Someone Other

Ever since I can remember I have had a powerful life in my head that hovers and glides to and fro across the relatively short human lifespan, into a timeless ancestral past, and an uncharted eternity. In this context, later life may be seen as a retrospective random search for personal links between past and future. Laurens van der Post, in his mid-70s, actually envisaged the lifetime link as his boyhood self, who stood before a pre-natal spiritual frontier in the role of critic and mentor of his adult life. This imaginary being he called ‘someone other’. This is the definition of the childhood comparator we all tend to return to for remembrance and affirmation of values that, for one fleeting moment were everything, but then were buried deep with the onward rush of the experiences of growing up. Youth comes into focus in later life, but also time, long past, is compressed, so things that happened decades ago appear as fresh as yesterdays. Also, the most significant factor in the psychology of getting old is that one becomes more oneself.

The shortest day is an appropriate cosmological metaphor for a distillation of these feelings that towards the end of my seventh decade are moving me at the deepest level of being to reconnect with my someone other. This invisible, subliminal being was with me briefly in childhood, but disappeared when I began to think of myself as being totally self-sufficient. I say it has disappeared, but recently I have gradually become aware that I need to rediscover this other being who is still lurking at the back of my mind. It is not a version of me because, as a child, I frequently found myself wanting to show a new discovery or share a problem with ‘her’; not a mother or a sister, but a shadowy girl of my own age, who came in daydreams. I now know this other embodied the qualities of generosity, curiosity and persistence.

Until this other becomes fully emerged, my new year resolution today is to move on alone and write a kind of autobiographical meditation on being human; an interior voyage seeking to understand humankind's place as an interlinked mass of thinking primates on a solar planet, as just one of many far older life forms, in a cosmos of unimaginable age and size.

For most people, there are actual places and objects that mark a notional boundary between the real and the imaginary. These are our personalised panopticons, or mental heights from which we view our past and decide on pathways to the future. Van der Post singled out the Cape of Good Hope as his personal panopticon of transition. Here it was, as he sailed away from his South African homeland for the last time, that he contemplated the Portuguese age of discovery which first brought South Africa to the European mind. To Portuguese sailors the Cape was a landmark and a symbol of nationhood as colonisers of half the world. Van der Post's mind-set then shifted from the technology of ships and marine chronology which were symbols for charting the old Earth, to space travel as a symbol of hope for the new spiritual challenges of research into the wider cosmos.

Writing about his personal distress on departing Cape Town on the last of the great passenger liners he reflected on what the Cape meant to the first European explorers.

"Some four hundred and fifty years before, the great Camoes had seen the Cape vanish astern of a ship in which he was one of a handful of survivors of the original crew bound for home. He had sailed on from there over the same swinging water to write in his epic Lusiad what that journey and that view of the Cape had done to him. The powerful symbolism of his description, drawn from the kind of intuition of which I was thinking, bore witness to the Pentecostal nature of all art, and shone out as another and greater light than the one just extinguished on my own heaving horizon”.

He wrote of the Cape personified as the last of the Titans, an image of the great natural forces that had fought the Gods engaged in their campaign to impose order on chaos, and to bring light to aboriginal night. Camoes proclaimed this bringer of light had been Admiral of vast and hidden seas, and who had longed, over immemorial ages in his loneliness of power and natural duty, for the love of a white daughter of the Gods of the Sea. One night he saw her by moonlight, a nymph of snow moving in the smoke and spray of a phosphorescent swell, and he strode out with the stride of a giant to embrace her, when the Gods snatched her away. For that and for so natural an impulse, he was turned to stone and became that 'far-flung and much-tormented Cape', that 'Cape of Storms', as Camoes significantly renamed it again, rejecting the 'Good Hope' that his countrymen had tried so naively to make of it.

The accuracy of the presentiment embodied in this imagery, and the significance of intuition that guided the spirit of man to the centre of its target over a range of four and a half centuries, seemed to Van der Post in that moment, as awesome as it appeared miraculous. For what could be a more conclusive symbol of the mobilization of white empire, in Camoes' wake? It symbolised what had been done to subjected peoples everywhere with an imagery, which clearly stated that a great natural heart in search of love had been turned to stone because of its denial of love by those who possessed the power to bestow it in abundance on lands they thought they had discovered. We now know that the Cape witnessed the birth of all humankind.