1. |
||||
2. |
14th Avenue
04:25
|
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|
14th Avenue: story and voice by Gerard Rudolf
Time takes the heart of every thing. It has nothing to do
with you or the place. There is just the overness of it.
Every thing is still there. Yet nothing is left.
....
It is the same house in the same yard in the same street.
It is the same window. It is the same stream.
Yet the water in it is different water. That is all.
....
So, you saunter down the unsame street, past the changed stream,
towards the house where the overness of every thing sits and waits
in patient chairs, on restless beds, inside a cold kitchen
....
with cupboards vacant as caves and a saltshaker filled with nothing
but thirst. In every photo they still pose: Stiff-backed-bug-eyed,
cramped inside collars and bodices, confined
....
to frames: Men's men, ashy women, offspring in sailor suits.
No names. Your blood is their blood. Their marrow inside your bones.
Box-Brownie-stares seem to expect a real birdie to fly at them
....
in that blinding blaze between the whip of a shutter and the flutter
of eyelids. Beyond the window: the garden of good and milk, the land of evil
and honey where days still break as they always have: Blood-orange red
....
behind bulky trees, black branches bending under wet weight
of unplucked fruits, rot slowly eating at the roots.
Yes, that unsame house under unchanged stars where
....
the sash window is the guillotine in your childhood dreams, where
numberless versions of you have stood in many shoe sizes, where
time broke in and took your heart and replaced it.
|
||||
3. |
You Are Here
02:51
|
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|
Monday, December 07, 2009
You Are Here: story and voice by Gerard Rudolf
Still dark.
You are in a car.
Black road ahead.
Poles bend past the side window.
Bushes blur. Koppies drift. Far off mountains move slower.
The smell of drought.
You are driving through sameness. The sameness of life.
You speed up. Hot tyres drone on cold tar.
Below the tar, a forgotten dirt track.
Deeper still insects tunnel. Roots. Eyeless things.
Now, dig deeper.
Crystalline forms. Fractals.
Below that shells and bones of ancient fish.
Petrified ocean old as stars.
Walls between mind and matter melt. Glacier slow.
You are here.
You live here.
You have always been here.
Terrene, clotted with rootedness.
You are stone. Sand. Dust. Powder. Particle.
The past is the present. The past brought you here.
Time is the endless fence rushing past.
Yet there are other parts to the moment.
Solar winds billow beyond imagination. Air in your nostrils.
Air made by plants.
Time here is time termless. Earth and sky.
Dig here and you emerge among the stars.
Die here and you'll be back in the cradle.
Life here begins where astronomers' laws never existed.
Then the sun.
It flares over the far horizon.
Swallow scuds from a thorny bush.
First light.
|
||||
4. |
||||
|
That night I am supposed to be on guard duty. Instead I am sharing a small fire with a
Bushman tracker. He's a member of my platoon. I watch him roll a Cuban cigar-sized
joint with a page from a battered Gideon's Bible.
We smoke in silence, pass it to-and-fro between us like ideas in a conversation.
Dagga seeds pop and crackle.
He folds the night, the fire, us inside a song about the Moon
and the Holy Mantis. It is a hymn in a prehistoric tongue of insects clicks and meandering hums.
His language is old as stone.
His Language is the First Language, a language borrowed
from plants and animals and insects, plucked from the ether at the dawn of history. It is
The Mother Tongue. I want to cry because I am stoned, because of the way his tiny frame seems to drown inside his brown combat uniform , because I know he'd rather carry a bow and a quiver of poisoned arrows than a R-4 assault riffle.
He'd rather run down a wounded Impala over two full days than track an invisible enemy not of his own making.
I know he'd rather walk away from this war in bare feet, drink water from the buried shells of ostrich eggs.
His song is the song of a soul that longs for the earth as it was before it was cut up, fenced in and flogged from under his father's father's feet.
The song stops. I look up from the fire.
There is no sign of the moon anywhere. Just a cloud covered in stars.
When I look back down, he too is gone.
|
||||
5. |
Blown Away
02:30
|
|||
6. |
Two Hands
07:28
|
|||
7. |
Portrait
02:04
|
|||
|
Portrait Of Frederik: story and voice by Gerard Rudolf
The first hot and nameless day of spring.
All afternoon he turns and tills the silent space,
snips-snips a decade's chaos from 14 apple trees,
furrows soil to lead astray the pending thought.
Now six o'clock, slumped in a dog-tired chair,
he studies his slog, sips blister-black Hungarian wine.
To the south, he heard, locusts ate entire territories to the root,
elsewhere it rained frogs, fires laid waste to farms, gardens.
Somewhere behind him his wife's pitter-patter in the house,
the nameless child inside her still only the size of a peach stone...
Yet, the garden must be ready, ready for The Arrival. Fleckless...
This garden will be their child's first full view of the world.
Now, eight o'clock, a giddy-laughter of wild geese
wades through the thick orange-skin dusk to the sea.
Soon night will close in around him like an eyelid
and he'll sleep the sleep of conquerors inside his red house.
|
||||
8. |
Of
01:19
|
|||
9. |
Frederik
00:31
|
|||
10. |
||||
11. |
Inbetween Tracks
01:22
|
|||
12. |
Shelling Peanuts
02:21
|
|||
13. |
Southern Discomfort
09:43
|
|||
14. |
Hidden Track (Exposed)
02:58
|
|||
redloz Amsterdam, Netherlands
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