Hotazel: Journal Writings of a Lipstick Lesbian

Hotazel: Journal Writings of a Lipstick Lesbian

Vincent Gray

Smashwords Edition 2018

Published by Vincent Gray

Copyright © 2018 Vincent Gray

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are fictional creations of the writer’s imagination and are not modelled on any real persons. Any resemblances to persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Author Biography

As a son of a miner, the author was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg during the 1960s and matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF) for compulsory national military service at the age of seventeen. On completion of his military service, he studied courses in Zoology, Botany and Microbiology at the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree he worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. Following the initial conscription into military service in the SADF, like all other white South African males of his generation, he was then drafted into one of the many South African Citizen Military Regiments. During the 1970s he was called up as a citizen-soldier to do three-month military camps on the 'Border' which was the operational theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War' during the Apartheid years. Before and in between university studies he also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales representative. The author is now a retired professor whose career as an academic in the Biological Sciences has spanned a period of thirty-three years mainly at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Before retirement, he lectured and carried out research in the field of molecular biology with a special interest in the molecular basis of evolution. He continues to pursue his interest in evolutionary biology. Other interests that the author pursues include radical theology, philosophy and literature.

eBooks by Vincent Gray also available on Smashwords as Free Downloads

The Girl from Reiger Park -The Barracuda Night Club Trilogy. Book No.1

Who was Oreithyia? -The Barracuda Night Club Trilogy. Book No.2

The Barracuda Night Club Mystery - The Barracuda Night Club Trilogy. Book No. 3

The Girl from Germiston

The Tale of the Sakabula Bird

Rebekah of Lake Sibaya

Segomotso and the Dressmaker

Devorah’s Prayer

Hotazel: Journal Writing of a Lipstick Lesbian

Farewell to Innocence: The full uncensored saga of Hannah Zeeman

Send Him My Love (Short Story)

Three Days in Phoenix (Short Story)

The Soccer Player (Short Story

Waterlandsridge (Novella)

The Man with no Need

Between Nostalgia and Dystopia

A Posh White Woman

Jo’burg: Sex, Love and Marx

Love at the End of Time

The Transaction

Dedicated to my wife Melodie and my daughter Ruth

Table of Contents

Foreword

In Place of a Preface

The Journal Entries 1 to 613

Foreword

Given the successful publication of the first edition of ‘Hotazel: Queer Memoirs of a Lipstick Lesbian’ Mr Goldrich contacted me and asked if I would like to work on a revised second edition. Before I could express any reservation regarding the possibility or even the value of a second edition he informed that he had evidence that Prof Hannah Zeeman as a consequence of her passionate love affair with Yael Kaplan the Rabbi’s wife may have indeed converted to Judaism mainly for the sake of their relationship. Ritual immersion or tevilah would affect the change of status from Gentile to Jew. There was no evidence in the form of Jewish conversion records that Hannah had indeed gone through the mikvah, with the process duly certified as kosher by the Beth Din after emerging from the threefold immersion, in the presence of witnesses, a newly born Jew, no longer a Goy, dripping wet, chanting ‘Hear O Israel…’ Anyway, it should be noted for the record, that her relationship to Judaism and Jewry, in general, was indeed strangely enigmatic, ironic, and ambiguous. Ambiguous because she often seemed to be blatantly anti-Semitic, enigmatic because of her complex views regarding Judaism as a system of rule-based religious praxis and the nature of Jewishness in terms of ethnic identity and peoplehood, ironic because she was often offended when mistaken for being a Jew or a convert to Judaism. However, it is also interesting to note, according to all accounts, in the 1990s when Yael moved in with Hannah after divorcing the Rabbi, Yael consistently related to Hannah as if Hannah was indeed a Jew for the entire ten years that they lived together as a lesbian couple. For the record, as a couple, according to outward appearances, they lived as if they were fully observant Orthodox Jews. Hannah certainly did practice Judaism during that time and conducted her life as if she were indeed an Orthodox Jew. This cannot be denied. In the streets of Yeoville, she was viewed as a Jew. However, what did her apparent observance mean or signify? This was the paradox that confounded Mr Goldrich. So was Hannah a Jew in her heart and soul, even if only secretly? I don’t personally think so despite Mr Goldrich’s conviction to the contrary. Hannah remained a committed anarchist, a Darwinian and a radical theological thinker throughout her life, and for these reasons, I could not imagine her converting to Judaism and becoming a Jew. In addition, her political convictions, personal philosophical views and metaphysical beliefs were inimical to Judaism, and also to be a Jew in heart and soul. Was she an atheist? Paradoxically no! Ironically no! Puzzling no! Her belief in God was profound. This is what made her so interesting as a lesbian, anarchist, scientist, philosopher and theologian. What does it mean to have a profound belief in God? I don’t really know. However, after reading the writings of Hannah Zeeman I am certain that rabbis, pastors, mullahs, and priests do not have a profound belief in God. Their gods are the human-created gods, which Feuerbach speaks of. Assuming that there is a God, who is God anyway? What kind of God could God possibly be in order to be God at all? This was the question that Hannah wrestled with all her life. No rabbi, pastor, mullah or priest can answer this question, believe me. All religions can only exist by ignoring this fundamental question. Again, believe me, even though I am an atheist.

Anyway, let’s get back to the reasons for publishing a new edition of ‘Hotazel’. Mr Goldrich felt that it would be a worthwhile literary or even a novelistic exercise for me to write something like a fictionalized biographical account of the life of Hannah Zeeman based on the material from her prison notebooks, and other new material in the form of her journals, diaries and correspondence. Let me also remind you once more, Mr Goldrich was immovable. He held fast to his theory, which, technically speaking, and completely contrary to everything that I have just said, that Hannah Zeeman could have become a Jew despite her contrarian, and very un-Jewish views, and also despite her very open Christian flavoured beliefs, especially in Jesus being the second person in the Trinity. When I countered that Prof Zeeman was a practicing Anglican (that is the Anglo-Catholic version of Anglicanism) he said that that doesn’t really matter. In fact, he argued that this did not change anything! He was adamant that Zeeman was a Jew. What were his reasons? He insisted that his belief in her being a Jew was fully justified; it was consistent with everything, for example, her apparent ‘philo-Semitism’ (this made me laugh). But in my opinion, a demonstration of philo-Semitism or ‘Judeophilia’ does not necessarily imply a religious commitment to Judaism or a deep love of the Jewish people or being a Jew in heart and soul, it could merely indicate a highly personalized academic interest in a subject which happens to be Judaism and the Jewish people, triggered by her love affair with Yael Kaplan. It could also have been due to an intellectual interest in what could be construed as the Hebraic, which would be consistent with her deep love of the Bible. Also, in my opinion, her apparent philo-Semitism could be consistent with her having acquired an intellectual interest in Judaic literature and Jewish life for its own sake, also possibly as a consequence of her relationship with Yael Kaplan, which had developed into a life-long friendship spanning decades, and remained intact in spite of Hannah Zeeman’s many romantic relationships with other women. It was Mr Goldrich’s contention that because Zeeman had a lifelong obsession with everything that was Jewish she must have become a Jew by conversion. This would also explain her interest in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature. To me, this could not be taken as evidence for conversion or for a deep heartfelt personal sense of Jewishness. It could also be seen as a deep-rooted symptom of anti-Semitism (I believe she leaned more to anti-Semitism than philo-Semitism). I then raised with Mr Goldrich the issue of Zeeman’s Marxism, her anarchism, her Catholic leanings and her scientific career as an evolutionary biologist all of which would be contrary to and inconsistent with any kind of serious religious leanings towards Orthodox Judaism or any kind of Judaism for that matter. She was certainly not a religious fundamentalist when it came to the Bible or religious belief. Still, Mr Goldrich insisted that this did not necessarily prevent her from living a double life, in secret as an observant Jew, in public as a radical anarchist who was openly anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and anti-Israel. Could such a person really be a lesbian Jewish Talmudist behind the scenes? ‘Maybe she was living a double life. Who knows?’ Goldrich insisted otherwise (maybe she was schizophrenic I thought). To drive home his point, Mr Goldrich told me a story that he hoped would demonstrate the human capacity for preserving and nurturing the most incredible private secrets of religious belief deep within their souls for the entire duration of their lives without anybody having any inkling on what was really going on in the secret and private life of their minds regarding what they really believed to be the truth without a shadow of a doubt. Mr Goldrich had an interesting story to tell which he felt had some bearing on the life of Hannah Zeeman. His story can be summarized as follows:

Mr Goldrich grew up in Boksburg where his father practiced as a medical doctor. His father’s partner in the medical practice was a Dr Kaplan. Now it turns out that Yael’s husband the Rabbi was the son of Dr Kaplan. The Kaplan’s lived in Boksburg North and over the years Dr Kaplan had also been the family doctor for a Pastor who ministered in a nearby Pentecostal Church. When Dr Kaplan’s mother who was living with them died, Mr Goldrich accompanied his father to Kaplan’s home to express their condolences. They all sat in the lounge. Mr Goldrich sat down next to Mrs Kaplan the wife of Dr Kaplan. They had barely sat down when the Pastor arrived out of the blue knocking at the front door wishing to also express his condolences. Anyway, for some reason, maybe out of civil politeness, they allowed him in, he was dressed in a black suit and was wearing a hat and he sat down on a vacant chair, which happened to be also next to Mrs Kaplan. In hushed tones, the two of them began speaking about this and about that. Then Mrs Kaplan got up, left the lounge, leaving an empty chair between the Pastor and Mr Goldrich, a moment later she returned to her seat carrying a Bible in her hand. It was a typical black leather-bound Christian Bible with the Old and the New Testaments. Resting the Bible on her lap, she patted the Bible’s cover, saying: ‘This is my Bible which I have read several times cover to cover, it is a Christian Bible.’ Then she quietly confided in the Pastor that she believed in Jesus, she believed that he was the Messiah and that he had risen from the dead and so on. Mr Goldrich, a teenage boy at the time, was the only other person in the room who managed to eavesdrop on her brief and hushed confession. Of course, he was shocked when he heard this admission of belief in the central tenet of the Christian faith being uttered by this dignified, intelligent, and sophisticated middle-aged Jewish lady whose parents originally came from Poland just before the German invasion. Even the Pastor was stunned. Now I happened to be the first person with whom Mr Goldrich had shared this story. He had filed the memory of the incident in the back of his mind and now after all these years, he retrieved it to make a point. In his opinion, Mr Goldrich’s story stood as a precedent for what he wanted to say about Hannah Zeeman’s apparent secret life as a Jew. He wanted Hannah’s secret to be disclosed. It was Mr Goldrich’s hypothesis that like Mrs Kaplan, Hannah Zeeman had indeed been living two lives all along, outwardly a Christian but inwardly a Jew, in fact, he insisted that she was a Jew in her heart (what could I say, we were going in circles, I merely shrugged my shoulders). Except for Dr Kate Jolly, all her close friends and circle of acquaintances were Jewish. Mr Goldrich’s point was that what one sees on the surface could be a cover for a deeper secret life that remains invisible and unknown to the rest of the world and would in most cases go to the grave leaving no one the wiser. His point was that Mrs Kaplan was outwardly a Jew but inwardly she was a Christian, she believed that Jesus was God, and Hannah Zeeman who was outwardly a Christian with Catholic leanings was in fact inwardly and self-consciously a Jew, with a Jewish soul. Mr Goldman even went so far as to suggest that this could be the hidden plot of the Hannah Zeeman story. On the face of the evidence contained in the prison notebook writings, I had to disagree with Mr Goldman. Nevertheless, Mr Goldman was insistent that his theory was true. He kept on reminding me about the new material which had come to light, all the other writings, journal notes, diaries and correspondence, the contents of which he felt would throw new light on the life of Hannah Zeeman.

To humour him, I listened while he continued to elaborate on his theory. From his dealings with the legal affairs of Prof Zeeman over a long period, he always felt that there was something very Jewish about Prof Zeeman. It was evident in her sharp wit, and quick turn of phrase, which was always laced with a very specific flavour, often embellished with the intrusion of peculiar idioms, slipping effortlessly into her manner of speaking, which could only have been acquired from years of reading the Talmudic and the Midrashic literature, and not to mention practically a life-time of mixing with Jewish people. There was more! While he was wrapping up her estate, he discovered that she had a full 30-volume set of the Sonico Hebrew/English Babylonian Talmud, and a collection of self-study books for learning Hebrew, plus a ten volume English translation of the Midrash Rabbah. Therefore, he felt that his suspicions had been confirmed. She had not only become by sheer osmosis a Jew, in fact, she was a Jew in the deepest possible sense. So he remained adamant that she was a Jew in a way that was remarkably similar to Mrs Kaplan being a Christian. They both harboured deep in their hearts their true religious identity and convictions without anyone else being the wiser. It was Mr Goldrich’s conviction that Zeeman had embraced Judaism in the way that only a convert could, by becoming more Jewish than a born Jew. His conviction was unshakable.

Having been given access to all her notebooks, journals, private papers and diaries, it became my job to establish if there was any warrant to Mr Goldrich’s belief that Hannah Zeeman had undergone a kind of private personal conversion to Judaism while all the time outwardly and publically denying that she had indeed become a Jew. So having listened to Mr Goldrich’s story and having also had the opportunity of mining Prof Zeeman’s ‘literary estate’ which consisted of her journals, writings, diaries, notes, letters, and collection of books, I have also come to my own literary conclusions regarding the putative Jewishness of Hannah Zeeman. Mr Goldrich felt his beliefs about Hannah were warranted for other reasons as well. Mr Goldrich’s hunch regarding Hannah Zeeman’s apparent Jewishness did not only rest on discernible elements of Orthodox Jewish piety or Orthodox Jewish observance. The nature of the ‘Jewishness’ of Prof Hannah Zeeman he felt was also reflected in her integrity and critical mind, in her moral predisposition to fight injustice which entailed costly personal sacrifices and great personal danger. Taking up the challenge of Mr Goldman I worked through all the documents of her ‘literary estate’ to compile this novel, a novel based on the prolific private writings of Prof Zeeman. Please note that I have used the word ‘novel’ rather than biography intentionally if not ironically. In my professional opinion as a professor of English and Literature, to write someone’s biography actually boils down to creating a work of fiction. Thus my reason for referring to this compilation of Professor Zeeman’s ‘literary estate’ as a novel rather than a biography. Paradoxically this admission does suggest that the novel you are about to read is true in some sense in that it is based on ‘facts’, but even the so-called facts of someone’s life can become fictionalized in the process of writing a biography. It is this process of fictionalization that interests me from a literary point of view. I have taken material from her personal diaries and various writings that were not part of the original prison notebook writings to compose an autobiographical novel in the form of a ‘Journal’. As the synthesizer, compiler, redactor, biographer, and editor, I have integrated the new material into her original prison notebook writings that she had written during and shortly after her lengthy prison detention. Her prison writings became the literary scaffold for the Journal. In her prison writings, there was no trace of any kind of commitment to Judaism. Her serious involvement with Judaism happened only after her prison detention following the rekindling of her relationship with Yael Kaplan. But before the reader jumps to any unwarranted conclusions I need to raise a red herring or a caveat which I have also communicated to Mr Goldrich and which concerns something called the Noble Lie. My redaction of the Zeeman’s prolific writings includes her writings on the broader significance of the Noble Lie, which I hope will shed some light on her relationship to Judaism and whether or not she was actually a secret Jew. If she was a Jew then she was Jewish by virtue of the fact that it would have been metaphysically impossible to encapsulate her essence. This would have been in all likelihood Hannah’s Talmudic answer to my interrogations. She would have argued that to try and define her as a Jew in terms of superficial stereotyping would be to legitimize the atavistic repugnance of the Jew as the eternal embodiment of the Other. And that would be the Other in the form of the subaltern where the subaltern paradigmatically represents the outsider, the stranger, the alien, the oppressed and the marginalized. That is probably what she meant when she joked in a letter to Yael that her conversion would metaphorically be her ticket to Auschwitz. Speaking about the social status and attributes of the subaltern, Zeeman did embody in a contingent manner the kind of categorical features that would have been associated with the subaltern. I need to remind the reader that there exists no documentation or record certifying her formal religious conversion to Judaism. But if she was a Jew she did not have a heart of stone which had become petrified in the Pharisaic letter of Judaism as Hegel would have put it. In this foreword, against my own better judgement it appears that I have succumbed much too readily to the inquisitive promptings of Mr Goldrich. Why should anyone be obsessed over whether someone had undergone a religious conversion? Well, it is because Hannah Zeeman happened to be a person who was larger than life. The previous book on Hannah Zeeman, which documented the queer memoirs of a lipstick lesbian was not about her relationship to any particular belief system, it was the published record of her prison notebooks, which dealt with the truth about the nature of the whole of reality. Of course, the whole of reality would in a sense, encapsulate Judaism as a part of that reality.

Whether or not she was really a Jew, whatever that might mean, remains a minor detail in her very interesting philosophical journey that she lived to the fullest. The book you are about to read has been written by Prof Hannah Zeeman’s own hand. I as the ‘author’ of her ‘Journal’ have added nothing. I did not have to. She had practically already written the novel before she passed away. Her collection of writings is her final testament. Mr Goldrich having glossed through Zeeman’s papers saw only the vague outline of a silhouette which looked in his eyes remarkably Jewish in profile. However, I have from Zeeman’s voluminous collection of writings managed to join all the dots, fill in the details so that a sharper picture of Zeeman’s portrait comes into focus, one which will be revealed in the pages that follow. The Jew may fade in or fade out as the field of focus is magnified. Read on and make up your own mind.

In Place of a Preface

All that needs to be said is that the final word on the meaning and significance of speech and writing has yet to be said, and there is no point in remaining silent about what cannot be said. All narration involves saying something about something to someone. The actual saying of something about something to someone occurs by means of a physical enactment in the form of a performed event. The performance of saying something about something to someone takes place or occurs as a performed event through the medium of speech or writing within a world of imposed meanings and significance. But are we really free to impose meaning and significance on things in any way we wish or choose without any push back from reality? The true nature of things has always existed independently of language, and surely, the push back of reality shapes the meaning of words. There can be no confusion about the meaning of words at the practical level of everyday life if we have to get by without incident or crisis or accidents or injury. To say something about something we assume that language itself is unproblematic and that it is a transparent medium and that we don’t really have to pay too much attention to defining the meaning of every single word we use in order to be clear about exactly what we mean when we say something about something. The ultimate conditions for any kind of communication that makes possible the realization or achievement of meaning and significance through the medium of speech and writing, or language, in other words, are imposed on the ‘world’ by a pre-existing order or by a physical/material state of affairs, which governs the occurrence or the eventuality of all possibilities in the Universe, including the writings of this journal, and also including the meaning of the words used. 

In a way, we discover the meaning of words, which means that meaning and significance and intelligibility had a pre-existence in the nature and order of things before the existence of words and language, and as such, meaning and significance and intelligibility, does not exist by virtue of words or language. The reverse is true. Only under very specific and externally imposed enabling conditions, and therefore as a consequence of independently imposed preconditions, or by virtue of these preconditions, can words or language ever function effectively as pictures of the world or as tools of communication, and this fact takes care of the early and later Wittgenstein, and puts to rest linguistic philosophy as a failed project. The fact that words and language function effectively is a direct causal consequence of external enabling processes and states of affairs and material conditions and it is this, which makes the comprehension and understanding of the nature of reality possible, and as a realized possibility in the enterprise of science, making science one of the most successful human endeavours. Words by themselves cannot give rise to, secure, or anchor their own meanings. To attempt this leads one into circularity or into an infinite regress. Aware of all the deficiencies of thinking, speaking and writing I have often wondered whether these deficiencies, deficiencies of finitude, could be therapeutically remedied by a new kind of thinking, speaking and writing. All attempts at thinking or speaking or writing within the realm of the finite are haunted or plagued by irresolvable internal contradictions or logical disjunctions or diremptions. There is always something that is not thought or written or spoken or said. There is always the unthought or the thoughtlessness that accompanies all thinking. This gives rise to the wellsprings of all dualisms or dichotomies that accompany all thinking when thinking something about something. Thoughtlessness is the absence of thinking. All thinking is accompanied by its absences, in the form of the unthought or the unthinkable. The emerging dualism is between what is present and absent in thinking, speaking and writing. The unthought or the absence of thinking is often construed as ‘nothing’, a special kind of ‘nothing’ which possesses the immanent possibility to become something by way of a negation, and is not this the starting point of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. But this is another story. A story retold in its various versions by Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Spinoza. It is the ‘nothing’ in the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’. The question of nothing becomes the fertile ground for endless questioning, for uncovering the unsaid and unthought, the hidden implications on any position taken on some matter that are never spelt, but left unsaid. Monod wrote a book accounting for everything in terms of chance and necessity. But why is there something which is identified or recognised as necessity. Necessity is always something that is intelligible. It can be recognised as such. Where does necessity (intelligibility) come from? Necessity is something. Why and how can it exist?

Why something? Why not nothing? Why not let nothing give rise to something? How can nothing give rise to something? This is done by construing nothing as something. There are a variety of ‘logics’ for something to come from nothing where nothing and something are one and the same. Cosmologies try to do this by means of a disguised or cryptic logic of something from nothing. Theories of the emergence of life also represent a cryptic logic of something from nothing logic. These loose strands will be knotted back in the fabric of Logos allowing us to see that nothing gives rise to nothing and nothing else. Instead of nothing, there is the necessitation of necessity. Instead of nothing, there is the intelligible. There is the Logos. In the beginning, there was necessity! In the beginning, there was the Word. The Word is ‘necessity’. ‘Let there be!’ In the beginning, there was the Torah! I don’t have a problem with this claim. I understand it fully. I own it.

Going back to Monod’s chance and necessity, the contingent means also chance or being subject to chance. Contingent also means ‘being’ dependent. What is chance dependent on? OK, I am ending a sentence with the preposition ‘on’. But you know what I am getting at. Chance also depends on conditions of possibility. Certain conditions must necessarily existence for chance to become manifest or for an event to occur by chance. Something makes chance possible, rather than nothing. Chance is necessarily coupled to a chain of causation. Is chance then an illusion? No, it’s not. It is a reality we experience. Can chance exist in a God created Universe? The answer is yes. God is the condition of possibility for what appears to be chance events.

In all thinking, there remains the unsaid, and within all speaking and writing there too remains the absence or silences of the unsaid or unsayable. It is the unsaid, the unspeakable, the unsayable, the silences, which sets a limit to language, writing, speech and reference, in which the unthinkable can be thought, this is what interests me because here the experience of what can only be understood as revelation makes its once and only in a life-time debut, which happens in an event of revelation, an event which floods the Universe with a light so glorious, so magnificent, in which darkness cannot exist. The unthinkable, the unsaid, the unsayable, the absence in the form of silence cannot become manifested or revealed or unconcealed or exposed or unveiled or articulated in the inadequate and fallible vehicle of speech and writing. The unthinkable, the unsaid, the unsayable, the meaning of which, the substance of which, while transcending the limitations of language, can only enter the consciousness through the incarnation of the meaning of meaning. This is the deficiency of speech and writing, a deficiency that seeks its own self-remedy within the confines and constraints and limitations of speech and writing. Can the unthinkable be thought? What about the unthought or the unthinkable? Is this also a symptom of the deficiency of thinking? The deficiency of thinking, speaking, writing and reference represents an epistemological problem because the deficiency of thinking, speaking, writing and reference becomes manifest in its incapacity to truly represent reality. So we are really left with no other option than to dwell on the poverty of thinking, speaking, writing and reference while engaged in the enterprise of thinking, speaking and writing about our experiences and how our understanding of these experiences bear on the nature of reality. The reality of what? Well, the reality of everything, which means making transparent the underlying intelligibility of everything that is. And this exercise is not without political significance regarding the nature of the City. And it is my critical and subversive engagement with the City that has brought me to this sorry state where I have been left with nothing else to do than write about everything which is somehow linked to furthering the destruction of the City. And any meaningful headway in the critical resolution of the problem of the City cannot be made without solving the problem of the first principles in philosophy, a solution that depends on proving the self-sufficiency of reason. All we have to go on is reason and evidence. But what could count as evidence, against what do we weigh evidence, to make it compelling and persuasive? How can we be persuaded? Is truth in the final instance based on the power of persuasion? Is truth based solely on the strength or power of persuasion? Does this mean that truth is always based on power in the last instance? This is precisely what Nietzsche was proposing with regard to the essential nature of truth. What else is rhetoric but the power of persuasion?

The Journal Entries 1 to 613

1

I know that ultimately in the broad sweep of history my own life is insignificant. I know that the life I have lived will be of little interest or value or consequence to the overwhelming majority who have opened this journal by accident. Now if you have bothered to read this far, you belong to that small minority who are generally driven by an inborn curiosity to know and to find out. My advice to you is to stop reading this journal right now at this point and ask yourself whether you really want to continue reading.

You will probably agree that the first few opening lines have in all likelihood failed to stir any further interest in the contents of this journal, which I have written during my detention and over the years after my incarceration. However, the fact that you are now reading the journal means that it has been published and that I have passed on. With regard to the actual publication of this journal, I would have ignored the advice of the editors, publishers and other literary pundits regarding its style, its contents, and the way it was presented or put together as a work of literature with artistic pretensions. What could be the plot underlying or underpinning the free-writing that fills the pages of any Journal. What are the concerns, or the ultimate concerns, which inform this free-writing exercise, and why do I refer to the contents of this Journal as an exercise in free-writing? The reasons will become manifest in the actual reading, and speaking of ‘reasons’, the ultimate concerns underlying this free-writing exercise in Journal writing, revolve around the relations between Reason, Revelation, Religion and Replication. The word ‘Replication’ is used in place of the concept of Evolution, that is, Darwinian evolution by genetic variation and natural selection. The engine of biological evolution is replication or self-replication. So the conceptual framework informing the journalistic free-writing would be the dialectical relationships between reason, revelation, religion and replication. The way the words ‘revelation’ and ‘religion’ are used includes philosophy and theology as focal referents of these two words. So the words ‘revelation’ and ‘religion’ encompass the academic disciplines of theology and religious studies. The backbone of this Journal is the Torah. How can this be? Well, let us see if this is possible. As a disclaimer, the intentions of the Journal writings do not advocate the practice of any religion. And so, I use the word ‘so’ among many other words to begin sentences, such as ‘and, but, then…etc, to start a sentences. The rules of grammar are there to be broken. Other words and phrases I like to use include: own, in fact, also, actual, actually, really, in order to, being, with regard to, by virtue of, and many more such words and phrases. And the word ‘And’ reigns supreme and relentless in the construction of new sentences in this Journal. I was shocked when proof reading the never-ending series of revised drafts how often I begun a new sentence with the conjunction ‘And’. In many instances I use ‘being’ in place of ‘is’. Why is this? Does it represent bad writing? Certainly not! This is how we write and speak as South Africans. And all writing is based on cultural conventions. I write in South African English. Hotazel English! Jump for my love.

It is said that studying the Torah helps one to bond with God. It is a way of offering thanks to God for everything. The non-Jew who diligently studies the Torah in order to bond with God is as great as the high priest in the holy temple of God. Before studying the Torah, we offer thanks to God with the following blessing: ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has sanctified us by Your commandments and has commanded us to get involved with the words of the Torah’. And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old, when I lay down my head and when I rise just before first light. The chief end of our lives and the Torah: Is to know that there is a God —Exodus 20:2. ‘When thou liest down and when though risest up’. And God said to the people of Israel: I am the Lord your God, the one who brought out of Egypt where you were slaves. Exodus 20:2, Deuteronomy 5:6.

2

While writing the journal notes in prison it was always in the back of my mind to write something of substance which would be both original, pioneering and experimental, and which would follow the literary format of a journal or a diary or even of a rough notebook. I liked the idea of a rough notebook or even the reworking of a rough notebook. I confess that I have worked on and off on this journal for the best part of my post-prison life even though its inception started with the prison notes. As the years passed I added to its contents. It never reached a state of finality. And this was because the Journal writings became an exercise in free-writing, allowing the writing to flow freely from is source in the mountain peaks of heavenly ideas, flowing from its source, meandering across vast plains, before draining into the bottomless ocean of free-writing. Unlike Zarathustra, I have descended from the summit of the mountain, like Moses from Mount Sinai or the disciples in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew’s account of the ‘Tranfiguration’ (Matthew chapter 17) we read: After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.  Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah. In Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ we read: ‘So when Zarathustra thus ascended the mountain, he thought on the way of his many solitary wanderings from youth onwards, and how many mountains and ridges and summits he had already climbed. I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart. I love not the plains, and it seems I cannot long sit still.’

I had no idea of how it would attain its final state of consummation with regard to its form and content. I liked the idea of a literary creation that had all the features or imprints of a work in progress rather than being something that bears all the attributes of something that has been premeditatedly contrived for the sake of producing a smooth-polished and elegantly crafted literary artefact. What I had in mind with respect to using the prison notes as a literary resource was to create something that would be both novelistic and journalistic. That means it had to have the literary form of a novel and a journal at the same time, but it had to be also autobiographical. It had to be a book that could be read as a memoir, but it had to be an atypical memoir, breaking all the literary conventions of autobiographical or memoir writing. It had to also be ‘journalistic’, filled with the kind of writing that one would expect to find in a genuine philosophical or scientific journal or learned periodical. This is what I mean by journalistic writing, that is, it is the kind of writing one would expect to find in an academic peer-reviewed journal. Yet it had to also have all the creative, poetic, artistry and aesthetic forms we associate with literary fiction. What is it precisely that we expect from works of literary fiction? Do we expect literary fiction to conform to some ideal or code or guidelines or structure or pattern or form? Of course, it is expected that the author or the writer have certain goals, objectives, aims, reasons, purposes and intentions in mind when writing fiction. To see if I have succeeded in satisfying any of the expectations that a reader may entertain when reading a work of fiction with a journalistic slant, I invite you to read further.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. Not to entertain thoughts of other gods besides Him—Exodus 20:3

3

I don’t believe that my life thus far has been particularly extraordinary. But as the Baron said to the Doctor in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood: ‘One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it’. The life I have invented for myself has not been lived as a public spectacle, it has been lived very privately, which is the kind of life that would be overflowing with an abundance of secrets that will go to the grave with me. So happily, I am not any kind of celebrity. And lastly, I am not even sure why I have embarked on this writing project. I am not even sure what my literary goals are, nor am I sure about what I may hope to achieve in this literary project. I am uncertain about my own motives, and I am unsure about my intentions. And I am not sure of the plot of the story that I am writing even though it is supposed to be an autobiography with a journalistic slant which can be read as a work of fiction, a strange work of fiction indeed. Anyway, what kind of plot if any would an autobiography with a novelistic and journalistic flavour embody? Do we live our lives according to a plot or do we retrospectively invent the plot that makes the most sense of the life that we have lived? Do we live our lives as an unfolding story? Can our lived lives be read as a journey whose passage we are able to narrate as if it were a travelogue? If you continue with the task of reading my journal you may stumble on the existence of an underlying plot that miraculously gives shape, meaning and order to what seems to be a fragmentary disconnected collection of epigrammatic sketches on a diversity of topics that have been somehow cobbled together into a rambling directionless narrative which does not seem to be going anywhere. Maybe this is exactly what the story of our lives will really look like if we try to encapsulate it as a story with a beginning and an end, all connected or meshed together by means of a plot, or we could have written the story of our lives as a moment by moment commentary, written on the go without stopping to think, trying desperately to capture the contents of each moving frame, describing our immediate impressions or sensations of a passing world viewed from a moving window. On what basis do we select our impressions of the passing vista? What do we describe and what do we leave out? Do we describe the infinite plenitude of the minutiae that overwhelms the mundane in an exuberant lyrical John Updike-esque fashion?

Anyway, apart from the infinite plenitude of the mundane, what would constitute the real story of anyone’s life? What would be the actual story in-its-self without any ‘spin’ or doctoring or embellishing, the true story in other words? And who would be able to tell the true story? And how could we possibly know that it is the one and only true story or the true version, the Authorized Version as it were? What could possibly make it the Authorized Version? These questions imply that there could be more than one story that could be told about any person’s life. A life, like all other lives, which could only have been lived in reality or actuality as a continuous series of events or episodes in space and time, in an ‘ordered’ sequence of contingent events that would necessarily be linked together by a chain of cause and effect, beginning with the birth and ending with the death of that person. Surely, this would represent the true story? It would be a story told in the form of a descriptive account of all the events and episodes that constituted the verifiable lived experience of a person’s life from the beginning to the end in their proper sequential order. But it would be a story vested without any meaning even though the plot of the story could with poetic hindsight be discerned in the chain of episodic causation which shaped the particular individual’s life from its beginning to its end. Only a particular kind of narrative that represents an intentional or purposeful or teleological reconstructed retelling of the story could invest the story with ‘meaning’, where meaning revolves around a reinterpretation or reconstruction or projected representation, which is nothing but a representation of a representation, with the latter representation being the ‘true story’ told without any ‘meaning’, an ‘objective’ account emptied of all meaning, consisting only of an enumeration of brute facts, or states-of-affairs. A narrative as opposed to the above supposedly simple telling of the true story would involve a re-telling of a story, which would become a representation of a life in terms of its projected or constructed or imposed telos or anti-telos. Each narrative tells its own story by reshaping the plot, by investing it with a telos or an end towards which the story progresses, and in doing this the narrative engages not only in the creation of a fiction but also in the creation of a myth. We can only grasp the full ‘Arc’ of our lives, from its beginning to its final termination, in the sense of its meaning and significance and inevitability, in the form of myth. The significance of the full Arc of our lives, which we set out to imagine for ourselves, or attempt to visualize mentally, especially during the final moments of our existence or during the gathering gloom of our last days, will turn out to be a myth or a parody, in the form of a story, which we have constructed. The Arc represents the trajectory of our lives in a metaphorical fashion. The Arc shares the geometrical features of a parabola. The words parabola and parable and parody share the same Greek root ‘parabolē’, which literally means ‘throwing alongside, comparison, juxtaposition, analogous, allegorical,’ and by expansion and extension of these meanings, the word ‘parabolic’ has also been interpreted to mean from a rhetorical and metaphorical perspective a ‘fictional narrative’ often in the form of a parable. When we reflect upon the significance of the Arc or trajectory of our lives, the mode of reflection in which we undertake this imaginative exercise is inescapably parabolic. We cannot help it. Moreover, by extension of the etymological meanings and significance and references of the word ‘parabolic’ we become our own parody in the way we think about or construct the story of our lives. We can also speak about the ‘comedy’ of lives but for now let’s focus on the ‘parable’ of our lives in the form of its unique Parabolic Arc, from the beginning to the end of its journey through the labyrinth of life with it infinite forks along the road. In the imaginative re-construction of the Arc of our lives, we become our own parable. The story we tell ourselves, self-reflectively and privately or internally, about ourselves, about our life, about who we are, cannot but be a myth. It is also a story we cannot share or chose not to share, even if we believe in its truth. The reality we chose to ignore regarding the Arc of our lives is that our lives are in reality completely incomprehensible. Our lives are incomprehensive for many reasons, even to ourselves. One of the reasons being is that we remember hardly anything about our lives. We hardly remember even the minutest fraction of our lives. On a moment-by-moment basis, our lives have been flooded to overflowing with the ordinary, insignificant, and forgetful events, which filled every second of each day. We lived most of our lives unconsciously. Our daily lives are filled with moments that slip away leaving behind no memorial trace of anything worthwhile remembering. We do not remember anything of the mundane, everyday struggles with which we were so often preoccupied, and all the cares, and the worries that caused us so much anxiety. We fill in the gaps with fiction. In the end, the story of our lives becomes almost completely fictionalized. Who would be interested enough or willing to listen to the story that we have constructed about ourselves?

With regard to the Arc of the ‘Parabolē’, I would like to imagine the parable of my life to be ‘read’ as a narrative that has been thrown alongside the grand sweep of things, and seen within the largest view or context possible. Is this not what we all wish for ourselves? Is this not the very essence and significance of the meaning of a life lived in the Hegelian sense. From a Hegelian perspective, can we find the thread of our lived lives through the labyrinth of our historical existence as conscious beings? To find the thread is equivalent to climbing the ladder of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of the Spirit’. Having made this statement it is necessary to ask Hegel the question: ‘Who or what is Hegel talking about in his ‘Phenomenology’? Who or what is ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’? Surely to be spirit or mind is to be conscious. So, who or what is driven by the logic of desire in the ‘Phenomenology’? Is it not consciousness? What is the logic of desire? Is Eros under the compulsion of the logic of desire? Unravelling the meaning of the logic of desire is the focus of Hegel’s work.

Mythos (or Muthos) and Telos belong together. A narrative often acquires its meaning by reference to a larger more ‘meaningful’ narrative, a narrative that represents the order or disorder or chaos or purpose or purposelessness or rationality or absurdity or irrationality of the Cosmos. Meaningfulness here means saying something about something by someone to someone else. This telling of something about something may be utopian or dystopian in its plot thrust, concerning its Telos or Mythos, which has become thematised in the fictionalized account, or in the novelistic work of fiction. Fictionalization always involves an aestheticized representation of a representation, which involves the verbal process of speech or writing in a retelling and it is the retelling that constitutes the aestheticized narrative. In this aestheticization of the seemingly mundane, and ordinary we see the relationship between story, narrative and plot. It is the aestheticization, which makes the infinite plenitude of the mundane appear extraordinary. The theme may be utopian or dystopian. In its aestheticization, the theme is plotted out in terms of or within a framework of a Mythos and a Telos. Not every recounting, whatever it happens to be about, can avoid the inevitability of fictionalization in the actual performance of telling or writing. It is in the aestheticization of the recounting that the fiction is created. Yes, I have used the word ‘recounting’. To recount is precisely a recounting, and recounting is a taking of stock, a stock of what? To take stock is to be involved in a reckoning. But a recounting as such also involves a performance, a performance always entails a form of engagement. A performance, which brings about a telling, a narrating, a reporting, a describing, or even an explaining is always also an adding up, or a summing up, a final reckoning of things. Yes, recounting something is to add up. To add up what? To add up a life? How do you add up a life, what kind of magical and strange calculus is required to add up a life? However, what does it mean to add up? To add up in the recounting always ends up in engaging in an inevitable and inescapable fictionalization, which is the telling of a tale or a story, in other words, saying something about something to someone, is to add up, to recount, and as such to tell a story. The plot of the narrative revolves around the reckoning; the reckoning has to entail a finalization, a balancing of pluses and minuses, in other words, a judgment, which is also a taking of stock. Can there a recounting of a life lived without any judgement or finalization or reckoning or taking of stock? To tell a story about something or someone also involves communicating a message of truth or a lie, maybe even a Noble Lie about something. Leaving aside the idea of the Noble Lie, for the time being, this claim seems to suggest the omnipresence of truth, or the constant intrusion of truth into every recounting, in every adding up the truth seems to intrude, even if the recounting involves the inevitable fictionalization of what is being recounted, yes even if the recounting turns out to be an exercise in aestheticization, the truth still seems to intrude. The truth haunts speech and writing. This claim that the shadow or light of truth falls upon every utterance or every act of writing, that is, on every single word that is ever uttered or heard or read, may strike you as a gross over-exaggeration of the powers of language. How can truth be a constant ghostly presence in every communicative performance? How is it possible that the presence of truth haunts every performance of verbal expression? To recount is to add up and to add up captures the idea of the dialectic, and by dialectic, we mean the work of dialectical reasoning. It is in the adding up that the message of truth emerges. It is in the adding up or in the recounting or in the dialectical analysis that the truth about reality emerges even from the tales, stories, allegories, fictions and myths, the substance of which Socrates calls the Noble Lie in Plato’s Republic. The ‘substance of which’ also becomes the occasion for the intrusion of truth. Truth about what? Truth about the state of affairs. Everyone experiences those occasions where the need is felt to tell the story about their lives. It is an inbuilt or natural impulse, which we all share, to a greater or lesser extent. And mostly, we want to tell the truth, even if it is about the life we have lived. This is what my life has been like. Do I really want to lie about this? Do I want to lie to myself? Do I really want to live a lie? But when I try to ‘recount’ the story of the life which I have lived the threads of fiction and truth become inevitably entangled, intermeshed, knotted up, and inseparable. Recounting the story of our lives is like weaving a tapestry on a loom. On the loom with our own hands, we ply the weaving shuttle in executing the cross-wise inter-weaving together of weft and warp threads, creating in the process a woven fabric, and selecting the appropriate colours of weft and warp threads, different patterns or figures or images or signs can be woven into the fabric. This of course resonates with the symbolism of time, fate and destiny in the moving of the loom’s shuttle in the process of weaving the weft through the warp that Herman Melville was making in Moby Dick when Ishmael and Queequeg were working together to weave a mat. We weave the fabric of our own lives. We become our choices at each branch or fork as John Updike would have it in his book Toward the End of Time.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. 3. To know that He is one—Deuteronomy 6:4

4

This patchwork tapestry, which has been woven together into a complex narrative, has all the confounding features of a selectively composed autobiography, containing a jumbled catalogue of unconnected memoirs that have been interpolated with frequent diversions into a philosophical or scientific flavoured commentary of a journalistic nature. The composite narrative seems to be overwhelmingly greater than the sum of its parts. This gives the reader the deceptive impression that the journal has been inadvertently and haphazardly stitched together by the frequent and random interruptions of different kinds of writings on apparently unrelated topics, some of which are distinctively didactic in tone and intent, and which often don’t seem to have any bearing or relevance to any kind of connecting thread, which by any stretch of the imagination could possibly hold together the vaguest outline of a plot waiting to be born. This would represent what I mean by a novel or innovative or even an experimental approach to writing which is neither modernist nor postmodernist, and also neither fiction nor nonfiction. If I may say so, this journal embodies all the pretensions to be something else, something quite different. It is different because of what I have stated in my preface. And my ‘preface’ actually gives away the formulaic agenda guiding my intended literary project. So there we go (off to the Wild West show). I have given away the plot before I have even begun to expound on the narrative or tell the story. The plot has imposed itself on the writings. There was nothing I could do to circumvent this. It would have been an exercise in futility. To circumvent, to undermine, to repudiate, to deconstruct, to defer, to ignore, and to disavow the plot would have been to engage in an exercise of self-denial, to labour under an illusion, to become blinded by the kind of short-sightedness that is unable or incapable of recognizing the abyss of the infinite regress, the infernal vicious circle and the self-reference paradox. So the plot revolves around avoiding the inevitable falling into all the logical and metaphysical traps of one’s own making when trying to comprehend the meaning or non-meaning of the life that one has managed to live in the thicket of conflicting choices. And as Sartre has said, we are our choices. Nothing could be truer, in fact, it is inescapably true. It is true that I am the choices that I have made. I take full responsibility for my life and the way that it has turned out. In this sense, I have been existentialist, even though I have never overtly self-identified as an existentialist or identified with the writings of Sartre.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. 4. To love Him—Deuteronomy 6:5

5

I am not sure under what genre my writing would fall or could be categorized. Maybe my writing does not conform to any specific genre, nor does it fall readily into any kind of literary classification. Maybe this literary project should be read as a work of metafiction. Which would make it a work that is constantly and self-consciously pre-occupied, with the essential nature of fiction while in the actual process of saying something about something to the reader. What I can say is that I write as a scientist, and also possibly as a philosopher. I will leave it to you the reader to decide on the nature of my literary work. If I had to give away the plot of my narrative right at the very beginning of the story which I hereby wish to write it would be best to state it in the form of an enigma, an enigma that will haunt every word