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I found an empty address book in a demolished Cape Town apartment. The page for A had been torn out. There was one address in it, under B for Beatrice. The city and its people made a stranger of me, and it was as if this woman was the only person the owner of the book had ever really known.
Who was she - this imaginary woman whom one might meet? How had the owner lost this book, and was it important to him? I drew people walking on the beach in the book, so there would be people without names to fill it. I began to paint her with red food colouring, but she shifted her identities like a mutinous fantasy.
Everything is already leaving before it arrives. As soon as a word is spoken, it is no longer exactly what you meant to say. If you repeatedly forgot every person you knew, and searched for ciphers that might remain, you might in your surrender discover the approach of some imaginary person, half sensed, half-glimpsed by intuition. Not a ghost, not an archetype exactly, but an empty form waiting to be filled, something like an unspoken, unremembered word. A thing as yet un-named, or already un-named by the mind and time.
I threw the book into the sea, and to my surprise it returned. The waves just kept on bringing it back, and the red seeped through the little pinpricks with which I had drawn the woman, staining and erasing page after page.
There was a picture of the man who might have remembered her and wanted her to exist again and again with every meeting – a return just like a breath, a dance, a wave, or paging through a book of whitening pages. The waves blotted out his face.
As people come and go, time comes and goes, unspeakably, and one becomes younger with each forgetting, closer to the alpha and the play of its codes. Although it is unspoken, it articulates itself over and over, in no particular order. This is what language knows, but cannot adequately say about its own formation, a place in your memory where coherent codes like the alphabet run uselessly through your fingers, and the words they form make no sense, and yet they return from your very first days, and you cannot forget them. Recent nerological discoveries suggest that these repetitive manifestations of an almost ancestral human language are not learnt after birth, but are bestowed by genetically programmed dreams the foetus has while in the womb.
These are the people we repeat from childhood, filling in the blanks. These are moments of lives you might have lived - a dog, a girl, a guy, lovers. We speak a language of intimate, silent, imperceptible interchanges with an oracle called ‘the world’, and it allows us to play - like a breath, a dance, a wave, a book of whitening pages.
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