foreign, desolate sensation. A fire blazes beneath the bridge, huddled figures gathered in its warmth. The buildings slowly dissipate as the streetlights now illuminate only piles of rubble in amongst the empty grassland; the mosque that guards over the east city precinct, turning its reticent shoulder.

We never were really there. The landscape will remain. We people it only briefly with the promise to occupy it later as those ghosts Maggs and Sloon conjure. This is our responsibility. How we people such a terrain, in our transient time, is as much our doing as it is our undoing. Such are the opportunities between life and death. To learn to live then, and to do it, finally. Nothing could be more, nothing could be less.