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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

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kabuki theatre of the mind

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G21 AFRICA - Traveling Into My Life: Mphuthumi Ntabeni continues his personal soul-search. This time in the desert.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - Travelling is one of our numerous ways of escape. The trouble, of course, is that we carry ourselves wherever we go. So we don't get much escaping done on our travels; we just see our lives in different landscapes, which has its blessings also.

The lure of the desert is that it promises nothing. Throughout the better history of mankind deserts have been places of refuge, of decision-making.? It was with that mentality I traveled to the Namib Desert during the last weeks of 2005.? My companion was Leonard Cohen on my Ipod.

Cohen's art comes from his emotional experience. His songs feel like scrolls of a lived life. There's a startling calm in them, an inner peace that comes from being resigned to the nature of things.

At the start of the Namib Desert, just before the border of South Africa and Namibia, is a missionary station the Roman Catholic Church uses as a training camp for religious novices, and a retreat centre for the lay faithful. My travels took me there.

The lure of the desert is the vastness of the sky and the wondering shadow of Cain. The sun in the desert suggests the unflinching eye of God that penetrates all appearances. In the desert the visible is visible with illusions at a distance. There's dotted lucidly in the debris of desert appearances that refuses to be translated to human representation. But likeness, once caught in the desert, carries the mystery of Being.

What most of the time we call our lives is just a collection of our pleasant memories, wounds, and our reactions to life's environment. Still there're those who lighten the burden of living by the wounds they've received from life; the wounded healers, whom we're likely to encounter in the parched atmosphere of the desert.

I've yet to meet a person who is not impressed by the person of Jesus Christ, even if not interested, or disappointed, in Christianity. Cohen, that incorrigible Jewish cynic, had a strong lifelong attraction to the person of Christ. He put, naturally, a spring of melancholy that runs in most of his songs in his attraction to Christ:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower.
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them."

What is it about the person of Christ we cannot ignore? Christ was the first 'wounded healer.'

Yes there were men like Socrates before him, but there's the mystic poise, an affirming undoubting authority, about Christ the pragmatics like Socrates, with their perpetual vacillations, cannot measure up to, I think.

But he himself [Jesus] was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human,
He sank beneath your wisdom like stone. ?

They tell me courage is the mean between the extremes of timidity and recklessness. Christ was courageous. Socrates was reckless. Socrates was a product of iconoclastic cosmopolitan cynicism with a penchant for aiming to shock. Socrates was a generous wistful agnostic, the ceaseless honest wonderer. What differentiates Christ from this honest man is his embrace of God's incomprehensible silence as a symptom of love and not abandonment. Christ's character and words gives assurance that he knows something more than we do.

And you want to travel with him [Christ]
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

Most of us when gazing on the haunting silence of God discover our incapability, our murkiness and failures. If we're faithful we also find a beseeching air that seeks to release us from the prison of our own consciousness. Cohen had an artistic way of putting it.

?When you're not feeling holy
Your loneliness says that you've sinned

When I travelled to the desert I had left behind my fiancée with our nine-month-old baby called Khazimla (Shine). I knew, in coming to the desert, I was trying to find a way of coming into a concrete decision about our lives.

Life remains very much open to accidents and possibilities in the desert, perhaps because the desert is linear and severe. Everything in the desert is articulated in severe clarity; the sense of loss, expressed by violent sand storms, and severe mercy in the wild torrents when the rain comes. Life in the desert is lived on despairing successes and intimate boredom suggestive of autumn. The desert has a terrible indifference to sentient things.?

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters

Often, in the desert, there are images of death without signs of redemption, brought by the pellicle thinness of desert nights. The soulful and dreamy desert early evenings are as active as the wavering sea, except the sand waves spray the eternal dunes. Desert winds comb every corner of a desert with surplus curiosity.

And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning,
They're leaning for love
And they will lean that way forever.
While Suzanne holds the mirror

You become painfully aware of failings in the desert. You've no ability to look at love with a romantic eye, and she wants a romantic; the desert wind whispers in your ear. You don't trust in the silence of the desert. Under the sandy ashes there are live coals. You don't wear shades. The desert blinds. The terrible flash of lucidity. Love must be strong enough to sublimate weaknesses. Love must correspond to a spiritual, intellectual and emotional constitution.

And you want to travel with her,
And you want to travel blind,
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

And you know you belong there, with her, your son and your deserts.