Simply Seeing

I hope you haven’t given up on my ever writing another post. My mother’s house, the home I grew up in, has sold and the pain of all that has passed. I have done so much that I found both difficult and sometimes outside of my comfort zone. Now I walk away from it and into something brand new. I just turned 51, and all that has been, has placed me right here where I am, living in a suburb called Sea View, a suburb that is steeped in history, but is often frowned upon because it is perceived as a ‘dangerous place’, a place where poor people live. I am now claiming it with all its faults and all its beauty. 

end of day at the end of my street

My home is here, and even with holes in my floor boards and wood borer in the timbers, I have earned it all. I will no longer feel embarrassed when I tell someone I live here, and I will not want to disappear when I watch a lip curl at the thought of being here. I still yearn for a studio though, or an attic overlooking the sea (there is a sea view in Sea View if you can rise above the trees), a library filled with wonders or an apothecary’s jewel-like storeroom. For now though, I am here, and I have earned this and it hasn’t been easy.

 daybreak from the vacant lot in my street...yes that's a sea view.

I have been watching a warm Durban Winter creep over us. Cool mornings and warm days with huge skies. I have been taking photos whenever I had a chance and have made a collection of them; skies, some visual oxymorons, and some moments of soul warming. I am very aware that sunsets and sunrises are perceived as over-done and clichéd, and it’s almost a sin to post a photo of a sunset. Bearing this in mind, I still couldn’t help myself, and I challenge anyone with a camera who is faced with a punch-in-the-stomach sunset to not shoot it. 

So this is my sentimental, no-excuses-made, personal record of my sunrises and sunsets, and the breathing space between them over the last two months. They are taken close to where I live, they are my everyday skies.

 

I was so aware of the contrasts I saw and the moments of glory in the mundane. We so often live like prisoners in our own homes here in South Africa, and we live angry lives because we are not free to walk alone, or go to the beach at night, or even to wait in a car outside a school, without being aware or suspicious of other cars or people approaching. Life has changed and we remember what it was like when we were children. When we played in canals and stayed out until bath time and came home with grazed knees and dirty faces, and so now we live with anger, because we have been victims of a great theft, that of personal freedom. 

I have been aware of this personal loss of freedom as I travelled through the last two months of sun-ups and sun-downs in Durban. I would see the blues and ambers and darkening purples, like a child looking through a piece of coloured glass, and even though it took my breath away I would think of the city skyline and the people living there, both the compassionate  and the black-hearted. 

The sunset on the last day that I worked late clearing out my mother's house, taken on Bluff Road

I saw fences with their barbed tops and thought of those living behind them and those lurking in front of them. The barbs themselves, became something sinister in my mind. I realised how much I was losing by doing this and I tried to just ‘see’ without commenting. In rusted barbs of wire, tall fences, and in the veneer of our city itself, I found a strange and compelling beauty.

I looked at the surface of things, and these surfaces became artworks that had their own tales to tell. It is difficult to see past our attachments to things, and our pre-conceived ideas of how things should be. Nature re-invents our shining, barbed-wire armour, and over time, without a sound, it is changed into ragged, rusted wire, and there is glory there too. The elements change things - wind, rain, salt air and time, they become the artist’s hand. 

In a sunset, a city seething with fragmented life, disintegration and lack of services, can become just blocks glinting against the sky, architectural shapes that lose their shabbiness and become part of a painted Durban, a story book page in which all of us have a part to play. Sometimes it is cathartic to just see the surface, the shapes, the light, the textures, and to leave the complexity of life out of the vision.

In these past few mild Winter months, I have watched our Durban and have tried not to comment too loudly, the whispers were still there at times, so both an ache and a sense of wonder was in much that I saw. I have seen old men sleeping on benches and children cold and wanting, lizards basking in the sun, brilliant Erythrina and Leonotus flowers dripping nectar and sunbirds.

a sunbird outside my window

a skink in my garden soaking up the sun on the Erythrina

A vervet in my garden eating flowers in the Erythrina tree

 There have been car-jackings and burglaries in the neighbourhood, while small birds had sand baths under my trees. There have been hungry monkeys at my back door, and hungry people at my car windows. No matter how we feel, we cannot stop things from changing or staying the same, and we so often forget to look, or hear, or see those brief moments of magic. I feel it is often in our quest for new and better and more expensive, that we lose great chunks of our lives and of everyday magic. Perhaps if we looked for the ironies in our days we would be more creative, perhaps laugh at ourselves more and see art in everything. 

Life certainly presents us with small ironies and bitter sweet contrasts, the obvious ones like the sunset resting briefly behind the harsh spikes atop our walls  or the barbed wire reeling across the gates to protect monuments for the dead, even a police van parked under a flowering tree. 

protecting the dead

Another little irony...flower power?

I had to smile at one such irony when I parked outside the cemetery to take a photo. I parked under a Natal Mahogany tree and next to me was a sleek silver Jaguar, glinting and almost sidling off so as not to be seen too close to my dirty little 15 year old car. I smiled to myself because, although my car looks like it’s barely survived the digestive systems of a multitude of birds during a mulberry season, the affluent owner of this low flying machine was not spared a small indignity. On the bonnet, right next to the polished, leaping silver jaguar, a bird had dropped its effluent and flown off unaware of the comment it had just made.

 

When bad things happen, life-altering things, we may be angry that the sun still shines, that it has no comment to make on the happenings in our lives, yet there it is, changing the colour of the sky, rising and setting on us daily. It just does what it’s always done, quietly and with dignity, whether we deserve it or not.   

When I admire the wonders of a sunset

or the beauty of the moon,

my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi