non-knowledge

The difference between me and my friend Jenny, who sat next to me, and was from South Africa, is that she already knew what the limits of her existence were, and was quite happy with that. I didn’t know them even slightly if at all, and even if someone had told me what they were, I wouldn’t have accepted that. I wanted to find out what they were all the time. But Jenny had much more culturally in common with the Australians who sat around the classroom in my first year in Perth than she and I had together, even though we were both from Africa. Even though Jenny went along with some of my more interesting schemes – to meet the sunset at the break of dawn, for instance – there was something within her that was already settled, that knew what to expect from the sun, and didn’t anticipate anything more or less than what had been expected.

It was like so many of my friends who sat with me in my classes at the next school I went to, when my parents moved up into the Perth hills to a place called Lesmurdie. Even if they went to Mauritius for a break, and sunbathed there naked, you had the impression that they already knew what to expect, and had developed their sunbathing naked story to tell only for anecdotal purposes.

In a strange way, this limit drawn on taking a risk was also the limit drawn on their friendships. They knew who they were and that was it, whereas I was always querying it. I just sought, as if to assuage an inner dryness in my throat, others who could feel the same inner yearning. When I found skydivers many years later (SCUBA divers weren’t quite up to snuff), I knew I’d found my spiritual and social equals. I had come home at last – at least for a little while, to where the grain of life seemed normal, satisfying and healthy. A child of war, I had to live up to this level of excitement. My partner at the time got cold chills. “I couldn’t jump,” he said. “The newspaper article on the wall at the dropzone said that a man had been sucked up to thirtythousand feet, had nearly frozen to death, and had drifted hundreds of kilometres away from where he had been dropped. I was afraid that this could happen to me.”

I sneered at him a little, I’m sorry to say, since this artefact alone had been more than enough incitement to persuade me to jump. What if the hand of god had snatched you away and given you a really journey to experience? How would you write home if that had happened? All the things that you would want to say ……..