Table Of ContentBy THE SAME AUTHOR:
Pots and Poetry
Klip en klei
Die neukery met die oppel boom
and other essays
Martin Versfeld
Pro tea Book House
Pretoria
2009
Contents
Pots and Poetry and other essays - Martin Versfeld Introduction by Andre Brink ....................................... . 7
First edition, first impression in 2009 by Protea Book House
Pots and Poetry first edition in 1985 From Pots and Poetry:
by Tafelberg Publishers Limited
Pots and poetry 19
"Egology and ecology", "The university as pimp",
On the rights of man and the rights of rocks ....... . 36
and "At Maclears" first appeared in Sum,
published in 1991 by the Carrefour Press Our rapist society ...................................................... . 55
Time and speed and the quality of life ................... 71
PO Box 35110, Menlo Park, 0102 A Western sunrise ..................................................... . 88 .
1067 Burnett Street, Hatfield, Pretoria
Onyoga ...................................................................... . 98
8 Minni Street, Clydesdale, Pretoria
[email protected] Plato and Confucius 106
www.proteaboekhuis.co.za
Writing for the polis 128
Editor: Iolandi Pool In defence of bawdy 133
Cover design: Hanli Deysel
Typography: 11.5 on 17 pt ZapfCalligr by Hanli Deysel
Printed and bound: Mills Litho From SUM:
The egology of ecology 140
© 2009 Ruth Versfeld
ISBN 978-1-86919-319-5 The university as pimp 156
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
At Maclears .................................................................. 166
or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechani
cal means, including photocopying and recording, or by any
other information storage or retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher.
7
In praise of all
that is fleeting and eternal
FOOTNOTES TO THE ESSAYS OF MARTIN VERSFELD
I remember how the Afrikaans writer Bill de Klerk told
me many years ago about a climb he and Martin Versfeld
had once made along one of the more dangerous routes
up Table Mountain - I believe it was Africa Face - arid
how at one stage they had taken a few minutes off to
catch their breath on a narrow ledge on a sheer cliff reach~
ing down hundreds of metres into the chasm below. Lit
erally out of the blue a large boulder suddenly came tum
bling down the cliff, mere millimetres from Bill's face.
Trembling with shock, he stammered, "W-what the hell
was that?" Whereupon Versfeld, with a characteristic dry
chuckle, replied, "Oh nothing. Just the angel of death
flexing his wings."
For Versfeld, life and death were always inseparably
linked, and he could contemplate both with equanimity
and humour. Everything was evaluated within a con
text of relativity. Which means that nothing should ever
be taken too seriously. There was always room for a pinch
of salt. But the opposite was also true: to him, nothing
was ever entirely trivial or beneath contempt, as even
the most insignificant phenomenon was linked to the
eternal.
8 INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK 9
He had a very special way of underlining this. I can guage as it expresses itself in signs and traces and pos
say this playfully, but also with appreciation: Versfeld was sibilities; its ability to convey only one thing very pre
the most virtuoso farter I have ever known. Visiting him cisely, namely its inability to say anything with precision.
in his delightfully chaotic old Victorian home against the Versfeld approaches this from the opposite side: the im
lower slope of the mountain in Rosebank, I would in perative to root oneself in the here and now, to define
variably be impressed by the way in which he would oneself, not in evasion or grandiloquence or great ges
punctuate every turn of phrase in the most profound tures, but within the limits and limitations of rocks and
philosophical argument with well-articulated and per clay. In the course of an unforgettable morning spent
fectly timed farts. This was how - with admiration and with Derrida in a dark, book-littered little office in the
due respect - I used him as a model for the character of Rue de l'A ncienne Comedie in Paris, he helped me to
the philosopher/professor Bruwer in A Dry White Sea discover - truly to dis-cover - the miraculous awareness
son. On the occasions I visited him, usually in the com of how Versfeld's here and now blended into Derrida's
pany of the publisher Daantjie Saayman, it was invari own grammatology. All that was required was to trans
ably in winter with a fire burning in the grate, which mute Qerrida's understanding of traces, of difjerance, of
helped to minimise the olfactory accompaniment to his dissemination, of ecriture, of supplements and blind spots,
discourse, although it proved ineffectual against the into the elasticity of clay and the ephemeral quality of
sound: either an explosion like that emitted by the noon rocks. "Being here," affirms Versfeld, "is the characteris
cannon on Signal Hill, or the tearing noise of a sheet be tic of the existing" - but his own concept of existence
ing ripped. And the impish expression on Versfeld's face borrows from Zen the notion "that we have to remain
- something like a sculptured head of Socrates, weather within the existent and learn to flow with the Tao so that
beaten and deeply furrowed, with bushy eyebrows and we prevent the immediate from congealing". If we al
crooked teeth - conveyed that he was keenly aware of low for the diametrically opposed points of departure of
every comma or full stop. Derrida's understanding of the ephemeral nature of
What he shared with Socrates was precisely the traces and Versfeld's profoundly Christian philosophy,
earthy quality of his thought: literally close to the earth, one can learn to appreciate their similarity in the latter's
rooted in the earth. Above all, the ability to find and to belief that "the being of creatures is entirely from God,
define himself in the here and now. For many years I im and they are his footprints, vestigia, upon the primal noth
mersed myself in Derrida's investigations of language: ingness".
the floating, indefinite, ever-unreliable nature of lan- Versfeld refuses to bore the reader with anything that
10 INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK 11
smacks of" abstract thought": what he is concerned with key issues - pots and poetry, human rights and the rights
is the small, hard reality of a plant, an apple, a bowl of of rocks, time, yoga, ecology and what he calls" egology",
food - all the most ordinary components of a conscious etc. - aspects focusing mainly on the differences between
ness "in which all manner of things come washing past: a Western and an Oriental view.
petals, rags, banana peels and the trembling reflections "Pots and poetry", one of the most seminal of Vers
of birds and willows" - but to this he adds a hint of St feld's essays, concerns the difference between the essence
Augustine and a touch of Aquinas, mixed with a dash of of things and their use. In his characteristic terminology,
Buddha and a soupt;;on of Christ, and before you know this is how he phrases it: "1 am still fascinated by the prob
where you are you find yourself in a profound discus lem of what I mean when I say: this cabbage is green;
sion of God and man. He always refrains from preach but I cannot dissociate it from the question: how shall I
ing; and he has the miraculous quality of nudging read cook this cabbage?, nor from the statement: this is a good
ers towards making their own significant discoveries. cabbage bredie." Through the twin processes of associa
Which means that Versfeld has the rare ability of pre tion and analysis, Versfeld offers a truly unforgettable
senting you with the most sublime, the most abstruse, piece of writing, dealing consecutively - and more often
concepts while making it seem like a hike in the moun than not Simultaneously - with matters like" the relation
tains, through fragrant fynbos, until you arrive at the of all things to each other, that is with the fact of commu
breathtaking sight of a white waterfall surrounded by a nication". To him, this begins with what seems a charac
sprinkling of red disas. teristically light-hearted connection "between the maj
When he recognises humanity's primal desire for a esty of St Thomas's intellect (he is referring here, as he so
small house of stone and clay, surrounded by a garden often does, to St Thomas Aquinas) and the half-moon
of beans and mealies and pumpkins, he is really return that had to be cut into the refectory table to accommo
ing to Voltaire, who at the end of all his explorations in date his belly"; the relation between the self and the
Candide concludes his far-ranging endeavours with the worlds surrounding us (that is, lithe world as a human
wish: Cultivons notre Jardin - Let us cultivate our garden. conspiracy"); the processes of "making" which determine
both poetry and cooking; the links between culture and
In the collection Pots and Poetry and other essays we are wisdom; between "the savage cooking his meat" and the
invited on a journey of discovery through several of Vers explosion of the H-bomb; the chain that runs from pots
feld's most illuminating and charming essays. In one way to bread to history and from there to salvation. Inevita
or another all of them involve different aspects of some bly, this brings time into the equation, as so often hap-
12 INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK 13
pens in Versfeld's thinking ("We shall not reach eternity The most beautiful order is an anarchy of love.
by saving time, but by savouring the present"), and leads
to the kind of ringing statement that makes his writing The quality by which a flower or a mouse asserts,
so memorable: "Cookery should be a realm of freedom,
against all the powers of nothingness, that it has the
and perhaps in the long run the good chef makes as great dignity of actuality.
a contribution to liberty as the good statesman".
More often than not, his essays are centred in the The mountain is there because I am here.
epigrammatic formulation of aphorisms:
Power goes to our heads and heads the list of danger Words create reality - and, I should add, our falsifi
ous drugs. cations of it.
Genesis did not intend but did portend the rape of Eve Good writing is good carpentry.
and of Eden.
When Michelangelo carved the David he was enrich
In our ordinary experience, rocks have character and ing both marble and mankind.
individuality and answer back. I know a sandstone wall
where every rock speaks out its name. The problem of man is man.
It was the observation of the angels that made matter ... And all of these lapidary lines are taken from one sin
move. gle essay (the wonderful commentary "On the rights of
man and the rights of rocks").
If we are not supposed to idolise stones, still less should In "Our rapist society", an essay even more relevant
we idolise egos who shatter them to bits for their own to the centrality of the many definitions of "rape" in our
glory. New South Africa than when it was first written well
before the transition ("Merely moralistic legislation
Weight is to a stone as love is to a man. against theft and sexual rape is ... merely a critique of
rape by rape"), its acknowledgement of "the radiance of
When the Americans dropped the bomb on Japan, they heaven that keeps the fires of hell alive, in whose ashes
dropped it on America. the divine sparks linger" goes far beyond the small-
14 INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK 15
minded discussions and proposed remedies that have the ego", and why his immersion in Plato also leads to
marked the pronouncements of both the Old and the Confucius (which takes him past fascinating considera
New South Africa - culminating in the magnificent and tions of morality and politics, the need for humour, the
moving insight that, "To say that man is born free is to implications of the belief that "the human task is to
say that he is a risk that God took." achieve humanity", reflections on the true aim of edu
Returning to one of his favourite topics in "Time and cation, and the function of music in society).
speed and the quality of life" Versfeld takes issue with Meditating on the perception that, "Man is a ques
the tendency in human" evolution" to reduce everything tion and a mystery to himself", Versfeld entertains the
to violent confrontation: "Thus we talk about the con reader (in the wonderful sense in which all his medita
quest of Mount Everest, the war against disease, the con tions are also entertainments) on the place of the human
quest of poverty, the defeat of racialism, the conquest of being within his surrounding natural world - that is "the
fear - as though the proper way to deal with anything is egology of ecology", which in Versfeld's multi-layered
to dander it." In its stead, he explores the gentler, more view of our universe inevitably leads to tantalising state
nuanced and broader approach, borrowed from the East, ments like: "You couldn't land a man on the moon un
of a more positive engagement with the world. This is less the moon were first in the man", or: "When a man
why he persistently returns to St Augustine and the be dies, or a dog or a tree, it is not a simple excision: a world
lief not in constantly changing the world, but in allowing dies with it." And all these perceptions return to the most
it - and everything in it - to be what it is, and constantly inescapable assertion of all, that "Every 'I' is a 'We"'. (It is
to become what it is (and what it is meant to be). This im illuminating to bear in mind that the polite Zulu form of
plies a liberation from things, objects, constructs of the address in greeting an individual, which recurs in a vari
will: "Loving is a willingness to let a thing be what it is ety of other languages, including French, Italian and
... If you love Sue, you want Sue to be Sue and not Jane Spanish, is the plural, not the singular - because, it is
or yourself. You want Sue to be, endure as what she is, to said, it includes the individual's entire invisible entou
wear the garment of her own time in the original beauty rage of family and ancestors.) For Versfeld it also opens
of its creation. Sue is Sue and not Jane. Just as a stone is a up a perspective on the discovery that "being what one
stone and not a cabbage." is and being where one is, are the same".
This is why he so often turns to Lao-tzu, the reputed Even essays that at first sight appear to be on the pe
author of the Tao-te-Ching, and why he is fascinated by riphery of the essentials that are considered in others -
yoga as "the wakening of the spirit and the escape from like "The university as pimp", or 'At Maclears", an ad-
16 INTRODUCTION BY ANDRE BRINK
dress given at the unveiling of a memorial to mark the
centenary of the Mountain Club of South Africa - are
preoccupied with, basically and revealingly, the same
challenging propositions about the functioning of con
science in our society, the relationship between the hu
man ego and its environment, the profound morality that
binds - and by the same token, liberates - all living things
(including rocks and stars and mountains) in the miracu
lous oneness of the many-faceted universe we live in.
It is the deep respect with which Versfeld regards the
difficulties and wonders of life, the humour with which
he expresses his veneration of it, and the lightness with
which he approaches the weightiest of problems, that
illuminate his world, and ours. Years after his death -
and undoubtedly for many years to come - his work
functions, like Beatrice and Virgil, as a companion on our
way through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, to help
us understand, in many respects for the first time, at least
something of the mysteries we encounter along our way.
Like Blake, he can recognise the universe in a grain of
sand; and in his own songs of innocence and experience
he constantly adds new dimensions to our perceptions
of the world.
And at this point, I have no doubt, Versfeld would
punctuate his comment with a resounding fart.
ANDRE BRINK
APRIL 2009
19
Pots and poetry
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a professor of phi
losophy who, I am pleased to say, would be disowned
by most schools of philosophy in the English-speaking
world. I believe a young man once said of me that I wrote
good essays but was no philosopher. I suppose what he
meant was that I wrote intelligibly. I have always felt a
certain affinity with Socrates, who was my superior also
in this, in that he never wrote at all. And one of the things
I have learnt from him is that it is the ordinary which is
extraordinary, that philosophy is a descent to the earth,
and that "this is a good stew" may be a statement carry
ing more weight than some of the sentences in Hegel
which I have not breath enough to quote. That is why
Callicles could object: "You keep talking about food and
drink and doctors and nonsense: I am not speaking of
these things." Or again: "By heaven, you literally never
stop talking about cobblers and fullers and cooks and
doctors, as if we were discussing them."
I must admit that to earn my living as an academic I
often battened on the higher unintelligibilities, but I have
since endeavoured to amend my ways by speaking of
such things as food and houses and cooks and builders.
I am still fascinated by the problem of what I mean when
I say: this cabbage is green; but I cannot dissociate it from
20 POTS AND POETRY POTS AND POETRY 21
the question: how shall I cook this cabbage?, nor from speak hot air or we may utter wisdom, we may poison
the statement: this is a good cabbage bredie. The eidolon human relations or heal them, we can eat our porridge,
of an Epicurean Socrates appears to me and says: Friend, or partake of divinity in the Eucharist. A very early con
what do you mean by a good stew, or, for that matter, a tact with the outer world is our mother's breast. There
good cook? I grow more and more interested in the we first learn the taste of love, which ever after cries out
higher obviousnesses, and aspire to understand a remark for tactual realisation. Take and eat. The gustatio Dei goes
of A.N. Whitehead's, that it requires a great mind to take back to the mother's breast, and all love, including the
an interest in the obvious. love of God, is cupboard love. Mary and Child are pri
I intend to speak about cooking, and I trust that you mary symbols. On the reverse of the canvas is Eve eat
will, without further verification, accept it as true that I ing apples. We are irretrievably materialists. The word
am speaking with and through my mouth. This appears "matter" comes from mater, and the Resurrection includes
to me to be obvious. And as I stand here, I see before me the resurrection of the mouth, because the Word spoken
a number of more or less oval shapes, each with a hole by God was a suckling.
in the middle. All sorts of things go in and come out of Observe that I am not underrating the importance of
these holes. For instance, all sorts of sounds come out breath, which has always been associated with spirit. One
and all sorts of food go in. This hole is as obvious as the eats with one's spirit as well as with one's mouth, or there
nose on your face, about whose inbreathings and out would be no Sacrament. Atmospheric pollution is un
breathings my yogic friends bore me to tears. These or godly, and one does not care to dine in the lee of a sew
gans are, moreover, connected: good food smells good age plant. Sewage is the end of mortal food. But there is
and I need breath to talk my Socratic nonsense. But pri a connection between mortal air and food and that which
marily I eat with my mouth. Of course, the mouth is the is immortal. Sewage also has a philosophical interest,
entrance to an exit, about which, as Dean Swift would though for the moment I am leaving that subject to Prof.
tell you, one might also be concerned; but for the mo Dr Teufelsdrock. In fact, I am trying to show how deep
ment we can sit on that subject, leaving the phenom the connection is between food and spirit. This is by no
enology of its outbreathings to make the reputation of means a new theme; you will find it, for instance, in the
some Sehr Gelehrter Prof. Dr Krapphauser, or Swami Upanishads. In the Maitri Upanishad (6.11) you will find
Poepananda. Om! this:
By their versatility, mouths determine our being in Truly food is the highest form of the Soul, for truly this
the world. They establish communications. We may breathing life consists of food. For it has been put like
