Yesterday morning, I was woken first by the call of a hawdidaw, then by a rooster (who’s got a rooster in suburban Cape Town???), then I just laid there and enjoyed the rest of the morning’s sounds coming in an open window. This is always what I enjoy most about the first days of summer in Canada too: hearing the daily sounds of life. A dog bark, some traffic, and the wind in the leaves. Always the wind. I don’t know why they call Chicago The Windy City when there is Cape Town. Yesterday and last night it was windy; when my jet lag woke me in the middle of the night, I even heard things banging around – in our yard or the neighbour’s I’m not sure.

Sometime after I fell back to sleep, though, the wind must have died down because this morning it is still and already warm. Today we get our rental car. I’m nervous about driving in the city on the other side of the road, but I think it will be good for us to explore the area more independently than we have in the past. Last night as I laid awake, I couldn’t help but ask myself: why am I continually pushing myself outside my comfort zone??? Why can’t I just stay at home and chill out in my safe little world? Sometimes it almost feels like a moral imperative to me, like discomfort (not physical but emotional discomfort – the byproduct of intimacy and new experiences) is next to godliness or something.

My father-in-law has lent me some of his books by Stephen Watson, a Cape Town poet and professor at UCT. I’m reading a writer’s diary, which is just as it says. I chuckled at this entry, from 21 December 1995, written while he was in New York City:

“There are certain environments, particularly these post-industrial cities, which are clotted with words in the same way that certain landscapes are polluted by filth. Words proliferate here like layers in a landfill: all psychic space is overpopulated with them. At the same time they float free of all signification, losing their substances as a result.

[...]

Words, no less than human beings, need a certain amount of space in order to mean, to be. Failing that, the very feel of the language starts changing, losing its reality. One gets the emergence of phenomena like postmodernism which at times strike one as simply a way of shifting the word-garbage around when it’s grown too deep to be disposed of.”

And later, on 27 December 1995:

“[R]eliance on cliché is not only a reflection of a kind of collective crassness; it is also an index to a certain form of brutality. Clichés being the dead wood of language, they provide the verbal clubs with which people commonly beat others about the head.”

Now, I think it’s about time I woke my husband and son and we got on with our day.