 
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 which the author pursues includes 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)

Raghavee: The Immoral House Keeper (Short Story)

Waterlandsridge (Novella)

The Man with no Needs

## 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 practise 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. But what did her apparent observance mean or signify? This is the paradox which confounded Mr Goldrich. So was Hannah a Jew in her heart and soul, even if only secretly? I don't personally think so in spite of Mr Goldrich's conviction to the contrary. Hannah remained a committed anarchist, a Darwinian and 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 being 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. But 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 is the question which 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 that 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 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 seated 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. But still Mr Goldrich insisted that this did not necessarily prevent her from living a double life, in secret an observant Jew, in public 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 which 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 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 the 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. And 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 to 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 can be a cover for a deeper secret life which 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 suggesting 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. But 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 of time 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 Talmudic and the Midrashic literature, and not to mention practically a life-time of mixing with Jewish people. And 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 also a collection of self-study books for learning Hebrew, plus a ten volume English translation of the Midrash Rabbah. So 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 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 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 and I have also came to my own literary conclusions regarding the putative Jewishness of Hannah Zeeman. Mr Goldrich felt his beliefs about Hannah was warranted for other reasons as well. Mr Goldrich's hunch regarding Hannah Zeeman's apparent Jewishness did 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 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 some one's life can become fictionalized in the process of writing a biography. It is this process of fictionalization which interests me from literary point of view. I have taken material from her personal dairies 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 which 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 commitment of 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 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 deals with the truth about the nature of the whole of reality. Of course the whole of reality would in sense encapsulate Judaism as a part of that reality.

Whether or not she was really a Jew, whatever that may mean, remains a minor detail in her very interesting philosophical journey which 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 too. 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 remarkably Jewish in profile in his eyes. 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 silence 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 have 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 which makes possible the realization or achievement of meaning and significance through the medium of speech and writing, or language in other words, is 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 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 or 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. 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, which 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 which seeks its own self-remedy within the confines and constraints and limitation 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 experience 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 to 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 which 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.

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. To know there is a G d—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 where 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 pasted I added to its contents. It never reached a state of finality. 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 being something which bears all the attributes of something which 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 the using of the prison notes as a literary resource was to create something which 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 which 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 has 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 which 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 which miraculously gives shape, meaning and order to what seems to be a fragmentary disconnected collection of epigrammatic sketches on a diversity of topics which 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 which 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 can possibly make it the Authorized Version? These questions imply that there could be more than one story which 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 in fact 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. Mythos (or Muthos) and Telos belong together. A narrative often acquires its meaning by reference to a larger more 'meaningful' narrative, a narrative which 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, with regard to 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 which 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. Every recounting, whatever it happens to be about, cannot 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 entail 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. But 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 lived life 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 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 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 weave 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 which 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 most 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 which will haunt every word that I have set out to write. I would like to believe that in one way or another all speech and all writing which endeavours to say something about something cannot escape the desire to make totalizing claims about ultimacy. Totalizing claims about ultimacy are the kinds of claims we make when we try to express the ultimate purpose or significance or meaning of our existence or attempt to expand on the ultimate nature of reality. And if I am going to betray the plot at such an early stage, then this would count as the hidden plot buried deep within the narrative which I have woven together from the material of my prison notebooks.

It needs to be borne in mind: To say something about something to someone depends on the speaker or writer being motivated by some intention or desire, which also means to be in that state of mind or consciousness. Being in that state of mind, something is intended or desired, an intention to communicate something. It has been said that to understand what is being said is to understand what is being intended or desired, which means to understand the intentions or desires of the speaker or writer. Maybe to even grasp the state of mind of the speaker. It would seem that language is deeply rooted in desire, that desire is the wellspring of language. Desire for what? Desire for meaning? It is the impulse of desire which gives rise to speech. Language makes it possible to understand what is desired.

To understand what has been said or written involves an interpretation of what has been said, or written for that matter. Something has to be meaningful in order for it to be understood or comprehended. To understand what has been said or written is to be transported into another life. And if life is not originally meaningful then understanding would be impossible (Paul Ricoeur). There is an ontological dimension to understanding anything. And also Hegel's phenomenology of mind would be impossible if life was not originally meaningful. What does it mean for life to be originally meaningful? It means life and also the world or Universe refers to or points to something else beyond itself.

Making totalizing claims about ultimacy involves venturing beyond borders, beyond the thresholds of discipline boundaries, in this sense totalizing claims involve transgressions and subversions. Making totalizing claims involves the transgression of the boundaries that divide literature, theology, politics, ethics, economics, behaviour, evolution, philosophy, science, morals, genetics, sociology, metaphysics, logic, ecology, mathematics, anthropology and biology, into separate disciplines and intellectual enterprises, each with its own theoretical framework and critical agenda. Transgression of thresholds and boundaries in thinking, speaking and writing ultimately revolves around the relationship between the one and the many. In this sense a genuine Summa Theologiae is essentially and necessarily transgressional in the scope of its address when engaged in the business of making totalizing claims about ultimacy. Even the Socratic Noble Lie, as a totalizing claim about ultimacy, especially in regard to the nature and sanctioning of the City, carries within itself the seeds of its own self-transgression, if not destruction or deconstruction. It is through the cracks in the edifice created by transgression that the light of truth penetrates and shines into the darkness. Transgression is always against the edifice, the citadel, the foundations of the Oligarchy, which is paradigmatically exemplified in what we call the City, the City which is founded on the Noble Lie, and the City which can only exist by virtue of the Noble Lie. No Oligarchy and also no City which embodies the Oligarchy can exist without the cementing glue or the cohesive hegemonic power made possible by a fundamental untruth, a falsehood hidden within the bowels of the Noble Lie. The transgression ushers in the day of reckoning, and the day of reckoning also represents a summing up, a settling of accounts, a balancing of assets against liabilities and also an adding up, in other words a judgment. The reckoning, the summing up, the balance sheet, the settling of accounts, the recounting, the judgment and also the adding up, metaphorically represent what dialectical reasoning is all about, in contrast to the persuasive force of rhetoric. But there is more. I don't know where to start or where to end. Talking about where to start and where to end is a good place to say something more about dialectical reason. Dialectical reasoning involves seeing the connection between the parts and the whole. It is through dialectical reasoning that the truth is recovered in the unveiling of falsehoods. Falsehoods which are hidden within the body of the Noble Lie which constitutes both a poison and a remedy or cure. Poison versus cure represents a binary contrast. The fundamental untruth on which the City and the Oligarchy has been founded also represents in Plato's Republic the poison and remedy which has been referred to as Plato's Pharmakon. The remedy has the effect of being a poison, having no curative efficacy. The poison, a concoction which exists in the form of the City or the Oligarchy, has been emblematically and metaphorically exemplified in the Hobbesian artifice, which is that artificial man created by man and called the State or the great Leviathan. This great artificial man whose sovereignty gives life and motion to its body, a machine-like body, which can only be animated or automated by a criminally bent Frankenstein, is the monster that rules over our existence.

Before expanding on the self-replicating nature of the Oligarchy into its infinite morphs it is necessary to place the idea of transgression in fruitful and dialectical tension with the idea of unification. Unification and totalization and systematization are complementary concepts. All claims to ultimacy are claims which unify the diversity of the world of phenomena with regard to a single fundamental underlying principle. Totalization involves unification with respect to some fundamental underlying principles. In this sense totalization and unification involves the reconciling of the relationship between the one and the many. The many exists by virtue of the one. The desire for the good entails a transgression because the idea of the good is inimical or hostile or subservice to the principles and interests upon which Oligarchy is founded and perpetuated. The Oligarchy is founded on the principles of self-interest, self-appointment, and self-perpetuation of a ruling political elite. The Oligarchy is founded on the centralization of power. Centralization of power in the hands of a ruling elite. This is what 'democratic centralization' really means. It means hierarchicalization and social stratification with respect to the distribution and ordering of power. This is the reality. The rest is illusion. The illusion comes in many forms. Examples include the phenomenon of vanguardism. The idea of the Party embodying and furthering the real interests of the proletariat is an illusion. The reality is the reverse. In reality the Party is hostile to the real interests of the proletariat. The real interests of the proletariat revolves around the concretization of the autonomy of the individual. This is the unifying and fundamental principle underlying the entire edifice of Marx's Capital. Autonomy means being able to act on one's own behalf as an individual. If you cannot act on your own behalf then you do not have autonomy. If you are prevented from acting on your own behalf then you are acting under the directives of someone else's rule or power or governance. Thus the concept or idea or meaning of autonomy is essentially transgressive. It is transgressive with regard to the essential nature of the Oligarchy irrespective of the historical form in which the Oligarchy has become concretized in space and time. Capitalism, National Socialism, Fascism, Nationalism and twentieth century Communism all represent historical embodiments of the Oligarchy. They are all species belonging to the same genus. They have all descended from a common ancestor. They all prevent the individual from acting on her own behalf with regard to her own best interests. Being free to act on one's own behalf with regard to one's own best interests is the ultimate transgression. Seeking this freedom, the freedom of autonomy, is the essential objective of social revolution. It can only be realized through the subversion and destruction of the Oligarchy. This was what the 1960s counter-culture and the student uprising was all about. It was about radical autonomy. Autonomy can only be realized through the liquidation of the ruling elite.

What is the Oligarchy? Taking into account the general consensus in the academic literature an Oligarchy is defined as a form of government in which political power effectively rests in the hands of a small minority or in the hands of a self-appointed and self-perpetuating elite. Given this definition one is motivated to ask: What factors prevent the formation of elites and what factors favour the formation of elites. How do elites appoint and perpetuate themselves? According to Schumpeter democracies are ruled by alternating elites who compete for power and control of the state which they achieve through the electoral process, a process in which the citizen's practical participation in the democracy is limited to the sporadic casting of votes, and after the election the citizen plays now further role in the so-called democracy. So what looks outwardly like a functional democracy is in reality an Oligarchy. It is safe to conclude that real democracies don't exist anywhere in the world, only Oligarchies exist, and elites are able to appoint and perpetuate themselves through processes and mechanism which create only the illusion of democracy. Everywhere democracies exist only as meaningless fantasies. For example, can meaningful democracy be achieved through electoral competition between self-appointing and self-perpetuating elites? Only an anarchist can see through the fantasy for what it is. The fantasy of elections is a veil for hiding the machinations underpinning real power struggles between competing elites which includes patronage, clientelism, nepotism, gatekeeping, influence peddling, and information control, the rest is all pretence, a theatre of make belief for the average citizen who remains a passive spectator of a counterfeit or sham democracy in action, unable to discern the shadows from reality.

Where does the word Oligarchy come from and what was its original meaning? The term Oligarchy has been derived from the following Greek words: ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía), where oligarkhia is a form of government where political power effectively rests in the hands of a small elite, ὀλίγος (olígos), where oligos means a few, scanty, small or a small number, and ἄρχω (arkho), where arkho means the rule or exercise of political power by a small elite over the many or the masses. Somehow it seems that Oligarchical arrangements or relationships arise or emerge spontaneously or contingently within human populations or communities when the majority of individuals lose or are deprived of their capacity or power to act as free, autonomous and sovereign agents on their own behalf with respect to securing the means for their own happiness and existence. All sedentary or settled forms of sociality or social existence in which individuals are unable subsist on their own terms as autonomous hunter-gathers, become politically organized under the rule and control of an Oligarchy. All democracies develop into Oligarchies. In all settled non-nomadic human populations or communities when the majority of individuals are deprived of their power to cooperate as free, autonomous and sovereign agents on their behalf regarding their means of subsistence, that is, when their power and agency is restricted or completely curtailed through the forceful and violent interventions of an emerging ruling elite, then the establishment of a self-appointing and self-perpetuating ruling class follows automatically, as if it were due to an iron law of history. And the protection of their power and minority interests becomes the chief concern of the emergent ruling class. Self-appointment into and self-perpetuation within the ranks or hierarchy of the ruling elite is achieved through patronage, threats, intimidation, force and violence. The social dynamics which give rise to the political institutions or political arrangements on which the Oligarchy depends, especially in the various forms or instantiations of the nation-state, instantiations which have emerged continuously throughout post-Neolithic history represents or embodies the paradox of the political. The Oligarchy in terms of structure, organization and functioning can only exist as a criminal organization, this constitutes the paradox of the political. The political can only be sustained by criminality. Hence the Leviathan or the Behemoth in all of its forms or embodiments, must of necessity be slain in order for humankind to flourish. Revolution is a categorical imperative.

The line 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss', captures the paradox of politics. The paradox of politics revolves around the inevitable regeneration of the very conditions of dissatisfaction, disaffection, repression and oppression which first gave rise to the genesis of politics or the political. Arising in the wake of the genesis of the political is the genesis of other paradoxes such as the paradox of the individual, the paradox of the community, the paradox of law and authority and the paradox of the state and government. Criminality can only exist by virtue of these paradoxes. The paradox is never resolved, instead it is perpetuated through criminality, through lawlessness. The paradox revolves round the constant regeneration of lawlessness under the mantle of the restoration of law and order. The distinction between lawfulness and lawlessness dissolves in the self-perpetuation of the political and the Oligarchy. The political and the Oligarchy can only exist in the form of the necropolis. Dead but alive, alive but dead. A zombified universe. The paradox of anarchism comes into sharp relief when it is contrasted with necropolis of the Oligarchy, or put more bluntly the Oligarchy can only by virtue of a thorough going antinomianism. With respect to the idea of law and justice the Oligarchy is essentially antinomian in nature. The self-appointed and self-perpetuating elite can only exist by virtue of an allegiance to a thorough going antinomianism. Which means the Oligarchical elite exist above any law, they are not bound by law or the rule of law. This state of affairs also exemplifies the paradox of the political and politics. Anarchism is essentially non-antinomian with respect to the idea of law in relation to autonomy, justice and equality. The synonyms of anarchism are autonomy, justice and equality. Anarchism equals autonomy, justice and equality rooted in the foundations of reason and evidence. The foundations of law are reason and evidence. The Oligarchy is not founded on the rock of reason and evidence. In fact reason and evidence threatened the entire edifice of the Oligarchy.

Plato's Republic is full of surprises which will astonish the thoughtful and reflective reader. It is a book which is concerned with civic morality from beginning to end. It is the weave which holds the entire tapestry of the Republic together making it a seamless work. It anticipates and also lays out themes and concerns which became the preoccupations of Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In fact I would recommend that the student of Marx should read the Republic in parallel with Marx's early and more mature works. The unarticulated paradox which should haunt every acute readings of the writings of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith and Marx is the unacknowledged social-political fact of criminality which necessarily accompanies the emergence of all settled communities of the kind which Plato first analysed in the Republic. In other words criminality defines the social-political character of the Politeia or political system. Criminality and therefore 'lawlessness' defines the relationships between individuals within the community from which the Oligarchy and the political emerge. This is because the structuring and functioning of the community is out of necessity based on social inequality, social differentiation, social rank, social stratification and hierarchicalization. In short the community is never established on egalitarian relationships but rather on systems and relations of social domination which coalesce in the formation of the state. In other words the coalescence of relationships of social inequality and social domination gives rise to what can only be called the criminal organization of social systems and politics in general. Plato in the Republic was aware of this. However, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx were blind to this. The all-pervasiveness of criminality which characterized the essential nature of the political realm was overlooked even in Marx. Criminality exists by virtue of an asymmetry in the distribution of power and violence. The state upholds and embodies this asymmetry thereby making it essentially a criminal organization. The evidence for this is beyond dispute. Apartheid South Africa represents a paradigmatic instance of the criminalization of the state and all the institutions which constitute the state. But it is not only South Africa, it is the case for most states in the world. The USA is another exemplary case. This reality constitutes the framework and theatre for the revolutionary struggle which is now more urgent than ever to save ourselves and our planet. The struggle entails the destruction of the state and abolishment of the professionalization of the political realm.

The professional politicians in the various third world liberation movements, in Africa and elsewhere, playing the populist tune don't represent or embody the Left - this much is clear. They represent their own self-interests as an increasingly privileged elite who are a law unto themselves and have become their own sovereigns acting with impunity in doing whatever they wish. This is the great betrayal of the liberation struggle. This is all consistent with the reality that the state has always been a criminal organization or Crime Inc.

A compelling case can be made for the claim that the evolutionary development of the structure and functioning of the institution which we now call the State had its origins in criminal organizations and the state throughout history has reproduced itself as a criminal organization serving the interests of powerful elites. Every state that has ever existed regardless of the specific particularities of its evolution, history, social formation and modes of production, from the emergence of the very first post-Neolithic States, has always been under the control of a self-reproducing Oligarchy which in the service of its own elite interests imposes its rule upon the ruled through force, violence, authoritarianism and bureaucratization. The self-reproduction of all Oligarchies is achieved by social elites and heredity elites who use the state in whatever form it may exist, monarchy or capitalist or socialist, to control the commanding heights of the economic system so that it can be exploited for their own benefit. Rank, status, social stratification, hierarchies and inequalities exist by virtue of the state and in turn the emergence of rank, status, social stratification, hierarchies and social differentiation gives rises to the institution setup which we recognize as the state and the 'political'. In response to a suite of predisposing factors the state originally emerged as a political institution round about 5000 BC. A critical question: What factors or forces drive the emergence of rank, status, social differentiation, social stratification, social hierarchies and systems of social domination which gives rise to the perpetuation of inequalities and the destruction of egalitarianism?

From a Marxist and Communist perspective every confirmation of the paradox of politics and the paradox of the state is really excellent news! Why? Because it is evidence for the case we want to make from a Marxist and Anarchist perspective. We rejoice in the unveiling of the evidence which supports the thesis that the state, especially the capitalist state, is essentially a criminal enterprise engaged in what can only be called organized crime, devoted to all kinds of criminality including looting of state resources and corruption. Of course the apartheid South African state under the Nationalist Party presents us with a wonderful case study to explore this idea of the state as a centre of criminality. However, least we get too smug, what has been going in South Africa is not exceptional or unique, it is just a replication of a universal pattern that we see in every country across the globe. The pattern of state organized criminality applies to every state on this Planet, it has been the pattern from the dawn of time, ever since the first state-like institutions began to emerge within settled communities. If there is such a thing as an Origin Sin, the origin of the State is the exemplification or even the paradigmatic instantiation or origination of the most perfect conceptualization of all Original Sins. The state as an institution represents not only the original, but also the vehicle or vector for the intergenerational transmissible of Original Sin. The commission of this particular Original Sin represents the 'Fall of Man', it embodies the 'Fall' of 'Man' to the fullest possible extent. It also embodies the paradox of the Noble Lie which lies within the heart of the justification of the existence of the State in the form of the Oligarchy. The paradox of the Noble Lie is exemplified in the paradox of politics and the paradox of the state. It is a paradox because the idea of the apparent purpose of politics and the state is never realized in practice, it is a paradox because politics and the state can only exist as the opposite of its apparent purpose. This is what is meant when it is proposed that Truth and Freedom requires the dialectical overcoming of the Noble Lie not only as an ideology but also in all of it concrete or material embodiments. It is also obvious from a theological perspective that the origin of the State is the source or fountainhead of all Evil. In line with this idea, it can be further argued that the State, whatever its form, has always been throughout its history the epicentre of organized criminality and lawlessness. In this respect it is the foundation of antinomianism. This also means that no political movement or party or organization whether socialist, conservative, liberal or nationalist is immune to the contagion of patronage, impunity and lawlessness. They readily morph into centres of criminality. In reality, their apparent desire to seize state power for the benefit and sake of the people, in the name of the people, is a mere subterfuge, a cover for concealing their real intentions which is self-enrichment at the expense of the very people who they pretend to represent. All forms of populist politics, whether nationalist or ethno-centre or capitalist or even socialist, share the same goal, the formation of criminal or mafia state. This means that the struggle for socialism needs to be international and has to transcend nationalist, ethnocentric, race based and identity based politics. Ironically some of the best research on the intrinsic criminality of the state has been done by American academics.

Books and papers have been written on the criminality of the State throughout its history as an institution. Hobbes got things completely wrong. Organized crime, criminal entanglements, and criminality have all played an integral role in the evolution of the structure and functioning of the State in all its variable historical instantiations. The Apartheid State conforms to the same old pattern. We should not be disturbed about this, we should rather rejoice and treat it as exemplary evidence for the above thesis. The essential nature of the State in all its forms including the past and recent nation states have been and still exist as essentially criminal enterprises. In additional, they are forms or species of the genus 'Oligarchy'. While Karl Marx seemed to hint at this he did not expound on it explicitly. But he did address the essential criminality of capitalism and so we can argue by extension that the state is essentially a criminal organization. Understanding crime and dealing with the pervasiveness of criminality seems to be insoluble given that criminality is intrinsic to the essentially nature of the state and the elite which it serves including the bankers.

What is meant by sovereignty? Sovereignty can only exist meaningfully and concretely at the level of the individual, as opposed to being an abstract concept regarding the nature of political institutions. Individual sovereignty or sovereignty of the individual can only be realized or concretized through the instantiation of self-ownership, where instantiation in this means bringing about something, or a state of affairs, into effective being. In this context we can note that truth supervenes on being. This idea will be fleshed out in the journal writings. Self-ownership means the moral and natural right of a person over her own personhood which includes her personal bodily integrity and exercising the moral and natural right over one's personal bodily integrity incorporates exclusive control of one's body and life, which necessarily includes exclusive control over the means which are necessary for sustaining and ensuring a safe, free, autonomous, meaningful and happy life. Any violation of individual sovereignty constitutes a criminal act. The Oligarchy in all of its various forms of existence can only exit through the violation of individual sovereignty and thus the Oligarchy can only exist as a criminal enterprise. Since the dawn of the Neolithic the rise of the Oligarchy in its wide variety of manifestations has always existed as an empire of slavery. And ever since the world has of various kinds of slave empires ruled over by elites who were essentially criminals. Slavery in its all its forms including wage labour represents an institution of human exploitation arising from the criminality of the Oligarchy.

Revisiting the metaphysical and theological ideas linked to the origin and nature of the State, these views can be summarized as follows: 1) the origin of the State represents a paradigmatic exemplification of the Fall; 2) the State also represents the source or fountainhead of all Evil, and 3) furthermore the State represents not only the ideological, but also the concrete or material embodiment of the Noble Lie. Taking into account the origin and nature of the State it is enlightening to read the meaning and significance of the temptations of Jesus and his response to the temptations through the prism of these ideas. In is also fruitful and enlightening to re-read Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers of Karamazov' from the perspective of these views. In 'The Brothers of Karamazov' the chapter dealing with Ivan's poem regarding the Grand Inquisitor which can also be viewed as a kind of midrashic or deconstructive re-reading of the three temptations of Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew. It is easy to see that Ivan's or Dostoevsky's reading of the meaning and significance temptations are questionable. Taking our que from Dostoevsky it clear that the reading of the temptations is central to way we conceive, comprehend and apply the 'politics' of Jesus as God incarnate. Yoder in his book 'The Politics of Jesus' and Jacques Ellul in his book 'The Ethics of Freedom' have both given an interpretative and applied reading of the significance of the three temptations of Jesus in the wilderness after fasting in the wilderness for forty days. Of course it is patently clear that after 2000 years the 'Church' has not really understood or grasped the broad philosophical and political significance of the meaning of the three temptations and Jesus' own responses to the Tempter. Again I need to emphasize that the temptations and the repudiation or rejection of the temptations by Jesus must be dealt within the appropriate theoretical or metaphysical framework. And that framework is the Oligarchy versus the Kingdom of God. In my opinion Dostoevsky, Yoder and Ellul all fall short in their critical discourse on the meaning and significance of the dramatic portrayal of the three temptations. Meaning or significance of Jesus's Messiahship represents a radical challenge to the continued existence of Religion and the State in the form of the Oligarchy, where ironically and paradoxically the State can only exist in the form of an Oligarchy.

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. 5. To fear Him—Deuteronomy 10:20

6

The erotic quest for ultimacy.

In keeping a journal during the time of my detention I have also succumbed to my desire to narrate an account of a life and also a desire to expand on the kinds of concerns which could have given meaning to that life. This desire which always bordered on the erotic was a desire to garnish and dress up my narrative with the kind of interpolations or interruptions or insertions or deviations or transgressions or unifications that have the form and content of totalizing claims about ultimacy. And I have mingled various formulations of claims to ultimacy, all of which are concerned ultimately with the erotic quest for the beautiful, and also the good. Claims regarding the significance of human existence cannot be divorced from the desire for the possession of the beautiful, which cannot be separated from the desire for the good. Hence the passionate quest for ultimacy, which is aroused by the desire to possess the beautiful always involves the intimacy of the erotic. To know the truth is like experiencing the intimacy of the erotic. To know the truth is to experience the fulfilment of the erotic desire to possess the beautiful. To know the truth is to experience the kind of erotic intimacy that we experience in nocturnal adventures involving encounters that are secretive, secretive like our most unspeakable dreams, and many of these secrets which I have already alluded to will of course go to the grave with me. So my ulterior motive and hidden agenda behind the writings of my notebooks has been to speak the truth to matters of ultimate concern, matters which have borne down on my life, and from which I could not escape by ignoring. And these matters of ultimate concern have involved passions, desires, ideals, hopes and dreams, all of which concern truth, and meaning and significance, in one form or another. And of course the thing which we call the 'good'. The truth, the good and the beautiful are indeed one.

Like the desire to possess the beautiful, the desire to know the truth is erotic in the sense that knowing has an unavoidable sensual dimension. Knowing is being sensuous, knowing the truth is mediated through sensuality and sensuality involves the physical and physicality, and the physical involves matter, it involves the flesh. The erotic is always embodied, the erotic is always incarnate. The sensual and erotic desire for the knowledge of the truth and for certitude cannot be divorced from the physical and consequently the desire for true knowledge is necessarily anti-Manichean and anti-Gnostic and therefore anti any form of dualism of Good and Evil or dualism of Mind and Matter or dualism of Spirit and Body. The erotic desire for truth concerns that which is ultimately knowable. And that which is knowable possess the property or the attribute of knowability, knowability as something which is central to its essence, to its essential nature.

The subject of knowledge as a sentient being cannot be equated with something like a transcendental ego or the absolute spirit. The finite subject of knowledge whether an animal or human always exists in the form of a materially embodied subject in a continuous state of becoming in response to an ever changing environment. The genesis of knowledge is always rooted in the life history of the subject.

The truth or the certitude of all claims to knowledge, including claims regarding ultimacy, can only become possible or realizable or even concretized, if we agree that there are some critical claims which we can state as being true no matter what. Being true no matter what is a radical postulate, it means that there are claims which we have no alternative but to accept as being true, that is true, even though it would impossible to fully account for the truth of these claims on the basis of empirical evidence or logical inference.

For example we readily accept the claim that the Universe is intelligible. We can claim that the truth of this claim explains the historical success of the scientific enterprise. And we can also make the claim with supporting reasons that this intelligibility of the Universe is not in itself self-explanatory, in a self-referencing fashion, because the reasons for its intelligibility lie outside of itself and not within itself. Any attempt to demonstrate that the intelligibility of Universe as a self-explanatory fact will end in failure. Accepting the fact that the Universe is intelligible without being able to give an empirically based account of what makes this fact true in a logically rigorous self-explanatory fashion is a problem which resists solution. This problem has logical consequences. It means that ultimately there are no self-explanatory empirical facts. There are only facts. Brute facts. There exist physical constants, some of which are fundamental, which define the properties of various physical entities such photons, neutrinos, electrons, proton and neutrons. The various fundamental constants, especially those applied in the Standard Models of Particle Physics and Cosmology, can be taken as paradigmatic examples of what is meant by fundamental and unchanging Regularities or Uniformities of Nature. The fact that the various fundamental constants used in particle physics and cosmology take on only certain very specific empirically determinable values, finite values which happen to be fixed, unchanging, and very precise, and never any other value but these, is something which cannot be explained. This is what is meant when it is proposed that the existence and reality of certain essential features of the physical Universe are not self-explanatory facts within the bounds of theory or within the bounds of empirical evidence and reason. The metaphysical or ontological or theological or onto-theological question is: Who or what set or fixed the values of the various fundamental physical constants which allow for the making of precise predications and for the confirmation of hypotheses such as what we have seen in the recent developments in the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The non-self-explanatory nature of certain facts such as the values of the various fundamental physical constants, together with the question of how the values for the various fundamental physical constants were originally set or fixed or prescribed and so on, is suggestive of another 'fact', an onto-theological fact, a fact of a transcendental nature, and it goes along the lines that there actually exists in reality an overdetermination of causality. Some kind of agency fixes the empirically determinable values of the various fundamental constants of Nature, and by agency some kind of mechanism is implied, the fixing or setting has to be caused or brought about, it cannot happen by itself, it cannot happen by some kind of self-causation, no effect can cause itself. This is a radical conclusion. Is such a conclusion warranted? Judge for yourself. What is implied here is that while the Universe as a physical or material system can be rationally conceived as being causally closed it is still causally overdetermined with respect to the setting of the values of the fundamental constants of Nature. So being causally closed does not rule out the possibility of the overdetermination of a causal chain of events. Overdetermination can be viewed as the transcendental conditions of possibility, as the something by virtue of which something else is possible or made possible. What we have here is an example of 'metaphysical push-back'. The metaphysical questions impose themselves, they are forced upon us the moment we want to understand or comprehend or explain the fundamental nature of things. It is inescapable.

If we try to rationally demonstrate that the fact of the Universe being intelligible is self-explanatory, our reasoning which also happens to be logically and empirically well grounded, will lead us in an infinite regress or into circular arguments or into logical contradictions. It is because of these kinds of problems that we are forced to accept some claims no matter what, and all 'first philosophies' seek a way out of this conundrum of having to accept certain claims no matter what.

The Universe or the Natural World of things and beings as we experience it in science and in our ordinary day to day living presents itself to our perceptions as something which has the properties or predispositions or the essential nature of being knowable. The essential nature of the Universe also includes from an ontological perspective it knowability. It knowability is one of its essential properties, an attribute which is built into its constitution or nature. The Universe in its very existence or being is the bearer of a built-in or innate or intrinsic knowability and this is what makes it intelligible. In other words it embodies or bears immanently in itself the kind of nature or ontological character of something which is able to be known. But having said this, on second thoughts, I think I have rushed into proposing that the Universe is intelligible in the sense that it bears the ontological character of something which is able to be known without expanding more fully why this intelligibility in the sense of its knowability is in itself not something that is self-explanatory. Its intelligibility while being the condition which enables it to be known does not include the reasons for its intelligibility. While we know 'that' many things are the case in the Universe we cannot know 'why' they are the case in any ultimate sense. With respect to the 'why' question, the ultimate reasons as opposed to the 'proximate' reasons for something being the case can never be given. The proximate reasons for something being the case or the existence of a state of affairs embraces or entails all the essential properties, powers, and dispositions of things by virtue of which something of interest is what it is. In science we are able to establish the facts for something being the case, in other words, we can establish the nature or kinds of facts which would support the actual existence of a given state of affairs as opposed to its non-existence or the impossibility of its existence. But knowing the facts which show a given state of affairs to be the case, does not include knowledge about the reasons for the facts themselves being what they are. This is because facts themselves also represent states of affairs, that is, states of affairs which provide the necessary support for the existence or knowledge or intelligibility of the particular state of affairs which happens to be the subject of inquiry or investigation. To search for ultimate reasons for intelligibility results in an infinite regress. No ultimate reasons can be given for why a given state of affairs is intelligible and in this sense the intelligibility of the Universe is not self-explanatory. The reasons for the intelligibility of anything in the Universe is always by virtue of something else being the case, and as a causally closed system the physical Universe is ultimately not self-explanatory in terms of the reasons for why it is knowable or intelligible. Something has to be knowable for it be intelligible. Only what can be known is intelligible, but trying to establish the underlying reasons for why anything is knowable and therefore intelligible always ends in an infinite regress. This represents the ontological and epistemological problem of the intelligibility of the Universe. Reasons for the existence and intelligibility of something always depends on something else being the case. In this sense everything that exists in the Universe and which also happens to be intelligible to our minds is always contingent on something else.

Will my own life be intelligible? Intelligible to who and why? What is it that makes a life intelligible? Should a life have a purpose or plot for it to be intelligible? Would anyone set out to write an autobiography or biography without a plot in mind? Would one set out to write an autobiography or biography that would be completely and intentionally unintelligible to the reader? Plot, purpose and intelligibility seem be correlated or linked in any form of literary narrative, because ultimately the narrator is motivated to say something about something to the addressee whoever that person or reader may be. The plot represents the 'plotting' or the organization of narrative elements in an order or form which gives structure to the sequential unfolding of the story trajectory from its beginning to its ultimate goal or terminus.

So if there is going to be a plot to this narrative, it will end up having the colour, sounds, aroma, feeling, texture and flavour of a sensuous and erotic autobiographical account which seeks to unveil a first philosophy. Establishing a first philosophy is not only a transcendental obsession or passion, it may be an exercise in futility. Thus it is needless to say that it may end as a futile venture into the no man's land of wasted and broken dreams, yet in spite of the risks, dangers and hazards it remains indeed an enticing possibility, an adventure of the mind and body, something to strive for. In fact it is more than that, it is as a life-saving necessity with incalculable redemptive value, measurable in that intangible currency which nurtures and sustains hope and meaning in the infinite here and now.

The empiricist ontological reduction: Logical positivists seek to reduce all talk about things such as electrons, protons or quarks to observables. All the theoretical entities which represent the subject matter of science can be logically reduced or construed in terms of observables.

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. 6. To sanctify His Name—Leviticus 22:32

7

We are fellow travellers.

Understanding and comprehending the significance of what I have written has been made possible by virtue of the fact that you the reader also happens to possess true knowledge which you may also find that you are unable to justify or show why this knowledge has the ring of incontrovertible certainty. This makes us fellow travellers. You the reader without always being aware of it, may also have been engaged in this search for ultimacy. And in this search for ultimacy you too may find yourself searching for words, the words by means of which you are able to say something about something which will express the certainty of what is ultimately significant and meaningful in this life. That is the plot of my story, and that is also the ultimate enigma or paradox of speaking, writing and reading.

Can the knowable be encompassed? No of course not! The knowable is without boundary or border. No there is no finality regarding the knowable or what can be known. What is knowable is infinite. This is what is meant by Totality and the existence of the Totality of the Knowable. It is exists as a promise and as a hope. But this does imply that cannot have knowledge or experience the certainty of something that comes with knowledge. Knowledge of something is knowledge of part of the whole of knowledge, part is inseparable from the whole which is infinite. Knowledge of the whole involves transgressing the boundaries, because the part is inseparable from the whole. The truth of the part is contained in the truth of the whole. Knowing the truth about something is like standing on the shores of the infinite. What is like to stand on the shore of infinite? How long does one have to gaze at the endless horizons of possibility that come into being with each passing moment as the present rushes into the future? A new future is born with every passing moment, filled with inexhaustible possibilities, and there is no end regarding what can be. We struggle to know that which is and we cannot imagine that which is possible, and what is possible can only exist by virtue of that which is, and here we have the One and the Many, and here we the relationship between Being and Becoming. And Being is everywhere. And Becoming involves a continual rebirth which is made possible by what remains immutable, what remains constant, what is time-invariant. Everything supervenes on Being. This includes the Essences, the Universals, the Forms or the Ideas, and the Good. Everything supervenes on the Being of the Prime Mover or the First Cause. The Prime Mover becomes the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Everything revolves around the One and the Many. And because of this relationship which characterized the ultimate or essential nature of reality, there can be no end to thought or thinking, and mind is the unceasing motion of the infinite ocean of what can be thought to be true. In this sense there is no end to thinking. Thinking is about what can 'be' thought to 'be' true and in this sense thinking dwells on being and on becoming. This means that ultimately there is nothing which can be known with certainty, as in metaphysical certainty. Without the possibility of something being true there cannot be thought and there cannot be thinking, because thought always finds itself dwelling on that which could be true. Without the possibility of attaining the truth there can be no thinking. It is by virtue of the possibility of acquiring knowledge of the truth that sustains thinking, that draws thinking along its journey, and that brings thinking into being. Thinking emerges as a possibility the moment that matter attains a state of sentience or 'consciousness'. This first insipient state of nascent consciousness arises initially in the various forms of sentient awareness of the external environment, made possible through the acquisition of powers and capacities to respond reactively or adaptively to external stimuli. And it arises as a consequence of matter having attained the physical states which makes sentience possible, a state which seems to have arisen as something seemingly inevitable, as an emergent capacity, something made possible through the attainment of certain kinds of cellular and molecular configurations and molecular motions, first instantiated in the structural and functional evolutionary development of nervous systems. And it does not matter how primitive or under-developed the very first states of sentience happened to be when it initially became manifested in the simplest forms of animal life. With regard to animals, a continuous variation in the states or degrees of sentience or consciousness exists along a continuum from the simplest to the most complex forms of animal life. With the evolution of consciousness and with the attendant capacity or power to not only think about things, but also to entertain thoughts or ideas about possibilities or to start imagining possibilities, it was then that the power or disposition which we refer to as 'freewill' became a reality. The wellspring of freewill is the imagination, the POWER TO IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE is the power which gives rise to freewill. To be conscious entails the capacity to imagine. We could not have survived as animals without having the power to imagine possibilities. This means we could not have survived without having the power to exercise freewill, which is freewill in the making of decisions or choosing or deliberating or inferring or in the imagining of outcomes or in the imagining of possibilities. Having the power of freewill is a built-in capacity, a power that has been engineered into the very workings of the nervous system, into the very configuration and motions of matter at it various levels of complexity. Freewill is something which supervenes on the electro-mechano-chemical mechanisms which underlies the structural and functional complexities of the animal nervous system. Freewill in all of its enigmatic and paradoxical complexity evolved as an attribute, a property, a power or predisposition of conscious beings. It came into existence as something which was made possible by virtue of reality of the imagination, a capacity and power which evolved as a behavioural adaptation. Imagination endows consciousness beings with the power or capacity to entertain possibilities. And we possess freewill only by virtue of this conscious or mental power or capacity which allows for us to entertain possibilities. And also, the imaginative capacity or power to entertain possibilities that have an emotional dimension, to imagine the experiences of hurt, pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, dread, sadness, and happiness others, and because of imaginative capacity we can place ourselves in the shoes of others. This makes it possible for us to experience empathy for others and to experiences the pangs of conscience. The power of the imagination and the capacity for the exercise of freewill also contributes to the birth of moral consciousness. To imagine is to possess the power to create, to invent, to innovate, to question, to criticize, to enchant and to believe. How can we believe in anything or even have faith, without being enchanted by the power of an idea, a possibility, a thought, or a mental image of something? To be enchanted, to be in state of enchantment, entails an 'exercise', an exercise which would be impossible without the power or capacity or ability for 'imaginative entertainment'. The word 'entertainment' is used here in the sense of mind-linked or cognitive-linked events, actions, a performances or activities, all of which are designed to achieve something which enchants not purely for the sake of diversion, pleasure, enjoyment, amusement, distraction, excitement, but enchants for the sake of what could be possible in the sense which has life-changing or life-enhancing or life-redeeming significance. This is what it means to entertain possibilities which enchant. I find the prospect of something enchanting because of what it means. Of course in a broad sense to be enchanted also means to be captivated, charmed, delighted, dazzled, enraptured, entranced and fascinated. But to be enchanted also means to be enthralled, beguiled, bewitched, hypnotized, ensnared, and mesmerized or to be under a spell and so on and so forth. None of these states of enchantment are possible without the imagination playing a significant role.

Having said all of this, the power to entertain possibilities involves not only the imagination, but also the capacity to exercise mental processes such as deliberation and inference, which allows for the weighing up of a situation, or for the sizing up of a given state of affairs, which thereby allows for choices to be made regarding alternative actions or agencies which will have different ethical or moral values and implications or outcomes, ones that serve one's own interests at the expense of others or ones which will serve the realization of the general and inclusive good of everyone.

Material forces drive life-history transitions, this much is obvious. Life-history analysis as a scientifically based disciple involves the investigation, description and explanation of the evolution, development, structure and functioning of social systems, where the structure and functioning of social systems includes the social behaviours associated with a given life-history or life-history strategy. And the study of social behaviours necessarily involves social psychological investigations on the status and roles of all players within a given kind of social system or social formation. Changing patterns and dynamics in social behaviours play a critical structural and functional role in the biogenesis or psycho-social genesis of the Oligarchy in all of its multifarious or diverse manifestations. Life-history studies therefore include unravelling the processes, activities, events and stages associated with a typical human lifecycle within the context of particular social system or social formation. From a physicalist/materialist perspective: In a causally closed Universe, various material forces are responsible for driving evolutionary changes or developmental transitions in the nature of the material modes of production by virtue of which a given social system or social formation is able to exist in its particular characteristic form. From a materialist-mechanistic perspective, changes or transitions in the material conditions of life-sustaining productive activities also drive the associated adaptive transitions in life-history from one form to another. Understanding what constituted the suite of material forces which drove the transition from a nomadic or mobile lifestyle or life-history based on hunter-gather foraging to a sedentary or settled lifestyle or life-history based on cultivation or agriculture is essential for explaining the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition, and for a comprehensive development of revolutionary theory. Within the conceptual framework of economics the diminishing returns earned or derived from increasing the increment of effort or labour applied to some essential or obligatory productive or life-sustaining task captures what the life-critical idea of diminishing marginal returns really means for human social evolution. As a concept it represents the idea of a reduction in the marginal production of labour, where the word 'margin' is synonymous with the word 'increment'.

The evolution of bipedalism in hominins including humans is an evolutionary adaptation for not only a mobile nomadic lifestyle involving long distance walking and but also an adaptation for endurance running. Bipedalism in not an adaptation for a sedentary lifestyle in which endurance running or daily long distance walking does not play a prominent role with respect to survival. So then what were the driving forces which caused the transition from an endurance based nomadic hunter-gather foraging lifestyle to a more sedentary agricultural based lifestyle? Possibly they were multiple with all acting in concert, each contributing in some degree as a cause in effecting or pushing the transition in the direction of its tipping point. Possibly climate change played a major role as the prime mover behind the transition. Archaeological evidence supports the hypothesis that the transition was accompanied by or coincided with a rapid demographic expansion in human populations within various regional localities across the planet.

What were the contingent material factors and forces which drove the transition which resulted in the formation of the State in the form of the Oligarchy? I have applied my mind to this question and I do have ideas. One this is clear the origin of the State was not based on the formation of a social contract, it was brought about by means of violence and coercion.

To take advantage of a situation means to act opportunistically. Kinds of situations come into existence which can be taken advantage of. Taking advantage of a situation comes with positive and negative consequences. Power to entertain possibilities and to act accordingly is something which arises when the existence of opportunities are recognized. Question: Recognized by who? By those in a position to take advantage. These opportunities arise in the form of states of affairs, states of affairs which while arising contingently, that is arising contingently by virtue of the prevailing material conditions of life or existence, if you wish, are ubiquitous and prevalent in almost every social situation. The power to entertain possibilities and act accordingly arises from a privileged and strategic awareness of the situation. Inadvertently, but inexorably, if such thing is possible, opportunities arise, emerging out of the material conditions of social existence, opportunities to be taken advantage of, to exploited, to extract benefits there from. Opportunistic means to be on the lookout, it means to possess a special kind of vigilance. Conditions for opportunities materialize. They are there for the taking or for seizing by means of calculative planning, strategic actions and implementation of tactics. It is by virtue of the power to entertain possibilities for personal benefit that self-serving actions arise out of a shrewd, secretive, tactical and strategic sizing up or appraisal of a given social situation that Oligarchies are born. These premeditated ventures or purposefully planned enterprises of seizure of resources and benefits, for want of a better word, can only succeed if the contingent nature or conditions which characterize the existence of a given social situation readily lends itself to the emergence of social differentiation and stratification. Social differentiation or stratification arises where power asymmetries or imbalances or disequilibrium's or inequalities become possible because the contingencies of the social situation causes social dysfunctionalities to take root which in turn allows for the general erosion in the capacity of members of that society to exert moral sanctions on self-seeking non-egalitarian behaviours of individuals. Social dysfunctionalities that lead to power imbalances with regard to accessing resources and benefits originally arose within the social context of a sedentary or settled agrarian based communal setting when the capacity for concerted cooperation between individuals for the maintenance of egalitarian social arrangements became impossible. It was also within this context that modes of production based on social stratification came into existence following the transition from nomadic low population density egalitarian hunter-gather Palaeolithic societies to the more sedentary Neolithic high density non-egalitarian forms of sociality. Sedentary high population density forms of sociality became totally dependent for their continued existence on social modes of production which were became increasingly hierarchically organized and controlled within a stratified or oligarchic social system. This system of oligarchy reproduced itself through every transition from settlement to village to town to city to state or empire to nation-state and so on and so forth until it reached its apotheosis in twenty century Capitalism and Communism. This may sound strange, but twentieth century Communism represents an oligarchic system based on social differentiation, social stratification and moral entitlements with regard to access to status, resources and benefits and this hierarchical system of social domination is necessarily dependent on the disempowerment of the masses. Disempowerment of the masses necessarily entails the complete loss of their individual autonomy and diminishment of the life of the individual person. The same kind of disempowerment of the masses occurs under Capitalism.

The end of the Oligarchy signals the end of history. If God reveals herself in history as the one who determines the end of history or the telos of history in terms of the realization of the promise that has already been made. The end is determined through the realization of the promise. This sounds Hegelian! What is promised in concrete terms? It has to include the end of the Oligarchy. There cannot be an end of history so long as the Oligarchy in any one of its forms continues to exist. The promise of God cannot be divorced from its political implications. It has to signal the end of politics. 'It is finished!' Does this line of thinking signal the return of a new Hegelianism which has been re-invented in the form of an erotic union between theology, philosophy and universal history. I don't really know. But there is a whispering of something like the spirit of a new age. Still, is there anything that could signal the arrival of a new future without the preceding fall of the Oligarchies? No I think not. Can we think of an erotics of history? I think so!

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. 7. Not to profane His Name—Leviticus 22:32

8

The broad genre under which my writing, which conforming to a journalistic approach, would possibly fall, would be neither modernism nor postmodernism, but rather something like 'trans-modernism and trans-postmodernism' or 'meta-modernism' or even 'modern-realism'. Meta-modernism or modern-realism would be saying something about something that is informed by claims to ultimacy without falling over the edge into the abyss of the infinite regress or the prison of circular reasoning or the cul-de-sac of logical contradiction. Meta-modernism or trans-modernism or even modern-realism is the belief that through the continual process of self-correction our speech and writing converges asymptotically onto the Truth. Knowledge of the Truth exists as an eternal possibility before us. We stand perpetually at the brink of Truth, at the breaking dawn of Truth. The opposite of this would be Nihilism. Nihilism is sustained by feeding on Non-intelligibility, Hopelessness, Despair, Futility and the Absurd. In this sense my writing is incurably 'theological' and 'ethical' even though I am writing from a Lipstick Lesbian homoerotic perspective. At times it may not seem to be neither ethical nor theological, yet my writings in spite of being based on a Queer discourse, is deeply ethical and theological, it is laden with moral undertones and concerns of ultimacy. It is motivated by the search for the Good, the True and of course the Beautiful. My narrative is necessarily autobiographical for the simple reason that it is a search into the core of my being, to find out what lies there and which I share with all of humanity. Without putting myself on the same level as Sartre in his Being and Nothingness or Heidegger in his Being and Time or even Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind, I have been on a similar pilgrimage of the mind, and also the body, recognizing the same landmarks and following all the usual ups and downs on the same long and winding road. Will I get to the end of my journey? I don't know, read on and decide for yourself.

Now that I have got these preliminaries out of the way, let me begin with the job at hand. And embark on this ethical journey in the search for certitude, a journey in which my life has become deeply entangled.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old each day before when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. 8. Not to destroy objects associated with His Name—Deuteronomy 12:4

9

So after some reflection and having nothing else do with my time I have decided to include the story of my life and the story of some of the ideas which I have found interesting in my journal notebooks. This is the reason why you will discover that the story of my life happens to be intertwined, interpolated, with the story of ideas and thoughts which also form so much of the subject material of the journal writings, and it is my hope that this co-mingling of the autobiographical with my intellectual reflections and musings can be seamlessly carried out. In short, I have lived a life centred on intellectual preoccupations. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have lived the life of the mind, so it would have anyway been impossible for me to keep a journal narrating the story of my life without reference to the life of the mind in search of certitude, including moral certitude regarding the nature of the Good.

Now in the context of moral certitude and moral entitlement, Nihilism rests on contestable metaphysical and therefore questionable ontological claims regarding the essential nature of Reality and specifically the essential nature of Nature, including the nature of man (I use the term 'man' anti-euphemistically, like as in calling the bathroom the lavatory). The latter claim of Nihilism can be shown to be false. With regard to the metaphysics of Nihilism the Marquis de Sade is of one the arch exponents and it is therefore in the interests of establishing the moral certitude regarding the nature of the Good that the claims and beliefs of Sade are not left unchallenged, and also shown to have no foundation within the realm of Nature.

In October 1976 I saw the Peter Weiss play 'Marat/Sade' at the Market Theatre in New Town in Johannesburg. The year 1976 was a watershed year in my life. It was the year of the June 16th Soweto student uprising. As a precocious lesbian from a young age (thanks to Kate) I had become thoroughly acquainted with the writings of Simone de Beauvoir (thanks to myself) including her 'Second Sex' and so I had some idea about the thought of the Marquis de Sade and of course I had a completely different view of sex, including the 'metaphysics' and ethics of sex, informed mainly by my own wonderful and fulfilling experience of the joys of lesbian sex within a moral context informed by my knowledge of zoology from a Darwinian theoretical perspective, supplemented with deeply rooted feelings of human care, empathy and conscience. I loved sex in a way that the Marquis de Sade could not have imagined. I have always been a highly sexual and erotic person with a healthy appetite for sex with women. And of course I believed in making love with affection and care for the person I happened to be with. Making love always with affection and a lot of dedication! Thank you Joan Armatrading. As a feminist I was interested in the writings of Sade and I managed on my oversea travels to obtain his books, which I read. Of course as can be expected in spite of Sade's questionable and obviously false metaphysics regarding the essential nature of man and Nature, his influence has been nothing short of remarkable, especially on the thinking of such diverse luminaries as Georges Bataille, André Breton and Michel Foucault. Knowledge of the metaphysics of the Marquis de Sade also haunts the writings of Dostoevsky.

Sade as a member of the aristocracy was sadly wrong about almost everything. If anyone was lost in the wilderness of fantasy, falsehood and illusion it was the greatly celebrated Marquis de Sade. It is critical to understand that Sade was not a scientifically informed or qualified naturalist, he laboured under an illusion and a mythological understanding of the essential nature of Nature and the ontological status of a naturalist or physicalist metaphysics of morality. He was absolutely ignorant about the nature of Nature. He was not a zoologist nor was he primatologist.

In Sade's 'The 120 days of Sodom' the question of the 'legitimacy' or condonation of moral transgression is raised in relation to the essential nature of sovereign power. Politics in all its forms ultimately concerns the legitimacy of moral transgression. And it's the claims of sovereignty by a ruler or ruling elite or ruling class in the context of all possible political formations, Capitalist or Communist, which legitimates all kinds of moral transgressions against the people. The very idea of sovereignty embodies not only the power but also the unconstrained moral capacity for the transgression of all ethical norms concerning human life which in order to be meaningful ultimately rests on the autonomy of the individual. Karl Schmitt's study on the nature of sovereignty in relation to the exercise of political power demonstrates that the legitimacy of sovereign authority has never been constrained by any moral understanding or moral commitment or the common good but rests solely on the power of the sovereign in whatever form it exists to make political decisions which ultimately favour or server the interests of a ruling elite at the expense of the masses, and in this sense it is voluntaristic, immoral and ultimately irrational.

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. 9. To listen to the prophet speaking in His Name—Deuteronomy 18:15.

10

I need to add a rider. The writing about my life is not something which I have tried to do systematically. It would have turned out to be a senseless, boring and worthless expenditure of intellectual and creative effort because to be quite honest my life has been relatively speaking a mundane affair. Memories of the events in my life which have intruded inadvertently into the journal notebooks are the episodic once in a life time events which disturb the tranquillity of the average everydayness of the smooth flowing stream of lived experience like the sudden ripples caused by a stone thrown into a still pond by chance. The ripples that disturb the mirror of the average-everyday-normalcy of existence are those destabilizing contingencies. The ripples that disturb the normality of appearances dance to the strange and abnormal rhythmicity of the syncopated beat of an unexpected dissonance, and then it becomes quiet again, in the damping muffling of normalcy. I did not sit down and decide now I am going to write my autobiography or a story about my life. When I say that I am writing the story of my life, I actually mean that I have been tracing the barest recollections of the threads of events in my life while reviewing the 'raw' writings in the prison notebooks. The threads of the events in my life which were meaningful and significant were not premeditatedly selected as having some kind of privileged status, they were the events that for one reason or another insinuated themselves into the notebook writings, like the disturbing ripples of unforeseen contingencies. While reviewing the notebook writings I have been engaged in the rewriting without any reordering of that which had already been written. Depending on the biographical raw data collected into the journal notebooks there are many alternative biographies which can be resurrected, resuscitated and reconstitution into the life of someone who once lived as a historical person from the same data. As the autobiographer I am possibly guilty of a creative re-imagining of myself into the kind of historical person who I would have liked best to be.

What can we discover about ourselves through introspective reflections? Possibly nothing! According to Hume what we call the 'self' is nothing more than a 'bundle of perceptions'. Could a 'self' be genuinely or authentically reconstructed through deep reflective introspection, a self which happens to truly be me? Could I introspectively reconstruct the self that I am through a process of recording everything about myself in writing as I have been doing in these journal notebooks? Or will this autobiographical exercise fail to disclose the self that I am? Will this autobiographical exercise which is based on a reflective introspection produce nothing more authentic than a complete fiction regarding who I actually am in reality? Maybe the I who I am does not exist, maybe such an I, a self cannot in fact exist. Taking up Hume's challenge, I have endeavoured to look within myself to see if I can find the I who I am. Of course to discover the I or the self within me who happens to be the I who I am does rest on have a good hold on what it feels like to be me. Yes a good hold, which means I need to be able to grasp, as in comprehend, understand and know who I am with certainty, and to achieve this I need to feel or experience what it is like to be me. Can I do this? Can I really feel what it like to be me? What happens when I start this exercise of introspective reflection or this introspective exercise of 'self-conscious-awareness'? What does this exercise entail? It entails observing and recording whatever 'pops' into my head or conscious awareness. This is what actually happens: I have a thought, I have this sensation, I have this feeling, I have this emotion, I have this idea, I have this sense impression, I have this mental image, I have this dream. This is what I am observing: thoughts, seasons, ideas, feelings, emotions, mental images or pictures, sense impressions and so on and so forth. In all of this can I find the self within me? Can I observe the self within me as a datum? Where does this self reside? In my head? In my mind? In my consciousness? Where does my mind or consciousness reside? In my brain? But where in my brain? All of these questions arise from my capacity to reason. And what is reason? Reason or reasoning involves the systematic, reflective, logical, inferential, deductive, inductive, analytical association of ideas. Reasoning is a habit .We habitually engage in reasoning. To reason about things is a built in capacity. It part of our nature. We also construct fictions through reason or reasoning. An association of ideas is constitutive of fiction. Reasoning is instinctive. Through the instinctive association of ideas we come to expect things to happen. It is naturally instinctive to start acquiring expectations, expectations which are borne out time and time again. Things happen as we expect them to happen. So maybe a correlation or a correspondence or a convergence exists between what we instinctively have a capacity to reason about and the actual essential nature of things or reality which by bearing out our instinctive expectations appears to conform or matchup with our reasonable expectations. This conforming or matching-up could be taken to represent a form of one-to-one mapping from one thing (mind) to another thing (reality of nature). This is the basis for the intelligibility of reality. It can be mapped in terms of a 'truthful' correspondence of one thing with another thing. This truthful correspondence or mapping from one thing to another thing can be rationally and logically viewed as a mirroring, a mirroring in which one thing is equivalent to another thing. This mirroring has a causal dimension, one thing gives rise to another thing. In the mapping or mirroring something gives rise to something. This is the basis for the existence of things having the properties of being intelligible. This intelligibility conforms to or is due to the mind's capacity to mirror nature. Can we in like manner acquire access to a mirror image of the self or the I which exists within us, assuming that a self or an I can indeed exist like a something?

Who am I actually? I don't know really. That could be the plot of anyone's life. And it would be a plot of one's own self-invention. Why? You will see, but for now let's agree that I may not really know who I am. All I know is that I exist. I know this with the utmost certainty. Descartes has provided us with reasons to believe in the irrefutable certainty of our own existence: 'I think, therefore I am' (cogito ego sum). The words 'I am' means I exist (ego sum). The word 'cogito' means I think. I think, means I am conscious, I am a sentient being, I am able to have thoughts and therefore I have a mental life or a life of mind. This much I know for certain. Thank you Descartes! So I have a direct intuition of my own existence which following Descartes I am able to deduce from the cogito, which is the 'I think'. So my intuition of existence is intelligible. For me to experience and feel and intuit my existence is intelligible, it is intelligible personally to me, the I that I am, to what I experience as the self that belongs to me alone. It is true that I exist. Like Descartes this is one thing alone that I cannot doubt. Anyway doubting or scepticism is overrated. In order to doubt I need to believe that something is at least true, for example my own existence. If nothing is true then it is pointless doubting. I may be able to invent myself or invent the plot of life, in a retrospective interpretation of my life (a hermeneutic search for meaning, using my memories as the text).

The quest for self-knowledge is as futile an exercise as is self-love. Why? Is there not something which make me essentially me in a way which differentiates me from all others. Who am I essentially? I can answer this in an apparently objective manner. And you the reader can too. You know me. You feel that you know me. This knowledge is comforting. We have established a connection. There are things, properties, predispositions, attitudes, relationships, capacities, competencies, and powers which objectively define who I am in an essentialist fashion. The key word is essence. It is metaphysically and philosophically a technical term. Essentialism is not a bad thing. You cannot hold to a realist theory of truth without holding to some kind of essentialist views. Essentialism is a form of Platonism, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Platonism can be rationally defended as a 'sensible' theory. Essences are instantiations of Platonic ideas or forms. Essences are instantiations in which immanence and transcendence are brought into a relationship, a relationship in terms of a singularity, where a singularity is an event, an event which is an instantiation, a making present of something, which is the condition or conditions by virtue of which existence of something, including me, is made possible. Everything exists by virtue of its essence. How can this be disputed? I am who I am by virtue of my characteristic traits or attributes, is this not a form of essentialism? Yet I am also a mystery to myself. This is also something to consider. I am a mystery to myself because I am essentially free to become something or someone who does not yet exist, I am free by the virtue of living or existing on the threshold of a horizon of infinite possibilities. I am free and a mystery to myself because the Universe and its future is open in an existentially meaningful and significant fashion, even though the Universe is material and physical and is causally closed and is a place where entropy is increasing inexorably. The Universe is not self-perpetuating in an essential sense, which thus excludes the possibility of the Universe being something which is self-causing. Yet it is open, existing as something which is open, open to all kinds of possibilities, infinite possibilities. The infinity of its possibilities is evidence of the immanence of God in everything which exists. That immanence is the condition of infinite possibility. God is God by virtue of being the condition of infinite possibility. So I believe in God! Should that be strange? I think not. But don't get me wrong, I am not a pantheist. I am a theist by theological persuasion. The immanence of God in everything is a complicated but unavoidable idea. If God is truly God then nothing can exist independently of the Being of God. In this sense all becoming, and therefore all truth, supervenes on the Divine Transcendental Being. Existence is a possibility. It is a contingent possibility. Contingent on something which it is not, which it is not before the fact, all facts exist as instantiations. All existence supervenes on Being. To end this paragraph, all of this bears down on the truth of the statement: The quest for self-knowledge is thus futile. But it is a virtuous futility because I am able to be a mystery to myself. In this sense as a being I am inexhaustible. The infinite exists within the finite and temporal.

So OK I exist! But I exist only in the moving or transient present. This is my state of exile, and it could be my state of metaphysical exile. In my state of metaphysical exile I am never sure what it really means 'to be'. In this sense I am a 'homeless wonderer'. How can I be if I am constantly losing each moment of my life, if I am condemned to live a rapidly shrinking present. Thank you Leszek Kolakowski for this lovely way of explaining the metaphysical problems associated with the idea and experience of what it means 'to be' (I hereby acknowledge the deep influence that Kolakowski has had on my philosophical development). Which brings us to the ancient history of the problem of what it means 'to be'. The feeling or intuitions or thoughts of what it means 'to be' raises the idea of 'being elsewhere' beyond time, so in this context the meaning of 'elsewhere' in terms of 'to be' has a lot to do with the ideas of: time and timeless, finite and infinite, and the ultimately the timeless infinite or timeless eternal present and so on and so forth. These questions has been raised by Parmenides, Plotinus, Augustine, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre.

Now let's go back to Descartes in relation to the idea that I inventing the story of my life and I am unable to escape inventing the plot and transforming the memory of my life into a fictionalized narrative. The 'I am' is the irrefutable idea that I exist as a self-referencing or self-referencing inference from the 'I think'. But if we are existing in the ever shrinking present then I am never self-identical with the 'I exist'. I only have a rapidly fading recollection of who I was a few moments ago. I can only be self-identical in the timeless eternal moment. So my exile results in a self-estrangement, I am never self-identical with the self that exists in the passing moments of the constantly shifting present. And this idea which comes from the ancient Greek philosophers, St Augustine and the medieval thinkers is basically the same idea that Sartre formulated with regard to human existence as a pure negation. This would be an instance of self-knowledge being an exercise in futility. I am a mystery to myself in more ways than I can comprehend.

So I am expressing a profound truth when I say I don't really know who I am. I am also expressing a truth when I say my notebook writings based on my recollections and memories is a work of fiction in which I have invented myself as a character.

And I remember always 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. 10. Not to test the prophet unduly—Deuteronomy 6:16.

11

It is evident that there are more ways than I could possibly imagine with respect to the task of formulating my memoirs in the process of committing them to writing. There possibly exists an infinite or inexhaustible number of alternative representations or versions of who I am or who I have been, or even of who I could be, it all depends on selective interpretation and assumptions. The truth, or knowledge of the truth, about who I really am represents the problem of Totality and Ultimacy. Having admitted the caveats we have to face in writing a memoir or an autobiography, I have decided on rewriting the original rough draft in a more radical and reflective self-correcting sense without changing the flow of consciousness that was initially captured in the notebooks. I have preserved for the sake of literary, poetic and aesthetic reasons the actual moment by moment flow of consciousness which gave birth to the sequential ordering of writings in the journal notebooks which I have numbered in their proper numerical order. This means I am reworking but not re-ordering the flow of the writings or recording of thoughts in the original work of note keeping, or recording of thoughts, which had become 'concretized' in the original collection of the 'raw' or unprocessed prison notebook writings.

Interlude: So I am now fully engaged on the 'literary' project of redacting, reviewing, researching, reworking, resynthesizing, re-editing, reinterpreting, re-thinking and revising what I have already written in my prison notebooks without interfering with the actual flow of consciousness which I hope to capture if that is at all possible. I am engaged in the process of self-corrective reflection on the matter on hand which are the contents of my prison notebook writings.

And then there always remains the question concerning the intentional omissions, the deletions, the erasures which every revision of the 'original record' incurs, often for reasons that are vague and difficult to articulate. We often write in haste and then on review we may want to strike out things which have been written from the record, rather leaving those things unsaid and unwritten, leaving only the barest of clues and suggestions in the finished product. Is this not the fate of all writing? So the idea of the 'original record' will always haunt the final revision which becomes public. Traces of what is absence or what has been left out will leave some kind of marks behind, the hidden scars within the text. This contributes to the mystery of the unwritten and the unsaid in the final literary text.

Rather than structuring the narrative into a faithful chronological account of my life in the form of some kind of conventional memoir or autobiography I have instead decided to capture the chronological flow of my thoughts while in prison. The writings are therefore fragmentary.

I have tried to capture the actual flow of the stream of consciousness which I had experienced moment by moment during the time of my incarceration. Given that this has been my intention I have decided to leave the order or sequence or the flow of writings intact or unchanged in which I recorded them moment by moment in the notebooks. In doing this I have intentionally avoided imposing an ordered restructuring or re-organization on the material captured in the notebook writings so that a narrative, or storytelling, conforming to the rules or literary conventions of storytelling would conveniently emerge. I have done this because I wanted to preserve in writing what happened to be my momentary states of mind while in prison. I wanted to preserve and fix in writing the order in which ideas, memories, thoughts, musings, recollections and reflections entered my mind at specific moments. Whatever happened to be on my mind at a given moment I made an effort as best as I could under the circumstances to commit those thoughts into language or transform them into writing. So what was originally private and personal existing in the interiority of my mind I have subsequently tried to convert into language in the form of writing which is something that is exterior and public. In this exercise I have tried to reveal or make manifest the interiority of my mind, that is, by making the contents of my consciousness or awareness or feelings or thoughts, externally present to another mind in the form of a perceptible incarnation or in the form of a perceptible embodiment. In the process of writing, pure interiority in the form of mind which is infinite, transcendent and inaccessible, becomes finite, accessible and immanent as a presence in the form of an appearance, which is the text that you are now reading and understanding. That is, in the form of an appearance of something which coincides 'geometrically' or 'isomorphically equivalent' or 'realistically', point for point with the concrete, as a being-there before someone, a being-there which can only exist in the form of an incarnation or an embodiment. It occurred to me that if the mind or consciousness is transcendent or infinite in the sense of being inexhaustible then it is the revelation or disclosure of the transcendent or infinite as an appearance or as an immanent incarnation which makes the discourse on the nature of the infinite or the transcendent possible. This is how language which is finite with respect to its referential powers can still demarcate or indicate that which is infinite or transcendent. Here we have an example of the power of language which also includes the potential to make our experiences appear real to others in our speaking and writing. The power of language reveals the infinite power of the imagination.

Expanding on this theme by turning the focus of language to the relationship between the finite and the infinite with regard to the realization or the revelation of the 'truth' embodied in the event of the articulation, in speech or writing, and also in the meaning of the individual or isolated word, whether it be noun or verb. In Plato's dialogue on language in the Cratylus it is proposed that the truth or meaning of a word or a noun cannot be fixed forever by convention, the truth or meaning of any word taken in isolation must remain undecided, which also means that the exercise of naming cannot ever exhaust the power of words and by extension the power of speech, and we may also add the power of writing. The two fundamental elements or units of language which makes it possible to say something about something to someone, are nouns or names and verbs. When stating something about something to someone, the truth and meaning of the words used, that is, the names and verbs, are interdependent. Words are meaningful only in terms of the truth claims which can be assigned to the words. In addition, the meaning and the truth of any word, whether it be a noun or a verb, functioning in any unit of speech or statement or proposition can only be decided or validated in terms of a system of reference which is essentially infinite. In itself or in themselves, words are neither true nor false until they are used to state something about something to someone. However, in full agreement with Popper, while the indubitable truthfulness of a proposition making some kind of claim about something, may have to be postponed indefinitely, there does exists a definite and realizable asymmetry between the truthfulness and falsehood of statements. The falseness or falsifiability of any claim about something actually being the case can be settled immediately by a single disconfirming instance. The meaningfulness of nouns can be established and likewise with regard to verbs, which in addition to having meaning, verbs also indicate tense or time. Nouns refer to entities which may or may not exist, and the extent of their meaningfulness depends on the existence of their referents. A referent is a concrete object or concept referred to by noun or name. The actual existence of what has been referred too, in the form of a real or concrete entity, can be empirically established as something being the case, otherwise the name refers to a non-existent fictional entity or concept. A verb refers to an action which has taken place in the past or is currently occurring in the present or will occur in the future, so in this sense the meaning of verbs in statements which say something about something are time bound. To say something about something which refers to the performance of an action executed or carried out in space and time requires a meaningful conjunction of noun and verb. In this context, the act of speech or speaking, which embodies the act of saying something about something to somebody, the heater or listener, also embodies the fulfilment of language as a system. Language as a system is something which is finite, whereas language as something spoken or written is open and infinite. Which means that a speaker of a language can construct a statement which until the moment of its utterance it had never been spoken or heard before, and yet both speaker and hearer will understand its significance or meaning. Here we have the dialectic of the finite (language as a system) and the infinite (language as spoken or written). The sense in which this dialectic can be conceptualized in terms of language can be stated as follows: the finite structure of language as system (grammar and logic) mediates the infinity of significant or meaningful speech events (Chomskyan generative grammar) in which someone says something about something to someone. Language as a system consists of the grammatical and logical rules, by means of which or in accordance with which, statements can be constructed from words to convey meaning from speaker to hearer or from writer to reader. Together, or working in combination, language as system (composed of words, signs, grammar and logic) and speech embody a dimension of Logos or the Word. The Word as Logos embodies not only linguistically the operative combination of system and action or event, but also non-linguistically the operative combination of the laws of nature and evolution of non-living and living things. It by virtue of the operation of Logos that perception and language or seeing and speaking or explaining and understanding emerges as a salvific possibility within the unfolding or revelation or unconcealing of Logos, where Logos as the Word is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. Logos or the Word as salvific revelatory event cannot be reduced to a finite text frozen in space and time. History in the broadest possible sense is the medium and theatre of salvific revelation. History in the broadest possible sense is Universal History and Universal History unfolds on the grand scale of the entire Cosmos, and from this perspective, Cosmology on a grand scale is what constitutes the theatre of Universal History, a theatre which embraces which Natural History of the Universe and the Natural History of Earth and in turn includes the geological history and evolution of life on our planet. In summary the medium of salvific revelation is the theatre of Universal History in the deepest and broadest, and grandest scale. The view that history is the medium of God's salvific revelation stresses the public 'eventfulness' of God's self-disclosure through an act of kenosis. It is only through God's kenosis that the infinite can be revealed within the realm of the finite, a realm which includes the entire scope of Universal History. The Universe as a physical entity is finite.

And I remember always 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. 11. To emulate His ways—Deuteronomy 28:9.

12

A reading of the prison journal writings should render a faithful representation and hopefully an accurate reflection or mirror of the state of my mind at specific moments. This should give the reader some insight into what the contents of my mind were at that moment, and also how the contents of my mind changed from moment to moment. It may also help the reader to feel what it was like or what it is like to be me. A university education and a mind enriched by an insatiable appetite for reading books gave me the spiritual and intellectual resources to endure an extended period of isolation in solitary confinement.

Interlude: The sources apart from my own personal experiences that have inspired me in the writing this journal many and multi-fold. As a work of art, this Journal as I already hoped, should aspire to be a literary work in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It my ambition that the 'Journal' falls into that celebrated genre of literary creations that arises by way of not only breaking out of, but also transcending, those four walls of confinement which imprison, detain, cut-off, isolate and remove the inmate or detainee from society and the life-sustaining social intercourse which one enjoys with family and friends.

It is my literary goal that the 'Journal' shares the same sense of bodily confinement with other works such as Descartes' 'Meditations', Xavier De Maistre's 'A Journey around my Room', Beckett's Molloy and Malone, Bunyan's ' Pilgrim's Progress', and Proust's 'Narrator'. Forced to endure the mind numbing paucity of events which usually interrupt and fill the normality of our daily lives, I am also clinging onto my sanity by exploring my memories, by story-telling, by day dreaming, by lecturing to an imaginary audience, by preaching to an imaginary congregation, and by philosophizing in an imaginary seminar. And sometimes the dreaming, story-telling, recollections and the interludes of didactic-pedagogic-lecturing-to-an-invisible-audience on various themes, all merge into one another. In the prison cell the boundaries between storying-telling, dreaming and imaginary pedagogic-interludes, breakdown, and become hazy and indistinct.

While writing my Journal, I have felt what it must have felt like for Descartes, who while completely room-bound, trapped within the walls of his wintry lodgings spent his sojourn pondering on the Cogito, now I am also in that state of 'enforced leisure', likewise I find myself embarking on my own journey of the mind, in a fashion similar to De Maistre's Journey, Bunyan's Pilgrimage, and of course the meanderings of Beckett's room and bed-bound characters.

Out of the microcosm of seclusion, first in this prison cell and then later in the isolation of the bedroom of my childhood following my release, I have become like an intrepid explorer of the boundaryless macrocosm with represents not only my physical-material confinement but also my 'metaphysical' confinement.

Like all the characters who are engaging in breaking down the walls of their confinement I too even in my own immobilized state have emerged as an unstoppably loquacious protagonist who somehow manages to have the final word on all matters of ultimate concern. Hopefully it will be this attribute which will endear me with my readers and make the Journal a book worthwhile reading.

In the Zen-like meditative exercise in trying to feel what it is like to be me I became self-consciously aware of an intractable mystery. And the mystery became even more enigmatic on reflection. It is because of consciousness that I can reflect and ask strange and perplexing questions like who am I or what am I? What I am or who I am is a question that can be readily answered at one level. For example, I am matter or I am the totality of my experiences, where the possession of conscious is what has made my experiences possible. Also there is the question of the unity of my soul, the unity which underlies the being of the person that I am, and this a very Platonic question, which needs to be addressed. Leaving aside the question of the unity of the soul for the time being, there is no disputing that I am basically composed of matter. I am also in a sense the totality of my experiences. I am matter that has developed through the process of evolution into a complex and interesting configuration of elements. Yet I am matter that is conscious. I am matter that is conscious of having experiences. I am not just conscious of my experiences, I am also conscious of being in a state of consciousness. This is what I mean by reflecting on my own state of consciousness. To reflect on my states of consciousness is to reflect on my experiences and on my thoughts and these writing are just that, a written reflection on my states of consciousness, which includes my lived experiences or the memories of my lived experiences. To repeat, it is my capacity for consciousness or conscious awareness that makes it possible for me to have experiences and memories of past experiences. The stability or integrity of my identity, plus its endurance or self-persistence depends on my capacity for self-conscious recollection or retrieval of memories, and of experiences that have somehow become fixed in my being as a person. I am the sum total of my experiences. I would cease to be the familiar person that I have been to others if I ceased to be the sum total of my experiences through recollection or remembrance. Without my memories I would cease to be me. All of this is self-evidently obvious.

Apart from all of that, my rough notes are also an exercise in clarification. Hence the reasons for the innumerable interspersions of asides on topics which I happened to have thought at the time of their emergence in mind as been worthwhile exploring in their own right and then committing my thoughts on them to paper. So the many asides and detours which intersperse my notes represent the scope of my intellectual preoccupations and they are all interrelated, which means they have a bearing on the ideas of Totality and Ultimacy, that is, they form integral and related parts of what would constitute the Whole, especially in terms of what is intelligible and knowable with regard to truth. Out of necessity I have thought about various things and topics at a high level of generality and abstraction. I have always being interested in the all embracive 'natural' history of the Universe from a materialist and physicalist perspective. And of course the evolutionary emergence of complexity in a causally closed Universe has been something which needs to be explained in terms of structures, properties, dispositions, powers, process and mechanisms, whether it be the emergence and evolution of life or general mechanism of all social change. The evolutionary emergence of complexity has manifested itself in the Universe in multiple forms and representations including stellar evolution, formation of the elements of Periodic Table, formation of galaxies and solar systems, formation of planets, origin and evolution of life, origin and evolution of multicellular life, origin and evolution of sexual reproduction, origin and evolution of sentience, origin and evolution of consciousness and mind, origin and evolution of language and literature and religion, origin and evolution of ethics and morality, origin and evolution of sociality or social organization, and so on and so forth.

And then of course there has been the peculiar natural history of humans, analysable in terms of the evolution of human social formations, which includes things like political organization, ownership of property, formation of political institutes such as the state in its various forms, formation of modes of production, formation of the social relations of production, development of the forces of production and the appropriation of surplus production and the accumulation of surplus value. And then also there have been the series of revolutionary transitions from one epochal social formation to the next. In the natural history of humans there have been major life-changing and social transformation transitions such as the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition, an epochal transition from a non-sedentary hunter-gatherer mode of social existence to a sedentary mode of social existence following the so-called agricultural revolution which triggered by the domestication of animals and plants.

Humans have existed in hunter-gatherer social systems for hundreds of thousands of years during what has been referred to euphemistically as the pre-historical era. Human history supposedly only began with the emergence of post-Neolithic civilizations. In many ways the significance of human pre-history has been largely dismissed as unimportant with regard to understanding what kind of beings humans have evolved into. This is hardly surprising because humans are not generally perceived as animals nor have they been conceptualized scientifically as members of the animal kingdom. Only recently with the development of sociobiology has a more comparative approach been taken with regard investigating human sociality relative to the various forms of animal sociality.

And it has been a gross misconception of the essential nature of Nature by both Thomas Hobbes and the Marquis de Sade especially with regard to the nature of animals which has been responsible for the misrepresentation of the nature of 'man' in the so called 'state of nature'. Sade, Hobbes and John Locke have completely misconstrued what has been referred to as the 'state of nature' in political theory. For Hobbes, man in the state of nature existed in a state of interminable war, 'war of every man against every man'. Which is patently false! Palaeolithic or pre-Neolithic populations of 'indigenous' or 'aboriginal' humans existing outside the confines of post-Neolithic civilization and outside the walls and gates of Hobbes' Leviathan have not lived lives that have been 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' In fact this description is more fitting for the state of affairs experienced under the regime of Hobbes' Leviathan with its political sovereignty and political authority, also favoured so much by John Locke with his dream of the 'public good' being the guaranteed benefits of political authority and political governance exercised through the institutions of the sovereign state. Compared to the moral universe of these Palaeolithic societies of indigenous and aboriginal humans who have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and in many instances into the late 20th century in remote patches of inaccessible jungles, thousands of years of civilization, and including Hobbes' Leviathan, all represent in reality a moral catastrophe which in the modern world is now also beginning to display all the feature of a dystopic nightmare. The classical political theorists including Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humans had a solitary existence while living in a state of nature. Socialization was perceived to have been a later development. The opposite is true, humans have evolved as social animals and could only survive in a state of nature within a social system governed by a collective moral consciousness regarding cooperation, fairness and various egalitarian values including the absence of social stratification and social hierarchies of domination. Civilization was founded on the establishment of the oligarchy and the entrenchment of inequalities and non-egalitarian systems of social organization, which has given rise to the development of the pathological anomaly of the solitary, atomized, disempowered and defenceless non-autonomous human being. So in truth the emergence of civilization has coincided with a systematic regression in morality and the destruction of the kind of social cohesion and solidarity which are the conditions that ensure genuine autonomy, empowerment and freedom of individuals.

It is interesting why the idea of morality has always been problematized in Marxism and there are valid reasons for this. But did not Marx have an underlying moral theory? In one sense yes he did and it was Hellenic. The Greeks held to the idea of civic virtue and civic virtue was based on justice and justice was the condition for the soul's unity. So moral or ethical conduct in relation to society is articulated in terms of civic virtue and civic virtue is something which arises internally in the soul (See Plato's Republic) rather than as an external imposition by a transcendental moral ordering.

Within the framework of a physicalist or materialist view of the Universe or Reality or History, a framework which is shared by both Marxist philosophy and evolutionary biology the answer to the question, which asks where do the actual ideas or beliefs of what counts as moral or morality come from, the nature of the answer to this question challenges the very foundations on which the legitimacy or binding validity of moral claims or moral principles rest. For example it can be argued the morals represent class interests. It can also be argued that there is no external transcendental moral order which needs to be observed and not transgressed.
And I remember always 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. 12. To cleave to those who know Him—Deuteronomy 10:20.

13

How can matter, or 'substance' or different combinations and configurations of chemicals or the elements taken from the Periodic Table, if you like, have the power or capacity by itself to bring about states of consciousness and self-awareness such that I can experience: memories, recollections, feelings, sensations, emotions, mental images, all kinds of perceptions, and thoughts? All of which makes me the familiar public person that I am. Being in a state of self-conscious awareness involves the experience of subjectivity, of subjective feelings, including what it feels like to be me. The question of the meaning of Being as in what does it mean to be, includes what does it feels like to be, which also includes under the question of the meaning of Being what does it feel like to be me. No one knows what it feels like to be me. Anyway how can the question of the meaning of being ever arise. What makes this kind of questioning possible? What are the conditions of possibility or the pre-conditions which must first be filled in order for the question of the meaning of being to be posed? How can a substance like matter, composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen plus all the other elements, on its own account for subjectivity, for consciousness, for emotions, and for feelings, for the capacity to experience, for the capacity to live through experiences. To feel something is to live an experience. How is it possible that matter can feel? How is possible for matter to live, to have life in other words. What is life? Life is motion, without motions there can be no life. Life is matter in motion. But what kind of motions are we talking about? That is something that I would like to explore in these notes.

The ideas of being and becoming, identity and difference, ontology, knowability, interiority, exteriority, transcendence, immanence, encounterability, materialism, accessibility, causality, emergence and reducibility take on a new meaning when we try to fathom how matter can feel and how matter can be self-conscious, as in reflective conscious awareness of the interiority of one's mind and the exteriority of the world in which mind and body are embedded. These ideas are not only relevant to any investigation into the foundations of intelligibility, meaning and morality, but also have a bearing on the nature of reality. They also have a bearing on the perennial crisis of human self-conceptualization and human self-understanding, especially given the fact that no one can really doubt that humans are animals. To dismiss the possibility of a rational foundation for intelligibility, meaning and morality on the grounds that the universe is causally closed and the mind is the brain is not only over-simplistic but also quite erroneous. Why would this be so? Read on!

Interlude: Knowability, accessibility and encounterability are possibilities which are interdependent and their realization are the basis of realism. This was also the kind of stuff to which I had given considerable thought and which I wrote on repeatedly from different perspectives in my notebooks. And which I have continued to expand with each new insight into the matter.

And I remember always 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. 13. To love other Jews—Leviticus 19:18.

14

Interlude:

Challenging questions continue to crop up as I work through my journal writings. And of course I need to apply my mind in the search for answers and solutions to these questions. Many problems and questions will remain unresolved.

For example: What is consciousness and how is it possible that we can be conscious? These are examples of the kinds of thoughts which have entered my mind and which I wrote down subsequently. And when I was not intellectualizing on matters of mind or consciousness or moral theory or politic theory and I would ruminate over more personal matters linked to the life that I have lived. I found myself exploring the person I that have been and the person which I have become. I thought about myself in a state of pensive melancholy. I say this because I felt pensive. It was obvious that I was self-absorbed. It could not have been otherwise. I was being held in solitary confinement. And I was takin g stock of my life.

It was not only my thoughts about abstract or intellectual considerations which I felt compelled to write down. I also wanted to preserve in writing the thoughts linked to the memories of my personal history, including recollections of my life experiences. I wanted to plot the journey of my life. Of course my personal destination or destiny was something that would remain unknown. I have an idea about what my life has been like thus far. But it was an idea only, something which I could now entertain, and possibly explore. The idea of who I was became a preoccupation. I wanted to know more about myself, I wanted to establish or comprehend or know or understand who I was. It was an act of cold self-objectification. This is me, this is how I see myself. Does my own idea of who I am correspond to any objective reality? Can I have a God's eye-view of the person that I am? Do others see me as I perceive myself? Or am I my own idea, which no one else necessarily shares. To be honest, at times, it actually felt like that I was a mystery to myself. And the question remains unanswerable: Can I confirm my beliefs or my thoughts about who I am? Is there any truth to what I believe or perceive, especially regarding the mental image of myself that emergences from the work of self-perception, self-awareness and also self-consciousness. What does my self-consciousness tell me? All I have access to is consciousness of consciousness. Is it possible that I am actually someone else? Or am I my own self-creation? Do I only exist as my own self-creation? Am I my own creatio ex nihilo (Latin for "creation from nothing")? Of course I did not create the material being that I am. I believe that I am indeed an embodied self-consciousness. This much I have to believe. I cannot rationally deny this fact. I have seen the reflected images of myself countless times and there are all the photos and films of my image. They do count as some kind of evidence for something, the significance or meaning of which I still have to clarify in my own mind. But what about the ideas that I entertain regarding who I am? What about the mental pictures of myself that I carry about in my own mind, in my consciousness. What about my self-image? Surely this is also my own self-creation. Surely I have created the life I have lived, the life which has made me what I am. I am my choices, and I have 'made' those choices. In this sense I have created who I am. I am my own invention. This is what I need to confess and own up to.

And so because of this I was motivated to preserve the contents of my thoughts as they surfaced into my consciousness. In the back of mind I knew that I was busy trying to construct the narrative of my life, but not only my life but also my intellectual life, the life of my mind. In doing this I also wanted to remain faithful to the actual sequential flow of consciousness in the process of transforming the notebook material into what was increasingly becoming my autobiographical literary project. I wanted to document the flow of my consciousness, moment by moment, and make this the contents of not only my Journal but of my autobiography. So the Journal was also become a biographical documentary in the widest possible sense. As documentary it documented the contingent flow of my thoughts. While the journal entries 'plotted' my thoughts there was no plot structuring the narrative as it becomes fixed in the ink on the pages of the notebooks. I write without a plot in mind. I don't how the narrative is going end or what course it is going to follow. I wait for the next thought. What will it be about?

And I remember always 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. 14. To love converts—Deuteronomy 10:19.

15

I admit that it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that I am writing the story of my life or the story of my thoughts. My life is far from over. And I am far from reaching the end of my intellectual disquisitions and reflections. I am far from grasping the totality of being and becoming. I am still in my thirties, I am still young, and so now I am busy only with the writing of the first volume of the story of my life. The story of my life will never be completed even after I have breathed my last breath. My life is an inexhaustible quarry of thoughts, experiences, facts and events. The owl of Minerva will remain seated on the fence post and will not rise to fly with the outset of dusk, it will only fly off from its roost at the break of dawn and not at the end of the last day of human history. Maybe that is the real plot of my literary project. While the fall of dusk is now upon us as we draw to the end of this decade which has been marked with the scars and brutality of the turbulent 1980s, we cannot yet grasp the full meaning of everything including our lives until the break of dawn in the light of full enlightenment. The night is upon us, I do not see the coming of the dawn. We are far from the END even though in my bones I sense that we are at the brink of an epochal collapse, which is a collapse that bears resemblance to the collapse of other great civilizations such as the collapse of the Roman Empire. But we are not even near the end of history.

As the well-worn cliché goes, every age rewrites its own history. It may seem trivially prosaic to say that with the accumulated wisdom of hindsight that breaks on the infinite shores of each fading moment we are given the chance to see the past in a new light. Yet there is something inescapably Hegelian to say that knowledge, especially in the case of scientific knowledge, which is the exemplary case of what constitutes knowledge, scientific knowledge grows or accumulates through the revolutionary process of constant self-correction. Science as a human endeavour is founded on the institutions of self-correction. Among its many meanings and references the word or the idea of 'institution' also entails the communal intersubjective and cooperative activity of 'practice' or praxis. Science in its institutionalized setup exists as a self-sustaining practice of self-correction. It is this which makes science a progressive institution. When we think of science we think of progress, we think of the progressive growth of scientific knowledge. And I don't believe that the Kuhnian view of scientific progress or scientific revolutions portrays the complete picture regarding the essential nature of science, or the essential nature of scientific revolutions. Essential nature? Yes as a realist when it comes to science there is ample warrant to justify belief in the idea of essential natures. I suppose this makes me a Platonist. It is what defines or characterizes the deeply Hellenistic streak in my intellectual makeup. It is the reason why I am not a relativist or a postmodernist in my thinking. I subscribe to the spirit of authentic modernity as opposed to forms of modernism we associate with the writings of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf and the others. Many postmodernist theorists would have us believe that the very idea of modernity has become passé. It is not true that the vision and experience of modernity has become something which is now passé. That sentiment is anti-revolutionary in spirit. Ironically the very word 'modern' is ancient. It first appeared in the fifth century as the word used to distinguish the pagan past from the epochal rise of Christianity. In fact the word 'modern' includes in its vast referential scope also the ideas of soteriology and eschatology both of which embrace or incorporate a salvational or messianic vision of the future. But this does not exclude a revolutionary reappraisal of meaning and significant of the past. We can re-appropriate the legacy of the past for example, especially when the memories and recollections of the past are actually subversive memories and subversive recollections. We just need to think back about the Palaeolithic mind and Palaeolithic sociality to realize that humans existed in a state of nature within a moral universe that made egalitarian social coexistence a lived possibility, which is something that we have lost under the aegis of civilization and modernity. In this sense we are living in a fallen state. We are indeed fallen! The Edenic myth which gave rise to the idea of the fall in Christian Theology is ironically linked to the idea that fall was a consequence of having acquired knowledge of good and evil through an act of disobedience which involved the eating of the forbidden fruit. The threat of death was linked to the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil. 'Knowledge of good and evil' is a metaphor for having knowledge of everything that could possibly be known. It is equivalent to having knowledge of the Totality of truth with absolute certainty. To have this kind of knowledge one has to be God.

From a Christian theological perspective the plot of the Edenic narrative is inexhaustible because there is no ending to the reading of the story and for there to be a plot the story has to end, or else the plot is postponed indefinitely or deferred to use the phraseology of Derrida. The story embodies a sublime irony. It makes me think of Fitch's Paradox of Knowability. In short, the Paradox can be stated as follows: 'logically, if all truths are knowable in principle, then all truths are in fact known', and 'logically, if there is an unknown truth, then there is a truth that could not possibly be known'. I am not qualified to expand on the Paradox.

Going back to modernity. The idea of the futuristic cannot be disconnected from the idea of modernity. Modernity is forward looking, always looking towards the future in anticipation as the emerging horizon of new possibilities. Modernity is about innovation and novelty. Modernity views the world through the prism of technology and science. Secularism is the creed of modernity. Modernity is Promethean. Modernism in its various forms represent a reaction against a particular imaginative conception of modernity. Modernity as Logos imposes a crisis on Mythos. And modernism is the articulation or expression of this crisis of Mythos due to the corrosive action that Logos has on belief and faith that is ultimately rooted in mythology and fiction. Mythos is the Greek word which can be used to denote the system of beliefs concerning the essential nature of reality. The Greek word Logos can be used to denote Reason, Logic or the Word which can also be viewed as implicit in Reality, in the Universe and in the essential nature of things. Logos can also be viewed as the Ground, the Absolute or the Ultimate, concerning the Truth about the Nature of Reality. In the metaphysics of scientific realism, Truth is what corresponds to Reality. Which also means that Truth supervenes on Reality. And this also suggests that Reality is not a mental construct or mental picture generated by the mind of the scientist. Reality also exists as something out there external to mind or conscious as an independent state of affairs which embodies immanently as where, powers, dispositions, properties and relationship, thereby endowing it with the capacity, or even agency, to act on the sensory apparatus, the cognitive apparatus, to act ultimately on mind or conscious. What is Truth not only corresponds to Reality, but 'rests' on Reality, making Reality the 'ground' of Truth. For something to be true it has to be grounded in Reality. In other words, to repeat, whatever is true supervenes on Reality. Metaphorically speaking we can say that Reason is the pathway to Truth or in other words Reason is the means by which the Truth regarding something is attained. Reason is the 'way' we arrive at the Truth or get to the Truth. It is also for this reason that the meaning of Being is so important for Heidegger. Being and Reality are inseparable. So it makes sense to state that Truth supervenes on Being. Going back to the idea that Reason is the means or way through which we attain the Truth, this line of reasoning can be expanded further. Attaining knowledge of the Truth through Reason is based on the metaphysical assumption that there exists a fundamental correspondence between Reason and the Reality towards which it is directed. The two statements: Truth is what corresponds to Reality and Reason corresponds to Reality, have radical ontological implications for our understanding of the nature of Reality.

When we apply our reason we engage in the mental or cognitive processes of deliberation, evaluation, weighing-up, analyses, contrasting, comparing, recognition, deductive and inductive inference and applying what is called logic. We also engage in the process of informed expectation almost habitually. Our understanding and knowledge of the natural world increases constantly as our expectations or predictions or models or theories or hypotheses or explanations regarding the nature of Reality are confirmed or falsified. This state of affairs corresponds to or reflects the intelligibility of Reality or knowability of Reality. Reality is knowable and intelligible because there is a fundamental correspondence between Reason and Reality. Reality is knowable and intelligible by virtue of the fact that there is a correspondence between Reality and Reason towards which Reason is directed. Reason is mirrored within nature, which leads us to conclude that everything in nature has a reason and this is what makes Reality intelligible and therefore susceptible to scientific investigation and scientific explanation. The explanation of why something is the case follows from the reasons why something is the case. The Reason why something is the case is exemplified or demonstrated for example by means of logical inference in deductive nomological explanations. All claims to know have to assume that there exists a correspondence between Reason and the nature of Reality. Also all claims to know have to assume that there is something in the nature of Reality which makes it intelligible. It is by virtue of the fact that there is a correspondence between Reason and Reality which what makes Reality intelligible and therefore knowable. The conditions which make knowledge possible exist outside of or external to the mind. These conditions are immanent in Reality. To repeat, for the mind to represent or know the world the world must in itself be intelligible, knowable and representable.

McLuhan's idea of the medium is the message seems to have a bearing on the relation between Reason and Reality. Reality is the medium through which Reason is communicated Form and content are inseparable. Form is finite and content is infinite. Content cannot be reduced to form. He washed my sins away. Oh happy day. When Jesus washed my sins away. He washed my sins away. I get on my knees and pray to God.

Postmodernism represents a reactionary attack on the idea of Logos in terms of an overriding commitment to relativism or perspectivism. The postmodernist critical strategy falls into its own trap. It assumes as its own ground what it sets out to discredit. It cannot escape the trap of its own self-referential paradox, therefore its claims are ultimately vacuous, empty or hollow or unfilled in other words. Perspectivism emerges in Hellenic consciousness in Plato's 'Protagoras'. The full meaning of modernity cannot be decoupled from the idea of the New, and the idea of the New finds its meaning and significance in the novel, as in creation, invention, innovation, imagination, and ultimately in the continual self-renewal through openness and self-correction. It is this dynamic of Logos which triggers the crisis of Mythos. Mythos' own inability or incapacity for initiating self-renewal through revolution makes Mythos the agency of stagnation and oppression which is the characteristic condition of societies ruled by religious institutions and religious conventions, which are rooted in the belief of mythology. Ultimately modernity represents revolutionary transformation. The constant advancement of science and technology encapsulates the essence of modernity.

Modernism as an idea versus modernity as a realized state of affairs: Modernism's reactive response to the scientific and technological progress which we associate with modernity is coloured by a radical sense of historical discontinuity. Uprooted from the perceived certainties of the past modernism as an aesthetic movement invents its own Mythos, a Mythos identifiable in the forms and contents by means of which it gives expressions to a new order of sensibilities. Sensibilities that have become clouded by the dark shadows of emotional and psychological experiences of an alien 'reality'. A reality in which it seems that life's moorings have become severed from the safe harbour of certainties. And the individual in modernism experiences existential states that take the flavour of been cast adrift in a sea of contingencies. There is nothing. And nihilism finds an escape and distraction in the pursuit of decadence. And decadence see its wild narcotized reflection in the profane, the barbaric and the primitive. The horror of this metaphysical nightmare becomes inexorably numbed by artistic feats which celebrate trivialization. And Mythos arises afresh adorned with the anthropological peculiarities of its characteristic and determinative Cultus in the world of modernity. It is all the rage.

And I remember always 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. 15. Not to hate fellow Jews—Leviticus 19:17.

16

Mind or Spirit is always something which we experience. It is always experienced in the form of consciousness, where consciousness is consciousness of something, be it ideas, perceptions, sensations, feelings, things, events, state of affairs. Mind or consciousness is what makes experiences possible, and it is in this sense that consciousness is constitutive of experiences, or in other words experiences become possible by virtue of consciousness or mind if you wish. As an experience it occurs within the interiority of our mental life in the form of perceptions, thoughts and thinking. It always in the form of mind which happens to be embodied or incarnate. Mind and matter are inseparable. Mind exists by virtue of matter. Without matter there can be no human mind. What does this mean for Hegel's phenomenology of mind and the end of history and the Absolute or the Totality? What does this mean for the dialectic? What does this mean for transcendence and immanence? What does it mean for being and becoming? What does mean for the reality of experience expressed in language?

Mind exists by virtue of the dispositional powers inherent in matter, and in this proposition is encapsulated the totality of the sublime metaphysical drama of being and becoming, being and nothing, presence and absence, time and eternity, finite and infinite, identity and difference, idealism and realism, nominalism and universals, freedom and determinism, faith and reason, truth and certitude, meaning and significance, transcendence and immanence, interiority and exteriority, good and evil, necessity and contingency, and the limits of intelligibility and knowledge of the Totality or the Absolute.

If there is such a thing as Universal History, then that is the backdrop or scaffold of my story, the story of my life, the meaning or absurdity of my autobiography. The question regarding the existence of Universal History is entangled with ideas about Totality and Infinity and of course Ultimacy, in terms of matters of ultimate concern. What are my ultimate concerns? To be honest I am not sure at this moment. This is something that I have to find out.

And I remember always 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. 16. To reprove wrongdoers—Leviticus 19:17.

17

While the context or historical situation in which my private or personal story is rooted or embedded or unfolding, may be the story of a life caught up in the chaotic torrent that is going to end in the imminent collapse of twentieth century civilization, and not the story of a life connected virtuously or vicariously in some way to some stage or phase within the relentless march of Universal History towards its destination. The story being told here, which happens to be my story, rather focuses on a series of moving window shots or frames into the life and thought of a young woman. I say young woman, because I feel that I am still a young woman, even though I am facing the rapid approach of middle age. I am still in my thirties as I have already stated. I am still a prisoner of my own vanity and I have yet to come to terms with what it feels like to experience the inevitable passing of my youthfulness. Yet I have a youthful mind and body. My mind and body is that of a young person. Out of vanity I have taken good care of myself. No smoking, good eating habits, lots of exercise and moderation in the consumption of alcohol. Still I admit to liking nice clothing even though I have lived frugally thus far.

We live in an age in which we are engaged in constructing our identities not by virtue of our community membership, but by our choices. You become your choices. Sometimes you make choices under duress and then you finding yourself having to with live with the consequences. And I remember once more that I did became a daughter of Sarah. Thank God it was not kosher (the mikveh). So 'halachically' speaking I am not Jewish. So like Moses I have not crossed the Jordon into the Promised Land. But the thought that I may still be a Jew lingers in my mind. But to be a Jew is to be engaged in an endless war against an unappeasable foe who happens to be the rest of humanity. This is the burden of being God's chosen people, it is the price one has to pay for the unquestionable prestige of being called a Jew. Today the Jews exist as the remnants of a bygone ethno-racial religious civilization which with the passage of time has acquired an afterlife in the form of a fictionalized memory which shares a lot in common with some mythological Atlantis. It highly likely that the majority of Judean Jews remained behind in Palestine after the destruction on Jerusalem in 70 AD. There was no depletion of the local people as a consequence of a mass exile, in fact there was no mass exile of Jews from the region. They eventually vanished from Palestine not as a consequence of migration but because they all converted on the pain of death to Islam after 600 AD. Ironically a sizable majority of the descendants of the diasporic Jews who had migrated from Palestine in the centuries before and in the centuries after 70 AD were the progeny of Gentile women who had converted to Judaism. Without the Gentile female converts, some of whom where slaves, the diasporic Jew population would have suffered a demographic collapsed.

God changed Abram's name to Abraham and Sarai's name to Sarah. And my name was also changed. And Sarah who was very old, an ancient woman, became pregnant with the son that God had promised Abraham. Abraham was ninety-nine years old when God appeared once more to him and said: I am God All-Powerful and I am going to make a covenant with you. So God made a covenant with Abraham, a covenant underwritten by a solemn promise, an oath if you like. He told Abraham that as long as Abraham obeyed God and always did what was just, then he God would keep the solemn promise regarding the covenant that he had made between himself and Abraham. To be just was Abraham's side of the bargain. But what does it mean for someone to be just? The covenant that God made with Abraham, the man who originally came from Ur, that is, Ur of the Chaldees, otherwise known as אוּר כַּשְׂדִּים ʾūr kaśdīm, was that Abraham would become the father of many nations and the land in he which was now a nomadic foreigner, the land called Canaan, would be given to him and to all his descendants. The covenant was conditional on Abraham and his descendants keeping their side of the bargain which required them to be obedient to God in all matters and they could only be obedient to God in all matters by virtue of being just. This is my Midrash on what covenantal obedience to God actually entails for it to be meaningful or have any significance. And to expand on my midrash I would argue that that terms of the covenant (that is the entire Mitzvot, taken as a whole) as defined in the Written Torah and expanded on in a fantastic elaboration in the form of the Oral Torah is in reality inimical to the realization of Justice and in this sense the Mitzvot is an embodiment of a Noble Lie. Now for the Mitzvah of circumcision: God said to Abraham – 'Abraham, you and all future members of your family must promise to obey me. As the sign that you are keeping this promise (your side of the bargain regarding the covenant between you and me) you must circumcised every man and boy in your family. From now on, your family must circumcise every baby when he eight days old'. The mitzvah of circumcision made Abraham the first Jew. Was Abraham a just man? He had slaves and servants, and this meant he stood in non-egalitarian relationships with his fellow man. He impregnated Hagar the Egyptian slave who was his concubine, which meant he kept sex slaves for his own pleasure. Was Abraham a more just man after his circumcision? The first Jew was a patriarch. The City and the Oligarchy are founded on the eminence of patriarchical figures. The City and the Oligarchy exist by virtue of the rule of patrimonialism. As a patriarch could Abraham ever be a just man? The interactions between Abraham and God are played out in a fabricated universe that bears the stamps of Mythos and Telos, and in that universe the meaning or even the metaphysics of justice is shaped relative to the way that universe works in the minds of men and the way it works represents and articulates the nature of the myth.

Law as a social institution which regulates social relationships on an egalitarian basis, that is, in terms of social arrangements which reflects fairness, justice and equality, originally came into existence, from an anthropological and sociobiological perspective, as a natural process within the confines or boundaries of a Universe which can be viewed as causally, physically and materially closed.

Law as a socio-anthropological-cultural-institutionalized and intergeneration-transmittable arrangement which regulated the fair and equitable allocation of material resources between humans living in small groups arose as a linguistically mediated and genetically driven social behavioural adaptation. Social arrangements based law-observant and moral-based relationships between individuals which enforced fairness and equality arose primarily as consequence a biological evolutionary processes. Such forms of egalitarian sociality are biologically rooted behaviours. As biologically rooted forms of social behaviours they are the results of natural selection. They represent behavioural adaptations, which embody attributes, properties, predisposition and traits, which conferred greater survivorship on individuals living within these kinds of social arrangements.

Linguistically mediated systems of rules and regulations became enforced by means of rewards and sanctions (punishment) and became the kind of social behavioural adaptation which made the existence of the peculiar nomadic hunter-gather forms of human sociality possible. Language in the form of speech is the intertwining weave with binds the fabric of human sociality. And many of the words used even in the most primitive forms of speech have a legal or law-like or contractual or judicial resonance, reference and significance. In their evolution humans did actually evolve the necessary social adaptive cognitive capacities to monitor and engage in social behaviours regarding the fairness of resource sharing and allocation which were based on the reciprocal expectations of virtuous actions, moral actions which were communally recognizable as being just and fair and equitable. Humans evolved into morally conscious social animals, animals which had all the necessary attributes to be called by the genus and species name of Homo juridicus.

With respect to Hannah Arendt's idea of the juridical subject or person as described in her book 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' there an ambiguity in legal terminology in that she is not using the idea of the juridical person in the conventional sense. In the conventional sense of its usage in law the juridical person refers to a non-human entity like a business. The sense given to the meaning of the word 'juridical' as applied to the human subject by Arendt is used to designate the manner in which a governing sovereign political authority 'legally' or 'politically' treats or exercises power over or controls an individual person under the rule of the state (or Oligarchy). The manner in which the political authority treats or exercises power and control over an individual person is legitimated in terms of its moral-legal-juridical construction or conceptualization of the individual person under it political authority. In essence the way the political authority treats the individual person depends on how the person is envisaged as moral-legal-juridical subject. How the person is envisaged is shaped the by universe which the political authority has fabricated to mirror its fantasy of reality. Under totalitarianism the juridical subject is destroyed by stripping the person of all moral and legal claims to any kind rights protected by law regarding her or his existence as an individual with agency and autonomy. From this perspective there exist no difference between the Nazi death camps and the Soviet death camps of the gulag. According to Arendt the labour camps or death camps of the Nazis or the Bolsheviks demonstrated that anything is possible and permissible in a fabricated universe in which the distinction between appearance and reality, life and death, truth and falsehood, and even victim and murderer has become blurred. This represents the ultimate horrifying significance of the myths and allegories of the Noble Lie and Plato's Cave.

When night cloaks Johannesburg in darkness, the distance sounds of the City fade away, and the mute presence of silence fills the corridors of John Vorster Square, I listen in vain for the slightest sound, and in my cell the light which burnt throughout the day now burns throughout the night.

And I remember always 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. 17. Not to embarrass others—Leviticus 19:17.

18

Interlude:

As I have already said, this autobiographical narrative has been constructed from a revised and critical retelling of the original narrative that I have had occasion to document in my journals. The revision and retelling is nothing more than a sharpening of the focus, a magnification of the resolution, so that a clearer picture emerges, so that the shadowy silhouettes of moving trees become transformed into the sharp outlines of walking men, of men walking into the setting sun, and not the shadows dancing on the wall of Plato's cave. I am doing what humans have done throughout the ages ever since writing was invented by Theuth. The editorial sharping of focus, the constant imaginative magnification of resolution, could not be helped or avoided because each time I proof read a draft that I had composed from the raw material recorded in my notebooks I could not refrain from revising and expanding. So I have expanded and elaborated and clarified where I thought it was necessary.

Having said that, I soon discovered that the task of writing the story of my life has the real potential of becoming an obsessively endless enterprise, but once the book becomes eventually bound and printed, the gates of revision will be locked for good, well anyway for that edition and I don't think there will be any revised editions to follow. But the point that needs to be made is that the task of writing can never be completed, even when attempting to write the story of one's own finite life, as I have discovered to my surprise. In a real sense the reader completes the project of writing in the act of reading which always takes place in the absence of the author. Once the book has passed into the hands of the anonymous reader, the author vanishes and ceases to exist. The performance of reading coincides with the death of the author. Once the reader has taken possession of the text in the act of reading, the author fades from the scene of the written text, the author then ceases to exist, and the writing acquires a life of its own, that is, it becomes autonomous, freed from the intentions and control of the author. The author's intentions no longer dictate the meaning of the narrative. In a way the act of writing is also a way of dying. The characters represented in the book can only be brought to life in the creative act of the reader's reading, an act from which the writer is completely divorced, and over which the author has no influence or control or power. The reader is sovereign and all powerful, it is the reader who magically recreates the world in which the character comes alive. It is the reader who breathes life into the narrative and the characters.

Very often even the actual title of the book will have slipped the reader's mind while engaged in the reading of that book. And often when the reader is done with the book, the reader may not even remember who wrote the book, and in that act of forgetfulness the death of the author is finally certified. The author as a living person or dead individual becomes progressively exiled and banished from the scene of writing until she becomes an unknowable stranger bordering on non-existence to the reader. As the author fades away from the scene of writing the book takes on its own life and embarks on its own career independent of the author's existence or influence. I think it's a fallacy that the dead have a voice beyond the grave. The writing acquires its own voice and becomes its own witness to the truth.

And what about the life of the character or characters which form the subject matter of the narrative? Again the character breaks free from the control and intentions of the author and becomes transformed into someone else in the mind of the reader. The character finally becomes truly fictionalized as it undergoes a transforming metamorphosis in the imagination of the reader. The work of fiction undergoes a continuous rebirth in the endless acts of the anonymous reading. Its afterlife is sustained by the infinity of rebirths and in this process the dissolution of the author's original intentions becomes the fertile soil for the inexhaustible life of new meaning that endures forever through the act of each new and novel reading.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old each day when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. 18. Not to oppress the weak—Exodus 22:21.

19

Dear reader I give myself over to you. I am no longer me. I am your creation, you are the one who brings me to life and allows me to live once more. I live in your imagination, I live once more only because of you. I feel privileged, I am humbled and I also feel unworthy of the relationship that you have made possible between you and myself.

So I bid farewell to the person that I am as the story of my character becomes a creative fiction in the imagination of the reader. Paradoxically I actually want this to happen. The reason for me stating all of this at the very beginning of this writing project is because I have you the reader foremost in my mind. Whoever you are, I have written my autobiography for you only. If you have found enough interest in what I have to say then I can only express my sincere gratitude. I am eternally indebted to you.

The Torah differentiates between the obligations of males and females with regard to the observing of the Torah, for example it releases women from the stricter form of the obligations required for observing certain mitzvot such as the time bound mitzvot for prayers. As a Jewish woman you should pray at least three times a day without the wearing of the phylacteries. In the morning the Shema part of the Shacharit can be recited, and the Amidah can be prayed in the afternoon and the Mincha just before sunset. During prayers especially during the recitation of the Shema the mitzvot requires that men wear the tefillin which otherwise are called phylacteries in the New Testament Gospels. The word phylactery is derived from the Greek for a protective amulet. The tefillin consist of leather straps with square leather boxes fixed to the straps. Four scriptural passages from the Torah placed inside the leather boxes. The Torah readings are as follow: "Sanctify to me..." (Exodus 13:1-10); "When YHWH brings you..." (Exodus 13:11-16); "Hear, O Israel..." (Deuteronomy 6:4-9); and "If you observe My Commandments..." (Deuteronomy 11:13-21). For males when praying the obligatory prayers the arm-tefillin, or shel yad, is placed on the upper arm, and the strap wrapped around the arm/hand, hand and fingers; while the head-tefillin, or shel rosh, is placed above the forehead.

I soon learnt to think about the relationship between the Written Torah, the five books of Moses or the Pentateuch and the Oral Torah in the form of a floating iceberg. Compared to the Written Torah, the Oral Torah consists of huge tomes of writings dedicated to the exposition, commentary, interpretation and application of the Written Torah in the form of an iceberg. The Written Torah was what one saw floating above the ocean, while the Oral Torah being the colossal mountain of writings submerged out of sight beneath the ocean's surface. It is no exaggeration, but you can spend your entire life dedicated to the studying of the Oral Torah without ever being able to complete that study. Sartre viewed his 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' as a mountain which had given birth to his 'In Search of a Method', a mere mouse in comparison. In the case of the Written and Oral Torah the relationship is reversed, the Written Torah as a mere mouse has given birth to the Oral Torah, a mountain.

We are faced with a dilemma or a paradox, even though you may have spent every second of your life studying the Written or Oral Torah or the Christian Bible, at the end of your life you will still know nothing about God. In the view of the Christian theologian Karl Barth, the written word, in the form of the Written Torah or the Oral Torah or even in the form of the Tanakh or the Christian Bible is just a thing among many other things, a book filled with writing, filled with letters and words, but still a finite thing created by finite beings, a thing which only came into existence relatively recently within the era called the Holocene, as such it is a creation of the Holocene, and as such a thing it could vanish from the Universe forever, it remains a thing which could be erased from existence, it exists as a mere human created object and as such it can never be the actual Word of God, for the revelatory Word of the infinite God cannot be reduced to a finite thing in the form of a man-made literary artefact, a written document, a mere finite object composed of legends, sagas, myths, stories and fictions. A product of a proficiency called writing, a product which is accessed through the learned capacity to read. What is writing and reading anyway? It is a recently human-contrived post-Palaeolithic invention of the elite rulers of the first City States. Writing or the capacity to convert speech into writing represents the end result of a process which in evolutionary biology can be referred to as an exaptation. Structures and functions of the brain where co-opted through the processes of exaptation for the purposes of converting speech into writing. An exaptation involves a process leading to the co-option of neural structures and functions for purposes for which they were not originally adapted to serve. In the process of exaptation selected neurons in brain are trained and developed by means of learning processes which results in the re-wiring of the brain so that the brain can be adapted to read and write. Why would the Word of God have to wait for more than 200 000 years for humans to first invent reading and writing before God could speak to humankind through the human-written words of revelation, before God could speak through the medium of human reading? The possibility existed that humans may not have evolved on earth. The possibility existed that writing and reading may not have arisen on earth. The realization of both possibilities, that is, the evolutionary emergence of humans and their ability to read and write were contingent on the realization of multiple preconditions. Karl Barth having been exposed as a student to the full critical and erosive assault which the European Enlightenment and the rise of modern science had had on the Bible ended up making a tactical pact with the Enlightenment and modern science and in the spirit of the Enlightenment also denied that it was possible to acquire redemptive knowledge of the nature of God and of God's will through reason alone or by an 'unmediated reading' of scripture. By a mediated reading I mean a dialectical reading. A reading in which the parts (the many) are connected to the whole (to the One) which embraces all truth within a system or within in the totality of what there is. This is something, a concern, my reader, which I have dwelt on all my life so far. Knowledge of God can only come from God Herself. Reason alone will persuade us that the actual contents of the scriptures, as written words, as narratives, as stories, as poetry, as prophetic writings, as moral-law-commandments, all of which bear the unmistakeable imprint of human authorship are in-them-selves powerless to provide indubitable knowledge of who God is and what is the will of God independently of God own self-revelation, and the self-revelation of the Infinite cannot be reduced to finite writings, words and readings. What did Karl Barth propose? Well he said yes to Feuerbach, yes to David Hume and also yes to Immanuel Kant. But why not go further than Karl Barth, and agree that the God projected in all the scriptural based traditional theologies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam represent nothing more than a human created construction, an idol, a Noble Lie. Karl Barth grounded his entire theology in the contingent historical event of Jesus. For Barth, Jesus the Word becoming flesh represents the self-revelation of God in space-time history. Apart from Jesus no revelation of God is possible. What is the significance of this with regard to the status of the Old and New Testaments? As fictionalized narratives they are revelatory only in a dialectical fashion when read through the prism of Jesus. Here we have the full meaning of the Corner Stone metaphor.

And I remember what has been written and what has been said of old each day, when I lay down my head to sleep and also when I rise just before the first light of dawn. 19. Not to gossip about others—Leviticus 19:16.

20

Interlude: What you are now reading happens to be a very specific kind of story. It has all the features of an autobiographical narrative or even a memoir, which in its current form is the end product of a weeks of intensive and obsessive literary labour which I undertook while recuperating in a manner of speaking in my bedroom in my parent's home in Hotazel. I have returned to my childhood room. It happens to be a room on the second storey or floor of our double storey home in Hotazel. The large window of my room, which also happens to be one of the best rooms in the house overlooks the vast expanse of the Kalahari. The room is now also haunted with the ghostly presence, or the evidence if you like, of the various persons that I have been.

Well the evidence of the various persons that I have been in my life so far can be viewed in the form of a presence, even if it is a 'past presence' like a photographic image or footage of celluloid film. The presence of my past is imprinted everywhere in this room. This presence of the history of a person becomes plainly manifest quite readily to the keen observer, it becomes manifest in the form of various kinds of evidence or traces of who I was or who I have been and also of who I have become. Anyway the evidence of the lives of the persons who have progressed with the passage of time from childhood to adolescence to post-adolescence and then through the different phases of adulthood are all evident in my room.

The absences mark the passage of history. The past as an absence exists only as a memory. And memories undergo a process of fictionalization in the very act of recollection and the chain of causation linking the present with past becomes increasingly foggy in the mists of so many competing myths. And if we bind ourselves to the past we bind ourselves to a mythology of the founding events, events which give shape and structure to the plot of narrative of who we are. I am not who I was. This is bewildering. I have become detached. I recognize my own myths, I see them for what are. How do I know with certainty that I am actually remembering something and not just imagining something? How can I distinguish with certainty between memory and imagination? I can't! The very act of remembering involves a process of fictionalization. You cannot write your autobiography nor can someone else write your biography. We are trapped in a world of fiction. Everything is made up. Everything is an embellishment. In all of this, the key word is certainty, and the problem is the absence of certainty and the solution involves establishing the grounds or foundations for certainty. What can we be certain of? What cannot be doubted? Ask Descartes. What can be known about the past, even our own past, with certainty, especially when what we call knowing is in fact a remembering or a recollection? How can we actually re-collect? What is there to collect, to collect together, or to retrieve? A theory of recollection is foundational to Plato's idea of certainty, and without certainty there can be no knowledge of anything, past, present or future. Can we assume that the absence of certainty is the foundation on which fictions of the past, present and future are constructed?

The binding of God's Word on the arm is a mitzvah for men which seems so superfluous to me. For something so superfluous it is a complex exercise for the uninitiated. In the Jewish Encyclopaedia we are given the full instructions: 'In putting on the tefillin, the hand-phylactery is laid first (Men. 36a). Its place is on the inner side of the left arm (ib.36b, 37a), just above the elbow (comp. "Sefer Ḥasidim," §§ 434, 638, where the exact place is given as two fist-widths from the shoulder-blade; similarly the head-phylactery is worn two fist-widths from the tip of the nose); and it is held in position by the noose of the strap so that when the arm is bent the phylactery may rest near the heart (Men. 37a, based on Deut. xi. 8; comp. "Sefer Ḥasidim," §§ 435, 1742). If one is left-handed, he lays the hand-phylactery on the same place on his right hand (Men. 37a; Oraḥ Ḥayyim, 27b). After the phylactery is thus fastened on the bare arm, the strap is wound seven times round the arm. The head-phylactery is placed so as to overhang the middle of the forehead, with the knot of the strap at the back of the head and overhanging the middle of the neck, while the two ends of the strap, with the blackened side outward, hang over the shoulders in front (Oraḥ Ḥayyim, 27, 8-11). On laying the hand-phylactery, before the knot is fastened, the following benediction is pronounced: "Blessed art Thou . . . who sanctifieth us with His commandments and hast commanded us to lay tefillin.'

And once more, one more time, as in a continuous repetition of the same, I remember each day 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. 20. Not to take revenge—Leviticus 19:18.

21

In recreating my autobiography I have tried to be faithful as much as possible to the original spirit and intent embodied in the notebook writings. From a literary perspective I felt it was important for my own sake to recapture the impulses, moods and emotions that gave shape, content, flavour and life to the original collection of aphoristic writings with which I filled my notebooks. The prison notebook writings are epigrammatic and dialectical. This has been unavoidable. A dialectical kind of engagement with the sense or significance or meaning of my own lived life and the life of my own mind has been unavoidable in the creation of this autobiography. I don't believe that the inner life, or what has been referred as the 'interiority' of the individual is something that is ahistorical or unaffected by the vicissitudes of time. We are in a constant state of becoming. The self is in a constant state of flight from the past. The past recedes with every passing moment and we live out our lives at the constantly moving threshold of advancing moments, with each passing moment the future always remains essentially open to all kind of possibilities, and in this sense we are free. This is not a platitude. In a way the future does not exist. And this is the foundation of our freedom to be someone. If the future does not exist then it remains open to all kinds of possibilities, including even who I may become. It is only the passing moments that continue to exist in some ghostly irretrievable form as a fading memories, that is fading memories which inevitably become increasing fictionalized. Fictionalized in a process of metamorphosis, a process which accompanies every act of recollection or remembrance. And in this process of metamorphosis we are able to re-invent ourselves. We become our own fictions.

We live in a state of dying constantly. In a significant sense the future does not even exist for God and I would argue that this is the basis for the radical freedom of God. So at this stage in the writing of my autobiography I am committed to the metaphysical idea that the future does not exist as a fixed state-of-affairs. The future has not been predetermined or pre-arranged or foreordained in advance. It remains essentially open to all kinds of possibilities and eventualities. What else is God's providence but the freedom of future prospects? Providence becomes the realization of that which is possible for our lives. God's providence is God's freedom. A future which is always open to infinite possibilities is the horizon of God's providence. We live in the now and we re-imagine the past, and with regard to the future we live in a constant state of expectation and anticipation, which is the basis of our hope and desire. Desire feeds off the future, it draws its sustenance from the non-existence of the future, and if the future were not non-existent then there could not be any desire and desire would only exist as an exercise in futility and in a state frustrated expectation or hope. If this is true, and I am convinced that it is true, then it is the non-existence of the future that allows desire to exist. It is this which gives history it erotic dimension. In a sense history is Eros. And I am prepared to go much further than this, and argue more fully that the significance of the non-existence of the future is much more than this, the non-existence of the future is the very 'condition of possibility' for the continued existence of desire, and also of hope, and this is also the nature of Eros. Desire draws is sustenance from the non-existence of the future, in this sense, desire can only exist in the face of nothingness, where nothingness can only exist in the form of the non-existent future. The life of desire can only live out its full possibilities if the future is filled with the openness or emptiness of nothingness. Each passing moment is a creatio ex nihilo, or a creation out of nothing. Desire is realized as a creation out of nothing. And this represents an essential dimension of the Erotic. And it is this dimension of the Erotic which makes history possible. It is also what makes the resurrection of Jesus an Erotic event, an event in which the Good becomes a realized possibility for all of us. An event in which the Hellenic merges or fuses with the Hebraic, an event with joins Jerusalem with Athens, an event in which the futurity of Universal History is realized proleptically in the life, history and future of the resurrected Jesus.

The comprehension of the erotics of history is a critical focus area of Christian theology especially given that our union with God is integral to the realization of our redemption and salvation. In Christian theology the events of salvation are inseparable from the events of actual history, and this is what should be meant by the erotics of history. The events of actual history are inseparable from the realm of eternity. The relationship between the realm of eternity and the concrete events occurring within actual history is covered by themes which philosophy deals with within the framework of the relationship between the One and the Many or the relations of the particulars and the universal, or the relation between the parts and the whole. Hello Plato and hello Hegel!

The erotics of history as embracing both a hermeneutic and scientific exercise involves closing the gap between the facts of concrete historical events and the interpretation of the significance or meaning or the messages embodied in those events. In the erotics of history the medium is the message, that is, it is through the medium of concrete historical events that the message or meaning or significance of history is communicated to us. Eros or the erotic is mediated through the incarnated or in other words through materiality. Eros involves the realm of the materially embodied rather than the disembodied. The material incarnation of God is the focus of Christian 'erotica'. The historical horizon of the entire evolving Universe, which as a continuously unfolding event occurring within the frame of eternity, is also the medium of God's revelation, where God's revelation also includes that peculiar message addressed specifically to us, a message of Good News which communicates salvic hope, meaning and significance to finite beings such us, and that message is embodied in Jesus, who is also the Word or Logos. The materially embodied or historically incarnated Jesus is the only anchor and grounds for faith that we have. Apart from Jesus there is nothing but the void of inexplicable intelligibility which in the strongest possible sense is the frightening reality of the absurd – significance without hope or meaning or sense, only statistical significance which rules out the chance occurrence of random events.

The erotics of history embraces the relationship between past, present and future, and articulates that relation in term of the crisis of promise and fulfilment, which can only be conceived and experienced in terms of the crisis of desire. The crisis of desire is experienced in terms of expectation and anticipation. Expectations are awakened or come to life on the threshold of the horizon of infinite possibility. Against the backdrop of crisis, desire is thus sustained by the open horizons of possibility, which is the openness of the future, which also ironically represents the 'not yet' where the 'not yet' is the 'realm of nothingness', the realm in which new creations come into being, something out of nothing, and in this sense the future is the realm of Eros and the erotic imagination.

The continuing power of the past is only effective in the present or is only eternally present at the threshold of the infinite horizon of possibility which constitutes the future by virtue of what we call 'Being' which includes in its extended scope of meaning and reference the invariance of the Laws of Nature or Uniformities of Nature or Regularities of Nature. This time invariance of the Laws, Uniformities and Regularities of Nature is what endows the past with its continuing power over the presence and therefore the future. It is also the key to our understanding of divine immanence. This time invariance 'exists' or has 'being' in spite of the temporality of material reality only by virtue of something which make it possible for time to exist as a sequential passage of events in the first place and for things such as Laws, Uniformities and Regularities of Nature to endure or to be timeless or eternal. It is this unchanging persistence, endurance, invariance, and timelessness of what we call the conditions of possibility for something to be something, including time itself, which reveals the infinite and eternal within the realm of the finite and the temporal. What exists as the transcendent or transcendental conditions of possibility for something to be something, which while being something that is infinite and eternal, can exist as something which is immanent within material reality. This is the metaphysical assumptions which underpins the statement: Law-like statements support counterfactual conditionals. What is it which makes a law-like statement different from an accidental generalization? Short answer: Law-like statements are established inductively, but past experiences cannot be logically projected into the future. This is the Humean problem which is articulated in the form of the riddle of induction. The argument that law-like statements support counterfactual conditions is based on the metaphysics that a transcendental order governs the conditions of possibilities for something to be something. The existence or real nature of this transcendental order cannot be established by empirical means within science, but science works as if this transcendental order does in fact exist, and its existence is what makes the Universe knowable and intelligible. Yet its existence is not self-explanatory. If it were self-explanatory then the Humean problem of induction would not exist.

Within the realm of immanence, that which is transcendental exists as the temporal manifestations or temporal instantiations of the infinite and eternal from one moment to the next. A temporal instantiation of the infinite and eternal is the only sense or meaning which can be given to the idea of revelation. Revelation occurs as an instantiation of something being the case, a disclosure, an unveiling or unconcealing which occurs within the horizon of temporality or time. Revelation in the form of the meaning and significance of the infinite or infinity or the eternal is ever present from one moment to the next. The occasion of revelation is fraught with crisis. The crisis of doubt and disbelief. The occasion of revelation has to be fraught with crisis because it invites doubt. The occasion of revelation is always an event within the realm of the mundane and the ordinary and is therefore necessarily plagued or haunted by doubt.

Within the moving horizon of temporality, the enduring invariance of the conditions of possibility for something to be something represents the manifestations of the infinite and the eternal. Within the constantly shifting horizon of temporality, something is always revealed, a revelation which necessarily invites doubt or begs to be doubted. What is revealed, is revealed as something which happens to be immanent within the empirical realm, but it is at the same time a revelation in so far that it manifests something which exists transcendently. And it this which makes it something which is projectable into the future. It is also a manifestations of the eternal or infinite conditions which makes the existence of the material world or the existence of the entire Universe possible. The infinite is present in the finite. Transcendence and immanence are inseparable. This continued existence of material reality is made possible with the passing of each moment. It is what endows material reality with the property of endurance or persistence within the framework of passing time or passing moments. In this sense each passing moment involved a re-creation of what has previously existed. This endurance, invariance and timelessness regarding Laws, Uniformities and Regularities can be viewed: 1) as a manifestation of something which is immanent in the workings of the Universe; 2) as the conditions which makes the existence of Universe a realized possibility; and 3) as reflecting the essential nature of physical Reality. As an immanent reality, endowing the past with power over the present, it is also a manifestation of the immanence of the erotics of history. This unchanging endurance or timelessness can be taken to represent the erotic immanence of God as the ground or condition of possibility for all being and becoming.

The erotic immanence of God as the condition of possibility for all being and becoming becomes manifest or revealed within the realm of the sensual. The sensual is the realm of the senses. It is also the realm where we encounter God in the face of the Other. The Other always exists as the least of those brothers and sisters with whom God always expresses solidarity in a self-revelatory act of kenosis. God becomes the Other by identifying with the Other where the Other exists as the Other only by virtue of one having no status, no elevation, no position, no power, no rank, no capacity to rule or dominate. God does not exist in the face of the leader, the king, the ruler, the patriarch or the oligarch. The face of Other never become manifested or revealed in the face of the leader, the ruler, the patriarch or the oligarch. In the narcissistic face of the leader, the ruler, the patriarch and the oligarch the face of the Other in the form of the least of God's brothers and sisters is erased.

What about the so-called immanentist view or immanentism with respect to the relationship between the nature of the divine or God and the nature of reality? Immanence in this context may be construed in terms of the divine reality of God as encompassing or as being manifested in material reality or being co-incidental or being present in some form within material reality. If this idea of immanence is the case then questions regarding the nature of divine transcendence can be elucidated through an appraisal of immanence or within the framework of material reality. What is immanence is what is actual in existing material reality without any considerations regarding any transcendental elements or reference. But this does not exclude that what is essential regarding the actual nature of reality somehow has it origination in a transcendental state of affairs. The transcendental state of affairs is the condition for the existence of whatever is immanent in material reality. What is immanent are the uniformities and regularities which exist within the material reality or nature. This is the same as stating that the laws of nature exist immanently in the material reality or nature. The laws of nature in this respect are instantiated as the essential powers, properties and relationship of everything with is constitutive of material reality. These essential powers, properties and relationships cannot exist independently in their own right or as something which has arisen in a process of independent or autonomous self-causation. Something gives rise to something. Nothing cannot give rise to something. Nothing gives rise to nothing. If God is truly God, then nothing can exist independently of God, everything exists by virtue of God. In this sense Jesus who is God, is God because he is the way, the truth and the life with regard to everything which exists, and where for example, his truth and way also includes 2 + 2 = 4 and also includes the laws of nature. The logical truths of mathematics and the laws of nature exist as the way, the truth and the life through their instantiation as the essential properties, powers and relationships which are constitutive of and which embrace the totality of material reality. To say that God is immanent in this fashion within the totality of material reality, then God being incarnate is the condition of possibility for the existence of material reality. God being incarnate or God being immanent in material reality is made possible by God's kenosis or God's act of self-empting, and material reality exists only by virtue of God's kenosis. And kenosis as a self-empting action is the condition of possibility for all contingencies, accidents, chance, randomness, freedom, openness and becoming. The act of kenosis is the agency through which these features are built into the essential nature and fabric of material reality. Within this framework of God's kenotic immanence the Bible can exist as an object of human creation. Also within this framework the Bible as an object of human creation becomes true and revelatory only by virtue of it becoming the medium through which the message that Jesus being the truth, the way and life is realized existentially or instantiated through a salvific act of reading in which the reader discovers God in Jesus, and confesses that Jesus is Lord. In this salvific act of reading the Law of God regarding redemption and salvation is instantiated. And this is the only way that the Law of God can exist as being relevant to the human existential desire for being in the right with God. In any other form or modes of existence the words which are putatively claimed to be the Law of God can only exist as mere dead letters authored by human creativity and having no salvific power in themselves. They are just marks on paper no different to any other kind of marks on paper. Like George Steiner's proposal that all meaning represents an event of divine transubstantiation. Meaning is instantiated or transubstantiated into written or spoken words as a revelatory event, which can be likened to the actualization of the statement: 'This is my body...' Which makes the Mass the paradigmatic salvific encounter with God, in which all meaning and significance finds its eternal and infinite origination and realization.

Out of the darkness Yael returned in my life. Out of the darkness which had enveloped both of our lives she came into my life like an angel from heaven. She was in dire straits. In the grip of sheer madness she came into my life, madness drove her into my arms. Madness made her love me with an insane love. She came back into my life when I felt that I lost everything that was precious and meaningful to me. I fell in deeply in love with her again. For the sake of our love, for the sake of my love for Yael I fell in love with the Jew and Judaism, but only because of her, my love as you can see was conditional. But for the sake of our love I affixed the mezuzah to the entrance of my flat. Your God will be my God and your people will become my people. And while living in the light of Mount Sinai, we bumped into Mrs Judith Höchheimer at Checkers in Bellevue. It was she who introduced both Yael and me to the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer. We joined the Jewish women's book club which Judith organized. My past with Yael had come back to reclaim me or to haunt me. The Jew had come back to lay its claim on my soul. Now with Yael as my partner everywhere I went in Yeoville people recognized me. The sharp elbows of Jewish women pushing their trolleys down the aisles of the local supermarket while shopping for groceries reminded me that I was among my own people. The mezuzah now affixed to the flat door was a now sign signalling to everyone that Jews lived here, we joined an Orthodox Synagogue, I started keeping the Shabbat, and I went to Shul with Yael a mere Sabbath's walk from our flat. Suddenly I had deal with the advances of Jewish suitors who happened to be divorced and successful. All were plump, balding and middle aged, advocates, attorneys, dentists, chartered accountants and doctors presented their calling cards. They took it for granted that I was Jewish. In the fulfilling of the Mitzvot as a woman my obligation was to procreate. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD the Torah and the Synagogue had become the dominating focus of Jewish life and piety. The rabbis became the dominating force in Jewish life. As I soon discovered, in Orthodox Jewish life the Jewish home co-exists and is actually co-extensive with the Synagogue itself, it contains many of the ritual and ceremonial objects one would see in a Synagogue like the menorah. The whole of Jewish life is dominated by ritualistic religious practices and religious observances. Thus every detail of Jewish daily life becomes incorporated and integrated into a ritualistic act of worship. This is the gateway to that peculiar Jewish experience of the transcendence and immanence of God which is integral to the daily life of the devout Jew. Strange as it may seem nothing of this was foreign to me, I experienced a seamless intermeshing of Judaism with Christianity, and this was the case even though Orthodox Jewish religious life was not so much based on a radical faith commitment, but rather concerned itself with an all absorbing focus on correct religious observances as prescribed by the Rabbinic traditions which have become historically embodied in the Talmud. While Jewish life was not based on a radical faith commitment and confession as was the case with Christianity, the religious observances of Orthodox Judaism were still based on a creedal foundation, a belief system and belief claims all of which had their own specific theological and metaphysical justification, yet did not jar essentially with Christianity, I was constantly and acutely aware that there was nothing which could prevent a Jew from being a Christian.

In a radical sense Orthodox Judaism is a form of religious fundamentalism based on the belief in various founding mythologies, legends and fictions which are assumed by the Rabbinic Traditions and the Midrashic literature to be literary true in various senses. The Law of Moses as articulated in the Oral Torah is considered in Orthodox Judaism to be of divine origin. Religious practice and the overall concerns of general morality and justice are integrated or co-joined or enjoined or enshrined in the Oral Torah. Thus all the prescriptions, commandments, rules, juridical and legal practices given in the Oral Torah for religious observance, general morality, civil law and criminal law are believed to have a divine origin. This is the root of the religious fundamentalism of Orthodox Judaism and the foundation of what can be called Jewish religious civilization. All the commandments, prescriptions, laws and observance are believed to have a divine revelatory origin in a very specific literal sense in that the Oral Torah and the Written Torah were both given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai. Afterwards, the original Oral Torah and Written Torah received at Mount Sinai were trans-generationally transmitted to each successive generation of Israelites. The Oral Torah was trans-generationally transmitted by verbal dictation to each successive generation. The Written Torah was trans-generationally preserved by coping and passing on written copies to each successive generation of Israelites. Trans-generation transmission of both Torahs occurred without errors or variation of content, starting with Moses and then through successive generations of elders, scribes and priests and so on and so forth. All of this constitutes the founding myths or the Noble Lie of Judaism. Judaism is the living and self-sustaining embodiment of the Noble Lie. The founding myths includes the narrative of the trans-generation transmission myth itself and the myths embodied in the contents of the Torah. A Noble Lie embodies and articulates a founding myth which functions as a Mythos toward some End, which I refer to as the Telos of the myth. As the chosen people first the pre-exilic Israelites and then the post-exilic Jews were called on to be a holy nation. In terms of the Oral Torah the chosen people of God were not called to fulfil a world historical universal mission as a holy nation. God's law given to Moses at Sinai had to be valid from eternity for all time because it was God's law. The law had to be obeyed and preserved without any change or revision or adaptation to changing circumstances. It this sense it was ahistorical. But the passage of history has rendered much of the Oral Torah obsolete, superfluous, meaningless, irrelevant and useless. This places a question mark on the law as something which carries the stamp of divine revelation. Yet in spite of these vexing conundrums Judaism continues to exist by virtue of the same Oral Torah and Written Torah. In a significant sense the Oral Torah is the raison d'être for the continued existence of Judaism and the Jews. Unfortunately, the rise of Christianity from the womb, milk and cradle of post-exilic Judaism as a world historical religion has cast a dark shadow over Judaism and the Jews. The shadow is darkened by the fact that the Church has accepted the Hebrew Bible without revision in its entirety into its own Biblical Canon and has affirmed the founding myths of the Jewish people and ultimately of Judaism itself. In fact the Christian Church, quoting the ironical and paradoxical words of Jesus, affirms that salvation comes from the Jews. Jesus became a name that was reviled by Judaism and this exacerbated the Jewish retreat from history which increasingly became the theatre of the Gentiles. History belongs to the Gentiles. It is the Gentiles who make history.

The fact that Judaism has retreated from world history has not doused a weakly flickering spark of Jewish Messianism. The idea of the Messiah haunts Judaism. But Judaism lacks a fully-fledged theology or metaphysics of a Messianic Soteriology or Eschatology. Obliquely related to these considerations of the history, soteriology, eschatology and messianism which still burns albeit as a weak flame in the heart of Judaism is the literary and fictional merging of the historical and the 'parabolic' (as in parable) in Isaac Bashevis Singer's 'Satan in Goray'. The ideal reader of 'Satan in Goray' will benefit from having some degree of Jewish cultural perspicuity, however a good knowledge of the Talmudic and Midrashic literature and a profound and deep empathy for Orthodox Jewry will greatly facilitate the transportation of herself into that obscure and remote 1666 Polish-Jewish shtetl which found itself at the centre of the unravelling of the Sabbatean heresy. Any deep reading of Jewish literature which is rooted in the religious ethos of fundamentalist Judaism does require an extraordinary proficiency in a 'Gadamerian' (Hans-Georg Gadamer – German philosopher and student of Martin Heidegger) kind of informed hermeneutics, which is a hermeneutics in which the merging of religious, cultural, literary and metaphysical horizons can be realized. Can one discover or enter the Hassidic universe as a non-Jew. A universe inside of which, literary speaking, there happens to exist a place so fabulous, so exotic and so remote that it can only exist as a 'fictional coincidence' which dove-tails with the dramatic scenes which emerge from the pages of the book 'Satan in Goray'. Can one empathetically enter this universe without being a student of the Oral Torah, the Hebrew Bible and full canon of Judaic literature? Of course not! Singer's book is highly encoded and the ideal reader is a person who is steeped in the traditions of Judaism and especially the Midrashic literature. Singer's literary work highlights our literary-illiteracy as one of our most serious modern short-comings. We labour under a profound cultural deficit. I admit that Judaism expanded my cultural, spiritual and intellectual horizons, there was no doubting that. I was supremely indebted as an individual to what can be called the Hebraic, thanks basically to Yael the most unlikely of all proselytizers. In the end I got to know more about Judaism and the Torah than Yael or any of the other Jews with whom I happened to became acquainted with. In this sense I was behaving like a typical Gentile convert to Judaism, trying to become a better Jew than a 'real' Jew. But deep down in my heart I knew that it was all masquerade. How could I possibly ever be a Jew? It was a troubling question. No one questioned my pretence of Jewishness. Yael was my faithful accomplice. I was a perfect chameleon in camouflaging the truth about myself. But then I was not even sure about myself. I knew where I stood with regard to a number of issues. Yes I believed in God. I knew that I had my own peculiar reasons for believing in God. But then I did not take the Bible at face value. I knew that Darwin's theory of evolution was true. And that changed everything for me. If anything muddied the whole situation it was my entanglement with Yael. In these notebooks I am trying to work through a lot of issues. Issues of a metaphysical nature, issues of an epistemological and ontological nature. Issues of a political and theological nature. Like Descartes, enclosed in my confinement I want to establish without a shadow of doubt what I can really believe in as the truth with certainty. I know I am not going anywhere. In a sense I know that my journey as a political activist has come to an end.

Obey my laws and teachings – I am the Lord your God. I demand respect from the people of Israel, so don't disgrace my holy name. Remember – I am the one who chose you to be priests and rescued all of you from Egypt, so that I would be your Lord. (Leviticus 22:32). Don't disgrace my holy name. (Leviticus 22:32). Listen, Israel! The Lord our God is the only true God! The Lord God is ONE. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength. Memorize his laws and them to your children over and over again. Talk about them all the time, whether you're at home or walking along the road or going to bed at night, or getting up in the morning. Write down copies and tie them to your wrists and foreheads to help you obey them. Write these laws on the door frames of your homes and on your town gates. This is how you are supposed to love God, to be constantly aware of his Word and Will which is the Law, the Torah, and the whole of the Tanakh. But when you have eaten so much that you can't eat any more, don't forget it was the Lord who set you free and brought you out of Egypt. Worship and obey the Lord your God with fear and trembling, and promise that you will be loyal to him. And I remember that our God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and we have learnt to put our trust in the Word of God, and so we read in the book of Deuteronomy: 'The Lord promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give you this land. Now he will take you there and give you large Cities and large towns, with good buildings that you didn't build, and houses full of good things that you didn't put there. The Lord will give you wells that you didn't have to dig, and vineyards and olive orchards that you didn't need to plant. But when you have eaten so much that you can't eat anymore, don't forget it was the Lord who set you free from slavery and brought you out of Egypt. Worship and obey the Lord your God with fear and trembling, promise that you will be loyal to him. Don' have anything to do with gods that are worshipped by nations around you. If you worship other gods, the Lord will be furious and wipe you off the face of the earth. The Lord your God is with you, so don't try to make him prove that he can help you, as you did at Massah. Do not put God or the Word of God to the test'. In the Book of Leviticus in the Torah it can be read: 'I command you to show respect for older people and to obey me with fear and trembling'. 'Memorize his laws, and tell them to your children over and over again, whether you're at home or walking along the road or going to bed at night, or getting up in the morning'. 'Cleave always to those who know him. As it is written in Deuteronomy – Respect the Lord your God, serve him only, and make promises in his name alone'. . 'Someday a prophet may come along who is able to perform miracles and tell you what will happen in the future. Then the prophet may say, 'Let's start worshipping some new gods – some gods, that we know nothing about'. If the prophet says, this don't listen!' It has been said in the Torah that no commandment of the Torah should be taken away, modified, revoked, removed or erased. The laws of the Torah as it is stands forever from all eternity as the Word of God.

Know your Bible, both Old and New Testament. It seems that God's covenant with Israel made at Mount Sinai stands. The Law of Moses remains binding. Not even the smallest iota of Torah can be changed. The New Testament Gospel of Matthew 5:17-32 (New International Version (NIV)) makes the fulfilment of the Torah a non-negotiable obligation. That much is clear from Jesus' own Midrash of Torah which can be read as follows:

17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. 21 "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell. 23 "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you. 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift. 25 "Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny. 27 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.'28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. "It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.' 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. 33 "Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.' 34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 All you need to say is simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. 38 "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.'39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.43 "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

It is worth emphasizing, Jesus proclaimed: 'For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished'. In the original Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew uses the phrase 'not one iota' which has been translated into English as 'not the smallest letter,' I think a case can be made that the original Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew from within the community of Jew who were followers of Jesus and this would be consistent with the view that the Greek letter iota in the Greek translation was derived from the Hebrew letter yod. Yod which is as small as the little finger and is shaped like a little finger was derived from the Hebrew word yad (יד) which means 'hand' because it is shaped like a little finger, and because it is so small scribes were tempted to omit it from text so as to save space. And Jesus as a typical Jewish sage made this Midrashim to emphasize that the whole Torah was binding of the Jew. Yod as the smallest and most trivial letter in the Hebrew alphabet should never be left out of the Torah. 'Even not one yod will pass from the law' means that not even the smallest detail may be eliminated from the Torah.

Going back to Singer. I became obsessed with Singer's writings. I read and reread his books over and over again. If anyone could claim credit in turning me into Jew it would be Singer. In Singer's 'Satan in Goray' the merging of the messianic and the utopian leads to catastrophic consequences of chaos and evil, because 'human nature' is irredeemably sinful. Which represents politically a strongly conservative scepticism. If you want to treat Singer's book as embodying or articulating a parable as its plot then it may be read as a critique of the delusionary political utopias of Polish-Jewish socialists, anarchists and communists. The book was inadvertently prescient and prophetic because it was published on eve of the rise of the Nazi Reich and the Terror of the 1930s under Stalin in Russia.

And each day 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. 21. Not to bear a grudge—Leviticus 19:18

22

Going back to my notebooks. Narcissism rises its ugly medusa head. I confess that I fear that you may see me as a narcissus. I fear this because I have a hunch that all writing is motivated by an element of narcissism. Maybe I will have to say more about this, mainly in order to disentangle myself from my own web of narcissistic tendencies, mainly to defend myself against the accusation of narcissism.

How does one pray to an omniscient and omnipotent God? Surely if God is God then prayer is pointless. Gods know all our needs without having us to remind Her. Also if God is truly God then God knows beforehand what we are going to pray about. How does one say something about something to God when God already knows everything beforehand? Is it possible that God does not know everything beforehand? What if the future does not exist even for God? Only if this is the case can God answer our prayers. But still, if God is really God then prayer should be quite unnecessary, especially if God can anticipate all our needs. God anticipating our needs is the basis of God's providence. If God really cares, then God will take care of us whether we pray or not. However, prayer is meaningful by virtue of the possibility that God is the very condition of possibility for a future that remains open. The future is unknown or unknowable in so far it remains open to the providence of God. The future remains open by virtue of God's freedom and providence. Nothing exists independently of God's will. This does not mean that the future is not open. So prayer remains a vital dimension to our relationship with God, and we should pray at all times.

And each day 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. 22. To learn Torah and teach it—Deuteronomy 6:7

23

I have endeavoured to avoid as much as possible in the redaction of my notebooks any contrived or intentional or premeditated fictional embellishments. So in my literary attempts to transform into book-form the raw contents of my thoughts which I have managed to capture in these notebooks I have intentionally avoided a polished stylistic autobiographical rendition of my life in the form of a choreography that marches in lock-step and synchrony to the beat of chronology, to the tones and melodies of self-praise. I am keenly aware of my faults and failings, and I have laid them bare, as if I were confessing my many sins.

I did not live my life that way. I lived my life unscripted. The sequence of events associated with the progression of my life do not constitute any kind of plot. There is no story to my lfe. I can in all honestly state that I did not live my life as a campaign, as a premeditated programme of self-advancement. However, I went through all the motions which looked like self-advancement. I did what was necessary to become a senior lecturer, an associate professor and then finally a full professor on the eve of my arrest. But I would like to believe that my life was driven by passion. Going back to my literary project, what I have captured in my notebooks are topics or writings which are wide ranging, but based on very fragmentary thoughts, which I am trying to knit together, so that matter, mind, and the Ultimate will become One.

The writing of the fragmentary journal notes was conducted almost like an exercise in free association, one idea generating another idea, one thought giving birth to another thought, and one memory sparking another, and so on. This has proven to be a fruitful and creative writing methodology.

Hence the literary form of the epigrammatic account and that of the aphorism is the form I have stuck to. Interpolation happens when I allow my mind to range freely. My writing is ruptured by didactic interpolations. This is a warning to the reader. The didactic interpolations could not be avoided. Hence the reason that my writings represents the genre that I have decided to call 'meta-modernism' or 'meta-realism'. Why not also call the journal writings metafiction? In what sense are they metafictional or metafiction? Metafiction is a literary device. In metafictional writing the reader is reminded in many ways that the work of writing which has been intentionally created to be read by an anonymous reader is a work of the imagination rather than a true to life account which entails the actual mapping of reality or live reality. But why should fiction not be true to life? If it is not true to life, then could it be true to something else? A work of literature is a work of art by virtue of being true to something in a meaningful and significance sense. So fiction is indeed 'true' if it is a work of art or if it is a work of literature. What is a work of art? What is a work of literature? Everything I have written in this journal is true even if it is a work of the imagination.

The literary form which corresponds to or has been dictated by the actual notebook writings has imposed itself on my autobiographical narrative. This has now become the artistic or aesthetic form which characterises my literary project. While I have already hinted that the narrative in terms of being a selective autobiographical account of my life has not been intentionally structured by any plot other than the search for ultimacy, by way of exploring claims which seem to carry the weight of certitude. What happens, happens. Does my life have any meaning? I really don't know! Only the search for ultimacy will reveal whether my life has any meaning at all in the big scheme of things. And what is the big scheme of things, what does it entail, what does it involve, or what is it all about? Is there some big scheme or is there nothing, nothing other than matter in motion, in a vast continuum of motions, from the invisible quantum micro-level of vibrations and waves to the macro scales of the relatively slow motions of visible bodies.

Without matter in motion we cannot hear the voice of God. Without matter in motion we cannot write. Yet God has spoken. He speaks in the wilderness. He speaks to Moses and Joshua. He calls them. He has something important to announce. They must take heed. God speaks and Moses writes down the words.

'Moses and Joshua, I am going to give you the words to a new song. 'Write them down and teach the song to the Israelites. If they learn it, they will know what I want them to do, and so they will have no excuse for not obeying me. I am bringing them into the land that I promised their ancestors. It is a land rich with milk and honey, and the Israelites will have more than enough food to eat. But they will get fat and turn their back on me and start worshipping other gods. The Israelites will reject me and break the agreement (covenant) that I made with them'.' And so the Book of Deuteronomy chapter 31 verse 22 tells us that 'Moses wrote down the words to the song straight away, and he taught it to the Israelites'. From verses 24 to 27, you can read if you which, 'Moses wrote down all these laws and teachings in a book (scroll), then he went to the Levites who carried the sacred chest (ark of the covenant) and said this is 'The Book of God's Law. Keep it beside the sacred chest that holds the agreement the Lord your God made with Israel. This book (scroll) is proof that you know what the Lord wants you to do'.

Daily prayers have been conveniently collected into the Siddur. I kept a copy of the Siddur on the pedestal under the lamp next to the bed and I have copy in my office and in the cabby of my car. In fact I have collected multiple copies and editions of the Siddur. I read the Siddur at every opportunity. Copies of the Siddur are laying everywhere in my flat. The designated prayers are prayed for each of the three daily prayers. I start and end the day with the Shema: Sh'ma Yisra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. It is now a habit like brushing my teeth. I find myself subvocalizing: Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. The Shema comes straight out the Anglican Prayer Book. Praying the Shema is part and parcel of the Christian Mass. I also have a collection of Anglican Prayer Books laying around.

And each day 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. 23. To honour those who teach and know Torah—Leviticus 19:32

24

As the writer of this journal I find myself playing the role of both spectator and actor. Writing therefore becomes a performance, the act of writing is a performance. As the writer, I am the spectator and actor of the life which I have imagined myself to have lived. I say 'imagined myself to have lived' because the writing of an autobiography or even a memoir can only be realized as a possibility through an imaginative remembrance and imaginative recreation or re-enactment of one's own life. As you will discover, this imaginative work of writing is not going to be a strict or rigid autobiographical exercise that follows a deterministic and sequential sequence of lived moments in the correct chronological order. Instead my autographical literary project is a montage or collage of snap shots juxtaposed together in the same frame with the ordering or arrangement of the contiguity of scenes emerging as a random falling together of memories, rather than being represented as a sequential mapping of events against a linear time line. So my book is not a reordering of or a restructuring or a rearranging of the fragmentary contents of the notebooks. This book has grown out of a collection of notes, the order and arrangement of the book's contents follows the order of the notebook pages, starting from notebook number one and ending with the last notebook. Each note is numbered sequentially starting from 1 and ending with n = 613. Why the number 613? It is supposed to be code. A code for what? You the reader possess the keys or password to unlock the code.

In actuality the arrangement and flow of the contents or notes of this book follows the pattern in which the cards fell, one after the other, from a well-mixed and randomly shuffled deck. My autobiography is composed of a series of random flashbacks and thoughts and memories and ideas which will appear, well shaken and stirred, before the reader as a montage of juxtaposed epigrammatic scenes, scenes which are not contiguous with respect time. The scenes are ruptured by gaps of forgetfulness. So in a way my autobiography represents a record of moments in which each passing moment has an element representing a creatio ex nihilo, or a creation of something out of nothing. And it is in this way that fiction or the fictional has found its way into the autobiography of my life.

What do I remember about my life? Hardly anything! I cannot rewind and replay all the moments or events of my life from childhood and to adulthood, moment by moment. Most of my life is a complete blank. It seems like most of my life simply passed by without incident. So who am I?

We can never tell the story of our lives as a continuous sequential uninterrupted record of each lived moment. We live each moment in the now and tell the story later by stringing together only those moments which we are able to remember, especially after the lapse of time, so there is necessarily a selectivity of remembered moments imposing itself on the development of the story line, which means we manufacture the story line of our lives almost as if it were a fictionalized narrative rather than the actual remembered autobiographical account of our lives. It becomes a story built on selected moments, moments which have not altogether escaped our memory. Moments which have been remembered, represent only partial recollections given the fact that the myriad of details associated or which accompanied that those events or incidents have been irretrievably lost forever. The bright vividness of those unforgettable events swarming with so many facts quickly fade away into ghostly-shadowy negatives in the twilight world of our memories. In this sense autobiography cannot escape from being a form of fiction. In the composing of an autobiography a life has to be reconstructed from such a paucity of tangible evidence that we are inevitably forced to re-imagine our lives, and re-imagine who we have been and who we have become. The palpability of eventful autobiographical moments have to be somehow conjured up. Our re-imagined lives become a sequence of memorial scenes no different from storyboarding in movie making. We reconstruct our lives as a sequence of screen shots which recreate the drama for each scene.

Live now, write later. But what you write at a later time regarding the life you have already lived, you cannot in the process of writing about that life avoid writing a fictionalized account. You cannot bring back the past in all its fullness and immediacy as a lived experience. You cannot recreate or retrieve the lost or receding moments in writing. There are no words which will bring back that moment in all its vivid experiential immediacy through the mere act of writing and reading. Can words bring back the past, so that it can be re-experienced or even relived, so that it can be felt what it was like once more. Does writing have the power to make the non-existent contemporaneous again, can words bring the past back to life, allowing us to re-experience what that moment felt like once more. What was it like? What did it feel like? What the experience of that moment once felt like in all its tangible immediacy, is now gone forever. Even though it lives on as a phantom in the memory, as a mental picture in the imagination, what was once real has been irretrievably lost. We can only mourn the past, but we never relive it. We can only relive the past as a fiction. We are able to think of past moments. We strain our memory, we strain are imagination, we try our utmost to recollect. What was that moment really like? The question haunts us. We have lost something. Words fail us. Words continue to fail us. Their powers of signification are limited. Words fail to represent what we want to convey. Too much has been made about the role of language in representing the world, things, objects, feelings and life. We are continually at a loss for words whenever we wish to communicate the fullness of meaning or the nature of an experience. We often end up saying: 'you know what I mean?' 'Yes I know what you mean.' 'Then please tell me'. 'You know that I can't, but please believe me'. 'I know what you mean'. We all know more than what words could possibly confer. Knowledge is not reducible to language or representation or reference or signification. The sign in the form of the word is only a marker for the site of the treasure trove which lays unseen in its fullness of meaning and signification. Words fail to fully represent reality. Words do not mirror reality. It is our imagination which is the mirror of reality. Yet we feel constantly seduced by the power of words. If words are such feeble vehicles for conveying the fullness of meaning and signification, then it would seem that writing is ultimately an exercise in futility. If this is the case then my prison notebooks and my project of writing a journal also represents an exercise in futility. Well yes and no. Words and writing and the whole of language for that matter is constantly working against this paradox of futility in its unremitting struggle to convey meaning, significance, wants, reference, needs, desires, representations, knowledge, instructions, commands, emotions, feelings, requests, ideas, concepts, pleas, descriptions, theories, narratives, tales, stories, moods, atmosphere, perceptions, ambience and so on and so forth. Now in spite of this paradox of futility, language still works, because what words cannot fully convey the imagination can see, grasp, feel, understand, perceive, comprehend and know. The imagination works as the mirror of representation, it is the imagination which gives words, speech, writing and language its power. It is imagination which gives words their power of overreach. We cannot even begin to speak about how language works without taking into account the role of the imagination. The power to imagine overcomes the paradox of futility. And fiction grows in the fertile soil of the reader's imagination, and words literally take on new meanings and fiction constantly takes root and flourishes like a flush of weeds in the garden of good intentions, and like weeds the intrusion of fiction overwhelms the work of the gardener or writer and this is how fiction constantly intrudes into the autobiography or the biography and into my notebooks and into my journal, and into all writing for that matter. The reader constantly recognizes more than what the writer can anticipate. The reader brings a world of meaning to the reading of the text. This much is obvious. It is by virtue of the imagination that mimesis is possible, and reality can be represented in literature. But mimesis as the imitative representation of reality of experiences through the medium of words also faces its own paradox of futility. The writer is faced with the problem of imitating the fullness of life. Mimesis is the imitation of life. What is life? What is does mean to experience life? What does it mean to live a life? We live life through a series of moments. We experience the moment, however fleeting it may be. We live between moments. And we often want to relive the moment. We want to relive that something which we experienced in that moment. In the passing of each moment we die in a manner of speaking, we die that little death that men talk about in the case of the experience of an orgasm, an ejaculation. Realism in writing and in science involves the endeavour to represent reality. But not merely to just represent reality, but to represent reality as in to unveil or disclose or reveal the essence of reality or the essential nature of reality to the imagination. So representation is 'revelatory'. This is how I see both literary realism and scientific realism, and also philosophical realism. Essentialism arises in the context of realism. And I would like to say more about this, hopefully later after I have applied my mind to realism and essentialism.

Going back to the fullness of meaning and significance contained in the immediacy of the moment and the reviving of the fullness of the feelings linked to the experience of that moment: What was experienced in that moment, what did it feel like, what did you actually see, what did you actually hear, taste, smell, can you please tell me? What did it feel like during that intense and memorable moment? Can you describe what it was like, what it felt like? Can you describe the sounds, the mood, the play and flash of light, the ambience, the tactile richness, the atmosphere, the scent, the fragrance, the aroma, the vivid sharpness of the images and scenes that filled the visual field? The remembered life is not the lived life. The remembered life is the story or tale we tell. We can only narrate the events which have already happened, we can only narrate the past as something which we have re-imagined as it was. We cannot in truth narrate the future which does not yet exist. We normally find ourselves speaking or writing about our lives in the past tense. Why not break the code? A first-person narrator can tell her story in the present tense, moment by moment. I must remember this. If fiction is really timeless then why not be indifferent to narrative tense. The point of all of this is that autobiography and biography are forms of fiction, they have a novelistic character, precisely because they are imaginative recreations of that which no longer has any existence. Does the past exist? Maybe it does, as something which has become frozen in a preserving medium. The past is something which can be preserved. We have records of past events whenever something from the past has somehow become preserved is some medium, for example, in a photograph or film. The past also becomes accessible to us in the mode or manner or medium of its preservation. The preservation of the past can be in the form of the fossil, as foot prints, in the form of sediments and layers of rock that constitute the stratigraphy of a given geological formation, or as a picture, a photograph, a film, or in the form of various kinds of artefacts. All of these things bear testimony to a past that was once real. The past is made presence in photographs and celluloid film. Through the medium of fossils, geological formations, photographs or film the past becomes accessible to the senses, to the mind, to the imagination? Through its preservation in some medium the past acquires an afterlife in the present. In this sense the past as something materially preserved becomes co-extensive with the present as object. In many instances the afterlife of the past exists for someone else, for the reader, for the person viewing the photograph, for the person watching the movie. In such cases the afterlife of the autobiographer exists for the reader. The autobiographer will not experience the afterlife of her autobiography. In its afterlife the autobiography existing as something which has become materially detached from the autobiographer becomes a form of fiction. In wanting to preserve the past the word archaeology comes to mind. Writing my autobiography is a form of archaeology, an exercise in archaeology.

Moses said to Israel: 'After you eat and are full, give praise to the Lord your God for the good land he gave you. Make sure that you never forget the Lord or disobey his laws and teaching that I am giving you today. If you always obey them, you will have plenty to eat, and you will build good houses to live in. You will get more and more cattle, sheep, silver, gold, and other possessions. But when all this happens, don't be proud! Don't forget that you were once slaves in Egypt and that it was the Lord who set you free. Remember how he led you in that huge and frightening desert where poisonous snakes, and scorpions live. There was no water, but the Lord split open a rock, and water poured out so that you could drink. He also gave you manna, a kind of food your ancestors had never even heard about. The Lord was testing you to make you trust him, so that later on he could be good to you. When you become successful, don't say, 'I'm rich, and I've carried all myself'.

And each day 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. 24. Not to inquire into idolatry—Leviticus 19:4

25

To reiterate.

The raw material of this narrative was something which I had previously composed and documented in the form of copious handwritten prison notes. Hand written notes which I had the opportunity and time to compile. In the original notebook compilations I recorded the contents of my random musing. With time on hand due to a long period of enforced boredom I found myself in a situation with nothing else to do. So in order to pass the time I found myself drifting on fairly random mental excursions which involved thinking about many topics, including my life and who I was. And while I was doing all this thinking and reflection and meditation I was able to enter into a mental or conscious state in which my mind was left to its own devices, to range free and unhindered. During the long hours of silence and solitude in the prison cell my mind drifted through the landscape of recollections. For hours on end with nothing to distract me, my mind meandered in all directions. I found myself ruminating aimlessly on matters, on various thoughts, on memories and recollections which under normal circumstances I would never have found worthwhile entertaining as something of value or deserving of any concerted and serious attention. Thoughts flowed in and out of my mind. Memories and recollection which under ordinary circumstances would not have had any personal significance came back to haunt me. I was never one to dwell on the past or attach any special significance to my past. I lived a future oriented secular life. It was only the future that mattered. In that sense I have lived the life of desire, the life where each passing moment was a moment of creatio ex nihilo, or a creation out of nothing in which desire was fulfilled and enjoyed as a momentary gratification.

'The Lord said: I am the Lord your God! So don't make or worship any sort of idols or images. Respect the Sabbath and honour the place where I am worshipped, because I am the Lord. Faithfully obey my laws, and I will send rain to make your crops grow and trees produce fruit. Your harvest of grain and grapes will be so abundant, that you won't know what to do with it all. You will eat and be satisfied, and you will live in safety. I will bless your country with peace, and you will rest without fear. I will wipe out the dangerous animals and protect you from enemy attacks. You will chase and destroy your enemies, even if there are only five of you and a hundred of them, only a hundred of you and ten thousand of them'.

And each day 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. 25. Not to follow the whims of your heart or what your eyes see—Numbers 15:39

26
Sometimes while in a state of wakefulness it felt as if I was dreaming, that is, dreaming with my eyes wide open as I became lost in thought. Even so, while in this state, which often had the qualities of being dreamlike, I managed to record everything that came to mind, scribbling from time to time in the notebook lying in my lap as I sat cross-legged on the sleeping mat in my cell. Any ideas or reflections or recollections or memories or ruminations or theorizing or imaginative-creative thinking which came to mind and which I thought at the time were worthwhile preserving I jotted them down there and then. Committing them to writing, before they slipped away forever into the abyss of forgetfulness. And in this way I quickly filled up my notebooks with writing. In the back of my mind at the time, I sometimes entertained the vain idea that I was keeping a literary journal. With that thought in mind I did not want to lose or forget any of the vivid recollections, excellent ideas and valuable insights which I happened to stumble upon when I allowed my mind to range freely. That is, to be free to explore any meandering path that the flow of my consciousness happened to take me on.

At the time, it seemed that my circumstances had changed dramatically for the worst. I can now see that in retrospect my confinement or detention had actually turned out to be an extraordinarily opportunity not only for self-discovery and self-reconstitution but also for applying my mind to things which I now consider to be of great scientific and philosophical importance. The point I wish to make is this: a situation or state of affairs which had been literally forced upon me ended up being, quite paradoxically, a once in a lifetime opportunity which happened to be favourably conducive for undistracted deep reflection and serious writing. When I say deep reflection and serious writing I was ambiguous and foolhardy enough to mean the kind of thinking about thinking and the kind of writing about writing that serious authors are usually engaged in. So instead of merely recording my memories, thoughts and impressions on practically every possible matter under the sun, I also felt compelled to probe deeper into my own mind and my own world of experiences for answers to the most fundamental questions that anyone could possibly face in a lifetime. Without wanting to pre-empt the end of this autobiographical narrative and give away the story which started so inadvertently to take shape in my notes I discovered that my thoughts were continually bringing me back to a critical refection on the anthropocentric underpinning of a critical political theology. Political theology in its various forms deals ultimately with the secular or religious meaning of freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, revolution and liberation. Political theology also trafficks in the mythologies of salvation or redemption. Political theology necessarily articulates a soteriological and eschatological narrative, which happens also to reflect or represent a metaphysics, where metaphysic involves transcendental claims about the essential nature of reality. What I mean by all of this will become clearer in the course of the writing of this autobiography, which I hope will have the intellectual flavour of a literary journal. I have made this a commitment and I don't intend letting you or myself down in not making good on my promise.

In the New Testament the Torah is fulfilled in the words: 'I command you to love others as much as you love yourself '.

And each day 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. 26. Not to blaspheme—Exodus 22:27

27

So my collection of notebooks represent my attempt to document a different kind of deep reflection and the outpouring of serious writing was meant to be a different kind of writing, a writing that in the end found itself deeply implicated, deeply entangled with the world of my personal experiences and the world of my personal thoughts. It was a kind of rewriting of recollections and thoughts which in a way embody the story of not only my personal life, but also of my intellectual life and history, as I have already mentioned. But these thoughts, memories and recollections in turn became the springboards and points of departure for thinking along certain lines about matters that have always concerned me deeply.

I soon discovered to my chagrin that making sense of the prison notes which I had so diligently compiled necessitated a complete rewriting and a rethinking of everything I took for granted. And so I could not avoid the dialectical engagement with my own thoughts and writings. The dialectical moment in the rewriting of what had been thought thus also necessitated a creative re-thinking, creative re-discovery and a creative re-invention of my life. So I found myself reflectively revisiting the idea of who I had been and also who I actually am. Who I actually am has been the most difficult subject to deal with and understand. Who I have been cannot be rescued from fictionalization. As I have already eluded. In a way the reworking of my notebook writings has been an exercise in self-exploration, self-discovery and self-reconstitution. This has been made possible through the process of a dialectical engagement with the thoughts, reflections and ideas captured in my prison notebooks. It is possible, that dialectically speaking, I have re-invented myself as a fictional character. If this is the case, I confess that I was powerless to do otherwise, that is dialectically speaking. Why do I feel the need to state this? It might be because I don't really know who I am or who I have been. But apart from the questions relating to the self-constitution of a personal identity I have also put considerable effort into critically evaluating and reviewing my beliefs. I have endeavoured to make explicit all the claims on which my beliefs about the nature of reality have been based. And it has been my hope that I would be able to reasonably justify the claims on which my beliefs have been based. Usually we state that knowledge is based on true belief or alternatively we can state that knowledge depends on certitude. Certitude about anything is something that has to be established or justified. It is not possible to exist or live a meaningful life without having any certitude about anything. We cannot exist or live without having a sense of certitude about an infinite number of things. Our way of being in the world is made possible only because our relationship with the world is based on certitudes or warranted belief based on reasonable inferences. Warranted belief together with ideas of metaphysical certainty or metaphysical necessity features large in my narrative. And there are reasons for this which will become clearer as we progress through the notebooks even if it entails wrestling with order or disorder in which they were written. The many detours in the notebooks came as a welcome relief to me as the endless tedium of each day exerted itself on me as a punishment.

Certitude is one thing. What about literature or literary writing which happens be a work of fiction rather that a factual account about something? Can literature in this sense have any cognitive value which endows it with the capacity or power to speak the truth about something which is not factual? Maybe it is not possible to separate fiction from the factual. Maybe the factual becomes the conditions of possibility for the creation of the fictional. Seen from this perspective, it not simply a situation of the factual versus the fictional because in order for the fictional literary text to be intelligible it cannot exist in a conceptual vacuum emptied of all facts and logic and rationality, and because literary fiction does not in fact exist in a conceptual vacuum the fictional narrative inevitably has all kinds of logical consequence which entangle it with the empirical world of fact and actual states of affairs. In this sense fiction cannot be intelligible without have the power to tell the truth or alternatively without the Universe imposing itself on the writing imbuing with it an intelligibility so that meaning can be extracted from the linear sequence of one word following from another.

Creative re-thinking and re-writing was thus unavoidable, and I suppose this is how slippage and fictionalization of any autobiographical narrative becomes inevitable. I discovered that I could not remember everything about my life, even though I had personally lived it. I found myself joining dots, filling gaps and making connections. My memories were necessarily selective, my thoughts were also necessarily selective, and also my reflections on my thoughts and memories were also invariably and necessarily selective. The agency within me that brought about this selectivity remains a mystery. So I am in a manner of speaking a mystery to myself. But everything that I have managed to remember or think about seemed to me at that moment to be worthy of documentation. On careful reflection I believe that many of my recollections, ideas and thoughts were worthy of recording because they happened to be interesting in-them-selves as mental objects. I felt that they deserved the honour of being committed to writing, to be fixed forever as it were in writing for all posterity.

And if you love your neighbours as yourself then: 'Don't be a gossip, but never hesitate to speak up in court, especially if your testimony can save someone's life'. You may save a life. Is this not life should be about, saving lives? But what does it mean to save lives. How can lives be saved. What does it mean to have a life and to have that live saved? The Torah is about saving lives. Who can dispute that?

And each day 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. 27. Not to worship idols in the manner they are worshiped—Exodus 20:5

28

I had to confess. I confessed my deeds, my transgression against the state of the Republic of South Africa. I will be judged by my deeds, I will be judged for my transgressions and punished accordingly. The convictions I hold will also come under judgment, because my deeds and transgressions are the products of my convictions. My conscience will also be under judgment, it will be under judgement because my convictions which represents a form of desire, a desire for the good, where the realization of the good represents my hopes for the future was indeed stirred into action by my conscience, and my actions were concretized in transgressions, by acting on my convictions I become a transgressor. I acted under the coaxing of my conscience, under the coaxing of my desire. I became an agent of my desire.

And because of my desire I became a transgressor. Any desire for the good is a desire with no regrets. I confessed without regret. I took ownership of my transgression. My transgressions defined who I was. And this is the paradox, because who am I if not a transgressor?

So I confessed. I had to avoid perjury. I was warned to confess only the truth.

Am I able to confess the truth about myself? The truth that I had transgressed and that I was a transgressor. In my confession I signed an affidavit which listed my transgressions. My transgression was that I was furthering the cause of the South African Communist Party, I was guilty of furthering the cause of Communism.

Who am I? I am a Communist. Who am I? I am a lesbian, a lipstick lesbian who loves having sex with other women, who falls in love with other women. I am an animal lover. I am a professor. I am a scientist studying animal behaviour. I am an academic. I would like to believe that I am an intellectual.

Who I am? I am a revolutionary. But I am not a politician. I am engaged in a political struggle but I do not have any personal political ambitions.

I could not confess to the totality of who I was. Nor could I confess what concerned me ultimately.

Who do I confess to be? On the Day of Judgment I will not need to confess at all, the totality of my transgressions will be laid bare before my eyes, on the Day of Judgment the totality of my transgressions with be unveiled. On the Day of Judgment the truth of who I am will be finally revealed.

On the Day of Judgment the full weight of my debt towards my brothers and sisters will be measured.

On the Day of Judgment I will stand naked.

On the Day of Judgment I will be judged according to what I did to the least of these brothers and sisters. Whatever I did to them I would have also done to Him/Her and that would constitute the totality of my transgressions and the totality of what concerned me ultimately in the life that I lived.

My faith and belief will be judged on these terms on the Day of Judgment.

Is there an ultimate truth about myself and do I have knowledge of that truth? What if there is no ultimate truth about myself? Is the truth about myself reducible or constructible in terms of the person I desire to be, which could be conceived as the myth that I would like to believe about myself. Must my confession be truthful with regard to the person that I have been in the recent relevant past. What if I fabricate the person that I have been?

To live a life is to unfold in time, to be in a state of constant flux, but also to be in a state of becoming, which is to cease to be who one was and to become someone else, so our lives are necessarily discontinuous, populated by many selves and changing faces. To compose the story of our lives seems an impossible task, our memories and recollections are fragile and unreliable threads. We have no reason to believe that the thread of our memories are golden or unbroken, threads which can weave with unquestionable fidelity the seamless tapestry of our lives as one continuous weave joining our childhood self of the distant past with all the intermediated lived selves who we happen to have become with the passing of each of our lived moments, passing moments which bring us ever afresh to the shifting horizon of a constantly changing present. Who do I confess that I am? Am I every one of my selves? Am I the same person? Being the same person, is this the depth and extent of my many transgressions? Yet we live with a paradox, to erase or blot out the memories of one's past, so as to suffer amnesia, results in a loss of one's 'true' identity, it means we cease to be someone, we don't know who are, and we become no one. The fictions which our memories create regarding our past lives somehow embodies the truth of who we are at every moment of our lives. We need the memories of our past life in order to create ourselves. We live as a constant recreation of ourselves. We constantly reconstruct or even re-tell the narrative of our lives in order to retain the integrity of our identities. This constant re-composition of who are is necessary for maintaining the cohesion of our lives, and to forestall the fragmentation our personhood into multiple competing sub-identities. Also to maintain the cohesion of personhood we need to deny who we seem to be in the perceptions of others. To be is to deny oneself! To maintain the cohesion of one's selfhood, which embodies the I, the I who I am, the self in other words, means to deny the subject which others imposed on oneself. Paradoxically, to be true to oneself means to live in denial of one's perceived 'subjecthood' which has been imposed by the other, which is the not 'the real me'. The real me struggles in vain and despair to survive in the face of the other. The look of the other erases, liquidates and empties the real me, making me feel alienated, estranged, objectified and foreign to myself. I become someone else's fiction, I become someone else's fancy. I exist as an illusion. This is the paradoxical problematic of confession. I become a fictionalized person. A communist or a Jew. Someone who has transgressed the laws and order of the Oligarchy. Talking about the Jew, after Yael and I had been living together for several years, the lie that I was a Jew or had become a Jew had taken firm root, what was the difference, the difference meant that I had become someone else's fiction, and when I ceased to deny that I was a Jew, I became the Jew more fully and more irreversibly, until I realized that I would not be able to cease being a Jew if I was faced with the prospective of annihilation for being the fiction that I was a Jew. The fiction had become my truth, the truth was a lie and the lie was the truth. The real truth was that I could not cease being a communist. Being a communist was a narrative that I constantly subjected to re-construction and renewal.

Who am I? To answer this question I have to subject myself to a self-interrogation. How can I answer this question without it being a confession in response to a self-interrogation? In an inquisition involving a third party, to escape the pain of interrogation the confessor confesses what the interrogator wants to hear. The confessor engages in an act of self-incrimination even if it is a lie, a complete falsehood. This is who I am. 'This is'! The 'this is' is what is revealed, what is revealed or admitted is what the interrogators wishes to hear, this is me, I am this person, I am the person who has done this, I am a communist, this is the 'self-incrimination'. I am guilty. But this is not the full extent of my guilt. The full extent of my guilt cannot be conceptualized within the judicial and legislative framework of the law as it stands in defence and protection of Oligarchy against all its assailants and enemies. I guilty of being rebel against the order of the Oligarchy. I am guilty of rebelling against the existence of the Oligarchy. With regard to the Oligarchy I live in an internal state of exile. I cannot escape the Oligarchy, which is why my state of exile is internal. I am internally displaced and marginalized. This is my transgression for which I am guilty. I confess my guilt.

In the writings of Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Camus I have read about the rebellions and exiles of the various literary creations, fictional protagonists or mythical heroes, who have invariably or should I say have consistently been depicted as men only. The rebellions and exiles of these masculinized-mythical-heroes are metaphysical rebellions and exiles in so far that they have been casted in the literary roles of abstract or metaphysical rebels and exiles. By this I mean that these masculinized heroes whether they be Hellenic or Hebraic, whether they be Prometheus or Job, they have all be cast and scripted in the roles of abstract rebels and abstract exiles, abstract in the sense of that their rebellions and exiles have against 'existence' itself. And this is why they remain trapped in the role of problematic rebels rather than being revolutionaries. Their transgressions are metaphysical in nature. Metaphysical in the sense in that they have nothing to do actual reality. Their rebellion becomes a futile and absurd exercise by virtue of it being based on an irrational metaphysics. More precisely the metaphysical framework within which their rebellion or exile unfolds is not based on a rational or warranted metaphysics regarding the nature of reality.

With regard to my arrest and detention my putative transgressions were also viewed as metaphysical, or even philosophical and theological. And thus my rebellion and my exile were likewise viewed as metaphysical, because there was a philosophical and theological dimension to my transgressions against the Oligarchy. In the eyes of my interrogators my transgression were also ultimately metaphysical because I placed in question their version of the nature of reality. On scientific, philosophical and theological grounds there was metaphysical warrant or rational grounds for rejecting their version of the nature of reality. It was this which made me a communist revolutionary rather than a rebel. This was what I was ultimately guilty of. This was my transgression.

As a revolutionary I was not rebelling against 'existence'. I was rebelling against a mode of existence or the concrete material conditions of existence. So I was not merely rebelling, I was jointly committed in solidarity with others to revolutionary overturning and transformation of the concrete material conditions of existence. This is what made my 'metaphysical transgressions' such a dangerous threat to the Oligarchy. It threatened the destruction of the Oligarchy.

How can we lie when we are living a lie? The lie is the 'truth' and the 'truth' is a lie. This is what is so paradigmatic about dialectical reasoning. The Oligarchy perceives its existence as the concrete materialization of the truth and in this sense it sees itself as an instantiation of some transcendental ordering, organizing and arrangement of how things should be. The Oligarchy's existence depends on the defence of this 'truth', and this 'truth' represents the Noble Lie of the Oligarchy. In the context of the Oligarchy's existence the lie is the truth. And the truth is a lie. It is a Noble Lie because the existence of the Oligarchy is perceived as something which is good. The truth is that there does not exist a transcendental ordering, organizing and arrangement of how things should be which goes by the name of the STATE. The concrete state or actually existing state is a contingent product of history, it is something which is historical, a contingent product of the material conditions of historical existence, and as such it has always been a creation of history and not an immanent instantiation of something which exists transcendentally. And if it is historical or a product of history it can removed in history. There is nothing metaphysically necessary about the existence of the state or the Oligarchy.

The truth about me is really about what it is like to be me which includes what it has been like to be me for the whole of my life, past, present and future. I cannot cease to be me, whoever I may be.

I really wanted to know what it was like to be me. Hopefully at the end of this narrative I may discover who I have been and who I am now, and what it actually feels like to be me. I really what to know what it feels like to be me in a direct unmediated manner. What I am asking for is a paradox. This also happens to be the paradox of confession. Confession is supposed to be a truthful or veridical disclosure of one's self which includes the admission of the totality of one's culpability and liability. It should be an exercise of will free. In fact, a true confession has to be an exercise of free will and moral agency. For a confession to be efficacious and non-vicarious it is supposed to be a truthful, uncontrived and transparent disclosure or unveiling or un-concealing of one's condition, of one's essential nature, which includes the totality of one's culpabilities and liabilities. A non-vicarious confession involves an act of accepting your own guilt, an act of owning up to one's transgressions, an act of owning up to who you are, an act of self-blame, an act of accepting personal liability and an act of personal responsibility for one's own actions and therefore an act of free will and owning up to one's autonomous moral agency in the affairs of one's own life. Liability confirms agency. Liability confirms causality, the power to effect, the power to change, the power to make a difference. Philosophically a liability is also a predisposition or disposition in the form of a power to affect. A property or quality or attribute or condition becomes manifest as a disposition or predisposition when it possesses the power to affect or to cause an effect. A property of any object or thing has dispositional powers by virtue of its power to cause effects. And without properties possessing dispositional powers there can be no free will or moral agency or culpability or liability or non-vicarious living. We are transgressors to the extent that we live non-vicarious lives. This is a statement of metaphysical necessity and it is not without warrant, and warrant carries no weight if unsupported by reasonable inferences.

What would count as a reasonable inference for the existence of something which is not empirically accessible? Can any rational justification be marshalled in support of claims for the existence of things or states of affairs such as Universals or Ideas or Forms which are not directly visible or perceptible? In short, what I am proposing is that it is rational to have beliefs which go beyond what is empirically accessible.

The phrase 'by virtue of' appears as a constant refrain in my speech and writing. My lectures are littered with this phrase. It literally rolls off my tongue as effortlessly as the cementing link which seals all relationships in the unity of the One and the Many. So the phrase 'by virtue of' is related as a synonym to words like: because of, on account of, by reason of, by dint of, by means of, by way of, via, through, as a result of, as a consequence of, on the strength of, owing to, thanks to, due to, based on, with the help of, with the aid of, with the assistance of, and so on and so forth. This words are all indicative of situations in which something exists because of something else or due to something else. And it is my contention that this is the case for many instances where something seems to exist necessarily by virtue of something else, but the existence of this connection or link or relationship while seemly credible from a rational perspective, cannot be established empirically by means of a direct observation. For example, it is my contention that the Universe can exist and possibly does exist as a causally closed system, but existing as a closed system does not necessarily entail that it does not exist by virtue of something else such the time-invariant laws of nature and constants of nature. What is the ontological status of laws of nature and constants of nature? Why should they be time-invariant or why are they time-invariant, and why do they even exist at all? Why does anything exist all? We cannot give an answer to this. But the question remains. Why is there something rather than nothing? We don't know. Science cannot give us the answer.

It is rational to believe in the existence of time-invariant laws and constants of nature. The dynamical behaviour of the Universe, its structure and 'functioning', its structure and functioning understood in terms of its agency, powers, properties and dispositions are intelligible, mainly because its structure, powers, properties and dispositions persist as unchanging uniformities or regularities of nature, that is, they exist in a time-invariant non-self-explanatory fashion. They exist as indubitable facts of nature, they exist as brute facts, as facts they are just there, and as facts they don't carry within themselves the reasons for their existence, and in themselves they are unable to reveal the reasons for why exist. They just exist as indubitable facts of nature as far as we are concerned from the scientific point of view. Their existence makes the nature of the University intelligible in terms of predictability or susceptibility to explanation in the form of deductive nomological explanations. While predictability makes the Universe something which we can understand with respect to its behaviour and is therefore intelligible in this sense, its intelligibility is not self-explanatory, because as a physical system subject to the laws and constants of nature, it does not carry within itself or embody within itself any kind of evidence or 'text' which would suggest or indicate the reasons for it being the way it is. The reasons for it having this particular set of structures, properties, attributes, capacities, powers, and dispositions and not another set is not given. In this sense the Universe while being perfectly intelligible in terms of it predictive behaviours is ultimately not self-explanatory. Therefore in this sense it also does not carry its own meaning within itself. It is not the source or originator of its own meaning. It is not self- causing. Its meaning is something which is conferred. Something which is conferred 'subjectively'. We project meaning onto the Universe. Or we can come to the rational conclusion that the Universe in itself while being intelligible is quite meaningless otherwise. We can be fascinated by the Universe but this fascination is not about its meaningfulness. The fascination provoked by its intelligibility predisposes us or puts us in a frame of mind to inquire into its meaningfulness. Ontologically, the Universe's intelligibility is an attribute of its intrinsic nature, but its meaningfulness lies outside of itself as something which is conferred upon the Universe. It is meaningful by virtue of something else.

So going back to my original point, what I am proposing is that it is rational to have beliefs which go beyond what is empirically accessible such as the meaningfulness of the Universe. Can we establish the connection or relationship between its intelligibility and its meaningfulness? By virtue of what is it meaningful? Is its intelligibility meaningful by virtue of Mind or Absolute Spirit? Can we know this? God gave the Israelites material incentives to be obedient to the Torah: 'I am the Lord your God, so obey me and don't cheat anyone. If you obey my laws and teachings, you will live safely in the land and enjoy its abundant crops'.

Someday we will be together.

And each day 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. 28. Not to bow down to idols—Exodus 20:5

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Is its intelligibility meaningful by virtue of Mind or Absolute Spirit? Can we know this? Keep reading and you will see why.

In advance I admit that I could not avoid following the footprints step for step along the path which Hegel had taken with the dawn of modernity. The dawn of modernity begins with Descartes who became the pioneer of the particular kind of thinking which we usually associate with modernity. And because of Descartes the dawn of modernity begins with a new understanding of the nature of human subjectivity and its relation to the world. This new understanding of human subjectivity and its relation to how we conceive the nature of reality ushered in an epistemological revolution which had wide ranging consequences, including inescapable theological and anthropological implications. In contrast to modernity's radical transformation of the conception and experience of human reality and the nature of the world which followed in the wake of modernity, postmodernism as a reaction, represents a failed counter-revolution, especially in its inability to have any meaningful impact on the unstoppable juggernautic progress of science. The epistemological revolution churned up in the wake of the writings of Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke was parasitic on and consonant with modern scientific revolution which had been triggered by figures such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton among others. The scientific revolution vindicated the epistemological revolution and signalled a real philosophical break with the past, and the consequent rise of the modern epoch. And it comes as no exaggeration that the scientific and philosophical revolutions which were based on the bedrock of empiricism inaugurated a new age. The rule of empiricism in science and philosophy inevitably resulted in a complete rethinking of the nature of the human subject and also to a complete rethinking of the relationship between the human subject and the Cosmos. The scientific and philosophical revolution laid the foundations for the triumphant revolution of modernity. A revolution which was paradigmatically exemplified in the ceaseless growth of scientific knowledge which at every turn was tightly and reciprocally coupled with a seemingly inexhaustibly capacity for the 'self-generation' of wave upon wave of new technological developments which irreversibly paved the way for the great Industrial Revolution. We now exist at the edge of a never waning threshold of new scientific and technological discoveries. Since the seventieth century the world has been in a constant state of scientific and technological revolution, and the growth of scientific knowledge and technological power continues to increase exponentially. This unstoppable exponential growth in scientific knowledge and technological power has given rise to the profoundly modern paradox of scientific knowledge. Knowledge is always about the certainty of something being the case and Truth resides in the certainty that something is actually the case. Often knowledge is viewed as a belief that something is the case, and that this belief is not mere belief but true belief or credible belief, and true belief or credible belief is belief based on certainty. Certainty is an epistemic property of beliefs. What does it mean for a belief to be based on certainty? The idea of certainty includes a psychological or emotional element, the element which makes a belief psychologically compelling or psychologically incorrigible, so that one is fully convinced without a shadow of doubt of the certainty of one's belief. One is certain of one's belief that something is the case because one also believes that one has sufficient or credible warrant for one's belief. So epistemic certainty includes the idea of sufficient or credible warrant. But ultimately, certainty is something which is indubitable or has be understood in terms of something being indubitable, thus the epistemic meaning of certainty has to include the idea of indubitability. Descartes' famous Archimedean point was the indubitability of the cogito - I am thinking therefore I must exist. The certainty of this belief is indubitable because it is resistant to all possible kinds of doubts. In this sense it represents a belief which is also incorrigible. A belief is incorrigible when it cannot be amended or revised or corrected, and in this sense it resistant to all forms of doubt, it is beyond reformability. It can even resist the most 'hyperbolic' of doubts, therefore the certainty of this belief is 'geometrically' secure or 'geometrically' axiomatic in a Euclidian and Archimedean sense. The idea that the meanings of certainty and indubitability are inseparably intertwined especially in relation to the idea of certainty being belief which is resistant to all possible kinds of doubt are consistent with Ludwig Wittgenstein's claim that: 'If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.' But there is a dilemma with regard to the certainty of all beliefs in relationship to their putative indubitability. In all cases, the rational grounds for the certainty of any belief will be reducible to the validity of the subject's reasons for holding to that belief, and not the fact that the belief is indubitable. And this is because the validity of one or more of the reasons for holding the belief may be disputed with good reasons, and so the indubitability of the belief may be postponed or deferred indefinitely, in something like Descartes' radical doubt. Reason itself may be the obstacle to the indubitability of beliefs.

And each day 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. 29. Not to make an idol for yourself—Exodus 20:4

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To have certain knowledge that a given belief about something being the case is indubitable entails or requires that one is in possession of the Totality of Knowledge or True Knowledge of Everything. This is the Paradox of Knowledge: To know indubitability is to know everything that could possibly be known, and to resolve this problem is to embark on Hegel's project of Mind but in a reconfigured approach which includes a reconfiguration of Marx's reconfiguration of Hegel. A reconfiguration is not revision, it is a complete rethinking of everything. A rethinking of everything includes a critical rereading of the collective fictions that rule our lives, the collective fictions which embody our collective beliefs (indoctrinations), collective beliefs and collective fictions which ultimately have their ideological originations in the narratives which defend and justify the perpetuation of the succession of Patriarchical Oligarchies that have arisen throughout the history of post-Neolithic social formations since the dawn of Civilization, and which also include modern Capitalism and the so-called existing Socialisms of the 20th century, possible with the latter presenting the apogee of the realization of the Oligarchy. So am I implying that Communism failed? Yes existing Communisms have failed by virtue of the fact that are perpetuations of the Oligarchy. In this sense they represent the full culmination of the catastrophe which we euphemistically call Civilization. Why am I still a Communist? Well strictly speaking I am an Anarcho-Communist that is I 'believe' in Communism in its non-Oligarchic embodiment. This would represent a reversal or an erasure of what we view as Civilization in the form that we have inherited it. And it would entail a reconfiguration of both the Hegelian and Marxist project, a reconfiguration which would not lead to another re-mythologization of lived social reality by constructing just another counter-narrative, another counter-narrative friendly to just another resurrection of the Oligarchy, a counter-narrative which would also ultimately be just another collective fiction to imprison our minds once more, so that just another elite can rule over us.

Such a reconfiguration would have to be guided by the idea of Truth as a Totalization. This reconfiguration of the Hegelian and Marxist project which would necessarily have to be anti-Oligarchic and therefore Anarchist would involve a dialectical reconfiguration of everything, where the essential nature of the Dialectic is self-correction. Science is the only institution which embodies the capacity for revolutionary self-correction. Science is a revolutionary institution by virtue of its capacity for self-correction. Since the seventieth century science and technology has been in a constant state of revolution and therefore exemplifies a form of anarchism.

In this context I defend the idea that this revolution in science and technology represents nothing less that the inexorable asymptotic convergence onto the Truth regarding the Nature of the physical Universe, this increasing awareness of the 'nature' of the Truth regarding the Nature of the physical Universe remains paradoxical. Paradoxical about the nature of the human subject and the nature of relationship of the human subject with respect to reality. In other words paradoxical with respect to the nature the relationship with respect to Totality or Ultimacy regarding the nature of Reality, World, Cosmos or Universe. The paradox is that the realization of this relation with regard to the Conception of the Totality or the Ultimate is already immanent as an emergent property or as an emergent capacity embodied as a possibility within the physical universe.

The World or Universe is ultimately a Unified Totality or a Unity or a Unified System. This realization is the motivation and rationale which drives the search for unifying theories or a General Theory of Everything in physics, for example a Theory which is able to unit or unify quantum mechanics with general relativity within a single more fundamental theory or in terms of a single fundamental underlying principle. Logic requires unification of theories. Logic requires the kind of Universality which can only be attained by virtue of the unification of theories, also by virtue of the fact that the Universe is unity or a system, in which everything ultimately interacts with everything else. Logically included in this Principle of Unity in which everything ultimately interacts with everything else is that the real world exists independently of us and as such it also acts upon us. There exists something which could be described as 'reality push back'. Therefore any theory of everything based on the principles of unification or universality or totality must be able to account for the essential nature of reality in our absence and in turn must also account for our emergence as sentient beings seeking to have knowledge and understanding of reality in terms of a true theory of everything. Thus a true theory of everything is a theory which does not depend on our existence. While not depending as such on our existence it explains our existence or gives an account of our coming into existence in terms of our emergence as one entity among other entities in the Universe. We are ourselves a product of a system in which everything ultimately interacts with everything else. Reality is something which does not depend on our existence. There was time in the evolution of the Universe during which time the phenomenon which we call 'intelligence' or 'conscious' or 'cognitive capacity' did not exist within the realm of the physical or material universe as an actually or reality. It was something which came afterwards as a consequence of the 'push back of reality', a reality which we did not construct or manufacture. It pre-existed as a built-in possibility existing immanently or latently or nascently as part and parcel of the essential nature of the Universe. We are a product of this reality. While we may not fully know or understand or comprehend the essential nature of reality in the absence of a Grand Theory of Everything, this does not logically or rationally mean that something which is reality does not exist. In our mundane existence we often become aware of what we call a 'reality-check'. This is one way of how we experience the 'push back of reality'. But we can also set up experiments where this 'push back of reality' can be observed, measured, monitored and objectively documented. We become persuaded that a real world exists out there and it exists independently of us and it has the capacity to act on us, and in many ways we are its product rather it being the product of our construction. A real world exists out there. This is the position of realism. A Grand Theory of Everything would have to be a realist theory. And to be a Grand Theory of Everything it would necessarily have to overcome the observer/observed divide. Belief in the existence of real world out there is what drives the scientific enterprise, in other words a commitment to realism underlies the scientific enterprise.

A reconfiguration of Hegelianism and Marxism would begin with the following indubitable postulate: In a causally closed physical universe, the subject's ideas or concepts regarding the nature of Reality, Cosmos, World or Universe which live as the embodied thoughts and mental contents of the finite mind exist as emergence possibilities, possibilities which are always exist immanently as 'higher order' emergence properties of the 'lower order' properties, powers, capacities, relationships and dispositions of the fundamental entities out of which the physical universe is constituted. The relation of the subject's mind to Reality, Cosmos, World or Universe as articulated or realised in understanding and in the growth of knowledge involved a constant process of self-correcting adaptation to the contingencies of an ever changing environment in which the subject was embedded. It was by virtue of this cognitive power which enabled the conscious-rational-self-correcting-adaptive-responses to the environment that were necessary for survival and which were based on conscious and self-aware deliberation, inference and therefore reason, that science as an institution, eventually in the fullness of time became a realized possibility.

Something to take to heart: 'Don't hold grudges. On the other hand, it's wrong not to correct someone who needs correcting'.

And each day 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. 30. Not to make an idol for others—Leviticus 19:4

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The outputs of science in the form of increasing epistemic certainty about the knowledge and understanding of the nature of reality, cosmos, world or universe, also have ontological or metaphysical significance regarding the meaning of words like Reality, Absolute, Totality, Universal and Ultimate. The idea or concept of the Absolute, Totality, Universal and Ultimate in terms of the achievement or realization of scientific knowledge and technological power, are not divorced from the idea that the rise in epistemic certainty about the nature of Reality, or truth in other words, is a real ongoing social and intersubjective phenomenon. It is evident that truth expressed in terms of certainty has been constantly rising mainly in the form of the growth, development and expansion of scientific knowledge. All historical evidence seems to suggest that this rising tide of truth and increasing epistemic certainty represents a real asymptotic converging of knowledge onto the actual Truth. This is a convergence, a convergence measurable in terms of increasing certainty, which has been made possible with each new scientific discovery, with the relentless advancing of the frontiers of scientific knowledge and technological power. It has become increasing absurd and irrational to deny the fact that truth and certainty is indeed 'rising' or increasing or converging asymptotically mainly as a consequence of the self-correcting growth of scientific knowledge and the unceasing innovative, progress, development and expansion of technological power. We are beginning to know more and more about what is true with increasing certainty, not only with respect to scientific knowledge or technological power, but also in terms of what can be called Critical Theory which has its foundation in Marxist theory concerning the structure and function of social formations with respect to the production, distribution and accumulation of Capital or power or resources or financial assets or surplus value.

The facts and theories emerging from the scientific revolution and from critical theory challenges all notions or ideas we have about the nature of the human subject, the nature of the Cosmos or Reality or the Universe and the nature of the relationship between the subject and the Cosmos or external reality in its totality. We may be not what or who we think we are as narrated in the collective fictions which have their origination in the Oligarchy. Nor may the nature of the Cosmos or World or Universe be what we may think it is. We and the Cosmos in which we exist may be completely different from our preconceptions.

Something to keep in mind: 'Stop being angry and don't try to take revenge. I am the Lord, and I command you to love others as much as you love yourself'.

And each day 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. 31. Not to make human forms even for decorative purposes—Exodus 20:20

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Since the dawn of time in the evolution of the hominins and modern humans it is clear that cognitively 'advanced' primates like ourselves seemed to have acquired the anthropological predisposition which predisposes us to view the Cosmos as a meaningful order or as existing under the governance of a meaningful order. The idea of a meaningful order governing the structure and functioning of the Cosmos is inseparable from the idea that the order which manifests itself within an infinite plenitude of observable natural phenomena exists by virtue of the outcome or realization of final causes. Everything which exists in the Cosmos exists as the embodiment of ordering principles or ideas or forms in one way or another. And everything which is observed to exist, exits as the exemplary or paradigmatic embodiment or representation of a universal or eternal archetype or form or idea which is a manifestation or an effect of the divine will of a supreme being. These kinds of views have been narrated in various collective fictions held by various religions. The difference between this 'anthropomorphic' views of the Cosmos as the manifestation of a meaningful order under the governance of the will of a divine supreme being, and the scientific view of the Cosmos following the epistemological and scientific revolutions of modernity does not necessarily embody an irreconcilable clash between two alternative views of reality, an illusionary view versus a scientific view. At a fundamental level the revolution in philosophy and science has been triggered by a profound epistemological shift or revolution in the understanding of the idea or nature the human subject, it is also a consequence of a radical shift in the understanding of the idea or nature of the human self. The understanding of the subject or self under modernity, especially after Descartes revolves around the realization that the self as an entity possesses the capacity or the power for self-definition as being integral to its nature as a subject. The self as a subject was no longer defined in terms of the governance or ordinance of a meaningful or purposeful Cosmic Order which may or may not embody the will of a supreme being. The subject or self was essentially free to imagine and entertain possibilities, to doubt, to criticize, to question, to contradict, to problematize, to solve problems, to analyse, to test, to predict, to engage in inference, to deliberate, to compare and contrast, to categorize and order things according to identity, likeness or difference and so on. These cognitive faculties and intellectual powers were critically important for human survival and were consequently under evolution selection pressure.

After Descartes the human subject acquires a new sense of self-presence by becoming increasing self-consciously aware of and confident in the power of autonomous reason in establishing epistemic certainty independent of or in the absence of and free from a meaningful governing Cosmic Order. Before Descartes the human subject came into self-presence or self-awareness as being subject to and in relationship to a meaningful governing Cosmic Order ruled in many instances by a supreme being. With Descartes the human subject comes into genuine or authentic or credible self-presence only after undergoing a radical process of universal doubt, which included the doubting of the existence of a meaningful and purposeful Cosmic Order. With Descartes the existence of the self is demonstrated while the existence of everything else including God and the Cosmic Order is doubted. 'I think therefore I am!' 'I doubt therefore I am!' The demonstration of the existence of self-presence by doubting everything means that the self-presence can be established without believing in the existence of meaning, the 'I think therefore I am' represents the emancipation from meaning and this emancipation accompanies or is co-extensive or concurrent with the emergence of modern science or with the scientific revolution, and also with an epochal revolution in philosophy. The understanding of the meaning of the Cosmos or even the meaningfulness of being, as in the meaning of life, which before had been explicable in terms of the existence of the Cosmic Order are not the concerns or competencies of science. The focus of science are the contingent regularities of nature and in this sense science is concerned with the intelligibility of nature rather than with discovering what could possibly be the underlying basis for meaning and the significance of nature. In terms of what can nature be conceived as meaningful? We cannot equate the intelligibility of nature with its being meaningful. We cannot equate the intelligibility of nature with its purposefulness or its being purposeful. We cannot talk meaningfully about the purpose of nature. It is perfectly legitimate to state that nature has no intrinsic purpose.

And each day 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. 32. Not to turn a city to idolatry—Exodus 23:13

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In biology functions are ascribed to structures. The explanation for the presence or the occurrence of something such as chlorophyll in plants or hearts in animals is often done in terms of means to ends structural-function relationships. In biological systems structures such as eyes or wings is often viewed as something which has been adapted or is designed to serve some function or purpose, such as sight or flight respectively.

Intelligibility is not reducible to meaningfulness. Something can be perfectly intelligible without being meaningful. Being meaningful belongs to the category of intention, purpose and teleological means-to-ends relationships or why something like a function or adaptation is the case, whereas in science something is made intelligible by resorting to causal-mechanistic explanations or demonstrations of function or adaptation.

Only nothing can come from nothing. Something can only come from something, rather than from nothing. Descartes' 'I think' is something. It is definitely not nothing. It is by virtue of something that Descartes' thought 'I think therefore I am' was made possible, rather than from nothing. Mind exists by virtue of something which is not mind.

Descartes had to use words to express the idea: 'I think therefore I am.' He had to have a language which is something at the very least. He had to have knowledge of the meaning of the words that he used. He had to know and understand in advance what it means to 'think' and what it means to 'exist'. Yet in spite of Descartes ignorance regarding the 'conditions of possibility' or the preconditions which make things possible, that is the conditions or preconditions by virtue of which Descartes was able or empowered or capacitated to make the announcement: 'I think therefore I am', inaugurated not only the epistemological revolution which contributed to the rise of modernity, but also led to the destruction of the traditional anthropomorphic vision of cosmos as a meaningful order, setting humanity free not only to redefine the self as a fully individuated and autonomous being which was also endowed with the power of self-reflection and self-conscious awareness, a power or a disposition which makes it possible for the individual to exist as a self-presencing agency and self-defining agent, which is radically instantiated in the revolutionary declaration: 'I think therefore I am'. The ignorance of Descartes regarding the conditions of possibility by virtue of which the 'I think' could be announced and developed into a full blown narrative of doubt which is integral to the Cartesian mind-body dualism, a dualism which persists paradoxically and ironically in the ignorance which continues to be evident in the work of all anti-Cartesian thinkers. Until the physical origination of mind or consciousness can be scientifically explained all thinking about mind and consciousness remains unavoidably trapped within the realm of the Cartesian mind-body dualism, and the status of mind persists as the ghost in the machine.

'Do not put a Jew to shame.'

And each day 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. 33. To burn a city that has turned to idol worship—Deuteronomy 13:17

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Now after Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton, Locke, Hume and Bentham the anthropomorphic vision or belief in the traditional cosmos as a meaningful order was gradually replaced by the physicalist's or the materialist's vision of the causally closed universe of modern science which also became the prevailing vision of modernity. With the transition to modernity the vision of the 'meaningful order' of the cosmos was replaced by the vision of an indifferent, stark, cold, purposeless and non-providential, yet intelligible cosmos. Yes intelligible and comprehensive, in spite of being indifferent and purposeless, because by means of science the cosmos is rendered intelligible and comprehensible to reason. Reason can be used in language as verb, a verb which describes a very specific capacity which intuitively includes making sense of something, comprehending something, understanding something, explaining something and making something intelligible. The word reason describes a faculty or capacity for doing something with regard to something. Reason is the cognitive capacity to make sense of things where 'making sense' includes explaining why something is the case, and explaining why something is the case is to render something intelligible or comprehensible. Synonyms of reason include: think, comprehend, reflect, speculate, deliberate, infer, or cogitate. All of those synonyms relate to the capacity or power to argue, to rationalize, to judge, to conceive, to conceptualize or to infer and so on and so forth. The word reason can also work in language in the role of an abstract noun. Finally, reason represents the power or capacity of the mind to think, reflect and understand something in rational or logical manner. Reasoning involves the application of logic in the development of arguments which provide an account or explanation why something is the case. Also explaining why something is the case is to render something intelligible. In realism it is argued that truth corresponds to reality. In which case truth is one thing and reality is another thing. The truth about something also entails explaining why something is the case. An explanation is an answer to a 'why question'. The paradigmatic model for a scientific explanation is represented by the deductive nomological form of explanation which is also known as the 'covering law' form of explanation. In this model of explanation, explaining why something is the case is justified by conformity or consistency with a Law of Nature or a law-like generalization. Uniformities or regulatories of Nature count as Laws of Nature of law-like generalizations as opposed to accidental generalizations. Laws of Nature support counter-factual conditions whereas accidental generalizations do not. Explains render something intelligible. Intelligibility is established when an explanation demonstrates that something is 'logically' or 'rationally' the case because it conforms to or is consistent with a law-like uniformity or regulatory of Nature. Consistency or conformity with a Law of Nature is what makes a statement or proposition or argument about something being the case both true and intelligible. Consistency or conformity with a Law of Nature constitutes what is called a 'truth-maker'. In science something (a phenomenon or state of affairs) is rendered intelligible by virtue of its conformity or consistency with a Law of Nature. A state of affairs is rendered intelligible to what? It is rendered intelligible to intelligence. As can be seen there are two words corresponding to two things, one to a rendering of intelligibility and the other is intelligence. The two things are 'intelligibility' and 'intelligence'. As an abstract noun the meaning of intelligence overlaps with the meaning of reason and the meaning of mind. Something is made intelligible to intelligence, to reason or to mind. We talk about intelligent life. Something is intelligible, or accessible to reason, by virtue of its properties, capacities, dispositions, powers and relationships. Intelligence, or the capacity for exercising reason, exists in something by virtue of its properties, power, capacities, dispositions, powers and relationships. The existence of intelligence or reason complements or corresponds to or mirrors the existence of the intelligible, or in the other words the existence of something which can be rendered intelligible by reason. Something which is not innately intelligible cannot be rendered intelligible by reason. Being intelligible is a mode of being. Being innately intelligible as a possible mode of being also means that being intelligible is something which exists immanently in things. If things were not inherently intelligible then intelligibility could not be logically or rationally imposed on things. From a realist perspective intelligence or mind or reason cannot construct intelligibility or impose intelligibility on things if things lack innate or inherent intelligibility. This means the intelligibility exists independently of intelligence, mind and reason. The intelligence, mind and reason recognizes the inherent or innate intelligibility in Nature, by recognizing the existence of law-like uniformities and regulatories in Nature. This source of intelligibility is external to mind. The intelligence or mind or reason of finite beings do not create the law-like uniformities or regulatories in Nature, rather the intelligence or reason stumbles on the external existence of uniformities and regulatories which make Nature or the Universe intelligible. The intelligibility of Nature is something which is discovered. Whatever is discovered regarding intelligibility in the realm of Nature was always there, it existed before the emergence of intelligence, and this pre-existing intelligibility is what made the emergence of intelligence possible in the first place.

On the first page of his book 'Knowledge and Human Interests' Habermas poses the founding question: 'how is reliable knowledge possible?' A few lines later he goes on to make the sweeping claim: 'Yet no matter how much modern physics, which combined so effectively the rigor of mathematical form with the amplitude of controlled experiment, was a model for clear and distinct knowledge, modern science did not coincide with knowledge as such'. What is knowledge? We associate the word 'epistemology' with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology is the name of the philosophical discipline which focuses on the study of the various theories of knowledge. Epistemology tries to answer the question: 'What is knowledge?' This is a complex question and providing convincing answers it is not that easy. Broadly speaking knowledge is about knowing the truth about various matters or states of affairs including the essential nature of things and reality. In plain language epistemology tries to answer the following question: 'How do we know that we know?' To answer this we are faced with the following infinite regress: 'How do we know that we know that we know...?' It seems that no claim to know or have knowledge is self-grounding or free of presuppositions or free of assumptions. All claims to knowledge seem to be ultimately 'ungroundable'. This means that there is no knowledge of anything which can claim to be free of any presupposition or assumptions. Consequently no claim to have knowledge can escape falling into the infinite regress which plagues epistemology.

Attempts have been made to escape falling into an infinite regress by proposing an assumption-free foundation for epistemology. In fact, such a search marked the beginnings of modern philosophy. One example of a epistemological foundation based on a self-evident presuppositionless starting point or an assumption-free Archimedean point would be Descartes' cogito ego sum in which the cogito or the 'I think' was supposed to provide the ultimate support or epistemological foundation on which the complete edifice of all possible knowledge claims could be erected. The rational for this rested on a single claim which could not be doubted. The claim that I am thinking is something which cannot be doubted. The knowledge that I am thinking is certain and true. Being consciously aware that I am thinking, I know that I thinking, I am reflecting on the fact that I am thinking is something which cannot be doubted. On the basis of this one singular certainty which cannot be doubted, we should be able to systematically expand on what else can logically be known with absolute certainty. But despite Descartes' radical epistemological proposal, it would seem that our knowledge about the world still lacks ultimate foundations. The fact that I am thinking does not by itself take me very far down the road of knowledge.

That I am thinking is something which cannot be doubted. If I am thinking, if I have thoughts, then I also cannot doubt my existence. I could not be thinking if I did not exist. Something gives rise something. Nothing gives rise to nothing. Something cannot arise from nothing. If I exist then I cannot doubt that I am existing as a thinking being. So far so good! To think is something. Also to exist is something. I have no grounds to doubt my existence. I can even conclude that because I doubt I exist. To doubt is to think something. In order to entertain doubts I have to exist. How is it possible that I can think and how is it possible that I exist as a thinking being? What does it mean to be or have being or to exist? What are the conditions which makes thinking or having thoughts a possibility? This kind of question is a scientific question, it is also a knowledge seeking question, and therefore philosophically speaking it is an epistemological question. The scientific inquiry starts with the rational and logical idea that nothing can cause its own existence or cause itself to come into existence from nothing. It is true that an effect cannot cause itself. In science any effect is the consequence of an action or cause. The fact that I am thinking has to be the consequence of some kind of actions or causes. Can this statement be doubted? Is this statement true?

The search for the secure and credible foundations of knowledge, for knowledge which is certain, in other words for knowledge founded on the certainty of some foundational truth, such a search inevitably turns out to be the search for Ultimacy or the Absolute or the One or the Totality. However, in our search for certainty it would seem that we are unable to escape the infinite regress or can we? The kind of epistemology problems we encounter in our search for certainty, which is securely grounded knowledge, ultimately revolves around theories concerning the nature of truth. It is one thing to state that truth supervenes on being but in what way does this resolve the question regarding the nature of truth. Comprehending the nature of truth is linked to the meaning of certainty. To find the truth or the meaning of the nature of truth we have to continue exploring how we are able to increase the certitude of our claims to have knowledge. How can we be certain that our claims to have true knowledge are valid or are credible or are justified or can be substantiated? How can we be certain that our knowledge is true knowledge? How can we be certain that we know the truth? How can we substantiate or justify the truth of our claims to know. How can we be certain? What is it that makes something certain? What exactly is it which makes our claims to have certain knowledge about anything true? What exactly is it which makes any claim true? It has to be something. The claim is one thing and for it to be true it depends on something else. It is true by virtue of something else. So what precisely is it which makes any claim indisputably or self-evidently or indubitably true? True regarding what? Answer: True in terms of something being the case. How do we establish that something is indeed the case? What is it that makes something true? Things which are referred as 'truth-makers' are what make something true or which establish that something is indeed actually the case. Being true is equivalent to being the case. What is it that makes something the case? The word 'case' stands for the instance of a particular situation or the instance of a particular state of affairs or the instance of a particular fact. The word 'case' as used here also stands for something which exists, for some particular instance of something in which existence and essence converge contingently. So what then is a 'truth-maker'? Things such as experience, observations, sense perceptions, theories, explanations can all function in the role of truth-makers. Something is true or certain or justified or substantiated by virtue of its supporting truth-maker. Words such as certain or certainty or credible or justified or substantiated or certified or even instance are all synonyms which converge on the idea of what it means for something to be true, and in that sense they function as synonyms of the word 'truth'. The meaning of the following set of words such as certainty, credible, justified, substantiated or instance, are combined in propositions with the meaning of another set of complementary words such as observation or experience or sense certainty or sense perceptions to establish or ground or certify or substantiate or justify or make certain the status of something being a truth-maker? Is seeing believing? Yes, or at the very least it represents the start of the journey to truth. And the journey towards truth is made possibility by things possessing 'see-ability' which means more than things having mere visibility. In science all knowledge claims need to be observationally grounded. This is the problem facing String Theory, its truth can only be certified when its claims become observationally grounded. Experience is the litmus test concerning all knowledge claims about the nature of reality or the Universe. Reason operating alone can only establish the certitude of certain abstract truths in the realm of logic and mathematics by demonstrated proofs. In these instances truth and certitude are established by or grounded in logical proofs. In this sense the truth and certitude is established in an a priori fashion. The truth or certainty about everything else outside the abstract realm of formal logic and mathematics can only be established a posteriori by appealing to empirically based experiences which means only after the fact and not prior to any fact. The facts in these cases consist of events or things which can be experienced or observed, in other words they are empirical facts, they are all facts which are in principle empirically accessible. Facts are derived from what can be experienced or observed. Facts are rooted in observation. An observation counts as an experience of something being the case, which is usually some kind of observable state of affairs, and to be observable the state of affairs in question needs to exist in some form. The question now is what is it which makes an event and anything else empirically accessible? The phrase 'what is it' is equivalent to being and it is also includes the idea of essence. The 'what' of whatever 'is', where the word 'is' implies existence and presence, is related to the 'mode of being' and the mode of being of anything is equivalent to its essence. An electron is an electron by virtue of its properties, the electron exists by virtue of its properties, an electron cannot exist without its properties, so existence and essence cannot be separated. This statement capture the sense of what is meant by the word 'mode of being'. So the 'what' is defined by the essence of that being or entity. This line of reasoning while having a Heideggerian flavour is not quite Heideggerian but it does draw on Heideggerian insights. This line of reasoning also gives a sense of what is meant by truth supervening on being. Existence and essence converge contingently with regard to the being and becoming of finite things.

In seeking an answer to the question concerning 'what is it' precisely which makes anything an object of experience the answer would be that it is by virtue of its essential nature that it is something which is experienceable and therefore knowable. It is through the set of properties, which constitutes the essential nature of its mode of being and existing as the thing that it is that its presence has the power or capacity to participate in the generation of a possible experience. Something can become the object of an experience by virtue its powers, dispositions, properties, qualities and the relationships in which stands with respect to other objects, properties, powers, dispositions and qualities. It is the existence of these external and independent factors which makes the Universe of objects empirically accessible, thereby rendering them experienceable, intelligible and knowable. This represents another way of stating that truth supervenes on being.

Examples of claims: I believe that this X (object) belongs to P (objects which happen to determinative set of properties). I believe that this object is an electron. Give me reasons for why you believe that to be the case. To give a reason for something also means to give an explanation. By means of scientific explanation science includes rendering the cosmos or Universe intelligible. The intelligibility of things which was observed in the cosmos in terms of directed processes or adaptations or designs or powers or dispositions or properties or structural-functional relationships were not perceived as the work of some intelligent agency. impersonal intelligibility or ordering, impersonal because it could not be explained as the handy work of any divine personage or divine being and hence the order which was plainly evident in Nature was treated as inexplicable within the terms of reference or the framework of science. The existence of so called uniformities and regularities of Nature is indicative of an underlying governing order in Nature, ordering or intelligibility which was evident in the cosmos in the form of invariances and necessities which manifested in the observable uniformities and regularities of Nature were treated as brute facts. The cosmos perceived to be governed by an invariant and indifferent necessity. Cosmic intelligibility or knowability or cognitive accessibility was based on the existence of regularities and uniformities of nature which allowed for the predictability of events. The uniformity or regularities of Nature became the basis for the experience of an inherent or innate or immanent intelligibility at 'work' in the occurrence of natural phenomena, and it was this that made the rational explication of natural occurrences possible, that is, possible through the transparent, public and intersubjective application of deliberation and logical inference, or in other words the application of reason, within the institutionalized setting of modern science. So with the rise of modernity the idea of reason and the status of science reached a new supremacy in human affairs. Hegel and Marx together with Darwin rose up as iconic figures of 19th century modernity, influencing through their writings the intellectual climate which would shape the thinking of the 20th century. In a profound and significant sense the 20th century has been shaped by the influence of Marx and Darwin. More than Marx, Darwin has been the secular father of the 20th century modernity. In contrast to Marx, after Darwin nothing would ever be the same again. Marxism is necessarily always going to be a work in progress.

Marxism putatively provides the theoretical underpinning for a scientific theory of revolution and socialism. In very general terms 'value neutral' or 'morally neutral' scientific theory of revolutions revolves around the conditions or factors by virtue of which a transition takes from one mode of production to another mode of production. Usually the transition is conceptualized as from a lower to a more advance mode of production. A revolutionary theory also deals with the social forces that drive the transitions from one mode of production to a more advanced form of production. The driving forces arise 'immanently' as a result of the internal 'contradictions' or 'antagonisms' or 'conflicts in class interest' between the relations of production and the forces of production for a given mode of production. A given mode of production with its characteristic social formation (or Oligarchy) is theoretically and therefore 'scientifically' or systematically conceptualized in terms of a set of abstract or theoretical concepts or ideas or elements or things such as: labourer or worker, non-workers, labour-power, necessary-labour, surplus labour, commodity exchange, exchange value, use value, mode of appropriation of surplus value or labour, accumulation, relations of production, forces of production, means of production, property, state, social formation (Oligarchy) and so on and so forth. The social, economic and political dynamics for a given social formation and its corresponding mode of production is characterized by the social-economic-political-tensions/conflicts or class-conflicts between the forces and the relations of production. And the way the whole social-economic-political formation works with regard to its mode of surplus value appropriation and distribution revolves around the idea of 'articulation'. Which is a very specific kind of idea when used in the context of modes of production and in the corresponding revolutionary transitions from one mode of production to a more advanced mode of production. The manner and contexts in which the word 'articulation' is variously used is strongly suggestive of mechanical or even causal mechanistic interactions or linkages or connections or transmissions or structured relations between the forces of production and the relations of productions. It would seem that for any articulation between two things there must be a causal mechanism by means of which the process of articulation in achieved or realized. And of course there is necessarily a metaphysics underpinning the notion of articulation as applied in the structural approach to Marxist theory. If we want to talk about cause and effect we are obliged to accept that there cannot be agentless causes which give rise to tangible or observable effects. An effect is caused by something, and that some is the cause which has to exist as an embodiment of agencies which have the capacity act on something. Similarly, we can conceive of power or conceptualize power independently of its agency. In the physical and natural sciences power is defined as the rate of doing work, and as a rate it involves the transfer of energy per unit time, and energy is conceptualized as the capacity to do 'useful' work on something or in some process. Power involves a relationship between two things, a cause and an effect, in process were useful work is done and forces are exerted. Foucault is the philosopher of power or more precisely the philosopher of the relationship between power and knowledge. It obvious that the conditions which make knowledge possible is cognitive power, which means the power to perceive that something happens to be the case, that is. To be the case in terms of a state of affairs or in terms of the relation between one thing and another thing. So the relation between knowledge and power, in the form of cognitive power, can be construed as the capacity or ability to perceive the true relationship between things or states of affairs or facts. The relation between knowledge and power can be construed in terms of the cognitive power or ability or capacity to perceive and in turn to establish the rational relationship or links or connection or correlations between ideas. The meaning of power in this instance is linked to the ability or capacity to exercise agency in the form of thinking about things.

Important consideration: Marx lumps together as one the state, market and economics. And assumes that socialization of the means of production will magically bring into effect the cessation of working class exploitation, oppression and repression without realizing that the socialization of the means of production does not automatically in itself abolish social stratification and hierarchies of social domination. Consequently nothing changes. Political power remains in the hands of an elite bureaucratic ruling class and workers remain alienated and oppressed. For most anarchists this is precisely what needs to be addressed in revolutionary praxis. Revolution requires the abolishment of the Oligarchy in all of its possible embodiments, especially those based on rule by a bureaucratic hierarchy. This kind of Oligarchic rule, which has become stereotypical of communist social formations, conflates the mediation of proletarian representation and rule through a state apparatus in the form of a bureaucratized hierarchy with vanguardism and democratic centralism. Nothing changes, the workers remain disempowered, and dispossessed of any meaningful agency, deprived of individual autonomy, freedom and sovereignty, in other words the workers remain exploited, dehumanized, alienated, oppressed and repressed.

Practice humanity and care for others at all times. Do not curse any other Israelite. 'I am the Lord your God, and I command you not to make fun of the deaf or to cause a blind person to stumble'.

And each day 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. 34. Not to rebuild it as a city—Deuteronomy 13:17

35

Attempts to construct a 'scientific' Marxist theory of modes of production, and the corresponding social formations and the transitional dynamics between modes of production, have been made by theoreticians such as Hindess and Hirst, and representatives of the structuralist school of Marxist theoreticians such as Althusser, Balibar and Poulantzas. And going back to the idea of articulation I can quote Hindess and Hirst from memory: 'A mode of production is an articulated combination of relations and forces of production structured by the dominance relations of production. The relations of production define a specific mode of appropriation of surplus-labour and the specific form of social distribution of the means of production corresponding to that mode of appropriation of surplus-labour'. The use and understanding of the word 'articulated' in the conceptualization of any mode of production is critical. A mode of production exists by virtue of the articulated relationship between the forces of production and the social relations of production. And the precise nature of this relation from a historical perspective is of interest especially with regard the distribution of power in terms of the hierarchicalization of social dominance in societies. The capitalist mode of production is based on a system of hierarchicalized or stratified or unequal social relations which mediate through the 'operation of markets' the sale of labour power, the production commodities and the circulation of commodities. The hierarchicalized system of social relations within a capitalist mode of production is articulated or enforced by means of an interconnecting network of financial, legal-political and cultural institutions. And it is by virtue of these institutions that the relations of production are organized, controlled, maintained and perpetuated. In other words the system of institutions acting in coordination and cooperatively constitute the instruments or apparatuses or machinery for the articulation of the forces of production in a manner or fashion which ensures the generation of profits and the private accumulation of profits. And of course the idea of the hierarchicalization of the social relations of dominance is central and relevant to the analysis of any given mode of production and that idea is realized concretely or materialized in the perpetual existence of the Oligarchy and the existence of the Oligarchy has been co-extensive or ubiquitous within all modes of production though all space and time of recorded human history over the past 10 000 or so years, because all modes of production so far have not been based on concrete egalitarian relations. In fact, with respect to the ruling elite under both capitalism and existing socialism they have been consistently antagonistic to egalitarianism and anarchism. This is the shared failure of both capitalism and existing socialism. The very idea of a mode of production corresponds to a social arrangement and social formations which had emerged only after the transition from Palaeolithic sociality to Neolithic forms of sociality. This emergence was preceded by hundreds of thousands of years during which time human existence and human sociality was not dependent on modes of production as has been generally conceived in Marxist theory. Human sociality with its strong behavioural, psychological and emotional re-enforcement of egalitarianism evolved as a successful adaptation to a hunter-gather mode of existence. This means that there existed strong moral 'overtones' of fairness in 'primitive' forms of human sociality. I think there are justifiable grounds in evolutionary and behavioural biology to give substance to the idea of human nature. Also in Darwin's treatment of the evolution of animal and human emotions I think we are correct in accepting that there exists an innate moral dimension to the behaviour, sociology and psychology of animals and humans which in the case of humans has had significant adaptive value. It is in the nature of the Oligarchy to have a ruling elite. As revolutionary Marxist theories, the various forms and revisions and re-interpretations of a structural Marxism usually fail due to a very simple oversight. The theories are blind to the fact that someone rules the Oligarchy. The rule of the Oligarchy is always embodied in the person of a ruler, who exists as an identifiable individual, and who therefore exists as a historical person. The differences between the various rulers, who have existed as identifiable historical persons, is one of degree and not of kind. For example, Hitler and Stalin as rulers of Oligarchies were species which belonged to the same genus. In this sense they were of the same kind, in fact it does not matter that one was a fascist and the other claimed to be a communist. Oligarchies are different only in degree along a continuum of different structural and functional forms of totalitarianism. But generically or structurally-functionally as species of the genus Leviathan they belong to the same in kind. They are the same kind of social systems, that is, they are representative or expressions of social systems which are paradigmatically characterised as systems in which one man rules by violence with absolute impunity over the disempowered masses. They are of the same kind, they belong to the same genus, irrespective of how we characterise their particular or idiosyncratic modes of production. Its defining principle is the Oligarchy. The entire history of western civilization has been the history of the Oligarchy. The twentieth century history of the so-called communist block has been the history of the Oligarchy. The entire history of what we refer to as the Orient has been the history of the Oligarchy including the Islamic civilizations. The Islamic caliphate is an exemplary model of the Oligarchy ruled by one man, the caliph. All civilizations are catastrophic representations or expressions of one or other form of the ubiquitous Oligarchy.

Historically the Oligarchy has always been founded on an unresolvable political paradox in which the realm of the political and the realm of politics are in perpetual conflict over irreconcilable interests with respect to resource allocation, power distribution, individual autonomy, freedom, human rights, civic virtue, popular sovereignty, authority, consent and the common good. In essence the political always concerns the fulfilment of the common good through a life based on civic virtue. By contrast politics always involves individuals engaged in a perpetual contest and struggle for political power against each other for the sake of individual self-interest and never for the common good. The idea of emancipatory politics is a contradiction. Politics refers to the pursuit and use of power for the advancement of individualized interests whereas the political concerns the communal interest in securing the common good. I prefer to define Paul Ricoeur's paradox of the political in the following terms: the political defined as the common good cannot be realized through politics. Politics betrays the political. The political involves the cooperation between equals for the sake of the common good whereas politics involves the struggle between rivals for the acquisition, possession and use of power for advancement of self-interest. Politics creates to the Oligarchy and the Oligarchy depends on politics for its continued existence. The Oligarchy will disappear with the ending of politics. Politics is based on the strategic action informed by the rationality of calculation with makes politics a supremely Jewish phenomenon. Politics involve the rational reckoning with prospects, probabilities and the weighing up of possible consequences. Politics involves calculation. The state as an institution exists only virtue of politics. Politics creates the state as a vehicle, instrument and apparatus of power.

The Oligarchy is essentially based on the myth of the social contract, and the social contract as functions as the Noble Lie in the service and legitimation of politics. It also functions within an ideology of consent in the service and legitimation of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy creates the ideology that it rules by consent and the will of the polity. Betrayal of the polity or the political depends on consent. Even in the most despotic forms of the Oligarchy the ruling elites justify their legitimacy and right as rulers by claiming that they rule on behalf and in the interests of the masses which constitute the polity. The sovereignty in terms the actual existence of community of equals under the rule of all forms of the Oligarchy is an illusion. The state which can only exist in the form of an Oligarchy can never be what it claims to be. The Oligarchy state can only exist as a body of lies and untruth. From this perspective the Oligarchy exists as a perpetual source of evil.

'Do not give occasion to the simple-minded to stumble on the road'.

And each day 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. 35. Not to derive benefit from it—Deuteronomy 13:18

36

Confession usually takes place in the context of a dialogue in which the inaccessible private self of the interlocutor, becomes transformed into a subject, in this transformation and metamorphosis the invisible mysterious self invariably endeavours to create a dualism or dichotomy, between the unobservable invisible self with its inaccessible interiority and the public subject by means of a creative invention or fabrication or by a covering up. The self, as pure interiority, is private and inaccessible, the self is what it is like to be me, what it feels like to be me, this is the unreachable core of the self. The subject is the person or entity that is publically accessible and observable as a psychological and social phenomenon. In this sense the subject exists as a fiction or as a 'not me'. The subject as a social construct exists as an uncontrollable fabrication of the publically visible embodied self, which is always a manifestation of the alienated self, a self with which we cannot identify as being truly me, it remains a subject, a social projection, in the form of the 'not me', as a something which is not identical to me, something which exists publically outside and independent of myself or my interior selfhood, which is the publically inaccessible consciousness of the Descartian 'I think'. In various situations we often have this uncanny experience of becoming a subject in the presence others, as an exteriorization of myself, an alienation of myself, which we are all able to recognize as the 'not me'. We are all plagued by this alienation or self-estrangement, which is instantiated in the experience of this dichotomy or dualism or divided self, which coincides with externalized social construction of our identity in the presence of others. We became aware of this externalization and consequent objectification of ourselves as subjects over which we have no control when we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of others. This would be an example of an identity-difference dualism that has a schizophrenic effect on us. Under the gaze of others in the public social space over which we can exert very little control, we exist for others as a parody, as a representation of a representation, and in this way we become inadvertently fictionalized, we become the subject of a collective fiction, a fiction which others share as they form their own intersubjective discursive narrative of who we are to them. And so we are trapped into living fictional lives. It is through this fictionalization of ourselves by others that we are forced into experiencing our own self-estrangement. Being alone we find ourselves in the silence of our thoughts.

'Rebuke sinner a sinner when it becomes necessary'.

And each day 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. 36. Not to missionize an individual to idol worship—Deuteronomy 13:12

37

The subject as opposed to the interiorized self becomes an incarnate being, a public accessible historical fact, by force of circumstance outside of its control. The subject, as opposed to the self becomes by virtue of its incarnation enmeshed, entangled and entrapped in the web of the other and in the web of a multitude of externalities all of which possess dispositional powers which cause effects. We become objectified. The self becomes an incarnate subject by virtue of a self-emptying act. As a result of this experience the person as an incarnate being experiences a loss of selfhood in the process of public objectification, our sense of self is lost and in its place we become a living fiction. The subject existing as a fiction, as a parody, can also destabilize the fiction, creating the parabolic dissonance by becoming the parable, thereby challenging the ingrained perceptions that others share in their social construction of the fictionalized subject. Or else, the person experiences the reality of itself as a subject split off or divorced from the secret and hidden self, which is the real person, the real me, the person which it believes to be its own true being as the concrete or genuine self, the entity which fully encapsulates what it is actually like to be me, that is, what it feels like to be really me. Now instead of being its real self, the life of a person becomes externalized in the form of a visible subject for others in a process of objectification, in a process of externalization, in a process with involves becoming enmeshed or entangled in that sticky clinging web of relationships, which coincides with being embedded in situations, or with being caught up in all kinds of states of affairs, in which we become factualized as a concrete being existing within an actual material and physical world, subject to the material conditions which determine the nature of our existence, material conditions which are not of one's own making or choice, and so on and so forth. In the form of the visible subject its life becomes a spectacle or a masquerade. The self or the person sees the subject that it has become through the eyes of the other, or in other words through the mirror of the gaze of others, and the inaccessible invisible self now trapped in the gaze of the other as the subject, experiences a deep alienation in the form of its own self-estrangement. This consciousness or sense of self-estrangement is the same as not knowing who one really is, especially when the self finds itself in the presence of others. So what do we confess or what can be truthfully confessed regarding ourselves. Is our confession of who we are a fictionalization in the form of the creation of a subject split off from one's real self, which is a splitting off of the self as subject, from the self as I, as in the I am who I am.

The Unity of the Queer Soul in relation to Parody, Imitation, Expressivity, Performativity and Self-Misrepresentation.

How can we avoid using Aristotelian terminology, and here I am thinking of substance and essence in particular. The idea of substance and essence is of particular relevance in relation to the unity of the Queer Soul of the Lesbian. The unity of the Queer Soul of the lesbian concerns the issue of self-sameness and the underlying thing or principle of existing in this state of self-sameness. What is the internal principle underlying the unity of the lesbian soul which allows the lesbian soul to remain one with its self or same as itself even while experiencing conflict arising from parody, imitation, expressivity, performativity and self-misrepresentation? Maybe there is no conflict, maybe the internal principle underlying the unity of the lesbian soul is actually parody, imitation and self-misrepresentation. Essence involves the idea of 'what it is to be' something or someone, where being means in the form of a unity based on some underlying principle of intelligibility. My intelligibility as a lesbian soul rests on or is based on the peculiar kind of queer expressivity and performativity of who I am as realized in parody, imitation and misrepresentation. This is my internal principle of unity and self-sameness. The internal principle of unity and self-sameness is being not what I appear to be. Appearing to be heterosexual but being lesbian. Appearing to be Jewish but being a Hellenic Gentile in my soul.

It is the conflicts within the soul which suggests that the soul is divided into a plurality of parts rather than a unity according to Socrates observations in the Republic. Conflicts within the soul arise when the different parts of the soul are at war with each other. Conflicts arise between the parts only because they are connected in the sense that they belong to one individual. The different parts may have different compulsions, motivations, desires, appetites, needs or wants. This means that the different parts of the soul are able to pursue opposing or contradictory goals. The simultaneous pursuit of opposing goals, such as simultaneously wanting to go out and not to go out, violates the principle of non-contradiction. The soul whose parts are in conflict, because the parts are connected, also suggests that the soul is also a unity, that the soul is one, in the sense of a unified whole composed of different parts. If the parts were disconnected in the sense of not being part of a whole then there would not be conflict between the parts. Socrates in Plato's Republic is keenly aware that his division of the soul into a plurality of parts is problematic. It is especially problematic with regard to identity since identity of a person is based on the unity of the soul. How can a person be one person rather than a divided personality? The unity of the soul is a critical issue for Plato. A single person embodied or incarnated in one body can be torn apart by desires or compulsions which are in conflict with deep seated values or moral predispositions. In Plato's Republic the soul's unity is based on the idea of its wholeness or it being a composite entity. In order for the soul to be a unity in terms of wholeness of parts or as a composite of parts it must be subject to some underlying internal principle of unity in which the parts are held together 'holistically'.

Going back to who I am, I am the only one who is able to experience what it is like to be me. And if I try to confess who I am, I inevitably create a fictionalized subject. So it is impossible for me to make a full confession for the simple reason that I cannot make it possible for anyone else to experience what it is like to be me. Language fails to express what it is like to be me in the most intimate inner experience of my own selfhood. This not the only occasion in which language fails to communicate the nature of an experience. Language consistently fails to achieve representation or expression. It fails constantly to achieve in words, the meaningful fullness of what I wish to express. How do we express our feelings, especially regarding what an experience feels like? The moment we attempt to use words to give verbal expression to an experience we are immediately at a loss in our search to find the right words which will have the power to convey the fullness of meaning. And what we do eventually manage to convey is always fiction. Fiction represents the failure to convey the fullness of meaning that is embodied in an experience of something. So ultimately we always fall short in conveying the fullness of meaning when it is our earnest wish to say something about something to someone. In this sense fiction is always a representation of a representation. And as such it fails to represent what it wishes to express. We may be fully entitled to conclude that the experience of something can be beyond verbalization. Yet we have full knowledge and certainty of what it means to experience something, but more often than not words fail to convey what we want them to communicate. Not all knowledge of experiences or thoughts or states of affairs or things can be represented or expressed in a fully verbalized or even textualized form. So how do we make a full confession of the truth? How do we confess our innermost feelings and thoughts? There are no words. Words fail. Words or language cannot exhaust the fullness of meaning. Language fails when needed the most. Language fails to convey fully and transparently the contents of the mind, it fails to express or convey fully the multi-dimensional experiences of insight, recognition, meaningfulness, understanding and intelligence, it also fails to represent the fullness of our cognitive powers. This is one of the main reasons for why the belief in the absence of mind and intelligence in animals is based on the false premise that mind and intelligence can only exist by virtue of language (langue) and the capacity for public textualization made possible through the performance of speech (parole) and writing (also parole), and therefore the absence of language in animals is falsely taken as evidence for the absence of mind and intelligence. Animals don't need to possess a capacity for language into order to have intelligence or to possess a mind or to be capable of having knowledge and cognitive powers. Going back to the language of confession and the sentiments of confession let's see what can be said about the act or the performance of confession. For all the above reasons, based on the short-comings of language, our confessions are fictions which we create for the convenience of context and situation. So how do we confess?

Helping the animal and your neighbour: 'If a donkey is overloaded and falls down, you must do what you can to help, even if it belongs to someone who doesn't like you'.

And each day 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. 37. Not to love the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9

38

In this literary journal, I want to bare my soul and make the fullest of confessions without desiring or seeking any kind of absolution. I am not a stranger to confession, especially in the juridical experience of having made a confession that was supposedly legally binding in the form of a signed affidavit. I have confessed all the deeds that I have supposedly committed in the furtherance of the cause of Communism in a plea bargain for a lesser sentence. I confessed my liability, and in doing this they would sentence me according to the weight of my liability minus the discount that I would have earned for the full truthful confession of all my deeds. So of course my confession was not rewarded with any kind of absolution in the form of unmerited favour or grace of the judge, the law or the court. I eventually realized the devious wisdom of my brother's Malcolm's advice. Given this foreknowledge he knew that the confession of my deeds would be on record and my deeds would eventually expiate me and would earn me atonement, merit, favour and grace, not in the here and now of apartheid South Africa, but in the future post-apartheid South Africa. So I would finally, in the fullness of time be saved by my confession, by my own works, the works of a Communist, and my judge, and the law and the courts would be shown up as vehicles and instruments for the perpetration of evil against humanity. I would benefit from the great historical reversal of political fortunes that would be visited upon Afrikaner Nationalism and the whites in general, and as in the words of the song of Mary, in the Magnificat, which I recited so solemnly as a school girl during Evening Song, God's reversal of power will overturn the Oligarchy. In the fullness of time the words of the Magnificat would become my reality. Ironically the singing of the Magnificat had been banned several times in history by the ruling political powers of the day who represented the Oligarchy.

'Oxen and donkeys that carry heavy loads can stumble and fall, and be unable to get up by themselves. So as you walk along the road, help anyone who is trying to get an ox or donkey back on its feet'.

And each day 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. 38. Not to cease hating the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9

39

Ironically it was through the singing of the Magnificat that my political awakening and eventual radicalization took place while I was still a school girl at Potchefstroom Girl's High. After high school I become a lapsed Anglican. But I have remained a closet Christian in spite of being a Communist. While doing my PhD at the University of Cape Town (UCT) I joined the stop conscription campaign. It was during that time that I first became acquainted with South American liberation theology in a series of seminars organized by some radical Catholic students. There was also the Rosa Luxembourg study group that I joined which in terms of membership overlapped with the radical Catholics. I was invited to an anti-conscription campaign meeting that an Anglican priest had convened at his parent's home. He stayed on the property, living in a cottage which had a large thatched roofed upstairs loft that one had to access via a ladder through a trap door in the loft's floor. Just before breaking for lunch some female students belonging to the radical Catholic group invited the other attendees to go skinny dipping in the swimming pool. I accepted the invitation. We peeled off our T-shirts and shorts or jeans or our dresses and we dived naked into the pool. None of the guys joined us. It was just us girls frolicking in the pool. While in the pool one of girls asked if I would be interested in coming to a Marxist study group that night. We became lovers and it was through her that I was eventually recruited into the underground South African Communist Party.

The memory of that day in the pool became fixed in my mind as one of those special snap shot memories filled with blue skies, hot sun, green lawns, blue swimming pool and images of our frolicking, splashing and flirting. My girlfriend soon to be was the exquisitely beautiful and convent school educated, Samantha MacGuire, who had done a BA majoring in philosophy, politics and economics and was now doing a PhD in politics. I learnt that she had relatives who had a long historical association with the Irish Republic Party. The home with its beautiful swimming pool was set in a magnificent garden with huge trees. It was located in the elite and luxurious suburb of Constantia which contrasted so starkly with our socialist ideals.

As part of the Party work that I shared with Samantha I became involved in an adult education programme in the informal settle of Crossroads. We were in the same cell and travelled to Crossroads in my car.

'Do not leave a beast that has fallen down beneath its burden unaided. Help the animal to get back onto its feet, and replace the burden on its back even if it is you neighbours beast'.

And each day 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. 39. Not to save the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9

40

Notebook writing or journal writings, it does not matter, I am using the terms notebook and journal interchangeably. I am writing notes. I am now writing note No. 40 which is a journal entry. It is an entry I have made in a spiral bound notebook, which I assume that my brother had bought with his own money from the CNA. After my interrogation and confession he made a brief visit to my cell and asked I had any pressing requests or needs. It was then that I asked for writing materials. It was a privilege that could condoned so long as the notebooks were 'handed in' once they had become filled with notes. They would become the property of the state. If the state of the Republic of South Africa had become my addressee, so let it be, I will address my writing to Leviathan. I was now past caring about anything, I just wanted to have something to do and writing was the best option I had for passing the time. I sometimes refer to my notes as entries into my journal and sometimes as notes I have made in my notebook. I have numbered the notes in numerical order because I gave up recording the dates for the notebook entries after I had lost track of time. I was no longer sure of the date or day of the week. I could not tell you whether it was Monday or Sunday. I had stopped counting the days. Every day was the same as ever other day.

My notebook writing seems to be a disorganized jumble of musings. How am I going to make sense of these notebook writings? My mind has no order, it jumps from one thing to another. How I am going to make sense of the flow of my own consciousness? Is there any sense to be made or discovered or do I have to impose some kind of sense or coherence or plot on these notebook writings?

I am confronted with the question: Why have only certain memories become fixed in my mind even though on all accounts they seemed to be insignificant snapshots taken at random intervals during the passage of my lived experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling? Taken together the collection of snapshots form a collage which the viewer can interpret in any way they like. Each memory fixed as snapshot of a life lived may be vivid or grainy but taken together they constitute the unfolding of a life, a narrative which the viewer can assemble in any way they wish.

So in a real sense, as I have already hinted, I have become, unavoidably, my own creation, my own fictional character. Even the frozen moments trapped in the photographs, even though materially imprinted on the negatives, and then on the actual photographic plates they have become with the passing of time the scenes of fictions, fictions because now the images can only exist as something disconnected and disembodied in the eye of the viewer. They exist as scenes with no memory attached to them, unrooted images dislocated in time and space, images which have lost all intrinsic, innate or immanent significance or meaning. Detached from the web of remembered life they stare back mutely. I stare at Ouma Vollenhoven the real or authentic narrative of her is a dark secret, she could be any person, any character the viewer may wish to invent.

Now the 'I', the person, who I am, who happens to also be the subject of these journal writings, this 'I' is someone who I have invented, and it is in this sense that I am my own invention. I am the only witness of the private life which I have lived in a private world to which only I have had access to. You have to take my word for the veracity of what I am about to write about myself and the experiences of my private life world. I would have a succeeded in this exercise of writing 'metafiction' if by some miracle of writing you the reader could feel what it was like to be me, that is, whoever I am. You will feel what it is like to be someone else, if not me, then the fictional character that emerges from the pages of this book in your own imagination. What stops you from being me, dear reader? I remember as teenagers sitting in circle before hockey practice talking about who we would like to be if we were given the chance to be anyone we liked or admired. When my turn came I struggled to image who I would like to be. In the end too much gaiety and laughter I said that would like to be me. I could not image not being me.

What I am saying cannot be repeated enough times.

Keeping notebooks and writing down everything that I happened to observe or notice or think about has been what I have done my whole life as an evolutionary biologist and behavioural ecologist. My field notes became the raw data for scientific manuscripts which were published in reputable peer reviewed scientific journals. So in many ways my engagement with writing and reflecting on what I have already written and what I thought about is actually an extension of my work as an academic. This is who I am. Writing is my work. As an exercise it is an activity which has been my profession for quite some time. Observing, thinking, and writing are what I have been doing for most of my life as an academic, as a Professor of Zoology. Now I have also been presented with the opportunity in which I had an abundance of time, time that was free of all external distractions, free to engage in self-observation and self-reflection. Self-observation through a process of undisturbed self-awareness. Left with nothing else to preoccupy myself with, I engaged in that deathbed or terminal illness kind of self-conscious reflection or mindful self-reflection on my own life. I reflected on the thoughts that I began to have about myself. I reflected on what I could remember about the life I have lived. I thought about who I was. I wondered who I was. At times I wondered if I was real and not self-invented. Like a person dying of cancer I felt that I no future. I had a friend who was diagnosed with cancer. She underwent pre-operative chemotherapy and then again post-operative chemotherapy. Through the long sleepless nights lying in the dimly lit private ward she said that the memories of her life and friends played itself out like a movie in her mind. The prognosis was not good. The day before she died I visited her. She was still lucid when she greeted me with the words while smiling weakly: 'The party is over'. She reached out her hand. While I held her hand she asked if we could pray the 'Hail Mary' together. I started to choke with emotion as we ended with the words: 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.'

He washed my sins away. My Lord.

'Do not ill-treat widows or orphans. If you do, they will beg for my help, and I will come to their rescue. In fact, I will get so angry that I will kill your men and make widows of your wives and orphans of your children'.

And each day 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. 40. Not to say anything in his defence—Deuteronomy 13:9

41

Interlude:

To repeat, my situation had changed dramatically, as an awaiting trial prisoner I became involved in the compulsive recording in notebooks of anything which happened to enter my mind. In the absence of any kind of disturbance or distractions I began to write down everything which I happened to find myself thinking about or recollecting or remembering, no matter how insignificant it might have seemed at that specific moment. If any thought entered my mind I simply wrote it down.

I write down what I am able to recall or remember or recollect. Without imagination or eikasia there can be no recollection or anamnesis. Yes anamnesis, as in recollection or remembering, or even anamnesis as in a remembrance of something, where the meaning or significance of remembrance lights up the idea of reminiscence or memorial, as in the memorial sacrifice represented in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Plato writes about a recollection or anamnesis in his 'Meno' and 'Phaedo'. It is not hard to see that imagination is not only the faculty for anamnesis but also for eikasia which also plays a role in mneme, where mneme is the name given to the persisting effects of a memory or of an experience. And Mneme is also the name given to one of the original three muses. She is the muse of memory. And memory or recollection is made manifest or actual or present in language and writing, which happens also to be the work of the muse. The muse is the agent who makes present or brings to presence the persisting effects of a memory or an experience.

I agree that by recollecting I am learning something. In fact I am learning quite a lot and that is why I seem to be all over the place with my writing. And as a result I am trying to say many things all at once. Jumping to something else before finishing what I have started with. And I write day and night, because where I am there is no night, the light never stops burning, it shines throughout the night. I find myself writing something about something. Jumping from one thing to the next until overcome with sleepiness and I drift off, not even aware that I have fallen asleep, and the pen falls from my hand. And I dream that I am writing. And when I am writing I am not sure whether I am dreaming. In Plato's Republic there are different ways to be engaged in thought or to be in various states of awareness. I suppose we can say that the thoughts we have are determined by the nature of our different states of awareness or different states of consciousness. In Plato's Republic our different states of awareness could be likened to the different states of our souls. Socrates would have us believe that it is our capacity for imagination which makes our souls truly human compared to animals. I am beginning to believe that it is my restless imagination which has become my only means of survival. I remind myself of this. How else will I be able to survive my physical confinement? There is nothing to see in the universe of my confinement except the images that inhabit my mind. I no longer dwell in the world of the visible. In a manner of speaking my sight does not allow me see anything other than the shadows that I sometimes playfully create by putting my body between the light and the wall. I think often of Plato's allegory of the cave and the divided line. Unlike Plato's prisoners chained up in the bottom cavern of the dark cave I have εἰκασία (eikasia) which is my imagination. But dint of my imagination I am able to inhabit the non-visible world of the intelligible, and this is in spite of my confinement, and it has been made possible only through my imaginative recollections. Recollections of what I have experienced in life and what I have read and learnt. Διανόια – thinking as separating and relating. Apart from the light bulb, the foam mattress on the floor, the two blankets, the toilet bowl, small towel, soap, tooth paste, tooth brush, pen, notebook, enamel mug, enamel plate and spoon, I have no perception of visible things. But sight represents more than mere vision, such as the seeing or perceiving of the visible. Sight also means seeing beyond the purely visible or sensible to the Intelligible or the Intelligibility which underlies all that is sensible or visible to the senses. In the words of Plato the Intelligible embodies the Good. The Intelligible is also what is true and what is knowable. If I say that truth supervenes on being what do we really mean by this? This is the conclusion which we ineluctably come to from reading Plato. And we can read the meaning of being differently from Heidegger's peculiar reading, if we read the meaning of being in a truly Hellenic and Hebraic fashion. For the sake of truth and intelligibility, we are obliged to contest Heidegger's reading, interpretation, commentary and exposition of the meaning of being. In fact we are obliged to contest the entire Heideggerian project regarding the question of the meaning of being, by returning to our Hellenic and Hebraic roots. There is no better place to start with this contestation than with the reading of the fragments of Heraclitus' on the flowing river and the reading of Plato's Republic. And there is no better path to take in the search for the meaning of being than to start with Plato's allegories, especially the allegory of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave. Contrary to Heidegger the Greeks did have a very clear idea regarding the meaning of being.

The Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave:

In Plato's Republic (Chapters 6 and 7) regarding the relationship between the simile of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave, in the traditional view the Divided Line and the Cave are parallel similes/allegories. The allegory of the Cave represents the education of the soul with regard to the form of the Good. The allegory of the Divided Line or Line represents the relationship of the four states of the soul with regard ultimately to the knowledge of the Good. The Line consists of the following entities or elements: two domains, four states of mind or states of the soul, four kinds of objects, and two kinds of methods of thinking. The Line is first divided into two unequal segments. The two unequal main segments of the divide the Line represent: The domain of the visible world presided over by the sun (the smaller segment). The domain of the intelligible world presided over by the Good (the greater segment). The two segments Line representing the domain of the visible or sensible and the intelligible are further divided into two unequal segments. The Line is therefore divided into four segments, with each segment representing different degrees of clarity with respect to knowledge or truth regarding the nature of the Good.

And of course I thought about language and writing all the time. To express my ideas or thoughts and also my recollections verbally in writing became an obsession, a burning passion. Why was writing so important? The pages of the notebook became filled with text, the text that you are reading. I was in fact writing for a reader. But I was also plagued by the question: 'Who was going to read this?' If there was not going to be a reader, then why write? The short answer is that there is going to be at least one reader, and that would be me. I will read what I have written. There will of course be a distance between the performance of writing and the performance of reading. And in all likelihood a lot would have been lost in the distance that separated the writing from the reading. So it is evitable that I will read what I have written with new eyes. It will be like looking at myself in the mirror and asking: is this really me?

'Do not reap the entire field'. When you harvest your grain, always leave some of it standing along the edges of your fields and don't pick up what falls to the ground. Don't strip your grapevines clear or gather the grapes that fall off the vines. Leave them for the poor and for those foreigners who live among you. I am the Lord your God'.

And each day 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. 41. Not to refrain from incriminating him—Deuteronomy 13:9.

42

Can we really externalize and make public what is 'inside our heads', such as our private thoughts and private feelings by committing our thoughts, feelings, mental images, and ideas to writing or speech. Given that our mental life is inaccessibly private, can we make it transparently public and accessible to the reader by means of the words which we have committed to writing. Can the reader actually experience my private world, my private mental life or my private feelings through the reading of the words which I have written down? Can the reader see the world through my eyes or experience the world as I experience it, simply by reading what I have written? Can the reader become me? Can the reader or hearer really share our internal experiences when we describe them in the medium of speech or writing? Or does the act of writing always result in the creation of fiction no matter what. Does the act of speaking or writing create a distance between what is inside our heads and what has become public in the form of speech and writing? If this is the case then what we call the Totality is not only beyond thought it is beyond communication and Hegel's Mind will never attain a knowledge of the Totality. It means that there exists an unbridgeable abyss between what is actually felt or thought in our minds and what we can know publically through intersubjective communication. A good example is the private experience of pain. No one can feel my pain. No one can feel my emotions. No one can feel my joy. We can see but we cannot feel. But many times we cannot see what other people are feeling. We search their faces for signs of what may be going on in their brains, minds, thoughts, emotions and consciousness. We try to read their minds from the expressions on their faces. We listen to their words and see the expressions on their faces and we feel empathy and compassion. And we experience the grip of moral conscience and we reach out to the other in meaningful and practical acts of solidarity. We try to comfort the Other. We see this phenomena in animals as well. Darwin wrote about the expression of emotions in animals.

We can see that someone is sad. We can see that someone is in pain, especially when they wince in agony or feel the intense sharpness of unbearable pain, the experience of that pain is vividly written in the contortions of their facial features. We can also see that someone is at peace. We see all the signs of tranquillity written on their face. We see the etched lines and shadows of tiredness. In this sense we can read minds, and we read emotions, without feeling what it is actually like for that person to be in that state of mind or emotional state which we can still clearly recognize, and which thereby enables us to experience feelings of empathy and concern. Mind reading is essential for showing empathy and for experiencing the pangs of our conscience. Without having a conscience, there can be no expressions or feelings of empathy. We can say, you look sad today. And the person will say, yes I feel sad. This is a simple act of mind reading through what is plainly visible in the demeanour of a person's face.

And each day 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. 42. Not to prophesize in the name of idolatry—Deuteronomy 18:20 (But the prophet who intentionally speaks a word in My name, which I did not command him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.)

43

When a notebook became filled with my rambling thoughts and random recollections, I was given a fresh notebook filled with blank pages. The notebook filled with my writings was always taken away. This explains the repetition in my writing. I could not always remember precisely what I had previously written and I would often find myself unable to continue with a specific train of thought that I had been developing. After a lapse resulting from a break in a train of thought, I would pick it up and develop the same thoughts afresh on the fresh pages of a new notebook. So I often found myself in a situation of being unable to go back to the old notebooks to cross reference what I had already said.

And each day 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. 43. Not to listen to a false prophet—Deuteronomy 13:4

44

To be perfectly honest while jotting down these notes, I must admit that the thought did cross my mind that if my story seemed be worth something, I might even decide to publish it, even possibly as a lark.

Interlude: So with this recurrent thought cropping up in my mind I have now decided to write this story which I have creatively distilled or edited from these rough handwritten notes scrawled down in my almost illegible handwriting.

As I have said, it was my desire to imbue this literary project with its own peculiar flavour. I have also discovered that writing fiction always involves nothing short of a dramatic performance. Writing is a performance if it has any pretensions to be literature. I have raised the bar high for myself. I have recklessly embarked on this venture, possibly because I am not in the right frame of mind to make a sober and rational assessment of the project that I have decided to engage myself in without any preparatory training for mastering the craft of authorship.

This is a paradoxical admission, as I have been an author for most of my working life. But not an author of fiction or of literature which has artistic pretensions. For me this kind of writing has been a process of self-discovery. Or self-invention. Maybe I am not discovering myself at all, maybe I am inventing or re-inventing myself in an exercise of artistic bricolage from the scraps of memories, information, knowledge and recollections that I have managed to dredge from the bottom of my brain. Who knows?

Anyway, if my story happens to gets published as a book, I won't really mind if the reader treats what I have written as a work of fiction. I leave it to the reader to imaginatively reconstruct or recreate a living flesh and blood character, possibly the actual character who has written these words, whoever that person maybe. In all likelihood the character will not be me as I see myself. If I had access to the mind of reader, I would probably be astonished with the reader's re-creation of who I am. It will certainly be someone else, someone who is foreign to me. It will be a stranger.

I have always wanted to be a writer in the convention sense, that is a writer of literary fiction, and with regard to this book or journal I would like it to be considered as my debut literary work as an author. I admit that I have been rambling on and on about what I trying to achieve. Maybe I am not sure what I am trying to do.

So having got all of that out of the way let me begin with my story, which I think is going to be some kind of novel or journalistic novel or novelistic diary, rather than something purely autobiographical. It has been my intention from the beginning for this writing exercise to be autobiographical, but I know that that will be an impossible task. It is going to turn out to be a work of fiction. I have tried to explain why this would inevitably be the case. Fictionalization if built into the performance of verbal expression whether in speech or writing. But the performance of expression with its inevitable verbal fictionalization of its content whether it be the medium of speech or writing also represents in the very moment of expressive performance the realization of an event or episode of revelation in which something is unveiled or unconcealed which was hidden before. Speaking, writing or reading represent different forms of expressive performance. Expressive performance is a process through which the textualization of meaning is realized. Textualization of meaning always involves saying something about something or hearing something about something or reading something about something. It is this saying or reading or hearing which constitutes the formation of the text or the creation of the text in other words. In the event of saying something about something an idea is expressed. The text expresses an idea about something. The ideas or meaning expressed in the content of the text is not reducible to the form or structure of language. To reiterate, the meaning or content or significance of the ideas expressed in the text are not reducible to the form or structure of the text or the form or structure of language. This all seems fairly obvious. The idea is the creation of the mind and the mind is not reducible to language. The form and structure of language is something which is finite and represents the tool kit for building the expressive text realized through the performative event of speaking or writing. While the basic tool kit of language and grammar is something finite, the breadth and depth of meaning, significance and reference expressed in the content of speech or writing has no boundary and in this sense speech and writing reaches out towards the infinite. The content of the infinite cannot be reduced to the form of the finite.

Mind and conscious precedes language. Language and linguistic capacity evolved as an adaption which made complex social relations possible in a manner that increased evolutionary fitness including reproductive fitness. Fitness in an evolutionary context represents how well an animal is adapted to the environment and this is reflected in its reproductive success. It does not take a great mental leap to see that linguistic capacity increased biological or evolutionary fitness to survive and reproduce under the prevailing environmental conditions. It made humans and their hominin relatives better adapted to the environment. Animals can have ideas even though they do not have language like humans have. An idea in the form of a mental image represents something or refers to something at the very least. It is by virtue of the capacity to form and entertain ideas as mental images in the mind that language became possible, not the other way round. The animal mind and its capacity to form mental images, ideas and have thoughts represents an emergence property of the brain. Mind is an emergent property. If we say that mind supervenes on the brain what is actually meant by this. Does it mean that mind is reducible to physical events occurring within the brain? In response to this question it could be argued that without the occurrence of certain physical events in the brain mind could not emergence or even exist. This is not the same as saying that the mind is the brain, which is what the statement that mind supervenes on the brain seems to be proposing. Workings of the physical brain consisting of neurons, axons, and dendrites brings the experience of having a mind into existence is not a simple task. What kind of molecular, biochemical, intracellular and cellular mechanisms all working together can bring a thought or mental picture or memory into existence? It is possible to dissect the brain into these various molecular, ultracellular and cellular components and describe in detail the structure and functioning of each component, however from this knowledge it is not possible to describe and explain how the brain as a complex electro-mechanical machine generates a mind. How does the brain as an electro-mechanical machine generate an entire world filled with space, shapes, sound, colour and motion in which we experience ourselves as being fully embedded as beings? And in our dreams we also discover ourselves moving about in exotic landscapes filled with space, shapes, things and events all of the which the brain has created while we lay fast asleep in our beds.

Given that God does exist, and if God is going to make Her self-revelation possible then that possibility, the possibility of God's self-revelation would necessarily have to be built into the fabric, workings or causality of the physical Universe, a Universe which in all likelihood would be a causally closed system. The possibility of God's revelation would exist as an immanent possibility in the form of an emergent revealing phenomenon within the physical Universe. The way that God becomes revealed has theological consequences. God's self-revelation does not depend on a contingent voluntaristic punctuating intervention into the physical Universe from without, because God has no within and no without to Her existence. She exists everywhere all at once. God's self-revelation would emerge from its place of hiddenness, which has always been visible in plain sight, within the physical Universe. There is no 'outside' versus 'inside', no external versus internal, and there is thus no boundary or barrier separating inside and outside or finite and infinite with regard to God's self-revelation. The possibility of God's self-revelation can emerge from 'within' as opposed to from 'the outside or from without' in a process of unveiling or unconcealing in which the eternal Logos, Idea or the Word is able to become finally manifest not to faith only but also to Reason. Reason is the condition of possibility for faith. Without reason faith cannot come into existence. The very possibility of revelation needs to take into account the nature of human subjectivity. The possibility of revelation depends on the nature of human subjectivity and it relation to the world, and to the whole of reality for that matter. The possibility of revelation depends not only on the nature of human subjectivity but also on the nature of reality. And what exactly is it about the nature of reality which make revelation possible to human subjectivity? And what would be the form and content of this revelation which becomes disclosed to human subjectivity in its cognitive encounters with reality. Something is realized in a revelatory encounter. What is it that is realized? In the form of the Bible we have inherited a literary tradition which has shaped our understanding on what has been taken to be the nature and content of revelation. Revelation in this tradition comes to us in the form of stories, such as stories about the patriarchs, stories about the Israelites, stories about the prophets and so on and so forth. These stories should not be taken literally at face value. However, in spite of the question marks on whether they represent actual historically rooted narratives based on actual events, they are still in some sense revelatory, they may be revelatory with regard to some kind of truth claim, a claim about something being the case with regard to something else or relative to something else. I suppose we could argue in the defence of the idea that in some sense all truth is revelatory and each individual claim to something being true or being the case is only true or revelatory by virtue of it being part of a system of truth. Hegel also proposed that truth could only be expressed in term of a system. Something is true by virtue of its being part of a Whole. Somehow it is true because the content of it claims acquires its truth-worthiness or truth-value only by virtue of how it is logically or rationally or meaningfully or poetically or analytically or theologically or ethically or metaphysically or philosophically or semiotically or even rhetorically integrated into the Whole or into the Totality in a way in which it also bears on the Absolute or the Ultimate. And it is revelatory from this perspective and not as something in itself in isolation from the Whole or the system. So taking a Hegelian approach we could argue that any truth whether it be philosophical or theological is true or has truth-value by virtue of its relationship to all the other claims made by the system, that is other claims which also have truth value. And what can be possibly be meant by something or some claim having 'truth-value'? Everything which contributes to the certainty or credibility of a claim about something being the case contributes to its truth-value where truth-value is measured in terms of the strength of the claim, in terms of its support, in terms of its substantiation or justification, in terms of its indubitability, in terms of its rationality, or even in terms of its intelligibility or meaningfulness. Truth in this sense is multi-dimensional. Truth-value of any claim could also be weighed in terms of the rationality or intelligibility or meaningfulness of its claim by virtue of its relationship to the whole system of Truth. And it's by virtue of this that a particular truth claim acquires it status as being rational or intelligible or meaningful or revelatory. So the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are indeed true in a 'real sense' or even in a 'revelatory sense', and are indeed both true and revelatory by virtue of the stories being shown to be integral or part of or embraced within a totalizing system of truths, a multidimensional system of truths which embraces all claims to truth in an all embracing Totality of Truth or the Absolute, which represents the realization of Reason or the Idea of Reason or the Idea of Mind.

And each day 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. 44. Not to prophesize falsely in the name of God—Deuteronomy 18:20

45

Anyway let me get back to my story and let's start from the beginning. I will try and introduce myself.

My name is Hannah Petronella Hendrina Wilhelmina Zeeman. I am no longer ashamed of my name. I am no longer uncomfortable with the fact that my family became Anglicized Afrikaners. My great grandfather died fighting in the anti-colonial Anglo Boer War against the British. He died in Ladysmith. I am also a direct descendent of a Mr Ambroos Zeeman who settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1661. He was a slave trader connected with the Dutch East India Company or Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie which was founded by the Dutch in 1602.

I am one of those dark toned South Africans who have been accepted as being a white. I am also one of those South Africans who have never been fully Afrikaans or fully English. So I grew up living in the interstitial spaces of two languages, two cultures and two white ethnicities, while never been fully at home in either language or culture or ethnic group. Even though I have grown up as a white South African, I have become one of those white South Africans, an umlungu as they call us, without really having a mother tongue or an unambiguous sense of ethnic identity or even racial identity. By sheer contingency and not by choice I have become predominantly English speaking. So in a real sense English has become my adopted language. In South Africa, like many Indians, Coloureds, Whites and now also many Blacks, I have also become 'English' without having any intimate or special kind of ancestral or cultural connection to England. My perception of England, an island which I visited on a number occasions, has been shaped and coloured more by the books that I have read than by my visits to the UK. England never felt like home in any sense of the word. I felt more foreign in England than in Spain or France or Holland. Outside of Africa I felt most at home in France, a country that I have had the opportunity to visit regularly. I do not feel European and I do not feel in any connection with Europe. Except for Africa I am a foreigner everywhere in the world.

I am not really English nor do I wish to be English. Maybe English speakers outnumber the English. English as a world language belongs to anyone who cares enough about the language to claim it as their own. English knows no nationality, race, colour, creed, country, culture and ethnicity. English as a language is at home in the world no matter where that home happens to be. English has colonized my mind. English is a language which assimilates foreign words and concepts. It is a language which has colonized the minds of natives and aboriginals filling their minds with words that embody foreign concepts and meanings which cannot be decolonized. So I reconciled myself to speaking English as my language. I don't really know why I am expressing these thoughts about English.

In South Africa I am English because I speak mainly English and of course I have written these notes which now seems to becoming a memoir in English. Well it is not really a memoir. Already I am drifting from my project of writing pure fiction to the writing of a memoir. My life experiences are overwhelming my writing. Everything I have experienced is overtaking, occupying and filling the content of my writing. My mind is scrambling like mad to find words to express the recollections of my experiences. But the words are not up to the task. They do not have the power to express the full flavour, texture, feeling, and colour of my life experiences.

And each day 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. 45. Not to be afraid of killing the false prophet—Deuteronomy 18:22

46

I have discovered that my memory is fragmentary. And so consequently my writing is fragmentary. It is composed of fragments, often disconnected fragments. It is pointless trying to order the fragments into any coherent composition that will function as some kind of self-portraiture of my life. No portrait can capture a lived life in all its complexity and ambiguities. So what we have here are fragments of a life. It will be your task to re-construct the picture, maybe you will see the full picture.

So dear reader I am giving up on my initial project. It is impossible to write a real memoir. It is impossible to write in words what it is like to be me. Therefore, you may treat these writings as pure fiction if you wish or as the story of my life filtered through the medium of words. It does not matter really anymore, whatever your choice I will not hold it against you.

And each day 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. 46. Not to swear in the name of an idol—Exodus 23:13

47

And I don't presume that these notes are ever going to be a literary work or anything like Gramsci's prison notes or even like the notes which Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote while in prison. These notes are fragmentary records of events that have happened in my life. But they are hardly a record of my life. As a behavioural ecologist and evolutionary biologist I know what it means to record the events that constitute the natural history or life history of an animal. Do I have a natural history? Good question. What is the difference between a natural history and history? Something to explore. History is a reconstruction, a story, a particular narrative, an investing of the facts of past events with meaning and significance, an attempt to uncover the plot, because without a plot there can be no meaning or significance, yet the imposition of a telos on history in the form of plot represents the creation of a fiction or even a myth. This is not the case with natural history in biology or ecology, especially when it comes to the study of the natural history of a plant or of an animal. Natural history as a sub-discipline of biology includes the study of a given species' life cycle strategy within an evolutionary or behavioural or ecological context.

Yet these notes are prison notes. They have been written in prison. My prison writings do in fact belong to the celebrated genre of prison writings because they are not systematic, they are fragmentary and episodic, they range far and wide, not dwelling too long on any single thought or topic, picking up here and letting go there, picking up and letting go, like looking for the perfect pebble or shell on a beach. It is this kind of writing which reflects the way the mind of a prisoner works when confined within the walls of a shadowless prison cell with silence as her only companion.

And each day 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. 47. Not to perform Ov (medium)--Leviticus 19:31

48

To repeat.

In the notebooks the writing were never intentionally ordered into any kind of structured narrative. There is no structure to my notes, and there is no structure to my story. I have no idea of the nature of the plot round which to organize my story, there is no climax and there is no rhythm, there is no sequential merging of one scene with the next, there is no natural flow, there is no consummation, and there is no finality. The writings are haphazard and improvised, but not by choice, my focus shifted constantly with the drift of boredom. At best they represent a concatenation of events and thoughts and ideas that lead to nowhere, the sequence dissolves in a repetition of the same.

What I have written are reflections from prison, but not reflections about prison, but reflections of a mind set free by imprisonment to wonder unrestrained, a mind that was no longer distracted. A mind that no longer had any vested interest in any point of view. Strictly speaking my imprisonment was different from that of my comrades. I was treated differently, even though I was not enjoying any special privileges which the others did not have. The fact that I was treated differently in terms of being supplied with writing materials did not change anything. I was going to be tried and sentenced with them in the same court under the same laws that had been made for people like my comrades and me. Maybe the reverse was true. Maybe my comrades were enjoying better treatment. Who knows? I am actually beginning to believe that they getting better treatment. This is the way the mind works. It is the effects of solitary confinement. I have been isolated, completely isolated. Why? Is it Malcolm's doing? Is this part of a 'purification'? Or even a kind of purgatory.

And each day 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. 48. Not to perform Yidoni (magical seer)--Leviticus 19:31

49

Two weeks after my arrest I was escorted by a policeman to an office on the 11th floor of John Vorster Square. When the door was opened there was my brother Malcom standing with his back to the door. His presence in the office blew me over. It came as a shocking surprise. The last person I expected to see within the labyrinthic precincts of John Vorster Square was my own brother. I had not seen him nor had I spoken to him for nearly five years. I didn't even know that he worked at John Vorster Square. I knew that he had joined the security police some time ago.

It was a beautiful morning.

He was gazing out of the window at the panoramic view of the southern side of Johannesburg. The highway, the Crown interchange, the massive mine dump and in the distance slim dams planted with blue gums, a merging of toxic wasteland, industrial townships and working class white suburbia dominated the view from the window. The view was far from picturesque. The window framed a grim view of a blighted mining and industrialized landscape. The door was closed behind me and then it was just us in the office. Malcolm turned around and smiled pleasantly at me. It was a friendly smile. He cordially invited me to sit down on one of the chairs. The door opened again. A tray of tea and biscuits was brought in by a black constable. While in the security police he had completed a BA, studying by correspondence through UNISA, majoring in international relations and political science. I had learnt from my parents that he had also been awarded an MA for a dissertation on the MPLA in Angola. I would never have guessed that he had an academic bone in his body.

I soon learnt that several of my close comrades and I had been betrayed by one of our close friends who had turned state witness after he had been arrested. Malcolm did not name the person who the security police had turned. With an ironic grin on his face Malcolm said:

'I tried to warn you so that you could escape. You could have got away if you had an escape plan. You were only a small fish, we caught you in the net by pure accident. You were a mere low ranking propaganda and media officer for the South African Communist Party looking after information pamphlet and newspaper production and distribution as propaganda and ideological recruiting tools. I was quite happy to let you slip through the net. But you basically set yourself up for the fall. I could not believe that your flat would be filled with so much self-incriminating Communist propaganda materials. You broke every rule of a professional Communist underground operative. I actually felt embarrassed when they caught you, I expected more from my sister,' he said with that ironical grin still plastered on his face. He then laughed and shook his head in mock disbelief.

'You had no escape plan,' he reiterated.

'Yes I had no escape plan,' I murmured.

'You are a bunch of amateur revolutionaries, completely disorganized, and undisciplined. Who has ever heard of underground revolutionary operatives that do not have escape plans or any kind of escape drill?' Malcolm asked me with that same ironic grin still fixed on his face.

He then burst out laughing, shaking his head in disbelief at my apparent lack of an escape plan. But I knew Malcolm. He was digging for information, for clues, because he knew that I had managed to do something, something which had unexpected propaganda consequences and he was curious to know more.

'You can't pull the wool of over my eyes. How was it possible that you have become almost overnight an anti-apartheid celebrity activist in Norway of all countries? You have become a poster girl for Communism. Your smiling photograph on some God foresaken windswept beach is plastered on the front page of every major newspaper in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland, and also now in France and Italy. All the bloody foreign embassies are going hysterical over your arrest as if you some are kind of fucking saint or celebrity revolutionary. How did they find out about your arrest? Who has escaped the net? Why are you so suddenly well known in the international media?' He asked.

'I don't know,' was all I said. I could not believe what I was hearing, and I think the undisguised surprised showed on my face. But it was a relief. I had now become a high profile political prisoner only because of my international connections. Ironically my ancestry and my privileged position was not going to save me from the worst depredations of the Nationalist state oppressive apparatus. But still, there was another way of looking at my situation. Being a high profile political prisoner was also another way of fighting the people's war, it contributed to the intensification of international political pressure on the apartheid regime.

'There is fuck-all the Norwegians can do for you,' he continued.

He pushed over the charge sheet for me to see.

'By the way you will be getting a minimum of seven years for this,' he said.

'The others are going to sit a lot longer, they will get life, so you are lucky,' he added.

'But then again you all may walk,' he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

I realized by that remark that he knew a lot more than I could ever have guessed. I knew Malcolm, he was brother. That shrug of his shoulders indicated that he knew more than he was letting on. At that moment for me the future was an ocean of uncertainty, but he seemed to be certain about things regarding the future which I could not even begin to imagine. I sensed this. He did not seem to be overly concerned about my arrest and pending conviction or my long sentence which I was now waiting to serve. My detention seemed to be a bit of joke to him, as if it was the result one of his clever pranks in which he was eventually going to say that I could go home now. But then his demeanour and attitude changed, he became very professional. Now as a brother he was going to give me the best possible advice on how to deal with my situation.

'When they interview you it would be best for you to simply state that you want to plead guilty to the charges. I want to save you from all the shit that you would otherwise have to go through. I have done this for you as my sister and because of dad and mom, so please don't let us down. I have put myself on the line for you. The prosecutor has agreed that if you plead guilty you will be given the mandatory seven year sentence, the others are going to sit a lot longer, because they were involved with the smuggling of weapons and explosives into the country. When they interrogate you just stick to the fact that you were a low ranking media officer in the party and leave it at that,' Malcolm said.

The words: 'I want to save you from all the shit that you would otherwise have to go through,' rang in my head. He did not want his sister to be abused and humiliated. He did not want his personal pride to be wounded. The Zeeman name had to be upheld and all Zeemans should be treated with dignity because we were the descendants of an ancient lineage, maybe we had a bit of Khoisan blood flowing in our veins, who knows? He was indirectly instructing me not to make things difficult for myself and I could achieve this end by openly confessing to being a communist and plead guilty with regard to the charge of distributing communist propaganda materials. I should gratefully accept whatever sentence they imposed on me, and do this as matter of honour, for the sake of our family name, Zeeman.

'Pleading guilty and receiving the seven years sentence may stand you in very good stead for the future,' he said mysteriously.

He poured tea into a cup, asked if I took sugar and milk, and then pushed over the plate of biscuits to me. I had nothing to say. I just sat there stirring my tea. All that I could think of was that I was going to get seven years, that I would be sitting in jail for the next seven years and Malcolm could not save me from that, and he thought that I would somehow benefit by confessing guilty as charged and accepting the seven year sentence as punishment or retribution for my deeds. I would be a middle aged woman at the end of my sentence.

And each day 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. 49. Not to pass your children through the fire to Molech—Leviticus 18:21

50

But in doing this I would be upholding the Zeeman name, I would be upholding the honour of the Zeeman name by taking full responsibility for my subversive actions and by accepting my sentence as some kind of badge of honour worthy of any Zeeman. It really felt as if this was what he wanted me to do especially as his sister. After all these years I could still read his mind. He would want to hear how tough and resolute his sister was, and how she did not quiver or quake or flinch at the prospect of her punishment. He wanted his sister to show the same strength of character and fearless in the face of extreme adversity and dire danger that he had shown in Koevoet. He wanted the family reputation for 'harde gatness' (hard arseness) to be upheld. I had to be hard arse for his sake, for his reputation and for the sake of his name, Zeeman. He wanted to hear that his sister demonstrated an indomitable spirit in the face of adversity; he wanted to hear that she did not allow herself to sink into a state of shameful abjection when subjected to the humiliating rigors of detention and interrogation. She had to uphold the responsibility of being a genuine Zeeman, that is, hard, resilient, and tough right to the very bitter end. He wanted to take pride in that fact. She could not sink to the despicable level of a traitor, even if it meant sacrificing her own life, if his sister was a communist, then she must be a communist in the fullest possible sense of being a communist so that they will respect the Zeeman name because of her strength of character and her sense of honour. He knew that the police despised traitors. His sister must take it on the chin without blinking an eye. She cannot be a traitor. The families name was at stake. She was a Zeeman even though she was a communist. He had killed communists, his own hands were dripping with the blood of slain communists, men who were brave right until the end, who died with the fuck you sign of the thumb clenched tightly between forefinger and the middle finger. They died saying 'fuck you' as they took the bullet to the head.

He also poured himself a cup of tea as well. Now that the reason for his wanting to speak to me was done he became all philosophical about everything. He wanted to speak about his work, about his profession, about his philosophy of life. So before I was escorted back to my cell I listened to what he had to say while sipping a cup to tea and eating biscuits.

And each day 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. 50. Not to erect a column in a public place of worship—Deuteronomy 16:22

51

This was the gist of his speech:

'After many years in counter-insurgency military operations and security police work I have become very cynical about human nature especially when it comes to leaders involved in the so-called revolutionary struggle. They are a self-serving elite who don't really give a fuck for socialism or communist ideology. I have had a lot of experience with the foot soldiers in the lower and middle ranks that have been recruited into SWAPO and the ANC, and also the SACP. I am different in my thinking compared to the other members of the security establishment in South Africa. Most of them are just as stupid as the liberation leaders and their foot soldiers who are trying to overthrow the South African government. I am not your typical closed-minded cold war warrior. I know for sure that there are no compelling grounds to interpret the southern African conflict in terms of a cold war ideological struggle. There is no longer a grand communist plot to overtake the world. Marxism as an ideology is dead in all communist countries. Ironically Marxism remains vibrant in the West. But the spreading of communism is no longer possible or feasible. Communism is losing its foot hold in the world. Communism is dead. Socialism has failed. It is clear that Russia has been drawn into the southern African conflict only as a very reluctant participant and America does not want to be drawn into the conflict at all, if possible, nor does American want to take sides in the conflict. Broadly speaking this is the global picture of the current situation in the world. We are at a critical juncture in world history. Things are never going to be the same again. We are living in the age of betrayal and broken dreams. The history of the twentieth century will go down as the century of betrayal and broken dreams. Everyone is going to be betrayed, everyone is going to be shafted. I firmly believe in this. I should know, I am in the betrayal business, I am in the shafting business. I have worked with the dynamics of betrayal all my life, it has been my profession, it is my area of experience, it is my speciality, I work with human nature, I am what you can call an engineer or technician of betrayal, I am the technician who works on the souls of men, I am the surgeon of the soul, I know how the soul of men works. One thing I learnt in security police work and in anti-terrorism is that deep down everyone is a Judas Iscariot; everyone is ultimately a traitor to the cause that they thought they believed in. In this world there are few true believers. Everyone is ultimately a traitor and a betrayer. Everyone is out for themselves. Unless you have the courage to accept death, you will turn and became a traitor, it is only human. No one choses death or pain above being a traitor. Betrayal is man's mode of being in the world. There is no such thing as solidarity, in the end when faced with hard choices between self and solidarity, human solidarity is something that is relatively easy to betray. Man's ultimate sin is that he only seeks his own personal self-interest and he can only do this by being a traitor and a betrayer of his own moral principles.'

He continued with his monologue.

'If we turn and focus our lens on the local situation in southern Africa you will not find any great intellectuals or leaders in the so-called southern African liberation struggle who have a real or genuine ideological vision, imagination, integrity and commitment when it comes Socialism or Communism, of say a Fidel Castro or a Ché Guevara or a Mao or a Hoi Ching Ming. There is not a single person of this level of revolutionary calibre in the ranks of the southern African liberation movements. They are not real revolutionaries, they are actually very ordinary people who are basically 'gatvol' with the whole Apartheid situation. They just want what the whites have. They definitely don't want Communism or Socialism. They are not really interested in the big self-sacrifices and huge personal demands required for building your ideal Communist society. They just as materialistic and bourgeois as the next person. None of them have a deep intellectual commitment or interest in building socialism, it is just talk and a lot of froth. All the movements are controlled and led by very mediocre leadership, a leadership that will eventually prove to be one of inferior moral calibre, a leadership bent only on self-interest, and self-aggrandizement. I think that the liberation movements have all become glorified mafia organizations. They will betray the struggle; they will destroy their own revolution. They will engineer the eventual self-destruction of their own movement, they will betray all their values, they will betray all those who suffered and died in the struggle. It will happen, believe me. The leaders of the struggle are all cut from the same mediocre Nationalist mould. Like all African Nationalists they are not genuine Marxists or Communists or Democrats. Their ideological and political commitment to building socialism is at best lukewarm if not non-existent. They not interested in building socialism, this is the lie that the leadership sells to the foot soldiers on the ground. The leadership of the African Nationalist liberation movements are thoroughly corrupt, they are only interested in self-enrichment, they are only interested in plunder, looting and pillage, believe me they are not going to build socialism, they have no genuine interest in democracy, they have only one ambition and that is self-enrichment through corruption and theft. You are deluded if you believe that genuine political liberation and socialism is going to happen in South Africa. Socialism is not going to happen, not today and not tomorrow, it is not going to happen even if capitalism fails. The historical epoch of socialism is rapidly coming to an end. We are facing the global collapse of twentieth century civilization, mark my words.'

'And you my dear Hannah you are just a disposable pawn in this game, you have been fighting for a lost cause, you got to believe me,' he said with a serious look on his face.

And each day 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. 51. Not to bow down on smooth stone—Leviticus 26:1

52

To be honest I was shaken by what he had said. His conviction and sense of certainty was not only convincing it was ironical and paradoxical. Was it possible, was it so inevitable that the struggle would be betrayed, that the revolution will be destroyed by its own leaders? Was it possible that human civilization was on the brink of collapse? What did Malcolm know that I could not grasp or foresee? But the seeds of the idea that our modern civilization could collapse had now taken root in my mind. As a scientist who had studied animal population dynamics and ecosystem stability the idea of a collapse in human civilization was something I could readily entertain as a possibility. Extinction was a natural event on our planet earth. The history of our planet has been a history of massive extinctions.

Was it possible that we had finally arrived at the end of socialism; were we now at the end of history? Was betrayal at the root of this great historical unravelling of the human project? The root cause of the fall of humankind was betrayal and betrayal always ends in the destruction of human solidarity. Malcolm had caught me completely off guard. He had changed. He was not defending the establishment or the status quo. Instead he it seemed that he had become a cynic in the classical sense of the meaning of that word. Could it be that the Oligarchy reproduces itself through betrayal, could it be that the Oligarchy exists by virtue of betrayal, could it be that betrayal is the principle or essence or expression of the Oligarchy, the principle or Idea which is not only the Oligarchy's principle of reproduction, of its repetition, or of its transmission through time and space, but also the Idea of its realization as the Oligarchy, the Idea that it expresses in all its fullness. As the agency of the self-causation of the Oligarchy, betrayal is the father of history. Betrayal is the catastrophe with gave rise to Civilization. Betrayal is the principle and the cause of the Fall of man. Betrayal is man's original sin. Sin is the destruction of human solidarity and betrayal is the agency of that destruction. The Oligarchy exists by virtue of the destruction of human solidarity. The Oligarchy is the realization of the Idea of the Fall. The Oligarchy as Original Sin rises perpetually as the City of strangers where the face of the Other is no longer recognized, it rises perpetually in the shadow of the Fall. The Oligarchy is the realized form of human alienation. It is the place of exile, the place of estrangement. The face of the Other is no longer recognized, the mirror becomes instead an opaque window through which nothing can be seen. The face of the Other in its expressive fullness no longer exists in the eyes of the Oligarchy. The face of the Other always expresses the fullness of the 'least of these who are my brothers and sisters'. 'And what you do unto them you do unto me'. The roots of violent betrayal of the Other also has its origination in misrecognition or non-recognition of the self in the face of the Other. The Oligarchy rises up like the tower of Babel, it returns perpetually as the City built on the ruins of Babel, the City which we call Civilization. Civilization rises like a grotesque and malevolent parody of progress. Civilization realizes its expressive fullness, its Idea of itself, its truth, in a never ending orgy of violence. The violence of the patriarchy, the violence of religion, the violence of slavery, the violence of exploitation, the violence of colonialism, the violence of a predatory capitalism, the violence of appropriation of surplus value, the violence of the accumulation of capital, the violence of genocide, the violence of never ending war, the violence of ecological destruction, the violence of the Holocaust and the violence of the Gulag. Also, violence in the form of non-recognition of the self in the face of the Other becomes manifest or fully expressed in racism, in the oppression of women, in colonization, in the exploitation of the working classes in social formations based on the capitalist mode of production. The rise, perpetuation or repetition of the Oligarchy, as a hierarchy of social domination, has been realized through the violent defeat of reason and rationality. The so-call project of the Enlightenment was never realized, it was stillborn and persisted in the minds of 'men' as an illusion, as a myth, as a fiction. The realization of reason has been postponed, seemingly indefinitely. Of course, the rational critique of the Oligarchy and it revolutionary overthrow and destruction is based on the knowledge and understanding of the conditions of its genesis and reproduction in every historical epoch since the time of the post-Neolithic. In other words the critique and revolutionary overthrow of the Oligarchy is based on Reason and its destruction represents the full realization of Reason. Historically the recent defeats of Reason have become expressed in all its fullness in Auschwitz, in Apartheid, in Stalin's Gulags, in the putative free-market economy of modern capitalism, and in the electoral based modern system of democracy by representation, which in reality facilities the continuation of the rule of powerful elites over the masses. In the end the Oligarchy emptied of all possibility for the realization of the good becomes the fitting abode for the habitation of evil. Does evil exist? Oligarchy exists as the embodiment, as the concrete expression of the full meaning of the idea of the Fall. So the idea of the Fall is hardly a fiction devoid of any truth. This I would grant. As an embodiment of the idea of the Fall the Oligarchy exists not only as the city of the dead, but as the city of death. In this sense the Oligarchy cannot fail to be also the full incarnation of the necropolis. And as a necropolis the Oligarchy can only exist as a dystopia in spite of its utopian illusions. And as a dystopia the necropolis is in a continuous state of war with Nature. It is also at war against 'human nature' which represents a system of behaviour attributes and predispositions which have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. The Fall is something 'unnatural'. It represents an aberration, a pathological condition or a state of disease. It can be conceived as a transgression against the 'natural order'. There is an ethical ring to this view. I am fully aware that the idea of a 'natural order' is problematic and can be mobilized for the purposes of ideological legitimation. But a rational and a theological case can be made for the view that the self-destructive and dehumanizing war against human nature and Nature in general represents the essence of the Fall. I also use the idea of human nature in a strongly qualified evolutionary based sense, that is, in the sense that humans have evolved the emotional capacities or predispositions necessary for egalitarian sociality, emotions in which we see the expression of empathy, loyalty, solidarity, compassion, conscience, care, and altruism. And it was only by virtue of these behavioural adaptations which made the complex forms of egalitarian sociality possible that hominins and various other species of the human genus were able to survive and reproduce progeny as physically vulnerable bipedal animals in a difficult, hostile and unforgiving environment. As a dystopia the Oligarchy has not only destroyed egalitarian sociality which is the human natural state, but also transforms the natural world or the world of nature into a toxic wasteland. For the sake of the existence of the Oligarchy Lenin's programmatic announcement of 'all power to the soviets' was reversed and replaced with the centralization of all power within an Oligarchy ruled by a politically empowered and privileged elite. The relations of production and the forces of production irrespective of the mode of production, socialist or capitalist, have historically become centralized, embodied, crystallized and concretized in an Oligarchical arrangement or setup. An arrangement based on the stratification or hierarchicalization of social status, social domination and political power. As long as the Oligarchy exists the realization of a full egalitarian sociality will never become a reality. And the state of 'fallenness' will prevail. Anarchism as the polar opposite of the Oligarchy represents the fullness of egalitarian sociality. Ownership always equals control. Control is always a form of ownership. Control of the apparatus and levers of power is a definite form of private ownership which is made possible by virtue of the Oligarchy. Political power and control translates into the real or practical ownership of the 'means of power' and the 'means of violence' for sake of private or individual interests and desires. Ownership of the means of production equals 'who has the power to control the means of production' in whatever form this 'ownership' is politically embodied or realized. Universal control and ownership is always realized in the form of the Oligarchy. Ownership in the form of political control is always something which is practically realized in a personalized or individualized capacity within a hierarchy of social domination. In a practical sense the Soviet Union under Stalin was controlled and owned by Stalin in the same way that Nazi Germany was practically controlled and owned by Hitler. Both were species that belong to the same genus. Nothing can be owned or controlled on behalf of the interests of others!

And each day 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. 52. Not to plant a tree in the Temple courtyard—Deuteronomy 16:21

53

'Say to the daughter of Zion, 'Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.' Here in the events leading to Golgotha and the Resurrection we have the 'parabolic' overturning of the ubiquitous and universal Oligarchy in all its forms and in all its historical realizations by none other than Jesus as the God incarnate. Jesus as the king mounted on a donkey advancing onto the gates of Jerusalem without an army represents the crisis and cancellation of all Oligarchies, ironically also of the Israelitic Oligarchy inaugurated under King David. The King of Zion riding on the colt of a donkey owns nothing, he has no kingdom or empire under his control, he commands no army, he carries no sword, yet his presence at the gates of Jerusalem creates a world shattering crisis. He is crucified as the King of the Jews on a Roman cross. And salvation comes from the Jews. This may answer why many of us outside the fold of conventional Christianity have the temerity to self-identify as Christians.

The Parousia does not only stand for the end of history as the apocalyptic closure of time but also as the event grounded in the Eucharist. The eschatology represented in the event of the Eucharist is 'anarchic', as in a radical reversal and as a radical subversion of the Oligarchy in all of its historical forms. As Jean-Yves Lacoste the French theologian writes in confrontation with Hegel and Heidegger, 'meaning comes at the end'. In the Eucharist, eschatology represents the coming of meaning only at the end. In Exodus God identifies her name to Moses as 'I am who I will be'. God's name is synonymous with God's freedom and God's openness. And God's freedom is synonymous with the openness of God's future. Nothing is predetermined to be or persist unchanging into the future as it now is, and especially in the form of the Oligarchy. 'I am who I will be' resonates with the clarion call of anarchism with its affirmation of freedom in terms of the openness of the future to all possibilities.

The Christian idea of the Fall haunts a life like mine which has been saturated with the readings of the Gospels. Even though our parents were not particularly religious and never pretended to be Christian role models and furthermore their lives were remarkably devoid of any outward expressions of religious belief, it comes as a great irony, that they still felt that it was their parent duty to ensure that Malcolm, Elsabe and I never missed going to Sunday school or church. My life became saturated with the stories of the Bible, especially during my childhood in Hotazel. Unlike Kate I have tried to merge apparently conflicting narratives. Kate lived her Catholicism with a devotion that bordered on piety, she remain religious despite her unshakable belief in evolution, despite her sadomasochism, and despite her complete immersion in a lesbian subculture, a subculture of alterity that I shared with her. Kate believed in the sacraments. She was a firm believer in the sacrament of confession. She believed in absolution, yet she lived a life that was fraught with the tensions of transgression.

And each day 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. 53. To destroy idols and their accessories—Deuteronomy 12:2

54

Malcolm seemed to have read my mind.

'You were betrayed by one of your own comrades, by someone who was your friend. This is life. This is how things always turn out. Everyone is a potential traitor. I have worked with this principle all my life in counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism. I have seen it all the time. People will betray their beliefs, they will turn, they will join the other side, they will join their enemies, and they will work for their enemies against their own ideals. They will do this while they are in the thick of the struggle, the sell-outs that work for us are all comrades who are currently deeply submerged in the struggle, and those who remain in the struggle until the bitter end, they will in turn betray the struggle, they will be the final traitors, they will betray their own ideals, its human nature, it is also Africa, Africa is the theatre of betrayal, Africa has been betraying its own people from the dawn of civilization,' he said.

After a moments refection he began to express the belief that everyone was ultimately a traitor, that everyone will eventually perform an act of betrayal. It was his cynical belief that the revolution will always end up betraying itself, that all revolutionaries once they have power, will betray all their values and principles. It was his cynical belief that it was inevitable that revolutionaries in whatever political form, Right or Left, would become the traitors towards their own cause. This was an iron-law of inevitability. Humans are beings who have become irreparably damaged, this is why betrayal is so easy for humans; they are 'irreparable', as in beyond repair, in the sense of having become irreparably damaged by insuppressible desires, such as the desire to rule, to lead, to have power, to become the overlords. This condition, this infirmity, this moral disease, has been mankind's own self-affliction, man is the animal afflicted with uncontrollable desires, deep down man is an animal, and this was Freud's greatest discovery according to Malcolm.

I listened to Malcolm as he explained that the desire for power, the desire to rule, the desire to lead, the desire to be the overlord, is nourished by a pathological sense of moral entitlement, and this make the desire for power inherently narcissistic and violent. Desire for power over others is the irredeemable affliction of mankind. This desire rules man's nature. Desire for power defines man's essence. Man's moral incapacity is incurable when it comes to controlling his desire for power. This desire for power is expressed in every desire, power is what makes the realization of all desires possible. Desire for power underlies everything that man wants or wishes for. It is in his desire to survive, it is in his desire to continue living, it is in his desire for self-enrichment, it is in his desire for recognition, it is in his desire for constant gratification, all of this makes him susceptible to temptations which will transform him into a traitor, which will make him betray everything he once stood for and believed in with all his heart. Betrayal is always the inevitable consequence of the desire for power. The political activist, the politician, the revolutionary, the insurgent or the guerrilla eventually turns traitor, they all eventually undergo this metamorphosis which will transform them into traitors, into a death moth.

Death moth? Yes he used the very words 'death moth'. I could not help smiling at his mentioning of the death moth and he noticed my smile. I suppose in Malcolm's mind the betrayer or the traitor can be likened symbolically to the death moth as in the herald or messenger of death. Ironically Malcolm himself was a death moth, his work required him to be the messenger of death, the angel of death. That possibility had always been in his power. He could bring about death. In the kind of work that he had done he had had a 'license' to kill. Death had been part of his trade. The Oligarchy cannot exist without its death moths.

And each day 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. 54. Not to derive benefit from idols and their accessories—Deuteronomy 7:26

55

Malcolm poured himself another cup of tea. I could also read his mind. I knew he wanted to end our interview by saying something really profound which he hoped would make a deep and lasting impression on me, something which I would think about while serving my seven year prison sentence.

I sat and listened to his speech.

He said:

'There is no fundamental difference between Capitalism and Communism, structurally and functionally as forms of structured or stratified sociality that are merely variations of a similar theme or paradigm if you wish. I like the word paradigm. The point I am going to make by using the term paradigm is that Capitalism and Communism differ in nature only in degree, but not in kind. It is in this sense that they are strictly speaking not incommensurable. I also like this word, incommensurable. Yes I have also read Thomas Kuhn' book. At a deep structural and functional level they are different representations or embodiments of essentially the same kind of system. They share structural and functional forms of social, political and economic organization with respect to the differential distribution of power in relation not only to life and death, but also in relation to the distribution of all kinds of privileges including material benefits. In this sense, Capitalism and Socialism differ only in degree, and not in kind. While differing in degree, they remain essentially the same at a very fundamental level when it comes to the differential distribution of social and material benefits and also in the unequal distribution of life and death, health and posterity, and pleasure and suffering. In this sense they are same in kind. Both systems are both based on centres of power and impunity which enables the ruling elite to impose inequality on the masses with respect to every dimension of human life. They both embody a system and form of social domination that is similar in the sense that the mode and mechanism of domination involves the centralization and concentration of political power at the pinnacle of a hierarchically organized or structured social system. Objectively, in actual reality, they are both intrinsically and essentially hierarchical systems of social domination. Objectively, they both represent highly centralized and stratified systems of social domination. In a hierarchical system of social domination an entrenched political elite essentially owns the power, instruments and apparatus for political and social coercion. The masses are essentially powerless and passive in their relation to the ruling overlords in both Capitalism and Communism. So Capitalism and Communism both represent stratified or hierarchical social systems in which a political elite exercises 'ownership' of power and the means of coercion with respect of the subjugated masses of the people. Both systems can only exist by virtue of betrayal, by betraying the masses. Both systems can only exist by virtue of the destruction of solidarity, by the destruction of civil society, by the destruction of communities, by the atomization of the masses into alienated individuals that become locked into a life of radical loneliness, estrangement and personal alienation. Both systems can only exist by virtue of destroying the autonomy and freedom of the individual person.' He shrugged his shoulders and smiled the smile of philosophical irony. There was astonishing convergence in our ideas even though we were on the opposite of the political spectrum, and could be viewed as political adversaries. Well so it seemed. But then again I could not be certain whether he was really fighting on the side of the Right, even though he was definitely not aligned with the Left.

And each day 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. 55. Not to derive benefit from ornaments of idols—Deuteronomy 7:25

56

Just before I was taken back to my cell he made some oblique and seemingly out of place comments, his tone was confidential, bordering on the conspiratorial:

'The Cubans in spite of the great sacrifices that they have made in turning the war in Angola in favour of the MPLA, will suffer an unexpected historical and political betrayal at the hands of the MPLA political elite for whom they gave up their lives. The death toll of both FAPLA and Cuban soldiers in Angola has been astronomical. This is not an exaggeration. The tide of history is turning and there are going to be losers on all sides. The losers will be the Angolan people and the Cubans who fought in Angola. This is the paradox, because the Cubans will believe that they have won a significant victory, but they have won nothing that was worth sacrificing their lives for. In fact they have been betrayed. But most will never know that they have been betrayed. They will be betrayed by the very Angolans that they fought for. In the years to come you will come understand this paradox. A battle at a remote place in Angola called Cuito Cuanavale between the Cubans and the SADF-UNITA alliance has now ended in a stale-mate. What I am telling you is a state secret. It is confidential information. Just keep the historical fact of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in your mind for now. It will eventually become public news and there will be different interpretations of the historical significance of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. But remember one thing the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was fought in vain by both adversaries. The Cubans and Angolans died in vain. The MPLA elite are on the verge of betraying the very ideology that the Cuban and MPLA soldiers died defending. We know from our intelligence that the MPLA elite have reinvented themselves, they have become rentier capitalists, they are currently living the good life of crude oil businessmen, and they are going to abandon Marxist-Leninism and socialism before the end of this decade, mark my words. Angola post-colonialism is going to be the story of how the MPLA betrayed the revolution and looking at things from this historical perspective we can only conclude that ideologically speaking the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was lost by all sides, it will turn out not to be a victory for socialism, also in reality it will not turn out to be a victory for Capitalism or the Nationalist government. No one wins in southern Africa.'

And each day 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. 56. Not to make a covenant with idolaters—Deuteronomy 7:2

57

So eventually, on the advice of my brother I made a full written confession. I was expecting the lengthy prison sentence he had spoked about. Speaking about my brother, it was through his intervention that I was allowed to have notebooks and pens. Without those notebooks and pens this story would never have been written. It is thanks to Malcolm that you are reading my story.

Thinking of Hegel and the phenomenology of mind. Why bother with Hegel? Hegel's relevance to modern philosophy is something that can be debated at length. If philosophy as an intellectual activity can legitimately be characterized as being essentially an intense, rigorous, analytical and logical involvement in thinking about thinking, then it arguably does represent the highest level of human cognitive endeavour. Hegel's philosophical enterprise could also be viewed as essentially a self-conscious philosophical engagement in the process of thinking about thinking towards some End, which would be the achievement of the self-realization of Mind, where the self-realization of Mind would be the self-realization of its own Idea or Purpose or Essence. The realization of its own Idea would represent the End, where the End is a synonym for Totality or Absolute or Ultimate or Ultimate Reality as in the attainment of Absolute Knowledge of the Truth concerning the essential nature of Ultimate Reality. It is in the Mind of God that the self-realization of the Absolute is achieved, where the Absolute can be defined as the full self-conscious embodiment of the Knowledge of the Ultimate Nature of Reality, which would include whatever 'Meaning' which may be embodied in Reality. Here I have also made the promised bridge between Herder and Hegel. But not in a manner in which Herder or Hegel would have envisaged or imagined such a bridging. Of course the realization of Mind's own Idea as the goal or purpose of the Hegelian project makes it a variety of philosophical idealism. That is, idealism as opposed to materialism or realism. In the realization of its own Idea the Mind of God becomes actualized in the thinking minds of finite human subjects. Our consciousness becomes God's consciousness. Which means that we through our own thinking about thinking mediate the realization of God's own self-consciousness of Mind's own Idea. Thinking about thinking involves the process of continuous self-correction in establishing the certainty of something being or not being the case for a given state of affairs.

And each day 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. 57. Not to show favour to them—Deuteronomy 7:2

58

Going back to the idea of the natural history of plants and animals versus the idea of human history, Hegel would distinguish nature from history on the basis of the fact that nature in terms of natural phenomena is explicable or understandable in terms of law-like uniformities, regularities and repetition, whereas explanations from a Hegelian perspective of the progressive character of human history as a phenomenon characterized by unceasing and continuous innovation revolves around the dialectical role that Reason, Idea and Mind play in the realization and actualization of historical reality.

Hegel's dialectic expressed in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis has grown with time into the status of a legend, or perhaps even a fiction or a myth, which has been passed on and has become fixed in our minds as part and parcel of the Hegelian legacy. However a careful reading of Hegel's writings shows that he himself has failed to consistently follow the triadic dialectical method. Hegel actually deviates from explicitly and unambiguously applying the triadic dialectical formula. When applied by Hegel in those few instances it tends to be forced and unconvincing. So this conceptualization of the dialectic should be abandoned. It is actually rationally and logically impossible to apply the triadic dialectical formula to any problem or situation or state of affairs. So what then is the dialectic? The dialectic is equivalent to the critical application of reason to the analysis and resolution of any problem. The dialectic represents a critical self-correcting procedure of analysis, deliberation and logical inference which is best captured as: 'thinking about thinking' which is the universal mental or cognitive activity associated with the business of science and philosophy. One of the best descriptions of dialectical reason is the one given by Socrates in Plato's 'Phaedrus'.

And each day 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. 58. Not to let them dwell in our land—Exodus 23:33

59

Going back to Hegel's Nature versus History dichotomy we could argue 'dialectically' that this is a false dualism which cannot be upheld by science. Rationally speaking, History is reducible to Nature and by virtue of this reducibility of History to Nature the conditions which make History possible are precisely the law-like uniformities, regularities and repetitions we associate with Nature under the reign of contingency. In other words History as pure contingency is reducible to Nature which is something that exists in a causally closed Universe ruled by Chance and Necessity as so poetically elaborated in Monod's book by that title. History is reducible to Nature because in actuality as a process it manifests the characteristic nature-like kind of state of affairs that we associate with something existing naturally under the governance of law-like uniformities, regularities and repetitions. We see this state of affairs being paradigmatically exemplified in the persistence over time and space in the repetition of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy has existed as the generic form of societal and political organization ever since the Neolithic.

Also dialectically speaking the Hegelian phenomenology of Mind, Idea and Reason can only exist and give rise to Universal History as emergent properties of Nature made possible by the law-like uniformities, regularities and repetition which characterise the essential nature of Nature. Hegel fails to resolve the Nature versus Mind dualism, the Nature versus History dualism, the Idealism versus Materialism dualism, Idealism versus Realism dualism, and Form versus Content, the Visible versus the Invisible, Ontology versus Epistemology and as a consequence of this Hegel fails to see that the repetition of the Oligarchy is History's greatest obstacle to the realisation of Reason, the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Totality and the End. The Idea that human history is progressive remains a Hegelian and Marxist illusion until the repetition of the Oligarchy is abolished for good by removing all the conditions which makes it existence possible. This is the true and authentic historical goal of the Revolution and everything else represents a counter-revolutionary perpetuation of the catastrophe of civilization.

And each day 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. 59. Not to imitate them in customs and clothing—Leviticus 20:23

60

While I did not expect to meet my brother in the flesh after my arrest at John Vorster Square, I had known for some time, as I have already said, that Malcolm had become a member of the South African Security Police, but I did not know that he was working at John Vorster Square. I had learnt from my parents that he had been promoted to a Colonel. He worked hard to reach the rank of Colonel. But no one told me he was stationed at John Vorster Square. None of my comrades in the Party knew that my brother was a Colonel in the security police. It was something that I had kept secret. No one in the Party suspected that I was related in any way to any Colonel Zeeman. This was mainly because Colonel Malcolm Zeeman, even given his illustrious career in counter-insurgency, had not become notorious or 'famous'. He was not a public figure. He had maintained a very low profile, he functioned below the radar. He was a talented and knowledgeable specialist in counter-insurgency and counter-intelligence. He was a dedicated professional, and a supremely gifted hunter of men. Because he worked with 'turned' ANC insurgents or 'Ascaris' as they were called, it was necessary for him not be in any kind of media limelight. He worked in complete anonymity behind the scenes. No one knew anything about Colonel Malcolm Zeeman. I later learnt from Malcolm that it was one of his loyal Ascaris, an ex-MK operative, who had phoned me on Malcolm's instructions to warn me of my imminent arrest by his colleagues in the security police. This was typical of the audacity of Malcolm Zeeman.

Malcolm liked to work in a world of shadows and death. He seemed to have acquired some kind of transcendence. It was clear that he had earned everyone's respect, and because of this the system or the military-security establishment allowed him to do what he liked, and he knew how to work the system with impunity. From long experience he had learnt that in the dark semi-criminal underworld of state security work and counter-insurgency, if you were clever enough, like he was, you could exercise God-like powers of intervention in matters of life and death. Of course no one should have power over others. Why should anyone have power over anyone else?

And each day 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. 60. Not to be superstitious—Leviticus 19:26

61

As I have already said, dear reader, these notes grew from spontaneous and random thoughts, thoughts that were often of a scientific and philosophical nature, but also thoughts which included recollections of my life, recollections which often had a photographic or cinematic vividness. They lived as mental images in my brain or my mind, they lived independently of words and language. Words could only function as ghostly shadows in relation to all my lived experiences which have somehow managed to survive in some kind of afterlife existence as retrievable mental images buried deep somewhere in my mind, in some dark closet in my brain.

Why are some memories retrievable and why have some been lost? In defence of Theuth, I agree that writing is a bulwark against the losses suffered as a consequence of the limitations of memory. Writing is a solution to forgetfulness. It is the only cure we have against forgetfulness. We cannot remember everything, and I have also discovered how difficult it is to write down everything, to record the passing show that entertains the mind left to its own devices in the solitude of a prison cell, in the silence uninterrupted by any external distractions. As I sit in my prison cell day after day waiting for news of my trial date I think about the limitations of memory. The only resources I that have to stay sane are my mind and my memories. The normal everyday passing show of phenomena which however fleeting and unnoticed still manages to saturate the life of the senses has been stripped from my cell, a curtain has been dropped and the world outside has been erased. An impenetrable and mind numbing silence fills the empty space within walls of my cell. All I have is my mind and silence. My mind is trapped in silence. My mind is enclosed within these walls of silence. I have no senses, I feel no sensations. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week the light bulb burns. My cell is filled with light. There is no day and there is no night. Time no longer marches. The flow of time has stopped, the drums have become silent. There are no longer any beats, the beating has ended. Even the beating of my heart has stopped. I have no pulse. There is no rhythm, there is no ebb and flow. There is no change, everything remains the same. Time has ceased to exist. Time can no longer be felt. What does time feel like? I can't remember. I am living in eternity. There are no shadows in my cave, only light, the unbearable tungsten light, 100 watts of power flows continuously from the naked light bulb fixed to its socket in middle of the cell's ceiling. The ceiling is a hundred stories high. Like the sun and moon the light bulb is unreachable. I sit at the bottom of a deep square grey shaft that is filled with light. Then just at the point of despair when I feel the unbearable depth of the emptiness of my mind a random memory suddenly comes alive and starts to flicker in my consciousness as if it were the awakening of a dream, a dream waiting to be born. Where does it come from? The memory flutters like a butterfly trapped in the shaft of light that is my prison cell. And I start to remember things. I see the fish in the bath tub. I see its fins and gills moving as if in I were dreaming it for the first time. I sleep when I think it is night. I sleep and my dreams dredge up memories that have laid deep undisturbed in my subconscious as if buried beneath layers of sediment. I wake when I think it is day. My body cannot remember if it is night or day. I am no longer sure if I am awake or dreaming. I no longer have any expectations. I live in the presence of absences. The absences are filled with dreams, thoughts, reflections, musings, recollections, ideas and illusions.

And each day 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. 61. Not to go into a trance to foresee events, etc.--Deuteronomy 18:10

62

I try to imagine what nothingness must 'be' like. A bewildering paradox lurks in this thought. Nothing cannot 'be' anything. Nothingness cannot exist if it cannot 'be' something. Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing can only give rise to nothing. Something cannot come from nothing. Something can only come from something. This is the metaphysical certainty and the metaphysical necessity that underpins materialism. It is the metaphysics of materialism. Nothingness is the absence of being. The future has no being. It is filled with the plenitude or an ocean of nothingness. It can only exist as an imagined possibility, as an expectation, as an anticipation, as hope. In this sense, as Sartre has said, nothingness haunts being. Nothingness makes it its presence felt in failed expectations in the form of the presence of an absence. The future exists as an expectation, it can only exists as an expectation. Otherwise the future does not exist. Where does time from? How is each moment born? How do moments come into being before they vanish into the shadowy realms of memory? Can moments, which make the experience of the present and presence possible, come from nothingness? The past no longer exists as a presence and the future is always 'not yet'. And the 'not yet' is experienced as an absence of something, something which is not present, or 'not yet' present.

And each day 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. 62. Not to engage in astrology—Leviticus 19:26

63
What kind of relationship exists between language and reality? What kind of relationship exists between our thoughts or our experiences and language? Could words or language make it possible for you the reader to experience what it is like to be me, the writer of these words which you are now reading? Is language with all its words and grammatical rules a reliable vehicle or tool or medium for unveiling the ultimate nature of reality or for making fully accessible what I privately experience, remember, recollect or feel? Can language help you feel the private sensations that I experience, the feelings that I feel, the thoughts that I think, the conscious awareness or the quality of that moment-by-moment animal-like experience of sentience that I endure as a living being, as an animal if you like. Can language help you feel my moods and emotions? In spite of all the words and rules of grammar, I remain completely inaccessible to you the reader. In reading these words which I have written especially for you the reader, who I hold dear to my heart, you remain powerless not to create your own character of the person or subject who writes these words and who now lives in your mind as token of who I am. Oh my dear reader, if I could physically present myself suddenly to you right now, there would be a profound cognitive dissonance between me the material person in your presence and the mental image of me that lives in your consciousness. But be that as it may, I live because of you, without you my dear reader, I have no existence.

And each day 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. 63. Not to mutter incantations—Deuteronomy 18:11

64

It does not seem possible that language could be the mirror of the mind, or the mirror of our experiences or thoughts or feelings or conscious awareness, nor can language be the mirror of nature or of reality. Searching for more metaphors for expressing the limitations of language, it seems that language cannot provide us with a transparent window to see into the mind. Hobbes proposed that language was a vehicle for the communication of ideas. But the ideas themselves which exist in the mind are not directly transferable from one thinker to another, instead what is transferrable from one person to another are ideas represented by words. Words may be inferior representations of ideas. Ideas are things that inhabit the mind in the form of impressions and feelings derived from experiences or as mental images. Ideas don't inhabit the mind as words. It seems that the ideas living in the brain can exist independently of words. If thinking involves the transaction between ideas in the mind, then thinking does not necessary depend on words or language. Maybe to think in this fashion preceded language and was what made language possible in the first instance. What came first, thinking or language? Can we think anything without the help of words or language? What do non-human animals think? Do they have minds? Maybe all sentient beings have ideas and can therefore also think without needing words or language. We don't think or have ideas by virtue of having words rather we have words and language by virtue of our capacity to have ideas. Ideas arise from experiences. Ideas need to find words in order for thoughts to become public and intersubjective.

Locke proposed that we use sounds for words to stand as signs for internal private conceptions that inhabit our thoughts or minds. Words as audible sounds stand as signs or 'marks' for ideas within our minds. Ideas are translated into audible words or written words. Words are translated into ideas. What is lost in the translation?

And each day 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. 64. Not to attempt to engage the dead in conversation—Deuteronomy 18:11

65

I am certain from observing animal behaviour that animals do have ideas which are linked to their experiences of the world. If animals have ideas they are capable of thinking. If they have ideas and are capable of thinking then animals must have minds and to have a mind does not necessarily depend on having a language. Something, a robot or animal, can have a mind of its own without speaking or writing a single word.

Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus expressed the opinion that 'all philosophy is a critique of language.'

What is language? What is speaking? And what is writing? What is literature? What is fiction: De Saussure provides answers. Roland Barthes provides answers. What would the value or power of language be without predication? The conjunction of the two words 'what is' opens the floodgates of predication. Language exists by virtue of assigning predicates. In the reading and fathoming of Parmenides' Poem it would seem that every claim of 'what-is' sustains not only every act of mortal faith or mortal belief, but the very ground swell of theology, because the 'why-ness' of every claim of 'what-is' somehow eventually finds its way to God. God is the ultimate 'because' in which the 'what-is' eventually terminates. Where termination becomes the source of origination. In this God is the 'what-is' by virtue of which predication becomes possible. In this sense God is the source of origination of all meaning.

And each day 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. 65. Not to consult the Ov—Deuteronomy 18:11

66

I spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, which is thinking about my thoughts which were filled with ideas, experiences and reflections. Thinking about what I was aware of at odd moments was how I came to preoccupy myself. But now even after my release I am still in this mode. I was aware of the stream of consciousness that was flowing through my mind.

In this state I kept on thinking: why do we bother to write? Words put ideas into our minds, ideas give rise to thought, and thoughts are expressed in words. But most of all whenever I started capturing my ideas, thoughts, memories and imaginings by converting them into words, sentences and ultimately writing it was always because I was haunted by you my dear reader. It was always you whom I was addressing. I was seeking you, I was reaching out to you, I wanted very deeply to have communion with you, no matter who you were black or white, male or female, young or old. You were constantly on my mind, you the reader, whoever you may be.

Without you in mind I would never have been able to write down anything. In my darkest moment you appeared to me as an angel who bore me up in your arms. In your strong arms I lay in as you held me in my weakest moments. I was writing to you, I was addressing you, even though you will always be like that angel, anonymous, a stranger, someone that I will probably never meet, but who was always close at hand. I take comfort in the fact that you there, that you really exist and that I able to speak to you personally across this impossible divide that separates our minds. I think of you. I try to image you reading these notes. I feel sentimental, I think it is because I am overcome with loneliness. I have never been a sentimental person but I not only haunted by you my dear reader, I am haunted by the women that I have loved. I think of them. Regrets have been awakened in my soul. I am in love with Isabella Sabina. I am filled with the most incredible yearning for her. I want to be with her so badly. The prospect of never seeing her again fills me with an incredible forlornness. I cannot bear thinking the thought that I will never see her again, that I will never embrace her or hear her voice again or see her face and feel her love. I whisper in my loneliness: 'I love you Isabella.'

And each day 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. 66. Not to consult the Yidoni—Deuteronomy 18:11

67

I whisper in the darkness of my despair, in the isolation of my prison cell, that I love you my dear reader. I love you with that pure love, because if you have reached this point in your reading, in your forbearance, in your patience, in your attentiveness, it can only mean that we have started an affair, a love affair. I the Lipstick Lesbian have become your lover. I wipe the tears rolling down my cheeks with the back of hand. I am in love with Isabella. Will I ever see her again? She must have learnt about my arrest.

And each day 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. 67. Not to perform acts of magic—Deuteronomy 18:10

68

Malcolm has saved me from being betrayed by whatever hidden weaknesses that I may have carried unknown hidden deep down within my soul like a brooding cancer. As the doctor of the soul he may have saved me from myself. He knows that everyone is ultimately a stranger to themselves and it is the stranger that lives unknown deep within us that ends up betraying us in our darkest hour when we have sunk to our weakest and most vulnerable emotional state. Malcolm has removed all uncertainties. Malcolm has become my guardian, he has saved me. I have confessed my guilt as charged. I have protected the Party and the comrades, and I will be sentenced to seven years in jail as a loyal Communist. This I have been told on good authority will be the verdict of the court. It is a done deal. Now I have been informed that I will appear briefly in court alone, to be sentenced. The others, my comrades will be tried in a separate trial. Once in the court the changes will be read and I will plead guilty. The whole judicial process has been scripted and I have been coached to do as expected. The judge will strike the mallet or whatever he has to do and the court will sentence me to seven years for propagating the aims and objectives of the Communist Party and for Communist subversion. I will immediately be driven to prison and processed as a convicted prisoner. I will serve my sentence, seven years without the prospect of early parole. Malcolm has been pulling the strings behind the scenes. The Zeeman name apparently counts for something. We are not a noble family. I am sure our history is a shameful one. As a Zeeman I have confessed and as a Zeeman I have received absolution, not from the politicians or the security police or the prosecutor or the judge. I have received absolution from my own conscience. I know what to expect, the future has been unveiled. I am no longer in the icy and terrifying grip of the unknown. I am only faced with the burden of incarceration. I am filled with thankfulness that I have not been broken. I don't know how I would have fared without Malcolm's interventions. He has saved me.

Yet at the same time, in spite of the Malcolm's arrangement, I felt that I was still drifting in an ocean of uncertainty. As an awaiting trial prisoner I had been remanded in custody. Bail had been denied. I was a flight risk. And I have been kept in complete isolation from the other comrades who were in detention. I am also practically being kept in solitary confinement, even though I have been given writing materials, I remain in complete isolation. I am not even sure whether I should be kept in solitary confinement as a waiting trail prisoner. I have no real or meaningful communication with anyone. And to compound matters, my trail date now keeps on changing. From one moment to the next I did not know what was going on regarding my fate. It seems that I am being intentionally kept in the dark for some unknown reason. I have no knowledge of law. I have not yet seen a lawyer or a doctor or a magistrate or even a priest. It feels as if I do not exist. I am just waiting, and waiting, and waiting, cut off from the world. It seems like I have been forgotten by the world.

And each day 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. 68. Men must not shave the hair off the sides of their head—Leviticus 19:27

69

And my mind wonders. I have strange thoughts, strange recollections. I can even see things. Sometimes I see things with the vividness of a dream.

In Hotazel a man almost dies drowning in his own blood in a bar fight at the manganese mine's rec club pub. There is a huge drunken commotion in the foyer that separates the pub and lounge from the hall. We hear that there has been a fight over a woman. Someone's wife was been screwed by a young man in the single quarters. I suspect that my own father has been fucking the wives of other men on the Hotazel mine. My father has a young pretty twenty five year old secretary in his office and even as a ten year old I know that they were having an affair. It is late Saturday night the movie that we have been watching in the hall has just ended. The movie was 'Serengeti Shall not Die.' As a young ten old girl in standard three I have been deeply moved by the movie. With a bunch of friends, Malcolm, Elsabe and I walk home from the rec club. Everyone is talking and joking. I trail behind them. I am wrapped in my own thoughts. The movie scenes of the Serengeti flow through my mind. I am gripped by an urgency bordering on anxiety regarding the fate of the wildlife of Africa. It is a pitch dark night. I gaze up at the swarm of stars lighting up the Kalahari night sky. I hear Malcolm shouts out: 'Hannah, Hannah, roer jou litte!' (Hannah, Hannah, move our bones!)

He has stopped speaking in English to me.

And each day 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. 69. Men must not shave their beards with a razor—Leviticus 19:27

70

Hotazel is in the Kalahari, the Kalahari is a vast ancient desert, in the Kalahari the night is haunted by many secrets, which only the foot prints in the sand at dawn bear a strange testimony. Does God exist or is the universe causally closed?

In a hotel pub in Mozambique in a hotel overlooking the jetty at Vilanculos, as an eighteen year old Wits student I sipped Laurentina beer for the first time. I will always remember how pleasantly my cheeks tingled. My head was filled with first year Zoology. I had done something adventurous, during the first orientation week I joined the Wits diving club. I also joined the Wits Film Society. Now almost six months later I am in Vilanculos and we will be leaving the next morning to one of the islands of the Bazaruto Archipelago. In the north in the Tete province the anticolonial war rages on in the bush. FRELIMO is fighting the liberation war against the Portuguese Colonialists. But tomorrow we will leave the mainland of Africa on a voyage over the horizon which will take us to a small paradisiacal island belonging the chain of islands making up the Bazaruto Archipelago.

We are spear fishing off the edge of the coral reefs, I see the marlin, it is huge, it has suddenly materialized seemingly from nowhere, it is so close, mere meters away, and its eyes are as big as saucers.

'A woman must not wear man's clothing, nor a man wear woman's clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.' No clothing has survived in the archaeological record for the period which coincides with the Pleistocene, a geological epoch which lasted from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago. In its duration the Palaeolithic almost coincides with the beginning and end of Pleistocene. Etymologically speaking the word Palaeolithic is derived from the Greek words palaios which means old or age and lithos which means stone, and signifies the 'old stone age'. All the species numbered 1 to 20 share a common ancestor with the chimpanzees, they all phylogenetically related having descended from ape-like common ancestor between 6 and 7 million years ago. The group of ape-like animals which we refer to as the hominins include modern humans, extinct human species, proto-human species and all the other relatives with which the genus Homo shares phylogenetic affinities, such as the species belonging to the following human-like genera: Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Ardipithecus. Bipedalism represents one of the major defining features of the hominins. Species form the following genera, Sahelanthropus, Ardipithecus and Orrorin, represent the earliest examples of bipedal hominins. The bipedal-hominin genera which share phylogenetic affinities, meaning that they all share a common ancestor, thus belonging to the same phylogenetic tree , can be listed as follows:

1 Sahelanthropus tchadensis (6-7 million years ago)

2 Orrorin tugenensis (6 million years ago)

3 Ardipithecus kadabba (5.2-5.8 million years ago)

4 Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 million years ago)

5 Australopithecus anamensis (3.9-4.2 million years ago)

6 Australopithecus afarensis (2.95-3.85 million years ago)

7 Kenyanthropus platyops (3.2-3.5 million years ago)

8 Australopithecus africanus (2.1-3.3 million years ago)

9 Paranthropus aethiopicus (1.2-2.3 million years ago)

10 Paranthropus boisei (1.2-2.3 million years ago)

11 Homo habilis (1.4-2.33 million years ago)

12 Homo rudolfensis (1.8-1.9 million years ago)

13 Homo ergaster (1.3-1.8 million years ago)

14 Homo erectus (200,000-1.89 million years ago)

15 Homo heidelbergensis (200,000-700,000 years ago)

16 Homo rhodesiensis (125,000-400,000 years ago)

17 Homo neanderthalensis (40,000-400,000 years ago)

18 Denisova hominin (765,000-48,000 years ago)

19 Homo floresiensis (about 50,000 years ago)

20 Homo sapiens (300,000 years to the present).

The earliest hominins being partly arboreal and partially bipedal probably looked a lot like ape-like animals or even chimpanzee-like animals, but bearing a strong resemblance to Sahelanthropus and Ardipithecus. Round about 2.3 million years ago the first proto-humans or increasingly human-like hominins evolved from an ape-like partial bipedal African-savannah-inhabiting Australopithecine ancestor which due to various selective pressures became increasingly more and more proficient with regard to a bipedal form of locomotion. And as a consequence of this increasingly efficient skeletal and anatomically based form of upright bipedal mobility they adapted quite successfully to a more terrestrial and wide-ranging opportunistic foraging lifestyle, and this where the prehistory of clothing has its roots. Obviously the evolution of the bipedal skeletal-framework made the hominin body ideal for the wearing of clothes. It also freed the grasping hands for carrying, foraging, food processing, tool manufacturing and eventually dressmaking, especially when the wearing of clothing became a vital adaptation for survival under increasingly harsh climatic conditions. The development of the habit or custom for wearing clothing or dressing the body or clothing the body always existed as practical possibility by virtue of the innate dexterity of fingers acting in cooperation with the opposable thumb. Being set free as a consequence of the bipedal lifestyle the hands could be readily co-opted into the manufacturing of clothing, especially when the wearing of clothing became a necessary survival strategy for life under harsh and extreme climatic conditions, especially under freezing temperatures. Thermal protection in the form of clothing became increasing necessary for survival as human populations migrated from the more tropical zones of their evolutionary origins into the higher and colder latitudes, especially during the Pleistocene ice-ages. It evident from a biological and physiological perspective that thermal insulation, that is, protect against cold or low temperatures, was originally the primary function of clothing following migrations from the tropics.

The development of clothing seems to be a fairly obvious adaptive response to the thermal environment making the reasons for wearing of clothing seemingly self-explanatory. Yet apart from the origin of clothing as a means for ensuring thermal insulation against the cold within zones in the higher latitudes, the further development of clothing to serve other functions or needs such dressing for display or representation, which becomes a performative act separable from any practical or essential thermal insulation needs or requirements, becomes in turn a conundrum that needs explaining from a cultural, anthropological, sociological, ethical, political and theological perspective. Dressing for the display of what? This is the question which concerns Deuteronomy 22.5. What kinds of displays could God possibly detest? The 'evolutionary default' is for humans to be in different states of undress or being unclothed. Maybe we need to differentiate between being 'clothed' and being 'dressed'. Here we have too different states of affairs, one practical (thermal insulation) and the other symbolic (semiotic and ideological). In Matthew 25:36-40 English Standard Version (ESV) we read: 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' 40 And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.' What is the parable about? It is about the material conditions of existence. The material conditions of existence determine the level or intensities of one's state of deprivation. The state of one's deprivation coincides with one's position within the hierarchy of social domination under the reign of the Oligarchy. It is the Oligarchy which determines the material conditions of one's existence. Your degree of 'nakedness' is a reflection of your social status in the hierarchy of domination. You can be fully dressed yet still be naked. To be clothed entails a change in one's status with respect to the material conditions of existence.

'I was naked and you clothed me...' According to Seneca to be naked is to be 'ill-clothed'. The same sentiment is expressed by Tacitus. With the bringing of the Ark of the Covenant home King David undressed, laying aside his royal robes, and he then danced with all his might before the Lord, without being dressed up in his royal robes, maybe in this sense he was naked. David was girded with a linen ephod (2 Samuel 6 verse 14). Girded in a linen ephod, he was ill-clothed' and in this state he was as good as naked. Or was he 'dressed' or was he 'ill-clothed' in a priestly garment. To what degree was he naked and dancing? By being dressed in linen ephod was David directing sacrifices, was he involving himself in a priestly function beneath his dignity and rank as a King? Was he not going beyond the boundaries with respect to the performativity or expressivity of dress? Is this what Michal detested as 'acting' or 'performing' or 'expressing himself' in manner which was unbefitting for a king? The performativity or expressivity of dressing can represent or symbolize a state of nakedness or even a state of non-nakedness. To be naked in these terms could also be interpreted as being non-nakedly dressed with regard to some another terms of reference. It way can a lesbian possibly be naked? Is there no restriction to the stretching of the boundaries of identity, role, status, rank, meaning and symbolism when it comes to dressing, is this the essence of the conundrum regarding the wearing of clothes?

What more can be said about the ambiguities of identity or performativity or expressivity in connection to the clothing of the body? In Genesis 25 verses 15 to 19 we read: 15 Then Rebekah took the best clothes of Esau her older son, which she had in the house, and put them on her younger son Jacob. 16 She also covered his hands and the smooth part of his neck with the goatskins. 17 Then she handed to her son Jacob the tasty food and the bread she had made. 18 He went to his father and said, "My father." "Yes, my son," he answered. "Who is it?" 19 Jacob said to his father, "I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Please sit up and eat some of my game, so that you may give me your blessing."

In Genesis 37 verse 3 (NIV) we read: Now Israel (Jacob) loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colours (an ornate robe). And then in Genesis 41 verses 41 to 43 (NIV) we read: 41 So Pharaoh said to Joseph, "I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt." 42 Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph's finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. 43 He had him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command, and people shouted before him, "Make way!" Thus he put him in charge of the whole land of Egypt. In Genesis 38:13-19 (NIV) we read: 13 When Tamar was told, "Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep," 14 she took off her widow's clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelahhad now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife. 15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. 16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, "Come now, let me sleep with you." "And what will you give me to sleep with you?" she asked. 17 "I'll send you a young goat from my flock," he said. "Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?" she asked. 18 He said, "What pledge should I give you?" "Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand," she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. 19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow's clothes again.

There is no reason why we should not see Naomi and Ruth as lesbians, a lesbian relationship between an older woman, Naomi, and a younger woman, Ruth. Walter Benjamin was not wrong when he proposed that the lesbian is the heroine of modernity, so why should we not also see Naomi and Ruth cast in the roles of lesbian heroines trying to make their life journey as women in love in the ancient world of patriarchical rule. Naomi concocts a plot for seduction, she instructs Ruth to wash herself, anoint herself with perfume, and dress in her best clothes, and then go to Boaz at night while he is sleeping on the threshing floor. Even though Naomi and Ruth are practically destitute Ruth still appears to have perfume and seductive clothing among her meagre bundle of possessions. Furthermore, regarding Ruth's nocturnal visitation, Naomi instructs Ruth to go lie down at Boaz's feet and uncover his feet, only after he had eaten his fill and imbibed sufficient alcohol to render him reckless. Reference to Boaz's feet is merely a euphemism for his penis, and the uncovering of Boaz's feet means exposing his penis, the uncovering is meant to bring Boaz to a state of sexual arousal. Following Boaz's arousal Ruth tells him to spread his cloak over her, and she inserts the erect penis. Why do we believe that in this story the male foot functions as a metaphor for the penis? In Deuteronomy 25 a man who refuses to perform the Levirate marriage symbolically has his shoe pulled from this foot, where the shoe in this instance, in keeping with ancient Near Eastern custom, signifies the female vagina. The story of Ruth has meaningful resonances and contrasts with the story of Tamar, Joseph and even Esther. Joseph manages to escape from the clutches of a nameless woman, in the role of Potiphar's wife, she grabs his cloak, fleeing in panic he leaves his cloak behind, instead of covering Potiphar's wife in his cloak, yet the cloak is used as evidence in the credible manufacture of his sexual intentions.

In sum we are able to discern a series of transitions, such as the transition from the naked body to the clothed body which coincided with a geographic-climatic transition in the form of human migrations from the tropics to the colder regions in higher latitudes, and then the transition from clothing as protective thermal insulation to clothing as the physical embodiment of the symbolic, or the symbolic embodiment of coded messages concerning rank and status, which accompanies the rise of the uniform or costume in hierarchicalized social system. The relation between the body and clothing or dress changes as a consequence of changes in the material conditions of existence, for example, the change from a nomadic hunter-gather Palaeolithic lifestyle to the sedentary agrarian Neolithic lifestyle.

The social-politico-ethno-religious-hegemonic founding ideology which become what we now call Judaism was something which grew to full fruition out of the Babylonian Exile. The systematic legal codification of the contents of a complex and diverse corpus of Near Eastern mythological and fictionalized literature played a significant role in its creation as an institution. During the post-Babylonian exilic period round about 400 BC the idea that one was a Jew by virtue of one's mother being a Jew first took root. The impetus of this idea grew with the return of Ezra to Judea from Babylon. Ezra played a pioneering in role in the establishment of the Torah as the centre of the ethno-religious life of the people who began to identify themselves as Jewish. He contributed to the development of the Midrashic method, an interpretive method which for example could be used to justify the forbiddance of intermarriage between Jews and non-Judeans. The idea of the Jews being the chosen people of God seemed to be continually refuted by history, and the ad hoc theologically rooted hypothesis used to explain away the apparent falsification of the idea of the Jews being the chosen people of God was based on irrational assumptions concerning the nature of God, the nature of God's will, especially with respect to the system of codified laws as embodied in the Torah. Could all the commandments embodied in the Torah be logically and rationally consonant with God's nature? Could they be logically and rationally consistent with God really being God? Could they be consistent in a non-ambiguous and non-contradictory manner with the diverse and variable content of Hebraic literature? Why would a rationally consistent God constantly punish a divinely chosen people for their failure to fully observe a covenant based on a religious-legal code that was morally inconsistent and ambiguous, and irrational and also patently absurd.

And each day 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. 70. Men must not wear women's clothing—Deuteronomy 22:5

71

I returned from Cape Town to Wits with a PhD. I also found a suitable flat in Bellevue which on my father's advice I bought under sectional title and I became a member of the Powder Puff in Hillbrow. The Power Puff was a new popular and posh lesbian nightclub frequented by well-heeled fashion-conscious lesbians who were seriously into social dancing. At high school my sexual odyssey had begun in earnest. With my first post-adolescent sexual awakening I became increasing aware of my erotic attraction towards members of my own sex. From an early age I realized that I was different to most of my female peers, I did not share their attraction to boys. Instead I found myself attracted to them, the girls. It was perplexing, especially for a ten year old who felt this strange and overpowering attraction towards other girls. I wondered if I was the only person in the entire world who was romantically drawn to women. It remained a secret that I did not confess until that 'fateful' day. Friendships with girls always mutated into infatuations. I fell in love with all the girls with whom I had entered into the shared intimacy of best friend relationships. However same-sex best friends were never reciprocal love affairs, but even so I was still a wonderful best friend always smothering my girlfriends with so much affection and tenderness. And when the intensity of our friendship ended in a drifting apart my heart would break and for days I suffered the emotional pain of lost love. I would become overwhelmed with inconsolable sadness. My girlfriends had no inkling that I was in love with them. With time I became increasing curious and adventurous. In standard six I read Patricia Highsmith's erotic lesbian story 'The price of salt.' I found the book in a second-hand bookshop in Potchefstroom.

Dressed up in a clinging high-hem-line chic number I would dance the night away in stilettos with legs encased in stockings. In the earlier hours of the morning I would often find myself lying naked on my back on satin sheets in someone else's sumptuous bed in a plush and elegantly furnished bedroom with my legs spread wide open, and a woman who had I met at the club would be going down on me with a flicking, licking and probing tongue, with two fingers of her right hand in my vagina and the forefinger of her left had stuck deep into my anus. Gasping, moaning and panting, writhing about in pleasure as a deep and exquisite orgasm spreading from my vulva proceeded to tingle deliciously up my inner thighs. I have an insatiable appetite for sex. I love having sex but only with women. I have never been with a man.

And each day 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. 71. Women must not wear men's clothing—Deuteronomy 22:5

72

In high school at the tender age of thirteen I made the serious mistake of confessing my love for my best friend. I thought that our feelings for each other were mutual because she reciprocated the tenderness and affection that I had shown towards her. When I eventually confided to her that I was a lesbian and that I was in love with her she drew away from me as if she was recoiling from a reptile. The rumour that I was a lesbian spread like a wild fire and the expected summons to the office of the headmistress for a tête-à-tête soon followed. Over a cup of tea Mrs Gladys Hornsley an astute politician and pragmatist took a realistic approach to the problem of lesbianism at an all-girl school. She referred to it as the eternal problem that would never go away and that while she did not condone lesbianism in any way, she thought it served no rational purpose to expel or persecute lesbians as long as they don't become a nuisance or create problems or trigger scandals. Lighting a cigarette she told me to be discreet in expressing my affections towards members of my own sex. But also solemnly warned me that she will not tolerate any kissing, hugging, hand holding or bed sharing between girls at the school. She did not ask if I was indeed a lesbian so I assumed she had got all the information she needed from a prior interview with my ex-best friend. Anyway things normalized pretty quickly and I ceased to be a social leper as most people generally accepted my sexual status and got used to the idea that there were lesbians in their midst.

What could be more natural than lesbianism given the fact that women and men have lived separate lives for most of human history, which includes more than 99% of human history, a time span that includes the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, a time span that for modern humans stretches back to more than 200 000 years into the past, possibly even further back than this, possibly as much as 300 000 years when the dawn of the age of modern humans first broke? The fact that the genetic predisposition toward lesbianism has persisted in the human gene pool for hundreds of thousands of years means that the genes for lesbianism encoded vital adaptive behavioural attributes, functional behavioural attributes which increased the overall or collective fitness of individual females within the communities in which lesbians were embedded. Two centuries of industrialization, a period accounting for less than 1% of the total time span of human existence brought about the restructuring of the ancient and prehistorical patterns of female to female sociality. With the emergence of nuclear family the ancient sisterhood was completely eradicated. The community of children, young women and older women being brought together each day to forage for food or to labour in the fields in which female-based solidarity ruled their lives has now changed forever following the industrial revolution. But the fact that women and men have been living in separate worlds since the dawn of the evolutionary emergence of humans did not change with industrial revolution. They still live in separate worlds. Men and women are actually strangers to each other. This is the great paradox of human existence. This the great enigma of heterosexual sex. The industrial revolution destroyed the ancient sisterhood and isolated women from each other, impoverishing their emotional lives and diminishing them as persons. Biologically women have evolved to be together and they need to be with each other in order to grow and develop to full human potential as women. Throughout human history women and men had very little to with each other, the two sexes lived separate lives, and in many ways knew very little about each other. For most of human existence women and men have never worked side by side together. It is only very recently that the social phenomenon of women and men working together, side by side, has emerged in various wage earning occupations, following the industrial revolution.

The sexual revolution which the industrial revolution unleashed upon women did not improve the quality of womanhood, in fact it destroyed the nurturing and emotionally enriching social intercourse between women which was part and parcel of female solidarity for most of human history. Women became separated from each other. The modern nuclear family and the patterns of work in the industrial age isolated women from each of other, severing in the process the deep bonds that have always existed between women, bonds that were always necessary for women to be women in the fullest possible sense. Women need women. Women are now forced to compete with each other, making the world crueller towards women. Older women no longer enjoy the privilege, status and power of being respected wise councillors and leaders, who have accumulated the collective wisdom that comes with lifelong experiences. Women are no longer empowered as they age, as was the case during the time when they worked together on a daily basis as Palaeolithic foragers or post-Neolithic agrarian labourers.

And each day 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. 72. Not to tattoo the skin—Leviticus 19:28

73

Interlude: Up until now, that is following my release from detention I have been recuperating at my parent's home in Hotazel. While in detention there had been nothing else for me to do in order to pass the time except to think and reflect, so while I waited and endured the passing flux of time within the closed confines of four walls, I decided to write down everything that I could remember about my life in these notebooks. As I said, I was expecting that I would be serving a lengthy prison sentence, but it turned out that I was eventually released, released unexpectedly, and following my release I returned to my parent's home, the place where I had grown up, which happened to be in Hotazel.

In prison I had spent the time using the best and most suitable words that I could think of to represent and express my ideas in the medium of writing. Of course, I found myself often subconsciously mouthing streams of words as soundless sub-vocalizations in my mind.

And each day 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. 73. Not to tear the skin in mourning—Deuteronomy 14:1

74

Refrain and interlude: Now I have returned to the Kalahari. I returned to the Kalahari in a world that was no longer the same. The world seemed to have reached a historical crossroad, the world now teeters at the threshold of disaster, recalcitrant systemic instabilities have driven the world to a conjunction, and the world is in a state of crisis, things will never be the same again. Yet while the world has changed, the Kalahari has remained the same in its original ancient state of unchanging beauty. The world has changed for the worst, and I feel disconnected from this world. Everything seemed to be so topsy-turvy. Were we now really at the threshold of a new epoch, was this the dawn of a new age? Had a new order come into existence? Or was it that the more things seemed change the more they actually stayed the same or something like that? The collapse of socialism was in the air. Everything had become more uncertain. Maybe Malcolm was right, the epoch of betrayal had dawned which meant nothing had changed. Humanity had reaffirmed its condition of pathological degeneration, human nature had become terminally ill with the disease of civilization. We have now become natural traitors, betraying the goodness of our natures. Betrayal is the condition of our hearts and minds. I have not become religious; my family environment had never been a religious one, but I had grown up in a Christian ethos in which the idea of man's fall and the human state of fallenness seemed to explain everything about the human condition. It was natural to think of man as a fallen creature. As a fallen creature that is living in a state of disobedience to her better nature, and as a creature existing in a state of exile and alienation. Betrayal persists as an incurable affliction in the inexorable repetition of the Oligarchy, the Oligarchy exists as the realization of betrayal, and it exists by virtue of betrayal. Does humankind have a better nature? We are forced to believe that this is the case, otherwise it would be impossible to explain how we managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years without the 'benefits' of Leviathan or civilization. The emergence of civilization represents the fall of humankind. Civilization is our punishment.

And each day 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. 74. Not to make a bald spot in mourning—Deuteronomy 14:1

75

I was born into a secular home but I grew up is a religious or Christian ethos. In the back of my mind I assumed that God existed, as a child and also later as a teenager I just went with the flow, taking it for granted that there was a God. As I have mentioned my parents had never before been particularly religious. God was never mentioned in our home. We never said grace before our meals. I don't think we even had a Bible in our home. But Malcolm in spite of his cynicism about the human species was always religious in a manner of speaking. After he got married he ceased to be merely religious in a general unspecific manner. He became a true believer like his wife, and as a husband and father and as the head of an Afrikaner household he became a regular church goer. After he got married he also stopped shedding human blood, he washed his blood stained hands, but he could not let go of the dark world completely, he was addicted to it. He had to live with one foot in that world. He never gave his friends up who remained in that world. In many ways he remained a member of the brotherhood, he remained a 'spiritual member' of the Recces and of Koevoet. His network in the world of darkness remained intact.

With Malcolm, in spite of his wildness as child and as a teenager, when he heard the Word, the seed of the good news always fell on fertile or good soil. The seed that was sown at the weekly Kinderkrans afternoons we attended at primary school in Hotazel took root in Malcolm's mind, and in his soul. If the soul existed then Malcolm possessed a soul that had been touched by the Word. The seed that was sown at the weekly Anglican mass while we were at boarding school in Potchefstroom also found fertile soil in Malcolm's soul. With Malcolm, the Word sown by the church would yield a big return on its investment. When the time was ripe the church reeled him in.

While the church eventually reeled in one of its wayward sons in the form of Malcolm Zeeman, my own relationship to the Institution of Christianity has always been ambivalent, and possibly filled with all kinds of contradictions and inconsistencies. But then maybe the Christian life is a life of contradictions, a life filled with paradox. Has my own soul been fertile soil for the Word of God? Has the Word of God touched my own life? This I will need to explore by way of my own personal reflections on the meaning of the Word of God, especially in relation to its incarnation, its immanence and its transcendence, and its relationship to the canonical literature out of which the Bible as a book has been constituted or instituted. Before I can answer this questions I need to first talk about Christianity as an Institution. Only then can I expand on the Word of God and state whether it has been a power in my own life. John Calvin called his magnum opus the Institutes of the Christian Religion. The meaning of the words 'institute', 'institutes', 'institutions' and 'institutionalization' are key to understanding the full social and political significance of Christianity as a religious institution.

The majority of the families in Hotazel were Afrikaans and they were all deeply religious in their own way. Every Sunday morning travelling from far flung dorpies (small towns) in the arid Northern Cape, dominees making the long journey to Hotazel would take turns to lead services in the rec hall. Each Sunday after a drunken Saturday night in the rec pub, dominees from one of the three Afrikaans reformed churches, Gereformeerde Kerk, Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk, would pitch up to preach to a full hungover congregation. While still in primary school, neatly dressed in our church clothes, Malcolm, Elsabe and I would walk to church. There was no Sunday school linked to the services so we attended the adult service which was never longer than one hour. Every now and then some young dominee, usually a fresh faced theological graduate, would arrive, and it was usually these young ministers filled with passion and enthusiasm who had put a huge amount of effort and research into the preparation of their sermons, and we heard preaching from their youthful mouths that was truly inspirational. Mom and dad who were teetotallers never attended any of the church services while we were still at primary school in Hotazel.

Malcolm the man with blood on his hands was a deeply religious person. Was he a traitor to the Word? Did he betray what the Word in truth stood for? He spoke so much about betrayal, but did he grasp the irony that he had betrayed what the Word signified in its full semiotic richness?

And each day 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. 75. To repent and confess wrongdoings—Numbers 5:7

76

Speaking about words, the etymology of the name 'Kalahari' has been debated by the explorers and missionaries such as Thomas Baines, Burchell, and Robert Moffat. According to these fellows a consensus had arisen that the name Kalahari was derived from the Tswana words Kgalagadi and Makgalagadi. Thomas Baines reports that travellers spoke of the Kalahari been referred to as the 'Magalle galle Karri Karri' which includes the Hottentot word 't'karri'.

Intermezzo. Cassation. Divertimento. There has never been a mother-daughter bond between mom and myself. I can't help feeling that my mother sees me as someone who has been released after an extended stay in a mental or lunatic asylum. They don't ask about the events which led to my arrest nor do they show any inclination to talk about my arrest and detention. I feel that they treat my political convictions and commitments as an illness which can be cured. My mother makes me feel like a person who is spiritually and mentally ill. She thinks I am insane. I am not married, I have no children and I have never brought a boyfriend home. I go downstairs to the lounge. Dad draws the curtains to dim the lounge. He has put a new light bulb in the 8 mm projector. His has keep a stock of these ancient project light bulbs. We watch reels of film for hours. Timeless snatches of my life have been captured on celluloid. I am pretending to be a seal in the children's pool at the Stilfontein public swimming pool. Dad dives off the high board at the Klerksdorp public swimming pool. We are at a picnic at Klerksdorp Dam. We are on holiday at Plettenberg Bay, the wireless radio is playing Bill Harley and the Comets 'Rock Around the Clock', I am eleven years old and I am dancing the rock and roll with dad at our camp site. More films of swimming pools, the Hotazel rec pool, the high school gala, and the provincial gala. At various swimming pools, I see my developing body in different bathing costumes, as a toddler, as a child, at various stages of puberty and adolescence, and then as a high school teenager participating in numerous galas, and as a teenager in a bikini on the beach while on holiday with my parents. My parents betray all the signs that they struggling to come grips with their 'errant' daughter. They are unsure of how to treat me. While watching the home movies there now appears to be a huge gap in the story of my life in their minds. There is an inexplicable disconnection with the past. The continuity has been raptured. I have turned out to be somebody else. I am not the person that they thought they knew. They have difficulty in connecting me with the cinematic images they have unfolded on the screen in the dim light of our lounge in Hotazel. There appears to be nothing that is normal about me. My dad is trying to reconnect with his little girl. I am also reaching out to him. We go for long walks. We talk. I tell him that I will always look after him. I tell him that I love him. He finds it difficult to grasp that I can indeed look after him. He is on the brink of retirement and I am still young relatively speaking. It seems ironical to him that given my arrest and detention that I was suggesting that I was able to look after him. It seemed so incongruous that a person who has landed in such 'deep trouble' with the law of the land could indeed look after him in his old age. I insist that I will always be there for him. 'What about your mother?' he asks. I confirm that I will also look after her. Malcolm and Elsabe would not to be able to take care of them. They have families and all kinds of encumbrances. I have no family other than them. I tell him that they are all I have in the way of family and I insist that I will be visiting them at every opportunity in Hermanus. 'What about the politics?' he asks.

What about politics? What answer can I give him? How can I explain to him that I have become an anarchist?

And each day 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. 76. To say the Shema twice daily—Deuteronomy 6:7

77

Some philosophers have argued that external objects have dispositions, capacities or even powers to act directly on the senses, thereby causing sensations that have the potential to affect behaviour in both animals and humans. In the case of humans, empiricists like Locke and Hume, have proposed that sensations caused by external objects result in the creations of ideas or impression or mental images in the mind, and the more modern philosophers have argued that the mind or the mental supervenes on the brain. But still, we don't really know what consciousness actually is nor do we know how conscious is related to or caused by brain activities or how it is generated by the neurological biochemical and physical processes in the brain. The causal chain of events that result in consciousness or conscious awareness is a mystery.

Grand claims regarding the illusionary status of all thinking and perceiving cannot be proven without lapsing into a species of self-reference paradox. It is impossible to escape from the fact that a huge chunk of what we claim to be knowledge happens to be based on sense experience in the widest possible sense. What is sensible experience? Can it be proven that external objects do not act directly on our senses? Can it be proven that external objects do not cause sensations in our bodies, in our brains, in our hands or in our skin, can it be proven that external objects do not fill our mind with ideas, representations and feelings? No of course not! So totalizing claims to ultimacy also functions as the presupposition underlying the impossible proof that everything is an illusion, and that totalizing claims have no foundation.

We cannot jump out of skins, we cannot leave our bodies, and therefore apart from our bodies we have no other means or avenue of access to the empirical Universe.

Objects possess powers to bring ideas to life in our mind and ideas give rise to thought. And ideas invite the creation of words.

And each day 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. 77. To serve the Almighty with prayer daily—Exodus 23:25

78

Refrain and interlude: I have returned to my bedroom, where I have slept as a child, as an adolescent and as a teenager. I have come back to this bedroom, my childhood bedroom, as a guest in my parent's home at the manganese mine in Hotazel. Returning to my room was a dreamlike experience. We only return to our past in all its vividness in oneiric visitations, in dreams which are often life-like, in the kind of dreams that Descartes and the philosophers spoke about. In adulthood we only return to our parental homes, to our childhood bedrooms, to our school classrooms and to our school lives in our dreams. And while I recuperated from the ordeal of solitary confinement I spent my time collating and reworking these notes into some kind of meaningful and readable narrative.

I have returned to my bedroom in my parent's home. I have become a child again in a manner of speaking. It seems that I need to be looked after. My parents are fussing over me. I stare out of my bedroom window. I am no longer caged in a prison cell. The tide of history has turned, the laws under which I was arrested and charged have become redundant; they no longer have any force over my life. My seven year prison sentence will never be served. I own my future again. The laws were not eternal, they were perfectly arbitrary and they have now been swept away forever. The legal and political edifice that the Nationalist Party has built has turned out to be nothing more substantial than a sand castle in the face of the rising tide of history.

I stare out of my bedroom window. The mantle of Kalahari sands stretches northward beyond the horizon. The sand is deep. The Kalahari sands have accumulated over the passage of eons, over the passage of geological time. Over the eons the rain fell, the wind blew, mountains crumbled to dust and the sands of the Kalahari piled up in deep layers.

As I stare out of my bedroom window I am thinking about my notes. I have re-read everything that I wrote while in prison. I wonder about my life, on how I came to be here, how I came to be the person that I am. From my window nothing has really changed. The Kalahari has stayed the same in the brief window of my life. Yet as the years passed I have constantly seen the Kalahari with new eyes. My love for the Kalahari has grown over the years. I am now beginning to feel sad. I feel overcome by a strange melancholy mixed with nostalgia. The intimate connection that I have enjoyed with the Kalahari by virtue of my parent's home and my bedroom is about to be severed as my parents go into retirement. As I have said, being back in my bedroom, I can't help feeling like a child again. My parents have bought a cottage in Hermanus. They are at the cross roads of their lives. They will be leaving Hotazel to start a new life by the sea. It has been their dream and soon they will be living their dream. My father has taken care of everything. He will spend his autumn years fishing and bird watching. Mom wants to start painting.

And each day 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. 78. The Kohanim must bless the Jewish nation daily—Numbers 6:23

79

As a child I spent hours exploring the surrounding bush and scrub land. My eyes glued to the light reddish sands. I later learnt that the grains of sand were red as a consequence of been covered in a thin skin or shell of iron oxide. As the sand became stabilized by vegetation the scanty rain which fell each year eventually dissolved and washed away the red oxide pigments, and the red sands began fade with the passage of time in lighter shades, into pinks before they finally became the white sands that glare like snow in the sunlight.

With eyes glues to the sand I was drawn as a child ineluctably to the scattered clumps of low sprawling brush of candle thorn or trassiebos. On the perimeter of the candle thorn thickest there were always tunnels dug by rodents and invariable there would be a small tortoise resting in cool shade of one of these rodent holes.

In January 1968 a few days before the start of the new school term I arrived in the small deeply Afrikaans town of Potchefstroom with its Reformed Church steeples, extensive system of irrigation channels, oak lined streets and rich Calvinistic heritage. I arrived with my parents from Hotazel with my head filled with dark secrets, dressed in my new Potchefstroom Girl's High school uniform and with two packed suitcases in which I had my tapes, tape recorder and transistor radio, and I might add that for obvious reasons I was comfortably happy to be in an all-girls boarding school. Potchefstroom lay smack-bang in the Western Transvaal corner of the so-call maize triangle, located 36.7 km east of Stilfontein and 40 km east of Klerksdorp. It was originally founded by the Voortrekkers in 1838 on the banks of the Mooi Rivier in the north-western reaches of the vast featureless steppes of the Highveld grasslands. With an average rainfall not much higher than 500 mm Potchefstroom had a fairly arid climate, with hot summers and icy cold winters.

In the early 1960s the Hotazel the mine's white community was relatively small when compared to Stilfontein or City Deep. It was too small to constitute an economical viable church congregation with its own church building, dominee and 'manse'. When I was still in primary and high school there were never more than 24 families living on the site. The unmarried white men who worked on mine were accommodated in the single quarters close to the rec club. There were enough able bodied young men working on the mine to make up the Hotazel mine rugby and cricket teams. The layout of the township was simple. Except for our house all the other mine houses, were built according to the same simple plan. They were all three bedroomed light face brick homes, with a single toilet, a single bathroom, kitchen, laundry, dining room, and a lounge that opened into a gauze enclosed veranda.

Our newly built primary school consisted of two classrooms and toilets. It was not fenced off. One classroom was for juniors. In this class grade 1, grade 2, standard 1 and standard 2 were all accommodated in class room. There were never more than 20 kids in this class. In the other class standards 3, 4 and 5 were taught by the Dominee who was also a part-time cattle farmer. In the 'senior' class there also never more than 20 kids. It was a dual medium school, with the majority of pupils being Afrikaans mother tongue speakers. There were only a handful of English speaking kids. Malcolm, Elsabe and I were treated as Afrikaners, and at school we were only addressed in Afrikaans even though we spoke mainly English to each other at home.

Culturally, socially, nationally, ethnically and educationally I started my high school career as a member of that typically mongrel breed of people who belong to the diasporic flotsam and jetsam that European Imperialism had left behind to fend for themselves as castaways amongst the aboriginals in the far off colonies. I was forced by circumstance into which I was born to self-identify as a white person. Later in life I became increasing self-conscious of the hybrid being that I was: a strange blend of the African, the Hellenic and the Hebraic, I was neither fully Occidental or the Oriental or African, and my official status of Whiteness was coloured with the all clearly visible morphological racial ambiguities that comes from a historical dash of miscegenation in one's ancestry which I shared with so many other persons of 'very deep' Afrikaner descent. In many respects I was that gay mythical dark Semitic Phoenician woman that Kate joked about even though I had grown up with all the trapping of White privilege. My official racial classification as a white person was ironic.

And each day 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. 79. To wear Tefillin on the head—Deuteronomy 6:8

80

Anyway when I left Hotazel to further my schooling in Potchefstroom my head was far from empty. Apart from the dark secrets and passions of queerness that filled my head, my head was also filled with all kinds of other things. My head was filled with the names and stories of the people who populated the drama of the Old Testament: Aaron, Abagtha, Abednego, Abel, Abiathar, Abigail, Abijah, Abimelech, Abinadab, Abishai, Abner, Abraham, Absalom, Adam, Agrippa, Ahab, Ahasuerus, Ahaz, Ahimelech, Amos, Arioch, Baal, Baalzebub (Beelzebub), Balaam, Baruch, Bathsheba, Belshazzar, Belteshazzar, Benjamin, Bildad, Bilhah, Boaz, Cain, Caleb, Canaan, Dagon, Dan, Daniel, Darius, Dathan, David, Deborah, Delilah, Dinah, Eli, Elijah, Elisha, Enoch, Enos, Ephraim, Esau, Esther, Eve, Ezekiel, Ezra, Gabriel, Gad, Gideon, Goliath, Habakkuk, Haggai, Ham, Hannah, Hezekiah, Hosea, Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael, Israel, Jacob, Jehoshaphat, Jeremiah, Jesse, Jethro, Jezebel, Joab, Job, Joel, Jonah, Jonathan, Joseph, Joshua, Josiah, Judah, Korah, Laban, Lamech, Leah, Levi, Lot, Malachi, Mannasseh, Methuselah, Melchizedek, Meshach, Meshech, Micah, Michal, Miriam, Molech, Mordecai, Moses, Naaman, Naboth, Naomi, Nathan, Nebuchadnezzar, Nehemiah, Noah, Orpah, Pharaoh, Potiphar, Rachel, Rebecca (Rebekah), Rehoboam, Reuben, Ruth, Samson, Samuel, Sarah, Saul, Seth, Shadrach, Shechem, Shem, Solomon, Tamar, Uriah, Vashti, Zechariah.

It is undeniable that our tall, lean, dark, bespectacled and moustached dominee-teacher-cattle farmer had a deep and lasting influence on our lives. For the three years he taught us, that is, from standard three to standard five the school day began with prayers, a lengthy Bible reading, one day in Afrikaans and the next day in English, followed by a brief, artistically and cleverly analysed exegesis of the reading, pitched at a level which it possible for everyone to grasp the essence of what made the story meaningful and significant. In this way while our minds were still fresh and our blood sugar was still high from breakfast we worked systematically through the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel 1 and 2, Chronicles 1 and 2, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. The Gospels were read and the Word was preached during the weekly afternoon Kinderkrans meeting at the school. After Bible study we did arithmetic until first break while we still had enough sugar left in blood for brains to work. At break we played with an intensity of calves bouncing in the field with the energy of joy. The boys played rugby and the girls skipped and played hop-scotch. When the bell rang again, we would be flushed and breathless from strenuous physical exertion. With our brows covered in sweat we took our seats in the classroom.

And each day 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. 80. To bind Tefillin on the arm—Deuteronomy 6:8

81

In standard four I went through a religious phase and began to speak about wanting to become a zoologist-missionary, a career in which I would combine my interest in zoology with mission work in the remote Amazon jungle. I would study the animals in the jungle while preaching the Gospel to the Amazonian Indian tribes. I had this idea that I would erect a giant wooden cross in the middle of the Amazon jungle. After listening to my careers plans my mother suggested I should rather study medicine and then go as doctor to preach the Gospel in the jungles of the Belgian Congo like Albert Schweitzer did in Gabon. That was the first time I heard about Albert Schweitzer. But then dad ruled out the Congo as a destination because of civil war that was currently raging in the Congo. And this were the Encyclopaedia Britannica became useful. I read up on Albert Schweitzer in Gabon, I also read up on the Amazon and Congo. My interest in missionaries, colonialism, jungles never waned. I read Conrad' 'Heart of Darkness'. I saw Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' several times. And also 'The Deer Hunter' during that time. I was still in Cape Town. And also while in Cape Town I read Graham Greene and ever since he has always been one of my favourite author. Catholicism has penetrated into the jungles of the world where it has taken root in Africa and South America.

My brief flirtation of becoming a zoologist missionary as a nun in the Congo or the Amazon came to an end with the beginning of my sexual awakening in standard five. During my adolescent flirtations with a religious vocation I was motivated with the dark erotic fantasy about becoming a nun. In Hotazel my parents were instructed by our teacher that we should have Bibles and that it was their responsibility to ensure that we read our Bibles and say our every night before going to sleep. My parents were forgetful and lax in their parental duties. Kneeling by my bedside I prayed the 'Our Father' in Afrikaans every night.

And each day 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. 81. To put a Mezuzah on each door post—Deuteronomy 6:9

82

Why all these details? I don't know what the point is that I wish make other than that the Bible is a work of literary art and this is where its truth lies. Please do not skip the pages as a famous author once wrote, if I remember it was Vladimir Nabokov's character, Humbert Humbert, in 'Lolita', who pleaded with his readers: '...do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me...' Whatever I have written is essential for you to read if you wish to imagine me. I was intellectually precocious as a kid, I was precocious in many ways for my age. It was a direct result of the kind of relation that I with my dad. By the time I reached standard five I had guessed correctly what he and Corelle had been up to. I did not condemn him. I still respected and loved him. I loved him because he was also my best friend and my favourite human. We spoke a lot about all kinds of stuff and he never spoke down to me. We enjoyed each other's company and liked being together. He was a deep thinker and he shared his thoughts.

At primary school, after first break the next three periods where devoted to Afrikaans and English: grammar, vocabulary, spelling and reading. And then it was second break. After second break we were taught and we learnt stuff which fell under the rubric of 'social studies' which included the geography and history of the Republic of South Africa. And then it was home time. There were no extramural activities after school like sport. We would go home for lunch and spend the afternoon at the recreational club swimming pool during the summer months or I would go walking into the surrounding scrub land. I can't remember doing much homework, but I read a lot and everything I read became the topic of conservation with my father. We all spoke a lot at dinner. We were a very close knit and balanced family, still close knit even though I was not that close to mother as would have been expected for a normal daughter – mother relationship. She often complained that my father had stolen me from her.

In Hotazel like the rest of South Africa during the nineteen sixties there was no television to distract children after supper. After eating supper at the dining room table in the dining room adjoining the lounge the family would retire to the lounge and we the children found ways to preoccupy themselves until it was bed time, usually at 9.00 pm. I for one spent countless evenings browsing through the volumes of the Britannica Encyclopaedia until my eye lids grew heavy and my yawns threatened to engulf the entire Universe.

And each day 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. 82. To write a Sefer Torah—Deuteronomy 31:19

83

I have become torn between wanting to write a fictionalized kind of memoir and writing a purely autobiographical narrative. But I really had no choice in the matter. My life transcribed into writing has become a fiction. Fiction is created through the textualization not only of recollections or memories but also through the textualization of emotional feelings, private experiences, private sensations, private mental images and thoughts into the medium of writing. In fiction we achieve the convergence of meaning and being. And this is precisely what the overt or covert or unconscious or premediated purpose of any biography or autobiography is. If nothing else it remains the hidden subtext, the point of reference. It was Herder the pupil of Kant who became one of the leading lights of the German romantic 'Sturm and Drang' movement who in his attacks on the enlightenment's severing of being from meaning endeavoured to re-establish the unity of being and meaning or the merging of being and meaning in the idea or concept of an 'expressivist' theory, which was something completely different from the expressionist movement in painting. The expressivist theory was a theory of self-realization, a self-realization which was achieved in the self-unfolding of person's or a subject's life. In a way this was the telos of the subject's lived life which was fulfilled when a person's life, in its unfolding, realizes its true or ideal essence or form. According to Herder in contrast to Aristotle each of us are called to realize our own unique essence or form, and in this sense everyone is different and unique. The self-realization of this unique form or essence represents the Herderian expression of the unique meaning of one's life, which includes not only the purpose of one's life, but the actual clarification of what that purpose is. And also, it is in this expression that meaning and being merge or converge or are united with respect to the life that one has lived. The achievement of self-realization in or through the expression of the meaning, idea, form or essence of one's life is not achieved by virtue of it being a representation of something else, or the self-realization of something else, something pre-existing on its own terms, something existing independently as something else which functions as an independent reference point as an Idea or a Form or an Essence to be emulated, which has been wholly determined beforehand in terms of an overarching meaningful order. No, this is not the case with Herder's theory of life as an expression of meaning. The meaning of one's life is derived from the self-realization of its own idea, its own form, which is always unique, which resides only in one's life, where one's life is the lived or living embodiment of its own idea or essence or form. The 'message' in terms of the meaning which is embodied or which is residing in one's life cannot be known until it is expressed, as a self-realization of its own idea. And this applies to the goal of a writer or an artist or even a revolutionary when she recognizes that she has achieved the full expression of what she wanted to say, write or do. And so I am fully aware of the task at hand in the writing of these notes. In Herderian expressivism, the self comes to know itself through the achievement of its own self-expression, and by clarifying what she is through her self-recognition in her self-expression, where her self-expression is the achievement or self-realization of the idea or essence of herself in the life that she has lived. Self-awareness is achieved in self-expression. The idea of an independent and autonomous self-defining subjectivity is what characterizes modernity, and represents a fundamental break with the ancient world. In this sense the romantics where indeed also modernists.

In summary: The idea of a self-defining subjectivity can be formulated as followers \- The idea of a self-defining subjectivity involves the realization of her own essence or her own idea of herself, which is achieved by virtue of a self-realization or self-actualization through self-expression, in which her self-definition becomes her own achievement in the sense that it is not achieved by reference to or in relation to an ideal order existing beyond her life or world, but rather as something which emerges or unfolds from within her own life as a lived experience, and in this sense the idea of herself is her own self-realization, her own achievement. But in her own self-realization of the idea or essence of herself, she is always more than the sum of her parts, and this is what should be meant by the full meaning of her life in terms of its clarity, purpose and idea, all of which 'emerges' as a realized immanent or innate possibility in the unfolding of her life. I think what I am proposing here encapsulates more than that what Herder was proposing in his expressivist theory and I think my proposition is a bridging link between Herder and Hegel and finally to Marx.

And each day 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. 83. The king must have a separate Sefer Torah for himself—Deuteronomy 17:18.

84

While browsing in a second-hand bookstore in Melville I came across Albert Schweitzer's book 'The Quest of the Historical Jesus'. I already knew who Albert Schweitzer was so I bought the book out of curiosity, and ended up reading it with keen interest. In the never ending search for the historical Jesus there have been many attempts at writing a historical biography of Jesus.

Interlude: Anyway, going back to my bedroom, I have enjoyed a long relationship with this bedroom in my parent's home in Hotazel, a relationship which has stretched from 1961 to 1990. It had been my room while I was in primary school in Hotazel, it was my room to which I came home to from boarding school during school holidays and long weekends, and it was my room to which I came home to during the university student vacations and it was also my room to which I came home to when I visited my parents several times a year after I had graduated from university and started working.

The historical Jesus said: 'This is my body.' What did Jesus really mean? The pronoun 'this' possesses an unmistakeable determinateness, where presence and absence stand in an asymmetrical relationship, the 'this is' possesses an infinite over-determinateness, the 'is' in the 'this is' represents the singular present indicative of 'be' or 'to be'. There is no dichotomy in the meaning of 'this is'. Therefore there can be no ambiguity, only over-determinateness or omni-determinateness and omnipresence, in the meaning of the pronoun 'this' and the words 'this is'. In the Totalization of the determinate Real Presence or omnipresence signified in the 'thisness' of 'this is', as in 'this one' – the 'this', in 'this is my body' – dissolves and transcendences all the metaphysical dualisms or dichotomies such as: presence versus absence, determinate versus indeterminate, finite versus infinite, temporal versus the eternal, appearance versus reality, life versus death, before versus after, mythos versus logos, meaning versus being, nominalism versus realism, continuity versus discontinuity, speech versus writing, being versus becoming, the one versus the many, immanence versus transcendence, the visible versus the invisible, ontology versus epistemology and so on and so forth. In the 'this is my body' the sign acquires the full unambiguous referential power in its expression of the full positivity of meaning and being. All meaning is grounded in the referential power of signs, a power which is ultimately secured by a transubstantiation in which the Real Presence of the 'this is' can be discerned with certainty. The coming of the Messiah is fully actualized Jesus' announcement: 'this is my body'. 'This is my body' cannot be disentangled from Jesus's eschatological messianic pronouncement: 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. 'This is my body which is given for you' represents the salvific self-emptying or kenosis of God which has been realized once and for all in real space and time through the historical actualization of Jesus as the Messiah. The Messiah has come, his work is done, and there is no longer any need to wait.

Thus the historicity of Jesus is grounded in the words 'this is my body'.

In the holy Eucharist, transubstantiation signifies the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus in the material substance or elemental substance of the bread and wine in the referential use of the pronoun 'this'.

'This is my body.' What does it really mean? Does this claim of 'thisness' represent the fullness of 'the meaning of meaning', the totality of the meaning of meaning in everything that signifies something, in the ultimate saying of something about something to someone, does the saying of the unsayable, in form of the 'this is', rest ultimately on the Real Presence of God as omnipresence in everything and also in the overdetermination of the Real? Transubstantiation is the omnipresence of God in the overdetermination of the Real, which is everything. Hence 'this is my body' is the signification of the Real Presence as omnipresent and over-determinative in the Total realm of the material or the physical.

I believe this! And this is what ultimately makes me a Catholic in the original medieval and possibly also the pre-medieval sense of being a Catholic and a believer in the Apostolic Faith and Catholic Church. Hence I do partake of the Catholic Mass at every opportunity in spite of what Kate thinks about the 'rightness' or 'permissibility' of my consuming the body and of my drinking of the blood of our Lord, the God who is the Creator of the Universe. She does not accept my confession that I am a Catholic in the real and true sense of being a Catholic. If I need to objectify myself in terms of identity– I am a Catholic-Marxist-Anarchist-Communist-Lipstick-Lesbian! I belong to this tribe of misfits, in the same way that Yael belongs to the tribe of Jews. I could never become a Jew, even for the sake of Yael, as long as I believed in: 'This is my body'. There is nothing more Hellenic and more Hebraic than the statement: 'This is my body'. The words 'this' and 'is' are haunted by Heidegger's question of the meaning of being and it awakens the question of Ultimacy: Truth supervenes on Being, which is the meaning of meaning, the dissolving or termination of the spiralling infinite regress, the gateway for escape from the despair of the self-referential paradox, the way out of the trap of the infernal epistemological circle. 'This is my body' and 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. Jesus! Our Lord and God.

And each day 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. 84. To have Tzitzit on four-cornered garments—Numbers 15:38

85

Every act, every performance whether in the form of speech, writing, art, music or science which signifies meaning or significance by stating something about something to someone, is underwritten by the assumption of God's presence. What does it mean for something to be 'underwritten'? Anyway, let's not deviate from the point. Every experience of aesthetic meaning in any form of art whether it is architecture, music, dance, sculpture, painting or literature infers not just the possibility, but the actual necessity of the Real Presence, the transubstantiation, 'this is body'. In this sense there is no division between Nature and Grace, there is no division between the Sacred and the Profane. All is ONE. What is transcendent is immanently present in the 'this is'. The 'this is' underwrites all meaning and significance. God's transubstantiation is the condition for the possibility of all meaning. Who ventured to talk in this Christian manner about transubstantiation? It was a Jew, George Steiner.

The paradox of the necessity of the Real Presence as the possibility of meaning is precisely the phantom which not only haunts but also clings to every poem, every work of literature, every piece of sculpture, every painting, every musical composition, every architectural creative endeavour and every move in a dance. 'This is my body'. We cannot escape the Wager. The wager of meaning, the risk is not seeing or perceiving meaning. The wager of meaning is the risk of losing meaning in the 'this' or in the 'thisness'. The risk of not finding it, the risk of not understanding or comprehending, the risk of the failure of the creative imagination. The wager of meaning confronts us in: 'This is my body'. It is the wager of transcendence. It is the wager of immanence in the sense of presence, in the sense of omnipresence, in the sense of omnidetermination or omnideterminateness, or ultimately in the sense of omni-overdetermination of everything that exists either contingently or necessarily. It is by virtue of which the causality closed Universe can exist. This is my body! It is the wager that everything exists by virtue of something else. It is the wager of Ultimacy. This wager, the wager of Descartes, of Kant, of every poet, of every writer, of every composer, of every dancer, of every scientist, of every theologian, of every architect, of every artist and philosopher, is predicated on the presence of a realness or overriding reality which is necessarily grounded or made possible only means of a transubstantiation of meaning in every possible kind or form or act of communication. This is the meaning of meaning. The risk of the wager of meaning is that we fail to encounter God. This is the risk in the 'this' or the 'this is' of 'this is my body'. It is the transcendental and immanent meaning of the Holy Communion, of the Mass.

And each day 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. 85. To bless the Almighty after eating—Deuteronomy 8:10

86

Revelatory versus Revelation. Is there a difference? Yes there is. An experience can be revelatory when we see that something is the case in the light of reason. The light of reason is God in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 is God. God is Reason. This will be made clearer. It is something I will need to apply my mind to.

Reason and sense experience are the only guides or means we have at our disposal for establishing what the truth is on any matter, there is no other way to establish with any kind of certainty what is true and what is undeniably false. This fact makes the idea of revelation problematic when it comes to questions about the truth of something. We cannot accept any claim about any matter that is based on appeals to the authority, infallibility, inerrancy or divine inspiration of revelation as grounds for believing something to be the case. To say that something is the case because it is based on the revelation of God it ultimately the same as saying nothing, it is the same as saying something that is not substantial or binding, or in other words it is the same as saying something about something which is not true. Claims based on appeals to the authority of revelation are infected by incurable pathologies in the form of conflicting dualisms, such as: revelation versus science, revelation versus experience, revelation versus truth, revelation versus reason, or reason versus faith. The moment we have a situation in which are faced with having to make choice between following the dictates of reason or faith, revelation or reason and revelation or science, then we are in serious trouble, and if we chose revelation and faith over reason and science, then we are nowhere near knowing God or the Truth or the Way or the Life, we are instead under the dark rule of Mythos and Violence and Evil.

And each day 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. 86. To circumcise all males on the eighth day after their birth—Leviticus 12:3

87

And so I wrote my confession, and after reading it I signed it and thereby committed myself to the truth of what I had written. I had confessed that I was a Communist and that I was a member of the South African Communist Party. I was now officially a Communist in the eyes of the State and in terms of the Laws of the Country. My identity and personhood was absorbed and assimilated into the singularity of being a Communist. This is what defined the totality of my being at that moment. I embodied everything which threatened the existing order of civilization. I felt the full burden of responsibility for being the embodiment of that threat, the burden of responsibility was placed fully on my shoulders, and seven years in jail was the price that I was going to pay. I was a dangerous person. The interrogation was over, the paper was done. The papers including my statement and the charge sheet were placed in the docket. They were finished with me and I was escorted back to my cell.

In their eyes my being a communist defined my essence. In my being and becoming the individual person that I am, the statement that existence and essence have converged needs to be qualified. The philosophical topic of essentialism with respect to individuals, whether they be things or persons, is based on the view that individuals possess essential properties and would not be able to exist without having those properties. They exist by virtue of possessing those essential properties. However individuals, whether they are things, objects or persons, possess in additional to their essential properties by virtue of which they are necessarily what they are, they also have other properties which have been acquired accidently or contingently. My being a communist is an accidental attribution, and not an essential one such as my being a lesbian. I am necessarily the individual that I am by virtue of being a lesbian. Being a lesbian is one of my essential attributes or properties, it is written into my DNA, whereas being a communist is not written into my DNA. From an essentialist perspective I am an 'accidental' communist, but I am by necessity a lesbian because being a lesbian is part and parcel of my essential nature or essence. I am a lesbian by nature.

I have not stopped writing my confession. I have continued to commit my thoughts, feelings and experiences to writing. In my prison cell words were the only recourse I had to express myself, it was also the only means I had to preserve my sanity and maintain my morale. The notebooks and pens were the life-line that my brother had extended to me. He had the power to break the rules. He had spent most of his life breaking the rules, always doing the unexpected; this is what made him such a deadly and formidable foe to the enemies of the apartheid state.

And each day 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. 87. To rest on the seventh day—Exodus 23:12

88

It dawned on me, as a revelation that we have no other option available apart from the written word and spoken word for the expression, communication, representation or description of our thoughts, insights, ideas, experiences, impressions and feelings. To express my thoughts, or give voice to my thoughts, I am forced to use a system of signs to represent my thoughts. I have to first encode my thoughts into a system of signs, signs which can represent or stand for my thoughts. In this encoding process much is lost. The sign cannot represent or embody the full richness of my experiences, thoughts, ideas or feelings that the sign is meant to signifier or represent. The signifier in itself, in its materiality as sound or visual sign, cannot capture or embody the surplus plenitude of the imagination. Something remains unexpressed and unsaid. I mourn the loss of the representativity of sense and meaning in all its fullness. A verbal or written or some kind of symbolic representation of something, say a description of state of affairs, can only be truly representative if it captures the full and actual reality of the state of affairs. Representation of something in language involves description. Please describe what you see. I can't, I don't have the words! Or please describe what you saw. I can't. I cannot put into words what I saw. Will you be able to recognize it again? Yes I will be able to recognize it if see it again, I 'know' what it looks like, but I can't describe it in words, words fail me.

Can any reality exist independent of language? I think so, and I have animals in mind. From an animal point of view they do interact with a meaningful reality which exists for them outside the bounds of any language. They recognize things and situations, and by their responses, which indicates a process of deliberation, they do display an understanding and recognition of what the given reality represents without having to resort to language or words. However, after Ferdinand de Saussure the belief in a reality independent of language became increasingly questionable, and eventually that belief collapsed. After Saussure the world becomes a text, and in a Kantian fashion we supposedly cannot know anything directly beyond the text. The world or reality as something in itself does not exist as something which could possibly be made accessible to the understanding without intermediary mediation (medium) of signs, signifiers, words, symbols, language and text. In this sense the medium in the form of intermediary mediative functioning of signs or words is the message. The medium is the agency, it is an intervening agency which facilitates or effects 'resolution' which is realized in the conveying of the message. The medium in itself conveys the message, the message is immanent in the medium, the medium is the message, and the message is the medium. But what words 'say' can never be foreclosed. The full sense or meanings is always deferred as Derrida has accurately pointed out.

Reality or the world can only be represented as the signified within a symbolic system of signs or within a language in other words. A big deal has been made of Saussure's fairly obvious reflection that the relationship between a word and thing, or between the signifier and the signified is completely arbitrary. It a relation established by convention only. So there is no natural correspondence between the word or sign and the thing or object signified. The structure of language or the system of language was seen by the followers of Saussure to inscribe a structure or inscribe a representation or project a representational structure onto things, onto reality or onto the world. And through this process of representation language as a structure or system of signs and symbols was seen to constitute what became known as a semiotic or structural universe. And the discipline of semiotics or semiology or structuralism or structural linguistics was born. In semiotics language was viewed as the system or structure which shaped our understanding or gave form to our understanding of reality or what constituted the essential nature of reality, to phrase it even more radically. So if the structure and possibly the functioning of language can be visualized and theorized in terms of a system of signs, where the sign is always bivalent, as in side-by-side manner, consisting of a side-by-side relationship of representation or indication or signification between the signifier (word) and the signified (thing) then why not extend and elaborate the application of the Saussurean theory of signs with its conclusions and structuralist methodology to everything which can be visualized or represented as a signifying or representing system? So all signifying systems such as social relations, art, theatre, cinema, cooking, kinship, literature, myths, the mind or consciousness and even the sub-consciousness can be treated in a structuralist linguistic or semiotic fashion. And so Claude Lévi-Strauss applied Saussure's theory of language to the anthropology of myths and laws which structure social relations. Semiotics or structuralism became the universal framework for analysing the modes of operations of symbolic systems. And it was to be expected that following Lévi-Strauss' example very soon others also jumped onto the Saussurean bandwagon. One such person was Jacque Lacan who as a psychoanalyst astonished everyone by claiming that he had discovered the existence of the whole structure of language in the sub-consciousness! Could it be that Lévi-Strauss and Lacan were actually engaged in creating new myths, or even new fictions? Everything which could be visualized as signifying something or representing something could be conceived as a text. Everything which could be textualized could in turn be analysed as an embodiment of a Saussurean language system, a system based on the structure and relationship of the sign, a structure based on the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and signified. The construal of linguistic structures in terms of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified became a major thesis, if not a major discovery of great significance, out of which all kinds of ramifications and conflations and exaggerations and misrepresentation and confusions and fictions and myths grew in profusion and prolificacy like a wild thicket of weeds on abandoned farmlands. At this stage everyone in France jumped into the melee including the likes of Jacque Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and also to some extent Jacques Derrida. Others were side-lined like Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. They were no longer main stream and were consigned to the dustbin of philosophical history.

And each day 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. 88. Not to do prohibited labour on the seventh day—Exodus 20:10

89

In the wake of this preoccupation with the arbitrariness of the sign new dualisms or dichotomies arose: language as a system of signs (langue) versus speech or performance or expression (parole), form versus meaning, structure versus content, form versus expression, form versus performance, and so on and so forth. Given the reality of the persistence of Oligarchy in its multiples forms throughout space and time they as the philosophers of the 'repetition of the arbitrariness of the sign' also became the philosophers of a neo-conservatism and the popular propounders of reaction in that they expressed, possibly inadvertently (sub-consciously) in sentiment, the Ideas which the Oligarchy embodied. They ceased to be philosophers engaged in the expression of meaning in all its fullness, in its ontological and epistemological relationship to the nature of reality, to the nature of truth and certainty. The ceased to be philosophers engaged in the highest level of human cognitive endeavour, an endeavour that would be shared with scientists and engineers. They became mere panderers and seducers, wanting to enthral all with the spectacle of fabulous words, a magical show of sophistry with all the smoke and mirrors of jargon, tricks and snake oil included. They abandoned the project of Reason. The persistence of the Oligarchy as a repetition of a state of affairs, as a continuance of the hierarchy of social domination depends on the suppression of reason, rationality, logic, truth, and certainty, and also on the destruction of meaning and hope. So long as Truth and Reason are denied in the death dance of relativism in all of its theoretical, philosophical, literary and artistic forms the Oligarchy lives on, the Oligarchy lives on as the Necropolis.

And each day 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. 89. The court must not inflict punishment on Shabbat—Exodus 35:3

90

I remember reading about Tibetan Buddhist monks who lived, in remote almost inaccessible hamlets or caves located high in the mountains, for decades on end in almost complete isolation. They followed a routine that gave structure to their day. Much of the day was spent in silent meditation or just silence. In a way they had been living a life of solitary confinement for years on end.

And each day 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. 90. Not to walk more than 2000 cubits outside the city boundary on Shabbat—Exodus 16:29

91

Days often pass by when I am unable to write down anything. I stare at the blank notebook page waiting to write something down. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I should write. This was my way of meditating. I would allow my mind to wonder, searching for stuff that I could commit to writing. Many times my mind went completely blank, something like writers block. For hours on end I could not think of anything to write. Sometimes I could only manage to write a sentence or two and that was all I had in me for the day. I would think about all kinds of things for hours on end. Hoping that something which could be committed to writing would eventually emerge out of the depths of consciousness. I would wonder about my life and sometimes I would try to flesh out a story about myself from my memories. Somethings I succeeded and other times I failed. Stories often died still-born in the travail of forgetfulness. I often found myself on wordless mental excursions. Then without having to think too hard there would be days when my mind would be bursting with memories, ideas and thoughts, without being short of words the hours would slip by as I became lost in the composition of notes. Yes composition of notes. At high school in English we wrote compositions, another word for essays. My notes are literally compositions. I would jot down ideas or thoughts or memories and then thoughtfully develop them further, sometimes rewriting something several times over before I was satisfied. Sometimes poetic prose came easily other times my writing seemed dull, bland, uninteresting, pedestrian and turgid. Sometimes my writing lacked fluidity, it became rigid and ponderous, especially if I felt the urge to expound in a pedagogical or didactic manner at length on some matter which happened to grip me. When this happened I would be self-conscious of the fact that the writing was clinical, technical, remote, cold, cumbersome, laborious, possibly uninteresting and dry like a scientific paper. I would think to myself: 'Who would possibly want to read this!' But having done the writing I did not feel in pressing compunction to tear the page from the notebook and consign it to the trash bin. Like Pontius Pilate: 'What I have written, I have written'.

And each day 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. 91. To sanctify the day with Kiddush and Havdalah—Exodus 20:8

92

On the last Saturday night of every month the Power Puff Nightclub hosted a lesbian Argentinean tango milonga evening. Out of curiosity heterosexual women often visited the Power Puff especially on the milonga nights. I have often danced the tango and other dances with heterosexual women and I could sense that they were rarely comfortable with the erotic closeness of the female body, especially if the body belonged to woman who was overtly queer. It was easy to identify a heterosexual woman. Mode of dress and cut of dress often was often a strong indicator of feminine heterosexuality.

On the dance floor and at the bar there were differences in queer and heterosexual feminine erotics. Dancing the tango with a competent lesbian tango dancer is always a novel bodily experience for a heterosexual woman. Normally the lesbian would lead the heterosexual woman in the tango. Once the heterosexual woman had gained confidence and had made the necessary psychological and emotional adjustments to accommodate the closeness of the queer female body she would be able to exchange roles lead her lesbian partner in the tango, and this would be a unique experience for her. In contrast to same-sex lesbian sexual desire, in heterosexual women sexual desire is not usually awakened by the closeness of the female body. Heterosexual women often visited the Power Puff mainly because they had become sufficiently curious to explore the boundaries of their feminine sexuality and gender identity. They often became regular visitors and I once spent the entire milonga evening with one such woman, who I guessed was exploring the wild untamed frontiers of feminine sexuality. Maybe she was in search of an exotic sexual adventure. At the time I did not know what her motives were. I just guessed that she was seeking some kind of sexual adventure. She possibly wanted to explore the unknown dimensions of her own feminine sexuality. At the end of the evening I asked her if she wanted to come home with me and after some hesitation she agreed. In the course of the evening on the dance floor at the Powder Puff Nightclub our embrace had become comfortably close and we were eventually dancing with our cheeks pressed together. I kissed her neck and her cheek and she then turned head so that I could kiss her lips. She followed me to my flat in Bellevue in her car. Once in my flat she became incredibly nervous and unsure of herself. She suddenly announced that she was not certain whether she could go through with this.

That is what she actually said. She said: 'I am not sure whether I can go through with this.'

I hugged her and held her in a tender and affectionate embrace and after a while she put arms around me. I told she was in safe space and that I would not do anything that she was not comfortable with. I suggested that maybe we should talk about what she wanted and where she was in terms of her sexuality. I remember asking her if she was coming out of the closet and whether she was gay. She was adamant that she was not a lesbian. She admitted that she found me attractive and that she felt safe with me, and that she trusted me. I had never been in this kind of situation before. She keep on insisting that she was heterosexual and could not understand why she felt attracted to me. Okay if she was heterosexual why had she come to the Powder Puff? I had seen her there before, in fact she had visited the Powder Puff a number of times. She said she had come to the Powder Puff out of curiosity and because she liked the vibe of the club and it was an exciting place to visit. I began to gently interrogate her about her motives. Was she sexually attracted to me, did find me desirable? Yes she did! Does she like having sex? Yes she likes having sex! Does she want to have sex with me? She doesn't know, but maybe. What kind of answer is that? You either want to have sex with me or you don't. Is it yes or no? She thinks it is yes! Are you sure you want to have sex with me? Yes I am sure now.

I ask her: 'Are you absolutely sure that you are not gay?'

She answers: 'I am definitely not gay, I not a lesbian, I am heterosexual.'

I shook my head. It must have been a comical gesture because she burst out laughing and the tension evaporated. In the bedroom we undressed and lay on the bed for a while just kissing and caressing each other's breasts. When I eventually placed my hand on her vulva, it was moist, she was wet. I told her that I going to go down on her with my tongue and lips, and that I would also be penetrating her with my fingers, including in places where she had possibly never been probed and penetrated before, and that she must tell me to stop immediately if she feels uncomfortable with what I was going to do to her. I explained that everything that I was going to do to her, I would want her to do the same to me. But if she felt uncomfortable, she must feel free to tell me to stop immediately. After we had made love we fell asleep in each other's arms. In the morning we made love again. I was not convinced that she not gay or bisexual, but she could not bring herself to admit it even though she was wildly enthusiastic with having queer sex, she could not get enough of it, she was insatiable. We fell in love and were together for six months. She did not know I was living a double life. It was because of my underground responsibilities that I eventually stopped going to the Powder Puff and began to live increasingly as a celibate recluse.

My family and friends were my comrades in the cell that I belonged to. The long dark night of the violent 1980s had begun in earnest. The revolution which would bring down apartheid had begun in all its fiery fury.

And each day 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. 92. To rest from prohibited labour on Yom Kippur—Leviticus 23:32

93

Oupa Vollenhoven was a frequent visitor. Now sitting in my prison cell I am trying to fathom how he got to our home in Hotazel. He never came by car even though he had traded in his old Plymouth for a brand new white 1200 cc Volkswagen Beetle. I suddenly remember. We would go and fetch him in Kuruman. Somehow he managed to get too Kuruman. It must have been by railway bus. Anyway the bus stopped at Kuruman and after all the passengers had disembarked it travelled back to Park Station Rotunda in Johannesburg with a fresh load of passengers. He slept in the spare room. We always referred that room as Oupa's room.

It was in the spring of 1962 when he first came to visit us in Hotazel. It was late in the afternoon when mom and we kids arrived in Kuruman to fetch Oupa who we found standing next to his suitcase at the modest bus terminus next to the town hall. In spite of the heat he was smartly dressed in his white shirt, tie, sports jacket, navy flannels with turn ups and polished black leather soled shoes. He was also wearing his usual fedora styled hat, with its pinch front, centre crown crease, black ribbon, and narrow stiff stingy fedora brim. The hat sat centred on his head with a slight forward tilt that gave him the 1950s Mafia gangster look. Malcolm often remarked that Oupa looked a lot like one of those typical gangsters that we saw in American movies. I eventually inherited his hat which I loved to wear. Malcolm put his suitcase into VW's front boot. He gave each of us a tight bear hug and a generous pipe smoke flavoured kiss smack on our lips. On his jacket lapel he always wore without fail his little metal badge, with represented the insignia of the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (M.O.T.H.). In the Second World War he was a sergeant in the armoured car reconnaissance unit in the North African desert campaign against General Rommel. As we drove back to Hotazel dark storm clouds gathered and lightning flashed on the horizon.

When we reached the gravel road the cloud's burst and we drove into a massive thunder storm that did not abate until we reached Hotazel. The car was caked in mud and mom was quite shaken by the ordeal of our journey along a road which had turned into a sea of slippery mud. She kept on saying that it was a miracle that the car did not skid into a ditch.

The next day happened to be a Saturday, the storm clouds had vanished, and after showing Oupa my rock collection the two of us set off for a walk into the Kalahari scrub land. As I said, it was his first visit to Hotazel and I was excited for him to see the Kalahari and I wanted to know how it compared to the Sahara Desert. Cutting due north across the thorn veld savannahs we soon reached the two track sand road which run along the barbed wire boundary fence of a vast cattle farm. We followed the sand track walking in a westerly direction with our backs to the morning sun.

The fine Kalahari sand was still firm with moisture and animal spoor from the night before crisscrossed the sand track. We stopped frequently and bent down to examine the spoor that cut across the sand path. We identified porcupine spoor from imprints of the three planar foot pads and the two wrist pads. The hind foot always over-stepped the front spoor. It was easy for us to recognize the spoor of springhare, duiker and steenbok. And then we came across the fresh spoor of a tortoise. No tortoise had moved across the road during the night. On this fresh moist morning tortoises would be actively foraging.

We followed the spoor until we found the tortoise. Going back to the road to continue our walk we began to come across tortoises and tortoise spoor quite frequently. On our way back home we tallied the number of different animals that crossed the stretch of sand track along the border fence that we had followed on our walk. Oupa Vollenhoven who had been a sergeant during the North African Campaign and who returned to his humble job as a dispatch and receiving clerk at Johannesburg Park Station after the war realized that we should be able to estimate the population density of the different animals from the frequency of spoor intersections across the sand track. It was an amazing insight on his part. On that morning Oupa Vollenhoven had inadvertently planted the seeds of curiosity in my mind about investigating animals through the signs they leave etched on the environment. He planted an interest in animal behaviour in my mind which would eventually have life-shaping consequences for me.

And each day 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. 93. Not to do prohibited labour on Yom Kippur—Leviticus 23:31

94

Over the years number of spoor intersections with the track that run along the barbwire fence decreased as the number of animal species began to decline in the Kalahari scrubland that surrounded Hotazel. All kinds of human disturbances on the surrounding landscape were having a negative impact on the wild life populations in the vicinity of Hotazel. The pristine wilderness was retreating from the urbanized margins of Hotazel. The animals are vanishing. This was an issue of intense personal concern to me.

Over the years as a result of my professional scientific interest in the behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology of animals I had also became increasingly interested in the philosophical questions surrounding the status of wild animals in an increasingly human dominated planet. Everywhere wild animal populations were under severe stress due to the shrinkage of their natural habitats. Many animal species now stood at the verge of extinction because of massive habitat destruction. What had made my childhood so incredibly magical in Hotazel was the sheer abundance of wild animals that crossed my path almost every day. I always took the back route to school walking across the veld. Elsabe and Malcolm preferred to walk along the road. I walked to school with my eyes peeled on the ground.

John Berger in his 1980 book 'About Looking' writes: 'Everywhere animals are disappearing.' The complete disappearance of wild animals may eventually be the single most defining feature of modernity. Berger writes that the coming into existence of zoological gardens coincided with vanishing of animals from our daily life and it is because of the disappearance of wild animals from daily life that the need is commonly felt by the urbanized public to visit zoos and look at wild animal in cages. He also writes that the zoological gardens represent monuments to the disappearance of animals. It often the case that the last surviving member of a species dies in a zoo.

As a consequence of modernity the distance separating wild animals from humans has grown into an unbridgeable chasm, reinforcing the idea that the differences between animals and humans represents a difference not in degree but in kind, as in essential nature. However evolutionary biology provides ample evidence that the difference between humans and animals is one of degree and not one of kind. This means that only incremental differences in degree along of a continuum of similarity exists between animals and humans. This difference in degree along a continuum is what links humanity phylogenetically with the rest of the animal kingdom. This important fact has been wilfully ignored by humans and it is critical to our own self-understanding as beings, humans are animals, full stop.

The possession of language has re-enforced the idea that humans stands apart as beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is the human capacity for language and speech which is thought to represent the essential difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. In contrast to humans the rest of the animal is characterized as being essentially mute when it comes to language and speech. It is commonly thought that if animals are mute then the difference between humans and animals is a difference of kind and not of degree, but this claim is false.

And each day 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. 94. To afflict yourself on Yom Kippur—Leviticus 16:29

95

I had a strange recollection of going with mother and my brother to a cinema in Rosettenville when I was still a very young child. We were still living in City Deep at the time. It was on a Saturday evening, I am sure of this. But I can't remember whether it was the Adelphi or Grand. All I can remember with some vividness was one specific scene from the movie, it was of an animal that was trapped in a slippery muddy pit and in its struggles to escape from the pit it managed to lift its head up over the edge of the pit, and stretching its neck over the edge of the pit it began to repeatedly bash its head on the ground surrounding the pit opening in a desperation effort to escape from the pit.

I have never kept a pet, neither cat nor dog. I developed an affection for the racing pigeons which my dad kept. They were working birds and because of this we developed a relation with the flock. We spoke to the pigeons. We would call them in to land.

And each day 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. 95. Not to eat or drink on Yom Kippur—Leviticus 23:29

96

Refrain: Now that I have had the time and opportunity, and with nothing else to do or to distract me, I have been able to spent a considerable amount of time in deep thought. I am working my way through the stuff in my notebooks trying to discern whether any evidence exists of some kind of narrative. By stuff I mean everything which came into my mind while I languished in detention. Undisturbed I had spent hundreds of days alone in silence jotting down in my notebook practically every thought, idea, memory or recollection which somehow broke the silence and entered into the stream of my thoughts, or my stream of consciousness if you wish, and lodging itself in my mind long enough for me to reflect on and dissect it, and record it. As I have already mentioned this had become a meditative process. And with the passing of so many days, everyday being the same, the days become countless, and I lost track of time as my mind ranged widely over many topics that had interested me over of the years, and of course there were always the memories that resurfaced. Each day was interrupted by meals, breakfast would be mealie meal (maize) porridge with milk and sugar and a tin mug of lukewarm black coffee, at lunch it would some kind of stew with rice and a tin mug of lukewarm black coffee, and in the afternoon an early supper of soup, a slice of buttered bread with a tin mug of lukewarm black coffee, would be served. I never left the cell for exercise or for a shower. Once a week I was given a small cake of soup. I was allowed a tooth brush and tooth paste. I ended up using the water in the seatless porcelain toilet bowl for all my ablutions and for washing my clothes and underwear. I had stopped wearing my bra. The only clothes that I had were what I was wearing on the night of my arrest. So the clothes on my back, the T shirt and the pair of jeans, I washed once a week. While they dried I spent the day and night wearing only my panties. Never once did a magistrate, district surgeon or priest visit my cell. I had no visitors or any contact with the outside, no lawyer, no nothing. By listening to the sounds I came the conclusion that I was the detainee in this specific corridor cells. The wardens were forbidden to speak to me. I was treated as someone who was extremely dangerous. The summers were hot and the winters were freezing. If I wanted another notebook I would have to show that the current notebook had no blank pages left, and that I wanted to exchange it for a fresh notebook with blank pages.

And each day 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. 96. To rest on the first day of Passover—Leviticus 23:8

97

While in detention waiting for the trial date to be set I did not really have any worries to stress me. I had no family of my own. Apart from meeting Isabell before my arrest and having renewed my relationship with Yael also before my arrest, I was not in any kind of established ongoing relationship. I had reconciled myself to my fate and I was even planning what I would do during my seven years of incarceration. There were many things I could do while I waited for the revolution to sweep away the apartheid regime. I could study English literature through UNISA by correspondence.

And each day 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. 97. Not to do prohibited labour on the first day of Passover—Leviticus 23:8

98

Refrain: While I waited for the trial date to be fixed I made a concerted effort to jot down as quickly as possible every vivid recollections of events and experiences of my own life that surfaced from my unconsciousness at odd moments. It was like waiting for fish to bite and I was fishing in the deep waters of my mind to retrieve whatever laid buried beneath the surface of immediate consciousness. When a memory or recollection surfaced, and I became aware of it, it was like as if I had woken up from a dream. Once awake the dream fades away rapidly, so being anxious to record the contents of my dream before it faded away beyond the hope of any vivid recollection, I lived in constant state of readiness, with pen in hand to jot down any dreamlike recollection that happened to surface. In a sense this exercise has kept me busy and helped me to remain sane under the circumstances in which I found myself. These notes on sundry matters and recollections are not meant to be a record of my life, or my thoughts on diverse topics, nor are they meant to be true autobiographical accounts of my life, nor are they meant to make any sense of my life. I know that the only meaning that my life has is what I invest it with. Neither are they meant to be an intellectual autobiography. I belong to that school of thinking which holds that all autobiographical accounts of one's life cannot escape from being a work of pure fiction. So if I speak of my life or if I try to describe my life, I feel compelled to admit at the onset of this venture that what I am telling you about myself is actually in many subtle ways a fictionalized and incomplete version of who I am. I have tried to write a story about myself based on a partial retrieval of a potentially infinite number of possible scenes out of which my life has been constituted. Each scene now exists as nothing more substantial than brief memorable flashbacks of my life, flashbacks which vary in their vividness. The experiences of these flashbacks from the past, which were often vivid, were probably made possible as a result of the long hours of solitary confinement. At times it seemed that my mind was playing tricks on me and the flashbacks like dreams were purely imaginary inventions generated by the random firings of the neuron circuitry of my brain.

But as an empiricist and reductionist by nature, I was persuaded that whatever kind of impressions or ideas that were formed in my brain, and which then erupted into my consciousness awareness in the form of dreams or vivid flashbacks or ideas must have been ultimately derived from previous sense experiences. They were not de novo creations, produced by some kind of creatio ex nihilo process. Nothing comes from nothing. All perceptions and impressions have their origination in something.

I also very quickly realized that I could not reconstitute my life from memory as an ordered sequential series of highly visualizable scenes as if my life were a movie which could be rewound and played back (repetitively if need be) with each scene unfolding sequentially in time.

I realized that there was actually very little that I could remember in any great detail regarding the moment by moment lived experiences of my life. This was quite disconcerting. I don't think our memory consists of an archive of negatives which captures and stores in frozen form each and every passing moment of our lives. Recollection is not some kind of simple archival retrieval process in which a negative image of the past can be re-developed into a photographic plate. Recollection does in a sense involve an imaginative re-visualization of the past, but not in the fashion of a negative image being retrieved and redeveloped into a photographic print which possesses the power to capture a frozen slice of a past moment in time. An act of imaginative recall of some past event from the depths of our memory does not possess the power to recreate lost moments in time, that is moments which have already lapsed forever, as fully and as vivid as is the case with a continuous series of cinematic images captured on celluloid film.

Recollections definitely involves some creative editing and embellishment to sharpen up the pictures or impressions that we have managed to store in our memories. Recall is an act of imagination, an act of imaginative recreation, even an imaginative re-enactment of a past event. We cannot go back to the beginning. The past recedes further and further from immediate memory with every passing moment. This too is disconcerting. If my memories do in fact play a significant role in reconstituting who I am, then who I am with respect to each passing moment represents an ongoing imaginative re-creation or innovation of who I have been and who I have become in time. Can I prove who I have been? Well I don't think so. Have I stayed the same identical person over time? Can I prove to myself who I have been and what it has been like to be me at each moment of my life? Again I don't think so.

So who am I then? I am nothing but a work of fiction.

Well then maybe it is this which captures the sense of what I mean when I say my life is a fiction, a fiction that I have created. But fiction always finds itself trying to speak to the truth.

And each day 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. 98. To rest on the seventh day of Passover—Leviticus 23:8

99

Interlude and refrain: I am now in my bedroom in Hotazel. The bedroom is the bedroom of my childhood and teenage youthfulness. I am also now in my thirties, I am rapidly approaching middle age. I am still working through my prison notes. I am gradually becoming aware of the existence of several coherent narratives which I have written in parallel. Am I surprise? No I am not, even though I did not set out to write anything which would remotely resemble a narrative structured by some kind of plot, and carried inexorably to the climax of its destination in the flow of some unfolding drama. But even so, I always felt free to make the excuse that what I am writing was a kind of fiction, something which is neither modernist nor postmodernist. Maybe I am writing metafiction. Can there be such a thing? The plots that find their way into my narrative have not been consciously designed by me, there is nothing premediated about them, they are inadvertent intrusions, contingent hijackings of the story line. The world as lived imposes itself on my writing.

I turn my gaze from the window to my desk. I am deep in thought. I am thinking about my writing project. I have been thinking for some time about what I am writing, I am thinking about a different kind of writing, about the kind of unpremeditated ideas and thoughts that I have committed to the writing of this narrative. I am wondering about what is lost in translation when trying to commit one's thoughts to writing. We must definitely lose something in the process; we cannot reduce or translate our thoughts, our memories, and our recollections to writing without losing something in the process. We definitely lose something of the quality of the thought or recollection or feeling or experience. I don't think we are fully able to re-capture or retrieve the fullness of our thoughts, feelings and memories in writing or even in speech for that matter.

And each day 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. 99. Not to do prohibited labour on the seventh day of Passover—Leviticus 23:8

100

No one actually experiences the fullness and richness of world through the prism of speech and writing. The world experienced as something meaningful and knowable precedes language. Speech and writing comes afterwards. Its creations are distorted spectres of what was experienced as real. Language does not completely shape our perceptions and our experiences. I think about my childhood experience of gazing at that fish in the bath in the flat in Klerksdorp. In mind I can visualize in the form of mental images the experience of seeing the fish, or my experience of seeing the chameleon crawling so exposed on the top stand of the diamond mesh fence in Stilfontein. I can recollect and visualize the mental image of seeing my first tortoise in the wild just a few meters from the boundary fence of our new home in Hotazel. The memory and emotional feelings of excite and wonder which accompanied that experience of my first encounter with a tortoise will be forever lost in translation into speech and writing. What I saw and felt was beyond words. Hidden in our writings we mourn the irretrievable loss of what it was really like to have experienced those memorable moments.

It was similar to what I experienced when I first saw the chameleon on the fence in Stilfontein. There are no words to describe what I was experiencing. There are no words to capture the fullness of what was experienced in that encounter, and it would be absurd to say that the experience was without any meaning. So words or language are not the sole custodians of meaning. Of course at the time my mind was full of questions about the animal. I was intrigued, and I have never stopped being intrigued by animals. And that intrigue is not easy to verbalize.

And each day 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. 100. To rest on Shavuot—Leviticus 23:21

101

I saw the tortoise, its form jumped out of its surroundings, my heart skipped a beat, it was an extremely emotional and intense moment for me as a young girl. I was literally overwhelmed with wonder and enchantment. It was a female Kalahari Tent Tortoise or Serrated Tortoise (Psammobates oculiferus), a species that was endemic to the Kalahari. That first week I found nine more in the surrounding scrub land. My dad insisted that I release the nine tortoises that I had brought home. The release of the tortoises that I had collected was the start of my zoological career. We carefully marked each tortoise with Cutex. It was dad's idea. He did not want me to keep any wild animal as a pet.

And each day 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. 101. Not to do prohibited labour on Shavuot—Leviticus 23:21

102

I can see many nameless things which are familiar, which I recognize as being either a lizard, an insect, bird, or a fish. I also see things which I don't recognize at all. And I see man-made objects that I am acquainted with. They are familiar and I recognized them as things that I have seen before even though I don't what they are called or what purpose or function they serve. They happen to be strange objects. They are not natural, they are recognizable as man-made artefacts. I see such an object, I recognize that it has to be man-made. It is lying on the garage floor with other strange objects, they are all different objects which individually belong to the engine which my father has dismantled. They fit together in the engine. I don't know what function they perform in the engine. But now I recognize them as belonging to the engine, they are engine parts. If I happen to see the object again I will recognize it as belonging to an engine. I remember seeing these strange nameless objects before as a young child in City Deep and in Stilfontein. I recognized them by their size, shape and colour. It is that thing. I recognized it even if I don't know what it is. It is simply 'that thing' which I am acquainted with. My world from childhood was filled with all kinds of strange things, objects with characteristic shapes which I could not name, but I knew that they belonged to a car's engine. In my dad's garage as a child I often found myself in an unfathomable world of familiarity. What was plainly visible as a nameless object was not completely unintelligible to me. It was intelligible in the sense that it was a structure which served some unknown purpose in a car's engine. Otherwise it was unintelligible, it had no name and it had no recognizable function. The complete details or story of the world into which that object fitted as key element was unknown to me, yet it was not unknowable.

Looking at the various objects in the garage which belonged to a car's engine I knew that they were all things which served a purpose. What is this thing was often the thought that was foremost on mind. What exactly is this thing? My curiosity was piqued. I would pick it up and examine it closely. I could not even begin to guess what it was for. There it lay in my hand, this greasy, oily metallic object, which was soiling my finger tips and the palm of my hand. In my dress I sat on my haunches as I scrutinized this inert metallic object. The unfathomable world could become intelligible once my dad had explained what the object was all about. My newly acquired knowledge about what the object was all about was what made the object intelligible to me. I could see what purpose is served and it had a name as well. It had a place where it fitted in, a place where its structure contributed to its function.

As a child my mind was filled with the familiar mental images of many strange looking nameless things which remained fixed in my mind or brain so that I could say I know that thing in some sense, for example, I have seen that same thing before, I recognize it, the sameness has not changed, I don't know what it is called or what purpose it serves, but I know that it plays a role in the world of the combustion engine, it is that thing. Yet in spite of not knowing what it was it remained fixed in my memory as a retrievable mental image or mental picture in the archives of my mind. It was waiting for its name and its function to be disclosed, waiting for the word which could be used when referring to it. Yet it could exist as a nameless but recognizable shape, without any identifiable purpose in my mind, and there was no word I could use to refer to it. It existed just as one of many different kinds of 'thingamabobs' in my head, recognizable and familiar mental images with no names, and no knowledge of their function. I would see the same thing again, maybe at a garage or a scrapyard or on a farm. Yes it is that thing, and I am able recall that I had seen it before, I recognize it as that specific 'thingamabob'. There it is yet again, there is that same thing, it is that 'thingamabob'. There is that thing, I know that thing, and it looks just like that nameless thing I have seen before. What is it? As the pursuer of nymphets in Nabokov's 'Lolita' recounts: 'We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless'.

If we examine the actual practice of science it becomes increasingly clear that to be overly obsessed with the meaning of words can develop into a disastrous error. Preoccupation with the meaning of words does not increase our understanding of non-linguistic reality. And we cannot deny that something such as a non-linguistic reality actually exists and is indeed something which is accessible and understandable in ways unmediated by words.

Again, in some sense Derrida is right, to clarify and define terms, especially in science, leads us into an infinite regress, and it becomes logically impossible to settle the meaning of words with any finality. Many of us who were undergraduates in the sciences in the 1970s and did philosophy of science as an arts course cut our philosophical teeth reading Popper. But having said this about meaning and definition in the sciences it does not necessary mean that the postmodern view or take on the problem of meaning and the corresponding problem on the nature or non-nature of truth wins the day. It certainly does not. In spite of the problem of meaning and definition or even truth, science as an enterprise still works and scientific knowledge still grows ceaselessly and inexorably, and somehow in science we are actually getting to the bottom of a lot of stuff, which makes science exciting. This is something which postmodernist thinkers are unable to rebut. Metaphysics has definitely not come to an end, in fact, it is flourishing in the academy. Every time the death or end of metaphysics is proclaimed, metaphysics returns, renewed and reinvigorated.

Derrida has a point and he can only be taken seriously within a framework circumscribed by appropriate qualifications regarding the value of his philosophical project. The argument for this goes along the following lines: It can be argued that the debate on the meaning of words or terms or even concepts in the context of science inevitably becomes a self-defeating exercise. For example, every time we define a word or concept we introduce new terms into the definition, and in order to escape circularity, the new terms themselves have to be defined in terms of more new terms. This gives rise to an infinite regress. In this we hear echoes of Derrida. So what?

And each day 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. 102. To rest on Rosh Hashanah—Leviticus 23:24

103

We cannot draw a fixed line of separation between the world of thoughts and the world of things. The world of things imposes itself upon us. In doing so it forces us to respond or react in ways which reveal or unveil or confirm the existence of an external intelligibility that also imposes itself upon us often in ways which we neglect only at our peril. We cannot fail to recognize the existence of intelligibility in the law-like regularities and uniformities of nature, which continue to exist as realities in spite of all the insoluble self-reference paradoxes and riddles of induction. And it is in this respect or sense that the intelligibility of Nature is not self-explanatory. The problem of the intelligibility of Nature not being a self-explanatory phenomenon strikes us as a problem of the meaning of meaning. It is with respect to this latter problem that we find the fertile ground for the blooming of the Absurd Imagination and its aesthetic articulation. It is also the ground for a negative theology. If God does not exist the Universe is necessarily absurd and ultimately it has no meaning or significance in itself no matter that it appears to be intelligible.

If animals could speak in human language they too would confirm that this is the case. Words are not absolutely necessary for the forming of a bridge of intelligibility between the world of thoughts or experience and the world of things or even the world of mental pictures of things that have been seen before. There does exist a wordless or unsayable dimension to the intelligibility of experience and thoughts, which is the precondition for the possibility of language and words. It is by virtue of these recognizable mental pictures that live in our animal brains that language with its system of words and grammar becomes possible. The world was intelligible to animal minds or animal consciousness before human language evolved.

Going back to nameless things: Without being able to give a name to it or find a word to describe it, I still recognized it as that object, as that thing, with that familiar shape and colour. As an object, as some kind of thing, it exists as a wordless entity as a something, but a recognizable something, or a something without any relation to any words that I have in my vocabulary, but even disconnected from any word in my vocabulary I still recognized the object as something familiar and not at all strange or foreign in my mind. I could use adjectives to describe it quite accurately. I could draw its 3D or 2D shape on a piece of paper from memory, without it being present. I could remember its exact shape, form, size and colour without giving it a name. This what it looks like but don't ask me what it is. I had this experience not only with inanimate objects but with also with plants and animals. This was my experience when I was given my first copy of 'Robert's Birds of South Africa'. I paged through the book and recognized immediately all the birds that I saw in the coloured plates. Now the bird had a name, its name became known to me, I could now connect a name to the familiar mental image of the bird which had previously existed as nameless bird in my mind, which I had previously seen quite often in the wild. Now I could see the likeness of the mental picture of the bird in my mind with the picture of the bird in the coloured plate. But before that the same bird existed without a name in my mind. And I recognized it as 'that bird' in my mind, every time I saw it. I had seen that bird before, maybe many times, and each time I had recognized it as being that specific kind of bird. In my mind the question was always 'what kind of bird was that?' Now that I had Robert's Birds in my hands I began to read about what kind of bird it happened to be, and the world of birds that I began to encounter took on a whole new meaning. I could place the bird under a whole hierarchical system of taxonomic ranks: class, order, family, genus and finally species.

I see something, I recognized it as that thing. But I do not have a word for it. The object is wordless, yet it is familiar. I realize that I don't think in words, I don't need words or language in order to think. In fact I cannot find the words to describe what I am thinking of. The recognizable and intelligible Universe of things or objects or entities or processes or phenomena exists independently of words or language. I am continually at a loss for words. I constantly experience the poverty, the inadequacy of language to articulate, to refer, to symbolize, to describe, to explain, and ultimately to speak meaningfully. I experience the radical cognitive deficit of words and language. These exist a gulf between words and thing or between words and the world. There also exists a gulf between words and 'meaning'. Anyway what do we mean by meaning. There exists no reason why the structure of language should correspond to the structure of the world even if the structure of the world is intelligible to consciousness. Words don't make the world intelligible or even meaningful. Words and language do not make the world intelligible nor do they make the structure of the world accessible to understanding. Linguistic analysis cannot disclose the structure of the world or reveal the intelligibility of the world or make the world comprehensible. The world is intelligible independently of worlds. The world understandable and comprehendible independently of words. The accessibility and intelligibility of world does no dependent on words or vocabulary or nomenclature or linguistic categories or any kind of language in the broadest sense. Furthermore, we do not experience the world as something meaningful by virtue of linguistic categories, or in other words, by virtue of words and language. The world is meaningful independently of words or language. I am still able to recognize that thing, it is that object, without knowing what it is called. It is still that thing even though we do not have a word for it. Language or words do not play a necessary or obligatory constitutive role in what we are able to experience in a meaningful fashion. Language is not a necessarily condition for making a meaningful experience possible. This is why we are often at a loss for words when we want to describe what we have experienced in a significant or meaningful manner. The words: 'If only I had the words to describe what I have experienced' communicate a common dilemma when we want to share some significant or meaningful experience. What is meaningful cannot be reduced to words. More often than not there are no words which can adequately describe what I have seen or heard or tasted or smelt or felt. It is mostly impossible to describe in words or language what we perceive, or what we feel when see something. Mostly it is also the case that whatever I experience no matter how mundane or everyday ordinary, it is always completely inaccessible to language in the sense that there are no words which can capture and communicate what has been experienced in all its fullness and richness and immediateness. It is mostly impossible to put what has been experienced into words. Hence it is a fallacy that words or language shape experience or determine what can be experienced. There exists a radical disjuncture or unbridgeable gap between words and visual experience. Most experiences exist beyond the possibilities of linguistic description. What we experience regarding the nature of reality is generally unverbalizable. Often our most meaningful or significant experiences which happen to be beyond words are visual in nature. How can we capture the visual with words? We can't. Try describe a face. Words by themselves cannot function as pictures or mirrors of the world. What words by themselves are capable of signifying has been overrated or exaggerated. The magic, the life, the signifying power, the poetic richness of words and language depends on the imagination.

And each day 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. 103. Not to do prohibited labour on Rosh Hashanah—Leviticus 23:25

104

The species being the lowest rank in the ordering of the different taxonomic ranks. It is also the most natural taxon. The highest taxonomic rank is the phylum and surprisingly the phylum which is based on the body plans of animals also counts as a natural taxon. Depending on how one visualizes the animal kingdom there are 35 living metazoan (multi-cellular animals) phyla with each phyla based on a specific, unique and recognizable animal body plan. All species belonging to the same phyla share the same fundamental body plan as an evolutionary consequence of having descended monophyletically from the same common ancestor. This means they share a common evolutionary history. It also means that they differ only in degree along a continuum and not in kind. They are of the same kind in a very real and objective sense.

Taxonomic ranking of taxons works like this:

Kingdom

Phylum

Class

Order

Family

Genus

Species

How do we conceptualize animals, how do we conceptualize the animal kingdom and how do we conceptualize ourselves as animals belonging to the animal kingdom? What is an animal as opposed to bacteria, algae, fungi, or plants? Animals are living organisms. What does it mean to be a living organism? Animals are multicellular eukaryotes. What is a eukaryote? How did eukaryotic organism come into existence? How did animals become multicellular? Animals are heterotrophic which means that they depend on organic carbon substrates for their sources of nutrition and energy.

The morphological diversity of animals tests the very limits of the imagination regarding the various structural and functional forms in which animals can become embodied as living organisms. Body plans. And for the multicellular animals or the metazoa the taxonomic ranking or classification for the animal kingdom into various taxons is based on the concept of homology, where homology stands for structural and functional similarities and the sharing of structural and functional similarities between and within the different taxons is based on a common or shared ancestry. As a critical example, the protistan choanoflagellates and the choanocytes of sponges share structural and functional homologies which means that they are related in the sense of sharing a common ancestor.

In the taxonomy or systematics of living organism, plants, fungi, algae, protistans, bacteria, archaea and animals are classified by assigning different organisms into categories or groups or clusters or associations which reflect their RELATEDNESS or RESEMBLANCE in terms of shared similarities or homologies with respect to selected sets of diagnostic attributes. The recognition of relatedness or resemblance or likeness or similarities in terms of homologous attributes is what makes classification empirically, logically and rationally possible in the life or biological sciences. The fact that recognizable homologies exist with respect to an incredibly wide spectrum of structural and functional attributes across all life-forms suggests that everything is ultimately related to everything else. Relatedness in terms of resemblance or likeness with respect to structural-functional homologies is the defining principle of classification in the life science. Because everything within the biological realm is related in one way or another, classification in the biological sciences is natural as opposed to being contrived or artificial or arbitrary, or alternatively classification in the biological context is necessarily based on relationships which reflect evolutionary history an evolutionary genealogies or evolutionary lineages. In other words, biological systems of classification which are based on homologies reflect phylogenies. Taxonomy or systematics as an empirical and rational discipline is logically equivalent to genealogy where genealogy in this context is synonymous with phylogeny. Classification based on relationships which reflect homologies is equivalent to classification being reflective of evolutionary history in terms of descent with modification from shared or common ancestors. In this sense classification embodies the metanarrative of evolutionary descent or phylogeny. While this metanarrative includes ideas which we can speak rationally about, for example, we can speak and write about evolutionary history in terms of phylogeny, genealogy or lineages which reflect descent with modification or even adaptive innovations, where both adaptive modifications or adaptive innovations involves the role of natural selection in the evolution of adaptations to changing environments, however this idea of adaptive innovations excludes the concepts of progress, direction, purpose, destiny, goals or telos. There is 'no final state' to which evolution is 'advancing towards'. There no 'end of history' towards which evolution is inexorably marching. There is not inevitably directing the course of evolutionary history.

Kingdom Animalia

1. Phylum Choanoflagellata [Belonging to the Protista]

It has been hypothesized that all multicellular animals or metazoans arose monophyletically from a common ancestor in the form of unicellular or single-celled choanoflagellate. The multicellular metazoa and the single cellular protistan choanoflagellates are sister groups in the sense that are phylogenetically related which means they share a common ancestor. Haeckel's mysterious blastaea (from the Greek word blastos for bud) which he discovered while studying sponges was a ball shaped ciliated motile colony of cells. He proposed that this could be what the hypothetical ancestor of multicellular animals would look like. In fact the ball shaped colony of cells looked remarkably like the early blastula stage of many multicellular animals, having the appearance of hollow ball of cells, similar to that which forms when the metazoan zygote undergoes cell division and cleavage before the gastrulation stage of embryogenesis. What could be a more perfect blastula than the hollow ball of algal cells that we in the case of Volvox? But now most zoologists support the idea that the common protistan ancestor of the metazoa could have indeed been a multicellular colony of choanoflagellates. This protistan which became the common ancestor of the metazoa referred to as the 'urmetazoa' evolved some 600 million years ago. After sperm and egg nuclei fuse to give rise to the zygote the complex process of embryogenesis which gives rise the multicellular metazoan is initiated. How did multicellularity arise? In protistan eukaryotic cell division, if cell fission fails, that is if after mitotic nuclear division the two daughter cells which are genetically identical clones of each fail to separate completely into two individual separate cells but instead remained joined together then we are on the road to the evolution of multicellularity. If this process is repeated with each new cycle of cell division then a multicellular clonal colony of genetically identical cells will arise. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the first incipient multicellular metazoans were composed mainly of choanocytes or comprised of a clonal colony of genetically identical choanocytes, cells which are homologous to the protistan choanoflagellates. The colony arose from a fertilized ovum, and following fertilization the zygote underwent multiple cell divisions without the occurrence of cell fission.

2. Phylum: Porifera [Sponges]

Sponges are the sister group to all metazoan animals. Similarities between the protistan choanoflagellates and choanocytes of the Porifera suggests the sponges evolved from a choanoflagellate-like protistan ancestor. However, huge architectural gap exists between the multicellular organization sponges and the multicellular organization of animals belonging to the metazoa.

2. Phylum: Placozoa

3. Phylum: Cnidaria [Jellyfish & Corals]

4. Phylum: Ctenophora [Comb Jellys]

5. Phylum: Acoelomorpha

6. Phylum: Platyhelminthes [Flatworms]

7. Phylum: Mesozoa

8. Phylum: Nemertea [Ribbonworms]

9. Phylum: Gnathostomulida

10. Phylum: Micrognathozoa

11. Phylum: Rotifera Phylum: Acanthocephala [Spiny-Headed Worms]

12. Phylum: Cycliophora

13. Phylum: Gastrotricha

14. Phylum: Entoprocta

15. Phylum: Ectoprocta [Bryozoa]

16. Phylum: Brachiopoda [Lampshells]

17. Phylum: Phoronida

18. Phylum: Mollusca [Molluscs]

19. Phylum: Annelida [Segmented Worms]

20. Phylum: Echiura [Spoonworms]

21. Phylum: Sipuncula [Peanut Worms]

22. Phylum: Nematoda [Roundworms]

23. Phylum: Nematomorpha [Horsehair Worms]

24. Phylum: Kinorhyncha

25. Phylum: Priapulida

26. Phylum: Loricifera

27. Phylum: Onycophora [Velvet Worms]

28. Phylum: Tardigrada [Water Bears]

29. Phylum: Arthropoda [Arthropods]

Subphylum: Trilobita

Subphylum: Chelicerata

Class: Merostomata (horshoe crabs)

Class: Pycnogonida (sea spiders)

Class: Arachnida (spiders, scorpions, mites, ticks)

Subphylum: Crustacea

Class: Branchiopoda (tadpole shrimp, water fleas, brine shrimp, fairy shrimp)

Class: Maxillipoda (seed shrimp, copepods, fish lice, barnacles)

Class: Malacostraca (shrimp, crabs, lobsters, crayfish, pill bugs, amphipods,)

Class: Remipedia

Class: Cephalocarida

Class: Pentastomida (tongue worms)

Subphylum: Uniramia

Class: Chilopoda (centipedes)

Class: Diplopoda (millipedes)

Class: Pauropoda

Class: Symphyla

Class: Insecta

Order: Protura

Order: Diplura

Order: Collembola (springtails, snowfleas)

Order: Thysanura (silverfish, bristletails)

Order: Ephemeroptera (mayflies)

Order: Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies)

Order: Orthoptera (locusts, grasshoppers, walking sticks, praying mantis)

Order: Dermaptera (earwigs)

Order: Plecoptera (stoneflies)

Order: Isoptera (termites)

Order: Embioptera (webspinners)

Order: Psocoptera (book lice, bark lice)

Order: Zoraptera

Order: Mallophata (biting lice)

Order: Anoplura (sucking lice)

Order: Thysanoptera (thrips)

Order: Hemiptera (true bugs; squash bugs, chinch bugs, stink bugs)

Order: Homoptera (cicadas, aphids, scale insects, leafhoppers)

Order: Neuroptera (dobsonflies, at lios, lacewings)

Order: Coleoptera (beetles, fireflies, weevils)

Order: Strepsiptera

Order: Mecoptera (scorpionflies)

Order: Lepidoptera (butterflies, skippers, moths)

Order: Diptera (true flies; fruit flies, house flies, mosquitoes, crane flies)

Order: Trichoptera (caddisflies)

Order: Siphonaptera (fleas)

Order: Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, hornets)

30. Phylum: Chaetognatha [Arrowworms]

31. Phylum: Echinodermata [Echinoderms]

32. Phylum: Hemichordata [Acornworms]

33. Phylum: Chordata [Chordates]

Subphylum: Urochordata

Subphylum: Cephalochordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata

Class: Agnatha

Class: Chondrichthyes

Class: Osteichthyes

Class: Amphibia

Class: Reptilia

Class: Aves

Class: Mammalia

Order: Marsupialia (opossums)

Order: Insectivora (shrews and moles)

Order: Chiroptera (bats)

Order: Edentata (armadillos)

Order: Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares)

Order: Rodentia (rats, mice, squirrels, gophers, beavers)

Order: Cetacea (whales and dolphins)

Order: Carnivora (dogs, bears, raccoons, skunks, cats)

Suborder: Pinnipedia (sea lions, walruses)

Order: Sirenia (manatees, sea cows)

Order: Artiodactyla (deer, bison, cows, pigs, goats)

Order: Perissodactyla (horses, donkeys)

Order: Primates (lemurs, monkeys, gorillas, baboons, humans)

Suborder: Prosimii (lemurs, bush babies, tarsiers, lorises)

Suborder: Anthropoidea

Superfamily: Ceboidea (new world monkeys)

Superfamily: Cercopithecoidea (old world monkeys)

Superfamily: Hominoidea

Family: Hylobatidae (gibbons)

Family: Pongidae (apes, chimpanzees, gorillas)

Family: Hominidae

Genus: Australopithecus

Genus: Homo

Species: Homo habilis

Species: Homo erectus

Species: Homo sapiens (humans)

Subspecies: Homo sapiens neanderthalis

Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans).

Looking at animal phylogeny in relationship to the 'macroevolution' of the various body plans in the metazoa invites all kinds of speculation. What about the possible evolutionary emergence of more kinds of body plans? What about the existence of general principles of biological organization? Maybe there does in deed exist a 'theory' regarding the 'general principles' underlying the evolution of animal body form, where the evolution of body plans necessarily always conforms in a law-like fashion to the principles of engineering design, especially with respect to structure and function, and these engineering design principles place constraints and limitations on what kinds of different body plans could come into existence. In convergent evolution with respect to structure and function we see that there exists only a finite number of ways in which an animal eye can work and the same goes for brains. Convergent evolution demonstrates that evolutionary adaptations to the environment in terms of the organization of structure and function consistently arrives at the same convergent solutions within in different animal phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species. A good example is the box-camera-eye shared by octopus, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Cleary it seems that there exists only a limited number of ways in which an eye can work or see. We also see convergent evolution in terms of the similar organization of structures and functions with regard to olfaction, hearing, echolocation, vocalization, brain size, and even with regard to not only the 'emotions' but also in terms of complex forms of sociality which are based on the phenomenon of culture and agriculture. So obviously the number of evolutionary endpoints which can be achieved or realized in terms of phylum based body plans and the adaptive organization of structures and functions within and between different animal phyla are limited. This means that not everything is physically possible with respect to the organization of structure and function within the biological realm of existence.

However we are justified in believing on the basis of the evidence of converge evolution that whatever is possible with regard to: 1) the evolution of animal body plans, and 2) the evolutionary emergence of adaptations to the environment which are realized in terms of the organization of structure and function, is effectively inevitable. The evolutionary emergence of human-like creatures is an inevitability built into the workings of the Universe. The evolutionary emergence of animal and human sentience is also effectively inevitable and we are also justified in believing that this inevitability is built into the workings of the Universe. If emergence of sentience is effectively inevitable then so is consciousness, mind and higher dimensions of cognitive capacity. All of this is built into the nature of the Universe. I am quite happy to believe this claim on the basis of the evidence that we already have in the body of scientific knowledge. Maybe the Universe is saturated not only with life but also with sentience. Furthermore there does not seem to be any compelling reasons why we should not accept that the emergence of the animate in the form of life from the inanimate is a built in inevitability, in fact an effective inevitability which is part and parcel of the workings and Nature of the Universe.

And each day 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. 104. To rest on Sukkot—Leviticus 23:35

105

These effective inevitabilities which are built into the workings of the Universe are realized in the dance of chance under the choreography and beat of the laws of nature. Or along the lines of Monod in his 'Chance and Necessity' we can accept that the effective inevitabilities are the outcomes of interplay of contingency and necessity. Chance or contingency is often opposed to necessity. As a scientist I am quite satisfied on rational grounds to go along with the idea that there are things with exist necessarily and there are things which exist contingently. Something which is necessary cannot fail to exist. Something is contingent if it does not exist necessarily. It does not exist necessarily because its existence depends on something else. A contingent event or a contingency or a contingent existent or a contingent being exists only as a possibility, but as a possibility or even as an effective inevitability (which is not the same as a necessity) which is always conditional on something else or on the occurrence of something else. This is the basis of the 'contingency argument' or the 'argument from contingency'. The basic form of the contingency argument can be outlined as follows: for something to come into existence contingently, as in previously not existing, entails that something else be already in existence or existing, by virtue of which of which the contingent being can come into existence. The contingency argument can be reduced to the following bare bones statement that only something gives rise to something and that nothing cannot give rise to something and that nothing can only give rise to nothing. In other words something which is contingent cannot be self-causing. Also something which is contingent is only 'intelligible' in relation to something else. Also something which is contingent is only 'meaningful' in relation to something else. If something which is contingent exists then there must be a reason outside of itself or external to itself for its existence. There are many formulations of the Contingency Argument and by extension also of the Cosmological Argument which is similar to the Contingency Argument. There are good reasons for the credibility of the Contingency Argument. It seems that for starters there cannot ultimately be nothing. There is always something, the existence of which need explaining. Even the celebrated quantum vacuum is something which is actually a very complex and complicated something rather than nothing.

We know quite a lot on how almost everything came into existence in the Universe. The Big Bang which resulted in the origin of Universe occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. We know a lot about the physics and chemistry of all the major events and processes that were associated with the early stages of the Universe's evolution. We know a lot about the physical and causal process responsible for the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and solar systems. We know that solar systems arise as a consequence of the gravitation collapse of vast dust and gaseous clouds called nebulae. We know that the collapse and spinning of the nebula or vast stellar gas cloud can be triggered by the shock waves generated by exploding supernovas. We know that nebulae are formed from the debris produced by the massive explosion of giant supernovas. We know in great detail the physics underlying the nucleosynthesis of all the elements in the Periodic Table. We know that the synthesis of all the elements in the Periodic Table takes place during the different stages of the life cycle of different kinds of stars. We know that our solar system including the sun was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a region within a large nebula comprised of gas, dust and rocks that had been formed out of previous supernova explosions. The chemical evolution of organic molecules including the amino acid and nucleotide monomers from simpler molecules such as CO2, CH4, H2, H2S, and NH3 has been simulated in controlled laboratory experiments. Evidence now exists which indicates that the primeval atmosphere of the earth contained CO2, CH4, H2, H2S, and NH3. Formation of polymers of amino acids (peptides) and polymers of nucleotides (RNA and DNA) from their respective monomers can be catalysed by the surface chemistry of clay particles such as montmorillonite clay. The spontaneous chemical evolution of lipid bilayer vesicles has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments. Fossilized bacterial cells were formed 3.5 billion years ago which means that life could have first formed between 4.0 and 3.5 billion years ago, giving a window of time of 500 million years for life to form from inanimate matter, starting about 4.0 million years ago, which is roughly 500 million years after the formation of the solar system. Evolution of the first eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells has been established from the evidence for endosymbiotic hypothesis. Evolution of multicellular organisms from a common single cellular protists ancestor. Evidence suggests that a choanoflagellates-like organism was the common ancestor of all multicellular metazoans. All metazoan body plans for the 35 extant animal phyla were laid down just before the Cambrian Explosion at about 542 million years ago. The body plans of all complex multicellular metazoan organisms had evolved at about approximately 3.0 billion years after the appearance of the first prokaryotes.

And each day 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. 105. Not to do prohibited labour on Sukkot—Leviticus 23:35

106

The things that made up the Universe consist of tangible or empirically detectable objects like photons, electrons, proton and neutrons and slightly less tangible objects or more abstract phenomena such as the law-like relationships which obtain between objects and the law-like nature of the characteristic attributes of natural objects which includes their properties, dispositions and powers. Their properties, powers and disposition which define their essential natures in a law-like manner can be empirically measured and in many cases they are invariant over time. For example the speed of light does not change from one moment to the next, nor does the power of the electron's charge change in its magnitude from one moment to the next, the same goes for protons and neutrons, their properties and powers do not change from one moment to the next, but the remain invariant or fixed. Their remaining invariant or fixed from one moment to the next with respect to all their properties and powers is what makes them conform to law-like or regularities or uniformities of Nature. And it is by virtue of the invariant nature of their properties, powers, dispositions and relationships that a Universe can exist or does actually exist as we know it. This 'invariantness' or 'fixness' of the nature of fundamental entities is linked to Plato's theory of forms in relation to the One and the Many, and also in relation to Becoming and Being. Everything exists by virtue of the One and by virtue of Being. And it was this line of reasoning which lead to the idea or the inference that everything in and about the Universe is 'overdetermined' or 'omnidetermined'. And this idea is the basis for believing that causality in the context of law-like regularities of Nature is always an event or relationship that is overdetermined with metaphysical necessity. This idea will be become clearer as I endeavour to explicate it more fully. But for now take it as a given.

Thus, to summarize everything that I have said, the empirically accessible or detectable and therefore quantifiable and describable objects or so-call entities have 'objective properties' by means of which their natures or their essential natures can be fully characterized. The objectifiable or empirically accessible properties is what makes these things or entities physical or material and thereby 'tangible' in the sense of 'being there' and having a 'presence' in the form of a 'thisness' within some kind of experimental setup. Therefore it is possible to say: this is a photon, this is an electron, this is a proton and this is a neutron, even while we can't exactly see it directly with the naked eye. Even if we cannot directly see it with the naked eye we have no reason to doubt their existence or the fact that they are 'there'. We have no compelling reason to doubt their existence or the facts which characterize their essential nature. We have no compelling reason not to be in the existence of essences. When we switch on a light in a room we cannot doubt the existence of the invisible electrons, flowing a current through the copper wires. We can even believe that the essences which characterize the nature of photons, electrons, protons and neutrons exist with metaphysical necessity. A photon is photon and an electron is an electron by virtue of the properties which constitute its essential nature or its essence. This is the same as saying that electron is an electron by virtue of its essences. This kind of statement represents the 'essence' of Metaphysical Realism. This idea of essences as existing with metaphysical necessity is related to the ideas of the One and the Many, and Being and Becoming in Plato's philosophy.

Now by virtue of the nature of these objects and the relationships that obtained between the objects the Universe possessed an innate capacity or power to facilitate the occurrence of all the processes and events that were ultimately necessary for the eventual emergence of life, mind and consciousness on earth. Hence the relationship between Being and Becoming. It is apparent that the Universe possesses an inbuilt capacity for complex self-organization. Direct astronomical observation confirms that the Universe possesses something like a built-in capacity for the occurrence of processes such as star formation, nucleosynthesis and solar system formation seemingly without the external purposeful and causal intervention of an intelligent Divine Agent.

And each day 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. 106. To rest on Shemini Atzeret—Leviticus 23:36

107

Going back to my father's garage. I grew up hearing him refer by name to different parts or components of the engine without knowing which object was the bearer of any of the specific names that fell from his lips. I remembered the words without knowing what he was speaking about. The words stuck in my mind because they were interesting in themselves, words such as spark plug, gear, piston, cylinder, gasket, valve, connecting rod, crank, crankshaft, fly wheel, cams, ball bearing, governor, clutch plate, gear box, carburettor, distributor, alternator, generator, bush and brushes. I quickly learned the names of all the tools that he used. My dad would say bring me the shifting spanner, bring me a Philips screwdriver, bring me a number 10 ring spanner and so on. I would find the specific tool on the oil and grease stained work bench and bring it to him and then I would watch what he was doing with the tool and by watching I began to gradually connect names with things. I learnt that the cam was a metal disc that rotated about an axis that was perpendicular to the plane of the disc. It could impart a reciprocating or oscillating motion to other objects to which it was connected. And then I learnt the difference between a camshaft and a crankshaft. Over the years after spending many hours standing or sitting on my haunches in the garage watching and helping my father work on car engines my knowledge about how engines worked grew. By the end of high school I understood the function of each part in the working of the internal combustion engine. So I could connect the name of an object with the purpose that it served. In this sense my knowledge of a car's engine was complete. Also over the years my father had got so used to my company while working on cars in the garage that he could not bear to work without me being present. He complained about feeling lonely when I was not around.

And each day 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. 107. Not to do prohibited labour on Shemini Atzeret—Leviticus 23:36

108

It was while we were still living in the mine house at City Deep that dad bought the two-door 1934 Riley Nine Lynx Tourer. As a young child I watched them push the car into the garage. After dad had counted out the pounds the men who had towed the car to our home left with their money. I was alone with him in the garage when he first lifted the bonnet and started examining the engine under the leadlight which he had clamped to underside of the open bonnet. Overhauling the engine was first job that he was going to tackle. After he had finished his examination of the engine he ran his palm lovingly over the front fender. He explained that he had to fix the engine so that it would work again. This meant that he would have to lift the engine out. To me this seemed to be a task to daunting to even consider as a possibility. While he was draining the oil from the engine, mom came into the garage with Elsabe in her arms. She did not look very happy. She said that we could ill-afford such an extravagant hobby, a hobby which involved the restoration of vintage sports cars. That was all she said after glancing at the Riley. Before leaving she looked at me and asked if I was coming. I replied that I wanted to stay with dad and watch what he was going to do. She left without me, carrying Elsabe she walked to the house, slamming the kitchen behind here. I did not follow her, I stayed behind with my father. After draining the oil he leaned over the engine, clutching a spanner in his hand, he began to deftly unscrew bolts that were hidden from sight in every nook and cranny of the engine, all the time speaking to himself. Standing on a wooden box, leaning over the fender I peered down at the engine, observing what he was doing. I listened while I watched him work under the glare of the bright light. I asked him if the car was a girl or boy because he keep on referring to the car in the gendered terms of 'she' and 'her'. He replied without hesitation that the car was a she. He said all cars were she's. It was a bewildering revelation to learn that all cars were girls. No car was a 'he'. Out of curiosity I began into interrogate him on whether all machines were girls. Yes, he confirmed, all machines, all cars, all trucks, all boats, all aeroplanes and all steam engines were girls, they were all 'she's', not one was a boy. The feminization of all machinery was something that astonished to me. And it took a conscious effort on my part to accept that this was the reality of the world of machinery and engines and things with mechanical moving parts, covered in grease and oil, they were all girls. So the Riley that my dad was going to restore was a girl. Should we give her a name I asked? Yes, you can give her a name he answered with a distracted look on his face. I thought and thought. Eventually I came with Doris. The car will be called Doris after Doris Day, the singer of 'Que, Sera, Sera', which was my favourite song at the time, together with Patti Page's 'Doggie in the Window'. It was actually a toss-up between Doris and Patti. In good humour when my father asked if the car was going to have a surname I immediately said that Patti would be her surname. So the car was baptized 'Doris Patti'.

He disconnected all her wires, pipes and hoses. He unbolted and removed her radiator, carburettor, and alternator. He jacked up Doris Patti so that he could unbolt her transmission and unbolt all her remaining bolts which fixed her engine to her chassis. Once her mounting bolts were removed he hoisted her engine out. While her engine hung suspended in the air I helped my father to push the car out of the garage. He lowered her engine so that rested on blocks of wood which he had arranged on the floor in the middle of the garage. Bathed under a cone of light in the dim garage he stared at her engine. Now the engine by itself had become a she. He had to do this and that to her to get her working again.

By nightfall he had disassembled the complete engine. The engine block had to go the machine shop. Some of the engine parts had to be replaced with new parts and other parts had to be reconditioned. After overhauling the engine he then single-handedly using a chain block and tackle he put the engine back. Once everything was reconnected he turned the ignition key and to my amazement the engine started. Now he could drive the car in and out of the garage.

And each day 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. 108. Not to eat Chametz on the afternoon of the 14th day of Nissan—Deuteronomy 16:3

109

As usual after he had fetched us from Sunday school he continued working on the Riley. And as also usual Malcolm and I joined him while his was busy with the Riley. Malcolm generally made a general nuisance of himself. Somehow he had managed to collapse the bonnet on dad's head while he was busy with the engine. On another occasion also after Sunday school while dressed in his Sunday best Malcolm began to kick the front tire of the Riley which with his shiny new black shoes. I was sitting in the front seat playing with the steering wheel and dad was fiddling with something under the car. Most Sundays Corelle who was mom's best friend would visit us for the entire day. She and mom had been friends since their childhood days. They often joked that they were sisters. While mom was busy preparing the Sunday roast Corelle would often join us outside. Sometimes she would bring dad some tea on a sliver little tray that she had given to my mom as a birthday present. I always called her auntie Corelle. While she stood holding the tray I was my usual loquacious self:

'Look auntie Corelle I am driving daddy's Riley. Auntie Corelle do know that I have given the car a name, her name is Doris Patti.'

The Riley resting on four jack trestles had been lifted high of the ground. I climbed down from the passenger and crawled under the car.

'Hannah you going to make you nice Sunday school dress all grubby and dirty,' I heard Corelle say.

Lying on my back next by my father I looked up Corelle's dress. The whole world was upside down from my vantage point. I could see her stocking encased legs, her suspenders and her panties as her skirt billowed in the light fresh breeze. Then I could see Malcolm knees, socks and shoes. He was standing next to Corelle. Malcolm continued to kick the front tire and the toe cups of his shiny black shoes were becoming increasingly damaged with each kick. Dad was becoming increasing irritated with Malcolm's constant kicking of the tire and reprimanded him sharply to stop destroying his shoes. Malcolm ran bawling to mom who was busy in the kitchen preparing the Sunday roast. Knowing that mom would soon storm out of the kitchen I quickly back out from the under car and climbed into the front seat. Corelle also quickly climbed into the passenger seat next to me just as mom came screaming out of the kitchen wanting to know why dad had yelled at Malcolm and why he had upset the child by threatening to take away his new Sunday shoes.

It was lie, dad did not threaten to take away his shoes. Corelle smiled sweetly at me. Her eyes sparkled with conspiracy. I smiled back at her as mom dressed in her apron over her Sunday best outfit walked back to the kitchen with Malcolm holding her had. As soon as mom disappeared into the kitchen Corelle hugged me, kissed me on the cheek.

'You are definitely daddy's little girl hey? You are such pretty little girl I wish you were mine.'

Then mom called from the kitchen. Lunch was ready. Dad crawled out from under the car, took his greasy and oily overall off. After washing his hands and face he would join us at the table still smelling of grease and oil. We ate our Sunday lunch at the kitchen table. It was same table on which they had cut Malcolm's hair. He had a shock of dark curl locks which covered his ears and almost reached his shoulders. He had never had hair cut since his birth. Ouma Zeeman had brought her scissors and clippers and dad and Oupa Zeeman had to hold him down as he screamed, kicked and struggled while lying on his back on the table with his head hanging over the edge of the table having his locks shorn off. And then on the same table Oupa Vollenhoven cut up the carcase of a sheep. When he laid the skinned carcase on the table I thought it was from a dog. I was convinced that Oupa and Ouma had killed their Alsatian and that the carcase belonged to their dog. It took a lot convincing before I believed that they had not slaughtered and skinned the Alsatian and we were not going to eat the dog for supper.

Dad sat at the head of table and Elsabe sat in the highchair next to mom and mom would feed her in between eating her own meal. Malcolm sat next me and Corelle sat on opposite side of the table. We ate the roast lamb with mint sauce that mom prepared from the mint which grew in the garden. It was at lunch that Corelle announced:

'Did you know that Hannah has given the vintage car a name?'

'Nooo, I did not know that,' my mom replied with a frown on her forehead.

'Yes she has, such clever girl, the car's name is Doris Patti. Don't you think that is so sweet?'

After lunch dad would go back to work on the car and then at three-o-clock Oupa and Ouma Zeeman or Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven would arrive. When visitors had arrived mom would call dad several times to stop working on the car, his tea was getting cold, and it was also very inconsiderate of him to be work while Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven were visiting.

Corelle would came and tell him to stop working because mom was getting very angry. At five Oupa and Ouma would be ready to leave and then it was time for Elsabe to be bathed, fed and put to sleep. At seven mom complained that she could barely keep her eyes open. Elsabe and Malcolm were in already in bed and asleep. It was time for dad take Corelle home. Mom would apologise for being a bad host and excuse herself from coming with on the drive to take Corelle home. Instead I would go with. The drone and motion of the car made me sleepy and I would fall asleep on the back seat. I would wake up again when we arrived at the flat. Dad would park the Hudson next to Berea Park across the road from Corelle's flat. He would say he would be back very soon.

When we got back mom would be asleep and I would be asleep in my father's arm as he carried me into the house and tucked me into bed with me still wearing my Sunday school dress. Soon it was Christmas again. The Christmas before we had driven in the Hudson to Germiston Lake where dad surreptitiously sawed off a branch from pine tree which used as the Christmas tree. Now we had bought a Christmas tree with its brushes of spikey prickly needles. It had been planted into a large tin drum and dad decorated with tinsel and coloured lights. After our Christmas in he planted it in the middle of the front lawn. Years later when we drove past the City Deep mine houses we would spot our old home among the houses. Our Christmas tree had grown into a towering cone shaped grey-green pine tree with its brushes of spikey prickly needles.

And each day 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. 109. To destroy all Chametz on 14th day of Nissan—Exodus 12:15

110

Interlude: This pile of notebooks filled with my writings lying before me on my desk contains the raw material, the data if you like, from which I hope to reconstitute my life, or the narrative of my life. I would like to write: These notes which you the reader may happen to be reading, have been written and rewritten, and revised and revisited. The writing and rewriting seemed to be an endless task and I often wondered if I would ever be finished with the task of rewriting what has been written. I am constantly reworking what I have written, adding, or subtracting, filling in details. I have become aware of a sense of artistic duty with respect to the composition and the aesthetics of the Journal. The artistic duty to which I feel called to observe coming from some inner voice in my soul concerns the aesthetic form that I am attempting to impose on the content of the notebooks writings. How do I create gripping and entertaining poetic prose out of the conscientious recording of recollections and various random musings?

And each day 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. 110. Not to eat Chametz all seven days of Passover—Exodus 13:3

111

Philosophy and theorizing continually intrudes into my narrative. I find myself lecturing, writing lecture notes, there is a didactic quality to my writing, it has a pedagogical thrust, it cuts, and stabs, like a rapier, dividing the flesh from the bone. I cannot break out of the mould of being a teacher, a lecturer, I feel compelled to say something about something to someone.

Anyway I have managed to write down a series of vivid recollections of my life which I hope will work accurately or will capture accurately in the form of clear verbalized mental snapshots of the series of scenes which constitute the lived experience of my life up until now. I suppose that these notes which I have now compiled will not be read by anyone but me as I have no intention of publishing them. Anyway I will possibly read then again maybe in forty years' time or so. I am certain that I will then find them strange and interesting, and I will most probably be intrigued about who I have been and who I have become, and just maybe I will for a moment enjoy a personal sense of meaning and purpose with regard to the life I have lived in my old age. I will read them again, that is for sure, and I will reread them out of curiosity to re-discover who I have been and to be reminded of what kind of things I have thought about, and also what kind of things that I have done, and what kind of experiences I have had in my life.

Apart from this written record of recollections of the life that I have lived, I have also endeavoured to weave into the writing the thoughts and ideas which have crossed my mind while writing down these memories. I have had time to think about many things while I was incarcerated, and at the time I did not want to let any of ideas or thoughts escape into oblivion, or slip away as fleeting shadows. I felt compelled to commit them to writing as soon as they were born out of fear that I would forget about the ideas and thoughts and feelings that I became aware of. I found myself sitting on the foam mattress for hours on end staring at the wall waiting for a thought, an idea, a memory or recollection to surface from the depths of my mind, and then I would grab my notebook and start scribbling them down.

And each day 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. 111. Not to eat mixtures containing Chametz all seven days of Passover—Exodus 12:20

112

Interlude: My dad will retire as the general manager of the manganese mine in the New Year. My mother has asked me go through all my things in my bedroom. She told me to take what I wanted. The rest would be thrown away. A large part of my life had become archived in this room. Hanging in the cupboards were all my school uniforms. The boxes stashed in the top cupboard contained all my school books and school work from grade one to Matric. All my undergraduate university lecture notes were also stashed in one of the boxes. Every single test that I had ever written had been kept. All my school report cards had been kept. All my birthday cards had been kept. There were also photo albums full of photographs from my primary school days and high school days. All my high school magazines had been kept. All my clothes and shoes from when I was a toddler had been kept. My desk draws and bookshelves were filled with school and university papers and books. The artefacts linked to a large part of childhood and youth had been carefully curated by my mother in my bedroom. My room had become a museum. Everything had been carefully preserved and curated, even the two boxes in the bottom of the built-in cupboard still contained my childhood collection of animal skulls and rocks.

My mother no longer needed or wanted all these artefacts that were connected to my life. She was at the threshold of her own life; she was now living in the conscious awareness of her own finitude and mortality. She was also on the brink of starting a new life at Hermanus, and she wanted to shake the dust of Hotazel from her feet. But she would be leaving a legacy behind. She had started the Hotazel drama society and the Hotazel bridge club; she was also active in the NG Church's women's group. Dad and mom had re-established their Afrikaner roots. In this way Hotazel had transformed them. They would be leaving Hotazel as different people, different from who they were when they first arrived in Hotazel. They would be leaving Hotazel as re-established and re-rooted Afrikaners, members of the NG Church, they had returned to their ancestral cultural roots, they spoke to me in Afrikaans. It was strange to hear the echo of my Afrikaans tongue ringing in my ears as I replied in the tongue of my forefathers. The ambiguity of the new situation did not escape me. Here I was a grown woman of the world yet out of respect, out of diffidence to my parents, I spoke to them now in Afrikaans. They would be shocked to learn what kind of woman I have been. Like my father, my life has been an erotic one, like my father I have been unfaithful to all my lovers, like my father I am a person who has lived a secret life which only I know of. My dear reader, you are my confessor, I have confessed to you things which only strangers, not friends or family, should know. Why should I want confess personal and intimate things. I confess to you because I know you will not judge me. I have loved deeply and I have felt the pain of separation and loss.

And each day 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. 112. Chametz should not be seen in your domain seven days—Exodus 13:7

113

Interlude: I began to page through the high school magazines, starting from when I was in standard six in the year 1968, pausing to gaze at the glossy black and white photographic plates in which I featured. There I was in the hockey team, in the swimming team and in the debating society. In my final year, the Matric class of 1972, in spite of having received colours for hockey and swimming I was not among the school prefects in their photograph. I had a tainted past and with the passing of time my stigma clung to me like a shadow, the school's collective institutional memory like that of an old elephant matriarch never lapsed into the kind of forgetfulness that erases the deeds that marked the passage of our individual journeys through high school. My non-selection as a prefect represented the final judgment. I was beyond the pale, quite literary, as you will discover. From the sun my skin tone was a shade too dark, and my name was wrong. Whispers of the tar brush, whispers of miscegenation had haunted my life. I am the dark Afrikaner outlier. The whispers at high school still echo in my mind – 'she is actually Afrikaans I would have you know...she is from Hotazel wherever that may be.' 'Hotazel?' 'Yes hot-as-hell, some God forsaken place in the Kalahari near Kuruman. Kuruman?' 'Can't say I have ever hear of a place called Kuruman'. It was only Afrikaners who happened to be darker than the norm. But ironically I was whiter than the driven snow. Whiteness clung to me like a shadow. I was condemned by my history to be white. But whiteness worked for me, I used my whiteness. But as I have expressed from the depths of my heart there were many moments in my life when I wished I was not white. In my second year at Wits someone said to me that she thought that I was either Spanish or Portuguese or Italian or Greek and so on and so forth, but what she really meant was that she was convinced I was Coloured. She was trying to compliment me but instead she only embarrassed herself for speaking out what she felt. Now in my heart I self-identify as Coloured. I want to be Coloured, I want to be the progeny of miscegenation. I love the word 'miscegenation'.

And each day 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. 113. Chametz should not be found in your domain seven days—Exodus 12:19

114

I thought that I had lost my Afrikaner roots. As I grew up to adulthood I began to dream only in English. But in prison, as a detainee under the Suppression of Communism Act I was treated as an Afrikaner. They spoke to me only in Afrikaans. As a re-adopted Afrikaner and as a sister of Colonel Malcolm Zeeman I was treated differently to all the other detainees. I was not a Jew and I was not a rooinek (redneck) or soutie (slang for English speaking white South African). I was now an Afrikaner; I belonged to them, even in all my weirdness. I was one of them. I knew it was only because of my brother Malcolm Zeeman that I was receiving special treatment in the form of being allowed to have the notebooks and ball point pens.

He had become the archetypical Afrikaner macho male; he had become the model Boer. He has been a Parabat during his national military service, afterwards he had gone to Rhodesia and managed to become a Selous Scout, when he came back South African he joined the Recces as a permanent force officer, then after doing his stint in the Recces he was recruited into Koevoet, when he got married to a Namibian Boere meisie (Afrikaner girl) he decided to join the Security Police as specialist in 'terrorism' and counter-insurgency. He joined the security police because he wanted to be a family man with no counter-insurgency combat duties. He had survived countless contacts and now he wanted to pursue the counter-insurgency war at the level of the mind, at the level of the soul, and not on the battle field in the black townships or in the arid Savannahs of Southern Africa.

And each day 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. 114. To eat Matzah on the first night of Passover—Exodus 12:18

115

Interlude: While in prison it felt as if my ancestors the Boers who had died and lay buried in African soil had come back to claim me as their own. I was the lost daughter of the Boere volk. Even though I was a lesbian my buried ancestors expected me to bear Boer children.

And each day 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. 115. To relate the Exodus from Egypt on that night—Exodus 13:8

116

Interlude: In January 1988 I was detained under the Internal Security Act. I have been a Marxist-Leninist for a large part of my life. I flirted on and off with Trotskyism and anarchism. In spite of my independence of mind I remained a loyal member of the South African Communist Party. Just when I was getting accustomed to the idea that prison was going to my fate I was released from detention as an awaiting trial detainee on the 5th of February 1990 as apartheid, socialism, and communism collapsed. All charges against me were dropped. Communism no longer posed a 'threat' to South Africa and the rest of the so-called free-world. The world had become overnight post-communist. Marxism had to be re-thought, reconstructed and re-invented by a radical re-reading of everything that Marx had ever written. In my mind I felt that Marxism was now more relevant than ever before.

I was released after spending 751 days of my life in the belly of the beast, deep in the bowels of leviathan. I was released unconditionally, I carried a cardboard filled with my notebooks, I carried the box cradled in my arms, on top of the notebooks lay my handbag, I left wearing same the cloths in which I was arrested. My uncut hair which I managed to comb and plait every odd day now reached my buttocks. My notes had attained leviathanic proportions. And like a whale it encloses and encompasses everything that could be possibly said. In the box I carry the writings that I have become. The writings fill the box, the text is swollen with thoughts, musing, reflections and ideas, it swollen, absorbing my thoughts like a dry sponge. The box of writing is distended like a pregnant whale it threatens to rupture. It is bloated with writing, it is on the verge of bursting, but who is going to read the book that will be born from this box cradled in my arms.

And each day 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. 116. To hear the Shofar on the first day of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah)--Numbers 29:1

117

Who is going to read this book, this whale of book, a book full of digressions, full of diversions and interruptions, never getting to the point of anything? What is the point? The point concerns everything, the totality. The totality of needs, the totality wants, the totality of life, the totality of what is imaginable. Therefore the point, an infinite point that encloses everything, the point from which nothing escapes, a point that is infinitely sharp and penetrating, point that punctures through the impenetrable, the point of the lightning rod, the point of the metaphysical harpoon which captures the largest whale, a whale which concerns everything, everything in a way which only capitalism can, because capitalism can only exist as a totalizing system. This is capitalism, this is the name which we have given to a particular system of social-economic-political relations, a system organized around the ownership of private property, a system which did not exist until recently, a system which represents a totally unique historical phenomenon. Capitalism is a social-economic-political system driven by accumulation and profit-maximization. In fact Capitalism exists by virtue of the drive for the accumulation of Capital through the process of profit-maximization, a process that involves the appropriate of surplus value. Appropriation of surplus value is a process which is intrinsic to all forms of commodity exchange under Capitalism. Accumulation and profit-maximization involves the commodification of the totality of human life. Capitalism re-creates the totality of human life into a universe of desire, a universe of infinite wants, a universe were every possible want or desire can only be finally and fully satisfied through the process of commodification, a process in which every possible form of want-satisfying-utilities are transformed into commodities, commodities which can be bought or sold in an all-embracing market nexus that penetrates into the every dimension of human existence, human need, and human desire. Under Capitalism, no horizon can enclose the market, the market of want-satisfying-utilities under Capitalism is infinite, and everything in human life is transformable into commodities in the form of purchasable want-satisfying-utilities, and so as Marx wrote, under Capitalism...'all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...'

Capital necessarily has a material basis without which it cannot exist as social phenomenon. The material basis of Capitalism is the commodity in it multifarious forms. The commodity exists by virtue of a physical embodiment of utility. Capitalism can only exist as a vast universe of material or physical objects. Under Capitalism even an idea can only truly exist in the form and substance of its objectified embodiment, that is, an object in the form of a commodified utility, a want-satisfying-utility.

For Marx the general formula for Capitalism was M-C-M*, where M is money, C is commodities, and the second M* is more money in the form of the appropriation of surplus value. Piera Sraffa later proposed that under Capitalism commodities produce commodities and in the production of commodities, commodities are consumed. Want-satisfying-utilities produce want-satisfying-utilities, and in the production of want-satisfying-utilities, utilities are consumed. In the act of consumption a utility is consumed.

In Capitalism value necessarily has a physical objective basis in order for it to exist as something. Value, that is exchange value which can be monetized or financialized, always exists only as labour which has become congealed, coagulated or crystallized in the physical or objective form or the substance of the commodity or utility, a thing which satisfies wants.

And each day 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. 117. To dwell in a Sukkah for the seven days of Sukkot—Leviticus 23:42

118

Reflecting on what I have written and possibly what I would have to do in order to publish my writings.

Interlude: I am not going to bother about justifying the back and forth, disordered depiction of the events that have shaped my life which I have tried to document faithfully in the writing of these notes. However the way I have put them together does in a manner capture the flavour or sense of my life. So on realizing that there was no need for chronology, sequence, logic or temporal flow I have made very little effort to iron out the wrinkles or tidy up the jumble or messiness or bring order to the haphazard manner in which the Journal notes have been compiled or organized. This also means that I have not consciously or intentionally lived my life as it were a story which I would be in a position to narrative from begin to end, and anyway what would be the plot of my life? Could I in fact be living that plot, some acting out the script of my life, fulfilling my role or playing out my role as the main actor in the drama of my own existence? There has been no discernible or externally imposed telos or purpose or design or destiny to my life as I have lived it moment by moment. In fact each future moment was shrouded by the impenetrable unknowns, nothing was preordained to happen, nothing had been prearranged, and there was no predestination. Before dying in the transient moment, the future had no existence. Mostly things just happened. Anyway as you can now appreciate it is impossible to live one's life as if it were a true to life story. If from this sequence of numbered notes the reader can form a portrait of the life of an individual person who happens to me, a real person, the author of these notes, it will be of person who would be a stranger to me, it would be someone that I don't really know, and I would never be sure that it was actually me. The person that represents me in your imagination cannot be held up as mirror in which I would recognize myself. As have said, I often feel like a stranger to myself. In a real sense these writings are a genuine work of fiction. Again, this is what I have often felt to be the case while writing about my experiences and memories. I am aware that I have been engaged in a project of re-inventing myself as a character, a character who does not really exist, except in the world of fiction, except in the special world of this Journal, except in the shadow world of the prison notebooks, a world that is a product of a mental fabrication, a picture of a world which I have imaginatively woven with many different coloured threads, threads brought together with so many words, but always in response to the fulfilment of an enigmatic commitment to artistic duty, a duty with binds me to the telling of the truth, wherever the truth may lead. As a scientist the truth has been my occupation. Now it is also my wish to bask in the light of my own artistic creation. And my occupation as an artist still remains the truth.

I have not tried for my own sake or even for the benefit of any possible reader to faithfully and coherently join all the dots which comprise the events of my life. In the notebook writings the dots remain scattered all over the place without any discernible form or pattern. The dots represent the chaotic and seemingly disconnected flashbacks, recollections and memories of my life. Only through the work of the imagination can a clear picture eventually emerge of who I am, like a reflection in a mirror. My life has not been an open book, even to me, the person who happens to be both the writer and reader of this life, compiler and interpreter.

And each day 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. 118. To take up a Lulav and Etrog all seven days of Sukkot—Leviticus 23:40

119

To use the more loaded postmodern term: NARRATIVE. The story or narrative of any life, mine included will always be an account based on selection recollections which have become imprinted into our brains, the rest has been filtered out or lost and forgotten, forever irretrievable. These are the many gaps or empty spaces that punctuate the greater part of our lives with uncountable lost moments, moments which slipped away leaving no trace of anything that could even form the faintest recollection. How much of our lived lives do we actually remember? We have all experienced our own lives. Our lives are filled with familiar experiences. We know what it is like to live a life within a certain kind of sociality which is specific to a specific location in history, in time and space. We experience what it is like to live our own lives moment by moment. We are consciously aware most of the time of what it is like to be ourselves. We can be mistaken about what we are experiencing. We cannot always re-experience what we have already experienced and the freshness and vividness of a lived experience fades with time until we have forgotten what it was like to have such and such an experience. But then experiences often come back to us in the form of déjà vu. We cannot replay our lives like a movie and relive each moment frame by frame. If we could do this we may be very surprise to discover who we have been, especially when the intimate experience of that moment has been lost or has faded away beyond possible recall. I suppose that is why it is so amusing to see ourselves on the celluloid of 8 mm home movies. I have discovered that the greater proportion of our lives is mostly filled with huge memory gaps so much so that what we actually remember about ourselves constitutes only a very small fraction of the life that we lived. So we are forced to invent the history of the life that we think or believe that we have lived. The story that we happen to narrate about our lives to ourselves and to others will always necessarily be no more than a fictionalized account of our personal life history. Generally any serious effort at a reflective recollection of the events and episodes that made up our lives actually confirms just how meaningless, insignificant, and insubstantial our lives have been. The telling of the story of my own life has turned out to be an incongruent or inconsequential rambling of thoughts and memories many of which include all kinds of personal details of my life from when I was a young girl until my detention and subsequent release. They represent thoughts, recollections and memories that I have managed to dredge up from my past.

And each day 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. 119. Each man must give a half shekel annually—Exodus 30:13

120

What to do we experience? Often we believe that we are experiencing the truth. So truth is something which we are able experience. What are the kinds of experiences which can reveal the truth or make manifest the truth? The truth is always about something. And the experience of something has the power to reveal or unveil or disclose the truth about something. This is what is meant when we say experience communicates truth. There are different kinds of experiences, each experience been made possible by virtue of what it is that is experienced. In this sense the 'what of experience' is an ontological concern. What is experienced is always something or about something, something which exists, and because it exists it is accessible to experience, to been experienced as something. And there are different kinds of ways that something can exist. It would exist as something which is abstract like a mathematical proof, or something like an observation in a scientific experiment, or something like a work of art. Truth is made apparent or truth is communicated by means of or through an experience. So once again, truth is something that is derived from experience, and also once again, there are different kinds of experiences, with each communicating its own kind of truth about something. For example, truth can be experienced through a work of art. It is possible that the kind of truth that we are able to experience through a work of art cannot be derived from any other source, be it philosophical or scientific, nor is it reducible to something else. The experience of truth that is made possible through a work of art is a challenge to science, and it is also a challenge to philosophical investigation. It is a challenge to epistemology and to ontology. Yet we are unable to doubt or ignore the possibility that through the experience we have of a work of art, the truth about something can be communicated, the truth about something can be experienced, and the possibility arises that this truth can be narrated, that it can become expressed in speech and writing. The work of art has the power to express a truth, a truth about something, a truth that is accessible to the mind and to the consciousness, and can become an object of knowledge, an object of analysis.

And each day 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. 120. Courts must calculate to determine when a new month begins—Exodus 12:2

121

In many ways this writing project is turning out to be a bit of a disappointment. It is not going the way I expected. But I urge you dear reader not to give up but to persist in your reading of the Journal. I say 'the' Journal rather than 'my' Journal. The aim of the Journal is to tell the truth or at least to speak as a witness to the truth. This is the artistic duty of the writer. It was also the artistic duty of the Hebrew writers who crafted the story of Joseph, and the story of Naaman, and the story of Samson, and the story of Job, and the story of Jonah, and the story of God's creation in Genesis. Of course all these stories tell the truth! They speak the truth by saying something about something to someone. They are saying something that is true. And it is in this sense that they are revelatory, inerrant, infallible and authoritative. They speak the very Words of God because they are saying something that is true. Could I dare propose that the Journal writings that I am busy with is similarly also engaged with the telling of the truth in the sense that the writings are revelatory, inerrant, infallible and authoritative? All writing that speaks the truth becomes in this sense a form of Scripture and a revelation of the Word or the Divine Logos as opposed to Mythos. In the Mythos of the story of Jonah the Divine Logos or the revelatory Word is revealed, that is, revealed in the story crafted by an unknown oriental writer. Jonah was not a historical figure, Jonah did not exist as real person. He is a mythological person. Let me take this opportunity to remind the reader the difference between Jonah and myself. I am a real person. There was also a real person behind the literary creation of Jonah. Why is the story of Jonah so interesting? In the story, Jonah was commanded by the God of Israel to go and preach against the 'city' of Nineveh which happened to be the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the enemy of Israel. The story of Jonah is not about Jonah being swallowed by a whale or a big fish. The story is counter-intuitively about the saving of the city of Nineveh, a city so big that it takes three days to walk across on foot. Jonah after preaching to the non-Hebrew inhabitants Nineveh camps outside the city wall waiting for the spectacle of God's destruction of Nineveh, but God does not destroy Nineveh, instead the people of Nineveh find God and repent of their sins. Jonah waits in vain for Nineveh to fall like Sodom, and when God does not destroy the city of Nineveh an agitated and disappointed Jonah vents his anger against God. God saves the enemies of Israel. The myth written by a Jewish author reveals a great truth. The myth is a revelation about God. He seeks to save the enemies of Israel. He seeks to save the enemies of the Jews. Why? God seeks to save me, a non-Jewess, a lesbian gentile feminist, and a Hellenized woman. Am I a Hellenized woman? Yes, but I am also a Hebraic woman. But a Hebraic woman seeking sex and love with other women.

And each day 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. 121. To afflict and cry out before God in times of catastrophe—Numbers 10:9

122

In the Bible vivid poetic descriptions of eroticism have found their way into the canon, earning the status of divine revelation. In the 'Song of Songs' the Shulammite woman is encouraged to dance and she dances in the shadow of the erotic gaze. We read: 'Dance, dance, O Shulammite woman, dance, dance, so we can gaze, even feast our eyes on the beauty of your gracefulness, on your sharply and beautiful sandaled feet, on your legs, on your thighs that are so lithe, so shapely, so elegant, which are like spinning jewels, the work of master jeweller, your hips are like rounded chalice brim full of wine, your hips hold a goblet, filled with delicious nectar, your waist, your belly is mound of wheat, adorned with lilies, your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle'. Homoerotically I know that as lesbian my hips are like a rounded chalice brim full of wine, my hips hold a goblet, filled with delicious nectar'. In the shadow of my hips I possess the delights of the female vulva. If the Shulammite woman was dancing, she was also been watched by women, the daughters of Jerusalem.

And each day 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. 122. To marry a wife by the means prescribed in the Torah (kiddushin)--Deuteronomy 24:1

123

Since the age of Homer under the climatic conditions of the ancient Mediterranean world truth seemed to be inseparable from fiction or so it seems. For the Greeks and the Romans and also with the Hebrews, history seemed to merge with a mythic past and it did not seem strange that ancestral links with Adam or Romulus or Remus could be taken for granted. And ironically Celsus' critical writings disputing the resurrection of Jesus could only survive for prosperity in the writings of the Origin, one of the fathers of the church. If it were not for Origin we would have no idea of what was passing through the mind of writers like Celsus. We have to read the church fathers in order to find out what the ancient enemies of the church thought about Christianity. It was in the shallow unforgiving sun parched arid earth of the Mediterranean, a soil encrusted with deep set stratigraphic layers of fiction, myth and legend, that the Gospel, letters and epistles eventually set down vital roots among the choking weeds of fabulous fictions, myths and legends. Origin himself as the defender of the veracity of the writings of the New Testament was in turn sceptical about the historicity of the war in Troy between the Greeks and the Trojans. In saying this, what is the point that I am trying to make? What I am saying is that the Gospels took root in the first century in a literate, intellectually critical and sophisticated Hellenistic and Roman urban environment. It was a social environment in which there existed a heathy scepticism regarding the truthfulness of various kinds of historical, fictional and mythological narratives. Many of these narratives had been in circulation for hundreds of years becoming in the process fairly well entrenched in the minds of popular culture. Yet they were known to be fictitious. So why did the Gospels not also eventually succumb to the same kind of literary fate which befell much of the Greek and Roman literary legacy?

And each day 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. 123. Not to have relations with women not thus married—Deuteronomy 23:18

124

Yet in spite of all my misgivings the writing has saved me. The Journal has saved me!

When I began to cooperate they allowed me to have the notebooks and the pens, but no other luxuries. Ironically before my arrest I had only been a part-time Communist, mainly because I had to also hold down a job as an academic. So apart from being a Communist I did have another life. Most of my life was devoted to my scientific interest in animals. As a dyke I also shared my life with many partners, and as a lesbian I reclaimed that noun as a description of my gender identity. I discovered much to my surprise during my high school years that I was queer. I fell in love with one school 'girlfriend' after the next. Throughout my life I have borne the burden and pain of unrequited love in secret. All my relationships with girlfriends were based on the reciprocal and mutual understanding that we had other lives and other commitments. I was committed to the revolution, but I was also committed to my research and teaching. In a manner of speaking I was mostly a part-time revolutionary, I managed to squeeze in a bit of revolution here and a bit of revolution there in my busy schedule of research commitments and teaching obligations.

But still I managed to be a useful cog in the engine of revolution. With time many of friends moved on and my social circle shrunk until the only people I socialized with on occasions were the members of the cell that I belonged. I became a bit of reclus.

I now have misgivings about trying to put this narrative together from the material in my prison notes. It is turning out to be a bit of disappointment. I don't really know what am I doing or what I hope to achieve with this writing project. I have now realized I have not emerged unscathed from my arrest and detention or my solitary confinement. I have ignored all the obvious symptoms.

I never set out to write a story. It was my not intention. Surrounded by a deafening silence I had nothing else to do. The die had been cast. My trial would be a brief perfunctory exercise. I was guilty in terms of the law; I had no secrets left in a manner of speaking. There was nothing to hide. All had been laid bare, on the advice of my brother who hovered constantly unseen in the background I withheld nothing, and I had confessed everything. But in confessing everything I did not feel guilty of anything, I did not feel guilty of any wrongdoing. I felt strangely vindicated. In confessing everything I felt redeemed in some kind of way. The likelihood that I would be given a lengthy sentence was strong.

And each day 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. 124. Not to withhold food, clothing, and sexual relations from your wife—Exodus 21:10

125

Interlude: After languishing for two years in detention under conditions of solitary confinement the trial date was never set. While waiting for the trial date to be set I remained a prisoner remanded in custody. I was living with the expectation that the prison cell would continue to be my home until the trial was over. The trial would be a mere perfunctory appearance before the magistrate or judge. I would plead guilty. But then before my trial date could be set I was released unconditionally. It was an anti-climax. All charges were revoked. The tide of history had changed. I stood outside John Vorster Square on the pavement blinking in the bright morning sun while I waited for my father. In was the year 1990 and the world had changed. Socialism was on the brink of collapsing and apartheid had started to implode. It seemed that capitalism had finally won the day. My stomach started to grumble. I felt famished. I was as pale as a ghost. I had also become a walking skeleton and health wise I was in very bad shape. The first thing I wanted was a huge Wimpy breakfast.

My father spotted me, stopping the car close to the pavement in front of me; he quickly flung open the front passenger door. I felt like a child as I clambered into the front seat and he sped away as if we were trying to escape something. After the Wimpy breakfast we drove straight back to Hotazel. We drove back along the same old route, the route that I had traversed so many time in my life in my travels between Hotazel and Johannesburg, a route that was cluttered with all kinds of sign posts that brought back recollects of past my life, towns such as Klerksdrop, Stilfontein and Potchefstroom which had been so much part of my life.

And each day 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. 125. To have children with one's wife—Genesis 1:28

126

Before we moved from Stilfontein to Hotazel I remembered that my mom said something about the mine houses in Hotazel that struck me odd as a child. She said that the houses in Hotazel had floors covered with Marley tiles. As a young child I could not understand why she seemed to be so thrilled that our new home soon to be in Hotazel had floors that were covered with Marley tiles. I tried to imagine what a Marley tiled floor looked like. For some weird reason the word 'Marley' made me think of marbles. I developed this mental image that the surfaces of the floors of the Hotazel houses had marbles stuck into concrete.

Our house in Stilfontein had polished wooden parquet flooring which I liked. I was not very happy about leaving Stilfontein, especially leaving my room which had just been painted pink. I was also leaving behind the newly built Strathvaal Primary School.

My older brother Malcolm was ecstatic. If anyone wanted to escape Stilfontein it was my brother. For some unexplainable and mysterious reason he had decided to fling fist sized clods of red earth at the white washed walls of the Dr Simon Cohen our neighbour. Dr Cohen a medical doctor was a general practitioner in Stilfontein. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in the neat little house next to our home. His wife, a sophisticated Jewess, as I remember her, was also a housewife whose main job was to manage the domestic servant and look after their two daughters.

As a friend of her daughters I was a frequent visitor in their home. We would listen for hours to LPs of The Snow Goose and Alice in Wonderland on their brand new Pilot Radiogram. Compared to my mother Mrs Cohen was a wonderful mother to her two daughters and an excellent host to me as a regular visitor, a gentile intruder into her home.

Malcolm was mom's favourite. Elsabe and I often felt like second class children. My mother was always on our case. The bonds between my mother and me and Elsabe were never strong as far as I can remember.

There were the odd moments when my mother become our wonderful friend and indulged our ever wish.

An act of vandalism had been committed and the suspect was Malcolm.

I had to go and find Malcolm who had disappeared off the face of the earth after committing the deed. Malcolm's friend Kevin and I set out on a search for Malcolm while my hysterical mother Mrs Amanda Zeeman was having one of her dramatic cadenzas. Kevin reckoned that Malcolm was playing pin ball at a Café up the road on the bult which was next door to the old Strathvaal Primary School where I had been first enrolled as a grade one pupil. The memories and smells of that first year of school are still vivid in my mind, the apricot jam sandwiches wrapped in wax wrap, the little plastic bottle of Oros orange juice, the little black slate board, pencils, exercise books and the English reader.

Every day I would walk home down the bult (hill) along the tar road with my big brother Malcolm and his gang of friends. Every day we had to contend with the harassment of a pet crow that would be waiting to ambush us.

We saw Malcolm coming the downhill walking with his hands in his pockets quite nonchalantly as if he did not have a care in the world. My instruction from my mother was to tell Malcolm to come home immediately. I was to say nothing else. Kevin wanted to embellish on my mom's message with other threatening information like for instance that he must come home immediately because the doctor was going to give him an injection.

Before I could inform Malcolm that mom wants him to come home immediately Kevin blurted out that Dr Cohen was going to give him an injection. Malcolm instantly put two and two together and his face went ashen white with apprehension. I became livid with anger at his stupidity and insolence. I began to shout at him in the street so that the whole neighbourhood could hear what he had done. How could he spend the afternoon playing pin ball with not a care in the world after he had defaced the walls of the Cohen's home? How could he entertain the possibility that his act would have no consequences for him?

It was pathetic to watch him. He howled for remainder of the afternoon until nightfall while he washed down the Cohen's wall down with a hose and tried unsuccessfully to mop and wipe away the red stains from the walls. Dad had to pay for the repainting of the outside walls of the Cohen's home. Malcolm did not get a hiding. His punishment was the humiliation that he had to endure as the Cohens, mom, Kevin, Elsabe, the domestic servants and I watched him trying to clean the red stains off the wall.

After a while I made peace with my fate that my new bedroom in Hotazel would have thousands of different coloured glass marbles stuck into the concrete floor.

Mom always exaggerated. She said the manganese mine was in the Kalahari Desert which was covered in sand dunes for as far as the eye could see. They were flown in a small aircraft to the desert to visit the mine. My dad who was a mechanical engineer seemed to be some kind of bigshot on the mines. They wanted him very badly in Hotazel. So they flew my mom and dad to Hotazel to see the huge open cast crater of a mine from which broken rock was hauled out by huge yellow coloured Euclid trucks which were as big as houses.

They were away for a few days. We had to stay with family friends across the road from our house while they were away. I stayed with my friend Edith Malherbe. For three nights we slept in the same bed. Her parents took us to see Sleeping Beauty in Johannesburg at His Majesty's in Commissioner Street.

My mom loved the Marley tiles. And even though my dad got very sick on the roll-coaster flight to Hotazel and vomited into a paper bag he still took the job even after having to go through that ordeal.

Anyway I managed to form a mental picture of the house with Marley tiles in Hotazel after we saw a short documentary of a desert in Arizona which was screened before the main movie.
I couldn't believe that we were going to leave our home in Stilfontein. Our home in Stilfontein had become very special to me. A low diamond mesh fence separated the row of mine houses from the main road that connected Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom to Stilfontein.

And each day 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. 126. To issue a divorce by means of a Get document—Deuteronomy 24:1

127

While I stood on the lawn trying to come to grips with the fact we were going to move to a desert like the desert in Arizona I saw a chameleon walking on the top of the diamond mesh fence. I had never seen a live chameleon before. Fascinated and filled with wonder I watched it crawling along the top strand. It looked so exposed, so awkward and vulnerable. Its eyes mounted on mobile conical turrets eyed me out warily. Where was it going? Where did it come from? What was it thinking? I was curious beyond belief about this mobile sentient being which filled my visual world with such unspeakable mystery. What did it eat? Where does it sleep? What does it do with itself all day?

What was it thinking? It kept its wary little eye focused on me as it began to crawl faster along the fence towards our neighbour's property which happened to be the home of Dr Cohen.

What was it thinking? What could it possibly be thinking? I didn't realize it then, but I had asked the question that was going to preoccupy me for the rest of my life. I knew it was thinking. I could see that it was aware of my presence. It was a fully conscious being. It was sentient being that was aware of its surroundings which included me, a very curious little girl, who had become enthralled by the sight and presence of the chameleon on the fence.

It looked so vulnerable exposed on the top of the fence. I followed until it vanished into the brush in the Cohen's garden. I was born with an innate fascination for animals. There was something electrifyingly magical about living creatures that captivated me. I immediately began to search for more chameleons in the foliage of our garden. The search for chameleons became an obsession. From that day on I was always on the lookout for chameleons wherever I went, but I never found another chameleon.

Where was it going? Where did it come from? Where did it sleep? Did it have a home? What did it eat? What did it think about? These were the questions that filled my head as a small girl whenever some animal happened to catch my attention such as a lizard, a toad, a snail or a caterpillar. I did not realize at the time as a young girl in Stilfontein while I stood gazing at the chameleon in state which only be described as a mystical rapture of enthralment that I was going to build my career on trying to find answers to these questions as a Zoologist. Nor did I realize that the answers to my questions regard animal minds and animal behaviour would have profound personal philosophical, theological and political implications. The answers would shape my understanding of Marxist theory and my commitment to the class struggle and the communist revolution. Animal studies transformed me into a radical.

And each day 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. 127. A man must not remarry his wife after she has married someone else—Deuteronomy 24:4

128

Why study animal behaviour? Animal behaviour consists of everything that animals need to do in order to survive and reproduce in a given environment. And thinking may be one the most important things that animals need to do. I child I realized wild animals can look after themselves. It was evident that domestic animals could also look after themselves. When it came to humans, looking after ourselves was not such a simple matter. But there was a time in human evolution and existence when humans like wild animals could look after themselves by doing all the things that necessary for humans to survive as animals in a given environment without all the modern conveniences.

Animals do not always act instinctively or compulsively according to automatic impulses. They often have to go through a time consuming learning process before they are able to act decisively in response to externally imposed challenges. In responding in this delayed manner animals have demonstrated in various ways that they are capable of thinking first before acting or making choices when faced with situations that require problem solving before a decision can be made regarding what to do. Much of this animal thinking which precedes the making of decision involves the gathering of information. All of this indicates that animals have cognitive abilities which are consistent with them having a form of intelligence or even the possession of some kind of mental capacity, which is equivalent to having the ability to think.

And each day 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. 128. To do Yibum (marry childless brother's widow)--Deuteronomy 25:5

129

While I have forgotten much of the details of things and events that cluttered my life as a child in Stilfontein I found it strange that I could remember everything so vividly about the chameleon. I remember even less of my life in City Deep as a very young child. I remember the Christmas tree. I remember the little zinc square structure that dad built for Malcolm in the backyard which we called the 'clubhouse'. I don't know how Malcolm came up with the name clubhouse, but he wanted his own clubhouse. I don't even know what I have forgotten, especially when it comes to my early life at City Deep or even Stilfontein. What all have I forgotten in growing up? We either have our memories or we lose them. Which means that forgetfulness makes us a mystery to ourselves. Maybe it is only when we become aware of all that we have forgotten that we start experiencing the beginnings of recollection. And in recollection we begin to learn something about who we are. Plato also viewed learning as recollection.

The animals, reptiles, mammals, insects, and birds that seemed to populate the cactus filled desert of Arizona in such great abundance in the movie that I had seen made me imagine that the Kalahari Desert would be also similarly filled with an abundance of animals.

From our Stilfontein mine house, beyond the main road laid a veld dotted with acacia trees for as far as the eye could see. Sometimes on weekends we went on long walks with my dad into the veld across the main road. I was always fearful of the herds of cattle. It was on such walks that we would usually flush a hare. Malcolm and I would always chase after it. I would be breathless with excitement. Flushing a hare was always an intensely magical moment. The sudden unexpected appearance and sighting of any wild animal never ceased to be an electrifying experience. I needed to know everything about the hare. With the hare it was the same questions. I would pester my father with question after question: Where did it live, what did it eat, and what was the difference between a rabbit and hare?

I could still picture in my mind that very first sighting of a hare in the veld across the road from our home in Stilfontein. My heart skipped a beat. It bounded across the veld, running in a zigzag fashion, with its white tail bobbing. Years later while travelling along sand roads in the Kalahari late at night my eyes would always be riveted on the headlight lit road on the lookout for the next hare, the next duiker, the next steenbok, the next porcupine, or the next hedgehog. Every time I spotted some animal we had to slow down or even stop so that I could have proper look.

I have spent my entire life looking at animals. Looking at animals, observing what they do has been an experience of endless fascination.

Observing animals, watching what they do for hours on end seems like strange obsession. Why should it be viewed as a strange pre-occupation by the lay person? Studying animal behaviour has helped me to understand ourselves as humans. I have been a slave to this obsession of trying to expand mind and consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon. And this is the main reason why I have spent my entire life observing animals, watching them go about their business, watching, looking and observing what they do next, always in a state of fascination, passion, and wonder.

Why?

As a child Hotazel represented paradise on earth for me. In Hotazel I was surrounded by the living and abundant presence of real animals. As I have already stated, and it is worth repeating once more, in his book About Looking John Berger writes about the absence, the vanishing or disappearance of animals from ours surroundings, the fading of animals from our lives. 'Everywhere animals disappear,' Berger writes. Furthermore, he states that: 'In zoos they constitute the living monument of their disappearance.' With the arrival of modernity we gradually ceased to have any kind of relationship with real animals, that is, with wild animals, only wild animals are real animals in a very significant and profound sense of what it means for something to be an animal, an animal that we look at in as state of surprise, fascination, and wonderment. Wild animals have disappeared. They no longer have a place in our lives. They are no longer a significant presence or meaningful part of our lives. Wild animals now only have a spectral existence on the margins of our lives.

And each day 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. 129. To do Chalitzah (freeing a widow from yibum)--Deuteronomy 25:9

130

It was during the long days and nights in solitary confinement that I also began to have recollections of Corelle van der Buys. Corelle was an attractive blond. She was single and had been my mom's best friend from their schooldays. It was while lying on the foam mattress on the floor of the prison cell staring up at the ceiling of the cell that I suddenly realized that my dad had been having an affair with Corelle right under my mom's nose. I was amazed that I could remember so much, that I could discover dark secrets hidden in the recesses of my memories. Jacob Zeeman my father was a handsome man.

I experienced one of these vivid flashbacks. We were driving Corelle home. She had arrived by bus and had spent the Sunday with us at our home in City Deep. We had not yet moved to Stilfontein. On the way dad stopped at the Mobil petrol garage to fill the Hudson's tank. I was lying down on the back seat. The leather seat felt comfortably cold against my bare legs and through my thin dress. I stared up and saw Pegasus the flying red horse with wings. How old was I? I must have been four years old. How could it be possible that I could remember that nocturnal journey to Corelle's flat? I plotted the progress of our night journey by watching the lamps of the street lights flashing past against the star lit sky as I lay stretched out on the back seat of the Hudson. We turned into Harrow Road. I sat up on the back seat just in time to see the house flash past, the house where we had visited Dad's friends with Corelle. Dad always took me with to visit his friends who stayed in that house in Harrow Road.

We sat in the little lounge and watched 8 mm movies of their holiday to the Kruger National Park and also of all their holidays to other game reserves. For my birthday Corelle gave me a plastic rhino and a plastic lion. They become my favourite toys. I sat cross-legged on the carpet at my dad's feet. The projector clicked and whirred in the smoke filled room.

Now I also remember another home we used to visit. It was the home of Mr Harry Radman. Corelle sat next to dad. I would sit on Corelle's lap. She would hold me snugly in her arms. As a threesome, we, that is, dad, Corelle and me, also watched animal movies in Harry's large lounge. He showed his films on a 16 mm projector with sound. I don't know how many times we visited Harry Radman's home. Why this obsession with animal movies? I don't know. He was a big hunter maybe that was link? The animal movies, which were mainly of African wildlife and his hunting experiences was something which I remembered and it did have a long lasting effect on me. Later in life as a Zoologist I became interested in the philosophical aspects of what grew into the academic discipline that became known as animal studies. The Radman's must have been very wealthy. Harry and his wife lived in a double story mansion. Their house was in Parktown situated on high ridge which gave them a panoramic view of Saxonwold, Forest Town and the Johannesburg Zoo. Their house was filled with stuffed trophies, elephant tusks and stuffed elephant feet.

After Corelle visited us at City Deep dad would take her home. He usually parked the car under a lamp post next to Berea Park.

Berea Park, it by pure contingency that I find myself here in the park again. The future did not exist for me as I lay on the back seat in my father's car outside Berea Park while he was fucking Corelle in her flat. I saw my father move the curtains and peer down at the car to make sure that I was OK. He had taken his shirt off. He had a white vest on under the shirt. He stood looking out of the window dressed in his vest. Why had taken his clothes off?

Could the future be pre-arranged in advance to eventually become instantiated in a deterministic fashion in which as a grown woman I would be standing in the rain outside Corelle's flat. Or did the future not exist that night when I lay on the backseat of the car staring up at Corelle's bedroom and seeing my father standing in his vest at the window.

I remember that I waited for an eternity for dad to return. He had left me alone in the middle of the night in the car. I pressed my face against the window and stared out at the wrought iron fence mounted on the stone foot wall that surrounded the perimeter of Berea Park. How could I possibly know that many years later I would be arrested by the security police late at night in the same Berea Park where my dad had parked his car? I had been warned moments before they arrived at my flat in Bellevue. I discovered that all four of tires of my Volkswagen had been punctured. It was after my arrest in Berea Park that I often wondered even after listening to Malcolm's version of my arrest whether I had not been all along the unwitting victim of a sadistic cat and mouse game played out much to their great amusement, and possibly Malcolm's amusement.

Malcolm lived in a world of shadows, smoke and mirrors, where truth and falsehood seemed to merge seamlessly. It was a world in which men and women lied shamelessly. I remember my dad saying something about the police along the lines that you have to have a mind of criminal to catch a criminal.

Outside the rain had subsided to a light drizzle. I was still standing in the foyer of Corelle's flat. After staring for a while through the closed glass door of the flat foyer I turned around and walked over to the post boxes of the flat tenants which were fixed to the wall in the foyer. I began to read the names and I was stunned with surprise to discover the name Corelle van der Buys on one of the post boxes. After all these years she was still living in the same flat. So Corelle who had been fucking my father behind the back of mother was still living in the same flat after all these years. She had never married; she remained single, and had become an old spinster, an old spinster who had once been my dad's lover and mother's best friend. He had abandoned her when we moved to Stilfontein. Maybe Corelle was the reason why we left City Deep. Maybe it was also the reason why my mother was so excited about moving to Hotazel, was the need to put as must distance between our family and Corelle the real deep underlying reason for her embracing Hotazel with such enthusiasm. Hotazel did offer her a new life and it provide her with a refuge and a chance to save her marriage.

While staring at her name of the post box the thought did flashed through my mind that I should take the lift up to her floor. I could knock on her door or ring her door bell until she woke up and opened the door. What would I say to her?

'Hello auntie Corelle, I am Hannetjie Zeeman, I was the little girl who sat on your lap, the daughter of the man you were once having an affair with a long time ago. As you can see I am all grown up now. Can I hide in your flat? I am a fugitive on the run from the police. They want to arrest me because I am a Communist. I have my wallet with me. I have cash and credit cards. Could I please lay low in your flat for a few days? You could help me dye my hair blond and buy a dress and some clothes for me. I could catch a bus or train to Nelspruit and walk across the border into Swaziland. Or you could drive me to Swaziland. Or you I could hire a car to make my get away.'

I was thinking of the possibilities, of all the options that were open to me.

In theory if I managed to cross the border into Swaziland I could contact Isabella and she would arrange for my escape to Maputo and then I could be with her Inhambane while plans were being for me by the Party regarding my re-deployment. Maybe the Party will send me to Luanda in Angola or Lusaka in Zambia. Maybe I could stay in Maputo and then I would be close to Isabella. Maybe we could share a flat in Maputo, we could live as a couple, we could settle down like a married couple.

I left the flat foyer and walked across the deserted street back to the gates of Berea Park. The gates were open and I walked into the park and sat down on a wooden park bench under a towering fir tree. I was soaking wet and shivering with cold. Just beyond the southern border of the park a flash of lightning lit up the fifty story cylindrical skyscraper known as Ponte City. The upper part of the tower was hidden from view in a blanket of dark heavy clouds which now covered the entire city of Johannesburg. In another flash of lightning the silhouette of the Hillbrow Tower emerged from the inky darkness towering for a slit second above up the Hillbrow skyline before vanishing in the slanting rain.

I saw the headlights of an approaching car cutting through the rain as it travelled down Henden Street towards the park. It stopped momentary at the red robots at the bottom of the hill, ignoring the red lights it crossed over Harrow Road into Abel Road. I watched as the car stopped and parked in the street in front of the park entrance. It was parked under the lamp light at the same spot where my dad used to park his car when he gave a Corelle a lift back to her flat. Two men got out, dressed in raincoats and carrying umbrellas they entered the park and walked towards me. They stopped in front of me and asked in heavy accented Afrikaans:

"Is jy Hannah Petronella Hendrina Wilhelmina Zeeman?" (Are you Hannah Petronella Hendrina Wilhelmina Zeeman?)

I answered in Afrikaans:

"Ja ek is Hannah Zeeman." (Yes I am Hannah Zeeman.)

They then asked politely:

"Sal jy saam met ons kom?" (Will you come with us?)

Their comportment towards me signalled that they took me for an Afrikaner. I stood up and walked between them to the car. I felt a strange sense of relief. I somehow knew that this day would eventually come. I was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks before Malcolm had me brought to his office for the surprise interview. A week later the interrogations commenced. I answered all their questions after first making it clear that I wished to admit guilt to the charges and I wanted to have my day in court before a judge or magistrate. I told them of my role as media and publicity officer for the South African Communist Party. I remembered the Party guidelines: Appearing in court must be used as an opportunity to further the cause of the revolution. I must demonstrate defiance. On entering the court I must smile radiantly at the supporters sitting in the courtroom gallery. The occasion of the court appearance must be transformed theatrically into an effective expression of radical militancy. I have prepare myself mentally for this. I must be emotionally strong. I must not waver or show any weakness. I must appear unbowed and bursting with patriotic pride. I must use the court appearance as an opportunity to further the class interests of the struggling and oppressed proletariat of South Africa. It must be used as an occasion to galvanise the masses. I will be steadfast when facing the enemy. I will be determined. I will go through the drill like a true and disciplined soldier of the revolution. Dressed in a red dress, wearing a red bandanna and bright red lipstick I will turn around and face the gallery, I will raise my clenched fist and shout: 'Amandla! Mayibuye IAfrica!' This is my job as revolutionary, my patriotic duty and my obligation, I am just doing what revolutionaries have to do to further the cause of the struggle at every opportunity that presents itself.

And each day 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. 130. The widow must not remarry until the ties with her brother-in-law are removed—Deuteronomy 25:5

131

I followed Malcolm's advice. The truth was going to set me free. It was a supreme irony given the kind of world Malcolm and his colleagues in the security police lived. It was paradoxical and ironical that Malcolm who lived and worked in the shadowy world of lies told me to tell the truth. I did not know what the future held; I could not imagine that socialism and apartheid would collapse at the same time. Malcolm seemed know that the game was up with regard to white rule in South Africa. I did not know this then, but in retrospect I am now convinced that Malcolm knew this all along.

He had played me. My own brother had strung me along knowing full well how everything were going to unfold. He knew, but no one else in the Security Police knew that the game was up.

While the end of apartheid was imminent, I was none the wiser. I had to endure the long wait locked up in a prison cell writing my notes day by day, before I was eventually released into a world in which apartheid and socialism no longer existed. I lingered in a prison cell waiting for my trial date to be set. I waited in a prison cell preparing myself mentally for the seven year prison sentence that I thought awaited me.

But it was not going to be. There was going to be no trial, no judgment, no sentencing and no prison.

The day before my release Malcolm came to visit me in my cell. The Ascari accompanying him was carrying a cardboard box containing all my personal affects including all my notebooks. With an amused grin he said that he had enjoyed reading my notebooks. He informed me that he had contacted dad to come and collect me in the morning which was going to be the next day. He asked me to pass on his greeting as he would not be available tomorrow morning to see me off.

I could see he was in the mood for chatting with me. He had that mischievous smile which meant that he wanted to shock me. He wanted to shatter my world. He wanted to destroy my hopes and challenge my deepest beliefs. He wanted to call into question everything that I believed in. This was typical of my brother Malcolm.

He said he wouldn't be around to tomorrow morning to see dad as they were going to destroy tons of evidence which would incriminate everyone, including many Communists, UDF activists and ANC cadres who had been on the South African government's payroll. The truth about the depth of betrayal will never see the light of day. There would be no final judgment, everyone was deeply implicated. The truth would serve no purpose, no one really had any use for or interest in the truth other than as a weapon to blackmail. There was no honour among thieves. No one could be trusted with the truth. If the truth was allowed to emerge it would more destructive than a multi-headed medusa and once it had raised its ugly head no amount of decapitation would turn the daylight of enlightenment into the comfort of the night. So it would be best to leave things cloudy and muddy. Anyway it was in everyone's best interest. The orders for the destruction of the files had come from the highest government office and it was in terms of a deal that been struck with the consent all of interested parties, and those in the know. It had been agreed that it would be best for all to let bygones be bygones, and anyway, why should he care, he had been offered a lucrative contract private security contract with the new government to be. They needed his expertise and he was a professional, a professional respected by all. Listening to the torrent that spewed forth from Malcolm's mouth all I could was shake my head, my brother was also a mercenary for hire, he too was an Askari.

But in his own mind he was going to save the day for those who had betrayed the movement, so that they too would have their day at playing the role of traitors, and he will feel vindicated by this. 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone'. The day would come when some of the comrades will be in power, and once in power they too will have their chance to betray the principles that their movement fought for and for which many comrades sacrificed their lives. They too would prove in their conduct not be any different from Malcolm or any of Askari who served in the security police. They too would steal the food from the mouths of orphans. By the way the word Askari comes from the Arabic word عسكري (ʿaskarī), which means soldier.

'No, they are not going to be any different from any Askari, mark my words, dressed up in their smart suits, parading around like big shots of the revolution, in truth they are no more honourable than any Askari,' Malcolm said laughing, 'that is the way the world works, you can forget about your revolution, it is not going to happen, not in a thousand years, these guys, your comrades, are not interested in building socialism, they are only interested in one the thing and that is eating and getting fat, they are only interested in themselves. It is human nature, it has nothing to do with being Black or White. It proves that we are all the same. We all have the same rotten human nature beneath our skins. There is no difference between Black and White. And history will prove this. We are all corruptible and it is this fact that makes us the same. When you look at things objectivity, when you look at the fundamentals, the Black Man is no different from a White Man, especially when it comes to the deep things of the soul. They are the same as us. Believe me, I know, I have witness it a thousand times. It is astonishing, but it is true, deep down the Black Man is no different from the White Man. In this sense we are equal and have always been equal, we are equally bad. We lie to ourselves when we think we are different. Maybe we did evolve from the apes.'

The tall Askari who was standing in the corridor just outside the open cell door who had been listening to Malcom started to laugh, flashing his white teeth, he could not stop laughing, he laughed and laughed, shaking his head. And Malcolm stood there grinning. The laughing Askari was the person who had phoned me. I learnt that on Malcolm's instructions he had phoned me from a callbox close to Berea Park. They wanted to flush the vixen and see where she would run.

'Why did you go sit in the park in the rain after taking refuge in the foyer of the flat?' He suddenly asked.

In Malcolm's world we are all traitors, we are all involved in betrayal. For Malcolm it was in the nature of humankind to betray, to engage in idolatry, to fall. Man was essentially a fallible being. And it was this fallibility that makes Malcolm's job so easy. Betrayal has been his life's business, his life's work, he knows better than anyone how the dismal mechanics of betrayal works in the human mind. A man would betray everything to save himself. Knowing that this is the reality, Malcolm became the ultimate master at midwifing the inevitable birth of betrayal. He knows that death is the only escape the captive has. What kind of person can chose death? Very few! What is more precious than one's own life? The fear of death is the ultimate test of human moral frailty. He is a specialist in taking advance of human moral frailty. He is an expert at grooming the captive to become a traitor. Like the devil he understands the psychological dynamics of temptation. As a revolutionary it best to live as if we are already dead.

If I believed Malcolm, then South Africa was not going to be another Cuba. It was going to be business as usual, just a different shade of grey. Self-interest and self-enrichment was going to be all that really matters once they had taken over the levers of power. They were not going to be any different to the Nationalist Party. He said the MPLA was on the brink of rejecting Marxist-Leninism. He said Communism and Marxist-Leninism will be still born in South Africa. I remembered our old political arguments over apartheid at our parent's home in Hotazel when I was still a student. Malcolm would always throw out the challenge: 'Show me a true Communist. Show me a real revolutionary. They are all fakes, believe me. I have never met a real one. Maybe Ché Guevara was the only genuine revolutionary, but in the end he too took the bullet. Maybe that is the fate of all true revolutionaries, they will end up having to take the bullet. Maybe that is why we don't have any true revolutionaries.'

I had a strong feeling that Malcolm was the kind of man who had never shied away from giving the bullet. He had the courage of his convictions. I could see it in his eyes and in his demeanour, it was there in his smile, in his grin. I could read his mind. Knowing my brother I would not be surprised if he had acquired all the dark skills necessary for him to act as the sublime manipulator of the souls of men. Maybe he could do what no priest or psychiatrist could get right, who knows? It was a dirty war by all accounts, and if the captive does not buckle and bend, then give him or her the bullet.

Now according to Malcolm, like the MPLA in Angola, the new leaders in South Africa saw that there chance to eat had arrived. Life was like the words from the Who's lyric: 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'

He had finished what he wanted to say. He struggled his shoulders, gave me hug and a kiss on the lips. I did not doubt his demonstration of brotherly affection. I also loved him as my brother even though I had managed for the first time to get a glimpse into the inner workings of his mind. Just before he left he hesitated for a moment. 'Have you heard about the ANC camp called Quadro in Angola?' My answer was no. He shrugged his shoulders and left.

And each day 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. 131. The court must fine one who seduces a maiden—Exodus 22:15-16

132

From what I can remember at his farewell party, Jacob Zeeman my father was positively buoyant. It was not every day that at the young age of thirty three a man was appointed to the senior position of general manager of a mine. My parents had always been party animals. They loved to entertain. They were both good dancers. Dad wore his tuxedo and shiny black dancing shoes. He had combed back his Brylcreemed hair. Mom had put on a new tight fitting sheath-like shiny golden coloured cute Japanese styled evening dress, which accentuated her hour glass figure. To me as a child she looked drop dead gorgeous with her bright red lips.

Before moving to Hotazel in the New Year we spent the Christmas weekend of December 1960 with Ouma and Oupa Vollenhoven. Even as a young child the rift between my mother and me continued to deepen. We fought over every stupid silly little thing. We could not see eye to eye on anything. We could not have a normal conversation which did not turn into an argument. I wanted a robot and a Meccano Set for Christmas. Malcom had got a robot and Meccano Set for his recent birthday and those were the toys I wanted for Christmas. I wanted the robot, which I referred to as the Robot Man. I did not want a doll's house with furniture.

Oupa and OumaVollenhoven stayed in Belgravia in the second last house in Princess Street right next to George Goch station. Their house was two blocks away from Jules Street. Almost every Sunday before we moved to Stilfontein we always had lunch at their house, and then after lunch we would have late afternoon tea at Oupa and Ouma Zeeman's house in Malvern. Travelling the short journey from City Deep to Belgravia we would arrive just before lunch was served. After lunch we played outside in the street with the Middleton kids who lived in a large house across the street. In those days we would walk with the Middleton kids up Princess Street without any adult accompanying us, we cross Jules Street at the robot, and go play in the park which was at the corner of Park and Princess Street in Belgravia. In the shade of tall jacaranda trees we played on the seesaw, slide, merry-go-round and swings until Oupa came to fetch us.

My maternal grandparents, Ouma and Oupa Vollenhoven who lived in Princess Street next to George Goch station were typical Boere in that they kept chickens in their small backyard. As a child I watched in horror as Ouma decapitated a chicken, plucked and gutted it.

My paternal grandparents, Ouma and Oupa Zeeman lived just up the road from Ouma and Oupa Vollenhoven. Their house was in Fawcus Street Malvern. My dad's sister Auntie Hendrika Anna who was married to Uncle Roger Stopforth lived in Kensington over the koppie from Oupa Zeeman's house in Malvern. We used to stay over at Oupa Zeeman's house whenever we used to visit our grandparents while we lived in Stilfontein. When we moved to Hotazel we often spent the school holidays in Malvern or Belgravia at one of our grandparents. When it was our turn to we stay at Ouma and Oupa Zeeman's house we used would walk through the veld and over the Kensington koppies to visit our cousins. It was at Uncle Roger's house that Malcolm nearly killed himself by drinking petrol as a small boy while dad and Uncle Roger were rebuilding vintage cars.

And each day 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. 132. The rapist must marry the maiden (if she chooses)--Deuteronomy 22:29

133

Even though mom and dad had stopped going church shortly after their confirmation they both felt that it was their parental duty to make sure that Malcolm and I attend Sunday school. Elsabe was still too young for Sunday school. I think most of the young kids at City Deep went to the small stone Anglican Chapel. Apparently Malcolm and I were christened at the Chapel. Mom and Dad who had been baptized and confirmed in the Dutch Reformed Church (Afrikaans: Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk or NG Church) had become churchless parents. Oupa and Ouma Zeeman had also stopped going to church. It was only Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven who still went to the NG Church in Malvern every Sunday. The NG Church refused to baptise Malcolm and me because of our parent's zero church attendance. The kindly Anglican priest in Belgravia who asked no questions was quite willing to baptise us. And so we became Anglicans by virtue of our baptism in the Anglican Church.

And each day 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. 133. He is not allowed to divorce her—Deuteronomy 22:29

134

Oupa Zeeman fought in the North African campaign during the Second World War. He was a member of the MOTHs which stands for the Memorable Order of Tin Hats. The organization was a kind of brotherhood for white soldiers who had seen active service in World War I and World War II. Oupa Zeeman always proudly wore the little tin helmet on the lapel of his jacket. Apparently he was a member of the desert rats. Because Oupa Von Vollenhoven and Zeeman were both MOTH members all the grandchildren would attend the Christmas tree at the MOTH building which was located just to the west of Johannesburg Park Station. This was always a great family occasion.

And each day 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. 134. The slanderer must remain married to the wife he slandered—Deuteronomy 22:19

135

Just before we moved from City Deep to Stilfontein Uncle Roger moved with his family to Empangeni to establish a sugarcane farm. At the end of grade one during the December holidays we went to visit Uncle Roger on his sugarcane farm. One morning we woke to a huge commotion. We heard Auntie Anna shouting.

'There is a rhinoceros in the backyard.'

We jumped out of our beds and run barefoot into the kitchen dressed in our ankle length nighties, and sure enough there was indeed a black rhino in the backyard facing the kitchen door. We had climbed onto the kitchen counters next to the sink, kneeling on the counter with our faces pressed against the window panes we stared in total disbelief at the rhino.

Auntie Anna brandishing the kitchen broom standing her ground under the threshold of doorway began to shout: 'shoo, shoo, shoo,' while waving the broom in a menacing manner.

After a few minutes the rhino disappeared into the surrounding bush.

And each day 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. 135. He must not divorce her—Deuteronomy 22:19

136

On Monday the second of January 1961 we arrived at Hotazel in the brand new Austin Cambridge just after a rare massive thunder storm had saturated the dry Kalahari sands with life giving moisture. The Kalahari did not look like the desert in Arizona nor did our new home look like the rude dwellings that I had seen in the movie. The mine manager's house that we were moving into was a newly built six bedroomed double story face brick house on an acre stand. The house was surrounded by vast lush emerald green kikuyu lawns. To my delight the garden had a fishpond. In the backyard there was a nearly built fowl run and a large aviary; it was something that my dad had organized specially for me. He also had a pigeon loft built. In Stilfontein he had become a homing pigeon enthusiast.

While they were unpacking the furniture truck Malcolm, Elsabe and I went exploring. We walked over to the mine recreation club, which was referred to as the 'rec'. We discovered that next to the rec surrounded by a wooden split-pole fence was a swimming pool. I left Malcolm and Elsabe and went wondering off on my own because they wanted to go back to the house. I walked across the rugby field into a patch of veld. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a large chameleon walking with its odd gait over the fresh damp white Kalahari sand. It was the second chameleon that I had seen. I bent down to take a closer look. In a threatening display it inflated its body and began to hiss furiously at me, opening its gape widely. Again like with the previous chameleon questions flooded my mind regarding this beautiful slow moving reptilian animal:

Where did it come from? Where was it going? Where did it live and where did it sleep? What was it thinking?

I noticed that it had left a spoor trial behind in the soft wet sand. I began to follow the spoor to see where the chameleon had come from. I must have followed its spoor trail for more than 100 meters before I decided to give up and go back to our new home. I was in state of elation. I had fallen in love with Hotazel and the surrounding Kalahari.

Does the chameleon have a mind? It was clearly very aware of me. Does a chameleon have conscious, does it have self-consciousness? Does it feel? What does it feel? What does it mean to feel? To feel is to experience. Surely it must be able to feel something in order for it to be a sentient creature. By observing its behaviour we assume that it possesses the capacity or the power to feel hungry, danger, pain, fear, cold, hot, or excited, and so on.

Feeling something is the same as experiencing something. To experience something is to feel a sensation. To feel a sensation is to be aware of the sensation. In a materialist Universe it is matter that is feeling, it is matter that is aware of a sensation, to be aware of a sensation is to be on the road to full blown conscious including self-consciousness.

But on the other hand we honestly don't know how 'matter' can feel and experience consciousness especially if we hold to the materialist metaphysical thesis that the physical Universe is causally closed and all physical effects have physical causes. If this is our metaphysics then I promise you that mental activity and conscious is going to be a mystery for quite a while. If we can solve the problem of the mechanisms responsible for mind or what we call consciousness then we will be able to build a human robot with a mind and with free will.

And each day 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. 136. To fulfill the laws of the woman suspected of adultery (Sotah)--Numbers 5:30

137

Sartre, the modern philosopher of consciousness, did not ask the fundamental question regarding the origination consciousness, nor did Descartes who was the original philosopher of consciousness. He did not inquire into the material conditions of its possibility. The material conditions which make it possibility for something to possess the 'power' or capacity of consciousness, includes the causal mechanisms that result in consciousness or in the state of being conscious. Can we deny that the chameleon was in a state of conscious? Can it see something without being conscious of what it is seeing? Every experience of any sentient being has to be an experience of something.

The chameleon sees me! How could I possibly doubt that? The chameleon is showing all the signs that it sees me. My encounter with the chameleon resulted in the chameleon experiencing something. A human cannot be conscious without being consciousness of something.

With regard to its attempts to escape from my presence the chameleon's locomotory powers were absurdly modest in the extreme. As a young prepubescent girl I realized this, yet I was too fearful to touch it and I make no attempt to capture it.

For some reason the chameleon does not move, it remains fixed in one spot, trapped in my gaze, standing a full yard away from the exposed toes of my sandaled feet, bright green on the rain washed white Kalahari sand, it is exposed and vulnerable. It remains frozen. To escape it must not move. I repeat, to escape it must not move! Its immobility makes it appear inanimate. A large leaf lying on ground. I am fascinated. But also extremely cautious.

I step forward half a yard closer and bend over to have a closer look. Now the chameleon suddenly moves, it puffs up its throat, it opens its mouth in a wide fearsome gape and it hisses aggressively. My heart skips a beat. I pull back immediately, a rapid reflex response. Eyeing me out with its tiny eyes, watching my every move, it is no longer the passively frozen vulnerable green creature, instead it has become black with anger, and it now seems ready to lunge at me with all the ferocity that it can muster.

And each day 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. 137. Not to put oil on her meal offering—Numbers 5:15

138

Sartre in his metaphysics of freedom misses the point about essence.

And each day 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. 138. Not to put frankincense on her Meal Offering—Numbers 5:15

139

It was also strange that like the chameleon walking along the top of the fence in Stilfontein I also remembered the large fish in the quarter-full bath in the bathroom of a flat in Klerksdorp. Everything else was obscure. I can't remember whose flat it was or how we happened to be in that flat or why we were in the flat. It was just dad and me. We both stood in the bath room staring at the fish. Then my dad left me with the fish. I knelt down on the tiled bathroom floor and leaning over the side of the bath, while lost in state of silent enthralment, I stared for a long time at the large black barbel. It could have only been a barbel; I clearly remember becoming quite fascinated by its long sensory whiskers. Eventually I called away:

'Hannetjie kom kry a stuk koek, ons het tee vir jou geskink.' (Hannah come get some cake, we have made some tea for you.

I remember being called away to have some tea and chocolate cake in the small dim lounge. I can't remember the woman's face. The flat had a small balcony. It was late afternoon, eating the cake, I stared down at the town's empty streets. My fingers and face were sticky with chocolate icing. As young child the Klerksdorp central business district seemed like a huge city.

And each day 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. 139. Not to have sexual relations with your mother—Leviticus 18:7

140

While still staying in Stilfontein we also went to Klerksdorp to see an Elvis movie on a Saturday afternoon. Years later while travelling in South America with Angelica we stopped over in Montevideo in Uruguay for a few days and for fun we spent an evening watching an Elvis movie in an ancient movie theatre that had probably been built in the 1930s. It turned out to be the same movie I saw in Klerksdorp as a child. The similarities between the movie theatre in Klerksdorp and Montevideo was almost a perfect match. The mood, the ambience, the architecture, the sounds, everything about the movie theatre brought back that experience I had in my childhood on that Saturday afternoon in Klerksdorp bioscope.

Now also on Sundays I would go with my dad on long drives to Klerksdorp or Potchefstroom speeding along the road in the bright metallic blue Riley Nine Lynx Tourer, cruising past fields flush with the emerald green maize crops shimmering and rippling under deep blue skies in the bright light of summer. He would stop at a corner Café in Potchefstroom or Klerksdorp and buy me a Tex. It must have been on one of these Saturday or Sunday afternoon joy rides that we visited the flat in Klerksdorp and had tea and cake after viewing the fish in the bath.

And each day 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.140. Not to have sexual relations with your father's wife—Leviticus 18:8

141

They must have caught the fish in the Vaal River. I can vaguely recall that we went on several fishing outings to the Vaal River on weekends. Sometimes we camped overnight on the banks of the Vaal River under the acacia trees. The men would fish late into the late. Paraffin and hissing hurricane lamps lit up dark nights on the river bank. We would play 'Jack, Jack spot the light' with torches. They would cook pap and braai wors on the coals of an acacia wood fire. After the braai they would put logs on the fire and we would sit around the camp fire and gaze into the flames while listening to men speak about fishing and hunting trips. I remember the steep black clay banks, the wide grey river. I remember the bare hard red earth beneath the canopies of acacia trees, trees with big white thorns that reminded me of the horns of cattle. In fact we modelled oxen from the black clay and used the sharp white thorns as the horns. While the men fished we wondered under the canopies of acacia trees along the banks of the Vaal River. We flushed francolin; we flushed flocks of guinea fowl, sometimes we saw a steenbok or a grey duiker. And sometimes my father's friends from the mines left their fishing rods to go hunt guinea fowl with their .22 rifles. They drove off in a car, following the winding sand track that followed the river. When they returned the boot would be filled with dead birds and the floors of car would be covered with brass coloured spent cartridge cases. They boil water in huge pot on the fire, soak the birds and pluck the feathers and that night they would roast the guinea fowl on the coals for our supper. Sometimes at night they would drive into the dark with a powerful spot light to shoot a buck on some farm road. They also once shot a hare which they skinned and roasted on the fire that night for supper.

If we returned home in the early afternoons our domestic servant would soak the guinea fowls in hot water and plucked their feathers like Ouma Vollenhoven did with the chickens that she had slaughtered in the backyard. I collected a few of the wing feathers of the guinea fowls and placed them a shoe box with the porcupine quills that I could in the veld across the road from our home Stilfontein. In the box I had the skull of a scrub hare and a grey duiker that we had also found in the veld across the road while on one of the long walks that we went on with dad.

Now I remember, they did not catch the fish which I saw in the bath while fishing in the Vaal River. They caught the fish at Klerksdorp Dam. I remember watching boys fishing off the peer at Klerksdorp Dam. With hand held lines they caught long silvery shining fish that looked sardines. It was cloudy that day, the sky grey and overcast. The dense brush and trees on the other side of the dam wore a darker shade of green. While I stood on the peer watching the boys' fish it began drizzle. The boys that were fishing on the peer were wearing black mackintoshes, they were bare footed, and they spoke Afrikaans.

And each day 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. 141. Not to have sexual relations with your sister—Leviticus 18:9

142

Sometimes we drove in the Riley Nine Lynx Tourer to Potchefstroom Dam. I sat on the back seat with Malcolm, Elsabe. Mom sat in the front with dad. Mom wore a scarf and dark glasses. Her lips were red, she wore a long flowing floral print dress. I always thought she looked like a film star from one of those nineteen fifties movies. My mom loved it when people said that she looked like Audrey Hepburn. She was extremely attractive, there was no doubt about that, and I suppose she had reason to be vain. She was far more beautiful than Corelle. I could not help wondering why my dad found Corelle attractive and why he had an affair with her.

And each day 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. 142. Not to have sexual relations with your father's wife's daughter (from your father)--Leviticus 18:11

143

As I struggle to make something of my prison notes I think continually about thinking, language, speech and writing. We cannot separate speaking from thinking, but we can separate thinking from speaking. Pure awareness, pure consciousness, the mind emptied of words. Just try thinking or being aware without a single word in your mind. I can think without resorting to words. Man is the thinking and speaking animal. This supposedly separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Within a language a word functions as a sign for something, that is to say, the word stands for something. This much is clear. In language words stand for something and the texture of fiction woven from words into the fabric that we feel with our souls is made possible by virtue of the meaning of words.

In order for strings of spoken words (la parole) or written words, functioning in full accord with a rule-based system of signs which we call language (la langue), to represent or describe or communicate something, say a state of affairs, then for the words themselves to be fully effective in their task, they necessarily need to possess the power to create in our minds or imagination the mental picture which vividly corresponds to the actual reality of the state-of-affairs that is the focus of our attention or conscious awareness, as both speakers, listeners or readers.

After stating this as the goal of speech or writing I am struck by the poverty of words and the poverty of language. Do words possess revelatory power? To reveal is make something apparent which was hidden or concealed before. To represent something is to describe it, to describe is to reveal, to reveal is to disclose and to unconceal, to disclose and to unconceal is to make apparent the true and real nature of something. To unconceal is to engage in ontology. Ontology, which deals with questions regarding the real nature of things, is at the heart of what is required for words to have meaning or sense or significance within the context of speech and writing.

And each day 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. 143. Not to have sexual relations with your son's daughter—Leviticus 18:10

144

It was the year 1975, during the transition between late summer and early autumn it was still warm enough to swim and I had decided to continue swimming fifty lengths every evening until the onset of winter when the water would become too cold. It was tumultuous time. In an incredibly short space of time I was undergoing so many life changing experiences, that I felt almost dizzy with excitement at times. During that warm autumn days my life changed dramatically. So many things were happening at once. Yael and I were deeply in love. I don't think that I would ever again love someone as passionately as I loved Yael. And yet we were so different, emotionally and intellectually, maybe that was why we were in love. And in the midst of our love affair I found myself on the shores of a new intellectual continent. The student Left at Wits on their own initiative run a six weeks seminar programme involving lecturers and discussions. Yael dutifully tagged along with me to all the seminars, lectures, discussions workshops and cheese and wine parties. During those halcyon autumn days I became acquainted with the Pantheon of the leading lights in the universe of the mind. I was bursting with such energy, with such passion, with such a zest for life, and all the time I had this strange and acute awareness that I was living in the microcosm of the Jew. The Jews were the dominant personalities in the student Left. They had the greatest influence, they were the most articulate, they were the most persuasive, they were the most well read, they always seemed to be so exceedingly knowledgeable on all important and relevant matters, and they were the most Marxist, the most radical, they decided who was a vulgar Marxist or was not. Yet in the case of Yael, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse meant nothing to her. And surprisingly the dark figure of Martin Heidegger loomed large in the seminar programme, even the Jews became fascinated with him, as much as they were drawn to Nietzsche. And I too became fascinated with Heidegger. Yael was amused with the fact that I self-identified as a Marxist. I told her plainly that I saw myself as communist and her reply was: 'You can't get more Jewish than that!' In her mind all this was good. I was becoming Jewish. And that was important to her. She never expressed a political opinion. So I was taken by surprise when she confessed that politically she was a Zionist. I did not know what she meant by that, so she explained. She believed in the political idea of the Jewish State. She loved Israel, South Africa was just another place in which she just happened to be in a very disconnected manner, it was not really home, she didn't feel that she belonged, she could not really identify with anything that happened to be peculiarly South African. For her South Africa was a strange land. She would be happier in either America or Israel, but never in South Africa. However, our love overrode our differences. The idea of Israel left me cold. I felt completely indifferent to the fate of Israel, only Africa mattered to me. I felt that my fate was joined to the fate of the African continent.

And each day 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. 144. Not to have sexual relations with your daughter—Leviticus 18:10

145

In 1943 in the midst of the Holocaust Heidegger a Nazi at the time ironically delivered his lecture 'On the Essence of Truth'. The essence of truth had no bearing on Auschwitz. There was no metaphysical connection between the destiny of the Jew and the nature or essence of truth. In this remarkable lecture one could hear as an echo between the lines, like a distant train in the night en route to its destination, what was obvious: Truth for the Jew involved nothing more than brute cold calculated computation, the essence of truth was exhausted in the act of counting and in the enumeration of the accumulated. Heidegger also dealt with the nature of truth in his essay 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth'. In this essay Heidegger expresses the opinion that in order to gain access to the truth the reader needs to expose or unconceal what has been left unsaid in the writings of the writer, especially in writings such as Plato's dialogues. In the case of Plato's writings, Heidegger proposes that Plato left unsaid the changes that he has made with regard to his own revised ideas of what constitutes the essence of truth. So Heidegger is advocating that we have read deeper when reading Plato. In the Republic (VII, 514 a, 2 to 517 a, 7) we have the account of the allegory of the cave, which I quote for the convenience of the reader as follows:

"Imagine this: People live under the earth in a cave-like dwelling. Stretching a long way up toward the daylight is its entrance, toward which the entire cave is gathered. The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck. That is why they also stay in the same place so that the only thing for them to look at is whatever they encounter in front of their faces. But because they are shackled, they are unable to turn their heads around. Some light, to be sure, is allowed them, namely from a fire that casts its glow toward them from behind them, being above and at some distance. Between the fire and those who are shackled (behind their backs, therefore), there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built along the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets."

"I see," he [Glaucon] said.

"So now imagine that along this low wall people are carrying all sorts of things that reach up higher than the wall: statues and other carvings made of stone or wood and many other artefacts that people have made. As you would expect, some [of the carriers] are talking to each other (as they walk along) and some are silent.

[Glaucon:] "This is an unusual picture that you are presenting here, and these are unusual prisoners."

"They are very much like us humans," I responded. "What do you think? From the beginning people like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help by others, to see anything besides the shadows that the glow of the fire (continually) projects on the wall in front of them."

[Glaucon:] "How could it be otherwise," he said, "since they are forced to keep their heads immobile for their entire lives?"

"And what do they see of the things that are being carried along (behind them)? Don't they see only these (namely the shadows)?"

[Glaucon:] "Certainly."

"Now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to discuss it, don't you think that they would regard what they saw on the wall as beings?"

[Glaucon:] "They would have to."

"And now what if this prison also had an echo reverberating off the wall in front of them (the wall that they always and only look at)? Whenever one of those walking behind the people in chains (and carrying the things) would make a sound, do you think the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were anyone other than the shadow passing in front of them?"

[Glaucon:] "Nothing else, by Zeus!"

"In no way, then," I responded, "would those who are chained in this way ever consider anything else to be the unhidden except the shadows cast by the artefacts."

"That would absolutely have to be the case," he [Glaucon] said.

"So now," I replied, "watch the process whereby the prisoners are set free from their chains and, along with that, cured of their lack of insight. Moreover, consider what sort of lack of insight it must be if the following were to happen to those who were chained. Whenever any one of them was unchained and forced to stand up suddenly, to turn around, to walk, and to look up toward the light, in each case the person would be able to do this only with pain; and because of the flickering brightness he would be unable to look at those things whose shadows he saw before. (If all this were to happen to the prisoner), what do you think he would say if someone were to inform him that what he saw before were (mere) trifles but that now he was much nearer to beings; and that he also saw more correctly as a consequence of now being turned toward what is more in being? And if someone were (then) to show him any of the things that were passing by, and forced him to answer the question about what it is, don't you think that he would be at wit's end and in addition would also consider that what he saw before (with his own eyes) is more unhidden than what is now being shown (to him by someone else)?"

"Yes, absolutely," he said.

"And if someone even forced him to look into the glare of the fire, wouldn't his eyes hurt him, and wouldn't he then turn away and flee (back) to what he is capable of looking at?

And wouldn't he decide that (what he could see before without any help) is in fact clearer than what is now being shown to him?"

"Precisely," he said.

"Now, however, if someone, using force, were to drag him (who had been freed from

his chains) away from there and to pull him up the cave's rough and steep ascent and not let go of him until he had dragged him out into the light of the sun, wouldn't the one who had been dragged like this feel, in the process, pain and rage? And when he got into the sunlight, wouldn't his eyes be filled with glare, wouldn't he therefore be incapable of seeing anything that is now revealed to him as the unhidden?"

"He would be entirely incapable of doing that," he said, "at least not right away."

"It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it is a matter of grasping with one's eyes what is up there (outside the cave, in the light of the sun). And (in this process of getting accustomed) he would first and most easily be able to look at shadows and thereafter at the images of people and of other things as they are reflected in water. Later, however, he would be able to view the things themselves (the beings, instead of their dim reflections). But within the range of such things, it might be easier for him to contemplate whatever there is in the heavenly dome, and the dome itself, by doing so at night by looking at the light of the stars and the moon, (easier, that is to say,) than by looking at the sun and its glare during the day."

[Glaucon:] "Certainly."

"But I think that finally he would be in a condition to look at the sun itself, not just at its reflection, whether in water or wherever else it might appear, but at the sun itself, as it is in and of itself and in the place proper to it, and to contemplate of what sort it is."

"It would necessarily happen this way," he said.

"And having done all that, by this time he would also be able to gather the following about it (the sun): that it is what grants both the seasons and the years and what governs everything that there is in the (now) visible region (of sunlight), and moreover that it (the sun) is also the cause of all those things that the people (who dwell below in the cave) in some way have before their eyes."

"It is obvious," he said, "that he would get to these (the sun and whatever stands in its light) after he had gone out beyond those (that are merely reflections and shadows)."

"And then what? If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the 'knowing' that passes as the norm there, and the people with whom he once was chained,4 don't you think he would consider himself lucky because of the transformation (that had happened), and by contrast feel sorry for them?"

[Glaucon:] "Very much so."

"However, if (among the people) in the previous dwelling place (i.e., the cave) certain honours and commendations were established for whoever most clearly catches sight of what passes by (i.e., things that happen every day) and also best remembers which ones normally come first, which ones later, and which ones at the same time, and for whoever (then) could most easily predict which ones might come next -- do you think that he (who had gotten out of the cave) would (now still) envy those (in the cave) and want to compete with those (there) who are esteemed and have power? Or wouldn't he much rather wish upon himself the condition that Homer speaks of: 'To live on the land (above ground) as the [213] paid menial of another destitute peasant'? And won't he prefer to put up with absolutely anything else rather than associate himself with those opinions (that hold in the cave) and be that kind of human being?"

"I think," he said, "that he would prefer to endure everything rather than be that kind of human being (the cave-dwelling kind)."

"And now," I responded, "consider this: If this person who had gotten out of the cave were to go back down again and sit in the same place as before, wouldn't he find in that case, coming suddenly out of the sunlight, that his eyes were filled with darkness?"

"Yes, very much so, he said.

"If he now once more had to engage himself with those who had remained shackled there in the business of asserting and maintaining opinions about the shadows -- while his eyes are still weak and before they have readjusted, an adjustment that would require quite a bit of time -- wouldn't he then be exposed to ridicule down there? And wouldn't they let him know that, yes, he had gone up but only in order to come back (into the cave) with his eyes ruined, and so it certainly does not pay to go up? And if they can get hold of this person who undertakes to free them from their chains and to lead them up, and if they could kill him, will they not actually kill him?"

"They certainly will," he said.

What does the above translation the Plato's allegory of the cave mean for me with regard to Heidegger's idea of the unsaid nature of truth? I personally read the allegory of the cave politically. The cavern of the cave with its domed roof represents the world or universe of the City or world enclosed hermetically within the walls or boundaries of the City, where the City always stands as a metaphor or simile for the Oligarchy. The fire burning in the cave is the image of the sun. The allegory of the cave is about the education of the soul, the Greek word used in this context is 'paideia'. The education of the soul is not without political consequences for the City. The City stands as barrier to the education of the soul. Truth as correction serves the Telos of the City were truth as unconcealment threatens the existence of the City. To unconceal is a Heideggerian concept. According the Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's allegory of the cave, truth is 'unhiddenness' or truth is for something to be unconcealed.

And each day 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. 145. Not to have sexual relations with your daughter's daughter—Leviticus 18:10

146

I realize that in order to visualize or 'see' the full meaning of a word or sentence or concept I have to apply my imagination. I have to picture the meaning of a word or sentence in my mind. I have to construct a mental image or a mental picture in my mind, of which only I am conscious of. In the act of reading I perform a mental or imaginative re-creation of a spectacle, of a drama, of a life-world or an entire Universe for that matter. Together the act of writing and the act of reading as a mental power or as a power of the consciousness or the mind was something that developed long after the evolution of the human capacity for speaking a language. Writing and reading was made possible only by co-opting pre-existing parts of the brain which had evolved for other neurological functions. The human capacity to write and read is an exaptation rather than an adaptation. Exaptation is the process by which an organ like the brain for examples acquires new or novel functions for which the brain was not originally adapted or selected to perform to increase the fitness of human beings.

And each day 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. 146. Not to marry a woman and her daughter—Leviticus 18:17

147

Reading between the lines

Is there a method for reading between the lines? To read between the lines is to give voice, a hermeneutic voice, to the unthought and the unsaid, which lies hidden in writing or behind writing. The unthought is not just mere thoughtlessness.

And each day 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. 147. Not to marry a woman and her son's daughter—Leviticus 18:17

148

Rita Hayworth

The signs were always there, and for some reason as a child I could not ignore them, but indulged them with the natural pleasure of pure innocence. I loved my own kind, l loved women. Starting from the age of nine I began to experience a strong fantasy filled obsession with female actresses. In the process I became increasing enthralled with a curious fascination for female faces, lips, eyes, hair and bodies, especially of the leading female film stars. I wanted to be beautiful and sensual like them. I became hyper-feminine as an adolescent girl but not in terms of conforming to the stereotypical-patriarchical female-heterosexual role playing in the field of the masculinized gaze, but rather in terms of being the seducing female subject in the field of the aroused libidinous gaze of the other female who I imagined to be same-sexed erotically interested in me. And so I become strongly affected by the performative and expressive physical externalities of femininity, especially in terms of the codes, signs, symbols and signals of sensuality, sexiness and glamour which would captivate the feminine gaze. I wanted to be like the female cinematic characters who I was drawn too. I wanted to be Rita Hayworth dancing not with Fred Astaire but with another beautiful woman. I wanted to be in the embrace of Rita Hayworth, I wanted dance with her, I wanted her to kiss me and seduce me.

Every Saturday night was movie night in Hotazel. After supper with the sun having just slipped away and the evening star freshly visible in the darkest purple-blue Kalahari sky I joined the gang of bare-footed kids on the early evening walk to the rec hall to book our seats. For a while when I was ten Gertrude Viljoen who could barely speak a word of English was my best friend, seated on the hard foldup wooden chairs in the rec, we would hold hands in the dark while watching movies. Afterwards we would walk back trailing behind the others, arms around each other's waist. No one was the wiser, not even Gertrude, she did not know that I had a crush on her. And then her family left Hotazel for greener pastures. Holding hands and physical closeness, and affectionate kissing, was natural for Afrikaners, and especially so with Gertrude. Maybe she was also queer. I will never know.

Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Never Get Rich (So near and yet so far). You said I was beautiful. I am old fashioned.

And each day 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. 148. Not to marry a woman and her daughter's daughter—Leviticus 18:17

149

Years later while I was a border at Potchefstroom Girls High we used to sometimes go for picnics at Potch (short for Potchefstroom) Dam on Sundays after church. We would go in the school bus. For me it was always like going down memory lane. After lunch Alice van Niekerk and I would wonder off from the rest. We would spread a blanket under a tree, lay stretched out on our backs next to each other and listen to LM radio. I had known her from standard six when we landed up in the same dorm in the hostel known as North House. North House was a grand old three story building that had been built in 1937. The kitchen and dining room were on the ground floor. The dining room was used as the prep rooms in the afternoon and in the evenings after supper for studying and for doing homework. The prefects who acted as hall monitors made sure that no one talked and that everyone was either studying or doing homework.

Alice was the second girl that I fell in love with while in high school. I eventually fell in love with her when we were in standard nine two years after the debacle of my first love affair which landed me in hot water. Alice like the rest of the school knew that I was lesbian and I had a strong suspicion that she was also a lesbian. We secretly fell in love.

Interlude and refrain: I have returned to the room of childhood. As a standard nine sixteen year old teenager I shared the bed of my childhood with Alice. She spent a week of the July school holidays at our home in Hotazel. I had my first real intimate sexual experience in this bed in this room with Alice. We had to hide the fact that we were in love. My mom suggested that Alice should sleep in the spare bed room. I quickly said: 'No, we can sleep in my bed in my room.' There was a naughty conspiratorial smile on Alice's face. We were randy teenagers and could not wait any longer to have sex. After supper we showered together, changed into our pyjamas, and said goodnight to everyone.

'Why do you want go to bed so early? It is school holidays, you can stay up late and get up late.' My mom said.

We are both actually very, very, tired was our answer.

I locked the door. After stripping off our pyjamas I put off the light and we jumped into bed naked like two bitches on heat. With our lips pressed together and mobile tongues probing the depths of each other's mouth I fondled Alice's breasts while she fondled my breasts. In a whisper hot with arousal I suggested that we insert our fingers into each other's vaginas. I felt her forefinger entering my vagina, and then she squeezed two fingers into my vagina. I did the same to her. Does it feel nice? She whispered in my ear. It feels lovely, I love it. I answered. Me too she replied. After some experimentation we both learnt how to bring each bring each to orgasm through mutual clitoral stimulation.

Once more Saturday night came to Hotazel, and Alice and I decided to go and watch a movie at the rec club. 'From Russia with Love' was the feature movie for the evening. We were both pleasantly captivated by the Italian actress Daniela Bianchi who played the role of Tatiana Romanova.

When we got back dad was listening to 'Sing, Sing, Sing' played by the Benny Goodman band with Benny on the sax, Gene Krupa on the drums and Harry James on trumpet solo. What can I say? I had grown up with this kind of music. 'Play it again, play it again, right from the start', I cried out excitedly. I don't know what got into us, but it was so spontaneous, Alice and I started to go wild, dancing in a frenzy, the drums going crazy, the trumpet blaring. Then not to spoil our fun dad played Glen Miller's 'In the Mood'. And we did another dance performance, and in the process we woke up mom. She came down in her night gown scowling at us. 'You making too much noise, you going to wake up the whole of Hotazel at this rate'. And dad tried to pacify her. 'Leave them they having fun, they giving me a great cabaret show, come sit down and watch while I make you some tea, Hannah honey show your mom what you and Alice can do. The two of them are terrific you not going to believe your eyes, I promise you'. We gave my mom our improvised version of a 'Boogie Woogie Country Girl' and 'Candyman' cabaret show. It was late and both of us were flushed with excitement. 'I think it is way past our bedtime girls,' my dad said. 'No the night is still young and it is school holidays,' I exclaimed. I was manic. 'Look there is full moon outside, I want to go for a walk'.

Anyway after some arm wrestling with my parents we put on our coats and went out into the chilly Kalahari night. We were both on a high. It was one of the most unforgettable nights that I have ever experienced in my life. Even now that memory is so vivid. We walked towards the end of the road, and then followed a foot path westwards into the Kalahari savannah scrub land. The landscape was bathed in magical silvery crystal moonlight. As we walked we could hear the rustle of animals in the brush and in the distance we heard a jackal call. We stopped and gazed up at the star lit sky. 'Hannah honey darling kiss me.' Our bodies pressed tightly together in a warm embrace against the creeping cold of the night, we kissed each other passionately, long, lingering, and moist kisses. We eventually got into bed at 2.00 am in the morning. We lay in bed listening to Led Zeppelin on my cassette tape recorder while making love. Mine is a tale that cannot be told Alice whispered and we started giggling. 'C'est si bon,' she said before we eventually fell asleep.

And each day 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. 149. Not to have sexual relations with your father's sister—Leviticus 18:12

150

Each species of animals has evolved its own unique life history. An animal's life history includes things or variables or properties like its home range, it mode of locomotion, it physiology, it mass, its diet, its life span, its distribution, its fecundity, its niche, its bioenergetics, its ecophysiology, it behavioural ecology, its trophic position in the food chain, it social behaviour, its foraging strategy, its population dynamics and so on.

The isolated individual animal's survival or the survival of the species as whole to which it belongs depends on the efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness of the various components of its life history strategy or in other words how well it is adapted to its specific niche and how effectively it can outcompete any competitor that happens to share or invade the same niche.

It has been hypothesized that any given species of animal or plant is the sole occupant of a unique multidimensional niche, which means it does not share this unique multidimensional niche with any competitor and so from this idea we have the competitive exclusion principle which means that only one species can occupy a given multidimensional niche. Different species are functionally equivalent they occupy or are adapted to similar niches or niches which overlap. A niche can be conceived as the suite of the resources the availability of which are essential for the persistence of the species. Competition between species occurs when their niches overlap. Competition between two different species occurs when there is mutual exploitation of a limiting resource. Niche overlap occurs with respect to limiting resources that are required by two or more different species. Niche overlap is a prerequisite for competition between different species. Competition inevitably lead to the exclusion from the niche of the species that is less efficient or less effective with regard to the exploitation of the shared resource associated with the niche overlap.

And each day 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. 150. Not to have sexual relations with your mother's sister—Leviticus 18:13

151

What is art? During the 1970s I never fully understood the terms of the debate "Art for Art's Sake" that raged on Wit's Campus during those revolutionary years at Wits that preceded the unexpected eruption of the Soweto Students uprising. In the early 1970s Wits was a hotbed of revolutionary debate. The revolutionary debate raged in the student body. It was debate that had spilt out of the Central Block lecturer theatres and corridors down the steps of the Great Hall onto the library lawns and into the canteen in the student's union building as professors introduced students to Marxist-Leninism, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Althusser, Habermas, and Lukács. As I have already said, students had set up a parallel academic course in philosophy on Wits Campus which popularized Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Marxist-Leninism. By the end of my first year at Wits I was a full blown Marxist, a Marxist-Leninist. I am embraced Communism, I called myself a Communist. Mass meetings and protests on the Jan Smuts Avenue had radicalize me. I took to student political radicalism like a fish to water. What was it that made me a Communist before I was a recruited into the South African Communist Party? Many factors played a role in my political conversion. I was drawn to Communism for mainly intellectual reasons, rather than moral reasons or reasons springing from white guilt. I did not need any convincing to see that apartheid was an absolutely horrible, disgusting, immoral and cruel political system. And I was never a bleeding heart liberal. There was also the confounding phenomenon of my physiognomy. I was dark! I had a darker than average skin tone for a white person. In my head I was a white person. I experienced myself as being white with all the cultural trappings that goes with a sense of being-white-in-the-world.

And each day 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. 151. Not to have sexual relations with your father's brother's wife—Leviticus 18:14

152

In 1976 the Nationalist Party government banned the popular open air lunch-time speaker's forum at Wits. During that year waves of protesting students flooded into Braamfontein and marched to John Vorster Square over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge. Trapped on the bridge the police armed with tear gas and batons charged the students. In panic most of us scrambled off Queen Elizabeth Bridge and over the fences, dropping and sliding down the steep embankment into the Johannesburg Park Station shunting yard as police pursued us, we run across railway lines dodging trains. Fleeing from the shunting yard we tried to melt into the crowds. But crowds of Afrikaans speaking whites who worked for the railways streamed out the offices onto the streets, they recognized many of us as Wits Students and began to beat us up. Grabbing us by our hair, slapping us, punching us and kicking us after we had been thrown to the ground.

Flying out the crowd of onlookers an Afrikaans speaking woman targeted me and grabbed hold of my hair and started jerking me around, beating me on my back with her free hand. I felt a sudden uncontrollable fury raging within me. I swung around and slapped her in the sharply full in the face with the full force of the open palm of my hand. She let go of my hair. I began to scream at her in a voice seething with white hot anger:

'Jou moer, jou moer, jou moer!' I could not believe that it was me shouting these words. Words from Hotazel, words from Malvern, words from Belgravia, words from the mining community that I had grown up in, words which betrayed my deep Afrikaner identity, an identity that had been lurking hidden in the shadows of my soul, an identity that I was not even aware of, an identity which existed deep, dormant and silent within me and which now broke the chains of suppression and burst out of me like a demon. It was my first and only act of violence that I had ever committed against another human being in my entire life. The Afrikaans words of insult that flowed uncontrollably from my mouth now rang in my head like a foreign, yet familiar echo of who I was. The image of the shocked expression on the woman's face became etched into my brain.

Some Wits students were brave enough not to run away, empty handed they faced down the police with their police batons, they were beaten to the ground with batons and some were arrested and beaten up further in the holding cells of Hillbrow Police station.

And each day 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. 152. Not to have sexual relations with your son's wife—Leviticus 18:15

153

In 1976, June the16th arrived.

We first heard the news late that morning that protesting school children had been shot dead in Soweto. We received the news in a state of shock and disbelief. We armed ourselves with steel rods, sticks, and rocks and descended onto Jan Smuts Avenue in solidarity with the Soweto High School Students. Police had sealed off the Wits perimeter. A military helicopter circled in the skies overhead.

Professor Bozzoli who was the VC stormed down from the 11th Floor of Senate to Jan Smuts avenue. He told us to stop the protest immediately. He told us that the police were preparing to use live ammunition against the students who were armed with rocks, sticks, and iron rods. The minister of police Jimmy Kruger and instructed Bozzoli to clear Jan Smuts avenue of protesting Wits Students if he wanted to avoid bloodshed. It seemed that Bozzoli believed that Jimmy Kruger would carry out his threat.

And each day 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. 153. Not to have sexual relations with your brother's wife—Leviticus 18:16

154

As a consequence of the 1976 Soweto student uprising I had become even more deeply politically radicalized. At the end of June 1976 in my radicalized state I set off on a long journey to do the field work for my BSc honours project. My supervisor had organized for me to do the project at the Gobabeb research station in Namibia. I drove in my old Volkswagen Beetle to the research station which was situated on the banks of the ephemeral Kuiseb River in the Namib Desert in Namibia. On my way I stopped at Hotazel so that my dad could service the Beetle for the journey. Even though he was the general manager of entire mining operation in Hotazel, he was still deep down in his heart a hands on engineer. But now he no longer had any time to rebuilt vintage sport cars. The only recreational hobby he found time for now was flying his homing pigeons.

As a result of the recent rains the Namib Desert had been transferred into a vast ephemeral grassland that carpeted the desert landscape for as the eye could see.

We know intuitively what science is about. Science is not about the meaning of reality, it is about the so-called objective nature of reality. Science has to assume quite a lot of things and ideas in order not to be a self-defeating endeavour. In this sense science is never fully 'objective'. A convergent theory of truth is quite a nice idea. Science as an endeavour necessarily involves the self-justifying belief that the work of science is converging asymptotically onto the truth, whatever the truth maybe. Whatever the truth may be, science would be impossible without being a self-correcting institution. However, this truth does not include a coherent, logical or rational statement of meaning, or the meaning of meaning.

"Meaning" cannot be expressed in terms of the conclusions generated by deductive-nomological models of scientific explanations. Maybe one of the aim of arts+ is to fathom what the meaning of everything is. There are only a few answers: 1.There is no meaning. 2. There is meaning. The work of the artist is to give aesthetic form to how we answer these transcendental questions.

At its simplest the nature of reality is determined by the dance of chance and necessity.

And each day 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. 154. Not to have sexual relations with your wife's sister—Leviticus 18:18

155

Yael comes back
In 1977 Yael was back in South Africa. She enrolled again at Wits to finish her BSc. She decided to drop Zoology and major in Botany and Microbiology. I was busy with my MSc. We began to see a lot of each other and I started going to Shul again and we sort of picked where we had left off, reconnecting the threads and rebuilding the bonds. I felt less resistant and more accepting to this whole Jewish thing. I gradually started internalizing what it meant to be Jewish. I had given up a lot of myself to Yael in my commitment to her. Now I began to experience as some kind of personal return from my emotional investment into our relationship. What I gained from Yael was the gift of a more expansive experience of the foreign and the alien, of the Semitic. In a sense Yael had become my estranged wife who I could not let go, and nor could she let go of me. Acceptance is the life-blood of the convert. This was one lesson that I learnt painfully. The convert who has become a Jew by choice is always more devout, more observant, more committed, more legalistic, more strict, more dedicated, more conscious of what it means to be Jewish, than the Jew by birth. When it comes to the practice of Judaism the convert driven by the desire to be faultless in everything. You cannot find a better Jew, a more real Jew, a more committed Jew, or more authentic and genuine Jew, than the gentile who has converted to Orthodox Judaism. I was the outlier, the anomaly, I felt no need to be accepted, I often viewed myself as not actually being a real Jew, I was indeed a Jew by choice, my own choice, but I did not desire the confirmation of acceptance in the bosom of my adopted people. I had become a convert to Judaism by the unexpected forces of circumstances, circumstances which involved duplicity and deceit, I had become a Jew for all the wrong reasons in a moment of weakness, in a moment of madness when my judgement had slipped. My judgement had become clouded because of my love for the beautiful Yael, and it was for the sake of love I had become a Jew, I had converted inadvertently, by pure accident. Yael was complicit in the whole process. If I was now a Jew, I was Jew under false pretences. I was a fake convert, I was a counterfeit Jew, not a real Jew, but now after reconnecting with Yael I began to find it extremely difficult to state definitely - 'I am not a Jew'. If I was really a Jew, then what was it that made me a Jew? I pose this question in that peculiar Heideggerian fashion. It was Heidegger's manner of questioning things that drew people to Heidegger, even Jews, and Jews wanted to claim Heidegger's thought as a species of their own Hebraic way thinking. If Heidegger was indeed indebted to the Hebraic then this was only because within the depths of the Hebraic lies the dormant seed of anti-Semitism and paganism. The Jews or the Hebrews have a mythic history of wanting to worship Baal. They have a history of wanting to revert to paganism, and the only way they could block the reversion to paganism was to create the Talmud and exile themselves from history and live as nomad aliens in a strange land, always uneasy, always alert, always casting about their furtive glances in the expectation of the worst. This is why Heidegger associates the Jewish and Judaic mode of being-in-the-world with being in that continuous state in which 'calculation' and 'computation' becomes the very condition of one's continued existence. This is why money is the weapon the Jew. Why do I say this? I say it because of the irony that everybody wants to be Heideggerian, the Catholics included, but Heidegger is a thoroughly Pagan thinker deeply imbedded in the Hellenic, in the pre-Socratic tradition. And if we want to be Heideggerian, we have to pose the question: What are the metaphysical consequences of being a Jew? This was the frightening question I found myself facing. In this regard the possibility or even the eventuality of Auschwitz gives rise to its own metaphysically grounded mythologization. Hence the birth of the state of Israel, as the guarantor of this never happening ever again to the Jewish people.

Again I ask myself this question – what does it mean for me to be a Jew? It is a rhetorical question because I could see the seeds of anti-Semitism deep in my own soul, deep within me I was also aware of an underlying ancestral paganism which jarred with Judeo-Christianity. I am critical of my adopted religion and the people of that religion. In a way I am suffering from a mutant form of the 'Stockholm Syndrome'. Well it is true that I have not been kidnapped or taken hostage against my will, but because of my own weakness I became a hostage of my love for Yael and this contributed to me developing feelings, affections and a psychological alliance to a 'foreign' religion and to the Jews, even though there were misgivings which I decided to ignore. My misgivings were metaphysically and theologically rooted and they resonated many of critical ideas, perspectives, themes and conceptualizations regarding Judaism. For example, I agreed with many of the claims underlying Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann's criticism of Judaism. Of course, all the ifs and buts and qualifications and dismissals and denials don't really depreciate the currency of the critical claims in my own mind. Yael as an atheist found comfort in Orthodox Judaism even though she dismissed the Judaic narrative as a Noble Lie. And there are many Yaels within Orthodox Judaism. I read an article about Hassidic Jews who were secretively atheists but who continued go through the motions of orthopraxis without anyone knowing the better.

As an evolutionary biologist seeing humanities continuity with nature had a pagan resonance. Seeing humankinds continuity along a continuum with nature also involve a re-awakening of this subversive memory, a recollection which involves the education of the soul. An education of the soul into the nature of the God, an education which places a high value on living in harmony with the natural realm. In board terms the Hellenic myth is centred on the 'harmony and balance with nature' as opposed to the Hebraic myth which mandates humanity to 'subdue and dominant nature'. The seeds of anti-Semitism lie deep in the idea of subduing and dominating nature. The founding myth of the City and the Oligarchy is the mandate to subdue and dominate nature. The Hebraic myth is founded on the dialectical contradiction of the inevitability of anti-Semitism, this inevitability arises as a consequence of the Abrahamic promise, in which he would become the father of a chosen race of people, who would be given the divine mandate and covenantal arrangement with God to subdue and dominate the entire earth. But the reverse it all its horror and nightmarish detail has happened. This is the inevitable fallout, the inexorable consequences of the Mosaic yoke, which becomes your burden and fate when you want to know what it means to be a Jew.

And each day 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. 155. A man must not have sexual relations with a beast—Leviticus 18:23

156

I decided to do my PhD at University of Cape Town (UCT). I drove down to Cape Town from Hotazel in my old white 1961 VW Beetle which my dad had rebuild for me. It was the same car that I drove to Gobabeb in Namibia. I had taken over Malcolm's olive green army steel trommel. I packed in full of books. I could not live without my books. Once packed with books I could not carry the trommel, it was heavy. My father shook his head and then helped me load the trommel filled with what he called my Communist books. Malcolm had not shown an interest in going to university. He showed no signs that he had any academic inclinations or academic interests. After completing his army training in the Parabats he did a stint in the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia. In the late 1970s he came back to South Africa and signed up with the permanent force and became an officer in the 1 Reconnaissance Commando otherwise known as the Recces. He had become a career soldier. Every now and then I got snippets of information from my dad regarding Malcolm's meteoric rise in the military. It was so ambiguous, my dad was proud of Malcolm's achievement as well as my own. But I remained the one he confided in regarding his differences with mom and the rest of family. There was an unshakable bond between us even though he was very doubtful about my politics which gave him much anxiety.

He always said that I was going to get into trouble. But he was not a man who was given to making moral judgements, he was honest, he knew he was a flawed human being. In that sense he was a man of integrity and a good man. I knew he was a good man. What about Malcolm? He was an adventurer, he was fearless, but he was not a cheat or womanizer, when it came to relationships with women he was faithful and when it came to friends he was loyal and affectionate. In spite of everything Malcolm was deeply religious.

After 1976 Malcolm and I had stopped talking to each other. Our political differences had become irreconcilable.

When I arrived at UCT I had to drag the heavy olive green army trommel into the foyer of the newly built Leo Marquard Hall student's residence, and then into the lift. I stayed in the residence for a month before moving into a bachelor flat in Chester House which was in Chester Road in Rondebosch. The flat was small. The bed was situated in small enclave between the sliding kitchen door and the front door. In the front door was just a bit away from the foot end of the bed. The lounge has a bedsitter, two chairs and a small round coffee table. The tiny kitchen has a service hatch opening into the lounge. The service hatch has a counter and the two high stools in the lounge serve as the seating arrangement for meals.

At Wits I had been staying in Sunnyside Residence for women since 1973. I was still in Sunnyside when I was doing my MSc in 1977 and before that I had been in boarding school since standard six. The only place I could really call home was my bedroom in Hotazel.

Moving to Cape Town also meant open a new banking account in Rondebosch. The bank, the movie theatre, and the supermarket were all a few minutes' walk from flat. The popular Pig and Whistle was also a few minutes' walk from my flat. The Hard Rock Café was also just down the road within walking distance. And across the road was the Baxter theatre.

I had a CSIR bursary, but could not make ends meet with the bursary. My dad paid for the flat rent and gave me a monthly living allowance. He had always spoilt me. I suppose I was his favourite. I was paid to do some lecturing in animal behavioural ecology and animal ecophysiology and that helped a bit and it was good for my cv.

And each day 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. 156. A woman must not have sexual relations with a beast—Leviticus 18:23

157

The rhetoric of the real

I completed my PhD by the end of 1979; it was also the year in which Barney Simon's Cincinnati played at the Baxter theatre. It was a play about a multi-racial discotheque club in in Fordsburg near the Oriental Plaza that much I can remember.

The rhetoric of the real. In this connection I had acquired a taste for doing lipstick lesbian drag. And so now that I had for the first time in my life a bit of extra cash for discretionary expenditure I could afford to add some interesting garments and accessories to my modest wardrobe. Doing lipstick lesbian drag is also a performance of the rhetoric of the real. The lesbian body as a female homosexualized or homoerotized body exists in state of social and political tension as a deviant body, as a non-compliant body, as an ethical body, as a desiring body, and as an engendered body. The adornment of the lipstick lesbian body is always a whimsically performed symbolic parody of heterosexual femininity and this is the essence of lipstick lesbian drag. Lesbian drag is not only a parody, but also a caricature, a subversion, a distorting, a perverting and an undermining of the 'cultural costume' which has been imposed upon the bodies of women under the rule of the patriarchy to distinguish women by means of their clothed bodies so that they can be set apart from men in terms of identity and socio-political rank in the hierarchy of power relationships between men and women. So what does it mean or symbolize to dress up the lesbian body in feminized apparel? In terms of the rhetoric of the real it means to be dressed in drag. To be in drag involves the symbolic construction of lesbian identity which in a fashion necessarily entails the parody of heterosexual femininity. A femme lesbian's exaggerated femininity, with lipstick and high heels, cleavage and curves, slip of a short clinging dress with lots of exposed thigh encased in stockings, represents a parody of heterosexual femininity and is a form of playful imitation, but with a subtle hint of seductive intentions and sufficiently sensual to excite and arouse. The exaggerated femininity of the lesbian femme dressing up is a refined art which follows its own subtle drag code, which screams lesbian in its purposeful emphasis on the sensual and erotic, it is meant to be seductive, it is meant to enthral the libidinous female gaze. Lesbian femme fashion involves dressing up like a woman to seduce a woman, to arouse a woman, to have sex with a woman, to exhibit an interest in the bodies of women, by mirroring the female body as an image or reflection of desire. I dress up, I go out, I am cruising, I know I am cruising, I walk with intent, with purpose, the percussion of my high heels attracts the attention of women, they hear that distinctive sound of an approaching woman, a woman who wants to be seen and heard by other women. I am the talented pick-up artist. I am the temptress. I am sexually indulgent. I know the ways of the underworld. I am the appealing luscious and lascivious bowl of voluptuous fruit picked from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is me and I make no apologies. I notice a woman looking at me, she stares at me and I look back, I catch her eye, I continue to stare back, she is like Lot's wife, she cannot withdraw her face from Sodom and Gomorrah, she is fixated, I hold her gaze longer than what would be natural or even necessary between strangers – too long in fact, and I smile, it is an unmistakable invitation, and invitation to what? She doesn't know, she could not imagine in her wildest dreams, she is a stranger to herself, she does not know why she is aroused, but she smiles back. We see each again an hour later. I am back, I have come flying in from the darkness, I hold the reigns of unbridled sensuality. I am transformed, I am the stunning and sexually wanton Lilith. I have come to seduce the beautiful Eve away from Adam. Adam is a fool! He is also weak, so weak indeed, but we are perpetually orgasmic, this is the measure of the strength of our appetite for pleasure. We are both trying on shoes. I sit right down next her to try on a stiletto. We are close, very close. Close enough to breathe each other's perfume with each breath, to take in the fragrance of each other's presence. I don't intend buying, I try on one set of high heels after the next, and we become friendly, we make small talk, we exchange a torrent of compliments as we take turns to perform pirouettes, turning on the foot of a stiletto, admiring ourselves before the mirror, displaying our calves and thighs to each other. I have made up my mind, I want to have sex with the stranger, having sex with a random stranger is a fantasy I have been toying with for some time. She is an attractive woman in her late thirties, she takes great pride in her appearance, she is married, she has children, and we continue speaking about this and about that. I ask if she would like to go for coffee. We find a place nearby and we sit down and we order coffee. She works as an actuary for Old Mutual. She graduated from UCT with a degree in actuarial science. She won the faculty gold medal for being the best actuarial student to graduate in her year. I inform her that I busy writing up final draft of my PhD thesis in zoology and that I have temporary lectureship in the Zoology Department. She is very impressed with me. I am in her class of persons. She makes a joke that I don't look like a zoologist. She relaxes, she is now at ease knowing that I am not just a young delectable scallywag who is going to lead her astray and take advantage of her. She informs me that her husband is an orthopaedic surgeon and that she has two young children, a boy and a girl who are at primary school. They live in a mansion in Constantia and she is the boss of her division at Old Mutual. Her name was Elaine Redfield, Redfield was her maiden name which she had decided keep. She joked that she decided to keep her surname because it happened to be a posh English name, apparently she had deep roots in the English aristocracy. It was just a matter of time, but in the end she gave in to her curiosity: 'Are you Coloured by any chance.' The word 'by any chance' rattled around in my head while I took my time to answer. 'Yes I am Coloured, but I pass for white, it is a long and complicated story.' 'Oh! That is interesting.' This was the first time that I had ever self-identified as Coloured to someone else. The words echoed in my mind: 'Yes I am really Coloured in fact'. This startling admission from my own mouth even surprised me, was it merely a slip of the tongue or was it a pent-up release, an eruption of suppressed but deeply heartfelt sentiments? Here I was the paradigmatic exemplification of a seductive presence, filled with the fantasy of having sex with a strange woman, sitting across the table before Elaine, me now being a Coloured, representing the full embodiment of that richly textured and forbidden heritage of miscegenation. A heritage inextricably interwoven into the complex and intriguing fabric of an ancient aboriginal people, slavery and colonialism.

My admission was not a deception. It sprung from a deep seated yearning to be acknowledged and recognized as who I really was, a black woman. Yet having made the admission, even if it was eventually proven to be lie, it would be a very noble lie. I could now be a Coloured, with Elaine I could now finally proudly be a Coloured for the first time in my life, I could now play the role of a real Coloured in the eyes of this bourgeois woman, someone who believed that I was indeed Coloured. With me now being a Coloured I suddenly became a subject of compelling sexual interest and value to this woman. I touched her calf with the side on my high heel. She moved her leg slightly away. I pursued her calf and touched it again, firmly this time, my intensions were unmistakably clear. She did not move her calf away. I began to caress the inner side of her calf with the side of my high heel. I smiled sweetly at her. What she did not know in spite of all her poshness and English aristocracy was that this little Coloured slut with all her Aboriginal Heritage to boot was going to fuck her. I had worked hard to get to this point in my fantasy. I place my hand over hers and we clasped each other's hand. 'Should we go to some place private?' I asked innocently. 'We could go to my flat,' I quickly offered. 'No that will not be necessary, we have a very nice rustic little cottage in Llandudno, very secluded and private,' she said, making a counter offer. I followed her in my VW Beetle driving behind her Mercedes. It turned out to be a lovely little cottage nestled in the bush at the foot of the mountain with a neat little front lawn surrounded by a bushy hedgerow. It was close enough to the sea to hear the constant faint drone of crashing surf. Once inside after fiddling with a bunch of keys she asked if I would like a scotch, adding that she had an unopened bottle of a 21 year old Glenfiddich single malt scotch whiskey. 'I am not a big drinker but maybe a very teeny-weenie scotch would be in order,' I said, raising my hand to eye level, holding my forefinger almost against my thumb. 'With ice?' she asked. 'Yes with a cube of ice if possible,' I answered. 'We've got ice, we have a potent little gas freezer-refrigerator.' I followed her into the tiny kitchen and watched her pour half a tot into a tot measurer which she then emptied into a heavy crystal whiskey glass before dropping a cube of ice into the yellowish fluid which swirled in the glass, barely covering the bottom. Using the tot measurer she poured herself a stiff double, recklessly overflowing the scotch into her glass before adding several blocks of ice, after swirling the ice in the glass she took a deep sip. I followed her into a tastefully furnished and thoughtfully decorated main bedroom with a queen sized bedroom suite. In the room the moment of truth had arrived for her. She now stood at that existential threshold where warning lights begin to flash and sirens wail with a pressing urgency reminding her of every conceivable consequence which would inexorably flow from this momentary lapse of will power. What was she prepared to sacrifice in order to spend an afternoon in the arms of this smiling Coloured lesbian with the bright red lipstick standing before her in stockings and high heels, wearing a slinky dress, perhaps a bit too short and cheeky for decency? Hypothetically she was facing the future prospect of profound regret if she took the next step. But she was no longer in command of the situation and seemed flustered and undecided, and I guessed that she was on the brink of saying that she was sorry but she could not go through with this. And that was precisely what she did. She said: 'I am sorry I can't go through with this.' 'With this?' What did she mean by 'with this'. The 'with this' was a homosexual physical act with another woman. She must have previously entertained the fantasy of having sex with another woman. I put my glass down on the dressing table and then took her glass and put it down next to mine. I embraced her and began to kiss her. I could taste and smell the whiskey on her breath. She had succumbed, the line had been crossed, there was no going back, I could savoured it as my tongue probed the depths of her mouth, the vapours of her lust filled my nostrils and excited my taste buds. I felt for the zip of her dress and pulled it down to the small of her back, just above her buttocks, kicking off her high heels, she allowed me to help her out of her dress. I laid down naked next to her on the bed wearing only my stockings, she was still wearing her bra, panties and panty-hose. I began to kiss her while I slipped my hand under the top of her panty hose and panties. Her vulva was engorged and moist. This woman was hot and now fully aroused, but she just had no idea what lesbian sex entailed. 'Elaine my honey, my dearest darling, do you want me to stop what I am doing?' I whispered earnestly, affectionately, and sincerely, between kisses. 'No it feels fabulous, don't be afraid to touch me, I want you too.' Our affair lasted until I left Cape Town. I had developed genuine feelings for Elaine. I cared for her and I would never dream of hurting her or harming her in any way. Elaine was eager and insatiable when it came to lesbian sex. We met regularly for a romantic tryst at the cottage. She became vulnerable, clinging and jealous. She would phone me several times a day. After saying 'I love you Hannah' she would put the receiver down. She wanted to know about the other women in my life. I told her that the only other woman I was seeing on a regular basis was Bridgette who was heterosexual and our friendship was based on common intellectual interests which revolved around a mutual fascination for Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. When she heard that Bridgette was heterosexual and was not sexually interested in women that calmed her down. And as things turned out Bridgette was doing research for a paper on the anti-Semitism of Djuna Barnes. What kind of work was Nightwood, a vicarious confession or what? What about the Jew in Nightword? The Jew is anywhere and everywhere, anywhere and everywhere where it was important and advantageous to be, the Jew is always drawn to the City like a moth to the bright flame of a candle. The Jew desires to insinuate himself into the great courts of the Oligarchy. The Jew as the archetypical calculator becomes a necessary cog in the machinations of the Oligarchy in every age. This was my intellectual contribution to Bridgette's research on Nightwood, which dealt with the essential nature of the Jew in Nightwood, possibly in the way in which Djuna Barnes perceived it.

And each day 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. 157. Not to have homosexual sexual relations—Leviticus 18:22

158

The dualism of the naked body versus the clothed body makes its first fictional debut in mythological drama of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The story is fraught with contradictions, irony and paradox which emerged with the transition from Palaeolithic to Neolithic forms of sociality. The authorship of the Hebraic Edenic myth coincides with the rise of the patriarchical forms of sociality in more or less settled agrarian communities or pastoral communities in which sexual identities were rigidly mediated through the 'costume style' of the clothed body, in which the clothed bodies were assigned rank and identity according to the style and cut of dress. And so the clothed body dressed in its assigned uniform bearing all the signs, symbols, emblems and codes of rank according to sex and social status reflects and confirms the social ordering of status, of the hierarchies of social domination, and especially of the roles and identity of individuals within the City, firstly of women and then of slaves of both sexes. It is hard not to see that the Edenic myth together with the rest of the Torah serves to this day a deeply ideological and propaganda function in the perpetration of Noble Lies, and the Noble Lies embodied in and communicated by means of fictionalized histories, myths, similes and allegories represent literary inventions, created to primarily serve a hegemonic purpose in the structuring and functioning of the City which emerged with the formation of Neolithic and post-Neolithic societies. Like the rest of the Bible its true revelatory character can only be dialectically disclosed or unveiled once its ideological function is grasped and subjected to criticism. As a works of myth, allegories, similes and historized fiction the purpose of the Edenic Myth and the narratives of the rest of the Pentateuch were to 'ontologize', 'naturalize' and 'theologize' the social status and roles according to the visible sexual dimorphisms which have been imposed upon women and men through the medium of the clothed body. Imposition of socially constructed sexual dimorphisms on bodies through the medium of clothing serves a structural and functional purpose in the political organization of the City. The body is clothed in a uniform or costume and through the wearing of the costume the sex, social status and social roles of the body of the wearer are made visible and recognizable. Through the clothing of the body, the various assignments of the body of different individuals is fixed, organized, controlled and governed by means of non-egalitarian institutions, that is, by institutions which enforce the stratified and hierarchical ordering of power and domination. Dialectically speaking the 'divine revelation' embodied in the mythological or fictional narrative of the Edenic story of the clothed body versus the naked body is not the meaning of the literal story, but the exact opposite, and this how revelation become manifest in irony. So the divinely inspired message that is authoritative and infallible becomes dialectically manifested only in irony.

And each day 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. 158. Not to have homosexual sexual relations with your father—Leviticus 18:7

159

In this context, that is the context of the Edenic myth the lipstick lesbian's homoerotic feminization of the 'costume' of the clothed female body in the form of drag presents a direct challenge and subversion of the patriarchy and the City through irony and parody. The feminized homoerotic lesbian body subverts the body of the patriarchy by rendering it impotent, the feminist rejection constitutes a castration, the decapitation of patriarch's bearded head and placed the status of the City in jeopardy.

And each day 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. 159. Not to have homosexual sexual relations with your father's brother—Leviticus 18:14

160

Of course the feminist lipstick lesbian reading of Holy Scripture is necessarily a non-canonical reading based a non-patriarchical hermeneutics and non-patriarchical deconstruction or destruction. The same goes for a feminist lipstick lesbian's reading of the Hellenic canon, both pre-Socratic and post-Socratic Greek philosophical literature. It is taken for granted that the Western philosophical and theological canon is masculine. However this does not disqualify a non-canonical lipstick lesbian feminized re-reading of the Western Canon. This would constitute a serious challenge to the masculinized conceptualization of the City, the World and the Universe. Sexual dimorphism has been too rigidly conceived in terms of differences in kinds in a dualistic or dichotomized fashion. However, differences between feminized and masculinized bodies and minds should not be conceptualized as differences in kinds but rather in terms of differences in degree along a continuum. This will remove the dissymmetry or asymmetry kind that have been imposed on the sexes by men.

In literature this dissymmetry/asymmetry in kind always involves the objectification of the female with respect to a male subject in 'ad infinitum'. The male subject rules. We see this in the relationship between Zeus and Hera, Odysseus and Penelope, Faust and Gretchen, Don Giovanni and Zerlina, and more recently in Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze (Lolita). All the feminine heroines have been suppressed, we only have the masculine Prometheus, Odysseus and Faust. The feminist lipstick lesbian seems to lack a mythic heroine, a mythic feminine subjectivity in which she could recognize her potency. This is absolutely true. There has to be mythic figures that embody the feminine subjectivity of a female heroine on par with Prometheus. So where does the Hebraic and the Hellenic lipstick lesbian stand? What is her standing as a mythic heroine figure? Where is superwoman?

And each day 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. 160. Not to have sexual relations with a married woman—Leviticus 18:20

161

When observing animal spoor a thousand questions would cross my mind. Were these the same kinds of questions that crossed the minds of hunter-gathers? Did they constantly search the ground for signs? Did they wonder how animals utilized space and time?

Observing the tracks I often wondered where the individual animal had come from where it could be right at this moment. And how far would it be from this spot? What was its home-range? How long would it stay within its current home-range?

What factors influence the size of its home range and how do these factors interact in their determination of home-range size?

In theory home-range size or home-range area should scale allometrically with animal body size or body mass. It is well established that an animal's metabolic rate also scales allometrically with the animal's body mass. Obviously depending on the nature of an animal's diet its home-range should be large enough to provide sufficient food to satisfy its daily metabolic energy demands. Home-range should be strongly correlated with the availability, distribution and quantity of food.

Animal utilization of space is determined by multiple factors. The home-range demarcates the extent of the animal's foraging arena.

Now humans are also part of Nature. Humans have not yet transcended Nature. Humans are in actual fact immanently embedded within Nature in the form of a mammalian animal. Since the Neolithic humans have become increasingly maladapted to Nature mainly as result of the fact that the various feedback loops arising from his interaction with Nature have ceased to be immediate in their effect and have instead become subjected to a long time delays resulting in longer and longer time intervals between the chains of cause and effect which link humans to external environmental reactions to human actions.

Homeotherms versus poikilotherms. Homeotherms have higher metabolic rates than cold-blooded poikilotherms and thus have higher intrinsic energy demands than similarly sized poikilotherms.

What would have motivated God to have created the various species of animals having very species-specific body masses?

Resource encounter rates depends on resource distribution and resource availability. The resource distribution, especially in terms of its density in space and time, will influence its availability. The resource may not be uniformly distributed in space. It may be very patchy. Similarly, it may not be uniformly distributed in time, so time enters the picture.

What is time?

I began to think about mathematical models for various kinds of animal behaviour.

And then there are the different modes of animal locomotion.

Slithering locomotion of a snake. Snakes propel themselves by sliding their bellies across the ground. Snakes are expert sliders. Fish swim. Birds fly. Quadruplets can run. So it would be expected that flyers and runners have more extensive home-ranges that slithers. Fish as swimmers can have extensive or localized home ranges.

Animals don't only forage within their home-range for food they also forage for shelter, refuges, breeding sites and mates. Lower resource densities will necessarily force animals to forage over larger home-range areas.

Animal biomass densities depend on the environmental productivity of a region. Of course the Kalahari has a low environmental productivity.

Locomotion and niche. In vertebrates slithering is typically a limbless lateral form of undulating horizontal locomotion over a plane surface where the efficiency and speed of the forward propulsion of the slender flexible elongated body is influenced by the texture or roughness of the substrates surface. Slithers like snakes and legless lizards propel themselves by interacting mechanically with the surface of substrates.

And each day 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. 161. Not to have sexual relations with a menstrually impure woman—Leviticus 18:19

162

Samantha had fled to Angola. After returning from my holiday with Elsabe and her boyfriend in Durban I still had Nonhlanhla on my mind. Shortly after getting back I met Brigitte Cook, an English lecturer at UCT who had done her PhD on Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf had remained her life-long academic and research interest. We became good friends (she was heterosexual). It was through her that I discovered Eric Auerbach's 'Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature'. She had her ideas about realism and I had my own ideas about realism. Realism by convention usually means the representation of reality as it actuality is in both science and literature. I knew what I meant by realism from a philosophy of science perspective. We debated the meaning of artistic realism in literature. In artistic realism all representations of the world and of the self as subject where the self is also part of that world arises from the creative imagination of the self. Which means the self has to represent itself as subject and the world in which it exists as a subject realistically. Which means representing in words, both the self as subject and world, as it actually is. Simply put, the self is the source or the creative or the imaginative origination of all representations of reality. And the hope of the writer as a literary realist is that these representations are indeed depiction of the way things are in actuality. The problem that arises in this context concerns the question of whether the self, or the conscious self or the mind of the self has the power or capacity to also capture itself as a self rather than as a subject within its own representation of the world? Can the self-capturing representation of the self as it actuality is within its own representation of world be achieved in a totalizing act of representation which includes its own self-representation? Is this what a totalization of all representation really means? This is what Brigitte wanted to know. She wanted to know whether the eye of the self could be an object within its own field of vision. Does the perceiving eye or the representing self necessarily fall outside of the frame of its own vision or perceptive representation of the world? Could it be argued that the eye can be an object within its own field of vision only as a reflection in a mirror? But it can be argued that the self constantly exists as a subject within the world of its own representations. The twist here is that the self does indeed constantly find itself in the field of its own perceptions, but only as a subject. The self, transformed or metamorphosed into a subject happens to be an inexorable consequence of a process of objectification, a process of objectification which is realized as a mirroring reflection, in which we indeed see ourselves in manner of speaking through the eyes of others. We feel ourselves or we even experience ourselves as they see us, as if their eyes are mirrors of our reflection or reflective images of ourselves as subjects. So we do in fact appear as subjects in our own field of vision or in our representation of the world within the frame of our own vision. But it is always an alienating vision. We become the subject in our own field of vision or field of representation in an act of self-estrangement or self-alienation in which we lose ourselves in our self-reflection in the eyes of the other. The self is split from itself as a subject in the process of self-objectification. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the view that while we only can experience or feel what it is like to be ourselves, there is no possibility of representing this in words so that others can experience through the medium of speech or writing what it feels like to be ourselves. Words fail to achieve full representation of reality. Reality cannot be captured verbally, reality overwhelms language, and words fail. Language cannot represent reality in all its fullness and richness, or meaningfulness or significance. Totalization lies beyond the scope of language. If the self is the absent cause of the world coming into the fullness of presence as representation to the self-conscious mind at every moment, and in this context, it is only the self, but not the subject split from the self, which can exists as the blind spot at the very centre of the picture of the subject and its world which forms in the imagination. The self in this sense is always an absent presence, a presence which escapes representation, because it is by virtue of the presence of the self that presence of a representation is achieved. Something becomes the condition of possibility for something else, but maybe not the condition of its own possibility. The conditions which make the self a possibility lie outside of the self, the self, the human self as the centre of sentience and conscious is something which emergences contingently as a consequences of the essential nature of the properties, capacities, powers and predispositions of the elements out of which matter is constituted. The self alone is not the condition of its own possibility. These views have a bearing on how we can conceive the relationship between God and World.

It was Bridget's thesis that the literary modernists like Virginia Woolf and others dealt with the ambiguities and problematics of the self as a representation and the world as a representation through the medium of irony, where irony is saying one thing but meaning another thing. Also shortly after my friendship with Bridget got off the ground Kate arrived to stay with me for a few days. The three of us went out for pizza in Rondebosch. Kate was keen that we visit Sandy Bay, and fortified by a several glasses of wine Bridget volunteered to join us. Anyway that Sunday carrying towels, picnic basket and beach umbrella we found a sheltered sandy spot hidden amongst some colossal grey granite boulders and fynbos at the furthest end of the beach wedged between the foot of a steep sloping 'mountain' and the vast Atlantic Ocean. Kate and I disrobed. Looking awkward and apologetic Bridget said: 'I can't do this guys.' Sitting down on her towel beneath the umbrella between the two of us still dressed in her T-shirt and shorts she put on her sunglasses and gazed silently at the surroundings.

I discovered for myself that Virginia Woolf belonged to that category of writers who we classify as terribly difficult. I don't think she could ever have become a best seller in her own life time. She wrote for the university students who were going to study English literature. As a writer she placed huge demands on the reader. As one critic has said, Mrs Woolf in her writing had managed to create a world of luminous twilight. In fact Virginia Woolf succeeded in creating a very queer world indeed, a world which became vivid in its felt presence, yet at the same time remained strangely remote, and while it had all the qualities of being real it remained strangely elusive, and yet it was beautiful, almost tangibly so, yet it was also beautiful as a floating bubble in the bright sunlight, mysterious in its evanescence. This was my experience in reading her 'Jacob's Room' and 'The Waves'. After reading 'Mrs Dalloway' and 'To the Light House', what can I say? Her writing rather than being merely pictorial turned out to be a kaleidoscopic of ever changing detail. She writes for the eye. Yet her vision remained queer in its all its diligent exactitude even at the very brink of oblivion. Of course Woolf was queer. They were queer, all of them, that is the Bloomsbury crowd. But Bridget was not queer. She did not have a glimmer of queerness in her being.

Kate listened politely as Bridget began to speak about her literary research. The name Virginia Woolf only registered vaguely with Kate. A lot of what Bridget was saying about Virginia Woolf's oeuvre was going straight over Kate head and I struggled not to smile or laugh. The whole situation had become quite absurd. I uncorked the bottle of Rose. It was still chilled and I poured the wine into the three glasses.

And each day 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. 162. Not to marry non-Jews—Deuteronomy 7:3

163

Chance is woven into the very fabric of the Cosmos. What are the guarantees that modern science as one of the most successful institutions that has been created will last indefinitely. Intellectual freedom and academic autonomy are crucial for the continued existence of science as a knowledge creating enterprise. In the absence of external fundamentalist, religious, ideological and political interference modern science is the only institution that has demonstrated the capacity for continuous critical, radical and revolutionary self-correction. It has proven to be immune to all kinds of 'systemic pathologies' that have resulted in the implosion of other modern institutions such as capitalism and socialism. Both economic systems do not possess the institutional 'behavioural feedback responses' which drive self-correcting behaviour when faced with system instabilities and crisis. Both socialism and capitalism have failed to allocate resources in an efficient and effective manner for the maximization of benefits to the greatest number of working class people through a process of feed-back self-correction. This is what we should be fighting for. Feed-back self-correction is a nice concept. Without feed-back self-correction systems are unable to adapt through evolution when faced with crises and instabilities.

Revolutions have a tendency to fail.

And each day 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. 163. Not to let Moabite and Ammonite males marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:4

164

Shortly after I graduated with my PhD in January 1981 I found myself at a loose end for a while. A lectureship post in Zoology at the University of Witwatersrand had become vacant and I had applied for the job. I had a quiver full of papers in international journals on behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology so I felt pretty confident about my chances. I had made the short list and was flown up to Johannesburg for an interview. A few days later after the interview I received a phone call informing me that I had the job. I also received the official letter confirming my appointment as a lecturer in Zoology. It was strange to hear myself being addressed as Dr Zeeman on the phone.

I actually did not want to leave Cape Town. Anyway in February1981 I moved into Callisto Court in Natal Street Bellevue. It has been my home ever since that date. That brings me back to the telephone call. Now the persistent ringing of the phone woke me up from a deep sleep. I fumbled with my hand in the dark to find the bedside table lamp switch. Thinking it was the alarm clock, I grabbed the clock to switch of the alarm. The ringing persisted it was coming from the phone in the lounge-dining room. I glanced at the time. It was 1.30 am in the morning. Before I could get up the phone stopped ringing. I lay back in the bed and waited for it to ring again. It began to ring again. I sat up and quickly jumped out of bed and made for the lounge. As I picked up the receiver and said 'hello' I heard the metallic sound of coins one or two falling down the slot of a public pay phone. I listened while saying 'hello, hello, hello...' The voice on the other side, a black accented voice asked: 'Is that Hannah Zeeman?' I answered in the affirmative. There was a brief silence on the other end of the line before the caller spoke again.

'This is a warning, the security police are on their way to your flat to detain you.'

The caller put the phone down immediately before I could ask any questions. It had been raining the whole night. I went back to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of denims, slipped on a pair of takkies and grabbed a blouse off the hanger in my cupboard. My purse was lying on the dresser. I did not have much cash, but I had credit cards. I could not remember where I had left the car keys. I was beginning to panic. After a minute or so I found the car keys on the kitchen counter where I had left them when I came home. And then I remembered the prewritten letter to Angelika. I rushed back to my bedroom and scratched about in the draws of my bedside pedestal. I found the sealed letter. The airmail sticker has been stuck on. I needed stamps. In the study I found stamps. Folding the envelope in half I stuffed into my back pocket. Locking the flat I went down the fire escape stairs to get to the car park of the complex.

I immediately noticed that all the car tires had been punctured. It meant the security police had already arrived or where playing some strange game with me. I looked around the car park, but I could see no one. I was undecided about I should do. Should I go back to my flat and wait inside? Or should I try and make a break for it? Where could I possibly go? I had made no escape plans for such an eventuality. Maybe I could catch a train. I knew it was unwise to try and phone anyone.

Leaving the car park I began to run down Natal Street towards Hillbrow in the pouring rain. I had no idea of where I was running to or what I was doing. I was in state of panic. I remembered I had to post the letter. Looking around I saw no one and there were no cars, I was completely alone. I quickly stuffed the letter into the post box at street corner and turning left at the next corner I ran to Cavendish Road. Following the road downhill I continued running until I reached Harrow Road. Breathless, my lungs burning I run across Harrow Road into Abel Road. Out of breath I started to walk past the wrought iron fence of Berea Park. I walked into a pool of light under a street lamp. It was the same wrought iron fence and the same lamp where my father had parked the car when we still stayed in City Deep.

They had left me in the car. As a child I watched them through the car window, I watched my dad and Corelle crossing Abel Road, I watched them enter Sussex Court and disappear into the foyer. Over the years I had become convinced that Corelle had lived in Sussex Court. Many times while sitting in the car I had watched them as they climbed up the stairs and entered the foyer of Sussex Court, at 29 Abel Road. For years I have walked down Abel Road past Berea Park and looked across the street at Sussex Court and I would think about those nights that I sat alone in the car across the road. Sometimes I feel asleep on the back seat and only woke up while my father drove the car back to City Deep. Now may years later I can still vividly remember those nights that I had spent waiting in the car across the street from was flat where Corelle had lived, I waited and waited for my dad to return to the car. After they had disappeared into flat I would gaze for a while through the car's window at the surroundings. I could see the wrought iron park fence and I could see the huge trees in the park. When I became bored with waiting I would lie on the cold leather back seat and stare up through the back window at the lamp light.

As I said, many were the times that I had already fallen asleep by the time my dad had come back to the car. Lying on the back seat in my sleepy state I can still vaguely recall the motion of the car as my dad drove back to City Deep. He always made a shape U turn in Abel Road in order to get back to Harrow Road. Turning right into Harrow we drove past Saratoga Avenue and Gordon Terrance, past Charlton Terrance, down through Doornfontein until we reached Commissioner Street, turning into left into Commissioner Street, and then turning right into John Page going past Jeppe Station, and then into Main Reef Road and then right into Vickers Road were eventually arrived back to City Deep. My dad would lift me gently from the back seat and carry into the house. He would pull back the covers and lay me down in my bed with my head on the pillow. Pulling the covers back and tucking me into bed he would kiss me on my forehead and say: 'Hannah my little angel I love you so much, you are my sweetest darling child.'

All the car tyres had been punctured. I knew it was pointless trying to escape on foot, but anyway I found myself running in the light drizzle that was falling, I down the road towards Hillbrow, it was downhill all the way to Harrow Road. Breathing heavily, my heart pounding, I stopped to catch my breath and think, I was in state of panic, standing on the pavement outside Berea Park in the rain I stared across the road. Across the street was the flat. At night, even on this wet night, it looked suddenly so familiar. The past had come rushing back. I was again a little girl looking out of the window of the old Hudson across the same the street. The rain began to increase in intensity, I decided run across Abel Street towards Sussex Court, running up the stairs I pushed the glass door open and entered the foyer of Sussex Court. I was now soaking wet. I stood looking out at the street, the rain continued to pour in driving sheets. I don't know how long I stood in the foyer looking through the glass doors, staring blankly at the pouring rain. This was foyer into which my dad and Corelle had disappeared into as I watched them with my face pressed against the back window of the Hudson parked outside Berea Park. Eventually the rain stopped. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I had no escape plan.

And each day 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. 164. Don't keep a third generation Egyptian convert from marrying into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:8-9

165

After my arrest I learnt that it was Malcolm who had organized that early morning phone call. Malcolm eventually left the Recces and joined Koevoet. It was while he was with Koevoet in Namibia that he met an Afrikaans South West African girl from Gobabis. He did not want to put his marriage under stress so he left the Koevoet combat unit and joined the Security Police. While with the Security Police in South West Africa he was stationed in Oshakati in Ovamboland. And then in the mid-1980s he was transferred to John Vorster Square.

For Malcolm's wedding we flew as a family to Windhoek. We booked into the Kalahari Sands Hotel where the reception for the wedding was going to be held. After booking into the hotel we hired a car and drove to the cattle farm where Annemarie de Wet, Malcolm's fiancée's family lived which was about 40 kilometres east of Gobabis. They were married in the NG church and at the reception I had the unpleasant opportunity to meet many of Malcolm's wide circle of friends who were all involved as professional soldiers or policemen in the counter-insurgency war against SWAPO. They were from the Recces, 32 Buffalo Battalion, Koevoet and the security police. When the sakkie-sakkie Boere dancing started I had to fend off the unwelcome attentions from Malcolm's motley gang of drunken friends who pestered me for a dance.

And each day 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. 165. Not to refrain from marrying a third generation Edomite convert—Deuteronomy 23:8-9

166

In Hotazel while in primary school with my eyes glued to the ground I searched for the Kalahari Tent Tortoises (Psammobates oculifer). My father stopped me from collecting them, explaining to me that I was interfering with their lives and they should be left in peace. He made a suggestion that I should rather study their natural habits by marking them where I had found them with Cutex nail vanish. So I became obsessed with finding tortoises and marking them before I released them again. My father took an interest in my tortoise marking activities and soon he was asking me questions like: how many tortoises had I marked, how many times have I recaptured tortoises that I had previously marked. The marking and recapture of tortoises kept me busy throughout my primary and high school years.

The men on the mine sometimes went on nocturnal springhare hunting or chasing excursions. Several times dad took Malcolm and me on a night drive. He drove the mine bakkie and we sat in the cab next to him. The young men from the single quarters would stand on the back of the bakkie. One of the men used a power spotlight to locate animals in the pitch dark.

Years later I discovered the Formozov-Malyshev-Pereleshin (FMP) formula that Russian scientists had used for converting animal track counts or track frequency into animal density. But as a child in Hotazel I had entered into the fullness of the Universe of non-human sentient beings. I was obsessively curious about animals. The evidence of the presence of sentient beings was written in the many spoors, in the tracks in the sand that I came across, which I saw everywhere as I walked in the Kalahari's sandy scrub landscape dotted with its ubiquitous thorns trees. As a child I wondered into the Kalahari that surrounded the mining village of Hotazel in a continuous state of rapture and wonder. I never ceased to experience that state of wonder and rapture whenever I discovered an animal in its wild state. I could not help marvelling at the fact that the animal was a living sentient being which somehow managed to exist all by itself, whether it was a tortoise, or frog, or lizard or even a snake, and I came across many snakes, mole snakes, cobras and puff adders. My heart always skipped a beat if I flushed a hare or duiker or a steenbok. With every animal encounter I relived that same experience which I first had when I discovered the chameleon crawling along the top of the diamond mesh fence. I was amazed and filled with joy when we flushed our first hare in the veld across the road from our house in Stilfontein. I would never forget my fascination when I first saw that large blackish fish in the bath tub in the Klerksdorp flat. Without fail through my life, in my teenage years and when I was a student at Wits the sudden accidental discovery of a tortoise or the unexpected springing up of a steenbok or grey duiker in my path never failed to be an exciting event for me. Why this obsession with non-human sentient beings? From early childhood found myself in a state of proneness when it came to animals, I was prone or predisposed to be fascinated by any encounter I had with a sentient non-human being existing wild, undomesticated in a state of nature. It was a wonder and fascination with wild animals that was unsentimental. As I have already mentioned, I never had a pet in my life, not even a dog or a cat. Except for the pigeon, bantams, geese and ducks we kept, I was not drawn to domestic animals. But we got great pleasure from keeping the homing pigeons and love birds in Hotazel. And we got a lot of enjoyment out of having the bantam fowls, ducks and geese.

And each day 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. 166. Not to let a Mamzer ("bastard") marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:3

167

As a teenage girl back home from boarding school for the school while watching a rooster going through the motions of courtship I can still clearly remember asking Alice my girlfriend who was staying over for a few days: 'What motivates roosters to mate?' She burst out laughing. I continued my interrogation: 'Is it desire for pleasure?' Alice collapsed into a paroxysm of laughter while lying on her back on the lawn in our yard. Enjoying her laughter, and not wanting to stop my interrogation I posed the question: 'If not then what are the incentives or rewards for mating their mating?'

Alice with tears rolling down cheeks from laughter asked: 'Do think birds have organisms? Could it be possible that roosters experienced some kind of pleasurable orgasm while mating?'

My answer: 'I don't know but I am certain that all male mammals experienced an orgasmic ejaculation during copulation. Why else would they engage in copulation? It must be because male mammals anticipated the pleasurable experience of an orgasm as a certain reward for engaging in copulation. This had to be the motivation for engaging in copulation with the female sex. It was unlikely that they would fight among themselves risking injury just to gain access to females or carry out elaborate courtship displays if no orgasm occurred during mating'.

Her response: 'Yeah, that may be so, but while it seems to be that males needed some physiological based incentive in order to engage in intercourse, females would likewise also require a similar physiological incentive to also engage in intercourse with the males of their species. Do you female animals experience orgasm during sex? What reward to they get for having sex. Without any kind of physical reward of please what incentives does any female animal have to engage copulation'.

Of course Alice was spot on. My reply was: 'Just imagine if there no orgasms to be enjoyed then there would be no sexual reproduction, no evolution and no perpetuation of the species'.

This all seemed so clear and unassailable to me. Both of us now began to observe the mating behaviour of the bantams with new eyes. I has destined to become a zoologist and Alice eventually became a gynaecologist. Now if a rooster wanted to mate with a hen it needed communicate it intentions to that hen. So a rooster would begin the process by waltzing around hen in short shuffling steps, with one wing stretched out with the tips of the feathers sweeping the ground. Roosters would spend a lot of time stalking irritable and uncooperative hens. They would march behind them with puffed out chests, in a slow high stepped strutting gait, but often their efforts went unnoticed. More often than not courtship attempts initiated by the rooster ended in failure. The hens chose whether or not to engage in mating. The rooster spent a lot of time devoted to courtship display with energetic crowing, elegant arching of long tail feathers, loud clapping, beating and flapping of wings, and waltzing, and so on and so forth, but still failing to impress the hens. Some roosters even tried to lure hens into mating with an elaborate show of scratching bare patches of earth and vigorous pecking at imaginary food. Now and then a hen would stop and briefly cock an inquisitive eye at the bare scratched patch of earth. But most of the time the courtship overtures of roosters were rejected by disinterested hens. It seemed that the hens were quite choosy about their prospective mating partners. What was it that made one rooster more preferable as a mating partner compared to all the other contenders? Basically it is the same question that many teenager boys ask in the school yard during breaks. What does she see in him? Sometimes a rooster got lucky. Now and then a hen would become receptive to what seemed to be her preferred mate and she allow him to mate with her. To indicate her desire to mate she would spread her wings and crouch low. Once selected by the hen as a suitable mating partner, the rooster would be allowed to mount her. It was an awkward process. Stepping onto the back of his partner, maintaining his balance by firmly grasping the hen's upper wing in a vice grip, the rooster would begin vigorously pumping his feet, he would then spread his tail feathers wide, lower his cloaca so that it touch hers, and he would start thrusting his pelvis. It was the most amazing balancing and contortion performance to watch. The absence of any semen intromission organ such as protruding penis made the whole insemination process seem to be something of a miracle. Later as an undergraduate student I discovered from reading up on avian mating behaviour that with the exception of ostriches and ducks all birds lack penises. Ejaculation is caused by the rapid vibration of the rooster's pelvis. Semen is deposited on the rim of the hen's cloacal vent. Through the muscular contraction of the hen's cloaca the semen is sucked in and stored until being deposited into an egg. Immediately after ejaculation the roosters would dismount, swaggered off in search of a meal. After mating hen would stand up, puffed her feathers and shake herself vigorously. We soon became aware that there was another mating drama taking place in the backyard. It seemed that only high status healthy hens chose their mates. The low status hens at the bottom of the hen's dominance hierarchy docilely crouched before every stalking cock. They were practically raped. They would be mounted repeatedly throughout the day. Their backs becoming naked from the loss of feathers caused by the constant stepping of roosters onto their backs.

We showered together. Take me in your arms darling, you sexy thing. Rock me baby.

And each day 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. 167. Not to let a eunuch marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:2

168

I was aware from a philosophical perspective that the animal conceived as a beast, especially a wild animal, has often been metaphorically associated with the inhuman, the terrifying, the unhuman, the brutish, the degrading, and the cruel. Why does the animal as a sentient being not invoke or excite wonder in humans. It should awaken wonder which should provoke thinking, but also a wonder that was both poetic and cognitive. The animal invites thought. Animals should get us thinking.

I was glad that my father's intervention prevented me from developing as child a desire or need to possess wild animals as pets or keeping them in state of captivity. My father recognized something in himself in my fascination for animals or living creatures. He was also drawn to animals; he had a natural interest and curiosity in animals. This was something we shared, something we recognized in each other. And I have remained incurably curious about animals. As a child and teenager and student I needed to know their names. Knowing the names of birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects was important to me. It was something I needed to know. The mental capacity or cognitive capacity of animals has had an ambiguous history in philosophy. Hume seemed willing to concede that animals were conscious beings, with the some capacity for thought and reason.

Tapetum lucidum: a reflector system lying behind the retina in the eyes of many vertebrates reflects visible light back through the retina to the photoreceptors of the eye, increasing the night vision of animals. This reflective tissue makes the animals eyes shine at night the especially when the beams of a spot light or a car's headlights falls an animal in the dark. The shining eyes of animals in the night indicates the presence of sentient beings.

And each day 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. 168. Not to castrate any male (including animals)--Leviticus 22:24

169

An explanation of what sentience is in itself dependents on demonstrating how sentience emerges, how it as a condition or property emergences. We recognized sentience when we see it, but even so, we don't really what it is. Sentience involves awareness, the capacity to be aware. What does it mean to be aware? What does awareness, or the state of being aware, entail? What is the mechanism, how does it work?

And each day 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. 169. The High Priest must not marry a widow—Leviticus 21:14

170

Random thought: From early childhood Malcolm was a hazard to himself and to me. He had pyromaniac tendencies from which he was never ever really cured.

And each day 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. 170. The High Priest must not have sexual relations with a widow even outside of marriage—Leviticus 21:14

171

At each moment I find myself at the threshold of nothingness, the future does not exist, my life is not a story, my life is not following any kind of story line in accordance with some unfolding narrative, but the universe is open even though it is causally closed. This may sound like a paradox but causality and necessity do not negate the condition of possibility for an infinite variety of unexpected contingencies. If my life is a story which can be told then everything is predetermined.

And each day 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. 171. The High Priest must marry a virgin maiden—Leviticus 21:13

172

The story of my life is the story of the restless heart that Saint Augustine writes about in his Confessions. I have a queer woman's heart beating in my breast and it is desire and passion that makes it restless. The heart is the wellspring of desire and passion. At Vilanculos I felt the same kind of excitement being churned up by the restlessness of my heart. Now at Jan Smuts a full hour before our flight to Madrid I feel the awakening of my restless heart. To kill time before boarding we wondered about in the departure lounge. I struggle to contain my excitement. This was the first time that I would be embarking on an aeroplane flight. I was breathless with desire and passion, I suddenly want Kate to make love to me in the women's toilets.

I felt as hot as hell with lust and feelings of sensuality. Like Kate I am a sensual person. Kate literary oozes sensuality. Now I am so hot that I am panting like an animal on heat I want Kate to fuck me. I am a wanton woman, I feel like whispering my fantasy of my desire in her ear: 'I want you to fuck me in the public toilets.' Instead I follow her into the Central News Agency, she says that she wants to buy a book or two to read on the flight and on our holiday. She is oblivious of the state that I am in. I gaze at the shelf stacked with classical fiction. The title 'A Thief's Journal' catches my eye. I flip through pages. I am surprised, I am stunned and I am amazed. What is this book doing on a bookshop in South Africa, how did it escape the surveillance of the censors? The book by Jean Genet is dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre has composed a foreword to the novel. I decide that I will buy the book. I scan the other titles, thinking that maybe there is also book written by Sartre. I know about Sartre, his name has been dropped in conversations that I have eavesdropped on inadvertently among the student Left at Wits. Now suddenly the name SARTRE jumps out among the titles. It belongs to the novel called 'Nausea'. I decide to purchase the two paperback books. At the cashier Kate looks at my two books. She has never heard of the authors. She pays for her two murder mysteries. I find pulp fiction boring. I make a pretence of interest while remaining silent about my personal opinion regarding her literary tastes.

And each day 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. 172. A Kohen must not marry a divorcee—Leviticus 21:7

173

Women are ruled by their sensual desires

In his 'Timaeus' Plato describes the creation of men and women. Men were created first, they were the first generation of humans. The soul was implanted into the bodies of men and all men were initially equal as a race of superior beings, like a race of rational supermen. However, the implantation of a soul into the bodies of men also gave them the faculties of sensation, and with the faculties of sensation, feelings such as love, desire, fear and anger became possible. Men who were able to conquer and control the bodily passions of love, desire, fear and anger, lived courageous, moral, righteous and upright lives. Men who were unable to control their passions of love, fear, desire and anger began to live unrighteous lives and because of this became transformed into women. In this scheme of creation woman are the second generation of human being and represent the second sex, which is the female sex. Women are slaves to their bodily passions and bodily desires, because they are unable to control their feelings of love, fear, desire and anger. They are under the control of their bodily sensations. According to Plato, women are ruled by their sensual desires and appetites.

And each day 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. 173. A Kohen must not marry a zonah (a woman who had forbidden relations)--Leviticus 21:7

174

The boundary separating the human and the animal is artificial. From an ideological perspective or from a scientific conceptual perspective this boundary of separation between humans and animals can be logically and rationally breached or dissolved as an illusion. It has already been breached in the 'order and governance' of Nature in terms of evolutionary biology. Phylogenetically there is no ontological or onto-theological abyss separating humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Phylogenetically speaking 'man' has not been created in the image of God as a being that is fundamentally different from all other living organisms. The idea that 'man' was created in the image of God cannot be taken literally. It can only be appropriated as a cultural myth which articulates a narrative of paradox and irony. Only as a mythological or fictional narrative of irony and paradox does the Genesis Edenic story of Adam and Eve become revelatory with respect to existential challenges that are of Ultimate Concern to the life and fate of humans.

We have evolved from the same common ancient single cell animal ancestor. There has been no divinely initiated physical or biological or metaphysical or ontological or onto-theological rupture which has separated us as humans and the rest of the Animal Kingdom. There are no gaps or chasms which can separate us from our evolutionary roots in the Animal Kingdom. There are only inseparable phylogenetic lineages and links that bind us genetically together, that connect us within a common genetic continuum which stretches back all the way to the one ancestor that we all share. We are all related. Language and textualization cannot fix the boundary between the human and the animal kingdom. Language and textualization of the spoken word cannot erase our shared phylogenetic history, it cannot impose a genetic abyss between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. We differ only in degree, but not in kind from the rest of the animal kingdom. We are of the same kind, we belong to the Metazoa, which are the multicellular animals.

We can visualize our place within a phylogenetic continuum, which is a continuum that merges us or integrates genetically with the rest of the Metazoa within the same phylogenetic tree, a phylogenetic tree which links all animals in the Animal Kingdom together via branching nodes to our common root which was originally a free-living single celled organism that in all likelihood resembled a Choanoflagellate-like protistan.

The Choanoflagellates which fall under the Protista and which occur in nature as unicellular and colonial flagellates are the closest living single cell relatives of the Metazoa. This means that we humans also shared a common ancestor between 700 and 500 million year ago with all modern day Choanoflagellate species.

And each day 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. 174. A Kohen must not marry a chalalah (party to or product of 169-172)--Leviticus 21:7

175

What about male and female sexual identities in humans? How did these identities come into existence? Were they God ordained or God created as the Genesis myth suggests? How does human sexual identity and human sexuality fit biological, socially and ethically into the all-embracive-scheme-and-order-of-things in which God is perceived as the source or originator of all existence and all possibilities? I will deal with this shortly. If we want to know anything about the origination of human sexuality, then the short answer is that human sexuality ultimately descended or evolved from the sexual life cycle of a Choanoflagellate-like single cell animal. Single cell sex in the Protista comes in multiple shapes and sizes in which sexual identity in terms of maleness and femaleness cannot be readily determined as would be the case with multicellular eukaryotic animals where sex determination involves the sex chromosomes. Male and female sex chromosomes only came into existence much later with the evolution of the different multicellular Metazoa phyla which occurred during the Cambrian. So in manner of speaking sex as in the cycle of cell fission and cell fusion occurred before the evolution of sex chromosomes for 'male' and 'female' sex determination. Sex evolved as the alternation of haploid and diploid generations before sexual identity in terms of our idea of maleness and femaleness came into being. Pure sex came into being before the realities of gender related issues emerged. Biologically, sex as a life-cycle phenomenon, came into existence before the conscious awareness of maleness and femaleness emerged in 'higher' animals. Before that male and female sexes as we know it today did not really exist in the primordial common ancestor of the Protista.

Sexual life cycles involving alternating changes in ploidy or chromosome number (chromosome number (n) equals n for the haploid number and 2n for the diploid number) between haploid (n) and diploid (2n) phases started with unicellular or single cell organisms belonging to the Protista. The alternation between haploid and diploid life stages in the sexual cycle involves cell fission for the formation of haploid cells and cell fusion for the formation of diploid cells.

Well I am done with sex for now! It is not really so difficult to understand what it is all about. And don't think God is monitoring our sexual behaviour so that He/She can punish us for all our sexual misdemeanours on the Day of Judgement. Of course there is a moral imperative to conduct oneself ethically in the realm of sex and sexual pleasure and I think this is more easily achieved in homosexuality than in heterosexuality. Did God lay down ground rules for human sexual behaviour? From a biological and evolutionary point of view this is not only an absurd question, it is also completely irrational.

And each day 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. 175. Not to make pleasurable (sexual) contact with any forbidden woman—Leviticus 18:6

176

The God of Reason

How we can know the will of God? The quick Hebraic answer (and Christian answer) is that God has revealed His/Her will in the Law of Moses and in the rest of the Bible. Immediately we have a problem. The Bible, both Old and New Testament have been authored by human writers and every one word that has been written in Sacred Scriptures bears the full stamp of human authorship. So it is simplistic to hold that the Bible reveals God's will or represents the revelatory word of God. The Bible just one book among many other books that have been written by humans. How can the claim be justified that the Bible represents the authoritative, infallible, inerrant, truthful, divinely inspired and revelatory Word of God. This claim cannot be justified on behalf of any book of Sacred Scripture. They are all just books filled with human writing that is plainly phantasmagorical about what God has supposedly said regarding various matters of 'religious concerns' which include instructions on how you can earn your reward in heaven when you die. A lot of what you need to do in order to earn or merit God's favour is complete rubbish from a logical or rational or moral perspective. When it comes to issues of ultimate concern regarding God, life, death, morality, immortality and God's unmerited favour, then REASON is our best guide rather than all the Sacred Books posing as God's final revelation on all truth regarding religious matters or the will of God.

Who can possibly discern the will of God? It is best to start with logic and rationality when it comes to the discernment of God's will. This would entail an exercise in what can be called Natural Theology. Now I know that this has become a dirty word amongst theologians, and especially in the case of Karl Barth. But as a natural scientist specializing in evolutionary biology I would recommend that we give REASON a chance to put its case before the jury. Let REASON have its day in court when it comes to questions regarding God's will.

Where do we start with our exercising of REASON in the making of logical and rational inferences concerning not only the will of God but also the essential nature of God? Maybe once we can agree broadly on the fundamentals regarding the essential nature of God then we may find clues regarding the nature of God's will on various matters of ultimate concern.

So here is where we start: In order for God to be God, it is metaphysically necessary that God not only be omnipotent (almighty), omniscient (all knowing), but in addition God is omnipresent ( everywhere in space and time) and omnidetermining (meaning nothing can happen without God bringing it about or providing the necessary conditions for possibility of anything). Furthermore in order of God to be God, the will of God necessarily coincides with God essence or Gods essential nature, and God essential nature converges with God's existence. In God essence cannot be separated from existence.

I have purposely avoided stating that God is supremely good or that God is all loving. I believe that these attributes are linked the idea that God is necessarily free in order to be God. But we can agree that in order for God to be God, God must be the truth, and if God is truth, then God must also be REASON.

What conclusion we draw from all of these statements? For now, the most important could be stated as followers: Nothing what we have the power to do can effect God in such manner that God thereby feels obliged or compelled to react against us, because we acted in manner that offended God, injured God, angered God, humiliated God, hurt God, insulted God, transgressed against him, and by doing such things or committing such an act we have somehow diminished God. By our actions we have put God into a position, into a state, whereby out of necessity God is compelled counter-react, possibly in punitive in manner, in order to settle the score or to take revenge or teach us a lesson and so on. If we could offend or injure or anger or humiliate or hurt or insult or transgress against or diminish God in anyway and by doing so God is compelled to react punitively in response, then God is not omnipotent or omniscient or omnideterminative or omnipresent, and from this it follows that God is not God.

And each day 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. 176. To examine the signs of animals to distinguish between Kosher and non-kosher—Leviticus 11:2

177

There is something that it is like to be a particular living creature. Every living creature has its own peculiar kind of unique experience of the world in which it finds itself. Living creatures have conscious states, they each have their own kind of awareness, their own kind of mental states.

Insentient matter. How did conscious arise from insentient matter? How did the idea of sin arise? How did the idea of forgiveness arise? Sin and forgiveness are tethered together, the one seeks the other. One has to be conscious of something in order for the experience of sin to emerge as a state or condition which clings to one like a stain, like mark. Sin is something which is created ex nihilo. It emerges from nothing because there is nothing in matter itself with its varieties of motions, powers, dispositions, properties, interactions and interrelationship from which sin could emerge as a state of affairs, as a material or physical condition, as a stain or a blot. Sin is necessarily 'something'. Something which adheres. It is also something which can be forgiven. It something which can be removed. It something which can be removed by a work of atonement. On the Day of Atonement the 'thingness' of which sin is comprised and which also gives it the capacity to adhere as condition is removed from the minds or souls or bodies of the Israelites and transferred to a scapegoat. In Leviticus 16: 21-22, in the enactment of the ritual of atonement, the high priest places both hands on the head of a goat, and in the presence of all the people of Israel he confesses their sins over the goat, a performance which renders the transfer of the sins of every Israelite onto the goat. To remove the sins the goat is then driven into the wilderness of the desert carrying the sins of Israel into oblivion, into places so remote and forsaken, even beyond the reach of God, thereby allowing their sins to disappear for ever. This ritual is supposed to facilitate the actual physical or material removal of sins of Israel in way that fasting and repentance cannot.

And each day 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. 177. To examine the signs of fowl to distinguish between kosher and non-kosher—Deuteronomy 14:11

178

After my arrest in Berea Park on that rainy night we drove back to my flat. I became an object of curiosity. They were perplexed. I felt that they were trying to fathom me. I could speak their language fluently. I even surprised myself as I listened to my own Afrikaans. I am certain it was bewildering to them that an Afrikaans speaking woman whose surname was Zeeman had regressed so far or who had fallen so far, who had stooped so low. I had betrayed 'my people'. I was a traitor to my own kind, a 'volksveraaier' (a traitor of my own people).

And each day 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. 178. To examine the signs of fish to distinguish between kosher and non-kosher—Leviticus 11:9

179

It has long been argued that animals cannot imagine or contemplate or anticipate their own deaths. It is also believed that it is this characteristic which distinguishes non-human animals from human animals. It is has been thought that it is this lack, this absence, this incapacity which creates the ultimate dividing line between the human and the animal, it is this difference which creates the yawning chasm separating humans from the rest of animal kingdom. Furthermore, it has been argued that because an animal is unable to imagine, contemplate or anticipated its own death, animals do not die. By virtue of not being able to imagine their own death, death does not exist for an animal. It has been argued by many philosophers that animals in general are unable to imagine or reflectively contemplate the future or imminent possibility of their non-existence or their extinction or the termination their lives in death, and it is these philosophical beliefs which have been taken to mean or imply by some peculiar logic that animals cannot die or that death does not exist for animals. Animals have no perception or conception or understanding of their own mortality. Their being mortal is beyond their intelligence. In line with these considerations it has been concluded that animals simply 'perish' rather than die. Only humans die. Only human fear dying. Only humans contemplate immortality or some kind of existence beyond the pale of death. In the Book of Genesis we can read the immortal words:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.'

Animals cannot die because they are incapable of having knowledge of good and evil. Morality, based on the knowledge of good and evil, also depends on the existence of the metaphysical and theological line which has been drawn between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

And each day 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. 179. To examine the signs of locusts to distinguish between kosher and non-kosher—Leviticus 11:21

180

When I was in standard one I witnessed a goat being slaughtered on a farm near Hotazel. The goat did not seem to know that it was going to die in the next few moments. In the same vein Rousseau has also argued that animals have no conception of death and dying. Anyway the goat being held by the two farm workers on the small patch of green lawn next to the farm house did not show any overt sign which could be interpreted as betraying its fear of death. According to Rousseau the goat did not fear death because it could not imagine death. The goat did not know what it means to die, like the chickens my Ouma slaughtered in the backyard of their home, the meaning of death and dying was beyond the goat's comprehension, like the chickens my Ouma slaughtered the goat had no knowledge of good and evil, and so not having any knowledge of good and evil, it could not die, it could only perish without knowing beforehand that its life was about to be terminated for good.

The goat stood there without showing any visible signs of fear or anxiety at the imminent prospect of its own death. It just stood there quietly, filled with its own mysterious abundance of animal life, it heart beating, its brain alert, its goat eyes staring with a subtle glimmer of animal intelligence, it was a living sentient being which showed all the evidence of being fully conscious, of being aware of its surroundings but not aware of its situation, of its predicament. With a small sharp knife they slit its throat, the blood gushed with powerful spurts from the severed jugular vein into a large white enamel tub. The goat perished before my eyes, it ceased to be a sentient being, it eyes had become unseeing and its consciousness vanished. The living creature had disappeared, it was no longer alive, it was longer there, its absence was palpable, and all that was left was its unmoving, inanimate body, a body that was no longer aware of itself or of its surroundings. The transition from life to death was irreversible. This was the thought that whirled around in my brain as I watched them slaughter the goat. They quickly and deftly skinned, gutted and dismembered the goat. Being previously exposed to the slaughtering of chickens as a young child I had in a sense become familiar with the irreversible processes and 'phase transitions' involved in the violent death of animals. This was my Afrikaner heritage. The killing of animals was part and parcel of that heritage.

And each day 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. 180. Not to eat non-kosher animals—Leviticus 11:4

181

Animals as fully self-aware sentient beings exist outside the human world of language not by voluntary self-exile, but by the line of exclusion that has been drawn by humanity. For Martin Heidegger language is the great unbridgeable abyss that separates humans from animals. Heidegger also denies that animals have a world. They are essentially 'worldless'. Can animals be really worldless? What does having a world actually mean? What does it mean for an animal to be without a world? Animals can only exist as living beings by inhabiting a niche. There can be no life without a niche. Occupying a niche is central to an animal's existence and way of life. As a concept is not the niche a kind of world, is it not equivalent to a world? How does a niche differ from a world? How does a niche become a world? Did not humans start their evolutionary history as niche inhabiting animals before they became world possessing beings? Do humans now have worlds in contradistinction to the idea that animals inhabit niches? Humans have worlds and animals inhabit worlds which are niches. But humans do indeed occupy a niche, they inhabit a niche, their niche is the entire planet. Their world is co-extensive with everything that exists, in this sense the human world embraces everything, it contains everything, it incorporates everything, it a Totalizing act of incorporation, of containment, of occupation and of possession. It is matter becoming conscious of the Totality of Reality as a Habitant, as a Niche of Intelligibility. This is the World that humans occupy. This is possibly the real difference between humans and animals. In the world of the animal, is not the idea of inhabiting a niche central to the 'being' of an animal? There are several different competing ecological theories of what constitutes a niche.

But Darwin shatters the distinction between the human and the animal. With Darwin the chasm separating the human from the animal vanishes. After Darwin the relations between the human and the animal are no longer one of distinctions, of differences, of otherness or alterity, but instead it becomes a relationship of continuity, of graduations, of degree, of merging, of transition, of shared ancestor, of kinship, of common descent. After Darwin the human is restored to its authentic animality. After Darwin the human animal no longer dies as before, and the knowledge of good and evil proves to be an illusion. The Darwinian slow but relentless revolution which was triggered following his publication of 'The Origin of the Species' has finally started to usher in the great reversal and the great undoing of the humanistic enlightenment. Darwin's 'Origins of the Species' presages or inaugurates the end of human history which is marked by humanities return to animality, an event which has been noted by Kojève in his reading of Hegel. The evolving World of human habitation where 'habitation' means possession, occupation, comprehension, understanding, grasping, knowing is in fact the process of matter's growing awareness of its own Reality.

And each day 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. 181. Not to eat non-kosher fowl—Leviticus 11:13

182

Darwin's 'Origin of the Species' destroyed the religious and metaphysical foundations that underpinned the human - animal divide. Understanding that we humans are products of biological evolution is part and parcel of the Natural Life History of Consciousness, its emergence from its slumber in the bosom of the dormant power of inorganic and inanimate matter, the elemental debris and dust left behind by dying stars, its birth in the animation of inanimate elements that took place with the emergence of life, and its journey into the Universe of Conscious Awareness, the Worldhood of the World emerged as a Reality to be contemplated , in a self-contemplation and self-reflection ignited or triggered by a growing awareness of its own collective and extensive selfhood within the awesome vastness of space and time, the Universe eventually became aware of its own Intelligibility, the impenetrable mystery of its own Being. The question remains: What is the real meaning of its intelligibility, what is the significance behind its intelligibility. This is the real origination of the big 'WHY?' that haunts our consciousness, which becomes the well spring of theology, if not also political theology.

Physicists propose that empty space exerts a force. Astronomers report that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. Something acting against the force gravity being exerted by total mass of the Universe is driving the expansion of the Universe. Some kind of latent energy arising from empty space itself called dark energy gives rise to a repulsive force opposing the retarding action of gravity.

What about the idea of the existence of 'nothing'. The closest we can get to something which has been referred to 'nothing' by physicists is the quantum vacuum field which is something rather than nothing. Which means we cannot escape the physical into something called nothing. Anyway where does the quantum vacuum field itself come from, it cannot come from nothing if there is no nothing? The philosopher's idea of nothing does not have any existence. There is no nothing. Nothing cannot be!

Some philosophers of mind propose that mental states which include the full range of the different kind of conscious awareness, including all kinds of feelings, emotions, thoughts and experiences, are correlated, as in physically or causally correlated, with physical brain states, possibly reducible in turn to physical events occurring at several levels within the brain from the macro to the micro to the molecular to the atomic to the electronic to the quantum mechanical. If this is so, then consciousness emergences as a consequence of 'the interactive motions' of a complex physical system of machinery.

The Laws of Nature cannot exist independently of the will of God if God is really God. God's will necessarily converges with God's essence, which means God's exerts her will in a manner which is always consistent with God's essence or nature. The Laws of Nature are an expression of the divine will. If God's will converges with Gods essence then the Laws of Nature are also an expression of God's essence. The divine correlates of divine will-Laws of Nature-divine essence all converge with God's existence. In this sense God's will are the Laws of Nature and God is the Laws the Nature because God's existence cannot be separated from God's essence and this is the mode of God's immanence in the Universe and in the whole of Reality. Also in this manner or mode of being, God is the Truth and the Way. It is in also through this mode of her being that God is immanent within the Totality of Reality. It is also through this mode of her being that God preserves and sustains everything which exists and it is also by virtue of this that anything and everything can existence.

Rule, Reign and Realm: The rule or reign of God can also be conceived as something which is immanent within the realm of material existence. It is by virtue of the rule or reign of God which has a transcendent and immanent dimension that the material existence of everything becomes concretized or instantiated, or in other words emerges as one possibility within the horizon of infinite possibilities. For God to be truly God, the realm of God's rule or reign is always the realm of infinite possibilities, because God is infinite in every sense of what it means for a being to be infinite. The realm of God's rule is God's Kingdom.

God's rule as the ultimate condition for all possibility: As the infinite being God is by definition the First Cause or the preeminent or the ultimate condition of possibility for all causes. In this sense God is the Prime Mover. The idea of God being by definition the First Cause or the Prime Mover does not fully convey the sense of God being the Ultimate Condition of all possibilities. The idea of God's rule, reign and realm invites us to rethink the idea of God. For example, as Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes in his book 'Theology and the Kingdom of God, God's being and existence cannot be conceived apart from this rule. God is identical with Her power in the sense that Her being is Her power. In this sense as Pannenberg righty argues God's being or existence and God's rule are inseparable. As the ultimate condition of all possibility God's being and God's rule is always in the process of coming to be. This is what makes God the Infinite Being, the fullness or finality of infinitely of God's being or existence or rule or reign or realm cannot be circumscribed within any dimension or framework, as the expansiveness of the dimension of God is infinite. This is why any self-disclosure or self-revelation or instantiation of God within the realm of the finite to a finite being always entails on God's part an act of self-emptying or kenosis and the paradigm for this event would be God's incarnation in space and time.

Revolution and the Kingdom of God/Heaven: According to Albert Schweitzer's book 'The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity' the idea of the Kingdom of God was originally invented and developed by first the pre-exilic prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, further developed by the exile prophet Ezekiel, and then still further elaborated by the post-exilic prophets Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Joel and Danial. Ironically and paradoxically the prophetic idea of the Kingdom of God and the day of God's judgment arose with the waning and eventual collapse and disintegration of the Oligarchies of the Judean and Northern Kingdoms. The idea of the kingdom of God which had been developed in the pre-exilic, exilic and post exilic prophetic writings underwent a profound paradigm shift in the preaching and teaching of Jesus on the eve of the second temple period, before the inevitable destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. With the teachings of Jesus the idea of the Kingdom of God in Gospels was finally decoupled from the existence of the Oligarchy. In this paradigmatic shift the message of the prophets regarding the Day of Yahweh is finally consummated with God's judgement being passed on the Oligarchy, and Judaism retreated from the stage of history into inward exile, with Jews of the diaspora adopting a new life history strategy of parasitic dependence on the life sustaining resources and opportunities created by the Gentile Oligarchies who tolerated their presence within the city gates of the great metropoles of the World.

The idea of the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven, which we can express jointly as Kingdom of God dash Kingdom of Heaven as follows 'Kingdom of God/Heaven', carries a freight of multiple and an ever expanding series of motifs , and should therefore always be viewed as something, a state of affairs, which is all inclusive and multidimensional with regard to its points of reference or frame of reference, an should therefore always be comprehended as an embracing or ultimate or totalizing concept, and as a consequence of this it is also something which necessarily embodies a radical-revolution tension between what is conceived as the reign or rule or realm of God and the existing order, an order concretely instantiated in time and space by the prevailing social forces and material conditions which shape the forms of human existence , and it is precisely this which gives the idea of the Kingdom of God/Heaven it eschatological and apocalyptic dimension.

The full meaning of the Eschatological and the associated Apocalypse within the context of the Kingdom of God/Heaven: Firstly the full meaning, within the framework of the Bible, of the eschatological and the associated apocalypse cannot be reduced to a singular finite temporal future eventuality which can be referred to or encapsulate 'this is the End!', as in this is the end of the world or the end of history or the end of time. The eschatological or the apocalypse is not an ending of things in this sense, rather it is the End which is reached in the event of comprehending and attaining knowledge of Finality, where the Finality of all things, of everything, is disclosed in terms of what is the Ultimate Meaning and Significance of Being and Existence. And this can only be attained by entering into a fellowship with God which is something which cannot be attained or achieved or earned or merited by means of human effort or by obeying commandments or adhering to observances and so on and so forth. It is something which God alone initiates. This is the full meaning of the Eschaton, which is the Final End, the Event as in the realized Eventuality, of the divine plan of God. Etymologically speaking, the word eschaton has been derived from the Greek word ἔσχατον (éskhaton), where the neuter singular ἔσχατος (éskhatos) means the final or the last, and in this sense the eschaton has an eschatological and apocalyptic ring, it embodies the End. The eschaton as the moment of Finality which was realized proleptically in the words of Jesus uttered from the Roman cross 'it is finished!' The Eucharist or Mass is a sacrament of the Eschaton. Jesus as God incarnate, as the Word made flesh, is the eschaton, his life, death and resurrection embodies the eschaton, as the embodiment of the eschaton these events inaugurated proleptically the end of history or the eschatological end, and in this sense they were apocalyptic. In Jesus the definitive meaning of human history within the historical framework of the origin and ending of the State and the Oligarchy has been revealed once and for all. The meaninglessness or irrationality or absurdity which characterizes the history of the City, the State and the Oligarchy, a history of relationships based on domination, embodies or exemplifies or instantiates or brings into existence the eschatological crisis, a crisis catalysed by the confrontation between rule of the Oligarchy and the reign of God's kingdom. The eschatological crisis has been triggered by the face of suffering mirrored in those whom God refers to as the least of these brothers and sisters of mine (Gospel of Matthew 25: 31 – 46). In an act of self-emptying or kenosis, God as Jesus from Galilee, expresses eschatological solidarity and comradeship with those oppressed by the elite rulers of the Oligarchy, it is eschatological solidarity because the end (the eschaton) of oppression is already insight and is already breaking into history (apocalypse).

The Kingdom of God/Heaven versus the City, the State and the Oligarchy: Before the historical advent of the mission and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth the problematic and underlying crisis of the kingdom of God/Heaven versus the existence of the Oligarchy had a long prophetic pre-history in the Old Testament. It was the pull of the Oligarchy in the imagination, dreams and ambitions of ruling elites which thrust the tribal Israelites into the theatre of the war of competing States and their Kingdoms. In the context of these wars over resources the idea of a monotheism was gradually fleshed out. Monotheism in form of 'the God on our side' and the 'God who chose us to be his people' began to unfold in the imagination. No one had a monopoly on the idea of monotheism, but different motifs of monotheism began to be adapted in the service of Oligarchic existence. With rise of Oligarchies, it was an idea whose time had arrived, first in Persia and then elsewhere. It was something which was in the air and something which worked for the elite and for the Oligarchy, and in the case of the Israelites the Oligarchy included the hegemonic idea of a divinely instituted covenant and a covenantal relationship with God which was articulated as in the literary form of Noble Lies. The rise of the State and Oligarchy paved the way for the invention and development of writing by the ruling elite. Writing then paved the way for inscription of Noble Lies. Writing was invented independently in the great centres of Oligarchical development in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The development of writing in the form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script can be traced back without interruption or discontinuities over a period of 10 000 years extending back to the dawn of the agrarian revolution in the Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris-Euphrates rivers. By 3000 BC in the Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent writing in the form of phonetic signs or marks representing the sounds of speech had been fully developed. By 1500 BC the so-called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite alphabet with its set of 22 letters had been developed with each letter standing for a single sound of the voice. By combining the different letters in in various ways written words could be created and speech could be transcribed into writing.

The oldest Hebrew manuscripts discovered so far, the Dead Sea Scrolls, do not date back further than 300 BC. Orthodox or Rabbinic Judaism claims that the Oral Torah was given to Moses at Mount Sinai in 1312 BC. Modern scholarly consensus holds that the written Torah was composed over several centuries as the work of multiple authors and the first draft of the written Torah was completed sometime between late 700 and early 600 BC. There is no evidence that the Torah or Pentateuch had been written earlier than 700 BC. Evidence confirms that Hebrew was already a written language between the periods 800 or 700 BC which coincided with the existence of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

A very brief archaeological overview of Israelitic early history: There are huge difficulties in reconstructing the early historical origins of Israel within the Bronze Age before any king ruled Israel, before Israel became a kingdom with its own state, before Israel became just another Oligarchy. In the Near East the Bronze Age extending from about 3330 to 1200 BC was characterized by individual city-states. Following the collapse of the Bronze Age the Iron Age appears to have begun in the Levant round about 1200 BC, roughly coinciding with the emergence of the people who became known as the Israelites. Following the collapse of late Bronze Age civilizations in eastern the Mediterranean basin, tribes or clan which had been previously nomadic pastoralist began to re-settle in the mountainous region on both sides of the Jordon River in regions which we now identify as Judea and Samaria. The word 're-settle' was used because archaeological evidence indicates regular or frequent transitions between nomadic pastoral lifestyles in the surrounding lowlands and settled or sedentary lifestyles in the Palestinian hill country situated on either side of the Jordan River. By the 10th century BC these Israelitic settlements in the hill country had reached a population size in the region of 45 000, and the population began to also spread into the surrounding lowlands. From the permanent hill country settlements and low land occupations the United Kingdom of Israel eventually emerged as a regional Oligarchical polity. After the death of Solomon in 930 BC the United Israelitic Kingdom split into what would became the Kingdom of Judah (southern region) and the Kingdom of Israel (northern region). The two Kingdoms co-existed as separate but competing and antagonistic Oligarchical polities for two centuries. The Kingdom of Judah being comparative small, numbering about 5 000, existed as a vassal state of the northern Kingdom of Israel until 900 BC before breaking away over grievances relating to taxation and forced labour. In the late 8th century BC the northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian invasion (722 BC). In 587 BC after laying Jerusalem in a state siege Nebuchadnezzar II the king of Babylonian conquered Jerusalem, destroying the first Temple in the process. To incapacitate and decommission the ruling Judean Oligarchy the Judean ruling elite were deported from the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon. The Jewish exiles and their descendants who belonged to the Judean elite adapted quite readily to the Babylonia way of life adopting the local language, script and legal traditions within a short space of time. Following the conquest of Babylon by the Persian Empire under King Cyrus the Great the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in 516 BC. During the 70 year Babylonian exile the members of the Jewish elite authored the literature which eventually gave rise to the Old Testament making it a Judean biased creation.

In the period preceding the formation of the Israelitic Kingdoms round about 1 000 BC the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamian and Egypt had already being in existence for 2000 years and had during this period developed a written record history. In addition to historical documentation of events there also existed various literary, cultural and technological achievements.The Israelites themselves became inadvertent heirs of the cultural, social and technological legacies of great, long lived, well established, and flourishing and remarkably sophisticated civilizations.

Diversion: In the back of my mind the question which continues to preoccupy me is whether the 'truth' of the Bible, especially the Pentateuch's account of the origins of Israel as the elected people of God, stands or falls on whether the Torah based narratives of the early origins of Israel are historically true. What if it is not historically true? Should historical veracity be the only criteria for judging truthfulness especially with respect to Old Testament narratives? Of course, speaking from a literary point of view, historical veracity is the not only standard or criteria of truth when it comes to the Bible, especially if we view truth as a system. The time of the Patriarchs seems to be out of historical reach and because of this they will always exist as characters shrouded in mystery. However, even when historical evidence seems to non-existent, the wide variety of Biblical narratives are saturated with all kinds of details and information which have ethnographic, anthropological, social, economic, political and cultural significance and meaning, which reverberate with truthfulness and profound insightfulness. The literary genres of the embodied in the various Biblical narrative are obviously not historical. What could be historical about speaking snakes, talking donkeys, turning staffs into snakes, prophet swallowing fish, wondering about for forty years in the desert, manna from heaven, the pillar of cloud and fire guiding the Israelites and so on and so forth. What about the paucity of historical evidence regarding the exile, mass enslavement and oppression of the Hebrews in Egypt, the biography of Moses including his floating as an infant in the Nile in a basket made from bulrushes sealed with pitch and then his confrontation with the burning bush in the desert, the Exodus out of Egypt which he lead, the crossing of the Jordon River after the death of Moses, the conquest and capture of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, the collapsing walls of Jericho, the stories of the Book of Judges including the exploits of Samson and the Philistines? The popular beliefs regarding the origins of Israel and the Jewish people are based on the putative historicity of the narratives regarding the Hebrew Exile in Egypt, the Exodus, Moses receiving the Law at Mount Sinai, and the conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land. What if these narratives have no foundation in history? What if they are all fictions? What if they are founding myths composed during the Babylonian Exile? What if they bear the mythological and cultural influences of the Canaanites? What if comparative Near Eastern studies are able to discern similarities in oral traditions, sagas, legends, folklore, forms, themes, motifs, mythology and mythopoetic traditions in the literature of the Old Testaments? What if the specific covenant treaty form underlying the Ten Commandments bears remarkable similarities in form to those composed in ancient Hittite culture? What if the Israelites originated from a clan of semi-nomadic proto-Israelitic pastoralists who happened to have co-existed with other pastoral tribes in Canaan and who had never ever set foot in Egypt? Long term co-existence of proto-Israelitic tribal clans with other tribal Canaanites would go a long way in explaining the existence of parallel Near Eastern traditions and other Near Eastern cultural-anthropological resonances and affinities within the literature of the Old Testament. What if cross-cultural fertilization through diffusion, transmission, copying and plagiarism of practices, ideas and oral traditions between the different tribal clans within the Near East was actually quite rife? These possibilities would obviously jar with the religious sensibilities and theological self-perceptions of the post-900 BC Judean community who would have had real material and political interests in retaining the hegemonic and ideologically invested social-religious constructions which they had invented for themselves, especially for the ruling elites who occupied the upper ranks of the Judean Oligarchy. These possibilities would also jar with Orthodox Judaism and with modern Evangelical Christianity as it would undermine not only the perceived tribal uniqueness of the Jewish people as a covenantal people chosen by God, but also the special status of the Old Testament, and especially the written and oral Torah, as being divinely inspired by God, and therefore being the inerrant, infallible, authoritative revelation of God. Various social studies, including cultural anthropology have shown that cross-cultural transmission of all kinds of influences are unavoidable, unavoidable even with regard to the literary composition of the Old Testament. Near Eastern archaeological studies have revealed that the material conditions of social existence and life histories of the ancient Canaanites and the proto-Israelitic tribes shared many resembles indicating strong cross-cultural transmission of technologies, traditions and practices. Artefacts of material culture in various forms including the most obvious such as pottery in the archaeological stratigraphy of settlements would reveal not only the existence of long term continuities in cultural practices but also sudden shifts or disjunctions. Shifts, disjunctions and changes in the patterns and forms of material culture would signal the historical occurrence of dramatic events such as invasions, displacements, colonization, and the arrival of foreign occupants who have become established as permanent residents. Did a mass invasion of 600 000 or more Israelites escaping from Egypt sweep as a conquering force into Canaan and in the process importing all kinds of material cultural artefacts which would be the smoking gun, the forensic evidence that an invasion and colonization of Canaan by Israelites had indeed taken place? The discrepancies between the Exodus and Joshua accounts of the Old Testament and the material evidence of the archaeological stratigraphy place a question mark on the historicity of the Pentateuch. Could it be that the Pentateuch or Torah is indeed a work of fiction? Did Israelites become Israelites by a less dramatic and more mundane historical avenue? Could they have not developed into the pre-900 Israelites in situ rather than as invading colonizers from Egypt?

Is it possible to engage theologically or politically or philosophically in an authentic fashion with the Pentateuch or Torah especially given the fact that the Exodus narratives of God liberating the Israelites from their house of bondage in Egypt by means of a series of marvellous signs and wonders, involving the subduing of the Egyptians, involving the giving of the Law by God at Sinai, and then finally involving God leading the dispossession of the indigenous Canaanites of their land in fulfilment of the covenantal promises originally made to Abraham from whom the Israelites putatively descended, when all of these accounts are completely without credible historical foundation. Under a more jaundiced or sceptical view of things, this claims seem to be too fantastic, they are fabulous, fabulous in the sense of having no basis in reality, fabulous in the sense of being legendary, mythical, imaginary, fictitious, apocryphal and folklorish. To re-emphasize, it is not only the absence of historicity coupled with the fabulousness of the Torah which makes the Torah questionable and problematic, the Torah is also theologically, politically, philosophically and metaphysically questionable and problematic? Yet all of these Torah based claims are not only foundational to the formation of ancient Israelitic identity but are also foundational for continuation or preservation of modern Jewish identity. These claims are significant because they contributed to the solidifying of post-Babylonian exile Judean identity and were foundational for the development of Judaism as a religious institution, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 AD. Out of all of this the Jew emerges as a fabulous and fantastical figure, living a magical, almost gypsy-like existence at the boundaries of reality, claiming possession as the rightful heir of all the world's splendour.

If we concede for want of historical evidence: 1) that God did not make any covenantal promise to an individual of doubtful historical existence called Abraham; 2) that there no Hebrew slaves in Egypt; 3) that God did not liberate the Israelites from slavery in Egypt; 3) that there was no Exodus; 4) that there was no receiving of God's Law or covenantal promises at Mount Sinai; and 5) there was no God led Israelitic conquest, occupation and colonization of Canaan in the manner depicted in the Book of Joshua, then all we with is a mythic founding narrative embodying a powerful redemptive metaphor based on fictional covenantal promise. Yet this story from 1 to 5 has been a historical all-time best seller, a story which has captured the mind of Christendom and Western Civilization for 2 000 years. Now we have strong reasons to cast doubt on the truthfulness of this story, we can no longer just buy into it. But can we doubt the story in its entirety because of lack of evidence. The Christian and Jewish defenders of the historical truthfulness of the story argue that lack of positive evidence does not necessarily mean or logically entail absence of evidence. But still positive archaeological evidence supporting the slavery of Hebrews in Egypt, the forty year Exodus in the Wilderness and the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites will help anchor the story in actual space and time. What about positive disconfirmation? There is no shortage of this. The written Torah is full of implausibilities. It what way do these implausibilities make the written Torah less true? We can never know for sure anything concrete about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or even Joseph and his eleven brothers for that matter. What about the nameless wife of Potiphar or even Potiphar's own existence? But something about Potiphar's wife is most interesting and worth talking about. She is referred to as 'the African wife of Potiphar'. Maybe if Potiphar's wife was indeed an African woman then the Torah would be true! Maybe we can anchor the truth of the written Torah in that one singular fact, that Potiphar had an African wife, and possibly she was black as the night, and that is why this fact was passed on from generation to generation. It is the black woman who places the Hebrews in Egypt. It is the black woman which makes Moses' existence credible, it is the black woman which makes the liberation of the Israelite slaves by God plausible, it is the black woman who make Exodus, Mount Sinai and the conquest of Canaan plausible. The truth of whole of the Old Testament now hinges on the existence of one black woman from Africa.

The black African wife of Potiphar is pivotal to the entire drama which gave rise to the Torah. If she did not try and seduce Joseph then the enslavement of the Hebrews, the Exodus of the Israelites, the events of Moses at Mount Sinai, the conquest of Canaan, the rise of the Davidic Kingdom of Judah, Solomon and the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile, the building of the Second Temple, the post-exile development of Judaism as a religion, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the rise of Christianity would never have taken place. Eros in the form of the erotic intentions of one black women represents the corner stone on which the entire edifice of Judeo-Christianity rises. It is not Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Boaz and Ruth, David or Solomon which made origin of Israel possible, no it is none other than Potiphar's wife, the African woman. Now the seduction plot of Potiphar's wife is a common ancient Near Eastern story theme and this kind of storyline has been quite cleverly and artistically inserted into the fairly complex story of Joseph. When was the story of Joseph created and how many redactions did it go through before it entered the canon of Old Testament scripture? We don't really know, but maybe the Babylonian exile is a good place to start with. Maybe literary criticism does reveal more than we think or could hope for. Literary criticism would provide evidence regarding would could be plausible regarding the artistic composing of a narrative which becomes pivotal to the realization of the greater scheme of things in an epic drama on the scale of the origin of Israel. So where does this live us?

In the whole of Genesis Potiphar's wife emerges as one the most interesting female characters. Like Ishtar fixed her eyes on Gilgamesh, Potiphar's wife fixed her eyes on Joseph. In Genesis 39: 7, she commands Joseph (as in the imperative masculine singular) as follows: 'You lie with me' (הָ בְ כִ שׁ םִ ע). She is a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite. When Joseph hesitated, not complying immediately with her wishes, she tried to grab him. It could be that given Joseph's status as a slave she felt entitled to take sexual advantage of him. Unlike any other woman depicted in the Torah she of own volition chooses her male sexual partner for non-procreative purposes. Contrary to the Biblical norms for women she engages in role reversal by demanding sex from Joseph.

Leaving the story of Potiphar's wife aside, and going back to the Torah there are two narrative blocks, one dealing with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph and the other dealing with Moses and the Exodus. The first narrative block dealing with mainly with Patriarchs makes the Israelites indigenous to Canaan and the second narrative block dealing with the liberation of Israelites from Egypt, the Exodus and conquest of Canaan transforms the Israelites into outsiders. The two narrative blocks are joined by God's covenantal promise to Abraham and his descendants concerning the possession of Canaan. It is likely that a tribe called Israel was one of many tribes that existed in what now known as Palestine about 1200 BC ago. Also occupying the same region at the time were other tribes such as Hittites, Hurrians, Jebusites, Girgashite, Amorite and so on and so forth. They were all competing for finite resources and the scramble for resources would have created conflict between tribal groups, so during this time it possible quite that the situation was unstable, conflict ridden, dynamic and in state of flux with tribes occupying either the hill country or lower plains or occupy both sites, being pastoralists connected with a fixed base in a hill country settlement. It was possible out of this cauldron there would winners and losers and also merges, and a possible winner-merger was the United Kingdom of Israel. However the passage to territorial dominance of the northern and southern territories by 1000 BC would have necessarily involved violent occupation and conquest. Somehow the two narrative blocks could be merged into a single epic or else the Moses/Exodus narrative block could be seen as a founding mythology created during the Babylonian Exile.

Sweet Jane. Sweet, sweet rose.

And each day 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. 182. Not to eat non-kosher fish—Leviticus 11:11

183

In his dark world of shadows Malcolm traded in the commerce of betrayal, he traded in seduction, he traded in temptation, he traded in the gratification of desires, he traded in human weakness, he traded in hope and he traded in the currency of fear. With Malcolm the postponement of extinction could be bought, the price of life and death could be negotiated. With Malcolm the angel of death was also the angel of desire, and the angel of desire was also the angel of hope. Malcolm was the angel of desire, he could make good the desperate desire to save one's self from the pain of torture, from imprisonment and finally from death. For Malcolm, hope and betrayal, desire and betrayal, and finally fear and betrayal, were all stamped of the same counterfeit coinage, they were tradeable 'values' representing the two sides of the same coin. To him betrayal was natural, it was the gift of life, as he always proposed with great persuasion, it was indeed a very small price to pay to save yourself, and every man and every woman was fallible. No one could bring you back once you were dead. Fallibility and betrayal defined man's essential nature. He did not view betrayal as a cowardly act. For him it was a perfectly rational act. It was an act of pure self-interest. What could be more rational than one's own self-interest? What could be more rational than one's own act of self-preservation? Self-interest was self-interest, and every act of self-interest was an act of betrayal. He would explain this to the wounded or captured guerrilla, or the beaten up detainee, he would explain that the leaders of their movements were really the great betrayers, he would explain that they only had their own self-interest at heart, and that was to eat and drink their fill to the fullest. They were safely and comfortably ensconced in Luanda, in Harare, in Lusaka or in Dar es Salaam, eating and drinking with the whores of this world, and they would continue to eat and drink with the whores of this world after the so-called revolution. He told them that their leaders did not lead from the front like Fidel Castro or Ché Guevara, instead they lounged around in bars eating and drinking their fill to the fullest, growing fat, carousing with the whores of this world while their recruits died in the savannahs or died in detention, and for what he asked? The revolution will be betrayed anyway by their leaders who were nothing but prostitutes and whores, without any integrity. This was the story line he sold and it worked. Malcolm had survived many bloody contacts with insurgents in southern Angola, the smell and shock of cordite, of blood, of mangled bodies, of wounded men in agony, of the captured and of the innumerable dead were all too familiar scenes. Often the voice of sanity was reason enough for betrayal. It was very often a rational decision and a well-considered act especially under the circumstances if it was a life and death issue. But betrayal was also an act of succumbing to seductions, succumbing to temptations that were humanly irresistible. Betrayal involves succumbing to the power of desire. In this sense every man and every woman is drawn ineluctably into betrayal. What is betrayal? Betrayal involves a very specific kind of violation. At a raw fundamental level betrayal involves a violation of trust concerning a matter of common reciprocal concern and interest. At a political level betrayal involves a violation of a social contract which results in the destruction of solidarity. Betrayal as a violation of trust necessarily involves an act of treachery. But no Zeeman will succumb to the seduction of betrayal. Malcolm did not want me to betray the movement or the comrades because I would be betraying the Zeeman name. Where did Malcolm come up with this idea that the Zeeman name stood for something? Our father was a very ordinary man, he suffered from all the mundane moral frailties that were the common traits of all humanity, and what about our ancestral lineage, the procession of our grandfathers did not amount to much apart from the fact that a Zeeman did die as a guerrilla, as a freedom fighter if you like, fighting the British in the Boer War. This idea of the greatness of the Zeeman name was about Malcolm. It was about his personal sense of honour. It had everything to do with his pride, with his vanity, with his image as a fearless warrior. It was about the myth that he created about being a Zeeman, he wanted to believe that nothing will break the resolve of a Zeeman, and in his mind he wanted to believe that we were tough 'critters', we were supposed to be unbreakable. Family pride was at stake in his mind. Yet in retrospect all of this was understandable. At his inner-most core he was military man, a soldier, a warrior. He upheld the warrior code, which was to be disciplined, obedient to orders, brave and fearless in the face of death, better to die in honour than live in dishonour. It was about that mysterious thing called valour, honour and the warrior code. And it was a question of honour and of respect, especially self-respect, but in the end it was all about respect, everything hinged on respect. Malcolm was no different from a Mafioso boss. He had paid his dues in death and violence. And he had survived. He was a man to be respected. Respect was his due.

And each day 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. 183. Not to eat non-kosher flying insects—Deuteronomy 14:19

184

All the questions regarding the significance of our relationship to animals, and to the ideas that we have formed about ourselves as human beings cannot be ignored. The questions I have in mind are not reducible to zoological or ethical questions. The questions are more fundamental and have a direct bearing on the validity of our anthropocentric view of the Universe and they pose a critical challenge to our self-perception and self-understanding. The questions challenge the validity and truthfulness of the traditional and classical onto-theological claims that underpin our self-conceptions which we have formed of ourselves as humans.

Traditionally onto-theology has historically dealt with the ontology of God, that is, the being, reality, nature, essence and existence of God. In general, ontology deals with the essential nature of things or entities. Traditionally, ontology has dealt with questions regarding the essential nature or the 'whatness' of things. It has also become associated with the question of the being of things and with the question of the meaning of being. In this sense ontology has become associated with the philosophical investigation into the nature or meaning of being. This latter kind of investigation has had a direct bearing on our philosophical understanding of animals in relations to who and what we are. Ontology is also about existence and essences, and how do things exist, how they exist essentially, and ontology has to deal with the fact that if something exists, it can only exist in a certain way, and that is, it can only exist by virtue of its essential nature. An electron can only exists as an electron by virtue of its properties which include its powers and dispositions. If any of these are taken away the electron ceases to exist as an electron. A new articulation of onto-theology came into prominence with Martin Heidegger. I recall that I would have to expand on realism with respect to essentialism. Something, which we call X, can only exist as an X, by virtue of X having the following predicates or properties: colour (a), shape (b), mass (c), volume (d), temperature (e), texture (f), scent (g), sound (h), powers or dispositions or capacities, (i) relations with other objects, and chemical composition (j), and all of these, that is, the predicates a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i an j define its essential nature (essential nature = N, where N defines the set of predicates {a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j}), and X can only exist as X by virtue of N. Which is to say for X to be something it is essential X be characterized by having N. Which is the same as stating that X can only exist in terms of its essential nature, otherwise it cannot exist as X. So contrary to Sartre it seems that existence does not precede essence, but essence in the form of having N becomes the necessary condition of possibility for X to exist or for X to be. In other words X is X or X exists as X by virtue of its having a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i and j as its properties. For X to be X it necessary for X to be a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i and j. The copula 'is' has the same meaning and sense as 'to be' or 'to exist'. The predicates a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i and j are classed as primary predicates. From the position of realism all truth claims are satisfied by consistency or correspondence with what is called 'objective reality'. Objective reality determines whether a claim about something is true or false. This condition or test is built into the methodology of science and scientific progress has been made possible by believing in the existence of an objective reality. We could not test hypotheses if we did not believe in an objective reality which was empirically accessible in terms of scientific experimentation. And the success of the scientific enterprise, it progress and the growth of scientific knowledge all justify the truth and certainty of the belief in the existence of an objective reality or determinative physical reality which is empirically accessible. The belief that science has been made possible by virtue of the existence of an objective and independent reality, or a determinative physical reality, appears to be true or at least justified. So the case for realism appears to be convincing given the success of the scientific method and the inexorable progress of science.

Now here is the problem: According to Gottlob Frege existence cannot be a primary predicate or property of anything. Redness, heavier than, larger than, round or square, hot, wet, beautiful, rough, smelly or noisy, can all work as primary predicates or properties for something. What is the difference between redness and existence? Existences not a primary predicate of things. We can ask whether something can be red or round or hot with a simple yes or no. If X is universally in all space and time red, round and hot, then we are justified in saying that for X to be X is necessary for X to red, round and hot. X is X by virtue of it being red, round and hot. True claims or true propositions about something being the case, like X is red, count as true propositions because they observationally based, atomic and present-tensed. This specific X before me is red. X is red! It seems apparently justified that the claim that 'X is red' also holds for the claim that 'X exists', because the claim that X exists is also a observational, atomic and present-tensed proposition. It is the existence of physical determinative reality which makes both claims equivalent in terms of predication. Given the existence of physical determinative reality then if X is red, then X necessarily exists, and if X exists then X is necessarily red. X, redness and existence are constituents of the same objective reality. In terms of the determinative structure of physical reality X cannot be conceived or conceptualized without X existing. In terms of the determinative structure of physical reality then X's existing is a condition for conceiving X as being red. This does not mean that the notion of existence is part of the notion of X. Which means X could cease to exist in terms of the determinative structure of physical reality. In a compelling sense X as something real cannot be conceived without existing. But the existence of X is conditional on a state of affairs which are external to X. Which is to say that something exists inasmuch as something external to it exists. Which is also to say that inasmuch as X exists in a causally closed physical determinative structure its existence would always necessarily be by virtue of something which exists externally to this. Does this invite an infinite regress? There is no logically reason why an infinite regress should exist. The existence of an infinite regress would imply that an infinite series of conditions would necessarily have to first obtain in order for X to exist, and because the infinite series of conditions would never terminate, it would be impossible for X to come into existence, because the conditions for X existence would never be fulfilled. Now the long and short of this line of arguments are threefold: 1) existence is also a primary predicate of X, 2) if X exists, then X necessarily exists by virtue of the existence of something else, and 3) the conditions for X's existence can never be infinite in the form of a never terminating series of conditions. This argument is a condensed interpretation of Barry Miller's more exhaustive logical argument. Miller's argument is not a classical Contingent argument for God's existence, even if it is based on a proof that if X is red then God exists.

Nah na naa lah la laa lala, sweet Jane.

And each day 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. 184. Not to eat non-kosher creatures that crawl on land—Leviticus 11:41

185

The Era of the God is Dead Debate

The 1960s was the God-is-dead decade and Barry Miller did much to demonstrate that the generation of God-is-dead theologians much vaunted requiem sally into God's graveyard was motivated by a litany of ill-considered conclusions. They were intelligent men who had become overwhelmed by the excesses and extravagances of modernity. I think they actually lacked the intellectual resources to engage in theology in the height of the counter-cultural revolutions that prevailed during that decade and which was incubating in the preceding post-Second World War decade of the 1950s. I was born in the 1950s and I was a teenager in the 1960s. In the 1950s the beat generation came into existence and there was the publication of JD Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye', Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita', William S Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch'.

Now all of that is gone forever, never to be repeated.

In a real sense if God is truly God then no one has the capacity or power to reject God. In the same way no one has the power to cease be and still continue to exist as a living sentient being. Any attempt to reject God is the same as attempting to cease to be without having to annihilate oneself in an act of complete self-destruction. But even in an act of self-destructive annihilation everything by means of which your existence was a possibility remains intact, all that is gone is the emergent property of your own individual sentient state as a self-aware being. Your own consciousness is a mere transient flickering into existence of an ephemeral awareness before vanishing from the scene of being or existence, in the process not even creating the faintest ripple in the Cosmos.

Girl you are my angel.

And each day 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. 185. Not to eat non-kosher maggots—Leviticus 11:44

186

Something to think about.

Darwin's theory of evolution is not wrong. At the molecular level there exist built-in 'molecular engines' which possesses the molecular catalytic mechanisms and machinery to drive evolution at the molecular level of DNA with regard to the random, undirected and contingent generation of genetic recombination which is the source of heritable genetic variation on which natural selection acts. These molecular powers, predisposition, properties and capacities which make it possible for the emergence of molecular based systems to drive their own genetic self-engineering is something built into or intrinsic and innate to matter itself. This entropic and thermal fluctuation driven built-in molecular based self-engineering capacity represents the undirected driving force and agency in evolution, which is ultimately responsible for the emergence of biological complexity in all its forms, in other words the complexity which we often refer to as the emergent properties or emergent complexity in the form of biological structures and functions. The conditions or powers or predispositions for the self-generation of complexity is something which is already built into matter itself. The Physicalist or Materialist view of the Universe as a causally closed system is not something which science disputes and Darwin's theory of evolution is consistent with the Physicalist/Materialist thesis that the Universe is a causally closed system. Thus complexity including the evolution of biological complexity ultimately arises as a consequence of contingent entropic driven processes. It seems that intelligent design is evident in nature and therefore it seems that an external agency which is the Designer is the creative source of the complexity we see in biological systems. The mountain of molecular evidence does not allow for a Theistic Designer as conceived by Judaic, Islamic or Christian Monotheistic Fundamentalism. However, it is possible to have a rational founded belief in God while holding to the Physicalist/Materialist thesis of a Causally Closed Universe. A fundamental leitmotif in my own fiction is working through the Physicalist/Materialist thesis without ending up with the conclusions of Nietzsche, de Sade, Camus or Sartre. If we go down the road of accepting the Physicalist thesis of a Causally Closed Universe and still wish to believe in God, then we can if so wish. That option does exist, but only within a non-revelatory rational and logically based theoretical framework. It means that the 'theory of God' may not mirror the image of the God presented in the Bible. However - the differences can be resolved within the framework of a Dialectical Theology which resonates with the Judeo-Christian tradition. In such a theology the Hebraic and the Hellenic are engaged dialectically within a critical realist framework which also addresses the metaphysics of the Physicalist assumptions and the metaphysics of Hebraic and the Hellenic assumptions. At a more prosaic level the tactic taken is to treat the Hebraic and the Hellenic within the framework of Plato's Noble Lies or Noble Falsehood and the Allegory of the Cave. Here we interrogate the Hebraic in terms of its Cultus, Mythos, Logos and Telos, and we conduct the interrogation within the framework of Plato's Noble Falsehoods. And surprisingly enough we find Saint Paul stepping out of Plato's Cave with the Good News of the Gospel. This is also the leitmotif informing my own Journal narratives.

The unravelling of Mythos triggers the earthquakes which shatters the well laid theological foundations and it is these periodic shakings of the theological foundations and the rolling tremors of their aftershock which leaves nothing standing intact and undamaged, it is in the wake of catastrophic theological implosions that creative theological inspiration is born. In the moment of despair and hopelessness, in the aftermath of corrosive scepticism, in the dying embers of a once living faith, at the edge of dark abyss when reasons for faith and belief evaporate, it then and only then that the creative re-readings of the canonical Biblical literature, a literature which still remains after the passing of millennia the literary framework within which 'theological knowledge' in the form of truth claims can still be advanced, and it is in the work of the re-reading and re-thinking that their revelatory power is unleashed, unleashed once more in ways in which their message and meaning and significance become urgently and contemporarily relevant once more. The Word as the Logos of God speaks once in the unravelling and disintegration of Mythos. The Word of God speaks in the unravelling and disintegration of Mythos, in this moment the Noble Lies are revealed for the falsehoods which they stand for, this is the moment of Revelation, this is the event of Revelation, which coincides with the exposure of the Noble Lies. Here we discover the merging moment of the Hebraic and the Hellenic in the Idea of the Good. The birth of Christianity from the womb of Judaism was such a moment. The Reformation was also such a moment. The death of God theology was such a moment. Each moment is born from a critical and re-evaluative reading of the Biblical Canon. Why the Biblical Canon? Why that particular corpus of literature? Why has this particular literature and no other held readers in its thrall for millennia? Why are we so fascinated with the Bible? Is only a certain peculiar kind of person who remains fascinated with the Bible? Is this the mark or sign of some form of Election? Are we the Elect of God because we cannot let go of the Whole Bible, that is, the Old and New Testament? What motivates us Bible readers to care so much about the Bible? What motivates us to want to believe in God? Is this Election? Is this the Predestination of the Elect? Are we the Chosen? Anyway be that as it may, the restating of the Christian theological traditions as they have been passed down over the ages should be nothing less that re-affirming a radical orthodoxy within the framework of the Idea of the Good as mirrored in the Gospels. The Idea of the Good is inextricably intermeshed with Jesus being 'the way, truth and the life' and with 'no comes to the father accept through me'. These words are inseparable from the Idea of the Good, and everything which the Idea of the Good entails, and it this which makes claims embodied in these words as universally meaningful significant. We are duty bound to seek the Idea of the Good.

And each day 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. 186. Not to eat worms found in fruit once they have left the fruit—Leviticus 11:42

187

Insentient and inanimate matter, matter comprised of the elements of the Periodic Table, have been endowed with powers, dispositions, essences, properties and relationships. They have been endowed? This endowment is a paradoxical mystery. It is one of the greatest and most intriguing mysteries of the Universe. How have they become endowed in this manner? How have become invested with their characteristic powers, dispositions, properties and relationships. All the elements of the Periodic Table were originally created through a process of nucleosynthesis from protons, from hydrogen, in thermo-nuclear reactions during the birth, life and death of stars. How did consciousness arise from insentient matter? The protistan origins of multicellular metazoan is now beyond dispute. All metazoan, multicellular animals arose from a common colonial choanoflagellate ancestor. In turn, protistans, including choanoflagellates arose through a process of endosymbiotic evolution from prokaryotes, and prokaryotes arose from primitive macromolecular replicators that emerged from the world of RNA replicators, and RNA replicators arose from polymers of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H). The polymers built from C, N, O and H arose spontaneously from these elements which were originally synthesized during the life cycle of stars. Life and conscious arose from insentient and inanimate star dust as a natural event in the course of planetary formation during the development of solar systems which had in turn arisen from massive clouds of nebula gas and dust that had undergone self-collapsing due to gravity, where the gravitational collapsing event of gas and dusk, was triggered by the shock waves generated by the explosions of supernovas. Consciousness and life arose as a natural consequence of law governed events associated with the life cycle of stars and the gravitational driven formation of solar systems with their unique configurations of stars and planets.

Girl you are my darling angel.

And each day 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. 187. Not to eat creatures that live in water other than fish—Leviticus 11:43

188

Following the work of Galileo and Descartes the mechanical universe replaced the Aristotelian universe. According to the corpuscularian or mechanical universe the behaviour of everything was governed by laws of motion and the laws of interaction of small particles of matter. Everything that moves could be understand in terms of the behaviour of machines. The body was a machine and according to Descartes human intelligence could not reside in a machine nor could intelligence or mind or consciousness be the produced as a consequence of the mechanical behaviour of a machine. In other words intelligence or consciousness cannot be directly linked in physical fashion or coupled causally to the mechanical behaviour of the working parts of a machine. A machine was incapable of intelligence. A machine could not have a mind nor could a machine possess the mechanisms necessary for generating consciousness. Consciousness and mind were not reducible to machine behaviour, to the laws of motion and the laws of interaction governing events associated with invisible microscope particles out of which matter was composed. This is the same as saying that mind or consciousness is not something which is physical. Mind is not a physical substance. For Descartes mind was a nonphysical or immaterial substance which could not reside in any possible manner in a physical or material substance.

This is the classical reading and understanding of Descartes' Cartesianism which apparently is based on the mind-body or mind-machine dualism. Mind is irreducible to the body or to the body conceptualized as a machine. It is quite interesting and fruitful to conceptualise the Cartesian dualism in terms of the mind-machine dualism. In this formulation of the Cartesian dualism the 'problematic' revolves around the irreducibility of mind to the workings of the machine, in other words the mechanics or quantum mechanics or molecular mechanics associated working of machine in terms of the motions and dynamics of its parts.

Also central to the problematic is the question of whether mind or consciousness is a physical or non-physical thing, and how does it exist or come into being as a physical or as a non-physical thing. As a non-physical thing can mind or consciousness interact causally with machine, affecting its motions and dynamics? This is the problem, how can the non-physical entity interact causally with the physical. Only the physical can interact causally with the physical. Only the material can interact causally with the material. This is the foundational tenets of physicalism and materialism. The non-physical cannot interact causally with the physical, the non-material cannot interact causally with the material. And what about the converse? How does the physical cause the non-physical in the form of mind or consciousness, if the latter are ontologically non-physical? Similarly, how does the material cause the non-material in the form of mind or consciousness, if the latter are ontologically non-material entities? How does brain processes cause consciousness and in turn how does consciousness cause brain processes? Is mind or consciousness the ghost in the machine? How can the machine create the ghost and how can the ghost work or operate the machine? Did the ghost and the machine come together in some kind of package deal? Does the ghost as an intangible something emerge from workings of the powers, properties and disposition which are immanent or inherent within the elements that make up the macro and micro stuff that constitutes the substance of matter?

A related question to the above: Is mind or consciousness an emergent property of physical brain processes?

Now after having performed a preliminary dissection of the mind-machine problem we need ask ourselves this question: Why does everyone hate the Cartesian dualism? Why does everyone 'hate' Descartes? The poor man! I have a soft spot for Descartes. Cartesian dualism have become swear words. No one wants to be called a Cartesian Dualist. But Descartes did actually propose that humans possessed a non-separable unity of mind-body. In his letters to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia he was fairly explicit regarding this non-separable unity of mind and body. We need to try establish what precisely this non-separable unity of mind and body actually means or consists of from a causal, materialist and physical perspective.

And each day 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. 188. Not to eat the meat of an animal that died without ritual slaughter—Deuteronomy 14:21

189

After my arrest in the park we drove back in silence to my flat. Waiting outside my flat were several members of the security police all dressed in plain clothes, including a young woman in her twenties who was very casually dressed in faded jeans and an oversized jersey which she over her T-shirt. I unlocked the front door and we all went inside. They began to ransack my flat, unpacking cupboards and emptying the contents of draws onto the floor, they went through every book I owned, flipping pages for notes. Their excitement became comical when they discovered boxes of Party literature lying unhidden in plain view on the floor in the spare room which functioned as a guest room for visitors who happened to be staying over. They behaved as if they had hit pay dirt. The young woman had a camera and she was taking shots of everything, the camera flashed almost non-stop like a strobe light. Another security police had a video camera, he was recording sound and visual footage of everything. They were joyful, their faces beamed with elation. To their amazement they had discovered the mother lode of the most incriminating evidence imaginable. Their faces lit up with disbelief. They could not hide their astonishment. And the camera continued to flash incessantly.

The girl with the camera eventually spotted the cape fur seal skull on the sideboard. She immediately began to take pictures of the skull from various angles. Intrigued she picked up the skull and began to examine it. She run her figures over the sharp pointed white teeth. Two other security policemen also took an interest in the skull and took turns to examine it. The identity of the skull began to puzzle them. The girl asked her colleagues if they thought it was a dog or leopard or bear skull. The fact that it was a seal skull did not enter their minds.

Eventually they turned to me and asked about the animal to which the skull belonged. After telling them that it was a seal's skull I could not stop myself from giving an impromptu lecture on the carnivore skull and the characteristic features of carnivore dentition. Taking the skull from girl I pointed out the carnassial teeth and which are typical for all carnivores and represent a specialized dental adaptation for shearing meat or flesh. Holding the seal skull in my hand so that they could all see it, I briefly showed them by pointing out the key features of the seal's skull and how these features vary in the various species belonging to the Order Carnivora. I explained why and in what way the skulls and teeth of the seal, lion, leopard, wolf, hyena, jackal, mongoose, skunk, weasel, civet, genet and bear all differ from each other.

When I had finished with what I wanted to say regarding the carvinoran skull the girl looked at me and said: 'Ek het gehoor jy is 'n professor.' (I heard that you were a professor.)

After confirming that I was indeed a professor she wanted to know what kind of professor I was and so I naturally told her that I was a professor of zoology (dierkundige). Then she wanted to know where I had got the skull from. I told her that I got it from Swapkopmund from a dead seal that had been washed up onto the beach. All this time my eyes where focused on her face alone, I only addressed her and did not bother with engaging the faces of the two men who were standing on either side of her and who were also listening to what I had to say. I could see from the expressions on their demeanours that they had now in their minds acknowledged the fact that I was an educated person, a scientist, a real professor and so on. But there was still an element of cognitive dissonance in their perceptions of me. What they saw and heard did not tally completely with what they had in mind regarding the character and comportment of a Communist. Yes I was obviously a Communist in their eyes, the evidence for this was abundant and compelling, but I was also someone who had another life, another side to who I was. There was the mystery of who I really was and what it was like to be me. I as the subject was a Communist. In this sense I as a person had become objectified. That I was a Communist and transgressor and an enemy of the state, and that was all that mattered in their minds, my knowledge of the carnivore skull was only incidental to who I really was in their eyes.

She was actually quite attractive.

They began to carry out boxes filled with back and current issues of 'The African Communist,' and also boxes filled with banned SACP literature and the 'Study, Learn, Teach and Act' propaganda pamphlets. I had also accumulated for fun and interest a massive stash of Trotskyist newspapers, magazines and periodicals which I had managed to bring back illegally from my visits to the USA. I was not a Trotskyite and had no inclination towards Trotskyism. I was merely using the Trotskyite literature in a blatantly opportunistic fashion as a resource for production of my own Party propaganda news sheets and pamphlets which I had been distributing.

And then there was the shout of great excitement coming from the covered porch. They had found the Xerox machine. The girl with camera and the man with video camera rushed to the porch, the camera flashed continuously. Staked against the wall were more than a dozen boxes filled with realms of paper. This was the Party's media production centre. Here all the flyers, newsletters and pamphlets were produced for distribution in the townships, on trains, on buses, at funerals, at churches, at shebeens, at mass meetings, among the labour unions, at football stadiums, at hostels and at mining compounds. Next to the Xerox machine stood open boxes filled with freshly produced flyers, ready for distribution.

There was a lot of work to be done, in addition to the many books they were removing from the book shelves, they also confiscated the old typewriter and my computer, now they were faced with task of removing the Xerox machine and all the boxes of paper. The mountain of evidence had to be carefully documented and then removed.

I no longer had a captive audience. The seal's skull had been returned to its pedestal on the sideboard. They were not going to indulge me any further as a person, I had now been reduced to my proper status as the subject of an arrest, as the offender of serious crimes against the state.

I stood in lounge in my soaking wet clothes taking in the spectacle that was unfolding in my flat. I began to shiver with cold, but I had also started to shiver because of shock and trauma. I was consciously aware of the fact that I was in state of shock and it was not because I felt any fear or terror, it was more from the experience of personal violation that I was undergoing, it felt like I was being gang raped by strangers, by people that I had never seen before and who were now strutting about my flat, gloating like morons.

I needed to change into dry clothes. I just muttered that I was going to change into dry clothes. Someone said to the policewoman: 'Gaan met haar, bly by haar, hou haar dop.' (Go with her, stay with her and keep an eye on her.)

I had become objectified as a non-person, I was being treated with mistrust that is normally reserved for a dangerous criminal. They were now referring to me in the third person in my presence.

'Sy is dit, sy is dat!' (She is this, she is that).

Still holding the camera she followed me into my bedroom. Her attitude toward me had changed completely. I stripped off my clothes. My nakedness became a weapon. I was in no hurry to get dressed nor did I feel any need to be modest and cover my nakedness, I was comfortable in my nakedness, and being naked before her helped me to reclaim myself and take ownership of my selfhood. I knew that I was attractive and in my nakedness I was not modest or prudish. What could she do? She had been caught off guard, she had to stare at me as I paraded my nakedness, my breasts and my bush. I needed to dry myself so I walked naked to the bathroom in full view of everyone. She followed me and stood by the open bathroom entrance averting her gaze while I dried my body in front of her. I then took my tooth brush and a fresh tube of tooth paste back to the bedroom. After dressing in a blouse and an old pair of jeans I put the tooth brush and tooth paste in my back pocket. I took a small clutch handbag from the cupboard and put in my cheque book, credit cards, purse, small notebook, pen and ID book into it. I was now ready to go.

As a person I had lived in a world that was uniquely mine, I had a history which was uniquely mine, and I have a mental life that was uniquely mine. I was a conscious self-aware person, I think, I reflect, I remember, I recollect, I perceive, I analyse, I cogitate, I experience sensations, I feel, I have emotions, and I exercise agency, I realize goals, I act, I do, I will. All of this has been made possible because I possess a cognitive apparatus, because I possess a mind, because I am conscious. I am a sentient being. I experience awareness. I eventually had the opportunity to write this write down while locked up in a small prison cell in John Vorster Square. I wrote this down while I had nothing else to do but think, reflect, remember and analyse. All I had was my mind. In having a mind I told myself I was in full possession of who I was. I am not a subject. My mind was free to range where it wished.

I left my flat locking the door, putting the keys into my bag. I was under arrest. I did not know what to expect. Was I going to be tortured? Was I going to die? Oh dear I thought to myself at that moment. I was stepping into the great unknown. How was I going to survive this?

And each day 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. 189. Not to benefit from an beast condemned to be stoned—Exodus 21:28

190

Interlude and refrain: Now I am back in my familiar bedroom in Hotazel, the bedroom of my childhood, the bedroom where I spent hours ruminating as a teenager.

A few days ago I was in a prison cell. I have been in prison for two years.

Now I find myself again in my bedroom. It is as if I am in dream. My dad is fussing over me. He asks if he can bring me a cup of tea. My mother who still treats me as if I were a little girl, she shouts from somewhere in the house that I must go through all my things, so that she can throw away the stuff that I do not want. What I know about my father my mother will never know. Maybe she has guessed that he had an affair with her best friend, her lifelong friend from childhood. Corelle was an intimate part of our family while I was a child, while we still lived in City Deep. Why am I now thinking about Corelle? Corelle treated always me in an intimate and affectionate manner. I would often sit on her lap; she would put arms around me and hold me tight. My mother has never shown me this kind of affection; she has never been my confidant.

I stare out of the window. My mind wonders. I will soon be taking leave of the Kalahari for good. I begin unpacking the boxes from the built in cupboard. At the bottom of the cupboard I find a box filled with undergraduate lecture notes and lab note books. I also find my plant collection. It was for a project that we had to do during our third year in Botany. All the plant specimens were collected from the scrubland and Kalahari savannahs surrounding Hotazel. Each specimen had been pressed flat between newspapers. After drying out the specimens, the preserved specimens where mounted on white cardboard. We spent hours in the Moss herbarium in the Botany Department on the second floor of the Old Biology Building identifying our mounted plant specimens which we had collected.

I move my box containing my prison notebooks onto my bed so I can clear a space on my old desk for the stuff I am unpacking from the cupboard. I am curious about what I have written in my prison notes, a lot of what I have written I have forgotten about. I open a notebook and begin to read.

I read what I have written:

There is a qualitative feel or subjective feeling to our conscious experiences. To experience anything requires that we should feel something. To feel something with respect to our conscious experience we are normally able to use words to communicate what it was like for us to have had a particular subjective experience or conscious feeling. But the qualitative feel that we have been subjected to with respect to an experience can never be fully captured in words. Words cannot describe what I feel now. Words fail to describe what I am feeling right at this moment. I do not have the words to communicate exactly the qualitative feel of my conscious experience.

There exists an abyss between what I actually consciously feel and what I am able to communicate with words regarding what I feel.

If words fail to describe what I feel, how can I use words to describe how a bat feels or how a chameleon feels or how a tortoise feels? Even fiction cannot describe or even give a measure of the sense of what it feels like to be me. Even metafiction, self-referential metafiction which attempts to go beyond the limits of what can be written or said cannot penetrate the barrier of silence when it comes to the question of what it feels like to be me. When words fail to convey or capture the full sense or experience of the private interiority of my feelings or the exteriority of the intelligibility that I see and experience in the world in which I am embedded as a living being, we are then only left with metafiction which is the discourse that plots the boundaries or limitations of fiction, especially when fiction desires to convey a sense of Totality or a grasp of the Absolute within the realm of fiction, using fictional narration to communicate what it must feel like to experience the full sense of the Ultimate. Metafiction explains why this cannot be achieved. Why this cannot be achieved?

Have I written absolute nonsense? Why metafiction? What precisely is metafiction? What lies beyond fiction which metafiction is able to illuminate?

I look up, I am still in my bedroom in Hotazel.

My plant collection lies on the desk. It is late afternoon. I don't know what has happened to the day. I am free to do what I like. My car is parked outside in the carport. I can go if wish. I can go back to my flat. My dad had replaced the punctured tires with new one and he drove the car to back Hotazel. He has had the car serviced. It is practically brand new he said. He told me on the way back to Hotazel that my flat keys are with the key taker, and that my flat has been cleaned and everything is spick and span in the flat, just like I had left it before my detention. He had seen to that.

I am free to go but I stay. My bedroom door is not closed, it stands slightly ajar. My father knocks softy on the door. I hear him say:

'Your seal skull is gone. It is not on its pedestal on the sideboard.'

My seal skull is gone. How is that possible? Maybe one of the security policemen stole it as a trophy.

I have a home to go to. I am free to go but I stay. I sit on my bed and stare out of the window at the Kalahari. My father has gone outside. I see him standing by the loft. He opens for the pigeons. It will be their last flight over our home in Hotazel. Tomorrow the buyer from Upington will take the whole flock.

And each day 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. 190. Not to eat meat of an animal that was mortally wounded—Exodus 22:30

191

I have come back to my bedroom in Hotazel for my final visit. I have come to bid my bedroom farewell. I feel overwhelmed with all kinds of mixed emotions, I am trying to cling to my past. I am worried about my father, when we together he becomes tearful, his eyes brim with tears of emotion. I feel the tears brimming in my own eyes as we look at each other. We both feel that something has been lost. My room in Hotazel has held us together. He is trying to hold onto me as if I were still his little girl. I have always told him that I would take care of him and that he would not have worry about anything in his old age. What about mom he asks. I answer that I will take care of both of them. But they don't want me to take care of them immediately. They have made more than adequate provision for their old age. They don't really need me in a material fashion, they can take care of themselves. It seems to be that I am the one that needs to be taken care of. Malcolm and Elsabe can take care of themselves. They are married; they have children, they in the business of taking care of others. I am a spinster. I am like Corelle. Even though there is Isabelle I am not in a real relationship with anyone. I do not have a partner, and I have become used to being alone. All that I have is my career as a zoologist. My life is centred round Wits University and the Zoology Department. My father is worried that I cannot take of myself. He does not say this, but I sense his worry. I have travelled the world alone, I have travelled alone long distance in my car, I have spent time alone in the bush and on deserted beaches on field trips, I have dived in the ghostly presence of sharks. I tell my father that he does not need to worry about me. I am able to take care of myself.

He asks me about what I am going to do. He wants to know about my future plans. I tell him that I going work on my monogram on the comparative neurobiology of animals.

'What about politics?' He asks.

I don't know if my political career has come to an end. No one has contacted me, but then again I have made no effort to contact any of my comrades or political connections. Maybe the security police have poisoned the minds of the detainees with lies and fabrications about me. I may have compromised myself by signing the affidavit that contains the statement of my confession. But the statement said nothing about the others. Their charges were more serious than mine. I knew nothing about the weapons or explosives. None of us who were arrested had a high profile in the UDF or the MDM.

I tell him:
'My political career has come to an end.'

He wants to why.

I shrug my shoulders. I tell him that I too mentally exhausted and physically drained to think about politics, and that I feel that my health has taken a very serious knock.

He concerned. Shouldn't I see a doctor, a physician for a general check-up?

I say that I will be OK, he must not worry.

Dad informs me that Malcolm is leaving the security police. Malcolm has started his own security consultancy company. Already he has closed deals with the ANC as a security consultation. He informs me that Malcolm wants to re-establish familial bonds with me, he wants me to be a part of their family, and that I should visit them, and not cut myself off from him and his family. Elsabe feels the same about me. I am told that both Malcolm and Elsabe have a high regard for me. They are proud of my achievements.

I realize we have been speaking in Afrikaans most of the time to each other. If we start a conversation in English we soon slip into Afrikaans and finish what we want to say in Afrikaans. We are living within the interface of two cultures. My parents have become Afrikaners again. Hotazel has turned them into Afrikaners. They have gone back to their roots, reclaiming, re-asserting their Afrikaner identity. For the first time in my life I feel confused. In detention I was treated as an Afrikaner. While in detention no one ever addressed in me in English. For the past two years all exchanges have been conducted in Afrikaans. While in detention I did not utter a word of English to anyone.

Being a Zeeman the Afrikaans was always there. It is not the family that has changed. It is me that has changed. My family don't really know who I am or what kind of private life I have been living. I have so many secrets that I would never to share with my family. I have never had a boyfriend. I have only brought female friends home. I never told them straight out that I was queer. I assumed that they suspected that I was lesbian. Unlike Elsabe and Malcolm my parents know very little about me.

Whenever I came home on visits I would revert to the person that they knew. I realized that they had changed. This reverting to Afrikaans had started when I was still in high school. I am just more aware of it now, this switching from English to Afrikaans.

Now the final word is always in Afrikaans. I never really became fully aware of this until now. So maybe I have always been Afrikaans without even realizing it! This strange world of bilinguality, always slipping unconsciously from one language to the other language.

This switching from English to Afrikaans was also always the case with dad and Corelle. As they became more intimate they slipped into Afrikaans. The closer we got to her flat the more they spoke in Afrikaans to each other. Now that I am home and sleeping in my bedroom we seem to be speaking Afrikaans all the time. It is as if we are reaching to each. There is a strong desire coming from my father and mother that we need to re-establish familial closeness and intimacy, especially now that South Africa has plunged into a state of political uncertainty. Afrikaans was the language that anchored us to the past, to our grandparents, to our ancestors, it was the language that validated our claims to this bit of Africa, and it was the language that awakened our historical consciousness of who we are and from where we have come.

While I am aware of these dynamics, I can't buy into it. I have travelled to far away from my ancestral roots, for me there is no going back. I have embraced Africa.

Being a Zeeman has always meant to be rooted in the soil of Africa. Our links with the land were ancient. This is what Malcolm has said with such conviction. He said that we must not be ashamed to be Afrikaners.

Was I really an Afrikaner? I have grown up as an Anglican.

Malcolm said that the new generation of white and black South Africans would grow up without any sense of historical consciousness, they would have no anchor in the past, they would be a generation that had not suffered, they would be the post-struggle generation, they would be the generation that would experience the existential dislocation that comes with being born into a state in which they have been cut from their historical moorings.

They would become the ahistorical generation. The generation that did not experience apartheid, the generation cut off from the past of their parents.

My father asked if I would like to go to church with them. He had gone to my flat before I was released and had packed a suitcase from my wardrobe. He wanted me to go with them to church. He wanted us to be family, the three of us. I have agree to go with them on Sunday to the church service in the rec hall. He is happy. Tears well up in his ears and puts his arms around me. I hug him back tightly and tell him that I love him.

And each day 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. 191. Not to eat a limb torn off a living creature—Deuteronomy 12:23

192

It was the Anglican Church that had set me on a course in which I would end up being detained as a Communist. As I have said I have always been a closet Christian. Personally I could not find any compelling grounds for not believing in the existence of God or deny with conviction the possibility of God's agency in the Universe. To me while I accept that from a physical and materialist perspective the Universe is causally closed to science and to empiricism, but this does not rule out the metaphysical certainty that the Universe is actually causally overdetermined even if it is causally closed within the realm of empirical accessibility. This may sound paradoxical.

When it comes to reason, faith and God I don't believe that fideism is a viable intellectual or even a cognitive not mention a metaphysical option. By abandoning any kind of possibility for a natural knowledge of God theology conceded too much to the claims of the Enlightenment.

The abandonment of any possibility or warrant for a natural knowledge of God has given rise to the following irreconcilable divides: atheism versus theism, faith versus reason, and rationality versus irrationality. The positions of each side of these irreconcilable divides are ironically based on strategies of argumentation that are logically similar. The logical feature they share is self-reference circular reasoning.

And each day 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. 192. Not to eat blood—Leviticus 3:17

193

Re-reading Descartes. I think that Descartes, correctly identified as the first modern philosopher, has been unjustifiably maligned and Cartesianism as I already said has become a swear word. I lean towards a physicalist or materialist view of nature. But from a physicalist position we are unable to offer a causal explanation for consciousness. In other words we cannot explain its existence. Like Descartes, we know what it is like to be conscious, we know what it is like to have a mind, and we cannot doubt the existence of our own consciousness or our awareness of things, which of course is good a point to start talking about any kind of philosophy of mind.

Given the sheer scale of our Universe, surely it has to be populated with an infinite diversity of different kinds of minds possessed by an infinite variety of different kinds of intelligent beings existing in the various far-flung solar systems that are randomly scattered in their uncountable multitudes throughout the vast Universe. The existence of a mind in any sentient form of life is evident when intelligent behaviour is demonstrated. Intelligent behaviour or the possession of intelligence becomes manifest when a sentient being demonstrates the capacity for agency, and especially where the agency is goal directed behaviour. Mind, intelligence and consciousness or awareness are ideas that are interrelated in a meaningful cross-referencing manner. This means they are defined in terms of each other. We can hardly think of a sentient being having consciousness without having a mind and vice versa. We also cannot think of a sentient being showing intelligence without having a mind. If there are multiple forms of sentient beings then there must be multiple forms of consciousness or self-awareness. Also if there are multiple forms of consciousness or self-awareness then what about the existence of different kinds of experience which are not accessible to other forms of conscious or self-awareness or minds. Are other forms of consciousness inscrutable? Can one form of consciousness make sense of an alien form of consciousness? Could there be a meeting of minds, a meeting of alien minds.

And each day 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. 193. Not to eat certain fats of kosher animals—Leviticus 3:17

194

It was from the mouth of Father Francis Digby that I first was exposed to question of the inscrutability of other minds. Father Digby had been the priest at the Anglican Church at Potchefstroom during the time that I was at Potch Girls High. After the passage of many years our paths crossed again. I recognized him at the Total Garage. It was a Friday afternoon in late January, he was filling his car. I had stopped at the garage to fill the Toyota microbus while the students walked over to the nearby bottle store to buy booze for the evening. We were planning to have a braai on the beach that evening. I gave a student some money to buy a bottle of Southern Comfort and a six pack of Castle Lager. We had just come back from a zoological excursion into the forest and the mangroves where the Umzimvubu River flows into the sea near Port St Johns. I planned to chill the bottle of Southern Comfort down in the deep freeze.

A school bus stopped by the garage to load off high school children. As they went their separate ways they shouted back and forth to each other. It was a sultry afternoon, the air was stifling, still and heavy, and I thought then that nothing would be better than an ice cold Castle beer. I remember clearly the 'words I love you' ringing out from across the road. It was a teenage girl. She stood there waving and a boy walking away down the road with a group of friends stopped and shouted back 'I love you too.' At that moment I felt an unbearable loneliness and I also felt an inexplicable pain tugging at my heart. I suddenly felt that I had missed out on something beautiful and significant in my life. I felt a yearning for something inexplicable and undiscernible.

It was then that I spotted Francis Digby. We recognized each other. I walked over to him and we began talking. I learnt that he was no longer an Anglican priest and was also divorced. After leaving the ministry he got a job as an English teacher at a local High School. An Indian woman was sitting in the passenger seat of his car. She smiled at me when I glanced at her. I guessed that they were in a relationship.

In standard nine I was confirmed. On the completion of our confirmation classes we each had to make an appointment to do confession before our first communion. The confession was nothing like I expected it would be. Instead it was like an interview. We sat at a table in the vestry and while we drank tea we chatted. I clearly remember the topics of our discussion. I spoke about my interest in animals, and of course the question of whether animals have minds arose. In was in the context of whether or not animals have conscious awareness and minds that the topic of the inscrutability of God arose. I was a young teenage girl and I was in awe of him. He had become an important father figure to me while I was in high school. He was different to my own father, but intellectually he was the perfect complement or counterpart to my dad. He was also keen birdwatcher.

At the time the book 'Honest to God' by the Bishop of Woolwich was all the rage. The book had awakened an interest in religionless Christianity and it had a great influence on me as teenager. We discussed the mind of God and whether we could know anything about the mind of God. Father Digby proposed that if consciousness existed in any sentient being, it had to be a phenomenon which was more than the sum of the physical parts which made its emergence possible. What he meant was the conscious awareness as an emergent phenomenon had to be an irreducible capacity. The ability to discern the capacity for experiencing consciousness or consciousness awareness in some sentient being was dependent on whether we could discern in the sentient being the ability for purposive behaviour. Consciousness and purposive behaviour had to be causally correlated. As critical scholarship between strip away Jesus' divinity and God became more remote and removed in the new God is dead theology Father Digby began to cling to the idea of conscious as being something that was extraordinary significant. Man's possession of consciousness made man special. Falling under the influence of the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann he started to read Heidegger and then he started to study Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness'. He spoke about Camus. In retrospect, I believe that his interest in the writings of Camus coincided with the onset of his agnosticism. He no longer believed in the God of the Anglican confession. At the end of my Matric year he left the priesthood under a dark.

Then there was the politics. As an impressionable teenage girl Father Digby had not only awakened my political consciousness he had also planted the seed of political radicalism in mind. As he lost his faith and began to fall apart as a clergyman.

And each day 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. 194. Not to eat the sinew of the thigh—Genesis. 32:33

195

Finally from the built in cupboard I retrieved the last sealed cardboard box. On opening it I discovered my old Meccano set still in its original box. Also lying in the box was Mr Robot Man and next to Mr Robot Man was a transparent plastic packet filled with the plastic dinosaurs. I pick up Mr Robot Man and I began to examine him closely. I looked up at the mirror. I saw my smiling reflection in the mirror. After a moment's thought, I felt the need to sit down at my desk and start writing down what I had been thinking. This has become the habit that I had acquired while in prison. New habits die hard. I have to capture my thoughts and the only way I can do this before losing them through forgetfulness was by writing them quickly down while they were still fresh and warm in my mind.

I wrote the following:

Words fail to convey the flood of emotions that I am experiencing at this moment. Even if Mr Robot Man could demonstrate any of the signs of artificial intelligence (AI), no language could make transparent the full contents of his artificial mind if he were indeed capable of artificial intelligence, and if we equate demonstration of intelligence with the existence of mind.

I have become aware of a paradox that infects this entire human project of speaking and writing. We can only experience or acquire intersubjective knowledge of private worlds of thought and emotions by virtue of spoken or written language. Language often fails to convey what is intended in speech and writing. This cannot be disputed. It can be argued that language often fails to fully convey what was intended. But language still conveys something that can on all accounts be taken to represent knowledge, even knowledge of private experiences and emotions, knowledge which can trigger empathy and conscience in the hearer or reader. Through the medium of language we can act on other people's minds, we can influence their thoughts; using words we put thoughts and ideas 'into' their minds. With words we change their minds. By using words we can act on the brains of others. Words can put ideas in the brains of others, brains that are external or not directly connected to our own brains. How is this possible? How can this be explained scientifically? Seeing or hearing words also involves experiencing sensations which create mental impressions or mental images in our brains. What we mean by the word 'in' is problematic. How can a mental impression or mental image or even an idea or thought be 'in' our brains?

When Derrida and Lacan argue that language ultimately fails to successfully refer, and thus fails in its capacity to convey or articulate truth, they are caught in their own trap, the trap of the self-referential paradox. They are using language to refer to the incapacity of language to convey or articulate truth, they using language to make a truth claim about language's inability to convey truth or even ultimately convey anything at all. Intersubjective claims to truth are only possible by virtue of language, whether it be in the form speech or writing. So whatever our private world of thoughts and emotions happens to be about we remain trapped in language and therefore in the symbolic whenever we desire to express ourselves. Language is the medium or vehicle of desire made apparent. Language communicates desire and makes the intentions of desire apparent.

What do we really mean when we claim that words, language, ideas, sensations, experiences, thoughts, intentions, consciousness, awareness, intelligence, or the entirety of mental life, are only possible by virtue of having a brain. Are we able to unravel every link in the chain of causality that connects physically induced sensations with thoughts, emotions and consciousness via brain processes or by virtue of processes taking place in the brain?

And each day 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. 195. Not to eat meat and milk cooked together—Exodus 23:19

196

How does thought arise? What causal processes are responsible for the 'origination' of thought or mental life? How can a thinking machine, a machine that has intelligence be created? If we could understand and explain in detail, step for step, the causal processes responsible for the origination or emergence of thought and the capacity for intelligent mental life then it should be possible to create and engineer an equivalent physical process which could fully replicate this capacity. We should be able to create or fabricate a machine which has the capacity for being consciousness and having thoughts

This idea is not new. Thomas Hobbes entertained this possibility in the form of a thinking machine, a mechanical apparatus, which would have the necessary attributes that we associate with the possession or power of intelligence. Taking his que from Newton, Hobbes proposed that we can explain almost everything in terms of the motions of particles, and somehow all our experiences and all our thoughts are nothing more than the consequences of the motions of particles. This would be the physical basis not only of artificial intelligence, but also our human intelligence. Everything should be reducible to the consequences arising from the motions of particles. Everything in the Universe is ultimately explicable in its entirety in terms of the dynamics and motions of particles according to Galileo, Newton and Hobbes. This would an exercise in the great explanatory reduction of everything in terms of the dynamic and motions of particles. What we have here in essence is the idea of the mechanistic Universe. In the mechanistic Universe everything that happens is a direct consequence of the motion of the working parts of the great cosmic machine.

But how can the motions of particles give rise to meaningfulness. Meaningfulness is embodied in thought, and the meaningfulness of words is derived from the meanings embodied in our thoughts. As opposed to Descartes' mind-body separation, representing two different substances, the basis of the Cartesian dualism, can a materialist monism based on forces and molecular motions provide a more satisfactory mechanical based account for the phenomenon of mind and intelligence? Can a purely mechanical process involving only the action of forces and the motion of particles give rise to reason, to a mechanical form of reason in other words? Could this mechanical form of reason which would be the basis of artificial intelligence be capable of generating meaningful thoughts which could in turn be communicated through the medium of words? In other words could Mr Robot Man think and speak in a meaningful fashion? Could Mr Robot Man working as some kind of electrical-mechanical machine be capable of sentience in the form of self-conscious awareness? If Mr Robot Man could exist as a sentient being, then Mr Robot Man would have the capacity to experience subjectivity in the sense of feeling and perceiving. Can the process of reasoning and the generation of meaning be accomplished through the actions or mechanisms of a machine, that is, by the electro-chemical-mechanics or the electro-chemical-mechanical-dynamics of a machine? Can a thinking and reasoning machine ever tell us what it feels like to be a machine? Could a machine be engineered to feel? What could a machine possibly feel? Could a machine be engineered to feel empathy or to have a conscience? Could a machine experience desire? Could a machine experience needs or have wants? Could a machine commit a sin? What kind of emergent properties could a machine generate?

For Mr Robot Man to be a fully sentient and intelligent 'mechanical' or 'machine-based' being 'it' would necessarily have to possess the computational powers for exercising reason and communicating meaningful thought by manipulating a symbolic system based on signs and logical rules. Can a purely electro-mechanical setup or configuration or assembly based on the operation of physical processes (particles in motion under the influence of physical forces) be programmed to generate meaningful expressions as outputs in response to inputs? The fundamental question with respect to human or artificial intelligence is whether particles in motion under the influence of forces are capable of generating symbolically-based or language-base expressions of meaning, that is expressions of intelligible meaning, expressions of meaning which represent intentions, reflections, thoughts, mental images and ideas? In order to answer this question it is necessary to have a justifiable idea of what reason and reasoning entails. Reason, whether robotic or human, by definition, involves rational deliberation, where rational deliberation in turn involves judgement, that is, the judgement of truthfulness in accordance with considered attention to evidence and logical rules. The exercise of reason entails paying attention to meaning, that is, the meaning of signs that function within in symbolic referential system based on logical and grammatical rules. Reason involves deliberation and logical inference, can this capacity be realized as an output of a machine based process involving the motion of working parts or particles under the influence or action of forces?

In order for a robotic process, a process based on electro-mechanical operations, operations reducible to motions of particles under the influence of physical forces, to exercise reason, judgement and deliberation, the robotic needs to possess the capacity to pay intelligent attention to meaning, meaning in the form of signs and what they refer to or represent. Paying attention to meaning is not reducible to any kind of electro-mechanical operations based on the motion of particles under the influence of physical forces. So physical forces by themselves acting on particles cannot give rise to meaning, where the motions of particles somehow encode meaning, nor can meaning exert physical forces thereby influencing the motion of particles in a certain manner which somehow expresses the physical embodiment of meaning. Can meaning have a physical embodiment in the form of particles in motion under the influence of forces. Of the course the motions could not be random. Random motions of particles could not embody or generate meaning. The motions would to have pattern or follow a pattern, and the pattern which would somehow embody or represent the meaning to be expressed.

An electro-mechanical robotic process cannot reason and if it can reason then it cannot be an electro-mechanical robotic process. Does this mean that an electro-mechanic robotic process cannot be a vehicle for artificial intelligence, where the hallmark of genuine artificial intelligence is the capacity to exercise reason by paying attention to meaning? Does this mean that the construal of mind and everything that is connected to the concept of mind, in terms of a materialist monism, as opposed to an idealistic monism or a Cartesian dualism, is ultimately logically and rationally impossible?

If meaning in the form of mental images or mental representations or mental pictures or in the form of a thoughts or ideas cannot exert a physical force on particles within a robotic electro-mechanical process or within the human brain then what kind of agency can mediate the interactions between mind and the physical processes of either the brain or a robotic electro-mechano-system. Could the reciprocal interactions between mind and the motions of particles be mediated by manipulator such as a Maxwell's Demon?

To love someone, like I love you.

And each day 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. 196. Not to cook meat and milk together—Exodus 34:26

197

It will be impossible to prove that the following claims have no foundation: Something necessarily exists by virtue of something else. Nothing can exists necessarily by virtue of nothing else. Only something (something X) gives rise to something (something which is Y). Nothing gives to nothing rather than something. If one something is the laws of nature (something which is X) and another something (something which is Y) are physical states or physical states of affairs, then we can define the relationships between something which is X and something which is Y. The relationship between X and Y can be either asymmetrical or symmetrical. Using the following symbolism we can define two possibilities: 1) X --->Y means that the laws of nature which happen to be X set the conditions of possibility for the existence of Y, where Y is presents a physical state of affairs; or 2) X <\---> Y means that the laws of nature which happen to be X set the conditions of possibility for the existence of Y which represents a given physical state of affairs, and in turn the existing physical states of affairs Y set the conditions of possibility for the continued existence of X, which happens to be the original law X, or alternatively Y sets up the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new and different law which we call Z which replaces X, and X ceases to exist. Possibility 2) means that while the laws of nature determine the conditions of possibility for physical states, the physical states themselves in turn determine not only the nature of the laws of nature but also their continued unchanging existence. So with possibility 2, the physical states of affairs Y can somehow either maintain the continued invariance of the laws of nature X or cause changes in the nature of the laws of nature X which result in the emergence of new laws of nature Z which replace the old laws of nature X. Which also means that the laws of nature are not necessary, eternal and immutable or unchanging but are mutable or changeable and are also therefore contingent on the nature of the physical states of affairs. This also means that laws of nature are not inviolable. For example physical condition Y can change natural law X such that the new law of nature which can now be symbolized as Z represents a violation of X. This means a physical state of affairs possesses the kind of power which can change or modify natural law X into natural law Z where Z is a violation of X. A good example would be the changing of the laws of nature such that a perpetual motion machines become possible, a possibility which would necessarily entail the violation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. So we can imagine that a physical state of affairs could somehow arise in which the first and second laws of thermodynamics are violated. Of course this is not possible. So we can argue that some instances of X <\---> Y are not possible. This means a law of constraint can be applied to some instances of X <\---> Y but not to others. This means that it is impossible not to have immutable unchanging or inviolable laws of nature which prescribe what is possible and what I not possible with regard to X <\---> Y. But this makes things very complicated and contrived.

But what precisely is the nature of a law of nature? To repeat what has been previously proposed: The laws of nature exist immanently within the material or physical reality of nature. The laws of nature in this respect are instantiated as the essential powers, capacities, predispositions, properties and relationship of everything with is constitutive of the material or physical nature of reality. These essential powers, capacities, properties, predispositions and relationships cannot exist independently in their own right or as something which has arisen in a process of independent or autonomous self-causation. Which means they are invariant in the sense that no physical state of affairs could ever arise in a causally closed system which could cause the essential properties, powers, capacities and relationships of things like photon, electrons, neutrons and protons to change. Which means that in a causally closed system, possibility 2), described symbolically as X <\---> Y, can never be realized. In a causally closed system X remains immutable and inviolable while Y can exist in the form of infinite possibilities or in the form infinite possible states of affairs within the constraints or order or governance of X. X always governs what is possible in terms of Y, where Y cannot in itself govern what is possible for X to be. Which means Y cannot change X, which means that Y by itself through a process of autonomous, immanent, self-causation cannot change the essential nature of its fundamental physical constituents or elements, such as photons, electrons, protons and neutrons or any of the sub-atomic particles or the fundamental forces of nature, in a causally closed system. This is an argument which I will continue to repeat ad infinitum: For a capacity or power or force or agency or subject or for something or anything to be the origin or source or repository of whatever happens to be true or the case, including a statement describing a law of nature, and by extension everything else that is true or what happens to be the Totality of Truth it has to be everything it knows in a direct undifferentiated manner and in a direct unmediated manner. This capacity or power or force or agency by virtue of which everything exists whether as a law of nature or a law of logic or a law of mathematics or a physical state of affairs or a Universe or consciousness can be called 'God' if you like. So 'God' is not only 2 + 2 = 4 or the Laws of Nature or the condition by virtue of which all possible physical states of affairs exist in all possible Universes, but also the power or agency which makes consciousness a realized possibility, and so we can say that God is consciousness. God is everything which happens to be the truth because all truth exists by virtue of God, and God is everything by virtue of which everything else exists including consciousness or personhood or personality. God has infinite power of awareness. If God has consciousness and personhood then we can have a relationship with God. We can say and believe that this, a relationship with God, exists as a realizable possibility or as a physically grounded state of affairs in a causally closed Universe. We can address God with our voices or minds and God is aware of what is going on in our minds. Nothing escapes the awareness of God. This should be a source of comfort and also the motivation to work towards the realization of the Good.

Philosophy or science or literature exists by virtue of been able to say something about something. Also philosophy or science or literature exists by virtue of someone saying something about something to someone. If we believe with certainty that all of these claims are indubitable because they are self-evidently true then Hegel's enterprise of the Phenomenology of Mind become impossible because mind as a product of natural processes can never comprehend or capture the totality because the totality may include somethings which are not empirically accessible. And we cannot state with certainty that nothing exists beyond what is empirically accessible. We cannot know about things and states-of-affairs within the empirically accessible realm, and this realm does to coincide with totality or with being for that matter. We may even argue that knowledge itself is not self-generating in an autonomous fashion, but is self-generating by virtue of being endowed with capacities and powers which may the accumulation or growth of knowledge possible. This would be a case of something which cannot exist independently of something else. In this sense the Totality of what constitutes Reality is beyond fully comprehending or knowing with ultimate certainty.

And each day 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. 197. Not to eat bread from new grain before the Omer—Leviticus 23:14

198

Opening one of my notebook I read the following:

Today I tried to strike up a conversation with the young female warden mainly for the sake of finding out what was going on in the world. I speak to her in Afrikaans. She eyes me out warily as if am a dangerous psychiatric inmate in an asylum for the mad, but I can see that she also curious about me. I try to flirt with her. She sees me as the Afrikaans woman who is a Communist and a professor of zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand. This does not make any sense in her mind. I know that I am reading her mind correctly. In her mind I don't fit the stereotype that she has of a Communist or a professor. I don't look like a professor. I am too pretty or too attractive to be professor. Maybe she knows that I am queer. Maybe she is butch and would like to have some kind of intimacy with me, emotional or physical or both. All of these possibilities gives her sufficient reason to fear me. She wants to be kind to me.

Feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted I lay down on the foam mattress and close my eyes. I try to imagine what it would be like to be on holiday on a tropical beach without having a care in the world.

Drawing on thoughts, memories and recollections I make a conscious effort to exercise my imagination in recreating in my mind the mental experience of a carefree tropical holiday. Words slip into my mind: White sands, palm trees and a turquoise sea. Raised on stilts a rough timber beach shack in the shade of tall palm trees overlooks a relatively calm topical turquoise sea.

And each day 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. 198. Not to eat parched grains from new grain before the Omer—Leviticus 23:14

199

No one is concerned about the anti-colonial war. The 450 mile or so journey from Lourenço Marques to Vilanculos has been incident free. We have arrived in a Kombi and a Land Rover which was used to tow a trailer with a large rubber dinghy equipped with a Johnson outboard motor. We have a tonne of equipment with us, we have brought scuba equipment, spear guns, underwater cameras, a generator and a compressor. In Vilanculos the air is thick and heavy. It is July 1973 I am a first year student on holiday in Mozambique with the Wits diving club. I am free, my June exams behind me, I don't have a single worry in the world. Tomorrow we will set up camp on some remote beach somewhere on the Bazaruto Archipelago. It is midday and it is surprisingly hot and humid for July. At the small harbour we learn that except for Paradise Island there are no ferries going to any of the other islands. I'm thousands of miles from home, and I don't have a care in the world. I don't care that there are no ferries going to the other islands. We have a quick debate. Should we travel back to Inhambane or Xai Xai, or should be go to Paradise Island? We were also hungry, so we drive around the small seaside village of Vilanculos looking for a place to have lunch. We eventually decided on the art deco hotel Dona Ana which perched like a marooned ship on the headland overlooking the jetty of the small Vilanculos harbour. The sea facing aspect of hotel presented us with a tropical view of the palm tree fringed shoreline with an odd assortment of boats serenely moored on the beaches and along the jetty. We were soon quaffing back quarts of Laurentino beer while feasting on prawns on the hotel patio. My cheeks began to tingle pleasantly in response to the alcohol, and my fingers smell of garlic. As an eighteen year old fresh out of school I am not used to alcohol. I am feeling wild and reckless, and my head is full of knowledge, I have worked my butt off and I know I have done well in the exams, I was driven, I did not want to let my dad down as he was paying for my university education. But I felt that I earned the right to let my hair down and have enjoy myself. We discuss our diving options. We have given up on our initial plan to set up camp on some remote beach somewhere on one the island on the Bazaruto Archipelago. Carlos Santiago has a brainwave, he goes over to speak the manager of the hotel. Thanks to Carlos we are able to communicate with the owner who cannot speak any English. Carlos' family happen to politically well-connected in Mozambique, he makes a few phone calls and comes back to join us. Before he finished his beer the phone rings. It is for Carlos. We are told that we have permission to camp on the beach on Paradise Island. We listen as Carlos expands on the history of the hotel. The hotel was built in the 1950s by Señor Alves in honour of the beautiful and glamorous Dona Ana, the woman he loved.

Carlos a keen scuba diver is a fourth year medical student at Wits. His family owned a dairy and citrus farm close to Xinavane. It was one the biggest citrus farms in the southern hemisphere. We slept over at the Santiago farm on our way to Vilanculos. In 1974 tragedy struck the Santiago family. FRELIMO confiscated the citrus farm. Mr Santiago refused to leave the farm. An altercation ensued on the veranda which ended with him being shot dead. In the late-1980s a few weeks before my arrest I bumped into Carlos in Rosebank and we had coffee and lapsed into reminiscing about good times we shared with the Wits diving club excursions. Shortly after the Nkomati Non-Aggression Accord that was signed in 1984 Carlos and some family members travelled to Mozambique to see whether an agreement could be negotiated to regarding the return of their farm. The farm had gone to complete ruin. The vast citrus orchards which seemed to stretch beyond the horizons had been reduced to a arid graveyard of dried-out stumps sticking out of bare sun hardened red earth. The farm which had been asset stripped and abandoned after the death of Mr Santiago and had now vanished from sight as a consequence of steady and unremitting bush and thicket encroachment.

My friendship with Carlos was paradoxical. He was obviously very bitter about the losses that his family, relatives and friends had suffered as a consequence of the de-colonialization and liberation of Mozambique and it was ironical that he bared his soul me, not knowing that I was a member of the underground SACP in South Africa. He had become completely fascist and confided that he and others were involved with RENAMO.

While relaxing in the Hotel Dona Ana it felt as if the dreamy seaside village of Vilanculos occupied a place in space and time that was too remote to be touched by any kind of worldly worries. At that time one seemed to be concerned about the anti-colonial war raging between FRELIMO and the Portuguese. The 450 miles or so journey from Lourenço Marques to Vilanculos via our Xinavane stopover has been incident free. Carlos had explained that the war was localized mainly in the northern Cabo Delgado, Niassa, and Tete provinces. Tete was close to the Cabora Bassa Dam and FRELIMO was endeavouring to disrupt the construction of the dam. The Rhodesian counter-insurgency war had also spilled over into the Tete province.

In spite of the fact that my father was not happy about me going on this diving trip to Bazaruto especially because of the guerrilla war in Mozambique he eventually relented and paid for my trip. I signed the indemnity forms and paid the money.

The 50 km five hour ferry trip to Santa Carolina Island otherwise known as Paradise Island went by without incident. In spite of the fact that my father was not happy about me going on this diving trip to Bazaruto his still paid for it. I signed the indemnity forms and paid the money. The 50 km 5 hour ferry trip to Santa Carolina Island otherwise known as Paradise Island went by without incident.

Carlos was a fascist. And ironically Benjamin Schlossheimer could have been also mistaken for a fascist. Also shortly before my arrest there was knock on my office door. It was Benjamin. I learnt that he had a pilot's license and he spent the next two hours regaling me with the stories of his commercial flying experiences to Zimbabwe.

And each day 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. 199. Not to eat ripened grains from new grain before the Omer—Leviticus 23:14

200

Dressed in his usual khaki shirt and shorts Benjamin Schlossheimer had pitched up at Park Station to see us off on our second year Botany field trip to Belvedere in the Blyde River Canyon. He was an atypical Jew in every way, especially for a Jewish student at Wits. He leans strongly to the right, he had been befriended or adopted by a clique of fellow second year Botany students which include some guys from Rhodesia. He is in his third year also majoring in Zoology and Botany and why he has chosen to be part of this clique is beyond my comprehension.

And each day 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. 200. Not to eat fruit of a tree during its first three years—Leviticus 19:23

201

Exercising moral agency within a system where reciprocal monitoring of all members was possible.

Be my baby.

And each day 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. 201. Not to eat diverse seeds planted in a vineyard—Deuteronomy 22:9

202

To me personally one of the most pressing outstanding problems in science and philosophy is whether we will be able to explain mental phenomena such as mind or consciousness in purely physical terms. We all know what it is like to be in a state of conscious awareness. It is while we are in state of conscious awareness that we are able to experience a wide range of sensations, sensations which have recognizable qualities. We know what it is like to see the colour red, to feel the texture of satin or silk, to feel the coldness of ice, to taste the flavour of dark Albany chocolate, to smell the scent of jasmine or to hear the melodies of our favourite music. All these different kinds of sensory experiences, involving the perception of flavours, colours, temperatures, pressures, sounds, textures and odours, which we are able to perceive or experience by virtue of our sense organs, give rise to mental states whereby we become consciously aware of the qualities or properties of the experience that we happen to be having at that specific moment. It is these mental states or forms of conscious awareness which provides us with the sense or subjective experience of what it is like to smell, see, hear, taste or feel something. It is also by virtue of having a brain that we are capable of experiencing the various kinds of mental states that are triggered by sensory perceptions or sense experiences. In a word it is by virtue of our nervous system (brain and sense organs) that we are able to experience various mental states and we associate the idea or concept of a mind with the capacity to have mental states and conscious awareness of things. Can our conscious experiences, characterized in terms of the quality or nature or properties or facts of our mental states, be rationally and mechanistically explained in terms of the nature, facts, processes and properties of our brain or nervous system? Can we give an account of what it is like to smell, see, hear, feel and taste in terms of the nature, facts, processes and properties of our brains? Can we explain by virtue of the facts, processes and properties of our brains what it is like to consciously experience something? Can we explain the origination of the nature of our mental states or conscious experiences by virtue of scientific-reductive-mechanistic or deductive-nomological explanations that are based entirely or completely on the empirical knowledge and understanding of the structure and functioning of the brain?

What is the electrical-chemical-mechanical (electro-chemi-mechanical) relationship between the state of the brain and the corresponding mental state or state of consciousness awareness experienced by an individual person or animal? In other words what is the relation between mind and matter or mind and body or mind and brain? This is the mind-body problem.

Physicalism or materialism is a type of substance monism which is based on the idea that there is only one kind of substance which happens to be physical or material in nature.

Mental compartmentalization.

Are all our actions completely predetermined by our prior brain states?

We tend to believe something to be the case in the absence of defeating evidence and defeating evidence needs to be compelling in order for it to be persuasive. How do we relate this statement about the relationship between having beliefs and having prior predetermining mental states, especially with regard to having the capacity to revise our believes or giving up our belief about something? How do we go from a brain state which induces a mental state of convinced belief to a brain state in which our previous mental state regarding our original belief become superseded by new and different mental state?

Can we give a naturalistic and physicalist explanatory account of the different kinds of mental states ( sensations, thoughts, intentions, desires, fears, beliefs, emotions and so on) using only the language of physics. This boils down to being able to explain all mental states reductively and mechanistically in terms of brain states. It would be expected that if we could achieve this then we should be able to predict the occurrence of different kinds of possible mental states purely from our knowledge of the corresponding physical and chemical state of the brain using only the language of physics.

What does the language of physics consist of? Here we are thinking of explanatory narratives about mental states communicated solely in the language of physics.

And each day 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. 202. Not to eat untithed fruits—Leviticus 22:15

203

The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Interlude: I find myself starved for news, it is impossible to resist watching the news bulletins in the evening. So far there has been no news of Cuito Cuanavale. On SABC TV there is only news of the social and political upheavals in Poland and the Eastern European countries. The masses are rejecting Communism. The world is in turmoil.

Published in 1915 two years before the 1917 October revolution Robert Michels' 'Political Parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracies' was a remarkably prescient work. The revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism and ultimately Communism could only be achieved by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Michels was right, the iron of law of history, or the iron law of post-Neolithic history, seems to be the exorable re-emergence of the Oligarchy. Without fail, through every historical or revolutionary transition, through every historical disjunction, the Oligarchy re-establishes its existence, like a Phoenix it rises again and again from the ashes, renewed, re-invigorated, re-invented, re-established, resurrected and stronger than ever before. It was the Frenchman Alphonse Karr who wrote in his monthly journal, Les Guêpes the witty epigram: 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose' or 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' (January 1849). So something always survives unchanged from the past. Following every social-economic-political revolution since post-Neolithic times, a new elite replace the old elite, a new despot replaced the old despot, and the end new rulers replace the old rulers, what remains the same with every transition is that masses remain the ruled, the governed and the disempower. Through every historical transition the status of the masses remains unchanged, they remain essentially disempowered irrespective of the political dispensation or the material conditions of existence or nature of prevailing social formation or the particular instantiation of the mode of production. Oligarchies remain an ineradicable constant that belies the hopes of freedom and autonomy promised with the rising dawn of every historical social or political or economic transition. Oligarchies in the form of powerful ruling elites have managed to reproduce themselves in the aftermath of every social revolution. The historical reality is that democracies remain an illusion.

Why does this trend persist like a law of nature? Could it be a law of nature? Maybe! Are we then justified in believing that we are all doomed to live out our lives on this planet under an instantiation of the same old Oligarchy, under one of its multiple and ever changing disguises? This constant law-like self-replication or self-reproduction of the Oligarchy in the form of a multiplicity of different morphs, all sharing the same family resemble of despotism, through every post-Neolithic social-transition over the past 5000 or 6000 years, this recurrent state of affairs since the post-Neolithic agrarian revolution can be construed as nothing less than the birth of absurd universe. The World of the Oligarchy is the material and spiritual and metaphysical embodiment of the absurd universe. It is the universe which has been imposed on the ruled, on the masses, on the governed and so on and so forth. It is the universe which the masses experience as God made and as God designed. This is the message of the Noble Lie. The Oligarchy rules by divine mandate in accordance with the order and purposes that have been established by God. To rebel against the rule of the Oligarchy is to rebel against God, which could be taken to mean rebelling against existence, where existence is experienced as the full embodiment of the absurd, so the rebel is justified in his belief that there is no God, that there can be no God, especially given the nature of the world and universe as experienced by the rebel. The rebel as depicted in Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick', Dostoyevsky's 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers of Karamazov', Camus' novels and writings and in the novels and writings of Franz Kafka. The rebel is often presented as a Promethean figure. In some cases even the biblical Job is reconfigured in the role of a rebel. However, Jesus presented as the God incarnate or the kenotic God in the Gospel of John is found guilty of being a rebel against the World of the Oligarchy as incarnated in not only in the form of the Roman Empire, but also in the form of the Judean Oligarchy waiting expectantly to be re-born as a Davidic Kingdom, which nevertheless can only exist as the Kingdom of the Absurd which makes the idea of the return of the Davidic Messiah nothing more than another version of the ideology or political theology of the Oligarchy or in other words just another Noble Lie. And this is precisely the kingdom of the Inquisitor in 'The Brothers of Karamazov'. In the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus, Jesus makes it clear that he has no desire or plan to perpetuate the absurd world of the Oligarchy, and we can surmise that his reasons for this have already been outlined in his responses to the Temptations of the Tempter in the wilderness. The statement he made about his kingdom not being of this world meant that his kingdom was not the kingdom of the absurd, of nihilism, of death and of Noble Lies. It was not a necropolis. In the Gospel of John 18:33-37 English Standard Version (ESV) we read about my Kingdom not being of this World: 33 So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" 34 Jesus answered, "Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?" 35 Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?" 36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world." 37 Then Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." It is the intention of Jesus to break the iron law of the Oligarchy rather than perpetuate it. In fact the entire mission of Jesus revolves around the contestation of the iron law of the Oligarchy. In this sense Jesus became a transgressor and subverter by challenging the status quo, the foundations on which the Oligarchy had been built. The Jewish elite which included the Pharisees and the Sadducees were clients of the Roman Empire that why there representatives confessed: 'We have no other king but Caesar'. Caesar was their patron. Patronage was the Jewish survival strategy, they sort out the patronage of the ruling elite. They had done a very Jewish thing, they had struck a quid quo pro with Caesar, so an understanding existed between the Roman elite and the Jewish elite. The Jew were merely doing what they were good at – working out some kind of favourable quid quo pro which would benefit all and sundry. The Oligarchy worked for them, because they had an Oligarchical mentality which had become inculcated into the minds of the Judean political and religious elite, primarily as a consequence of their 70 yearlong exile in Babylon.

In the Garden of Gethsemane the Tempter returns with the offer of the Oligarchy. While on the cross the Tempter returns once more with the offer of the Oligarchy, even the Davidic Oligarchy, even the offer of the Davidic Messiahship. This much is clear: if Jesus climbs off the cross he will be recognized as the Messiah and he could rule forever the Oligarchy of the Jews just like King David, he could prove for once and for all that Judaism is indeed the divinely ordained religion which the Rabbi's claim it to be. Even the truth that the Bible is God's revelation will be confirmed if Jesus the devout Jew climbs off the cross. In the Gospel of Matthew chapter 27 verses 37 to 43 we read: 37 Above his head they placed the written charge against him: this is Jesus, the king of the Jews. 38 Two rebels were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. 39 Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads 40 and saying, "You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!" 41 In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. 42 "He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! He's the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. 43 He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.' "

How does the iron law of the Oligarchy work? I have some ideas. I would readily accept it as a global social law which accurately predicts the inevitable macro-social behaviour and social organization of human populations. In fact I would subsume Marxism under this global social law. The law is based on ideas of social complexity, social organization, social differentiation, and social stratification as functions of population size and environmental conditions. So the law has all the ingredients of a scientific law of nature drawing on animal behaviour, ecology, climate, niche theory, environmental carrying capacity, natural barriers to mobility and socio-biology.

Social complexity increases as the density of settled human population increases within a given social-geographical-ecological theatre of co-existence. The theatre of settled or sedentary agrarian co-existence may be open or closed, and whether it is open or closed is decisive for the emergence of the state and the oligarchy. The use of the word 'theatre' is intentional and also appropriate in this context as it captures the idea of 'stage' and 'staging' where staging involves both plot and execution of plot through the premediated actions and agencies of 'dramatic actors' on a passive mass of individuals who have lost their capacity as atomized individuals for cooperative action or agency as a collective. So they are unable to resist coercion as a collective, and this is central to origin of the state or Oligarchy. Coercion can on be resisted if the theatre of co-existence is open. Loss of agency and vulnerability to coercive forces increases systematically and inexorably if the theatre of co-existence becomes increasingly closed. When the theatre of co-existence is closed escape from it becomes difficult or impossible. Theatres of co-existence are best envisaged as temporary, semi-permanent or permanent settlements in the form of villages. Settlements can increase as villages merge and grow into larger more permanent settlements.

According to Robert Carneiro's theory of the origin of the state the concept of environmental circumscription determines the kind of conditions which make settled co-existence either open or closed. States usually arise when environmental conditions delimit or isolate or circumscribe landscapes and environments which are agriculturally favourable for permanent agrarian settlement. Paradigmatic examples of such agriculturally suitable environments and landscapes include the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus Valley, Valley of Mexico, and the mountain and coastal valleys of Peru. All these regions share one thing in common, they are environmentally isolated or circumscribed by barriers to migration in the form of mountains, seas and deserts. In all these regions a coercive state apparatus emerged giving rise to Oligarchies ruled by despots and privileged elites. The transition from settlements to coercive states and despot or elite ruled Oligarchies was purely contingent on external factors. One can treat the origin of the state or the Oligarchy naturalistically or materialistically. Its contingent emergence as a political entity or political state of affairs was based purely on the nature of prevailing material conditions such as climate, topology, landscape, soil fertility, environmental carrying capacity and human population dynamics. A critical factor driving the emergence of the state would be the system's capacity to generate an agricultural surplus.

Also according to Carneiro, theatres of open co-existence are not circumscribed by natural barriers such as sea, desert or mountains. These systems are able to support and sustain the emergence of settlements or villages. Examples

My idea of social complexity is based on the idea that social complexity increases when the theatre of co-existence becomes increasingly closed off and the material conditions of existence become increasing favourable for the emergence of a state.

This idea does not seem be counter intuitive. Social complexity increases. Social complexity is linked to the idea of controlling large numbers of individuals by means of an externally imposed system of orchestration. An orchestration becomes necessary when a desired social situation or social state of affairs can only be achieved by imposing external systems of control on an assembly of individuals so that they all behave collectively in a predetermined fashion towards a desired end. Social complexity increases when the enforcement of inter-individual and inter-group compliance with regard to ensuring the realization and maintenance of their common interests in an egalitarian moral framework of sociality based on the common good becomes impossible. So in this example social complexity is defined as what is possible and what is impossible in terms of social group sizes in regard to means and ends. The realization and maintenance of a common accord which is necessary for ensuring the common good within an egalitarian moral universe depends strongly on mutual agreement, mutual censure and mutual compliance between individuals and this can only be made possible through a process of reciprocal monitoring, which necessary entails continuous processes of mutual surveillance and reciprocal social interactions. This becomes increasing impossible as population size increases beyond a given threshold within the multidimensional space or zone of social co-existence. When the cooperative institutional framework of small groups for securing the common good on a rational and egalitarian basis breaks down due mainly to the increasing population density of settled communities, social asymmetries or social differentiation or social stratification with regard to the organization, distribution and exercise of power over individuals and groups by emerging coalitions of elites becomes the social reality. The elites become the orchestrators of means and ends within the social framework of conflicting interests. Social stratification necessarily results in a misalignment of interests. So orchestration through externally imposed systems of controls over large populations of individuals becomes necessary as social means to social-political-economic ends where the ends are predetermined by the ruling elites, and these ends because of social stratification cannot represent the common good. In a word the masses have to become 'captured' by a ruling class and as captured beings they have to become subdued or subjected to the will of a ruling class to serve the ends of the ruling minority. Following the transition of individual coexistence within small groups to atomized individual existence within the mass the stage become set for individuals to become captured and subdues as the subjects of leaders, chiefs, rulers, kings and emperors within settlements, villages, towns, cities, nations, states and empires, respectively. The iron law governing the process of social causation which leads to the inexorable emergence of social stratification, social hierarchies of domination and ultimately oligarchies acquires an inerasable immanent existence as an emergent property or emergent disposition within all human populations which have grown beyond the threshold of the specific group size that is conducive for securing an egalitarian arrangement between individuals based on the reaching of a consensus on what constitutes the common good for all. Such a consensus is arrived at through rational discourse between individual members of such a group. Once the group grows to a population size that exceeds the critical threshold the iron law of oligarchy becomes the prevailing sociality reality, rational discourse free of coercion between free and equal individuals becomes replaced by the authoritarian reign of the irrational. The rationally secured idea of what constitutes the common good for all is replaced by the irrational discourse of 'rights' where what is 'right' is 'instituted' violently by powerful ruling elites. From a literal or empirical perspective the operation of the iron law of oligarchy in human populations is symmetrical or equivalent for all historical or post-Neolithic social or political systems irrespective of whether they are conceived as monarchies or democracies. This means that all 20th Century political systems whether they were Fascist, Democratic, Capitalist, Socialists and Communist are all generically symmetrical or equivalent with regard to their being individual instantiations as oligarchies. What about Anarchism? Anarchism by definition is non-oligarchic. Pre-Neolithic humans essentially lived as anarchists. If we want to talk theologically about the 'Fall' and about Good versus Evil, and also about the essential nature of God and Humanity, then we can only have this discourse within the framework of Anarchism versus the Oligarchy, that is the Oligarchy as instantiated in all its post-Neolithic manifestation over the last 10 000 to 12 000 years. Which means that the discourse from an Anarchist perspective entails a comprehensive critique of the idea of Civilization as popularly conceived in the Oriental and Occidental mind.

And each day 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. 203. Not to drink wine poured in service to idols—Deuteronomy 32:38

204

The mind-body problem will not go away for the simple reason that we do not have any clear ideas on how brain processes cause consciousness, and while we experience what is like to be conscious we are not really sure exactly what consciousness actually is. What we can conclude is that consciousness is a property of the brain. We can't image being conscious without having a brain.

The fundamental question is whether the physical Universe is causally closed and the fundamental associated problem is that no immaterial entities or non-physical being or thing such as mind or consciousness in causally efficacious with respect to the occurrence of any event in the physical realm, because only physical causes have physical effects or only the physical even can give rise to or cause a physical event. Is consciousness a physical phenomenon?

The universe or the physical world is governed by the laws of nature. What is a law of nature? Law of nature determine the properties and behaviours of physical things. What is the source of the laws of nature, where do they come from, why do we have them? Do the laws of nature have a transcendent existence outside the realm of space and time? Are the laws of nature attributes of God? The physical universe seems to obey the laws of nature without exception. Laws of nature are real, they exist. The existence laws of nature as part and parcel of the physical Universe is an unwarranted assumption.

And each day 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. 204. To ritually slaughter an animal before eating it—Deuteronomy 12:21

205

Pain is something that is felt. What is it like to feel pain? Assuming that it was possible to fully observe the states and events taking place in the brain when someone feels pain, could one know what it is like to feel that specific pain after having full observational or empirical knowledge of all the physical brain states, brain processes and brain events associated with the experience of pain. We only have access to our minds and consciousness through introspection. Can we know what is going on in the minds of others if we were shown all the empirical data regarding the moment by moment physical states of their brain? This will require some kind of decoding that would facilitate the simultaneous coincidence or co-occurrence of characteristic momentary consciousness or mental states with their associated characteristic momentary physical brain state. If we had access to the code, and access to the momentary physical brain states of some individual then we should be able to ascertain what that individual is consciously thinking and feeling at any given moment. The individual could be in one room and the observers of that individual's physical brain state could be in another room. An algorithm could be used to decode physical brain states into the associated mental states and a powerful computer could be used to instantaneously generate the momentary sequence of mental states as an output which describe the mental states experienced by the individual in the other room into response to various kinds of external visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory and gustatory. We would know that from the brain data that the individual in the other room is seeing something, feeling something, smelling something, tasting something and hearing something. But we would not know what the individual is seeing or tasting or smelling or hearing or feeling. Nor will we know what it is like for that individual to see, taste, smell, hear and feel nor will we know what thoughts or mental images that the individual consciously engages in or experiences with regard the sensations of seeing, tasting, smell, hearing and feeling from the dynamics of the physical states of the individual's brain.

I have never believed that philosophy or science should be removed from life.

And each day 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. 205. Not to slaughter an animal and its offspring on the same day—Leviticus 22:28

206

How does consciousness happen?

In my notes I can see that my thoughts kept on shifting from one topic to another unrelated topic. I have even noted this in my notebooks. I often lost focus and my mind would drift. It was drifting from one mental state to another mental state. My drifted from kind of mental state to another different kind of mental state. A memory would come mind and I would explore the memory, gathering all the images that a memory brought together so that I could capture the mental contents of the memory in writing. And then an idea would come to mind, the idea of being mindless or being in a state of mindlessness, and I would start thinking how this may help a person to cope with being locked in a prison cell under conditions of solitary confinement. I would start thinking about how my own situation in the prison cell corresponded to the experiences of English woman I read about who went to India and became a Buddhist nun, and who found herself trapped by heavy snowfalls for the entire duration of the winter in a remote and isolated cave somewhere in the Himalayas. She apparently spent most of that winter in a state of meditation. The 'attainment of cessation' or nirodhasamāppti was an objective or goal of Buddhist meditation. The attainment of cessation was said to be equivalent to the cessation of sensation and conceptualization or samjnāvedayitanirodha, which was a state of pure consciousness, that is, consciousness emptied of all content, if that were at all possible, especially if we assume that the very definition of conscious always entails the idea of being conscious on something. If one can attain a state of pure consciousness, that is free of all content, free of all sensation, free of all phenomenal perceptive awareness of ideas or sensations, then in this pure state of consciousness emptied of all content one would be only conscious of consciousness itself, which in turn will be an altered state of consciousness. In this altered state of consciousness no mental function occur. In that sense the mind is 'empty'. This state could be seen as actually a special state of un-consciousness or mindlessness in which no mental functions occur. Sometimes this state is equated with Nirvana. This meditative state associated with the attainment of cessation which can be characterized as being in a state of altered state of consciousness in which the mind is empty all content, is equivalent to or identical to the attainment of enlightenment. The attainment of salvation flows from the attainment of enlightenment which in turn is conditional on the meditative attainment of cessation or mindlessness. The idea of attaining salvation in whatever form or pathway necessarily entails a theory and practice of soteriology, and this case it would be a Buddhist soteriology as it would the case with Christian or Jewish soteriology, or a Marxist soteriology, in fact, the attainment of Communism is also based on its own unique theory and practice of soteriology. A theory and practice of any soteriology is not only based on a philosophical anthropology, it also constitutes an ideology and a corresponding humanism, which is underpinned by its own characteristic and peculiar transcendental metaphysics. Soteriology is the word used with regard to a theory and doctrine of salvation and in this sense all forms of soteriology are articulated or expressed or narrated within a political theology or onto-theology. So there is such a thing as the political theology of Communism or Marxism or the political theology of Capitalism or the political theology of Apartheid. In this sense and context the philosophical or even technical meaning of theology in relationship to both politics and religions is linked or coupled to the way salvation and soteriology are conceived or conceptualized, irrespective of whether the language or semantics used happened to be strictly secular or otherwise religious. So while soteriology deals with the nature of salvation the articulation or the conceptualization of the nature of salvation cannot escape from dealing with the problem of the nature of man, and any conceptualization of the nature of man is necessarily based on some theory of the relation between the mind and body and therefore cannot escape the full implications of the mind-body problem and the form of its scientific or philosophical solution.

And each day 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. 206. To cover the blood (of a slaughtered beast or fowl) with earth—Leviticus 17:13

207

In a very blunt sense a philosophical anthropology tries to answer the onto-theological or the political theological question: what is man or what is women? Well what is man? Man is an animal, man is mammal, and most significantly man is a primate who shares a common ancestor with all the other primates. Humans are bipedal primates who had evolved and had become socially adapted to live in very small societies that were egalitarian in nature and remained non-hierarchically structured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was only subsequent to the agricultural domestication of plants and animals that hierarchically structured civilizations emerged and have being sufficiently resilient to endure in multiple forms for the past seven thousand years. And with the emergence of hierarchically structured societies humans who have been the most sociable of all animals for hundreds of thousands of years have become increasing lonely in their crowded cities and metropoles over the last six thousand years or so. The idea of sovereignty has co-evolved with the emergence of the state as apparatus for imposing and sustaining a hierarchically stratified organization of power over the lonely masses. All civilizations which have emerged subsequent to the agricultural revolution ten to twelve thousand years ago have been underpinned as a condition for their existence by hierarchically stratified structures of social domination which depended necessarily on the destruction of human solidarity. With the irreversible destruction of human solidarity the social-economic phenomenon of political sovereignty also emerged in the form of a ruling elite, first in the form of the king's body and then subsequently in various state-like institutions which replaced the king's body as vehicles for the domination of ruling elites over the lonely masses. For every generation that followed, the masses or subjects, were repeatedly rendered incapable of any moral agency, through a process of disempowerment and disenfranchisement. As a consequence of this they were deprived of the means and the power for expressing popular political solidarity with respect to initiating actions that would secure their political or class interests.

Loneliness, loss of individual freedom, lack of popular sovereignty, lack of individual autonomy, absence of solidarity and loss of moral agency are the social-political legacies of all hierarchical civilizations. I suppose we could argue that loneliness and alienation, especially in its modern forms is a direct consequence of the absence of individual freedom and autonomy, and also the absence of solidarity and the loss of individual moral agency.

Formally all hierarchical civilizations are essentially totalitarian in nature whether they are capitalist or communist because they are all based on a monopoly of power by an entrenched elite. Ironically as a communist I was an out-rider, I mean outsider, but I suppose I was also an out-rider, living on the margins. I did not buy into all the party dogma. I was critical of all the existing communist regimes including Cuba. They were all various species of the same dreary and grim embodiments of the same old familiar inflexible and stratified hierarchies of social domination by political elites. They were all similar representations in different versions of the same old arrangement of power and sovereignty that had existed essentially unchanged since humans first became sedentary creatures in densely populated permanent settlements. They all fell into the same genus, a genus whose members were comprised of all societies that happened to represent in one form or another of the same old stratified hierarchy of social domination which facilitated the monopolization of power in the hands of an entrenched self-serving elite.

The adjectives and adverbs characterizing the nouns and verbs are endless in their multiplicity of meaning as the merge in an infinite continuum of deceptive shades but the end we still have the loneliness of the disempowered masses. Loneliness is the essence of unspeakable impoverishment. Loneliness of masses is the symptom of the seemingly incurable totalitarian malaises. And I use the word malaise to describe a social pathology which has haunted humans since the domestication of plants and animals. Domestication of plants and animals represented the start of man's domination over nature. It also represented man's own self-domestication in the form of social domination of the few over the many. And man's own self-domestication through social domination represented man's ultimate attempt at the domination of nature. As a consequence humankind found itself bonded or enslaved in unnatural relationships which became the conditions under which loneliness emerged as a political and social pathology.

Loneliness, this abstract noun, is the synonym and symptom for all the nouns which refer to the wretchedness of the masses – alienation. Loneliness is alienation at its most desperate and wretched state of being and the verbalization of alienation is dispossession, disempowered, dehumanized, disenfranchisement, and enslaved.

And then we have the word 'solidarity', which happened to be the word we used all the time as communists, it is also a very special noun, it means the opposite of loneliness and it is the death knell of alienation. It means genuine and authentic comradeship.

I thought about my own experiences of loneliness that comes from being isolated from friends and family through imprisonment. Somehow in a significant way I was not really alone. There was Malcolm and I found myself experiencing some form of comfort in the fact that Malcolm was in John Vorster square and it was through his interventions that I had been given pens and notebooks.

Stratified hierarchies of social domination create loneliness because they happened to be essentially anti-social systems. They are intrinsically and essentially anti-social systems because they non-reciprocal in the way that they function politically and socially.

Going back to the idea of loneliness, as a phenomenon it is not purely a personal and therefore only a private emotional experience, it also happens to be political as well, and it seems that only a communist like myself would make the connection between the private experience of loneliness and public realm of politics. The politics of tyranny which also comes in multiple forms and is always experienced in the same way and that is as the politics of alienation, exclusion and exploitation. The politics of tyranny are an everyday reality even in the so-called Western Democracies which are based on a representation system in which an elected political elite who are always under the control of an establishment to whom they are answerable. Both the elected politicians and their establishment bosses are empowered through the process of elections to exercise sovereignty in any manner that will differentially benefit themselves and their clients at the expense of the masses who have been exploited as mere voting fodder. This is the essential objective of any tyranny. A tyranny only exist by destroying solidarity and the destruction of solidarity is achieved through various mechanisms and processes of control which ultimately work through the isolation individuals. The isolated individual loses all moral agency including the agency to prevent the isolation in all its various forms which inevitably leads to loneliness.

Tyranny is never rational. Tyranny involves rule by arbitrary whim. In this makes tyranny necessarily voluntarist in terms of moral agency or agency in general.

And each day 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. 207. Not to take the mother bird from her children—Deuteronomy 22:6

208

In writing her autobiography the author becomes her own character. She becomes a character, a fictional character to certain. In what way do we actually live our stories? The short answer to this question is that do indeed live inside our own stories, stories which we tell, we narrate all the time to ourselves, we constantly engaged in storytelling and revolves around our personal live, and we tell our stories about ourselves to ourselves. We live our own stories inside our heads, inside our minds, we are engaged in this internal private dialogue with ourselves, we are our own audience, we engage reflectively with ourselves concerning our life and our understanding of the life that we have lived or are currently living. The danger is that we can become locked into narrative, we can become prisoners of our own narrative about who, what and why we are what we have become. Each one lives their own lives within the envelope of their own skins, and we can never know what it is like to be someone else. The other always remains an eternal mystery. At the very heart of the story that we are living is the question of truth and meaning. Truth is about what we can know for certain, and meaning is something else. But truth and meaning should not be opposed, they should not be viewed in term of any dichotomy. Meaning should converge with truth in order for the world or for a life to be seen or comprehended as being intelligible, and not experienced as unintelligible or irrational or absurd. There can be no divorce between truth and meaning if things are to become intelligible to our understanding. These are musings.

What must a story be in order for it to qualify as a story? What must a story be for it to be a story? What is story? What is my story? And what is your story? The meaning of a story or narrative belongs to the reader. The reader in her reading of the story re-writes the story. Every reading ends up being a re-writing of the story.

And each day 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. 208. To release the mother bird before taking the children—Deuteronomy 22:7

209

Talking about love and Eros. An understanding of the meaning of Eros is a powerful antidote against the modern ideology of love. In the modern ideology of love, love is equated with sex and sex is equated with the erotic which is supposed to be about Eros. Eros and knowledge are the two sides of the same coin. The erotic is about knowing and about the love of knowledge. The love of knowledge is the highest form of erotic desire, of the meaning of Eros. The erotic is not necessarily the sexual. The erotic can manifest itself in relationships, especially in relationship and in pure friendships, without being overwhelmed with the sexual or with sexuality. We should be able to be erotic in relationships and friendships without being sexual. Skinning dipping for the first time with Samantha was a pleasantly erotic experience, seeing her naked and being naked with her in the pool was pleasurable, but it was not sexual. Thinking about love, Eros, sexuality and sensuality, we cannot help thinking about the physical and emotional act of sexual intimacy. Douceur as in sweetness and pleasantness was what turned me on. Sweetness, pleasantness, gentleness, tenderness, considerateness, warmth and affection were the things that turned me on and make me want to be physically and emotionally intimate in a loving relationship. Other things in a woman which turned me on were intelligence, vitality, charm and gaiety, and of course a natural sensuality which could not be reduced to physical beauty, sensuality does not necessarily always manifest itself in physical beauty. Many women, both lesbian and straight, who may seem plain can be more sensual, charming and erotic than someone who is unquestionably beautiful from a physical perspective.

And each day 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. 209. Not to swear falsely in G d's Name—Leviticus 19:12

210

The Name of God

In Jewish tradition God is worshipfully acknowledged always with a profound sense of awe Even verbalizing the name of God was considered a very serious matter, hence the reason for why the Ten Commandments and the Torah prohibit the saying of God's name in vain. Verbalizing God's name is not a matter to be taken lightly in Judaism. So out of reverence for God's name, God name is never verbalized directly, instead the Hebrew word Hashem is used when speaking about God. Hashem literally means 'the name'. When referring to God by using the word Hashem we are referring to God as 'He-Who-Must-Not-be-Named'. In the Hebrew Bible the word for God is made up of four vowels and traditionally was only pronounced on Yom Kippur by the high priest. As a consequence of the mitzvot prohibition on using God's name in vain the Jewish people have invented various substitutions 'for the name'. When reading the Torah we substitute the word Adonai for the four letter unpronounceable name of God. When praying we use also Hashem as a creative way of not saying God's name. Other names that stand for God in Jewish tradition include: Adoshem, Yah, Yahweh, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, El Shaddai, Av Harahamim, and Harahaman.

And each day 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. 210. Not to take G d's Name in vain—Exodus 20:7

211

Next Year in Jerusalem

In 1977 I observed Seder with the Librarian, her brother and their aged mother. At the close of our Seder journey the brother said 'next year in Jerusalem'. We all smiled at each other, the Librarian took my hand, it was a very moving moment and these words brought a tug to my heart which caught me by surprise. The realization flashed through my mind: 'God I have become completely Jewish, I am experiencing Jewish emotions. I am one of them and they see me as one of them'. Here I was with these old Jews round a table in Kensington across the koppies from my grandparents who still lived in Malvern, Oupa and Ouma Zeeman, who never liked the Jews. I had grown up in an extended family who were distrustful of Jews. My grandfathers had fought in the Second World War against the Nazis, yet they were anti-Semitic. And now I was going to Shul where I was the youngest member of an aging congregation of Jews, Jews who belonged to my grandparent's generation, the generation that witnessed the Holocaust and the Great War to end all wars. The Rabbi mentioned that we were the last congregation of this particular Synagogue because of the rapidly shifting Jewish demography in the area. This also brought a pain to my heart as I have grown attached to this particular Synagogue and its congregation. They were the Jewish community who I now associated myself with. And the words 'next year in Jerusalem' had a bitter-sweet resonance and the full force of the ambiguities and ambivalences that had now become an inextricable part of my life, tore me apart. I had now also got to the stage in my life where I could be Jewish without Yael.

And each day 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. 211. Not to deny possession of something entrusted to you—Leviticus 19:11

212

In hotel lounge in Vilanculos the rapidly rotating blades of the ceiling fan above our table makes a pleasant unobtrusive purring sound. We ordered more prawns and another round of Laurentina beer. I am feeling well educated, my brain is bursting with knowledge after six months of learning at Wits. They say there are thirty six different phyla and in the animal kingdom which is the same as saying that there are thirty six different recognizable animal body plans in the animal kingdom. Our Zoology lecturer, Professor Max Nudelman, a short plumpish balding homosexual atheist Jew was a honey and a genius, and could be a sarcastic bitch if he wanted to. He said: 'Don't believe what your text books have to say about animal phylogeny, they have got the whole story is wrong!' This was my first lesson in science. The conventional wisdom may in reality be completely false. I did not miss one of his lectures. I always made sure I that I was early so that I could get a seat in the front row. I hang onto every word that fell from his lips. To me he was the perfect man mainly because he was not interested in women. On the sexual level I found men physically revolting. I was a nascent feminist, ripe for recruitment. I think he knew I was queer, I'm convinced he could see that I was a dyke. He was perceptive enough, more so than the guys who tried to hit on me. He could also see that I worshipped him. My face must have radiated a dazzling glow of sheer joy as I listened to him. I wrote copious notes in class, and at night after supper while lying on my bed in my room at the Sunnyside Women's Residence, a room I had to share with a girl I did not care much for, I rewrote and expanded the lecture notes in a black A4 sized hardcover notebook labelled Zoology I. I was in heaven!

And each day 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. 212. Not to swear falsely in denial of a monetary claim—Leviticus 19:11

213

It was drizzling when we left the railway station in Nelspruit. After skidding dangerously on the steep muddy slippery gravel road which followed the winding coils of the contours that wrapped around the slopes of tall blue gum and pine plantations we finally arrived at what seemed to be some kind of mountainous summit. On the short stretch of level road the bus skidded to stop, dropping us off next to a low concrete bridge that barely cleared the river and which seemed to be in flood. Parked on the other side of the river in the Wits Botany Department Land Rover was Dr Glen Songbird and Professor Gladys Turner. All thirty four students plus four academics who were Dr Bruce Wallace, Dr Kate Jolly, Mr. Reinhardt Muller and Professor Keith Midas. After packing our sleeping bags, kit bags and personal effect into the Land Rover and the trailer we all trudged behind Land Rover the up the muddy sand track until we reached the top of the ridge. Following the Land Rover as it drove slowly down a narrow rocky two track path we descended into valley walking in single file, slipping and sliding, through the dense early morning fog which had settled in the Blyde River Canyon.

On the train journey down to Nelspruit from Johannesburg Park Station I ended up sharing a compartment with three guys who were definitely not part of the charmed circle. In fact they eventually become my lifelong friends and we have remained in touch with each other for years. Anyway they were Roger Ho, Wayne Bernstein and Michael Livingstone. Wayne was a Jew who had converted to Christianity and was one of those Jews for Jesus people. Michael was a newly born again Christian who belong to some or other Pentecostal church and Roger was Chinese and a devout Catholic. The three had become excluded from rest of the class by virtue of the fact they were highly religious and did not touch alcohol. We reached the base camp a few hours later soaking wet, foot sore and covered in mud because of all the slipping and sliding and falling on our butts. It had been a slow and torturous ten kilometre walk for most of the female students who were not wearing shoes suitable for hiking over rough terrain. We had to endure a chorus of moaning, whining and whinging.

It was Good Friday, the drizzling stopped, the mist lifted and the sun broke through the clouds. The base camp consisted of an ancient farm house with a strong flat cement roof. It appeared that house could double up as a fort. Our meals were to be cooked by ourselves on gas stoves in the small kitchen according to a chef's roster. The lounge and dining room were to be used as our field laboratory and the large covered veranda which overlooked the valley was where we ate our meals and socialized. Most the female students chose to sleep on the concrete floor in the two bedrooms. The rest of us were accommodated in the backyard behind the house in tents. The four of us took over one of tents. There was one long drop toilet and no ablution facilities or running tap water or electricity. We were given the afternoon off to settle in, wash off the mud from our limbs and generally get cleaned up and to go on exploration walks. Most of us trooped down the steep valley to the river to wash and change into dry clean clothes. At the river, for the sake of modesty, we all changed behind bushes into our bathing customs before plunging into the deep ice cold crystal clear rock pool. Being Good Friday Wayne, Michael and Roger wore very solemn expressions on their faces. They had brought their Bibles along. When we had finished swimming they asked if I would like to join them for Bible readings and prayer at some quiet private place among the rocks and boulders. I declined and went on a walk into the canyon by myself along a path which followed the river.

I was soon joined by Dr Kate Jolly who I quickly sensed had taken a sexual interest in me. In those days there weren't any policies or constraints for the prevention sexual harassment. In her mid-thirties Dr Jolly who was a mycologist was definitely not an unattractive woman and I was a mere nineteen year old second year student feeling very vulnerable alone with this woman. The previous year I had been with a bunch of guys to the Bazaruto Archipelago in Mozambique on a ten day diving trip without ever being bothered with any hint of a sexual problem, and now I had to deal with someone who was forcing herself on me. In fact, she had a stunning body and an eye-catching face. She was hot. Anyway I still felt that just because we were both queer gave her no right to make any kind of sexual overtures or put pressure on me.

I was beginning to feel awkward in the aura of her chumminess. Then out of the blue we both hear heavy breathing and the loud trudge of boots. We turned round to see who it was trying to catch up with us. It was Benjamin Schlossheimer. I could have embraced his sweaty khaki clad body and kissed him all over on his ruddy cheeked cherubim face which glistened with perspiration, he was my knight in shining armour racing to save me from the clutches and evil designs of Dr Kate Jolly. There was a flash of unmistakable irritation on her face. Anyway I flashed him a dazzling welcoming smile. His ebullient personality quickly subdued a flirtatious Dr Jolly who retreated back into her normal respectable academic self in the role of the fungal virtuoso. I had learnt my lesson, and decided to make sure that I was never alone without companions. And I should never go walking by myself as this could be interpreted as a signal for her to act on.

And each day 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. 213. To swear in G d's Name to confirm the truth when deemed necessary by court—Deuteronomy 10:20

214

I had not brought any alcohol of my own on the field trip and so I did not participate in any of the nightly raucous partying on the veranda which only ended in the early hours of the morning. Everyday bleary eyed hungover students staggered into the field after breakfast. After supper and lab work the four of us retreated with mugs of steaming coffee back to our tent. Now at the end of a busy day filled with botanizing we lit the hurricane lamp and reclined on our stretchers sipping our coffee while reviewing the day's events. Inevitably every night our conversation sooner or later converged onto religion or philosophical topics which had a strong theological flavour. After brushing our teeth and washing our faces we climbed into our sleeping bags and fell asleep while under the spell of discourses on the nature of God and His salvation for us, and so on. Our day always ended with one lone voice was left with no listeners as we slipped one by one into a blissful sleep. The vibrant faith of my three friends seemed to be anomalous compared to Father Francis Digby who while being an Anglican clergyman under holy orders with a BA in history and theology under his belt from Rhodes University lost his faith. In the wake of losing his faith his life fell apart, he marriage broke up and he fell in love with an Indian woman who became his life partner. In sharp contrast to Francis Digby whose faith was eroded by the corrosive acids of the higher criticism of the Bible the faith of Michael, Wayne and Roger proved to be resilient against the full intellectual onslaught of the enlightenment and twentieth century modernity. Their faith held firm within the intellectually hostile environment of the biological sciences in which Darwinian evolution reigned supreme as the comprehensive and established paradigm in the biological sciences. In the scientific establishment Darwinian evolution was treated as an established fact beyond all rational dispute. There was no other explanation for the diversity of life and the diversity of adaptations and the three had been exposed to the scientific and empirical underpinnings of the theory of evolution. With regard to the theory of evolution they could without hesitation recite chapter verse regarding the verification and verisimilitude of Darwinian evolution of the species by natural selection. Yet their faith stood strong and solid, and they believed in the literal truth of the Bible including the whole of Genesis.

As I have said before, I have never been an atheist and I am intellectually comfortable with the idea that God does indeed exist. And I am worried about whether or not there is after life. I am able to accept the finality of death and I have come to terms with my own extinction and eventual non-existence. Our nightly discussion generally revolved around whether science ruled out the existence of God and the nature of the arguments and evidence that can be marshalled from science to support the idea of the non-existence of God. I did wish to become involved with arguments regarding the truth or falsity of the Bible. I accepted that Bible was composed of great literature and the problems brought to bear on the status of the Bible was not only about the literal truth or falsity of ideas regarding matters of faith and confession. They were immune to the clear and obvious conflicts between a fundamentalist view of Bible and revelation and the facts of evolution. Evolution was part of the BSc curriculum in Zoology and Botany so they had to study Darwin's theory in a sort of intellectually quarantined fashion, so its contagion could be kept safely in check. They managed to cultivate a state of intellectual schizophrenia with while appearing to be perfectly sane.

Science has a direct bearing on the non-existence of God by holding to the truth claim that the physical universe is closed under causation which is the same as stating that every physical effect has a physical cause. This the fundamental thesis of a position that has come be known as 'physicalism', which is basically the position of all materialistic views of the universe and the world. This was also more or less my position on the field trip in our nightly discussions. The central logical implication flowing from this claim is that nothing in the world or universe exists other than the physical.

And each day 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. 214. To fulfil what was uttered and to do what was avowed—Deuteronomy 23:24

215

As I have already eluded Dr Kate Jolly was definitely not bad looking, she had a nice body and shapely powerful legs. Unless I was misreading everything, all the signals suggested that she was determined to fuck me. I knew that sooner or later she was going to get what she wanted, she was going to have her way with me. She had been subtly pursing me at every opportunity. At meals she always sat next me and took an interest in me as a person. To my own surprise I began to gradually warm up to her and started to enjoy the special attention that she was showering on me, and so I soon discovered that she was actually a very nice person, and I rationalized that there was really no harm in playing along with her plans and allowing myself to be seduced by this older more experienced woman. I began to encourage her with my own subtle flirtatious responses. The ball was in her court, it was now up to her make her move, and she would have her reward with me. She told me to call her Kate and not Dr Jolly.

As it turned out we were given an afternoon off to do our own stuff. Most of us wanted to collect insects for our second year entomology insect collection project. The autumnal sun was still warm and Kate asked if I would like to go swimming with her. I packed my toiletries, fresh underwear and clean clothes into my hiking bag. And I also packed my insect killing jar, and grabbing my insect net I ran down the path to meet Dr Jolly who was waiting for me with her hiking bag pack strapped to her back. Slightly out of breath I joined her and we hiked at a solid pace like amazons for a good five kilometres into the canyon to a remote and secluded rock pool that she knew of. Kate was known to be obsessive about health, exercise and fitness. She was not only a formidable squash player she also did body building, ran marathons and did ball room dancing on top of all these physical pastimes. At the pool as we stripped to skinny dip I began to feel breathless with sexual excitement, my whole body began shake and shiver uncontrollably with nervous anticipation, and my mouth suddenly felt incredibly dry and I also began to leak involuntarily, a conspicuous yellow stream of urine run down the side of my inner thigh, I realized that I lost complete control over my body. I was peeing myself. And I had never lost control of my bladder in my life. I quickly turned my back towards Kate so she would not see that I was peeing all over myself. I was in such a state of nervousness to be alone with Kate, an older and experienced woman who was going to do all kinds of pleasurable stuff to me which at that moment I could not even imagine. Because I did not want to cause any further involuntary embarrassment to myself I immediately dived naked into the crystal clear deep pool and the sudden shock of the chilly waters seemed to calm me down somewhat. After swimming for a while we soaped ourselves down, shampooed our hair and brushed our teeth in the shallows, and then rinsed our bodies and hair by swimming back into the deep rock pool. With our toilet done, after applying lotions and creams to our bodies, and after applying deodorant and spraying with perfume, we finally sat down on the blanket that Kate had spread out. Kate gently pushed me down so that I was laying on my back, she wiped the wet hair from my face and while smiling at me she stroked my forearm. She leant over me and began to kiss me while gently fondling my breasts. Her hand moved down and gently explored the anatomy of my vulva. Satisfied that I was ready for what she had in mind she sat up in kneeling position and reached into her backpack from which she retrieved a tube of lubricant. Instructing me to lay back she knelt down between my legs which she spread wide open. I was surprised by an unexpected and sudden wave of incredible pleasure as I felt her tongue probing and licking my vulva and clitoris. She stopped for moment. I lifted my torso and resting on my elbows I looked to see what she was doing. She gave me a mysterious smile and unscrewed the lid off a tube of lubricant and squeezed the contents onto the pad of left forefinger. After instructing me to lay back again she went down on clitoris again with her mouth. I felt the cold cream of the lubricant on my anus as she worked in the cream over my anal orifice and the sides of my anus. She applied the pad of her left forefinger to my anus moving it in a gentle rotatory movement. Pressing her finger down on my anus I felt the sphincter relax and her lubricated left forefinger slipped deep into my rectum. Moving her finger in my anus I could feel the pressure of her finger moving in my anus. She kept her finger moving in my anus while she inserted with her right hand two fingers into my vagina, she rubbed the inside walls of my vagina beneath the root of my clitoris. While licking she began to move her fingers vigorously. In response to an overwhelming surge of pleasure I began breathing heavily, I began to pant, my heart pounded in my chest, and then I began to feel the overwhelming and exquisite cascades of orgasms. My toes curled spontaneous, my legs writhed about wildly, my back arched, my gyrating hips lifted, I threw my arms back behind head, and moving my head from side to side I began to make the strangest mewing sounds.

Whenever the opportunity arose in the late afternoons we would slip off for some wild and passionate sex. When it came to lesbian sex Kate knew everything that was needed to be known and she was an excellent, knowledgeable and empathetic teacher and I became her enthusiastic student. She even taught me fisting. She loved to hump me, getting on top of me she would press her vulva against my pubic bone she rub herself against me until she climaxed.

And each day 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. 215. Not to break oaths or vows—Numbers 30:3

216

The Body of a Woman and the Pleasure of Her Body

In Greek myths we discover what the ancient Greeks thought about the bodies of women. To begin with, the idea of a world without women did once dominate the imagination of the Greek male mind. Greek mythology dreams of a womanless world. In a womanless world, even the idea of the body of a woman would be superfluous, it would have no role to play in the reproduction of man. In the Greek masculine mind, even given the necessary existence of women in the life of men, the female body it would still not play a direct role in conception. This argument was based on the allegorical or analogical idea that the ground or earth does not conceive the plant. The 'conception' of a plant is a direct result of the sowing of a seed into the ground. The woman's body is equivalent to the passive soil or the friable giving ground of earth which offers no resistance to the plough. The seed corresponds to the semen of men.

Still in the light of this ancient view of the woman's body being equivalent to the soil of the earth, the role and significance of the woman's body in reproduction remained mysterious, ambiguous and complicated in the ancient world. Many symbols or metaphors refer directly to a woman's body as a fertile but 'eggless' body. Its fertility was analogous to the fertility of the soil. Like the fruitful soil the woman's body was fertile to receive the seed of men, in the same manner that the earth was fertile to receive the seed of the sower. This is even evident in the Bible also, especially in the Song of Songs. For example, the idea of the garden, the vineyard or the field are all used as metaphors when referring to the role of a woman's body in sex and reproduction or in the generation of life. All of these metaphors which have been used in the symbolization of a woman's body exemplify or symbolize the idea of earth, the passivity of earth with respect to the plough and the seed, the earth is a passive receptacle for the life giving seed, and the earth in itself does not give rise to life. The bodies of women thus represent the earth into which men sow their life giving seed. The seed of men is the source of all human life. Men ploughed the bodies of women in the same way that a farmer must first plough the ground to make it ready before sowing the seed. In the ancient world a woman's body functioned as nothing more than the receptacle, like ploughed earth, for the seed of men. Allegorically speaking a man ploughs the woman's body when he has sex with her. This is ground for seeing women as really nothing in the ancient patriarchical universe. In this universe humanity descends directly from the semen of men with no contribution coming from the mother in the form of her eggs. In the mind of the ancient world the woman's egg simply does not exist. The woman body contributes nothing except the pleasure of her vagina for the sower of the seed. To take pleasure in the body of a woman ended in the sowing of a man's seed in her womb for the conception of the progeny of men. The idea of women taking pleasure in their bodies was not of great concern to the ancient patriarchal mind.

The men of Athenians believed that they descended from Erichthonius who was born not directly from his mother Athena but from the earth. Athena the goddess of war asked Hephaestus the Olympian blacksmith to make her a set of weapons. When she wanted to pay him, he told her not worry, he would do it for love. While she was watching him make the weapons, he tried rape her. But after a great struggle she managed to tear herself free and Hephaestus' seed rained onto the soil of Athens. Therefore, instead of inseminating Athena he ended up fertilizing the soil of Athens. In addition, as a consequence of this the earth gave birth to the boy Erichthonius. Even though Athena remained a virgin, she was considered in Greek mythology to be the mother of Erichthonius. However, her motherhood remained ambiguous. The first Athenian, a boy, had only a father and no mother. Athenians have descended not from a mother and father in the normal sense but only from a single person, a father. As a consequence of this all male Athenians were taken to be brothers in a literal sense. This is the founding myth supporting the view in ancient Greece that women were inferior beings.

And each day 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. 216. For oaths and vows annulled, there are the laws of annulling vows explicit in the Torah—Numbers 30:3

217

At sunrise we unpacked and off-loaded all our equipment including the rubber dinghy with its fifty horse power Johnson outboard motor at the jetty near the hotel in Vilanculos. The Land Rover and Kombi was driven away to be parked at the hotel until we got back. Standing on the jetty looking out over the vast expanse of ocean in the direction where I thought the tiny island of Santa Carolina (Paradise Island) would be located according to the map it seemed be an impossible 50 miles away. We were told by the ferry skipper that it was going to take us at least 5 hours to get there, and they wanted to still get back by night fall. I began to feel breathless with excitement. I realized that I was on the brink of an adventure that only comes once in a life time. Someone on the ferry said that for a person of average height the sea horizon is 4.7 km (2.9 miles) away and nothing beyond that distance could be seen. Soon Vilanculos disappeared below the horizon and we seemed to be lost in the vast Indian Ocean. Colin Brown the leader of our diving expedition told us to keep our eyes focused on the horizon if we don't want to become sea sick. There was hardly any swell and the sea was as calm as a lake. There was no breeze to create even the smallest ripple, only the slow chugging of the ferry's passage disturbed the tranquil ocean. I was so enthralled by the sight of turtles, dolphins, colossal whale sharks and huge manta rays I remember saying that I could easily become a marine biologist. My enthusiasm was almost childlike and brought indulgent smiles to everyone's face. For a moment I was not an adult. I became everyone's little kid sister. Five hours later the tall palm tree of Santa Carolina broke through the horizon and the island gradually emerged from nowhere out of the vast ocean like a magical remote oasis in the middle of desert. The sea which had turned from deep blue to turquoise remained as calm as a mirror on the leeward side of the island. After the ferry had moored at the small pier Carlos walked with over to the hotel while we unloaded our equipment and gear onto the peer. Half an hour later Carlos returned and we were faced with the odious physical task of carrying all our equipment to our designated camping spot about half a kilometre from the pier to our private patch of brilliant white beach in the shade of gigantic palm trees. It took until night fall to pitch the tents, set up the gas fridge and freezer, compressor and all the camping equipment. There were seven of us on the trip and I was the only female. I had my own tent and even though I was a tomboy I was worried about becoming a bit of eye candy for the boys. Having made no arrangements for supper we walked over to the hotel as twilight descended over the island. We all agreed that we deserved a celebratory party for managing to get to Santa Carolina against all odds. And we were also all starving having not eaten all day.

And each day 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. 217. The Nazir must let his hair grow—Numbers 6:5

218

Sex and the City

In ancient Athens sexual customs were very different compared to what we consider as normal today. It was pretty much normal for many male members of the Athenian social upper classes to have sexual relations even when they were married with males and other females. In addition, the hierarchical organization of Greek society was also very different from what we see in the modern Western world of today. In the ancient city-states of Greece, only adult free men had full democratic rights. In the city-state, all free men were recognized as equals. Being full citizens of a democratic city-state made them free men. Women, children and slaves did not have the status of being full citizens nor could they ever become full citizens. It was actually inconceivable that they could ever become full citizens. It was also inconceivable that they could be free in the same way that adult male citizens were free. It was perfectly natural for women, children and slaves to be excluded from the society of free men. Slavery was considered a natural human condition or social institution, part of the natural ordering of human social relations. A slave could never become a full citizen. The inferior status of slaves, women and children was viewed as a perfectly natural ordering of human social rank. It was not considered morally wrong in any sense. Slavery as a fact of life was never questioned, it was never perceived as being morally reprehensible or evil. Slavery was actually a very ancient social institution. A slave-free word was inconceivable, it could not even be imagined I suppose. For them the idea of there being no slaves was absurd. The idea of universal human rights would have sounded absurd to citizens of Athens.

In Plato's universe the only kind of love that could transcend the earth bound sensual desire for beautiful physical bodies was the homosexual love between two men. Only this form of love could undergo a transformation into the heavenly philosophical love of the idea of beauty. It was only in the context of homosexual love between two men that lovers could climb the ladder of Eros or love to heaven.

And each day 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. 218. He must not cut his hair—Numbers 6:5

219

Is the idea of the Class Struggle a founding myth?

As a myth it articulates a basic principle which underlies all forms of post-Neolithic social reality, but as is the case with all myths it leaves a lot that remains unsaid, and the truth lies in the unsaid, in what cannot be said, in the ultimate unsayable. It is in the unsaid where the truth lies hidden, where it remains concealed. You will notice that my language has become unambiguously Heideggerian and for that matter metaphysical and theological. Does the Communist Manifesto articulate a mythology, the founding myth of Marxism? It does articulates a founding myth in which the constant 'becoming' of the Oligarchy remains the unsaid and the unwritten, this constant becoming of the Oligarchy functions is the underlying principle of the class struggle which becomes the visible symptom of the existence of the self-reproducing Oligarchy. In the mythology of the class struggle we have the merging of Logos, Mythos and Telos. And the Telos in this instance is the constant Phoenix-like rising of the Oligarchy. But in the self-rising and self-reproduction of the self-same Oligarchy, in its continuous going out of existence and coming back into existence, we see the self-defeating dialectical tension between Logos and Mythos and Telos. The self-defeating dialect becomes evident in the constant re-emergence of the Oligarchy, the same self-defeating dialect becomes evident as the principle of the class struggle. The class struggle become the engine or motive force or machine power for the recreation or the re-emergence of hierarchies of social domination and this is the Telos towards which all social histories converge asymptotically as if under some iron law. The preceding hierarchy of social domination collapses only to re-emergence in the form of a 'new' hierarchy of social domination. Rising and collapsing and rising again the Telos remains an unchanging Terminus in the form of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy remains the treadmill of history forever forestalling the dawn of freedom and hope.

Direct quotations from the Communist Manifesto:

1) 'A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism'.

2) 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class", [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.'

Completion of the quote from 'The Communist Manifesto'.

And each day 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. 219. He must not drink wine, wine mixtures, or wine vinegar—Numbers 6:3

220.

Now in hindsight we see that it is the spectre of the Oligarchy that has haunted the whole of post-Neolithic human history and it threatens to shape all possible political futures in its mould. The revolutionary development and expansion of new technologies into every dimension of human life and production does not automatically augur well for the future. It will not necessarily forestall the possible emergence of a nightmarish dystopia which will pave the way for the final demise of humanity. Technology remains a double edged sword. History so far has been the unending betrayal of hopes and dreams. Maybe Malcolm is right.

And each day 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. 220. He must not eat fresh grapes—Numbers 6:3

221

In my confession I held nothing back. I answered the questions about stuff that they wanted to know. I was surprised to discover how little they knew. I did not volunteer anything. In retrospect the 'interrogation' was an exercise in futility. Malcolm had obliquely hinted that something completely unforeseen was going to happen. I had a premonition that it was going to be the collapse of apartheid. It was in the air. But the imminence of the unforeseen did not stop them from letting me languish in detention for two years waiting every day for my trial date to be set. Now I am sure that they knew that there was not going to be any trial.

Well it was entirely true in my confession I held nothing back. I did hold back in the making of a 'metaphysical' confession. Of course I disagreed with the Noble Lies on which the entire history of human civilization was based on. I betrayed myself by not confessing this truth. I betrayed myself by not making the metaphysical confession regarding the nature of Truth. It is true that Marx's theory of capitalism is a fairly consistent and coherent theory and in many respects what Marx has written in Capital is obvious beyond belief. To question whether his conceptualization of Capitalism has no basis or grounds in the economic realities of Capitalist economies involves denying the obvious. It is a historical fact that socialism has failed. Why did socialism fail in the great 20th century socialist experiment? The failure of socialism does not represent a 'total' falsification of the idea of socialism. Twentieth Century Socialism failed for very obvious and very mundane reasons, all of which came back to the singular inevitability that just like capitalism, socialism in the 20th century also turned out to be generically just another 'ontogenetic recapitulation' of the development of the Oligarchy. Like capitalism, the development of socialism in its 20th century conformed to the iron law of the Oligarchy acquiring all the generic features of the Oligarchy such as hierarchies of social status and hierarches of social domination.

The iron law of the Oligarchy kicks in when conditions become favourable for the genesis of the Oligarchy. What was initial historical trigger for the development of Oligarchical arrangements in the first place? The trigger consisted of all the predisposing factors which drove the transition from non-hierarchical egalitarian forms sociality to non-egalitarian hierarchical forms of sociality. The Oligarchy emerges as a consequence of factors which drove the transition from a low density nomadic form of sociality based on hunter-gather subsistence to a high density more permanent or semi-permanent settled sedentary forms of sociality based on agricultural forms of subsistence.

The hypothesis can be stated in the following expanded form: Historically the Oligarchy arose as a consequence of the transition from low density mobile or peripatetic or nomadic hunter-gatherer forms of egalitarian sociality to more sedentary high density permanent or semi-permanent settled populations which strongly favoured the spontaneous development of social hierarchies. Social hierarchies of domination arise when conditions favour the concentration and centralization of social, economic, and political power in the hands of a ruling elite. This happens under capitalism and socialism. Sedentary high density populations dependent on agricultural forms of subsistence provide the social conditions which favour the inevitable emergence of powerful ruling elites.

A wide spectrum of social pathologies arose as a consequence of this. It must be remembered that human sociality which was egalitarian in nature was an adaptation which evolved to increase the fitness for a hunter-gatherer existence. It was an adaptation which evolved over 300 000 years before the onset of the Neolithic. What is the message or point I am making? It is this: Palaeolithic humanity functioned according to a repertoire of behavioural adaptations which re-enforced egalitarian structured relationships between individuals living together in small nomadic communities. What I am implying is that humans are natural anarchists. Which means anarchism not a mere ideology - it is basically a social-behavioural-adaptation necessary for the continued existence of humanity. Any form of Oligarchy, whether capitalist or 'communist/socialist', necessarily requires the destruction of anarchistic forms of sociality. This is why both capitalism and 20th century socialism have failed so spectacularly. Socialism and communism can only exist as forms of egalitarianism in terms of an anarchistic sociality.

The history of post-Neolithic social development or evolution of social formations, irrespective of the corresponding modes of production, forces of production and relations of production, have been nothing less than the history of the emergence of ever new forms, systems and patterns of social stratification, that is patterns of social stratification or systems of social hierarchicalization in which inequality is legitimated on the basis of the differentiation of roles and functions. The hierarchicalization of social domination emerges as an iron-law throughout history for every kind of non-anarchist social formation, whether it be based on slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or 20th century socialist/capitalist modes and relations of production. In each of these history instances in the evolution of modes and relations of production, inequality has been institutionalized and legitimated.
Any theory of historical materialism cannot ignore the iron-law of the Oligarchy. Historical materialism is based on concepts such as: 1) The mode of production, where any mode of production is a specific combination and arrangement of productive forces such as the means of production and labour power. 2) The relations of production, which are based on how the effective control over the forces of production is exerted. Control by a ruling elite over the relations of production are always rests on the legitimation of inequality whether it by means of private ownership or administered and managed through the agency of a hierarchicalized bureaucracy as would be the case for 20th century socialism in the Soviet Bloc countries. Both forms of control over the forces of production are based not only on the legitimation of inequality, but also on the enforcement of inequality, through ideology, through the forces of hegemony, through effective disempowerment, through coercion and through the denial of individual autonomy and freedom, and consequently by means of violence. Inequality is a multidimensional cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon or state of affairs. Denial of individual autonomy and freedom is also a multidimensional cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon or state of affairs. Powerful elites exist by virtue of the institutional legitimation and enforcement of multidimensional inequality. Powerful elites and inequality also exist by virtue of the professionalization of politics.

In Marxist theories of historical materialism social changes or social revolutions are driven or triggered when crises and conflicts arise between the forces and relations of production in the form of class struggle between the exploited and the ruling elite. However, as long as there exists an Oligarchy whether it be a capitalist Oligarchy or a socialist Oligarchy in the form of a hierarchicalized bureaucratic class of political elites, there will be exploitation and inequality. Under the Iron Law of the Oligarchy each passing moment is eternally the same and interchangeable with respect to the eternal recurrence of inequality and its institutional legitimation. Through the episodic discontinuities and upheavals which separates one eras or epoch from the next, ever since the emergence of the very first post-Neolithic societies, the Oligarchy has re-emerged and inequality has persisted as an eternal social condition. This state of affairs could be viewed as the not so original Original Sin. The substance of the Oligarchy is identifiable in every metamorphoses undergone by all and any post-Neolithic social formation based on the existence of the kind of institution we can recognize as the state, as such it is self-perpetuating like an incurable and recalcitrant political cancer, metastasising in the body politic in the full radiation of its instances throughout time and space. The existence of the state in whatever form can only exist by virtue of it being in substance (or in essence) an Oligarchy. An Oligarchy by virtue of its essential nature, hierarchicalization and social stratification, is necessarily antagonistic to the common good as the material embodiment of inequality in every dimension of social existence. Anarchism is the only cure for this pathology.

The reification fallacy represents a logical and semantic error which gives the impression that an idea, which is merely an idea and nothing more, it taken to signify or represent something which exists in a concrete or objectified fashion in a manner similar to a tree, a cloud or a house, when in fact it signifies or represents something which in reality is not a concrete state of affairs or object or a material entity. The noun Oligarchy signifies an actual state of affairs, in other words, it refers to a material reality. So we can fight or overthrow the Oligarchy, because it exists concretely as something which is embodied in institutions and in actual persons who are members of the elite. So to overthrow the Oligarchy involves the destruction of institutions and the removal of actual persons who embody the Oligarchy or are representatives of the Oligarchy or agents of the Oligarchy by virtue of which the Oligarchy exists. The Oligarchy is purposed in its structure and functioning to work for the benefit and interests of an elite, generally at the expense of those over whom the Oligarchy rules or governs. To destroy the Oligarchy entails the decapitation of the oligarch which may be a person or persons representing the king, the chief, the ruler, the leader, the prime minister, the president, or the elite.

Hierarchies of social domination emerge with the onset of social stratification which in turn arises from any kind of psycho-social, social, economic or political process with facilitates social differentiation under the prevailing contingent conditions. The key element is this process is the gain of agency by certain individuals placed in positions of tactical and strategic advantage and the loss of agency by other individuals who fall into situations where they lose all meaningful and significant control or agency over their person lives or interests. Social differentiation within a society or social formation arises when its members become divided through the agencies of various forces and mechanisms into different social classes according to social status or social rank or social identity. Social stratification in terms of social status and social rank within a hierarchy of social domination is correlated with the formation of different social classes within any given social formation. What factors and mechanism cause the transformation of a previous homogenous egalitarian society (hunter gather forms of sociality) into non-egalitarian societies (post-Neolithic settled forms of sociality) which have heterogeneous social structure with respect to social status, social ranks or social identity with regard to class membership? It would be easy to give a straightforward answer such as: hierarchies of social domination which are characterized by social stratification in terms of differences in social status, rank, identity or membership arises as a direct consequence of the division of labour within a social formation. Each strata or rank or social status within any hierarchy of domination corresponds to membership of an identifiable social class. Thus, the structure and functioning of a society or social formation can be analysed in terms of the relationships between the different social classes. For example, in the Roman Empire, the different social classes in Roman could be categorized as follows: by official rank (senate/equites), by status (freeborn/freed/slave; citizen/Latin/peregrine), by wealth (rich/ poor), by relation to the forces of production (rentier/worker/merchant/professional). In other societies or social formation class divisions may be structured in terms of castes membership or in class divisions such as civilian/warrior/priest. In the continuous spectrum of post-Neolithic societies, the divisions within any social formation on the basis of social status, social stratification and hierarchicalization of social classes or class membership are recognizable. As social formations they all share the generic similarities which places them in the same genus, recognizable as possessing all the key attributes of an Oligarchical social arrangement. What are the nature of relationships between different classes? What and where are the divisions, conflicts, tensions, and antagonisms. Where do the solidarities lie? What about the nature of hegemonic forces? From Lewis Mumford's book 'The City in History' it does not take too great a leap of the imagination to visualize that the City in its various forms always exists as a generic embodiment of the Oligarchy and as such it will eventually degenerate through the practice of one folly to the next, from being a Megalopolis to a Necropolis, possibly through some version of the following sequence of stages: from Megalopolis to Parasitopolis to Patholopolis to Psycho-patholopolis, to Tyrannopolis and finally terminating in the formation of the Necropolis, the city of the dead.

Before eventually degenerating into a Necropolis, all Oligarchies because they are necessarily ran on patronage, will inexorably undergo metamorphosis into a crisis and conflict ridden Parasitopolis, which in turn will eventually collapse because no Parasitopolis is sustainable, however before collapsing into a Necropolis, in its gasping death throes it undergoes the usual series of symptomatic decompositions: Patholopolis → Psycho-patholopolis →Tyrannopolis. Patronage is the 'order' and 'rule' of the Oligarchy, it exists by virtue of patronage whether it be conceived as a capitalistic social formation or some version of a socialist or even a communist social formation, as was tellingly evident in the series of socialist debacles of the twentieth century. The intentions or purpose or rationale or raison d'etre for the Oligarchy's existence is ultimately to steal money for personal self-enrichment. The essential nature of the Oligarchy is that it is structured to function as a criminal organization.

Rome is the classical exemplar of the Oligarchy, an Oligarchy which eventually transformed itself into a vast apparatus of predation and parasitism. In its dying days of terminal crisis and conflict it could only sustain its centres of power through the universalization of patronage in the form of free bread and circuses. At the height of its dependency on patronage the majority of the Roman population who were essentially proletarian and living in the overcrowded tenement slums of Rome were on the 'dole' and were kept amused, passive and plaint by means of almost continuous holidays and mass entertainment in the form of endless gladiatorial spectacles. Of course the Devil knew about patronage and the power of bread as vital for the life of the Oligarchy when he tempted Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew, the beginning of chapter four we read: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, 'If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.' Jesus answered, 'It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'

Given X (Universe, Oligarchy, Law of Nature), an understanding or method or knowledge or approach is 'transcendental' when it inquires into the nature of the a priori conditions for the possibility of X or by virtue of which X is able to exist at all. What are the a priori conditions, if any, for the development of the Oligarchy, and also for degeneration of the Oligarchy into its terminal state as a Necropolis? From the history and practice of science we have learnt that the Universe is open to our understanding, successful scientific prediction implies that the Universe is indeed open to our understanding. In a similar fashion the driving forces and nature of human sociality in all of its possible forms is open to our understanding and therefore in principle malleable to our collective will so that the common good could be a realizable goal. The Oligarchy stands in the way of realizing the common good. Thus revolution is a moral imperative.

The metaphysic of truth should be focused on grounding a substantive theory of truth. There are many theories of truth, for example: correspondence, coherence, semantic, superassertability, primitivism, pluralism, redundancy, performative and so on and so forth.

And each day 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. 221. He must not eat raisins—Numbers 6:3

222

In December 1986 shortly after Samora Machel's tragic and untimely death in an aircraft crash a comrade and myself entered Mozambique clandestinely via Swaziland for a special meeting with the Party. One of the items on the agenda was to discuss the Study, Learn, Teach and Act pamphlets which I had been producing and distributing. There were concerns about the Communist narrative that I was propagandizing to the masses. There were hints, allegations and murmurings about my apparent Trotskyite leanings. I was also surprised to hear about my Trotskyite leanings. Of course they were baseless. From Swaziland we flew to Maputo. At the airport in Maputo we were met by Party comrades who told us that we had been given clearance to 'hitch a ride' almost immediately to Inhambane on a Russian plane that had been charted for transporting Russian officials and FRELIMO government officials to Inhambane for some business meeting on the growing of cotton and other crops in that province. We were fetched at the Inhambane airfield and driven in a Kombi to Tofo. A beautiful pastel pink villa close to the beach was going to be our home for the next few days. We learned from reliable sources that it used to be owned by some wealthy Jewish South African avocado pear farmer from Tzaneen whose son was a keen elephant hunter. It was a weird story, so much detail about a family who had last visited their villa in July 1972 before immigrating to Australia. And who had ever heard of a Jewish elephant hunter in Africa? I had a strange feeling of deja vu about the villa. It felt that I had been a guest or a visitor in the same villa before. But I had not! I may have walked past the villa before, but I had never been inside it before. On our way back from Vilanculos in 1974 towards the end of July on the eve of the revolution in Mozambique we did stay overnight at Tofo. We found the place eerily deserted, almost spooky. How could I have ever guessed that after so many years I would be again visiting Tofo but in the capacity as a member of the South African Communist Party on official political business.

We were informed that we had been officially invited to attend a special 'international' social function later that evening at the governor's home in Inhambane and we had been invited in the capacity as 'official' South African representatives and guests, and so because of this we decided to postpone our business meeting to the following day. There was nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon except laze around in the villa. I decided to go for a walk on the beach, but none of the comrades were in the mood to join me so I decided to go by myself. On the short gravel road to the beach I was greeted in Portuguese by a tall grey headed man who turned out to be a Russian agricultural engineer on holiday at Tofo. I think he was surprised to see a foreign looking woman walking alone towards the beach. When he realized that I was English speaking he switched to English. He spoke English fluently, but with a distinct Russian accent. Out of politeness I was friendly and we started chatting. I introduced myself as Allyson Cooper. Without batting an eyelid I informed him that I was working for the World Health Organization (WHO) as a malaria epidemiologist and I happened to be working on the containment of malaria in Mozambique, and I also mentioned I was also taking a holiday break with colleagues, and I was on my way to take a walk on the beach. He confessed that he thought I was Cuban and he was genuinely surprised to hear that I was from England. He told me that I looked Cuban or South American, because my skin tone was much darker than that of a typical English woman, yet to his ears I was speaking such a beautifully articulated and such a richly accented or toned English that he could not link such beautiful English to any country in the world. According to the Russian gentleman, even the English could not speak such beautiful English. I laughed and he also laughed. For all I knew he could have been working for the KGB. He asked if he may join me on my walk along the beach.

We set off down the pot holed gravel road to the beach.

His name was Dr Alexander Kuznetsova and he told me to call him Sasha. He was in his fifties, he was also tall, handsome and he had a dignified bearing. He reminded me of my father. Walking over the loose beach sand we proceeded past the old abandoned beach hotel which looked neglected and derelict. We headed northwards walking on the firm damp sand along the shoreline behind the retreating tide. The wide arc of the narrow beach was flanked by high dunes covered in dune vegetation. After walking about two kilometres we were completely isolated. It felt like that we were the only two people left on the planet. If it were not for the percussion of breaking waves and the boiling foamy white surf racing up the steep beach we would have been engulfed in that same kind of impenetrable human-free silence that would blanket the end of the world. We had been touched by our common humanity and we had discovered a spontaneous and open comradely liking for each other, and this has happened between us in spite of the fact that a wide abyss of culture, geography and history had originally separated us before our chance acquaintance. He was a mature man and I was a young woman. There was no evidence of any ulterior motives, we felt free to like each other without any encumbrances or expectations. At that moment on that isolated and remote strip of narrow beach I suddenly feel incredibly free and happy. He saw that I was happy and he smiled indulgently, this Russian man. He began to speak freely and intimately about himself. In fact he has told me his entire family history. His father had been tank officer in the war against the invading German forces. For outstanding and brave service in the armed forces during the Second World War on the Russian front his father and mother were allowed to relocate to Moscow where they lived in a small flat. He studied at the University of Moscow. He had worked in several Eastern European countries and had spent a stint in Cuba as well. I told him nothing about myself except that I had grown up my entire life in London and that I went Cambridge University. I was very familiar with the geography of London and was able to invent a life as a girl who had grown up in England. The story seemed to be credible and it seemed that I had managed to convince him regarding the broad biographical details of my life.

I had listened with great interest to his life story. Now standing next to him on the beach I am smiling. I don't know why I am smiling, but I am smiling. I am living in the eternal moment. I suddenly feel elated.

Right now at this moment in time, I am happy to be in Mozambique. I do not know what the future holds. I am living on the edge. I have taken on greater responsibilities and commitments with regard to the Party. My life has become centred round the mission of the Party and my academic work as a Professor at Wits. I no longer have a normal social life. It has been years since I have been to the Powder Puff dance club. I live the life of a celibate. I do not have a girlfriend, I am not in a relationship. Instead I am focused on revolutionary work. But now on the beach watching the rolling waves I realize just how emotionally and mentally exhausted I have become over the last few months. I am aware of the fact that the burden of the underground has taken its toll on me. I also realize that I need this break in Mozambique and I am entertaining the idea that I should consider whether I could spent a few more days at Tofo. I need to rest, to recover, to recuperate my strength.

We stand together looking out at the sea. I feel the sea breeze against my face. I am aware that I am burnt out. That I am close to breaking point. The sudden surge of happiness I felt was almost manic, it was possibly a symptom of madness. I want to talk to the Russian, but I keep quiet. The Russian is like an angel, he is like my father. I suddenly yearn to be with my father. I suddenly yearn to see and hear the flight of his homing pigeons. In Hotazel as child I would stand with him every evening just before supper and we would both be fixated on the flight of the flock of homing pigeons. We could watch the flight of the flock for hours, it was a mesmerizing experience that I never grew tired of.

And each day 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. 222. He must not eat grape seeds—Numbers 6:4

223

According to mind-body Cartesian dualists the mind or consciousness is a nonmaterial or immaterial substance or an immaterial mental substance, whereas the body as opposed to the mind is a material substance which has the property of extension. So as an immaterial substance can mind or consciousness cause physical events? To this question the Physicalists give an empathetic no. Immaterial mental events or consciousness cannot cause physical events. For a mental events to cause a physical events, mental events need to be physical events. Physicalism is the philosophical position which holds that the Universe is causally closed and every physical effect has a physical cause and that consciousness or mental events are physical effects resulting from physical causes. This is another way of saying that 'mental events' or 'mental phenomena' or consciousness awareness supervenes with metaphysical necessity on physical brain events which happen to cause mental events or consciousness in all its manifestations. All dualists as opposed to materialists or physicalists or materialistic monism deny that mental processes or mental events or consciousness awareness supervenes on the physical with metaphysical necessity. The idea of 'metaphysical necessity' is a hard-no-exceptions-kind-of-idea that needs to be examined in some depth, so I need to revisit this idea. Hard-core physicalists believe in some form of physical reductionism. Of course the idea of metaphysically necessity in this instance is dependent on how the nature of causation happens to be conceived in the generation or production of mental events. There are different views on the nature of causation in general. In terms of Humean regulatory theory, causation is viewed simply as the constant conjunction of events, one event causes a second event, just in case the first event is regularly followed by second event, which means the occurrence of first event is constantly linked to the subsequent occurrence of the second event, so when we observe the first event we expect the second event to follow in a regular fashion. Here we need to think about the ontological and epistemic status of general laws and also of Nelson Goodman's idea of projection. However the above idea of causation in the form a regulatory can be viewed as an expectation based on inductive assumptions that the future will always resemble the past, which in turn, cannot escape the philosophical worries associated with the riddle of induction. There cannot be a logic of induction which makes our expectations inviolable. Humean regulatory theory or the uniformity of nature theory is based on the unsupportable or unjustifiable assumption that the future will always resemble the past. What makes the future resemble the past? Short answer: A law of nature. But why should the laws of nature hold in the future? We can't argue along the following lines: they will hold in the future because they always held in the past. Given these problems, can we conclude that the laws of nature are overdetermined if they happen to be eternally time-invariant? Is it legitimate to ask what caused or forced the laws of nature to be time-invariant and therefore constant for all eternity? Something had to make this possible. If this is so, then we cannot exclude some kind of agency which ensures that the laws of nature remain eternally time-invariant. Is the process of maintaining the laws of nature in a constant state of invariance a form of causation? Can we say that the laws of nature are prevented from changing by some force or by some agency? If we do believe that, then we are justified in concluding that the laws of nature are time-invariant because the action of some agency prevents them from changing, and if this were the case, then it would also be logical to conclude that all causation is ultimately overdetermined by some immanent agency? In other words an immanent agency which must exist in some manner and which forces or causes the laws of nature to remain constant or time invariant. We may argue that it is logically coherent to conclude that all causation within the material realm of the Universe is overdetermined by some immanent agency which happens to be as an omni-extensive and omnideterminative agency. There is a circularity to the Humean regulatory theory of laws of nature. To the question: what is a law of nature as opposed to mere question-begging inductive based generalizations about the regular occurrence of events or a generalizations of the uniformity of nature. The answer would be that laws of nature or law-like generalizations support counterfactual conditionals, where all counterfactual conditionals have the following semantic form: a given preceding event always causes another event, if the second event would not have occurred if the first or preceding event had not also occurred. Generalizations of law-likeness can only support counterfactual conditions if the principle of the uniformity of nature is assumed, and the principle of the uniformity of nature assumes that the future will resemble the past, hence a counter-factual dependent theory of causation does not provide grounds for certainty without appealing to or assuming covertly the overdetermination of the laws of nature by some kind of immanent agency so that the future will resemble the past.

So if we feel that we have reasonable or warranted grounds to be believe in the overdetermination of the laws of nature by some kind of immanent agency then is it such a big leap of faith to believe that causal links can exist between mental events or consciousness and physical events such as brain and bodily processes?

Unknowability is a real problem especially with regard to theorizing within the framework of physicalism which necessarily assumes the causal closure for all physical events/processes and is thus logically committed to the elimination of the mental as nothing more an epiphenomenon of physical events, thereby disallowing the mental any causal efficacy with regard to physical events or processes.

As a biologist working all my life on animal behaviour I have had to deal with physicalism and reductionism and emergentism. My counter question to militant physicalism and narrow materialism has always been by way of posing the fundamental question: 'What is physical?' Please define the physical for me and so that I can see how physicalism works in reductive explanatory efforts with regard to explaining the mental or sentience in terms of the purely physical. Physicalists need to define what should be taken as the being the physical realm at its most fundamental or elementary. So then what are the elementary particles, events and process which underpin and causally determine the essential nature of the entire structure and behaviour of physical reality? What does contemporary physics tell us about the existence and nature of elementary particles, events and processes? It seems that according to current physics there are no irreducibly fundamental particles or events. There are only processes occurring at various scales of complexity. Even the behaviour of elementary subatomic phenomena at the most fundamental level of empirical accessibility defy intelligible and coherent description in ordinary semantics or language. Language has its boundaries and limitations beyond which nothing intelligible can be said about elementary phenomena at levels that cannot be probed empirically. Unknowability is a real problem especially with regard to theorizing within the framework of physicalism that assumes that causal closure for all physical events/processes and is committed to the elimination of the mental as an epiphenomenon of physical events at the very the edge of empirically accessible reality. What about the inaccessible realities underlying the empirically accessible realities? What if there are things that exist beyond empirical experience such as the realm of forms and ideas? What if reality is lot weirder and more impossible to grasp than what was first believed? It seems that a physicalist ontology cannot be sustained and much of the claims made by materialists or physicalists about the essential nature of reality is based on faith only.

And each day 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. 223. He must not eat grape skins—Numbers 6:4

224

My PhD is almost complete and the pressure is can afford to explore the rhetoric of the real again in my personal life. After my night with Nonhlanhla in Durban, I decide that I am not White. I need to mend the weave of my fractured personal life, and the person I have become can be best be described as a travesty bordering on the vaudeville, a carnivalesque fabrication interwoven with brightly coloured silk, satin and velvet ribbons of half-truths, exaggerations, deceit, lies, duplicity and misrepresentation. Even so, my life is hardly a work of art even though it sometimes feels like some kind of theatre of the circus or Mardi Gras or even like the Shrovetide seasonal madness before the commencement of the liturgical season of Lent. My life has now become ritually structured in which erotic play and frivolity continuously interrupts and undoes the work of steadfast religious obligations. Fastidious and meticulous attention to the practical details of religious obligation are punctuated by the most sublime lapses of will or by the intrusion of the ever present shadow of disbelief which dogs my every thought. I have become a feral creature scourging and living within those invisible perimeters which demarcate the forbidden boundaries of an ever present no-man's land of metaphysical and theological hostilities. Glittering rainbows and sparkling showers of unimagined promises and absurd surprises constantly distract me from orthopraxis. Like the court clown wearing warning bells, unintended consequences have become my constant companion. Unintended consequences continue to flow from the crystal spring of the purest of motives. In many ways my hero should be a person like Jean Genet. For my sins and out of a deep sense of remorse I have now taken full ownership of my actions which have brought me to where I am. No looking back now, after that long journey through the night of uncertainty before an ever receding dawn, after the interminable waiting and waiting before the court, I finally rose from waters of the Mikvah into the light of day, a new person, I have now put my hand to the plough and have submitted myself to the full weight of the yoke resting on my neck. I accept full responsibility for the person that I have become. And yet I still stand outside that gate to that Promised Land. I am now living in the aftermath of that tortuous process which ended with the reinvention of myself from scratch. My past has been erased and I no longer exist as the person I used to be. The continuity between who I once was and who I have now become has been severed by an unbridgeable chasm. I live now in a new universe and in a new life-world. I have had to make all kinds of radical readjustments and adaptations. I am now faced with new realities all of my own making.

My new life bears an unmistakeable theological flavour and metaphysical colour. But is all of my own doing. No one is to blame. Blameless abounding in it cheerful abundance, reminds me constantly: It is you, it is you, it is you only, through your own persistence, you have done this to yourself. I have no regrets. Just remorse. Yes it was I who decided to pull the lever which triggered the dominos to fall one after the other leading to the inexorable unfolding of a succession of events. By pulling that lever I alone am the author of the unexpected or unanticipated outcomes that have flowed from the choices I have freely made, made of my own volition, choices which were free from any trace, any contamination, of external influences, compulsion or persuasion. And in this process it seems that I have inadvertently self-generated the unexpected, I become someone whom I would never have anticipated ever becoming. This must give you some idea of what I mean when I say that I often feel that I have become a stranger to myself, but as dark obscure as it may seem it was by my own volition that I became a stranger to myself. For the moment let's focus on the consequences of choices and decisions from an abstract perspective. Many of the choices and decisions I have made have in my life have had surprising outcomes. The surprises emerge as a result of uncontrollable contingencies, which determine the final shape of the consequences which flow from all our actions. 'Counter-finality' is actually a nice word to describe this phenomenon. This hyphenated phrase comes from Sartre's 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'. The idea of counter-finalities deals with the problem of the origin of the unforeseen. Chance or the contingent plays a role in the occurrence of the unforeseen, and places a limit on our capacity to act as sovereign and autonomous agents in the realization of the goals which represent many of the projects we undertake in life. I am the realized counter-finality of all my choices and actions irrespective of the underlying motivations which prompted those choices or actions in the first place. We cannot escape the hand of chance or the play of the contingent in shaping the outcomes of our choices or actions. Which means we cannot pre-empt the counter-finalities which emerge as a consequence of the play of the infinite number of degrees of freedom which impact on and shape the outcomes of our choices and actions. And in this we can with a bit of imagination even discern the play of God's hand in our lives.

Having committed many deeds, having made choices and carried out the actions, all of which were done under for a noble purpose, I am now repaying the full debt demanded by the tattered remains my life, a life torn apart tensions and conflicts. Yet I am on the eve of a new life. I feel it my bones. And since that night with Nonhlanhla which fall short of eternity I have endeavoured to pursue the Good in both a Hellenic and Hebraic sense. On reflection I believe that there was a sweet poignancy to that night, which also happened to be the consummation or terminus or Telos of an exorable chain of unlikely events. Yet in spite of everything I am thankful for what has happened me by my own doing and I have no regrets. My remorse or should I say my mourning is about something which I cannot quite put my finger own. What have I betrayed? I feel I have betrayed something. Have I betrayed myself? In many ways I have been redeemed and have been given a second chance. My life has been touched by unexpected grace and beauty. The grace which saves the undeserving sinner, regenerates the soul, and fills one's life with hope. But let's leave all those details for later. The pieces of the puzzle will fall together, the picture will emerge in all its fullness and everything will become clearer, as I try decode what I have just said. Yet the rhetoric of the real cancels everything. The rhetoric of the real is always an exploration of the unknown, and the unknown destabilizes unthinking habit and unquestioned custom. The rhetoric of the real is an invitation to transgress boundaries. The rhetoric of the real is always an exercise in irony.

And each day 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. 224. He must not be under the same roof as a corpse—Numbers 6:6

225

The subject of nihilism is of value, with special emphasis on the moral dimension of values. All values or valuations are based on an idea of the good and as such any discourse on value or the essence of value, cannot avoid engaging in a discourse with Platonism. The sublime object of desire is the good. Expressions of nihilism logically and necessarily always revolve around the idea of value and the good, without an idea or conception of value or the good, nihilism would not have an object and thus as a phenomenon nihilism could not exist. Nihilism involves the denial or rejection of the idea of value or the idea of the good, where value or good always refers to something that has innate or intrinsic or objective value or goodness in itself. Nietzsche was the first to make the idea of values an object of critical philosophical discourse.

And each day 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. 225. He must not come into contact with the dead—Numbers 6:7

226

I made peace with the fact that Yael and I did not have a future as a couple. I realized that I had to let go no matter how painful it was going to be. As the sun set behind the dunes I walked back with Sasha to our villa at Tofo. At the villa we do not have to worry about supper. We have decided that we will eat at the function in Inhambane. After bidding farewell to Sasha I showered, and then I did my face, sprayed on the perfume and put on one of my Powder Puff dance club high-hem low-neckline sleeveless party dresses. It was a shining-glittering red outfit. Red for the Communist Revolution. To match the dress I put on bright red lipstick. Before leaving the villa I slipped on a pair of self-holdup black stockings and stepped into my black shining patent leather stilettos. I was now ready to party in Inhambane. Girls beware, fathers lock away your daughters. I am now on my way and I look deadly. Girls, I can give you the time of your lives if you are willing to let me.

It was Isabella Sabina the daughter of the governor and FRELIMO party boss of Inhambane who told me that the town of Inhambane had been established on the sheltered shores of the Bay of Inhambane as a trading destination since the 10th century. As I have said we had been invited to this social function of leading party officials and foreign diplomatic representatives from Cuba and Russia, at the Sabina residence which had originally been the residence of the colonial governor of the Inhambane Province, and was known as the Governor's Palace. The guests kept on mistaking me for Isabella who was a mestizo woman with a light caramel skin tone. She was dressed in a black sleeveless cocktail dress. I was struck by the fact that apart from being attractive, she had the most beautiful shoulders and arms that I had ever laid my eyes on. We were immediately drawn to each other. She was immensely amused that the guests kept confusing me for her, and once they realized their mistake they quickly observed that we looked like twins. Oblivious to everyone we spent the entire evening riveted to each other in conversation. After all the speeches we escaped into the cool night air of the perfumed gardens. Her cheeks were like satin and her breath was sweet like strawberries and peaches. We spent the weekend making love in the dunes of Tofo and then we were torn apart. My comrades disapproved of my relationship with Isabella and said that it could become a problem for the Party.

Before I left Inhambane I gave Isabella the address of Angelika so that we could stay in touch. We even entertained the possibility of going together on holiday to Norway. I felt that I had finally met my life partner. We were sisters, we were lovers, we were best friends, we were comrades, she was my mother and I was her daughter, and in turn she was my daughter. We were 'blood' sisters. We felt a deep and satisfying intellectual and emotional connection. We could read each other's minds. Isabella, Isabella, I love you so much, the pain of separation becomes more unbearable with the passing of each day. Will we ever be together again?

When I got back to Johannesburg I felt stressed about Yael. A lot of things were going on in my life and I couldn't deal with additional emotional complications, and I did not have the strength to phone her and speak to her and let her know that things had changed. It was a relief as the days and then the weeks pasted without her phoning or trying to make contact with me. I have kept my secrets from her. She knows nothing about my life. To me she is open book. She has no secrets like the kinds of secret that I have. Her only secret has been her love for me and our secret affair.

And each day 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. 226. He must shave after bringing sacrifices upon completion of his Nazirite period—Numbers 6:18

227

My attorney Mr Goldman once related a secret to me. I was revising my will. I had decided to leave my flat and material possessions to Yael and also a portion of my pension in the event of my death. It is a secret which still intrigues me. 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 Goldman accompanied his father to the Kaplan's home to express their condolences. They all sat in the lounge. Mr Goldman sat down next 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 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 on the other side of Mrs Kaplan. And in hushed tones the two of them began speaking about this and about that. Then Mrs Kaplan got up, left the room and returned a moment later carrying a Bible in her hand. It was a Christian Bible with the Old and the New Testaments. Resting the Bible on her lap she confided to the Pastor that she believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and that he had risen from the dead and so on. Mr Goldman, 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 came from Poland. Even the Pastor was stunned. I happened to be the first person with whom Mr Goldman had shared this story. He had filed the memory of this incident in the back of his mind and now after all these years he retrieved it to make a point. His point was that most of us live double lives or many lives, and we don't often decide to live a secret life intentionally, but somethings things happen beyond our control.

I asked Mr Goldman if he was an observant Jew and he said no, he confirmed that he did not believe in God. He asked me turn if I was observant Christian. I said yes. This surprised him. He confessed that he would never had guessed that I believed in God and self-identified as a Christian. Did I go church? Yes I go to Mass every Sunday.

And each day 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. 227. To estimate the value of people (when someone pledges a person's worth) as determined by the Torah—Leviticus 27:2

228

Revisiting the idea of physicalism.

The Universe is closed under causation, all physical effects have physical causes, and this is what is meant by physicalism. Do the laws of remain constant or fixed. How do they remain constant or fixed? Why don't the laws of nature change? Why don't they undergo a steady change with time or undergo sudden inexplicable random changes at any moment? Why do they remain instead invariant over time and space? Ontology revolves round the question of what kinds of things have existence. But all questions regarding what kinds of things have existence inevitably bring issues of causal overdetermination in their wake. For something to exist in time and space requires that the laws of nature remain unchanging for the duration of that thing's existence. Why should anything which exists now, not exist or cease to exist, when everything else stays the same?

What about being and becoming? The laws of nature remain time invariant. Becoming implies change, things do not stay the same, and everything changes with time. From moment to moment we are not the same. While everything else changes the laws of nature remain unchanging. Even the changing, the process of becoming is law dependent. Becoming or changing, involves law governed processes which in turn involve causality, so the dualism of being and becoming needs to be reformulated so that the idea or existence of a dualism is no longer warranted. Hello Hegel!

Dialectical materialism as emergence? Maybe! Becoming is not simply change and unreality, it is emergence, self-organization, and much more, and all of this somehow has to supervene on being, being make becoming possible, being is the condition of possibility for becoming, in this sense, they are not two opposing poles of a dualism.

And each day 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. 228. To estimate the value of consecrated animals—Leviticus 27:12-13

229

There is something else that I need the need to write about. No, it is not something I want to merely write about. It is a confession, a confession about belief, belief that is warranted. I feel the strong need to state my view on this new intellectual fashion called postmodernism.

In 1980 I bought Jean-François Lyotard's book called 'The Postmodern Condition'. Before the 1980s I had read Foucault's work and some of Derrida's work and went to seminars at UCT and Wits in which the ideas of postmodernism were still in their nascent stage of becoming topical in the universities of South Africa. As a Marxist and as a scientist at the time I had strong reservations regarding the narratives that were been spun in seminars by the academic proponents of this new intellectual fad. In setting the scene of a new intellectual movement Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as an incredulity toward metanarrative. But I could clearly see that postmodernism was just one more such metanarrative. The postmodernist putative critical posturing was trapped in its own self-reference paradox of being just another metanarrative. No one could rebut this remark whenever I raised it during question time at seminars. It was usually dismissed with all kinds of clever but unconvincing obfuscations and snide putdowns. As a Communist I was intellectually committed to what I consider the rationalism and the scientific credibility of what has been identified as outputs of modernity. I don't want to confuse the phenomenon of modernity with modernism. Modernism is a movement involving a reactions or responses to modernity. The essential defining feature of modernity is the phenomenon of constant technological and scientific revolution. So I was definitely not 'incredulous' to the metanarratives of the life sciences. And it would be pretty idiotic to confuse belief in the truth of Darwinian evolution as an example of being incredulous to the evolutionary metanarrative. Nor was I incredulous to the metanarrative of the physical sciences. And as a scientist I could not entertain a non-realist view of science or of the Universe. And finally when I because a Communist not only in terms of intellectual and moral persuasion, but also as an underground member of the South African Communist Party I could not, with respect to intellectual integrity nor in terms of what I knew to be the truth with certainty, become a slave to the postmodernism fad that was taking root in South Africa and in the rest of academy throughout the world.

And each day 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. 229. To estimate the value of consecrated houses—Leviticus 27:14

230

In my third year I took philosophy of science as my arts subject. It was 1975 and the student left on Wits campus was vibrant. In 1975 I also joined ECOSOC at Wits which was a subcommittee of AUS. There were ECOSOC branches on all AUS affiliated campuses. Nathan Coetzee was the chairperson of the ECOSOC at Wits. I started having a secret 'affair' with his girlfriend Janet Middleton after my Yael broke up with me. Janet was also a member of ECOSOC. When she finally came to terms with her sexuality she informed Nathan that she was a lesbian and of course that was the end of their relation. He struggled to come to terms with the disclosure. The revelation seemed to increase his insecurities and exacerbated his feelings of inadequacy. He suspected that something had happened between her and me after we went away for a week with the Wits diving club to Sodwana Bay. In spite of being slightly plump she was very attractive. She was in her first year and had joined the diving club. We explained to Nathan that we still wanted to be on best friend terms with him and we still wanted to serve on the ECOSOC committee. Janet told him that she still loved him but she also loved me. I felt sorry for him, my heart went out to him because he really loved Janet. And I also liked him very much. I actually said to him: 'Nathan I like you very much and I don't want to lose your friendship, I do kind of love you also.' He was the kind of male that you wanted to like.

'Let's rather speak about this later, someone is coming to see me,' he said as he stood up from behind the small desk. We also stood up to leave the ECOSOC office in the Student's Union building.

Nathan was tall and gangly with broad shoulders, but not ungainly or awkward in his movements. He had strong sinewy arms and legs. He was often dressed in an extra-large faded black T shirt which hung on his lean frame. Even though he wore a black leather belt he was constantly pulling up his size 34 faded blue jeans that seemed to be always slipping over his hips. A total stranger seeing him and Janet together as a couple would have wondered what they saw in each other. With his long thin slightly aquiline noise, sallow face, bushy eye brows and short cropped untidy hair he was not particularly handsome. Janet did confess to me that she found something attractive in his dark piercing eyes and full lips.

Before we left Janet hugged him. It was visibly a very stiff and awkward hug which promised nothing more than Platonic friendship and comradely loyalty.

I remember Janet asked if we should close the door.

'No it is OK, leave the door open, don't forget the meeting this afternoon,' he said as we left.

'Ok, see you later then,' she said a bit too cheerfully.

Once outside in the corridor we looked at each with rolling eyed expressions of relief. We had crossed the bridge and now we were free to with be each other as a couple.

'Shoo, I am glad that is all over,' she said once we were out of earshot as we went down the stairs.

Later that afternoon we all trooped into the AUS local office and settled down round the meeting table. Before Nathan could sit down Sheldon Swift from the Association of University Students (AUS) head offices in Cape Town arrived at the door. Nathan introduced the committee to Sheldon who was responsible for coordinating the ECOSOC programmes on all the different English university campuses in South Africa.

Sheldon was originally from Durban and went to the University of Natal where he eventually obtained an MSc in marine biology. Dressed in an old T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he was tall, well built, athletic with curly sun bleached blond hair, he was the perfect image of a surfer. He was charismatic, charming, jovial and good looking. He shook all of our hands vigorously with a firm hand shake. After plonking himself down in the chair he leaned back in the chair and grinned broadly at all of us.

'So tell me, what have you guys being doing?' he said as sprawled his muscular sun tanned frame in the rickety chair which he managed to balance on its two creaking back legs.

'I understand that the catholic students at Wits have high-jacked ECOSOC as their own organization,' he said laughingly. Almost everyone on ECOSOC were also members of Cathsoc, the Catholic student society at Wits. Nathan and Janet were Catholic. In a way I was honouree Catholic as I had started going to Mass with Janet who in spite of everything remained a devout Catholic.

A defensive look arranged itself on Nathan face as he started to explain the situation, but before he could say anything Sheldon interrupted him.

'Don't worry I was just joking. It is good to have the involvement of the Catholic students. You should try and build up the membership by getting more Christian students involved in ECOSOC at Wits. Christians are usually very committed and sincere,' he said with an ironic smile on his face.

'So tell me what have you guys been doing?' He asked again with a broad grin on his face.

'We have the Jukskei river clean-up project next to Alexander Township and we have the wattle tree eradication project in Melville Koppies and in Mondeor in the south of Johannesburg,' Nathan replied.

'That is great man! I heard you guys were very active. Hey man you can't image the apathy we have on the other campuses.'

'Tell me more about your Jukskei project. What exactly are you guys doing?' Sheldon asked.

It was difficult to fathom Sheldon. Was he phoney or was he genuine. I could honestly not tell. Anyway we were awe struck and quickly fell under his spell as he gave us an impromptu lecture on environmental activism. He spoke about 'guerrilla gardening' which involved planting seeds of indigenous trees in any open space within towns, cities and suburbs. At the end of the meeting he asked if anyone could give him lift to Hillbrow. He had flown up from Cape Town and did not have any transport. I volunteered to give him lift to Hillbrow where he was staying over with some friend. On the way to Hillbrow he spoke about saving the whale campaign and the research that he done on sharks for his MSc. At High Point just before Twist Street he told me to pull over into a vacant parking spot. I thought he was going to get out but he remained seated in the passenger talking about sharks. He presented himself as a very nice person and without any effort he managed to fulfil the role of a captivating conversationalist, but I immediately realized it was all a ploy to seduce me. When he asked if I would like to go for supper and maybe take in a movie I knew that he was hitting on me. I remember responding to his invitation along the lines that he was really a yummy guy but I was a lesbian and guys were not my scene. This disclosure, which was a valid reason for rejecting his advances, seemed to have momentarily taken the wind out of his sails. But he was not going to allow this to put him off. There was always a plan B. So he quickly managed to defuse a potentially awkward situation with astonishing aplomb decorated with persuasive smooth talking that shown and glittered with the illusion of unpremeditated innocence laced and spiced quite heavily with empathy and meaningful understanding. At the end of which he asked with an angelic expression on his face if I had ever tried a shuvarma at Mi Vami. That was the bait for our supper date. He was persistence, even explaining that Mi Vami means 'who's who' in Hebrew. I asked him how he knew this and he said he was Jewish, and he had leant Hebrew while staying on a Kibbutz in Israel, and Mi Vami was just around the corner. I found it hard to believe that he was Jewish. How could someone who was so blond and also a Durban surfer be Jewish? He laughed at my question. He took it as a positive signal. Apparently it was as a surfer that he had become interested in marine biology and specifically in sharks. I told him that I was no stranger to sharks having scuba-dived off the Bazaruto Archipelago and the Nine Mile Reef at Sodwana Bay, and of course when I mentioned this he could not hide his surprise, but he immediately managed to pretend to be very impressed with the fact that I had experienced encounters with sharks while diving. I could read his mind: If a girl had dived with sharks, then what else would she be prepared to do? Maybe she was indeed highly 'fuckable' if handled properly. And so we continued to sit in my car and we discussed sharks until it got dark and Hillbrow having dressed herself up in flashing multicolour neon lights was now ready like a slut for anything which the night could offer. He was not interested in talking politics or revolution or any highbrow philosophical topic, so sharks remained our topic of conversation.

So I have to admit, he did actually managed to sweet talk me, against my will, into having a shuvarma with him. Clearly he took it as a sign that I had given in to his good looks, irresistible charm and charismatic personality, and anyway how could anyone have sex without an erect penis shaft being stuck into you? My intuition led me to believe that he was banking on the possibility that my sexual curiosity had been sufficiently kindled and that maybe I was actually entertaining the possibility of having some kind of sexual adventure with him which would end with me being screwed over. And to screw a self-confessed lesbian would count as some kind of great sexual feat or victory for him. I was convinced that he believed that I would eventually let him fuck me before the night was over. And in all likelihood he may have even considered the possibility that for a 'shiksa' like myself to be fucked by such a wonderful and intriguing Jew would be an added bonus for me. I could read his mind. But I shuddered at the thought of having his erect circumcised cock ejaculating his semen into my vagina, and anyway I was not on the pill. The very thought of his circumcised cock left me cold, I couldn't do it, not even with the handsome shark-loving Sheldon. I did not have the stomach to be mounted and penetrated by any male no matter how good looking he happened to be. It was not going to happen ever. I found the prospect repulsive. I was definitely allergic to any kind of physical closeness to the male body.

Anyway we got out of the car and walked around the block to Mi Vami where we each had a shuvarma. It was the first time that I had ever eaten a shawarma. After that we ended up having a beer at the Café Florian before taking leave of each other. During the early1980s it was rumoured that he was a BOSS agent. I was astonished to hear this. But in retrospect I realized that he had shown all the signs of being a non-believer when it came to the Marxist project. But at the time I chose to ignore all the obvious signs that he was not the real McCoy. He came across as a highly individualistic and colourful maverick with leftist pretensions that were comical because of their obvious shallowness. It seemed he enjoyed cruising the grey shadowy margins of the student radical movement of the 1970s fucking any fuckable young bright eyed and gullible female student who fell for his charms. What I mean by fuckable is any cunt who had the capacity to give you a hard-on, that is, if you were a male. I had never allowed any woman to fuck me with a strap-on cock or dildo or vibrator or anything that looked like a cock. If she wanted fuck me then she had use her fingers and feel the inside of my hot vagina. Going back to Sheldon, if he was a spy for BOSS then maybe in this capacity he was also double agent for the Israeli Mossad. Before his cover was eventually blown he had already left for Israel.

An all-powerful state under the ideological mantle of democratic centralism stifles freedom and promotes the emergence of a self-serving dictatorial political elite through the progressive and insidious hierarchicalization of society. But this pattern of social domination by a hierarchicalized elite has been the dominant trend in human history since the Neolithic.

So in spite of being a member of a Communist Party that was orthodox in every sense of the word I have never stopped entertaining the idea of Anarcho-Communism as critical for the success of socialism and democracy.

And each day 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. 230. To estimate the value of consecrated fields—Leviticus 27:16

231

In the July school holidays of 1965 when I was ten years old we went on a family holiday to Sodwana Bay in the Land Rover that my dad had just finishing rebuilding from scratch. At night while he was working on the Land Rover in the garage I would join him, passing him tools and generally speaking his head off. I knew he loved my company and he listened attentively to what I had to say. I don't how many times I said to him I love you daddy, and he would always answer: 'I love you too Hannetjie'.

My dad was the only person who was allowed to call me Hannetjie. Everyone else had to call me Hannah.

We left Hotazel at 2.00 am and later that morning our Land Rover broke down in Springs. It was a disappointing anti-climax to the start of our holiday. Here we were stranded seven hours later at ten in morning in Springs of all places. The generator had burnt out and we were informed by the motor spares shop that we would only get the new generator at about midday the next day. So for the next 24 hours we would be stranded in the central business district of Springs while we waited for the delivery of a new generator.

I was surprised to hear that Springs was a city. As a ten old little girl the prospect of spending the next 24 hours sitting in the Land Rover which had come to standstill in one of the main streets in the central business district of Springs seemed like an unbearable trial. Twenty four hours was an eternity especially in the streets of a city at the far end of East Rand, like Springs.

My father's first choice was to study architecture at Wits, but he ended up getting a degree in mechanical engineering. I was surprised when on our way to look for a place where we could have a sit down breakfast he pointed out the 1930s art deco architecture style of many of buildings with their distinctive facades, motifs and embellishments which first became fashionable in the 1920s in Paris. The message that stuck in my mind was the fact that the central business district of Springs had many architectural features that it shared with Paris. The modernist architectural renaissance of the heady 1920s and 1930s following the devastation of the First World War had left its faint imprint like a fading echo on the City of Springs.

On that frozen July morning we braced ourselves against the icy head wind that whipped through the streets of Springs as we followed the directions to a café with a 'tea room' that served breakfast as well. Malcolm asked why the buildings were called art deco. My teeth were chattering and I felt the deep chill in my bones, but I wanted to hear what our dad, a man full of surprises, had to say about these buildings which were now bathed in the weak sunlight of winter. He said the building had a peculiar artistic construction in which the geometry of curves and lines were fashioned to capture the essence of progress, science, technology and everything that represents the modern world which has come of age in our century, the twentieth century. He said the buildings were modelled on the geometric shapes and forms of motor cars, aeroplanes, ships and great machines. He said we were lucky to be living in a modern world in progress never ceased to advance. In one of these architectural monuments to modernity we found the café that served breakfast. Apart from the previous occasions that we had sit down meals in the dining halls of hotels, this was the first time that we as a family had eaten out. While we ate breakfast Dad examined the roadmap that he had got from the AA. His finger traced for us the road to Ermelo, Piet Retief, Pongola, Jozini, and the Lebombo Mountains and finally the road that cut through the Savannahs of great Makatini Flats to our destination, Sodwana Bay.

It was well into the night when we reached the gravel road which would take us over the Lebombo Mountains. It had started to rain and the road had become muddy and slippery, and on many of the winding turns and steep inclines the Land Rover skidded quite treacherously. I sat in the front with dad, everyone else was asleep. Dad's cool head and driving skill got us safely over the mountain. It was past midnight as we drove deep into the darkness of the pristine Makatini Savannahs along a two track road which seemed to have no bends. In the beams of the bright headlights the rain had subsided to a light drizzle. I sat up alert scanning the road ahead for the luminous eyes of any wild animal. But unlike our many Kalahari night journeys we did not see a single animal next to the road or on the road. I felt extremely disappointed. Just before dawn we decided to stop outside a trading store in order to catch up with some sleep. After 8.00 am we continued our journey into the rolling plains of the coastal grasslands. In the distance lay the dune forests and behind the dune forests the rolling swells of the vast Indian Ocean crashed onto the beaches of the long subtropical Natal coastline

And each day 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. 231. Carry out the laws of interdicting possessions (cherem)--Leviticus 27:28

232

After an absence of ten years I am back at Sodwana Bay. So much has happened within these ten years. The twenty fours that we had to wait for the generator in Springs seemed like an eternity. But the ten years that have gone by since 1965 seemed to have pasted in a flash and so much has happened within those ten year. That thought did actually cross mind when I was walking with Janet on the beach. I thought to myself then in 1975: 'Ten years ago I was here and in ten years Sodwana has changed so much.'

It was our turn to stay behind while the others left in the dinghy for the Two Mile Reef. We watched them launch the dinghy after they started the outboard motor. Cedric the skipper skilful navigated the dinghy through the heavy surf of the breakers.

Yael had broken up with me. She was pregnant with Rabbi's child. And now I had become infatuated the Janet. Was I on the rebound? We set up our umbrella, spread out our towels, smeared on the sunblock and put on our sunglasses. It was low tide and the sun climbed rapidly on its way to the zenith. Two olive green army Bedford trucks packed with citizen force soldiers belching clouds of diesel smelling black exhaust fumes emerged dripping from the yellowish coloured waters of the shallow lagoon. The lagoon was the only access by means of which vehicles could get to the beach. From early in the morning the traffic of four by four bakkies emerging from the lagoon towing ski boats on trailers seemed endless. Following the early morning launching of the Wits Diving Club dinghy we watched the launching of ski boat after ski boat into the churning white surf which lifted the ski boats like bucking broncos as the fishermen cranked the outboard motors. The morning air on the beach was filled with deafening roar of outboard motors been revved.

Now the beach was quiet again. For a while the only sounds that broke the mid-morning silence were calls of seagulls and the crashing surf. The peaceful tranquillity that had settled on the beach was not going to last for very long. Some of the citizen force soldiers ran off with their surf boards to take advantage of the rising swells behind the retreating tide. Soldiers sitting close by in small groups began chatting like a troop of baboons while leering shamelessly at our black Speedo encased torsos.

Ignoring the soldiers we retrieved our reading material from our bags and began to catch up with some reading. But before we could make any headway with our reading three tall figures arrived in front of our umbrella. They stood before us blocking out our sun and casting their shadows over us. While gazing up at the men one of them began to speak.

'We see that you boyfriends have left you behind today.'

On hearing this stupid remark I suddenly began to feel extremely annoyed that they had the temerity to invade our privacy and still pester us with their stupidity. It was enough that we had to put up with gawking baboons on the side lines. Initially we were tempted pack up and move to another spot. But I could not bear to listen to their whistling and cat calling if we and gather our things, so we stayed put, ignoring them with our noses buried in our books. I snapped at the three:

'They are not our boyfriends, we have no interest in boys, we are queer we are only into women!'

Janet laughed. She thought I was making a sarcastic put down. They turned out to be students from Tukkies who had been spear fishing in the waters around the rocks and they obviously knew that we members of the Wits Diving Club. I could see that the three were caught off guard by my blunt remark and my abrasive manner. With an apologetic tone of voice one of them said:

'We don't mind if the two of you are queer, we just wanted to let know that some guy who owns a ski boat has offered to take us to Nine Mile Reef in his boat so that we can do some spear fishing and we thought that maybe the two of you might want to join us.'

In my own mind it was obvious that they were making a move on Jane and me. After making our acquaintances we learnt that two of them were final year medical students and the third was studying to be a dominee in the NG Church. We had been scuba diving off Two Mile Reef and that was where the Wits Diving Club were scuba diving. We had heard a lot of stories about Nine Mile Reef and it seemed like an opportunity not to be missed. So we told them to wait for us while we took our stuff back to our camp. Fifteen minutes later we joined them with our diving gear for snorkelling and spear fishing.

After negotiating through the barrier of rolling white surf we were finally past the line of breakers and the open ocean lay before us. With the twin outboard motors screaming at full throttle the ski boat planed over the surface of the waters, sometimes bumping up and down with a thumping sound as it skimmed almost clear out of the water over the crests of choppy patches of sea, creating huge showers of white spray. We could only communicate with each other by shouting above the noise of the engines. It was the first time that I had ever been on a ski boat.

At Nine Mile Reef, we had barely been in the water for more than half an hour when we noticed the skipper waving his arms frantically to get our attention. Swimming back to the boat I noticed it was lying unusually low in the sea and water was sloshing over the sides into boat, my heart skipped beat, it seemed that the ski boat was going to sink. We were nine miles from Sodwana Bay and just under one kilometre from the shore. The boat was taking up water into its hull. Diving under the boat we discovered that the plastic screw-in plug for draining water which had accumulated in the hull have been removed. The plug hole was between the two engines almost flush with bottom of the haul. It did not seem that the boat was going to sink immediately and they could beach the boat on the shore off Nine Mile Reef. They already sent an SOS message to Sodwana Bay and a convoy of four by four bakkies (one with a trailer) were on the way. We decided to swim back to the shore as the boat would sink with all of us on board. They started up the engines. We followed the boat as it chugged sluggishly over the reef back towards the distant beach. The swell was high and the breakers were huge. Unable to escape the powerful under tug of a massive breaker that had curled up like a towering cliff behind the boat, the boat plunged nose first down the sheer incline of the wave into the deep valley of the trough just before the wave collapsed over the boat burying it an avalanche of boiling white surf, which ripped and pulled at the boat with the violence of an angry sea monster, the boat rolling the over and over in the surf as was swept towards the beach. Miraculously the two engines had not been ripped off and lost in the sea. Several bakkies eventually pitched up and we managed to get a lift on the back of one of the bakkies back to Sodwana Bay.

After the adrenaline of our adventure had subsided I sensed with the keenness of finely tuned antennae that an unmistakeable mutual homoerotic attraction had formed between Janet and myself. While sitting close together with our wet bums on the sand, enjoying the pleasant sensations arising from the physical contact of our bodies we continued to engaged in an excited reliving of the Nine Mile Reef experience. I put my arm round Janet's shoulder and she leaned her head against my shoulder. I kissed softly on her salty cheek and she turned her faced and smiled. Pouting my lips slightly I kissed her on the lips. We held hands and sat in silence watching the rolling swells of the incoming tide.

She asked about Yael. She knew about us and had seen us together on campus. I told her that Yael was married and was pregnant and that she had broken off the relationship, possibly because she could not envisage us being together. In turn, I asked her about her Nathan Coetzee her boyfriend. She replied

'He is lovely, sweet, gentle and sensitive and I really care a lot for him, and I definitely don't want to hurt him, but then you know how things can become so very complicated. It feels so nice being like this with you, and it was never like this with him. I have not had sex with him or anyone before. I am a perfect virgin. He is a very serious Catholic and so respectful toward me, it was almost comical. Maybe it would be better for him to become a priest, he would make such a wonderful priest.'

'And you, could see yourself as nun?' I asked, feeling a bit whimsical.

'I have had a Catholic upbringing, I went to an all girl's convent, and to be honest I did at one stage consider becoming a nun after a visiting nun from Ireland spoke us about becoming a nun. She had visited Catholic communities all over world encouraging young women to pray about entering the novitiate. She spoke about young Indian women in India who expressed keen interest in becoming nuns'.

'The Church would never have got off the ground without the sisterhood of believers. The biggest irony about Christianity is that it is a women's religion and this fact has been overlooked, suppressed and erased,' I said.

'That is why the blessed virgin is such an iconic symbol and role model for Catholic women,' Janet added.

'I think Catholicism has imposed a construction of Mary on the Church that is not rooted in the historical Jewish Mary? I think the appellation of virgin is unfortunate. Jesus had siblings, he had brothers, so I cannot imagine Mary not enjoying having lots of sex with Joseph. There was nothing else for them to do at night except fuck,' I said.

'Do you think that many of the women that followed Jesus were lesbians?' Janet asked.

'I would not be surprised. I would also not be surprised if many of the women who were linked to Saint Paul's mission work were also lesbians.'

'Maybe Christianity is the religion of lesbians,' Janet said laughing.

'Yeah, maybe.'

Later that night, we got slightly tipsy after having a few tots of Southern Comfort while sitting round the fire at our camp site. Wanting to be alone together we decided to leave the lads who were engaged in army talk and spinning yarns about their diving adventures, and go on a night walk along the beach.

On the beach under light of hurricane gas lamps the men had purged the outboard motors with litres of oil to prevent sea corrosion of the piston, cylinders, and all working parts. Now they were cranking the two engines like crazy and too my amazement they actually managed to start both engines after they had been submerged in the churning surf. It was feat that my father as a mechanical engineer would appreciate and admire.

The Southern Comfort, the cool sea breeze, the sound of the rolling surf, the rising moon all conspired with the many secrets which lay hidden within the voluptuous bosom of the night, secrets which included our breathless love making as we climbed that magic mountain with Janet experiencing who first orgasm ever as she discovered that paradise of pleasure which existed in the valley between her own thighs.

And each day 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. 232. Not to sell the cherem—Leviticus 27:28

233

Of course the discourses articulated by every postmodernism project turns on the axis or pivot of some central or founding idea. The distinguishing difference between postmodern discourses and other discourses such as science, is that postmodern discourses are non-self-correcting, and this makes them dogmatic. The way I understand Foucault's intellectual project is as follows: Foucault's founding idea or central idea that underpins all of his thinking is actually very simple. His founding idea that structures his thinking can be stated as follows: the different forms or disciplines of discourse all emerge within some kind of institutional framework or within some kind of context or economic-social-political setting which not only provides the conditions of possibility for the production of the 'knowledge' articulated within the discourses but also controls or exercises power over the discourses with respect to what can be known. So power controls knowledge or what can be know. Really? And it is this what make all discourse and knowledge relative to the dynamics of power and control through the exercise of power. So what we believe or think we know is always shaped by external powers and controls exerted through the institutional systems that provide the conditions of possibility for the production of discourses concerning the known and knowable. What is knowable or what can be known or what can be the object of knowledge or the field of knowledge or the field that demarcates the objects of knowledge is subject to control through the powers vested within institutions that mediate the production of knowledge. This view in essence shares many similarities with Kuhn's philosophy of science in which paradigms exert control over the scientific discourse within the scientific community of practitioners regarding what is known and knowable or what is true. Knowledge is then always determined or mediated by relationships of power within some kind of institutional setting or framework.

This is obviously not true. Nor is the existence of epistemic relativity the rule in the life of the mind. The widespread or universal existence and occurrence of comparative reviews or critique of ideas in which we see the realization of the open or public contestation of the relative merits of conflicting ideas is the characteristic institutional dialectical dynamic which underpins all modern intellectual discourse and it is the actual existence of this state of affairs which conclusively refutes the Foucaultian and Kuhnian thesis of power controlling discourse or controlling what can be known. Given that conflicting ideas can co-exist does not by itself make knowledge relative. Institutionalized facilitated conflict or contestation between opposing ideas becomes the engine or mechanism for the self-correction of scientific discourse and also undermines the control of discourse or the control of what can be known. Conflict over the merits of competing or opposing ideas has been institutionalized within scientific discourse as the rule rather than the exception. Conflict and competition within the market place of ideas is what drives the self-correction of scientific discourse. So we can dismiss the founding claims of Foucault as having no basis in reality in the community or society of scientists.

The case of Derrida is a bit more subtle and his project cannot be as simply dismissed in the way that I have dismissed Lyotard and Foucault. But still, Derrida's ideas are also similarly infected with the logical problem of self-referentiality that is also the characteristic incurable self-defeating logic we see in the works of Lyotard and Foucault. Every time I have brought this up during question time I have been dismissed as an ignoramus.

Putting Lyotard and Foucault aside I would like to revisit Descartes as a kind of detour into what interests me as a Zoologist.

And each day 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. 233. Not to redeem the cherem—Leviticus 27:28

234

The Cartesian dualism of mind and the body viewed as a machine:

As I have already stated, Descartes in his own thinking had fixed a chasm between animals and humans. In doing so he had by implication also fixed a chasm in his philosophy, or metaphysics if you like, between machine and mind, and in the way he saw things, machines could only exist as mindless or unthinking automatons. An automaton does not possess consciousness as one of its properties or capacities or powers. If the human body is a machine what does it take for a machine to become conscious and to be able to think reflectively and to be able to deliberate, reason, reflect and consciously or mindfully carry out chains of logical inferences from premises and assumptions to conclusions? Can a man-made or human-engineered machine ever achieve this capacity? Is it possible that thinking robots will ever be created? A machine can be programmed or engineered to announce: _Cogito, ergo sum_ (I think, therefore I am), but can a machine ever be engineered to know what it means to think about anything including its material existence as a machine, that is, a machine crafted by humans. Automation of simple tasks is already a technological reality. Machines have replaced workers in factories. Mechanization can replace human labour for many productive processes in industry and agriculture. What is the difference between a complex robotic machine and an animal? Animals are sentient beings and apparently machines are not. Can the capacity for being a sentient entity be engineered into a machine? Animals demonstrate an awareness of their environment and a capacity to learn so they are not 'mindless' or 'unthinking' automatons. Contrary to Descartes we know with unassailable certainty that there is no chasm, physical or metaphysical, or differences in kind, that separates humans from animals. Instead the differences between humans and animals is on of degree and not one of kind, indicating that a continuity rather than chasm exists between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. The continuity between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom embodies the idea of continuity in terms of relatedness. We are related to all animals in the sense that we share a common ancestor. Humans and the rest of the metazoan making up the bilaterally symmetrical multicellular animals have descended from a common single cellular ancestor. This makes our phenotypic differences a difference of degree and not of kind. We are the same kind of things. How does this relate to the emergence of mind and consciousness?

The short answer would that when the following elements: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, zinc, cobalt, iodine, and so on, become the elemental building blocks or elemental constituents of a self-initiating, self-evolving, self-organizing and self-replicating macromolecular polymeric machine-like complex or configuration then the emergence of sentient awareness, consciousness, intelligence and mind becomes almost a certain inevitability. Each element possesses law-like dispositional properties or dispositional powers and when the different elements are combined covalently and ionically into complex macromolecular biopolymers, the biopolymers acquire new dispositional powers such as a catalytic agency for transforming substrates into products or mobility such as in rotational or translational molecular machine-like behaviour. To cut a long story short awareness or mind or consciousness or intelligences or even purposeful or goal directed behaviour emerges as an observable phenomenon across the entire animal kingdom from the protozoan to humans. Awareness, consciousness, intelligence and mind are all physical effects caused by an interconnected chain of events in which biopolymers and biomolecules participate as catalytic agents or as agents with the capacity for directed rotation or translation mobility.

I am not a biophysicist, but I have a deep interest in biophysics. I am not a reductionist, but I believe that a co-ordinated and directional system of intermolecular and intramolecular motion underlies in a causal mechanistic fashion the emergence of awareness, consciousness, intelligence and ultimately the phenomenon of mind itself. The entities involved or participating in this co-ordinated system of intermolecular and intramolecular motion are macro-biopolymers such as proteins and nucleic acids. At the molecular level motion is the predominating reality. It is the continual motion of electrons, atoms and molecules that underlies biological reality. Without the motion of electrons, atoms and molecules neither life nor mind would have emerged in the Universe. All physically significant motion that has been responsible for emergence of both life and mind has involved the motions associated with Brownian Universe or the realm of thermal fluctuations. What are thermal fluctuations? Brownian motion is caused of thermal fluctuation, and thermal fluctuations occurs in the form of atomic and molecular agitation. Agitation involves the different kinds of atomic or molecular motion, that is, rotational motion, vibrational motion and translational motion. Heat is thermal fluctuations and thermal fluctuations involve the rotational, vibrational and translation motion of atoms and molecules. In a real sense heat is nothing more that the motion of atoms and molecules. Motion is initiated and transmitted by the transfer of momentum as a consequence of collisions. Motion arises from the impulse generated by collisions. Life, mind and conscious emerged ultimately from the cauldron of molecular motions that prevailed and still prevails in the Universe of the Brownian realm.

And each day 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. 234. Not to plant diverse seeds together—Leviticus 19:19

235

Out of this molecular cauldron of thermal fluctuations emerges the dance of coordinated and directed motion, which is not only the dance of life but also the dance that gives birth to consciousness, mind and desire. And desire unconstrained blossoms into evil. Evil only exists in the form of the injury, pain and suffering of victims. Evil only exists as the reality of victims, it has no other reality, evil is felt by the afflicted, by the oppressed, by the repressed, by the dispossessed, by the alienated, and by the exploited in the form of suffering, in the form of pain and in the form of injury. Evil is created by perverse human intentions out of mere nothing, it is irreducible to the molecular motions of matter, in this sense it does not exist, it can only emerge as a reality as a 'creatio ex nihilo'. Evil having its source or origination in desire is something which can only be brought into existence through the moral act of creatio ex nihilo. And for evil to be a moral act or act of moral agency, the reality of free-will has to necessarily exist, and the future is something which does not exist, except as the instantiation of the passing moment. Evil can also be equated with nihilism in its denial of the existence of anything of meaningful and moral value. And victims become victims only as the consequence of the destructive rampage of the unfettered desire of the defector, of the traitor, of the betrayer, of the selfish, of the self-centred and of the narcissist. Evil arises as the consequence of the unfettered desire, where unfettered desire inevitably destroys human solidarity, and by destroying human solidarity it gives birth to alterity, where alterity arises with the emergence of the other in the form of the slave, the worker, the underclass, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed and the disempowered. Evil cannot exist in any other form. Apart from unfettered desire evil cannot exist.

And each day 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. 235. Not to plant grains or greens in a vineyard—Deuteronomy 22:9

236

Evil does not exist as a reality for God. As an omnipotent and omniscient being God cannot be harmed, injured or negatively affected by the evil actions arising from the work of human agency. God cannot be directly a victim of man's evil. God as an omniscient being has full knowledge of the existence of evil as a human created phenomenon, and as a phenomenon which is experienced by victims.

From a rational and logical or even a grammatical perspective, it is impossible for God as an infinite, omnipotent and omniscient and non-material being to be acted upon or effected or influenced by a finite material being. The subject-verb-object relationship can also be conceptualized as a relationship of objectification. It is rationally, logically and grammatical impossible for God to play or fulfil the role of the object in the subject-verb-object relationship, and still be God, in other words God cannot be objectified and still be God. God can only fulfil the role of object in an act of self-emptying in a process in which God ceases to be God in the instance of being acted upon by a finite subject. In any subject-verb-object relation, the subject as the agent or actor is the doer or the performer or the affecter of an action that influences or effects the object in a manner whereby the object becomes the recipient or receiver of an action or influence or an affect brought about by a subject. Whenever the object of the verb is a sentient being or a being having mind, then and only then, the human subject exercises moral agency by performing an act or action on a sentient being or a being having a mind. Any act performed by a subject acquired a moral value or a moral consequence whenever the effect of the action is either beneficial or detrimental to the being of the object who is the recipient of the action.

And each day 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. 236. Not to crossbreed animals—Leviticus 19:19

237

I need to make another detour, this time into the status of philosophical theology or metaphysics. Theology and metaphysics are viewed as nothing better than swear words in most philosophical headquarters. But to eschew or foreswear or repudiate or abjure theology or metaphysics, choose any verb you like, is tantamount to being in a state of self-imposed or self-inflicted epistemic denial, and this seeking of a refuge in the comfort of denial or wilful blindness this does not allow any thinker to ultimately escape from the prison of inviolable epistemic circularity or the infernal infinite regress. Epistemic circularity is inescapable by virtue of the fact that if the existence of the finite is contingent and not necessary then the finite is not self-explanatory, self-subsisting, self-creating, self-generating or self-sufficient. It is finite by virtue of the fact that it is not self-explanatory, self-subsisting, self-creating, self-generating or self-sufficient. Because the finite is contingent it exists only by virtue of something else which provides the conditions for its possibility. In this sense the finite supervenes on the infinite. All becoming or coming-to-be supervenes on the Infinite Being in which essence and existence converge. Supervenience is an ontological relationship between things or properties or events or powers or even essences. And a phenomenon of supervenience can be viewed as a hierarchical relationship between things. Supervenience of one thing upon another thing can be conceptualized in various ways, that is, various ways of articulating the nature of this relationship of dependency. Supervenience may be conceptualized as a relation of dependence in which the occurrence of one thing, say A, is dependent in some way on the existence of another thing, say B. Event A or thing A may be dependent on the existence or occurrence of B in manner that entails causality with metaphysical necessity. Supervenience conceptualized as a relation of dependence, including dependencies that result in emergent properties or powers or capacities such as consciousness or mind, necessarily also entail a reductionist view of the nature of the dependencies especially if it is beholden to a physicalist or materialist metaphysics of necessity. A physicalist view, out of metaphysical necessity, will require an explanation of emergent properties or powers or capacities to be governed by law-like generalizations. And if the occurrence or existence of any physical event or property or power is governed by a chain of material or physical causation, then these events or properties or powers can be fully explained in a reductionist fashion or by reductive inferences. Along these lines all complex events or occurrences which can be viewed as emergent phenomena are fully explicable by showing that they are effects of simpler events or occurrences, without any breakdown or rupture in the chain of causality. The formulation of reductive explanations is a requirement of physicalism or materialism, whereby complex or emergent phenomena are shown to be generated causally as effects of the dispositions, powers and properties of simpler entities. This requirement would be met by explaining how specific chains of causation, which are governed by law-like generalizations, are responsible for the emergent of complex phenomena such as consciousness or mind from the behaviour or dynamics of simpler entities.

And each day 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. 237. Not to work different animals together—Deuteronomy 22:10

238

But this paradigmatic exercise in scientific explanation does not escape the problematical question of Ultimacy or Metaphysical Necessity which is another way of speaking about Ultimacy. When pushed to the limit, the chain of physical or material causation does not terminate. Thus physicalist reductionism is really the twin sister of the First Cause Cosmological and Contingency Arguments for the existence of God. Both suffer from the same kind of infinite regression problem regarding the termination of causation in a first cause.

The question of what caused the causes, that is, the causal relationships that are governed by law-like generalizations, haunts all questions regarding the reasons for the intelligibility of a non-self-explanatory Universe. If everything that occurs in the Universe does ultimately in actual fact supervene on the 'laws of motion' of the 'most fundamental particles or entities' then where do these 'laws of motion' that govern the dynamics and behaviour of the associated 'fundamental entities, particles or strings' come from? They cannot to self-derived or self-creating or self-generating, as something which has the intrinsic power to give rise to itself in an act of self-generation or self-creation or self-bringing-into-existence whether it be a law of nature or the most fundamental entities in the Universe.

And each day 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. 238. Not to wear Shatnez, a cloth woven of wool and linen—Deuteronomy 22:11

239

Now returning to the question of God's vulnerability. As the infinite being, God's essence and existence converge in God's being. It is in God's essential nature to exist necessarily. Everything else apart from God exists contingently by virtue of God's essential being. This means that all of time and space exists contingently by virtue of God's essential being. This in turn means that time, whatever kind of thing time may be, also only exists contingently by virtue of God's essential being. God exists transcendently beyond time and immanently within time as the condition for time's existence. The future does not exist in any kind of pre-arranged or pre-ordained state of affairs, the future is brought constantly into existence by virtue of God's being immanent in time. In a sense God is time, in the same way that God is truth, and in the same way that God is the Laws of Nature that governs the Motions of the Universe. All this is equivalent to saying that all Becoming supervenes on Being, that is, on the Infinite Being. The essential nature of God as an Infinite Being makes it impossible for God to be the object of any kind of actions performed or perpetrated by the agency of a finite human subject. So it is impossible for the infinite God to be a victim of or to suffer from any kind of injury caused by a finite human moral agent without God ceasing to be God.

In this sense God cannot be injured or harmed or hurt or offended or wronged or disobeyed through any acts of human moral agency that are ethically negative and ethically detrimental. God does not need or require that any idea or conception of Her will to act could ever be governed human behaviour. If God needs or is bound to punish humans for acts flowing from human moral agency then Gods will is contingently subordinate to human will. If we can force God to punish us by going against God's will then God is longer God. Nor is it consistent with God's essential nature as the Infinite Being who is omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent and omnidetermining to impose a moral regime on humans that includes punishment of transgression and disobedience, eternal damnation in hell. A God who is infinite cannot be the object of a finite being's actions, therefore God cannot become a victim of human actions that are intended to be harmful or injurious. Human moral actions can only have evil consequences for human victims. God is immune to human moral actions because it is impossible that any kind of human agency would constitute an actual threat to God's sovereignty or God' being. However it is within God's power to voluntary become a victim of human created evil in an act of self-emptying solidarity with human victims.

And each day 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. 239. To leave a corner of the field uncut for the poor—Leviticus 19:10

240

Is there such a thing as 'evil' or a behaviour that could be construed as 'sinful'? Reading from the 'Book of Nature' we can argue that 'evil' and 'sin' have no objective existence. Reading from the 'Book of Nature' it become evident that everything in the Universe arises ultimately as a consequence of the motions of matter. In other words the complex emergent properties or capacities such as mind or consciousness or human capacity arises out of the simple, where the simple is merely stuff, stuff which is ultimately constituted out of the electrons, protons and neutrons. In itself the stuff out of which we as living beings are constituted cannot be evil. An electron or a proton cannot be evil in itself. So there no convincing grounds to believe with certainty that the apparent realities of 'evil' and 'sin' could have arisen from the 'ethically neutral' motions of matter or from matter itself. Therefore there is no rational support for the existence of a dualistic Manichean order governing the Cosmos or the World.

Furthermore, if humans evolved contingently through purely natural evolutionary processes ultimately from inorganic and inanimate elements then how-was-it-possible that evil could have come into existence? How can a narrative of redemption from the consequences of sin, suffering and evil be reconciled with the narrative of evolution? A literary-theological-metaphysical-narrative of a redemptive soteriology based on an Infinite Being's self-emptying act of solidarity with 'victims' of 'inhumanity' or 'victims' of 'suffering' can co-exist as a rationally compatible narrative with the narrative of the evolutionary history of humans in which humans exist as animals amongst other animals, and therefore belong as the rest of the animal kingdom whose members all descended from the same ancestor. The incarnation of God and the death of God at Golgotha represents God own voluntary self-emptying actualization of suffering victimhood in solidarity with the 'least of these brothers and sisters of mine'.

From Matthew 25: 40-45 we have the parable on the goats and sheep:

40 "The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'

41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,

43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

45 "He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

What is the essence of Christianity – contra Feuerbach? This how I the Lipstick Lesbian view the matter: The God incarnate, the Word become flesh, the Son of Man, in a self-emptying act inserts himself into history and allows himself to become entangled and enmeshed and bound-up in the myths created by men, myths which narrate man's own self-understanding of man's relationship with God. And God as the incarnate Word, chooses to speak in the language of parabolic symbolism. The Word made flesh, engages with the written words of man's myths by speaking only in the words of parables like the parable of the sheep and goats. In the human world of myth, God speaks in parables. Using the form of the parable the God incarnate as the man Jesus, speaks only 'parabolically', which means God speaks in the poetics and aesthetics of comparisons. God in whom essence and existence converge in the shining blaze of Reason, always engages parabolically with all mythic ideologies, for example Jesus as God always engages parabolically with the Law of Moses, with the Torah, by speaking only in parables. Parables which by articulating an enigmatic dialectic bring to consciousness an ironical awakening which cancels all religious precepts, inviting actions which provoke a liberating and critical disobedience, especially regarding the moral speciousness of all religions including the Law of Moses which anthropologically speaking exist as nothing more than legal injunctions rooted in man-made social conventions for the protection of property and social status within a hierarchy of social domination and therefore could never have come from God. So instead of observing the Law of Moses or any other kind of religious injunctions as a means to earn God's favour and God's salvation, men and women are instead invited to become the parable rather than slaves of a mythic ideology. To become the parable is to deny oneself and to live in solidarity with the wretched of the earth, which means to find God in human solidarity with the least of these, all of whom which happened to be God's brothers and sisters.

And each day 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. 240. Not to reap that corner—Leviticus 19:9

241

Executed under the orders of Pontius Pilate before dying on a Roman cross Jesus shouted the apocalyptic words: 'It is finished!' What was finished?

The 'least of these of my brothers and sisters' who are suffering are always embodied in the infinite face of the Other. I will go into this more fully later. I have made a note that I need to revisit this idea. Read on dear reader. You will be rewarded in more ways than one. I felt rewarded.

Going back to Jesus. There is more to reflect on! No better occasion than now to begin our reflection on Jesus. Who was this man? Who was the historical Jesus and how does the historical Jesus merge with the Jesus of the Gospels or with the Jesus proclaimed by Saint Paul or the Jesus in the Letters and Epistles of the New Testament? The short answer is that they are the one and the same. The New Testament and the whole history of the Church and of Christianity exists by virtue of its founding historical event which is the crucifixion of Jesus. It is a historical fact that first and foremost crucifixion was primarily and uniquely a form of Roman execution which served a very specific and well-thought out Roman social and political function. Its primary function was to eradicate and erase the existence of every agent or individual person which threatened in whatever manner, whether it be criminal or political, the continuance, stability and legitimacy of the Roman Empire. In other words, crucifixion on a Roman Cross was the guaranteed fate to anyone who posed any kind of threat to the Roman Oligarchy. All threats to the Roman Oligarchy were construed as acts of treason, and an act of treason was any kind of act which threatened or destabilized or jeopardized in any way the rule, the governance and the order which the Oligarchy depended on for its very existence. Crucifixion was an institution of capital punishment for the multifarious and multi-dimensional acts of treason, and in terms of securing and sustaining the Rule, Order and Governance of the Roman Empire all crimes where essentially acts of treason against a ruling Oligarchy, whether it be murder, theft or sedition.

So anyone who challenged the authority of the Roman State in whatever form or manner was a traitor, no matter whether he or she was a slave, a subject or a citizen, whether he or she was a rabble rouser, a criminal, a bandit, or a political dissident. Crucifixion was a public form of execution, it was meant to be a deterrent and for this reason alone it was stage-managed to be a horrifying public spectacle. It was meant to be an obscene, cruel, humiliating and agonizing form of torture from which there could be no escape, and which always ended not only in the death of the condemned but in the complete liquidation or annihilation of the condemned person. Crucifixion condemned the crucified to oblivion. Crucifixion is an annihilation because it obliterates the human, social and political significance of the condemned to nothingness, and this was its intended goal, especially in a society based on honour and shame. Nothing could be more shameful than crucifixion. The cultural, social and political stigma of crucifixion could not be eradicated. The crucified person was stamped with the brand of irredeemable criminality. No one was crucified without reason. Jesus was crucified between two criminals. The purpose of crucifixion as the Empire's machine of death was to engineer the most complete, utter and the most radical liquidation of the condemned by erasing every last trace of the memory of the condemned person not only from society or from the polis or from culture or tradition, but also from the history of the entire world. The purpose of the crucifixion for the sake of the perpetuity of the Oligarchy was to render the condemned person null and void, which means the end of the story for that person. But the end result of the crucifixion entails more than just the mere ending of the story of the crucified person, it is more than that, it involves the complete blotting out of the narrative concerning that person from the pages of history, and ultimately from what can ever be written or said about that person. In this sense crucifixion renders everyone speechless. All speech and writing ends with the crucifixion. What person in their right mind during those times or at that juncture of world history would want to write any kind of narrative for all of posterity about any single individual or person who has been condemned to die by execution on a Roman cross? Thousands were being crucified on Roman crosses throughout the Empire for all kinds of reasons, that is, reasons which were ultimately treasonous, and this was the profound reach of the political. The whole of life under the rule of the Roman Empire as with any Oligarchy was ultimately political in nature. That means every act, especially under the rule of the Oligarchy was ultimately politically consequential in nature. Every act of Jesus was ultimately politically consequential in nature. It could not be otherwise under the rule of the Oligarchy, especially in the case of the Roman Empire.

Yet the crucifixion of Jesus could not annihilate him. His death on a Roman cross could not erase him from the memory of his followers, nor blot out his story or expunge the narrative of his life and work from the pages of history. In a profound and paradoxical sense the world historical or even the cosmic meaning and significance of Jesus, cannot be established in terms of a real historical Jesus or an empirically certifiable reconstituted Jesus. Why? Because there is no other Jesus that we can find living behind the Jesus of tradition or the Gospels. The narrative of Jesus in the Gospels cannot be dissected, disarticulated and dismembered into myth, fiction and certifiable history. And this applies personally to each one of us as historically grounded subjects, especially when we attempt to tell the world the story of who we really are, as in our own autobiographies. In our own autobiographies which we compose in the role of first-hand witnesses of our own lives, we become the subject of our own myths, fictions merge with certifiable history all in one. And it is in this tangled web of myth, fiction and historicity that we seek to establish or discover the profound meaning and significant truth of our own lives. We are all driven by the need to construct our personal narratives so that we can at the very less derive some kind comfort, and possibly experience a sense of self-authentication. The tangled web of myth, fiction and history out which we have composed the story of our own lives forms the composite whole of who we are in our own minds and in the minds of those closest to us. Our own personal self-authentication can only establish its own truthfulness within the system of the Totality of all Truth. The inadvertent or unavoidable lumping of autobiographical myth, fiction and history together into a composite whole does not negate the possibility that the autobiographical truth claims which we make about ourselves, which constitute our individual narratives, cannot be substantiated or justified or certified. How else can we be judged? We can only be judged in terms of our autobiographical myths and in terms of our own self-composed fictions or in terms of narratives of who we are and who we have been. We are own stories. We are own choices. In autobiographical narratives we give an account of our lives. Giving an account necessarily involves an adding up which is also a measuring up. How do our lives measure up, how do our lives add up, how do they weigh up in the scale or balance? Against what are our lives measured or balanced or weighed? Judgement always involves an accounting, an adding up, a measuring, a weighing or a balancing. The only terms of reference for our own judgement on the day of reckoning is the Totality of Truth. How does the story of our lives measure up with respect to the Totality of Truth. With regard to the Totality of Truth no finite person measures up. Everyone falls short. This constitutes a central truth of Christianity.

And each day 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. 241. To leave gleanings for the poor—Leviticus 19:9

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After I had written this down in my notebook I felt strangely elated. I felt my morale lifting. At every opportunity I began to ask for a priest. I explained that I was baptised and confirmed as an Anglican and that I wanted to make confession and have communion. Weeks went by and my requests proved fruitless. The white Afrikaans speaking female wardens continued to treat me as someone who was extremely dangerous and as a self-confessed Communist they were warned that it was not beneath me to use all kinds of deceit to agitate and continue the war by other means to subvert and undermine the system. They continued to treat me with the fear and caution which would be normally reserved only for the criminally insane in a mental asylums.

And each day 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. 242. Not to gather the gleanings—Leviticus 19:9

243

As an evolutionary biologist I realized that if humans were really just animals who shared a common ancestor with all the other members of the animal kingdom then the evolutionary differences between humans and the rest of the animal was one of degree and not of kind. For me this fact made the issue of morals and the reality of evil problematic. There are so many pressing questions that beg answers. How is it possible that evil could exist? When did humans become evil? Why did they become evil? How did they become evil? What kind of acts did they commit in order for them to become guilty of doing evil? How was it possible that they started to commit acts which could be recognized as evil? The phenomenon of evil had to come visibly recognizable as part and parcel of human experience in order for it to become conceptualized as a moral problem. My own hypothesis is that the phenomenon of evil first became a societal reality as a consequence of a process of gradual social disempowerment. The process of social disempowerment was made possible through the social hierarchicalization of society into an elite class of self-serving rulers and who having gained control and ownership of the means of violence, used the forces of violence for the disempowerment, exploitation and dispossession of the underclasses.

As an animal humans could only survive through cooperation. Cooperation depends on complex social behaviour. Cooperation can only work if freeloading by individuals is prevented. Freeloading was the first step towards social stratification.

And each day 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. 243. To leave the gleanings of a vineyard—Leviticus 19:10

244

The fact humans that evolved changes everything. The simplest response to this fact is that God does not exist. In my own experiences atheism seemed to be a gut reaction to stifling religious conventionalism. As a reaction against religious belief, atheism also presented the defence of its own position in the same shallow and closed minded fashion as the defenders or apologists of religious orthodoxy. Both religious orthodoxy and atheism missed the point. The question of God is not only interesting, it is also intellectually fascinating. The question of God is closely connected to the question regarding the nature or essence or meaning of the Totality or the Absolute. Maybe the Totality or the Absolute is something unknowable and therefore unspeakable. That is not to say that we cannot say much about something which happens to be the Totality or the Absolute or the Ultimate, where the Absolute or the Ultimate could be conceived as the ground or the conditions of possibility for the existence and being of the Totality. The Absolute or the Ultimate is the ground or the conditions of possibility for the existence and being of the Totality. As the ground or conditions of possibility, the Absolute however we may which to conceive its Being, is the origination of the Totality. Co-existing and co-extensive with the idea of the Ultimate which is the origination of the Totality is the being of the Other. The Other is the Ultimate, the Being in which essence converges with existence.

And each day 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. 244. Not to gather the gleanings of a vineyard—Leviticus 19:10

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The relationship with the Other is always asymmetric and that is why the Other can never be 'totalized' as something which can be fully grasped or comprehended. Or as something about which something finally can be said. The Other cannot be exhausted or fully objectified by any amount of saying something about something to someone. In this sense the Other is the unspeakable. But Other becomes something 'speakable' or 'sayable' or 'graspable' in the face of the lesser beings who happen to be the lowest of our brothers and sisters. The Parable speaks about the disclosure of the Other in the faces of the wretched: 'Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers and sisters you do to me.'

So the self-emptying of the Other or of God involves God becoming present in the faces of the least of these my brothers and sisters. It is the face of the other that awakens my conscience to the moral imperatives which calls for ethical action or moral agency. The face of the other arouses my concern. This has been the political theology underlying or underpinning my commitment to Communism. It is why I am a Communist.

And each day 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. 245. To leave the unformed clusters of grapes for the poor—Leviticus 19:10

246

Even as Marxist I have always been haunted by the idea of a 'first philosophy' that is based on an ultimate foundation. It seems clear to me that if you abandon the search for the Ultimate Ground or for the Absolute to which everything else refers then you are faced with the prospect of never being able to capture the Totality as a something, that is, to be in position in which you will be able to say something about something when it comes to speaking about the Totality in terms of the ultimate meaning and significance of everything. If this is not possible then the very idea of truth as being able to say something about something has to be renounced. If we do not accept the possibility that all our scientific and philosophical endeavours represents a hopeful striving to approximate the truth, even asymptotically as a self-correcting exercise, then we are left with nothing but the relativism of competing perspectives that are all equally vacuous when it comes to the truthfulness of scientific or philosophical claims. The love of truth as the supreme good is impossible without accepting the idea that the Universe is ultimately meaningful. For the Universe to be meaningful it has to be intelligible to reason. And to believe that the Universe is ultimately meaningful is equivalent to believing in God. To believe the converse is to fall into nihilism. To believe in God in this sense of believing is to believe that the Universe can be simultaneously causally closed and causally overdetermined. How I am going to explain this?

And each day 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 And each day 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. 246. Not to pick the unformed clusters of grapes—Leviticus 19:10

247

About a hundred metres from the jetty a large male cape fur seal lay dead washed up on the beach just above the high time mark at Swapkopmund. The seal was a fine specimen and the stench of decay had not yet taken hold of the cadaver. The cause of its death was a mystery. It was late afternoon and the Atlantic Ocean was a sombre steel grey. I had been standing on the jetty for some time watching the wind whipping the crest of waves into a froth of foam that dazzled brightly in the fading light. It was a sight that had inspired poets to see galloping horses with their spray white manes floating high above the dying swell, like chargers racing towards shores, towards the crashing thunder of battle. A sudden gust of wind tagged urgently at my windbreaker, reminding me of the advance of a cold front rolling in from the Antarctic. Just before the sun set I severed the seal's head from its body with a carving knife that I had taken from the draw of my beachside bungalow into which I booked for two nights. After skinning the seal's head I dissected away most of flesh from the skull. Earlier that day after I had booked into the bungalow I drove to a nearby pub where I had lunch. Sitting alone at the bar on a high stool was a Scandinavian looking woman with deep blue eyes and long blond hair who seemed to be in her early thirties. Seemingly impervious to the approaching cold she was dressed in a thin woollen black pullover and tight jeans. I noticed that she was not wearing a bra. We were the only two women in the pub without partners or friends. She must have sensed that I was staring at her. I smiled spontaneously with a radiance of admiration when she turned her head and gave me a curious glance. It was a bold reflex of flirtation over which I had very little control when in the company of my own sex. I am sure this almost uncontrollable predisposition of erotic desire was something that I had inherited from father.

Later that afternoon while walking on the beach our paths crossed again while I was inspecting the dead seal. She walked over to look at the seal and we began speaking. She introduced herself as Angelika Karlsen. I learnt that she was from Norway and was an actress by profession and she was taking a short break from a film shoot.

At about 10.00 pm that night after having cleaned up the mess in the kitchen there was a knock at the door. It was the woman, the Norwegian actress. Apologizing for her late night intrusion she explained that she had seen me severing the seal's head from its body and carrying the head back to the bungalow. She had been drinking and was in a terrible emotional state. Her jeans and pullover were soaking wet and she was bare foot. She confessed that she attempted to commit suicide by walking into the sea in the dark but had lost her nerve. I invited her into the bungalow and insisted that she take a hot shower. Because of her drunken state I had to help her undress. While she stood under a hot shower I hung her cloths in front of a heater. Once I had dried her with a towel I managed to get her into a bed, pulling the covers over her as she lay in a foetal position with her head on the pillow. Laying naked under the covers her pale face filled was with anguish, she complained that she felt cold. She began to shiver uncontrollably. I felt her forehead, she was feverish. Like a sick child she took the two Disprins, swallowing then with a sip of water from a glass. In response to her plea that I hold her I stripped, slipping naked into the bed, I pulled the covers over both of us, and cuddling against her back I put my arm around her and pulled her tightly against my body. She passed out in my arms and I eventually fell asleep holding her.

The percussion of heavy surf and Angelika's soft kisses on the back of neck lifted me gently from the depths of a peaceful slumber. Her hand was caressing my breast. I lay with eyes closed.

'Are you awake?' She asked, her warm body pressed pleasantly against mine.

I did not answer. Instead I turned over and kissed her gently on the lips. I whispered:

'Have you ever been with a woman?'

'No.'

'Do you want me to make love to you?' I asked.

'Yes.'

As the enveloping mists disappeared into the dunes and the weak morning sun filtered through grey opaque skies the headless seal rolled with stiff flippers in the surf of the retreating tide. We ate a sumptuous breakfast at her hotel and I felt the guilt of my betrayal of Janet. I had become Angelika's new found love. Colour had returned to her face and I was awe struck with her Nordic beauty. She was thirty one years of age and she felt young again like a love-struck teenager and I was barely twenty-one, living at that precocious threshold of adulthood. I knew that I was infatuated with the older woman but I loved Janet, and I knew that in a days' time I would be leaving Angelika with feelings of regret and relief. We have managed to maintain a deep friendship over the years. Before I left Inhambane I gave Isabella Angelika's address so that we could keep in touch through correspondence via Angelika. It was secret line of communication that escaped the surveillance of the Security Police. As a wayward daughter I have enjoyed the generous blessings of the sisterhood.

And each day 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. 247. To leave the forgotten sheaves in the field for the poor—Deuteronomy 24:19

248

On the evening before my departure to Swapkopmund I was invited to join the braai hosted by the Botany honours students from Wits. In the past Lake Kariba in Rhodesia had been the destination of the Botany honours fieldtrip. However because of the bush war in Rhodesia Lake Kariba was no longer a viable option for student fieldtrips, hence the reason for their visit to the Gobabeb Research Station on banks of the Kuiseb River in the Namib Desert.The male students in the Botany honours class who were from Rhodesia knowing my support of the liberation movements had taken to calling me 'Comrade Hannah'. We had all majored as undergraduates in Botany and Zoology and knew each other from first year. My political radicalization from first year onwards had not gone unnoticed by my classmates. I was always in the frontline of the pickets during anti-apartheid student demonstrations on Jan Smuts Avenue. Scott Everton, a tall handsome and athletic Rhodesian was a full Lieutenant in the Rhodesian Light Infantry and could speak fluent Shona, which was ironical given his strong right-wing political proclivities which bordered on raw fascism. He was two years older than the rest of us. While I did not advertise my homosexual orientation they had correctly guessed that I was queer and that I had no interest in men including studs like Scott who was in fact a beautiful male specimen with his magnificently sculptured body, rippling six pack, lovely biceps and broad shoulders. June 1976 with the Soweto student uprising signalled a turning point in the southern African liberation struggle. Things were never going to be the same again. On the back of the Carnation Revolution following the military coup in Portugal, FRELIMO under the revolution leadership of Samora Machel had come into power in Mozambique. In Angola a civil war was raging. The South African Defence Force (SADF) had opportunistically invaded Angola in order to reverse the MPLA revolution and at the same time destroy SWAPO which was currently fighting the bush war for the liberation Namibia from South African colonialism.

Much to the extreme and incredulous mortification of Scott I stated that I supported ZANU PF. Scott was a great admirer of Ayn Rand. At the braai I noticed that Kobus van Wyk who had also been invited to the braai listened with intent interest to the political banter between myself and Scott. Kobus was one of the park's game rangers or nature conservation officers. He was also responsible for exercising oversight with regard to my honour's research project which entailed an investigation into the reptile biodiversity at Gobabeb. I had spent a lot of time with Kobus in the desert and we had developed an excellent working relationship. He was incredibly shy, but also a supreme gentlemen, a wonderful mentor and a bush craft genius. I enjoyed his company immensely as we went on our daily rounds inspecting all the traps that we had set up to capture lizards and snakes in my catch-and-release-reptile –biodiversity-study.

After listening to our political debate around the fire Kobus later confided to me as we stared at the dying embers that in his opinion Bram Fischer was a great man, possibly the greatest Afrikaner that ever lived. When the others turned in Kobus and myself remained behind looking up at the star bedecked clear desert night sky, listening to the calls of jackals and talking about the political future of southern Africa. We spoke about Bram Fischer who had died of cancer the previous year in May 1975 while serving a life sentence as a convicted Communist.

And each day 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. 248. Not to retrieve them—Deuteronomy 24:19

249

Back to the overdetermination of causality. Do laws of nature remain constant or do they change with time. Are the laws of nature immutable or timeless in other words? If they are not immutable or timeless, then why should this be the case? Not being timeless is naturally contrary to our expectations. If they are not timeless in-themselves, can the immutability or timelessness of the laws of nature be contingent on something else? What would cause a law of nature to change or remain constant? Can something like a law of nature be caused to remain constant? Can we speak about causality in this sense? Can be we speak of cause responsible for the various laws of causation. Are the unchanging properties of a law of nature something metaphysical, in other words is the unchanging character or the immutability of the laws a metaphysical necessity? What does it mean to say that something is a metaphysical necessity? Can we state with reason that anything which exists including a law of nature will always be contingent on something else? Personally I have always preferred an essentialist account of the laws of nature. As scientists it is natural for us to project the notion or idea of 'lawhood' on well-established facts. Of course for a regularity to be a genuine law of nature it cannot be an accident, and accidental regularity cannot support a counterfactual conditional. But if laws of nature are mutable and not timeless then what makes them different from accidents? Say laws of nature do indeed change and are not invariant over time. How is possible that they can change? What causes a law of nature to undergo a change? Any change occurring in a law of nature must have a reason, a reason why. If the Universe is casually closed then any change in a law of nature represents a physical change and a physical change must have a physical cause, therefore a law of nature cannot change without reason, where the reason would those physical affects which cause physical laws to change. In this sense Poincaré's general argument that the laws of nature cannot change is basically correct. The question which seemly cannot be answered physically or materialistically is: 'Why cannot laws of nature change or what prevents a law of nature from changing?' Something must be the reason for something. Laws of nature are timeless or immutable because of metaphysical necessity. We use the phrase 'metaphysical necessity' because we do not have any empirically based means to show why laws of nature are timeless or invariant over time. In this sense the Universe is not self-explanatory and Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' is physically impossible and we cannot reduce the idea of Totality to something which can be apprehended or grasped. In this sense I would say that metaphysically the Universe is necessarily causally overdetermined and in that case I do believe in God, even as a Communist.

And each day 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. 249. To separate the tithe for the poor—Deuteronomy 14:28

250

What can we say about God? If God does exist as the Being who made the Universe metaphysically intelligible then it is reasonable to say or think something about God. For example, it is rational to comprehend God as a Being who is omnipotent and omniscient. If God is omnipotent and omniscient then God cannot be harmed, injured, offended, wronged and threatened, or limited in any way that is contrary to His or Hers essential nature.

And each day 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. 250. To give charity—Deuteronomy 15:11

251

Next, if humans are animals who belong to the animal kingdom and who share a primordial common ancestor with all the members of the animal kingdom and who differ only in degree along a continuum from the rest of the animal kingdom and not in kind, then humans are animals who do not differ in kind from the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans are 'essentially' animals in the same way that mouse is 'essentially' an animal that is a member of the animal. The truth of these propositions are self-evident, they are indubitable. The fact that humans have the capacity for language and speech and possess something which we call MIND does not change anything. Humans are still animals.

What does this mean or what significances does this have with regard to political theology and onto-theology. It means that both theologies have be articulated from a naturalistic or physicalist or materialist perspective. The first metaphysical casualty of this approach will be our ideas regarding the ontological status of good and evil. If humans evolved then good and evil do not exist, and the Universe is not government by a moral order or does God impose a moral order on the Universe. The Universe is not Manichean, matter cannot be good or evil. The next metaphysical casualty is the idea of a theodicy. It a conceptual error to try and reconcile a God who is good and loving with the existence of evil. In a sense neither good nor evil actually exists as deeds that earn merit or condemnation in terms of some transcendental moral order governing the Universe. There is no transcendental moral ordering governing human behaviour in terms of good and evil. The possibility of evil and good arises in the face of humans. In this sense good and evil are human creations, made possible by speech and facial expression. In the cries and in the expression of pain and suffering we see the corporeal manifestations of the mystery of evil and the possibility of good. In the human face we are able to see or recognize: pain, anguish, agony, angst, anxiety, despair, desperation, hopeless, injury, suffering and defeat, and from within our conscience we have the capacity to respond to an inner call of moral decision, the source or origination of which is a mystery. When say that without this emerging capacity for moral agency which is linked to consciousness and language the evolution of humans would not have been possible. And the question of good and evil would not have risen. All ethical action responding to this mysterious moral imperative which is based on the idea that humans should not be treated as means to an end but only as ends in the Kantian sense represents an act of transcendence, because it is not conditional on any reciprocal settlement. It is transcendent because it is 'God-like'.

And each day 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. 251. Not to withhold charity from the poor—Deuteronomy 15:7

252

A reading of Exodus chapter 3 is consistent with what I have been proposing with respect to the moral foundations of political theology and an onto-theology:

Exodus Chapter 3. Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3 And Moses said, "I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned." 4 When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." 5 Then he said, "Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." 6 And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.7 Then the LORD said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt." 11 But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?" 12 He said, "But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain." 13 Then Moses said to God, "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" 14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'I AM has sent me to you.'" 15 God also said to Moses, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. 16 Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, "I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, 17 and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey."' 18 And they will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, 'The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.' 19 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. 20 So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go. 21 And I will give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty, 22 but each woman shall ask of her neighbour, and any woman who lives in her house, for silver and gold jewellery, and for clothing. You shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians."

How do we respond to this passage of scripture? Firstly, we can state that God is free. Secondly, God in a self-emptying act of identifies with the faces of the oppressed and decides to take the side of the oppressed against the oppressor because he sees their faces and hears their cries. Kenosis is the word used for God's self-empting act.

And each day 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. 252. To set aside Terumah Gedolah (tithe for the Kohen)--Deuteronomy 18:4

253

The absence of archaeological data is not a sufficient or even a compelling argument for questioning the underlying historicity of the exodus and exile narratives documented in the various books of the Old Testament. We need to understand that all reading is haunted by a longing for something to be true. Why is this? In the case of the books of the Old Testament and New Testament it was rooted in an inherited or socially acquired belief that the Bible was not a work of literary fiction but a collection of narratives which were true and were firmly anchored in history, involving real historical persons who existed in real space and real time. The Bible in it's entirely was believed to be the revelation of God and this meant that each word in the Bible had been divinely inspired, and that the Bible in its entirety was authoritative, inerrant and infallible. As a primary school child in Hotazel I could never have entertained the possibility that the entire canon of the Old Testament and New Testament was not literally true. Our social and cultural environment in Hotazel was a hot house for the incubation of Biblical based beliefs. We grew up in this milieu or ethos in which the literal truth of the Bible was taken for granted and no one could have dreamt of claiming otherwise, such was the respect for the Bible. As a child in Hotazel I could never have contemplated the historicity or truth of the Old Testament or the New Testament. In was natural to believe in the truth of Bible and to respect the Bible and hold it in awe. And it goes without saying that the person and being of Jesus commanded unquestionable respect and deep heartfelt adulation. Jesus was God, God the Son, the second person the trinity. Our parents where not church goers when were children or teenagers. Yet if asked about their beliefs they would have without hesitation affirmed their belief in God, in Jesus and the Bible. But they made no effort to nurture any kind of religiosity in us. So in practice our home life was secular. Our parents were not exemplary or observant Christians. Their worldliness was quaint and benign, and politically conservative, shaped and moulded by the distinctive urban conditioning which was very peculiar to the white South African cultural and social environment. It was the cultural, social and political environment which characterised the white working class and middle class neighbourhoods of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Neighbourhoods such Malvern and Belgravia, suburbs of the city of Johannesburg, which was the metropolitan heart at the very epicentre of the sprawling Witwatersrand.

My parents where teetotallers. Alcohol consumptions was frowned upon. This was odd given the fact that in their youth they had been keen dancers and as teenagers they had frequented dancing halls, ice-rinks, roller skating rinks, hot-rod stadiums, drive-inns and the cinemas of Johannesburg, venues of entertainment and recreation which reverberated and resonated with the music and cultural ethos of the United State of America. They were Afrikaners who undergone a process of Americanized enculturation. As a child I grew up with the sound of big band dance music, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, blaring from the Pilot Radiogram, at parties at our home, the carpets rolled up, dad and mom dancing on the polished parquet lounge floors in our house at Hotazel or at a social function at the rec club hall. Personally I loved the excitement of Glenn Miller's 'In the Mood' and Benny Goodman's 'Sing, Sing, Sing'. I loved the big band ensemble of trumpets, trombones, saxophones, guitar, piano, double bass, and drums. I loved the strophic form with the same chord structure repeated several times.

And at supper time we almost never ate at a meal without some LP on the turntable, always classical music. Where I am going with this? I don't really know. Within the context of being born white in South Africa I am in many ways a product of white South Africa. White South Africa is a social, cultural and political anachronism, and as such it is completely maladapted socially and culturally to the realities of its geo-political situation in Africa and also with the world at large. White South Africa has always defined itself in terms of racial, social, cultural, economic and political differences in relation to the African indigenous communities. As a self-defining community it turned in on itself and in the process turned away from the aboriginal inhabitants, not making any effort to learn their languages, customs, traditions and world views. It severed itself from the indigenous people. As a racially based white community it could only exist in remote isolation, disconnected from it historical and ancestral roots. Its isolation is something which happened progressively after being transplanted and cast-off onto the southern tip of Africa as a purely contingent consequence of British colonial imperialism, when Britain was once a world power.

And each day 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. 253. The Levite must set aside a tenth of his tithe for the Kohen—Numbers 18:26

254

The uniformity of nature, natural regularities, and the riddle of induction. In science the existence of laws of nature are usually invoked to explain the occurrence of natural regularities, in the sense that the regularities and uniformities of nature are governed by laws of nature. The ontological status of laws of nature is a metaphysical problem.

God empowers nature by endowing nature with dispositional powers.

And each day 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. 254. Not to improperly preface one tithe to the next, but separate them in their proper order—Exodus 22:28

255

In 1974 some unknown students sprayed painted 'Free Nelson Mandela' and 'Free Bram Fischer' on the wall next to the entrance to of the canteen in the Student Union building.

And each day 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. 255. A non-Kohen must not eat Terumah—Leviticus 22:10

256

To say or write something about something is to engage in ontology, in epistemology, and ultimately to create or construct a narrative using vocal or written signs as vehicles to convey meaning. What is meaning? What does meaning mean? What does it mean for something to mean something? Meaning arises out of saying or writing something about something to someone. For meaning to exist there must be an addressee. Meaning involves seeing, feeling, hearing and listening. We are able to say complex things or utter complex narratives which are fundamentally true like stating that the joining of monomers (amino acids) into polymers (proteins) gives rise to structures that become organized into complex three dimensional configurations that by virtue of their structure three dimensional organization acquire dispositional powers such as catalysts.

And each day 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 256. A hired worker or a Jewish bondsman of a Kohen must not eat Terumah—Leviticus 22:10

257

Here I am writing what I have called my autobiography. I have tried to show that the emerging narrative cannot escape from being an exercise in fiction, yet if my life can be construed as a work of fiction, I the author have not consciously or intentionally organized the narrative or structured the narrative around a plot. I cannot say that I am aware that there is or has been a plot to my life or that my life has been structured around some kind of plot. It does not feel like that this is the case. Yet you the reader taking my word that this autobiography is a work of fiction will possibly discover that there does indeed exist an underlying plot which gives the written narrative its sense and meaning.

And each day 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. 257. An uncircumcised Kohen must not eat Terumah—Exodus 12:48

258

Interlude and refrain: I have returned to the room of my childhood and youth. This has been the constraint refrain of my story. I have returned to Hotazel. But my return is also a departure from Hotazel. I am overcome by feelings of melancholy and forlornness. I became acutely aware of the passing away of a huge chunk of my life. On the wall of my room hangs the framed photomontage that my mother made. It was been artistically composed by her. She has put the effort of love into it. It was a Christmas gift to me from her. She has always been interest in art. The parts related to the meaning of the whole. Michel Foucault writes about the 'architectonic unities' of systems of knowledge in his 'Archaeology of Knowledge'. I study the montage and I see my whole life before me, divided up into frozen moments, slices of time, events that have been captured photographically. The parts find their truth in the whole like the tiles in a complex mosaic. A single tile seen in abstraction from the other tiles which make up the whole, out of which the whole is composed, is by itself meaningless. Only in terms of the Totality does it become meaningful, it is only by virtue of the Whole that it is meaningful. In the preface to his 'Phenomenology' Hegel makes the claim that 'the true is the whole'. Also in this connection, Hegel in his 'Science of Logic' (or 'Encyclopaedia Logic'), argues that whatever is true in the parts lies in the organic or systematic relationship that the parts have to the system as a whole, 'the science of the Idea must form a system' and 'Truth, then, is only possible as a universe or totality of thought'. In Hegel's philosophy the Truth has an 'architectonic' relation to the Whole or to the System of Thought or Mind. In the Hegelian context the word architectonic refers to the structure of a system in which the parts are related to each other in the organization of the Whole. I see my room architectonically – everything in it bears on the meaning of my life, the truth of my life, the truth of my existence began here in this room in Hotazel. The Kalahari forms the architectonic frame. Hotazel forms the architectonic framing of my life, my life expanded, it unfolded, into what it became from this room, and now I have returned to the room of my childhood. From the room of a prison I have returned to the room of my childhood. Could this mean anything at all in the Universe? I stare at the photomontage which encapsulates my life. The photographs, each one them in montage, and those in the photo albums and even the group shots, the hockey team, the swimming team in the high school magazines, they now longer speak with the freshness of a polaroid snapshot, now they say more to the searching gazing.

And each day 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. 258. An impure Kohen must not eat Terumah—Leviticus 22:4

259

I have sent a letter to Angelika informing her of my release. I have asked her to forward the letter within the letter to Isabella in Inhambane Mozambique. Now I wait anxiously for the Isabella's letter.

And each day 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. 259. A chalalah [see Mitzvah 174] must not eat Terumah—Leviticus 22:12

260

I think a lot about events surrounding my arrest and detention. For example there were no warrants. It seemed that everything was done outside the framework of the law. There did not seem to be any kind of adherence to due process. I did not see a doctor or a lawyer or a magistrate. I was isolated from the rest of my comrades. I know that they have also been released, but I have not been able to make contact any of them.

In retrospect I should have asked them if they had a warrant for my arrest and a warrant to search my flat. They possessed something which gave them sufficient warrant to believe that their inferences about me was sufficiently likely for a judge to grant them a warrant for my arrest and a warrant to search my flat, and confiscate everything which could be used as evidence against me. But they did not produce any warrant they acted with the sure certainty that comes with true belief. They believed that I was a communist and a member of the underground. They must have acquired this information from a close comrade who had betrayed me and the other comrades linked to our cell. But I did not know this at the time of my arrest. I just assumed that they had sufficient warrant to make inferences about who I was. They knew my name: 'Is jy Hannah Zeeman?' (Are you Hannah Zeeman). The words rolled of his lips with the certainty that comes with familiarity.

And each day 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. 260. To set aside Ma'aser (tithe) each planting year and give it to a Levite—Numbers 18:24

261

Ho Chi Minh.

And each day 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. 261. To set aside the Second Tithe (which is to be eaten in Jerusalem)--Deuteronomy 14:22

262

According to Hume a belief in the existence of necessary connections, a necessary connection in terms of cause and effect, between sequentially linked events was unwarranted. Hume argued that there was no ways that pure reason could establish in a priori fashion the existence of a necessary relationship between two events. Nor according to Hume is there any a posteriori chance of establishing necessary relationship between events in nature. Why would this be so? Any attempt to establish necessary relationships a posterior would be vulnerable to the problems associated with inductive reasoning. But there are states of affairs which exist because of apparent metaphysical necessity, in which we can say something about something with metaphysical certainty rather than with only empirical certainty. Hilary Putnum states that if something is water it is necessarily a dipole, salt is necessarily soluble in water, electrons necessarily have unit charge, and so on. Many natural objects have properties and powers which they necessarily possess with metaphysical certainty. An electron is an electron by virtue of its properties which includes having unit negative charge. A strong case can be made for the view that the properties possessed by things, natural things if you like, are properties that essentially have causal powers, and it is the possession of these powers which are constitutive of the identity of the thing.
And each day 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. 262. Not to spend its redemption money on anything but food, drink, or ointment—Deuteronomy 26:14

263

Yes I am Hannah Zeeman. I am the person who goes by this name. I am Hannah Zeeman the person who is in love with Isabella who is a member of FRELIMO in Mozambique. Who lives in Inhambane, who bears a striking resemble to me. I am Hannah Zeeman a person who has been classified as a white yet I suspect that my family carries ancient black DNA, possibly from the Khoisan, which has become mingled into our family genome. I could pass for a Coloured. There are slight traces of Khoisan in the physiognomy of my face. My cheek bones are high and prominent, and there is a subtle slant to my eyes. Yet I am white. A lot of things make me a white person. Yet I have never suffered from sunburn or peeled as a consequence of sunburn.

And each day 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. 263. Not to eat the Second Tithe while impure—Deuteronomy 26:14

264

I sat in the back seat. The two of them sat in the front. They did not seem to be concerned that I could open the back door and jump out and make a run for it. They were complacent in their absolute certainty that I would not attempt to escape from the car into the night. I felt strangely numb, outside the rain was falling again, visibility was periodically restored by the slapping beat of windscreen wipers squeaking to and thro, the unmarked police car's radio cackled intermittently, the night gleamed wet in the headlights. The car turned into the street in which I lived and stopped in front of the main entrance of the flat complex. I noticed that I left the lights on in my flat. I left them on because I did not think about putting them off in my rush to escape. The lights being left on was a signal that I had left the flat in a state of haste. The flat was empty. They saw this and when they saw this they also saw or realized that the externalized self, the subject that is taken to be me, was no longer in the flat. But the subject that they had under their consideration and consciousness deliberation was only the appearance of who I am supposed to be. It is the image in the mirror. The same image I see of myself in the rear view mirror of the car.

And each day 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. 264. A mourner on the first day after death must not eat the Second Tithe —Deuteronomy 26:14

265

The car finally comes to a halt in the street outside the block of flats where I live. Except for my flat the entire building is in darkness. The rain pours down steadily. I see and feel everything as an externalization of myself in terms of an objectification of who I am. But 'the I' which I consider to be the self has been split off from the subject which is an objectification of the self but not the self itself. Others can see me but they can never experience what it is like to be me, therefore if they are denied this experience, an experience which they can never really have, then they cannot know what it is like to be me, and this is the great limitation to what we can know by means of reason alone and also by means of experience. There is a limit to what we can experience and know in an absolute or ultimate sense. In this sense we can never grasp the totality of things as something about which we can say something in an absolute or ultimate fashion. Yet we know something about the totality in a provisional or partial fashion. We can have a natural knowledge of God which we can accept as justifiable or warranted. We can know things, even if only partially, because of warranted inference. We infer something on the grounds of evidence that is broadly circumstantial, and often this is not an exercise in unmediated or transparent access to something. There are things we know that do indeed exist or have to exist like the inaccessible self of others for example, yet we know that there are such things, or such states of affairs, even though we cannot experience directly what it is like, or feel what it feels like. So there are limits to saying something about something. In these instances we are faced with both the limits of reason and experience. But in spite of these limitations we know that something is the case. We find that we have sufficient warrant to believe, maybe even with metaphysical certainty that a given state of affairs does indeed exist. We know that there is something and it has being. Possibly we know it by faith alone, but without necessarily foregoing reason, we know it by faith alone only because reason gives us the assurance that our faith in that something is the case is not an illusion, is not about something that does not exist, but it concerns something that is there indeed. It does 'concern' something. Our thinking, our reasoning, our experiences, our beliefs and our faith concerns something. We are concerned, we do have concerns about various things. Concerned or being concerned is a state of being, a way of being-in-the-world. Here we use the word 'concern' in a very pregnant sense. And this could be what Paul Tillich meant about the 'concerns' under the designation of 'ultimate concern.' Our faith is about concerns, reasonable or rational concerns, concerns about something, a something that is there indeed. God is there indeed and She is not silent, because the silences speak out, out of the silences we hear that which cannot be heard without the voice of reason, without the inferences which have rational warrant, rational warrant that reason supplies. It is for this 'reason', I use the word reason in its most paradoxical sense, that I am a Christian in spite of everything. Well I have been a closet Christian all along in spite of appearances, in spite of being a sex loving lesbian. I have lived my lesbianism to the fullest, I lived it as a gift, I lived being a lesbian in a state of thankfulness. I have lived in a state of thankfulness that I am a woman. I have lived as a feminine lesbian, or a femme lesbian, because I enjoy being pretty, being beautiful, being attractive and above all I take pleasure in being desirable, to be the subject of desire of another woman. I know I am good looking and desirable. I have been blessed with good looks. Nature has been generous to me in that sense.

And each day 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. 265. Not to eat Second Tithe grains outside Jerusalem—Deuteronomy 12:17

266

I not anti-men or anti-male. I do have male friends. All my current comrades in the underground are male. It is just that I am not attracted to males sexually or emotionally. I cannot even contemplate wanting to bond emotionally or intimately with a male. It will be wrong for me to be with a male in that fashion, it will be unnatural. I relate to males as human persons and I have treated them respectfully as fellow humans. As biologist I cannot with intellectual integrity be a full blown radical feminist even though I am interested and supportive of the feminist project. I agree that women have been treated shamefully, that women have be repressed and oppressed and abused by men. But I am wired up as a homosexual, and this has allowed to see men differently compared to my heterosexual sisters. I can exist without men. Being homosexual is something that cannot be changed. Biologically I am not heterosexual and I can never become heterosexual. I am drawn ineluctably to women. However there are men that I love or have loved deeply, but not erotically. I love my father. He is a typical man in every sense of being a man or male. And I forgive him, I forgive all his sins, because of that special relationship which exists between a daughter and her father, and I have been fortunate to have had a wonderful father.

And each day 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. 266. Not to eat Second Tithe wine products outside Jerusalem—Deuteronomy 12:17

267

I feel the need to write more on the topic of the idea of the self versus the idea of the subject and how this relates to the experience of solidarity.

The self in the form of the 'I' or the 'I am' is always embodied. The subject which is a projection or construction or externalization of the person represents an abstraction or objectification of the embodied self and therefore the subject can only exist as an alienation or estrangement of the self or the embodied I. The subject can therefore only exist in a state of affliction, where to be in a state of affliction is to be in state of being externally acted upon, and it is this being-acted-upon which results in the experience of self-estrangement or self-alienation. The appraising or judgemental look of the other can be viewed as being subjected to an-afflictive-acting-on-by-the-other which results in the person, or the self, experiencing a sense of self-estrangement or a sense of not being one's self in the presence of the other. The self exists in a state of tension, a state of crisis. This is the opposite or the negation of being is a state of solidarity with the other.

These are the reasons why I prefer to see a differentiation between the concept of the self and the concept of the subject. The self is not the subject. The self becomes the subject only when externally acted up by the other. In the presence of the other, both the other and the I as the self, sees or experiences the self as a subject, that is, as an objectification, which in turn results in the experience of self-alienation or self-estrangement.

Yet only I can, but never the other, experience my private and personal self-hood as the authentic or genuine I am. Only I can know what it feels like to be me.

When we experience solidarity with the other, the other ceases to be a subject and in the face of the other we get a glimpse of the self or I of the other. Solidarity can only exist if there is a reciprocal mutuality of perceived personhood.

Having had my say about relationships between the ideas of the self, the subject and solidarity, I now feel the need to say something about relationship between truth and reason.

And each day 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. 267. Not to eat Second Tithe oil outside Jerusalem—Deuteronomy 12:17

268

Ethnocentricity and ethno-exclusivity are incompatible with human solidarity. Saint Paul as an apostle to the Gentiles had to confront ethnocentricity and ethno-exclusivity head on. Ethnocentricity and ethno-exclusivity was integral to the founding mythology of Judaism. What was Saint Paul's solution? Salvation is from the Jews! Saint Paul did not ever deny this or even contemplate the denial of this sentiment. Nor did Jesus! This is the supreme irony and paradox of the New Testament and Christianity. This belief was implicit in Saint Paul's theology. Does this mean I must become a Jew? No never! I have had almost a lifelong intimate association with Jewry and Judaism as a consequence of my relationship with Yael. I lived like a Jew for years with Yael. In Yael's struggle with her mental illness all she could cling to was her Jewishness, and this somehow saved her, and also brought relief and healing for her. For her sake during those years I became a Jew. I was a Jew for her sake alone, and she believed in her heart that I had converted. She believed that I was Jew. But I could never really be a Jew. I felt no burning desire to be a Jew. Yet with Yael, for her sake, I never denied being a Jew. She lied to our mutual friends, who happened to be Jewish, that I had converted. I was living a lie. Deep in my soul I felt the strong pull of Catholicism, yet I could never convert to Catholicism. I was an Anglican. My DNA was Anglican. I felt a deep love and loyalty to Anglicanism. Yet a Protestant flame did burn in my heart and that is why I remained an Anglican, even though I was of Anglo-Catholic persuasion and temperament. The Protestant flame was justification by faith. The Protestant flame was the belief in unmerited grace and favour. The Protestant flame was that salvation was not something which could be earned. It is always God who saves, and God saves without any preconditions, otherwise God could not be God if the sinner's own volition posed a limitation to God's capacity for goodness. And salvation is always an act of goodness. Also humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, being part of that biological and evolutionary continuum which connects humans biologically with the protozoan. We are fundamentally animals, and it is as animals and not sinners that God ultimately saves us. To what end and from what state of affairs does God save us? I don't have an answer! Yet God saves us.

And each day 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. 268. The fourth year crops must be totally for holy purposes like the Second Tithe—Leviticus 19:24

269

Jesus stated: 'salvation is from the Jews'. Saint Paul also expressed this sentiment. The claim that salvation is from the Jews is embedded in Christianity. It is the golden thread woven into the theology of Saint Paul who clearly expounded in the Letter to the Romans the parallel salvation histories of Jew and Gentile. Saint Paul did not convert to Christianity this much is clear from a careful reading of Saint Paul. Saint Paul remained a Jew even though he became the Apostle to the Gentiles. The issue between Paul and the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and elsewhere was that Gentiles should not be required to convert to Judaism as prerequisite to follow Jesus. In Galatians when Saint Paul confronts once more the issue that Gentiles must first convert to Judaism as a condition for following Jesus he is not confronting Jews, rather he is confronting those who he calls the 'Judaizers' who were actually Gentiles who had converted to Judaism. A similar situation arises in the Gospel of Matthew. The Matthean Jewish community who became followers of Jesus also insisted that Gentiles convert to Judaism as a prerequisite for following Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew is essentially a Jewish Midrash of the teaching of Jesus, and central to this Midrash was claim that Jesus upheld the observance of the Law of Moses or Torah, which was true for the Gospels and for Saint Paul.

And each day 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. 269. To read the confession of tithes every fourth and seventh year—Deuteronomy 26:13

270

If we say that all truth is enclosed within the limits of reason, we have actually said nothing about anything if we do not understand what constitutes the limits of reason. To grasp the limits of reason is to stand at the edge of the bottomless abyss of the infinite regress. To grasp the limits of reason amounts to confronting and attempting to fathom the idea of the Totality and attempting to communicate in words the idea of the Totality as something which can be grasped. Does the empirical define the limits of reason?

To attempt an answer to this question we need to know what constitutes the realm of reason or the domain in which reason can make things intelligible to the human mind or consciousness. It would seem that the realm or domain of reason exceeds or embodies more than everything contained in the empirically accessible Universe of sense experience. The realm or the domain of reason contains or includes everything about the physical or empirically accessible Universe as a particular concrete realization of intelligibility. However the fullness of reason or the domain of reason is not exhausted or confined to this particular concrete intelligible instantiation of a Universe. Nor is reason as the condition of intelligibility exhausted in the instantiation of all the possible Universes that could be brought into existence.

The realm or domain of reason is populated not only with tangible physical entities but also with abstract entities such as logical or mathematical entities, and also with aesthetic entities. The abstract domain of reason is populated by infinite set of mathematical and logical entities or objects which we can explore without end by applying our minds to the task with aid of reason. In exploring the domain of reason we are delving into the mind of God. And in the Mind or Being of God essence and existence converge. And also, the mind of God represents the Totality which embodies or contains everything with respect to intelligibility, meaning and possibility.

Now that I said something about the self, the subject, truth and reason, I would like to say something about the relationship between passion, desire, Eros, knowledge, reason, beauty, truth and doing or acting. By doing or acting I mean the exercise of moral agency.

We are driven by a passion to know and to act. The passion to know and to act according to what we know for certain as the truth is the only way we can escape from sinking into nihilism. Now this brings me to the question of why I am a communist. To be a communist is to be driven by a passion for knowledge and to act on that knowledge. To be a communist is to respond positively to the ethical imperative of moral agency, this call or this summons to moral agency has its origination in the voice of our conscience, and also in our capacity for empathy and in our heartfelt desire for solidarity with our fellow human beings. This is the source of the passion which energizes moral agency. This is the well-spring of the Erotic Desire which energizes moral agency. This is the well-spring of Erotic Desire expressed as the passion which energizes moral agency. So we are able to talk about Eros and the City. Eros cannot be decoupled or disconnected or disengaged from desire and passion. Nor can moral agency be decoupled or dis-articulated from desire or passion. Eros cannot be disengaged from the desire or passion for the Good and to know the Good. The face of the other, the feelings of empathy and conscience, the desire for companionship, comradeship and solidarity are erotic phenomena, linked to the moral desire for the Good. They are erotic phenomena because they are sources of genuine pleasure, and pleasure is a sensual phenomenon. Pleasure is experienced on a continuum which stretches from affectionate sexual intimacy to the pleasure of genuine comradeship in the sun shine of empathetic solidarity. It is in the face of the Other that we find genuine pleasure.

And each day 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. 270. To set aside the first fruits and bring them to the Temple—Exodus 23:19

271

Now is a good time to speak more fully about Desire and Eros.

It is desire that is that is the wellspring of our passion to know and to act. Eros is ultimately the desire and passion for that which is most desirable of all things which could be desired. The most desirable of all things possible in the self-realization of the Erotic quest for knowledge is necessarily that which is most beautiful, and the most beautiful cannot be separated from the metaphysical certainty regarding the ultimate meaning and significance of everything, which can only become obliquely manifest in the grasping in some way the essential nature of the Totality. Metaphysical certainty is the destination of the dialectic of reason. If we contemplate the possibility or announce the end of metaphysics then we are left with nothing else but the inevitability of nihilism and the end of humanity.

And each day 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. 271. The Kohanim must not eat the first fruits outside Jerusalem—Deuteronomy 12:17

272

Desire, Eros and the Beautiful City

We associate pleasure with desire and Eros. Pleasure or the source of pleasure is also the object of desire. Pleasure exists in the brain. Pleasure is also multi-dimension and consequently Eros itself is multi-dimensional and not singular in its focus. By extension we can argue that the Erotic is also multi-dimensional and not singular in its focus. With regard to Eros we may be prone to think of it in hierarchical terms as in Plato's scala amoris or the 'ladder of love', where love or Eros exists in different forms ranging from the lower to the upper forms of Eros as in the rungs of a ladder or as levels in a hierarchy. But we can also think non-hierarchically of love or Eros in terms of a seamless continuum, a continuum without rupture or tension or crisis in its fabric. The seamless continuum constitutes a totality where intimate affectionate sexual intimacy is continuous without rupture or tension or crisis with love or Eros experienced in the pleasure of non-hierarchical and egalitarian sociality between individuals who enjoy the pleasure of companionship and conversation and reciprocal mutual respect and recognition. In short the seamless continuum of Eros is equivalent to loving your neighbour as yourself. Agape and Eros are two sides of the same coin. Without Eros there can be no Agape. Eros is the condition of possibility for egalitarian forms of sociality.

What about Eros and the City? Eros enters Plato's 'Republic' obliquely or covertly. But in Socrates' discussion with Cephalus we can recognize the 'erotic continuum' in the passage from youth to old age. We don't have agree with Sophocles that Eros is a savage tyrant capable of driving us crazy. Nor do we have agree with the depiction of Eros as the embodiment or engine of danger and conflict as presented in Hesiod's 'Theogony', where Eros is seen to interpenetrate sex and violence, love and hate, and also love and blood. If this were so it would be necessary to expunge this version of Eros from the Kallipolis or the Beautiful City in other words, and this precisely what Socrates attends to in Plato's Republic. Can Eros be bad? It would seem that Eros does drive us mad, even to the point where under the tyranny of Eros we start to break social conventions. But on the other hand without Eros there can be no philosophy. Philosophy is the love of wisdom and the Kallipolis is born from philosophy in Plato's Republic, and so without Eros the Beautiful City cannot come into existence. Philosophy as the activity of Logos or discursive reason is the only bulwark we have against the tyranny and rule of the despot. By extension I would propose Eros is the bulwark against the tyranny and rule of the despot and it only by virtue of Eros that the Kallipolis can be born. Furthermore Eros as the love of wisdom represents both threat and negation of Oligarchy which is the opposite of the Kallipolis.

And each day 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. 272. To read the Torah Portion pertaining to their presentation—Deuteronomy 26:5

273

This brings me to the writings of Henry Miller.

I have always enjoyed reading the works of Henry Miller. There is a reason for the fact that in his universe women only exist as cunts to be fucked. In Henry Miller's universe there is only the overwhelming reality of the estranged and alienated individual. There is no community or solidarity. There is only the isolated individual existing in an indifferent universe. Henry Miller is the archetypical American male. For the archetypical American man the idea of solidarity is something completely foreign. To the archetypical American man everything is a commodity. To the archetypical American man it is only through the process of commodification that things become substantial including the individual male. While Miller rebels against this, the character or protagonist in his fictionalized autobiography does not escape this reality but remains powerless in the face of this reality. There is not rising up to transform this reality. The only fate facing the American man is the air conditioned nightmare of a commodified world. It is the oligarchy that brings the archetypical American male into existence as an un-erotic being.

And each day 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. 273. To set aside a portion of dough for a Kohen—Numbers 15:20

274

My flat has been invaded and violated, it has been looted, ransacked and pillaged. I have changed into dry clothes. Apparently we are now ready to leave. I switch off the lights and lock the door, and put the keys into my bag. I have not packed any clothes into a suitcase. They never told me pack a suitcase, apparently I will not be needing an extra change of clothing. I have become reduced to a subject, I have no autonomy, I am a detainee, and I am under arrest.

And each day 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. 274. To give the shoulder, two cheeks, and stomach of slaughtered animals to a Kohen—Deuteronomy 18:3

275

Interlude and refrain: And now that I have returned to my room in Hotazel, once more I see my reflection in the mirror of my dresser. I see the woman that I have become. I try to see who I am through the eyes of my many lovers. I like who I am. What a strange thing to admit. Over the years the image has changed. Do I exist behind my eyes and between my ears? What am I? What kind of thing am I? Who am I? Who is doing all this thinking and writing. I am certain that I exist. I see myself in the mirror. But I have changed. In the framed photomontage I see myself as many different persons. I recognized the resemblances, they are all photos of the same person, the person that has grown up in front of this mirror. The one side of the dresser bears the scars of fire. The varnish is rough and covered in countless blisters caused by the intense heat of flames caused about 31 years ago. It has been my bedroom dresser ever since I had my first bedroom from the age of two. It was my dresser in Stilfontein and has been my dresser in Hotazel.

Who am I actually? Sartre proposes that we are nothing other than the sum total of all our actions. To act is to be. In doing we become. Also according to Sartre man is nothing other than his own project. And ultimately our projects are meaningless.

And each day 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. 275. To give the first sheering of sheep to a Kohen—Deuteronomy 18:4

276

Ever since Descartes and possibly even before Descartes there have been competing views about the essential nature of the self. It seems obvious that human beings have a self. But what exactly is the self? Does the self exist? Does the self exist by virtue of the fact that we are conscious beings? To be conscious is to be aware. To be aware is to be aware of something. The self is something. We are indeed conscious of there being a self, with which we identify and through which we feel what it is like to be ourselves. The phrase 'there being' can be transformed into 'being there', which gives a rendition of Heidegger's Dasein, and we notice or feel a connection or relationship between the two words 'there' and 'being'. There cannot be a 'there' without an intuition of 'being'. And there cannot be a sense of 'being' without an intuition of 'there'. Something can only be 'there' if it is 'present'. Here we have the idea of presence, and it is only by virtue of being present or being there that we have an intuition of being, and by extension an intuition of existence. You cannot have an intuition of being without have a intuition of existence or what it means to exist and all of this is all impossible without an intuition of presence. Something cannot have 'being' without being 'there'. For anything to be something, something which someone can say something about to somebody, then it has to necessarily 'be there' in some way. In what way can something 'be there'? There are many ways in which we find ourselves in situations which have all the features of 'being there'. Am I playing with words? I think not.

And each day 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. 276. To redeem the firstborn sons and give the money to a Kohen—Numbers 18:15

277

Interlude and refrain: I look into the mirror of the old dresser. It is the same dresser and mirror from our home in City Deep. It once stood in my bedroom in the large mine house at the end of a long passage which ended at the doorway of a spacious kitchen with its wide window overlooking the backyard. The dresser stood near the doorway. Elsabe and I were partaking in some kind of religious ceremony that Malcolm was conducting. He had urinated into a potty and was trying to get us to have a sip of his urine. He had also lit a fire next to the side of the dresser, the flames were licking the side of the dresser and the varnish was becoming blistered from the heat. The smoke filtered into the rest of the house and mom who was doing something in the kitchen caught a whiff of the smell of burning paper and plastic. She screamed in horror when she saw the burnt offering of a plastic doll writhing into grotesque contortions on the sacrificial fire.

And each day 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. 277. To redeem the firstborn donkey by giving a lamb to a Kohen—Exodus 13:13

278

My girlfriends who have shared my bed over the years have all without exceptional asked out of curiosity about the burnt side of my antique dresser. And over the years I have retold the story of the sacrificing of the plastic doll. And of course we end up discussing the idea or concept or purpose or objective of making sacrifices to a god or the God of the Bible. Inevitably the role of sacrifice in the economy of expiation, propitiation, atonement, remission of sin, absolution, justification, grace, redemption and salvation arises. What is sin? Does the phenomenon of sin actually exist in reality or is it a fiction invented by human beings for ulterior motives, motives which have crystallized out of the chemistry of new forms of socialization? The question of sin is problematic given the fact that humans are animals who are related phylogenetically to the rest of animal kingdom? We don't believe that animals have the capacity to sin. What makes us different in this regard? Why do we have the capacity to sin? In the economy of sin, death and punishment arise as the wages of sin. The idea of sin is the pivot or axis around which the ideas regarding the meaning of redemption and salvation revolves. Without sacrifice there can be no atonement, absolution, redemption and salvation.

Without a blood sacrifice, or the shedding of blood at the altar, there can be no remission of sins, or redemption or salvation. Eros reappears as the interpenetration of love and blood in crisis of redemption and remission of sins.

Who do we sin against? We cannot sin against God. How is it possible to sin against God without God ceasing to be God? If a finite creature has the power to sin against God then God ceases to be God. To sin against God requires that finite beings possess the capacity and power to inflict injury and harm on an almighty and all-knowing Divine Being. But if God is indeed almighty and all-knowing then it would be impossible to sin against God by injuring and harming without God necessarily ceasing to be God, which is a contradiction. God cannot cease being God, so God exists beyond the reach and effects of sin.

So if humans as finite beings cannot sin against God who is an infinite being in every respect, then who do humans sin against? If sin exists and if evil exists as a consequence of sin, then we can only sin against ourselves, then we can only commit acts of evil against ourselves. Evil arises as a consequence of inflicting harm and injury on others. And the infliction of harm and injury on others can only arise as a consequence of the destruction of human solidarity. Solidarity is destroyed by inequality and inequality arises as a consequence social domination of the few over the many due to the hierarchicalization of society.

I suppose we could argue that the roots of sin and evil is inequality and social domination. If Jesus had a pivot message then this is the essence of that message. To preserve inequality and protect systems of social domination it is necessary to interiorize and personalize the idea of sin in a manner which makes God the focus of sin. God becomes the focus of sin, when sin is perceived to arise as direct consequence of violating the governing moral ordinances of God where the governing ordinances of God are precisely those ordinances which reinforce the continuation of the status quo through the preservation of inequality and the protection of systems of social domination. In this context the function of religion and belief in God is the preservation of social inequality and systems of social domination. The king rules by divine right. The state is controlled by an entrenched elite which supposedly rules over society by divine right. Religion becomes an ideology for justifying in the name of God the conditions of: repression, oppression, inequality, alienation, suffering disenfranchisement, estrangement, atomisation, racism, dispossession, and social domination. Religion is necessarily idolatrous and provides the conditions of possibility in terms of institutions and ideology which legitimize the reign and regime of evil. In this sense religion is a form of atheism, a form of denying God, a form of unbelief, a form of faithlessness. God is denied and negated by transforming God into a man serving idol which functions as an alibi and accomplice in the commission of evil.

It is for this reason that the eradication of religion has been a necessarily goal of the socialist revolution.

278. To break the neck of the donkey if the owner does not intend to redeem it—Exodus 13:13

279

In 1975 Bram Fischer died of cancer. It was also a year that would stand out as the most unforgettable year of my life. It was also the year that I managed to free myself from the hold that Kate had over me following my being seduced by her in the Blyde River Canyon on the second year Botany field trip during the Easter recess of 1974. That year after the June exams I spent four glorious weeks touring parts of Europe with Kate. She offered to pay for everything but I managed to persuade my father to pay for my airfare and provide me with a subsistence allowance. Because of me Kate had broken up with her longstanding partner. But then at the end of 1974 we in turn had our own painful breakup. I was young and I wanted to enjoy the freedom of student life without the stifling and claustrophobic encumbrance that goes with being in a serious and committed relationship with an older woman who had become increasingly jealous, clinging and emotionally needy. I also wanted to be free to have relationships and affairs with other women. However, the bonds could not be broken. There was deep connection between Kate and myself, and our relationship has endured. The same happened with Yael, the bonds could not be broken.

And each day 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. 279. To rest the land during the seventh year by not doing any work which enhances growth—Exodus 34:21

280

It seems that Augustine of Hippo could have been one of the earliest founders of the literary genre which we could categorize as conforming to what we now understand to be confessional-autobiographical-writing. Of course we are all familiar with Henry Miller as one of the quintessential fictionalized-confessional-autobiographical-writers of the twentieth century.

We can also guess that Antoine Roquentin the protagonist in Sartre's Nausea fulfils the literary role of Sartre's fictionalized autobiographer. Sartre is in a sense Roquentin. In Augustine's confessions we learn that while he was sitting in a garden God summoned him, that God called him. God reached out to him, by speaking to him through the contingency of ordinary and unremarkable events, the kind of events which happen haphazardly. He heard the sing-song voice of a child, possibly a young girl in the yard of a nearby house, who was singing or chanting some refrain along the lines of: 'take and read, take and read'. Acting on the message of the refrain he opened a Bible at a random page and read the passage from that page. The event in the garden and the reading of the passage resulted in his conversion to Christianity. Of course Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea does not live in a universe in which God summons people to decision. Roquentin makes his own decisions in a Godless universe emptied of all meaning and significance. The universe of Augustine's Confessions is causally overdetermined by God and is pregnant with meaning, purpose and significance.

And each day 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. 280. Not to work the land during the seventh year—Leviticus 25:4

281

Fiction fluctuates between the imaginary and the real. Fiction necessarily deals with realities when using cognitively intelligible statements to say something about something. If this is the case then literature must have some truth value. For both Marx and Freud fiction was not entirely divorced from reality, but could bear witness to the truth regarding realities, truths which could be used unveil the nature of reality with regard to empirically accessible states of affairs such the nature of political economy or of the subconscious. This view will draw the following kinds of criticisms: Fiction is not factual, fiction involves story-telling, and story-telling is equivalent to lying, lying in the sense of saying something that corresponds to matters of fact. Plato is his Republic will hold to this kind argument, especially in his condemnation of the poets, and by extension the condemnation of all artists who engaged in the work of art especially in the form of writing literary fiction. Does Sartre's Nausea or Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer or The Rosy Crucifixion traffic in untruths or lies. It would incredibly stupid and simplistic to come to this conclusion. In the same why it would be simplistic to dismiss the Bible as a book filled with stories that often have the form and character of literary fiction. Aristotle in his counter to Plato's condemnation of poets constructs the argument in his Poetics that literary artists in the creation of their literary narratives do indeed disclose various kinds of underlying truths about the nature of various kinds of realities or states of affairs. It is in this that the Bible is revelatory and speaks with divine inspiration, infallibility and authority regarding critical states of affairs that are of ultimate concern not only to humankinds search for meaning and for grounds for hope, but also with regard to the relationship between knowing and being, which bears directly on humankind's perpetual and persistent drive to grasp the Totality.

Aeschylus' tragedy of Prometheus Bound does not only haunt Marx's Das Kapital it also haunts the entire Marxist literary project including all the works of Marx. The political significance of the Promethean myth of Prometheus who by the command of Zeus was bound to the rock and tortured. Hephaestus the god of blacksmiths accompanied by Kratos (power) and Bia (force and violence) chain Prometheus a mountain in the Caucasus. Everyday Prometheus is tortured by the eagle that tears out Prometheus liver and consumes it. The myth of Prometheus echoes throughout the Communist Manifesto: like Prometheus the chained and tortured proletariat have nothing to lose except their chains.

Like Marx, Freud too is fond of quoting and using the powerful referential symbolism of myth in his work. Freud reinforces his arguments and claims by quoting from Shakespeare, Goethe and Sophocles. From mythical origination Freud introduces a new psychiatric vocabulary that includes terminology such as: the Oedipus Complex, Eros and Thanatos, as examples. The shadow of Aeschylus haunts the works of Marx in the same way that the shadow of Sophocles haunts the work of Freud. The boundaries between myth and fiction merge with discourses aimed at making claims that speak to the truth regarding factual states of affairs. The boundaries between myth and fact or fact and fiction become blurred without weakening or falsifying claims regarding the truth. So the demarcation between fiction and fact or fiction and truth or fiction and reality are ambiguous and paradoxical. And in this paradox we see the power literature at work in its relationship with reality. In this sense literature has the potential to be revelatory, inspired, authoritative and infallible. In this sense literature speaks the truth of God with regard to meaning and power, and this would be an example of transubstantiation where the Word of God speaks to us through the words of artistic literary creations. In the context I can speak as a Christian regarding the relationship between the Word of God and the words of the Bible, and how the eventfulness of the revelatory Word of God arises in the reading of the Bible.

And each day 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. 281. Not to work with trees to produce fruit during that year—Leviticus 25:4

282

Humans are fallible. So we are all indeed capable of sin. It was in our nature to be sinners. Kate was also fallible as I soon discovered. She suffered from all the human foibles. Her greatest character flaw was her vanity. My parents thought I was going on an overseas tour with fellow students. Instead I was going on a secret honeymoon holiday with a woman in her mid-thirties with whom I was have having a clandestine affair. They wanted to see me off at Jan Smuts Airport. Having much to hide about myself I insisted that it was not necessary. Anyway I was an adult, I was grown up even though I was still nineteen. I had experienced stuff with Kate that most adults could not even imagine in their wildest erotic fantasies. And going overseas with an experienced traveller would be a walk in the park compared to going to Vilanculos and the Bazaruto Archipelago. Anyway Kate was one of my lecturers, how I was going to explain my relationship with her to my parents? As I said, I was only nineteen years old at the time, and I was having sex with an older and more experience woman. Our relationship had to remain a secret, it was best for both of our sakes.

As our plane circumnavigated the edge of Africa flying at high altitude offshore over the rolling swells of the Atlantic Ocean I imagined that the lights I saw were the lights of various seaside cities of African countries including those of Luanda. After the military coup had removed the Portuguese Marcello Caetano regime in Lisbon Portugal the sun was fast setting on the centuries old Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.

In three hundred and thirteen years I become the first Zeeman to leave the African continent after our families three century sojourn on the continent. My grandfathers who had fought in the Second World War did not leave the continent, they did not go beyond the Sahara Desert. As a nineteen year second year BSc student Europe was a foreign continent. I did not know what to expect. My excitement was contagious. Kate felt my breathless excitement and was as radiant and flushed like a teenager on her first date. I could see she I spent considerable time and effort on her makeup. Her perfume was expensive and she made an extraordinary effort to dress as youthfully and stylishly as possible for an academic. I sensed her vulnerability and I felt a sudden surge of love for Kate. I kissed her on the cheek and whispered intimately that I loved her so much. As an older woman it was exactly something that she wanted to hear not once but a thousand times from me. She held my hand tightly. I had my window seat. I pressed my forehead against the cabin window and stared at the night sky and then down at the Continent clothed in darkness. Africa lay supine below us, she lay waiting for her lover, she lay reclined in exotic and mysterious splendour, and she lay in erotic repose somewhere below us at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. To me Africa was a beautiful black woman, her loins fertile, her strong thighs parted in enigmatic anticipation of pleasure and her breasts full like ripe fruit, her lips like honey, her breath like the scent of an orchard in full blossom, her eyelids like butterflies. I also felt a surge of love for this continent which was my home. The home of Hannah Zeeman. I was one of many of Africa's wayward daughters. I had lied to my parents. My audacity astonished me. My parents would not have guessed in a thousand years that their daughter was going on her first honeymoon with her lover and would be enjoying four orgasmic weeks of summer, sunshine and sex.

Shortly after sunrise we landed in Madrid. I had no idea of our travel itinerary. It was all very vague and up in the air. All she said on the flight was that we would hire a car at the airport and travel down to the Mediterranean and follow the coastline to Barcelona. After Barcelona we would travel across the border to France. From France we would go to Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. From Switzerland we would travel back to France. After spending some time in Paris we would return to Madrid. She said we would be criss-crossing many borders travelling across large chunks of European countryside.

Getting through the early morning peak hour traffic and finding the main road from Madrid to Valencia took some time. Being the navigator I sat with the map on lap. Travelling in the bright summer sunlight across the vast open plains of Spain we reached Valencia by midday.

And each day 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. 282. Not to reap crops that grow wild that year in the normal manner—Leviticus 25:5

283

Irreducibility of the being to knowledge. Irreducibility of lived reality to knowing. And we have a question of priority, consciousness or being. Truth supervenes on being.

And each day 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. 283. Not to gather grapes which grow wild that year in the normal way—Leviticus 25:5

284

It was past midday, feeling famished we found ourselves on the outskirts of Valencia driving through the suburbs in a seawards direction until we found a restaurant next to a stony beach with the Mediterranean sea lapping languidly on a sleepy shoreline. I realized that it was a Friday afternoon. Chairs and tables had been arranged in a scattered sprawling fashion on the uneven sloping surface of the beach. Sitting down at a table I felt the back legs of my chair sinking into the sand. Kate suggested that we order paella and a bottle of red wine. Two or three metres from our table sat five young men, possibly in their late teens or early twenties, lounged around their table, leaning back in their chairs drinking wine and talking. They had finished their meal, which seemed to have been paella. Having removed their shirts they sat bare chested in their jeans enjoying the summer glow of the warm Mediterranean sun on their bodies.

Like the boys sitting across from us we were in no hurry to go anyway. The meal, the wine and the sun made me feel pleasantly sleepy. We felt this unburdened freedom not to do anything. Eventually after coffee and vanilla ice cream we set out to look for a place to spend the night. After travelling for thirty kilometres or so we found lodgings in a suitably modest and cheap beachfront establishment in a small town. We booked into a single room with a double bed and balcony overlooking the ocean. Even though it was the peak of the European holiday season we managed to find similar kinds of lodging in small towns or villages along the coast away from the popular tourist beaches and hotspots. Every morning at six before breakfast Kate insisted that we go a run. Kate was obsessed with exercising. We ate breakfast and we ate supper, nothing else in between. I lost a bit of weight, not that I was bothered about losing weight. While I was generally fit from swimming, all this other daily physical exercise left me feeling as strong as a lioness. But being with someone like Kate also made me feel as randy as bonobo on heat.

And each day 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. 284. To leave free all produce which grew in that year—Exodus 23:11

285

In Europe for the first time I became aware of the existence of pornography. My gut reaction against pornography was that it misrepresented and possibly displaced the naturalness of human sexuality whether it be homosexual or heterosexual. For me personally homosexuality was not unnatural. Anyway in an act of defiance we brazenly entered the porn shop, and because of the heatwave that had enveloped Paris we were now both wearing slips of light fabric with exceeding high hems and low necks, exposing cleavage and thighs, in a purposeful provocative parody of femininity, we were not merely performing, we were parading a representation of a representation. Our invasion was unwelcomed, but we eagerly indulged our curiosity, in a state of innocent amazement we scanned through the glossy pages, porn magazine after porn magazine. I discovered that heterosexual femininity in its state of nudity as represented in the glossy pictures existed as something dead, inert, passive, and without agency. It its pornographic visualization the unclothed heterosexual female body, captured fully exposed in its state of repose to the all-consuming eye represents the unveiling of a deep void. Presented as eye candy in its glossy nudity it exists as a vacant orifice. Anatomically it is incapable of serving any function or purpose in and of itself. Flipping through the pages, gazing with searching intent at the photographic images of naked women being fucked by men in every conceivable manner, going though porn magazine after porn magazine. Ignoring the dark scowl of the porn shop proprietor we browsed through the porn mags. What was he going to do? Throw us out. Purposely taking our time, we examined the pictorial contents of each page, page after page, staring at pictures of erect penises and women being penetrated, until it became boring. I could not help wondering about the attraction and the effects of pornography. Men were drawn to porn like bees to honey. It was obvious that pornographic images were not mute. They spoke to the viewer, they were a form of speech, they articulated a discourse, they embodied a message, they could not avoid communicating an ideologically framed vision of women, which was grounded in an ontology and was epistemic regarding the nature of its claims. The ideology was underwritten by a deeply rooted mythological narrative, an ancient narrative of the patriarchy, which told a story about women, a story in which the plot revolved around the putative truths about the nature women, truths which were passed on as folk wisdom by generations of men, truths taken to be the gospel regarding the essential nature of women. Of course these truths could only be perceived and affirmed by men. This much was clear to me. The porn mags carried messages that was stark in their clarity and transparency to me. The magazines narrated a mythology regarding the nature of heterosexual masculinity and femininity. Only men possessed potency and agency. The myth was not only about male potency and agency, but the lack of female potency and agency. In the order to things, the female sex in the human species does not exist for its own sake. Women are the weaker sex, because they are lacking, they suffer from an ontological deficit in their very being, they do not possess the power to be autonomous beings in their right. They are deficient, they are bereft, and they lack self-sufficiency. In the patriarchical mind it was not possible for the female individual to exist for her own sake as a being-in-the-world, especially while embodied in form of the female body and having a feminine mind. In this sense the status of women's being was not much higher than that of an animal. Her animality resided in her status as the one to be mounted, to be penetrated as a sexual object, an object to be used in acts of sex, but always only an object to be acted upon, to be acted upon in her state of physical weakness, inertness, non-agency, compliance and passivity, as depicted in the pornographic images. In the mythology of the patriarchical universe the embodied female exists without the kind of agency and being which would endow her with ultimate significance, and this is because women by nature can only exist in a state of passivity and receptivity, and in this state a female can be nothing in and of itself. Nor can 'it' (the female person) exist for the sake of its own self on its own terms, in terms of its own autonomous personhood. In fact, women have been conceived as minors, having a status not much higher than a slave, and because of this women have been deprived of autonomy, treated as objects with no substantive or essential being. Because of this women can only exist under male guardianship, having the status no higher than a minor, to be treated as a child, to be treated as individuals having no rights over their own bodies. This is because a women's essence as a substance is constituted by an external act or external independent agency. It essence as a substance is imposed or conferred externally by a masculinized subjectivity. As a substance, the female body, is rendered bereft and deficient of all innate qualities, properties, powers and predispositions, she only exists as 'something' by virtue of her being fucked by a man. Her incarnation, her embodiment as a being, as an entity, derives its essential nature from its use as an external object. Her essential nature lies in her being the embodiment of a passive sexual object, to be acted upon, in other words to be fucked. Therefore in the heterosexual universe the feminine body in its passive embodiment functions only as a receptacle, an empty cavity to be invaded, probed and filled. Her mouth, her vagina, her anus exists solely for the sake of the erect phallus. She exists as the empty orifice of nothingness in a phallocentric universe. This is the core ideological message communicated in the mythology of pornography. Female consent is part of pornographic mythology. The anatomy of pornographic consent needs to be dissected. A compelling illusion of consent seemed to be projected in the glossy pictures of the porn mags, this much seemed clear to me. But my mind was filled with doubts. For what rational reasons or purpose would these women subject themselves to this? I could not fathom it. The message which screamed out at me was that in reality women in the eyes of men existed in the form of an inert passive pliable substance which was perfectly malleable in their hands. This was what constituted their essential natures. This was the essence of their femininity, in which the full meaning of femininity could be predicated or represented in pornography as follows: passivity, inertness, receptive as in being receptacles, the attribute of being void in themselves made them receptive as empty receptacles, lacking agents, being bereft, compliant, pliable, malleable, accommodating, weak willed, stupid, having no personality, having no pride, having no purpose, being willing, susceptible to being duped, vulnerable, impressionable, ignorant, immoral, gullible, vain and narcissistic. All in all women were projected as overwhelmingly the weaker sex. Men were the predators and women the prey. Women are nothing more than meat and completely stupid to boot! Pornography projects an image of women, a mythological image of women as been paradoxically the material or fleshly embodiment of the void, with the idea of the void functioning as the female metaphoric symbol of all that is absent in the female body, where her being has been reduced to her body of flesh, with the vulva and vagina between her legs constituting the very essence of her fleshliness, and the very gateway to her sensual fleshliness which excites desire and lust. The promise of fleshly pleasure lays hidden between her thighs. But it is the absence of reason which is the definitive essence of feminine fleshliness or of the female bodily incarnation of sensual carnality. Women are just dumb flesh.

And each day 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. 285. To release all loans during the seventh year—Deuteronomy 15:3

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I thanked God that I had been born a lesbian and that I lived in a lesbian universe. I must admit that I left the porn shop in a state of mental confusion and doubt. My mind was bursting with so many questions about the existence and meaning and significance of porn. I was going to be zoologist, and among other things I was interested in animal behaviour and also in the minds of animals. I tried to think scientifically about what I had seen and experienced in the porn shop. What did it really mean? Kate seemed to be blasé. She was worldlier than me or so it seemed. Or was she also just another stupid woman. I suddenly felt angry that women could be so stupid and allow themselves to be used as pornographic objects. I realized that we were actually perceived by men as being really stupid dumb creatures whose sole purpose in life was to be fucked by men. That was what we were for ultimately, that was the point of our existence, we had no other function as beings. Could it be that we existed solely to be fucked? Kate suddenly asked me why I was shaking my head. I did not realize that I had been speaking silently to myself. 'Do you think women are more stupid than men?' I replied in response to her question. She frowned and looked at me quizzically.

And each day 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. 286. Not to pressure or claim from the borrower—Deuteronomy 15:2

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Kate and myself had internalized and exteriorized our performative parody of femininity, and as I was to discover later after reading Roland Barthes, parody was always an exercise in the mythological representation of representation. And pornography was also primarily a male manufactured parody of the essential nature and roles of women in the life of men. Under the direction of the pornographer, pornography was inescapably structured to function as a written or visual parodical representation of a representation. This is what constituted its ideological content or its mythological narrative, or its so-called storyline, and it did have a storyline, even if it was formulaic and tediously repetitious. The pornographer was necessarily, unavoidably, engaged in discourse, a discourse which had the form and storyline of a myth. The pornographer in producing or creating pornography was ultimately engaged in a speech act, he was engaged in storytelling, he was saying something about something to someone, and the message of his story revolved around the mythologization of the essential nature of women. In the form of the mythological narrative, whether written or pictorial or cinematic, the pornographic plot necessarily centres on an illusion of mimesis in its conjuration of the erotic presence of the feminine. But in the world of pornography, mimesis is reduced to a parody, to farce, to spectacle, and the feminized erotic presence always eludes the pornographic creation. It is impossible for the pornographer to create through pornographic artifice the feminized erotic presence. The abyss between the pornographic spectacle and real lived experience of Eros is unbridgeable. And this is why the pornographic is not merely mythological or parodical, it is also paradigmatic as a parodical narration of the fantastical and phantasmagorical within a mythological framework that is rigidly and undeviating formulaic in its repetitiveness. In this sense as a form of mythological narrative it bears a greater generic resemblance with all-in wrestling as described by Barthes in his 'Mythologies' compared to 'strip tease'. Strip tease which while overtly and actively catering for the visual pleasure of the male voyeur, the strip tease show is necessarily centred on female agency and non-passive role playing. The strip tease artist possessing full agency performs in non-passive theatrical role which incorporates elements of choreography and cabaret. So while the strip tease artist is playing an active role as a female, the male voyeur does not participate but remains a non-participant, trapped in his marginalized voyeuristic role of passive impotency. As contrasted with the strip tease 'show', the dialectic of pornography which results in the totalization of the pornographic narrative into its actual representation of reality as opposed to it mythological representation, the dialectic of strip tease show transforms the ideological construed reality of the male voyeur into its opposite as its actuality, which is from the projected state of male potency to the reality of impotency, from projected state of male presence to the actuality of absence, from the projected state being active to the actuality of passiveness. In his role as a consumer of pornography like the male audience viewing the strip tease cabaret the consumer of pornography becomes inverted into the very opposite of masculinity, which entails the paradigmatic transformation from being active to being passive. Pornography brings about a metamorphosis whereby the voyeur is transformed into a 'feminized' condition of impotent passivity, he becomes the embodiment of being void. Which is a state in which he is reduced to a pitiful caricature of masculinity.

As a lesbian I have often swam against the current. I felt in my soul that lesbianism embodied the deepest possible truth regarding the essential nature of the feminine being. Maybe the full self-presence of femininity as a parody of representation of representation can only be attained homoerotically. That is, the attainment of the self-presence of femininity in a fashion that is completely independent of the constitutive agency or referencing agency of the male phallus. In the plot of the traditional pornographic narrative full feminine presence can only be attained by virtue of the penetrating penis which fills the void of feminine insubstantially. The otherwise illusionary state of feminine presence, can only be fleeting reversed into full real presence within the pornographic act. In the pornographic act full feminine self-presence exists only transiently in the form of the fucked feminine body. But in the pornographic depiction of the fucked feminine body the consummation of Eros is postponed or deferred for all eternity. In the pornographic performance erotic desire is never consummated, instead it evaporates into non-existence in the never ending mindless dreary repetition of the same in a spectator managed spectacle which in reality is a celebration of female stupidity, but also a confirmation of male impotency.

And each day 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. 287. Not to refrain from lending immediately before the release of the loans for fear of monetary loss—Deuteronomy 15:9

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In the mornings we went for our run along the right bank of the Seine and in the evenings after 8.00 pm while it was still light and we went for our evening walk on the left bank of Seine. It was twilight and Kate became quiet and reflective. It was our fourth day in Paris and the next day we would be flying back to Madrid for a three day stay in Madrid before returning to South Africa. There was melancholic expression on her face. When I asked if she was OK. She said that she loved me. I said: 'I love you too.'

And then she said:

'I will never be able to ever visit Paris and walk along the Seine ever again like this evening.'

I was taken aback and asked why.

She answered:

'Because it will without you and the memories of having been in Paris with you would be too painful for me to bear if I had to walk along the Seine without you by my side.'

Her eyes were brimming with tears of sadness. Then she tried to smile through the tears.

'I am being silly, please forgive me.'

I said: 'I will always love you.'

'I know,' she answered.

I put my arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek. She sighed.

A few years later it was twilight and I was strolling again on the left bank of the Seine this time with Samantha and I began to feel melancholic as I thought about what Kate had said. I told Samantha about my holiday with Kate in Paris.

'Well maybe it is inevitable that we will feel sad on our return trips to Paris as the past comes back to haunt us with forlorn memories and nostalgia, maybe it is our fate to mourn the loss of past love,' she said laughing, her eyes bright with joy.

And each day 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. 288. The Sanhedrin must count seven groups of seven years—Leviticus 25:8

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Interlude and refrain: And now I have returned to the bedroom of my childhood and I am in love with Isabella. I suddenly feel overwhelmed with sadness. I am conscious of the fact that writing about my own life experiences in the so-called spectral realm of lesbian love and romance has been unavoidable. I say spectral realm because historically speaking lesbians have mostly lived hidden lives as ghosts who are invisible in the midst of life. We are like Naiads of Greek mythology, nymphs or female spirits, inhabiting niches associated with water such as springs, streams, fountains or ponds, and water is a feminine symbol.

And each day 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. 289. The Sanhedrin must sanctify the fiftieth (Jubilee) year—Leviticus 25:10

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Kate as a feminist was vehemently critical of pornography. I agreed with her that pornography represented a degradation of women. But later as a Marxist I came to view pornography as the commodification of sex through the economic exploitation of the female body, this form of sexual exploitation necessarily entails the degradation of women.

And each day 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. 290. To blow the Shofar on the tenth of Tishrei (Yom Kippur of the Jubilee year) to free the slaves—Leviticus 25:9

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Kate was a fashion-conscious feminist. She was critical of the stereotypical view that lesbians dressed like slobs and did not worry about their bodies or appearance. Kate was conscious of her appearance. Like her I was also appearance conscious. If I looked good, I felt good. I enjoyed feeling sexy, and to feel sexy you had to look sexy. I have always been interested in the erotics of the visual pleasure associated with the lesbian gaze. There is a definite non-heterosexual or homosexual specificity to what excites the erotic visual pleasure of the lesbian gaze especially when it comes to female fashion magazines. Lesbians do in fact enjoy same-sex visual pleasure when looking at heterosexual fashion magazines such as Elle or Vogue. Lesbian fashion has not really undergone any creative developments mainly because the female garment market sees the lesbian consumer of clothing a bad and risky financial bet. Hence the neglect of lesbian fashion consciousness and the intrusion of heterosexual femininity into the lesbian same-sex gaze. The feminist political agenda has not helped lesbians in their natural quest and desire to express same-sex queer eroticism and sexuality through clothing, dress and fashion. Lesbian feminist activists have made heavy political and social investments into anti-fashion politics. Even as a communist I could not support feminist anti-fashion politics.

And each day 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. 291. Not to work the soil during the fiftieth year—Leviticus 25:11

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Lesbians as a community have much to learn from gay men who have led by example in their creative expressions of 'sartorial savvy' when it comes the gay discourse on taste and the visual pleasure of the same-sex erotic gaze. Clothing, fashion and dress function as essential visual and erotic codes with regard to queer identity and recognisability. In Numbers 15: 15 – 41 we read about dressing and killing. 'Then the Lord said to Moses, 'Tell the people to take that man outside the camp and stone him to death!' (This was his punishment for collecting firewood on the Sabbath.) So he was killed, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. The Lord told Moses to say to the people of Israel, 'Sew tassels on to the bottom edge of your clothes and tie a purple string to each tassel. These will remind you that you must obey my laws and teachings. And when you do, you will be dedicated to me and won't follow your own sinful desires. 'I am the Lord your God who led you out of Egypt'.'

And each day 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. 292. Not to reap in the normal manner that which grows wild in the fiftieth year—Leviticus 25:11

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It is impossible and also unnatural for a lesbian not to look narcissistically at a beautiful woman without experiencing the erotic desire to look like her and to possess her sexually. And this happens when a lesbian looks at a women's fashion magazine. There is a profound paradox and irony to the lesbian experience of visual pleasure when looking at female fashion models in women magazines. Very often all the erotic codes, symbols and imagery which animate any women's fashion magazine become visually apparent within a textual context that is characterized by the conspicuous visual absence of any form of male iconic or pictorial presence. Yet from a Darwinian perspective the fashionably clothed female body exists only as a sexualized and erotic ornamentation for the visual pleasure of the male gaze.

While the female body is a familiar topography and terrain of erotic pleasure for the lesbian this is not the case for men since they are incapable of experiencing or knowing what it feels like sexually to be a woman. To men the women's body and mind are terra incognita.

Lesbian homoeroticism or same-sex eroticism also inadvertently animates the pages of women fashion magazines. The lesbian gaze excites the twofold goal of erotic desire, and that is the desire to be like and the desire to possess. In this sense the males gaze is forever frustrated in a state of alienation, because to truly possess the object of desire one has to become like the subject of erotic desire. Being in this sense is possessing, and possessing is becoming, which constitutes the homoerotic experience of knowing what it must feel like to be a woman in that state of erotic excitement and erotic ecstasy. In this since queer sex attains completion or 'Totality' in a way that heterosexual sexual experience can never attain.

For me lesbian homoeroticism rocks! And sex can never get better than sex between two women.

And each day 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. 293. Not to pick grapes which grew wild in the normal manner in the fiftieth year—Leviticus 25:11

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It was one those unforgettably beautiful evenings. A full moon had just risen and the spring evening air was filled with the fragrance of fresh jasmine. For some time now they had invited me to join their Christian study group which they held weekly on a Wednesday evening. After supper Susan had spread a blanket on lawn beneath the towering silver oaks gardens of the residence. When I arrived the four of them, Susan, Charmaine, Barbara and Moira were already there sitting on the blanket, they had just finished praying. I heard Susan say 'Amen'. I felt that I was the object of their prayers. We had been in Sunnyside Women's Res since first year and usually ate supper together. Charmaine asked me about my overseas holiday. I told them that I had attended the choral Evening Song service at St Pauls in London. They collectively responded: 'Wow.'

This seemed to secure my seemingly ambiguous Christian credentials with them and did remove the slight underlying tension that I sensed. My four friends were evangelical Baptists. Susan who seemed to be the leader of their group had spent the July student vacation in Switzerland at a place called L'Abri. It turned out the L'Abri was a Christian evangelical organization founded by an American Presbyterian minister called Francis Schaeffer.

Susan had brought back cassette tape recordings of the books that Francis Schaeffer had written. Over the next couple of weeks we listened on Susan's cassette tape recorder to Francis Schaeffer's 'Escape from Reason', 'The God Who Is There', and 'He is There and He is not Silence'. Susan also lent me the books that Francis Schaeffer had written and she also gave me a thick book written by Os Guinness called 'The Dust of Death'. I dutifully read everything including the thick book by Os Guinness. Listening to the tapes and then reading his books, in a very short space of time I had become an expert on work of Francis Schaeffer and could quote him verbatim, chapter, page and verse. The ballast of Anglicanism and also my exposure to the richness of Kate's Roman Catholicism counter-balanced the enthusiastic fundamentalist evangelicalism of Susan and her friends. At heart I could never be an evangelical cut in the mould of Francis Schaeffer or Os Guinness, nor could I be anything but an Anglican with strong Catholic leanings.

We normally ended the evening together by kneeling on the blanket in circle and while holding hands each one would pray. I was the only that did not pray. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and listened to their prayers. Sometimes we sang hymns in between the prayers. Then one evening during the prayers I decided to pray as well and I prayed one the Anglican Evening Song prayer of supplication and penitence.

Almighty and most merciful Father,

we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.

We have followed too much the devices and desires

of our own hearts.

We have offended against thy holy laws.

We have left undone those things

which we ought to have done;

and we have done those things

which we ought not to have done;

and there is no health in us.

But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.

Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.

Restore thou them that are penitent;

according to thy promises declared unto mankind

in Christ Jesu our Lord.

And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,

that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,

to the glory of thy holy name.

Amen.

As I prayed I felt my hands being squeezed tightly. After ending prayer with the Amen, they all responded with their own resounding Amens. We stood up and they hugged me and kissed me on the cheeks and on the lips. I was completely taken aback by the sudden intense and spontaneous display of warm affection. It was the kind of Christian response reserved for a new convert to the faith, and I realized this immediately. I was a baptised and confirmed Anglican, but I was being treated as a new convert to Christianity. I heard myself saying: 'I am actually a Christian.'

It was a warm evening in October and it was the last week of the term. The November exams were approaching, the Jacarandas would soon be in full bloom and 1974 was rapidly coming to an end. Susan held her arm tightly round my waist and I put my arm around her waist just above the cleft of her rump and I spread my palm of my hand over her hip. She had showered and washed her hair before our meeting. The erotic fragrance of her hair and her perfume was intoxicating, I kissed her on the cheek, and her arm tightened around my waist. But from her side our intimacy was holy and not sexual. I felt sexually aroused by the closeness. As we moved apart we grasped each other's hand, and we stood together holding hands tightly in the sacred joy of holy and blessed sisterhood. Susan was heterosexual and I fell secretly and painfully in love with her. At night as I lay in my bed I yearned for the closeness of her body in the bed with me. She was also a keen swimmer and we swam almost daily in the Wits pool and afterwards we showered in the communal showers together. She was innocently and virginally beautiful. We were sisters and our love was one of agape and not Eros. She had beautiful thighs, a very sexy butt and lovely virgin breasts which no one had yet caressed or fondled were beautiful shaped like firm ripe pomegranates. We spoke about love and relationships and she said that she had high standards and expectation regarding what she wanted in a man. He had to be a devout Christian.

She was against premarital sex and was saving herself for her wedding night. She believed that as a Christian she should subject herself to her husband with regard to his sexual needs and it would be his right to have free sexual access to her body at all times except when she was menstruating. To me this situation was something too ghastly to complete. When I asked what about when she was not in the mood for sex but he insisted on having sex. She said that it was her duty to submit at all times to her husband's physical needs. I remarked that would give the husband the right to rape his wife. It was her belief that within the bonds of marriage rape does not exist. Given the way our discussion was going she asked I was a feminist. It was the time anyone had asked if I was a feminist. Up until this stage of my life I had not given feminism much thought. However I felt that I was morally obliged to defend the cause of feminism, so I admitted to being a feminist. At that moment I could read her mind, she was going to ask me if I was a lesbian. She couldn't bring herself to say the word so instead she asked if I was heterosexual. I had to say no.

'Are you a lesbian then?'

'Yes I am a lesbian.'

She smiled and asked if I had developed feelings for her. I confessed that I had feelings for her. She admitted that she was flattered and that it was OK, she valued our friendship and she wanted us remain friends with me irrespective of my sexual preferences. Anyway we were sisters in Christ and this was what was important to her more than anything else. It was clear that she was bound by a sense of Christian duty to preserve our friendship no matter what. She mused that in all likelihood many of the nuns in convents must be having lesbian relations, possibly even sexual relations, and in spite of this they had to be Christians, even if the Bible forbade same-sex sexual unions.

I drew Susan's attention to the fact that Bible did not forbid the institution of slavery. Slavery was one of the most morally reprehensible institutions ever invented by man yet it was condoned by the Bible. If anything was unquestionably evil, it was slavery. So obviously the Bible was morally flawed and inconsistent or alternatively the Bible was not a reliable manual for morals and ethics. If the Bible had failed to forbid such a serious moral evil as slavery then the moral condemnation of same-sex sexual relationships was irrational. What possible moral harm could lesbian sex cause between two consenting partners? How could it possibly offend God? Also how could slavery not offend God, it does not make sense.

After listening to my argument she conceded that the Bible could not be used as a consistent moral guide if it had failed to speak the truth to one of the most serious moral issues confronting humanity which happened to be the ancient institution of slavery.

I explained that I could not find any rationally justifiable reason for why it could be morally wrong for two women to enjoy having sex with each other especially if that act was not going hurt or harm anyone. I explained that was lesbian by birth, I explained that did not chose to be a lesbian, I did not chose my sexuality or gender orientation. I could not change. If God was omnipotent and omniscient then ultimately He made me a lesbian and if I was a lesbian according to the will of God then it would be a cruel act of God if I was forbidden the love and pleasure sexual pleasure of women. Furthermore, if God was rational, if God was the God of reason, if God was reason itself, then it have been against His nature to create me in the of lesbian and at the same time forbid me from being a lesbian, that would be irrational and incompatible with God's own nature.

Susan was taken aback by what I said. We were both naked together. I felt the luxurious streams of warm water over my body. Standing under her shower she asked whether I believed that Jesus had died for our sins and whether he had rose from the dead on the third day. I said yes. I confirmed my belief by reciting the Nicene Creed.

When I had finished affirming my faith by reciting the Nicene Creed she said: 'That is so beautiful, I have never heard something so beautiful.'

'I care for you,' she said.

'I also care for you deeply, I will always be there for you, you can come to me anytime you wish, my door will be open and I will be waiting for you,' I answered. What I said just come out. I had invited her to my bed. She smile indulgently. She was in her final of physiotherapy. Every evening we trained together in the pool, swimming over fifty lengths. Our bodies were magnificent. She had received her provincial colours for swimming. We were fit and strong like Amazons. We showered together, standing naked under the warm water while enjoying the pleasurable sight of our bodies, we debated theology and we debated the will of God.

Every night I waited expectantly in my bed for Susan. I fell asleep dreaming that our bodies were intertwined, our lips pressed together, filled with passion. My relation with Kate had not quite ended.

And then as if in dream Susan came, she carefully turned the door handle and silently pressed the door open, she gently closed the door behind her. Shrugging her shoulders she shed her gown, the sleeves slid from her arms, and the soft satiny fabric flowing from her body gathered into a rumpled heap around her ankles. Bathed in shafts of moonlight I could make out the silhouette of her body. Lifting the covers she slipped into the bed as I moved away to make space for her to lie next to me.

'Are you awake,' she whispered as I embraced her, drawing her into the bed against my body.

We kissed and as we kissed my mind was racing: 'Was this an erotic adventure for Susan or was it something more?'

'Is this what you really want?' I asked her.

'What do you mean by that?' She replied.

'Do really want to be with a woman?'

'Yes, I want us to make love,'

'Are you straight?'

'What do you mean?'

'Are you heterosexual or are you queer like me?'

'I think I am actually queer. I want to be queer like you,' she said.

'You want to be queer?'

'Yes I want to be queer. I want us to have sex.'

'So there is going to be sex with no regrets, no guilt, and no hang ups?' I asked.

'There is going to be no guilt and no regrets. I have feelings for you.'

Later after we had made love she asked:

'Why do you think God made lesbians?'

'Maybe it is because there is nothing more beautiful in human sexuality than queer sex. Maybe there is nothing more beautiful that two women kissing, than two women making love to each other. In my opinion it is wrong to look at sex dichotomously, masculinity and femininity are not a difference in kind, but rather differences in degree along a continuum. But I personally think that female sexuality is far more flexible and plastic than male sexuality. I don't think is a God of dichotomies, God is one even though we believe in a triune God, the trinity is not a trichotomy consisting of three gods bound together into a Godhead. Going back to the reality of queerness I think that it is far easier for females to explore same-sex eroticism than males, and there may be biological or evolutionary reasons for this. Same-sex eroticism may have had adaptive value in human evolution. Being queer may be a legacy of natural selection in animal evolution. Maybe God created same-sex eroticism as a property embodied within the potentialities of matter itself. So queerness or propensity to queerness does not fall into any categories of good or evil. Being queer and engaging in queer sex outside the bounds of the heterosexual marital bed is neither good n or evil, it is morally neutral like eating, drinking and sleeping.'

'Wow what you saying is really radical. Could it possibly have any truth?'

'True with respect to what?'

'I don't know, may be true with respect to the moral order of the Universe or true to human nature or true with regard to morals,' she replied.

'There is no moral order to the Universe.'

'How can you say that, how do you know that there is no moral order governing the Universe, it flies in face of the all the facts.'

'Describe one fact that provides proof for the existence of an externally imposed transcendental moral order governing the Universe.'

'What about everything that Francis Schaeffer has spoken about.'

'He has not made a sufficiently compelling case that convinces me.'

'But you do believe in God?'

'Yes I do.'

'And you don't believe that homosexuality is a sin?' She asked.

'Homosexuality and queer sex cannot be sinful. This no rational basis for believing that queer sex is morally wrong or that it can be construed as a sin.'

And each day 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. 294. Carry out the laws of sold family properties—Leviticus 25:24

295

During the nineteen seventies and eighties the cinematic voyeuristic commodification of lesbian sex including women kissing had been created solely for male consumption. As a 'biological' lesbian I became increasingly critical of any form of cultural or social depiction of 'lesbian chic' especially in the form where straight women indulged in whimsically contrived demonstrations of lesbianism. Having lived in the secret world of lesbianism I had experienced the social and emotional cost that was involved in being queer. It was in all likelihood that because I had self-identified as a lesbian in high school I was not made a prefect in spite of getting my colours for swimming and being one of the top academic performers. Being queer was not a choice that could be freely made. It was not an option among many options. I did not decide to be queer. Queerness was not just ontogenetic, it was ontological, and it was metaphysical, because it problematized the very idea or the ideology of what was 'natural' and what was abnormal. Throughout my teenage years I had to live with the prejudice that queerness was abnormal and that I was a freak of nature. Coming to Wits changed all this. Some very vocal students were openly challenging anti-queer prejudices and suddenly I was in place where I could be myself.

And each day 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. 295. Not to sell the land in Israel indefinitely—Leviticus 25:23

296

Inadvertently it was through Susan introduction of Francis Schaeffer to the Christian study group which she had led that awakened my life-long interest in philosophy. From listening to the Francis Schaeffer tapes and reading his books I became familiar in the context of Schaeffer's Christian apologetics with such as names: Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Paul van Buren, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Aldous Huxley and Julian Huxley. I was already familiar with Sartre and of course I was familiar from first year with the names and work of Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni as film directors from the Wits Film Society which I had been a member of since first year. Barth, Tillich and van Buren were some of the prominent Protestant liberal theologians have played a role in shaping twentieth century theology. Paul van Buren was one of several God is dead theologians who rose to notoriety in the nineteen sixties. Also in the context of Schaeffer's Christian apologetics and I learnt a bit about existentialism, the Nature-Grace dualism, the One and the Many which was basically another name for the particulars versus universals problem.

It was the writings of the God is dead theologians and other theologians such as Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren, and Paul Althaus who played a role in triggering the crisis of faith that Father Francis Digby experienced which in turn resulted in the failure of his marriage and in his resigning as a priest from the Anglican Church. I felt a kind of connection between Francis Digby's personal crisis of faith and the intentions behind the Christian apologetic work of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer's Christian mission project was to reverse the modernist and enlightenment induced crisis of faith which had taken root in Western or European Christianity.

Jumping ahead: In 1976 in my honours year I bought Maurice Friedman's book called the 'Problematic Rebel'. It was also the year in which I read with works of Albert Camus, Herman Melville, Kafka and Dostoyevsky.

The transcendental becomes manifest in the sublime and the experience of the sublime is essentially an erotic experience, an erotic experience made possible by virtue of Eros being synonymous with lacking, needing, wanting and insufficiency and thus fully primed or predisposed to experience the sublime. Eros predisposition to experience the sublime is rooted in the erotic desire of Eros. Does Eros necessarily need to strike a Faustian bargain in it's desired for knowledge and for the power with which knowledge provides the knower. Eros represents a way of being or a state of being or a mode of being. Eros is the love of wisdom. The sense or meaning of Eros is based on whether the word is used as a noun or verb. Eros represent that state characterized by an absence or a lack or a deficit. Eros as a state, as a mode of being exists as desire unfulfilled. Eros in essence is desire unfulfilled. The nature of reality is such that all attempts to de-eroticize or erase Eros will in the end be defeated.

While the words philia, eros and agape all signify various aspects of the polyvalency with word love, we tend to associate Eros only with passionate romantic love or erotic love or sexual love. Eros, Eros, Eros, is one of the most beautiful sounding word which has found a niche in the English language. The upper lip shaped like Cupid's bow, shoots arrows of love when the word 'Eros' is uttered; anatomically the lips are erotic, even the Latin word for upper and lower lips sounds erotic: 'labium superius oris' and 'labium inferius oris'. The word Eros and the Spanish word amor have the same meaning. The Romantic languages which have their roots in Latin are not only the languages of love, but also the languages of culture and civilization, and that it why we should love Latin even though it had become a dead language. At high school I remember reciting: Te amo mi amor. Ti amo amore mio. Eu te amo, meu amor. Amor, amor, my head was filled with amor. It was the most beautiful word for me when I was a teenager. Licking our lips we would lasciviously recite: amor, amo, Ti amo amore mio, Te amo mi amor, Je t'aime. Eros represents the tension in our souls which desire awakens in our bodies. In Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus the word Eros is used as an abstract noun in a personalized fashion, as in referring to some kind of being, that is a being having agency and attributes. For example, Eros is insatiable. I experience myself as being Eros, I am insatiable.

Eros also represents the tension between truth as one thing and reality as another thing. The nature of truth is one thing and the nature of reality is another thing. What is the nature of truth? There are a number of theories which attempt to explain what is precisely meant by truth? Truth concerns something. Truth is always something about something. The question is the truth is not that simple. Eros also represent the tension between existence and truth on the one hand, and existence and reality on the other hand. The rise of every new cosmology ushers in the death of the old God. In this connection the truth is that there is no real cleavage or discontinuity between the cosmos and humanity nor is there any cleavage between the animal kingdom and humanity, there only exists the unbroken continuum between the most fundamental level and the complex level of material and physical organization. This is the truth and this in the reality. There exists no material and physical cleavage between what we conceive as the reality called nature and the structural and functional constitution of humans. We are part and parcel of nature.

And each day 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. 296. Carry out the laws of houses in walled cities—Leviticus 25:29

297

I was now having regular sex with Susan who was self-identifying as bisexual, and like Francis Digby her faith was falling apart and she was undergoing an existential crisis on the eve of her final exams. The fact that I did not find Francis Schaeffer's apologetics or defence of evangelic Christianity compelling had a negative impact on Susan. I just finished reading Jacque Monod's book Chance and Necessity. Susan also read the book and it had the same negative impact on her faith as the writings of Altizer and Hamilton had on Francis Digby, it shuttered her faith.

She could see Schaeffer's apologetic edifice collapsing under the burden that Darwinian evolution was true and that the case for a materialist view of reality and the Universe was perfectly rational and reasonable in terms of the available empirical evidence. She could now see my point that a simple biological evolutionary based critique of Francis Schaeffer was not easy to rebut. In her despair she seemed to take heart in retreating into the refuge of fideism. This was not intellectually a viable option, no sane person should consider retreating from reason in order to find security in pure ungrounded and quarantined faith.

Her weeping over her loss of faith in the early hours of the morning, in the pitch darkness before dawn, woke me up from a deep slumber. I had fallen asleep after we had made love. All this time she had been lying awake in anguish. In desperation she asked me like a child:

'What must I do now if there is no God?'

It felt like the chickens of Susan's guilt and regret had finally come home to roost on my shoulders. I was in my second year of study and now I had to deal with Susan's emotional breakdown. Was it guilt over our sexual relationship or was really losing her faith for sound intellectual reasons.

'God exists, God is there,' I said trying to comfort her.

'How do you know that God exists?' She asked as I held her in my arms.

'I have my reasons.'

'What are your reasons?'

'Necessity.'

'I don't understand, what do you?' She asked.

'Necessities in Nature depends on the existence of law-like relations that are not self-evident or self-explanatory. The intelligibility, the encounterability and the knowability of the Universe is not self-evident or self-explanatory and this gives me sufficient reason to accept that there is a God,' I argued.

'Do you really believe in God, you not just saying it to make me feel better?' Susan asked.

I found myself in an ironical reversal of roles. I became Susan's lesbian lover and Christian spiritual councillor. At the end of the exams she returned to her parent's home in Durban. I went home to Hotazel for Christmas. We spoke a few times over the phone. While on a holiday to Jefferies Bay she had met a wonderful guy who she eventually married.

We have remained in regular contact over the years. Apparently happily married and she had a brood of kids. We have always ended our letters with the phrase: 'Love you deeply forever'. The bonds that developed between myself and the women that I have loved have endured the ravages of time, even with Kate. After my release from prison I received communications of support and care from all of them, from my sisters. Breakups were always painful affairs but for some reason we managed to mend and rebuild broken relationships and re-established them again in the form of a deep and abiding Platonic commitment of friendship.

And each day 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. 297. The Tribe of Levi must not be given a portion of the land in Israel, rather they are given cities to dwell in—Deuteronomy 18:2

298

What about fidelity to the scriptures? What does fidelity to the scriptures mean? What could it possibly mean in the light of what we know to be the truth? The truth is the fact of evolution, the truth is the fact that humans and other species of hominins have been around for hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of writing and before the invention of the idea of revelation being realized through the medium of writing in the form of scripture. In other words revelation could only exist by virtue of writing, and revelation could only become a full blown idea once writing had been invented. Another truth is that the idea of monotheism in terms of human evolutionary history is a very recent invention, the truth is that the idea of monotheism has probably being in circulation for less than 10 000 years, which is mere fraction of the time of human existence. Humans evolved to be the animals that we are before the invention of writing and without the help of writing, and also without the guidance of written scripture, and also without the idea or guidance of revelation or even the idea of God. The idea of the afterlife developed without a clear conception of God and before the invention of writing. The belief in the afterlife was a compensatory and comforting belief which helped our ancestors to cope with the grief that followed the loss of a loved one. Our ancestors experienced grief, and also the emotions of sadness, melancholy, and forlornness and because of this emotional capacity they were capable of compassion, and empathy, and it follows that they also had a natural sense of justice and fairness, and consequently they had a strong predisposition towards anti-Oligarchical forms of sociality. They had evolved through natural selection predispositions or preferences for forms of sociality based on egalitarianism. It is a fact, and therefore a truth, that 'pre-Oligarchic' humanity living in a 'state of nature' and as hunter-gatherers they were ethical beings, having a strong natural sense of wrong and right, and a willingness to act out their moral sentiments which were guided by a sense of fairness. Ironically moral behaviour in terms of upholding fairness had great survival value, and this emotional predisposition was under strong selection pressure. I think that the claim that the predisposition towards goodness or that the Good was immanent, always potentially present as an emergent capacity in the substance of the Universe carries the ring of truthfulness, even revelatory truthfulness. Goodness was intrinsic to Nature or naturally innate. If the Universe embodies a meaningful order, then the natural order of things is towards the realization of the Good. This is an anti-Manichean view. Evil is a contingent anomaly, a maladapted state of affairs which emerged like a disease, an infection of the soul and mind, in spite of the order, uniformity and regularities of Nature. It arose as a symptom of a pathological infection, an infection which was able to take root as a consequence of over-crowding, a consequence of demographic organization, as in a tower of Babel situation if you wish. And continuing along this line of reflection we could argue that the true revelatory sentiments of the Pentateuch or the Torah are anti-Manichean in nature. Evil arose de novo with the emergence of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy could only come into exist by virtue of the numbing of the natural human moral predispositions towards fairness and justice, a numbing arising from the dehumanizing consequences of demographic changes and changes in social organization, changes which are characteristic of high density and sedentary human populations. As a maladaptation the Oligarchy can only exist as a social pathology with detrimental moral consequences. The Oligarchy is the tangible embodiment or realization of the idea of the Fall. The possibility of a natural history of the Fall, expressed in the form of an aetiology or epidemiology of disobedience and the evil consequences of this disobedience, a disobedience towards the conscience, the human conscience which has evolved under natural selection, represents not only a metaphysical irony, but the sublime realization of a metaphysical horror, a metaphysical nightmare, and it is the horror of this metaphysical irony which invites theological reflection. The horror and the nightmare is the reality of the catastrophe of what we call civilization. The systemic causes of this catastrophe are multiple, but they are all interlinked with the multidimensional effects caused by increases in the density of sedentary human populations. I think Harvey Cox's 'Secular City' completely misses the point of the city. The secular city exists by virtue of the Oligarchy and the centralization of political power in the hands of an elite minority. Cox's secular city is an illusion wrapped up in the ideology of the Oligarchy. Os Guinness in 'The Dust of Death' and Francis Schaeffer as a lay Christian intellectual also miss the point in their enthralment with a Christianized Euro-centric illusion of western civilization and western man. They are incapable of seeing the horror and nightmare of an Oligarchical civilization existing in plain view. They fail to diagnose the coming into existence of the Oligarchy as the root cause of the catastrophe, the horror and the nightmare that humankind has been forced through violence to endue since the dawn of civilization. Ironically they fail to fully grasp the message of the secular prophets who they criticize. It was not a loss of the faith in God nor was it the post-Christian reality of modern Europe or the West in general which has been the cause of the horror and nightmare of modern western civilization. Nor was it the rise of atheism or unbelief. It was none of these, rather it was the rise of Hobbes' Leviathan in the multiple forms of the Oligarchy which was the cause of the horror and nightmare that has dominated human existence since the dawn of civilization. And it is this horror which has been the target of the secular prophets.

So in the light of this, that is, the fact of evolution, the fact of the Oligarchy, the fact of the catastrophe of civilization, what does fidelity to the scriptures really mean? What could it possibly mean? What does fidelity to the scriptures mean in the light of the fact that all religious scriptures have the work of imaginative and creative human authorship? They all bear the inerasable stamp of human authorship. And being a post-Neolithic literary phenomenon they also bear the imprint of the official seal of the Oligarchy. And they all bear the full certification of the Oligarchy as documents which legitimize the existence of the Oligarchy. And bearing the full weight of Oligarchic authorization, they can only speak with the voice of the Oligarchy. In this sense the scriptures are irredeemably mythological. Evangelical Christians have always been loyal defenders of the Oligarchy and they have justified their defence on the basis of an ironic fidelity to the scriptures. An ironic fidelity represents a wishful reading of the scriptures, a reading which represents a taming fictionalization of the scriptures, a commission of infidelity.

And each day 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. 298. The Levites must not take a share in the spoils of war—Deuteronomy 18:1

299

The question fidelity to the scriptures cropped up regularly in Susan's Bible study group. Our lesbian love affair put a question mark in Susan's mind on what fidelity to the scriptures meant if one felt that one had succumbed to sexual transgressions such as homosexuality in form of women enjoying sex and love with each other. Lesbian love represents a crisis for the Oligarchy which is necessarily Patriarchical in nature. The irony in my crisis ridden love affair with Susan was that while she had lost her faith in spite of having been a champion of Francis Schaeffer my own faith in God grew more intense. I tried to explain to Susan that fidelity to the scriptures had to be dialectical. The only way I could explain what I meant by 'dialectical fidelity' to the scriptures was by resorting to Hegelian ideas that Truth was a system, that Truth was systemic, that every truth claim finds it dialectical truthfulness in relationship to the Totality of Truth, and that Totality of Truth represents the Mind of God, which is the same as the Absolute and so on and so forth.

And each day 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. 299. To give the Levites cities to inhabit and their surrounding fields—Numbers 35:2

300

Years later, in 1982 I read the 'News Week' profile on Francis Schaeffer and all the memories of 1974 come flooding back. In 1982 we who were in the underground had begun working on the ground plan for the people's war to topple the apartheid state. In the meantime Francis Schaeffer had moved decisively to the right of the American political spectrum. In the process he had become an ideologue of the Oligarchy, a defender of the programme of the political elite of capitalism and of the economic and political project of neoliberalism. He had aligned himself with the forces of reaction. I think he did this in spite of knowing better. He was being inconsistent, he was betraying the essential message of the Gospels. By throwing his lot in with Political Right, which was the establishment, his move represented a betrayal of the poor, the vulnerable, the exploited and the wretched. The endorsement and legitimization of the Political Right has become the paradigmatic example of the intellectual and moral disaster which twentieth Christian evangelical fundamentalism has come represent as of consequence of their antipathy towards Marxism, evolution, socialism and the Political Left. Evangelical Christian fundamentalism evolved into a prosperity cult and in the process it became the religious face of capitalism. In choosing the side of the powerful right-wing establishment evangelical Christianity has revealed its complete intellectual and profound moral bankruptcy. And in choosing to defend the Patriarchy and the Oligarchy evangelical Christianity has demonstrated its lack of fidelity to the scriptures. Fidelity to the scriptures is ultimately realized or betrayed in terms of political allegiance, and political allegiance is never a theologically neutral affair. It always entails either being for God or being against God. Fidelity to the scripture means understanding that God is always on the side of the poor, the weak, the powerless, the exploited, the oppressed, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the destitute, the rejected and those who have lost all hope. As the wretched of the earth they belong to the very least, to the great mass of people who populate the bottom of the social hierarchy and by virtue of their lowly status they have been claimed by God to be brothers and sisters of God. As a communist the idea and significance of what fidelity to the scriptures really meant resonated with the political imperative to participate in the struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation. Fidelity to the scriptures could only be realized by joining the struggle. Fidelity to the scriptures can only be realized in revolutionary praxis. I was a member of the parish at St Mary's Cathedral and I hardly ever missed the 7.00 am Sunday morning early communion service. There were less than a dozen parishioners in the church for the early morning service. The priest used the old traditional Anglican prayer book for the early morning mass. I can vividly remember those dim chilly winter Sunday mornings in the icy cathedral, my frozen hands clutching the prayer book, my body shivering with cold. The priest celebrated the mass in the fashion of Anglo Catholicism, a legacy of the British Anglican missionary priests of the Community of the Resurrection. And following the example of the black women I learnt to gracefully and deftly sign myself with Orthodox signing of the cross. We signed ourselves with the sign of cross multiple times during the communion service, like the Russians, one of the black woman informed me. Yes like Russians of the Russian Orthodox Church we signed ourselves with the sign of the cross perpetually. I enjoyed the motions of my hand in the signing of the cross. First the right shoulder and then the left. In the darkest days of the struggle in the 1980s I found myself weeping during the communion service. Not fully knowing why I was overcome with emotion, my eyes were always brimming uncontrollably with tears, and the tears run down my cheeks. What was happening to me, why was I becoming so emotional? Was it the stress of the underground work? Was I burnt out? Was I experiencing a psychological breakdown? I realized I needed the emotional release, I needed to weep, and so during the dark days of the struggle I allowed myself to weep continually during the mass.

And each day 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. 300. Not to sell the fields but they shall remain the Levites' before and after the Jubilee year—Leviticus 25:34

301

Going back to Susan, Susan's emotional breakdown. It was also a revelation. She felt overwhelmed with the guilt of enjoying our homoerotic love making. She had given herself over addictively to the orgasmic ecstasy of lesbian love, and every climax left her feeling increasingly wretched and sinful. Her guilt and her feelings of sinful wretchedness revealed the intellectual superficiality and moral fragility of the evangelical Christian mind. She stopped reading the Bible. She could not bring herself to pray and read the Bible. She because wanton and lustful. But she asked me to keep our love a secret. She did not want her Christian girlfriends to know that she had 'backslidden'. So to maintain appearances she pretended to be a Christian, going through the motions of being a Christian, saying and doing all the right things, which would confirm her identity and steadfastness as a Christian. She kept on defending her pretence by arguing that I was Catholic and because I was Catholic I could never understand what it meant to backslide. It was useless saying that I was not Catholic. She saw me as a Catholic. I was Catholic because of the Mass, the Eucharist, was central to my profession of faith, to my Christianity, so I had to be Catholic. I could always confess my sins and the priest would say the prayer of absolution. Confession was a sacrament, a sacrament of God's grace. And I so I have never ceased to wonder what fidelity towards the scriptures ultimately meant. It was not reducible to obedience. It meant more than obedience. In fact it had little to do with obedience to an 'external will'. In South Africa the white evangelical establishment was firmly aligned with the apartheid state and supportive of their policies, and this represented not only an infidelity to the scriptures but also a mindless commitment to idolatry.

We love made, we pledged the deepest feelings of love for each other. If lesbians could marry I would have married Susan. In Susan's mind the will of God intruded into our relationship. According to her what we were doing was against the will of God. I asked her in all honesty how our lesbian love and love making could ever be against the will of God. How could it possibly upset God? Our love was not only deeply moral and ethical, it was also beautiful. How could it be sinful?

And each day 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. 301. To build a Sanctuary (Holy Temple)--Exodus 25:8

302

If I have to think of any year that was decisive in my life it would be 1975. It was definitely the decisive life transforming year of my life. In 1975 I changed. I became a different person. I was now a certified scuba diver and I had also received my diving instructor's certificate. As I have said by the end of November 1974 my affair with Kate had come to an end. We remained goods friends right until my arrest even though we had gone our separate ways. In 1975 she took her sabbatical leave and was away for the entire year in the USA.
Diving classes began at the Wits swimming pool on the first Saturday morning of the first semester of the new academic year. That was when I meet Janet Middleton for the first time. She was eighteens year old and was a first student majoring in zoology and botany. As the only female among the new diving club member she was given to me as my first scuba diving pupil.

And each day 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. 302. Not to build the altar with stones hewn by metal—Exodus 20:22

303

Theorizing on the specificity of lesbian sexuality or erotics has been pretty thin in the academic peer reviewed published literature. The word 'queer' appears to have been taken over by the gay men movement and had been dropped by most lesbians or feminist lesbians. Personally I have not dropped using the word for the self-designation of my same-sex sexuality. This puts me on the margins of the aggrieved feminist lesbian movement. I do not support the self-isolation of lesbians from the latest developments in what has become known in gay circles as the queer discourse, especially in relationship to queer theory or queer politics. Lesbians should be engaged in the discourse on queer issues such as queer sensibility, queer expressivity, queer performativity, queer visibility and queer identity. Compared to the gay men movement, lesbians have not made any radical progress in articulating at the level of theory and practice the nature of the lived experience or the embodied exhibition of queer femininity, or of would be equivalent to what counts as 'camp' for gay men. While camp is based on the gay male perception of the feminine. Lesbians have not really been creative or imaginative in developing homoerotic expressions of lesbian femininity. In fact the whole issue of femininity has become politically problematic among lesbian feminist activists. While feminists and activist lesbians have expressed an antipathy towards the idea of femininity which has often bordered on almost an outright rejection of feminine expressivity, gay men have celebrated femininity.

And each day 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. 303. Not to climb steps to the altar—Exodus 20:23

304

It may seem absurd for lesbians to dress up as 'drag queens'. But I together with other lesbians and bisexual woman have regularly experienced the pleasure and excitement of lesbian drag experimentation especially at the Powder Puff Nightclub. The appropriation of the femininity by heterosexual women and gay men has created a dilemma for lesbian feminists. What are lesbians supposed to wear? How are lesbians supposed to dress up as being queer? It would be contradictory and absurd for feminist lesbians to appropriate masculinity as often seems to have been the case. Maybe expressive performativity of femininity has been ideologically misconstrued and misrepresented as the trappings of female oppression by men. Ironically gay men and not lesbians have dominated the construction and projection of femininity in the female fashion industry. Lesbian feminists have been critical of the manufacture of femininity by gay men for the benefit of the libidinous gaze of heterosexual men. Feminist lesbian theorists have generally pushed the view that lesbian sexual agency is impossible in a patriarchal culture.

What needs to be realized is the fact that lesbian expressive erotic performativity falls within a continuum of variety which feminist theorists are reluctant to consider or even entertain as a possibility because of ideological blindness. Queer identity is something which is performed, you cannot be queer or feel queer without expressing your queerness. But going back to the reluctance of feminist theorists to entertain the full range of feminine performativities, especially in terms of the unrestricted possibilities regarding ways of being queer, my feelings could be precisely summarized as follows: 'so what' if the Powder Puff Club styled lesbian drag excited the libidinous gaze of heterosexual men, I don't really give a shit whether men get sexual pleasure from looking at me. For me lesbian drag would be a de rigeuer getup for a Hollywood styled depiction of a sexy hooker or a porn star. I liked to feel hot, erotic, wanton and slutty, with my face made up, hair styled, wearing a mere slip of a dress that barely covered my butt, stilettos and sheer stockings held up with suspensors. Of course for my lesbian drag getup to work it had to have something of the mardi gras, it had to be carnivalesque, it had to create an element or flavour of excitement, including an amplified sense of revelry, danger, and also a feeling of the world being in a state of mad erotic topsy-turviness. In lesbian drag I would feel aroused. Dionysian is word I think I am searching for especially in relation to the idea of the Dionysian impulse.

And each day 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. 304. To show reverence for the Temple—Leviticus 19:30

305

In lesbian drag, I am Pandora, I am Eros, I am Eve, I am Sappho, I am Athena, I am Venus, I am Diana of the hunt and I am Aphrodite. I am the first woman on earth, the goddess of lesbian love sent down from heaven and in my arms I carry an exquisitely jewelled trunk, it is filled with all kinds of mysteries, enigmas, paradoxes, riddles and last of all tricks. Descending naked from heaven I step down the ladder of love, my feet touch the soft earth of this planet, I lift the lid of the trunk, and the first thing I take from it is my mirror. I gaze into the mirror I see for the first time that I am the subject of lust and desire. In the mirror I see that my body is the most perfect sexual ornament ever created. It ignites the unquenchable fires of erotic desire. My body is a divine gift of Amazonian pleasure, for the pleasure of women who want to fondle, caress and touch me. My vagina channel is a furnace hotter than any black body. My vagina absorbs the entire radiation of the Universe and from my vulva the entire Cosmos erupts as a spectacle of rainbow dreams.

Nature has been generous to me. In the mirror I see that I have awoken the fountain of everlasting desire in both women and men, who with an urgency of desperation, lust after my body. From the trunk I retrieve the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. While the creature that is craftier than all the animals in the garden slithers out from the bottom of the trunk I consume the fruit and I discover that I have made myself visually conspicuous. In the mirror I see that in my nakedness I am spectacular, I am the perfect embodiment of feminine sensuality.

Filled with the knowledge of good and evil I reached down into the depths of the trunk and retrieved a tube of red lipstick which I applied to my lips. Also from trunk I retrieved a pair of sheer silk black stockings and a pair of stilettos. From the trunk I lifted a bow and a single sharp tipped arrow which was fixed to an infinitely long satin ribbon. Standing in my silk stockings and stilettos, my lips bright red and my body naked at the edge of a high cliff, on a boulder, overlooking the shores of the ocean of eternity, pulling back the bowstring I aimed at the horizon of infinite nothingness before releasing the arrow of entropy attached to the ribbon of becoming which through the multiplication of its dimensions becomes an evanescent bubbling foam which fills space-time.

And each day 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. 305. To guard the Temple area—Numbers 18:3

306

In making an erotic display of myself, it was my intention to trigger sexual desire in women. In animals sexual ornaments represents all of the secondary sexual characters that are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. In contrast to the secondary sexual characters, the primary sexual characters are the actual sex organs which have a more direct physically involvement in the process of sexual reproduction. In other words the primary sexual characters consist of the organs or the anatomical apparatus that are directly involved in the mechanical process of copulation. Secondary sexual characters such as the large fleshy wattles and combs, spurs, ornate tails, long colourful neck feathers of a rooster are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. Also other examples of secondary sexual characters such the horns or antlers of herbivores are not directly involved in the physical process of copulation. Plumage colour in male birds is yet another example of secondary sexual attributes.

In many species of mammals and birds the males and females often look very different as consequence of possessing different secondary sexual characteristics. These differences in the appearances between males and females in animal or birds are called sexual dimorphisms. Dimorphism means that the male's morphology differs very markedly from the female's morphology. This is fairly obvious in adult humans. Women's bodies differ markedly from the bodies of men in many respects including secondary sexual ornamentation. Darwin's theory of sexual selection explained how and why this phenomenon of sexual dimorphism between the two sexes arose. It is the sexual dimorphism of the two sexes that makes them sexually interesting to each other. According to Darwin's theory of sexual selection many characters or attributes possessed by birds and animals function as sexual ornamentation or decorations in order to trigger the desire for copulation in their mating partners. Without the triggering of desire no copulation would take place. If no copulation occurs then there will be no procreation or reproduction. Without reproduction there would be no progeny. And if no progeny was produced the species would vanish.

And each day 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. 306. Not to leave the Temple unguarded—Numbers 18:5

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In humans sex exists as a paradox, mainly because the act of sex can be decoupled or disengaged from its primary purpose in nature which is procreation or the reproduction of the species. In humans it has become possible to have sex for the sheer sake of sex itself. The unique biology and psychology of humans has made it possible to separate sexual activity from its primary or original goal which was reproduction. Humans are among the few animals that frequently engage in sexual activity primarily for its own sake and only secondarily for the purpose of reproduction. But in monogamy sex is never really engaged in for its own sake. It always serves the function of keeping male and female long enough together so that female's offspring can be successfully raised to adulthood. A lactating mother does not ovulate. So the man will continue to stick around for the sake of sex alone.

According to Darwin sexual selection has also shaped the human body, the human face and the human mind. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by male preference has shaped the breasts, waists, hips, buttocks, legs of female bodies. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by female preference has also shaped body size, beards, and the penises of male bodies. Sexual selection in humans has also influenced other secondary sexual characters such as hair colour, skin texture, skin colour, eyes colour, eye size and shape, lips, ears, nose size and shape, face shape, hand size and shape.

Women's breasts are primarily sexual ornaments and their main function is to attract the interest of men. It is impossible for men not to be excited by the female breast. Every feature that makes a woman's body attractive to men serves a sexual ornamental function. This is how women capture the attention of men and keeps them locked into the continuation of a relation which also includes an involvement in the rearing of offspring. The promise of sexual rewards for the fidelity of the male partner locks men into a relationship which ensures that the females fertilized eggs with eventually develop into progeny. In this drama of male capture the size and shape of a woman's breasts serves primarily as a sexual ornamental function, it is the lure that hooks the male partner into a commitment based on sexual rewards. Supplying milk to an infant is only a secondary function of the female's breast. Big shapely breasts don't necessary produce more milk than smaller breasts. So the size and outward appearance of a breast does not always give a true indication of its milk supply capacity.

Women as walking sexual ornaments are also competing between themselves for the attention of men. Women engage in public acts of sensual or erotic display not only to attract the attention of men but also because a woman also wants other women to look at her as well. Women in the game of sex compete with each other for the spot light of a man's libidinous gaze. Women spend an awful amount of time doing their faces and choosing their clothes so that they can look sexy. A woman often finds herself in a situation where she wants to appear exceptionally beautiful and sexy to other women, so that these other women will realize they cannot compete for the attention of a highly prize male, and once female competition in the beauty stakes has become internalized those women who feel less desirable will just sort of give up, concede defeat in the face of superior erotic competition for the gaze of men.

Humans are the most sexual of all the animals. Concealed ovulation and continuous sexual receptivity in women have evolved to keep men continually attentive with respect to supporting, provisioning, protecting women irrespective of whether or not they are ovulating. Females with narrow waists or a waist to hip ratio of 0.7 are preferred by men because it indicates non-pregnancy and sexual receptivity for fertilization.

In all living creatures sex is the dance of life because its goal is always the fertilization of eggs. In humans sex has been transformed into an activity for its own sake rather than for the sake of reproduction. That's the paradox I am thinking of.

In my own personal theory of queerness and homoeroticism, sex is for the sake of sex, sex is primarily equated with physical orgasmic pleasure without any link to reproduction. The female body generally and the female genitals specifically are designed by adaptation for sexual pleasure. The clitoris serves no other function other than being an organ of pleasure. The female body is a landscape of erogenous zones and even the anus is an intensely erotic zone of pleasure in many women.

And each day 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. 307. To prepare the anointing oil—Exodus 30:31

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What about lesbian sexual preferences regarding the erotic or sensual physiognomy of the female body? In queer stereotyping it is believed that on average gay men are feminine and lesbians are masculine, and this is believed to influence the desirability of sexual or romantic partners. It is generally believed that lesbians have short hair and wear masculine clothing. Personally I like feminine lesbians. If I wanted a Dyke then I may as well let a man fuck me. Kate was an attractive woman but these was an element of masculinity in her makeup even though she did body building she still had a beautiful feminine body and nice boobs. She was incredibly strong and physical but she said that what had drawn me to her was my femininity, but Kate has hardly a Dyke. I don't think I am too masculine in my orientation and interests. Maybe my interest in animals and zoology and also my love of diving plus my love for the great outdoors may reflect my masculine aspects. I suppose I do have stereotypical lesbian attributes. Kate reckoned that I had more feminine traits and she saw me as being on the femme side. Funny that Kate did not see herself as leaning strongly towards being butch, but there were butch elements in that she always took the lead in our relationship, especially when it came to sex. I had to play the role of the submissive and she like to do sadomasochism stuff with me. She had a kinky side. Kate was a lesbian who liked to appear femme on the streets but was always butch between the sheets. It is possible that some of my girlfriends would say the same of me. Maybe I have become butch between the sheets. A majority of studies have confirmed that the majority of lesbians prefer feminine partners. It may be that the lesbian silent majority leans more strongly towards femininity with respect to partners, and especially towards sexual partners than the popular stereotyping would suggest.

And each day 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. 308. Not to reproduce the anointing oil (for personal use)--Exodus 30:32

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My mother had always said that I was not a normal girl especially once we moved to Hotazel. Instead of being housebound doing girlie stuff I would disappear for hours on end into the surrounding Kalahari scrubland. I was doing all kinds of boy stuff such as spending too much time with father while he was with the pigeons or working on his cars. My interest in animals and wildlife was taken as being preoccupied with boy's stuff. It is only now on reflection that my predisposition towards lesbianism was always there for the astute observer to recognize. While my mother was always suspicions about the sexual significance of my girlhood predilections, my father always related to me as his little girl and it was him that reinforced my femininity and female sensibilities. I always felt like his little girl and always felt very feminine when I was with him. My mother found it strange that I would insistent on wanting to go on hunting trips with the men. I took no joy in the killing of animals but like Malcolm I was drawn to the adventure of being outdoors, camping and roughing it. There were times when Malcolm and I were very close as siblings and he would say that I was his best friend. Elsabe was the real girl in our family. Compared to me she was always busy with girl stuff and I could not bring myself to ever play dolls with her. I would rather be with Malcolm and the boys.

Maybe my father did sense that I was different from other girls. At Hotazel when Elsabe wanted to do ballet lessons at the rec which was being organized by one of the wives on the mine my father encouraged me go with Elsabe. He said ballet would give me a nice strong and beautiful body. Well I was keen about having a beautiful body so in Hotazel I started doing ballet and then when I went to Potchefstroom Girls High I continued with private ballet lessons as an extramural activity.

And each day 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. 309. Not to anoint with anointing oil (a non-Kohen or non-king)--Exodus 30:32

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Lipstick lesbianism. Femme invisibility. You too attractive to be a lesbian. You look too straight. You look too heterosexual. Who gives a fuck? I don't think I was ever in the closet. I was gay from day one and somehow I knew that I was different from other girls. As a pre-pubescent girl I fell in love with Show White and Sleeping Beauty. In standard two and just on the threshold of puberty as a nine year old girl I fell in love with the fictitious cinematic character Velvet Brown played by a very young Elizabeth Taylor in the movie National Velvet. I saw the movie at a morning matinee at His Majesties Theatre in Commissioner Street Johannesburg during the September school holidays. Elsabe and I were spending our school holiday at Ouma and Oupa Vollenhoven.

And each day 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. 310. Not to reproduce the incense formula (for personal use)--Exodus 30:37

311

Later, as an eleven year girl in standard four I paged through the Encyclopaedia Britannica to read up on Homo sapiens. At school we had been learning apartheid style about the different ethnic groups in South Africa and the teacher had said in passing that in spite of all our profound language, cultural and racial differences, which in turn was a consequence of what had happened with the building of the Tower of Babel, we were all still Homo sapiens. I was intrigued to hear that after Babel we had all remained Homo sapiens while becoming sufficiently different to make apartheid the only solution for living in harmony in spite of our differences. The teacher said that apartheid was God's solution, a solution which would enable us all to live in harmony in spite of the differences that resulted from the building of the Tower of Babel. She said that even the people who were referred to as the bushman were Homo sapiens. No one doubted that my class, even as small child I believed that the bushman were humans.

And each day 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. 311. Not to burn anything on the Golden Altar besides incense—Exodus 30:9

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In the Britannica after Homo sapiens there was: Homology, Homozygote and Heterozygote, Homosexual. I read about homosexuality. Through curiosity driven cross referencing of various homosexual related topics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica I made some self-illuminating discoveries about the meaning of Lebos, Sappho and Lesbianism. When Ouma Vollenhoven noticed my soft pubic down and my budding breasts she said that I was becoming a woman and I would soon be needing to wear a bra. She wanted to know if my mother had discussed women things with me. Before she could say anything about me becoming a woman and what all that entailed I told her that I was a lesbian. The disclosure shocked her.

I explained that I was like Sappho. She had never heard of Sappho. I told her that Sappho was a woman who loved only women. Sappho came from Lebos and this is why women who fall in love with women are called lesbians. Ouma listened to my story. She stared at me speechless. And then she found her voice again:

'My magtig, my kind, so jy sê dat jy 'n lesbiër is?' (Oh God my child so you say that you are a lesbian?)

'Ja Ouma,' I answered with a broad smile. (Yes Gran)

'Weet jou ma dat jy 'n lesbiër is?' (Does your mother know that you are a lesbian?)

'Nee Ouma, niemand weet nie, net Ouma weet.' (No Gran, no one knows, only Gran knows.)

My Ouma never betrayed me. My secret was safe with her. She took it to the grave. Anyway Ouma still insisted that even lesbians need to know things about what it means to become a woman, like having periods and the danger of getting pregnant if you mess around with boys. I told her that there would be no danger of me becoming pregnant because I had no plans for messing around with boys. I explained that to me boy are just boys, and they mean nothing to me. Later in life after Ouma Vollenhoven's death the dark family secrets of lesbianism on Ouma's side of the family surfaced. I knew from the day of disclosure that Ouma was also a lesbian.

And each day 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. 312. The Levites must transport the ark on their shoulders—Numbers 7:9

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My identity was decided. But by who? Not by me for sure. I don't know why I fell in love with Velvet Brown. I collected her pictures and stuck them on my bedroom wall. But I realized that my obsession with Velvet Brown was a sign that I was different. Parmenides the pre-Socratic philosopher believed that all existing things were ultimately one and self-identical. The unity established by being one and self-identical was the precondition to be unchanging and not being subject to the vicissitudes of difference. My love for Velvet Brown meant that there were no vagaries about my identity, I had self-identified with my own sex and in that sense I was one and self-identical, I discovered my unity.

And each day 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. 313. Not to remove the staves from the ark—Exodus 25:15

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Everything I wish to say in these notes revolves around some core ideas and I have perhaps been guilty of saying the same kind of things over and over, the repetition may be tedious or it may be the beat, the rhythm that drives not only the writing but also the thinking behind the writing. There is so much I want to say, so much that I want to write, if only I could encapsulate everything in a simple statement, a simple proposition. There is the problem of Totality, and also associated with the idea of Totality there is the problem of infinity. Then there is the relationship between totality, infinity, language, embodiment, finitude and responsibility. Yes responsibility.

And each day 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. 314. The Levites must work in the Temple—Numbers 18:23

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Ideas of Totality and Infinity are lofty. So what about the mundane, the ordinary, the monstrous and the banal that happens to be part and parcel of the everyday life of embodiment and responsibility. I think of Easter and another Good Friday, it is the long weekend which we always spend in Joburg, and I find myself wondering alone for the first time in my life through the labyrinth of stables, cages and animal pens at the Rand Easter Show at Milner Park in Johannesburg. We have come up from Hotazel for the Easter Weekend. We are staying over at Oupa Zeeman's home. I am twelve. I am experiencing regular bouts of moodiness and sullenness, I am also cheeky and sometimes quite abrasive. My mom rolls her eyes and mutters something about the start of the terrible teens. Next year I will be thirteen and in boarding school. The school in Hotazel only goes up to standard five. Boarding school is the fate of all kids growing up in Hotazel. They have already decided my fate. I will be going to Potchefstroom Girls High School. Malcolm is already in Potchefstroom Boys High School.

At twelve I was personally experiencing my state of otherness, of being different or to use the modern philosophical term I was in a state of otherness. And my sense of otherness increased my moodiness, which had become apparent to the whole family as we stood in the long queue to pay for our entrance tickets after miraculously finding a parking into which my father managed to squeeze our car into. On reflection I can now see with the wisdom of hindsight that my dark moods and adolescent sullenness was due to the fact that I was in the throes of a dramatic psychosexual metamorphosis orchestrated by a surging flood of oestrogen and progesterone. The drama of glands and ganglia within my body was invisible to me and also to the rest of world in spite of the fact that my braless breasts were mysteriously swelling under my black V necked T shirt and I had become, curtsy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fully aware through the force of curiosity of the pleasurable secrets of my downy mound after recently being suddenly and unexpectedly surprised by the exquisite sensation of a self-induced orgasm. In spite of all my hints my mother did not seem to be too bothered about the fact that I had to start wearing a bra or that my first period was going to be an imminent catastrophe. I felt that my mother was leaving me in the lurch as I became overwhelmed by that peculiar girl-child's self-perception of her own budding sexuality. In the end I was delivered from further embarrassment as a result of my father's observant eye and his fatherly concern. When we were alone he said I must be proud of my beautiful body and he promised that he will speak to my mother so that my pressing needs as a young woman would be taken care of. It was through his timely intervention that I got my bras and was saved from the disaster of my first period.

After passing through the turnstile into the show grounds we were faced with a family crisis, a crisis of indecision about how we were going to spend the rest of day at the Rand Show looking at the endless array of exhibitions. Malcolm now a teenager had his own agenda, Elsabe was happy to tag along with dad and mom and I wanted to go and look at the horses, the livestock and poultry that were on show. I knew that dad wanted to look at the cars, tools and machinery. I didn't know what mom wanted to do. Smiling knowingly at my bored adolescent face my father took two rand notes out of his wallet and gave them too me. Mom raised her eyebrows:

'That's a lot of money to give to a child,' she uttered unthinkingly.

He looked at his watch. It was 9.00 am.

'We will all meet at the Tower of Light at one-o-clock for lunch. Elsabe will come with mom and me. The two of you can go off and do what you want,' he said as he also gave Malcolm R 2.00.

'She can't wonder around the show grounds alone by herself,' my mother said looking at my dad with alarm written on face.

'She is big girl, you don't have worry, she will be OK,' he replied.

I put the notes in the pocket of my shorts. Thinking back, for the big city of Johannesburg, in my typical Hotazel casual after school and weekend attire, I was in reality, in a state of rural naivety, quite innocently unaware of my girl-child sensuality, made plainly visible in a very provocative getup, what with a long plaited pony tail, tiny white shorts, white ankle socks, takkies and a lose T shirt which did not hide the naked contours of pert adolescent breasts, I was perfectly delectable to any would be male predator who could be cruising the show grounds on the lookout for moody faced rebellious pre-teen girls.

And each day 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. 315. No Levite must do another's work of either a Kohen or a Levite—Numbers 18:3

316

I remember that I was feeling rebellious, lonely, confused and angry when I set off with the R 2.00 in my pocket to the agricultural livestock exhibition. When I told Ouma Vollenhoven that I was a lesbian she stoically accepted my confession with the fatalistic inevitability of the fearful expectation that accompanies the knock on the door late at night. The inevitable knock on the door in the deep darkness of the night always arrives suddenly, inconveniently, and unexpectedly. It arrives at the front door without any pre-warning, bearing the kind of bad tidings which will change the course of lives forever. Usually someone close in the family has died under strange circumstances. The knock on the door in the dead of night always means that the bearer of bad news has finally arrived and the thing that you never wanted to ever hear now rings in your ears, the echo of shocking news leaves you stunned and you wish that you could wakeup and escape from a dream that is too horrifying to endure. The realization of the thing that you feared the most has now dawned once more as a new reality and it cannot be wished away and there is no way that one can escape the full burden of the disclosure that comes with policemen's knock on the front door at the dead of night. I know that this sounds a bit too dramatic. No one had died. But it is how in retrospect I recall that unmistakeable mixed sense of sweet and haunting poignancy which accompanied my unexpected disclosure to Ouma Vollenhoven when I cut her short while she was on the verge of explaining the birds and the bees to her granddaughter. Did she have a premonition that I was going to be like her?

That is how my Ouma received the dreaded news that I was a lesbian. It came to her unexpectedly from the mouth of her granddaughter like the knock on the door in the dead of night. The ghosts of the past had returned to haunt the family once more. She stoically accepted what her own grandchild had confessed. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered that her sister, my auntie Nelly was also a lesbian and that her cousin, my auntie Dolly was also a lesbian. The fact that there were so many lesbians on my mother's side of the family took me by surprise. I waited for her to confess that she too was a lesbian. Her silence meant that she too was lesbian. Auntie Nelly and Dolly, often the subject of hushed whispering were both portrayed as lonely pathetic spinsters who had lived dreadfully unhappy lives. And there had been others in the family who had lived dreadful lives as spinsters. She said that she did not want this to also be my fate. 'Don't worry Ouma,' I said trying to reassure her.

'I want to be a lesbian,' I said smiling at her.

'Ek ook my kind (Me also),' she said.

And each day 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. 316. To dedicate the Kohen for service—Leviticus 21:8

317

I had self-identified myself as a lesbian, but I knew nothing about the secret world of lesbianism. But unknown to me at the moment of my disclosure, my Ouma knew about that world. She too was a lesbian. She knew about the existence of that world in which women became involved in same sex romantic attachments or romantic friendships. She knew all about what happened between romantically attached individuals of the same sex. She knew what it was like living in that secretive world which the outsiders did not know about, because outside that world no one spoke about what women did when they were in love with each other. I did not know at that stage of my life what went on in the secret and impenetrable world of lesbianism. I was just aware as an adolescent that I was possessed by a powerful inclination to develop romantic attachments or feelings towards girls or women. Generally it has been impossible for heterosexual people to conceive of lesbians as having any inclination or drive or predisposition or desire to pursue sexual pleasure with other women for the sake of personal pleasure. Only men did that. Until recently there was no vocabulary, no narrative, and no words to describe what homosexual women were doing in their same sex relationships. Many heterosexual people viewed lesbian relationships as asexual. In the recent historical past going back to the nineteenth century romantic attachments or same-sex attractions between women were viewed negatively as symptomatic of an underlying psychological pathology or some kind of deviancy or mental defect or personality disorder. Sometimes same sex attraction between women was viewed as a sexual inversion. And these female sexual inverts were viewed as men who were trapped inside the bodies of women.

And each day 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. 317. The Kohen work shifts must be equal during holidays—Deuteronomy 18:6-8

318

Plato's Cave, the Noble Lie, the Law, the City, Calvinistic Philosophy and the Destruction of Christianity.

The moral authority of every City or State as enshrined in its laws, including the City as embodied in Plato's Republic, is on founded of the Noble Lie, and in the education or the pedagogy of the Noble Lie. The pedagogy of Noble Lie replaces truth with ideology. The pedagogy of the Noble Lie replaces rational persuasion, which arises naturally from the compelling and liberating certainty and credibility of truth. The pedagogy of the Noble Lie replace reason with the pedagogy of violence, with the pedagogy of coercive force. The pedagogy of the Noble Lie is based on the authority of Mythos. The authority of Mythos is transmitted, learned, secured, taught, enforced, indoctrinated and inculcated through the liturgical repetition of false beliefs. False beliefs have their origins in the manufacturing and transmission of fictionalized memories. In the process of education Noble Lies replaces truth with ideological fictions, the content of which are based on founding myths and tales. As founding myths Noble Lies serve a hegemonic function. The founding mythologies embodied in Noble Lies achieves hegemony through brainwashing in which obedience to authority is rendered as a mandatory obligation towards that which counts as the highest good in the life of the individual within the all-embracing universe of the City. Obedience and subservience to authority of the law of the City on the pain of punishment makes compliance to the dictates of the rulers obligatory for everyone. Subservience is enforced through the laws of the City or the Oligarchy. Subservience and compliance towards authority is rendered as the highest good. Obedience and subservience to the authority of the City is not a choice but an obligation for the good of the City.

Given the fact that for up to three hundred thousands years humans were able to maintain egalitarian forms of social order, which were based on mutual reciprocity without recourse to law, it is difficult to understand why so much intellectual effort and energy was expended on creating a social and political science not anchored in biology. The emergence of law is symptomatic of a transition from a form of sociality based on equality and egalitarianism to a form of sociality based on social inequality, social differentiation, social stratification, social status, all of which leads to the development of a social and political order based on hierarchies of social domination. Hierarchies of social domination exist by virtue of the establishment of a system of authority and law. Law and authority stands in a paradoxical and contradictory relationship to the idea of justice, in fact they are inimical to justice. To understand the nature and principles of justice we need to understand what justice actually means. I think investigating the following confrontation of ideas, principles and theories such as: law versus biology or law versus animal behaviour or law versus Nature, will go a long way in demystifying the real nature and purpose of law and authority, and thereby lay bare the hidden ulterior motives which have given shape to various systems of law and legal practices. Law or legal systems are devices for social control.

Obedience to the authority of the City is a form of idolatry because obedience to the ruling elite is equated with obedience to God, the laws of the City are equated with the laws of God.

Both Judaism and Islam are founded on the myth of divine Law. Both Judaism and Islam represent religious civilizations which have been established, preserved, perpetuated, instituted, legitimized and secured through the pedagogy of the Noble Lie or Noble Falsehood. The Noble Lie perpetuates itself indefinitely through the liturgy of repetition and in this sense the Noble Lie represents a prison from which it is difficult to escape. What is required from a philosophical perspective to escape from the prison of the Oligarchy can be treated within the framework of the allegory of Plato's Cave and also from the allegory of Line and the Sun. The allegory of Plato's Cave and the allegory of the Line can be applied as a philosophical and political critique of Judaism and Islam. Both Judaism and Islam can only exist as a social-political-economic religious phenomena by virtue of belief in an all embracing system of divinely instituted legal codes and commandments. With regard to being consistent with its belief system Judaism and Islam can only exist in the form of a theocratic City founded on God's law and commandments. The belief that the theocratic City is founded on the supreme authority of God's law and commandments constitutes the Noble Lie. In both Judaism and Islam the theocracy can only be realized and ruled in the form of an Oligarchy based on a hierarchy of social-political-economic domination and inequality. Individual autonomy and sovereignty is inimical to the theocracy. Everything is justified as the will of God. Whatever state you find yourself in represents your God ordained destiny for your life. This means that it is God's will that you be sick, poor, powerless, and possessing no agency regarding your hopes and dreams. In a theocracy, rule by means of law and authority necessarily divides the polis into two unequal classes, the class of the rulers who rule under God's mandate and the class of the ruled, and whose duty and obligation is to be obedient to the dictates of the ruling elite who God's representative and who act in God's name. The theocracy can only be instituted structurally and functionally in the form of a hierarchy of social-political-economic domination, therefore a theocracy can only exist as an Oligarchy.

Christianity as a social-religious phenomenon, in contrast to both Judaism and Islam, has no legal code which could become the divinely authored founding law of the City. This much is clear, and it was through the Talmud that the Kingdom of Judea became the religion of Judaism and the Talmud as the full embodiment of the Oral Torah is a literary creation of the City, a City under the rule of law and authority. Committed to writing by rabbinic and scribal guilds of the post-Babylonian exilic Jewish society the Talmud was strongly concerned with hierarchy and deference to authority and power. The New Testament, which from a literary and theological perspective is in fact a Midrash of the Hebrew Bible including the Torah, and as Midrash it represents a reading and a writing of the 'New Covenant'. In stark contrast to the Talmud, the new reading and writing of the Word of God it is bereft of any legal code, and being bereft of any legal, the New Covenant could not become the law of the City, and thus strictly speaking Christianity is logically incapable of creating allegorical myths which could be used for the propagation Noble Lies and therefore an Oligarchy cannot be founded on the teachings of New Testament. In this sense Christianity embodies a lawless outlook with regard to social organization and social formations, making it deeply anarchistic in relation to the City as an Oligarchy. It becomes the consummation of God's revelation for humankind and at the same time confers 'retroactively' divine 'revelatory' status in a dialectical and ironical fashion on the literature which constitutes the Old Testament canon. Using the idea of the City as a metaphor for the Oligarchy Christianity represents the destruction of the City and the destruction of the City embodies the coming of the Messiah.

And in the tension between the birth of the City and the destruction of the City one has to remember that ever since the dawn of civilization the City could only exist in the form of an Oligarchy founded on law and authority. How then can the City and Christianity co-exist? Short answer: They actually cannot co-exist in reality. Historically, coexistence has only been possible when the Church and the City existed as separate institutions, in a social arrangement where the state was all powerful and the church weak with no real effectivity. This ironical arrangement effected the necessary destruction of Christianity. And so, ultimately the City in the form of the Oligarchy with its Noble Lies can only exist by destroying Christianity. The history of the City after Constantine is also ironically the history of the destruction of Christianity. Real or authentic Christianity ended within the historical horizon of the Pauline mission. Ironically and paradoxically, the Hebraic City endured ahistorically as the virtual City, as the Hellenic mirror image of actual Oligarchies, throughout the diasporic existence of Judaism until the Holocaust and the consequent birth of the Israeli Nation State in the form of a non-theocracy, in other words a secular democratic nation state, an embodiment of the continuance of the Oligarchy under the patronage of the USA, another Oligarchy.

All attempts to reconcile the existence of Christianity with the City in the form of a hierarchicalized Oligarchy required the destructive transmutation of Christianity itself into a Noble Lie for the ideological legitimation of the City. A paradigm example of this was the Noble Lie of Christian Nationalism which provided the justification for white rule under the inhumane regime of Apartheid which was universally viewed as a crime against humanity. The source of this Noble Lie was the work of the following Calvinistic philosophers: Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd and the South African theological acolytes at the Universities of Bloemfontein and Potchefstroom. Of course like all Cities the Apartheid City had its own ironies. Verwoerd the principle intellectual architect of Apartheid did not think much of the Noble Lies which the Reform Church and Reformed Theologians propagated from the pulpits and in the university lecture theatres. He did not even enjoy going to church and tried to avoid going to church as much as possible. Verwoerd was actually a deeply secular intellectual who believed ironically in the politics of identity and was therefore a nationalist. Was Verwoerd a fascist and was the Nationalist Party fascist? In a real sense they were, and this needs some explaining. Verwoerd and the Nationalist Party were not really interested in the rule of law or democratic principles or in the idea of a constitutional state based on the separation of powers or an independent judiciary or a free press or free political association. The idea of human rights was completely anathema to Verwoerd and the Nationalist Party. It was also anathema to the reformed theologians in the church and in the universities. And there was a strong antipathy to the whole idea of human rights within the Apartheid City and this antipathy was sanctioned by Noble Lies. The idea and principle of human rights was the first casualty of the Noble Lies of apartheid. It is this which made them fascists. So was the Apartheid City a fascist City? Yes it was a fascist Oligarchy and ironically the destruction of Christianity was necessary for its existence. Christianity exists in a constant state of destruction, but also as a kind of phoenix which constantly rises from the ashes only to die once more. Christianity exists by dying constantly as a religion. This is Christianity's own Promethean tragedy due to its enmity towards the Noble Lies, gods and idolatry of the City. This is also why Christianity is sustained by its absurd and lawless flavoured belief in a God who died on a Roman Cross for treason against the City, and whose last words were: 'It is finished'.

The self-destruction of the City is inevitable, it is realized in the open space under theAgon of the Agora. The City contains the Agora and the Agora exists by virtue of the City, and yet the City cannot exist so long as the Agora functions effectively as the Open Space.

All sedentary, high density, post-Neolithic forms of sociality have been oligarchical in organization. And it has been due to the inevitable irrationality of oligarchical decision making by a small self-selected or self-appointed ruling elite, within the context of all modes of production and social formations, whether they be Asiatic, Tributary, Capitalist or Communist, regarding the control and distribution of resources, which has led to the eventual collapse of all civilizations. And all currently existing civilizations will eventually collapse for the same reasons. Overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of post-Neolithic forms of sociality, the ruling oligarchs seeking only to further their own self-interests, whether it be power or profit, possess neither the requisite motivation nor the necessary information resources to sustain and preserve the existence of the civilization which has made their rule possible in the first place. All civilizations which have existed thus far have been essentially oligarchical in nature and consequently have been inadvertently self-engineered by the ruling elite to undergo eventual self-destruction.

And each day 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. 318. The Kohanim must wear their priestly garments during service—Exodus 28:2

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Like Christmas, Easter embodied its own peculiar religious narrative and with time I became increasingly aware that the Christian theological and eschatological significance of these two events which were celebrated as public holidays had become with time greatly watered down to the point that the Christmas and Easter message were no longer subversive to the interests of the ruling classes. With time the antipathy that I had developed towards Christianity as a result of my political radicalization during my undergraduate years waned as I became increasing conscious of the subversive and radical elements in the Gospel narratives. Even as a communist I had concerns about the rational and cognitive foundations for moral beliefs and ethical theory. I became more open to questions regarding the interrelationships between reason, faith, belief and the moral foundations of revolutionary praxis. Personally as a socialist and Marxist I had become privately critical of communistic orthodoxy and for moral reasons I was increasingly learning towards anarcho-communism and this made me more open to a critical re-thinking about revolutionary theory and praxis. It was during this time of soul-searching that I became acquainted with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray.

And each day 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. 319. Not to tear the priestly garments—Exodus 28:32

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Anarchism is built on the foundation of self-organization. Anarchism replaces law and authority, and all Noble Lies, with knowledge. Self-organization is not rooted in law and authority but based on mutual interests.

Outlooks regarding what it means to live the moral, just and good life, that is, a life guided by the principles of justice are formed and shaped by ideas regarding the nature of justice and the role of justice in living a good life. And the sources of these ideas are found in what Socrates refers to as Noble Lies or Noble Falsehoods. Noble Lies propagate the idea or ideology that all social and political arrangements between citizens of the city or polis exist by virtue of, or are dependent on, a transcendental natural ordering and transcendental governing principles. They are transcendental by virtue of their divine or transcendental origination, and also by virtue of their divine sanction. These ideas are articulated in the form of allegorical tales, myths and fictionalized memories. These allegorical tales, myths and fictionalized memories all play a role in the shaping of beliefs and outlooks. Beliefs and outlooks founded on Noble Lies are often resistant to critical appraisal and are not readily susceptible to rational contestation. For example, as demonstrated in an argument over the nature of justice between Thrasymachus and Socrates, Thrasymachus' idea of justice had already become fixed so that the truth or falsity of claims of all subsequent arguments regarding justice will be judged relative to the fixed outlook which Thrasymachus already holds. We could equate a fixed or unchanging outlooks as beliefs that something is the case without qualification and independent of all other beliefs. And it would seem that these kinds of outlooks or beliefs are impervious to rational argument. How can such beliefs be changed is the problem in question. How are fixed outlooks or beliefs revised or rejected in a process of self-correction based on evidence, logic, reason or rational argumentation? Changing of an outlook depends on the capacity to recognize the myth or fiction for what it is. Once an allegory or myth or fiction is recognized for what it is, it then becomes possible to interrogate and unveil the meaning of the allegory or myth or fiction with regard to it ulterior ideological function in the social and political organization of the city or polis. To recognize the allegory or myth or fiction for what it is depends on having or acquiring a concept of the nature truth, which is a concept that depends on the capacity to discriminate reality from appearance. And it is precisely this capacity which the in Plato's Republic the young lack. The education of the young in Plato's Republic includes the pedagogy of the Noble Lie. In this context, through the pedagogy of the Noble Lie, allegories, myths and fictions having set root in the mind of the young they seem to exercise a the kind of power in shaping their experiences and perceptions of reality. The power of the Noble Lie, the power in the pedagogy of the Noble Lie, lies in the power of the stories about the nature of the world and reality which are narrated in the allegory or myth or fiction. Stories have the power to generate conceptions of reality which can be terrifying to a child even though it is only a story. Here is an example where the capacity to discriminate an appearance from reality becomes a lived experience in the realm of the purely allegorical or mythological or fictional. In the exemplary case of Cephalus in Plato's Republic, the stories that he had heard in his youth were absorbed and retained until the end of his life. They become fixed mind as 'allegories-not-recognized-as-such' and retain their power to create anxiety in later life when the prospect of punishment in the after-life become a source of terror even in a mature man. Stories in the form of allegories, myths and fiction are vehicles for the transmission of the Noble Lies which shape the psyche, which through the educational process based on the pedagogy of the Noble Lie and the liturgy of repetition the Noble Lies become entrenched in the mind set and shape the outlook of not only the young but also in aging adults. Once entrenched in the outlook they become effective in influencing perceptions and beliefs at all stages of a person life, and this is mainly due to the failure to recognize allegories, myths and fictions for what they really are, and when this recognition does finally arrive, it is often too late. And as in the case of aging character like Cephalus childhood stories can continue to exert a disorientating effective. Cephalus makes a sacrifice to the gods just in case he offended the gods. The Oligarchy depends on the longevity of the Noble Lie in the minds of the citizens.

Also in connection with the meaning, significance and effectivity of the Noble lie, Socrates in the dialogues of Plato's Republic proposes that the incapacity to recognize an allegory for what it is represents an experience which is analogous to the dream state or shares similarities to the dream state. In the dream state the dreamer cannot recognize the exemplification of Platonic forms in the various structures of the world. This non-recognition of the imitation of the forms in the structuring of the world is taken to be analogous to the non-recognition of the allegorical for what it is as the case may be. The non-recognition of things for what they are in reality rather than the appearances of they seem represent is what Socrates associates with the dream state. Not recognizing appearances for what they are in conscious wakeful life is tantamount to entering a dream world. Recognizing the forms and recognizing the allegorical for what it is, is taken as equivalent to waking up from the dream state. This pattern of non-recognition, non-recognition of things as imitations of the forms and non-recognition of the allegorical for what it is, is taken be constitutive of the psyche and outlook of children in Plato's Republic. This non-recognition of the actual nature of reality in children also applies to the understanding of the meaning of words which become sources of verbal falsehoods in there sense that the truth is not grasped, and this counts as case of non-recognition analogous in structure to any allegory-not-recognized-as-such or myth-not-recognized-as-such or fictional-narrative-not-recognized-as-such. Interesting the verbal falsehood comes to rest deep in the soul without ever being connected to its 'deeper' meaning and Plato proposes that this represents an image or imitation of 'true falsehood'. This true falsehood represent the condition of the soul when living in a state of falsity. This lack of connection is what keeps falsehood in its verbal form and can be used as the Platonic 'Pharmakon' which is a remedy or medicine for a cure, but also at the same potentially a poison or dangerous drug depending on how it is used. As a non-recognized allegorical or mythological or fictional implant in the mind or soul this Pharmakon which is both a poison and a curative remedy can either help children through a process of enlightenment or cause children to live in a mental, emotional or psychological state in which they are unable to recognize the allegorical or the mythological or fictional for what it is, a mere story about something, a story about something conveyed as such in words, tales, stories and imitations all of which stand in a dialectical relationship to the true nature of the forms, and the idea of the Good. In the City the upbringing and education of citizens, including rulers and soldiers is equivalent to the implantation of the non-recognized allegory which results in the condition of being or living one's life in a dream state.

In this state or condition which is a consequence of upbringing and education the entire content of experiences is based on the non-recognition of the allegories or myth or fictions as such. This state is equivalent to the myth about having a dream about a dream and about waking up from a dream. And all experiences can be subsumed under this dream myth which arises as a condition or state brought about by upbringing and education as per the above reference. This myth which is transmitted as a Noble Lie to the citizens through the medium of education and upbringing serves as a wake-up call for those who undergoing 'education'. The myth sows the seeds of discontent with regard to the nature of the education which is now recognized as failing to distinguish appearance from reality. In this fashion the dream myth prepares the way for philosophy through the medium and enlightening 'effectivity' of the Noble Lie. The educational effectivity of the Noble Lie is realized in that 'aha!' experience of enlightenment when we see Noble Lie for what it is.

We need to remind ourselves that the function of the Noble Lie is make the citizen loyal to the prevailing order and therefore it has an ideological function in preserving the status quo. The Noble Lie in effect describes their condition with the respect to the totality of their experiences, where the totality of their experience as depicted in Plato's allegory of the Cave actually involves mistaking the shadows and echoes for reality. This account of the nature of the totality of their experiences which revolves around mistaking the appearances for reality sows the seeds of dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction involves more than a rejection of false beliefs, it involves a dissatisfaction with the totality of experience. It is the dissatisfaction which flows from the waking up from the dream state. When this happens the implantation of the Pharmakon has had a curable effect. The cure starts with dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction arouses discontent. These are the symptoms of health, confirming that the cure is doing its work by awakening the critical faculties.

The allegory of The Cave is likewise a remedy, a Platonic Pharmakon to cure the incapacity to recognize the allegorical nature of ordinary experience which has been brought about by upbringing and education involving stories and tales which incorporated Noble Lies in the allegorical representations of ideals of justice, duties, loyalties, roles and the nature of citizenship within the City. The allegory of The Cave provides a cure for the effects of the Noble Lie through the admission of Socratic Ignorance. The cure begins with the recognition that we don't know.

It would seem that even the presentation of evidence which is contrary to a belief will be ignored or even rejected for the sake of maintaining a cherished outlook. It is interesting to note that Thomas Kuhn's theory of the nature of revolutionary scientific paradigm shifts also eludes to this resistance to change in beliefs and outlook. Changing of an entrenched outlook or belief appears to require a conversion experience, which is also an experience which shares certain elements with Kuhn' idea of a gestalt switch, which involves suddenly seeing things differently. However, the argument here is not about changing outlooks through a process which involves a conversion experience or gestalt switch in order to revise or correct an outlook which has become fixed. It is the way in which enlightenment or seeing works in changing an outlook which is of interest here. How does seeing or perceiving something in a new light force a rational change in outlook? How can it be demonstrated that the existence of a state of affairs makes a belief or outlook false. For the sake of argument outlooks and beliefs will be treated as equivalent. A 'good belief' based on a Noble Lie is seen to promote the realization of good or positive outcomes but which are at the same time are also susceptible to future self-correction when shown to be inconsistent or contradictory with respect to various kinds of evidence, perspectives and arguments. Here we want to encourage beliefs without foreclosing on their later revision, that is, after they have served their purpose. Correction of beliefs involves the recognition of ignorance. The advice proposed by Plato in the Republic is along the lines that certain beliefs such as those regarding morals should be encouraged without any rational justification as a necessary interim measure during the period when the child's or young person's immature mind is still developing. During this juvenile developmental phase the child's mind is trained in logic and abstract reasoning through the medium of geometry and arithmetic. This training it is argued in the Republic will lay the foundation for dialectical reasoning which involves the ability to see the connection between things or the relation between parts and whole. The detached parts which constitute the different academic disciplines taught in the academy are brought together and their connections including their connection to reality are demonstrated. This happens when the young person has reached adulthood. The problem here is that dialectical reasoning involves seeing the nature of reality for what it is without the aid of sight or senses. It is anticipated in Plato's theory of education as proposed in the Republic that it will be through the mastery and exercise of dialectical reasoning, involving the interconnections of parts and whole in relation to reality, that previous held interim outlooks and beliefs, which when applied in their unqualified generality are actually false, will undergo a radical revision or self-correcting modification in accordance with rational dialectical arguments. The idea of defining the nature of justice in the form of an unqualified generality eventually runs into problems of inconsistencies and contradiction as was demonstrated by Socrates in the first three chapters of the Republic. This is reason enough for discouraging as an interim measure the education of the untrained minds of juveniles in the philosophical problems of morals and justice.

The education of the young to provisionally hold moral beliefs which are obviously false in their unqualified generalized interpretation and application will have pedagogical value once they have mastered the dialect of interconnection of the parts in relation to the whole. Mastery of the dialect will enlighten the adult mind on why a given moral outlook or a given concept of justice is problematic and possibly contradictory or even false when applied as an unqualified generalization to all situations requiring a moral judgement. Analogies to this can be drawn in the modern academy. Students are required to achieve mastery of classical mechanics and classical theory of electric and magnetic fields and so on as a prerequisite for studying quantum mechanisms and general relativity. A belief system or an outlook based only on classical mechanics regarding the nature and dynamics of very small and very large objects can be shown to be false, yet it is essential to know what a correct or valid solution looks like for a problem in classical physics in order to do and understand 'higher physics'. Going back to Plato's idea of the dialectic we can understand how the dialectic is applied by viewing truth as a system where a give singular or particular truth claim only has meaning or justification in relation how In Plato's Republic it can be argued that the pedagogy of the Noble Lie lays the foundation for dialectical reason. it fits coherently, consistently and rationally in the system of which embraces all other truths. A generalization of a specific belief as being true in all cases or situations without qualification can result in claims which are false. In contrast to generalizations, a specific belief can only be true by virtue of how it is connected to all the other relevant truth claims which constitute the system of truth or what Plato would call the whole. On a practical level in the education of the young mind Plato recommends that teaching should start with singular truth claims which when applied as unqualified generations can be shown to be obvious false in the sense of being contradictory or inconsistent. And this showing or demonstration that the unqualified generalization of a specific belief inevitably leads to claims which are obviously false represents precisely what is meant by the dialectical method. Here the notion of falsehood had been clarified. Falsehood is reducible in this instance to unqualified generalization of specific beliefs, for instance beliefs regarding justice and equality. However, in terms of the dialectic, it can be demonstrated how specific beliefs or outlooks can be false or truth, relative to a system of true beliefs. The framework for dialectical reason is the relationships between: Part and Whole, Part and System, Particulars and Universals, Instances and Forms or Ideas. Liberation from tyranny, oppression, inequality, injustice and violence can only be achieved when the code of law is replaced by dialectical reasoning. Because the Oligarchy is founded on a Mythos of law and authority, the greatest threat to the Oligarchy is the awakening of dialectical reason in the minds of the masses. Dialectical reasoning begins with dissatisfaction with the 'what is' and with the 'way things are'. The pedagogy of the oppressed involves the awakening of dissatisfaction and discontent. Criticism grows out of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction represents the frustration of Eros. A stronger statement would be that dissatisfaction embodies the frustration of Eros.

And each day 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. 320. The High Priest's breastplate must not be loosened from the Efod (priestly apron)--Exodus 28:28

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'She is a big girl now.' The words echoed in my mind and I managed to smile. My mood lifted as I walked towards the stables. While looking at the horses I wondered how they managed to get their coats so glossy, soft and velvety. The horses that I had learnt to ride after I became completely horse mad following my falling in love with Velvet Brown did not have the short soft shiny haired coats of the thoroughbreds that were used for show-jumping at the Rand Show. They were Boer ponies adapted to the harsh sandy thorn savannahs of the Kalahari. They were smaller than the thoroughbreds. But compared to the thoroughbreds they seemed to be a lot stronger, hardier and definitely indestructible.

As I walked from stable stall to stable stall I became aware that I was been shadowed by a man wearing dark glasses. He seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties. He was wearing a white short sleeved golf shirt and light brown flannels. It seemed to me that he was making an exaggerated display of interest in and affection for the horses chiefly for my benefit. Apart from the stable hands feeding, grooming and cleaning out the stables there was no one else around, we were the only visitors viewing the horses. There were rows upon rows of stable stalls all built back to back and separated by gangways wide enough for the movement of horses to and from the stables. The bottom half of the stable doors were bolted whereas the top half were left open so that the horses could view each other across the gangway. This arrangement also made it possible for visitors to view the horses. The parallel gangways were connected by narrow passages which broke the rows of stables into blocks. To get away from him I quickly ducked through a passage and quickly walked diagonally across the next gangway and disappeared into another passage, and I repeated this manoeuvre again and again until it seemed that I had shaken him off my trial.

I decided to leave the stable area and made off to the stalls and pens where the show cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were being housed. It seemed that I had given him the slip and there were streams of viewers working their way down the gangways that separated the animal stalls and pens, so I felt a lot safer. And then I saw him again. It was obvious that he was trying to draw me into his web of desire by insinuating himself into this strange pageantry of prize animals whose niche of domestication had become an absurd hybridization of zoo and circus. An invisible drama of cat and mouse was unfolding unseen in this crowded space that had been lit up with the penetrating gaze of a thousand eyes. I was not sure if he had seen me. Again I tried to shake him off my trail. I fled into a huge cavernous hall where the poultry, pigeons and rabbits were being exhibited. I was in state of panic now. He was ruining my day at the Rand Show with his persistent stalking. He soon appeared in the hall carrying a fluffy pink ball of candyfloss and made a beeline towards me. He wanted to give me the candyfloss. Still hiding behind his dark sunglasses he looked vaguely like Elvis Presley, especially the way he had styled his hair, his arms and hands were covered with a thick coat of curly black hair, and he smelt strongly of talc and cologne. When he tried to give me the candyfloss I declined and told him that I had been taught not speak to strangers and to never take sweets from strangers. I had also been warned by my parents never to get into a strangers car and because I would be most certainly strangled with a belt and die the most horrible death. I then asked him why was following me and why couldn't he leave me alone. Trying to be as charming and as friendly as possible he said:

'You looked so sad and lonely and all I wanted was to be your friend and do something nice for you, I just wanted to make you feel happy, because you deserve to be happy, especially because I think you are the most prettiest girl I have ever seen in my whole life, I don't think a pretty girl like you should ever feel sad or be lonely. I just wanted to be your friend, is that such a bad thing? Is it such a bad thing to care about someone who seems lonely and sad?'

'I am not lonely or sad, I just want to be left alone. You frighten me.'

'I did not mean to frighten you. I am sorry if I have made you scared.'

It looked like he wanted to put his arm around me and hug me. I stepped back, agilely escaping his grasping arms, and turning on my heel I sprinted away, running in full stride, dodging through the crowd, with my arms pumping wildly, the passage of my flight hemmed in between the cages of prize chickens, I run towards the exit at the other side of the hall. I burst breathlessly into the bright sunlight, sprinting across lawns, down winding paved paths under the canopies of towering trees and between vast hulks of exhibition halls until I reached the road with the overhanging cable cars, I continued running up the steep road, frantically pushing and pressing my way through the crowds towards the Tower of Light.

Standing by the Tower of Light with my heart pounding wildly I waited anxiously for my parents. I stood there for what seemed to be hours staring at the passing stream of Rand Show visitors, looking out for the Elvis Presley look-a-like wearing dark shades. My entire day at the Rand Show had been destroyed by a complete stranger. Trying to remain unnoticed in the long shadow of the Tower of Light I became uncomfortably aware as I watched their faces that grown men with wives and children were now staring at me. That I had become an object of male interest was a revelation and I wanted to go back to the shelter of my life in Hotazel where our adolescent female bodies even when clothed in wet skimpy swim suits at the swimming pool next to the rec club were never the objects of blatant adult male scrutiny. An angry defiance welled up in my heart: my beauty, my breasts, my legs and my body belonged to me and no one else. In spite of a growing awareness of the aura of sexuality that now veiled my face and body I had no interest in adolescent boys or teenage boys or youthful men. Only my Ouma Vollenhoven knew and understood the dark secret that I carried deep in my being, I was a lesbian, precociously a lesbian in my sexual self-awareness. As an adolescent girl I was finding myself increasingly erotically and flirtatiously drawn to women.

My encounter with Mister Elvis confirmed that I was now a fully-fledged sexual being. Above me the phallus of the Tower of Light stood erect as it reached upward into the blue heavens where young dark-eyed virgins dwelt beckoning every Mister Elvis cruising the grounds of the Rand Show.

And each day 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. 321. A Kohen must not enter the Temple intoxicated—Leviticus 10:9

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I hated it when my mom or others made the retort that Hannah was a tomboy. She was a tomboy because she wondered by herself into the Kalahari scrubland, because she took an inordinate and unhealthy interest in the inner workings of the internal combustion engine when she was with her father in the garage, and she collected rocks and animal skulls. I never saw myself as a tomboy. I was always very happy and satisfied with being girl. I loved my 'girlness'. I was always my father's little girl, and I loved the feeling of being his little girl, and I always felt very feminine with my dad. He did not seem to think it was unusual or something to be worried about with regard to my preoccupations with 'boys' stuff. But mom always felt that girls should not be interested in Robots or Meccano Toys. Why must the world be divided into two separate non-fusible realms, the masculine and feminine? Why do we have this Hellenic and Hebraic dualistic male-feminine partitioning of the Universe? I have never taken a strong anti-male feminist line. My father was one male that I loved very deeply and then there were the male friends and comrades who I loved in a non-erotic fashion with exceptional fondness. My Wits diving club male friends fell into this category and so did my male comrades in the underground.

And each day 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.322. A Kohen must not enter the Temple with long hair—Leviticus 10:6

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It was Euripides in his Medea who asked: If only children could be got some other way, without the female sex! Maybe in the history of 'mankind' it was not only the Greeks that dreamt of a womanless Universe. The Platonic philosophical tradition which is one of the corner stones of western civilization is imbued with the dream of a de-feminized world. The de-feminization of the world only began with the end of the Palaeolithic about ten to twelve thousand years ago with the emergence, growth and development of the Neolithic semi-permanent human settlements which was made possible following the domestication of plants and animals. In a real sense the self-domestication of 'Neolithic Man' which occurred in conjunction with domestication of plants and animals also coincided with the hierarchicalization of society and the masculinization of the world. And it was this masculinization of the world which resulted in the creation of the institutions of polygamy and slavery. With the Neolithic masculinization of the world women were demoted to a lower social status and we had the emergence of the patriarchal society and the patriarchal political order under which women have been oppressed and exploited for more than ten thousand years, and this has been the unbearable burden of women following 'mans' self-domestication.

And each day 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. 323. A Kohen must not enter the Temple with torn clothes—Leviticus 10:6

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The Bible is ridden with dialectical tensions: So God created mankind in his own image; in his own image God created them; he created them male and female (Genesis 1:27). God in 'his' own image is bisexual. 'He' is both male and female. God is the archetypical hermaphroditic being, 'he' is both man and woman, a fusion of masculinity and femininity, without one being subordinate to the other, because within the Godhead there is no hierarchy of being or persons, which is in accordance with the Triune formula articulated in the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed is both rich in theological, metaphysical and historical content, and it is beautiful when sung during Mass.

Can't help thinking about the deep paradox of Easter. The Nicene Creed, Good Friday, Good News, God is Dead. How can all of this be possible as a confession of faith? To put this altogether you need to some key concept such as: One Substance and Incarnation. The full meaning of God Incarnate means God actually died on a Roman Cross on Golgotha. Can God die? Yes God can die according to the Nicene Creed. Christianity is the most paradoxical faith on the Planet. The Nicene Creed goes as follows for the benefit of readers who have not be exposed to the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

And each day 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. 324. A Kohen must not enter the sanctuary of the Temple indiscriminately—Leviticus 16:2

325

My journey into the realization of my lesbianism and homosexuality has been a deeply enriching and wonderful experience. Along the road of my homosexual adventure into queerness I have had to work my way emotionally and intellectually through many conflicting and contradictory lesbian and feminist narratives. And the various narratives of deep history of women in love with women, and women having sex with women are not necessarily co-extensive or seamlessly continuous with the prevailing content of the modern orthodoxy of feminist lesbian narratives. Women have been in love with women, and women have been having sex with women for tens of thousands of years preceding the Neolithic. And I think that feminine or femme lesbianism has been under-represented in the dominant feminist lesbian narrative not because femmes were ever absent or did not exist in any significant numbers. They have always been there but they have not contributed to the public construction and performance of lesbian identities. As a biologist I came to realize that there were significant deficiencies in the theory of gender in relation to same-sex love and same-sex desire. Visible performative expressions of femininity frequently coincide with same-sex love and same-sex desire. This means there are feminine women who love and desire only women and who also have sex only with women. Homosexual women who self-identify as being feminine rather than masculine have always existed. These homosexual women are expressively and performatively feminine not only by choice and but as a result of an irresistible impulse or due to a reflexive compulsion that arises naturally as an inviolable biologically conditioned predilection or predisposition. In other words they do not have any choice in the matter, their love for women and desire for women and their need to have sex with women is governed by something which has all the features of a law of nature. In this sense same-sex orientation with respect to love and desire is a natural and morally-neutral condition.

And each day 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. 325. A Kohen must not leave the Temple during service—Leviticus 10:7

326

God is there and he is not silent. But where do we find God, if God is to be found anywhere at all? We can only find a faint trace of God in the marginalized faces of the finite Other, that is, we find God in the faces of the widow, the orphan, the sick, the dying, the prisoner, the poor, the destitute, the weak, the forlorn, the sad, the melancholic, the depressed, the exploited, the oppressed and in the faces of those who live without any hope. And in recognizing the faint trace of God in the Other, the Other becomes the Infinite Other. We don't find any authentic trace of God in the shining and gloating egotistical faces of the super-rich telly evangelists who collect buckets filled with cash sucked from the pockets of hypnotised assemblies of the credulous who under the spell of the evangelist's beguiling charisma are inspired to lust after the numbness that comes with the promised magical windfall of prosperity, which would be theirs, but only if they believe the theologically-suspect voodoo message peddled as the Gospel. But what must you believe in in order to be rewarded with God's cash bailout from a wretched life trapped in failure and poverty. What must you believe in? Must you believe in a simple formula? Will that save you? Will that be your redemption? Is this any different from pure magic? Believe this message and you will be saved. Believe this narrative and you will be saved. What does it mean to believe in a message? And what is the message? The message is the Good News. But pray tell, what is he Good News? The Good News is that Jesus died for your sins. It is as simple as that, or is it, in fact, that simple? The message is not that simple, however the apparent message, the putative message, the convenient message in all its illusionary simplicity, has been distilled from a narrative that is profound, enigmatic, paradoxical and totally unbelievable. God died on the cross at Golgotha. The God incarnate died on Good Friday on the Roman cross at Golgotha, the place of death and suffering. The suffering face, and finally, when it was all done, the death mask of the incarnate God bore the traces of the marginalized Other.

Women throughout the ages have worn the face of the marginalized Other. It was women who recognized themselves as the marginalized Other in the face of Jesus. Jesus was their lover, husband, brother and father. Women gathered themselves round the body of Jesus, on the shores of lakes, in villages, in pastoral landscapes of Galilee, at the well, in the street as adulterers, at his feet weeping, along the road to Jerusalem, at Golgotha on Good Friday and at his tomb on Easter morning. It was a woman that carried the message to the disciples: 'He has risen.'

And each day 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.326. To send the impure from the Temple—Numbers 5:2

327

Interlude and refrain: I am back in my room in Hotazel for the last time. I am surrounded by so many ghost from the past. I am also making steady progress with the writing as you can see if you have reached this point in my narrative. As you can see it is turning out to be a strange narrative. It is just the three of us in the house. I am aware that mom and dad have become increasingly religious after a life time of been non-practicing Christians. Speaking about religion, you may be wondering about the real significance of the theological or religious flavour of my writings. I do not confess that I have suddenly found God or that I have become religious. I have always believed in God, but without being particularly religious. So it is not a question of me suddenly finding God.

And each day 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. 327. Impure people must not enter the Temple—Numbers 5:3

328

I have not been searching for God. Of course the question of God inevitably arises in all my speculative forays into ideas regarding the meaning or significance or nature of: Universal History, Infinity, Sovereignty, Totality, the face of the Other, Consciousness, Responsibility, Morals and Free Will, the Absolute, Utopia, Sovereignty and the Epistemological Ultimum, and so on, and I don't think I have left anything out of the list of concerns, ultimate concerns if you like. The ultimate concern which is also the axis around which everything revolves is a commitment to the reality that we can know the Universal Truth or the Absolute Truth, even if only in some kind of provisional fashion, something like in the form of a convergent theory regarding the growth of knowledge where with the expansion of knowledge in a self-correcting manner we are continually converging asymptotically onto the Truth. All of these ideas or considerations have a direct bearing on how we conceive the nature of political theology. All of these ideas are also interdependent and therefore cannot be fully understood or analysed in isolation from the other ideas. Their meanings are mutually and logically interdependent. Our understanding of the significance of these ideas in relation to the meaning of life or the meaning of history or meaning of politics, and also to the question of how God fits into the overall picture, depends on how we conceive the essential nature of consciousness. And how we understand the nature of consciousness also has direct bearing on the problem of whether or not free will actually exists. And the question regarding the reality of free will has direct relevance to the problem of whether rational grounds exist for the reasonableness of moral action or moral agency in the world. Our conceptualization of consciousness will also have a direct bearing on our belief or non-belief in the existence of free will. Our understanding of the essential nature of consciousness will definitely decide whether or not free will exists as a reality. Together the question of the reality of free will and the nature of consciousness or the interrelation between the will and consciousness will determine what the end of 'man' will involve, and also whether with the end of 'man' we will see the rise of the posthuman or the rise of the transhuman, that is, the transcendence of the human, in the form of machine based consciousness and a machine based phenomenon of volition or will. The realization of the end of 'man' will come as consequence of a scientific and technological revolution. The creation by means of technological power human-like artificial intelligence in robotic entities will signal the end to the human and rise of posthuman or transhuman. The existence God may be the condition that makes this possible. God is immanent in some way in matter and matter can rise to a state of transcendence. This is why I believe in God I suppose, even though I am a Marxist and a socialist and increasingly an anarchist. Anarchist? Does that surprise you dear reader. Yes I am an anarchist as from now!

And what about the end of man and the rise of the posthuman and transhuman, is it a possibility? I believe it is a distinct possibility. It is a God made possibility. It a possibility that is inherent in the dispositional powers of matter.

And each day 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. 328. [Certain] impure people must not enter [even] the Temple Mount area—Deuteronomy 23:11

329

There are also a lot of things that I don't believe in. For example, I don't believe in representative parliamentary democracy based on elected representatives who are members of competing political parties. I don't believe that capitalism will ever be able to provide the conditions for securing popular political empowerment, popular sovereignty, freedom, individual autonomy, and the satisfaction of needs. I believe in socialism. I believe in the struggle. The struggle continues in spite of everything. From the growing flood of news reports it appears that the complete collapse of socialism is imminent. This increasingly seems to be the real reason for the dropping of the charges and for my sudden otherwise unexplainable release. Does this signal the end of history, the final victory for capitalism and the inevitable demise of socialism? I don't believe so!

And each day 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. 329. Impure Kohanim must not do service in the temple—Leviticus 22:2

330

Dare we dream of Utopia? Dare we dream of Utopia and the transhuman? Why not? In the struggle we are driven by a utopian impulse or a utopian compulsion if you like. Anarchism or anarcho-communism is a utopian ideal and the utopian ideal also seeks the transcendence of the human and the so-called human condition of a desiring being.

And each day 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. 330. An impure Kohen, following immersion, must wait until after sundown before returning to service—Leviticus 21:6

331

An anarchist utopia was first realized in some form in the Old Testament Hebrew republic under the judges. So we do indeed have theological grounds or a biblical precedent for seeking our dream of utopia. The reign of God begins when we recognize ourselves in the infinite of the face of the Other. Well I am taking this idea of 'infinity' and the 'faces of the Other' one step further than what I think Emmanuel Levinas the first inventor of this idea had envisaged. So going back to the question of my belief in God, like Levinas and others including Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur, I also happen to be a person of the Bible, believe it or not.

To be a person of the Bible in the truest sense possible is to be one who believes that God has to be there and She is not silent. So there you go, I believe in God, and I am not going to be defensive about this or try formulate an apologetic defence. God is there. There should be no problem with this datum. I don't believe it is incoherent or irrational, it is certainly intelligible to me.

And each day 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. 331. A Kohen must wash his hands and feet before service—Exodus 30:19

332

The idea of utopia has generally been pejoratively trivialized in a dismissive mocking fashion as something unattainable in any existing or possible world. Why? The dismissals are endless and many resort to a theory of human nature and some have a distinctive theological or religious flavour which hinges on the idea of the intractable sinfulness of the human heart. This does not mean that we should view the attainment of utopia as an apocalyptic hope realizable only by divine intervention rather than by an ongoing project involving the collective application of our minds and our human efforts.

The utopian ideal would be the practical and collective attainment of the conditions for human life that are infinitively better than what we are currently experiencing. This is a rational and attainable goal. This is want I mean by utopian. We could rationality list the preconditions for the attainment of utopia. We could also rationally identify the obstacles blocking the attainment of utopia. And we could rationally formulate the revolutionary theory and praxis for the reaching this goal.

How does this conceptualization of a practical realizable utopia figure with respect to all the talk about the meaning of Totality, Infinity, Absolute, Epistemological Ultimum and Universal History or the end of history or even of God? In Christian thinking the end of history, the event of Totality, the final Judgment, the Epistemological Ultimum and the unveiling of the Absolute, and the simultaneous inauguration of Utopia would coincide with the Parousia, which is the second coming of the Messiah. The attainment of ultimate certainty about everything would be equivalent to the achievement of the Epistemological Ultimum and this event of enlightenment would enable the building of the everlasting Utopia. Utopia is founded on an Epistemological Utopia.

In spite of what Richard Rorty has argued in this book 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', every serious philosophical and scientific endeavour dreams about finding or establishing the ultimate foundation of knowledge, the dream persists even though we have been, using Heidegger's metaphor, thrown into 'a' world, and our minds are no longer pure but have been shaped by the accretions of history, we are not uncontaminated, we are infected with all kinds of ideas, traditions, persuasions, predispositions, thoughts and beliefs, we are not pure subjects, our cognitive abilities or consciousness are distorted, yet we are still able to see as through a glass darkly that there exists a glimmer of hope, and that the dancing shadows will materialize into the embodiment of the unvarnished truth. The nostalgia for an Epistemological Utopia endures in spite of all the setbacks and ongoing chorus of the sceptics to the contrary. Many refuse to accept the death certification announcing the passing of the Epistemological Utopia and as steadfast stubborn philosophical toilers they remain bravely unconvinced by the notices of condolences posted in the unremitting flow of obituaries from the likes of the second Wittgenstein and others.

But then again what philosophical endeavour is not about truth? There are none which can honestly state that their quest is not about truth, but rather about non-truth! We are all searching for the truth, no matter what. What does it really mean to know everything? Personally as a scientist, for me it is clear.

And each day 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. 332. A Kohen with a physical blemish must not enter the sanctuary or approach the altar—Leviticus 21:23

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To know everything would mean that we would know how matter gives rise to consciousness and we would know what kinds of motions and mechanics gives rise to the emergence of consciousness and the preservation of memory. We would be able to exist forever as nonhumans or as transhumans in the form of robotic machines which are conscious and think. This will coincide with the end of desire and Eros would no longer be physical but would instead exist in its true form or embodiment as the mindful contemplation of the ideas or forms of the good, the true and the beautiful. There will be no future and time would cease to exist, there will be no becoming, only pure being, and Utopia would be everlasting as there will no longer be any needs or wants. As transhumans we would become the mirror of God reflecting Her image in all its perfection and feminine beauty. And finally we see that God and the Universe or God and Matter do not constitute a Manichaean dualism of Good and Evil.

And each day 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. 333. A Kohen with a physical blemish must not serve—Leviticus 21:17

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What would be the Christian pivot or fulcrum on which the Totality would hinge? It would be the recognition of infinity in the face of the Other. 'What you do to the least of these my brothers and sisters you do unto me'. So in the fictional form of the parable the Epistemological Ultimum of the Universe is unveiled and the Bible becomes the authoritative, infallible and inerrant incarnate Word of God.

In Mark 16: 1-8 we read:

Now when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, that they might come and anoint Him. Very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they said among themselves, "Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?" But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away—for it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man clothed in a long white robe sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples—and Peter—that He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him, as He said to you." So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

'He is going ahead of you to Galilee'. According to the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg the author of the book 'Jesus: God and Man', the resurrection of Jesus was a real historical event.

And each day 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. 334. A Kohen with a temporary blemish must not serve—Leviticus 21:18

335

It was a hot Sunday afternoon when we arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris from Zurich. Like a child I kept on asking Kate if could we go up the Eiffel Tower after sun set. She agreed but only after having an afternoon nap. At the station I bought a French phrase book, a street map of Paris and a Paris tourist guidebook. I was now equipped to conquer Paris. From the station our taxi dropped off in the Latin Quarter by the Hotel du Levant Paris in the Rue de la Harpe.

While Kate had her nap I decided to go for a walk. It was with some reluctance that she allowed me to go. It was the first sign of her wanting to cling to me and control me. She was hoping that we would take a nap together like we had often done so far and afterwards feeling fresh and amorous we would make love, shower, get dressed and go out until past midnight. She had got into a routine and of how we would spent our days and nights. She tried to plan everything to death on what we were going to do next. So it was a relief to be alone for a while and free to do what I felt like doing. Going down the lift I flipped through pages of the tour guidebook. Getting out of the lift I continued to browse through the guide while walking through the foyer to entrance. The name Sartre and a café called Les Deux Magots caught my eye. I had just finished reading Nausea and I had become an instant fan of Jean-Paul Sartre. From Rue de la Harpe I walked to the intersection with the Boulevard Saint-Germain and within minutes I was standing on the pavement outside Les Deux Magots. The tourist guide book said that not only Sartre, but also Simone de Beauvoir, Earnest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht and James Baldwin among others had frequented the now famous café as their chosen rendezvous and place of literary labour. In the bright light of a Parisian summer it felt as if I was standing on holy ground.

And each day 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. 335. One who is not a Kohen must not serve—Numbers 18:4

336

A day after my last exam and a few days before I left for the overseas trip I went home to Hotazel. At dinner it was just mom, dad and myself at the table. It was then that she raised the issue that the most money had been spent on me. My holiday the year below to the Bazaruto Archipelago had cost a fortune and now my trip to Europe was also costing a fortune. My dad just smiled at me when my mom was not looking. I did write a long letter of thanks to my parents from Spain and I sent it to them by airmail, I also sent Elsabe and Malcolm postcards almost every day. In fact I posted a card to parents every day. That cost me a small fortune! But this exercise of thoughtfulness did help a bit to salve my feelings of guilt for all the money that had been spent on my holidays and also on university studies. Maybe one day I will be able to repay my parents in some way.

And each day 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. 336. To offer only unblemished animals—Leviticus 22:21

337

Now a year later after my Vilanculos trip I am standing outside the Les Deux Magots in the Latin Quarter of Paris, I am nineteen years old and I am in a love relationship with a woman in her thirties her who is also one of my lecturers, lecturing mycology and crytogamic botany. Once again I felt highly educated and worldly especially after reading Nausea and The Thief's Journal, and also because of the fact that I was being fucked by Kate at almost every opportunity. Paris was another universe compared to the innocence of turquoise seas, palms tree and white beaches of Santa Carolina Island. Vilanculos and the Bazaruto Archipelago was a holiday of beautiful innocence and perfect purity. Now light years away from Santa Carolina I was alone, less innocent and less pure, on the streets of Paris for a few hours on a glorious summer's afternoon while Kate was getting her beauty sleep. Compared to last year when I was still very young and naïve first year student I am now a young woman of the world, experienced in the ways of the world thanks to Kate's prodigious appetite for sex.

I sit down at one of the tables on the sidewalk and quickly open my French phrase book. I open the book by the section on ordering beverages in a restaurant, and I read as fast as I can through the different ordering options:

Waiter!..Garçon! ( garhsawn!)

I'd like...je voudrias ( zhuh voo-dray)

A white coffee...un café au lait ( uñ ka-fay oh lay)

The waiter arrives at my table, he sees the map of Paris and notices my French phrase book. Obviously I am a tourist, but a very young tanned and sexy tourist with nice legs and a nice sensual body, and a pretty face, dark long glossy hair and bright red lipstick lips. I am one of those very feminine lipstick lesbians, but he does not know that.

I smile the most flirtatious Parisian smile and say as sweetly as possible:

'Je voudrias un café au lait...'

His face breaks into the most beatific smile. It is the first time in my life that I have ever flirted with a man.

And each day 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. 337. Not to dedicate a blemished animal for the altar—Leviticus 22:20

338

Kate has made me her confidant. After we have made love we lie in each other's arms. She is vulnerable, she tells me I am so young beautiful and she confesses that she loves me with all her heart and cares for me deeply. She wants to hear that I love her and so I tell her that I love her. I do love her. I have 'feelings' for her and I care for her. At the same I also wondered whether one day I will be like her clinging desperately to the body of a younger woman as I too began to feel my fading youthfulness slipping away with the creeping onset of the autumn of my life. Kate spoke a lot about her struggles with her career ambitions. She was a senior lecturer and had submitted in her ad hominem application for promotion to become an associate professor.

And each day 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. 338. Not to slaughter it—Leviticus 22:22

339

I hear the percussion of high heels. I turn and see an attractive woman possibly in her late thirties wearing a summers dress. She sits down by the table across from me. After she has ordered coffee she lights up a cigarette, she draws and exhales, we exchange curious glances, our eyes remain fixed on each other and I smile at her, she returns my smile and cocks a questioning eyebrow at me as my smiling gaze remains fixed on her face. We both know that we are queer. She quickly sizes up the situation, seeing the French phrase book and the map of Paris. She asks me in perfect but French accented English.

'Are you on holiday in Paris?'

'Yes,' I answer.

'Where are you from?'

'I am from South Africa.'

She is surprised. She asks if I would like to have another coffee. I join her at her table. I feel my knees pressing against her knees. We talk and her hand soon covers my hand. She asks if I like sex and tell her I like having sex. We go to her flat which is in the Latin Quarter close to the Sorbonne, close to our hotel. In her flat I explain that I don't have much time because my family expects back soon for supper. We make love. She wants to use a dildo on me, I resist explaining that I don't want a dildo in my vagina or anus. She understands. I feel her fingers in my vagina and anus. We lie naked on her bed. She lights up a cigarette and we speak. She is a writer and a journalist. I tell her that I am a student and I am studying to be a zoologist. I also tell her about my new found interest in Sartre and Genet. She laughs good-naturedly and then tells me bluntly that Sartre is now passé, he is a senile old man, and that no one thinks much of him anymore. She explains that there is a new generation of philosophers, and she rattles off the names of Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. She asks if I am a Marxist. Without thinking I say yes and she chuckles. You are such as a sweet girl she tells me. She then says: 'I suppose you going to tell me that you are also a communist'. Again I say yes without knowing why, and she laughs, her eyes are dancing with humour.

'You are a sweet, innocent and pure girl, do not ever change, the world can only become a better place with people like you.'

She then held me tightly in her arms and whispered in my ear saying that she wished we could be lovers forever.

'You better be going, my partner will soon be coming home from work,' she says, releasing me and getting up from the bed she slips on a night gown.

It was seven-o-clock when I left her flat. When I got back to the hotel Kate was in a state. She was extremely angry, verging on the brink of hysteria. We had our first serious fight.

'Where have you been, I was worried sick, I am responsible for you, and why do you smell of cigarettes?'

I shouted back at her: 'We always just do what you want to do and you never ask me what I would like to do. Everything revolves you and what you want.'

'You know that that is not true! Tell me now what you would like to do for the rest of our holiday.'

She then burst into tears, sitting down on the bed she began to sob. I sat down next to her and put arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the neck and cheek. I felt bad and said that I loved her.

'I love you too,' she answered as she turned and embraced me tightly.

'I love you so much,' she repeated, as she pressed her hot tear soaked cheek against mine.

It is our first day in Paris and the day shows no promise of ever ending. After a quick shower and a fresh change of clothes we step out into the streets of a city that was still bathed in golden light. In the space of one hour I have made love to two women before the sun had set. Paris the city of lights and the city of love seems to have lived up to its reputation. And neither of the two will ever know of the existence of the other unless we bump into her. I hope not, but I would like to see her again, the French woman. Her name was Monique Brouillet. Was I going to fall in love with Monique before nightfall descended on Paris?

We debate whether to have supper now or later. Kate is careful to let me decide what we should do. We are both famished, I think it would be good idea if we eat first before walking along the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. I open the Paris tourist book. I suggest we go to the Café de Flore. What if Monique happened to turn up at the Café de Flore? Kate meet Monique. Monique meet Kate. Who I am? What kind of person am I? I am a mystery to myself.

And each day 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. 339. Not to sprinkle its blood—Leviticus 22:24

340

Dear reader you may feel inclined to judge me harshly regarding my infidelities with Kate. Have I not expressed strong views on the foundations of morality and responsibility as something that concerns the conscience? Have I not hinted that morality or moral action or moral agency is actually caused by the awakening of conscience when gazing upon the face of the Other? I do not wish to excuse myself. I did feel bad at the time given the facts of the situation. In a way I did betray Kate. I can imagine just how shocked she would have been if she knew what I had done behind her back while she was napping.

And each day 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. 340. Not to burn its fat—Leviticus 22:22

341

You may think that I have no conscience, that I have been sluttish and immoral.

And each day 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. 341. Not to offer a temporarily blemished animal—Deuteronomy 17:1

342

But the operative word here is cause. The expression on the face of the Other causes the awakening of conscience and having gazed upon the face of the Other we feel compelled to act responsibly as moral agents to uphold what is good and true and beautiful. Was it uncontrollable lust or was it curiosity that drove me into Monique's bed? Was it a lapse of conscience? I don't think it was mere lust or desire. Ok then, I do admit that I did find Monique desirable, I did feel the awakening of desire, I did entertain the prospect of what it would it feel like to be with her in bed. Maybe she could sense it. Maybe my face was filled with unmistakable lasciviousness. Women don't feel lust. It is men that lust after women. It was in a way out curiosity and not lust that I gave in to desire. I was in the mood for a sexual encounter and wanted to be fondled, kissed and caressed and brought to an exquisite climax by a beautiful and interesting woman. I also wanted to feel what it was like for me to make love to this woman who was a perfect stranger in a strange city. I was ready for adventure.

But still, as I write these notes I cannot help thinking about the operative words that are the key to understanding the drama, or in other words the dramatic event which took place one afternoon in Paris, and the two specific words that I happen to be thinking of cause and effect and the role they play a role in explicating the relationship between consciousness and the body or the mind and the body. My act of adventurous infidelity with Monique was a mind-body problem that needed to be solved. Other thoughts begin to intrude, I must write them done. There is the issue of empathy, empathy can be viewed as a faculty, the faculty which makes the experience of conscience possible. The experience of empathy and conscience are themselves forms of consciousness. And still more thoughts intrude themselves into my mind, new thoughts which I know are somehow all interconnected with the drama of my little Paris adventure.

And each day 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. 342. Not to sacrifice blemished animals even if offered by non-Jews—Leviticus 22:25

343

Also in terms of the mind-body problem I can say for sure from my own experiences that many women enjoy being touched, felt, 'fingered', fondled, kissed and caressed by a woman. I love being brought to a climax. A woman's body is designed for pleasure, it is superbly adapted for the physical experience of pleasure, ecstasy and orgasm, and it is for this purpose that the entire body of a woman, every part of her anatomy has been adapted, adapted to experience erotic pleasure and in this sense a woman's body is the perfect sex organ, it is erotic in its entirety from head to foot, especially for a women who happens to be lipstick lesbian like myself. A woman, and especially a queer woman, is the full and perfect embodiment of a sexual being, of an erotic being, of a being seeking erotic pleasure and ecstasy.

And each day 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. 343. Not to inflict wounds upon dedicated animals—Leviticus 22:21

344

In his Theogony, Hesiod expounded on the myth of Pandora. It was through Pandora that the race of women brought both sex and death into world of men. Pandora the first woman was not born, she was crafted from mud by Hephaestus the master craftsman of the gods. The unborn Pandora came alive from clay, from matter as it were, as an artefact, as an artistically created artefact, shaped into a sensual being who was not supposed to become an erotic body for mere sexual reproduction. Before Pandora there was peace and harmony on earth among men. But then Prometheus stole the fire from the gods, an act more audacious than the building of the Tower of Babel, and Hephaestus was instructed to make Pandora the instrument for the punishment of man. With the coming of Pandora humankind became divided into two races, divided into two different kinds of separate beings, man and woman. And sexuality had entered the world through the agency and being of women, it was this which also brought about an asymmetry into the world of conscious beings, resulting in the difference between the self and the Other, creating a rupture between the self and the Other. The asymmetry of sexuality resulted in the dualism of identity and difference which in turn transformed humans into a divided beings, and the self from this event could only become self-identical with the Other through LESBIANISM. So while man represents mankind women represent only their own sex and it was through this self-recognition, this self-representation, this self-mirroring in the face of the Other, that women overcome the dualism of self and Other, and identity and difference, and being and difference. Difference vanished in women with the being of women becoming self-identical to itself through the recognition of self in the mirror of the Other. And so, only women can fully know the body of women when it comes to the pleasure of sex. For men the women's body as an artistic creation from the formlessness of mud remains forever a terra incognita. As terra incognita it can only be ploughed like the conquered and domesticated earth and sown with seed. This is how man punish women for dividing humans into male and female.

And each day 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. 344. To redeem dedicated animals which have become disqualified—Deuteronomy 12:15

345

The idea of the city has caught my imagination. As child I became aware of the notion of the City for the first time when we were stranded in the city of Springs and slept overnight in its streets. Yet I was born in the city. What is a city? As a child I was surprised to learn that Springs was a city, but it was a city that died every day when the sun went down, as night fell its streets became empty. I remember saying to my mother that real cities don't die when the sun goes down. In a very interesting Evening Song sermon Father Digby when he was still a priest spoke about the first city rising up phoenix-like from the collapsed ruins of the Tower of Babel. From the domesticated earth and the ploughed bodies of women the Post-Palaeolithic City rises from the ashes of Babel as an edifice of man's subjugation of women and earth and of its creatures. Dialectically a vibrant feminism emerges from ancient myths of the Greeks and the Hebrews to reclaim the rightful status of women in God's Universe as supreme and wonderful beings.

And each day 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. 345. To offer only animals which are at least eight days old—Leviticus 22:27

346

(Judges 4:21).

The Talmudic and Midrashic literature

The hermeneutical function of Midrash which been created and shaped by the 'Soferim' was to expound on and interpret the significance, meaning and teachings of the Torah so that under the guidance of the Torah a holy and God pleasing life could be lived.

And each day 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. 346. Not to offer animals bought with the wages of a harlot or the animal exchanged for a dog—Deuteronomy 23:19

347

Why make the queer world of lesbianism the ambiguous theme of art in paintings or writing? The lesbian image of women in love which has always been an object of male erotic obsession and a general social approbation so it came as no surprise to discover that since the nineteenth century lesbianism had become an object of high art and popular erotica. It was obvious that the public display of paintings of erotic images of lesbianism was more acceptable to the heterosexual male than images of male homosexuals in a sexual embrace. Gustave Courbet's painting called 'The Sleepers' attracted our interest.

Looking at 'The Sleepers' we both agreed that it was a failed heterosexual representation of putative female homoeroticism. It was obviously created exclusively for the heterosexual male gaze. And the symbolic representation served that objective only: 'symbolic lesbian sex' for masculinized erotic consumption. The misrepresentations of lesbian sex by male artists or male pornographers is a direct consequence of limitations imposed by the male heterosexual consciousness. It simply lacks the power of perception which would be necessary to have meaningful access to the reality of female homoerotism. It also lacks the corresponding mental capacity to assimilate or appropriate the visual phenomenon of the lesbian subject as a non-heterosexual or non-masculinized mental picture. It thus fails to represent the actual subjective reality of what it means to-be-lesbian-in-the world. What I am trying to say is that the heterosexual male cannot experience what it feels like to be a lesbian. This is why the male heterosexual depiction of female homoeroticism inevitability suffers from an under-determination of representational realism. Also as a being the male is sexually impoverished by the constraints imposed by his own mind and body. Sexually speaking the male is an ephemeral creature. The gun shot of the male hard-on-ejaculation-orgasm is nothing but a brief flash in the pan which cannot fail to echo of disappointment in the woman who has been mounted by a man. It lacks physical stamina. The male sexual act suffers from an embarrassment of physiological-emotional-psychological weaknesses. These limitations defines the essence of the male sex act, it simply lacks erotic substance and erotic power. When it comes to sex, women are the stronger sex by far.

Gazing at the portrait I can still remember saying to Kate that sex could not exist without the female body and that the female body constitutes the very conditions of possibility for the existence of male sex and that female homoerotic sex in turn represents the annihilation of men as sexual beings. In Greek mythology is was through Pandora that sex and death became the dominating reality that cast its dark shadow over the masculinized world of men. The need for men to have sex with women was a symptom of their twofold deficiency as a masculinized race. Firstly without having sex with women they could not perpetuate themselves as race, so in this respect they were deficient beings. And secondly, males were sexually incapable of satisfying their own erotic desires in the absence of woman. The male race were no longer self- sufficient with regard to procreation and the satisfaction of erotic desire. This was the punishment that the gods meted out to men because of Prometheus' deed. The crafting of Pandora as the first woman from mud symbolizes the conjunction of sex and death for the male race. In the absence of the female body the race of men are as good as dead, this is the real punishment of the gods because of Prometheus. Man lives enthralled to female sexuality and the female body. This is his ultimate insufficiency or deficiency as a being in the Universe. This is the punishment of Pandora that has been visited on the race of men.

Kate looked at me. From the expression on my face I suppose she could read my mind.

'The picture has really got to you,' she said.

'Yeah it really pisses me off.'

The painting irritated me. I felt belittled. It was patronizing.

'I think the painting serves an important educational function, there should be more paintings of naked women in love in art galleries,' Kate said.

'Why do you say that?'

'So the public can become enured to lesbianism and homosexuality,' she said

'Enured?'

'Yes habituated. Inured if you like. '

'Habituated! Inured! Like habituated to something that is undesirable, something that is unpalatable?'

'No that is not what mean,' Kate answered.

'Then what exactly do you mean?' Was my question.
'Pictures of lesbians in museums like the Louvre could result in the banalisation of homosexuality, and that would be good thing,' she said with an ironic smile.

'Banalisation of homosexuality, that is as a stroke of genius. To become inured to the spectacle of women making love, is ironical, because what could be more natural than women in mutual embrace, women are meant to be in love with each other.'

And each day 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. 347. Not to burn honey or yeast on the altar—Leviticus 2:11

348

In July 1974 on our second day in Paris when we visited the Louvre, I had just finished the first semester in second year botany and second year zoology covering courses in mycology, phycology, crytogamic botany, invertebrate zoology, and comparative vertebrate anatomy. Kate had lectured a course in introductory mycology, and as you may have gathered I was a student in her class. She said she was very proud me as I had done exceptionally well in all my exams. Of course she had her breached professional ethics in telling me this before the official release of the examination results. In botany I had learned about monoecious and dioecious sexual reproduction and in invertebrate zoology I had learned about hermaphroditism and amphimictic sexual reproduction. We had also covered in the various lectures the evolution of sex and sexual reproduction in fungi, algal, mosses, ferns, gymnosperms, angiosperms, invertebrates and vertebrates including humans. And as you can imagine in biology sex turns out to be quite a complicated phenomenon and the topic of sex from biological perspective is actually very broad and wide ranging in scope.

And each day 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. 348. To salt all sacrifices—Leviticus 2:13

349

What about gender? In order to differentiate between the sex and gender it is important to note that:

Firstly, Sex deals with – a) the anatomy, biochemistry and physiology of the male and female reproductive system, and b) with all the male and female specific secondary sexual characteristics with also include both anatomy and behaviour. When specific or selected characters and attributes associated with a) and b) are taken together as a package of characters and attributes for a given individual, this package of features then characterizes the specific sexual dimorphisms associated with what is typically a male and what is typically a female for a given species. At the cellular level sex involves meiosis, the generation of haploid sex cells or gametes (sperm and ova) and the fusion of the nuclei of gametes (sperm and ova) derived from the two sexes resulting in the formation of a diploid zygote. So this is what is entailed in the meaning and reference of the word 'SEX'. You can now appreciate that the idea of sex is actually quite a complex concept. The ancient Greeks and Hebrews had no idea just how complicated sex actually is. Nor could they have imagined that the fundamental first step in the evolution of sexual dimorphism resulting in the male and female versions of a species was the evolution of meiosis. The evolution of the process of meiosis triggered the evolution of sex in all eukaryotes. If we want to know where sex came from, then a good place to start would be solving the problem of how meiosis evolved in the first place. Sex in itself as a process of a reproduction is neither good nor evil. It is just the motion of matter. Sex is purely a matter of biology and evolution, nothing more than that. In generally biology sex is a binary state of affairs.

Secondly, Gender deals with the psychological and social construction of how femininity and masculinity is perceived and experienced, and how biologically rooted or biologically determined behaviour influences sexual preference for a given gender. Gender is what we experience as individuals in response to the femininity and masculinity of other individuals within a psychological, behavioural and social context or framework. Gender is defined by what we do sexually in terms of sexual preference. It is the result of how we are neurologically wire-up and nothing more than that. It purely a matter of the brain and the nervous system, and nothing more than that. Again, what we do in terms of gender perceptions and gender preferences is just a matter of matter in motion. There is neither good nor evil. However, there is rider that I have allowed to be slipped this explication of the concept of gender. Biologically rooted behavioural predisposition with regard to sexual preferences may be the over-riding factor in gender determination, and this would mean the role of external social influences may only plays a secondary role in gender determination. If this is the case the sex vs gender dualism may be false. Personally I think it false.

And each day 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. 349. Not to omit the salt from sacrifices—Leviticus 2:13

350

Personally as a biologist I am persuaded that homosexuality is biologically predetermined disposition regarding sexuality. I am biological queer, I have queer biology, this is my internal or innate or intrinsic constitution, it is my essential nature, I am queer by virtue of my biology, this is the way my internal nature has been biological and developmentally determined. I have no problems as a scientist with the idea of essentialism. I am essentially queer. When we did elements of animal behaviour in third year zoology, I have to believe that I was essentially queer. It was in my nature to be queer. It was not choice. In fact I had now choice in the matter of my sexual orientation. I gradually discovered that was queer. But all the signs that I was queer from early child would have clearly evident to the knowledgeable observer.

It was my nature not my choice: This fact is important with regard to the nature versus nurture dualism. No amount of corrective nurturing would have 'cured' me of my queerness. For my queerness there was no queer.

And each day 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. 350. Carry out the procedure of the burnt offering as prescribed in the Torah—Leviticus 1:3

351

Going back to this idea that gender is a social construction, it could be that the social may play a role in gender expression or the externalization of perceived and experienced gender identity. This is fine in my mind. Externalization of queerness increases the visibility or perceivability of your gender orientation and sexual preferences.

351. Not to eat its meat—Deuteronomy 12:17

352

There are tacit signs by means of which we advertise our queerness. Kate realized very quickly that I was queer. In a matter of moments both Monique and I realized that we were both queer. We knew by instinct and not by social conditioning or by nurture that we were queer, all the signs were screaming out that we were both queer. She saw that I was a lipstick lesbian.

352. Carry out the procedure of the sin offering—Leviticus 6:18

353

When did Kate realize that I was queer? I think it was when I was in my first year. Kate was our botany lecturer in first year. She lectured on the plant kingdom for a full semester. As a mycologist the fungi were her passion. However she was a highly knowledge overall botanist with side interests in the algae, mosses (bryophytes) and ferns. She made botany exciting in more ways than one. As I have already said she was a fitness fanatic and very health conscious, she also did weight training, modern dancing, ball room dancing and participated in vaudevillian female competitive bodybuilding or female physique 'pageants'. While being well build, she intentionally avoided developing excessive muscle mass and focused more on the eye-pleasing contouring of her figure. She presented her shapely calves, thighs, buttocks, hips, arms and bosom to the appreciative gaze with the poise and elegance of someone whose vanity needed constant inflation by the admiring gazes of both sexes.

In the lecture theatre she controlled a submissive first year class with the intimidating presence of a dominatrix who did not suffer fools gladly and who would gladly whip you with the cane that she flourished like a sabre while pointing it at her artistically drawn coloured chalk diagrams of the gametangium of a fungus, alga, moss, fern or plant. Her lectures were riveting as she expounded on the sex lives of fungi, algae, mosses and ferns, wearing a starched bright white lab coat over her chic clinging slip of a dress that barely reached her knees. She always wore sensible low heeled shoes.

In the very first botany practical class the exercise for that afternoon involved learning how to use the microscope. At our work stations we were given Pasteur pipettes, slides, coverslips and an Erlenmeyer flask filled with greenish pond water. Using the Pasteur pipette we were instructed to put a drop of pond water on the slide and then carefully mount a coverslip over the drop following which the drop would then spread out into a thin film of liquid trapped between the coverslip and slide. We placed the slide with the mounted sample on the microscope viewing stage fixing it into position with the two clips on the stage. After positioning the lowest power objective lens (x10) over the slide I peered down the eyepiece tube (10x magnification) and turned the coarse focus knob and then the fine focus knob until I could clearly make out the suspended particles floating in the thin film of liquid.

At 20x magnification it was the small crustaceans belonging to the genus Daphnia that caught my attention. Their swimming or motility in the water was powered by the beating of their second antennae. Their bodies were enclosed in transparent carapace. Under the 40x objective lens all their internal organs were visible. In some I could even see the eggs in the brood pouch. They had large distinctive compound eyes. While perched on the ancient wooden lab stole, hunched over my microscope completely engrossed, lost to the world, with my eye fixed on the Daphnia I felt a presence looming close up behind me, in fact every close if you measure closeness in terms of the visible boundaries of personal space. Turning my head I saw that it was Kate. It my very first encounter with Kate, she asked if had seen anything interesting. I told her I had been observing Daphnia and I added enthusiastically that I could even see their eggs. She asked if she could have a look. I slide my stole to make space for her. She bent over and peered down the eye piece. Her left elbow make contact with my right arm, pressing against my arm, I did not move away, in fact I pressed back against her arm. I could smell the fragrance of her hair and the perfume that she had applied to her neck. She stood up and smiling at me said:

'They are so cute, don't think, the ones with eggs are female, and what's so interesting the eggs are produced asexually, they can reproduce without having to mate with males. That is so queer don't you think.'

'Yes that is so queer, so queer indeed, I did not know that, they can breed without having to mate,' I said feeling very flushed and excited, as I smiled back at her.

'Queer indeed,' she responded.

'Indeed queer,' I agreed.

She touched my hand and said: 'I keep up the good work Miss Zeeman.'

'I will thank you,' I replied politely.

I was pleased with myself. I congratulated myself on being such an astute observer. I had guessed right that she was queer, that she was a lesbian, no one else could see it, all the guys in the class fantasized about fucking her, they sat in her lectures with perpetual hard-ons. She now also knew that I was queer. A bond of lesbian solidarity had become fixed between us. There were many of us floating around, an invisible sisterhood of queer girls.

353. Not to eat the meat of the inner sin offering—Leviticus 6:23

354

We were told by Dr Kate Jolly that while the attendance of Saturday botany field trips was not compulsory it was strongly recommended that we make every effort to attend them. And the first field trip would be at Melville Koppies. 'Be there at nine-o-clock sharp and bring a hard cover notebook, pen and pencil, sticky tape, food and cold drinks. We will have a picnic lunch afterwards which will give us an opportunity to socialize a bit.'

Come Saturday Dr Jolly looking very sexy in hiking boot, ankle socks, shorts, T-shirt, bush hat and sunglasses takes command. A couple of postgraduate botany students doing their BSc honours, MSc and PhD degrees in plant taxonomy and plant ecology have come along to assist with plant identification. We are divided up into groups and a postgraduate student is assigned to each group. With thick string marked at metre intervals we set up 100 m transects across the veld and bush. At each five meter interval we identified all the plants in a square meter quadrant. We spend the entire morning crouched over the quadrants in the hot late February sun counting the number of different plant species and the frequency of each species. Using sticky tape we fixed labelled samples of specimens into our notebooks creating our own field herbarium for identification.

354. Not to decapitate a fowl brought as a sin offering—Leviticus 5:8

355

Spring 1975 standing outside the Wartenweiler Library with Wayne Bernstein. He is wearing a T shirt with Jesus One Way emblazoned on the front. He has grown a beard and his hair is almost on his shoulders, and with his faded jeans and sandals he could easily pass for a 1960s hippy. Sitting next to him in the first zoology, I noticed the bundles of Christian tracts in his knap sack. Out of curiosity I ask him what his plans are with tracts. He is going to hand them out after the lecture, I offer to help him, and he gives me the strangest look. After the lecture we start handing out the tracts to students passing through the doors of the library. I hand out a tract to a Jew, an Orthodox Jew wearing a yarmulke, he says:

'I am Jewish.'

'I am lesbian.'

'A lesbian Christian?'

'I suppose so.'

He recognizes me.

'I thought you were one of those revolting lefties.'

'I am one them as well.'

Shaking his head he asks:

'Lesbian, Christian and Marxist all in one?'

'No quite, it is Lipstick Lesbian, Christian, Marxist and Human.'

'Sounds like lip-shit to me,' he answered before walking off. I give him the middle finger. Luckily Wayne did not see. That was my first and last stunt at evangelizing the Gospel.

Spring in 1975 so much still so fresh in my mind. It seemed like that an entire life time of lived experience had been crowded into my undergraduate years at Wits. I am reading widely. I am in love with Janet. I go to mass with her at Cathsoc on Sunday evenings. The young Priest gave a lecture rather than a sermon on what an incarnational theology entails. Of course as a non-Catholic I partake of the Catholic Mass with Janet every Sunday evening. I have not advertised the fact that I am not Catholic. And of course there are the words 'This is my body' which are uttered in the consecration of the Eucharist, words which sublimely signify the real presence God in the raised host and we sign ourselves with the sign of cross in recognition of the transubstantiation of God's body in the bread which is visible before our gaze. Who needs to defend a Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation when any logical and rational philosophical theology of God entails with metaphysically certainty that for God to be truly God, God has to be omnipresent and omnideterminative in the Universe in order for the Universe to not only exist but also to remain in existence from one moment to the next, and also in order for essence to converge with existence in the realm of the finite and contingent, in the contingent-temporal convergence of essence and existence all Becoming supervenes on Being and all Truth supervenes on Being. And the infinite and transcendental becomes immanent within the finitude and temporarily of all becoming. Hence the praxis or the dramatic performance of the Catholic Eucharist constitutes a bridge between time and eternity, a bridge between the finite and the infinite or in other words a link between being and becoming.

'This is my body' is a corporeal instantiation of God within not only the bread but also within the whole Universe of time and space. It a divine affirmation of all existence in the form of a materially and sensuously and erotically embodied life. And this is what both the incarnation of God and the Eucharistic Presence signify. And also in this signification the Catholic sacramentality of the whole of human life is realized with a 'Hegelian' kind of 'aufheben' or sublation of the dualism of nature versus grace or revelation versus reason. Plato is rediscovered, dramatically in his 'Phaedrus' and the postmodern denouement of 'Hellenic and the Hebraic' vaporizes to nothing substantial in the metaphysical presence and logocentricity of the morning sun in the breaking of a new bright day in spring.

355. Carry out the procedure of the guilt offering—Leviticus 7:1

356

Wayne's chutzpah was impressive. He was an irritating gadfly to the Jewish student community. At a lunch time meeting that was organized by the Jewish student society he debated with a very slick Rabbi in the Social Science lecture theatre SS1 during one lunchtime. The debate revolved around the status of Jesus in Jewish belief. The depth of Jewish antipathy towards Jesus was a revelation. I came along to mainly to give Wayne moral support. To me personally it was pointless arguing with Jews or anyone else about the messiahship of Jesus or more shockingly whether Jesus was God incarnate or about the Trinity.

356. The Kohanim must eat the sacrificial meat in the Temple—Exodus 29:33

357

Who is Jesus? He is God, he is the Word who became flesh, the God incarnate, the creator and ruler of the Universe who was executed on a Roman Cross at Golgotha and who rose from the dead on the third day. More radically Jesus is my brother, my father, my husband.

357. The Kohanim must not eat the meat outside the Temple courtyard—Deuteronomy 12:17

358

The American Dr Trevor Cleveland was a complete maverick with a bushy moustache and twinkling eyes. He was the newly appointed senior lecturer for phycology and cryptogamic botany in the Botany Department. He was philanderer of note, married with two daughters and lived in Edenvale of all places. After the Blyde River Canyon field trip I bumped into him of the stairs of the Old Biology Building, he asked me with a knowing smile on his face: 'How is Dr Kate Jolly?' I realize he knew that we were having a secret affair. I answered: 'She is fine, she is really nice'. We all knew that he was fucking Miss Reeva Levin the sexy photographic technician employed by the Botany Department. Phycological and cryptogamic research into the sex life of algae, mosses and ferns seemed to be heavily dependent on the photographic evidence of the deed, and this was where Miss Levin helped.

And we learnt from the mouth of Dr Cleveland everything we needed to know about the evolution of sex. The meaning of the terms isogamy, heterogamy and oogamy were first introduced to us by Kate Jolly while we were still in first year. She described the meaning of isogamy, heterogamy and oogamy in a neutral and objective manner with no hint of deviance or disturbance in the order of nature. Now the same terms used as signifiers in the depiction of the lifecycle of algae belonging to that model genus called Chlamydomonas cropped up again in Dr Cleveland's lectures during our second year. In his lectures he made a special effort to enhance the dramatic effect and metaphysical impact of his Rabelaisian styled narrative on the evolution of sex. With artistic oversight for our entertainment and education his lectures on the evolutionary significance of isogamy, heterogamy and oogamy were imbued with a subtle mythic-pornographic flavour which seemed to follow the kind of storyline that could only have been lifted out of Hesiod's Theogony or Plato's Symposium. By all accounts Dr Cleveland was an educated American and this fact shone like a light on a hill in his lectures. His hints that we should read the great American writers fell on fertile ground, I for one found myself wondering through stacks of American literature in the Wartenweiler Library especially on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, working my way through the American canon during my free time.

The majority of flowing plants are hermaphroditic with a single individual have male and female gonads or sex organs, producing both male and female gametes. Hermaphroditic flowering plants are also referred as being sexually monecious in that a single individual produces male sex cells called pollen which are also called the microgametophyte, and female sex cells in the form of ova also called the megagametophytes.

358. A non-Kohen must not eat [certain] sacrificial meats—Exodus 29:33

359

Feminism on Wits Campus in the early to mid-1970s was still in a very nascent stage of development. However, feminist ideas regarding the critique of the role of tradition in the legitimation of patriarchical power over the lives of women and the need for a women-centred redefinition of the human was in air like the Jasmine fragrance which foreshadows the inauguration of spring. Rethinking feminine subjectivity and sexual difference by challenging the patriarchical assumptions regarding the essential nature of women-as-the-Other were gradually taking root in my own mind. In reading the American canon of fiction my lesbianism made me acutely aware of the absence of the female voice not only in American literature but in the whole of corpus of Western literature in its entirety, and in all its of diverse forms and representations spanning the classics of ancient Greece, the Bible and modern literature. The absence of a feminine pantheon of literary giants and literary or mythological heroines was an intellectual and cultural catastrophe for women. It represented the full culmination of the Neolithic erasure of women as autonomous beings-in-their-own-right, an erasure that was of holocaust proportions. Women have become silenced and reduced to chattel following the great post-Palaeolithic domestication of the planet.

359. To follow the procedure of the peace offering—Leviticus 7:11

360

All the great and fantastical literary heroic figures have been masculine whether they were Hellenic or Hebraic. The figure of the masculinized Hellenic or Hebraic hero has dominated the Western mind for millennia. As women we only have Pandora. There are no feminized equivalents in the Hellenic and Hebraic tradition of Prometheus, Job, Jonah, Cane and Abel. There are no female equivalents of the modern Prometheus or the modern Job in modern literature. Where are the heroines in Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka or Camus? Where are all the female rebels and female exiles in the great Hellenic and Hebraic literary dramas of metaphysical and mythological rebellion and exile that have become the archetypes of the canon of Western literature? They are absent because women in the great domestication lost their autonomy and moral agency as beings after been reduced to chattel, that is, after been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

360. Not to eat the meat of minor sacrifices before sprinkling the blood—Deuteronomy 12:17

361

As I have already said without meiosis there cannot be sex, without meiosis the living world of eukaryotic organisms would be entirely asexual. The asexual preceded the sexual. Asexual reproduction by means of cell fission preceded sexual reproduction by cell fusion. To have sexual reproduction by cell fusion you have to have meiosis. With asexual reproduction in eukaryotes you only need mitosis and cell fission. To have sexual reproduction you need both mitosis and meiosis and you need both cell fission and cell fusion. Sex leads to the fusion of cells. Sex in a manner of speaking is cell fusion. Sex and the sexual differentiation in plants and animals began with the evolution of meiosis. Meiosis results in the halving of the diploid number of chromosomes resulting in the formation cells which have the haploid number of chromosomes. The evolution of sex and sexual differentiation evolved as a consequence of meiosis, and the alternation of haploid and diploid generations, but more of that latter, I want to write a bit about isogamy, heterogamy and oogamy.

But as a prelude I need to write something about a thought that has just entered my mind and it has some bearing on Eros and homoeroticism. Eros and sex can be decoupled in terms of morals and ethics. Heterosexual sex carries a moral freight which is absent in sex associated with homoeroticism and homosexuality. Heterosexual sex because it can result in cell fusion and conception it necessarily becomes an act that is burdened with responsibilities, obligations and moral liabilities, especially in the event of pregnancy. A child needs a mother and a father. It is a deeply human need and morally we are obliged to acknowledge the child's right.

Sex within the context of homoeroticism is not really sex in the true biological definition of sex. It is something else and it does not have the same moral burden of responsibilities, obligations and liabilities associated with heterosexual intercourse. Lesbian sex does not involve the sperm or ova. It involves the mutual and reciprocal engagement in homoerotic pleasure, which while it does involve Eros and erotic stimulation of sex organs, it is not really sex at all, because it is not linked in any way to the real consummation of the sex act which necessarily leads to the fusion of gametes or sex cells.

So we can agree with Diotima in Plato's Symposium that while the telos or the 'end' or goal of Eros is the fulfilment of desire. The fulfilment of desire reaches its apogee in the experience of erotic pleasure. The experience of physical and sensual erotic pleasure results only in the ephemeral satisfaction of desire in the homoerotic act of 'sex', but never in its complete gratification, desire can never be fully gratified through the sexual entanglement of two bodies. Knowledge of the Platonic forms or ideas also counts as reaching the ultimate apogee in the experience of erotic pleasure. Eros, desire and erotic pleasure with regard to Platonism cannot be divorced from the realization of the Totality, Infinity, Absolute, Utopia and the Epistemological Ultimum or the Epistemological Utopia in the City of Certainty.

Now going back to the concepts of isogamy, anisogamy or heterogamy and oogamy. Here we definitely have something to say about something to someone. The someone in this case would be the representatives of the Patriarchy. Patriarchalism, which manifests itself in the institutionalization of masculine power over women holds to a dualistic view of the mind and the body of men versus women with men being superior and women being inferior. Women's inferiority in mind and body makes her less human than men.

361. To bring meal offerings as prescribed in the Torah—Leviticus 2:1

362

It is 1983 the revolution has started, the long night has begun. I step into the Powder Puff Night Club to the sounds of Thelma Houston's 'Don't leave me this way'...Baby my heart is full of love. I spot a beautiful young Coloured woman with an amazing body, dressed in stilettos, stockings, a miniscule skirt, G-string panties and a white satin bra. She has a wild jungle of purple dyed hair teased up in an electrifying Afro style and we smile broadly at each other, I take off my coat and we both see that we are similarly dressed similarly, that is barely, dressed to be precise. The Pointer Sisters 'Jump for my Love' blasts away and we are dancing. I am smooth, moisturized, silky to the touch, delicately perfumed, and calomel in tone, and her pleasantly fragranced satiny skin is a shade lighter than glossy black in the dim club light. She is the splitting image of Kathy Sledge, I suddenly feel hot. I am feverish as hell with passion and desire. I know she feels the same about me, we dance close until the end of time to Donna Summer's 'I feel love', and our lips are pressed together. When we go to the ladies she tells me that she is a hair dresser and I tell her that I am a teacher. We dance the night until just before dawn, it is three-o-clock in the morning we are both a bit tipsy, and the club management wants to close. Her name is Vanessa Booysens. Her friends want to leave. She asks if I am also come from Eldorado Park. I tell her that I am originally from Kuruman, the Northern Cape. My convenient fiction is that I grew up in a Coloured location outside the White town limits of Kuruman. In her eyes I am Coloured and I want it to be that way. Her friends want to leave. I tell them that I will take Vanessa home. We put on ours coats. I am not too sure where I have parked the VW. We burst out laughing holding onto each other. We finally find my car and I ask her if she wants to sleep over at my place. She is hesitant. She is living with her parents in Eldorado Park. We have been speaking a mixture of Afrikaans and English in the club but now we are speaking only in Afrikaans.

She suggests that I can sleep over at her place. It is already Sunday, and it will soon be sunrise. We fall asleep cuddled up together on the small divan in her tiny room. Just before we fall asleep she tells me that her parents don't know that she is queer and that they are very conservative and religious. Her parents and sibling have left for church. We make love. I am a woman of the world and she is only twenty two years old. I laugh when she remarks that I am very educated and I speak 'baie op gepompte Afrikaans' (very posh Afrikaans). I need to leave before her parent come back as I am under dressed. We exchange phone numbers before I leave.

362. Not to put oil on the meal offerings of wrongdoers—Leviticus 5:11

363

In nature nothing is cut and dry when it comes to sex. In this regard we need to distinguish between two types of difference. There are quantitative differences in degree along a continuum and there are qualitative differences in kind. In nature we see relative differences in degree along a continuum rather than as absolute differences in terms of kinds. To repeat with some elaboration, in nature because of evolutionary descent from common ancestors with modification, everything differs quantitatively in terms of degrees of relative differences along a continuum and never qualitatively in terms of sharply distinct kinds. In nature everything is related through the sharing of genetic and phenotypic homologies. Humans differ from the rest of the animal kingdom only by differences in degree along continuum of differences and not in terms of a dualism of different kinds. The same applies with sex. Reproductive systems also differ in degree along a continuum.

We can view isogamy, heterogamy and oogamy as sexual reproductive systems which differ only in degree along a continuum and not in kind: isogamy → heterogamy → oogamy. Sexual reproduction in Chlamydomonas can be by way of isogamy or heterogamy or oogamy, so we here have an exemplary or paradigmatic example of different sexual reproduction systems in a collection of species belonging to the same genus but varying by degrees along a continuum of differences. The oogamous sexual reproductive system evolved from the isogamous reproductive system.

To complicate matters further sex change in nature is also a natural occurrence in many species especially among the gaily coloured coral reef fish. In protogyny, egg producing female fish change into male sperm producing fish. In protandry, sperm producing male fish change in egg producing female fish. So the same individual fish can be both male and female in its lifecycle.

363. Not to put frankincense on the meal offerings of wrongdoers—Leviticus 5:11

364

What is the relevance of the evolution and the existence of a wide variety of sexual reproductive systems in nature to a critique of Patriarchalism? Patriarchalism is based on an ideology of male entitlement. It seeks to justify male entitlement on the belief that in the order and nature of things men are ontologically speaking superior to women. Given the nature of sex in the animal kingdom, and given the fact that man is part of the animal kingdom, differing only in degrees from all the other animals, there is no rational, logical or empirical foundation for the belief that men are superior to women and that Patriarchalism corresponds to a divinely ordained ordering of relationships between the sexes and that the nature of sexual or gender identity is governed by some divine ordinance.

Given that this is the natural order of things in actual reality, it clear that homoeroticism is governed autonomously by its own system of queer ethics and morals and that homosexual acts between two consenting individuals is as natural as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Patriarchalism is based on the usurpation of power over women by men which was made possible when Palaeolithic systems of sociality broke down following the domestication of animals and plants which resulted in the global agricultural revolution between 10 000 and 12 000 years ago. There are no grounds for not accepting that sexual queerness and homosexuality existed since the dawn of human evolution and there is no rational grounds for claiming that sex between two women or sex between two men is immoral or sinful.

364. The meal offering of a Priest should not be eaten—Leviticus 6:16

365

Kate was manipulative and overbearing, she could not help it, it was in her nature, she tried to change, but she slipped quickly back into being bossy. The status and age gap between us was too big, it was difficult for her to treat me as an equal. I think in her mind I was going to be her plaint and submissive little mistress. With regard to sex because of this age and social status gap, I ended up being the submissive party and she liked that, she liked to overpower me and dominant me. But even though I enjoyed it, I was beginning to desire sex that would less asymmetrical, where one was not always top and other one always under on her back, being fucked all the time. I wanted something less masculine more feminine. As we got to Spain insisted on shaving my vulva so she could trib her pussy against my shaven vulva while sitting on top of me while I lay on my back with my legs spread wide open scissor-like, my right leg held vertically in the air and my left leg splayed outwards on the bed. Even though she was hurting my vulva she continued wanting to hump me in this fashion, always getting on top of me after she climaxed me, then it was her turn to have some fun with me and tribbing was what she liked to do. She loved tribbing her shaven pussy roughly and vigorously against mine, she mistook the pain on my face and my cries as expressions of ecstasy. She was incredibly strong and fit with a hard muscular body and she enjoyed wrestling with me, and that really got her hot. But she underestimated my strength. I did not do weights but I was a swimmer and one evening she began to wrestle with me on the bed and she started hurting me with her rough manner and I began to get angry with her bullying, and we really got physical. To my surprise I managed to overpower her and I sat on top of her holding her arms do down behind her neck.

Anyway I was sure that tribbing could be fun and pleasant if done nicely, but it could also be unpleasant if done rough in the dominating and grinding manner that Kate liked. She spoke often about making sex an erotic adventure and hinted about exploring sadomasochism. She said that sadomasochism (SM) can be incredibly enjoyable once you get into it. In the end Italy I decided to give SM a try. Kate took out all the SM paraphernalia that stashed in the bottom of her suitcase. I was going to be submissive. She took great pleasure in the role of the dominatrix. After covering the bed with plastic sheet which was then overlaid with a large towel. She told me to take my clothes off and lie on my side on the towel on the bed. She gave me an enema. Afterwards I expelled the water into the toilet bowl. It was the first time in life that I had experienced having an enema. After expelling the water I was told to lay on my stomach on the bed and then she strapped my hands to the bed stand. She explained that she was going to whip my buttocks with a riding crop and she would incrementally increase the intensity of the lashes until I told her to stop. That was the rule. If I told her to stop she would stop immediately. I had a low pain threshold and was soon yelping in pain shouting for her to stop immediately after a series of sharp lashes inflicted painful red welts across my bum. Then I had to get on my knees with my buttocks in the air. She lubricated my vulva and when I felt all five digits pressing into my vagina I realized she was going to insert her entire fist into my vagina and I screamed for her stop. I insisted that she immediately loosen the straps from hands but she baulked. She asked for one more chance to do something, something which was not going painful and which I would thoroughly enjoy, even begging her not to stop. If I allowed her to surprise me while I was restrained she would then unstrap me. I agreed. That was when Kate rimmed me for the first time. I have to admit that it was exquisitely pleasurable. I have never again engaged in SM sex. That was the first and last time. I did not have sadistic or masochistic sexual inclinations.

Kate was not feeling well. She believed that she suffering from a virulent dose of food poisoning, but I had my doubts, I think it was a case of a bug that she picked up from me while engaging in some serious anilingus, kissing, sucking, licking and rimming me, she penetrated the depths of my anus with her tongue. Waves of stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea had reduced her to a miserable state of painful incapacitation. As the morning wore on I was getting tired of playing nurse maid. It was now ten thirty. She could see that I had become unsympathetic, quiet, sullen and moody as I sat in a chair next to the bed idly flipping through a magazine while a glorious summer's day was rapidly drawing to a magnificent zenith stripping Paris naked of all her shadows and holding her in the warm embrace of radiant sunshine beneath an azure sky. Stuck in the hotel room I was going to miss out on a whole day of exploring Paris. It was hot and boring in the hotel room and the air con recycled the stench of stale, acrid cigarette smoke.

Kate loved doing the real kinky stuff with me. In this respect rimming had become a bone of contention, with Kate doing it to me it was an exquisitely pleasurable experience which I looked forward to in secret anticipation every time she went down on me, but I could not do it to her, I could not return the favour, even though the fragrance of her whistle clean rosebud was like a thousand perfume gardens filled with the sweetest nectar that would entice a thousand nectar seeking fluttering butterflies.

I made up my mind that I was not going to be bullied into rimming her. I was not going to give her the sadistic pleasure of forcing me to lick and rim her anus.

She said that I was selfish, she was doing all the work and I was lying on my back moaning, screaming, gasping and panting like a randy bitch on heat soaking up all the pleasure while she fucked me, and giving nothing of myself back in return. I was convinced that she saw herself as my mentor, I also felt she wanted to own me and control me, especially with all the subtle hinting that there was a lot that I could learn and benefit from her. She spoke about me going in the direction of mycology, becoming a mycologist like her. She wanted me to do honours in mycology when I had completed my BSc and then a PhD in mycology under her supervision, and that there were huge opportunities in the world for mycologists and she could really make things happen for me, and so on and on, like as if we were a married couple, or like lesbian penguins who had mated for life. She honestly believed that this was the case with us.

'If you want to go it is OK, you don't have to stay here with me, I am going to try and sleep anyway.'

After having a shower and changing into shorts and blouse I put on white ankle socks and the new pair of running shoes that I had bought. I decided to put on makeup, lipstick and perfume. In the back of my mind I entertained the possibility of visiting Monique.

I could not fathom Kate, one moment she was vulnerable and weepy, and then suddenly she would slip into the role of a dominating bully. Now she was sick and wanted to be nursed like a child. I couldn't bring myself to play along. I felt indifferent to her suffering. But then again as I was putting on some lipstick I suddenly felt conflicted, I felt that I had an obligation towards her. But then I wanted to escape from her so that I could go and see Monique and enjoy an afternoon of lovemaking in her bed.

After saying to Kate: 'Are you sure you will be OK?' I left, grabbing my handbag with my tourist guidebook, closing the bedroom door behind me.

I was glad to be alone. The only person I would have like to be with in Paris was my father, he would have been the ideal companion on this holiday. It would have fun if it were just the two of us. Just thinking of not being in Paris with him made me feel melancholic. Suddenly I missed him terribly. He was my favourite human being. My mom would sometime say sarcastically that I was wife number one and she was number two. It was a terrible thing to say and it made me so mad. How could she make such a remark? It was disrespectful and horrible. How can a father not love his daughter? How could any parent not love their child? Why would she make something like this so ugly with her remark? Was my own mother jealous of my father's affections toward me? It made me feel so depressed just thinking of it. It is a blessing to have a wonderful relationship with one's parent or parent's and she could not see that. This has bugged me my whole life. She always made feel me that I was choosing my dad over her, even as a grown woman she made me feel this way. I could never have a conversation with my mother without it ending in an argument. Yet with my dad we could speak to each other for hours about anything.

Kate said I was glutton for sex, I was always the one who took but never gave anything back. What the bloody hell I thought. She was the glutton not me!

Being a fungal person she did not seem to be too keen on visiting the National Museum of Natural History. Skeletons and bones did not hold any fascination for her. I had just finished a semester in comparative and evolutionary animal anatomy and I wanted to wonder amongst animal skeletons and gaze at bones. Now that I was free to roam the streets of Paris my first stop was going to be the museum. Heading down the Boulevard Saint-Germain until I reached the intersection with the Rue Saint-Jacques I took a slow walk pass the Sorbonne in the direction of Notre-Dame, and then turning right into a Quai de Montebello I walked along the Seine towards the museum grounds until I arrived at the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée, which is part the French Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle complex of museums situated in the grounds of the Jardin des Plantes.

365. Not to bake a meal offering as leavened bread—Leviticus 6:10

366

How is the subject gendered? As a scientist I cannot see how the subject can be gendered independently of physical events which take place at the level of genes. And the gendering of the subject becomes a species of the mind-body problem whenever consciousness is assumed to have causal efficacy without even knowing definitely what kind of phenomenon conscious actually represents or happens to be. And this is the problem with any theory of gender formation with respect to the development of love-object or sex-object inclination that happens to be based on a reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalytical theory is irremediably mythological with regards to its narrative of causation. Gender inclinations regarding the preferred object of love or the preferred object of erotic interest necessarily arises independently of the unconscious or conscious as a purely physically based gene expression driven developmental process.

366. The Kohanim must eat the remains of the meal offerings—Leviticus 6:9

367

The Noble Lie of the Mitzvot

To live a Godly and holy life is the ultimate objective of Judaism as a religion and the means for realizing this goal is ultimately reducible to the performance of a systems of actions or practices called mitzvot and there are 613 of them, and here is the paradox, it is hard to rationally see any value in many of the individual mitzvah, especially in the light of modernity and the enlightenment which resulted in the secularization of modern life. After that period in my life when I seriously entertained conversion to Judaism and then my 'relapse' from Orthodox Judaism after Yael broke up with me I needed to come terms with Judaism and work through what ended up being a deeply alienating and traumatic religious experience. I embarked on something for the sake of my love for Yael against my own better judgement. We were both complicit in a farce which left me feeling very damaged. In an exercise of penitence and also to regain a sense of my own personal moral integrity I have spent years studying the Talmudic literature, the Torah and the Midrashic literature, and according to own my reading of the massive canon of Orthodox Judaism, studying what the rabbis and sages has written about the meaning and significance of mitzvot, the startling conclusion that I eventually arrived at was that mitzvot as a rule or principle were only valuable for their own sake and for nothing much else. They have no magic, they don't help God in anyway, the don't earn us any merit or favours with God, they may purify us or help to be better people or make us feel holy, but even that is questionable.

In the Jewish world of Orthodox Judaism the Commandments or Law or Torah or Mitzvot, call it what you like, the terms are all synonyms of the Torah, written or oral, and they are meaningful and significant in an ultimate and profound sense, because when they are observed in their entirety they become the means for affirming and through affirming, they also become the means for instantiating something which is believed to be transcendent. Practice or observance of the mitzvot becomes the means for instantiating within the real world of Jewish life something which also exist transcendentally. Observance of the Law is thus the equivalent to affirming and instantiating the transcendent within the real world of Jewish life. The Law or the Torah as something which is believed and affirmed as God given is supposed to cover or regulate or address all aspects or domains of Jewish life and in this sense the Law given to Moses by God at Mount Sinai becomes the ultimate organizing principle or foundation of Jewish identity. By virtue of the belief that the Law was given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai the Law is necessarily something which has transcendental status. It has a transcendental status as a direct consequence of its divine origins. This is Mythos and not Logos. The Law as the codification of commandments derived from the Torah can never be from a rational perspective the embodiment of the Logos and in this sense it cannot be the Word of God. The belief that the Law is something transcendent is the Noble Lie of Judaism. In this context the Mythos is the Noble Lie and the Noble Lie is the founding principle of Judaism. Mythos works through a fictionalized memory, that is the 'memory' events which never occurred in real space and time, and therefore they are not anchored in history and for this reason the memories are not actual historical recollections but works of fiction. Give the founding and organizing role of Mythos in Jewish life and identity the Jew necessarily lives in a state of metaphysical exile outside of history. The Jew as the embodiment of Mythos is always the alien or stranger in our midst. The Jew exists outside the embrace of human fellowship and human solidarity.

367. To bring all avowed and freewill offerings to the Temple on the first subsequent festival—Deuteronomy 12:5-6

368

I have tried to fathom why I was homosexual or lesbian. I believe that science will eventually unravel the causal genetically based developmental processes which result in heterosexual or homosexual phenotypic orientations with regard to the gender or the sexual identity of the preferred loved object. At bottom of this there will a protein and protein-ligand binding interactions behind the formation of gender identities. In other words the gendering of the subject is the outcome of the physical or material effects of matter in motion under the governance of the laws of nature, independently of what is going on in the mind or consciousness of the infant or prepubescent child.

368. Not to withhold payment incurred by any vow—Deuteronomy 23:22

369

As a second year student of zoology I had an amazing epiphany. While deeply engrossed in the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée with the diversity of vertebrate skeletons on display I realized that nothing else other than chemistry and physics, that is matter in motion, was behind the mystery of my lesbianism, and I knew that I could not change my state of homosexuality. It was a wonderfully liberating experience. I resolutely reaffirmed who I was, I was irredeemably queer. Lost in thought it felt like I was awakening from a dream when I realized that I had been in the museum for several hours and it was already late afternoon. Standing on the floor above the ground floor looking down on the display from the balcony above I noticed that the light filtering into the museum was beginning to fade. Going down the stairs I stopped again to examine the mounted skeleton of the Giant Irish Elk called Megaloceros giganteus. The size of its massive antlers appeared to be an exemplary textbook case of runaway sexual selection of secondary sexual characters. Like the peacock's tail the elk's antlers were hypothesized to be exaggerated examples of sexual ornamentation.

369. To offer all sacrifices in the Temple—Deuteronomy 12:11

370

I walked slowly back to the Latin Quarter. Timewise on my watch it was late in the afternoon but in reality it was hours before sunset, the day was far from done, I could not get used to how late in the evening the sun set, the sun had barely moved, it seemed to be stuck high in the west. With all this northern hemisphere summer light stretching the day to an interminable postponement it was too early to go to back the hotel. One thing that I had to endure on the trip to Europe with Kate was hunger. We had been going on our regular early morning jogs and then after a continental breakfast we spent the rest of the day sightseeing which literally meant walking and after supper we would also go walking again, so all in all we were walking distances of more than twenty kilometres each day. I had lost weight, I did not have an ounce of fat on my body, and now walking past Notre Dame I began to feel the hunger pangs, my empty stomach started to rumble. It was the same hunger that I endured the year before on the Bazaruto Archipelago. Each day after an early morning breakfast we launched off and speeding across a tranquil sea in the dinghy, the outboard motor roaring as we set off for the coral reefs, and it was before six-o-clock in the morning that we were at sea, and we would only return after three-o-clock in the afternoon. After midday while diving the hunger would set in, I could have eaten a fish raw I felt so hungry, what with the fact that we had been scuba diving, snorkelling or spearfishing just about the entire day. I had lavished my body with a deep layer of sunblock but unlike the others I still tanned as brown as a berry, my skin tone became a luxurious deep coffee brown, glowing healthily in the sunlight with an exuberant abundance of melanin. I practically lived in my black Speedo for days on end. Fresh water had to be rationed and we just did the necessary bathing. While drinking Laurentino beer at the hotel Dona Ana in Vilanculos the anomaly that I was the only female became apparent in a teasing but innocent remark about the male:female sex ratio. I can't remember what led to me to disclose my sexual proclivities but I distinctly remember uttering:

'I only like girls.

To which someone replied: 'We also like girls.'

'Well at least we share something common,' was my response.

'Well let's say cheers to that,' someone said.

And there was a clinking of bottles as everyone toasted the desirability of women. I was one of the boys from that moment onwards.

That was that, I was a dyke, and that was the reason that a girl like me would be wanting to go on a hazardous diving trip with a bunch of fellows. I came to believe that I was not really a girl in their eyes. At least the talk of liking girls never came up again as a point of discussion for the rest of the trip, even though I could not escape their libidinous gaze. It was impossible for me not to be seen naked given the practical logistics of the situation. I also saw their testicles and their hanging flaccid penises, circumcised, uncircumcised, small, medium and large. Being naked in each other's presence was unavoidable, and we got used to it. I guessed that they had all fucked me countless times in their private imagination while masturbating whenever they had the opportunity for a quick wank on the island. Boys will be boys and they will spank the monkey out of primeval necessity. Anyway in line with Plato's Theaetetus philosophy begins with wonder and I was born with the wonder lust of the true wonderer.

370. To bring all sacrifices from outside Israel to the Temple—Deuteronomy 12:26

371

And now in Paris my skin tone after countless hours of sunlight on the Mediterranean beaches had again taken on that deep melanin flavour of rich coffee. I had never before taken notice on how deep I could tan. Later that night the women I met in the nightclub, the women who wanted to fuck me asked if I was an Arab, and when I said no, they wanted to know if I was Egyptian or Algerian or Tunisian or Moroccan or even Senegalese. Senegalese! The word being used was noire. I had been mistaken for a black person, a lesbian Negress or an Arab lesbian in the dim lighted nightclub that throbbed to the rhythm of rainbow showers of floating light dancing in a sun dappled tropical coral reef. I felt hot and aroused like a rare and exotic orchid, with my wet vagina becoming a delectable nectar chamber, I imagined probing desiring fingers of women hovering over my vulva in a dance of exquisite excitation, their tongues unravelling and their fingers twitching in the anticipation of pleasure, like the prehensile proboscis of flower fertilizing moths that flitter through perfumed gardens at night. I imagined drowning in an orgasmic sea of pleasure. I will have more to say about this experience shortly.

371. Not to slaughter sacrifices outside the courtyard—Leviticus 17:4

372

Walking past Notre Dame, I crossed the road, feeling now extremely famished I quicken my pace as I headed for Les Deux Magots for something to eat and drink. Sitting at the same table as before I ordered a glass of water and a glass of orange juice. I can't remember what I ordered to eat but it was something with ham. I gulped down my meal in what in seemed to be similar to the nervous displacement reaction often shown by crabs when engaged in courtship. I was hoping that Monique would turn up at any moment. My state of arousal increased as I nervously glanced around searching for the face and figure of Monique among the early afternoon pedestrian traffic. I waited in vain. I felt the rising tide of disappointed, yet my heart continued to throb with the beat of desire. I was hot and ready for sex.

I had felt no shame, on this trip to Europe with Kate, I had learnt to succumb to the compulsions that had taken possession of me, and in a real sense Kate was to blame, and so I could no longer linger a moment longer at Les Deux Magots. I had only one thought on my mind and that was to be with Monique. I was gripped by an urgency which I could not resist, after quickly settling the bill I went straight to Monique's flat looking neither left nor right like a wanton bitch on heat. The lift seemed to be stuck on the seventh floor, I run up the stairs, when I reached her floor I was out of breath and my mouth was dry, adrenaline was surging through my body. Standing in the shadows at the edge of the stairs I breathed deeply for a while, and when I had finally regained my breathe and allowed sufficient time for my racing pulse to slow down, I walked over to the door of her flat and knocked three times.

After the passing of several eternities Monique opened the door. She was surprised to see my excited and flushed face. Happy to see her new young friend again she invited me in. Her partner was away, she was alone and we spent the remainder of the afternoon in her bed. When the day light began to fade before the falling twilight she switched on the bedside lamp and asked if I would like to go out with her to a gay nightclub for supper, cabaret and dancing.

The fact that I no clothes or heels was not a problem, her wardrobe was overflowing and she was confident that some of her glitzy nightclub outfits would fit me. Well I had to let my family know about my plans for the night. Leaving her flat for the hotel I promised I would be back before nine-o-clock. At the hotel reception I left a note for Kate explaining that I had met some of my old school chums and that we had decided to go out together for dinner, to celebrate a reunion and catch-up with the present. It was clearly a patent lie. Then there was the problem of a tooth brush and toothpaste. I asked the receptionist where these could be purchased as I did not want to go up to the bedroom and have to deal with Kate. I would do my toilet at Monique's flat. Well before nine-o-clock after purchasing a tooth brush and toothpaste I was back in Monique's flat and into the shower. She had already showered and had laid out a selection of outfits for me to choose from on her bed. I had never seen so many beautiful dresses before.

She recommended that I should wear the very short tight fitting body hugging black dress with a low top for cleavage display because she said I had a pleasing body to show off. In the end I put on the dress that she had chosen since I could not make up my own mind. Its fabric composed of a mixture of rayon, nylon and spandex felt sensual against my skin, and Monique pulled the back zip up. The thin light fabric fitted comfortably like a glove. I slipped on the black satin and lace panties she handed me from her drawer and then I stepped into the black patent leather stilettos that she had selected.

Now for the makeup. Monique insisted that a dark foundation was going to work best. And now for the blush, but remember Hannah, she said, we not doing heterosexual, we doing lesbian drag, and so we need to choose the blush that works best for that kind of look and the same goes for the eyeshadow and also the lipstick.

We breaking the conventions, we breaking all the makeup codes. Doesn't my face look a bit too dark Monique? No Hannah you have a dark tan, your shoulders, arms and legs are dark, they are very dark and your eyes are also dark, Hannah you are a dark sensual woman. Maybe you should wear black stockings. Yes I think black sheer stockings will work. It gives me great pleasure dressing you up my darling, please indulge me. Monique don't you think that I look too much like a slut, like a whore?

'My dear lovely Hannah, you look a sweet transvestite, you look like a harlot, you look like a street prostitute, you look like a nymphomaniac, and tonight you definitely look like a teenage pornographic film star. You are the incarnation of the Eros, you are the daemon that has the power to ignite the most terrible desire in any woman.'

It was funny to hear this in her French accented English.

372. Not to offer any sacrifices outside the courtyard—Deuteronomy 12:13

373

I have remained in contact with Monique and by December 1975 I had saved enough money to fly to Paris to visit her. On reflection both Kate and Monique had been important mentors in my life. They were older and more experienced women who in spite of their own foibles and various shortcomings they had each in their own way contributed to my understanding of queerness, especially with respect to the sexualization or eroticization of homosexual relationships between women, and also, more especially with regard to the erotic power of attraction between women, and the deeper appreciation of the experience of lesbian sex and sexuality strictly in terms of the female body and its capacity to experience erotic and sexual pleasure. The female body and its pleasures was something that feminists have generally overlooked in their struggle against the patriarchal oppression and repression of women. The simple human pleasures of sex has suffered considerable collateral damage in feminist theory and the women's liberation struggle. Feminists who were also lesbian were not having any fun fucking each other. And if they were straight, they were celibate or dull sexless creatures, and were not even being fucked by men, so they were missing out on a deeply human experience.

373. To offer two lambs every day—Numbers 28:3

374

Going back to Monique's ideas about lesbian drag and lipstick lesbianism, there is much to say about the significance of this. It was about masquerading femininity. Pure and simple lesbian drag is a playful eroticized homosexual parody of heterosexual femininity. In this sense it breaks up the gender based binary schema imposed by patriarchical ideology regarding the nature and representation of female sexuality. Lesbian drag as a hyper-representation or exaggerated display of eroticized femininity destabilizes or undermines the view that lesbians are men trapped in the bodies of women, and thereby, challenges the binary butch/femme representation of lesbian female sexual identity inversion. Lipstick lesbian drag is a homosexual and erotically rich pantomimed-allegorization-parody of the mundane realities of female heterosexualized genders, performed to excite same-sex desire in women.

Looking at myself in the mirror I suddenly perceived my 'subalternity' in all its contradictory ambiguity regarding my own understanding of who I was in terms of what constituted my real identity, in terms of the idea of myself. Yet my identity was also being shaped by the recognition of my otherness in the eyes of the other. Recognized by the other as not being not quite White, not quite being English, not quite being African, not quite being European, not quite being a girl-child, not quite being innocently erotic, not quite being working-class, not quite being bourgeois, and so on and so forth. The idea of who I was dawned on me, I was really Coloured, yet not really Coloured, I could not be Coloured, so many constraints blocked my being a Coloured and yet I wanted to be Coloured, desperately in fact. My identity was frozen into the being of a White female. For the whole of my life so far I had lived like a White, I could not escape from being White. I was conditioned to be White. I was condemned to be White. I was trapped in Whiteness. I behaved like a White in many subtle ways and I thought like a White person. I had the consciousness of a White person. Yet I was bronzed brown by the sun of a European summer. Europe had graciously allowed me to be Coloured. Coloured in Paris. This contradictory ambiguity in my identity gave rise to the experience of misrecognition, a misrecognition of my identity by not confirming the realization of the Idea of myself, and the idea of myself could only be realized as parody, as a transgression, as a misrepresentation, as an absence, as a misrecognition and so on. Yet I desire the freedom necessary for expressive fullness.

I put on same of Monique's perfume, spraying in the region of my pussy, between my breasts, behind my ears, on my neck and in the crevices of my buttocks. She raised her eyebrows.

She embraced me, her tongue probed the depths of my mouth. We were ready for nightclubbing the night away, she called a taxi, and soon we speeding through the neon lit streets of Paris to our destination. We sat close together in the middle of the back seat holding hands like teenagers. It was strange situation. We had been physically intimate yet in reality we were still strangers who were enjoying a crazy romantic adventure without any encumbrances. We were strnagers.

Kate had probably read my note. Maybe she was feeling a bit better. She would definitely be in bed waiting for me. I was not sure what time I would be getting back to the hotel and I didn't even want to guess what kind of reception I was in for. Then there was the problem of the keys. She would have the keys for the door. Would the door be unlocked? If that was the case I could quietly slip in without putting on the lights. I would slip naked into the bed and cuddle against her back, she would wake up and say sleepily: 'You back.' Or something like that. I would kiss her on her neck, put my arm around her and whisper: 'Love you Kate.' And she would fall asleep again oblivious to the harsh hurtful realities of love and infidelity. I had turned to be just like my father. Just like him I loved women. Was I a bad person? Was he a bad person? Monique smiled at me: 'You look so pensive and thoughtful.'

'I am OK,' I replied.

The taxi turned into Rue Sainte-Anne, the street of gay Paris and stopped outside the club called Le Sept (Seven). We were hungry so we made our way to the restaurant. Afterwards we went to the nightclub in the basement. I was introduced to her circle of lesbian friends as Hannah from République d'Afrique du Sud. It seemed that the only word that stuck in their minds was 'Afrique'. I was from Africa was all they heard, and I was an African. To my amusement they did not see me as a white person from Africa which would have been just another mundane expat or colonial. Instead they perceived me as someone truly exotic like a North African or Arab from Egypt or Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco.

Then someone wanted to know whether I was from Senegal. After that Monique joking starting introduced me as her Senegalese lesbian friend. And that is how I became a lesbian Negress that night, curtsy of the dark base that formed the foundation of my makeup. Monique laughed: 'you are a truly beautiful black woman my darling young friend'.

My lack of French proficiency transformed me into one of those delightfully too-shy-to-speak-childlike-aboriginals, like one of those female natives from the old French African colonies, whose face in true aboriginal fashion, was drawn into a perpetual friendly smile, with a flash of white teeth breaking the impenetrably immobile mask of her face, and like an infant in response to the cooing of an adult, she smiled, as she always smiled when spoken to by a white person. Anyway the aboriginal lesbian danced the night away mainly with Monique, but she had to work hard to prevent me from being stolen away from her by a bevy of lipstick lesbian admirers who flirted openly with me, the smiling native girl from Senegal, and I played the role to perfection of a young naïve lesbian black woman, an African visitor from Senegal who was going to be a fashion model in Paris, well that was the storyline that Monique had concocted, and that it was her job to act as my chaperone until I had learned the ropes. I was her responsibility. Unlike Cinderella we got back to Monique's flat long after midnight. I showered and put on my own clothes. Monique wanted to call a taxi, but I insisted that it was not necessary. The hotel was minutes away. When I got back to the hotel the doors were locked and the foyer was dimly lit. I rang the doorbell several times. Eventually one of the hotel staff opened the door and let me in. The bedroom was locked. I knocked softly on the door. Dressed in a short nightie a sleepy Kate opened the door. I expected to her start shouting at me. Instead, all she said in forlorn voice that she had been worried sick about me and that I had behaved very strangely and then sighing deeply she said that she was not sure any more whether she really knew me, and that I had made her feel so sad over the last couple of days. Sitting on the edge of the bed burying her face in her hands she began to weep. I went again through the whole ritual of trying to comfort her and telling her that I loved her and so on. It was a terrible situation to be in. I felt extremely rotten.

I slept fitfully next to Kate. I woke up feeling exhausted and depressed with the whole situation. For most of that day Kate remained docile and melancholic, she was a shadow of her normal forceful personality. Love hurts, and love lost can break even the most forceful personalities.

She said later that day that all my expressions of love were just empty words, and that I had never really loved her. I was hollow and unfeeling. I was selfish and was only concerned with my own desires and needs. Kate was a personality that you could not reason with. I failed dismally to exonerate myself from all blame. She twisted and distorted everything that I said in my defence. She did this in all our arguments always twisting and distorting what I had said. It was the same when I expressed a difference in opinion regarding some matter between the two of us. Everything always boomeranged back at me with a new twist. That was Kate for you.

374. To light a fire on the altar every day—Leviticus 6:5

375

In the 1980s the whole issue of sex became more and more complicated, contradictory and idiotic in the feminist movement. Feminists seemed to have lost the plot regarding sexual relations between women. I was not interest in heterosexual relations. In the woman's deliverance movement female and lesbian understanding of their own sexuality became increasing overshadowed and distorted by concerns with sexism, male construction and representation of female sexuality, sexual oppression and exploitation of women, gender construction and so on, to the extent that feminists began to appear grotesquely asexual and 'erotophobic'. Feminists found it difficult to deal with sex, especially sex between women, and consequently they could not engage creatively and imaginatively with the realities of sexuality including desire, lust, eroticism, fantasy and the sweaty, hot, pleasurable, exciting, physical entanglement of sex. When I happened to be with these radical feminists I felt like a freak, none of them were into fucking anybody, they were not doing any sex, they were all so sterile, dried out, hang up and joyless, they were missing out on so much fun, adventure, excitement, and pleasure, and not to mention joy. There was an aura of sterile stern joylessness sexual repression that cloaked their minds and coloured the rhetoric of these de-eroticized radical feminists. They could talk passionately and endlessly without end about the construction of sexuality but they could not talk about erotic desire or the pleasures of sex. The feminist debate focused mainly on the oppressive nature of sex within the context of patriarchical power over women. This was all good and well, but in the process they had thrown out the baby (sex) with the bathwater (patriarchical power). Their suffocating and stifling sexlessness left me feeling very sad and depressed.

375. Not to extinguish this fire—Leviticus 6:5

376

In his Untimely Mediations Nietzsche constructs an image of the animal as something, possibly a sentient being, which exists unhistorically in a constant state of forgetfulness. So here we have the animal which in keeping with its characteristic or essential state of animality has to necessarily be a sentient being, but a sentient being in a constant state of forgetfulness. The animal as a being happens to be an animal by virtue of its sentient state. The animal is always recognizable as being an animal by virtue of possessing all the recognizable characteristics of animality, which includes the state or power or capacity of sentience. What do animals forget in order for them to exist unhistorically? Sentience is the capacity to feel, to experience, to be aware, to experience subjectivity, and possibly to experience the state of consciousness. An experience may also be a memory. Is memory something that we experience, something that we become aware of? We do have experiences that appear to our sensibilities, or conscious awareness, in the form of recollections, in the form of the resurfacing of a memory from the deepest crevices of our minds. The state of consciousness can be interpreted, even at its most fundamental level of complexity, as being in some kind of state of awareness, and this state of awareness is a fundamental or defining attribute of animality, which features even in the most simplest of the protozoans and metazoans. Surely memory is the condition that makes conscious historical existence possible and forgetfulness can be remedied by writing. Loss of memory which results in the erasure of history is not equivalent to forgetfulness. Maybe I have actually forgotten most of my life.

376. To remove the ashes from the altar every day—Leviticus 6:3

377

But I remember clearly:

The fish in the bath, the chameleon walking on the fence, the tortoise in the hole, the slaughter of the goat, the dead seal on the beach, the incredible heat of Alice's vagina, Mister Elvis at the Rand Easter Show, the odour of Mister Elvis' cologne, Kate Jolly's finger moving in my anus, the taste of Laurentina in Vilanculos, eating paella and drinking red wine on the beach in Spain, meeting Monique, the taste of Isabella's mouth, the massive marlin stealing the fish that had been speared, skinny dipping with Samantha, the man almost drowning in his own blood, lying on the cold backseat of the Hudson parked outside Berea Park, the neon light sign of Pegasus, the smell and taste of communion wine, every landmark on the road from Stilfontein to Johannesburg, the streets of Springs, my bedroom, Malcolm crying while cleaning the red earth sand-clod stains on the white walls of Dr Cohen's house.

377. To burn incense every day—Exodus 30:7

378

Memories are thoughts that we have or are able to construct about our past experiences. Our thoughts somehow come into existence, they must exist somewhere in some 'region' within the inaccessible interiority of my brain and mind. The complex systems of human sociality which has made human survival possible depended strongly, well even critically for that matter, on the capacity to communicate our thoughts and our intentions at an interpersonal or intersubjective level. Our intentions reflect our thoughts. Language facilitates the public manifestation or publication of our thoughts and intentions. Language can be viewed as the complex system which facilitates the public expression, in the form of perceptible/sensible signs and signals (exteriorization), of any conceivable thought or idea or intention or concept or feeling or emotion or experience existing in my minds or consciousness or awareness (interiority) thereby allowing others who possess the same complex language system to interpret symbolically what we have expressed in signs and signals. The meaning expressed in the signs and signals can be interpreted and the original contents of our mind or thoughts can be recreated in the minds of others, and our intentions where relevant can be understood.

378. To light the Menorah every day—Exodus 27:21

379

The complex system that makes language possible is a multi-component and multi-process system involving the signalling machinery/mechanisms (signal expression and signal reception), semantics and syntax. Many of the components and processes of the complex language system which makes language possible are also possessed by all animals to different degrees along a continuum of increasing complexity. The apogee to which the human capacity for the expression of the contents of the mind or consciousness in the form of language has reached does not transform humans into a qualitatively different kind of animal, making humans unfathomably unique from the rest of the animal kingdom, on the contrary, it only makes humans quantitatively different to a higher or lower degree on a continuum of genotypic and phenotypic variability with the rest of the animal kingdom. But then again how do we know that this complex system which embodies the full machinery for the production of language is nothing more than a generator of illusions and fictions with speaking and writing never having the power to really rise above the construction of impenetrable illusions into the transparent heavenly realm of the Platonic Ideas.

The Platonic Idea of the Goodness is something which I have obsessed about for most of my life. What makes a person good? What is virtue? What makes a person good or what defines virtue cannot be codified as a system of commandments or laws. There is no law or codification of laws which can capture the Idea of Goodness. One reason for this is that Goodness and Truth are inseparable and Truth is always a System in which all kinds of claims regarding the truthfulness of particulars or instances or instantiations are true only by virtue of how they stand in relation to the Whole System of Truth and the Whole System of Truth cannot be codified as a system of finite truth claims or commandments.

379. The High Priest must bring a meal offering every day—Leviticus 6:13

380

In the second chapter of his Untimely Meditations Nietzsche proposes, I use the word 'proposes' because he is writing from the science of the nineteenth century, anyway he proposes that animals like cattle for instance, grazing in the meadows :

'...do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored.'

In my prison cell I am also fettered to the moment, each moment is the same, there are no shadows or sun to determine the time of day, the light is on twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and I have no watch. What is there to forget?

For Nietzsche only man can say: 'I remember.' But for the animal, each passing moment is immediately forgotten, and for the animal: '...every moment really dies, sinks back into the night and fog and is extinguished forever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically...'

380. To bring two additional lambs as burnt offerings on Shabbat—Numbers 28:9

381

Deviance, transgression, gender role dysfunction, sex versus gender, spectacle of femininity, exaggerated mimicry, spectacles of femininity, femininity as pantomime, masquerade, myth, travesty, comedy, femininity is not biological, acts of gender, performer, performance, performativity of gender, actor, role, role player, character, author, script, agent, gender construction, theatre, theatrical, theatricality, stage, also what it means to be incarnated, subject → performer → character → role, performance of gender as drag, mimic, mime, repetition, iteration, formulaic codes, language/consciousness/speech-acts/presence/contingency/sender → receiver, analysis of role in performance of gender, camp as expression, camp as display, camp as representation of femininity, destabilization of binaries, coming out, Peter Pan as a woman, what about Pandora and the origination of sex, the writer as performer, queer femme → incarnation of the ideal feminine type, a femme is not a 'real' woman, spectacle of lesbian femme as the dreamt up real woman, femme in drag, lesbian femme in drag as travesty of transvestitism, imaginary gender and real sex, the femme as a femme, lesbian femme as lipstick lesbians, imitation is performance, the self versus subject as the presentation of the self, centrality of theatre in the spectacle of gender construction, impersonation of fantasy, lesbian aesthetic...

381. To make the show bread—Exodus 25:30

382

The subject is produced by performative actions and narratives.

382. To bring additional offerings on the New Month (Rosh Chodesh)--Numbers 28:11

383

Sexual pleasure has been rightly conflated with the goal of procreation and the occasion for procreation can only be realized by virtue of sexual pleasure.

The function of sexual pleasure in procreation takes on a new post-Palaeolithic significance with respect to human sociality and human solidarity. Post-Palaeolithic societies have evolved less egalitarian, more patriarchical and more hierarchicalized forms of social organization. Domestication marked the end of the Palaeolithic epoch and with domestication we have the emergence of the male despot or patriarch who rules as a dictator over the domestic household. The domestication of the female body, together with the domestication of sex and pleasure, co-occurred as a consequence of this transformation in the organization of human sociality. In this context the queering of sex and pleasure represents the threefold un-domestication of sex, pleasure and the female body, mainly because it has been decoupled from any domestic functional significance under the rule and power of the patriarch. Theological speaking the religious or soteriological idea of sin and fallenness could only exist as a meaningful mythical social construct in post-Palaeolithic societies. Sinfulness as a state of being-in-the-world exists by virtue of the domestication of the totality of human existence. Domestication and the condemnation of human life to a condition of sinfulness as a state-of-affairs can be mythico-causally and mythico-historically coupled to the Biblical phenomenon of the fall and the consequent exile from an original Edenic state, which was a state of nature and therefore a state of sinlessness, and therefore also a state of grace. Lesbianism represents the un-domestication of the female body, together with the un-domestication of sex and pleasure. In this sense lesbian homoeroticism which encapsulates the appetite and desire for the sensual pleasures of non-reproductive homosexual sex in wild feral women who have returned to a kind of secretive wilderness existence no longer constitutes something which can be conceived as sinful. Animals in a state of nature cannot sin.

383. To bring additional offerings on Passover—Numbers 28:19

384

I don't think God is really concerned about homosexuality. However, it is rewarding, insightful and illuminating to engage in a queer hermeneutics when reading of the Bible. The stylization and parody evident in the performance of gender informs the queer reading of the Bible. God in the first creation story of Genesis creates both man and woman together or simultaneous in a single event. God creates them in 'his' own image signifying that God's gender is ambiguous, God is neither a 'he' nor a 'she', in this particular mythological depiction of God. Adam and Eve went about their business completely naked. They were not nude. Nudity can only emerge as a state-of-affairs following the unclothing or an undressing from a pre-existing state of being dressed. Nudity first emerges in the post-Palaeolithic as an erotic unconcealing or erotic unveiling following the great domestication which included the human self-domestication. Before that nakedness was natural and un-erotic in the Neolithic sense.

In the Garden of Eden they were first naked and then after the Fall they were banished into exile dressed in 'drag' which also signified their parodic binary gendering into masculine and feminine. Their phantasmagorical gendering as a consequence of covering-up through dressing-up also symbolized their state of deterritorialization and denaturalization which represents the essence of being-in-a-state-of-exile, a state of alienation and estrangement, becoming a foreigner in search of a home in the wilderness of 'lostness'. Having knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for Totalization, for having acquired absolute knowledge, which means possessing absolute certainty about everything, which in the End represents full attainment of Epistemological Utopia. But having said the message of the Edenic Myth of the Fall and Exile articulates an ironic narrative. The tragedy of the Fall is the reality of the broken Totality, the division of the world into binary opposites: masculine and feminine.

384. To offer the wave offering from the meal of the new wheat (on the 2nd day of Passover)--Leviticus 23:10

385

To do drag is to create or construct the parody of gender for the purposes of flirtation and seduction. Drag now creates the conditions of possibility for the post-Edenic erotic encounter. To be in drag or 'to do drag' is to be in a state of open flirtation, to have knowledge of good and evil. Dressing up in drag, which is the ironical-comical-exaggerated-imitation of gender, is motivated by the intention to flirt and seduce, to flirt and seduce a potential sexual partner, to capture the object of desire. To drag is to pull, to pull along, as in pulling along the long train of the flowing dress, often loved by the transvestite. To 'do' drag is to 'train' as in trailing the long trail, to 'train' is to pull along, to 'train' is to trail the net which catches. To do drag is to construct the decoy that attracts, to seduce through stylized seductive pantomime. In order to capture the object of desire the drag artist engages in the comedy of sex, catching in the process that object of desire in the 'train'. To capture the object of desire one trails ones train or 'net' which is the imitation of gender. To 'train' is to domesticate, to domesticate is to do gender as parody and pantomime of masculinity and femininity. To do drag is to engage in the theatre of travesty, to masquerade the comical travesty of gender imitation.

385. Each man must count the Omer — seven weeks from the day the new wheat offering was brought—Leviticus 23:15

386

For the sake of the rest of the holiday I have managed to patch things up Kate. She became happy as a child holding my hand tightly on the flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport back to Madrid. She fussed over me, showering me with affection, showing concern for my every want and need. I reciprocated her demonstrations of affection. Glowing with radiant joy, she chatted incessantly about this and about that. We would be staying in Madrid for next three days before returning home to South Africa. What would I like to do in Madrid she wanted know. I could only think of visiting the Prado Art Museum. Maybe we could spend a night and day in Toledo she suggested. I agreed with her suggestion, confirming that I thought it was a great idea, she showed her appreciation by squeezing my hand and kissing me on the cheek. On the flight Monique constantly intruded into my thoughts. I had become infatuated with her, I was falling in love with her, I was falling in love with another older woman. She was completely different to Kate. I had to choice between Kate and Monique, it would be Monique. She was not kinky like Kate. There was concern written on Kate's face:

'You look so sad, is everything still OK with us,' she asked, her brow knitted.

I smiled and said: 'I feel sad because our holiday will soon be over.'

386. To bring additional offerings on Shavuot—Numbers 28:26

387

Compared to Monique, Kate was very one dimensional, she was an academic, a scientist, but she was definitely not an intellectual. Apart from mycology she had no other intellectual interests. She was more of a physical person who enjoyed going to the gym, playing tennis, jogging, keeping fit and dancing. She was a superb ball room dancer. The sad thing was that we had run out of interesting things to talk about. Our conversations revolved around trivialities. With Monique our conversations while intensely intellectual and probing were at the same time humorous, exciting and intriguing. When I was Monique I was always on the brink of laughter. She was a fun person with an incredible sense of humour which revealed a razor sharp and very observant mind. I loved her French accent when she spoke English. Kate was more attractive than Monique. Kate had the kind of body that men wanted fuck. She would be any man's dream fuck. But Monique had a sensuality and erotic aura which Kate while being physically sexy in an eye pleasing pinup girl fashion lacked. In spite of her obvious physical attractiveness Kate lacked that natural erotic sensuousness which Monique possessed. Monique was alluring, I felt aroused by her presence in a way that was never the case with Kate, in spite of Kate's almost dazzling physical beauty. To be sexually aroused by a woman involved all kinds of triggers and physical beauty was not on the top of the list. Sensuality and that mysterious erotic aura was something that was subtle, mysterious and unfathomable making the erotic encounter between two women something almost mystical and deeply spiritual.

387. To bring two loaves to accompany the above sacrifice—Leviticus 23:18

388

From the airport we drove in a hired car into the centre of Madrid where Kate had booked a room in the Hotel Regina Madrid. I sat in the passenger seat with the map of Madrid on my lap acting as the navigator. Franco was still alive in Spain while Hitler and Mussolini had long ago died ignominious deaths.

388. To bring additional offerings on Rosh Hashanah—Numbers 29:2

389

The Prado in Madrid like the Louvre in Paris proved to be overwhelming. We stare at Goya's Naked Maja. Tell me your impressions? We feel impatient with Goya. What does he know about that foreign continent that no man will ever discover, the other Universe of feminine sexuality and the nature of the female erotic being which has been cut free from the bondage of masculinity, a non-passive female sexual being which has broken free from the stifling and smothering sweatiness of masculinity? At night we walk the streets of Madrid for hours holding hands. Kate is my lover, she is my mother and I am her daughter, I put my arm around her waist and she puts her arm around my shoulders, we kiss. Paris had pulled me away from her, driving a wedge between us, and now Madrid has brought us close again. We have left the Paris, the secular city of love and we are now once more in the warm motherly bosom of a deeply Catholic city. After going to evening Mass we have a beer before our long night walk. Twilight has given way to darkness and we join the Catholic fiesta in the square in an old suburb on the outskirts of the city. I try to imagine a sacred life of erotic love within the cloistered conjugal bed in response to Kate's musing about us becoming nuns. Our day would be structured by observing the divine office or the liturgy of the hours. Like the Apostles in Jerusalem we would observe the same Jewish customs of praying at the third, sixth and ninth hour and at midnight. At Matins after prayers we would make love, at Lauds just before the break of dawn we say prayers and then we would make love before rising again for Prime, the early Morning Prayer. Prayer, orgasm, study, love, work, readings from the Old and New Testament, reciting the creeds and confessions, singing of canticles and Psalms will fill the hours of our day. Kate did not appreciate my profaning of the divine office by co-mingling it with the shared orgasmic celebration of the female body in all its divine beauty. I tried to explain to Kate that as queers we were in fact technically celibate. Without male sexual penetration of our bodies we were essentially non-sexual in our erotic and orgasmic intimacy.

389. To bring additional offerings on Yom Kippur—Numbers 29:8

390

What is immanence? We think of something being immanent in something else. Being immanent it to be inherent, to be indwelling, to be integrated or to be integral, to permeate, to be contained within, to be embodied, and not be external imposed. Plainly the meaning of immanence entails that something is in something, and that this something does not exist outside the boundaries of something. In this sense immanence signifies the idea of containment, or of being inside, rather than outside, which is to be integral, possibly integrated. Immanence signifies the quality of being contained within something. To be incarnate is to be immanent. For God to be reveal God becomes immanent. God is revealed by virtue of becoming immanent. God is immanent in everything by virtue of God's omnipresence. Since God is omnipotent, all power exists by virtue of God's omnipotence. For God to be truly God, God is necessarily omnipresent and omnipotent. By virtue of God's omnipresence and omnipotence all physical events in the Universe are causally overdetermined or omnidetermined. Immanence is the counter-concept to the idea of transcendence.

Human thinking and reasoning are immanent activities by virtue the fact that human consciousness cannot exist independently of matter. Matter is endowed with properties or powers or innate predisposition which are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of consciousness as a property or power of matter. It is in this sense that thinking and reasoning are immanent activities, because the capacity to think and reason is ultimately reducible or explainable in terms of properties of matter which include the motion of particles.

It has been proposed that thinking and philosophy are immanent to reason in the sense that they are ultimately involved in the application of reason to reason, which is the application of reason to itself.

390. To bring additional offerings on Sukkot—Numbers 29:13

391

The immanence of reason. In the application of reason, what is reason applied to?

Immanence and transcendence in Plato's philosophy of the forms or ideas or universals or the One in relation to the Many or particulars or instances. The ideas or forms or universals are transcendent whereas the particulars which resemble the forms are finite instances of the forms which are eternal, and if they are instances of the forms then the forms which are transcendent and eternal are immanent in their finite temporal instances. In this sense the transcendence and immanence are not opposed. The transcendent is immanent in the finite and the temporal. Some thinkers differentiate between the early Plato and the later Plato. The early Plato appears to say one thing about the relation between forms and their instances and the later Plato seems to say something else. Some thinkers argue that the early Plato is implicit in the later Plato. The forms are intelligible ideas which are not strictly speaking sensible. However Socrates would have it that the forms have to be something in order to be present or immanent in their finite and temporal instances. 391. To bring additional offerings on Shmini Atzeret—Numbers 29:35

392

The future is not concrete or actual in any kind of way, it is not pre-arranged or preordained or predestined, the future exists as a nothingness in the fathomless and bottomless emptiness in the open void of the non-existing and the not-yet. The future in its non-existence as the nothingness-of -the -not-yet can only exist as the prospect, expectation, hope and anticipation it infinite openness as the non-manifestation of the infinite virtual ocean infinite of possibilities unrealized dispositional powers in the here and now of the passing moment. In this sense the realization of the Totality as the knowledge of the Absolute in the Epistemological Utopia of Certainty is eternally postponed in the freedom of God. But knowing this is true knowledge, this is the Truth that we are certain of, the 'ungiveness' of the not-yet, nothing is given, and nothing can be taken for granted. The 'ungiveness' is an unforgiveness. The future holds no redemption or salvation. Nothing can be taken for granted, nothing is given – this has soteriological implications, it has implications for the meaning of redemption and salvation and for the meaning of sin. God cannot be pre-empted. Nothing can be done now in the present moment to earn or merit the future of God's favour other than responding to the present call of conscience and responsibility in the face of the infinite Other who is the least of all. The face of the infinite Other is the despised, the weak, the unfaithful, the downtrodden, the prisoner, the sinner, the adulterer, the thief, the murderer, the poor, the slave, the prostitute, the harlot, the whore, the lesbian, the proletariat, the dispossessed, the stranger, the refugee, the alien, the unbeliever, the atheist, the unemployed, the soldier, the forgotten, the sick, the hungry, the diseased, the heretic, the unholy, the unclean, the condemned, the ritually unclean, the eaters of pork, the drinkers of alcohol, the infidels and the outcast. No one is better than the next one. No one has the power to sin against God, no one possesses the power to harm, insult, offend or cause any kind of injury to God. No one can cause God to suffer. Only the infinite face of the Other can suffer harm, insult, offence and injury. In the absence of human solidarity Godlessness reigns with impunity and humanity suffers.

392. Not to eat sacrifices which have become unfit or blemished—Deuteronomy 14:3

393

Why would God care what anyone believes or whether one lives in a state of unbelief? Why would an infinite God who by definition is necessarily free, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnidetermining, be injuriously or negatively affected by the actions finite beings who are ultimately powerless. It is in our conscience and in our capacity for empathy towards the wretched and the despised that we experience the agency and presence of God in our lives. And in our act of self-emptying we draw close to God.

What you do to the least of these Sisters of mine you do to me. It is in God's power to respond to the cries of those in pain and God's response is always an act of kenosis. God hears the cries of those in pain.

And this is God's kenosis. In God's act of self-emptying, God has the power to experience our pain and wretchedness. In an act of self-empting God becomes one with Womankind, because the Women in our midst are the very least of these, that is, the least of the members that makeup humankind. This is the solidarity of God. God's act of solidarity is an act of kenosis, a self-empting act in which God ultimately dies a vicarious death so that Women can be liberated from their chains of slavery and bondage to the masculinized overlords of Patriarchalism. The God who died at Golgotha cannot coexist with Patriarchalism. This is Christianity.

393. Not to eat from sacrifices offered with improper intentions—Leviticus 7:18

394

I have realized more and more that spatial form is a poor substitute for time as a principle for coherence. I later learnt that Djuna Barnes' Nightwood had been rejected by five publishers. It was Bridgette who introduced me to Nightwood: 'This is a book you have read,' she said. I read and re-read Nightwood and I became obsessed with Djuna Barnes. And then she died in 1982, six days after turning 90.

394. Not to leave sacrifices past the time allowed for eating them—Leviticus 22:30

395

In a square in Madrid we watched young women, or they could have been teenage schoolgirls dancing the flamenco. I was enthralled by the sight and Kate noticed. She said that she would teach me to dance the flamenco, and the tango, and any dance, the rumba, the samba and the waltz. I was like child, radiant with delight at the prospect that Kate would teach me how to dance.

'Will you really!' I answered like an excited little girl.

Kate smiled indulgently as she saw the lure and I could read her as she spun a web of bondage.

'When we get back to the hotel I will teach you the tango and the basics of the flamenco, the tango is easy, it is like walking, you will love it.'

'Without music?'

'Without music, I will be your music, I will be your tempo, your rhythm and your beat, we will dance to the pulse of my body.'

'We will dance to the pulse of her body.' That statement has stuck in my mind forever. Kate always said I had the body of swimmer. She had the full measure of my strength and this excited her. She could not let me go, even when Janet and I were together. She would still ask if I would be her dance partner for some clandestine high-heeled lesbian get together of the Johannesburg rich and famous. And I would go with Kate, and Janet would be sad and forlorn and cry. I would say: 'I have too, I have to go with Kate.'

'Do you love Kate?' she would cry, hot tears running down her cheeks.

'I don't love Kate.'

'Then why, then why?' she would weep that heart wrenching plaintive plea for understanding.

'I love only you Janet, but Kate I only love in manner of speaking.'

'What do you mean?' Janet's anguish question I could not answer. I would love Kate forever.

Driving in the red Porsche that she had inherited from her grandfather we would visit Truworths, Foschini and Stuttafords to find an outfit for me. I still have all the outfits and high heels that she had bought for me. Until I left Wits for UCT I was Kate's whore. Afterwards we would go back to her flat. In her bed we were like tigresses on heat, pain merged with pleasure, as we wrestled for dominance over each other.

Kate was a Catholic even though she was not sure of God's existence. Sunday mornings refreshed from a night in each other's embrace we would rise early to go Mass. Praying the prayer before receiving Holy Communion:... 'Master and Lord, Jesus Christ our God, You alone have authority to forgive my sins, whether committed knowingly or in ignorance, and make me worthy to receive without condemnation...' I would fall down on my knees before the priest and with bowed head and raised hands I would receive the elements of the Mass.

Much to Kate's dismay and disapproval I would partake, as a non-Catholic, in the Catholic Mass. My defence was that no one could be turned away from the Lord's Table.

395. Not to eat from that which was left over—Leviticus 19:8

396

Yael Kaplan

On the 1975 January Botany field trip Yael Kaplan joined me in a second class single sleeping berth on the Johannesburg-Durban overnight train. It would be just the two of us in berth for the night. The leather upholstery was the usual green class coaches. I sat down next to the window. The seat was facing the direction in which the train would be travelling. I was familiar with the overnight sleeper train journey from Park Station to Durban, having on previous occasions travelled as a primary school child with Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven on holiday to Durban mainly during the July school vacations.

Both of us were not interested in joining in the drinking and partying at the other end of coach with the rest of the third year botany class. Yael who was a pretty, dark eyed, petit, inquisitive, Orthodox and Sephardic Jew had been my Friday afternoon lab partner in our first year physics class. I originally thought that she was Portuguese. Then she was Yael Toledano, now she was Mrs. Yael Kaplan. At the end of our second year she had married a Rabbi while still being at the tender age of nineteen.

'I saw you at Stuttafords with Dr Jolly, the dress that you were trying on was gorgeous, you looked fabulous,' she said, after pouting the word 'fabulous' she flourished her bright pink tongue seductively, its sharp pointed tip briefly curling up in the corner of her lip, before slipping behind smiling closed lips that teased with an elusive invitation that did not seem real. Was she coming onto me, the wife of a Rabbi? In first year when I first got to know Yael as friend I could not help wondering what it would be like to be physically intimate with her, as she was a truly delectable creature. If something was going to happen between us then she would have to live with that secret knowledge of homoerotic transgression for the rest of her life. She seemed to be so ripe for the taking that it was impossible not to test her resolve, and a little voice said why not? Prompted by the temptation I remarked in an offhand manner that Leviticus does not explicitly condemn women having sex with women. I added that women do not possess intromitting sex organs which ejaculate semen so strictly speaking women making love with women are not technically speaking engaged in having sex. The fingers of a woman's hand are not sex organs.

In the New Testament Romans 1:24 condemns women engaged in physical love towards each other. In Acts 25:11 Nero who outdid Caligula in acts of sexual perversion acquits Saint Paul. Paul did not condemn the Roman political establishment, instead he endorsed it as God ordained. Lesbianism was something sacred to me and was not something to be trifled with for amusement or sexual curiosity. Yet it seemed that Yael wanted to engage in a lesbian sex act with me.

Yael was sitting close to the door, there was wide space between us, and so I patted the seat next to me inviting her to sit closer to me. She got up and sat next me. Finding herself at the threshold of the great unknown she confessed that she was feeling extremely nervous.

'I need to have a smoke my whole body is shaking like a leaf.' She got up and rummaged in her bag for a packet of cigarettes. With visibly shaking hands she lit the cigarette. I didn't know she smoked. She said that no one knew she smoked, not even the Rabbi. After flicking the butt out of the window she rummaged in her bag for her mouth spray to freshen her breathe. Sitting down again next to me she turned her face towards me and said:

'You can kiss me if you want to.'

'I think you better first lock the door.' As a teenager I never had the typical heterosexual teenage experience of no-strings-attached-getting-off in a dark corner at a party or session as it was called in those days. Listening to the high school girl talk, getting-off involved sustained intimate boy-girl smooching for the duration of the party. We had a secret love affair which lasted the full seven weeks of the first term and then she broke it off just before I was due to go on a diving trip to Sodwana Bay during the Easter recess. She told me then that she was pregnant and that she was going to be a mother. Those seven weeks literally changed my life. At end of those seven weeks I was in many ways no longer the same person. I would never be the same again. What happened during those seven weeks would cling to me like a shadow for the rest of life. Until now I have only hinted about the thing that I have managed to keep a secret for reasons that I am even sure about myself. It was not shame. It was something else. I felt honour bound not to deny or betray the significance and meaning of the experience which I had gone through. I have never spoken to anyone about my experiences during those seven epic weeks of my life. Only four people and Yael know the real truth about me. So there has been this side of my life which I have managed to keep a secret. It is only now in the notebook writings that am acknowledging 'publically' that I have a secret, and that I have lived a secret life ever since my affair with Yael.

A rattling at the door interrupted our smooching. The door slide open. He wanted to know if we wanted bedding. While our two bunks were being made we went to the dining saloon for dinner. While waiting for the first course which was going to be soup we ordered two glasses of red wine. Yael sipping her wine had a mischievous secretive look on her face.

'What?' I asked.

'In first year I was infatuated with you,' she confessed.

'I was infatuated with you too,' I also confessed.

'Then our feelings for each other are mutual?' She asked.

'Yes.'

Back in our berth after switching off the lights we pulled the crisp cool sheets on the lower bunk over our naked bodies. I made love to Yael as the train sped into the night that cloaked the vast steppes of the Highveld in mysteries that were too deep and invisible to ever fathom. While enjoying the intimate closeness of our bodies we whispered and giggled like two schoolgirls. As the night wore on we listened to the lulling rhythm of the train's unrelenting swaying and rolling and clickety-clack. Our limbs intertwined, our lip pressed together we were oblivious to the progress of its steady passage through the thick silent darkness. Yael's tongue penetrate softly into the passage of my ear, she nibbled and sucked my ear lobe, she bit my neck until the pleasure mingled with the sharpness of pain made me cry out, she moved her moist vulva rhythmically against my thigh until she climaxed once more. Reaching over me she opened the window blinds, I gazed up at the black bejewelled night sky, and put arms around her and held her tight against my breasts, I could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, and the strong beat of her heart. We communicated with the constant flutter of moist kisses, we chuckled softly to each other as our nocturnal journey of love was punctuated intermittently by the rough bashing sounds of berth doors sliding back and forth, by the rapid thudding of running footsteps, by the kicking of a football in the passage way, by sudden bouts of boisterous shouting, by the eruptions of raucous laughter, by bursts of wild guitar strumming and then by an intense passionate rendition of Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath. In a sleepy voice I heard Yael say before we both fell asleep: 'I love you.' And the train, it motion relentless, snaked determinately towards its destination across the night enveloped plains of the great and ancient plateau before eventually winding stealthy down the steep dip of the Drakensburg escapement like a python into the pitch dark star lit silence of the rock hilly savannahs which gradually merged into the rolling coastal plains which kissed the sensuous surging shores of the vast Indian Ocean. We gate-crashed erotically into each other's dreams. Oneiric images of Yael who was asleep snugly against me populated the landscape of my dreams with her heavenly sweetness.

With the night-train train journey of drunken revelry between Park and Durban Stations behind us, we boarded a second train for Port Shepstone. From Port Shepstone a bus took us to the Oribi Gorge Nature Reserve. The rest camp with its rondavels had been booked by the Botany Department for our 3rd year botany fieldtrip, and would be our base camp for seven nights. On the way to Port Shepstone, the train stopped at seemingly remote and strange looking railway stations linked to all the familiar towns with their holiday beaches along the Natal south coast, Isipingo Beach, Amanzimtoti, Warner Beach, Winklespruit, Illovo Beach, Umkomaas, Scottsburgh and Hibberdene. Following the coastline of the Indian Ocean the railway line cutting through the dense dune bush.

396. Not to eat from sacrifices which became impure—Leviticus 7:19

397

Wayne Bernstein the Jew who converted to Christianity married a Jewess who had also converted. They became part of community who called themselves Hebrew Christians and they were connected with the movement called Jews for Jesus. Wayne was the deepest and most credible Christian I have ever met. Today I am a closet Christian entirely because of my admiration for him. The Rabbi's attempt at debunking the idea that a Jew could not be Christian was not compelling. In my own judgement Wayne had argued successfully that a historical precedent existed regarding the possibility that Jews could believe in Jesus as the Messiah without leaving Judaism. He argued that the very first believers in Jesus as being the Messiah were in fact Torah observing Jews. He argued further that before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD all gentiles who wanted to follow Jesus as the Messiah had to convert to Judaism. So even before the name Christian was applied to the very first believers in Jesus, gentiles wanting to live out their faith in Jesus had to first convert to Judaism and become Torah observing Jews. The earliest community of believers who were followers of Jesus in Jerusalem and who are now referred to by church historians as members of the primitive Christian church were mainly Jews, Jews who had not rejected Judaism but had remained Torah observing Jews. Saint Paul even referred to them as Judaizers, because they insisted that gentile converts to 'Christianity' could only become Christians by virtue of their conversion to Judaism, which meant in reality that in order for them to become Christians they had to first become Jews. Wayne had demolished the Rabbi's argument that a Jew could not be a 'Christian' after Wayne had proven that gentiles who wanted to be Christians had to first convert to Judaism and to effectively become Jews. It was Wayne's contention that the biggest irony of Judaism was that Christianity as a world conquering religion had inadvertently emerged from within the heart of Judaism. Wayne also argued that even the Talmud or the Oral Torah does not emphatically declare that redemption can only be earned through observance of the Laws of Moses. Which would be consistent with Saint Paul's arguments regarding the faith versus law controversy in relation to justification by faith only. Justification by faith only is not inconsistent with the Oral Torah in Wayne's opinion. Paul's own Midrash of the Oral Torah could have contributed to his understanding of the issue of faith versus law in relation to God's redemptive justification of the believer. Observance of the Oral Torah was indeed a work of faith involving the worshipful acknowledgement of God in every action within the totality of life. A work of faith is a work of belief. True observance of the Law of Moses is a work of faith and as a work of faith it is inseparable from a work of belief, and a work of belief is reducible to accepting that certain proposition claims of a metaphysical and theological nature are justifiably true. Saint Paul would argue that the very capacity to belief that something is metaphysically and theologically true is a God empowered capacity. A capacity to grasp or comprehend the Totality or the Absolute. A capacity which is intrinsic to matter, a capacity which is realized through the immanence of God within everything that exists.

Worshipful acknowledgement of God in every action of human existence, which would make the whole of human life sacred and holy, could be construed as the observance of the true TORAH, and according to Wayne this was the message of Jesus and Paul. And I would add to what Wayne said by emphasizing that the worshipful acknowledgement of God in every action of human existence which makes human holy and sacred has to be centred on Justice. To live the Just Life is to truly and authentically live the life centred on the worshipful acknowledgement of God in every action of human existence. The Torah as the way points to the living of the just life. Wayne's parting shot was that authentic Christians were 'spiritual Semites' and genuine Christian were in a subtle fashion actually Jews because to be a Christian that had to believe in the revelatory truth of what Christian's refer to as the Pentateuch. Wayne did not dwell on the significance of why Christians divide the Bible into the Old Testament and the New Testament or the Old Covenant versus the New Covenant. This the chasm which divides Jews from Christians. It is something which would eventually become my own personal struggle. A struggle with a conceptualization of religious and political ideology as Noble Lies or Noble Falsehoods which could only be resolved dialectically into its opposite. And this is why the reading of both Marx's Capital and Plato's Republic has been a lifetime's titanic intellectual struggle especially when read in the context that Darwin's theory of evolution changes everything. I was drawn ineluctably into the vortex of the great struggle of life which included the liberation struggle.

In retrospect with the knowledge of hindsight from years of thinking about the Bible and dwelling on theological issues that centred mainly on the nature of 'Man' and God it was clear that the Rabbi's arguments were specious in the extreme, and with due respect to him as a person, it was plain to me that the Rabbi had done himself a great disservice by showing himself up as a shallow theological and philosophical thinker, his grasp of the essence of Christianity was appalling, and as a consequence he was embarrassingly overshadowed and diminished by Wayne's rebuttal which was logical, analytical and Biblically sound. The Rabbi missed the critical issue, which hinged on the Biblical metaphor of sin as a debt which could never be settled by the works of Man and also on Anselm's work on why God became Man, and was executed on a Roman Cross on Golgotha.

The Rabbi was Yael's husband. His attack on Jesus was particularly vicious and quite strange. It was also strange because he said Socrates was greater than Jesus. Socrates the great homosexual, the lover of Alcibiades, was greatly admired by the Rabbi. The main plank in the Rabbi's dismissal of Jesus as a man of no significance was the story of his cursing of the fig tree, which subsequently became withered fig tree, which taken from the Gospel of Mark reads as follows:

12 The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 13 Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. 14 Then he said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." And his disciples heard him say it.

15 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 16 and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 17 And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.' "

18 The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

19 When evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

20 In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. 21 Peter remembered and said to Jesus, "Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!"

The Rabbi's reference to the story of the withering of the cursed fig tree was deeply ironical.

397. An impure person must not eat from sacrifices—Leviticus 7:20

398

At Oribi Gorge we were the five misfits, that is, Yael the lesbian Jewess married to an orthodox Rabbi, Wayne Bernstein the Jew who had become a Pentecostal Christian, Roger Ho the Chinese Catholic and Michael Livingstone the Protestant, and all of we ended up in the same rondavel. There were only four beds, so Yael and I shared a bed. Each night as the only students who were sober we eventually returned to our rondavel leaving the revellers to drink the night away in a haze of alcoholic hilarity. In the dark we lay in bed chatting until we fell asleep. Each night Yael and I laying on our backs, our hands fondling, probing and exploring each other's genitals, experienced the most delicious orgasms in the pitch darkness, amidst the jovial banter which filled our rondavel, in the background we could hear peals of drunken laughter. In the early hours of the morning Yael's fondling of my breasts and vulva, her kissing of my neck would bring me to state of pleasant arousal. And before the boys woke up we made love. And then we would get up at first light flushed with the afterglow of love and go outside and watch the sun rise while breathing in the fresh morning air of a new day.

Our sleeping quarters became a theological hot house with no holds barred jousting over the nature of truth and the meaning of the idea that salvation was from the Jews. Yael under extreme duress eventually confessed that she was a borderline atheist but preferred to call herself an agnostic just in case there was something actually out there. When asked what she thought could be out-there-somewhere-as-something?

'Well you know God and all that stuff,' was her answer.

'Why did you then marry the Rabbi if you are an atheist?' Wayne wanted to know.

'Well strictly speaking I am not completely atheistic, but I have problems believing in God especially given the facts that support the theory of evolution, which also means that I do not believe in the literal truth of Genesis as anymore, I do not believe in Adam and Eve, and also I do not believe in Noah and the flood. There is so much stuff in the Bible which is not based on any certifiable historical facts, even Moses at Mount Sinai receiving the ten commandments seems like a legend to me,' Yael explained

'If you don't believe in the Bible as the revealed Word of God, then how could you have married an Orthodox Rabbi,' Wayne said, in his interrogation of Yael.

'It is lot more complicated than you could ever imagine,' Yael replied.

'I don't understand why it should be so complicated,' Wayne countered.

'I was sort of trapped by circumstance over which I had very little control. The marriage was sort of half-arranged, even in spite of the fact that my faith had collapsed completely. He was also pursuing me and well there was so much pressure. I did not want hurt him or my parents, and there were all these expectations, I was under so much pressure, coming from an Orthodox family and all that. I did not have the strength to cope with everything, and I thought that maybe I could learn to love him, he was handsome and so debonair, and then also there was always the possibility that I could find God again, especially if I was married to a devout Rabbi.'

'You got to be joking!' Wayne exclaimed, his face a picture of astonishment.

'So you married the Rabbi, hoping that he will help you find God again, even though you don't really love him, I mean you married the Rabbi as complete unbeliever,' Roger asked.

'Well maybe I do love him, who knows!'

'Maybe you love him! What kind of kind of answer is that,' Michael exclaimed.

'Well I sort of love him. He is my husband after all, and he is kind, considerate, loving and gentle, he is a very nice person, and therefore in a way it is impossible not to sort of love him, I don't want to hurt him.'

'To sort of love him, what do mean by that, how can you sort of love your husband, it does not make any rational sense?' Wayne questioned.

'I do love him, he is my husband,' she insisted.

After our night of love in the train I had no doubt that Yael had woken up to the reality that she was a lesbian, that she was queer, that she was completely homosexual. I was her safe harbour, and her first real love, she had never experience real love before this. Lying in the dark in the bed next to her while holding her hand I listened while she tried explain her situation regarding her marriage to the Rabbi and my heart ached for her. On the field trip I fell deeply in love with Yael and felt protective towards her. We were desperately in love, but there was a strange unreality about the situation. In our intimate moments when we were alone she began to hint that I should come to Shul and that her husband the Rabbi would make my conversion easy, all I had to do was come to Shul and start observing the Shabbat. If I started observing the Shabbat I would have practically crossed the first hurdle in converting. It was her belief that if I converted to Judaism and became a Jew then it would be as if we were married, we would be bound together forever in the bonds of our love for each other, because it was only as Jews that we could be together, that is really together. She did not say this, but it was obvious. There was something so desperate about her plan. In the eyes of her husband I would be like her sister, her best and dearest friend, her friend for life. And then she hit on the crazy idea that once I had converted I could possibly move in with them, her and the Rabbi. They would build a cottage for me in the yard. Yael was going insane.

For the sake of our love I went to Shul every week until Yael broke with me. I went to Shul to be with her and because I was in love with her. Ironically I went to Shul because Jesus said: 'Salvation is from the Jews.'

But I had no desire to convert to Judaism, in fact I had a strong antipathy towards Judaism as a religion and I could not see myself as Jew or Jewess. I did not want to become a member of a race or an ethnic group, I was happy to be without an identity that was anchored in the history of a people who self-identified as Jews. For the sake of our relationship I went to Shul, but I every effort to keep the Shabbat. She wanted me to speak to her husband the Rabbi about my desire to convert. She had confused my love for her with me having a desire to convert. I found myself going through the motions of being Jewish just be with her, even to the extent that my diet became kosher. In the end after I gone through the whole process of conversion it was a relief when our relationship ended. It was a release, even though it was so incredibly painful. Yet I felt a strange kind of obligation to be observant and I started going to another synagogue. But no longer a prisoner of her love, I could be myself again while I tried to work through this Jewish thing. Jesus was once more my brother, my father, my husband, my lover, he was the only man that I could fall in love with. To love Jesus not like the Evangelical or fundamentalist profess but to love him like Mary Magdalene loved him. To love Jesus was to love God the creator of the Universe, the only way we could love God was to cling to the man Jesus. To love God was the highest form of erotic love that could be attained by a finite being.

It became increasingly painful for me to go to Shul and be forced to listen to the Rabbi while having this 'ironic knowledge' that salvation was from the Jews. This was a Christian belief. Jesus said salvation was from the Jews! Had the Rabbi not read that passage from Gospel of John? Why would he use the story of the withered fig tree to dismiss Jesus and the message that he was preaching, not only did the Rabbi dismiss Jesus but he also implied that Jesus was inferior to Socrates? Jesus consistently acknowledged his own Jewishness. Of course Jew and Christian have been at enmity over Jesus for 2 000 years. We have been at enmity over the real identity of a Jew. A Jew has been at the centre of our enmity. Salvation is from the Jews. This is the creed of the Christian. While sitting in Shul it was hard for me to digest this truth. Here were all these Jews holding the salvation of the human race in their hands and they were completely unaware of their huge eschatological responsibility. Through God Abraham founded a nation the Jews which was supposed to become a blessing to all nations and this blessing would be their adoption as Abraham's children.

I have dreamt that unsettling dream again: It is a recurring dream. I am dreaming of Yael once more. In the dream I in an ironical situation with regard to my relationship with Yael. In my dream I have to become Jew. Now as a Jew I am meant believe without any doubt in the existence of God and in the Torah, the five books of Moses, and so on and so forth. But she does not have believe in any of this, nor does she have to believe in God. In the dream she confirms that she is still an atheist. She tells me that now I am Jew and I cannot be unmade a Jew!

398. To burn the leftover sacrifices—Leviticus 7:17

399

I personally cannot deny that Yael's husband the Rabbi was a great Talmudist, and he was quite an authority on the Mishna, and the Gemara, an also on the voluminous Midrashic literature in the Midrash Rabbah and this explained his attack on Jesus, it had all the literary expository elements of a classic Midrashic interpretative manoeuvre, one that would be expected of a Talmudist, I would not have expected anything less from him. I soon discovered that all the Biblical protagonists were cast in a much less favourable light in the Midrash expositions compared to their Scriptural portrayal. With the exception of Ruth the Midrashic exegesis, exposition and commentaries spared no one in the Bible. In the Midrashic literature the balance between praise or glorification and blame tilts sharply on the side of moral failure. Moral faults and character flaws are unmasked and exposed for all to see. It seemed that the literary purpose of the Midrash interpretations of scripture was to correct all the oversights of the Bible, no Biblical figure was above suspicion or above having ulterior and sinister motives. Exegesis was saturated with suspicion and second guessing regarding what had been left out in the story lines of the Old Testament narratives. In fact it would be perfectly valid and appropriate to read the Midrashic literature as the literary product of an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion. In the Midrashic exegesis, commentaries and story-telling we are presented with the dismal unending spectacle of moral failure. The absence of faith based moral agency and faith based moral responsibly seems to be the general rule rather than the exception. Blame saturates the Midrashic stories and commentaries. No character in the Old Testament escapes blame. All suffer from some hidden character flaw which in the fullness of time blossoms into acts of moral failure.

So why stop at laying blame only on the shoulders of almost all of the Old Testament characters, why not also blame God for the endless cycles, replays and repetitions of moral failure? The ancient sages and rabbis who authored the stories and commentaries in the Midrash were beyond brilliant at reading between the lines. The Midrash without pulling any punches tells it like it is, and gets straight to the point. Take for instance Boaz and Ruth. Boaz the wealthy, upright, honourable and devout man of God becomes filled with sexual desire for the poor vulnerable and destitute Ruth who he sees walking behind the men who are harvesting his fields, gleaning for whatever paucity of grain she can which has been leftover by the harvesters. Boaz does not think that maybe he should offer her a decent meal or a bit grain from his surplus. No that is the least on his mind. All he wants is to fuck her. He can think of nothing else. Her being hungry does not enter his head, it does not seem concern him. Naomi knows that Boaz wants to fuck Ruth her daughter-in-law and she realize she has much to gain from Boaz fucking her so encourages Ruth to allow Boaz take sexual advantage of her, especially for sake of getting at least a bit more food to stave off their hunger. The Midrash states the reality of the situation plainly: 'All night, the Yetzer Hara, the evil spirit, tried to persuade him to move closer to Ruth, saying to him, you are free, she is free, what are you waiting for?'

399. To burn all impure sacrifices—Leviticus 7:19

400

In 1977 Yael came back to Wits to finish her degree. We often met for coffee in the student union canteen. Cynthia Silverstein was Yael's class mate and as third year students it was a prerequisite that they take an arts course. Essay writing as in the humanities has different requirements than essay writing in the sciences.

Coffee with Yael and Cynthia: Cynthia is taking Biblical Studies and she is busy with an essay on anti-Semitism or hatred of Jews in the narrative of the Gospel of John. I feel offended by her belief that the Gospel of John is anti-Jew or filled with hatred towards the Jew. Yael showed no interest in hearing about Cynthia's essay on the Gospel of John. Biting my tongue and hiding my offense, I listened with pretended interest. Yael was studying Classical Life and Thought, and in the embrace of Hellenic paganism, Hesiod's 'Theogony' had become her Bible. Yael's essay was on Hesiodic mythology surrounding the origin of evil which she was able to communicate to us with effortless aplomb. As in the myth of Eve the Hesiodic aetiology of evil is founded on the duplicity of women. In Yael's essay she decided write on the mythic aetiology of evil, and in her interpretation the aetiology of evil in the Edenic myth converges with the Hesiodic aetiology of evil involving Pandora. The basis of the convergence into a single aetiology of evil rests of course on the duplicity of women and Yael as a non-feminist seems to be ironically comfortable with this view. Yael does not have a political or feminist bone in her beautiful body. The mythic aetiology of the origin of evil is misogynic in its very core, and this was precisely point that Yael was making. To unmask the origination of evil was also the task of political philosophy in my opinion. The good seems to be self-evident or is it?

400. To follow the procedure of Yom Kippur in the sequence prescribed in the Torah—Leviticus 16:3

401

To believe in the existence of God is the easy part. To believe that everything exists by virtue of the agency of God is the easy part. To believe that the intelligibility of the Universe reflects the mind of God is the easy part. To believe that we can have knowledge of God as a result of discursive reasoning is the easy part. What then is the difficult part? The difficult part is to believe that the Bible represents God's self-revelation, the actual spoken and written Word of God and that it bears the indubitable stamp of Her divine authoritative, inerrant and infallible authorship. This is a very hard call indeed. It is easy believe that the Word of God, the Logos, manifests itself within the unveiling or unconcealing of the truth in the process of discursive reasoning, in the saying of something about something through the expressivity and performativity of discursive reasoning. Speaking, seeing and hearing the truth in relation to idea of God is neither submissive or passive, it always involve engagement, it is something which realized in an act, in a performance involving non-passive participation, mental effort, intelligence, receptivity, open-mindedness, understanding, grasping, comprehension and apprehension. It does not involve mere listening. Rather it involves engaged listening and reading. This is easy to accept.

We can decouple belief in God from 'belief' in the Bible as the revelation of God's Word. We can decouple or disconnect faith in God from 'belief' in the Bible as the revelation of God's Word. The Word of God is not reducible to the words of the Bible. The Word of God is the Mind of God, and the Mind of God is the Logos. And Logos is not reducible to Mythos even though Mythos speaks to Logos and the Telos of Mythos is ultimately to speak to Logos. And to speak to Logos is to say something about Logos, and this is the internal Telos of Mythos, and this represents the Crisis of Mythos, where the Crisis of Mythos represents its incapacity to speak to Logos. Faith versus knowledge is a false dichotomy. Faith in God is necessarily conditional to well-grounded intellectual assent. Well-grounded means indubitable. What can be indubitable and how does that indubitability have any bearing on establishing or grounding assent? The innate intelligibility of the Cosmos can be grasped through the exercise of discursive reasoning, but its existence cannot be explained without falling into the abyss of the infinite regress. Its intelligibility is not self-explanatory. It is a short step to believe that the intelligibility is God. God is or is in the intelligibility that we grasp. It is this grasping that we are able to draw close to God and become aware of the Word of God which is the Logos and we associate the Logos with the Good, and the Good embodies Truth, Beauty and Justice. It is a very short step from the idea of the Good to belief in God.

What is revelation in the context of belief, faith and confession, or in other word what do we mean by revelation in the context of the practice and observance of a religion founded on revelations which are articulated or narrated in the form of sacred texts or a sacred literature? The idea of revelation in the form of injunctions, commandments, statements, propositions and stories or narratives which have become preserved as sacred literature or in a sacred book of scripture, and as such are taken to be divinely inspired or divinely dictates or divinely recited and therefore have to be believed as true, authoritative, inerrant, and infallible. This representation of divine revelation in the form of sacred scripture cannot be accepted as communicating the unqualified truth on all matters of ultimate concern. The truth regarding the existence, essence and will of the infinite God cannot be encapsulated or documented in human speech and writing, and as such it cannot be preserved or communicated in any so called book of sacred scripture. God cannot be contained in a book of writing. The Word or the Logos of the infinite God can be reduced to writing.

Jesus said I am the truth, the way and the life. However, to put this claim into perspective, we need to interrogate how it is at all possible that the Truth, the Way and the Life which the infinite God embodies can be fully revealed in all its awesome and terrifying immensity to finite humanity. How can the Infinite Being be revealed to a finite being without utterly annihilating or completely obliterating the human recipient through the manifestation of the sheer power and weight of the Divine Presence which creates Universes from nothing and sustains them in their existence. God voluntarily reveals the infinite divine presence of the Supreme Being through an act of kenosis or self-emptying by becoming incarnated in a finite being in the life of the man called Jesus. Jesus reveals himself to humanity as both finite man and the infinite God, a reality which has been so majestically and magnificently stated in the Nicene and Apostolic Creeds of the Christian Church. In the words of Jesus: 'if you have seen me you have seen the Father' and 'the Father and I are one'. Jesus represents the kenosis of God. Jesus is God, one substance with the Father, begotten not made. The act of kenosis captures the essence of the meaning of being begotten. Kenosis captures the essence economy of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God the Holy Ghost is the Comforter who comes to dwell within us, the Infinite and the finite are joined within the bonds of divine fellowship following the baptism or indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the being of the believer who has become a follower of Jesus. This is all so wonderfully astonishing!

The cosmic event of the Infinite Word becoming finite flesh in an act of divine kenosis which shatters and destroys all ideas and notions of the essential nature and content of divine revelation. God's revelation, God's self-expression as the Word of God, is not a system of statement or propositions, or a sacred book of scripture. The revelation of God or the Word of God is not a proposition but a person, Jesus. The Word of God comes to us finite beings as an invitation to participate in a life-changing encounter with Jesus the Messiah.

We find God in Jesus, in the life of the historical Jesus, and we find Jesus in studying, meditating and reflecting on the writings of the Bible, and we also find Jesus by following him, and we able to follow Jesus in our acts of self-emptying through which we enter into relations of solidarity with others and especially with our friends. In doing all of this we self-identify with God by becoming followers and imitators of Jesus. We only truly self-identify with God through Jesus. This is why we preoccupy our minds with Jesus. While Jesus is the guaranteed self-revelation of God to humanity, we are able to gain access to revelatory knowledge of God through rational inquiry into the nature and significance of Universe. Here we experience the revelatory dialectic between knowledge of the Universe and our faith based relationship with Jesus as the Word who created the Universe. Discovering the enigmatic knowability and intelligibility of the Universe can be experienced as a rationally based encounter with God as the Infinite Being who we desire to believe in, to whom we are drawn by an irresistible love. In this conscious dynamic of wanting to believe in, love and know God we encounter Jesus. And in our encounter with Jesus we are drawn irresistibly to the Good, and we are driven by a desire to have knowledge of the Good, because such knowledge is one with the knowledge of God, a knowledge with brings us into a closer relationship of fellowship with God.

401. One who profaned holy property must repay what he profaned plus a fifth and bring a sacrifice—Leviticus 5:16

402

The Liturgical City versus the Oligarchical City. The Kingdom of God versus the Oligarchical State.

402. Not to work consecrated animals—Deuteronomy 15:19

403

What does the fig tree mean? What is the eschatological or apocalyptic significance of the fig tree? How could the Rabbi overlook this? How could he misread a portion of scripture that was Hebraic in its essence?

Why did Jesus curse the fig tree when it was by its very nature not bearing fruit out of season? Of course the tree was barren because it was out of season. To be out of season is to be out of history. Could the curse that causes the barren tree to wither be a symbolic act that embodies a metaphor? In all three synoptic Gospels the fate of the fig tree is critically related to the fate of the temple which linked decisively with the future cultural-social-political prospects of first century Judaism with the horizon of history. The judgment on the temple is that it has been found to be barren like the fig tree. It is barren within and out of season. Judaism is not only barren, but because of its barrenness it is condemned to wither away. It season has passed forever. It can only exist as a memorial to the past. It can only look back and not forward. It has been cut loose from history and has been left to drift without direction in an ocean of uncertainty, too be tossed about by violent and unpredictable storms, to be finally shattered and wrecked on the rocks. The Jew has no home, the Jew is a wonderer, a stranger, the eternal Other, a people condemned to be oppressed by all nations. I saw this in Yael's eyes in our mutual reciprocal moments of affection and tenderness when we were caught off guard in each other's embrace of vulnerability. It was her destiny be a Jew, not mine. I felt that I could never be a Jew. But now I was a Jew in her eyes.

403. Not to shear the fleece of consecrated animals—Deuteronomy 15:19

404

It is a fact of history that Christianity was born from the womb of first century Judaism, right from its inception first century Christianity was a very Jewish religion. It was not invented ab initio or de novo from scratch, the roots of Christianity are deeply embedded in the ancient Hebrew Old Testament canon of scripture. The first Christians in Jerusalem did not perceive themselves as being theologically beyond the pale of first century Judaism or the Old Testament. With birth of Christianity following millennia of gestation within the heart and soul of the ancient Hebrew religion God finally entered Universal History as the God of all humanity. After the Roman destruction of the Temple and the Roman crushing of each new wave of Jewish rebellion, Judaism was finally forced by historical circumstances to adapt itself both religiously, philosophically, culturally, socially and theologically to the new overwhelming realities and social-political instabilities. In this process Judaism could not escape becoming increasingly entangled in its own inner contradictions and paradoxes. This was exemplified most radically and dramatically by Judaism inward turning away from the present and the future. As a consequence of this inward migration, it retreated from history, it bound itself forever to a mythologized past, becoming a living institutionalized memorial of a mythical history. As an increasingly isolated ethnic group Jews became increasingly trapped in the mirror of their own reflection.

404. To slaughter the Paschal sacrifice at the specified time—Exodus 12:6

405

Judaism is an ironical religion. The destruction of the second Temple brought Israel's history to a standstill. After the end of the second Temple period the Jews began to exist outside of history. The Jews had entered into a state of perpetual exile, and as a consequence of this they had entered again into a wilderness of ahistorical existence which eventually in the fullness of time found its terminus in the Holocaust. Its God ceased to be the God of history. He no longer existed as a vital presence and agent that opened up the present into the future. Instead the God of the Jews also took refuge in a life anchored to the past, a life chained to the remote past, a life increasingly cast adrift from the future, a life lived in the dimming light of the backward gaze, a grief filled life, lived mournfully in the shadows of endless remembrance, a life sustained only by memories, memories that needed to be constantly re-awakened by the endless reminding's of re-celebrations, re-readings and re-telling of all that happened a long time ago. Ancient narratives of their origination as a people founded on a mythical view of patriarchs, election, promises, covenants, formulas of redemption, all the ingredients necessary for constructing a salvation history, which when collected together in an imaginative and creative literary process of remembering, reminding, re-hearing, re-writing, re-invention, re-formulation, re-editing and redaction, became fixed and canonized in a foreign land, in a foreign climate and in a foreign geography, finally into scripture, during the Babylonian exile. The Jew as a wonderer, as an exile, as a foreigner, in a perpetual state of homelessness, constantly needs to re-invent himself by re-inventing and ritually re-living his past in order to endure the endless stasis of ahistorical existence in the doldrums of a timeless ocean. In this endless cycle, which has never ceased in its remorseless re-visitations, the Jew whose bags are always packed in readiness to leave at any moment, goes through the same motions of having to re-invent himself each time he find himself as a homeless wonderer, living as an exile, as a foreigner in a foreign land. He re-invents himself in order to stay the same, faithful to his founding myth. Those who found the stasis of exile from history too stifling, too claustrophobic, eventually rejected the God of the Patriarchs and by breaking the bonds that made them prisoners to the past, they tried to re-insert themselves into history as the messianic agents of the great secular experiments of the twentieth century, drawing their inspiration from the readings of Hegel and Marx, rather than from the study of Nietzsche or Heidegger.

405. Not to slaughter it while in possession of leaven—Exodus 23:18

406

The Jew stands condemned. The Jew can do nothing to exonerate himself. He is the eternal Other, the wondering stranger with bags packed, ready to take flight at a moment's notice. His memories are his only comfort, the past is his only refuge. He lives as an exile outside of history. If he dares to be a moral agent in history he stands condemned. History belongs to the proselytizer, to the assimilator of people, to the outbreeding mongrel nations and cultures.

406. Not to leave the fat overnight—Exodus 23:18

407

In George Steiner's novel 'The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H', Steiner imaginatively in his work of fiction, allows Hitler to argue his defence in his trial for his role in the Holocaust. Hitler argues that modern Israel as a Jewish state owes its existence to the Holocaust. In Steiner's myth Hitler measures the Nazi genocide against the far greater rolling genocides perpetrated through the moral agency of Jewish Bolsheviks in which millions upon millions died in the Gulags.

407. To slaughter the second Paschal Lamb—Numbers 9:11

408

In the hands of the Apostle Paul the Jewish myth of sin, patriarchs, circumcision, election, promise, covenant, exile, liberation from bondage and slavery, sacrifice, law, grace, forgiveness, atonement, absolution, justification redemption, salvation, resurrection, kingdom of God and the world to come (Universal History) was thoroughly Christianized, embedded in history and future orientated with its imbuement of messianic hope, and the God of the patriarchs finally came out of exile, and once more re-entered history and Christian theology became a theology of Universal History and the Reign of the Kingdom of God, calling together all nations as the seed of Abraham through adoption.

The Apostle Paul as the great dialectician, transformed first century Judaism into Christianity through an imaginative and creative exercise in dialectical theology, thereby becoming the Apostle of a universal faith open everyone who desires to believe in the God of Universal History whose Kingdom with Reign with the coming of the Epistemological Utopia. OK dear reader I have really got ahead of myself. I am in a manic state. What is the point of all this? Well it is nothing less than my idea of Christianity and it also fulfils my need to give a check list of all things Christian, so that you may have some idea why I am prepared to call myself a closet Christian. To sum up, I have given an account of why I dare to call myself a Christian in spite of everything else about the life that I have lived thus far.

Of course I have a great respect for Steiner. I have a great respect for all great Jewish thinkers and writers like Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, Levinas, Derrida and all the others. In fact, I am indebted to all these great Jewish thinkers and it is impossible for me to escape their intellectual influence.

But then again all religions are 'under the cosh' of Nature's judgement. And the verdict of Nature is that humans are animals.

408. To eat the Paschal Lamb with Matzah and Maror on the night of the 15th of Nissan—Exodus 12:8

409

Bipedalism, small groups and feeding ecology. Hominids versus Pongids. Suite of selective pressures favouring the evolution of bipedalism. Coevolution of bipedalism and human social systems. Behavioural ecology. Contest and scramble competition. Smaller group size – what are the advantages. Increased efficiency. Decreased resource availability. Small groups vs large groups. Group fission and fusion.

409. To eat the second Paschal Lamb on the night of the 15th of Iyar—Numbers 9:11

410

Even Buddhism has failed to conquer desire. To identify sin with sexuality has been a disaster for Christianity. In his book Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche wrote: Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, to be sure, but degenerated into vice. Desire cannot be subdued. The life and being of Eros is desire, but as Plato has argued Eros as desire cannot be reduced ontologically to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, but to remove the pursuit of physical or sexual pleasure from its all-encompassing human reality as something integral to being human where being human is reflected in the face of Other and the face of other demands a response of moral responsibility, then Erotic desire cannot be disengaged from seeking the Good, where seeking the Good includes acts of generosity which cannot be realized without necessarily involving a reciprocal self-empting between two humans.

410. Not to eat the Paschal meat raw or boiled—Exodus 12:9

411

I dreamt of Ouma Vollenhoven. In the dream I was a child again. I was in bed with her. Whenever I stayed over at Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven I slept with Ouma. When visiting them in the school holidays I usually slept with Ouma until I turned twelve. Malcolm and Elsabe slept in the spare room, the other spare room was Ouma sewing room. Oupa and Ouma slept in separate beds. Even when I turned twelve Ouma would tuck me into bed after making sure that I had said my prayers. She would kiss me on the lips and stroke my hair and then she would say good night. My own mother never kissed me on the lips or hugged me or stroked my hair. Corelle kissed me on the lips and hugged me while I sat on her lap as a very young child. Each day as a child my father kissed me good morning and kissed me good night. When I got older Ouma told me that Auntie Nelly and Auntie Dolly were lesbians. Ouma Vollenhoven was also a lesbian.

Next to Ouma's bed was a chest of drawers with a mirror. On the wall above the mirror hung a glass framed picture of a train wheel with a pair of angel-like wings where the axle should have been. Below the winged wheel were the letters SAR, which stood for South African Railways. At night after she had bathed me soaping my body with the lather from a thick slab of red Lifebuoy Soap I would fall asleep snuggled in a foetal position tightly against my Ouma's body and also smelling of Lifebuoy Soap she would wrap her arm around me. She would refer to me as 'my kind' (my child). In the morning after Oupa had left for work she would wake me up. She would help me dress. Slipping on my socks over my feet and then buckling up the straps of my shoes while I sat on the edge of the bed. After breakfast the two of us would set off hand in hand down Jules Street to do the day's grocery shopping, stopping off at the baker to buy freshly baked bread, at the dairy to buy a quart of fresh milk, at the green grocers to buy fresh vegetables, at the butcher to buy fresh meat. There was a physical and emotional intimacy which I shared with Ouma Vollenhoven which I had never experienced with my own mother. Everyone knew that I was Ouma's favourite grandchild.

411. Not to take the Paschal meat from the confines of its group—Exodus 12:46

412

I always felt uncomfortable with being cast in the role of a Gentile seeking to convert to Judaism. The stigma that I wanted to become a Jew clung to me like a stain that could not be removed. This was how I felt in the eyes of the other women at Shul, as someone wishing to become a convert. I could not help feeling pathetic and empty of substance. I felt inferior because I was not born a Jew. I am saying this for the record. Even if I wanted to become a Jew by converting to Orthodox Judaism it would have been intellectually and morally impossible. It would have been spiritually and theologically a backward step, a regression. When I tried to explain this to Yael she took offence. She could not grasp how deeply embedded in my mind was the Hebraic and Hellenic world and life view, and this was in spite of the fact that I also saw myself leaning more and more towards Marxism and socialism. The Hebrew Bible was my heritages as much as it was hers. This was also something which she could not comprehend. I also felt sorry for the Rabbi. He was absolutely clueless about his own wife. He did not know that she was queer and that she was practically an atheist. He did not know that his marriage was a farce, that his wife was living a lie.

I will always be drawn to Yael. I cannot help it. She is the living embodied of contradictions and paradoxes. Sometimes I see myself in her. In her I see the intellectual and spiritual consequences flowing logically from the acceptance that Darwin's theory of evolution is irrefutable. The fact of biological evolutions has yet to change the human perspective on everything that is has been until now considered as sacred and inviolable. Nothing any longer in the realm of religious belief can be viewed sacrosanct. Religion's legitimacy has no foundation. The fact of evolution represents the indestructible and immovable theoretical foundations from which the towering edifice of modernity rises like a City of Light on the mountaintop. The de-sacralisation of the World can never be reversed. The disenchantment of the World can never be wished away. The sun has finally set on the hope that a religious civilization will ever rise up again like some Phantasmagorical Utopia based on some dubious idea of an infallible revelation spelling out God's will and purpose for humankind.

This does not mean the end of faith or belief in God, it means the beginning of the possibility of a religionless and dogma-free relationship with God unmediated and uncontrolled by the power, forces and violence of religious institutions and the totalitarian authority of religious leaders. Drained of all scientific, philosophical and theological legitimation the cultus of religion that has enslaved the minds and bodies of humanity will finally wither away and vanish forever. Sanity will be restored. There will be relief and peace for everyone. It will be like waking up from the long night of torment. And the horrifying nightmare of religion will be remembered only as a bad dream. 'It is finished'. The death of God on the Roman Cross of Golgotha inaugurated the final judgment on all religion. It revealed in all finality not only the absolute evilness of religion as something that patriarchical man has invented but also its utter uselessness in realizing the project of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. This is the Eschaton. This is the anti-nostalgic consequences of the Eschaton. There is no future in the past. The dialectical tension between Mythos and Logos will finally succumb to the Totalizing Hegelian 'aufheben' or sublation, in the realization of the final abolishment and resulting transcendence, which will disclose the Absolute. This will be the final judgment of the last day, and the final judgment will have nothing to do with hell and damnation. There is no hell and there is no damnation. There is only the fact of evolution and the fact of humanities continuity with the rest of the animal kingdom. It is unimaginable that God would stoop so low as to the punishment of animals, the products of evolution.

412. An apostate must not eat from it—Exodus 12:43

413

I was one of the few females who took Philosophy of Science. In my weekly tutorial group I was the only female. I am only thinking about this now. I have wracked my brains, and cannot remember any other female in the Philosophy of Science class. Wayne Bernstein and Roger Ho were in my tutorial group. From the kind of questions he asked I soon realized that Wayne had read Francis Schaeffer. Before getting to grips with Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos we spent the first three weeks studying the intricacies of scientific explanation in the form of the deductive nomological explanation starting with the little book on the philosophy of science by Lambert and Brittan, before reading Carl Hempel and Israel Scheffler on the raven paradox. Then we read Nelson Goodman's 'Fact, Fiction and Forecast' wrestling with his new riddle of induction and projectable predicates. It was during this time that the Student Left on Wits Campus underwent an unprecedented renaissance. I joined the informal Marxist seminar group which met once a week. I also went on a book buying binge. I had opened an account with Campus Book Shop and De Jong's Bookshop. My poor father settled the bills.

Studying the Philosophy of Science proved to be an exciting intellectual diversion. I read Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' and learnt a whole new philosophical vocabulary. Similarly, I read Karl Popper's 'Conjectures and Refutations' and also his 'Logic of Scientific Discovery. And as with Kuhn I also learn from a Popper another philosophical vocabulary. In seminars and essays we debated the nature of scientific revolution and the nature of the growth of scientific knowledge. With regard to the work of Kuhn we debated and critiqued the ideas of: incommensurability, puzzle solving, normal science, revolutionary science, paradigms and paradigm shifts. And regard to the work of Popper we debated and critiqued the ideas of: confirmation, falsification, verisimilitude and demarcation of science. And then there was the issue of the correspondence theory of truth. And course we also applied our minds to the observation-theory distinction, and in the end we all agreed that a sharp line could not be drawn between the verbal reports of observations and the semantics surrounding the statements of scientific theory. Where did truth begin? Was it anchored in observation? Could only the observation results of experiments, the epitome of empiricism, provide the foundations for and justification of hypotheses and theories? Having knowledge is synonymous with knowing the truth and without any certainty there can be no truth. I became one of those 'philosophical fundamentalist' who believed that all problems in philosophy and epistemology can be reduced to the Philosophy of Science.

And then there was my friend Wayne who sat with me in the Philosophy of Science lectures and seminars. We debated the nature of truth and how we could know the truth. And of course Wayne was convinced that he knew the truth. He knew the truth from reading the Gospel of John 16: 5-6 → 'Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?' Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me'.'

But still we continued to debate the nature of truth and how we could know the truth. The standard argument was that no one can have knowledge of the truth about something without assuming something else. It was as simple as that. There was no presupposition-free road to the truth. And in additional no truth can be established without resorting to logical inferences, and therefore no truth can be established without assuming that the rules of logic were valid. And no truth can be established without evidence. But that is not all. All attempts to justify any claim to truth is susceptible to the vicious circle of the infinite regress or the infernal self-reference paradox. No claim can be made that something is the truth in the absence of compelling justification or substantiation. This means that no self-grounding claims can be about something being the truth. Because no truth claim about something can be a self-grounding or a self-justifying claim, all claims regarding the truth of something depend on something else also being the case. Where 'something else also being the case' is the ground or justification or substantiation of the original truth claim. It would be perfectly valid to generalize this line of reasoning on the grounds of logic. So we can accept that all particular claims to truth, or in other words all particular truths, are true by virtue of a greater Truth, a greater Totalizing Truth which grounds the truthfulness of all particular truth claims. There can be no particular truth without it being part of a greater grounding Truth. Any particular truth is true by virtue of it being part of the whole Truth. And the particular truth being true by virtue of its being a part or aspect of the whole Truth can only be certified or made possible by the infallible eye of the all-knowing subject who by being omniscient is the repository of the Totality of Truth. For a subject to be the repository of the Totality of Truth it has to be everything it knows in a direct undifferentiated manner. So the subject makes 2 + 2 = 4 true by being that particular truth in a direct unmediated manner. So God is 2 + 2 = 4. God is everything that is truth. God is Truth and because God is the Truth, God is also the Way.

Jesus was God incarnate, the Word made flesh, the Logos who was in the beginning and who is also the end, so He is the alpha and the omega, the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Beginning and the End. He is the Word that made everything. He is the Truth. He is 2 + 2 = 4.

Wayne and I had jointly came to this conclusion not by mere agreement but by deep conviction. I reminded Wayne that he was not only a Jew, but he was now also a Platonist. And he also reminded me, heaven forbid, that I too in spite of being woman also belonged to Plato's academy. So I was deeply Hellenic and Hebraic. How was I Hebraic? I wanted to be Hebraic. Being Hebraic did not equate with being Jewish. But being Hebraic is something I have to still fully figure out. I had fingered what it meant to be Jewish. I had had first-hand experience of what it is like to be Jew, especially when Yael came to live with me after being discharged from Tara Psychiatric Hospital shortly after divorcing the Rabbi. I became a Jew without being a Jew. I had not converted. Even so, many times I found it so difficult to consider myself ever being fully a Jew even though I readily thought of myself as being Hebraic. Being Hebraic was part of who I was. I suppose I had sub-consciously left the door open to consciously be a Jew. But I could not act out being Jewish completely. This proved to be impossible. My day to day practice of Jewishness, if I can confess to such a state of affairs, was deeply personal, invisible, hidden from view. I had to remind myself constantly that I was merely imitating being a Jew without technically being a Jew, this meant that ritually I was not a Jew, even though through Yael I had become socially submerged in the community of Jewish people to which Yael belonged, and who thought that I was Jewish like them. I could not bring myself to become a born again Jew. I did not have a yearning to be ritually inserted into the nation of the Jewish people. I was not seeking to be a member of the tribe. So technically speaking I was not even remotely a Jew. I had decided to be someone else. I read the Old Testament, but I also read the New Testament, and now I was also studying the Talmud and the Midrash. Jewish philosophy and theology interested me. I was as much at home in Judaism as in Christianity. This gave me a sense of Wayne's situation.

How can we be Hellenic and Hebraic in the age of modernity? To me the word modernity still described the world of my personal experience. I was modern in every sense of that word. And as a modern woman for me the Universe was no longer sacred or enchanted precisely because it was intelligible and contingent. By saying this I also agree that the logic underlying the view that Monod expressed in his book 'Chance and Necessity' does indeed resonate in a fashion with the portrait of the Universe that I have painted in broad strokes. But from a distance with the light falling the right way the picture can also disclose a hidden reality for the perceptive viewer. There is always more than the eye can see or read whether it be the Universe, a painting or a work of fiction. There is always the Totality to consider.

Evolution is a fact and this fact is the truth. This truth refutes the phantasmagorical claims regarding the nature of reality, the nature of humanity, the nature of humanity's fate, the nature of revelation and the nature of God made by the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their claims regarding the nature of reality and the fate of humanity are all rooted in the violence and idolatry of Mythos, where Mythos serves an ideological and legitimating social-political function. Their claims have no foundation in Logos or Reason. In this sense they are Godless religions, and may as well be atheistic.

413. A permanent or temporary [non-Jewish] hired worker must not eat from it—Exodus 12:45

414

My intellectual appropriation or assimilation of Marxism was constantly filtered, modified and adapted to accord with my understanding of the nature of reality. Similarly my intellectual assimilation of Christianity was also constantly adapted to accord with my understanding of the nature of reality. So my engagement with and the articulation of my understanding of Marxism and Christianity was influenced by my philosophical and ultimately my metaphysical commitment to Scientific Realism. For me personally it was rational and logical to believe that Truth corresponded to Reality. As a scientist and philosophical realist I was naturally intellectually comfortable with a correspondence theory of truth. Such a theory made the most sense to me and was the basis of the scientific enterprise. If truth corresponds to reality, then in the saying of something (the truth or reality) about something (nature of reality or nature of truth) to someone, we understand that truth means one thing and reality means another thing. In this context metaphysics involves a rational inquiry into the nature of reality. Simply put, metaphysics is concerned with the nature of reality, and it is impossible not to have any idea concerning the nature of reality, and therefore it is impossible not to engage in metaphysics while saying something about something to someone. Metaphysics cannot be circumvented without slipping into absurdities. Ultimately metaphysics is based on the idea that truth supervenes on being. This is a foundational metaphysical belief and as such it is the basis of the entire Heideggerian enterprise. And it was the dedicated exploration and development of this view which has contributed to establishing Heidegger as one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century.

414. An uncircumcised male must not eat from it—Exodus 12:48

415

Humans are part of nature, humans are rooted in nature by virtue of their evolution from a common ancestor which they share all other animals. Humans are animals in every sense of their being.

415. Not to break any bones from the Paschal offering—Exodus 12:46

416

Shortly before the June exams in 1975 Yael who was now visibly pregnant wanted to speak to me. We went to my room in Sunnyside, the place that used to be our love nest. She said it pained her heart to see me so happy with Janet because she still loved me, and would always love me no matter what. She said that she had made a mistake to breakup with me when she fell pregnant. Apparently she broke up me because she felt that God had let her down. She said she felt so stupid because she had prayed so earnestly and desperately that God would speak to my heart so that I would convert completely and heartily to Judaism. She laughed sadly saying that she had made a bargain with God that if I had really converted she would have devoted our lives to him. But then my conversion never happened. She said she could see that I would never become a Jew and that therefore we could never be together. She said that she had made a pact with God. If I had become a passionately devout Jew filled with the unspeakable joy as a result of my conversion to Judaism then she would take this as a sign that God really existed, and wanted us to be together, this was her earnest hope. She would then also give up being atheist not only because I had become a devout observant orthodox Jew, but this would represent a sure sign that God was real and that God cared about human feelings and human desires when it came to love. But when I did not pursue conversion to Judaism she felt that God had abandoned her. It also left her feeling terrified that she would lose me because she was trapped in the world of Jewish orthodoxy and there was no ways that she could have a real and deep relationship with me if I remained a Gentile. She admitted that she had been selfish about wanting me to convert, but it was only because she wanted us to together and she would die if I we could not be together and Judaism was the only means to that end. And then she became pregnant and she felt as if she was drowning. Becoming pregnant left her feeling crushed by circumstance beyond her control and consequently her world was fulling apart, and she even seriously contemplated suicide rather than live without me. She repeated that she could not cope with become pregnant. It was out of desperation that she broke up. She said that she felt incredibly guilty about our break up and she wanted to make amends and if possible it would be nice for us to be together again. And then she starting weeping, repeating over and over that everything had become too much for her, and that she felt that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and that is why she broke up with me. It felt as if she was losing her mind, she was incapable of thinking rationally at the time, and it was impossible for her see a way out. And then the Rabbi insisted that she start seeing a psychiatrist which made everything worse.

She wanted to know from me what she should do. What could I say? In the end I spoke plainly to her. We could be Jews together? We would have devote our lives to God.

But how would we devote our lives to God? Well she would divorce the Rabbi and we would move into our own home where we would live as a devoted married couple. We would be a family, we would be sisters, daughters, mothers and wives to each other. We would observe the laws of Moses, observe the Sabbath, do all things that God fearing Jews would do in order to please God. We would live in the perpetual shadow of Mount Sinai, we would live according to the Torah. The holy Torah would be our light, our guide and our life. We would bring up her children together. She suggested that maybe I would also have child. I wondered how this would be possible, maybe I could seduce a Rabbi or some Jew and get him to fuck me and impregnate me so that I would conceive a child who will be a real Jew, and then we would live happy ever after as an oppressed people, with our bags packed, ready to flee the pogroms at any moment. What could I do, what could I say? I promised that I would be her friend for life. I also said I could not leave Janet, I could not do that to her. I told her that I had also been deeply hurt when she broke-off her relationship with me. We tearfully made up, restoring our friendship and promised each other that we would be friends for life no matter what. She understood that I could not breakup with Janet.

416. Not to break any bones from the second Paschal offering—Numbers 9:12

417

Yael did not go on the third year Zoology trip to Inhaca Island, mainly because of her pregnancy and the political uncertainty reigning in Mozambique. Frelimo had taken over the government. In all likelihood this was going to be the last Wits Zoology fieldtrip excursion to Inhaca Island. The Frelimo authorities had given Wits permission to visit the Island and safe passage was guaranteed. With my heart torn between Yael and Janet, I bordered the train at Park Station with the few Zoology students who had decided to go on the trip despite the political uncertainties in Mozambique. I shared the sleeping berth on our coach with Wayne, Roger and Michael. I slept fitfully dreaming of Yael. The night journey to Mozambique was subdued. There was none of usual drunken revelry on the train. At the crack of dawn the train rolled into the grand old Central Railway Station which was located next to the Azeredo Square in Lourenço Marques (LM). After disembarking we gathered outside the station in the square in the sombre early morning winter's light to admire the classical architecture of the station's facade with it wide Roman arch gracing the main entrance of the station. Raising high above the arch was the ornamented turret which supported a semi spherical roof, a green stained copper coated copula. Below the copper copula the large clock facing the square indicated that it was 6.30 am in the morning. On either side of the main façade stretched two story structures with a row of arcades on the ground level and above that an upper gallery of porches which overlooked the square. The station building was completed in 1910. Now 65 years later apart from us the normally busy Azeredo Square was deserted and it felt as if time had come to an end in LM. We had all spent our teenage years listening to LM Radio which was broadcasted from Lourenço Marques. We sensed the passing of an era. The curtain had been drawn on 400 years or so of colonial rule, and now a new dawn was breaking. The surprising suddenness of the ending of Portuguese Colonialism in Mozambique and Angola was unexpected, it had not been predicted. No one had thought that it could happen so quickly, changing the entire southern African landscape almost overnight. The unreality of the situation was palpable. Scott Everton and Alex Muggeridge, the two Rhodesians glanced warily about with dark scowls. Their worst nightmares had now become their grim certainty. With Frelimo in power it was just a question of time before Rhodesia would fall under the cumulative effect of falling dominos. We exchanged glances.

'You must be happy now that your communist dreams are coming true,' Scott said sarcastically.

I raised my clenched fist in the air and said: 'Viva Frelimo.'

'Stupid communist bitch,' Alex muttered.

I could feel that the sympathies of the entire Zoology class were on the side of Scott and Alex.

Carrying our stuff we walked to Gorjão Wharf. In spite of the recent revolution the coal terminals and wharf cranes were busy loading coal and cargo on the ships in the harbour. Under grey skies and across a choppy seas the ferry took us to Inhaca Island. Benjamin Schlossheimer who had failed his third year was now in our class and was doing the Inhaca fieldtrip for the second time. He hang out with the Rhodesian lads who were racist and anti-Semitic. He was as happy as a pig in shit, completely garrulous and glorying in his role as 'mister know it all'. With rocking, rising and falling, and see-sawing over the heavy swells, soon everyone was seasick and vomiting into the sea, including the dyke from Israel who was a PhD student at Wits. She was in her late twenties was being supervised by one our professors who was collaborating with the Israelis. Having a good knowledge of Mediterranean marine invertebrates she had been asked to come along as a teaching assistant. We had exchanged knowing glances and smiles before boarding the ferry and it was clearly evident that she was planning to fuck me. I guessed that if we going to do it, it was going to be rough sex, wrestling and all that kind of stuff. Even though she was bigger than me I was still a tough little lioness. The thought of being pursued and eventually fucked by this dark eyed Zionist Sabra, a veteran of the Israeli army left me in a state of pleasant arousal. But now she was also retching violently over the side into the sea.

To my surprise the Zionist Sabra was not pursuing me. We openly flirting. She had nice strong legs, a big bust, a nice swell of tummy and a nice butt. She was voluptuous, but emotionally fragile, in spite of her exterior Israeli 'machismo'. She was a delicate and vulnerable woman behind the armour of her exterior presentation of selfhood. I had misread her completely wrong. She would initiate nothing. She was queer but completely virginal .I would have to make all the moves if I wanted to fuck her.

It was Saturday and our field trip schedule informed us that we going have a fish and shellfish braai and party that evening after we had finished our work. Her name was Shachar Mizrahi and she was a completely atheistic secular Jew whose religion was the nation state of Israel. At lunch I sat down next to her and during the course of our meal I asked her if she would like to go for late afternoon walk on the beach before the braai when we had finished with the day's work. The sun was already setting when we set off. There was a jersey, a small picnic blanket, tissues and a tube of suitable gynaecologic lubricant in my knapsack. The necessity of the lubricant for the mutual masturbation of our vulvas was something which I had learnt from Jean Genet and Kate. Shachar had showered and washed her hair. I could smell the fragrance of her perfume. She had put on makeup, lipstick and eye shadow. I put our sandals in my knapsack and we walked barefoot along the shore line, the surf racing up washing over our feet. I asked her about her PhD research. She was working on the embryogenesis of _Xenopus laevis_. She was using mutagenic agents to knock out gene expression and was trying to correlate protein profiles with visible phenotypic mutations in the developing embryos. We exchanged autobiographic details of our life histories and as we talked I took her hand.

In American literature and movies the burlesque has become associated in the popular mind with cabaret in which the overtly sexual is mixed with comedy and strip-tease or with the staging of the obviously whimsical comic trope within which the visual spectacle of the scantily dressed females bodies are choreographed for sole purpose of exciting the masculine libidinous gaze. The burlesque as travesty and parody is part and parcel of creating the feminized homoerotic excitement between two women. It is the absence of the masculine presence within the sexual entwinement of two female bodies which caricatures the reality of male erotic insufficiency. The female body is an emblematic mirror of male sexual self-insufficiency. Sex only came into existence with evolution of with what we call the 'female'. The orgasmic self-sufficiency of the homoerotic female body is a parody and a travesty of heterosexual reality. The orgasmic of its own sake can only exist by virtue of the female body. In the Kantian framework the transcendental question is always reducible to: 'What makes X possible, whatever X may be?' It is Y which makes X possible. Y is the conditions of X's possibility. X exists only by virtue of Y. Heidegger's work revolves around this kind of questioning. This kind of questioning in ultimately inescapably metaphysical. And it is this kind of questioning which constantly gives new life to metaphysics, and so contrary to Heidegger there will never be an end to metaphysics or ontology. What is art? What makes art possible? Here we are confronted with ontology and metaphysics. What makes the erotic possible? Somehow the erotic can only exist by virtue of the female body. Plato spoke of knowledge and truth as being feminine. And the meaning of Eros cannot be fully grasped without understanding what knowledge is.

Shachar put her arm around my waist and kissed the side of my head. We spread the blanket in the shelter of some brush and made love. Twilight arrived and we found ourselves basking in the euphoric warmth of our mutual affection. I also felt guilty. I been unfaithful to Janet, just like I had been unfaithful to Kate in Paris and now I was in danger of falling in love with Shachar. Why was I getting mixed up these Jews? Like Yael, Shachar had no religious interest in Judaism, her Jewishness was ethnocentric and Zionist, and she was very patriotic. Yes salvation was from the Jews, and this meant that God chose Israel as a people and as a nation for sake of the salvation of all nations on earth. This is what we Gentiles had been taught. In my own conceptualization of the Hebraic I realized that there were no compelling grounds to conflate the world view of Second Temple Judaism with the Old Testament scriptures. Second Temple Judaism and its further evolution into Post-Jerusalem and Post-Temple Judaism represents a significant theological and religious paradigm shift.

The next day I told Shachar that I had a girlfriend. She said she was a 'big girl', and she had thought as much, but it would be nice if we could still remain friends, and anyway she would be going back to Israel in as soon as her lab work was done, which would be very soon.

417. Not to leave any meat from the Paschal offering over until morning—Exodus 12:10

418

Years later, in 1982 after Zimbabwe had become independent and ceased to be Rhodesia Scott returned to Wits to do his MSc in ecology. When I heard he was around I went to look for him in the Botany Postgraduate Room where he had been allocated a cubical. The last time I that had seen him was at the end of 1976. We had a surprisingly cordial reunion. He was actually happy to see me, we shook hands, and on the spur of the moment I asked him what he was doing that night. Looking incredibly surprised he said nothing. Wits had acquired the12 floor office block called Lawson's Corner which included a revolving restaurant at the top which we jokingly referred to as the 'Pie in the Sky.' Anyway I offered to stick him for supper at the popular revolving restaurant which provided the patrons with a 360o panoramic view of Johannesburg. I fetched him straight after work at about five-o-clock and we walked over to Lawson's Corner. At that time I was already an underground member of the Communist Party. Of course he did not know that nor did I tell him. We ordered T-bone steaks and chips and beer. In fact we drank and chattered until the restaurant closed at eleven-o-clock. It was one of those very rare occasions that I got totally smashed. Somehow I managed to drive home to my flat in Bellevue. He was a changed person. His was no longer cocky and self-assured. His eyes were filled with angst and there was a vulnerability about him. He was working for the Zimbabwean Parks Board as a game ranger. I did confessed to him that I was a lesbian, but he shrugged his shoulders and said that everyone knew that I was queer and a Communist. I learnt that I was disliked intensely by most of my old class mates because of my brash leftist attitudes and radical feminist views, and I was referred to behind my back as that 'Queer Bitch' or the 'Communist Slut' because of the bright red lipstick that I wore as an undergraduate student. He spoke about the gruelling and intense bush war in the Chimanimani Mountains in Manicaland in eastern Zimbabwe along the border of Mozambique.

We spoke about the vast Miombo woodland wilderness areas in Mozambique which lay to the east of the Chimanimani Mountains. The tall forests provided ideal cover for the Zanu PF guerrilla military camps in Mozambique from which they could penetrate with impunity into the rural areas of Zimbabwe. Scott surprised me with his honesty. He admitted that by the late 1970s the insurgents were winning the bush war and that they had successfully turned vast swaths of rural Zimbabwe into military no go zones, which had become effectively liberated zones.

When he began to talk about seeing ghosts at night in the Miombo woodlands I was not sure whether he was joking or whether he was serious. After Zimbabwe independence he was employed for a time as a wildlife consultant to make an assessment of the status of wildlife in the Chimanimani forest in Mozambique. It was quite a dangerous job because REMANO who were busy fighting the FRELIMO government had set up military operational camps in remotes parts of the forest. He did a lot of night travelling in a 4x4 bakkie along winding two track roads which criss-crossed the forest to see if could spot big game like rhino and elephant using a powerful floodlight mounted on the roof of the cab. He had a Mozambique driver who knew the area and who had incidentally been a FRELIMO insurgent. When Scott noticed the scepticism on my face about him seeing ghosts of dead freedom fighters wondering about in the shadows of the Miombo woodlands engaged in some kind of spectral bush war he became serious about the power of the imagination. Before his brother died of a brain tumour he reported seeing all kinds of outlandish images. Scott who had a British passport left the then Rhodesia in 1980 to escape further military duties. He ended up in Amsterdam where he went on a drinking and drug binge. He smoked a dagga zol that had been laced with an unknown cocktail of drugs. He tripped for 24 hours during which time he saw a prostitute with three breasts and flames coming out of her head leading a pageant of chimeric beings that were part-animal, part-human and part-fantastic through the alleys and streets of Amsterdam. But he was not on drugs or drunk when he noticed a shadow drifting in the gloom among the tall trees. He turned the spotlight on the shadow. And out of the darkness the haunting silhouette became transformed into a guerrilla in boots, peaked cap on his head and wearing sun faded camouflaged battle fatigues. In the spotlight the apparition smiling broadly with white teeth flashing lifted up his Kalashnikov high in a gesture which looked like one warrior saluting another within the netherworld of dead soldiers.

Totally alarmed he shouted to his companion the Mozambican driver:

'Did you see that, did you see that?'

The driver answered:

'See what?'

'A man in camouflage uniform carrying an AK 47.'

'No I did not see anything,' the Mozambican answered.

Scott did not know whether he had seen a RENAMO rebel or a ghost or whether his brain was playing tricks on him. He even thought that he might be suffering the effects of a brain tumour like his brother had. Knowing from his Amsterdam drug experiences he knew that the brain could wreak havoc on the mind, playing all kinds of tricks on the senses and consciousness. He wanted to check if his mind was playing tricks. Old habits die hard. After driving about 100 meters he told the driver to stop. He got out of the bakkie and marked out a big X in the sand across the two lane track that they had been following through the forest. They came back the next day, found the X and then retraced the extract spot where he believed that he had seen the apparition. They walked into the forest the approximate distance from the road to the spot where he thought he had more or less seen the apparition, and to their surprise they discovered the boot prints of nine men. From the pattern of the tracks he retraced the steps of the person who had waved the AK 47. They were RENAMO rebel soldiers and from the boot prints it was obvious that they were wearing boots issued by the South African Defence Force (SADF). Scott said the experience was like déjà vu. It was spooky, it was uncanny. It felt like he was back in the bush war, he sensed all the dramatic elements associated with the theatre of guerrilla warfare, the intrigue, the mystery, the danger and the strange magic, all of which was written in the text of the nocturnal prints that had been left behind in the sand. As usual the wearers of the boots had melted away, vanished into thin air, where they were nobody knew.

'It was not my war,' he said, his face which was serious while he told the story, now broke into a broad toothy grin. Throwing back his head he swallowed the remaining beer in his glass in one gulp, and I ordered another round.

'I was curious about RENAMO so I put my ear to the ground, visited a few of the old drinking holes, chatted with the lads and sure enough I soon discovered from reliable sources that RENAMO was getting weapons, ammunition, equipment plus insurgency or guerrilla warfare training from officers who had served in the old Portuguese colonial army, in various regiments of the old Rhodesian armed forces and of course there were guys who had links the SADF and the South African security established. I can tell you straight out that these guys are borderline criminals, they live in a different universe, they all believe that they are fighting Communism, but their real motives, apart from the money, for their involvement in all kinds of clandestine military operations is more ulterior, more sinister, than you could possibly imagine, these guys are not noble Cold War warriors, these guys are adventure junkies, they are addicted to danger, death and violence. They are men without any moral principles. They are not servicing any higher cause. There is a criminal side to everything they do, they are involved poaching, illegal diamond smuggling, car theft, gold smuggling, drug trafficking and arms trafficking. A lot of the dirty work that the South African security establishment needs to get done is outsourced to these guys. If anything is illegal in terms of international law and requires cross border operations, it is these guys that will do it. When it comes to politics these guys are completely illiterate.'

'All governments, all states have a criminal side and are involved in various kinds of criminality in the pursuit and preservation of political power,' I added to what Scott was saying.

'Political power, that is the key word, you hit the nail on the head, this is the driving force in all politics, this is the goal and objective, everything revolves around the capture, possession and control of political power, and no one understands this better than the professional politician, the electorate and the so-called people are just dumb arses,' Scott added.

'Ian Smith and all his cronies thought they could hold onto political power indefinitely by means of naked armed force and military power, they were completely deluded, and even so they still managed to hoodwink the public who were their voters, they kept the voters in stupefying ignorance by controlling the flow of information and feeding them a lot of propaganda shit. In Rhodesia no one apart from the terrorists knew what was going on politically. The terrorists held the real political power and they knew it. This knowledge boosted their moral and gave them confidence. They controlled the shifting and invisible bush war, they exercised tactical and strategic control over the entire battle front and the actual theatre of war not by force of arms or military power but with the understanding of the politics of the Rhodesian situation,' Scott went on.

'The revolutionary forces gained popular political power by means of the strategic and tactical mobilization of the masses of the people,' I responded.

'Yes as a Communist you would say, I have to concede that you are right. Whoever can mobilized the masses of the people politically has the political power or else gains the upper hand in the political struggle for power, and it clear that in Rhodesia the terrorists had gained the upper hand, there was no doubt about that, in fact they had the upper hand before the first shot was ever fired in the bush war, we whites just too blind not see it, and it was the sad truth that the whites could not even begin to conceptualize it as the reality of the situation in Rhodesia, ' Scott confirmed.

'Look I can tell as someone who has been through all the shit, that the political mobilization of the masses will defeat the best armies that the state can muster. Political mobilization of the masse in a war of attrition will in the long run destroy any state or political system based on minority rule. If you can mobilized the masses politically you will win the war for political power. The war of attrition can be fought in many ways. You can fight a war of attrition without guns and bombs or armed forces,' Scott said.

418. Not to leave the second Paschal meat over until morning—Numbers 9:12

419

Ironically it was Scott who had provided me with so much information and insight into the multi-dimensional nature of the dynamics and mechanics of political mass mobilization. And also it was his knowledge on the nature of the dynamic and mechanics on how to conduct the war of attrition. Based on Scott's information, knowledge and insights I was able to draft a working paper on mass mobilization for political power which I circulated within the Party and it was adopted as the guiding strategic and tactical plan that would supplement the armed struggle. My pushing of the plan behind the scenes in the underground movement was the main the reason for my secret trip to Inhambane in Mozambique. I continued to have dinner dates at 'The Pie in the Sky' with Scott until he returned to Zimbabwe and I managed to glean a lot of very useful information and practical know-how from his Rhodesian counter-insurgency experiences regarding political mobilization, armed struggle, insurgency and the war of attrition. In my capacity as the publicity, media and propaganda officer my slogan in the underground became: Study, Learn, Teach and Act. I developed, drafted, produced, printed and distributed thousands of pamphlets whose contents promoted the concretization of the slogan: Study, Learn, Teach and Act.

419. Not to leave the meat of the holiday offering of the 14th until the 16th—Deuteronomy 16:4

420

The majority of my peers when I was still an undergraduate studying zoology and botany were either agnostic or self-proclaimed atheists. Scott was a convinced atheist whereas Wayne, Michael and Robert were convinced theists. People like Yael drifted between agnosticism and atheism. Janet who was my girlfriend from 1975 to the end of 1976 was a devoted Catholic. I would classify myself theologically as a theist. I believed that God was transcendent and immanent. I believed that God was not only omnipotent and omniscient but also omnipresent and omnideterminative. The standard argument against the existence of God goes like this: Evil, pain and suffering are incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and perfectly good God, and therefore given the fact that evil, pain and suffering do indeed exist it follows that God could not possibly exist. Personally I don't find this argument very compelling or convincing or beyond rational rebuttal. To be honest I could not find sufficient reasons not to believe in the existence of God and I have constantly tried to have a relationship with God. I have thought about God a lot and in my mind I did engage in a form of communication with God, even if it was in the form of the constant thought: 'You there and you are close'. Of course I was not religious and by the standards of any conventional Christian or Orthodox Jew I was a sinner living beyond the pale, my life reflected an apparent state of Godlessness especially given my sexual proclivities. I masturbated regularly and was always ready to engage in homoerotic acts with women. It was obvious that the female clit was made for the pleasure of orgasm, it was obvious that the female genitals were adapted and designed to give women maximum pleasure, it was obvious that the entire female body was a sexual organ and a sexual ornament to delight the visage of the erotic and libidinous gaze of both women and men. Women were preoccupied with the erotic beauty of other women, women constantly looked at other women with an appraising eye. Women dressed up and put on makeup not only to impress other women, but also to be erotically attractive to men and women alike. Women were more inclined to bisexuality than men. It is easy for a heterosexual woman to engage in homoerotic acts with another woman than for a heterosexual man to perform homosexual acts with another man.

420. To be seen at the Temple on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot—Deuteronomy 16:16

421

Given my belief that the social and imaginative construction of problem of evil was not a real problem, but rather a point of view which was ultimately meaningless given the nature of reality and the Universe, I did not entertain any ideas or answers regarding the question of theodicy, to me it was non-question. The reason why any belief in the existence of evil as a reality was not compelling can be explained as follows: Firstly, we do not see the existence of evil in non-human forms of nature. Secondly, we can imagine the existence of higher forms of conscious life that would be alien to us, and we can imagine the possibility that these alien forms of intelligent life would have the technology power to observe life on earth, and we can imagine that the possibility exists that they would view humans in the same light that we view nature on earth as something existing beyond good and evil, and that everything which humans do on earth would be viewed in a morally neutral fashion, almost with the eyes of God. For example, these alien forms of intelligent life may see war and genocide as strange forms of human behaviour induced as an adaptive response to various kinds of exigencies. What we take to be evil could be viewed by a superior alien intelligence from another galaxy as something natural and typical of human social behaviour. For millennia slavery was not considered as something evil by slave traders and slave owners. Apartheid was not considered evil by the majority of whites in South Africa.

421. To celebrate on these three Festivals (by bringing an offering)--Exodus 23:14

422

The key word here is imagination. We can imagine that all difference are only differences in degree along a continuum rather than differences in kind. We study nature as scientists and we develop a knowledge of the realities of nature which is morally neutral, we do not see nature is either bad or good, we see nature as a phenomenon beyond good and evil. In the same why we can imagine a higher form of intelligent alien life which will view life on earth including human as being 'natural' phenomena beyond good and evil. What we consider to be evil they will in turn see as mere adaptive responses to exigencies by forms of life whose imaginations are inferior to the imagination of higher forms of life. So all behaviours will differ in degree as adaptive responses to what could be imaginatively entertained as an alternative reality. So war and genocide are not in themselves intrinsically evil, they are the outcomes of exigencies which arose due to a failure of imagination.

Post-Palaeolithic humans could not imagine slavery as being evil or wrong. It took a long time to imagine slavery as being a social institution that was unacceptable. All social institutions which determine the nature of social, economic and political relationships have been viewed as 'natural' in the course of human history. Being viewed as 'natural' the social institutions which enforced the arrangement, ordering and organization of human life in terms of the distribution of power and ownership of property were never questioned. They were never questioned because alternative institutional arrangements seemed to beyond what could be imagined as possibilities. Could a slave-free society be imagined? No it could not be imagined, because slavery existed as a 'natural' social institution. Some men and women were born to be slaves and some were born to be free. This was the natural ordering of human life. And if it was the natural ordering of human life then it was God ordained. Whatever appeared to be the 'natural' order was taken to be the God ordained ordering of things.

422. To rejoice on these three Festivals—Deuteronomy 16:14

423

We have the reality of nature and we have the ideological conceptualization or construction of the 'natural'. Nature is not ontologically equivalent to what is socially constructed as the 'natural'. What is taken to be 'natural' is an ideological construction which can be used to defend the institutional organization of social, economic and political relationships. Nature exists as something which is external to consciousness. Nature is thus something which can become known through discovery, nature is an object of knowledge, whereas the 'natural' exists as something which has been constructed and projected as a justifying ideology for the ordering of human life. Because the 'natural' happens to be something that has been created by subterfuge it needs to unveiled a process of demystification. The 'natural' can only exist in the form of the phantasmagorical.

The 'natural' becomes the unquestionable phantasmagorical ordering and arrangement of human relations in terms of status and power. As the 'natural' order of things it cannot be subjected to change. To question the unquestionable phantasmagorical is to challenge the 'natural' order. And to challenge the 'natural' order is to engage in subversion. To question the unquestionable phantasmagorical is made possible by setting the imagination free. The imagination set free becomes a power of subversion, it subverts by destabilizing the unquestionable, by making the unquestionable questionable. The questioning of the unquestionable leads inevitably to the upsetting of the ordering of things which was assumed to constitute what was 'natural', where the 'natural' has existed in history in the forms of: the institution of slavery or the divine right of kings to rule or the institutions of capitalism.

423. Not to appear at the Temple without offerings—Deuteronomy 16:16

424

What is evil? Evil is the absence of the good. This means that there is an asymmetric relation between good and evil. In all its manifestation evil represents an absence of good, in this sense evil can only exist as a pure negativity, as a gaping hole, as a nothingness relation to the good. If evil is the absence of the good where does it come from, what is the source or origination of evil? Evil always arises as a result of human actions. And human actions which result in the commission of evil never take place in a social or political vacuum. And by virtue of that fact they do not take place in a moral or ethical vacuum. Evil is always experienced by someone. It is always experience by someone under very specific conditions, evil it experienced by a conscious or by a sentient beings, who is aware of their own existence as a thinking self and as a feeling self. I feel there I exist is an irrefutable truth. I feels things from the very depths of my personhood or selfhood. I feel fear, I feel anxiety, I feel angst, I feel sad, I feel despondent, I feel lonely, I feel melancholy, I feel anger, I feel loss, I feel nostalgia, I feel pain, I feel injury, I feel powerless, and because I feel all these things, I exist, I exist as a self. And therefore when I am subjected to an action that violates or transgresses what I think and feel should never be permitted or allowable then I am experiencing an act of evil. And I at that moment I am aware of what is the Good, I have absolute certitude of what is the Good, I am in possession of the knowledge of the Good. And it this anomaly in the face of evil with reinforces the asymmetry of evil in relation to the Good. It is always within a specific social and political context, under a definite state of affairs, that something which should never be permitted or allowable to take place. And when we feel as rational and reasonable beings that an act is evil because it represents something which should never be permitted or allowable to take place if we are possessed by the Absolute Idea of the Good, we are living in the light of the Logos, and we can perceive right from wrong. And if the evil act is permitted to place or made allowable by the governing sovereign order, then we are in the realm or under the reign or in the kingdom of Godlessness. We are under the despotic rule of Mythos. Which in an ironical sense is or has been or will be the conditions of life in a theocracy under the aegis of any of the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but not only under a theocracy, but also under secular regimes where Mythos has been used to legitimate social hierarchies of domination. To sum up, evil which can only thrive under the aegis of Mythos becomes concretized as an absence of the Good in an act of violation of something which should never be permitted or allowed. All acts which affect others, whether in a Good or Evil manner, are acts of moral agency. Human sociality as it had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years transformed all humans in moral agents out of adaptive necessity. Human fitness and survivorship depended on a very strict adherence to forms of moral agency that were not merely socially beneficial but were critical for decreasing mortalities and increasing reproductive success under the harsh and unforgiving conditions in which humans had to live and reproduce as animals. Humans as social ape-like animals evolved a natural aptitude for fairness, equality and for what was permissible or allowable. Humans evolved a natural preference for egalitarian social arrangements because this form or system of sociality increased their overall fitness as hunter-gatherers. So functioning as accountable moral agents was a natural behavioural and mental attribute of humans and was imposed and reinforced by the particular form of egalitarian sociality that characterized the social evolution of human in small sized hunter-gatherer societies.

Evil as a result of human actions or moral agency was always experienced as an action that caused someone pain, injury, harm and suffering, and who then as a consequence of this was then transformed into a victim. Humans dealt with each other in terms of accountability as moral agents and on how individual acts of moral agency either benefitted or threatened their precarious existence as a functioning social unit.

The aetiology of evil in terms of its conditions of possibility can be reconstructed in relation to the various contingencies that resulted in the inadvertent stratification of human sociality and the coevolution of Mythos as the necessary legitimating narratives defending and justifying the existence of social stratification and hierarchies of social domination. In this sense Mythos represented the birth of ideology in all its specific narrative forms, from religious to secular justifications for the existing of the reigning social, economic and political order.

Evil legitimated by religious or secular Mythos acting under the auspices of political sovereignty manifests itself by inflicting pain, harm, suffering and injury on victims through disempowerment, dispossession, disenfranchisement, enslavement, denial of freedoms, stripping of autonomy, impoverishment and so on and so forth.

If you feel that you need to give evil an ontological status as something which acquires a concrete reality in human life, then evil can only exist by virtue of the unquestionable phantasmagorical of what is believed to be 'natural'.

It is through the free exercise of the imagination that the infinity of possibilities 'opens' up and the 'natural' is shown to be a phantom based on an ordering of things, which is an ordering legitimized or authorized by an appeal to phantoms. The phantoms are not only ideological constructs, the phantoms are the personalization and institutionalization of these ideologies. In this sense the phantoms are the demonic principalities whose powers to rule are made possible by the chaining or enslavement of the imagination, by the numbing of consciousness, by the dismembering of the mind, by the destruction of conscience, by the annihilation of empathy, by the zombification of society.

Critical to the aetiology of evil is the idea of what is permissible. Acts of evil become permissible under all religious or secular regimes of the phantasmagorical which are grounded or anchored in either a religious or secular Mythos. Godlessness and idolatry defines the essential nature of the phantasmagorical regime built on the foundations of Mythos. It is the peculiar and paradoxical character of its Godlessness that makes the cruelty of its absolute evilness permissible.

It is through a dismal dialectic rooted in social stratification that Mythos is re-imagined and re-created and re-worked as the final authoritative revelation of God that always paves the way for the Godless permissibility of evil. Godlessness in the form of the absence of the Good created the fertile ground for the lush eruption of evil under the mystical enchanted dome of the sacral order of the Patriarchy. The mark of this evil, its death stench is evident in slavery, decapitations and the repressive diminishing of the humanity of women.

But Mythos is also a doubled edged sword. Mythos acquires its revelatory power by unleashing the saying of the unsayable (through deconstruction and dialectical hermeneutics). What is unsayable always involves the reawakening of the subversive imagination of the future as the dawn of freedom, autonomy, popular sovereignty and egalitarianism. Which is the hope of the revolutionary anarchist, and also of the militant anarcho-communist.

424. Not to refrain from rejoicing with, and giving gifts to, the Levites—Deuteronomy 12:19

425

If I wear my Christian hat, then I see enslavement versus the freeing of the imagination in terms of the dialectic of 'openness' versus 'self-centredness'. The unquestionable phantasmagorical can only exist by virtue of self-centredness which manifests itself in the creation of hierarchies of domination. The opposite of self-centredness is kenosis or 'self-emptying'. The self-emptying of Jesus, who was God incarnate, and who was crucified on Golgotha on a Roman cross, calls into question all manifestations of the unquestionable phantasmagorical. Jesus crucified on the Roman cross on Golgotha was a historical event through which God FINALLY revealed himself as the God who was behind the historical events which nurtured the writing of the Bible. God reveals himself/herself through history of Israel, and the history of Israel has been the medium of God's revelation. It is in this sense that Jesus said: 'Salvation comes from the Jews'. It is in this sense that the Hebrew people have been a special people and it is this sense that Jews remain a significant people in spite of their retreat from history and the future. I absolve myself from whatever has come across as anti-Semitic in my musings thus far.

Is God knowable? On the basis of reason alone can we know anything about God? On the basis of reason alone we are able to make rational and logical claims about God which have to be true if God is really God. If God is really God then God has to be all knowing, all powerful, all determining, ever present everywhere and nowhere absent, and nothing can exist independently of God and God has to be absolutely free. What does this mean? It means that if these claims concerning the essential nature of God are true then we do have meaningful knowledge of God and God is knowable in a significant way.

425. To assemble all the people on the Sukkot following the seventh year [the king publicly reads portions of the Torah]--Deuteronomy 31:12

426

Dear Reader I have been waiting to make this confessional detour in the writing of my memoirs, now that is done, I can get on with the dialectic of 'openness' versus 'self-centredness'. The question of God emergences within this dialectical tension between openness versus self-centredness. This tension manifests itself in the tension: between the self and knowledge, self and the world, between the self and Nature, between the self and Society, between the self and Reality, between the self and the Universe, between the self and the Good, between the self and the beautiful, between the self and the Absolute, between the self and the Totality, between the self and the Truth and finally between the self and God. In a way this tension involves the erotic assent of Plato's ladder of Love. The tension between openness and self-centredness find manifests itself in Hegel's account of the 'unhappy consciousness' in his Phenomenology of the Mind. In my own mind this tension between openness and self-centredness is the basis of Hegelian and Marxist idea of alienation and estrangement, and it is this feature what makes Hegelian and Marxist ideas deeply consonant with the Hellenic, the Hebraic and finally with the essential nature of Christianity.

426. To set aside the firstborn animals [to be eaten by the Kohanim, and sacrificed unless they are blemished]--Exodus 13:12

427

Just before my arrest I got word that Scott had died in a boating accident on Lake Kariba while working on a freshwater fishery project. I felt a deep sense of loss with his passing away, and for days I was depressed and tearful. He embodied all the worse features of the Rhodesian white male. He was selfish, self-obsessed, sexist, chauvinist, racist, fascist, anti-Semitic and an incorrigible philanderer. Yet women loved him! In spite of his attributes as a white male, there was always this uncertain flicker of angst in his eyes and a shadow of vulnerability in his handsome demeanour and it was this I think that drew women into his bed. It was Benjamin Schlossheimer who phoned to let me know that Scott was no more. Benjamin had turned out to be a very successful businessman. He owned a small commercial airfreight company which filled a specialized business niche and he also run a commercial intelligence company.

I asked Benjamin if we could meet for coffee. When he asked where, I suggested Dominic's in Braamfontein across road from Wits University. News of Scott's passing seemed to be a good excuse to phone Yael.

It was tearful reunion. We sat at the table and wept together unashamedly. I don't think we were weeping only for Scott. PW Botha had made his Rubicon speech and he had declared a state of emergency. The United Democratic Front (UDF) had become the vehicle for waging the people's war through rolling mass action. Even though I had joked in earlier notebooks that I was a part-time revolutionary, doing a bit of revolution here and doing a bit of revolution there and so on. There were days that I did not sleep as I produced round the clock thousands of Study, Learn, Teach and Act pamphlets for distribution in the townships, at funerals, at mass meetings, at churches, at bus stops, at railway stations, at football stadiums and at music concerts. I packed the pamphlets into boxes, supervised and coordinated their dispatch and distributions. I was travelling hundreds of kilometres at night in the old VM Beetle to deliver boxes of pamphlets across the country.

Wiping away our tears we reminisced over our undergraduate years. We talked about the lads in the Zoology and Botany Class, they were the guys who hung out and drank with Scott in the downstairs Devonshire Hotel pub (called the Dev) almost every night. How they managed to pass their exams was a mystery. In 1975 Scott who had a room in Phineas Court was going out with a pretty medical student. I think her name was Alison. Phineas Court was just around the corner from Dominic's Coffee Shop. In 1976 after breaking up with Alison, Scott moved into a flat with Tracy who worked as a technician in Department of Genetic. However, Scott still kept his room in Phineas Court for the occasional secret trysts with other females. If I can recall Tracy's flat was at the bottom of Stiemens Street close to the Civic Theatre. Both Benjamin and I often had coffee with Scott and the lads at Dominic's in 1976 during our lunchbreak while we were doing our BSc Honours.

The event that both Benjamin and I vividly recalled was the day when the lads, Scott, Tracy, Benjamin and I were all together drinking coffee outside Dominic's. Unknown to all of us Alison was busy purchasing a medical text book at Campus Bookshop which was just around the corner located directly under Phineas Court. She had parked her car in Stiemens Street opposite Dominic's. Coming round corner she immediately spotted Scott and radiating a smile she made a beeline towards Scott and sat down on an empty chair next him.

We all just sat there watching this unbelievable drama unfolding before us.

Tracy's face freezes up. Alison in the meantime has taken hold of Scott's hand and has shifted her chair closer to Scott cuddling up to him, Scott reciprocates and puts his around her.

All what we hear is Alison bubbling away: 'So nice to see you again. What have you been doing? How are things with you?'

And so and so, Alison carries on with Scott without any knowledge that he has a relationship with Tracy who sitting on the other side of Scott. Then Alison suddenly asks: 'Can we go to your room?'

Yael with her eyes still red from weeping listens with a look of disbelief on her face to the story that Benjamin and I are recounting in turns.

'Scott and Alison get up and leave the table. We all remain sitting, including Tracy,' Benjamin recounts.

'We all sat around the table saying nothing, wearing the most solemn and beatific faces of pure innocence,' I said.

'Tracy, her face now livid with bewildered anger almost falls while trying to escape from the humiliating situation,' Benjamin continues.

'Stanley jumps and runs after Tracey as she runs back to her flat down the street,' I said.

'Brian then quips what's the bet that Stanley is going to fuck Tracey,' Benjamin said.

Yael just sat there shaking her head.

427. The Kohanim must not eat unblemished firstborn animals outside Jerusalem—Deuteronomy 12:17

428

Benjamin looks at watch: 'I have to go now.'

Yael wearing headscarf and a long plain dress that reached her down to her ankles looks at me plaintively. She is now a mother of three children, two boys and one girl. Her face wore the tired signs of motherhood and kosher housekeeping.

'I am so unhappy,' she said looking at me with her tear stained eyes.

'Can we go to your flat?' She asks. Her car is parked just down the block, she offers to drive me there and bring me back later to Wits.

Once in the my flat I followed quietly behind her as she inspected the tiny kitchen, the small bathroom and shower near the front door, the combined dining and lounge, the single bedroom and the closed off porch that houses the huge Xerox machine for making the Study, Learn, Teach and Act pamphlets. She picked up the seal skull and examined it closely with her eyebrow knitted in a frown, putting the skull back in its place she inspected the book shelves which occupied the spaces against wall between the furniture. She spent a while reading through the titles, sometimes taking a volume from the shelf and flipping through the pages before putting it back.

Turning to me she said: 'I have lost my life.'

428. Not to redeem the firstborn—Numbers 18:17

429

Without a sense of social obligation and solidarity the preservation of the dynamic complexity of human sociality which is necessary for the realization of creative, meaningful and spiritually fulfilled human existence would be destroyed and individual personal existence would become degraded to a state of anomie with all it associated social pathologies and characteristic symptoms of dysfunction such lack of agency, incapacity, distrust, estrangement, alienation, meaningless, depression, listlessness, loneliness, disempowerment and social disintegration. Solidarity and a sense of social obligation depends on living the social reality of one's life in a state of mutual and reciprocal social and personal indebtedness. We are all equally indebted to one other and this is the basis of egalitarianism, social cooperativity, social welfare, social justice and social mutualism, and ultimately the realization of the Good. The centrality and integrality of the reality of indebtedness in the lives everyone is the only rational and moral basis for formulating the idea of sin. Sin is the failure to honour one's debts. Dishonouring one indebtedness means reneging on one's social obligations and this has played a huge role in destroying human solidarity. Destruction of human solidarity results in social anomie and the rise of tyrannies. In the absence of the Good, evil emerges from the shadows.

Unfortunately due to the religious, theological, philosophical, social, political, economic and ideological upheavals that characterized the first four centuries of Christianity, the nascent church was both cause and effect in the development of the idea of sin as something which was associated with the flesh in a sexual sense took root. During this time the dominant classes in the form of the aristocracy and the urban elite played a key role as the ruling minority a new sexual morality. The new sexual morality had deep roots in Jewish, Greek, Roman and Gnostic traditions. In fact the pagan Romans were quite big on chastity and believed strongly that expressions of sexuality should be confined to marriage only.

The Hebraic heritage in the form of the literature of Old Testament cannot be blamed for burdening the Christian world and life view with the intolerable baggage of sexual repression. The Old Testament is fairly indulgent with respect sexual behaviour. Leviticus 15 and 18 addressed sexuality purely in terms ritual and cultic sanctions forbids various sex related practices such as incest, nudity, male homosexuality, bestiality, sodomy and intercourse during menstruation. Leviticus 15 and 18 don't address lesbianism. It possible that lesbianism as a way of life was something that could not be conceived by the Old Testament writers.

Can there be a new sexuality with respect to Christian belief? I would definitely say: Yes! There has to be a reconceptualization of sexuality that will necessarily entail a rethinking of a Christian based philosophical anthropology. And the first step in this rethinking would require the severing of the link between sin and the flesh, in its place there should be a more comprehensive or totalizing re-establishment of the link between sin and debt.

429. Separate the tithe from animals [to be eaten by the Kohanim, and sacrificed unless they are blemished]--Leviticus 27:32

430

While scuba diving for the very first time among the coral reefs in the close vicinity of Paradise Island in the Bazaruto Archipelago close to Vilanculos I was amazed and fascinated by the stunning brilliance and inconceivable variety of coral and coral fish colouration made possible by the streams of sunlight which bathed the blue crystal depths with a luminosity that made every living thing glow with a fluorescent radiance that gave new meaning to the words in Genesis: 'Let there be light'. It is only the visible and the ultra violet wavelengths of the spectrum of the sun's electromagnetic radiation which have made it possible for the rainbow carnivalesque queer world of the coral reefs to vibrate with the energetic motions of sentient life. The shockingly colourful world of the coral reefs was alive with the most exquisite range of queerness: invertebrate and vertebrate hermaphrodites and fish that change their sex, females becoming males and males becoming females. As a young first year zoology and botany student, only eighteen years old, my mind literary exploded with wonder and with questions which I was unable to answer at the time. What was the function of all this colour? Why did so many different species of fish have various blue and yellow colour combinations? What did the fish see? Did they see the world of the coral reef in the same way that I saw it? Was the retinal system of their eyes different from mine? Blue was the most prominent light wavelength the aquatic oceanic world beneath the waves, and yellow was the most conspicuous colour in world of blue. In the terrestrial environment humans are excellent at distinguishing yellow from blue. When under water, I noticed that for human eyes there is a good match between the blue background dominating aquatic world of the ocean and the blue colour of many of the reef fish and other predatory fish which patrolled the open waters of the ocean surrounding the reefs. The pure blue back ground of the sea provides a perfect camouflage for blue coloured fish. The coral reefs are characterized by an inordinate range of bewildering diversity of habitats or niches and corresponding life-styles and evolutionary adaptive functions which form and colour serve within this diversity of niches and life-styles are multiple, including: camouflage, communication, defensive warning, mimicry, unpalatability and so on.

At night drinking Laurentina around our communal fire we made a variety of fish and shell-fish dishes which we ate with rice which was our carbohydrate staple. While some of us were scuba diving and the others would swim off and spearfish for our dinner, we literally lived off the ocean. I also tried my luck at spearfishing with mixed success. We would chop up onions, garlic, tomatoes, lemons, and then the stuff the ingredients into the gutted cavity of the fish, spice the fish and then wrap them in aluminium foil, and bake them in the coals. We used paper plates which we burnt afterwards. The boys loved cooking over an open fire but hated dishwashing!

The glowing coals of the fire would eventually die and our eyes would become accustomed to the dark. We would lie on our backs and gaze up at the star lit night sky. It was the first time that I learnt about the Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe. The phrase 'Big Bang' was first coined by Fred Hoyle a British astrophysicist. Hoyle did not believe in a Big Bang origin of the Universe. He held to a steady state theory of the Universe. He argued that the Universe was eternal, unchanging and in a steady state. He explained the observable expansion of the Universe as seen by the receding galaxies moving away from each other as being due to the continuous creation of matter between the galaxies over time. As older galaxies move further and further apart new galaxies emerge apparently out of nothing and develop in the empty space being left behind.

Staring up at the pitch black star bedecked night sky I tried to visualized in my imagination that all of the stars in my field of vision were racing away from each at increasing velocities and that the Universe has been rapidly expanding from an initial unimaginably small invisible point non-stop for billions and billions of years.

The students studying engineering, geology, computer science and applied mathematics, chemistry and physics in the Wits diving team debated the various versions of the Cosmological Argument for the origin of the Universe. The most rational basic statement of the Cosmological Argument could be reduced to the following simple syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause, the Universe began to exist, and therefore the Universe has a cause.

One of the guys said that nothing can cause itself. Another guy said only something can cause something. And we concluded that nothing causes nothing rather than something. Then someone chirped: 'There must be a God'.

I surprised them when my voice broke the silence: 'I believe in God, I don't see any problem with believe in God, why is it so difficult to believe in the existence of God.'

And then followed the usual spluttering's of 'yeah but...if there was a God...then there would be...and so and on, blah, blah.'

The conversion would drift on to other topics and the soft drone of male voices made me sleepy. Every night I fell asleep on my towel on the beach sand. A hand would gently shake my shoulder: 'Hannah wakeup, we are going to bed now.'

I would get up half-asleep, switch on my torch, scratch around in my tent for my tooth brush and tooth paste, stagger back out into dark to the water drum, open the tap and fill my plastic mug, brush my teeth, gurgle and spit out water, and stumble back to my tent, crawl into my sleeping bag still wearing my shorts and Speedo and fall instantly asleep.

When I crawled out my tent in the morning at sunrise the fire was already going. The fire and smoke blackened kettle would be boiling on the coals. After a breakfast of instant coffee and cold fish that was left over from the previous evening we prepared our gear for another day of Scuba diving and spear fishing. The boys did not shave. Their sun tanned faces were prickly with stubble. Just before we set off I had to comb my hair and one of guys had volunteered to plat my hair each morning, and he became quite good at it. Every morning he said the same thing:

'Girls with long hair should never be allowed on a camping diving trip'.

I would answer: 'Yeah, Yeah.'

They had all done their military service straight after matric. But I was young and sassy, and I had a lot of lip, not scared to speak my mind. Five years of high school dorm living and six months in Sunnyside res at Wits had equipped me with a sharp and mobile tongue, and with a matching vocabulary, I could out jab any guy punch for punch when it came to a verbal sparring bout. The male mind was slow when it came to words and self-expression. They tended to be lumbering and a bit clumsy. In general I did not find males very attractive or enticing, and this sentiment also applied to the guys of the Wits diving club who happened to be very nice humans, and as animals they were OK. In that sense I liked them and could get on with them. But nothing in a male's being did anything for me, and I think they could feel my physical aversion to intimacy with maleness. They were good looking and very physical but it did not work for me. No palpitations, no hot flushes, no blushing, no lingering looks or fluttering eye lashes, no arousal, no attraction, just nothing. It is hard for most heterosexuals to know what it feels like to be homosexual, and what feels like to feel no sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, and to find the opposite sex complete un-erotic. This was the vibe they got from me. Our relations had to be 'organized' on an asexual basis, they liked me as person and I liked them on the same basis, and of course it goes without say that we needed teach other, we mutually dependent on each other especially while diving, and we had to look out for each other and be concerned about our collective welfare and safety especially when out at sea. A real bond did develop between me and them, a bond of asexual comradeship, the kind of bond to be expected between sister and brothers, and this is how it worked out on the trip. Somehow all of this happened and it was to their credit. The boys were fantastic, in spite of the other things that might have been going on privately in their minds.

430. Not to redeem the tithe—Leviticus 27:33

431

Filling in the explanatory gaps is what science does. Darwin in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal has provided grounds for filling in the putative gaps between humans and the animal kingdom. The language gap which supposedly separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom may not be a gap at all, but a functional adaption falling within the continuum of communication capacities and differing only in degree with respect to the rest of the animal kingdom. What is the adaptive function of language? Niche theory and what did humans do to make a living before the so-called beginning of history?

431. Every person must bring a sin offering for his transgression—Leviticus 4:27
432

In the study of the living world of animals and humans we discover explanatory gaps everywhere, but especially in the dynamical-causal-mechanistic-chemical-electrical relationship between the vibrating, rotating and translational physical world of matter dancing to the beat of a fantastic variety of motions and the subtle invisible mysterious impenetrable non-physical world of sentient experience and awareness. One of the most pressing scientific problems involves the bridging of the great reductionist-causal-mechanistic explanatory divide which separates the physical world of brain structure and function from the seemingly non-physical realm of the subjective world of experience. It all boils down to knowing with certainty how physical bioelectrical events and processes in the brain give rise what to we think are non-physical events such as what it feels like to me. How can I possibly ever tell you what it feels like to me so that you would be able to know and feel intimately with direct tangible and palpable awareness of how I subjectively sense, feel and experience everything? Language ultimately fails to bridge this gap between the physical and the non-physical worlds.

Through the medium of language we want to unveil and make transparent the mystery of how the physical can trigger the non-physical states like sentience, like subjectivity, like feeling pain, like feeling happy or aroused or filled with desire or fear or melancholy? We want to say how this happens. Then language would have achieved its own self-transparency and self-immediacy, and the veil between our consciousness awareness and the physical world will be finally lifted, and would see everything as it really is in a manner which can be directly communicated between separate minds, and we would be of one mind.

Being of one mind we would have full knowledge and understanding of how the physical bioelectrical processes of the brain and body generate the world of our conscious awareness, a world in which we experience desire, lust, love, anger, pain, hope, joy, sadness, despair, anomie, fear and ennui? Once we know how the physical events taking place in the microscope and quantum realm of pure matter generate the non-physical world of sentient experience with its full range of conscious awareness we would have reached the summit of ultimacy, and we would be one step away from creating robots which feeding directly off the sun's energy will move about the earth with full consciousness and intelligent minds. They will be sentient beings and we would be able to recreate ourselves as thinking and conscious machines and we would have attained the post-human, post-animal and post-biological state of being. As thinking machines that have consciousness we would be living in the futureless and timeless world of the eternal now, which is also the world of post-desire, post-evil, post-lust, post-want, post-sex and post-pain, therefore we would have attained the state of non-living beings, we would exist in a 'non-living' state. We would be 'non-living' but existing beings, existing as consciousness beings, existing in a world of eternal contemplation where truth supervenes on being, on the being of the machine as opposed to being a living being. As thinking and conscious machines we would be perfectly free, because we would have no needs, we would have conquered desire and we would have attained the state of nirvana. Desire is the source of all pain and suffering. Existing as conscious and thinking non-living beings drawing our energy from the sun is one possible world amongst many possible worlds, but a world without death, desire, pain, suffering, lust or sex. A world without Eros.

432. Bring an asham talui offering when uncertain of guilt—Leviticus 5:17-18

433

Leibniz was right in with respect to his theodicy. God did indeed create the best of possible worlds in which sentience, consciousness, desire, Eros, free-will, autonomy, orgasm, love, joy and hope could all co-exist. But this world could only co-exist as a package deal with death, pain and suffering, and with the reality of evil. To make this kind of world free of pain, suffering, death and evil would be like trying to square the circle. However, the idea of the Good, the True and Beautiful always exists as a tantalizing possibility in the best of all possible worlds in which biological beings such as humans possess free-will and understand that they are capable of realizing autonomy through the process of having direct or unmediated sovereignty over their existence as individuals. And this possibility can only be realized through a radical revolution.

433. Bring an asham vadai offering [for certain sins] when guilt is ascertained—Leviticus 5:25

434

Only after creating the institutional foundations for the praxis of Anarcho-Communism can individual autonomy and freedom be realized through the direct or unmediated sovereignty of individuals with respect to their lives and existence.

Ideas about sovereignty. Direct democracy versus elected representational democracy. Soviets, wards and constituencies.

434. Bring an oleh v'yored offering (if the person is wealthy, an animal; if poor, a bird or meal offering) [for certain sins]--Leviticus 5:7-11

435

Victory turns out to be the moment of defeat.

435. The Sanhedrin must bring an offering when it rules in error—Leviticus 4:13

436

The queer tango.

Tango was invented for queers. The men in Argentina went out at night to dance with men, while the women stayed at home. The girls said we can learn something from the men, why must we sit home at night? We too should go out at night dressed up and wearing high heels and dance the tango with each other, women with women, just like the men. In the authentic tango when men dance with men, and women dance with women, dancers constantly switch their roles between follower and leader. To be truly good at the tango you should be able to dance in both roles.

436. A woman who had a running issue must bring an offering after she goes to the Mikvah—Leviticus 15:28-29

437

The intellectual labour of philosophy since the pre-Socratic and the post-Socratic philosophers has focused its collective efforts on distinguishing the real from the unreal, the true from the false and the good from evil. And if we had to do a progress review on the findings of two and half millennia of sustained philosophical endeavour, the only verdict that can be accepted it that not a single philosophical problem has been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. To date the community of philosophers remain divided on what is real, what is true and what is good. Philosophy in trying to establish what is real, what is true and what is good has failed to escape the pit falls of the infinite regress, self-referential or circular reasoning and logical contradiction or the logical cul de sac. The following three Kantian questions remain unresolved: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?

437. A woman who gave birth must bring an offering after she goes to the Mikvah—Leviticus 12:6

438

What can I know? Only a fool or idiot will agree with the view that science has not made any significant and critical advances regarding the question of what we can know. Thanks to science there is indeed a lot of things that we actually do know with a high degree of certainty. There is a lot that we do know about the empirically accessible Universe. There is also a lot that we do know about the non-empirical abstract Universe of logic and mathematics. It is beyond dispute that there has been a cumulative and progressive growth in scientific knowledge regarding the nature of the empirically accessible Universe. It is hard to dispute that the cumulative and progressive growth in scientific knowledge regarding the nature of the empirically accessible Universe has been based on the correspondence theory of truth, which in turn is based on a metaphysics of realism. Truth is about what is real and truth supervenes on being. It is impossible to know that we know without committing ourselves to these metaphysical claims.

438. A man who had a running issue must bring an offering after he goes to the Mikvah—Leviticus 15:13-14

439

There will be no end to metaphysics so long as there is consciousness of experience. The conclusion that I am, that I exist because I am conscious, opens the door for metaphysical thinking, and once that door has been opened it can never be shut again. Metaphysics is the shadow that is cast over everything that becomes the subject of thinking, and so long as we live in the shadow of metaphysics, there will theology.

What is metaphysics? Even the word 'metaphysics' provokes all kinds of responses, especially that of derision. But the truth is that everyone who has something to say about something to someone cannot avoid becoming entangled with the metaphysical. Once entangled in the snare of metaphysics the question of God cannot be erased and there is no escape from theology or the onto-theological. Metaphysics cannot be slayed like the proverbial dragon – it cannot be destroyed or deconstructed.

So what then is metaphysics? Metaphysics is ontology. And ontological is the most embracive and the most generic study of what exists. We know that all kinds of things exists and the moment we express our knowledge or ideas about what exists in whatever form we are ineluctably engaged in ontology, and we become metaphysicians. Evidence of what exists in the physical Universe is produced by the empirical investigations of science. Physics provides us with the metaphysical irreducibles regarding what kinds things exist in the Universe, things like photons, quarks, electrons, and space-time. The questions which are metaphysical in nature can be reduced to a problem of ontology. And the problems ontology focuses on trying to provide answers to questions about what kinds of things actually exist out there.

The transcendental and the immanent cannot be decoupled or separated. The question which asks: 'what are the necessary conditions for any possible experience of things?' has an answer. The answer to this question has to include both the subjective and objectives conditions which make any experience of things possible. Instead of limiting the question to what are the subjective conditions which make experience of things possible, we need to also ask about the objective conditions which make subjective experience of things possible. The internal and the external, the subjective and the objective, the transcendent and the immanent are inseparable. How do we deal with this? What is taken to be the realm of the transcendent is not something which can be dismissed on rational grounds. It exists as an external and ever present imposition. It is something which forces itself upon us from without (objective) and not from within (subjective). The relationship between the subjective and the objective is in the form of a lock and key. The lock can only turn if the key fits and as able to engage the keys a cause and effect manner. Lock and key, cause and effect, contingency and necessity reveal what is possible and what is knowable and what is intelligible, the Universe is not passive but reactive in a knowable and intelligible fashion. We cannot construct on a whim just any model of the Universe and expect that reality will conform to our ideas and expectations regarding the nature of reality. The lock acts as a constraint or limit or boundary regarding the opening action of the turning key. This means that only certain kinds of experimental results or physical actions are possible. For example, no experiment or abstract theorizing will ever prove that a perpetual motion machine could in fact exist. How do we know that this statement is true and not false? Reality will always let us know when we have made a mistake regarding our theories about the nature of reality. It is this 'telling us' that we have made a mistake about our ideas concerning the nature of reality which corrects our thinking and reinforces our conscious awareness that reality is accessible, knowable and intelligible and therefore susceptible to, or compatible with, or consistent with the work of reason, in a lock and key fashion. We can confidently say 'reality is like this' and 'not like that'. The work of reason embodies a system of conscious or mindful cognitive operations which involve the confluence of logical inference, perception, sensory experience, deliberation, evaluation, comparison, contrasting, recognition and memory. All of these contribute to the cognitive powers of reason. Everything that we can possibly know about the empirically accessible Universe necessarily involves the reason acting in cooperation with the senses. What about the abstract non-empirical Universe of logic and mathematics? Here it seems that reason is able to produce analytical truths in the words of Kant unaided by the sense experience. However it is not reason acting alone on its own resources as Kant has put it. It is by virtue of something else apart from reason, rather than just nothing but reason acting on or in terms of its own resources, that reason is able to generate or rather discover 'analytical truths' in the realms of logic and mathematics. There must 'exist' the necessary condition or pre-conditions or foundations which make it possible for reason to both act on its own internal resources or powers and in cooperation with the senses in generating or discovering the Truths about the abstract Universe and the empirical Universe, respectively. It is metaphysics or ontology or even theology which addresses itself to question of the necessary conditions or pre-conditions or foundations which make it possible for reason to discover what is true and thereby be involved in the generation of knowledge. Metaphysics as a discipline or even as an intellectual exercise poses the foundational questions: 1) by virtue of 'what' is it possible that reason is able to exist in the first place , and 2) by virtue of 'what' is it possible for reason to gain understanding and knowledge of the abstract and the empirically accessible Universe. The various 'whats' exist as foundational presuppositions and assumptions, assumptions which scepticism necessarily assumes in order to deny the possibility of knowledge.

By virtue of 'what' is it possible for reason itself to exist in the first place? The cognitive capacity or the cognitive power or the intellectual ability which we call reason is itself an emergent property of inanimate matter, of the very elements to be found in the Periodic Table, elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen which have been generated from the thermonuclear reactions of dying stars. The capacity for reason emergences as a consequence of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen plus other elements acquiring certain kinds of configurations, which by virtue of those configurations become endowed with the capacity to undergo certain kinds of dynamics or motions and so on and so forth, which result in the 'materialization' of reason in conscious and thinking beings. All this of this boils down to the fact, that for us as human beings, a certain kind of World or Universe has to exist by virtue of which it becomes possible for us to be endowed with reason, where reason itself as an emergent property of that Universe. The Universe in itself contains the possibility emergence of reason. The Universe is thus endowed with the powers, predispositions, capacities, properties and kinds of relationships by virtue of which emergent properties such as intelligence, consciousness, mind and reason can come into existence. The existence of the powers, predispositions, capacities properties and relationships which characterize the essential physical and material nature of the Universe cannot be accounted for in self-referencing fashion. They exist as brute non-self-explanatory facts. They are non-self-explanatory because every explanation of something is always in terms of something else, and this leads to an infinite regress, which in turn demonstrates that the Universe does not contain within itself its own self-explanation. The infinite regress that logically arises when attempting to explain something in terms of something else means that there is no final empirical observation or final-terminating-account which provides an Ultimate explanation for the existence of the powers, predispositions, capacities, properties and relationships which characterize all the entities or things out of which the Universe is composed. The physical and material Universe does not contain within its self the kind of information which would make it logically, analytically and empirically possible for the realization of its own self-explanation or self-accounting in terms of itself, in a self-referencing manner, as something which could be attained through the cognitive powers of the mind of a conscious being who is a product of the self-same Universe. This means there is a limit to what the cognitive powers or mental capacity of a conscious being produced by the Universe could attain regarding Ultimate knowledge about the Universe. In this sense the Universe is not self-explanatory in any Ultimate sense from within itself or in terms of itself in a self-referencing logical fashion. Even reason cannot explain its own existence or capacities or power in terms of itself in a self-referencing manner. Something cannot account for itself in terms of itself, it can only account for itself in terms of something else. Metaphysics and ontological arises from the awareness of this problem. And it's this awareness which makes metaphysics and ontology the study and investigation of foundations, the foundations which form the basis on which truth claims are made, the foundation which form the basis of knowledge and understanding and so on and so forth. The fundamental question which haunts every critique and every inquiry and every claim is: on what basis or foundation are the critiques, inquiries and claims made? Every kind of intellectual endeavour is built on a metaphysical foundation. No thinking can escape metaphysics or ontology. In this sense all thinking is ultimately theological and represents in one way or another an asking after God no matter what. The question of God haunts every thought and every idea and every act of consciousness awareness. The question remains even if ignored.

439. A metzora ("leprous" person — see According to the Torah is Leprosy a hygienic problem or is it something spiritual and miraculous?) must bring an offering after going to the Mikvah—Leviticus 14:10

440

Will there be an end to metaphysics? Metaphysics ends when the knowledge of the nature of the Totality, or the Absolute or the Ultimate is known with the certitude of truth. When will this be? It will coincide with the Eschaton. The Eschaton is the event when the Absolute or Ultimate or Totality is finally known with the certainty of Truth. The Eschaton represents the finality that comes with the knowledge of the Truth regarding the nature of Ultimate Reality. The judgement that accompanies the Eschaton rests on the exposing of the non-truth or falsehood of idolatrous ideologies that legitimate social and political domination. This is the Judgement of Divine Violence that accompanies the Eschaton.

440. Not to substitute another beast for one set apart for sacrifice—Leviticus 27:10

441

'Meet me in Galilee.'

Refrain: Jesus crucified on the Roman cross on Golgotha was a historical event through which God FINALLY revealed himself as the God who was behind the historical events which nurtured the writing of the Bible. Dying on the Roman cross Jesus shouts out to the women at the foot of the cross, to the women who see Jesus as their lover, their son, their brother, and their husband, Jesus shouts out in a loud voice from the cross: 'It is FINISHED', meaning that the prolepsis of the ESCHATON now reigns following the Easter realization that the resurrected historical Jesus is the Truth, the Life and the Way.

At the empty tomb the women were told: '...Go and tell his disciples and Peter that he's going ahead of them to Galilee...'

441. The new animal, in addition to the substituted one, retains consecration—Leviticus 27:10

442

Yael gazed at the painting hanging above the sideboard. It depicted two women erotically embellished in a dramatic decorative tango embrace. I had commissioned the painting some time ago. It was a picture that had been painted from a photograph taken of Kate and myself. In the picture a woman (myself) is executing a tango adorno (embellishment or decoration) known as the gancho (hook) with another woman (Kate).

'It is so beautiful,' Yael said wistfully. I could see that she did not recognize the dancers.

'The two women are strangers,' I decided to say.

'What do you mean?' Yael asked.

'The two women met at a club.'

'Are implying that there is story behind the picture, that there is actually more to the painting than one can see from the surface layers of oil paint, something which is hidden deep within the picture beyond what is plainly visible to the naked eye?' She asked with an indulgent smile, as her spirits lifted.

'Yes, there is and it is quite an interesting story, would you like to hear it?'

'Yes,' Yael answered with a sudden show of child-like willingness to indulge in a game of make belief.

'Well at the beginning of time the girls had grown tired of staying at home at night while the men went out carousing with each other, so the girls or women began to meet at a social club only for women where they could go to once they were finished with their household chores. At least once or twice a week they would spend the evening dancing the tango with each other in an old hall that some kindly landlady allowed them to use. Now there was this very beautiful young woman who had heard about the club where the women danced the tango with each other. She worked as a seamstress at a women's garment factory and from the offcuts which she stole she made herself tango dresses. Out of love and respect for the tango the poor working class women did the best they could to put together a costume for their tango evenings. After dressing she did her makeup and when she was finished she put her high heels in a brown paper packet, slipped on her sandals and put on her garment workers knee length factory jacket over her tango costume, locking the apartment door behind her, she hurriedly descended the dimly lit flights of stairs until she reached the dark ground floor foyer which opened onto the pavement of a busy street in the centre of the city. The evening star was already high in the purple night sky as made her way to her rendezvous

As she entered the women's social tango dance club a strange woman sitting alone on one of the chairs against the wall of the hall noticed her arrival. The wooden floor of the hall was crowded with women dancing. She hung up her overall and stepped into her high heels. While looking for a place to stand or sit she spotted the lone woman sitting on one of the wooden foldup chairs which were arranged against the wall around the perimeter of the hall.

Their eyes met, and their gaze lingered as when two strangers find themselves drawn to each other for the first time by that faint indiscernible fragrance of mutual attraction which comes wrapped in that enigmatic blend of mystery, uncertainty and eroticism. Standing up the woman who had been sitting at the edge of the hall signalled with that subtle suggestive gesture of the slight nod of the tilted head and the raising of the eyebrow whether the young women who had just arrived would like to dance with her. The young women keeping her eyes fixed on the other woman walked quickly around the rippling margins of dancing couples towards the other woman in response to her invitation, the invitation of a stranger, an older but attractive woman. Smiling she stood in front of the older woman.

The older woman seemed to glow with a sultry sensuous passion that seemed to be out of place with the drabness of the hall that was filled with the sweet aroma of cheap perfume and women. Her tango custom fitted her body seductively like a glove accentuating the shape, curves, and contours of her body, accentuating the perfect proportions of her breasts, waist and hips. She had taken good care of her appearance.

The stylus of the ancient radiogram moved along the black shining revolving vinyl tracks and the melancholic opening cords of the next tango track filled the hall. The music became increasingly powerful, dramatic, emotional, intense, sensual and erotic. The young woman was drawn ineluctably by an irresistible but familiar rising acoustic tidal wave that had been stirred by up an ensemble of the accordion, the violin, and the guitar, which working together produced the compelling rhythms and syncopated beats of the tango which never failed to excite every nerve in her young body. She noticed the exposed firm cleavage of the older woman and the long slit in her skirt which terminated tantalizingly midway up her well-formed muscular thigh. The older woman in turn noticed the pleasing curves of the young woman's shapely sheer nylon stocking encased legs, accentuated by the stilettos. The older women also noticed at the top of the younger woman's stockings the suspender clips, the triangle of dark naked skin of her upper thigh, bare and satiny above her stockings. She inhaled the heady fragrance of the perfumed body of the younger woman who was now standing before her, the exquisite embodiment of that dark Spanish beauty which carries that unmistakable touch of the African and the Moor. Without saying a word they stepped into the mutual embrace of the tango.

That evening they did not let go of each other. The manner in which they danced could only be described as being like motion picture painted in the most intense shades of the tango's enduring pathos. That is, the kind of palpable pathos which one can only experience with the tango. They clung desperately to each other, afraid that they would be pulled away forever. The older woman had lived long enough to know that the tango embodied the paradox of life and love, she knew that in the tango the dancers lived fleetingly all the moments which could be lived, they lived those moments all at once, in an instance at each step to the rhythm of the tango's beat they lived all the moments which filled the entire drama of a human life. In the tango she knew that bound in each other's embrace they lived in each step and in each embellishment, they lived the eternal beat, in each beat they lived the finite moment filled with an inexplicable transient effulgence, which allowed them to experience almost mystically all at once as in a dream the unfathomable and countless indiscernibles that crowd a finite life, a life lived at the threshold of the unattainable infinite, a finite life in which the deepest of enigmatic mysteries are experienced in moments of pure ecstasy and in moments haunted by the inevitability of unbearable pain, agony and sorrow. The older woman knew about the sweetness of life lived in the constant shadow of melancholy which is the tango. Tonight she would rather die than not wake up with younger women in her arms. They embraced the first embrace of strangers, but immediately succumbed to the electrifying effect of each other's body. Their embrace became urgent, and she the older woman felt the younger women's warm smooth cheek pressed against the side of her face. Leading the younger woman she pressed her palm against the back of her naked shoulder so that her firm breasts pressed against her own bosom and the younger woman reciprocating the intimacy of the older woman by caressing the exposed silky skin between her shoulder blades. The older woman kissed her softly on her cheek and the younger woman turned her face inviting the older woman's lips to her youthful mouth.'

'And then what happened?' Yael asked when I stopped the story at that juncture.

'Apart from love, they had much to give to each other. The older woman from an aristocratic family that had known better times could give the younger woman dignity, security and commitment, and the younger woman would infuse the older woman's life with that invigorating and life sustaining nurture of hope and meaning.'

'Hope and meaning, that is precisely what I lack in my life, but going back to your story is there any truth to it?' Yael asked.

'Is there any truth to any story? What does it mean for the story or anything to be true?'

'I don't know, you tell me,' Yael countered.

'Any particular thing or situation or state-of-affairs or the story for that matter could be perfectly true in its own particular fashion if it can be seen or visualized or even imagined in some realistic way as being part of the Whole Truth.'

'The Whole Truth, what is the Whole Truth?' Yael asked with a sceptical look.

'There has to be something which is the Whole Truth in order for us to ultimately distinguish the particular truths from the falsehood and spurious beliefs on all matters that concern us and also for that matter the real from the unreal. The Whole Truth represents the Absolute, for Absolute Knowledge, and it's the Absolute with is Ultimate, in the sense of being the Ultimate basis for distinguishing the Truth and the Real from the illusionary and the ideological,' I expanded feeling a bit silly and over the top using words like the Whole Truth, the Ultimate, the Absolute and Absolute Knowledge. In my mind all if these words represented the Totality. In my own ears I sounded religious. I could see from the expression on Yael's face that what I was saying sounded foreign to her ears.

'Hannah, I am a simpleton, this is all too much for me to grasp, I have become dumb,' she said.

'No you are not dumb,' I quickly added.

'Well that's the way I feel,' she replied despondently.

'I always thought I believed in science, but now I not even sure about science, what is science anyway?' she continued.

I did not know where all of this was going to take us.

'Science is concerned with the real,' I tried to clarify.

'The real with the big R such as the REAL, in capitals?' she asked.

'The real with the small r as in what is contingently real,' I replied.

'And what is the REAL with the big R?' She asked.

'The REAL with the big R as everything that is real non-contingently, and is which makes whatever is contingent in the Universe real.'

'So the capitalized REAL is what must be necessarily True for any contingency in the Universe to be real and by virtue of being real it can become the object of scientific investigation,' Yael said summing up.

'Yes, I could not have put it better. Because the capitalized REAL exists necessarily, and therefore non-contingently, it has to be self-grounded, in other words not dependent on anything else but itself,' I expanded on what Yael had summed up.

'This sound like Platonism,' Yael said, finally smiling, allowing the gloom to lift, the gloom that we both felt and which we recognized each other's eyes.

'I suppose so, Plato rules the moment we start reasoning along these lines, embracing ideas such as self-grounding, non-contingent and necessity regarding the nature of the REAL and TRUTH.'

'Please hold me,' Yael said suddenly, moving towards me.

I embraced her, hugging her tightly to my body. I kissed her on her cheek and she turned her mouth so that I could kiss her on her lips. Before she drove me back to Wits we spent the rest of the afternoon making love. In spite of the lines and stretch marks of child-bearing etched on her body she was still beautiful.

She asked if I was with anyone. I said No, which was the truth. What about Kate she asked. I confirmed I still saw Kate from time to time but only in connection with dancing as her dance partner. Kate also had no one else to support her when she participated as a contestant in a physical beauty pageants, so I inevitably went along as spectator to provide morale support. Was Kate lonely? Yes Kate was lonely, like the rest of us. What do I mean Yael asked. I admitted that it would be nice to share one's life with another woman on a permanent basis as life-partners, and also be part of a broader organic queer community. Couldn't I have this with Kate? No it was not possible, we were not emotionally compatible. That is so sad Yael said.

I don't why, but I said it:

'If you divorce the Rabbi, I will live with you and your kids. I will look after you and the kids.'

'What about the politics?' She asked.

'I would give it up for the sake of the family.'

'Will we live as Jews?' She wanted to know.

'Yes we will live as Jews, as Torah observing Jew,' I said.

In the case of a Jew, a Jew is born a Jew. In the case of a Christian, one is not born a Christian. One becomes a Christian by conversion only, something which entails becoming 're-born' or 'born again'. Infant baptism does not make one a Christian. In this regard the fundamentalist evangelicals are absolute right. The life of a Christian begins with personal coversion. My personal conversion to Christianity happened in Hotazel when I was ten years old. It happened one afternoon at our weekly after school Kinderkrans. Our teacher explained what it meant to become a Christian. We had to acknowledge and believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. We had to acknowledge and believe that he had died for our sins and that on the third day he rose from the dead. We had to believe that he was God. We had to believe that there is no other name given under heaven by means of which we could be saved. We had to believe that it is only through him that we can come to the Father. We had to believe that Jesus was the way, the truth and the life. This is what we had to confess if we wanted to become Christians

After explaining all of this to us the teacher made the invitation: All those who in their hearts wanted to be become Christians should get up and come to the front of the class and kneel down. The whole class got up from their desks and we all knelt in rows in the front of the class. We were each individually given the opportunity to first recite our public confession of faith in Jesus and then pray the sinner's prayer for God's forgiveness, all of this was done in Afrikaans while the teacher laid her hand on our heads. We were then told that we were now God's children and that nothing could separate us from God's love. She explained that we had just made what would count for all eternity as the most important decision of lives. She further expanded on the fact that we had now also made a decision to devote ourselves to the service of what was good and this entailed to love God will all our might and to love our neighbours as ourselves. She said that this is the law of God. From that day onwards I have been a Christian and have remained true and loyal to my confession that Jesus is the risen Lord, the Lord of the Universe.

The God who the Christian confesses belief and faith in is none other than the Jewish God, the God of the Hebrew Bible. The paradox and irony of Christianity is that the Christian embraces the God of the Jewish nation. In doing so the Christian acknowledges that salvation comes from the Jews. Jesus was a Jew, the New Testament was written by Jews, and almost all Christians are not Jews. It is natural for a Jew to believe in the God of Israel but a Jew is not a Jew by virtue of faith and belief in the God of Israel. Belief in the God of Israel and the Hebrew Bible is not conditional for a Jew to be Jew, a Jew is simply born a Jew, but it is conditional for a Christian to believe in the Jewish God in order to be a Christian. The Gentile becomes a Christian through conversion only by confessing faith and belief in the God of Israel. The Christian adopts the Hebrew Bible. So the Gentile who converts to Christianity confesses the belief that the God of Israel and the God of the Hebrew Bible is the one and only true God and that this is sufficient reason for believing in that God even if one is not a Jew. The Gentile who becomes a follower of the God of Israel does not necessarily desire to be a Jew. Why should anyone want to be Jew when it is not necessary to be a Jew in order to believe in the Jewish God and the Hebrew Bible? There is absolutely no point or value in being a Jew. And there is absolutely no point or value in a Gentile becoming a Jew. There is also no point or value in making Jerusalem or the existence of Israel the focus of special interest, status or significance.

442. Not to change consecrated animals from one type of offering to another—Leviticus 27:26

443

Hegel: The Universe is Rational.

To make understandable by paraphrasing, we could say that Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' is about the science of the experience of consciousness. What precisely is experienced in the experience of consciousness? The comprehensive answer to this is the ultimate goal of Hegel's mammoth inquiry. According to Hegel one of the things that we do experience in our states of consciousness is the rationality of the Universe. This is something which we become consciously aware of. The Universe is rational because it is intelligible. Its intelligibility becomes an inborn expectation. We expect to find the Universe rational, an expectation seemingly born of instinct. We are tuned almost instinctively to this awareness of an overwhelming presence or immanence of rationality in the order of Nature. There is nothing false about the expectation of discovering reason being immanent in the Universe. It is an expectation which has been borne out in the conformity of fundamental physics to mathematics. Reductionist approaches to explaining the fundamental physical nature of the Material University become increasing dependent on the mathematization in the description and analysis of the fundamental constituents of matter. What could be more rational and subject to the dictates of reason than mathematical logic? You cannot find something that is not there already. It is no coincidence that the rational constructions of the nature of reality undertaken by science which are based on reason and logic seem to fit reality as a glove fits a hand. Rationality, through its existence and its immanence in Nature, by its innate presence and power, imposes itself on our consciousness, on our sense organs, on our nervous systems, on our minds and on our bodies. By imposing itself on our very being we cannot escape being conditioned to experiencing Nature as it actually is, that is, as a state of affairs in which a rational ordering prevails no matter what we think or feel. One of the motivations of scientific inquiry is to unveil or disclose the essential nature of this rationality to the full reflective awareness of consciousness. This motivation, which is the heartbeat of the scientific endeavour is triggered by an insatiable curiosity. It is a motivation driven by desire. A desire that knows no boundaries. This desire borders on the erotic. This desire is almost instinctive in its need to understand, in its desire to explain, in its desire to comprehend things as they are, in reality, in all actuality.

Now back to Hegel. Elsewhere in his 'Philosophy of Right' Hegel writes that Nature is rational within itself, and because of this Reason (reason with a capitalized R) is present within Nature. Reason working within Nature becomes manifest to consciousness. It is along these Hegelian lines that we are able to recognize and comprehend the existence of Reason at work, immanently in the very substance, fabric, dynamics, relations and motions of Nature, and this we recognize, comprehend, conceptualize and theorize on the basis of our own innate and natural capacity to reason. Reason, its immanence is manifested, to use a Platonic expression, in the forms of laws and essences within Nature. And it is this which makes Nature intelligible and therefore the very embodiment of the rational, and because of its intrinsic rationality, Nature becomes accessible to the labour of reason in the work of science and technology. It is the presence and therefore the existence of the rational within Nature which makes Nature intelligible to the exercise of reason. The reflective conscious awareness of the rational and the intelligible in Nature is not a mental construction, it is not a mental fabrication, nor is it a mental projection, rather it is a recognition, it is a comprehension, it is a grasping, and it is an understanding. Recognition is not something that is imposed. You cannot recognize something of which you have no knowledge or experience. Recognition is always something which is experienced as being familiar. It is not something that is imposed on Nature by human minds, but rather it is something that Nature itself imposes on the mind, and which the mind then recognizes, comprehends, grasps and understands through the application or labour of reason, where the exercise or work of reason involves analysis, reflection, dialectical deliberation and logical inference. The 'work' or 'labour' of reason results not in the imposition of arbitrarily contrived socially derived constructions of a manufactured 'reality' which is then called Nature (this is idealism and this where I depart from Hegelianism), but a recognition of something intelligible and rational which already exists-in-Nature-in-itself independently and externally as a property, as a disposition, as a capacity, as a relation, as an essence, as a power and as an imposing force, prior to any human reasoning. The immanence of Reason (with a capital R) in the Universe or Nature becomes manifest to our conscious experiences or self-conscious awareness, when things or situations or states of affair begin to make sense, in a significant and meaningful fashion.

When reason as a consequence of its labours starts making sense of Nature or the World or the Universe, as something already there, having a prior existence as an external independent reality, then it begins to see itself in that external reality. In that moment, mind through the labour of reason becomes self-consciously aware of Nature possessing a rationality, possessing an intelligibility, and in the event of this awareness, there no longer exists a dichotomy between the labour of reason in the mind and in the workings and play of Reason within Nature or the World or the Universe as a thing-in-its-self. In place of a mind-nature dichotomy or dualism there is instead a self-recognition based on a correspondence or reflection between the work of Reason in the mind and the workings of Reason in Nature. The internal reflects the external. The external reflects the internal. The mind mirrors Nature in the work of science and technology. And the human mind finally find its home in the Universe. It is no longer estranged, alienated and in a state of exile. The subjective is real and the real is subjective.

443. Carry out the laws of impurity of the dead—Numbers 19:14

444

The relationship between God and abstract objects.

There are abstract objects or entities which exist necessarily, eternally, independently and therefore have not been brought into existence by invention or creation by some creative agency. In Latin these abstract objects exist 'a' (from) 'se' (self). From these two terms we get the word 'aseity' which describes the property of something which exists underived or uncreated 'in' and 'of itself' and 'from itself'. It self-subsists necessarily and independently from all eternity without ever being brought into existence by any kind of external and independent agency. Aseity applies to anything that has not been caused to exist or brought into existence from non-existence by the action of some external agency. In a sense aseity applies to something which is self-causing or self-grounding.

Abstract objects such as mathematical and logical entities or theories possess the property of aseity. What is the relationship between God's aseity and the aseity of abstract objects? If God is the Ultimate Reality which includes the Ultimate Ground of Everything including Being and if all Truth supervenes on Being then why should the being of God not also include the immutable truth that 2+2=4 as a property of God's essential nature?

In a manner of speaking God 'IS' actually 2+2=4 in all possibility worlds and in all possible realities. God 'is' also the Abstract Universe of all Truth. God is the Laws of the Nature. God is Reason. God is Rationality. God is Logic. God possesses the power for 'Personhood'. God is freedom. God's will converges with God's essence or nature.

444. Carry out the procedure of the Red Heifer—Numbers 19:9

445

Forms of sociality that secure cooperation and collective action.

Sociality based on the free and transparent flow of information made possible by a social arrangement that facilitates co-surveillance and co-monitoring of individuals by individuals are the necessary preconditions for preserving egalitarianism and protecting freedom by preventing domination of the many by the few. How can domination be prevented? What are the material conditions which make domination of the few over the manner possible? How do these material conditions arise and what needs to be done to prevent or remove them? What is meant by the words 'material conditions'? The meaning depends on the context, framework and the terms reference which are relevant to the posing and answering of questions regarding what is meant by material conditions. Material conditions also consist of the environment in the widest possible sense. In fact, the existence of the Universe itself is constitutive of the material conditions by virtue of which human life becomes a possibility. The full range and diversity of material conditions by virtue of which human life is made possible can be conceptualized in a hierarchical fashion from the simplest level of molecular to the most complex level of social organization. Each level is characterized by different degrees of freedom, where degrees of freedom are related to the number of alternative arrangements or configuration which can be realized for a given assembly of elements. The material conditions which make the continuance or persistence of any form of life possible can be characterized and enumerated in terms of qualitative and quantitative variables. Material conditions can also be linked to the nature of the conditions which are necessary for making anything possible. For example, it could be asked what makes the continuance of human existence possible. Short answer: It is the capacity to reproduce which makes the continuance of human existence possible. What all does the capacity to reproduce human life entail? Direct answer: It entails what we call the 'material conditions'. The material conditions include the human reproductive system. But the material conditions to reproduce human life also include sustenance in the form of resources. Resources include food or nutrition. What other kinds of resources are necessary for the continued and uninterrupted reproduction of human life? The carrying capacity of the environment also represent the material conditions for the reproduction of human life. The climate also represents the material conditions for the reproduction of human life. From a biological perspective structural and functional adaptations also represent the material conditions for the reproduction of human life. Without the evolution of these adaptation the reproduction of human life would not be possible. Being a member of a social group also represents the material conditions for the reproduction of human life.

Apart from the human sexual reproductive system the material conditions which make the continuance of human existence possible include a suite of anatomical, physiological and biochemical adaptions which together constitutes the life-maintaining and survival tool kit and machinery which human's necessarily have to possess in order to exist as sentient beings. So in addition to the sexual reproduction system, the suite of structural and functional evolutionary adaptations which are constitutive of the survival tool kit or survival machinery and which humans also share with other metazoan animals consists of the following components: body covering, skeletal and muscular systems; digestive, assimilatory and metabolic systems; circulatory systems; respiratory and excretory systems, endocrine systems; the immune systems; sense organs and nervous systems. By virtue of these systems acting in a co-ordinated fashion various kinds of agencies, powers, dispositions, skills, aptitudes, properties, capacities, and competencies emerge which make everything that is humanly possible for sustaining and perpetuating life, from the hunter-gatherer mode of existence to the commodification of labour power.

Apart from the material conditions of a purely anatomical, physiological and biochemical nature which are necessary for human existence, the various social modes of human existence which make it possible for the continuance and reproduction of both individual and social forms of human life also constitute or contribute to the material conditions necessary for human existence. Living together in groups, or sociality in other words, is constitutive of the material conditions necessary for human existence.

In Marxist theory a mode of social existence is fully characterized in terms of or with reference to or within the theoretical framework of its mode of production. In this respect the material conditions for a given mode of social existence is fully represented or characterized or accounted for in terms its mode of material production.

445. Carry out the laws of the sprinkling water [of the Red Heifer]--Numbers 19:21

446

Visualization and the moving frontiers of visibility or the visible. Science is constantly moving the frontiers of the visible and at the same time also moving the frontiers of existence or the frontiers of the kind of things which could exist. In 1984 I became aware from colleagues in Physics at Wits that a new theory about the putative existence of fundamental physical objects existing beyond in any kind of observability had emerged. The new theory referred to as 'String Theory' has proposed the existence of objects that were essentially invisible.

446. Rule the laws of human tzara'at (Leprosy, see Mitzvah 439) as prescribed in the Torah—Leviticus 13:12

447

Rent seeking and monopolization. To free Marx from Marxism is to hear his own voice speaking through the texts of his own work. Marx's theoretical work never reached completion but remains a work in progress from beginning to end.

447. The metzora (leper) must not remove his signs of impurity—Deuteronomy 24:8

448

Reality and fiction

Reality cannot be simplified. But the best story tellers do not simplify reality but rather unveil it in its full complexity in a manner that enthrals, confounds, delights, dazzles, engrosses, stuns, shocks, amazes, fascinates, intrigues, educates and ultimately enriches the life of the reader with knowledge, wisdom and meaning.

448. The metzora must not shave signs of impurity in his hair—Leviticus 13:33

449

It is December 1972 the Matric exams are over, I am awaiting the results. Alice van Niekerk who has been my girlfriend has been accepted into medicine at UCT and I have been accepted into first year Zoology and Botany at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). I will be starting university in the New Year. I am at the cross roads of my life. In retrospect I can now say quite dispassionately that force of circumstances have pulled Alice and me apart. Malcolm is still in the army. He has joined the permanent force as a Parabat officer. We are on holiday in the Kruger National Park. I sent Alice a postcard from Skukuza. Dad has redone the old Land Rover, the engine has been overhauled, and the vehicle which has taken us on so many bundu bashing holidays now has a new gear box, a new clutch, a new set of tires, a new radio and a powerful air conditioner. For the past two days I have been driving the Land Rover. I have never driven a car before and now I am feeling quite confident behind the steering wheel, I can change gears effortlessly and I no longer stall the Land Rover when pulling off. Dad is sitting in the passenger seat, mom and Elsabe are sitting behind us on the back seat. Elsabe and I have hijacked the use of the car radio. It is constantly tuned to LM radio and I have turned up the volume because the near pop hit of a local South African band from Pietermaritzburg called the Rising Sons, 'How do you do', is now playing on the car radio. Mom wants me to turn the volume down. Elsabe wants volume to remain turned up, it is also her favourite pop song, and it was Alice's and my favourite as well. There are impala everywhere, languishing in the shade under thorn trees quite close to the road.

'How do you do...then we became...give me more...hey that's what I'm living for...' In matric Alice and I shared a room, listening to the lyric now in the Kruger National Park I could taste Alice's lips, tongue and the inside of her mouth with my probing prehensile tongue. I never ceased to be amazed by the heated interior of Alice's vagina. Her own probing fingers confirmed the same sensation of heat inside my own vagina. In standard ten, at night, the door locked, cuddling under the covers in the same bed, the hours of deep intimate kissing and inquisitive erotic exploration of our teenage bodies brought us to the Eldorado of the most exquisite orgasms. At 14, 15, 16 and 17, we were hot and randy as hell, and madly in love. We accused each other of being nymphomaniacs, we were both sex mad. We had been going steady for four years, since standard seven. Now I felt a tinge of depression, my silence, and pensive mood had become visible and my dad asked if I was OK. I smiled back up at him. We were on holiday, it was supposed to be a happy occasion, my high school years had come to an end, and I was going to university, I had every reason to be happy and carefree, objectively I did not have a real worry in the world, life could not have been more perfect at that moment sitting next dad in the front of the Land Rover, yet there was a bitter sweetness to that December.

'I am happy,' I said to my father.

'I am happy for you,' he answered.

Outside in the open savannah woodlands the late morning temperature soared into the late thirties, degrees Celsius. Inside the Land Rover the cool interior was washed by the sounds of a never ending stream of LM radios hits current and from the recent yester-years of 1968, 1969, 1970, and 1971. The turbulent nineteen sixties were now behind us and their contagion never threatened to disturb or destabilized the stifling tranquillity that appeared to reign in apartheid South Africa, a country that had become increasing remote and isolated from the rest of the world.

And of course our favourites filled the air waves:

...My Sweet Lord. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Spanish Harlem. Woodstock. Riders On The Storm. Love Her Madly. Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again. Me And Bobby McGee. Venus. Bridge Over Troubled Water. Let It Be. Mama Told Me (Not To Come). Get Back. I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Crimson & Clover. Bad Moon Rising. Come Together. Everyday People. Something. Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye. Magic Carpet Ride. Cry To Me. Monsieur Dupont. Marrakesh Express. Conversations. Angel Of The Morning. Pictures OF Matchstick Men. Hey Jude. Might Quinn MacArthur Park Hurdy Gurdy Man. Jumpin' Jack Flash. Piece Of My Heart. You Keep Me Hangin' On. With A Little Help From My Friends. San Francisco Nights. The Wind Cries Mary. Ramble On.

Different strokes for different folks...Do you come here often...Baby...Baby...

Elsabe did not want to go to Potchefstroom Girls High so dad gave her a choice of other boarding schools and she chose St Andrews School for Girls in Johannesburg. Having the over-confidence and brashness of a typical Zeeman, she took to her new school like a fish to water. Adapting effortlessly to a social environment characterized by overweening poshness and preoccupation with status, she adopted all the preppy airs of private school kids who were the progeny of the English speaking white elite. In her own mind dad practically owned the manganese mine and we lived in palace in Hotazel, and this placed her in the same class as everyone else at the school.

For me it was relief that she went to St Andrews. I did not want my kid-sister to know anything about my secret life.

At 'Olifants' (elephants) Rest Camp we booked into two thatch roofed rondavels. We arrived at Olifants just after midday. We had spent our first night at the Sukuza Rest Camp after the long journey from Hotazel. The rest camp at Olifants overlooked the Olifants River and from our elevated rondavel stoop we could observe elephants on the white sandy banks of the river drinking water. Elsabe and I were restless, dad and mom wanted to have a siesta and dad expressing confidence in my driving skills suggested that Elsabe and I take the Land Rover and spend the rest of the afternoon on a game viewing drive. Heading northwards we soon found ourselves driving through the unique Mopane Veld dominated by the seasonal fruit bearing small mopane trees known by the scientific name of Colophospermum mopane. In the distance the tar road shimmered. Bored and listless in the air-conditioned interior Elsabe hiding behind her sunglasses showed no interest in the surroundings. I glanced at her and this prompted her to say something.

'You are really weird'.

'I beg your pardon,' I replied.

'You are weird,' she repeated while staring straight ahead. I wondered where this was going.

'I really don't get it,' she said as if talking to herself.

'What don't you get?' I asked.

'Just look at you, you have a body, hair, eyes and a face that any woman would die for,' she retorted.

'What are you implying?'

'You can get any boy or man you like,' she said.

'I can say the same about you,' I said.

'Yeah, but we not talking about me,' she answered.

'So, what is the point you trying make?' I was curious to know what she thought.

'I don't know, it just that it so weird.'

'What is so weird?'

'You are not interested in boys,' she said, flashing me a look.

'How do you know that I am not interested in boys?'

'It is so obvious,' she said. 'You have never expressed any interest in the opposite sex and I find that really weird.'

'I have never met the right person.' That was all I could say at that moment, she had caught me totally off guard.

That night instead of the usual evening braai we went to the small restaurant for supper. Afterwards from the height of our vantage point overlooking the Olifants River we observed the arrival of a small herd of elephants. They congregated on the sand bank of the river, slurping water up with their trunks. The heat still hung heavy in the dusky evening air. I watched the sun set over the bushveld before returning to our bungalow. Elsabe lay stretched out on her bed wearing only a T-shirt and panties, staring vacantly up at the rafters which supported the thatch. I slumped on my bed, and turning on my side I stared at her. She turned her head and looked back at me. We were sisters, but we had become strangers to each other. It was too early to sleep or shower so I began to read my book.

'When do you think it is a good time to start having sex?' Elsabe asked me later that night while we wilted under the thermal radiation from the white washed rondavel walls.

'You should postpone surrendering yourself to sexual penetration for as long as possible,' was my adamant answer to my sister, a fifteen year old girl in standard eight.

'Anyway I would like to go on the pill next year, Marcia's mother has put her on the pill and she is having sex with her boyfriend even though she is still fifteen.'

'Well you better speak to your mother about that,' I said. I could just imagine mom's reaction.

I returned to my book.

'Were you in love with Alice? You can tell me, your secrets are safe with me, I am not going run to Mommy and tell her that you are a lesbian, I just want hear from your lips the truth, I am your sister you know, and you never share anything with me. I have told you everything about myself. This could be such great holiday for us if we could just open up to us other.'

'You can tell me all your secrets, they are safe with me, I am your sister, I have been very open with you about myself and my plans to have sex with boys, times have changed you know,' she reiterated. I smiled at her. Having sex was on her agenda. Teenage sex was a rite of passage into adulthood.

As I said the turbulent 1960s were now behind us, only the reverberations of its echo in the form of rock music remained to remind us of that decade which in the words of Theodore Roszak represented the youthful counter culture sparked by a radical disjuncture between the generations. Roszak writes about the authoritarianism operating overtly and subtly at every level of society, and here he is talking of the overweening conservativism of America society, where even through the medium of comics what was permissible in the expression of human sexuality was constantly reinforced: In words of Searle, a spokesman for the Black Panthers - 'Archie and Jughead never kissed Veronica and Betty. Superman never kissed Lois'.

The Black Panthers were rejecting the values of white America. Those values included an intolerance towards anything which did not resonant with white American culture and the logic of that intolerance was expressed in the collective condonation of acts of genocidal criminality in the face of perceived threats of the Other, extermination of the enemy in the embodiment of the Other, in the form of the Communist was the only solution.

449. The metzora must publicize his condition by tearing his garments, allowing his hair to grow and covering his moustache—Leviticus 13:45

450

Appetite, desire, wants, consumption, consumerism, commodities, and commodity fetishism.

We are immersed in a culture in which the whole of life revolves around or is taken up with the satisfaction of desires and appetites. It is a fact that the whole of life is absorbed in the endless pursuit of the gratification of wants in endless cycles of shopping. Clearly in this context the term consumerism which means the consumption of commodities in order to satisfy an appetite is a value loaded term. Shopping predisposes the consumer to profligacy. Confronted with a world saturated with an infinity of different objects for sale the shopper armed with credit cards ends up becoming a profligate.

How does the commodity become fetishized? Commodities become fetishized by the consumer or shopper the moment they appear as objects for sale on the shelves of shops. In the mind of the shopper the commodity as an object for sale appears as something which is completely disconnected from its universe of meaning and significance which includes its genesis as a commodity or its intricate journey to the market. Commodities are displayed to bedazzle, charm, mesmerize and beguile the consumer. Once the commodity enters the cash nexus of the market as an object for sale it always appears in the eyes of the consumer as something which has undergone a metamorphosis, a transformation in which it has been stripped of all the symbols, signs, significations and references which would reveal the history and nature of its genesis into a use value and an exchange value. After it appears on the shop shelf the substance of commodity mysteriously acquires all the powers of fetish, powers to satisfy a want, a desire or an appetite of the mind. The commodity detached from the owner of labour power, labour power which was consumed in its production, detached from the noise of the factory machines, detached from the means of its production, the commodity enters into the world of objects. As an appropriation of surplus value it enters into the world of exchange, and on entry into this world it becomes endowed, through a socially instituted process, with the power of a fetish, which is the power that captivates the consumer's fancy without betraying any residue of its history in the sweat and toil of exploitation. The socially instituted process, which includes marketing, exerts its influence, or its force of persuasion on the mind of the consumer, setting off a chain of causation which predisposes the consumer to treat the commodity as a fetish object. In commodity fetishism an object, becomes a fetish, a fetish which possess power within itself to satisfy the appetites of the mind, from which all desire springs. The real social relations of production by virtue of which the commodities are able exist as objects for the purpose of satisfying wants remind hidden from the eyes of the consumer under capitalism. The realities of the abattoir, the sweat of the slaughters, the gushing of blood and bovine eyes filled with terror are nowhere evident in the medium-rare T-bone presented to the steakhouse patrons. In department stores packed with hanging garments and shining patent leathers shoes the realities of the factory sweatshops are also hidden from view.

Anything which has utility or a use value in other, can only exist as a commodity in capitalism. All wants are satisfied by something which has a use value. And under capitalism every conceivable want has been commodified.

From Matthew 6:26-34 (NIV) we read:

26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? 28 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Do not worry, each day has enough trouble of its own!

450. Carry out the prescribed rules for purifying the metzora—Leviticus 14:2

451

Before I met Isabella I fell all over again in love with Yael, Scott's untimely death had reunited us. I was earnest. Divorce the Rabbi and we would be family. Just like Ruth I told her I would become a lover of her people. I who am Electra the gentile Hellenic daughter of Agamemnon, and my father has been murdered by my mother Clytemnestra, I will flee and hide in the shadow of Mount Sinai, and as my refuge I the gentile Hellenic woman will also embrace the Hebraic, I will not turn my face away, I will embrace that withered fig tree, that spectacle of barrenness, for God will never abandon his chosen. Your children will be mine also, I will be their mother and their father and together we take on the yoke of Moses and feast on the sweetness of Leviticus and the Shabbat with be our mistress.

451. The metzora must shave off all his hair prior to purification—Leviticus 14:9

452

Now Isabella has saved me from Yael. She has healed my heart that had become torn apart by an impossible love, and yet deep down in my heart I still love Yael, I yearn for her, I will love her forever. I who am Electra the daughter of Agamemnon will love Yael forever. But now my only hope of love is with Isabella.

452. Carry out the laws of "leprous" clothing—Leviticus 13:47

453

Unknown to us the charges have been laid, the detonators are in place, and now the chilling sounds of the mine siren fills the Kalahari skies of Hotazel announcing the threat of imminent danger. Our immediate surroundings has now become a strictly forbidden zone, but we have cycled to the perimeter fence of the open cast manganese mine, and only the locked gate has prevented us from entering so that we could gratify our curiosity. Panic takes hold of us. As the icy hand of unspeakable terror grips our hearts we immediately turn around and embark on a frantic retreat bending low over our bicycle handle bars and peddling furiously we race away down the gravel road. My imagination runs riot as I visualize rocks and boulders raining down on us, crushing us to death, I fear that my life may be over as we sped away on our bicycles in an attempt to put as much distance between ourselves and the mine. We hear the heavy artillery bomb-like booms of the exploding dynamite, the shockwaves of the blast rips the sky apart. We feel the vibrating earth tremors as the dynamite shatters the manganese bearing rock deep in the bowels of the opencast mine. The rain of rocks falling on our heads failed to materialize. Malcolm suddenly brakes sharply and skids his bike into a wide arc. He is ecstatic, his eye beam with the thrill of danger. We all stop and look back at the mine. Massive clouds of dark blue and black dust and smoke start billowing out of the gigantic crater and the fresh smell of cordite diffuses through the air.

'Dis is net soos oorlog (It is just like war)!' Malcolm exclaims grinning at us.

453. Carry out the laws of leprous houses—Leviticus 14:35

454

The Kalahari sands of Hotazel overlays one of the largest sedimentary deposits of manganese on the planet. Many years ago our Hotazel primary school teacher often reminded us that South Africa is the mineral treasure chest of the world. After a geological survey of regions surrounding Kuruman the Hotazel manganese mine was established in 1954, one year before my birth. The rock sediments containing the manganese deposits became known as the Hotazel Formation.

454. Observe the laws of menstrual impurity—Leviticus 15:19

455

Interlude and refrain: I have returned to the room of my childhood in Hotazel. If the Kalahari manganese rich ore fields had not by a chain of contingent geological events come into existence I would not have landed up in Hotazel as a child. This statement does not qualify as a counter factual conditional. Many crossed lines or the cross-talk of multiple interwoven contingencies have shaped the fabric of my life. In many ways I am the product of chance. If my biography is the record or list of the many contingencies that have somehow determined the course of my life, then what is the plot, what is the role of providence in the predetermination of that plot? Was anything meant to be in my life? Was I meant to have a love relationships with Yael and Kate? Was it meant to be that I would fall in love with Isabella? What about Angelica? What about Monique? If I had not met Monique in Paris by chance I would have never experienced something that was so incredibly memorial and I have lived with the memories of that Paris experience with Monique for my entire life. My encounter with Monique was a life changing event for me. I am haunted by Yael and I am yearning for Isabella. I care about so many women. Right now I am sure about anything except my love for Isabella.

455. Observe the laws of impurity caused by childbirth—Leviticus 12:2

456

In 1964 Malcolm and I spent ten days of our July school holidays with Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven in Durban. We travelled down on the Johannesburg – Durban overnight sleeping train. From Durban station a male white porter pushed the trolley with our suitcases to the taxi rank. Oupa would tip the porter. The taxi dropped us off at the main entrance of the White House Hotel. After confirming our room booking at the reception one of the Indian hotel porters would assist us with suitcases. Our room had a porch with a sea view overlooking the bowling greens across the road. Behind the Bowling Greens stood the Lido complex with its domed roof. On the far hand side we had a view of the bluff and to the left to the Lido we could see the peer which separated the South Beach from the North Beach.

Oupa slept on a bed that was moved onto the porch. Ouma, Malcolm and I slept on our own beds in the room. On a few occasions we went to the Lido in the evenings for milkshakes, tea and entertainment. In the day Scotty the photographer with his cameras would be mingling among crowds moving up and along the promenade outside the Lido taking photographs of willing subjects, handing them a numbered card so that they could collect their pictures the next day at his circular kiosk which functioned as familiar almost timeless promenade landmark next to the Lido. On the bluff side of the Lido was the Little Top. Shops under Lido opening onto the beach and the promenade like the Cherry Tree milk bar and the American Candy Store sold ice cream, candy floss and coloured sugared popcorn.

Malcolm had brought his fishing with and it was on a grey overcast day with a light unseasonal drizzle that I stood next to Malcolm at the end of the pier while he baited a sardine to his line. We could see the dark silhouettes of shoals of fish in the rising swells shortly before they came crashing down into a churning bed of white foam at the edge of the pier. It was high tide and the Indian waiter at the hotel hinted as we left on our fishing expedition that this was when game fish could be caught off the pier. After an hour of fishing there was sudden tug on the line and then Malcolm's rod bent sharply, and the reel began to scream as metres of line were rapidly shed from the spool. A tall Indian man gave his surf rod to his son and came quickly over Malcolm and following the instructions of a seasoned fisherman Malcolm in state of great excitement managed to eventually reel in the fish to the edge of peer where another Indian fisherman managed to gaff it. It turned out to be a 3 kg Garrick which we took back to the hotel and they prepared the fish for our supper that night. I was so proud of Malcolm and I was also unspeakably elated at our catch.

Interlude: Malcolm and I were once very close as brother and sister, we had shared experiences which deepen the bonds between us, but then as we grew older we drifted apart, mainly because our political beliefs had become irreconcilable. However a week or so after my release Malcolm phoned. I was sitting with my dad in the lounge watching TV.

456. Observe the laws of impurity caused by a woman's running issue—Leviticus 15:25

457

For roughly two thousand five hundred years Genesis chapter one has been the focus of endless readings and interpretations by many of the best minds from diverse faith communities and different scholarly traditions. Chapter one of Genesis is a beautifully composed poetic prologue to the book of Genesis was most probably written by members of Israel's priestly caste before Israel's first Babylonian exile.

457. Observe the laws of impurity caused by a man's running issue (irregular ejaculation of infected semen)--Leviticus 15:3

458

As products of biological evolution humans are necessarily imperfect beings.

Through an evolutionary process involving chance genetic variation and the action of natural selection humans came into existence contingently. This means that humans do not exist necessarily, their coming into existence as ape-like mammals was a consequence of a series of fortuitous accidents. Consequently as contingent beings it was never in their essence or essential nature or in their being to exist necessarily or out of necessity. This natural or biological fact makes humans from an ontologically perspective imperfect as living or sentient beings. This imperfection includes the possibility that they may not have come into existence at all, and the fact that humans do exist was solely by virtue of accidental circumstances that they somehow managed to survive as animals in a challenging and unforgiving environment.

As imperfect beings humans are faced with the infinite task of overcoming gaps or bridging the gaps which have also played a prominent role in condemning humans to a state of imperfection. In philosophy these gaps can be conceived as the gaps between subject and object, words and things and so on. Because of these gaps human knowledge is necessarily imperfect. It is imperfect because it may be unreliable and therefore lack certainty. If truth supervenes on being and truth is what corresponds to reality then a correspondence theory of truth is all we have. The success of science as a self-correcting enterprise which has contributed to the steady growth of knowledge is indubitable, and it is this fact which provides rational grounds for believing that the scientific narrative regarding the essential nature of Reality is converging asymptotically onto the truth. To believe otherwise would be absurd. To deny the success of science forces one inexorably into the dead end of nihilism.

Science cannot cure human imperfection, it can only work as a prophylaxis or therapy against the sickness of nihilism and the disease of oppression which are the inevitable consequences of human imperfections. Human evolution involved a constant struggle against the social and behavioural dimensions of human imperfections.

If human life is incurably contingent or accidental this does not mean that human life is essentially meaningless and inexorably condemned to a degraded and alienated state of existence.

Another thing to consider: With Kant we have claim that without experience we can have no knowledge. We can add to this a Heideggerian flavoured claim that without a world or without being-in-a-world we can have no experiences. So to have an experience presupposes being in a world. Acquiring knowledge presupposes that we exist in a world. It also presupposes that the world is knowable and intelligible. What is it that we experience? We experience the world acting on us. How does the world act on us? It acts upon us through the medium of particles in motion. We can say that the nature of the world is such that it is knowable. What does this mean? It has built-in feature which makes it knowable and therefore intelligible.

In a way the world acting on us is also the world acting on itself because we are part of the world. We are not our own creation, we are creation of the world. In a sense knowledge of the world results from the world acting on itself. How else can we say that knowledge of the world has been achieved within a world that is essentially causally closed without the capacity for the world itself to act on itself? The world can be as system in terms of parts-world relation. The world is more than the sum of its parts. What does this mean? For one thing the world contains in its parts the properties, capacity, powers and potential for the emergence of further higher level properties, capacities and powers which are not reducible to single parts in isolation from the other parts, which means that the emergence of properties including capacities and powers are made possible by the specificities of relationships between parts, and not caused by the parts acting in isolation from other parts. Thus the world acting on itself within a causally closed Universe can be envisaged in terms of the interactions and relationships between its parts and it is from the consequences of interactions and relations that whole or totality emergences as being more than simply the sum of the parts, because emergence of powers, capacity and properties arise as a consequence of the infinite number of ways in which the unique specificities of interactions between parts can be realized. This means that the Whole is infinite with respect to its possibilities or potentialities. It also means that the totality which can be known as the objects of knowledge is also infinite and this is why we can speak about Totality in terms of Infinity and Eternity. This is also what we mean that a finite causally closed Universe still embodies an infinity of possibilities.

458. Observe the laws of impurity caused by a dead beast—Leviticus 11:39

459

The fact of evolution together with the Big Bang Theory changes everything.

I kept on saying this on many occasions but no one seems to be overly concerned about the implications of these facts. This always left me feeling a bit astonished.

Between 1975 and 1984 I went crazy, I went on a binge of book buying and reading. I tried to read everything. In 1977 I even went on a University of Sussex speedreading course at Wits while doing my Masters. I was speedreading Habermas and the Frankfurt School thinkers, Althusser, Ricoeur, Barthes, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Deleuze, Lukacs and of course Marx. On top of this I was trying to keep up with the literature on animal behavioural ecology, animal evolutionary biology and animal reproductive biology. It was crazy. I had also joined the Johannesburg film society and I bought books on film theory. I had amassed a massive collection of books. I was part of a wide circle of friends who self-identified as Leftists and Marxists. At a party in 1978 at someone's house in Houghton someone called me a dilettante and then to add insult to injury someone called me a vulgar Marxist. I realized that I was not part of the charmed Wits Leftist circle. Behind my back they referred to me as being a prude! I shunned all male advances. It seemed that everyone was predominantly heterosexual and they were fucking each other. At parties I sought out and latched onto the seemingly asexual cerebral males who I felt were borderline gay (not yet out of the closet) and they were totally inept and awkward when it came to anything physical or sexual regarding women, which suited me just fine, I treated them as honorary women, and I liked their company. At parties all I wanted to do was talk philosophy and Marxist political theory.

At the back of mind I kept on thinking that if evolution was a fact then all of this philosophical and political theory had to be reworked if it was not going just turn out to be a load of shit. No one had digested the implications of evolutionary theory for social and political theory. I felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness: 'Evolutionary biology changes everything.'

459. Observe the laws of impurity caused by the eight shratzim (rodents, amphibious creatures, and lizards) [specified in the Torah]--Leviticus 11:29

460

Interlude and refrain. I have made steady progress working through the prison journal writings. From my room I can smell the pleasant aroma of the roast leg of lamb that my mother has prepared for Sunday lunch. I hear her calling me. I find her in the kitchen, the roast is just about ready, and she asks if I would collect some fresh mint from the garden and make the mint sauce. I am still dressed in the gay floral frock that I wore to church. It was a white dress with a red rose floral motif. I found it in my bedroom cupboard. Ouma Vollenhoven had made the dress for my matric dance. She asked about my partner. I told her that officially I was going without any partner, but in reality Alice would be partner. We had arranged that we would be sitting together at the same table. She smiled a mysteriously indulgent smile. I have often wondered whether Ouma was lesbian.

We had a guest for Sunday lunch. The doorbell rang, the dominee had arrived right on time for lunch. After saying grace dad carved the leg of lamb. I was happy to see that it was not well-done, but was pink and juicy in the middle.

The dominee who was the visiting preacher at the morning service was from the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk. He had a PhD degree. His thesis was on Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling'. After the morning service the congregation were encouraged to enjoy a bit of fellowship over a cup of tea before rushing home to prepared Sunday lunch. The water in the urn on a table at the back of the hall was boiling. White cups in sauces, sugar, milk and plates laden with sweet pastries and biscuits had been arranged on the table next to the urn. I would have preferred to walk back home to my room than stay for tea, but I acquiesced reluctantly to my father's request that I stay for the after service tea. Dressed for church I did not look like a communist nor would it have mattered anymore, what with the world having been turned upside down the Afrikaner's fear of communism had vanished. With a cup of tea in his hand the dominee walked over us. My father proudly introduced me as his daughter Professor Hannah Zeeman. He said something about knowing who I was, and extended his hand which I shook. His handshake was firm and he held my hand after the handshake longer than was appropriate for a greeting between first time acquaintances. I could sense that he was sexually attracted to me. He was not wearing a wedding ring so I surmised that he was not married. Mother who was perceptive enough to grasp the situation struck while the iron was hot and immediately invited him for lunch, and having no prior commitments he immediately and graciously accepted while smiling broadly at me. The plot was transparent. The mother wanted to marry her daughter off, a daughter who was getting on in her years. And he too was a perceptive man and understood the underground subtext of the mother's invitation, he had the tuned ear of a bachelor who was still on the lookout for a life partner. And of course I could read my mother like an open book. In her mind I needed a strong man to keep me in line, in my place, on that straight and narrow path which was the highway of marital life for any decent Boer vrou.

To his credit the dominee was an intellectual and Kierkegaard was going to be his foil for engaging in a game of flirtation while we consumed roast lamb, a lamb that had been slaughtered in our neighbour's yard a day ago. Going back to the substance of the sermon that he preached. His sermon involved the creative and paradoxical exploration of a well-rehearsed narrative which he delivered effortless with the aplomb of a talented jazz musician who was a genius at improvising on a theme with all the nuances and subtleties that are characteristic of jazz as a musical genre.

His well-rehearsed narrative was based on the text that dealt with God's 'testing' of Abraham's faithful obedience. The Bible text reads as follows:

1Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"

"Here I am," he replied.

2 Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you."

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you."

6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?"

"Yes, my son?" Abraham replied.

"The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

8 Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.

9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"

"Here I am," he replied.

12 "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided."

15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me."

19 Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba.

My original note which I have numbered 352 in my prison journal and on which I have now expanded more fully originally concerned some thoughts on the notion or idea of the absurd, an idea that feature quite prominently in the story of Abraham and Isaac on their journey to Mount Moriah. In a reading of the Abraham and Isaac story the idea of the absurd is rooted in the impossibilities of critical outcomes regarding matters or states of affairs which are of ultimate concern for life or existence. In the Abraham and Isaac story, the notion of the absurd acquires it radical meaning or sense in the light of two opposing realities, the reality of the pure contingency of existence and the reality of intelligibility. The meaning of the absurd feeds on the impossibility of hope in the face of perceived realities. The perceived realities which are assumed to govern ordinary existence become paradoxical in the face of the recognizable intelligibility of the Cosmos. The absurd in Kierkegaard takes its meaning from the idea of the impossible. Technically speaking the meaning of the absurd has been traditionally based on the perception and belief that the Cosmos is unintelligible, and that human life is also intrinsically unintelligible and therefore absurd. The idea of the absurd is based on the belief or the realization that ultimately life or existence has no meaning, and that no grounds or reasons exists which would endow life with meaning. There exists no Totality or Ultimacy or Absolute by virtue of which human life on earth would have meaning. If we are willing to accept the metaphysics which claims that the causality of all physical events is the Universe is overdetermined and that every contingent event in nature depends on a non-contingency then there is an invisible reality that make the visible reality of the Cosmos possible and intelligible. And if the Cosmos is Ultimately Intelligible and if nothing can come from nothing then we have no grounds for claiming that the Universe or life is absurd or without meaning. Yet the mysterious echo or resonance of meaning or meaningfulness haunts the Universe at every turn of scientific investigation. Reason permeates and infiltrates the Universe. The absurd has no foundation if there is something because of something else. By imagining the possible, we imagine the attainable, the attainable shifts the boundaries of the impossible. We struggle but we do not struggle in vain.

The story of God's testing of Abraham is a fiction which describes a myth. The Kierkegaardian exegesis of the story of Abraham's faith in response to God's testing is a further elaboration of myths based on the primary myth. The myth of the impossible, the myth of the absurd, the myth of infinite resignation and the myth of the knight of faith are the Kierkegaardian mythological elaborations created from the exegetical or hermeneutical extraction and articulation of meaning from the primary mythical account of Abraham's three day journey to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah.

The subject matter of Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling' was the hidden subtext of the dominee's sermon on Genesis 22: 1-19. The dominee in delivering his sermon represented that glaring embodiment of thinking which is based on the kinds of intentional contradictions and inconsistencies associated with the wilful subversion of truth for sake of preserving and legitimating vested interests in the ordering of political power. The subversion of truth and the trafficking of falsehoods became the root cause of the moral failure and the non-Abrahamic faithlessness which has typified that Broederbond linked tribe of male Afrikaner intellectuals to which the dominee belonged.

While these thoughts were running through my mind I refrained from engaging with the dominee on political issues. Sitting in the lounge listening to him speak I felt an incredible emotional and physical fatigue. I felt drained. The international collapse of socialism meant starting the struggle all over again from the very beginning. It meant the organization, educating and conscientization of the international working class, it meant the struggle had to be started from scratch, it meant going back to the trenches, back to the barricades, back to the battle fields of class war. The world was facing a new rampant resurgence of a predatory capitalism on a globalized scale. For the time being it seemed that socialism was retreating in defeat all over the world. We could not imagine what horrors awaited us in the future.

460. Observe the laws of impurity of a seminal emission (regular ejaculation, with normal semen)--Leviticus 15:16

461

Why would a lipstick lesbian have any interest in God and Theology?

There are many reasons. Here are a few of them: Francis Digby an Anglican priest lost his faith. Wayne Bernstein a Jew found God and converted to Christianity and his faith in God remained strong in spite of accepting the facts of Darwinian evolution. This stark contrast made me curious about why Francis lost his faith and why Wayne became a believer and retained his belief in God. And then I had my own personal and private reasons for believing in God which can be summed up as follows: The Universe or Cosmos is intelligible to reason but its intelligibility is not self-explanatory. The physical universe is causally overdetermined – this is expressed in the argument that the physical contingencies of the visible Universe occur by virtue of the invisible non-contingent.

461. Observe the laws of impurity concerning liquid and solid foods—Leviticus 11:34

462

Why am I interested in theology?

Let me think. Well it has a lot do with Jesus.

Who was Jesus? What we can know about Jesus with historical certainty? When we start asking these kinds of questions concerning the historicity of Jesus anthropology converges with Christology. All attempts to write a biography of Jesus have ended in failure, yet no rational person questions the historicity of Jesus. Reading Pannenberg the following kinds of questions arise in his work: What significance or meaning does the particular historical fact of Jesus hold for the Universal Meaning of all history or for the totality of history? It was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who wrote: 'accidental truths of history can never become the proof of the necessary truths of reason'. According to Lessing's 'big ugly ditch' there is no bridge which can connect in a necessary fashion the particular events of historical, which may be purely contingent, with the Absolute Truth. Hegel tried to argue against Lessing that the truth would become apparent with certainty or realized as a reality in the comprehension of history as whole or in terms of a Universal History in other words. Kant in response to Lessing critique that absolute knowledge of a particular historical event could not establish an indisputable claim regarding Universal Truth or the Truth of a particular conception of Universal History felt therefore that religious claims regarding any kinds of ultimacy about anything in human life could not be justified by historical events or acquire the status and certitude of Universal Truth by virtue of being anchored in history. Kierkegaard who was familiar with the writings of Lessing and Hegel rejected their different or contrary claims regarding the relationship between the particular facts of history and the Ultimate Truth or the Truth of Universal History or the Significance of History or the Ultimate Meaning of History. For Kierkegaard the truth claims of Christianity could not be substantiated by appealing to the particular facts of history regarding the life Jesus.

Does Jesus have Universal Significance or Ultimate Significance to every individual historical human being that has ever lived? Karl Jasper argues no. A transcendental apocalyptic other-worldly messianic conception of Jesus linked to a heavenly and therefore unearthly Kingdom of God removes Jesus from human history and from the associated meaningful concerns of flesh and blood humanity. For similar reasons Nietzsche also rejects this possibility. I know that the writings of Lessing, Kierkegaard, Jaspers and the God is Dead theologians of the nineteen sixties all contributed to Father Digby's crisis of faith and his exit from the Anglican priesthood.

In response to the intractable problems regarding the relationship between the particularity of the historical events associated with the life, preaching and death of Jesus and its meaning and significance in relation to the Truth of Universal History Wolfhart Pannenberg, the German theologian has tried to improvise a workable theological solution. His solution goes a long way in addressing the critical views of Lessing, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Albert Schweitzer and many others who were concerned with the relationship between the history of Jesus, his apocalyptic message and his relevance to the continuity or continuance of human history, and its putative significance in relationship to the idea Universal History. The problem confronting Pannenberg can be summarized as follows: how does a theologian reconcile the apocalyptic or eschatological significance of Jesus in relationship to: 1) the continuity of human history with its very human concerns, and 2) the meaning and significance of Universal History?

I need to add something here. The idea of Totality cannot be divorced from the meaning and significance of Universal History, and because this the idea it cannot be detached from Universal History, the very idea of Totality cannot therefore be divorced from the demand for commitment. The idea of Totality does not merely invite commitment, it demands commitment. We can cannot escape the obligation of commitment that the idea of Totality imposes upon us. It is a rational obligation, an obligation compelled upon us by Reason. And if the whole of Truth is a System, and all truths find their rational grounding or justification in relation to the Totality, that is, in relation to the System of Truth, then the very idea of the possibility of Truth cannot be severed or decoupled from commitment. But commitment to what? Answer: Commitment to what concerns us ultimately as conscious, self-aware, human beings. Our ultimate concern is our relationship with the Other. The Other is our source of joy, happiness, pleasure, comfort, companionship, friendship, love and belonging. It is through the Other that we are able to experience sentiments of empathy and conscience. The Other becomes the subject of our commitment, a commitment which is always moral in nature. It is through the Other that we are able to encounter God. In a real sense it by virtue of the Other that God exists for us.

Because God is concerned with the least of his brothers and sisters the issue of what ultimately concerns human are necessarily integral or central to the eschatological significance of Jesus in the history of humanity. This makes it impossible to drive a wedge or create a dichotomy or dualism between the eschatological significance of Jesus and the continuance of human history with all its ultimate concerns for life in the here and now, and our life in the here and now is only possible by virtue of the Other, and God meets us in our darkest hour and in our most ecstatic moments in the face of the Other.

The Oligarchy exists by virtue of absences and by virtue of erasures. The Oligarchy can only exist by virtue of what is absent in the social life of the Oligarchy or by virtue of what has been erased from the social life of the Oligarchy. What is absent or what has been erased is the free day to day, open face to face vitality of human sociality, a sociality which is mutual and reciprocal, an egalitarian sociality which has not been hindered or constrained or blocked or limited or erased by alienating and estranging externalities. Sustained by it centralizing agencies and forces, the Oligarchy cannot exist in the form of participatory democracy. The existence of the Oligarchy is threatened by the decentralizing egalitarian centrifugal social forces acting antagonistically against the centralizing anti-egalitarian centripetal forces of social coercion, social domination and social hierarchicalization. The destruction of the Oligarchy whether in its capitalistic or maladapted socialist formations requires a reversion to decentralized small community based egalitarian forms of sociality where all members are known to one another and where all members govern themselves, resolving conflicts and reaching mutual agreement in face to face 'confrontations' through debate, argumentation, reasoning and compromise, all of which takes place in public encounters, public encounters and engagements which are free of social domination, free of leaders, free of rulers and so on and so forth, every person fills the role of judge and jury.

I am thinking along the lines of the Athenian democracy in the form of the city-state or the polis in which all citizens vote directly on all legislation and executive bills proposed by a council of sitting senators. The polis is governed by a council of senators who are appointed through a lottery process and have to serve out their appointments for two years, during sometime in their lives, and may not serve two terms of duty. The senate is chaired by rotation of presiding officers elected again by a lottery process from within the senate. There is no direct election of representatives through a plebiscite. There is no electorate and no elected political representatives. There is no Oligarchy, and there are no presidents, prime ministers, cabinet ministers, kings, chiefs, rulers, leaders, or bosses, there are only citizens or comrades. The burden of duty, accountability and responsibility with respect to self-government is placed on the shoulders of all citizens of the polis.

462. Every impure person must immerse himself in a Mikvah to become pure—Leviticus 15:16

463

Dialectical and Historical Materialism
The Party is unaware of the profound shifts that have taken place in my thinking. We have not been on the same wavelength for quite a while when comes to theory and praxis of revolution and how it impacts on the nature of peoples war. Over the past few weeks in the back of my mind ideas have begun to crystalize regarding the significance of a global theory of human social behaviour and paving the way to reconceptualising Marxism on a more scientific basis.

463. The court must judge the damages incurred by a goring beast—Exodus 21:28

464

As I have already said the fact of evolution changes everything. It changes how we should theorize about anthropology, psychology, sociology, politics and economics. It changes how we should conceptualize dialectical and historical materialism. It changes how we should conceptualized the revolutionary objectives and the nature of a classless society. It short the facts of evolutionary biology necessitates a complete re-thinking of the human sciences and revolutionary praxis. Ultimately everything regarding the NATURE of plants and animals is explicable it term of the facts and theories of evolutionary biology. By the way this represents an example of a totalizing claim about something, which has the ring of Ultimacy and Universalization. Do the facts and theories of evolutionary biology explain everything that can be known with certainty about plants, animals and ultimately humans? What does it mean to know everything about something? Can evolutionary biology explain exhaustively everything that can be known with certainty about the animal that we are? Can we know who and what we are with absolute certainty? And what would this knowledge mean for us? Will it help us or guide us with regard to what we ought to do. Would be it be able to provide the ultimate grounds for a theory of ethics or for an epistemology of morals? Would it be able to guide revolutionary praxis and revolutionary objectives?

464. The court must judge the damages incurred by an animal eating—Exodus 22:4

465

We have survived as a species by virtue of the evolution of our characteristic structural and functional adaptations. We have a complex repertoire of structural and functional adaptations which have shaped or enabled the characteristic suite of behaviours and capacities that make us humans. Long-term monogamous pair bonding is one such characteristic pattern of behaviour which is typical of humans

The capacity for long term monogamous pair bonding has played a critical role in our survival as a species. It makes biological and evolutionary sense that it is in our nature as humans to crave emotional and physical union with a partner or a mate. We have survived as a species by virtue of this fact. It is part of our natural behavioural biology as animals to seek out and form strong monogamous attachments with a specific partner. Neurobiological and hormonal adaptations which facilitate the formation and persistence of powerful emotional bonds between monogamous partners have evolved through the process of natural selection. What are the factors or forces or circumstance or states of affairs that have favoured the evolution of long term or lifelong pair bonding between humans (typically between male and female, but homosexual pair bonding can also be a lifelong affair)?

465. The court must judge the damages incurred by a pit—Exodus 21:33

466

Phenotypic plasticity. One genome, multiple possible phenotypes.

Humans are plastic. This makes them highly adaptable to a wide of environments and circumstances.

466. The court must judge the damages incurred by fire—Exodus 22:5

467

Gradual incremental evolution or punctuated equilibrium.

467. Not to steal money stealthily—Leviticus 19:11

468

Interlude and refrain. I stare out of the window of my room. I am digesting what I have written in my prison journals. My mother's knocking on the door of my room interrupts the train of my musing. She smiles as she enters. The dominee is on the phone, he wants to speak to me. She winks and says: 'I think he likes you, maybe he has fallen in love with you.' The dominee wants to fuck my body is the thought that crosses my mind. I am a Zoologist I know what is going on in the mind and body of the dominee. I study animal behaviour. This is the first thought that always comes to mind when a man shows interest in me. I know that he has already fucked me in his mind, in his imagination he has had penetrative sex with me. He has already taken possession of me, he has climaxed and ejaculated into my vagina, he has impregnated me with his semen, now my womb is filling up with his child, now heavy with child I must keep his house, cook his food, become the homemaker, and the mother of his children. He wants to possess me as his wife. Every night I will be expected to perform my bedroom duties, with my legs spread apart I lay supine before him so that he can mount me, and thrust his sword into me. In this way he will dominate me as I lay beneath his heaving body and feel him intimately inside me, a sabre sheathed in its velvet scabbard, in me a foreign body, an invasion of my being, I am now his field, he will plough my body and sow his seed. Like a garden filled with the perfumed fragrance of brightly petalled blooms I will lay spread out, as an erotically ornamented inflorescence with the silky and satiny tissue of soft buds surrendering their promise of pleasure before him, a woman's body, submissive to his every whim. I will have to learn to know my place as the weaker sex and fulfil my role as a woman under his roof. He will want to break me in like a mare, and like a stallion he will mount me when it pleases him. This has been the fate of Yael, and thinking of what has become of her brings tears of sadness.

Reluctantly I follow my mother downstairs. I am thirty five years old and I feel like a child again who has to reason with an adult who is about to make demands on me. The dominee is three years older than me. Between playing provincial rugby and completing a number of undergraduate degrees and postgraduate degrees, a BA and a degree in theology, an MA in theology and a PhD while all the time been supported by wealthy parents he did not feel the urgency to settle down and marry any one of his many girlfriends. He had a few long term relations with one being as long as seven years. However the years slipped by without any of his relationships culminating in marriage. He was well into thirties without ever being employed in a non-sport playing capacity. When he eventually stopped being a professional sportsman and a fulltime student he found himself in the situation of being unemployed bachelor without any marriage prospects. He did confess that he had devoted his entire life to playing rugby in the vain hope that he would eventually make the Springbok Team. He had sacrificed his relationship with women on the altar of his sporting ambitions. Now he was a dominee trapped in the role of a minister in a reformed church in Kimberley and like many reformed dominees in the region he had volunteered to conduct services at Hotazel ever so often. I suppose that realizing his good looks were fading and his strapping muscular body would soon start turning to flab he needed to find a wife who could look after him. It was obvious that among the many expectation he had regarding the role of a wife, one of those roles would also include the wife being his mother. It was actually a shame that a man with such a fine intellect and who was also good looking and athletic to boot had now eventually sunk to this level after such a promising start in life. If he had more imagination he could have been a Beyers Naude or a Bram Fischer, but instead he had become just another Christian Nationalist factory clone of the average Afrikaner male.

The heavy black phone lay off its cradle on the polished surface of the table in the entrance hall next to a large ceramic vase filled with an arrangement of fresh flowers from the garden.

After dad said it was OK I asked the exchange to make the connection with Norway from Hotazel. After several minutes I was speaking to Angelika. Choking with emotion I began to cry on the phone. I heard her voice: Hannah are you OK? We have heard that you have been released. We have been trying to contact you. No one could in South Africa could put us in touch with you. I can arrange for you to come to Norway. I answered her that I would like to visit her in Norway in June when it was summer. Angelika then said she have been in constant contact with Isabella in Mozambique and Isabella has been frantically concerned about me. After speaking to Angelika I then phoned Yael.

Mom have been eavesdropping.

468. The court must implement punitive measures against the thief—Exodus 21:37

469

Why do we fall in love?

469. Each individual must ensure that his scales and weights are accurate—Leviticus 19:36

470

The future is something you have to create with your imagination.

470. Not to commit injustice with scales and weights—Leviticus 19:35

471

Human life-history theory, historical materialism, Marxism, class war, and Anarcho-Communism

All living organism have a characteristic life-history. All possible life-histories can become the object of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis once all the essential variables which fully characterize the overall pattern or properties of a life-history have been identified and described. Life-history variables once identified become the factual or empirical foundations of life-history theorization. I have devoted much of research career as a scientist in the empirical study and theoretical analysis of animal life-histories. It has always been in the back of my mind to close the conceptual, theoretical and empirical gaps between the life-history theory of Palaeolithic humanity in its 'evolved state of nature' and the necessary conditions of an imagined modern human life-history theory which would make Anarcho-Communism an attainable possibility.

471. Not to possess inaccurate scales and weights even if they are not for use—Deuteronomy 25:13

472

Big brains are metabolic expensive to maintain. This means they have a high basal metabolic rate (BMR) relative to the BMR of other organs in the human body.

A change diet necessitates in change in overall behaviour.

472. Not to move a boundary marker to steal someone's property—Deuteronomy 19:14

473

The raw and the cooked.

Explaining the cultural or social significance of the raw versus the cooked as a social fact of human sociality can have paradoxical consequences. The meaning or significance or explanation of the full domain of observable facts which are characteristic of the entire constellation or universe of human social phenomena or human sociality has been theoretically articulated in a reductive fashion by anthropologists like Levi Straus within a structuralist framework based on dualisms in the form of conscious versus unconscious, form versus content, structure versus meaning, nature versus culture, necessity versus contingency or the arbitrary and so on. The project is to explain the origination, structure, functioning and dynamics of all the different and diverse manifestations of human culture, which emerge or come into existence within the framework of every possible form of human sociality, in terms of a few universal principles and universal systems of causation. This means that the manifestation of every possible kind of cultural phenomena, which by its very nature is always contingent and arbitrary, are universally explicable in terms of or reducible to an instantiation of general principles or a general underlying system of causation. This formulation of structuralism embodies a paradox, which can be stated as follows: Human culture which by its nature is always something which contingent and arbitrary is also the effect of something which uniform, regular, general, invariant, universal or in other words something which is natural as in a law of nature. What are these things which are uniform, regular, invariant and universal which play a causative role in the emergence of social or cultural phenomena relating to sexuality and sexual norms for example? They are things like 'incest avoidance'. What about table manners? What basic underlying universal principle or uniformity or regularity plays a causal role in the emergence of cultural practices such as table manners? The paradox of structuralist explanations of social or cultural phenomena is that as contingent and arbitrary phenomena they are the effects of underlying universal law-like causal processes which would in this case belong to the domain or realm of the natural or in other words Nature. So all arbitrary cultural and social phenomena are the effects of Nature. Therefore they are natural and not arbitrary!

473. Not to kidnap—Exodus 20:13

474

Does evil exist? What is evil? When did it come into existence? How did it come into existence? Could it possible that evil does not exist? What are the conditions that make it possible for evil to come into existence?

474. Not to rob openly—Leviticus 19:13

475

Interlude: She had been standing out of sight by the kitchen door. She had eavesdropped on my conversation with the dominee. When I had rested the phone back on its cradle she came into the entrance hall. She could not hide the disappointment from her face. She had listened to my conversation with Angelika and now she was interrogating me in Afrikaans as if I was a teenager:

'Who is Angelika, who is Isabella and who is Yael? Don't worry, I will spare you, you don't have to tell me. I know who they are and now I also finally know who you are. I have always had my suspicions about you ever since you brought Alice home during the holidays. I should have guessed long ago, but I refused to believe what my own eyes were telling me. Malcolm was right, he saw something but could not understand what he was seeing. Malcolm often said that you and Ouma had an unnatural relationship. I should have guessed then. Since when does a granddaughter always want to sleep with her Ouma, and that is not all, I never heard of an Ouma dressing and bathing a granddaughter when she was quite capable of dressing herself and bathing herself, and she even wiped your bum when you went to the toilet. And why did she put lipstick on your lips, rouge on your cheeks and eye shadow too when you went to the shops with her as a little girl, you were only a child, she corrupted you, Malcolm saw all of this and he told me. It was abnormal, the two of you walking in the streets all made up wearing bright red lipstick. I just get sick when I think of it. I never ever thought that I would ever have to say that word out aloud, but I always felt that your Ouma was a lesbian just like her cousins Nelly and Dolly and now she has turned you also into a lesbian. As a child I knew that there was something wrong with my mother. The way your Ouma and the women carried on with each other was so unnatural that even I as her daughter, as a young child knew that my own mother was not behaving like a normal mother. As a child I also used to go with her on her daily rounds of morning shopping, off we would go, she carrying her basket, we would walk down Jules Street to the baker, to the green grocer, to the dairy and to the butcher. It was always the same, she would get to meet all her friends, it was as if their rendezvous' at the baker, at the butcher or at the green grocer had been prearranged, and what's more, well except for Hester, they were all married women, but that did not stop them from carrying on with each other like teenage girls while their husbands were at work, working hard to put bread on the table. Your Ouma would hug and kiss her friends, kiss them on the mouth, the way they kissed of each other was improper kissing, it was not normal, and they would hold hands and there would much gaiety and laughter, and your Ouma would happy, more happy than when she was when she with your Oupa. And sometimes on the way home we would stop for tea at Hester's home that she shared with all her cats. And the women would gather in the dining room drinking tea and playing rummy. And Hester would play those big band swing records from the 1920s and 1930s, and she would dance with one of the women, wearing a funny hat with feathers, and the women would smoke cigarettes. It was just before the war and when the men went off to the fight the war I don't want to even think what their wives got up to with each other. And then it felt as if your Ouma had poisoned you against me your own mother. When I gave birth to Elsabe and while I was in the Queen Vic you and Malcolm stayed with Ouma, I remember on the way home from the Queen Vic after Elsabe's birth we came to fetch you and Malcolm. You gave me such a strange look, Ouma was holding you on her hip and when I reached out to take you in my arms because I had missed you so much, you turned your head away and clung to Ouma, you wouldn't come to me, your own mother. I was so hurt by that. You were always turning away from me, I could never figure out what I had done to you to make you hate me so much and I don't know why we could never have a normal mother-daughter relationship.'

'I don't hate you,' I said to my mother, and I began to weep and she began to weep too. I heard myself saying that I was sorry for everything. She held out her arms to me and we embraced, sobbing against each other, finally my mother and finally after so many years we had found each other.

'My kind, my kind, ek is so lief vir jou, en ek is so trots op jou.' (My child, my child, I love you so much, and I am so proud of you.)

While she made tea I began to communicate with my mother in a way that was never before possible. She listened while I shared things with her. I told her about the reason for my phone call to Angelica. I wanted to thank her for all the support that she managed to drum up. But I was also concerned about Isabella. My mother now knows that I am in love with Isabella and that Isabella is a Mozambican and whom I had met during my clandestine visit to Mozambique shortly before my arrest. My mother also now knows all about Yael and the Rabbi, and I explained to her that I did not want to become like Yael where I would be caught up in similar situation as Yael was in a manner of speaking. That is I did not want to become Hannah and the Dominee in the way that Yael had become Yael the wife of the Rabbi. Angelica had established contact with Isabella had kept her appraised on my situation. Now Angelica was trying organize a visit to Norway for Isabella and myself as soon as my affairs were in order and back to normal. I was hoping it would be our honeymoon. It was also now becoming my dream that with the imminent collapse of Apartheid Isabella and I could become partners in a permanent relationship. It was seemingly possible that we could set up two homes, one in Maputo and the other in Johannesburg, and we could live between South Africa and Mozambique, especially if I made Mozambique the study site for my research. So I was now looking forward to going to Norway with Isabella in June or July. On a previous trip to Norway I had spent time in the remote sparsely populated north under the northern lights of the arctic sky in which the never setting summer sun hung in the sky at midnight.

I acknowledging all my intellectual debts and they are many. Everyone's work is haunted by unacknowledged intellectual debts which like the blood of the innocent cries out to God above. Well let me now get back to dealing with the full acknowledgement of my own intellectual debts:

When I was appointed as a lecturer in zoology at Wits I made an effort to re-establish my relationship with Yael. We remained in contact on and off until my trip to Mozambique. One lunch break while I was waiting to meet her for coffee at the Café in the Senate House concourse at Wits I happened to arrive early at our rendezvous so I went into the bookshop which had recently been set up shop in the concourse and while browsing I came across a book that had been recently published. The book was written by the polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book's title was 'Religion'. The blurb below the title read: 'If there is no God... On God, the Devil, Sin and other Worries of the so-called Philosophy of Religion'. I bought the book. It was a book that has had a profound influence on my own thinking about God and the Universe and meaning or significance of everything. My prison journal notes and all my subsequent journal and dairy notes bears the imprint of Kolakowski's exposition on the many worries concerning the existence and essential nature of God, and also the existence and nature of the Absolute or the Ultimate. I openly admit that my journal writings and my thinking on many theological concerns bares the stamp of his influence. I hereby acknowledge my intellectual debt to Kolakowski. And this is in spite of the fact that Kolakowski was now an ex-communist whose antipathy towards Marxism and communism was influenced by the negative realities which has characterized the evolution and ultimate failure of the twentieth century socialist project.

475. Not to withhold wages or fail to repay a debt—Leviticus 19:13

476

The Commodity and Commodification: The rise of things that we call commodities.

Critical question: 'What is a commodity?' and 'What is commodification?' 'How do commodities acquire value?' The historical evolution of the commodity

Marx begins his critique of capital with an economic analysis of the concept of the commodity. The commodity is always something that emerges as a product or creation of social labour in societies that have evolved beyond the Neolithic threshold, chiefly as a consequence of multiple interacting contingencies. The commodity producing labour is always social labour. Social labour is a definite form of labour which can only exist by virtue of certain kind of social conditions and social arrangements, that is, social conditions and social arrangements which are characteristic of relatively high density permanent settlements. High density relative to the small bands which characterize widely dispersed hunter-gather communities. The existence and dynamics of commodity producing social labour can only arise as a concrete social reality within the context or matrix of a system of social relations or within social formations or within definite forms of social organization which are essentially stratified or hierarchical in nature. The social phenomenon of commodity production does not occur at all within hunter-gather systems which are essentially characterized by cooperative and egalitarian social relations between individuals. Commodity production as a social phenomenon always arises within a framework of social relations between individuals which are stratified, hierarchical in terms of social dominance and therefore always based on social inequalities between individuals. Commodity producing social system or formations or organization have always existed within the generic social framework of an Oligarchy. Generic in the sense that social relations between individuals within any given kind of Oligarchy are always stratified or hierarchical in terms of social dominance and the distribution of power.

As a product of social processes which are always embedded within the kind of social relationships that are constitutive of the Oligarchy the commodity emerges in the form of a service or a thing or an object which has some kind of utility. It can only emerge as the end-product of human labour or human work or human effort or human exertion. Without the exertion of labour power the commodity cannot come into existence. It emerges within the Oligarchy as a commodity only by virtue of its properties conferring on it some form of utility. And in terms of its utility in the broadest possible sense, the commodity as a commodity necessarily possesses the kinds of properties, powers, predispositions or capacities which are able to satisfy human needs, wants, desire or fancy. The origin of the commodity as such begins with the commodification of use-values. And the commodification of use-values can only occur within social formations that are Oligarchic in nature. A use-value is always something which by virtue of its properties possesses the power to satisfy a want. A use-value is by definition anything which has utility within a given social context. For example it would not necessarily have any utility within the life-history of a hunter-gatherer society. Wants exist by virtue of the Oligarchy. If the Oligarchy disappeared most of the wants associated with the Oligarchy would vanish. Commodification is a post-Neolithic social process by means of which use-values become invested with exchange-value or economic value in other words. In the social context of the Oligarchy a use-value can only exist as an exchange-value, and therefore use-values can only present themselves or be embodied in the form of a commodity. In the social context of the Oligarchy the whole of human life is subjected to the processes of commodification, and therefore to the inevitable processes of financialization. Meaning all social relationships are inexorably based on economic or financial transactions. Without money it is impossible to exist. In contrast to hunter-gatherer societies no one can exist without money in the Oligarchy. The commodification and financialization of life under the regime of the Oligarchy brings the whole of life under the control of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy controls the whole of human life by imposing wants through the creation of desire.

From Mathew 19: 16-22 we read:

16 Now behold, one came and said to Him, "Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?"

17 So He said to him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments."

18 He said to Him, "Which ones?"

Jesus said, "'You shall not murder,' 'You shall not commit adultery,' 'You shall not steal,' 'You shall not bear false witness,' 19 'Honour your father and your mother, 'and, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' "

20 The young man said to Him, "All these things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?"

21 Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

To follow Jesus requires that one leaves the Oligarchy. But the only way that one leave the Oligarchy is through its destruction. How do we destroy the Oligarchy?

And Luke 9: 57 -62 we read:

57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go."

58 Jesus replied, "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."

59 He said to another man, "Follow me."

But he replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."

60 Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

61 Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family."

62 Jesus replied, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

While the Oligarchy spans its circumference around Jesus he does not live under the regime of the Oligarchy. He has no place within the Oligarchy to lay his head. To follow Jesus one has disconnect one's life from the entanglements of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy transforms humans into commodities. Your income determines your worth as a human being.

The Oligarchy in the form of capitalism feeds parasitically on desire through its creation of the narcotic of infinite wants which can never be satisfied. Capitalism in the form of the Oligarchy transforms human beings into consumers of commodities. Capitalism drains the whole of life into the void of insatiable consumerism. Capitalism transforms Socratic desire as a lack into the addictive slavery of the compulsive shop-o-holic who can never have enough stuff, who buys for the sake of buying, a behaviour which represent a form of spiritual obesity.

476. Not to covet and scheme to acquire another's possession—Exodus 20:14

477

Any endeavour aimed at denouncing metaphysics is in turn based on metaphysical assumptions. The denouncement assumes as its own foundation the very thing it endeavours to denounce. Question: what support do have for your claim? We cannot escape the trap of logic and inference. All claims are meaningless if they are not based on logical inferences. Nietzsche's methodological approach with regard to expressing critical opinions on various matters has been characterised as 'perspectivism'. He would argue that there is no perspective-free opinion regarding any matter. This line of argument is typical of the various forms of relativism including that of postmodernism. The argument is not at all compelling. What does it mean to have perspective on things? To have a perspective does not necessary weaken a claim or invalidate a view or even relativize a view regarding the nature of a particular state of affairs. We cannot view the world in a perspective-free fashion. If I claim to view a particular state of affairs from a scientific perspective then in what way is my view invalid or false or wrong or relative and so on and so forth? My view of things from a scientific perspective may be entirely valid, objective, and ultimately based on truth. The scientific perspective is informed by an edifice of knowledge which has been accumulated through a self-correcting process of methodologically sound processes of investigation and observation. So if I make the claim that the fact Darwinian evolution changes everything, then in truth it does. The Darwinian perspective on the nature of biological reality puts all other perspectives in question. All non-Darwinian perspectives on the nature of biological reality are false! If it is claimed that the Darwinian perspective on the nature of biological reality expresses a Grand Narrative, that does not in any way make the Darwinian theory of evolution less true or relative or a social construct or a myth. The theory of evolution as a Grand Narrative is true. Just because something can be conceptualized as a Grand Narrative does not diminish its truthfulness or make it falsie or make it mythological or relative.

Based on our capacity to reason and our ability to solve various kinds of puzzles or problems we are able make sense of the Universe and it is by virtue of our capacity to make sense of the University that the Universe appears to be intelligible in response our interrogations. To expand on this theme of intelligibility, the World or Nature or the Universe appears to be intelligible to our minds mainly because we are able perceive and come to an understanding of how different things fit together to make something work or make something comprehensible or make something which is a problem soluble, such as: finding out how a watch works or how an animal's heart or eyes works or completing a picture puzzle or proving a solution for a mathematical problem.

Also regarding the actual physical or material Universe and everything in it which has been made possible by virtue of the properties, powers and dispositions of the material constituents of the Universe we are able to see the links between the meanings of the words: existence, intelligible and contingent. The Universe exists contingently as opposed to necessarily, and in this sense the Universe's existence is not logically necessary. If the Universe does not exist necessarily then its existence is logically contingent on something else, and it follows that if the Universe is indeed contingent then it is impossible for it be a self-causing, self-constituting or self-creating or self-actualizing physical and material phenomenon. It cannot self-cause its own existence or bring its own existence into being out of nothing. This is why the Universe is contingent. It is contingent by virtue of the fact that it does not possess the power or capacity or properties or dispositions to create itself in process of self-causation into an intelligible phenomenon out of nothing. Rather it is 'endowed' with the powers, capacities, properties and dispositions which make it an intelligible phenomenon. Going back to the words existence, intelligible and contingent we can formulate the following dualisms regarding the Universe:

Existence vs non-existence (being and nothingness, being and existence, being and becoming). Intelligible vs non- intelligible (intelligible as opposed to absurd, essence versus existence). Contingent versus necessary (intelligible, essence contingent on existence).

Also regarding the idea of a Universe we can add the following dualism:

Reality versus appearance, reality versus illusion, reality versus irreality, the real versus the unreal.

Question: Does a real World or Universe actually exist? Or have we created an illusionary Universe which only exists in our imagination or mind or dreams, and which does not correspond to any real external object actually existing out there independent of mind, perceptions and language. Are our mental states or what is going on in our minds the only certainty that we have of anything or of what exists? In which case only my thoughts or ideas exist, nothing else exists, and if I have ideas and thoughts then I must have a mind, so only mind really exists. If we follow this line of reasoning then we end up with the conclusion that only the self can be known with certainty to exist. Which brings us back with Descartes. While we cannot communicate the picture of the Universe or Reality that we have formed in our minds independently of perception and language, we are at the same time incapable of ascertaining to what extent the operation of our brain and sense organs and also our dependency on language has contributed to constructing the image of the Universe that see and speak about. The truth or certitude of what we say when say something about something to someone depends on the reliability of perception and the descriptive power or reference or representational fidelity of language with regard to reality. And ultimately the truth or reality of what is perceivable and therefore sayable cannot be substantiated without showing to what extent perception and language has contributed to the formation of our beliefs regarding what is truth and what is reality in the first place. We are trapped in an infernal circle of self-reference, we cannot escape the self-reference paradox, we cannot escape our dependency on perception and language in assessing the contribution that perception and language has on the actual act of seeing something and then saying something about something. The claims regarding the seeing and saying self-reference paradox and impossibility of escaping from the prison of solipsism is irrefutable.

477. Not to desire another's possession—Deuteronomy 5:18

478

Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith slaying of Holofernes.

Freed in minds and bodies forever from the phallocentric construction of our civilization so flagrantly described in the sexual antics of Val the hero in Henry Miller's Sextus we travelled in a state of unabated arousal from Barcelona through the night by train via Nice to the French Rivera. Submitting to the pleasures of our bodies the white sheets of those warm moon lit Mediterranean nights in Spain became damp with the intensity of our erotic passions for each other. In the bright sunlight of a hot summer's morning we arrived in Nice still basking in the radiation of our voluptuous emotions, we were in love. From Nice we hired a car and travelled to Cap d'Agde's world-famous naturist resort for a two day visit for nude sun tanning. After Paradise Island on the Bazaruto Archipelago I was comfortable with being naked in the presence of others. We experienced at first hand the well-known phenomenon of the banality of nakedness which in its fleshly excessiveness and abundance satiates the voyeuristic gaze, quenching it of its libidinous excitement, even when hidden behind the uncensored view of sunglasses. However Kate broke the spell of banality and stirred a ripple of turning heads both male and female in her wake. There was no doubt that Kate had a magnificent body, something which seemed to be foreign on European shores. Naked she was breathlessly spectacular and she was aware of this. Topless we explored the beaches of the Rivera, lingering in Saint Tropez for a day and a night before departing by train to Italy. From Turin to Milan and via Verona and Padua we traced the rail route across Italy to Venice. From Venice via Bologna we travelled by car to Florence. From Rome we travelled by train to Zurich and from Zurich after spending a day and night there we travelled by train to Paris.

478. Return the robbed object or its value—Leviticus 5:23

479

In Florence we visited the Loggia dei Lanzi on Pizza della Signoria where we spent some time in the arena of rape and decapitation. A monument of sculptured forms celebrating the capture and violent subjugation in marble and bronze of the erotically voluptuous feminized body to the eternal order of patriarchical power. Pio Fedi's Rape of Polyxana. Giovanni Bologna's Rape of a Sabine. Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa, with its slain headless feminized body laying sensual and erotically supine with legs and arms bound to the pedestal under the feet of a triumphant Perseus. The message is that rape makes women the weaker sex.

And in stark construct we have the discordant intrusion of a misplaced anomaly in the sculptured form of Donatello's Judith and Holofernes which stabilizes, and threatens to cancel and erase and make impotent the reign of the masculine over the feminine. Does this confrontation of opposites symbolize the politicization of the sexual identity, the feminine versus the masculine? Kate had bought Henry Miller's Sexus at the station in Barcelona. She could not put down Henry Miller's ghastly and horrid book as she called it. On the drive to Florence after flipping through the book which seemed to be borderline pornographic I asked her if she ever had sex with a man. I was surprised when she said that she had had sex with men on several occasions, the first time was when she was eighteen. 'How was it?' I asked. 'Bloody awful, I won't recommend it,' she answered. 'Did you ever want to have children?' I asked. 'Yes there times that did think seriously about have a child, a girl or a boy, I think I would have made fabulous mother. I suppose the ideal situation would be one in which one was in a permanent lesbian relationship with a child or children,' she said.

479. Not to ignore a lost object—Deuteronomy 22:3

480

I had finished Nausea and The Thief's Journal. I liked Jean Genet. I liked the fact that he was both male and female. But I had a problem with Genet's view of the feminine as being passive and submissive. With Kate this may have been true in the beginning with me. I was the passive and submissive partner. She would initiate sex with me. She was more experienced, more confident and she knew how to bring me to a climax, she could do things to me that were exquisitely pleasurable. But my confidence as her lover was also growing, I also learnt what she liked, I was learning about her body too, I was learning fast on how to please her. In fact I was a very fast learner when it came to sex. In lesbian sex there is no intromitting sexual organ which can function as the instrument of power and domination as in heterosexual coitus or male homosexual simulation of coitus. In heterosexual coitus the politics of sexual consent reinforces the asymmetry of male versus female distribution of actual power. Asymmetrical sexual consent is the foundation of patriarchical socialization, and Val in Henry Miller's Sexus is an exemplary model of this socialization phenomenon based on sexual consent. In this sense Henry Miller's literary oeuvre is paradoxically politically conservative rather progressive or radical.

480. Return the lost object—Deuteronomy 22:1

481

We heard a loud speaking American recommend to another American tourist that they should go view Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith slaying of Holofernes. Later in Naples we did go to the Museo di Capodimonte and viewed the painting of Judith decapitating Holofernes. On Paradise Island in the Bazaruto Archipelago I became with a bit of practice quite skilful at abusing my expensive diving knife by throwing it into the trunk of a coconut palm tree. It was quite a big double bladed knife, with very sharp blade on one side and also a serrated edge on the other, and I wore it while diving and I am sure I could easily decapitate a man with it. I had witnessed the slaughtering and butchering of goats and sheep, so I knew that a man's throat could be easily slit in a flash with my diving knife, despatching a man in this fashion would be much easier than slaughtering a goat, severing a man's carotid artery with a well delivered vicious slash of my diving knife would drain away his life in seconds.

After a celebratory banquet Holofernes the commander of a great Assyrian army in anticipating the imminent arrival of Judith waits alone, secluded in the privacy of his tent, stripped of his armour, his sword, helmet and shield now lie in a heap on the ground next to his bed where he lays prostate in comfortable repose. In response to his expectation that she is going to have sex with him, and in a parody of heterosexual femininity, she first performs the ceremonial bathing of her body in a nearby stream. His eyes now heavy with the wine he falls into a deep dreamless asleep, his drunken body sprawled out on his bed. In the rendition of the Midrash aggada for the festive celebration of Hanukkah the story line for the dramatic fiction of Judith avenging Dinah's rape is inescapably queer. The decapitation of Holofernes is a symbolic castration. The general of the Assyrian army is reduced to a eunuch, a feminized man. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith strong and powerful and determined as a lioness in the act of pulling down a struggling bull is beautifully dressed up in drag, she and her slave are lesbians. With the strength of their arms and bodies they quickly subdued the panic stricken general in his bed, holding him down with their bare arms, Judith first slits his throat with his own sword and then severs the head from the body. Judith and her slave woman carried the severed head of Holofernes covered on a platter. With a donkey loaded with the war booty that they have looted from Holofernes tent she and the slave set off for Jerusalem. At the gates of Jerusalem She presents the head of Holofernes. With the help of her slave, she has otherwise single-handily liberated the men of Israel and now she too sets her female slave free before taking her to bed and making love to her. Mythos and Logos blended together in unveiling the truth.

481. The court must implement laws against the one who assaults another or damages another's property—Exodus 21:18

482

My grandfathers never made it out of Africa, they got no further than Egypt and North Africa in the desert campaign against Rommel. They did not manage to cross the Mediterranean and reach Italy. I am the first Zeeman to leave the shores of Africa since the first Zeeman settled in Africa, he was one of the first Dutchman to set up home in the Cape of Good Hope. Now I find myself in Italy, and I am only sure of one thing and that is that I am queer. Apart from God I am not sure about anything else. I am not sure of my race, and neither is Kate sure about what I am. She laughs at the darkening of my pigmentation and jokes that I could be North African or maybe a Phoenician woman. A Phoenician woman! She found her own joke very funny and laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks. Objectively speaking I am an Afrikaner if I really have to define my ethnicity. But I speak mainly English. And now in Italy I feel half-Catholic.

I am a dark gentile Hellenic lesbian woman at home in the homoerotic atmosphere of Mediterranean. Across the ocean lies the great continent of Africa, my home and place of my birth. Africa has always been part to the Mediterranean milieu. The blood of Africans has mingled over thousands of years with the people that lived on the shores of this ocean. And like my ancient Hellenic lesbian sisters who were the very first Christian converts of Saint Paul I am joined by faith and confession to what has been characterised culturally and socially as the Orient and the Semitic. Culturally I am a fusion of the African, the Hellenic and the Hebraic. I am from the Old World. Ironically Saint Paul was the real liberator of the gentile women in the villages and cities along the coast of the Mediterranean.

I identify with great sisterhood of Hellenic and Hebraic women. The paradigm of heterosexual marriage was not the essential defining attribute or the inexorable destiny of the female mythological and historical figures who populated the crowded and dazzling galaxy of heroines and goddesses who carried the torch of hope for all women. Mythos and Logos becomes welded together into the great narrative of women breaking the chains of chattel slavery and bondage under the patriarchical regime of men. Again I am comfortable in my nakedness, minimally dressed up in the symbols constitutive of being in drag, a parody of masculinity and femininity, wearing only sheer stockings and shining stilettos, my double edged sword sheathed in its scabbard fixed to my leather suspender, strapped over my shoulder I carry a quiver of arrows, and in my right hand I carry a bow, my lips painted bright red with lipstick. I am Penelope weaving, I am the maid servant from Thrace, I am Demeter the great mother, I am Diotima of Mantinea the woman who is wise in matters of the erotic, including love and sex, I am Hestia the maker and sustainer of the home.

I am not like Val in Henry Miller's Sextus who can only speak of his prick. Instead I am the alpha female Hyena with powerful jaws capable of great violence, and a giant clitoris that is constantly erect, on the brink of an orgasmic eruption. All males quiver in submission before me, I mount them with impunity to show my dominance as the female, the great matriarch. I Judith cut off Holophernes' head whereas, contrary to the writings of the Zohar, Esther laid with Ahasuerus, using sex to acquire benefits for herself. In contrast to Esther, Queen Vashti refusing to debase herself before Ahasuerus even though he was her husband, emerges in the Book of Esther as the real heroine. According to the Mĕgillāh which is read during Purim Esther was one of the four most beautiful women, and the four women of surpassing beauty were Sarah, Rahab, Abigail and Esther. On her way to Ahasuerus' bed Esther recited Psalm 22 in which she referred to herself as the 'hind of the morning', meaning her vagina was tight and narrow, and would remain tight and narrow for the pleasure of Ahasuerus every time he mounted her. On each occasion that Ahasuerus had sex with Esther it was like fucking a virgin for the first time. If certain mitzvot should never be transgressed then why did Esther enjoy sex with a non-believing heathen rather than choosing martyrdom? The Tractate Sanhedrin recommends that the betrothed girl should rather be slain than ravaged by a heathen. Well such are the paradoxes that emerge in the creative weaving of Mythos and Logos that goes into the creation of literary fiction. And is this not what literature should wrestle with in its narration of things, in its struggle to say something of ultimate significance about something. Can any serious literary endeavour escape addressing things of ultimate concern, can it escape the reach of Mythos and Logos and still be able to say something about something? To say something significant about something involves a transubstantiation because all meaning represents the incarnation of the Word of God, the Logos. This is my body, this is my blood, eat and drink all of it.

In terms of the Hebraic I am Judith, I am Deborah, I am Tamara dressed as a harlot on the side of road, I am Ruth.

In the cased of the Greek goddess Hestia, the word sustainer used to describe what she does is a deeply theological term. God is the ultimate sustainer of all things.

482. Not to murder—Exodus 20:13

483

Sitting naked on the hotel bed in Rome I am beautifully tanned, dark as a berry, and my hair is glossy, long and shines raven black after Kate has brushed it. Kate is in a state of saintly rapture. She joyfully confesses that to really find God one has to come to Rome. Saint Paul came to Rome, Saint Peter came to Rome. We are in the City of Saints. Kate speaking passionately in a tone filled with missionary zeal, confiding urgently that every true believer eventually takes the road to Rome even if it is only metaphorically. Finished with my hair she tells me stand up. Kate has become my mother, my sister, my best girlfriend, my lover. I stand up and she applies creams and lotions to my body. She mutters like a mother that I have been exposed to too much sun, and I tell I have never been sunburnt in my life. She whispers that she has never felt such a beautiful skin in all her life. I burst out laughing. Now standing behind me she puts her arms around me and she pulls me tightly against her body, I feel her hands caressing and fondling my breasts while rubbing in the lotion. She feels my arousal in my erect nipples. She kisses the back of my neck and nibbles my ear lobes. Her hand slips down to my vulva which has become moist. She forces me down onto the bed and makes love to me while the warm morning sun shines down on us through the open window, and the bustling sounds of the Eternal City filter into our small modest hotel room.

Inside the cathedral it is cool. I have lost count of all the cathedrals that we have visited in Spain, the south of France and now in Italy. I have lost count of the number of candles that we lit at the feet of the Virgin Mary. I now also whisper before the Blessed Virgin: 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of death. Amen'.

483. Not to accept monetary restitution to atone for the murderer—Numbers 35:31

484

Dear reader you have been my faithful companion on a long and tortuous journey. Male or female I view you dearest reader as my romantic partner. We have got this far together. On a quiet day when the wind blows in a particular direction I can hear the flow of traffic like the coming and going of the tides or like the distant sounds of crashing surf. I spoke previous about artificial intelligence and machine existence in which sex and desire no longer featured in that timeless state. The absence of sex and desire as being a feature of timeless or immortality goes back to Parmenides' poetic critique of Hesiod's Theogony. Beyond time, beyond becoming and beyond sexuality we have immortality. Shadowless the day becomes night and the night fades imperceptivity into day disappearing in plain sight in the unremitting glare of the tungsten 100 watt light bulb, and with the break of dawn I hear the distant sounds of traffic like surf rushing up the beach, the echo of the percussion of the rolling swells, and now working on my journal notes like Penelope the tapestry which I have woven during the day I unweave at night in my room in Hotazel. The drama of Plato's Phaedo was set within the walls of a prison cell, where there was nothing left to do while languishing on the shores of infinity other than to drink the hemlock, and there were days that I felt like this. I wanted to hang myself rather than endure another moment. Yet the body with all of its secrets is not a prison, and there is no existence beyond the body, beyond the material, beyond the physical, why else believe in the resurrection of the dead. There were times I found myself praying to God and realized that deep down I was a believer and I could not understand why Francis Digby let it all go so easily. In Rome on our last day in Italy Kate made the sign of the cross in the Sistine Chapel. Following the graceful movement of her hand I too signed myself with the sign of the cross and Kate looked at me in surprise and wondered for what reason I had never signed myself before with the sign of the cross. I was only half-way Catholic. Kate had beautiful hands, her fingers were elegant, whenever we laid together her fingers found their home in my vagina where they explored the familiar spaces unseen, she crooked her fingers and pressed them towards my pubic bone against the base of my clitoris while her tongue caressed the swollen protruding hemisphere that had emerged shining with the lustre of a large pink pearl from its bed of soft folds, at the same time she began to move her fingers inside me, overwhelmed with intense and uncontrollable excitement my pelvis rose, my vulva with unremitting urgency pressing, pushing and thrusting against her lips, my thighs spread wide apart, my feet and calves writhing on the sheets, my toes curled, my chest heaved, my arms splayed out and my ears filled with the most unbelievable voluptuous moans as I gave myself over like an animal once to more to the depths of a bottomless orgasm. Kate also in a heighted state of excitement brought herself to a climax with her left hand between her thighs she rubbed, stroked and fingered herself while bent down over me. Cuddling in each other's arms, awash with tenderness and lips pressed together in soft kisses, breathing in her fragrance, with her moist silky skin against mine we fell asleep naked in our embrace.

484. The court must send the accidental murderer to a city of refuge—Numbers 35:25

485

Interlude: If you have come this then I hope you will agree with me that postmodernism is dead. God is coming back with a vengeance. The falling of the Berlin Wall signals the final demise of postmodernism. When the Berlin Wall was being dismantled I was still in solitary confinement cut from what was happening in the world. With the end of postmodernism literature can one more engage with real and wrestle with the Big Ideas. Metaphysics is back. The One and the Many once more engages our attention.

485. Not to accept monetary restitution instead of being sent to a city of refuge—Numbers 35:32

486

Everything that exists now, at this precise moment, in whatever form, for example, as a particle, as an object, as any kind of entity, as a process, as an event, as a state or any kind of state of affairs, as a property, as a quality, as predisposition, as a power or as every or any kind of potential possibility, exists only by virtue of the Big Bang having occurred. Furthermore, everything that exists now, at this precise moment, even these thoughts which I happen to be entertaining, and which has now become fixed in the written text that you are now reading, exists only by virtue of the Big Bang having occurred. The entire natural world exists by virtue of the Big Bang having taken place in the distant past. Everything that exists in one form or another whether it be a photon, an electron, a proton, a neutron or even a mental state such as having a thought or a desire or an inclination, exists only by virtue of the Big Bang having taken place in the distant past. The physical in its totality exists only by virtue of the Big Bang having occurred. And the physical is the basis of the Totality of existence or the physical basis of all possible things, events and processes in the Universe including the mental or Mind.

So if everything that exists, including Mind or mental states or consciousness or sentient life, exists only by virtue of the Big Bang having taken place, then everything necessarily exists as a physical or material consequence, or in other words as a causal consequence of the Big Bang. If all of this is the case, then the existence of everything, and this means that the Totality which embraces all existents, including Mind, within the Universe has a physical basis.

But what is the physical? When we probe the essential nature of the physical it is soon discovered that an ontology of the physical cannot be grounded in anything, in other words an ontology of the physical cannot be formulated. Instead of a fundament entity or a fundamental 'particle' which is the ontological basis of everything we only have processes. There are no fundamental 'particulars' or fundamental events, there only processes, the process of becoming. We only have becoming! A particle based physics seems to run aground into all kinds of intractable problems that seem to defy all solutions.

So we are still able to believe that the physical is real without really knowing what it is at the most fundamental level. Does this pose an ontological dilemma to reductionism? Can this dilemma be circumvented by substituting 'process' for 'particle' in our understanding of the essential nature of the physical. Added to this, it seems that according to modern physics there are no fundamental particles or elementary particles or basic particular-like entities or an elementary substratum, there are only 'fields'. Does this mean that a substance based metaphysics has no grounds and could be actually incoherent if it is based on a metaphysics of the particle? There may be no fundamental level of organization based on the existence of finite particle like entities. Is possible that only fields in the form of quantum field exist?

486. Not to kill the murderer before he stands trial—Numbers 35:12

487

As a young child I did not know that the golden age of ocean liners was on the brink of coming to a sudden end. Standing on the quay of Durban harbour less than ten meters from the towering moored hull of a gigantic metallic ship with its row of tall smoke stacks was an awe inspiring experience. In my mind the Union Castle was majestic beyond belief and I envied all the waving passengers looking down on us from the deck. As the tugboat towed the ship to sea hundreds of passengers crowded on the deck above began to throw thousands of coloured paper streamers overboard which rained down over us as we stood on the quay watching the ship slowly slipping away from the dockside into the deep still greyish waters of the harbour. Across the harbour beneath the dark looming densely vegetated buff filled with chattering monkeys a whale lay dead on the slipway. And a gulls' flight away a sly Indian gentleman in the Victoria Street Market would wink and whisper at passing teenage boys and young men: 'I have good price for genuine Spanish Fly guaranteed to work'. One little pinch of the aphrodisiac in a girls tea or soft drink would transform her into a randy nymphomaniac allowing you to give her urgent relief to her hot and itching vagina. And the myth never seemed to die as generations of teenage school girls and young women were secretively fed with heaps of Spanish Fly. As a pre-adolescent and adolescent girl who spent several July holidays with her grandparents in Durban I was never privy to the secret male dream world of Spanish Fly which was sold at the Victoria Street Market. My childhood and adolescent holiday memories of Durban are stilled filled with white colonial perceptions that are still deeply etched into my brain. I have vivid recollections of the image of the bright red neon Coca Cola sign at night on the Fairhaven Hotel which stood across the road from Addington Beach. I can still smell and taste in my mind that wonderful and very unique aroma and flavour of the 'Durban-beach-ice-cream-cones' sold by Indian vendors who patrolled the hot sands of the coloured umbrella crowded South and North Beaches with their white ice boxes packed with dry ice that puffed clouds of cold whitish grey smoke when the lid was opened. And in my mind I can see parked along the Marine Parade and Snell Parade the sight of the coloured beaded ornamented rickshaw carts pulled by Zulu men wearing fantastic beaded head gear adorned with large white elegantly curved horns of Nguni cattle.

487. Save someone being pursued even by taking the life of the pursuer—Deuteronomy 25:12

488

The possibility of a lengthy imprisonment was an occupation hazard that I had dealt with in my mind once I became a Communist and joined the Party. I did not join the Party out of my own volition I was won over and recruited after a screening process which I was not aware of. I had quickly developed Leftist learnings as a first year student at Wits and I had demonstrated a very public and genuine intellectual interest in Marxism. In retrospect none of this had gone unnoticed. When I was eventually recruited I felt very honoured and privileged to be considered worthy. In the underground Communist network that I became part of the leadership was very strong on enforcing discipline and professionalism. It was drilled into us that we were professional revolutionaries and that we should always conduct ourselves a manner that is was in accordance with this view of our status as responsible and accountable combatants in the class struggle. But there was always the improbable. One the leading comrades always said don't do anything that you going to regret if you are caught. There was always the human fear of torture, of physical pain and emotional pain. We all knew what had happened in Argentina and Chile. Comrades had been tortured and murdered. As you know now Malcolm's intervention had saved me from torture and possible death. I don't know what would have happened to me if it weren't for Malcolm. I had confessed my guilt to the charges and after that I was left to languish in solitary confinement. It felt like I had become a forgotten person and that somehow due to bureaucratic bungling the prison and justice system had erased my existence, or my case was under indefinite postponement like some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare because something very minor or very serious had been overlooked in Malcolm's grand plan of manipulation or in the processing of my case docket.

488. Not to pity the pursuer—Numbers 35:12

489

By mid-morning after the Botany field to Oribi Gorge we were back once more in Durban. Our train to Johannesburg would be departing at five-o-clock so we had time on hand to kill. Walking down West Street to the Marine Parade Yael and myself wanting to be alone together broke away from the rest of the class and the academic staff. It was like going down memory lane. The atmosphere was different. The beaches were empty, the holiday season was over. On the North Beach side of their peer there were some surfers. At the end of the peer there stood one lone fisherman. We walked past the Lido, past the Small Top and stopped by Arlington Beach. Since primary school in Hotazel I had spent so many of my school holidays walking up and down the Marine Parade. I wanted to say something profound about this fact, but I could not think of anything. Being on the Marine Parade out of season made the whole experience different, it was not the same as the experience one has when being on holiday during the holiday season. I was strangely aware of this. I even turned to Yael and asked: 'Doesn't it feel strange being here?'

She thought for a moment and then agreed with me: 'Yes it does feel strange. It feels empty, different, it does not feel like we are actually on holiday in Durban. We just killing time.'

Being-on-holiday involves the novelty of de-localization and re-embodiment which gives another sense to the experience of the passage of time, to the experience of location or place and the experience of dwelling in that de-localized fantastical geography in which one has become re-embodied with that peculiar holiday-sense-of-self. This is what makes being-on-holiday such a magical experience and gives it that feeling of unreality, the feeling of unreality is brought about by the erasure or the removal or dislocation of that ordinary sense of everydayness that characterises the average or normal state-of-affairs of our daily lived lives while we are at home. To be away from home when home comprises an entire world of being and existence is to be dislocated as in de-localized and to be away from home allows for us to become re-embodied in a different experience of self, different from the self that is being constantly reconstituted and re-shaped by the forces of circumstances and situations that goes with being at home, but another sense of self emerges when we are away from home. By being-on-holiday as a result of de-localization we have placed a distanced not only in terms of space and time between ourselves and but also in terms of the circumstances and situations which characterises the physical, emotional, social and psychological state-of-being-at-home or the-world-of-being- when-at-.home. Maybe wanderlust is also connected with these social-psycho dynamics of at-home-ness versus the constant experience of novelty through de-localization and re-embodiment.

We turned back. Yael lit up a cigarette. She had tried cut down on her smoking mainly because I strongly disapproved of smoking, but now she seemed to have given up trying. She had become increasingly curious about Kate during the field trip, she was insatiably inquisitive, always digging for titbits. My alibi was that because Kate was a keen dancer and needed a dancing partner. I had done ballet and modern dancing in Hotazel and in Potchefstroom while in high school as an extramural activity, and I happened to be good on the dance floor, and I enjoyed dancing, and so on and so on, and the long and short of it was that we became dancing partners, mainly because we had a serious interest in dancing. I was uncomfortable about her buying the dress for me. Kate bought the dress at Stuttafords because I actually did need a decent outfit for a dance competition and I could not bring myself to ask my father for more money on top of all the money that had already been spent on me. My mother would have a fit. Yael wanted to know more about Kates being a lesbian and whether we had an affair. I denied having an affair with Kate. My trip overseas with Kate remained a secret. The only person who ever learnt about my affair and my overseas holiday with Kate was Samantha. As I have already mention we were in the underground together and we had become mature and adult enough to share intimate stuff regarding our personal lives. I managed to convince Yael that my relationship with Kate had always being strictly Platonic. In spite of all our ups and down my friendship with Kate has endured, like my friendship with Angelika.

To change the subject away from Kate I asked Yael if she had ever visited the Fitzsimons Snake Park. 'No never, I have no fascination for snakes. I think I lean more to Botany than Zoology. I am not really an animal person. I find viruses, bacteria, fungi, algal, ferns and all the cryptograms more interesting,' she said.

'Kate is my favourite lecturer, she is the best,' Yael admitted.

'Yeah, yeah,' I thought in my head. Yael was playing games with me.

'I should have taken microbiology instead of zoology,' she mused as she exhaled a cloud of smoke.

'But it is too late now. I am trapped,' she added.

'What do mean?' I asked.

'You know, being married and all that, I have responsibilities now,' she said smiling ironically.

'Does being married change everything, your personal hopes and dreams, who you are as a person?' I asked.

'It does, I am no longer really me,' she said.

'Who are you really?' I asked.

'You should know, you me intimately now,' she said.

'I do?'

'Yes you do, if you love me you do. Do you love me?' Yael asked.

'I love you Yael,' I said with conviction.

'I love too Hannah. I just wish things could be different,' she added, lighting up another cigarette.

'Should we take a walk to the snake park?' Yael suggested.

Walking towards us we spotted the familiar figure of Mrs Raisa Brodsky.

'Oh my God not her, she is going to want to join us,' Yael whispered.

Mrs Brodsky was a very cultured, almost aristocratic Jewish woman, who was probably in her sixties and who had emigrated from Russia to South Africa as a young woman. Her English was heavily accented in that typical Eastern European Jewish manner. Except for the compulsory attendance of the third year Botany field trip she had completed all the requirements for a BSc degree majoring in Botany and now that she had earned that credit she could finally graduate after enrolling as a Botany student three years ago when she was in her late fifties or had just turned sixty, anyway she was in her early sixties now. She and her husband owned a chain of hotels and liquor stores in Johannesburg. She had become a keen botanist.

Anyway she came along with us to the snake park. We caught a bus. Later that evening while we travelling back to Johannesburg there was a knock on the door of berth, it turned out be Mrs Brodsky, she invited us to join her in the dining coach for dinner.

After we had sat down at our table Wayne arrived. Seeing the unoccupied seat next to Mr Brodsky he asked if he may join us. When the soup arrived he asked whether we would mind if he said grace before we ate.

Immediately Mrs Brodsky answered: 'Yes, why not, go ahead my dear.'

Bowing his head he prayed in Hebrew:

Ba-ruch a-tah a-do-noi

elo-hai-nu me-lech ha-o-lam

ha-mo-tzi le-chem min ha-a-retz...

(Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, Who brings forth bread from the earth...)

Mrs Brodsky bowed her head and closed her eyes. I glanced at Yael while Wayne prayed. Her eyes remained open. When she saw me looking at her she raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes.

489. Not to stand idly by if someone's life is in danger—Leviticus 19:16

490

I had just finished the first year of my PhD at UCT and had travelled up to Hotazel in the last week of November 1979. At the beginning of November Samantha MacGuire had been served with banning orders and had immediately skipped the country crossing the border into Botswana and flying to Luanda in Angola. The Party instructed us who had escaped the drag net to go to ground, to lie low and cease all overt involvement in public activism for the next couple of months.

Nineteen seven nine was a roller-coaster eventful year. We had witness one of the first conscientious objection trials at the Winfield military base. We crowded outside the courtroom following the proceedings through the open windows. I experienced my first frightening encounter with a huge white and black whale shark while diving in the Atlantic in a forest of kelp with other divers who were research scientists based at UCT and who were somehow linked to the Department of Sea Fisheries. Samantha and I were also cinema fanatics and went to movies several times a week at the Labia Theatre. We also saw 'The Deer Hunter' and 'Apocalypse Now' which had been released on the Cape Town cinema circuit. And then there was the Cape Town Film Festival. I was already familiar with Luis Buñuel cinematic work and was interested in viewing his insouciantly surreal movie 'That Obscure Object of Desire' starring the mouth-watering Carole Bouquet and the equalling attractive and sensuous Ángela Molina, both of whom played the beautiful Flamenco 18 year old dancer named Conchita who was being pursued by Mathieu played by Fernando Rey. Bouquet and Molina alternated in the two character roles of Conchita and Mathieu the frustrated sexual pursuer of Conchita often finds himself being cruelly and sadistically reduced by the sexually tantalizing and erotically provocative Conchita into the humiliating, powerless and almost impotently passive role of the voyeur. Sexual possession of Conchita's body becomes a frustratingly unrealizable erotic fantasy, possession which can only be realized in the act of sexual penetration forever eludes Mathieu, and he burns with unrequited desire for the young Flamenco dancer.

Elsabe and her boyfriend invited me to share the costs for a weeklong holiday in Durban just before Christmas. We rented a two bedroom holiday flat and travelled down in the boyfriend's car. Elsabe was living with her boyfriend and our parents accepted this without batting an eyelid. She did not listen to my advice and started having sex with boyfriends when she was still only sixteen. She had no idea that I was lesbian, she just thought that I was a stuck up prude who was only interested in having my nose always stuck in a book and not having any life outside studying and reading.

It was to be my last real beach holiday. We spent each day on North Beach enjoying the sea and the sun. I remember this holiday for many reasons. I read Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests and I read Radnitsky's Contemporary Schools of Metascience. I was also thinking of Yael all the time and the Botany field trip to Oribi Gorge. I had to deal with the fact that I may never see Samantha again. Walking alone along the Marine Parade tracing the path that Yael and I had followed that day after the Oribi Gorge Botany fieldtrip. Also visiting all the spots that I had once frequented as a child and as an adolescent girl when on holiday with Oupa and Ouma. On these walks into the past along the Marine Parade I sank into a state of deep melancholy. I felt strong emotions of nostalgia and forlornness and yearning. I found myself longing for Yael now that Samantha was gone. I also thought a lot about Mrs Brodsky and Wayne. She was such a fine old lady. In a way I also loved Wayne, as students we spent a lot of time together, it was not a romantic love but a love of agape, and he was my brother in the Lord. At night Elsabe and her boyfriend went clubbing and when they invited me to join them I declined. It was incredibly hot and humid at night and I tossed and turned in the bed, only falling asleep in the early hours of the morning. One night unable to fall asleep I got up, I showered, put on makeup, perfume and a slinky clinging short party dress and low heeled sandals. Before I left the flat I left a note on the table informing Elsabe that I had gone out. I felt like having sex and I decided to go out on the prowl and see if I could get-off with someone. There were no gay joints that I knew of. I bought a gin and tonic at a popular pub at an up market beach front hotel. I asked the barman if he knew of any gay nightclubs. He gave me directions to a club frequented by gays and lesbians in a remote part of the city. Anyway fortified by the drink I hit out for the club. The streets were well lit but deserted and it spite of it being a hot and humid night it felt strangely eerie. On my way to the club a block ahead of me two girls crossed the street and began walking in the same direction. Clutching my hand bag I quicken by pace to catch up with them. Before I could close the gap they disappeared from sight down an alley, feeling nervous all alone I run after them, to the spot where they had disappeared. When I reached the dimly lit alley there was no trace of the pair. They had vanished into the night. Standing at the entrance of the alley I had this sensation of being in a dream. I also felt the grip of panic. Here I was alone scantily dressed like a hooker in a remote part of the city. I decided to enter the cobbled alley. In the middle of the alley there was a very ordinarily looking wooden door that was slightly ajar. There was no sign on the door. I could hear the faint sound of music. I pushed the door open. The door was the opening to a down stairs basement. The stairs were illuminated by the diffuse glow of a red light at the bottom. Convinced that this was the club that the barman spoke about I pushed open the door I descended the stairs. At the entrance of the basement was a small reception foyer. I paid the entrance fee and entered the dimly lit nightclub throbbing at that moment with the sounds of 'We are Family' by Sister Sledge. At the bar I ordered a double gin and tonic, the cost of the drinks were criminally exorbitant. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light I noticed that it was indeed a gay and lesbian club and it was multiracial, there were Zulu lesbians, Indian lesbians, Coloured lesbians and White lesbians dancing on the crowded dance floor or drinking at the tables and bar. I started dancing to Joan Armatrading's ' Love & Affection', I danced my own chorographical interpretation of the lyrics, I exchanged meaning glances with a young pretty Zulu woman who was watching my every move, we smiled at each other, she was dressed in drag, wearing a wig, dressed in a shining sequined black micro mini dress with suspensors, stockings and panties which under the UV tubes glowed with a dazzling white phosphorescence in the dark, coming closer to her I moved my hips erotically at her while singing in accompaniment the words '...make love with affection...' Smiling brightly she joined me in a loose embrace as we quickly found a mutual rhythm which allowed us to tighten our embrace so that we could feel the heat emanating from our bodies, and breath in the erotic fragrance of our skins pressed against each other together '...make love with affection...' And then we found each other's mouths with our bright red lipstick lips and moving tongues. At 4.00 am the club closed its doors. Outside it was still dark, however I could hear the sparrows, starlings and Indian Mynas beginning to stir. Given the state of our mutual arousal the need to have intense orgasmic sex was urgent. Outside in the alley we continued to smooch while fondling and caressing. Soon everyone was gone and it was just us in the alley. In the dark purple-blue shades of dawn just before sunrise when the moving shadows before first light start to play tricks with the mind we made love under tall palm trees beneath the early morning star-lit sky while lying on the dewy lawn in some garden near the harbour. High above the Indian Ocean in the east the morning star still shone brightly against the dark violet skies which can began turn into shades of pastel magenta at the edge of the horizon. Breaking out of a passionate clinging embrace I tried to pull away, I had to leave her. She was reluctant to let go of me and held onto me. Our lips still swollen from a night of love we began kissing each other once more. While getting back up onto our feet and smoothing out the folds and ripples from our rumpled dew-damp dresses she asked if I was Coloured. It was such a strange question, and I said yes. If she thought I was Coloured then I must be Coloured. I did not know what else to think or say, I definitely did not have the words to say that I was White, like Kate once said jokingly that I was actually Phoenician, but I wanted to be Coloured, and in the back of mind I wished that I was really Coloured, and it was obvious that in the hours of our physical intimacy she had not experienced me as a White woman, and possibly she had been with a White woman before. In her eyes I was Coloured, and I had denied my race again, once more I was experiencing my lack of fixed identity, my identity was again fluid, I was neither English nor Afrikaans, neither White nor Black, neither European nor African, I was overcome with a sense of otherness in relation to who I was, it was like in the gay nightclub in Paris, when I did in fact start pretending that I was the girl from Senegal who was going to be a fashion model in Paris, I bought into the fantasy, it was a lovely fantasy, I took ownership of that fantasy of being somebody else, a dark woman from Africa. Maybe this fluidity of identity like the shifting shades of the skies at dawn was a hidden blessing, a mixed blessing, but also a precious gift, and this gift of being a chameleon was something that I should cherish and thank God for. But in leaving her standing there alone I felt down to zero. The words of Joan Armatrading echoed in my mind. The sky was now beginning to blaze a fiery orange over the bluff, I turned and waved, and she was still standing there under the towering palm trees, a dark silhouette which merged and melted, blending into the colours that were slowly becoming visible with the rapidly fading away of the night, she waved back from the shadows of bushes and blooms as the thrushes scurried about the edge of the shrubbery. Bathed in the mid-morning sun I woke up refreshed with the fragrance of her body still on my skin like as if she was still lying next to me. I did not shower, I wanted her scent to linger on my body. 'Down to Zero' was still going through my head. 'Oh the feeling...' It was a lesbo lyric definitely.

Later that morning I joined Elsabe and her boyfriend on the beach at our usual spot where they had erected the umbrella. And also as usual for that week the two delectable young women in bikinis who were about my age were sunbathing close by. They had been camping at the same spot for most of the week. When we exchanged glances they smiled broadly and gave me a friendly wave. Elsabe noticed our exchange of greetings and wanted to know if I knew them. I answered that I had never met them before and that I thought that they were just being friendly because we had been seeing them the whole week at the same spot across from us. In the course of the morning they walked the short distance over to me and asked if I would like to join them for a swim. I closed the book by Radnitsky and covered it with my towel. As we walked to the sea one of them said: 'We saw you at the nightclub last night, we loved watching you dance, you and that other woman, both of you were such stunning dancers, we were spell bound, we could not keep our eyes off the pair of you, it was quite a show watching the pair of you'.

The penny dropped. They were the two young women I had seen walking ahead of me. They were the two women who had vanished down the cobbled alley so mysteriously into the night. They were partners in a romantic relationship, and also lawyers, well rather candidate attorneys at some big shot legal firm in Johannesburg. And they had also studied at Wits, and they had recognized me from their student days, and we shared so much, we had come from the same generation, the same Matric class of 1972. Three gay women cavorting together in the surf on North beach Durban, near the peer across from the Lido, what were the odds?

We agreed to meet for supper. Later that evening after supper while having drinks we reminisced about our undergraduate years at Wits and in due course the name of Carlos Cardoso cropped up in our conversations about what we remembered during our undergraduate years at Wits, and so on and so on. We had all fallen under the spell of the charismatic radical student leader Carlos Cardoso from Mozambique. It turned out that they were now involved in the firm's legal defence team in a number of ongoing political trials. We were kindred spirits brought together by chance. I have forgotten their names.

490. Designate cities of refuge and prepare routes of access—Deuteronomy 19:3

491

Her name was Nonhlanhla. She did not want to let me go, she held onto me with strong arms before the break of day. She feared that the rising sun was going to take me away from her forever, and it was so. We were wet from the dew, we were wet from love. We had tasted each other. Her arms were strong and I did not want to wash the scent of her body from my skin. Her name was Nonhlanhla. The towering palms supported the tent of darkness above our heads as we lay in each other's arms. The bluff lowered its horns like a giant piebald Nguni bull against the rising sun, but the red oxen pulled the sun from its deep sleep beneath the earth and they dragged the sun, ploughing the sky, scattering the stars, and in its fury it the rising sun drove the night away. As the stars slunk away one by one vanishing into the deep blue vault of the infinite sky Nonhlanhla's dark silhouette merged with the colours that started to fill the day with shafts of light laden with gold. At night I searched the streets of Durban for Nonhlanhla, but she was gone.

491. Break the neck of a calf by a stream following an unsolved murder—Deuteronomy 21:4

492

In January 1980 I drove back to Cape Town. I was not in a hurry to get back. Driving slowly through the Karoo while listening to taped music in the old faithful VW Beetle, thoughtfully taking in the vast arid landscape, meditating on my PhD, stopping frequently along the way. I made Beaufort West by nightfall and booked into a hotel. I was haunted by Nonhlanhla. I was advantaged and she was disadvantaged and powerless. Almost a month had passed and I still could not stop obsessing over her and her situation under apartheid. There could not be any genuine multiracialism while there was apartheid and capitalism, there could only be intense emotional pain, alienation, disempowerment and exploitation. There could never be any genuine non-racialism until every human irrespective of race was completely empowered. A genuine non-racial society could only be achieved in a classless society. As long as class divisions exist with respect to the ownership of means of production and the control of the state it would be impossible for a non-racial society to exist. The more I thought about my intimate experience with Nonhlanhla the more I realized that the real goals of the class struggle was not non-racialism or multiracialism or racial equality or equal opportunities for all races, these were bourgeois and liberal ideals, the goals of the class struggle was a classless society, and a classless society can only be brought through the full and genuine empowerment of every single black person in South African, and it was only through Communism that this could be fully achieved. I reminded myself that as a Communist I had to focus on the real goals of the class struggle which was the overthrowing of the existing capitalist order in South Africa, and this could only be achieved though the seizing of social, economic and political power, and only this will make building of socialism possible. I reminded myself that this is what I needed to focus on. Therefore I had to work through my own all too human guilt feelings regarding Nonhlanhla by refocusing, revising, reorientating, realigning and subordinating my emotionally clouded thinking about her to what was most important for her life. I had to be a revolutionary. And the work of a revolutionary involves securing the objectives of Nonhlanhla's class interests which is a classless society. Her very human needs could only be satisfied through the Communist struggle, and that this was the only way that I could express authentic or meaningful solidarity with her instead of succumbing to feelings of bourgeois White guilt and a sense of bourgeois moral wrong doing.

492. To neither work nor plant that river valley—Deuteronomy 21:4

493

Interlude and refrain: I have returned to the sanctuary of my childhood room in Hotazel. I have returned to my childhood home in Hotazel for the last time. My return to Hotazel is the beginning of a departure from Hotazel forever. A departure from so much. As a child Hotazel encapsulated an entire world, a world that shaped me and in real sense a Universe which made me the person that I became. It was a world of stark contrasts. A mining village inserted in a pristine Kalahari wilderness. A wilderness in which as a primary school girl I run wild. The social life of the mining village was centred round the recreation club, which we referred to as the rec with its cricket pitch, rugby field, swimming pool, pub and hall. The hall itself with its stage and projector room was a multi-purpose venue. It shared all the features of a school hall. It functioned as a theatre venue for amateur theatrics, as a dance hall, as a church and as a cinema. It functioned as a sports hall for badminton. It was used as a community centre in which enterprising women voluntarily organized ballet classes. My love of and interest in cinema was nurtured by the weekly movie nights that were organized at the rec. And then there was the rec swimming pool and swimming became my sport of choice in which I excelled at high school and which steered me into scuba diving. Hotazel made me physically and mentally strong. It made me into the lioness that I became as a young woman. It made me into the wild child that I became in young adulthood. In Hotazel I was left to my own devices as a child. I was free to roam, I roamed alone, far and wide into the surrounding Kalahari savannah bush and scrubland, sometime for the entire day, returning home in the late afternoon.

And then there was the violence of Hotazel, the drunken fights in the rec pub over women and infidelity. The predominantly Afrikaans community in Hotazel were religious and politically conservative and racist. But at the same time it was a mining community racked by infidelity and alcoholism. I grew up in home that was free of alcohol. My mother and father were teetotallers. My grandparents were also teetotallers. Drinking was frowned upon by my family.

493. Not to allow pitfalls and obstacles to remain on your property—Deuteronomy 22:8

494

I leave the door of my room slightly ajar as a sign that my parents are welcome to enter. But they always knock respectfully before entering. Now my mother knocks on the door. She pushes it open. She smiles and there is a loving tenderness in her deportment towards me. We have become reconciled and we are fast becoming best friends. My mother is discovering me as a daughter and I am discovering her as a mother. She is carrying a shoe box. She sits down on the bed with shoe box on her lap and lifts the lid. It is filled with all the postcards that I have sent them over the years. She has saved every one. I am astonished and delighted as we examine and re-read each postcard. All the postcards that I had sent from Spain, Italy and France while on my overseas holiday with Kate have been saved.

494. Make a guard rail around flat roofs—Deuteronomy 22:8

495

What triggered the development of the intellectual movement which created the literary and artist products that became the symbolic expression of the thing or phenomenon that we call Modernism? Modernist literature emerged in the late nineteenth century following the establishment of Darwin's theory of evolution of species by natural selection and also following other scientific discoveries, so it would be safe to conclude that it was the major advances in science which constituted the watershed or the cultural crisis resulted in the development of the thing we call Modernism. Modernism is the symbolic hallmark of an age characterised by tumultuous crisis in the self-understanding or comprehension of sense, intelligibility, meaning, purpose and significance regarding the nature of man and the nature of the Universe. Modernism in literary and artistic expression also emerged as a symbolic response to the fiery destabilizing cauldron of the industrial revolution which in turn gave rise to the development of modern capitalism, colonialism and the psycho-social-political-economic-cultural crises which these developments triggered. Modernism marks the self-alienation and the self-exile of man. The forces which triggered the development of thing or phenomenon that we identify as modernism were generated by the thing that which can identified as the phenomenon of Modernity. Modernism is not the same thing as Modernity. Modernism is the symptoms of negative effects of Modernity. Modernity is the product of successes of science and technology.

As a Communist I don't find the postmodernist discourse convincing or credible. A historical case can be made for the fact that the emergence of postmodernism as a full blown phenomenon was preceded by long period of gestation. But if we wish to mark its origins in terms of a singularity, which is in terms of singular originating event discernible by a flash of light, or an explosion in time and space, as the event which marked the beginnings of the flood of postmodernist outpourings then we need look no further than the launching of Lyotard's pamphlet.

His little book set the stage for the exposition of the grand postmodernist narrative with all its themes, views and opinions which transformed into a respectable intellectual movement in the academic playground.

Novelty and innovation are forces of modernity. Transience change ephemerality.

495. Not to put a stumbling block before a blind man (nor give harmful advice)--Leviticus 19:14

496

Truth supervenes on Being. The truth is not self-evident. The Universe is intelligible. What makes the Universe intelligible? Its predictability and its predictability being explainable in terms of natural laws, and it is this which makes the Universe intelligible. Is this statement true? Yes it is true? Is it self-evidently true? No it is not self-evidently true. Can it be shown to be self-evidently true? No it cannot be shown to be self-evidently true. What does it mean for something to be self-evidently true without being an empty tautology? In the heyday of positivism it was sufficient for a statement to have meaning if the truth conditions for its verification could be shown otherwise the statement was meaningless. This was the verificationalist theory of meaning. What is the connection between meaning and truth? Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' epitomises the modernist moment in analytical philosophy. In characteristically modernist fashion the 'Tractatus' creates the modernist dualistic tension or abyss between empirically verifiable 'sayable' statements of 'facticity' which can be spelt out in terms of descriptions or pictures in the form of this-worldly-state-of-affairs on the one hand and 'meaning' in terms what is the Totality or 'Ultimate Significance' on the other hand. This abyss between facticity and the un-utterable Ultimate significance of the facts as they stand before us captures the essence the Modernist Moment. To say something significant and truthfully about something to someone faces an unspeakable abyss in modernism. What is sayable is necessarily drained of all meaning – this is the Modernist Moment, and in this Moment or Movement therefore whatever is 'sayable' has no self-evident or intelligible Ultimacy in terms of meaning or significance. It does not point to anything except the absurdity of the unintelligible, or intelligible for that matter, because what appears to be intelligible becomes the absurd in the face of the impossibility of the intelligible especially when an attempt is made to interrogate its significance, or its source or ground of significance, which would make something like the Universe intelligible. Modernist themes in art and literature polarized into irreconcilable dichotomies of the mystical versus the rational, fact versus norm and Mythos versus Logos. With its flight from Platonism via the unsayable of the Tractatus into emotivism and expressionism, modernism final dissolution brings it to the dead end of fascination with the primitive and the savage. Modernism is also a reaction against the rationality and intelligibility which is clearly evident in the makeup of the Universe as disclosed by science, meaning the makeup that has been unveiled by science in spite of the disenchanting secularity of the physicalism, materialism and naturalism of modern science. Modernism represents a flight from the inevitable unavoidability of the question of metaphysical realism, a problem which has been continually resuscitated and brought to the surface by modern science, and it is a problem that will not go away so long as science continues its triumphant march, the question of metaphysical realism will never go away. In this sense there is a tension between the 'atheism' of the art and literature of modernism and the 'theological question' arising as a consequence of the rampant 'advances' of the various forms of modernity such as has been embodied in modern science and technology. In its reaction to modernity, modernism in the form of art and literature represents a flight from society and the world into the private and intimate but futile refuge of the individual's personal feelings, emotions, consciousness, intuitions and thoughts for the sake of their own value and for nothing more. This kind of literary or artistic reaction against modernity finds exemplary expression in the work of writers such as Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett. As forms of artist expression it is elitist and politically it is quietist. Again, in its attempt to be progressive Modernism sought an escape into voluntarism and populism embracing all kinds of whimsical utopian ideals in the form of the various existentialisms and in idiosyncratic readings of Nietzsche which paved the way for postmodernism. 496. Help another remove the load from a beast which can no longer carry it—Exodus 23:5

497

Modernism, Postmodernism and Grand Narratives

Of course, contrary to the prevailing scholarly opinions, Grand Narratives are not ideological constructions, they exist as scientific or realistic accounts of 'natural life histories', as fully justifiable accounts of the how, what and why regarding the evolution and existence of the various arrangements and systems of sociality in the animal kingdom. In the case of humans we have justifiable accounts or to use a stronger and more controversial word we have scientifically based credible Narratives regarding the 'Essential' features of the 'Natural Life History' of humans, especially regarding the how, what and why of arrangements and systems of Human Sociality since the evolutionary dawn of hominids. The Story has existed as a Grand Self-Correcting Narrative in the form of countless writings and speech events for everyone to read or hear. The natural history of humanity lies as an open book before us to read. To question or deny this would be the greatest evil. The post-Neolithic is a story of social stratification, hierarchicalization of social domination, of centralization of power in the hands of an ever shrinking self-serving elite, of differential access to privileges and benefits, of mass disempowerment, of mass dispossession, of mass incapacitation, of mass control, of mass oppression, of mass repression, of mass exploitation, of mass expropriation, of mass loss of autonomy and mass loss of freedom. Can this be denied? No of course not. This has been the prevailing truth of the post-Palaeolithic history of humankind. What about the 'prehistorical narrative' of Palaeolithic human sociality? We have a very good idea regarding the narrative of the prehistory of humanity which includes the evolution of the forms of sociality which fulfilled the critical adaptive functions that made the emergence of modern humans possible. 497. Help others load their beast—Deuteronomy 22:4

498

Relativism versus Rationalism

We cannot define what knowledge is without having any idea of the nature of truth, for example, the definition of knowledge is based in one way or another on the idea of true belief or on what makes a belief true. A definition of knowledge is vacuous if it is not based on any ideas concerning the nature of truth or on any ideas regarding the processes by means of which truth can be established. These processes are necessarily cognitive because they entail various mental or mindful or conscious activities. We usually associate cognitive capacities or what can called intelligence with the following: remembering, perceiving, observing, hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling, judgement, deliberating, reasoning, thinking, reflecting, inferring, puzzling and solution finding or problem solving. Cognition is the mental processes or conscious processes or experiential processes by means of which beliefs or knowledge are acquired. The synonyms of cognition include: perception, discernment, awareness, apprehension, learning, understanding, comprehension, enlightenment, insight, intelligence, reason, reasoning, thinking and so on. To sum up, cognition refers to the mental actions or processes or capacities or abilities for acquiring knowledge and understanding through the interactions of thought, reflection, and experience. Experience is the ultimate source of knowledge about the nature of reality. Without any experience of the world there can be no knowledge of the world. Experiences are mediated through the senses, so cognition or the conscious mental processes that give rise to purposeful or intelligent, action or response orientated thinking, understanding, reflection or comprehension are necessarily dependent on the senses or sense perceptions or sense experience. Purposeful or intelligent action and response orientated thinking or mental activity depends on the cognitive capacity or faculty for discursive reasoning, where discursive reasoning includes the ability for logical inference (deductive or inductive), judgement and deliberation. What do I mean by discursive reasoning? To repeat, discursive reasoning involves the logical stepwise evidential based inference from valid premises to a valid conclusions, a processes which depends on deliberation and judgement. Beliefs which are secured by discursive reasoning are more credible than beliefs imposed by tradition, custom, propaganda or indoctrination.

With regard to the actual contents of beliefs, relativists in the guise of either the anthropologist or the sociologist of knowledge are usually only interested in identifying the nature of the causes responsible for making one belief more credible than the opposing beliefs irrespective of whether the beliefs are true or false. Various psycho-social forces such as conditioning, influence, persuasion, indoctrination or propaganda function as causes for inducing beliefs. The credibility of these beliefs are not secured through a process of discursive reasoning involving evidence, inference, deliberation and rules of logic, a process which conforms to justifiable or defensible standards of rationality. The various anthropological or sociological causes or forces by virtue of which beliefs are rendered credible have their origins in various kinds of institutions. The basis of their persuasive powers are social or institutional rather than rational. Various forms of social institutions, especially those which have a religious nature, have the capacity to exert the necessary persuasion or influence necessary for beliefs to be rendered credible independent of any rational validation. Denying the possibility for the rational validation of beliefs, a relativist would argue that two opposing beliefs should be treated as equivalent in terms of their credibility because their 'validity' does not depend on evidential based discursive reason but solely on the strength of the persuasive powers that the respective social or religious institutions are able to muster and exert on their members. Furthermore, the relativist would argue that the nature of rationality or its binding objective conceptualization cannot be non-arbitrarily and independently established outside of an institutional framework. The standards of rationality are themselves the products of institutional persuasion, indoctrination and propaganda by institutions. For example, it is proposed by the relativist that in deciding in favour of one belief over an opposing one, the rationalist appeals to reason or logical inference in the form of deductive or inductive explanations, or to ideas of truth such as the correspondence theory of truth, or to empirical evidence or to observation, as the only means available for validating a belief. The relativist would argue that all of the so-called rational means for validating belief are themselves forms of institutionalized causes of belief. They are forms of persuasive powers or persuasive influences. The relativist insists that there are no bare validity claims or truth claims which are self-evidently obvious, nor can the justification of a truth claim escape circular argumentation or an infinite regress. Thus it is argued that the rationalist fails to make his case against the relativist, especially in her guise as sociologist of knowledge. Seen from this perspective the case that the rationalist is making with regard to justifying claims regarding the truth or falsity of a belief is formally equivalent to what the sociologist of knowledge perceives as just another kind of cause enrolled to secure the credibility of beliefs.

The causes which make belief credible have an institutional origin in the broadest sociological or anthropological sense. They argue that causes of belief in the form of ideas of validity or evidence or rational arguments or deductive explanations are equivalent to institutionally based causes which render beliefs credible. It appears that no set of core beliefs exist which could provide a bridgehead between opposing beliefs, which would allow them to be compared and contrasted in terms of their relative strengths or powers in causing credibility. The operative word here is cause rather than rationality, where what causes something to be credible is reducible to powers of persuasion rather than appeals to reason. This idea of the nature of causes which make a belief credible invites ideas of power or strength as the reason for one belief being more appealing than the opposing belief. If this is the case then it would be impossible to separation rationality from irrationality when it comes to the causes of credibility of beliefs. This would be my argument against the symmetry of opposing beliefs.

Relativism continued:

Relativism as a strategy for dealing with the meaning, significance and putative solutions or non-solutions to philosophical question or problems, also has wider implications for our appreciation of not only the significance, status and standing of science but also for other fields of intellectual or academic endeavour, all of which rest their truth claims on assumptions regarding the nature of rationality, reason and reality. The claim that there exists no obligatory standards of rationality is a foundational relativist premise. Strictly speaking the validity of any claim cannot be established on rational grounds or by means of inference or discursive or deliberative reasoning. To put it bluntly, without any further explanation or qualification, from a relativist perspective, there is no such thing as objective validity, there are no rational, inferential or discursive grounds for something being valid tout court. Something is valid only in relation to something else such as rules and conventions in the form of beliefs or traditions or customs or culture or religion or history or any kind of perspective. Something being valid is always contingent on a rule or convention or perspective or tradition or belief, but never in terms of rationally or inferentially grounded necessity. With regard to articulating the meaning and significance of various kinds of claims, whether they be moral, philosophical, theological or scientific, or even putative truth claims, all relativist strategies used in the evaluation of the status of claims are rule based. For simplicity, something (a claim about something) being rule based includes being based on convention, beliefs, traditions, socialization, customs, cultural norms or indoctrination. A claim is valid solely in terms of contingent rules, in the form of beliefs, habits, conventions, norms, and customs and so on. In other words a claim is valid relative to some set of rules. The credibility or validity of claims or beliefs being solely rule dependent is the essence of relativism. Any conception of the nature of reality hinges on rules in the form of convention and custom. Rules take precedence over discursive reasoning or rational considerations. Conforming to rules or observance of rules or obedience to the authority of rules establishes what is valid, what is credible and what is permissible, and therefore whatever is good and true. In terms of the rules one choses or in relation to rules within which one lives, it is permissible, valid and credible to state on the one hand that the Devil did not exist in the Soviet Union or the People Republic of China, but at the same time, it is permissible, valid and credible that the Devil is very much alive in Saudi Arabia or Iran, it is all dependent on the set of rules which work for you. Also in relation to or relative to the set of the rules one holds, it is permissible to claim that both of the following statements are equally credible and valid: Adam is a mythical figure having no connection with space and time or Adam as the first Muslim and first prophet of Islam existed in space and time, and strode the earth as a historical person who happened to be sixty cubits tall (90 feet or 27.432 m). While it is seemingly 'paradigmatically' permissible for one to claim that Adam was the first Muslim and prophet of Islam, however what one is really claiming is that it is permissible, valid and credible for one who is living according to the rules of Islam to claim that Adam was the first Muslin and prophet of Islam. In the same way it is permissible, valid and credible to say 'the Devil tempted me' if the rules according to the world in which I live permit me to make this claim. However, while these claims are made permissible, credible and valid within a given paradigm, this does not make them true. In relativist arguments, rules in the form of a convention, tradition or custom cannot operate as truth-makers. The hallmarks of the relativist strategy regarding the permissibility and validity of claims can be characterized as follows: In reality, the following state of affairs objectively holds for the relativist regarding what is actually going on when a claim is being made (Adam is the first Muslim). The relativist needs be mindful or conscious of the fact that she is obeying or observing relativist rules when making her relativist claims regarding her own beliefs and the beliefs of her subjects. She needs to be mindful when she is saying that something is the case, WITH NOTHING ELSE BEING THE CASE, in the instances where the rules of relativism permits her and her subject to make certain claims about something. With nothing else being the case, the rules of relativism permit her to say things or make all kinds of claims which are 'valid' and therefore credible and permissible, but only valid in relation to the world she and her subject lives in or in relationship to some operative paradigm. In other words the claims are valid only in relationship to rules and conventions of some paradigm. With nothing else being the case, what has been said is taken to be 'valid' only in relation to the rules, conventions, customs, traditions, cultural norms, belief systems, revelation, history, brain-washing and indoctrination associated with the world she lives in. This summarizes the 'rule of relativity' which states that all 'truth claims' are only credible or valid or permissible relative to a system of rules and conventions, and so on, which in turn are part and parcel of the world or paradigm which one happens to be living in. The rule of relativity is not supposed to be relative to itself, which means the rule of relativity represents an arbitrary degree and therefore has no force, it cannot rule on any statement regarding something not being the case or something being the case. Which means when anyone tries to talk about the relativity of all knowledge it is impossible to state whether any claim in this regard is true or false. In this sense arguments for the relativity of knowledge cannot escape running into the problem of being a self-reference paradox. Which also means that it is impossible to be a consistent relativist. Relativist arguments inevitably become self-defeating because they cannot escape an implicit dependence on discursive reasoning, and consequently appeals to rational standards of argumentation or logic in the form of the rule of non-contradiction. In the end relativistic attacks on the theory of knowledge ineluctably end up making self-defeating concessions to the existence of eternal norms of rationality.

Going off on a tangent:

It is important to go back to the proviso of 'nothing else being the case'. What if 'nothing else being the case' happens to be the case in reality? Then the paradigmatic rules, conventions, customs, habits, cultural norms, traditions, belief systems, indoctrination and so on, should in an ideal world no longer have any objective or binding force because they would be invalid, even if the relativist or her subject who happens to be bound by the rules are unaware of this. The relativist originally assumed that nothing else was the case. This means that the relativist was originally operating under a knowledge deficit. It also means that the relativist's subject was also operating under a knowledge deficit. The relativist may be practising her relativism as a psychologist or sociologist or anthropologist or political scientist. In her role as a psychologist or sociologist or anthropologist or political scientist, it is only by means of discursive reasoning and application of rational norms and standards that she may discover that she and her subject have a deficit of knowledge. Once this happens the relativist's position begins to unravel. Her position as a relativist becomes untenable the moment she is able to differentiate between true and false belief. Following her enlightenment she is able to present rational arguments that the rules and beliefs which inform her subject regarding the nature of reality are in fact false. The relativist will have to revise her own beliefs regarding the epistemic status of discursive reasoning and the standards of rationality.

De-colonization of the mind could become inadvertently an oppressive, regressive and anti-modernity exercise:

498. Not to leave others distraught with their burdens (but to help either load or unload)--Deuteronomy 22:4

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Metaphysics generally deals with ontology or ontological questions. Ontological questions arise in scientific and philosophical inquiries concerned with the essential nature of things which exist in one form or another. Things can exist as empirically accessible entities or as mentally accessible abstract non-empirical entities in the form of logical propositions or mathematical theories. In short, ontology is concerned with questions regarding the existence and essential nature of various kinds of things. A thing could also be a state-of-affairs. Scientific and philosophical knowledge of what kinds of things exist and on what is the nature of the things that do in fact exist is always based on empirical evidence or the proofs of logic or the proofs of mathematics or the inferences of reason. And empirical evidence is always rooted in perception, or more broadly expressed, in experience. Metaphysics deals with necessary truths and necessary truths from a Kantian perspective are assumed to be a priori truths, and by definition, a prior truths are truth claims that do not depend on empirical evidence for their justification or for establishing their certitude.

Ultimately metaphysics is about the nature of Reality or what is ultimately Real. Also the ultimacy of metaphysics regarding what is ultimately Real, which essentially embraces everything that falls under the rubric of ontology, cannot be extricated from the concerns of saying something about something to someone. Metaphysics is deeply and inextricable entangled in determining or arguing what is ultimately sayable about anything. Everyone who has something to say about anything is a metaphysician. No one can escape this self-reference paradox in the critique of metaphysics, in the same way no one can be a logically consistent relativist or sceptic. These conditions have been imposed upon us by the essential nature of the Universe which has shaped the Human World in which we live, exist and have our being, we do not have a choice in the matter, this is our Reality. It is impossible to say anything meaningful or significant about anything without at the same time affirming or assuming or presupposing some kind of metaphysics. There can be no end to metaphysics. There exist only two options: one is trapped into either articulating a bad or good metaphysics. We can equate bad with false and good as converging onto the Truth asymptotically through a self-correcting exercise of Reason. 499. Buy and sell according to Torah law—Leviticus 25:14

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The Peoples War

While sitting in detention, there is no better time than now to become a student of the people's war. How do teach the people about the people's war. Where does one start the course and what is the curriculum? What is the prescribed reading? And how does one merge theory and praxis. Must one join a political party? Compulsory reading should include biological evolution, molecular biology, genome evolution, human evolution, palaeo - anthropology and the evolution of human sociality. Of course there is Plato, Hegel and Marx, and also Lenin and Trotsky, and don't forget Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason as essential co-reading with literature on the evolution of human sociality. A physicalist Theory of mind is essential reading and readings on naturalistic or physicalist metaphysics are necessarily compulsory. 500. Not to overcharge or underpay for an article—Leviticus 25:14

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The Lineage of Influences

The intellectual influences that shaped the thinking of Darwin and Marx should be of interest to the student of revolution and the people' war activist. Darwin's 'The Origin of the Species' and Marx's 'Capital' did not drop out of the sky like some heavenly revelation. To use a Derridian metaphor - they have their 'traces' or 'lineages'. Darwin's subversive ideas have their lineage in the literature of his times, and they were Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. And of course we all know that the books that Karl Marx read included Adam Smith, Ricardo, Feuerbach, Hegel and so on. 501. Not to insult or harm anybody with words—Leviticus 25:17

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What is Civilization?

Currently the papers and academic works of a number of scientists including paleo-anthropologists are providing grounds for challenging the accepted wisdom regarding the origin and nature of the phenomenon we call Civilization, which is something that began quite recently, only 10 000 years or so ago. Before that modern humans were around for 260 000 years and during that time they were hardly savages or barbarians, they were intellectually very sophisticated, and they had to be in order to survive for so long as hunter-gathers. Given these new perspectives on the long-run of human 'pre-history' the time has dawned to rethink the real nature of civilization and the post-Neolithic forms of settled and city based sociality. This will lead to an intellectual and revolutionary revitalization of historical materialism and its relevance to the revolutionary destruction of post-Neolithic civilization and the building of anarcho-communism. 502. Not to cheat a sincere convert monetarily—Exodus 22:20

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Words and things. Words and objects. Predicates and substance. Sexual morality

On Hegel, Idealism, the Dialectic, Materialism, Realism, Thinking, Being, Desire, Eros, Reason, Rationality, Totalization, Totality, Ultimate, and the Absolute. Finding our way to the meaning the Dialectic. How do we conceive the Dialectic or Dialectical Reason and various Materialisms? What exactly is Dialectical Materialism and how could it be scientific? Are all these issues or problematics reducible to how we conceive or understand or explain the relationship between 'thinking' and 'being'? Yes! In idealism or idealist thinking something that is conceived as more real is contrasted with something that is considered to be less real. In this sense idealism is inescapably dualistic. In idealism whenever someone says something about something to someone a dualistic contrast between the more real and the less real is usually being made, and in this sense the idealistic relationship between thinking and being is necessarily dualistic. At its most starkest and radical articulations, the idealistic relationship between thinking and being is based on dualisms that have the following forms of articulations: An external, autonomous and independent material reality does not actually exist out there (there is no reality to the statement: 'this is my body'), nothing exists other than our sensations or sense perceptions, ideas and thoughts, and there is no external reality that corresponds to or mirrors or reflects or imposes itself on our sensations, ideas and thoughts. The only things that are 'real' or immediate are our sensations, ideas and thoughts. We can know nothing more than this, and any intuitions about some putative external-independent-material-reality possessing powers, predispositions, properties, relationships and essences are illusionary and baseless. The only things we know anything about are appearances, which are the objects of sense perception. We only have our sense experiences to go on. This means we can have no direct unmediated knowledge of the external Universe or kind of external objects independently of what our body experiences. What our body experiences is mediated by, or brought about by means of our sensory apparatus. All empirical knowledge of the external Universe is mediated by sense experiences, by the excitation or stimulus of our sense organs. Empirical knowledge is derived from the perceptions, but these perceptions are not of things-in-themselves, the things which perceive are only appearances. According to an idealism, the appearances or impressions of objects that we become consciously aware of as sensations or sensory impressions are not identical or truthful representations of the actual essential nature of external objects. Apparently the actual nature of external objects as things-existing-in-themselves-independent-of-being-objects-of-acts-of-perception are empirically inaccessible. So if a real external world does exists, it is unknowable, and it is this idea which captures the essence of the relationship between being and thinking that is articulated within idealism. Of course there are different kinds or different expressions or articulations of idealism, but they all share similar ideas and preconceptions about the nature of the relationship between thinking and being. They are just different versions of the same thing, different ways of casting the dichotomy or dualism between the more real and the less real. The ideal world, which exists in the mind in the form ideas, mental images and thoughts is taken to be more real than what is believed to be an imaginary or illusionary world existing out there or outside the mind. If there is an external world, it exists only as an illusionary world of appearances and shadows. In direct contrast to this idea, which is characteristic of idealism, materialism believes that the external material world existing out there is something which is real, accessible and knowable, and which is not illusionary or only a world of appearances and shadows. Ultimately materialism denies that there is an inaccessible reality lurking behind the appearances of things existing out there. In other words there is no dichotomy between appearance of things and the empirically inaccessible world of the thing-in-itself.

Simply put: the attainment of the Absolute or Ultimate knowledge of the Universe in its Totality, requires the dialectical over-coming of dichotomies or dualisms or 'contradictions' such as the real versus the ideal, freedom versus necessity, the one versus the many, being versus becoming, individual autonomy versus communal solidarity, mind versus matter, appearance versus reality, freedom versus determinism, morality versus determinism, nominalism versus realism, the finite versus the infinite, the human versus the divine, nature versus grace, the temporal versus the eternal, the I versus the natural self, the self versus the subject, subject versus object, slave versus master, and so on and so on. It is the desire of Reason to find satisfaction by overcoming constraints in the form dualism that block the way to the attainment of the Absolute. Eros is the desire of Reason. Eros is Reason's desire to possess, to appropriate, to become One with the Real, in a Dialectical Totalization which overcomes the dualism between the more real and the less real. The One is a oneness of identity, an identity in the sense of recognition, understanding and comprehension, that is realized in a subjective or conscious experience of rationality, in which the Mind mirrors, reflects, and recognizes in a mutually reciprocal movement the rationality and reason existing immanently in Nature. This is the constant and revolutionary movement of a self-correcting convergence onto the nature of Truth which we see already exemplified in science. In this sense science is the self-correcting exercise of dialectical reason in which the immanent rationality of reality, of Nature or the Universe in comprehended, in a movement that overcomes the dualisms between the more real and the less real, this is the Dialectic. The Dialectic is the movement of thought or thinking or mind or conscious reflection that results in the grasping, the comprehension and the understanding of Reality by overcoming dualisms or dichotomies or oppositions or contradictions or differences between the more real and the less real. In this revolutionary self-correcting movement of discovery the rationality corresponding intelligibility Nature or the Universe increases, becoming fixed or established as an indubitable fact, even a brute fact, as something being the case beyond any doubt. However, this recognizable rationality or intelligibility is ultimately not self-explanatory. Any attempt to explain or demonstrate why the Universe is rational or intelligible cannot escape the infinite regress, the self-reference paradox and logical contradictions. The Universe is haunted by a mystery in the shape of its intelligibility. This makes the idea that the Universe is causally closed completely unwarranted. The existence of a rational and intelligible Universe is a mystery. To phrase it strongly in metaphysical and theological terms the reason for the existence of a rational and intelligible Universe is a mystery that defies any kind of empirical resolution. Empiricism can take us so far but no further. Empiricism cannot provide the 'Ultimate Explanation' for the 'Ultimate Why Question' for something being the case in Nature or the Universe. In this sense, from an empirical point of view the rationality and intelligibility of the Universe is not self-explanatory. 503. Not to insult or harm a sincere convert with words—Exodus 22:20

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In general explanations provide answers for 'why questions'. Strictly speaking in science causal explanations having the general form of deductive-nomological arguments are the only genuine explanations we can offer for occurrence of natural phenomena in the Nature. The question of why the Universe is rational and intelligible is ultimately unexplainable in terms of material or physical causality in the form of a covering-law explanation. 504. Purchase a Hebrew slave in accordance with the prescribed laws—Exodus 21:2

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In year nineteen seventy five, in the final year of my BSc I took Philosophy of Science as my compulsory art subject. Our introductory lectures covered explanation, confirmation, deduction and induction. The prescribed textbook for the short introductory component of the course before got onto the Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend was the little book by Lambert and Brittan called 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science'. In chapter 3, page 24, an explanation was defined as an answer to a 'why' question. And in science a why question is usually answered with so-called causal explanation which usually has the form of a deductive-nomological model explanation or a covering-law explanation in over words.

'Why did the string break?' If a weight heavier than the characteristic weight is attached to a hanging string which is characterized a given thickness, material composition and tensile strength the string will break. This statement represents a law of nature. The explanation giving reasons and conditions which constitutes a deductive nomological argument for why a hanging string will break when a certain weight is attached to it, represents a causal explanation or a covering law explanation, involving deductive subsumption under natural laws and given premises. Natural Laws can be viewed as statements which express a generalizations regarding regularities or uniformities of Nature.

We are able to distinguish accidental generalizations from law-like generalizations by arguing that law-like generalizations support counterfactual conditions whereas accidental generalization do not. This has been made clear by Nelson Goodman. Also if a law-like generalization can be distinguished from accidental generations by being projectable, that is, the status of law-like generalization in regard to their continual applicability into the future remains unchanged, then what is that makes a law-like generalization projectable? Why is it projectable into the future, why should it continue to hold in the future? We have no logical grounds for believing that law-like generalization or even well-established laws of nature should or will continue to hold in the future. Why should they hold in the future? We cannot find a logical reason for the fact that should hold in the future? This one fact that cannot be established. This is the problem of inductive logic. However, the Universe is only intelligible so long as the laws of nature continue to hold in the future, and thereby have the nature of being time invariant. That belief in the intelligibility of the Universe in the sense that law-like generals or laws of nature will remain time invariant is an act of faith. If the necessary conditions for the intelligibility of the Universe depends on the time invariant nature of the laws of nature and we if don't know why or understand how this invariance is established or maintained or sustained, then the belief that the Universe will continue to be intelligible in the future rests on an act of faith. We believe that is the prevailing and enduring reality regarding the essential nature of the Universe. 505. Not to sell him as a slave is sold—Leviticus 25:42

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It is a big jump to propose in this connection that God 'is' the intelligibility of the Universe, which is the same as saying that God 'is' what makes the Universe intelligible. I also believe with good reasons that the intelligibility of the Universe is not self-caused. And to repeat another recurrent refrain in my memoirs: the intelligibility of the Universe is not self-explanatory. The non-religious idea of the possibility of the Good Society which is synonymous with Communism is rooted in the intelligibility of the Universe, which in turn functions as the Natural Conditions of Possibility for the realization of the Good Society. This possibility is built into the essential Nature of the Universe, it is grounded in the intrinsic immanent rationality evident in the essential nature of the material and physical realm which constitutes the Cosmos. In other words the very stuff of the Universe is endowed with powers, qualities, properties, dispositions, capacities and relationships which not only make the Universe intelligible to reason and but equips the stuff of the Universe with the capacities for the realization of infinite possibilities, including conscious agency and the realizability of the Good Society. The Universe in-itself is not a Manichean realm. In other the words the stuff of the Universe is neither good nor bad in-itself.

But having said all of this, it needs to be fully comprehended that dialectically speaking religion in the broadest sense is a totalizing social phenomenon. Dialectically speaking religion in the broadest sense is a human created product. It is a product of man's (unfortunately I have to speak generically of human by using the noun 'man') creative imagination, and man in turn is the social product of the very religion that he has created. This is the essence of the Hegelian dialectic and also the dialectic of Marx as he elaborated in his 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'. But religion is a very specific kind of totalizing phenomenon when viewed from a dialectical perspective. As at totalizing social phenomenon religion the essential nature of its totalization of human life can be grasped or understood as a 'closing-off' of the human world through the erection or creation of all kinds of boundaries at every level of human experience and existence, boundaries which narrow the human horizon of existence and experience, boundaries which strangle to death the infinite possibilities of human experience and human existence. Unlike a non-theistic religion such Buddhism, religion in its so-called monotheistic Abrahamic historical manifestations, has essentially been a violent tumultuous social phenomenon. It feeds on the fear of the beast within the self, the fear is always of its own self, of its liabilities, of its culpableness. The self as subject experiences itself in the role of a moral agent. A moral agent constantly facing the terrifying possibility that it has incurred a violation or a transgression. At every turn, in every action, the self is confronted by what it perceives as the ordinances of God's divinely imposed moral order for the governance of every act or every action, this fear boils within the inner core of his or her being. The self yearns for a state of blamelessness, for a state of innocence. It yearns for that state where it once rested naked in the bosom of nature as a beast among beasts. But it cannot go back to that state. It cannot go back because now possesses knowledge of everything, and it may get decided to also eat from the tree of everlasting life, so the man and woman were banished from the garden. They were banished, they were forced into a state of exile because they now possessed a knowledge of good and evil. Why good and evil? What is the use of having a knowledge of good and evil? What is the use of having a knowledge of evil? Did evil pre-exist the first act of evil in the form of disobedience? Maybe it is necessary for evil to exist. But what does knowledge of good and evil really signifies? It signifies knowledge of the Ultimate, a knowledge of the Totality. Good and evil is a metaphor for everything that can be know and only God can know everything because God is not only the source of everything, God is everything. And the serpent was craftier than any of the creatures that inhabited the garden. The serpent told her that they would not die. Was the serpent lying? And yet in the garden stood the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and no beast ate of its fruit. Why was it planted in the garden in the first place? The story provides no reasons no answers. This makes it indeed a very strange story, yet the story was a product of human imagination, it was invented by man, for some purpose. We can only guess why the story was invented. It was an ancient story that had undergone uncountable revisions until it was became fixed in the form of a beautiful myth in the Book of Genesis. And the myth was beautiful to all who heard it or read it, because it narrated a sublime and mysterious irony, and all fiction speaks the truth dialectically in the form of irony. And the myth was told and re-old for hundreds and hundreds of years until it had diffused to every corner of the Middle East, and had become common knowledge to all, including the highest and the most lowly, the educated and the uneducated, the literate and the illiterate, and then one day a man come along and decided to change the story so that it would fit into another totalizing narrative. The man did know that the original story was a myth, and that it had been invented by an imaginative story teller in the deep past. And the man could not have known that Adam and Eve never actually existed as real historical people in real space and time. The man could not have known that Adam and Eve were not the actual ancestors of all humanity. The man could not have known that humanity descended from a common ape-like ancestor that humans shared with all the other primates. The man could not have known that humans belonged to the animal kingdom and were phylogenetically related to all the multicellular animals belonging to the metazoan. The man decided to make Adam the first prophet, the first believer and practitioner of a new religion of which he would be the leader and chief proponent. But that is another story in the unfolding drama of the history of monotheism.

And soon different kinds of monotheism evolved. And one kind of monotheism made another form of monotheism to vanish. And the different monotheism were said to embody similar belief systems and so they were placed in the genus of Abrahamic monotheism. And as the different monotheisms like giant dinosaurs began to devour each other, everywhere the level of anxiety increased, and there was moral panic throughout the world, and there was great alarm that the hard-and-violently-won-order that was governing existing social arrangements throughout the world was under a grave threat from different adversaries coming from all directions. And hence in order to protect the hard-won-order, there was an urgent need to identify what was forbidden, and the building of walls round the forbidden began in earnest, and the unrelenting-incumbent-urgency to erect cognitive, mental, emotional, psychological, sexual, social, economic, and political boundaries, boundaries which could not be transgressed or breached without violating religious sensibilities, sensibilities that were cleverly kept alive by the constant fear of a God's violent wrath and punishment in everlasting hell. And so, whenever a transgression of any boundary was committed, the offence was to be dealt with the violently. And the adversaries of the hard-won order were brutally and cruelly slain in a spectacle that was so bloody that it would discourage all pretenders who wished to destabilize the hard-won-order and the loot the bounty that had fallen into the laps of those who ruled the hard-won-order.

The Social Setting of Beliefs: Historically established religious belief systems or religious paradigms based on ideas regarding the nature and will of God have been imposed with the threat of violence on the populations of various political regimes that bear the name of a religion as a mark of their national, cultural, social and political identity. The enforcement of religious belief systems based on the ruling religious paradigm could only be achieved through threats of violence. For this reason the enforcement of religious compliance necessitated that the means of violence or the instruments of violence be built into the institutional apparatus of the various societal governing structures, including the family. With the constant threat of violence against non-conformity, conformity to the ruling or prevailing religious paradigms could only be secured through a process of self-monitoring, societal monitoring, surveillance, and through the exercising of official oversight on private and social behaviours. This meant that every individual was co-opted as an agent of violence. In this dialectic of violence the religious system was a product of the believer and in turn the believer was a product of the religious system. Pejoratively speaking the faithful adherence to the ruling religious belief system was secured dialectically by an enabling social environment, where adherence is incentivized through threats of violence. Violence is conducive to religious conformity.

The dialectic of violence underlying the life based on the observance or practice of religious beliefs ensures the existence, perpetuation, maintenance or persistence of a regime that exists by virtue of the violence of a totalizing religion. The meaning of totalizing or totalization and dialectic are interrelated. A regime that exists by virtue of a totalizing religion exists by definition by means of a dialectic of violence in which all social determinations which reproduce the regime are the products of believers and in turn the believers are the products of the social determinations that characterize the nature and reality of the regime, where all social determinations are realized through the moral agency of violent coercion.

The dialectic of violence becomes a self-perpetuating tread mill in which the motion of the dialectic leads to no destination of liberating enlightenment and freedom, but instead the motionless march leads relentless nowhere but into a bottomless spiral of death and putrefying stagnation as the mountain corpses grows. In this sense the dialectic of violence associated with totalizing religions is essentially nihilistic. Under the regime of the dialectic violence the totalization of religious belief system cannot escape from the never ending cycle of violence. A self-perpetuating cycle of violence in which religious beliefs may never be questioned or criticized or challenged and in which religious beliefs, practices and observations are encouraged, promoted, enforced or made obligatory. In this sense the lure of religion is like the flame that lures the moth into its spiralling dance of death. And it is this what makes the idea of divine revelation the candle of the ultimate death dance. Inspired divine revelation is what supposedly endows a religious book with the status of being Sacred and Holy Scripture or God's own book, thereby making it a source of unquestionable divine authority on all matters concerning life on earth and heaven. And as an ultimate unquestionable source of divine authority it has to be necessarily inerrant and infallible. And because the holy and sacred book happens to be necessarily authoritative, inerrant and infallible as God's revelation, it becomes the ultimate manual of death and nihilism. As one of the ultimate dialecticians in the person of Saint Paul said: 'the letter kills...'

The dialectics of violence associated with religious totalization, is a dialectics of the descend, a dialectics of negation, and a dialectics of disaffection, because only the disaffected can find succour in the religious totalization that stands for the nihilism in the form of the negation of the positivity associated with the dialectics of enlightenment, the dialectics of the ascend, the dialectics of the ultimate concern for truth.

It obvious to any mindful sociologist that the historical and customary beliefs about the nature and will of God are not held by individuals existing in a social vacuum. They are held as personal beliefs precisely because the believing person or the person of faith is first and foremost a social being, and as a social being the believer as a believer is the product of social processes and social institutions. Religious belief is very much a creature of history and as such it is a creation of historical material processes. Religious beliefs exist by virtue of the social institutions and social process which sustain and reproduce the conditions that make it possibility for a given system of religious belief and the associated religious social phenomena and religious practices to existence within a region of space and time. These social institutions and social processes are not only responsible for the existence of religious beliefs but are also necessary for the reproduction and transmission of religious beliefs across successive generations,

Religious Beliefs and Social Institutions: Religious beliefs do not exist in a social vacuum nor do they originate or have their genesis in a social vacuum. They arise within a pre-existing social and cultural matrix which in turn is shaped or determined by its characteristic agglomerate of social institutions and social processes around which the life-cycle dynamics and social behaviour of the community or population are predetermined, influenced, arranged and organized. To sum up thus far, it is clear that there are two things which have been under consideration. Firstly, religious beliefs in themselves, and secondly, the social institutions and social process which together function as the conditions of possibility for the origination, existence, persistence and perpetuation of religious beliefs. The two kinds of social phenomena, religious beliefs in themselves and the underlying social institutions and social process which provide the conditions of possibility for the existence of religious beliefs are not inseparable or independent. They co-exist necessarily in a chicken-egg kind of relationship. Each exists by virtue of the other, religious-beliefs-in-themselves as 'objects' exists by virtue of the role that sustaining social institutions/processes play in the production of religious beliefs, and social institutions/processes exist by virtue of the sustaining or legitimatizing functional roles played by religious beliefs.

It is telling that religious beliefs which are actually false by any rational, logical or evidential standards have this dialectical relationship with social institutions and social processes. In summary: Religious beliefs give rise to social institutions/processes and religious beliefs are generated by social institutions/processes to sustain hegemony, to promote social integration, to legitimize violence, to enforce social compliance and to preserve social arrangements in terms of social stratification and social hierarchies of domination, especially with regard to the access, distribution and accumulation of resources. So there are strong social, economic and political incentives to perpetuate false religious beliefs. Religious beliefs have a useful brain-washing function. In a very real manner religious beliefs control the believer 'in a behind the back manner' as a puppet master hiding behind the stage controls the dancing puppets. In an analogous manner false religious belief generates hegemony through a social conditioning process which coercion, violence and the threat of violence.

Function of Religious Beliefs in Moral Agency: Ultimately religious beliefs have an ideological function in legitimizing political systems of social stratification and social hierarchicalization especially with respect to access, exploitation, accumulation and distribution of resources, where women and the enslaved are also resources. Through force and violence religious beliefs are imposed on the minds of others and eventually they become entrenched in the minds of entire communities and populations and once becoming entrenched in this manner they become self-perpetuating, capable of self-transmission from generation to generation, so anyone born into the community is born into a world of religious beliefs based on or rooted in falsehoods which will colonize the minds of the new born and become fixed in each new generation. False religious beliefs provide moral grounds for legitimizing or sanctioning private and socials behaviours that result in or are linked to acts of moral agency and any action becomes an act of moral agency whenever anyone is affected in a negative or positive manner by that action.

How is the cycle broken? How is the self-transmission of false religious belief disrupted? Not easily, as false beliefs are for many reason impervious or resistant to critique or falsification on logical, rational and evidential grounds, with the chief reason being because of the huge social and political vested interests that false religious beliefs protect and justify.

The Genesis of Religious Beliefs: Religious beliefs have a literary or oral source or origination. They are creations of the human imagination, often inspired by complex and contradictory and paradoxical influences and motivations which ultimately serve a social and political hegemonic function.

Forces Driving the Evolution of Religion as a Social Institution: Religion as we know it in its multiples forms is actually a very recent post-Palaeolithic social phenomenon. It first arose with the emergence or the transition from nomadic Palaeolithic forms of sociality to the more or less settled of Neolithic forms of sociality. Small agricultural based settlements developed into villages and towns and as the settled population increased the villages grew into town, town grew into cities and cities became kingdoms. The emergence of kingdoms was associated with the division of labour, social stratification and the hierarchicalization of social and political domination by an elite who ruled over the disempowered majority. The political idea of sovereignty developed with the emergence of kingdoms and empires, and with the formation of kingdoms and empires the idea of civilization was conceived. Civilization was contrasted with barbarism. People who existed outside the boundaries of a civilization where identified as savages or barbarians. Usually the foreigner or alien was identified as a barbarian. Barbarian or barbarous comes from the Greek word meaning non-Greek or foreign. The idea of the savage comes from the Latin word 'silvaticus' which means from the 'woods' or from the 'forests'. In contrast to freedom and egalitarianism of the wild or indigenous people living outside the boundaries of a civilization those living within the 'walls' of a civilization exist as subjects who ruled over by an elite. Thus the forms of sociality which exist within the confines of civilization are characterized by control, stratification, hierarchicalization, repression, oppression, subjection, domination and non-egalitarians. The control of subjects by a ruling elite is the essential hallmark of a civilization. In ironical contrast to the sociality of a civilization, the social relationships between savages and barbarians was based on a system of egalitarianism and anarchism as opposed to the control, social stratification and the political domination of the city, the kingdom, the empire and the civilization. Slavery was one of the new institutions which arose within the so-called civilizations of the post-Palaeolithic world. And all the great religions, both monotheistic and non-monotheistic, arose within the so-called great civilizations. 506. Not to work him oppressively—Leviticus 25:43

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Mind and Consciousness once more.

I have not finished my rumination on the nature of mind or consciousness. We associate the idea of mind or consciousness with the existence of mental states in which we have or experience thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, moods and so on and so forth. Now the question is whether a mental state is a physical state and if it is a physical state then what kind of physical events and processes cause the mental state in question?

The immanence of God become materially manifest as the condition of infinite possibilities. All possibilities acquire their being or existence by virtue of God's immanence been constitutive of the Totality of Everything. God transcends everything and every possibility because nothing can exist or have its being independent of God's power. 507. Not to allow a non-Jew to work him oppressively—Leviticus 25:53

508

On becoming a Communist.

The road to becoming a Communist begins when one accepts that the vision of the Good Society exists as a real possibility. A possibility which is economically, socially and politically realizable through constant or continuous revolutionary praxis. There is no point or meaning or reason to being a Marxist without at the same time being a Communist or having Communist ideals. To accept the validity of Marx's insights regarding: the essential nature of capitalism, including its dynamics; the nature of alienation and exploitation; the reality of a class structured society; the nature of the class struggle; and the goal of the proletarian revolution automatically makes one a Communist. To be a Communist does not mean that one has to be a member of the South African Communist Party or the ANC. To be a Marxist and therefore a Communist does not necessarily entail that you have to be an activist adherent of a political party or a movement bearing Marx's name as its banner. But being a Marxist and therefore a Communist inevitably inspires and motivates you to become engaged in your own individual capacity in rational and meaningful forms of activism that is ultimately aimed at achieving the realization of the Good Society. Social stratification and social hierarchies of political domination are the most formidable obstacles preventing the realization of the Good Society. The social, economic and political dynamics and phenomena that inevitably result in the endless re-establishment of exploitive and oppressive hierarchies of domination are as follows: Political representation, vanguardism, democratic centralization, politburos, leaders, rulers, presidents, cabinet ministers, directors, bosses, managers, parliaments, elections and representative democracy, the nation state, and ultimately the State. The very idea of any individual in any kind of political system being the 'appointed' leader, commander in chief, CEO, ruler, boss, manager, president or king must be made a political and social anathema. 508. Not to have him do menial slave labour—Leviticus 25:39

509

In Marx's writings this moral vision of the Good Society exists as the underlying premise, motivation and guiding light in his collected works. It the necessary and fundamental motivation and rationale underlying the form and content of the collected works of Marx.

What persuaded me to take Marx's work seriously and identify fully with the Communist cause? 509. Give him gifts when he goes free—Deuteronomy 15:14

510

What about the patriarchy?

It seems that patriarchy as an 'institution' arose relatively recently with the emergence of agriculture about 10 000 to 12 000 years ago. The patriarchy as an institution of exploitation and domination is ultimately unsustainable and in the long run its continuation will result in the catastrophic collapse of societies and entire civilizations. Patriarchalism has always been the fertile ground for the emergence of societal stratification and hierarchies of social domination. Social stratification and hierarchies of social domination are inherently irrational, alienating, oppressive and exploitative, and in the long run they are a destructive social phenomenon, that is, a social phenomenon which has the potential to bring the human species to eventual extinction. 510. Not to send him away empty-handed—Deuteronomy 15:13

511

Speaking the unspeakable.

In place of a foreword the notebook writings began with a short preface. I suppose it would be in order to end the journal writings with an epilogue. We will be making our final departure from Hotazel tomorrow morning. Maybe I could tie up all the loose ends in an epilogue. Reading a book is like viewing painting. If we stand back a bit to view a painting from a suitable vantage point we begin to notice details that were invisible when we first viewed it close up. But at an appropriate distance things in the picture begin to become more visible to the naked eye and also to the eye of the mind. It is the same with reading. Like viewing paintings there is also an art to the reading of fiction, especially literary fiction. The point is not to get the reader to turn the pages but rather to mediate on each sentence, to re-read each word, each line, each paragraph and each page. After a life-time of looking a animal spoor in the Kalahari sands of Hotazel starting from when I was a young child soon learnt that an animal's spoors have a story to tell, an animal's biography, its life history, is written in the spoors of the sand. I spent hours roaming through the Kalahari thorn scrub land following the spoors of animals. I became an expert tracker. I learnt to see, I learnt to read the meaning of the visible silent signs that the animal left in the wake of its trail. Driven by curiosity I followed the spoors in the sands backwards and forwards. Where was the animal going, why was it going along a particular route, where did it come from, where was it going, when were the spoors made, where did the animal sleep or rest, how far did the animal walk in a day, what did it eat, how big was its home large, and was it territorial or was it nomadic? The spoor as signs written in the sand were meaningful and significant. The story which they narrated became increasingly intelligible as I learnt more about animal behavioural ecology and animal behaviour in general, the animals were sentient beings, that much was very clear, and the schedule of their diurnal or nocturnal activities as recorded in the sands of the Kalahari were a testimony to their sentience. As a bipedal animal I discovered that I was superbly designed for tracking and following animals. As a bipedal animal I discovered that I was a very energy-efficient walker. As a young girl and also young woman, I was always strong and fit, and I could walk for miles and miles non-stop without eating, and I would follow my own spoor home. In fact over the years of tracking animals in the desert sands of the Kalahari I learnt that I was physically more energy-efficient that all wild animals when it came to sustained locomotion over long distances for long durations in the heat of the sun. Most hunters have experienced this, especially our Palaeolithic ancestors. Anyway I am getting a bit off the point that I wish to make. The point I want to make is that the 'intelligible' is evident everywhere one looks. The signs of intelligibility, like animal tracks in the Kalahari sands of Hotazel, are etched into the very substance and processes that constitute the material Universe. If the Universe were not intelligible science would not have possible, the intelligibility of the physical Universe is the condition of possibility of science. Science is possible by virtue of the intelligibility of the Universe. And God is that intelligibility because God's essence converges with God's existence, and God 'is' everything that 'is true'. Take and eat, 'this is my body'. In my heart I am not only a Communist, I am also a Catholic, but a Catholic who can do without the Pope and the celibate priesthood, and the Churches hierarchy. And as a Catholic of the heart, I believe in the Totality of Transubstantiation, in the sense that the Totality of Everything is God's body.

The drive to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between appearance and reality, between essence and appearance, and ultimately between what is true and what is false has played a huge role in the success of science. However, the success of science is ultimately not self-explanatory. As I have said the empirically accessible Universe is not self-explanatory with regard to it been intelligible, predictable and responsive to scientific investigation. Nor are the successes of the mathematical instruments we use to investigate the structure, dynamics and behaviour of the Universe self-explanatory. The information required to render the intelligibility, predictability and responsiveness of the Universe transparently self-explanatory cannot been found or derived from within the Universe itself. In these sense the Universe remains an enigmatic mystery. All our mental or conscious powers and capacities which make science possible by rendering in a symbolic fashion the intelligibility and predictability of the Universe have been imposed on us by the Universe itself, by its very Nature, by the Universe being what it is. So our minds, our consciousness, our mental capacities, our imagination, our logical faculties, our physical and functional sensory apparatus, our perceptions and our language have been imposed on us by the Universe in the sense that they have been imposed, derived or engineered by the inner working of the quantum and molecular machinery of the Universe, they been causally imposed on us by means of the essential and intrinsic powers, properties, capacities and predisposition possessed by elemental matter out of which biological beings are constituted. And it is precisely this, that is, the possession of these essential and intrinsic powers and properties by elemental matter which is not self-explanatory. Our minds and language no matter how much we may strain and force them cannot break out of, or up root, or disconnect from their origins in the perceptual, experiential and logical system of constraints and limitations which Universe has imposed upon us as sentient beings. While we can describe from our position within or inside the Universe the way or how the Universe works, but we cannot explain why the Universe works in the way that it does and not in some other way. In other words we cannot account for why the laws nature which govern the Universe are the way that they are, and not otherwise. In this sense the Universe is ultimately unexplainable, and in this sense the Universe is ultimately unknowable, and in this sense it exists as a mystery, and we encounter God in this mystery. God is the mystery of everything. God is the mystery of 'this is my body'. God is the mystery of intelligibility. We possess an unambiguous knowledge of the limitations of our knowledge. And it is because of this strange kind of knowledge that we know that cannot escape from the infernal circle of epistemology. From this strange kind of knowledge we also know that relativism is logically inconsistent, we know that both the positive justification and the negative critiques of knowledge turn on arguments which are invalid because they suffer from self-reference paradoxes or fall into the abyss of the infinite regress, and we know that scepticism is self-defeating. We know that taken literally the statement 'I know that I know nothing' is self-contradictory. We find ourselves in the world already knowing quite a lot about the prevailing states of affairs which have a direct impact on our lives. We don't start from a cleaned slate or tabula rasa. We are in possession of a strange knowledge.

It's pointless renouncing the goal of gaining access to a knowledge of the Totality, or the Ultimate or the Absolute on the grounds of not being able to establish the unconditioned beginnings or ground or foundations of knowledge in consciousness, language, and sense-data or in any other Archimedean point. Maybe we can learn something from Heidegger by accepting that the human condition is one best described as being in a state of invincible contingency, of being literally thrown into a state of contingency from which we are incapable of escaping. We always find ourselves contingently already in a world as an ontological fact, a fact which is not self-explanatory, especially from the 'this-sidedness' of our being already in a world in a state of 'thrownness', that is, as being thrown into a world whose intelligibility is not self-explanatory and nor is our understanding or grasping of its intelligibility is something which is self-explanatory. We find the world and the Universe intelligible, and this is a fact that cannot be denied or explained. It can only grasped almost as some kind of mystical or 'existentiell' insight into the being of Dasein. The world in Heideggerian language exists 'ready-to-hand' in the way a hammer or door handle exists in the form of equipment, where we find ourselves already equipped to engage with the world in a way which is meaningful and intelligible. We existence in a state of always already being equipped to grasp the sense or purpose of things as we encounter them. 511. Redeem Jewish maidservants—Exodus 21:8

512

What about chance?

The role chance in the generation of random genetic variation is a significant feature or element of the theory of evolution, which happens to be a theory that entails 'design-less' or 'designer-less' processes responsible for the emergence or generation of complexity. But chance or the element of contingency or accident in the occurrence of events is made possible by virtue of something else, because an accident does not occur without causation, an accident is caused by a chain of events. Accidents or contingent events exist as possibilities in space and time, still they exist by virtue of something else, they are not self-generating, a contingent event is not something which is self-generating or self-instantiating. No event is causeless or self-causing. No laws of nature are violated in the occurrence of any contingent event or accidental event in the Universe. An accident or a contingent event can only come into existence by virtue of the existence of a 'landscape' of infinite possibilities within a natural law-governed realm. It is this realm with defines the topology or topography of the landscape of infinite possibility. And in the same way that it can be argued that God is 2 +2 = 4 we can similarly state that God is the topography of the landscape of infinite possibility. In this sense every possibility exists by virtue of the being of God. In the same way, God is the quantum vacuum and in the same way the Mass is the body of God. Everything exists through or by means of or by virtue of God's immanence in the Universe. It by virtue of God's immanence that the Mass becomes the body of Jesus. 512. Betroth the Jewish maidservant—Exodus 21:8

513

What about God. I need to say something about God given my confession of faith.

From a scientific and logical perspective we cannot directly discern the signs of God in the World or Universe. Scientifically there is nothing we can detect or identify with certainty using empirical methods as a direct sign of God's presence in the world. Summarizing Leszek Kolakowski's argument let's propose hypothetically that God exasperated with humanity's disbelief in His/Her existence decides to supply an irrefutable proof of His/Her existence without resorting to any kind of manipulation of our brains by means of which belief in God's existence will become fixed or induced in our minds with such a strong sense of irresistible certainty that it would be impossible for us to doubt His/Her existence. So in the absence of any kind of direct physical/chemical manipulation of our brains what act could God perform that would persuade everyone of His/Her existence? How would the infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omnideterminative, omnipotence, and omniscient Being manifest His/Her presence in a perceptible manner in space and time and perform a visible supernatural intervention in which an irrefutable proof of His/Her existence would be convincing demonstrated before every incredulous and sceptical finite human being such that it would be impossible for anyone to seriously doubt God's existence? We could imagine that there would many who would not be able to assimilate the significance and meaning of the event as an empirical demonstration of God's existence. But even if it were the most convincing empirically based demonstration on Planet Earth of God's existence we could still imagine a scenario where after a cooling off period many would begin to doubt the significance or implications of what they had recently witnessed. Many would become sceptical and begin to believe that the supernatural miraculous event was susceptible to some natural explanation or that it was an illusion created by a master magician. Some might even request a second demonstration as confirmation, but again after a cooling off period, doubt may begin to grow again, and like Pharaoh of old many would still request yet further demonstrations just to make absolutely sure that their last remaining doubts would be finally vanquished. And there will be those who like Pharaoh will never be fully convinced by any sign of the Divine Creator of the Universe and like Pharaoh they will repent their belief in God with regret and like Pharaoh of old, sober again in the bright light of the morning after, scepticism would resurface, unvanquished, and Pharaoh once more doubted the Divine significance of every sign delivered plagues that had been delivered to his doorstep, casting off all doubt he pursued the Israelites into the death trap of the Red Sea. And Spinoza the Jewish philosopher not doubting the historicity of the event felt that a natural explanation was in order and believed that it was a chain of natural events that lead to the parting of the waters, opening up a passage of escape for the fleeing Hebrews. Of course God's helplessness in the face of these examples of persistent human doubt in no way represents a constraint on His/Her omnipotence. If God so wished She could impose belief by modifying the human brain so that the human mind would be forced to believe without the slightest shadow of doubt in His/Her existence.

And once they had settled in the Promised Land the old men whiled away the hours spinning yarns and telling stories. The ancient Hebrew people were innovative story tellers of great genius. And with the passing of generations the oral traditions that had taken root among the tribal community of Hebrews eventually became committed to writing once the Hebrew alphabet had been invented. After a long prehistory of narrative crafting by many generations of story-tellers some of the stories eventually acquired through a process of general consensus the status of Divine Revelation. And it was these stories that were admitted into the canon. And the remembrance of the authorship of the stories was also lost with the passing of time. However, while they were in circulation as a folk tales no one would have imagined that many of the stories which made up the living oral traditions would eventually be viewed as the Word of God representing his Divine Revelation. 513. The master must not sell his maidservant—Exodus 21:8

514

The ethical and moral dimension and the ethical and moral exigencies associated with the seeking after the self-manifesting God versus a pure inquiry into the nature of God.

The religious, confessional and faith based contention against 'natural' theology is that the framework or approach of natural theology is knowledge based rather than faith based. Natural theology aims at establishing rationally justified knowledge that is independent of faith or a faith based relationship about what it means for God to be God. Natural theology as an inquiry into God as its subject matter is necessarily based on 'pure reason alone' and as such it revolves around entertaining rational and logical ideas, theories, concepts and metaphysics regarding the putative 'nature' of God or in other words 'what it means for God to be really God'. What is apparently and significantly absent in this approach to establishing credible and rationally justifiable knowledge about what it means for God to be God is precisely this ethical or moral dimension in its investigation into the nature of God. In this sense the inquiries of natural theology into the 'Godhood' of God does not entail a faith based or religious orientated seeking after God. A faith based or confession based or a religious orientated seeking after God is always necessarily based on oblique assumptions regarding God's moral and ethical nature and what it means for God to be a moral or ethical God. These assumptions therefore reflect a wide range of ethical and moral beliefs about the nature of God, especially about what kind of a being God would necessarily have to be in order for there to be some form of relationship between humans and God. So the argument goes: If we are seeking God, then we are were driven by an ethical and moral need to find God. If we are seeking God, then we are ethically and morally motivated in our seeking to establish a relationship with God towards the realization of some 'existential' moral or ethical end for want of a better word. Such an end would include the following moral elements: empathy, compassion, forgiveness, redemption, expiation, atonement, protection, providence, mercy, and cooperation. Collectively all these ethical and moral coloured elements have a 'curative' character. This kind of seeking after God has an ethical and moral curative motivation or intention or purpose. In a word, the seeking after God has personal salvation as its goal. The seeking after God has a soteriological goal or objective. Why else would we have a need or a desire to seek God or a need or desire to establish a relationship with God? The most basic or radical or fundamental assumption underlying the curative need or curative desire to seek God in order to establish a relationship with God revolves around the ethical and moral idea of the 'Good'. Without the idea of Good and the nature of its essence and its possible existence there would be no purpose or reason to seek out God in order to have a relationship with God as the source of the Good in all its forms and manifestations. The assumption driving the seeking out of God is that God is the embodiment and agency of all Goodness. God is thus necessarily immanent in all Goodness whatever its form or nature of existence. Linked to the idea that God is the embodiment and agency of all Goodness is the idea of God's Omni-Perfection. And also linked to the idea of God's Omni-Goodness and Omni-Perfection is God's agency in terms of God's Perfect Will. God can be seen as mysteriously manifest and present in the world. God as a being has been conceptualized in prevailing monotheisms as a remote or distant, unknownable, incomprehensible and inscrutable reality. And consequently, in the traditional monotheisms of antiquity, God has been visualized as someone who relates to the world through the imposition of his will in a purely voluntaristic manner. And in this view, the nature of God's relationship with the world and humanity lends itself to a rigid legalistic conceptualization of God's will in relation God's rule of the world and humanity, thereby placing everything to do with God, especially from a religious and theological perspective, within a legalistic and voluntaristic framework.

God can only will what is perfect and what is perfect can only be what is Good. The Good is always Reasonable, or in accordance with Reason, or aligned with Reason, and God is the embodiment and agent of Reason. God's will necessarily expresses God's essential nature. We cannot imagination a decoupling or dislocation between God's will and God's essential nature which includes all Goodness. God's Omni-Goodness is always in accordance with God's will thereby ensuring that God's will is always perfect and good and in accordance with reason. If the exercise of God's will is decoupled or disengaged from God's essential nature then God would be voluntaristic and a nominalist, acting on pure whim and not in accordance with reason, perfection or goodness. God would then have a split personality or God would be a schizophrenic being. In this case the absurd would have its origination in God as the Supreme Being. The absurd and voluntarism are in this context the two sides of the same coin. But this kind of speculative reasoning is germane to natural theology. So natural theology does have a therapeutic or curative bearing on the seeking out of God and natural theology does not exclude the ethical and moral in its inquiring into what it means for God to be God. Of course all of this is qualified by the fact of Darwinian evolution. If humans evolved or descended from the same common ancestor of the supra-primate clade then this fact will have a direct bearing on natural theology including the idea of the Good which is a central pillar in natural theology. We have to contend with the fact that biological evolution changes everything, even the idea of the existence of good and evil, and the conceptualization of the essential nature of God. And it is in this context that natural theology has a role to play as an important branch or sub discipline of philosophy and theology. In the natural theology I propose the curative moral desire or therapeutic moral desire which motivates the existential seeking out of or the existential seeking after God can only be realized in God's own dramatic action of 'kenosis' which is the Greek word for the self-emptying of God. This self-emptying of God is the means by which God becomes an incarnate agent of salvation which is realized through an act of solidarity which Jesus described 'parabolically' in the parable of the separation of the sheep from the goats in the statement: 'what you do to the least of this brother and sisters of mine you do to me'. This is the kenosis of God, realized in the radical incarnational solidarity with the wretched and the despised. God ultimately 'saves' by making the wretched of the earth the brothers and sisters of God. Salvation is never a reward that can be earned on the basis of merit. Salvation is always an unearned and unmerited 'curative' intervention. It also means that the religious and the devout are doomed to oblivion in their pursuit of folly. The face of the Other borne by the faithless and unbelieving wretched who as the faceless infidel become the face of God in the kenosis of God. In this action of kenosis all religion is made worthless and all religious belief is annulled as trash. This is the essence of Christianity contra Feuerbach. 514. Canaanite slaves must work forever unless the owner amputates one of their limbs—Leviticus 25:46

515

The idea of evil and the reality of evil.

Given the fact of evolution does evil exist? The moment that the following abstract nouns and their associated adjectives (in brackets): Omnipotence (omnipotent), Omniscience (omniscient), Omnipresence (omnipresent), Omnidetermination (omnidetermined), Omniperfection (omniperfect) and Omnigoodness (omnigood) are identified as essential attributes of God's nature and being in order for God to be truly God, the problem of evil and theodicy raises its ugly medusa head as an irrefutable axiom in the argument against the possibility of God's existence. The arguments rests on the premise that God's existence is incompatible with the existence of evil. If evil is a reality then God cannot existence, so the argument goes. But evil still exists even if God supposedly does not exist. This is the issue that requires further and fuller examination. Can we deny the existence of evil? I think not. How is it possible that evil could exist? That is, exist as an experiential reality. In addition, the idea of evil also arises, possibly dialectically, as a contrasting, defeating and contradicting possibility in relation to the fullest possible meaning and significance of these abstract nouns and associated adjectives as they pertain to the idea of what it actually means for God to be really God. Maybe independent of any physical reality, the idea of evil exists in the abstract in the same way that other abstract 'things' exist such as numbers, logical theories and mathematical theories. The idea of evil becomes a tangible or experiential reality only when certain kinds of states of affairs prevail or when certain kinds of conditions of possibility are instantiated which facilitate the emergence or realization of the following interrelated phenomena: self-awareness, consciousness, mind, mental states, thoughts, intentions, desires, empathy, conscience, language and so on and so forth. The idea of evil becomes an experiential reality by virtue of the existence of mental states which have the power to give rise to feelings or emotions like empathy and conscience. Usually the mental or conscious states of empathy and conscience are triggered or induced by the face of the Other. We possess the power or predisposition to recognize and experience in the face of the Other the reality of suffering, humiliation, pain, sadness, terror, depression, and oppression. The existence and reality of evil becomes readily manifest in the face of the Other. We become aware through empathy and conscience of existence of evil when we are able to recognise suffering in the face of the Other. Evil comes into existence as a reality because of our power or capacity to recognize its effects on the face of the Other. The idea of evil becomes an 'emergent' or 'emerging' experiential reality by virtue of the existence of the mental capacity for the experiencing of empathy and conscience. Without empathy and conscience there would be no ethics or morality. Evil becomes an ethical or moral idea of or about something because of or by virtue of something else. Evil becomes an ethically or morally experiential reality as something by virtue of something else. Without that 'something else' evil could not exist as a reality. The numbing of the conscience and a drastically attenuated capacity to feel empathy are the core conditions for the emergence of evil. What other states of mind or states of consciousness function as bulwarks against the emergence of evil? At its most mundane level it is something as simplistic as a sense of fairness in the distribution of benefits, power, privilege and entitlements that constitutes the strongest barrier against the emergence evil. Evil begins with the asymmetrical individualization or hierarchicalization of claims to moral entitlement regarding the distribution of power, benefits and privileges. In other words evil become actualized with the emergence of the oligarchy at the expense of egalitarianism. A belief in one's moral entitlement as an individual to status, power, benefits, rights, privileges and agency at the expense of others are the preconditions for the existence and realization of evil as a reality experienced by others. Oligarchies are sustained, justified and protected by claims to moral entitlement regarding access to power, benefits, privileges and agency. Evil therefore can only come into existence and be realized by virtue of claims to moral entitlement regarding power and agency. Evil exists by virtue of asymmetries or inequalities in the distribution of power and agency. Evil exists by virtue of conditions which allow for impunity in the exercise of claims to moral entitlement. Impunity is the abstract noun for that which makes evil a realized reality. Victims of evil exist by virtue of the impunity of the few in relationship to the powerless of the many. The reality of evil is manifested in the creation of victims, where victims become victims by virtue of their having suffered injury and harm. There cannot be any evil without victims of evil. Therefore evil cannot exist as a reality without the experience of suffering. And suffering is caused by the actions of 'moral' agent acting with impunity in the infliction of injury and harm. Acting with impunity means exemption from punishment or liability or culpability with respect to the moral regime of the oligarchy under which the actions were sanctioned. But exemption from punishment or liability or culpability counts as moral sanction by the oligarchy for actions that cause suffering, injury or harm. But moral sanction under the aegis of the oligarchy does erase or diminish the fact that a moral offense or a moral transgression has been committed, nor does it erase or diminish the moral culpability or moral liability of the offender or the transgressor even while acting on behalf of the oligarchy. On what grounds can this counter moral claim be made? The argument goes as follows, irrespective of the nature of the actions, that is, it does not matter whether the actions committed were morally good or morally evil, anyone who acts or performs an act effecting someone else cannot can avoid fulfilling the role of a moral agent, whether for good or for evil, such a person remains a moral agent. Premediated or intentional or purposeful actions that cause loss, suffering, pain, injury or harm in the form of violations of a person's self-worth, autonomy, freedom, security, health, integrity, dignity and general welfare and are on these ground self-evidently immoral or evil. Acting with impunity to bring about evil in the above manner constitutes a form of moral agency, which is moral agency in the sense that it results in the commission of moral effects which are evil in nature. Acting with impunity is a precondition for the existence of evil and the oligarchy is the fortress which guarantees impunity. In this sense evil is able to exist by virtue of the machinery of the oligarchy and evil arises as an intrinsic facet of the inner workings by means of which the oligarchy is able persist and prevail. Oligarchies exist by virtue of claims to moral entitlement. Claims to moral entitlement can only be enforced or secured by violence, evil arises in the context of claims to moral entitlement. Claims to moral entitlement arise whenever there is a conflict of interests or where social differentiation arises as a consequence of inequalities. The foundation of the oligarchy is always inequality and inequalities are justified by appeals to moral entitlement. The rulers rule by virtue of having attained or secured the moral entitlement to rule. They have been 'elected' to rule and therein lies their moral entitlement to rule.

Generically the oligarchy in whatever form it becomes manifested whether it be as Western Capitalism or the Communism of the Soviet Union, its existence is always based on social differentiation or social dichotomies or dualism: the empowered versus the disempowered, the free versus the unfree, the rulers versus the ruled, the active versus the passive, those possessing agency versus those bereft of any agency, the actors versus those who are acted upon, those who represent versus those who are represented, and so on and so forth. In the oligarchy freedom of the ruling elite necessitates the unfreedom of the ruled. Similarly the empowerment of the ruling elite necessitated the disempowerment of the ruled. In whatever socio-political form that oligarchy becomes manifest or concretized it always reactionary and never progressive because it is always based on the radical loss of freedom by the ruled. Evil arises as a consequence of the radical loss of freedom ruled, resulting the disempowerment, the loss of agency and the enforced passivity of the ruled. The oligarchy in this respect always represents a negative utopia as opposed to the progressive ideal of a utopia in which the Good prevails. In all oligarchies we have the never ending repetition of the same. 515. Not to extradite a slave who fled to (Biblical) Israel—Deuteronomy 23:16

516

The marginalization of animals has ethical and moral consequences especially in the context of monotheistic religions

This was first analysed in depth by John Berger in his book 'Why look at Animals'. We can add more inputs to Berger's original insights regarding the modern disconnection with animals. This disconnection also involves an estrangement, a separation and creation of chasm of separation between humans and animals. Disconnection with animals also represents a significant and consequential form of human alienation. It is also a manifestation of a general alienation with respect to 'Nature' which is a symptom of both capitalism and monotheistic religions, the so-called Abrahamic religions. Disconnection from animals, involving alienation from animals and nature is an essential feature of Abrahamic monotheisms and this disconnection and alienation is evidenced by a real loss or diminishment of the capacity for empathy, compassion and conscience. Disconnection from animals has moral consequences. Diminished capacity for empathy, compassion and conscience arising from a profound disconnection from animals and nature becomes increasing evident in emotional pathologies which have real moral consequences regarding human behaviour. Having no emotional feelings for animals is strongly coupled to being under the influence of religious indoctrination. There appears to be an inverse relationship between being religious on the one hand and having a fascination or passionate curiosity about animals on the other. A scientific interest in animals often goes hand in hand with a diminished interest in religion. However it is impossible not to experience ethical sensitivity towards sentient beings and nature in general if one has been drawn into the natural sciences or life sciences. There is an ethical dimension or an experience of a moral consciousness associated with a zoological interest in animals. Moral sensitivity to the 'welfare' of the being of an animal is strongly correlated with the recognition and appreciation of the capacity for sentience in an animal. This explains the ethical reluctance to inflict pain and suffering on animals. It also explains the moral rationale for ethics in animal studies. Lack of emotional feelings for animals is strongly coupled to a lack of compassion, empathy and conscience with regard to other humans who do not share a similar religious or political or cultural outlook.

The argument that moral sensitivity and ethical behaviours are influenced by emotions such as compassion, empathy and conscience is strongly compelling. In a similar vein we can argue that diminishment of the capacity for experiencing sensitivity, compassion, empathy and conscience with regard to other sentient beings such as animals predisposes a person to ethical and moral numbing when it comes to behaviours towards other persons who do not share the same religion or political ideology. Cause and affect come into play. Moral numbing towards animals under the influence of religion has ethical consequence with regard to the treatment of humans in general.

We have an inbuilt capacity to disregard or disbelieve evidence which threatens our most cherished beliefs. This is why education and especially moral education is such a difficult human enterprise and this is the biggest obstacle regarding our capacity to respond appropriately with regard to moral and ethical challenges. In fact religion is the greatest obstacle regarding our capacity to be moral beings. This fact endows new meaning to modern forms of decadence. The rise of fundamentalist religions in their various and multiple modern guises represent the many possible expressions of modern decadence. We see this in the form of millionaire tele-evangelists with their mega churches. This is an outward symptom of inner decadence. Not only is Christianity in its modern re-institutionalization and adaptation to a capitalistic ethos prone to an inevitable praxis of decadence, the same applies to all other religions in their re-invigoration which is often an adaptation or reaction to life in an ethos shaped by the experiences of modernism or postmodernism. And in Islam the conditions of possibility for the recreation of a Sadean Caliphate makes it also prone to decadence which could become manifest in the public spectacle and festival of death and cruelty. Decadence in the form of perversions which become manifested in inverted moral spectacles represents a maladaptation to a resurgent global capitalism. 516. Not to wrong a slave who has come to Israel for refuge—Deuteronomy 23:17

517

Inverting Nietzsche's idea of decadence.

Decadence in all its forms arises with the emergence of oligarchies. From a Nietzschean perspective civilizations arose as consequence of 'mans' self-domestication and as a consequence of this decadence arose as the moral condition of human societies. Oligarchical social, cultural, religious, economic and political arrangements are characteristic of the structure and functioning of all social formations we associate with civilizations in contrast to those we associate with Palaeolithic human social existence. In contrast to the healthy or natural instincts of humans as visualized by Nietzsche, the actual instincts of humans in hunter-gatherer Palaeolithic forms of sociality were moral in the Christian sense, in that they were based on egalitarian and altruistic sensibilities. Palaeolithic humanity were motivated by a sense of fairness which was rooted in an emotional capacity for feeling empathy, compassion and pangs of conscience. These emotions were adaptations shaped by natural selection and became the basis for encouraging behaviours which increased survival and successful reproduction, and also were also co-dependent on humans having large brains. Large brains made these sensibilities and emotions possible. With rise of the oligarchy as the basis of post-Palaeolithic sociality decadence arose as consequence of diminishing and numbing of the humanities natural ethical sensibilities regarding fairness and egalitarianism in social arrangements. Decadence is equivalent to having a diminished capacity for compassion, empathy and compassion. Because of the moral numbing effects which give rise decadence, decadence manifests itself in spectacles of the sublime, therefore decadence becomes actualized in the circus, the theatre, and the festival where death, cruelty, torture, suffering, humiliation, injustice, domination, injury, dispossession and fear become an ecstatic celebration. Decadence gives rise to nihilism or manifests itself in nihilism. 517. The courts must carry out the laws of a hired worker and hired guard—Exodus 22:9

518

All oligarchies are inherently nihilistic and decadent because they can exist only by virtue of the destruction of human solidarity, egalitarianism, individual autonomy and social cohesion, all of which are made possible by a numbing of moral consciousness, and a numbing of the capacity to feel compassion, empathy and conscience in response to the face of the Other. And the Other always exists as an ethical or moral subject under the condition of oppression, disempowerment and dispossession in relation to the political sovereignty embodied in the ruler or rulers. And this is always why nihilism and decadence can be experienced as the mundane, and give rise to the mundaneness of evil which Hannah Arendt recognized as a pervasive reality. It was this pervasive reality which made the Holocaust, Soviet Gulags and apartheid possible. Evil becomes the all-pervasive and therefore the mundane reality under the rule of all oligarchies without exception. Capitalism can only exist within an oligarchic social formation and it is this which makes capitalism intrinsically nihilistic and predisposed towards the reign of decadence and the inauguration of the mundaneness of evil. Of course this state-of-affairs goes for all oligarchies including Islamic oligarchies in the form of the caliphate and the current oligarchies which exist in the so-called embodiments of existing socialism that we have in China, North Korea, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and possibly also in Cuba. In all their forms oligarchies are dictatorial by nature. 518. Pay wages on the day they were earned—Deuteronomy 24:15

519

This is my body, once more.

Anyone who wishes to fulfil the role of the 'virtuous narrator' can do no better than to explore the meaning and significance of these words uttered by Jesus. As we know only too well, these words, 'this is my body', are central to the Catholic idea of transubstantiation. The Jewish literary theorist George Steiner has expanded in some detail on this apparently very Catholic idea of transubstantiation with regard to the meaning of meaning especially in a literary context. In Steiner's thesis (a Jewish thesis) the meaning of words ultimately rests on the idea of the 'condition of possibility' (a term used by Foucault) of meaning, where all meaning is linked ultimately to God, and here Steiner introduces the connection between the meaning of words and transubstantiation. In other words it is by the means of God's transubstantiation that meaning, including the meaning of words comes into existence. This is a marvellous insight coming typically from a Jew. In this context Steiner offers insightful commentary into the constant Rabbinic re-reading of the Torah and the Talmud. All in all, the event of 'meaning' in any symbolic text is always an event of transubstantiation because of God's immanence in everything. This also seems relevant to the Parmenidean philosophical ultimate significance of what-is-ness regarding predication, which is essentially about the meaning of meaning. The Parmenidean view of the ultimate significance of predication is that everything that exists, exists as a manifestation of a single eternal reality. We could rephrase this as follows: the objective possibility of predication in a Realist and Essentialist sense, which involves the assigning of 'what-is-ness' to things, exists by virtue that everything which does exists, exists as a manifestation of a single eternal reality. The 'single eternal reality' is a synonym for the Ultimate, Totality or Absolute by virtue of which everything else acquires being. In other words, Plato's Forms.

But be this as it may, the words 'this is my body' are so religiously repugnant that they constituted the very negation of all earthy religions, this was why it was so difficult for his followers to understand and accept. The death of God and the eating of God's body represents the very core of the Christian religion. In this sense Christianity is an anti-religion and the negation of religion as something coming from God. God teaches nothing! God wants nothing .God expects nothing. God only invites everyone to eat his body! God is the condition of possibility for realization of erotic desire or the realization of Eros in which desire finally finds its consumption in the Good. It is a fact that Jesus taught very little other than the overturning and the reversal of all social ordering which is marvellously summarized in the Mary's Song of Praise: The Magnificat - "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked on.....' And in the sermon of the mount. In these texts plus the narrative of the temptations in the wilderness of Private Property, Political Sovereignty of the ruling classes, the existence of Political Oligarchies and the continuance of the existence of religions are challenged as presentations or manifestations of Demonic Orders and Principalities. What could be more irreligious than eating the flesh of God, finding life in the body and blood of God? We find life not in following religious teachings but in an erotic performance of eating, in the eating of God, we find life through Eros, and Eros is ultimately the desire for the Good, as Socrates would have it, especially well put in his speech to Phaedrus (Plato's Phaedrus) on the banks of river Ilisus in an idyllic pastoral setting outside the city walls of Athens.

To be Erotic in the sense of eating God and in the sense of Plato's Socrates is to be phobic towards religions in general and which is something that is morally rational, and so 'phobicity' towards religion and religious teaching represents an ethical sentiment, a sentiment on the same scale as repugnance, repugnance to slavery, repugnance to oppression and so on. An antireligious sentiment actually represent an ethical sentiment, a sentiment of healthy repugnance and if they also have an anti-religious sentiment then they are also essentially Erotic in nature and are ultimately desirous of the Good above all else.

John 6:53-58 New International Version (NIV)

53 Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever."

Considering 'this is my body' once again. I exist by virtue of my body. I am who I am by virtue of my body. My body is uniquely mine and is uniquely different from every other human bodies which has ever existed in the evolutionary history of human. It is genetically unique because of meiosis, recombination and independent assortment of homologous chromosomes. It is a female body with female sexual organs. It is the body of a lesbian. It is a bipedal body. It is a mammalian body. It is a body with a large brain. It is sentient body. It is a body which from an erotic perspective it is 'nonphallomorphic'. Instead it is 'vulvomorphic' and 'vulvocentric' in a homoerotic sense, and therefore as a homosexual body it is metaphorically, emotionally, psychological, physiologically, anatomically and biologically completely and radically decoupled, divorced, disconnected, severed, and disengaged from the masculine erotic economy. Metaphorically I am a virgin with a desiring, sexualized and orgasmic body. There are infinite or an uncountable number of ways in which we can speak about the female body.

One way of speaking about the female body could be in terms of the theology of the female body. The Bible is filled with metaphors and symbols which are pregnant with motifs of the female body. The church is presented as the perfect female body in Ephesians, and as the perfect female body she is the bride of Christ, the wife and lover of God. The Virgin Mary is the mother of God. The Church being the bride of Christ feminizers all believers irrespective of their sex. In the first creation narrative in the Book of Genesis God brings the naked woman into existence, creating her out of his own image. In the second creation narrative in the Book of Genesis, Eve the first woman as the bearer of God's image finds herself sensually and erotically naked in the Garden of Eden, there is another way in which Eve can be depicted, because she is clearly unclothed, in her essence she is naked, in her vulvomorphism she exists in a state of nature. However, following the fall of Eve, in direct contrast to the Church being depicted in the form of the perfect female body as the restoration of Eve, the shadow of the original female body, in the form of the perfect body of the naked Eve lives on in its mythological representations, Eve in her voluptuous nakedness continues to loom large in the thematic presentations of Eve in the role of the seductive temptress being ultimately responsible for the fall of man. Throughout the ages the temptation drama involving the agency of the naked Eve has been portrayed repeatedly in works of art. The erotic representations of Eve's naked body cannot fail to excite desire. Female nakedness becomes the constant object of male desire. The theological challenge in the light of the erotic Eve being the mirror image of women under the voyeuristic gaze of men is for women to reclaim their bodies from the patriarchical overlords who rule the Oligarchy. Against the mythology of the erotic Eve which symbolizes the chaos and moral danger provoked by the allure of the naked female body, the theology of the female body is grounded in the humanity of the incarnate God. The humanity of the incarnate God as the Word become Flesh becomes fully expressed in terms of the female body, in terms of its engagement with the bodies of women, where the female body is the paradigm of humanity. In the Gospels Jesus in his humanity constantly engaged with women. This becomes a source of offence to men. Jesus' engagement with women becomes a manifestation of transgression, he transgresses by engaging in discourses, which is 'intercourse', with women at every opportunity, this represents a transgression against the patriarchical social norms regarding the traditional status of the female body. Women in turn, constantly seek Jesus out, they become his most ardent followers. The body of the woman caught in the act of adultery is saved from stoning by the intervention of Jesus. His intervention as the Incarnate God on behalf of the adulterous woman represents a 'parabolic' merging of the Hebraic and the Hellenic, where rhetorically the geometric is employed figuratively in a divine semiotics, which involves a setting of things side by side, so that a 'falling short of' can be 'geometrically' demonstrated. In the Hellenic geometric, the 'parabola' and 'ellipsis', of rhetorical engagement, feature in Jesus' discourse with the woman's accusers. Jesus a Jew from the district of Galilee marches onto the stage of history in a Greco-Romanized milieu which has been shaped by the cultural co-existence of the Hebraic and the Hellenic, an intellectual co-existence which has endured for centuries. Aramaic, Greek and Latin drench the atmosphere. In this social environment with all its contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes, Jesus as the full embodiment of the Law of Moses invites those without sin to cast the first stone, and in doing so Jesus adheres fully to the Torah, and those who wish to live by the Torah are shown through a 'metric' or a measurement to fall short of the Torah by their actions in the form or idiom or symbol of an 'ellipsis'. Jesus lives the paradox of the Torah in his discourse with women. The paradox of the Torah arises from the belief that its authorship is divine. The content of the Torah including the Law of Moses as expounded especially in the Book of Leviticus is obviously not literally the divine Word of God. This is where the paradox lies. And the paradox is fully resolved when we discover that Jesus is the Word of God. In the Torah we are presented with the dramatic narrative of God's law being revealed to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It is only through Jesus that the Law of Moses becomes 'parabolically' in the form of a rhetoric of the geometric the actual Word of God. And in its obvious moral and ethical paradoxicality or self-contradictory nature, the Law of Moses it is interpreted dialectically or resolved dialectically as the Law of God through its sublative cancellation (Aufheben or Aufhebung). Sublation drives thinking in a forward or progressive direction. In the process a given concept undergoes a transformation into a new concept encapsulating a revised and differentiated field of meaning and significance in terms of identity and difference with respect to the original concept. Something is preserved in the process, but what is it? It would be the summation of the entire Law in terms of the singular moral imperative of exceptionalness and unconditional love for God and women! Love and take care of the Other as you would do for yourself and your own kind. It necessarily cancels out endogamy. Now having said this, lets return to the rhetorical geometry of the woman's body in relation to the Hebraic and the Hellenic. The body of a woman represents figuratively the geometry of the rhetoric of the Torah which in essence represents the Eros of God. Does this make any sense? I think it does. It makes sense elliptically through a geometrically circuitous route which involves the allegorical re-reading of the 'Song of Songs'. To set the scene for what I want to say let me relate the fact that Kate always confessed that she wanted to believe in God and this was the reason why she believed in God. Likewise, I also confess that I wanted to believe in God and it also my reason for believing in God. I never felt any emotional or intellectual compulsion to be an atheist. God made sense to me personally. My belief in God has been a life-long romance. Going back to the allegorical rendition of 'Song of Songs' we see a depiction of faith in God as an erotic affair, and this brings us back to the whole idea of the merging of the Hebraic and Hellenic with regard to the existence and nature of the Divine in the Form of Eros. And the vulvomorphic body of the woman in the 'Song of Songs' becomes the concrete exemplification of Eros where exemplification is the paradigmatic becoming of Eros by virtue of Being.

Christian women have always believed that they could fully access the body of God in the Eucharist celebration. Union with Jesus, as God incarnate, was achieved through faith in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Mass which made it possible for them as women to experience an erotic encounter with God which involved the enlivening of the senses during the partaking of the eating of the body and the drinking of the blood of God before the Eucharist altar. As women participate 'erotically' or 'sensuously' in the celebration of the Mass they became with Mary the mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and lovers of God in a union which is fully feminine and even homoerotic in a holy feminine sense. The sign becomes what it signifies in transubstantiation. 519. Not to delay payment of wages past the agreed time—Leviticus 19:13

520

Human behaviour and the origination or natural history of moral judgements and moral values.

The significance and meaning of ethics and morals as values measured in terms of benefits (good) and liabilities (bad) can only arise in the context or framework of human behaviour. The full spectrum of individual human behaviour in terms of goal directed actions is strongly correlated and determined by the organization of the social system in which the individual happens to be inextricably embedded. The organization of a social system is defined in terms of its structure and functioning and in which the individual is inextricably embedded in a web of relationships. Different forms of sociality or social systems are achieved or realized through the way social relationships between individuals are organized in terms of structure (hierarchical or egalitarian) and function (social roles determined by subordination and domination). A taxonomy which categorizes or classifies the ways social systems can be organized in terms of structure and function can be productivity used to compare and contrast various forms of human sociality (hierarchical or egalitarian) in terms of similarities and differences with regard to the arrangements, relationships and distribution of economic and political power between individuals. Social systems which share fundamental similarities can be lumped in a single category on the basis of whether or not they are oligarchic or egalitarian. All oligarchic social systems are stratified or hierarchical with respect to political status and power, whereas egalitarian or anarchist systems are not. In an oligarchical system individuals are deprived of meaningful autonomy, whereas in egalitarian or anarchist systems individual autonomy is the overriding economic, social and political reality of the individual. The analysis of whether a social system is oligarchic or egalitarian will necessarily be reductionist by virtue of the requirement for scientific, logical, rational and analytic vigour and robustness. This means that the analysis has to be carried out in terms of the properties, powers, agency and status of the most fundamental entity in a social system which is always the individual person. Autonomy and dependency are mostly negatively correlative in an oligarchic system, whereas autonomy and dependency are positively correlative in an egalitarian or anarchist system. In all oligarchic systems an individual's autonomy is stripped away as the individual's access to benefits and enjoyment of rights such as: education, work, housing, health service, culture, recreation, personal development, freedom and self-expression is ultimately dependent on the individual being compliant and submissive to the interests and dictates of an entrenched ruling political elite. But even being compliant and submissive to the interests and dictates of a ruling political elite in an oligarchical system does not in itself guarantee any meaningful or significant realization of benefit or rights for the individual. The loss of individual autonomy is more often than not correlated with diminishing benefits and rights. The loss of individual autonomy is accompanied by the increasing disempowerment of the individual.

Asymmetries – represent imbalances and inequalities regarding social status and social benefits in a ranked or stratified or hierarchicalized social system. Social imbalances and inequalities in a ranked or stratified or hierarchicalized social system is based on and secured by an unequal, differential, preferential and privileged access to the instruments and levers of power and domination. Unequal, differential, preferential and privileged access to the instruments and levers of power and domination is facilitated by processes which allow some individuals and not others to capture and control institutions of power where the state is the archetypical or exemplary institution of power. Institutions of power such as the state are institutions of power by virtue of the fact they embody the full instrumental capacity or means or apparatus for the 'legal' and physical exercise of power through violence.

Systems of social organization which based on an asymmetrical or an imbalance in the distribution and exercise of power are able to reproduce themselves. The model order which we associate with egalitarian sociality is something which when give a chance will emerge spontaneously or naturally, as a principle of Nature if you like, established through evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. The State exists as a hindrance to the functioning of a moral order. Without the State (Hobbes's Leviathan) there can be no Oligarchy. The Oligarchy in all its manifestation irrespective of the economic base exists by virtue of the State. The Oligarchy persists as the towering constant of all civilizations and as such it represents the horrifying, nightmarish, malevolent and monstrous monument to the disaster and catastrophe we call civilization. All modern forms of the Oligarchy whether capitalist or socialist are characterized by hierarchies of social domination, social stratification and patronage. The Oligarchy works on the principle that an elite minority represents the interests of the masses and 'rules' on their behalf with the myth or illusion or fantasy of their consent. Representation, elections, the electorate and party politics are characteristic of the Oligarchy.

What are the alternatives? The alternative is direct democratic self-government based on the Greek city state model in which a senate is elected and drafted or called up by a lottery system - to fulfil the role of governance or government for a limited term of office for about 2 to 3 years. It will be the duty and legal obligation of all citizens to serve as a senator if called up through the lottery draft system. The presiding chair of the senate is rotated on a semester basis also through the lottery a process. Strictly speaking there are no leaders, rulers, presidents, kings, chief, prime ministers. Under the guidance of magistrates the senate elects juries, judges and prosecutors from the ranks of senate members to rule on all civil and criminal matters regarding the law and the rule of law. What about policing, law and order? All citizens will bear arms and all citizens will be obliged to do duty in the neighbourhood, city or community militia.

I am always privately amused at the irony of being stereotyped by my black compatriots as 'Western' within the country of my ancestors and my own birth in spite of my ambiguous pigmentation. On my trips to Europe and travels in Europe when I was engaged in scientific collaboration with European partners I was again privately amused at the irony of being recognized as obviously non-European because of my ambiguous pigmentation. In Europe while travelling off the beaten path strangers who I happened to converse with could not fit me into a specific ethnic/cultural/social category. I was obviously not American in any way, nor was I recognizable as being English, and I was not seemingly Australian or a New Zealander. After a lot of guessing I would eventually reveal that I was South African. I was also surprised to discover that at international conferences I found myself comfortable and happy in the company of Russians or Chinese or Indians. I felt comfortable in a cosmopolitan setting and saw myself as an internationalist, which I felt were the hallmarks of being a communist. 520. The hired worker may eat from the unharvested crops where he works—Deuteronomy 23:25

521

Bottom-up moral theorizing is superior to top-down moral theorizing.

What is moral and what is ethical is established in everyday social interactions between individuals. Everyone possesses a natural sense, anchored in conscience, empathy, compassion and sensitivity, regarding what is right and what is wrong for a given situation or state of affairs. Humans have evolved over millions of years into highly sociable animals and to this end they are neurobiological predisposed to behave towards each other in a manner which reinforces the survival adaptive values or 'fitness benefits' of a form of egalitarian sociality based on sensitivity, altruism, compassion, empathy, fairness and conscience. To freely paraphrase what Darwin proposed regarding sociality in animals, it is hard to disagree with the fact that social animals possess social instincts, as a consequence of evolution, facilitated by natural selection acting on genetic variation, which has lead them to take pleasure is associating with each other in a social setting which in the case of primates and human has been made especially conducive and pleasant through reciprocal expressions of sensitivity, compassion, empathy, altruism, fairness and conscience. These emotional attributes or behavioural predispositions have contributed to the evolution of egalitarian forms of human sociality which are characterized by social cohesion and solidarity between individual members regarding share goals. These facts regarding the social evolution of humans would be the anchor, point of departure for the development of bottom-up theory of morals. The complex forms of egalitarian hominin sociality predates the Neolithic epoch by hundreds of thousands of years and played a major adaptive role in the evolution and survival of humans.

The transition from Palaeolithic hunter-gather egalitarian sociality to non-egalitarian post-Neolithic forms of sociality which has been based on self-reproducing oligarchic systems of social organization has created a human moral catastrophe which has persisted to haunt humanity over the last 12 000 to 10 000 years. Post-Neolithic civilization has been a self-created moral disaster by all accounts. Only against this backdrop does the idea or concept of evil as moral failure acquire any rational meaning or significance. The occurrence of evil in human life is inextricably entangled with all forms of entrenched self-reproducing oligarchic systems of social organization. Arendt was right about evil. The prevalence of evil under the rule of the oligarchy is so extensive that it has become barely recognizable in its existence as part and parcel of every facet of ordinary life or the mundane in other words. 521. The worker must not eat while on hired time—Deuteronomy 23:26

522

The mundaneness of political evil and the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. All the devils temptations revolved around the acquisition of political power under the regime of the Oligarchy.

The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone'."

In what way was this temptation about political power? Provide bread and feed the masses and you will be king. Of course Jesus as the incarnation of the omnipotent God of the Universe could turn rocks and boulders into loaves of bread if he so wished. In the context of Jesus being God incarnate and therefore challenging God to be God becomes a political temptation: 'use your omnipotence as a provider of food and you will be king over the entire Earth.'

With regard to the second temptation, the devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendour; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours."

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only'."

What is the political meaning of the second temptation in relation to power and the Oligarchy? There are number of interesting things about the second temptation, not only because it is the most politically overt temptation of the three temptations. This is an irony in this temptation, an irony because it was not possible for the devil to deliver on this profoundly political temptation. But this was not the reason that Jesus rejected the offer. Jesus rejected the offer because the nature of political power is intrinsically idolatrous; this is why the desire for political power is equivalent to worshipping Satan. Political power is always idolatrous in nature because it is based on enforced social stratification or enforced hierarchies of social domination which necessarily entails self-aggrandizement of the political overlords. Very often this enforcement of hierarchies of social domination involves violence, in fact social stratification of society into classes or racial groups cannot happen without violent force. Apartheid would be impossible without violent force. When the ancient Hebrews wanted to be ruled by an Oligarchy Samuel warned them that there could never be such a person as a good ruler, there is no such thing as good master. Why is this so? Well it is because the desire for political power is always equivalent to worshipping the devil, and therefore there can never be a good ruler or a good master. The nature of political power is always intrinsically idolatrous and violent.

In third the temptation take from the Gospel of Luke: The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down from here. For it is written:

'He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone'. "

Jesus answered, "It is said: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.' "

When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

This last temptation was the cleverest and the most audacious temptation of the devil. The devil in this temptation was challenging Jesus to publically prove his divinity to men by throwing himself from highest pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem. Blasphemy was punished by throwing the blasphemer to his or her death from the walls of the temple into the Kidron Valley below the temple wall. Satan did come back at various opportune times with the same temptation which involved prompting Jesus to publically perform an act that will prove his divinity. For example, in Mark 8:31, when Peter tried to persuade Jesus from accepting the inevitability of his execution on a Roman Cross, Jesus said to Peter 'get behind me Satan.' In Matthew 26 Jesus refrained from calling on God the Father to send twelve legions of angels to rescue him from arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Luke 23:35 while Jesus was on the cross people mocked him calling on him to rescue himself if was truly God's Messiah. The temptation to prove his divine credentials as God's Messiah was fraught with political consequences. Josephus writes about many messianic pretenders that provoked bloody and futile political uprising against the Roman Empire. Jesus resisted this temptation to allow himself to become a messianic freedom fighter against Rome in order to prove his divine messianic mandate, which would ultimately mean replacing one hierarchy of social domination with another one.

In contrast to the Oligarchy what can be said about the Biblical idea of the kingdom of God? The reign of God, which is the Kingdom of God, is in essence hostile to all political hierarchies of social domination. It is necessarily so because the political kingdom of men is essentially idolatrous and is therefore both anti-human and anti-God. 522. The worker must not take more than he can eat—Deuteronomy 23:25

523

The transcendent and the immanent, and the incarnation.

One of the purposes or goals of my journal writing has been to find a way in which the Good with entails Morality can be established as part of the natural order of nature in a physically closed Universe and which by virtue of that cannot be based upon a transcendent set of values imposed upon the world from without, but which must be found to be grounded immanently in the basic elements out which human existence is constituted, and grounded immanently in basic or fundamental nature of the Universe. Of course these concerns relates to the theological and metaphysical problematics of Dualisms which seem plague our thinking about anything, and at every turn, and which continues crop in the form of various kinds of either or dichotomies such as: external versus internal, part versus whole, one versus the many, being versus becoming, nature versus grace, faith versus reason, and so on and so forth. Maybe the all dichotomies and dualism are linked to the not resolving the relation between immanence and transcendence which is captured singularity in the words: 'this is my body'. The solution to all of this may lie in working out what we mean by the idea of Emergence in the context of the nature of the various relationships between parts and whole. All possibilities in a physically closed Universe exist contingently as emergent possibilities of the parts in relation to the whole, in the context of being and becoming.

The relation of the One and Many, bears on problems of the visible versus the invisible, and also the relation between ontology and epistemology. The problem of the visible versus the invisible arises in the context of the existence of two realms, the realm of the visible, which the empirical world of things and object, and the realm of the invisible. The realm of the invisible is not merely the realm of ideas or universals or forms, it is the realm of the abstract, the possible or unrealized possibilities, the mathematical and theory. Does the invisible realm have any kind existence? Do the things in the invisible realm exist, we know 'nothing' cannot exist, because something is nothing by virtue of its non-existence. I don't think we can say that 'invisible things' such numbers or mathematical proofs or mathematical theory, or abstract theories in physics or logic do not exist. They are not nothing. If they are not nothing then they exist, as ideas at the very least. We cannot say that an idea is nothing. It is something, it can have proposition content in the form of claiming something about something, and this is something rather than nothing. An idea can exist. Existence is not universally reducible to that which is visible. Something can be visualized in the imagination without it being visible. We say the invisible realm is transcendent in the sense it does not exist by virtue of the visible realm. We say that the visible realm is the realm of immanence, the realm of 'this is'. In this sense the visible realm is the realm in which something becomes individuated as a 'this is'. It becomes immanent as a 'this is'. In the visible realm things become actualized which is the same as saying that something becomes individuated, as existent which can be predicated. This is it, it is over there, it is round and it is red. Embracing a form of Platonism we argue along the lines that actualization or individuation occurs by virtue of a participating or an emergent relationship between the visible in the form of the individual thing and the invisible in the form of the idea or the universal. As Parmenides said nothing comes from nothing, and everything which 'is', is either 'there' contingently or necessarily. These are old ideas. Whatever exists in the invisible realm can only exist necessarily, and that which exists in the visible realm can only exist contingently. If existence is a primary predicate like shape, size, volume, mass, colour, temperature, texture, and so on, there we cannot separate existence from essence, to exist is also the essence of something, which means something exists by virtue of it essences, that is having this shape, this size, this volume, this mass, colour and so on. It seems absurd to say that existence is not the essence or does not belong to the essence of something. There is no privileging of being over substance or existentiality over essentiality. It does not seem right to say something that is round and red but it does not exist. What is wrong with saying that something is round, red and it also exists. 523. Not to muzzle an ox while ploughing—Deuteronomy 25:4

524

The Marquis de Sade.

The ideas expressed so vividly in the writings of the Marquis de Sade are morally and theologically significant in that they present a graphic illustration of what the world of humankind would necessarily look if the Universe did not exist by virtue of something else however we wish to construe the precise nature and ontological status of the 'something else', where the idea of the 'something else' embodies the idea that all emergent possibilities exist contingently by virtue of an irreducible and transcendent 'something else,' best captured in 'this is my body'. This idea of the 'something else' revolves around the merging of Hellenism or Platonism with the Hebraic as the way forward in resolving the dualistic either/or tensions which are constitutive of the Marquis de Sade's representation of the nature of reality.

Sade is motivated by the desire to substitute the idea of a transcendent and immanent God who is also the perfect embodiment of the supremacy of Reason with his own metaphysics of the ultimate and essential nature of Nature or Reality. In essence, Sade is a metaphysician and therefore an ontologist. And as a metaphysician he fails to secure the credibility of his ideas. Sade's entire conception of reality rests on a view of Nature that is fundamentally false. By prioritising his own metaphysical reading of Nature Sade invests considerable literary effort in propagandizing an ideologically laden metaphysical narrative which advocates in the name of freedom how we ought to behave in a Universe that conforms to his metaphysical vision. Ironically, Sade as the supreme libertine succumbs to being the sublime moralist. He is also the supreme mythologist. And lastly he is the supreme virgin. Sade fails dismally in the realm of the erotic. His erotic dysfunctionality stems from his denial of Eros which is rooted ultimately in his erotic ignorance, an ignorance that is opposite to the famous Socratean ignorance expressed in Plato's 'Symposium' where Socrates paradoxically acknowledged that the only knowledge he possesses is the knowledge of Love or Eros. Socrates as opposed to Sade is the supreme exponent of Eros and the Erotic. Sade remains a virgin because he fails to understand the nature of the erotic being. He is a virgin in the ironic sense that he fails to 'know' in the Hebraic or Biblical or even in the Hellenic sense of knowing which entails the consummation of the fullness of Erotic Being. Ironically Sade does not know, and thus in spite of all the sexual excesses he remains a virgin, trapped in his virginity he does not know, he remains a person without knowledge, and therefore a purveyor of myths, myths in the sense of the fantastic. 524. The courts must carry out the laws of a borrower—Exodus 22:13

525

The natural history of morality.

The evidence from multiple sources that morality predates modern civilization by hundreds of thousands of years in the primates generally speaking and specifically in the family of the various hominins is now well established and is now beyond questioning. The fossilized skeletal remains of adult Neanderthals bearing the signs of various serious and debilitating afflictions and injuries resulting in a life of invalidism, paralysis, and dwarfism and so on, provide us with indubitable evidence that these individuals were nursed and cared for until the event of their natural deaths after reaching old age. Incontrovertible evidence for the natural evolution of empathy, compassion and conscience, or in other words moral predispositions that had life-saving consequences for individuals who had suffered various kinds of accidents or misfortunates which rendered them incapacitated or handicapped, leaving them in situations where they were less able to take care of themselves and would have died or starved without the help and assistance of others. 525. The courts must carry out the laws of an unpaid guard—Exodus 22:6

526

Sexual dimorphism and moral consciousness

Human sexual dimorphism and pair-bonding dynamics differs significantly from other mammals. And it appears that this divergence occurred within a short span of time following the separation of the hominin lineage from the chimps and it also played a significant role in the behavioural evolution of humans.

Male - female sexual dimorphism in mammals and especially in the case of males evolved as an adaptation which facilitated greater access to females for mating opportunities. Also the greater the sexual dimorphism in males the smaller the role the male plays in the rearing of progeny. Compared to the majority of primates human male-female sexual dimorphism is not as great or prominent as in the rest of the primates and correlated with this reduction in sexual dimorphism in humans is the stronger pair bonding that forms between human males and females. In human evolutionary history access to females and male mating opportunities with females seemed not to be constrained by competition between males where size and strength determined who had the most access to females and who mated most often with different females. And it appears that Palaeolithic technology levelled the playing field with regard to male access to females for the purpose of mating. Because of technology all males had equal access to females irrespective of their relative size and strength as individuals for the simple reason that most forms of hunter-gather technology for foraging had a dual function. A sharp stick could be used for digging and killing of prey. It could also be used as a lethal weapon in the hands of any male irrespective of his size or strength to kill a larger and stronger or superior male. Hence lethal technology reduced the advantages of evolutionary investment in male sexual dimorphism. At the same time an evolutionary synergy between reduced male sexual dimorphism and stronger pair bonding to a single female mate for longer periods came under stronger selection pressure because 'free-loading' or 'free-riding' males could no longer have guaranteed risk-free access to any females because of increased dangers associated with opportunistic mating.

Violent elimination or social exclusion of moral delinquents including status seeking males and male seeking to establish themselves in a position of social dominance over others ensured that fairness in all social transaction and the maintenance of coexistence and social cohesion in an egalitarian ethos or arrangement. Individuals using bullying tactics and strategies to establish themselves in positions of social dominance over others posed a moral danger as agents of social stratification and as seekers of moral entitlements with regard to resources and benefits. The danger or risk or hazard of this happening could only be prevented or forestalled by the removal of the offending individual where removal often involving the killing the status seeking bully. These actions would have been ethically condoned for the sake of preserving the preferred egalitarian arrangement where a morality or moral sense of fairness prevailed as the norm in all social relations between individuals. Everyone understood what was fair and what was not fair, and this became the overriding ethic which was observed by all in all social transactions between individuals or between groups of individuals. 526. Lend to the poor and destitute—Exodus 22:24

527

Moral entitlement is secured through a process of circumvention and undermining of the egalitarian social arrangement based on an ethic of fairness and equality in all social transactions involving utilization, distribution and access to life-sustaining resources.

Moral entitlement involves the concomitant process of emotional numbing and the diminishing of moral consciousness or moral sensitivity with regard to considerations or issues of fairness and equality with regard to access and utilization of life-sustaining resources. There are very specific drivers or causes involved in the processes which result in emotional numbing and diminishing of moral sensitivity regarding considerations of fairness and equality which would have been the status quo or moral norm in an egalitarian social arrangement. 527. Not to press them for payment if you know they don't have it—Exodus 22:24

528

Sade and the theatre of atheism.

Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade is anchored in and resonates with Sade's actual love of the theatre which was literally the theatre of atheism. And his theatre of atheism, which was dramatized as a theatre of violation, transgression and sacrilege was premised on a mythological reading of the nature of Nature. The mythological premises underlying the Sadean metaphysics was not fully articulated in Weiss's Marat/Sade which in its historicist contextualization was political significance regarding the world as I was experiencing it at that time. Weiss's play spoke profoundly to me as a student radical in 1976.

It comes as no surprise that the 20th century re-discovery of Sadean metaphysic was not based on a critical re-reading of the Sadean mythology which was assumed to be consonant with what was taken as the Darwinian vision of the world of nature. But it was apparent that no one had seriously digested the writings of Charles Darwin. A general ignorance prevailed about the nature of Nature including the nature of humans. No one seemed to fully comprehend or understand how it was possible for humans and other hominins to have survived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years after splitting off from the other primates. Instead everyone seemed have good drunk on an intellectual concoction based on a reading of Hobbes-Sade-Darwin-Nietzsche, a concoction of ideas which induced a hallucinatory mental state which gave rise to the mythologies underlying modernist and postmodernist perceptions of the nature of Nature. Of course Sade was the glue that held the metaphysical fantasy together which of course turned out to be a metaphysical horror of false belief and irrationality.

It is not too difficult to see that the Sadean theatre of atheism is based on a sincere credulousness of belief, on ignorance, on misinformation, on wilful stupidity. It is sustained by sheer gullibility. And not on the disobedience of Eve, and consequently not on the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for the totality of knowledge, for the knowledge of absolute truth. The ignorance that informs the Sadean theatre of atheism is not that of Eve's disobedience but of the male mind in its Sadean embodiment of credulousness.

The Sadean theatre is comprised of hidden and inaccessible rooms and antechambers which represent the secluded, secret and private spaces in which the bodies of women can be secretively enjoyed, violated and destroyed. These spaces of violation and transgression are always out of public sight. They are always hidden, screened off from the viewing eye, from the eyes which judge or condemn, always blocking out the viewing face which stricken with the pathos of empathy, compassion and conscience, becomes a disturbing, destabilizing and unsettling presence in the space of narcissistic desire.

In the Sadean theatre the female body can only exist in state of involuntary bondage, hidden from view in some remote inaccessible and secret space within the dim depths of a castle. This is the trope which feeds the Sadean fantasy. Dungeon and bondage are the tropes of the Sadean theatre of violation. In the bowels of the castle the dungeon with all it props and secrets can only exist as an inaccessible space within impenetrable boundaries. Within this spatiality the non-compliant feminine body can only be rendered accessible for violation as an immobilized body, as a bound body, as body in state of bondage, as a non-voluntary body, as body devoid of passion and Eros, as a body emptied of all desire. Ironically the feminine victim is the gate-keeper to the realm of the erotic. She is the embodiment of all erotic possibilities. She is the source of sweetness of intimacy, she is the source of the hidden secrets of pleasure and the forbidden territories which awaken desire. Yet as a captive, as a prisoner in a state of involuntary bondage she becomes erotically inaccessible and lifelessly inert when her body like a carcass is rendered physically accessible in the remote depths of an inaccessible dungeon. The woman's sex organs, her breasts and her vagina, and also her anal orifice can now be invaded, violated and destroyed with impunity, and without any moral consequences. The secrets of a woman's body only become accessible to the other when her own desire for erotic pleasure has been awakened in a reciprocal intimate entanglement of mutual desire.

As it to be expected, Sade has his modern acolytes, who as victims of their own credulity, who having bought into his mythological metaphysics have had to work hard at finding all kinds of redeeming features in his world of pornographic fantasy. Only an insignificant minority of Sade's libertines are female and even they function as masculinized bodies with masculinized psyches, and having all trace of femininity erased from their being, they no longer really represent authentic female bodies or feminized psyches. They are men, fully phallo-transmorphosized. But wait, self-claimed feminists such as Angela Carter, are able to mine the work of Sade, and come up with all kinds of strange creatures, Sadean females, who are paraded as fictionalized role models of feminine liberation. Sade's female libertines remain the creations of the male fantasy, they are phallocentric abominations. How do feminist critics explain Sade's morbid and relentless fictionalized preoccupation with the transgressive and sadistic pornographic violation and destruction of the feminine? The short answer: Through a process of mythologization or meta-mythologization, that is, as a parody, as forming a representation of a representation. Jane Gallop resorts to a version of the Freudian oedipal scenario, which is a myth in itself. 528. Press the idolater for payment—Deuteronomy 15:3

529

Eros and the anarchy of desire

The evolutionary and biological reality and the corresponding scientific truth is actually contrary to the message proclaimed by Murry Davis in his book 'Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology'. Sex evolved from meiosis and sexual dimorphism eventually evolved differently in different species as an adaptation for facilitating efficient male mate selection, in which the female of the species was always the natural partner who did the selection of a male mate, with all potential male mates competing amongst themselves for a specific female partner. In nature the female is in control. She chooses her mate! If there has to be a cosmic principle that has been violated then this is that principle. Of course as a consequence of sexual behavioural maladaptation arising from the social pathology of the Patriarchical Oligarchy, this process underwent a subversive reversal and in this process of reversal human sexuality underwent what could best be described as a pornographication. This was the inexorable inevitability of the commodification of the totality of human life in relation to the full spectrum of human wants and including the more basic human needs, and the most basic human needs involved the realization of relief through consumption and in pornographic consumption a form of financializable utility was realized in relation to a basic human need. In the pornographication of human sexuality, a commodity was created for consumption, wants were united with utility, and things which embody utility as a means towards some end, become objects for the consummation, where consummation is reduced to consumption, and consumption is a substitution, a substitution for the relieving the deep yearnings of desire. And this is alienation feeding on the emptiness of illusion.

In Plato's 'Symposium' and 'Phaedrus' we learn that it is Eros who desires, and Eros desires that which is lacking. Eros desires out of need, out of deficiency and the erotic desiring of Eros is always a journey of assent to the Beautiful. It is the beautiful that Eros lacks and which Eros desires. Erotic desire is the cosmic principle if we need to debate about any cosmic principle linked to sex. All of this is of course is mythological but as a representation of representation it strikes chord, and has something which echoes the ring of truth. Desire corrected framed functions as a good, but only as good in the anarchy of desire. Anarchy of desire can only be realized under the conditions of individual autonomy and freedom, because anarchy always represents the autonomy, it in the realization autonomy where the truth and meaning of anarchy stands for lies. This is the order for which anarchy strives, it is the order which represents the reversal or destruction of the oligarchy. This also presents the desire of anarchy. The desire of anarchy represent the Eros of anarchy.

If there is cosmic principle which embodies the anarchy of desire then it has to be grounded in the autonomy of the feminine, the agency of the feminine and the non-passivity of the feminine. This cosmic principle represents the negation of the Sadean mythology of the nature of Nature and the also negation or cancellation or erasure of the Sadean pornographication of reality as the means for waging a war of rebellion against the idea of God in the theatre of atheism.

Selection of sexual of secondary characteristics which ultimate results in sexual dimorphism including that of the female human body represents a natural biological process in which the female is the agent of mate choice. And female controlled mate choice was in all likelihood the primary driver responsible for the evolution of human sexual dimorphism over hundreds of thousands of years in mobile or non-sedentary hunter-gatherer societies. In the context of egalitarian sociality it was highly likely that human or hominin females exercised agency and autonomy in choosing their prospective male reproductive partners in relationships which would have been monogamous given the environmental exigencies. In these forms of sociality the anarchy of desire in relationship to realization of the good, would have been the operative cosmic principle until the emergence of the Oligarchy following the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

Now to change the subject. Why should the Universe not be saturated with life? Why should the Universe not be saturated with signs of intelligence? Given the nature of the Universe, the emergence of life was inevitable. Given the nature of the Universe the Good, the Beautiful and the conscious awareness of what is the Truth exist as tantalizing possibilities. The fullness of Truth waits to be realized. Truth exists as an inevitability which is constantly being denied. Denial of the Truth is the grounds for Divine Judgement. There can be no judgement if there is no Truth. But denial does no erase the Truth. Denial only invites Judgement. If God must judge humanity then it is the denial of Truth which will be judged. 529. The creditor must not forcibly take collateral—Deuteronomy 24:10

530

God, omnipresent, omnipotence, omniscience and contingency or chance.

It will be clear to you by now that the shadow of God has haunted the writing of the Journal of almost every page. Why would an anarchist lipstick lesbian have this unremitting preoccupation with God, Anarchism and Communism? It would seem this has been a preoccupation with irreconcilables. But wait before you judge me unfairly! Given the existence of God, God's omnipotence and omniscience does not exclude possibility of Universe endowed with the immanent power to be a creative self-engineering and creative self-designing Universe under the regime of chance. God's omnipotence and omniscience is the condition of possibility for all logical and rational possibilities including the logical and rational power to know of all possibilities whether actualized or otherwise existing in a state of unrealized 'virtuality'. Also the future remains open to all logically realizable possibilities in the sense that the future does not exist ontologically. In this sense contingency, unpredictability and uncertainty are built in features of the Universe, they are ontological features of the cosmos. If the future does not exist, it is open in the sense of having no content, which means there is nothing to really know about the future. The eternal present comes into existence by virtue of God's continuous re-creation of the entire Universe with each passing moment. In this sense God is perfectly free. God is not bound by the future, in the sense that nothing can be bound by nothing. The future is nothingness. Nothingness exists in the form of the future. So in reality we have no future, we only have the transient present. There is no predetermined destiny. You are free to re-invent yourself at the threshold of each passing moment. What about the past? The past reaches into the present at each moment in the form of becoming the ground or basis or foundation for conditions of possibilities that can be realized at each moment. I arrive at each new moment equipped or constrained by the conditions of possibility which I inherit with each passing moment. This is my effective history which brings me to the dawn of every moment with the power and capacity to act. I am continually being reborn. I am continually being given a fresh start, a new chance. Each passing moment is a moment of self-realization, a moment of self-actualization, a moment of self-invention or self-creation. Jesus as God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and therefore for God there is no externally imposed succession of time or flow of time linking the before with after, because as the only immutable existent, God is the creator of the succession of moving moments which 'fill' or 'link' the before and the after. In God there is no succession of moments, and independently of God there is no existence of a succession of moments as something in itself, like a continuous stream or flow or a process, which can exist as something in-its-self in the form of a self-creating phenomenon. So like space, time cannot create itself, and because of this the succession of moments can only exist by virtue of God bringing each moment into existence. God is the relation between Being and Time. What makes time tick? What is the measure of time? Time is something, and this allows to us to say something about time, a clock ticks slower when a clock undergoes acceleration or converges onto strong gravitation field. Time and space are quantized, the intervals and lengths, cannot be reduced indefinitely, respectively. An interval of time cannot be shorter than Planck time (tp) where tp = [hG/(2πc5)]½, where h = Planck's constant, G = gravitation constant and c = speed of light. This is not fiction or myth. No theory as yet, including quantum theory or general relativity, gives an explanatory account for the origination, existence or genesis of space and time. Physics remains incomplete so long as it is unable to give an explanatory account for the emergence of space and time. Something must give rise to the existence of space and time. In this context it is pertinent to repeat once more the line of argument about nothing giving rise to nothing, nothing cannot give rise to something, only something can give rise to something. The existence of space and time is not self-explanatory. Why not mix physics and theology? Time is the horizon of God's revelation and God's revelation is always a self-revelation. Why not mix history and theology, history is the medium of God's revelation and God's revelation is always a self-revelation in the unfolding of history. God's omnipresence, as the condition for the possibility of every 'presencing' gives meaning to the idea that history is the medium God's self-revelation as in becoming present in the unfolding of eventful events, where the 'idea' of eventful is captured by its contingency. 530. Return the collateral to the debtor when needed—Deuteronomy 24:13

531

Power once more.

The subject and the phenomenon of power are coterminous and correlative. The subject is a creation which arises from externally imposed processes of objectification, which are consequences of power arrangements, and it is through these multiple processes of objectification that the subject becomes entangled in a web of power relationships. In fact the subject, brought into existence through multiple processes of objectification becomes subjected to a multidimensional economy of power relationship. The economy of power relationships takes the form of exploitation, and exploitation necessarily also involves a loss from which others derive a benefit, and these losses include the loss of freedom, loss of autonomy, loss of agency, loss of control, loss of choice and so on and so forth. All these losses are facilitated or extracted through a process of submission. The struggle against power and its processes of objectification and control necessarily has to follow an anarchist strategy, a strategy which begins with resistance.

The modern theoretical conceptualization of power received renewed impetus from the writings of Nicollò Machiavelli (The Prince, early 16th century) and Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, mid-17th century). There are persuasive echoes of truth in each of the multiple possible theoretical conceptualizations of the multi-factorial way in which power actually works within social systems or social formations, different but overlapping conceptualizations of power include the contributions that have been made in the writings of Hobbes, Weber, Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Gaventa, Giddens and of course Foucault, who some see as the philosopher of power. A systematic theory of power which has explanatory and predictive 'power' would have to include the multi-dimensional determinative, causative, active, mutually reinforcing, supplementary, correlative, interactive and synergistic of roles of factors which shape and give form to the configurations, mechanisms, structures, functioning, asymmetry and workings of power such as: political elites, agency, passivity, violence, force, terror, ideology, exploitation, disempowerment, private property, accumulation or appropriation of surplus value, mode of production, forces of production, relations of production, class, influence, persuasion, authority, social status, history, beliefs, myths, narratives, religious, gender, race, hegemony, ethnicity, culture and so on and so forth. Dualism and dichotomies emergence in the various theoretical constructions of the inner workings of power in society. For example, centralization versus decentralization of power, personalization of power versus the de-personalization of power, overt versus covert exercise of power, the concentration versus the dispersion of power, and so on and so forth.

The workings, effects and existence of power become empirically manifest or perceptible in the multi-dimensional forms and realities of actual inequalities. The exercise of power always serves a social, economic and political purpose in which its intended multi-fold functions are realized in the interests of a ruling elite, who are the ultimate agents of power. The objectives of power are nothing less than the total disempowerment of the masses by the ruling elite, and disempowerment of the masses is the overriding and global goal of the ruling elite irrespective of the prevailing mode of production which happened to be in existence, which may be capitalist or socialist. All non-anarchist social formations are ruled by a political elite. They are non-anarchist by virtue of fact that are generically oligarchical systems in which power is concentrated centrally in the hands of a ruling elite. Total disempowerment is a achieved by: imposing hegemony, engineering passivity in the form of passive agreement, enforcing non-resistance to directives, instilling unquestioning obedience, restricting free expression, controlling the flow of information, maintaining mute compliance, suppressing conflict, achieving consent through threats and systematic coercion, creating a climate of fear and distrust, mobilization of bias regarding beliefs and values, shaping political perceptions through the indoctrination of political mythologies, using terror to undermine solidarity and social cohesion, and so on and so forth. The multi-dimensional approach to the psychological, social, economic and political engineering of disempowerment by virtue of which the Oligarchy secures its rule and existence reduces the masses to a state of powerlessness.

In order to secure legitimacy, manage crises, quench conflicts and dissipate resistance, the Oligarchy in whatever form, but especially in its capitalism forms, is dependent on the creation of institutions which promote the maintenance of social order through the means of various kinds of praxis or actions (praxis = action). The ruling elite secures or imposes it domination through the instilling or engineering the consent of the dominated classes. Ideology plays a central role in the engineering of consent. Ideology exerts its hegemonic influence as a living or vital force. For want of a more powerful expression: Ideologies operate as materializable praxes or actions or practices. The adjective 'materializable' translates in reference to something which is 'capable of being materialized'. Ideologies in the form something represent actions or practices which are capable of being materialized as states of affairs. When becoming materialized into state of affairs, ideologies determine not only lived experiences but the mode of existence or life of individuals, thus ideologies represent more than mere illusions or false consciousness. In 'The German Ideology', Marx and Engel argue that the major ideas of each epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, which control not only the means of material production but also control the means of mental production. This means that the materialization of ideology become objectively manifested in the conditioned behaviour, values, expectations, belief systems, convictions, morality and sociality of the subjugated classes or subclasses, who become active bearers of the prescribed roles which have been determined by their position within the hierarchy of social domination. As such, any ideology functioning as a hegemonic force is mediated by institutions, institutions which constitute the superstructure of a social formation and its corresponding modes of production. These institutions also function as the Ideological State Apparatus. Even the institutions of civil society are incorporated into the Ideological State Apparatus and mediate Oligarchical hegemony at all levels of the social formation including the family. Even the idea of the National Interest mediates the materialization of ideologies which serve the interests of the Oligarchy. Even institutions such as wage bargaining councils or trade unions or welfare organizations play an active role within the Ideological State Apparatus. Other institutions such as the mass media, popular culture or the culture industry (popular fiction, cinema, music and TV), play a mediatory role in the ideological apparatus of the ruling class, their ideological content becoming transmuted into the consciousness of the subjugated classes, making them passive and plaint.

The genesis, nature and dynamics of power, and its corollaries or consequences in the multiple forms of disempowerment and powerlessness, and its global or totalizing concretization in the generic forms of the Oligarchy can only be fully articulated in a comprehensive and empirically valid theory of power. The challenge is to formulate a theory for the genesis power, for example an evolutionary theory which is based on the contingent development of those forms of sociality in which the conditions for the emergence of an elite are realized, that is conditions which result in the non-egalitarian concentration of power in the hands of that elite. The inexorable consequence of this asymmetric concentration of power in the hands of an elite would be the emergence of the Oligarchy, an event corresponding to the eruption of the phenomenon we like to refer to as civilization. In contrast to the development of a robust theory of power along the lines of Darwin's theory of evolution, Foucault as one of the chief exponents on the phenomenon of power has not bothered to construct a coherent or comprehensive or developmental/evolutionary or even a systematic theory of power. Foucault as a thinker is also cognitively constrained by his own non-modernist metaphysical assumptions and is very much a prisoner of his own historical horizon. While never explicitly identifying himself as a postmodernist, his metaphysics places him firmly in the postmodernist camp. So it is not surprising that Foucault did not develop a comprehensive or coherent theory for the inevitable occurrence of power arrangements which would give rise the recurrent or repetitious re-emergence of the Oligarchy in its multiple forms.

Some of the Foucaultian ideas on power are redeemable where they throw light on or are consistent with this particular investigation into the nature of power within the framework of the Oligarchy. For Foucault power is omnipresent. We argue that the Oligarchy can only exist by virtue of the omnipresence of its power. Power in the context of Oligarchy cannot be comprehended independently of an understanding or explanation of the nature of the power relationships between subjects by virtue of which hierarchies of social domination are able to actually exist. Humans become subjects or are constituted as subjects in terms of the power relationships in which they are embedded or trapped. Subjects and subjectivity are formed in the dynamics of power relationships. This idea resonates with idea that the materialization of ideology as a hegemonic force become objectively manifested in the conditioned behaviour, values, expectations, belief systems, convictions, morality and sociality of the subjugated classes or subclasses, who become active bearers or subjects of the prescribed roles which have been predetermined by their position or status within the hierarchy of social domination. Clearly the materialization of ideology is constitutive of both subject and subjectivity within the framework of the Oligarchy. Ideology as a hegemonic force is necessarily consistent with the concept of the Oligarchy's existence being dependent on the omnipresence of its power. Again the Foucaultian idea that subjects and subjects are formed through power which is mediated through or coupled to various kinds of discourses, is another example of the materialization of ideology. The Foucaultian idea of discourse is something which is institutionally controlled. Discourses are controlled, structured and regulated by systems of rules which define who can say what, when and how. This is consistent with the way Oligarchic hierarchies of social domination are structured and work or function.

In Romans 12.2, Saint Paul writes: Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's is. Jesus was counted among the transgressors (Luke 22.37). Not to conform to the pattern of this world by renewing one's mind means to be counted among the transgressors. One cannot follow the teachings of the New Testament and at the same be a subject who has been formed by the hegemonic forces of the Oligarchy. To be a transgressor is to become the parable (as in Matthew 25: 35 – 36): Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' To become the parable is become the materialization of the parable through praxis or actions. 531. Not to delay its return when needed—Deuteronomy 24:12

532

Revelation as History.

I don't agree with Schleiermacher that revelation involves God's self-disclosure within a religious experience, which could only be something which was experienced privately, as one's own personal experience, an experience which remains publically inaccessible and which cannot be verified or confirmed as an encounter with God. Hegel conceived God's revelation as the self-disclosure of the Absolute. Karl Barth was amenable to the conception of God's self-disclosure in events which were of a historical nature. Which means their occurrence had the character of being public and therefore accessible to general observation, and could be recounted by witnesses, often in the form of a tradition of re-telling or re-narrating of what was originally witnessed by many. This is the form in which much of the stories of the Bible have been told and retold, including the Gospels. Of course the idea of revelation as divine verbal inspiration in the form a direct dedication of words from God or through one of the angels is absurd or as a recitation which is equally absurd. The very idea of reciting God's Word or God's revelations is absurd. God's Word is not something that can be written down! In the words of Wolfhart Pannenberg revelation as God's self-disclosure can only be mediated through historical events, in which case, a historical event can be conceived as an act of God. This is the original understanding of revelation in the religion of Israel. The Israelites collectively and publically experienced their own history of deliverance from oppression as the self-disclosure of God. The event of God's self-disclosure is a collective event, which is experienced collectively, and it becomes an institutionalized memory, a memory entrenched in the transgenerational collective memory, which is the same as becoming institutionalized as a literary tradition. The constant retelling of what happened or what was experienced becomes entrenched, consolidated and fixed first in the form and content of an oral narrative, and later the oral tradition becomes preserved in the form and content of written texts. The retelling of the event in the form of a narrative, where the narrative is always a literary interpretation of the events which had previously unfolded in history now also forms part of that historical event. The event as an objective fact and the interpretation of that event belong together, possibly in the form of a dialectical tension. The truth of the literary interpretation has a bearing, or a dialectical bearing, on the Total Truth or the Totality of Truth, where the Totality of Truth is the System of Truth. And the Totality of Truth or the Absolute has a 'systemic-epistemic' connection with the 'truth' embodied in the event, in which case this truth is connected to the Total System of Truth or the Absolute, and it is this relationship or this dialectical relationship which gives the historical event and its literary interpretation/narration the status of revelation, that is revelation in the form of God's self-disclosure in history. This means revelation is not reducible to writing. Revelation always points back to the event itself, as something that was experienced collectively in time and space. It was experienced as an event, an event which imposed itself from within history rather than from without. It was immanent. As Pannenberg argues, Israel's interpretation of her own history within the framework of God's promise of liberation and the fulfilment of God's promise is paradigmatic of the form and content of God revelatory self-disclosure. The Word of God as God's revelatory self-disclosure is never in the form and content of a list of commands or instructions or laws or dictates or recipes which need to be assiduously followed in order to earn or merit salvation. This idea of revelation is absurd. The revelatory Word of God is the saving event and nothing else. The saving event is the Word become flesh in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. The events of Golgotha that ended with the words: 'it is finished', represents God's saving event. The words 'this is my body' are the words of a saving event, rooted in world history, and representative of God's revelatory self-disclosure. The resurrection of Jesus represents God's saving event. In each of these cases the saving event is rooted in 'world' history, confirming the world historical character of God's revelatory self-disclosure. In line with Pannenberg's thinking, each of these saving events which are embedded in world history, have meaning and significance only with reference to Universal History and not to some supra-history or spiritual history. Universal History represents the whole of history and therefore the significance and meaning of the whole of history. Universal History derives its significance and meaning only within the framework of a saving event, an event which as the fulfilment of the promise can only be the revolutionary destruction of the Oligarchy. The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, refers to the destruction of the Oligarchy. 532. Not to demand collateral from a widow—Deuteronomy 24:17

533

In the thrall of Capitalism. Once more!

For most of human history human wants were not satisfied by commodities which embodied utility or use values and exchange value. When reading capital most of us want rush through the opening pages that deal with commodities. But this is a mistake. Both Marx and Heidegger were in their own different ways under the captive thrall of capitalism in a very profound way, but they responded differently. In the commodity Marx saw both the wealth of capitalism and the source of alienation. After the 1917 revolution Bolsheviks had to urgently deal with the satisfaction of wants in the only way possible which was in the form of objects which embodied utility. They were committed to an idea of socialism, which represented socialism in the form of a giant factory churning out objects which would satisfy human wants or needs. But they could not reproduce the 'revolutionary' dynamism of capitalism with regard to generation of utility or use values in the form and diversity of commodities which the masses desired. When evaluating the construction of Russian socialism one has to been quite perceptive, that is ironically perceptive, in expanding on the socialist fantasies of Bolsheviks which was actually a dream of emulating what capitalism could offer, but without capitalism, that is, a dream exorcised of all the nightmares of capitalism, and this was the ultimate goal of 20th century Communism.

What about Heidegger? Heidegger saw the dominance of instrumentality and technology in life as alienating. While Heidegger does address the utility of objects, we cannot separate the utility of objects regarding the satisfaction of human wants from the instrumentality of reason and role of technology in human life. Technology, instrumental reason, calculation, commodities embodying use value and exchange value, labour, surplus value, expropriation of value, accumulation, forces of production, relations of production and modes of production are all intertwined in what we conceptualise as a social formation. In different ways both Marx and Heidegger confront the revolutionary overcoming of the chains that enslave humanity by a revolutionary reconfiguration of the modes of production. Heidegger's criticism of instrumentality, calculation, technology and commodification of utility offers fascism as the solution. Marx offers communism as the means for overcoming the commodification of utility and ultimately all of life for the sake of profit.

Ironically a nuanced reading of Heidegger brings to light or unveils a paradoxical resonance between his metaphysics of fascism and the metaphysics of identity politics and 'decolonization' of the mind of all foreign influences by returning to essence of the original, which is emblematic of all nationalisms, all of which emphasizes a return to a consciousness of an 'authentic' identity. The metaphysics of fascism is integral to all nationalisms and is deeply antipathetic to internationalism and ultimately to communism. The metaphysics of fascism yearns for a return to the way things were before. Fascism desires to reverse history, a reversal which necessarily entails the wish to make the myth of the way things were the goal of all political struggle under the leadership of the great leader. 533. Not to demand as collateral utensils needed for preparing food—Deuteronomy 24:6

534

Why would God ever put Her trust in a human authored book to reveal Her will for the Universe?

It seems that it was only in the context of Middle Eastern monotheistic religions that the idea of divine revelation in the form of the writings of sacred scripture first took root. The idea of divine revelation in the form of written scriptures became a culturally entrenched belief following a long process of religious institutionalization which coincided with the gradual and incremental consolidation of the Judaic Tanakh which occurred over a period of 500 or so years. It was over this period that the Hebrews or Jews invented themselves as a people having a special relationship with the Creator of the Universe.

The Torah in its current form consisting of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were finally completed only after the Babylon exile, but the period of its gestation and development probably stretched from 586 to 539 BC, with the terminus ad quem for the final draft of the Torah being no later than 250 BC. It seems that the main themes of the Torah were in dynamic incubation during the exile period and the consolidation of the Torah eventually reached it fruition during the post-exile second temple period. The Torah is obviously a work of fiction and was shaped by the exilic experiences in Babylon. The so called Deuteronomistic history consisting of the books Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were probably completed during the Babylon exile, and again these books represent the post-wilderness and post-Mosaic fictionalization and mythologization of the history of Israel, in the period from 538 to 330 BC. Also in the exilic period the following prophetic books were drafted, expanded and reshaped: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, second Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah and Zephaniah. It is likely that the early Psalms known as the Psalms of David were also composed during the Babylon exile.

Beginning with the post-exilic period and ending round about 200 BC the following Old Testament literature had been composed, drafted, reworked and given its final shape: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Haggi, Zechariah, Malachi, Nehemiah, Ezra and Chronicles. During the Hellenistic period from 330 to 164 BC the following Old Testament literature emerged: Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Book of Jonah and the finalization of the Book of Psalms. The Book of Daniel was composed after 164 BC. The composition and formation of the Old Testament starting from seven century BC was written intermittently by multiple authors, editors and redactors over a period of roughly 581 years drawing their ideas and material from multiple literary and oral sources. In all likelihood the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were fictional inventions with no or only very tenuous links to historical personages who may have actually existed in time and space. In contrast to the Greeks and Romans the religious life of the Jews gradually became increasing centred round the continual re-reading of the Torah and the rest of the scriptures. Also in contrast to the Greeks and Romans who had become increasing less religious as a consequence of their continual re-reading of the Classical Literature, the Jew became increasing religious and more devout as a direct consequence of their continual re-reading of the Torah and the scriptures. The Greeks and Romans, the pagans or gentiles in other words, knew that both truth and fiction in their Classical Literature had become hopelessly entangled. At the time when Jesus made his entrance onto the stage of history the learned gentiles were well aware that culturally speaking their Mediterranean world had become encrusted in deep layers of myth and legend ever since Homer. And the Jews could only escape from drowning in the Gentile Hellenistic ocean of ideas while remaining unavoidably immersed in this milieu by a continual re-reading and re-interpretation of their scriptures. And it was in re-reading and re-remembering that they found their refuge from history. They found their refuge by retreating into a fictional history of themselves. By embracing their fictions the Jews now lived outside history. By taking flight from history their God too was no longer the God of history. Their God no longer revealed himself in their history, because their history had ceased to be universal history. Universal history now belonged to the pagans, to the gentiles. First the Greek and then the Romans had taken upon themselves the re-inventing of history. Cicero proclaims that Herodotus is the father of history. Yet Cicero is well aware of the fabulous tales that litter Herodotus' accounts of history. In contrast the scribes and Pharisees are blissfully unaware of all the fabulous tales which litter their Torah and scriptures. But fabulous tales are readily believed by a race that has migrated from world history into the ghetto of the wilderness. As the end of the second temple inexorably approached it was an irony that Jews who had no future had already spent more than half a millennium engaged in a constant re-telling and re-writing of their own peculiar history as the medium of God's revelation. At this juncture Jesus was crucified on a Roman Cross as the King of the Jews and on the road to Damascus Saint Paul the Jew re-enters history as a Jew by proclaiming that salvation is from the Jews.

Sextus Empiricus was concerned with stories, narratives, falsity, lies and fiction. He proposed that there were three kinds of narratives: history, fiction and myth. History was always something that had actually happened, and not mere tales that bordered on the fabulous. Myths embraces everything that did not actually happen. And fiction in contrast to myth and history concerns everything that could have happened but did not actually happen. Yet history and fiction merge or become intertwined in the re-invention of the past. And the re-invention the past is an inescapable consequence of wanting to re-visit the past in order to re-tell or rewrite the past especially in the light of the present. This is precisely what the Old Testament authors, editors and redactors have ended up doing.

Was the canonical instituting of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible as the word of God an inevitable outcome of Israelitic history? What drove the collective editorial process which resulted in the recognition and preservation of a collection of sacred literature? Was it the Babylonian exile? It seems that a tradition and consensus took root regarding what collection of sacred literary works should acquire the status of being the infallible and authoritative word of God's revelation. Did Israel's self-consciousness invention of its own history and the idea of God's revelation became conflated? Whatever the influences and forces may have been, in the end the books accepted into the Biblical canon were duly given the status of being divinely inspired and authoritative on all matters regarding the will of God. In addition, the canonical scriptures decisively and unambiguously revealed God's divine moral order and salvation plan for Universe for all time and for all generations. In contrast to this, the pagans and polytheists with their uncountable number of gods had not based their religion on the authority of sacred and revelatory scriptures. In Greco-Roman world the foundation or justification of religious beliefs and practices on the basis of the contents of a sacred literature which was believed to be verbally inspired by God was something inconceivable and possibly even laughable. It was something which could not be taken seriously. Judaism in the Roman-Hellenic context was something quite anomalous. Why would piety, religious devotion and salvation depend on the study of a sacred literature? How could a life of reading become the road to salvation?

How was it possible that something literal could be said or written about God? Can any predicate be literally applied to God? Can we say that God is X, Y and Z, and so on and so forth. 534. Not to lend with interest—Leviticus 25:37

535

To be a Jew.

When Yael still struggling with her mental illness moved in with me and I began to take care of her, and I also began to realize a lot about what it practically meant to an Orthodox Jew. To be a Jew is more about belonging than believing. What makes one a Jew is not reducible to a faith commitment? You are a Jew by virtue of birth or else you become a Jew by choice, which means you become a Jew by virtue of conversion. Existentially the experience of becoming a Jew by conversion is completely different from being born a Jew. Someone who was born a Jew will not be able to know what it feels like to become a Jew. To become a Jew by conversion involves an experience that is quite drastic, it involves a complete re-invention of oneself, a re-invention which necessarily entails a clean severing, a clean break, an annihilation, a destruction, a disowning, a denial, an isolation, a cutting loose of everything that is linked to or associated with one's previous life-commitments, life-relationships, life-experience, life-world and life-history. All of this can leave one feeling traumatised, devastated, estranged, lost, isolated, alienated and alone. Conversion can be a traumatic and devastating rather than a joyful or wonderful or liberating experience. A person becoming a Jew by conversion will not know what it feels like to be born a Jew. The experiencing of being born a Jew is different from becoming a Jew by choice through conversion. Whether you are born a Jew or become a Jew by choice through the process of conversion you are essentially defined by belonging to a people who share a tradition, a history, a culture, a way of being, a way of life, a language, a sense of common nationhood, a sense of ethnicity, even a sense of race, and a loyalty to a land called Israel.

While on a flight back to South Africa I became shocking aware of how 'Jewish' I had become. After her stint in Tara and having divorced the rabbi, we lived together as a couple for more than years before Yael committed suicide. Yael had moved in with me after Isabella had died in an aircraft crash in Mozambique. Sitting in the seat next to me on the flight back was a woman about the same age as I and she looked strikingly similar to Yael, but a more angelic and pure version of Yael. And we got talking as usually happens on these long flights. And then out the blue she asks me if I am Jewish. Of course I had introduced myself has Hannah. I am curious, so I ask her: 'What makes you think that I am Jewish?' Her answer: 'It is the way you put things when you speak, just like a Jew, for example the way you answered my question – 'what makes you think that I am a Jew?' You answered my question with a peculiarly flavoured kind of rhetorical question, which is a typically Jewish characteristic especially if you have grown up as an Orthodox Jew in a very Talmudic environment.' She turned to be a Jew by birth who had been a wild teenage rebel, studied a BA in psychology, did a postgraduate degree in clinical psychology, converted to Christianity, married a Baptist Pastor, had three children and practices as a clinical psychology. I confessed that I was not Jewish, and then I explained that my life with Yael could possibly have contributed to my subconsciously picking up the mannerism and subtleties of being Jewish. When I asked her whether she still viewed herself as a Jew, her answer was yes: 'I am a Jew, that cannot change, and I don't see any point in erasing the fact that I am Jew'. My question to her: 'But you are a Jew who believes that Jesus is God?' Answer: 'Yes I do. But that does not make me a lesser of Jew or negate the fact that I am a Jew. Saint Paul never stopped being a Jew, not did the God incarnate deny being a Jew. He was crucified by Pontius Pilate as the King of the Jews, and he still rules the Universe as the King of the Jews and the Jewish Messiah.' She was saying exactly what Wayne Bernstein had said to the Rabbi.

The re-dating of the writing of the Old Testament (OT) or the Hebrew Bible (HB) has been shifted to later and later dates. Post-classical or recent OT scholarship which includes a more radical later dating of the Hebrew Bible (HB) may reflect an anti-Semitic agenda to discredit the Torah or Pentateuch in addition to the rest of the Tanakh. I do sometimes think that there are anti-Semitic elements driving the new revisionist trends in Old Testament scholarship. This new OT revisionism is just one more example of the postmodernist critical scepticism of what it calls grand narratives, where the scepticism itself is based on ideologically loaded premises and assumption. The new revisionism proposes that the history of Israel as narrated in the books of the Old Testament (OT) or the Hebrew Bible (HB) represents in reality nothing less than historicized fictions which have been contrived by a guild of scribes during the Babylonian Exile for ideological purposes. The word 'contrived' is loaded because it invites the question: Contrived towards what end or what purpose or what Telos? So the new revisionism in Old Testament studies with its own ideological motivations falls into its own trap. It accusations of an overriding ideological plot giving shape to the historicized fictions embodied in the HB are in themselves ideologically motivated. This represents a typical case of somebody saying something which is ideologically motivated (a grand narrative) about something representing an ideology (a grand narrative).

The claims made by the new revisionism that the writing of the OT consists of historicized fictions rests on the arguments that no archaeological evidence exists which can attest to the historicity of events and personages spoken of in the pages of OT. Not only have the revisionist placed question marks on the actual historicity of the Exodus and the Babylonian Exile they have also questioned the historicity of the patriarchical fathers, Moses, David, Solomon and so on.

The new revisionist also called minimalists have based their claims that the OT is a work of historicized fiction on a construction of counts as evidence. The written contents of the OT are excluded from counting as self-referencing evidence. Only empirically well-grounded sources of evidence in the physical archaeological artefacts can be recognized as supportive evidence for the occurrence of OT events and as evidence for the existence of OT protagonists such as the patriarchical fathers or Moses. These are the grounds for their scepticism of the historical reliability of the historical narratives of the Old Testament canon

The minimalist are adamant in their insistence that the historicity of the Old Testament narratives cannot be self-grounding or self-substantiating in a circular fashion by textual self-reference. The textual contents of the OT cannot self-substantiate their own claims independent of external evidence. External evidence has to be in the form of material archaeological artefacts. The minimalists make the radical and destructive claim that there is no substantial external archaeological evidence to validate the historicity of all major events or the existence of major role players which have given shape to the plot which binds the books of the OT canon into a reliable history of ancient Israel. For example, the minimalists claim that the two events which gave rise to the historical-theological plot of ancient Israel are not based on actual historically verifiable founding events, events which the OT constantly eludes to. The new revisionist claim that these founding events which underpin the entire grand narrative of the Torah and indeed the Tanakh are not real historical events which actually occurred, involving historical actors who actually existed. Rather they represent founding myths, in which case the Torah is based on the Exodus Myth and the post-Exodus existence of Israel as a Polis and a people is based on the Babylonian Exile Myth. Thus the fictionalized historiography of ancient Israel and its political life as articulated in the OT has been structured on these two great founding myths.

The critical approach taken by the minimalist theorists is broadly and legitimately 'materialist' or 'physicalist' and therefore excludes the possibility of the involvement or existence of: 1) a supernatural agency in the production of the literature which constitutes the Torah or any of the books in the Old Testament canon, and 2) the embodiment of any divine revelatory status in the writings of the literature which constitutes the Torah or any of the books in the Old Testament canon. The minimalist critical approach to the literary and historical appraisal of the Old Testament cannon is exclusively naturalistic and unabashedly secular. And consequently, in their view the Bible itself, must be abandoned as a credible source of history or revelation and should be treated instead as historicized fiction. Yael like many Jews I know all of whom self-identified as a Jews accept the minimalist thesis regarding the nature of the OT. They are happy to accept that all events and persons are fictionalized creations. Examples would include: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah, Job and so on. The events would include creation, flood, the patriarchical sagas, Exodus, Sinai, the wondering in the wilderness, conquering of Canaan, the stories in the Books of Judges, Ruth, Esther and so on.

Yael always spoke of the Noble Lies embodied in the Torah and the Tanakh. In her opinion the whole of Judaism was based on a Noble Lie. She did not believe in the existence of God nor did she believe in the soul or the afterlife. The term 'Noble Lies' applies to a philosophical concept possibly first developed by Socrates and expanded on by Plato, especially in his Republic. The theme of Noble Lies has its roots in Plato's Republic and plays a role in the ideological and onto-theological defence of the Oligarchy. On a superficial level Noble Lies are equivalent to ideology and serve an ideological function of sanction, legitimation, education or indoctrination.

If the narratives which make up the Old Testament canon consist of historicized fiction then the theologies of both Judaism and Islam are based on pure fictions. What about Christianity? A case can be made that Christianity represents the 'great disclamation'. Both Jesus and Saint Paul's relationship to what is believed to be fictions and historicized fictions of the Biblical canon are 'parabolic', allegorical and ironic in nature or in their literary form. The great disclamation represents a dialectical overcoming of the canon. Jesus' dying utterance on the Roman cross outside the city walls on Golgotha was: 'It is finished'. What was finished? What was finished represented the end or dialectical overcoming of Noble Lies which are embodied and articulated in the Biblical canon and now also in the Islamic canon which was essentially derived from the literature of the Old Testament canon. The words 'it is finished' does not mark the fulfilment or confirmation of the canon, it announces the creative destruction of the canon. This is the enigma and great mystery of Jesus and the preaching of Saint Paul. This message or Word which Jesus embodied actually advocated the end of religion and religious practice, the end of the City, the end of the Oligarchy, and the end of Noble Lies. This is why it was necessary to execute Jesus. 'It is finished!' Again, let us reflect on this. What does 'it is finished' mean? It means the arrival of the end. It means that this is the end. The end of what? The end of building the City. The end of the City. The end of the continuance of the City. The City can only exist in the form of an Oligarchy. These multiplicity of 'ends' or 'endings' constitutes the apocalypse, the eschaton, the coming of the messiah, and the arrival of the Kingdom of God. The arrival of the Kingdom of God is manifested in the destruction of the Oligarchic City. The end arrives proleptically, it arrives as an anticipation of the future, as an expectation. This contributes to the enigmatic and mysterious status of Jesus and his message. It also requires the destruction of Christianity by the prevailing principalities and powers. The destruction of Christianity has occurred because Christianity cannot exist so long as the City continues to exist as a reality. What now exists as Christianity is counterfeit Christianity. 535. Not to borrow with interest—Deuteronomy 23:20

536

Yael's suicide

After Yael's suicide and I decided to rework my prison journals. I have decided to integrate the Torah into my journal writings. It is a retroactive, redactive exercise. I accept Judaism as integral to my Christianity. I have no problem with Judaism. Jesus was an observant Jew and so was Paul. I too live now as if I am an observant Jew. For me this is not problem. I am not a Judaizer. I have adopted Jewish customs and practices for their own sake. And because I want too. I enjoy being observant. I understand why Jews want to live a kosher life. I don't view this as an exercise of obedience to the Law of Moses, and this is because I do not see any salvific or redemptive value in doing this. I don't believe that God requires anyone to live as an observant Jew, including Jews. It is habit which gives me peace, joy and fulfilment. This means I enjoy following the Jewish liturgy of daily living. I do this in a meditative mindful manner. I end each prayer and blessing by uttering the name: 'Jesus'. I am a follower of Jesus. If anyone should asked me who God is, my immediate answer world be Jesus! Of course this does not mean that do not believe in the Trinity and I love the Trinity: I believe in the Father, and in the Son and in the Holy Ghost, One God. Christianity has deep roots in Judaism. Christianity is a form of Judaism. It is impossible for the Jew to grasp this. So as I said, I have decided to update my journal writings. It will be obvious to the reader to see that I have got into the habit of being Jewish without being a Jew or wanting to be Jew. To Yael I was a Jew. Acting Jewish was a way of expressing my deep love for Yael. Even though Yael is gone, every morning I still pray the Jewish prayers and recite the blessings. Every morning I wash my hands before I recite the Shema. Each week I look forward to welcoming the Sabbat. For a while after Yael's death I kept on attending a Reformed Shul in Hillbrow on Saturdays. The congregation was always very welcoming and I enjoyed the services.

I bumped into Wayne. He had heard about Yael's suicide. He wanted to know if it was true that I had converted to Judaism. He frowned when I said no.

'It does not make any sense'.

'What does not make any sense?' I asked.

'I heard that you and Yael were attending the Reformed Synagogue in Hillbrow'.

'Initially we attended an Orthodox Synagogue but then we switched to the Hillbrow Reformed Synagogue. No one ever asked if I was a convert or Jew. Everyone thought that I was Jewish. It got all so complicated. After Yael passed away I continued to go to shul for a while. No one asked any questions. If I am asked whether I am Jewish I will have tell the truth. If had acquired all the habits of being Jewish. I sensed that the Jews wanted to belief that I was Jewish, convert to Judaism, and I decided to let them belief in the lie that I was indeed Jewish, more Jewish than the average typical Jew Johannesburg. I had fallen into my own trap, but I could not help myself, I enjoyed being treated as a fellow Jew. A big part of my life has been about imitation and parody, it had become second nature for me to be more than the sum of the parts who I may seem to be in the eyes of others'.

'Do you want to convert?'

'No, I don't want convert. I have no desire to convert. Yes I am practically Jewish in the way I have been living my life even since Yael and I have been together as partners, but I am not really Jewish nor do I want to become a Jew. I don't want belong to the Jewish people'.

'I don't get it. But then again you have been a complete mystery to me even though I have known you for so long'.

'You of all people should be able to understand why I can live within two apparently irreconcilable religions without ceasing to be a Christian,' I responded.

'What do you mean?'

'You were born a Jew and still see yourself as Jew, yet you also believe that Jesus is the messiah, that Jesus is divine, you believe in the New Testament and you claim to believe in the Trinity, but you also claim that you have not left Judaism, you are practicing a faith and confession known as Messianic Judaism, you have assimilated Christianity into Judaism and you try to convert Jews. I don't need to convert to Judaism, Christianity as a belief system is deeply rooted in the Hebraic, the entire New Testament is imbued with Judaism, it has assimilated the core elements of Judaism. As Christian there is nothing in Judaism which I cannot claim as being integral to my confession of faith and belief in God. I am comfortable in both Synagogue and Church. Yael was my link to the Jewish community'.

Wayne in spite of having a degree in Botany and Zoology held to a fundamentalist view of the Bible. He would never question the belief that the Jews were God's chosen people. He was proudly Jewish. Yael was never proudly Jewish, she was just Jewish. She could not be anything else but Jewish. I explained to Wayne that because of Yael I had become emotionally entangled with the Jews and Judaism.

Wayne made a throw away comment: 'You don't have to get the Rabbi's permission to be a Jew if you really want be a Jew. Moses may not have really been a Jew. He could have been an Egyptian. Freud didn't think he was Jew. Maybe Moses was not even circumcised. The rules for what make a person a Jew have chopped and changed. Ruth decided to become a Jew without having to go through any special conversion ceremony'.

In Exodus 4:18-31 KJV, we read incredibly strange account:

18 And Moses went and returned to Jethro his father in law, and said unto him, Let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren which are in Egypt, and see whether they be yet alive. And Jethro said to Moses, Go in peace.

19 And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, Go, return into Egypt: for all the men are dead which sought thy life.

20 And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt: and Moses took the rod of God in his hand.

21 And the Lord said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

22 And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn:

23 And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.

24 And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him.

25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.

26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

27 And the Lord said to Aaron, Go into the wilderness to meet Moses. And he went, and met him in the mount of God, and kissed him.

28 And Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord who had sent him, and all the signs which he had commanded him.

29 And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel:

30 And Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses, and did the signs in the sight of the people.

31 And the people believed: and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped.

In the NIV version verses 24 to 26 read as follows:

24 At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it. "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. 26 So the Lord let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.)

It seems that verses 24 to 26 have been inserted quite intentionally as an ambiguous rupture in the narrative of the journey of Moses and Zipporah to Egypt to execute God's mission for the liberation of the Israelites from bondage of slavery. These two verses constitute a story within story. It is a culturally and theologically destabilizing story. It is a crack in the entire edifice of the Torah.

Zipporah touches Moses feet with the bloody severed foreskin of her son while uttering the words: 'You [Moses] are a bridegroom of blood [hatam damim] to me'. Circumcision was fairly prevalent in the Middle East as ancient cultural practice among many tribes. For example, circumcision of the bridegroom shortly before marriage was a traditional rite in some tribes. The Talmud and other Midrashic commentaries don't really offer a satisfactory interpretation of verses 24 to 26.

Wayne and I discussed versus 24 to 26 and it seems pretty obvious that Moses was not circumcised and without Moses Judaism would not have come into existence. Moses is pivotal to the Torah and the Judaism, because he was supposedly received the Torah directly from God's own mouth on Mount Sinai. So many questions. Did Moses exist as a historical person in actual time and space?

Maybe the Old Testament writings are not really as Semitic as we may think! Maybe they are more Persian or Iranian. Maybe Judaism borrowed from Zoroastrianism. There is no internal evidence or smoking gun within the Old Testament which supports this idea. However the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah seem to suggest that just maybe the cultural and social exposures experienced during the Babylonian Exile and the rule of the Persians had left a religious and theological imprint on the Judean religious elite. Maybe it was something which was really decisive in the development of the Torah. There is a mechanism for everything. Which brings me to the topic psychoanalysis and consciousness and emancipatory enlightenment. According Freud the unconscious 'mind' is the primary source or determinator of human behaviour. The unconscious mind forms the greatest part of the unseen submerged iceberg in Freud's typology of the human mind. In the Freudian typology the conscious mind represent only the tip of this iceberg. Also in this typology there exists a thing which can be called the preconscious mind. The preconscious mind apparently contains all the thoughts and feelings which we happen to possess but which we are mostly unaware of until they become part of our conscious mental life. The colossal inaccessible unseen submerged iceberg of the unconscious mind is responsible for all those mental processes which we happen to completely unaware of even though they determine our behaviour and conscious life. This most important thing which determines our behaviour happens behind our backs without our knowledge.

Through psychoanalysis the behaviour-determining mental processes of the subconscious mind can be 'decoded' or interpreted through some kind of critical and emancipatory dialectical hermeneutics (HD), a process which results in the emancipatory enlightenment the subject of psychoanalysis. Somehow this psychoanalytical process of enlightenment removes or cures the symptoms by means of some unknown mechanism or chain of causation, symptoms which have their origination and causation in the subconscious. Here we have two paths of causation or two kinds of mechanisms, the mechanism by means of which the subconscious causes the mental or psychological or psychiatric symptoms which become manifest or observable in various forms of behavioural pathologies, and then we have the 'curing' or 'removal' of the symptoms through a process which entails the enlightening of the consciousness, a process which in order to 'work' necessarily has to act mechanistically or causally on the source of the problem which lies hidden in the depths of the inaccessible subconscious mind. The existence or structural-functional details of these systems of causation or mechanism operating between the subconscious and conscious could never be established. In addition, the conceptual framework of Freudian psychoanalysis is based on a petitio principii. Freud assumes the existence of an unobservable in the form of the subconscious and he also presupposes a mechanism of causation by means of which the workings or mental processes of the subconscious become visibly manifest in the form of various behaviour pathologies. The subconscious in this conceptual framework appears to have the capacity to exert some kind of agency but no one knows how this is made possible. Psychoanalysis is therefore a kind of psychological metaphysics in that it assumes the existence of a state of affairs which cannot be validated scientifically or empirically. Psychoanalytical theory introduces a problematic dualism involving the co-existence of an inaccessible subconscious mind and an accessible conscious mind, with the subconscious mind acting on the conscious mind and in the psychoanalytical situation the possibility of the conscious mind acting on the subconscious arises in a dialectical hermeneutical fashion resulting in the patient's emancipation from the pathological effects of the subconscious through enlightenment. Psychoanalytical theory depends on what has been called a critical hermeneutics which in itself is based on interpretation theories. In general hermeneutics deals with the interpretation of texts and the subconscious in this context or within this conceptual framework of psychoanalysis has also been treated as some of kind of text which happens to be amenable to interpretation. Within the conceptual framework of hermeneutics, hermeneutics deals with texts, where texts can existence in various forms, and where irrespective of its particular form, all text are equivalent from a structural-functional perspective. In general a text embodies the means or the conditions of possibility for the transmission of various kinds of significations which may even have effects, which may embody beliefs, judgements or experiences, or may bear some reference to something. Hermeneutics attempts to ground the meaning of text with respect to something such as the intentions of the author of text (the 'author' of the text may be the subconscious), but the meaning of text may not be reducible to the intentions of the consciously aware author. The intentions of the author may not be accessible. In these cases some would argue that the text could be subjected to psychoanalysis. In its various applications hermeneutics as an interpretive endeavour necessarily operates within what has been referred as the 'hermeneutical circle'. This implies that the interpretation of meaning or the understanding of the meaning of texts is based on presuppositions regarding the meaning and understanding of the text, therefore in a way, in order to understand one must begin with some kind of preunderstanding or some degree of preunderstanding. In other words one has to understand in order to understand. The model for this would be the interpretation of an unknown foreign language by the translation of the meaning of foreign words and text into the nomenclature or vocabulary or grammar or syntax of the known language, and one would necessarily have to go through several cycles of this exercise in order to express and understanding the meaning of the foreign text more fully and more accurately in the syntax of the known language. In a real sense the ultimate problematic which hermeneutics wrestles with revolves around answering the question of what it means to understand anything, how do we understand what a language or text is communicating. What makes it possible for text or anything to mean something? How is it possible for something, say a journal, to communicate something about anything to someone, the reader or the interpreter or the psychoanalyst? To understand the meaning of any text or any communication via a text, one has to jump into the hermeneutical circle.

The possibility of a dialectical emancipatory hermeneutics is something to consider. Having said that, it needs to be noted that ironically it has already been considered within the conceptual framework of Freudian psychoanalysis. I say ironically for the obvious reason that from within a physicalist or materialist conceptual framework such a dialectical emancipatory hermeneutical psychoanalysis-based endeavour is metaphysical in the derogatory sense of the word. For there is no demonstrable underlying mechanisms or processes of causation which operates in an empirically accessible fashion. So natural science rules out a dialectical emancipatory hermeneutics or does it? 536. Not to intermediate in an interest loan, guarantee, witness, or write the promissory note—Exodus 22:24

537

The heavy black phone hand piece lay off its cradle on the polished surface. I picked up the hand piece and pressed it gently against my ear. I could feel the unseen presence of mother who was eavesdropping. She has hinted that I was getting on years, but at thirty five I was still sufficiently attractive for men to be interested in me, this is what she said. In my mind her actual message was that I was still fuckable and I have this very fuckable virgin body to offer to a suitable male suitor. In her mind I was still a virgin because I had never had a boyfriend. She once asked if I had ever been with a man and I said no, and she believed me. I have not been penetrated by a man. The thought made me shudder in disgust. At thirty five I am a virgin spinster still on the shelf and my time is running out, my shelf-life will soon expire, I would not be able to bear children without exposing myself and my eggs to all kinds of risks. She said there will be problems with my eggs if I don't have children soon. I had reconciled myself to being childless. The dominee said that he had received and accepted a call from a church in Johannesburg but that was not why he was calling. He explained that he wanted to invite me go a trip with him and his friends to the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. Accommodation was not a problem as I would be staying in my own chalet, and it would great to have a Professor of Zoology accompanying them on the game viewing drives. 537. Lend to and borrow from idolaters with interest—Deuteronomy 23:21

538

Sailor Boy Seamstress

As Adam Smith would have it, the human desire to consume is deeply rooted, to consume without end, to consume every possible kind of thing, anything will which possesses the slightest vestige of imaged utility, which would satisfy the most passing whim of fancy, was the ultimate locomotive of all economic activity. Desire ignites the unquenchable and runaway fire of our prodigal needs and wants. Prodigal because they are beyond exhaustion. Prodigal because the excesses of desire is without limit, it cannot be contained within any boundary. It is boundaryless. A forever expanding universe of human creation.

I listened with one ear while thinking. Professor Kate Dolly, my seducer, my mentor, and my-I –dunno-what-all, we have had this weird on and off love affair for years, was prattling on about something or other. It didn't really matter what it was about.

'Don't you find him strange?' She asked.

'Who?' I wasn't too sure who she had been talking about.

'The sailor boy,' she said. She given him that nickname. We had meet him at the Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg in a fabric shop. Kate could not decide on the fabric she wanted, she tried to describe the textual and other physical qualities of the material she had in mind, she wanted try her hand at making an outfit which had designed. This was when sailor boy stepped in to help, and we got talking, and after Kate bought the fabric he had recommended we invited him to join us for a meal of samosas and chilli bites.

He had done his national service in the navy, where he had being trained as ship chef, and then afterwards he had joined the merchant marine as a cook. After his stint at sea he put himself through art school at the Witwatersrand Technicon across the street from Park Station in Johannesburg. And now he was a primary school teach at Martin School in Boksburg North. He could not make a living as an artist, nor could he survive on his small salary as an under-qualified school teacher, as he was struggling to pay off the bond of small plot which had he bought in some remote place, to his keep his head above water he had managed to supplement his income by making dresses for various clothing boutiques, hence his presence at the Oriental Plasa. We were so taken in with this charming homosexual man with all his sailor stories and the stories of the strange rural community that he had joined, that we undertook to never again buy another dress but have him instead make all our clothes.

The white withered maize lands and the autumn brown landscape were hidden under a blanket of darkness. Behind us on the outskirts of Benoni the brooding township of Daveyton smouldered. Kate asks me what I am thinking as I stare into the dark.

'We are not only animals consumed with desire, but we are also metaphysical animals,' I answer. She quickly glances at me, there is a confused frown on her face. I look at her profile as she focuses her attention back on the road. There is no doubting that Kate is a beautiful woman. I continue:

'We don't only live in a physical universe, we also live in a universe which we have created, a universe of meaning, a universe of signs, signs which give rise to the possibility of meaning, signs which refer to things, everything that has been manufactured or produced invested with meaning and therefore embodies an idea, and therefore the sign of being something for something.'

'Something for something?'

'Yes something for something, which distinguishes it from something which is a natural thing. The sign of something being something which is not a product of nature is always something which has been created or manufactured by human design and effort like a dress.'

'And a dress which has been designed with some function and purpose in mind embodies an idea and therefore a dress functions also as sign, something which signifies something,' Kate answered.

'Yup, you right. The dress transforms the entire female body itself into a sign, into a system of signification, something which says something about something to someone,' I answered. 538. The courts must carry out the laws of the plaintiff, admitter, or denier—Exodus 22:8

539

Desire drowns us in the infinity of our wants. Our wants, the things that we want embody signs, they signify, they speak their own language to the heart of desire, the say something about something. We consume the signs. The universe we create is a universe of consumption. Our metaphysical universe of our creation is a factory, a factory that produced products of signification. The significance of the sign which is embodied in the form of a commodity expresses itself in the language of its utility. Wants which suck us into the relentless and endless infernal cycle of consumption, consumption of everything and anything which economists euphemistically call utilities. This insatiable appetite which can never fill the screaming emptiness in our shrivelled up souls, souls which exist on a diet of fantasy. The sign embodies our fantasies. Our metaphysical universe is a factory of fantasies. And our fantasies becomes the fuel which drives the economic engine, the giant fantasy machines of capitalism. Without the machine capitalism cannot be capitalism. Without the machine the factory cannot exist. Without machinery there cannot be any commodity production. Without machinery there cannot be fantasies. Without machines there cannot be history. The machine embodies the essence of modernity.

Without machinery there can only be nothing, without the machine there cannot be what Marx refers to as the forces of capitalist production. The machine and labour gives rise to forces of production. The machine looms large in what has become known as the industrial revolution. The machine looms large in what we now call modernity. The machine has become the metaphor for technology, the means for all ends. But the internal combustion of this leviathanic machine, the processes of combustion which powers this runaway economic locomotive which churns out an entire universe of want-satisfying-utilities has be constantly stoked into motion, into the motion of its articulated moving parts, it will not move by itself, it has to be stoked into motion by humanities monstrous, ravenous and insatiable desire for gratification.

So what is the machine? First of all the machine is controlled motion. The smooth motion, the caressing stroke, hum, push, revolution, translation of the machine, the click, tick, tock, slide, and whirr of the machine, the complex mechanical engagement and articulation of gears, rotations and levers of the machine is nothing more than the infinite translations of motion, and the infinite translation of motions is nothing else but the hymn of capitalism, the machine is the symphony of capitalism. To repeat again, so what is the machine, what is the machine in of all its essence, in all of its universality, in all of its applications, in all of its practicalities, in all of its logic and rationality? If we know the science of the machine, if the machine does not hide any of its secrets from us in the way it works, then what is the machine? What is the essence of the machine? Even Marx posed this searching question in his 'Capital'. And socialism has struggled with this question concerning the ultimate meaning of the machine, the liberating significance of the machine, the 'how' concerning the possession and mastery of the machine, not to mention the radical fullness of the meaning and significance of the inexhaustible 'what' of the machine. So then, what is the machine? Is the essence of the machine reducible to pure motion? Is the 'what' of the machine tied up with understanding the 'what' of the 'end' towards which the motion of the machine 'moves'. If the machine could be invested with intelligence it would 'know' towards what end the aggregations of its motions were moving towards. Without motion there can be no machine. Even Heidegger struggled with the question of what the machine is ultimately. The machine is engaged with 'becoming'. What is the machine in relation to Being? What 'is' the machine? The machine has been fundamental to the birth of capitalism. It was the machine which made capitalism possible. It is impossible to talk of the forces of production without mentioning the machine, without the idea or concept of the machine. The machine is always a means to an end, and a means towards an end is also remedy. A technological remedy. But a remedy for what? A remedy for the incurable? This the paradox of the machine. It cures nothing. Capitalism cannot cure itself. The markets fail constantly. Self-correction of markets is a myth. There is no cure for the infinity of wants. No remedy exists for ameliorating the addiction which stokes the machine, the addiction for want-satisfying-utilities. The machine creates an infernal cycle. The 'infernal' characterizes the hell of the underworld. The machine creates addictions and addictions in turn stoke the fires of the machine, the fires that power the motion of the machine. No cure exists for the addiction which drives the infernal cycle, the infernal cycle which involve the ceaseless pursuit of gratification, which we call consumerism. Wants give birth to new wants in an infernal recycle of reproduction. Desire is aroused by a lack of something, something in the form of want-satisfying-utility. Desire is constantly awaked by new wants. Desire feeds tirelessly on novelty. The engine of innovation is powered by desire, and by appetite. This is capitalism. Capitalism is sustained by an inexhaustible appetite of novelty, for the new, for innovation, for the fantastic. Desire in the form of an inexhaustible appetite for the new and the novel, for the fabulous, becomes the motive power of the machine, becomes the source of creative energy, which unleashes the flood of new inventions, inventions of increasing novelty, embodying ever new utilities, stimulating ever new wants. Novelty, new inventions, new fantasies, new wants, new desires, new motivation, all of this stokes the infernal motions of the machines of capitalism opening up new horizons, bringing new worlds into existence, opening up new possibilities, finding news way for the rebirth of an interminable wanting, conjuring up new unimaginable embodiments of want-satisfying-utilities, all of which is transfused as new life giving blood into the capitalist economy, an economy sustained by a constant stream of fantasies which inspires the creative imagination for invention of unimaginable utilities. Utilities dreamt up for the gratification of an inexhaustible and ever expanding universe of needs, needs parading as wants, wants parading as needs, needs and wants merge, awakening an infinite and endless rolling procession of desire. New desires continue to form in the mind, sustaining a universe of fantasy. The metaphysical universe becomes more surreal and dreamlike. The machines become dream machines, the factories exist for the purpose of wish fulfilment, struggling to keep pace with the morphing fantasies of every new desires. And in the world of the machine and the factory we find ourselves living as powerless captives. Captives without agency, captives wondering as strangers, strangers to ourselves, and strangers to others. Strangers trapped in an infernal nightmare, a nightmare of wondering in an incomprehensible, stark and impoverished landscape, a landscape populated with the images of death, where omnipresence of death disguises its horror in an infinite glittering spectacle of commodities. And in the face of death all we are offered by the machine is the comfort of an empty palliative, a palliative filled with the mirage of barrenness. 539. Carry out the laws of the order of inheritance—Numbers 27:8

540

And so in spite of all this we sallied forth like lesbian vampires into the night. Tuning into the English Radio, Kate turned up the volume for the classical music programme. 'Comfort ye my people. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crocked straight and the rough places plain'. We listened in silence to Handel.

My mind wondered back again to our sailor boy. Our sailor boy's name was Christiaan Joubert. I don't think Christiaan had a Leftist born in his queer body, but he planted a radical seed in the heart of Kate. The seed of anti-consumerism. Anti-consumerism resonated with her environmentalist sentiments. He spoke about the authentic life, a life of self-sufficiency, a life which did not impact negatively on the environment, a life that was not centred round shopping. I suppose we could call it a life in which the machine was no longer in command. Christiaan spoke about a life in which individual agency was restored and were we controlled the machine and the machine no longer controlled us. All of this appealed to Kate. It appealed to me too.

We wanted to short circuit the commodification of life in an exercise of parody, a parody which entailed an undisguised exercise in perversity and transgression. Considering the circumstances I told myself we would have to be inhumanely strong. It was with these thoughts criss-crossing my mind that I found myself trying to digest the opening chapter of Marx's 'Das Kapital' as we drove to our destination, a far flung hamlet where our angelic sailor seamstress lived. It was pitch dark and we were hurtling through the night at high speed along the Witbank Highway travelling due east in Kate's Porsche.

'Shit I think I have just missed the turn-off,' Kate exclaimed as the Porsche screeched to a halt. She changed the gears into reverse, wheels spinning, and rubber burning, engine screaming she reversed at high speed until we reached the turn-off. We took the turn-off, leaving the main road we drove into the country until we spotted a sign 'Bronkhorstspruit Village'. There was no village to speak of. The village consisted of a community of artists living on small holdings of between two and five hectares in size called 'plots' strung along on the banks of the Bronkhorstspruit River. We found the house at the end of a narrow sand road. I got out to the open the farm gate. The sprawling white washed and corrugate iron roofed house was hidden amongst tall blue gum trees. Inside the walls had been knocked down to create a spacious open-plan which functioned as a home and studio. Prominently displayed on a large stark white wall was a voluptuous still life of a mixed bowl of fruit filled with mangoes, pomegranates, peaches, plums, pawpaw and bananas. When our business was done we sat down at a large rough Oregon pine table to eat a meal that he had prepared for our visit. Kate and I sat down on the side of the table which allowed us to view the painting. In the course of having our dinner we asked about the picture. It was supposed to represent Bathsheba. He painted the still life as one of his projects while at art school. The lecturer told them to paint a picture depicting Bathsheba bathing using any object except the human form. The lecturer had now become a successful and well known artist, a Jew going by the name of Joel Mandelstam. We were told by Christiaan that Mandelstam had converted to Christianity and as a dynamic charismatic personality he had become a catalyst for a veritable Christian revival at the Art College before becoming a full-time artist and popular guest preacher at Christian youth camps. His conversion experience was a fascinating story which had been told countless times in numerous churches and Christian conferences. His conversion experience started with a strange and startling dream. 540. Appoint judges—Deuteronomy 16:18

541

In his dream he found himself outside the ticket office booth at the Rosebank Cinema Nouveau. After buying a ticket for a movie called 'The woman who fell from the sky' he entered the movie theatre and he noticed that the theatre was quite small, the size of a church chapel. It was fully carpeted from floor to wall to ceiling in crimson red velvety carpeting. The rows of seats were also covered in crimson red velvety upholstering. He sat down in the middle row in the centre seat. On the screen stage was an altar and on the altar was large silver bowl. The heavy crimson drape curtained opened the screen lit up with graphic scene of the crucifixion of Jesus on Golgotha against a dark brooding sky. A Roman soldier standing at the foot of the cross hold in spear in hand stabbed the spear in the side of Jesus' upper abdomen below the heart and blood mixed with water gushed out the bowl on the altar. He then heard a voice saying:

'The blood of Jesus shed for all of you, drink ye of it'

It was so horrifying that he woke up in cold sweat. Lying next to him was his wife who was suffering from multiple sclerosis, she also woke because he was shivering so much next her as if had he had fever. He was shivering because he was in a state of shock.

'I had a terrible nightmare, I am OK, go back to sleep'.

The next day Joel went to the Central News Agency. He did not have a copy of the Bible with the New Testament, and he wanted to find passage about the blood in the Gospels. While paging through New Testament Prof Jeremy Isaac a theoretical physicist from Wits pitches up out the blue from nowhere as it were at the same bookstand packed with Bibles. He also wants to purchase a Bible. Joel recognizes him as the Jew who converted from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, and who also appeared as a guest on some magazine programme on SABC TV. They start chatting. They go have coffee. Joel tells Jeremy about his dream. Jeremy tells Joel about his conversion experience. Jeremy convinces Joel that he has had encounter with God. Joel goes home and before he can tell his wife about his meeting with Jeremy, his wife tells him that the new drug for the treatment of her illness appears to be working. Joel spends the resting of the day reading the Gospel of John. By evening he and his wife have converted to Christianity. 541. Not to appoint judges who are not familiar with judicial procedure—Deuteronomy 1:17

542

Barely a minute had lapsed after Christiaan had finished telling the story when Joel Mandelstam himself came strolling in from the dark through the open front door. He taken his over energetic Border Collie for a late night walk, seeing that the lights were on, he spontaneously decided to drop in and visit Christiaan. His dog full of excitement bounded up to me and I began stroking the dog's head. Joel was in a jovial mood, like his dog he radiated an energy filled with an enthusiasm for life. Christiaan then informed Joel that he just related to us his conversion experience. Joel looking at Kate and I asked us straight out. 'Do you know the Lord?' Kate answered for both of us. 'Yes we do!' Stared intensely at me from across the table he asked: 'Are you Jewish?' Before I could say anything Kate burst out laughing and exclaimed: 'Good heavens No! She is Catholic.' Then I reaffirmed: 'I am Catholic'. He stared at me for moment with a puzzled frown, seemingly wanting to say something. I had this uncanny feeling that he still believed that I was indeed Jewish. I then told Joel that one of best friends was Jewish and that I was very familiar with Judaism and with the observance of the Oral Torah and so on and so forth. Smiling knowingly he replied:

'Well that is very interesting, I am ready to admit that in a very profound sense the whole Torah including the Book of Leviticus are the most important books in the whole Bible. There is nothing essentially wrong with the Laws of Moses, some of the so-called 613 laws are actually mandatory to the Christian life. Take for example Leviticus 19: 18 which basically states that you should love your neighbour, whether a brother or an enemy, as yourself. Some of the Laws of Moses that deal with slavery are now completely redundant, or obsolete. In fact the slave laws in the Law of Moses are based on an acceptance of the legitimacy of slavery as a social institution. The slave laws in the Mosaic Law have now become practically null and void. All the Laws of Moses that dealt with the Temple, with priests and with sacrifices all depend on the existence of the temple and the practice of sacrifice. Without the Temple there can be no priests, and with no priests there can be no sacrifice. In a very profound sense without the Temple and with the non-practice of blood-sacrifice a huge chunk of Mosaic Law has become null and void forever, because without blood sacrifice the essential core, the very heart of the religion of the Israelites, has been ripped out. Without blood sacrifice the religion of the Israelites has become an empty hollow shell. This is why the destruction of the temple was such a catastrophe for the Jews.' He then got up. 'I have got go, nice meeting you.' He shook our hands and left. 542. Decide by majority in case of disagreement—Exodus 23:2

543

Yael had been in Tara psychiatric hospital for about three months when I fetched her to come and live with me. The Rabbi had divorced her. I had made all the necessary prearrangements. The kitchen had to be renovated so that it could function as a kosher kitchen and I had bought an additional small fridge so that the meat and milk could be kept separate, and of course I had to also new pots, pans and cooking utensils.

In truth the Hellenic within me rebels against the Hebraic. As Plato would have it truth and philosophy is personified in his writings as being feminine. This suggestive that rationality has feminine roots. In contrast to Plato's Hellenism the Torah and Judaism is personified as masculine, making the Hebraic masculine and patriarchical. 543. [In capital cases] the court must not execute through a majority of one; at least a majority of two is required—Exodus 23:2

544

Departure from Hotazel

I have parked my car at the front gate behind the furniture removal truck. We have decided to leave Hotazel together in convey until Vryburg. Everything has been loaded into the furniture truck. I have managed to pack all the personal stuff from my room into the VW Beetle. The house now stands empty and unlocked. All the keys remain in the doors. My room now stands empty. It no longer bears any trace of my life. The personal officer will come and collect the main door keys later. The mine manager position will be filled by the new incumbent in a few days' time. From Vryburg I will head for my flat in Bellevue and my parents will travel to Bloemfontein on their way to their retirement home in Hermanus. This is the last entry of the prison journal. The truth is I don't know how to end the story that I have set out write. I suppose finally bidding farewell to Hotazel is good way to end the story and close the notes of the prison journal.

I am filled with melancholy. It is not only because of our departure from Hotazel it is also because the international socialist experiment has run aground and now we all face the difficult road ahead that we have to travel in rebuilding the socialist project from scratch. The task seems to be an insurmountable, and just thinking of what needs to be done makes me feel exhausted. I wonder if I have the energy to continue with the struggle. Revolution is not for the fainthearted, yet I feel fainthearted. All revolutionaries have to pass through that dark hour of defeat. And now internationally this is where we find ourselves once more. As Rosa Luxemburg said: 'The road to socialism is paved with defeats...' And before he took the executioner's bullet Ché Guevara said: 'We have lost, but the revolution is immortal.' A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues). 544. A judge who presented an acquittal plea must not present an argument for conviction in capital cases—Exodus 23:2

545

Back home in my flat it feels like a whole lifetime has passed since my arrest. The seal skull has indeed disappeared, no doubt stolen by the security police. There are gaping gaps that punctuate the shelves of my library. Ironically, coinciding with the collapse of communism the entire corpus of my books linked to Marx and Marxism have been removed by the security police, possibly to have been used as evidence in my trail. None of the books were ever returned. 545. The courts must carry out the death penalty of stoning—Deuteronomy 22:24

546

In the wake of the collapsing dominoes of existing socialism the rising tide of a resurgent capitalism is clearly evident everywhere on the world stage. However this does not mean that finally the actualization of human liberation, freedom and autonomy is going to be realized under capitalism. We are not standing at the threshold of new dawn. Even Max Weber derided the idea that capitalism has anything to do with democracy. Yet while the rapidly receding tide of existing socialism appears beyond doubt to signal the final emblematic denouement of the twentieth century, it is puerile in the extreme to discount the legacy of Marx and all the various 'Marxisms' and to accept uncritically the supremacy of capitalism. It is difficult to ignore the enormous explanatory power embodied in the work of Marx. The relentless destruction of Nature and the environment, the depletion and the degradation of the Earth's resources remain the inexorable dystopic consequences of mass consumption and the commodification of the whole of life which characterises the essential nature of capitalism. After deep reflection I have decided to cut my links with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). 546. The courts must carry out the death penalty of burning—Leviticus 20:14

547

Marxism in the hands of the ruling elite of the Oligarchies which governed the countries of the Soviet Block underwent a metamorphoses which transformed it into a dogmatic ideology. And it was the metamorphoses of Marxism into a rigid fossilized inflexible dogma within almost every communist party on planet Earth as they persisted in their mindless obedience to the directives on all matters emanating from the Soviet Union. This certainly played a role in the crisis of both Marxism and socialism which had become especially evident during the 1970s and the 1980s. This crisis has deep historical roots, it goes all the way back to the tragic post 1917 unravelling of the Russian Revolution basically as the inevitable result of Lenin's compulsive obsession with the concentration and centralization of absolute power and control in hands of a ruling elite within the communist party.

We can only see, understand and explain the crisis of Marxism and the failure of socialism through the prism of the cultural, social, political and economic realities of the existing socialisms of the Soviet Block. This crisis in revolutionary theory and practice which characterized the post-1917 Soviet forms of socialisms were mainly due the absence a scientific theory of the essential nature of the state which would rationally demonstrate that historically the state in all societies could only exist as an institution or a vehicle which serves the interests of an Oligarchy. State and Oligarchy always merge, the Oligarchy can only exist by virtue of the state in which all power has become concentrated and centralized. I am in full agreement with the view that a critically important factor which has contributed to the crisis of Marxism and socialism has been the radical absence of a Marxist theory of class mobilization, class organization and class agency with respect to the concrete, meaningful and comprehensive actualization of class based interests at all stages of the revolutionary struggle and at all stages involved in the construction of socialism after the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. Class based interests relating to egalitarianism are the first casualties arising from the complicated, conflicting and antagonistic relationships which inevitably arise between the working class movement, Party and State. Leninism has become the theoretical model for the socialist state, and the Leninist model fully articulates the 'causal or mechanistic' nature of the relationship between an essentially passive working class movement, the Party as vanguard and the all-powerful Leviathan State in the form of a colossal monster-like bureaucratic apparatus with tentacles and an omnipresent-panoptica which reaches every facet of social life. The state as a centralizing and all powerful bureaucratic apparatus oversees and governs socialism in the form of a giant factory connected to a complex central planning and supply system for the manufacture and distribution of use values which will optimistically satisfy the most basic needs of the working class. Socialism in the form of an omni-factory governed by an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent bureaucratic apparatus is central to Leninism. But to achieve this ambitious objective the Leninist State can only function as in Oligarchy under whose rule all social solidarity has been destroyed by engineering the complete breakdown of trust between every citizen through the means of mass terror.

What about a Marxist critique of existing socialism and by extension Leninism? The answer is simple. Who has benefitted most from Soviet Block style socialism? It has been the Party elite and their families. Only the privileged fill the ranks of Party membership. The privileged includes those who by virtue of their Party membership have a greater measure of their wants satisfied compared to non-Party members who work in the factories, and who have to make do with the satisfaction of only the most basic of their needs in order to survive from day to day in a hand to mouth existence. Inequality is embedded in the Soviet Block style of socialism. This prompts a searching question, which is deserving of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis. Well the question addresses who has benefitted most from the ideological mystification of the Soviet regime? Althusser and other Marxist theorists have not made a significant effort in the critical analysis into the concept of the bureaucracy in the way that the analysis of concept of the means of production and the relationships of productions has been undertaken. Althusser and other Marxist theorists have shown a reluctance to deal critically with the Oligarchical organization the Party, the State and the bureaucracy in existing socialisms. This reluctance stems from an unwillingness to recognize that a rising class in the form of a Party and bureaucratic elite could emergence contingently outside or external from the relations of productions where the two opposing poles of the relationship are the working class and the owners of the means of production. The new Oligarchic ruling class rises from the ranks of the dominant political party which has managed to seize political power.

In socialism the Party and the State by means of the bureaucracy fills the void which in capitalism would have been occupied by the private owners of the means of production. The opening lines of Marx's book 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' state: 'The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities...' 547. The courts must carry out the death penalty of the sword—Exodus 21:20

548

'What did the Church believe before the Roman magisterium?'

This was the question which Cranmer asked when working on the revisions which gave rise to Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The only way he could answer this question was to read the writings of St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Gregory the Theologian. 548. The courts must carry out the death penalty of strangulation—Leviticus 20:10

549

Christianity as an institution of belief is thoroughly Hebraic in its custodianship of the Hebrew Bible, but at the time as an institution it also become the natural cultural heir of the Hellenic metaphysically legacy and it has managed to integrate this heritage into its confession of faith and theology. Plato thus looms large in the Christian view of the nature of the Cosmos and then at the other extreme in orthodox Christianity there is the mysticism of the Theotokos, the Galilean Jewish woman of Nazareth who is the Mother of Jesus. 549. The courts must hang those stoned for blasphemy or idolatry—Deuteronomy 21:22

550

Re-reading so that we see the subtle nuances in Derrida's idea of deconstruction takes us in the direction of thinking which in fact is completely opposite to the simplistic relativization of the singularity of putative truth claims into a deconstructive disassembly into endless and multiple perspectives. In Derridian speak, binary opposites are 'supplementary' in the sense that they supplement each other with regard to the addition of meaning, reference and significance. Night is night because it is not day. The meaning of day supplements the meaning of night. Night is known by virtue of it be unlike day. Light and dark are unknowable without supplementary reference to each other, this is what is meant by supplementation. In other words, we know the full of meaning of light when this meaning is supplemented with the knowledge of what darkness is like. To supplement is to add something to something else in a way which enhances, increases, amplifies understanding and so on. Deconstruction does not prove or demonstrate that there is ultimately no meaning or truth, rather it shows the reverse, it is indicates the existence of the Totality which embraces or encircles the expanding horizon of meaning and truth. Deconstruction also brings to light traces of meaning which are not present in what happens to be immediately apparent. 550. Bury the executed [as well as all deceased] on the day they are killed—Deuteronomy 21:23

551

In the Hebraic tradition it is impossible to think of a priest without at the same time thinking of blood. Priests and blood go together. In the Hebraic tradition it impossible to separate a priest from blood. Without blood the Hebraic traditions ceases to exist. It cannot exist without the shedding of blood because there is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood. Without blood the Torah ceases to exist in practice or reality. Blood is integral to the Torah. The Torah is written in blood. Without blood there can be true Hebraic religion. Judaism which has become a religion without blood ultimately means that all Jews will be forever ritually impure and are thus existentially dead in their sins. Being existentially dead in their sins captures the essence of the Jew especially in his eternal role as the cabaret artist who is always ready to perform, always ready to entertain with music, dance, imitations, comedy and wit, even if it happens to be the eve of the last of day of mankind. 551. Not to delay burial overnight—Deuteronomy 21:23
552

Ever since our third year at Wits Yael had slipped in and out of my life. When we were living together every Saturday evening at the end of Sabbat we would go see a movie somewhere, but usually at the Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank. Afterwards we would browse at Exclusive Bookshop and then end the evening having coffee with friends. Friends who were always Jewish and I began to understand what Henry Miller was getting in his book Tropic of Cancer:

'...He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand. Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew .Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?'... 552. The court must not let the sorcerer live—Exodus 22:17

553

Returning from the loo I sat down again next to Yael. I knew that they had been taking about me. I knew what they had been talking about. I suddenly felt angry. I also felt my cheeks burning red with embarrassment.

Driving back home later that evening Yael sensed that I was annoyed with her.

'What's the matter?' She asked innocently.

'You know exactly,' I replied.

'No I don't'.

'Yes you do,' I snapped.

'Well then please inform me,' she said sarcastically.

'They asked you if I had converted, they asked you if I had become a Jew, and you told them that I had converted, you lied to them,' I said.

'Well what if I did? To me you have become completely Jewish and you didn't have to,' Yael answered.

The words 'you didn't have to' stung me for some reason. I did not want to remind her that we were living as observant Jews because that was what she wanted after she was discharged from Tara Psychiatric Hospital. She starting crying and began to apologise. We made up and I forgave her, and typically of Yael she could not refrain from a making a joke of the whole incident:

'They really think you are Jewish, you should just hear yourself, you come across just like a Jew. So you can't really blame them for asking. To me you are Jewish.'

I just shook my head and thought 'God help me'. The thought crossed my mind – have I really become a Jew without even realizing it? Had I by habit internalized Jewishness? Had I begun to externalize typical give away Jewish mannerism, am I behaving like a Jew, have I become visibly and audibly Jewish, do I actually talk like a Jew, have my facial expression become Jewish, God help me? 553. The court must give lashes to the wrongdoer—Deuteronomy 25:2

554

Talking about blood.

For religious festival such as Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot thousands, possible hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would converge on the Temple in Jerusalem to make their sacrificial offering which involved an enormous animal slaughtering operation. During these celebrations water stained thick with blood flooding from the Temple gutters drained into the small Kidron stream which flowed in the Kidron Valley below the Temple precinct. Levite priests collecting the blood gushing from the slashed jugulars of sacrificed animals waded in blood up to their knees. Carrying the blood in basins they would slush and splash it over the sides of the altars. The stream of blood flushing from the sides of the altars would drain into gutters. In a single day during the festivals the blood of up to 1.2 million animals would flow down the sides of altar from the Temple into the stream at the bottom of the valley. After being slaughtered the animals would be skinned and butchered. The bones of million upon millions of butchered animals filled the dumps surrounding Jerusalem. In addition to the massive abattoir operations during Jewish festivals animal sacrifices also took place on a daily basis. The economic heartbeat of Jerusalem before 70 AD was powered by the income flowing from the sacrificial slaughtering of animals. Blood gushing from the severed jugulars of animals was transmuted into money. The remission of sins by the shedding of blood turned out to be a profitable business in the economy of atonement and salvation. 554. The court must not exceed the prescribed number of lashes—Deuteronomy 25:3

555

Ritual slaughter of animals

From an anthropological perspective it is rational to infer that the Levitical sacrificial rituals and rites are adaptions of older Middle Eastern practices. Ancient sacrificial practices copied and ritually adapted by the Hebrews. The subsumption and adaptation of these ancient sacrificial rituals were based on theological assumptions regarding their moral and judicial efficacy in pleasing a divine Being who happened to fit a particular theological construction. The soteriological or salvific efficacy of animal sacrifice was also based on assumption regarding the best remedies for ameliorating the consequences of offenses committed against a divine Being. I think it is pointless to seek a uniformed theory of animal sacrifice which explains all sacrificial rituals as some version or as some variation of an underlying or overarching blue print or theme or purpose, even if different forms of animal sacrifice share the same basic trope of selection, surrogacy or substitution, killing, altar, fire, appeasement, burning, cooking and eating. Animal sacrifice as a religious institution of atonement for sins started only after the domestication of animals in Neolithic societies. It would seem that Palaeolithic hunter-gather societies would have no reason for practicing ritualized animal sacrifice for the propitiation of sins committed against a divine Being. The ritual of animal sacrifice involves a transaction or an exchange between two parties, the offender and the offended, for the purpose of satisfaction, achieving satisfaction represents the salvific or redemptive goal, sacrifice of animals with shedding of blood thus functions as the only efficacious means for the realization of some beneficial end, such as the removal and cancellation of offence. The sacrificial system involves a set of activities which include identification, selection, slaughtering, burning, cooking, and eating. The burning and cooking takes place on an altar. 555. The court must not kill anybody on circumstantial evidence—Exodus 23:7

556

The slaughtering of the paschal lamb.

In Judaism the sacrifice of the paschal lamb which is killed and eaten on the first day of the Passover was inaugurated on eve of the Exodus from Egypt. Was this a historical event or a founding myth? We really don't know. Suffice to say we cannot know for sure. With Yael I celebrated ten Passovers. Why does the night of the Passover differ from all other nights? Of course we celebrated the Passover with Jewish female friends who were not observant, but who Yael who never the less invited to celebrate the Passover with the two of us. And I always ended up playing the role of the head of the home. I knew that according the Palestinian Mishna three question were supposed to be asked. 'Why on all other nights do we not dip even once but on this night we dip twice? Why on all other nights do we eat meat roasted, boiled and stewed, but on this night only roasted? Why on all other nights do we eat leavened or unleavened bread while on this night we eat only unleavened bread?' In the Mishna of the Babylonian a fourth question is asked: 'Why on all other nights do we eat all kinds of herbs but on this night only bitter herbs?'

The first question I discovered was completely obscure. It was obscure regarding what was being dipped and into what substance it was supposed to be dipped. No one knows anything about the origin and meaning of this dipping. There is no answer in the Haggadah to the first question. The lamb is slaughtered on the fourteenth day of the first month. What was done with the blood of the lamb? Well we all know, the blood was supposed to be smeared on the two door posts and on the lintel above the door of the home in which family and invited friends were going to celebrate the Passover meal. Jews abhor blood! Yet is seems pretty obvious that the dipping had to do with blood. On the eve of Passover the Samaritans sprinkled blood on the sides of their doors and smeared blood on the foreheads of their children. But Jews abhor blood! So the sages amended the law regarding the smearing of blood on the door posts and lintel. 556. The court must not punish anybody who was forced to do a crime—Deuteronomy 22:26

557

Passover and Eucharist

The sacrifice of the mass is not only a service of praise and thanking, it more than that, it is also more than a mere commemoration or memorial or remembrance of the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus on a Roman Cross to make atonement of sins of all humans past, present and future. In other words Jesus who is God voluntarily died sacrificially for our sins in an act of kenosis or self-giving. In the same way the sacrifice of the mass in the Eucharist is a true propitiatory sacrifice. Leviticus 17:10-15 New International Version (NIV) states the following:

10 I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people.11 For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. 12 Therefore I say to the Israelites, None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood. 13 Any Israelite or any foreigner residing among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, 14 because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off. 15 Anyone, whether native-born or foreigner, who eats anything found dead or torn by wild animals must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be ceremonially unclean till evening; then they will be clean. 557. A judge must not pity the murderer or assaulter at the trial—Deuteronomy 19:13

558

Fact, evidence, memory, history, fiction and myth

What is a fact? What is a memory? What is history? What is fiction? What is myth? They are products of various kinds of imaginative constructions. They are constructed out of elements, which means they are constructed from something, where the something could be an observation, a recollection, a report, a tale, a story, a belief and so on and so forth. A fact is also an example of an imaginative construction. As an imaginative construction, a fact represents the kind of claim which can supported by evidence. This does not mean that because something represents an imaginative construction it cannot be true. Just by being an imaginative construction does not necessarily make a claim untrue. The claim may true in some sense, but not in another sense. So in the imaginative construction of a work of fiction the claims embodied in the fictional narrative may in some sense be rendered as true with respect to something of ultimate concern, say life or the meaning of life and so on. What renders a fact true is the idea of evidence. What is evidence, what kind of things or entities or elements count as evidence? Evidence always corresponds to the existence or actuality or reality in the form of certain kinds of state of affairs. That is, the kinds of states of affairs which can be established to be true without any possibility for doubting. A fingerprint on a glass is a state of affairs. The DNA left on the filter of cigarette butt is a state of affairs. The existence of the print of a finger on a glass is fact which cannot be doubted. The meaning of the words existence, actuality and reality are all interconnected in relationships of supplementation. Napoleon actually existed, which means his existence was a historical reality, because the body of evidence in support of the claim that he actually existed is beyond reasonable doubt. The body of evidence consists of an interconnected web of supplementary evidence from multiple sources which strengthens the truth claims about something being the case. It is the body of evidence which compels us to believe that something is case. It is the body of evidence which removes all reasonable doubt. It is the body of evidence which supports the claim that something is actually the case and is therefore a fact. Can we say that Moses actually existed? 558. A judge must not have mercy on the poor man at the trial—Leviticus 19:15

559

The phrase 'causally closed universe' plays a prominent role in the formulation of a foundational premise in the physicalist/materialist view of the universe. The idea of being causally closed is not wrong or problematic even for a theist. Being under the regime of a causally closed universe is something which makes the existence of consciousness something exceedingly difficult to explain. But the possibility of conscious cannot be ruled out in a causally closed universe. Everything which defines a universe as being causally closed also constitutes the conditions of possibility for the existence of consciousness. It does not exclude that possibility. The horizon of possibility within a causally closed universe is infinite. Causal closure under laws, uniformities and regularities of nature does not rule out infinite possibilities. It is simple, the horizon of possibilities is infinite within the boundaries of a causally closed universe, so anything can happen without breaking a single law or rule with respect to the uniformities and regularities of nature. Even if the Universe is a causally closed system it does mean that it is not an infinitely complex system which is capable of behaviour which is not deterministic or predictable or susceptible to reductionist explanations. So consciousness exists. It exists as an emergent property of matter. It is infinitely unpredictable in what it can entertain - yet it belongs to a causally closed system. 559. A judge must not respect the great man at the trial—Leviticus 19:15

560

As I discovered on my journey into Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud represented something equivalent to a summa of rabbinic oral traditions. 560. A judge must not decide unjustly the case of the habitual transgressor—Exodus 23:6

561

Counting the 613 commandments. Yael in the throes of her madness discovered God and became urgently self-conscious of her Jewishness, she clung on to this as one would clutch onto anything even straws to save oneself from being sucked into the vortex of nothingness, where nothingness is the absence of all meaning and significance. She often said: 'I have lost my life.' It was impossible for me not to love Yael. We started working through the daily cycle of the Rambam, studying Maimonides' Sefer HaMitzvot. Studying daily, chapter by chapter, we both absorbed Maimonides' classic legal work in the Mishneh Torah. It was a tonic to both of our souls. It brought peace to Yael. Like the sun breaking through the dark clouds of her depression she began to find her way out of the dark valley. Like a housewife she took it on herself to do the shopping, cook our meals and generally keep a kosher household. We had become religiously Jewish. I began to wear long skirts and dress more conservatively, putting on only the barest minimum of makeup. 561. A judge must not pervert justice—Leviticus 19:15

562

According to Heraclitus we cannot step into the same stream twice. Yet science would be impossible if we could not repeat experiments and get the same results each time. In being able to repeat experiments and get the same results each time something has remained constant, something has remained unchanged. In a sense this shows that nothing has changed and that not everything is a state of flux or becoming. In fact the conditions which make everything possible including the flux of time remain changed. Being and becoming are indeed inseparable. 562. A judge must not pervert a case involving a convert or orphan—Deuteronomy 24:17

563

My journey into Judaism has not been a journey which entailed passing through the gateway of conversion and thereby becoming a member of the Jewish people or a citizen of the nation of Israel. I was never a true member of the tribe nor did I feel the desire or need to be a recognized or acknowledged as a genuinely certified member of the tribe. I never sought membership or citizenship. I was never one of them. I had made up mind who I was. I had already taken full ownership of the physiognomic evidence of who I really was and who I really wanted to be. Yet in spite of this, I had practically, even if quite inadvertently, became Jewish in the way that I had lived when Yael and I shared our lives with each other for a bit more than ten years. Ironically, my journey into Judaism was never that of a stranger passing through an unfamiliar and foreign land. Yael was a fideist. In the latter part of her life when we were together as a loving and committed couple she openly confessed that her religious faith and beliefs could not be supported by science or logic. She admitted that her belief in and religious commitment to Judaism had no rational foundation. There was no doubting that Yael was an extremely intelligent person. Like myself she accepted that the authorship and the historicity of the Torah and the Tanakh could not be validated beyond reasonable doubt. She admitted that it was the socially conditioned belief in the putative historicity of its own founding myths which drove the self-creation of the Jewish people during and following the Babylonian exile. In the light of this reality no Jew was more Jewish than me. As a primary school child I had read the books of the Pentateuch several times over. As a child and teenager I believed in the historicity of everything that I read in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And also as a child I believed that the Jewish people were God's own chosen people. Like all Christians, who have throughout the history of Christianity believed in the story of Moses and the Israelites, I too believed in the historicity of the giving of the law by God to Moses at Mount Sinai. Growing up as a Christian child in a non-religious home I had by virtue of my schooling and church attendance internalized not only intellectually but also emotionally the seamless intermeshing of what is known as the Hebrew Bible and the message of New Testament, and as a consequence of this I had assimilated into the core of my being what has been called the Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course the Christianized seamless theological merging of the Old Testament and the New Testament around the person of Jesus has been rebutted by the Rabbis since the birth of first century Judaism. 563. Judge righteously—Leviticus 19:15

564

Out of its own self-creation by recourse to and belief in its founding myths and ideologically biased fictionalized history, which were literary productions of its own creative invention, post-exilic second temple and post-second temple first century Judaism inadvertently gave birth to Christianity. Christianity in turn assimilated the founding myths and fictionalized history of Judaism into its own confession of faith and integrated them into its theology. 564. The judge must not fear a violent man in judgment—Deuteronomy 1:17

565

The revival of natural theology need not necessarily involve a resuscitation and defence of the traditional proofs of God's existence. The revival of natural theology includes among other things revisiting various Platonic philosophical and metaphysical themes. Natural theology is metaphysical in its focus. Natural theology focuses on question such as: 'What is the nature of ultimate reality?' All knowledge including scientific knowledge is to a certain degree deeply personal. Individually we know more than we can tell. We each have our own reasons for believing in God. But one of these reasons, which many of us share, is in the inexplicit intelligibility of the Universe. We as individuals all personally encounter the divine in our own unique experiences of reality or in other kinds of experiences. However our mental and emotional predispositions to believe that is there is more to reality than what we are capable of perceiving with the senses is made possible by the nature of our innate cognitive powers, powers which are themselves emergent capacities of the substance or the stuff or the material out of which we are composed. We have built-in predispositions see or perceive or entertain all kinds of possibilities regarding the ultimate nature of reality. We perceive in our imagination more that we can see with our eyes. These predispositions, to see beyond the merely apparent, beyond what is empirically accessible, is not simply something which exists by virtue of the language, culture or civilization in which we happened to be historically embedded. The conditions of possibility by virtue of which we are capable of seeing or perceiving or becoming cognitively aware of something beyond what is empirically accessible is what we mean by Revelation. Revelation is always something which revolves round the awareness of conditions of possibility. A revelation involves becoming aware of what is possible, not merely possible, but rationally possible. Revelation exists by virtue of us knowing more than we can tell. This is the way the refracting or reflecting or mirroring power of revelation works. Revelation is not a set of indubitable propositional truths written down in book or on a tablet or divinely dictated to someone like Moses or Mohammed. Nor is revelation an oral tradition. Revelation is always the disclosing of intelligibility, especially regarding the nature of ultimate reality. It is in this sense that revelation becomes the window through which we have access to God or the Divine Being as individuals. In this sense revelation is the direct unmediated experience of the individual, and it is therefore something which is not mediated by a prophet, priest or rabbi. No one has privileged access to revelation or knowledge of God. Revelation is always personal and individualized, but being personal or individualized does not mean it is something which cannot be confirmed through reasoned consensus. Rationality and intelligibility is the hallmark of divine revelation – it confirms that which we already know but cannot tell, it is always something which resonates with Reason and Intelligibility. It is always something which is true like a proof of a mathematical theorem. The possibility of revelation is ever present in the experience of something having meaning or something being intelligible. The experience of meaning is a transubstantiation of the divine into the mundane, and in this sense revelation is always a kind of transubstantiation of the divine in the mundane. God's omnipresence in everything is the condition of possibility of revelation. It is by virtue of God's omnipresence in everything that the idea of meaning, significance and intelligibility of something always represents a transubstantiation or an incarnation of the divine. The bread becomes the body of Christ because God is omnipresence in everything. Everything exists by virtue of God's omnipresence in everything. And it is God's omnipresence in everything which is the source of intelligibility. In science intelligibility becomes evident in the fact that we can reproduce experiments and get the same results each time. Everything may be in a state of flux or change or becoming, yet the INVARIANT is ever present in the form of the laws of nature or the regularities of nature or the uniformities of nature. What is invariant becomes apparent in the reproducibility of the scientific experiment. What makes certain things invariant? Why not the omnipresence of God as the condition of possibility for things being invariant? There are many names for this thing we call invariance. It could be: Being, Plato's forms or ideas, essences, universals, and so on and so forth. They are real and their reality becomes manifest in the invariant or the unchanging. It is their reality which makes things intelligible. And recognition of their reality is an example of what revelation could possible mean or how revelation could be experienced. And the experience of this revelation can be taken to signify the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of God. Why do some things stay the same when all other things are in a state of change or flux? 565. Judges must not accept bribes—Exodus 23:8

566

How does the Infinite become revealed to the finite individual without obliterating the recipient in the very act of revelation which is made possible by the presence of the sheer power that brings everything into existence from nothing? Christianity propounds an answer. In order to become revealed to humanity, once and for all, God as the Infinite Being in an act of kenosis or self-emptying become incarnate in the life of a finite being as the man Jesus. This astounding claim made in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, that the Word or the Logos became flesh, not only forecloses but destroys all revelatory claims that are severed from this claim which takes priority over all other claims and which is the only certification that all other claims of revelation are indeed revelatory of the Infinite Being. The revelatory Word of God is not a propositional statement or written words, it is a person, and that person is Jesus. In Jesus we encounter none other than God, the Infinite Being. In Jesus we find that an unconditional personal invitation has been extended to the whole of humanity. The invitation even if extended unconditionally from God does NOT require a suspension of rationally structured inquiry or questioning. The invitation is unconditional because it is God who extends the invitation, an invitation without any terms attached, without any strings attached. Why? Well Martin Luther and John Calvin were right to note that nothing can be done to earn God's favour, the very idea is absurd, because to be able to earn God's favour would mean that God is not God. It is God who invites all men and women regardless of who they have been or who they are. 566. Judges must not accept testimony unless both parties are present—Exodus 23:1

567

'What you do to least of these brother and sisters of mine you do to me'. We cannot pursue God or seek God in solitary isolation. We find God in our communal relationships with others. We find God in our communal solidarity with brothers and sisters who are also the brothers and sisters of God. This is precisely what I found attractive in Judaism, it was the fact that to be authentically Jewish you had to belong to a community of people as a committed member of the Jewish people. You had to love Jews, and you had to love everything Jewish, and everything about being Jewish. And if cannot love everything Jewish then you could not be a member of the Jewish people. Halakhic speaking I was not a member of the Jewish people, so I was not Jew. I chose not to be a Jew. I could not affirm without qualification the Mythos of Judaism, I could not bind myself intellectually or emotionally to the mythology underpinning the self-invention of the Jewish people. 567. Not to curse judges—Exodus 22:27

568

Slaughtering on the north side of the altar.

You must slaughter it (the animal or bull without any blemish) on the north side of the altar before the Lord, and the sons of Aaron, the priests, will splash its blood against the sides of the altar. 568. Not to curse the head of state or leader of the Sanhedrin—Exodus 22:27

569

The iconographic representation of the sacrifice of Isaac. Animal sacrifice becomes a substitute for human sacrifice. 569. Not to curse any upstanding Jew—Leviticus 19:14

570

Women have been banned from religious practices such as the sacrificing of animals. If the Eucharistic celebration, is more than a sacrifice, more than a memorial, more than a repetition, then its completion involves a mysterious inauguration, which provides for the consumption of the divine offering, where the divine offering is God herself, and the feasting on the flesh and blood of God involves an actual partaking in the 'life' of the divine. According to Irigaray the blood sacrifice in the form of the Eucharist and I would add to this the blood sacrifice in its original form which involved the slaughtering of animals and the splashing of blood on the sides of the altar was always accompanied by a hidden sacrifice in the form of an extradition or an exclusion or an exiling of women. 570. Anybody who knows evidence must testify in court—Leviticus 5:1

571

Most of the genomic DNA of plants and animals is comprised on non-coding DNA. Non-coding DNA do encode for proteins. 571. Carefully interrogate the witness—Deuteronomy 13:15

572

With Yael and her Jewish friends I had to deal with the hidden realities of dual identities, observance of a religion and identification with the people of that religion, the commitment to a faith or system of belief based practices and an allegiance to a tribe whose identity are rooted those religious practices. Can anyone really be a Jew without Judaism? This the question all converts face, they can only become Jews through converting to Judaism. Many in our Jewish circle of friends while observing how 'religious' in terms of the practice of Judaism Yael and I were, they themselves openly admitted that they were not at all religious or even believed in any religion let alone Judaism. Many professed agnosticism or atheism. Yet they were proud to be Jewish or Jews. But then what were they exactly proud of? Yael and I were living out the norms of Jewish behaviour. I was attending the Synagogue with Yael, I was giving money to Jewish welfare and charity organizations, I was giving money to Israel, I was giving money to Jewish community projects. They took my money and treated me as good Jew in return. Jewish fund collectors were never turned away from my door empty handed. And they never stopped beating a trial to my door. The more I gave the more Jewish I felt. Living the life of an observant Jew had profound civic consequences, such as increasing civic consciousness and a sense of civic obligation. Did this make me more Jewish? Within the observant Jewish community there were concerns regarding the growing lukewarm identification with organized religion among Jews. In Jewish newsletters and the publications I read more than once this pervasive international trend of the so-called-Jews-of-no-religion phenomenon was brought up as a matter of concern. 572. A witness must not serve as a judge in capital crimes—Numbers 35:30

573

Mikveh immersion, ceremonial cleansing was practice which Yael felt was necessary to observe after menstruation. Our menstruation cycle was now in perfect synchrony and ceremonial cleansing in the Mikveh was part of our women's cycle. Of course the immersion of my body in the Mikveh rendered it ritually non-kosher. But I held to a materialist metaphysic so my body could not in my own mind render the waters of Mikveh non-kosher n objective or physical or material sense. In a materialist Universe kosher or non-kosher could not objectively exist as a real state of affairs of any material or metaphysical or theological consequence. The whole idea was irrational. If God was truly God then kosher as a state of affairs putatively instituted as a divine ordinance or commandment cannot be true or binding, objectively speaking, as a ritual and ceremonial observance with any consequential significance, it has no efficacious value with regard to the life of the Cosmos. From a biological or cosmological perspective as a religious observance or institution it is completely meaningless and inconsequential, especially in terms of the ultimate nature of reality or with respect to the ultimate being and purpose of the Universe. It is a manmade convention without any salvific benefit or merit. It does not really matter whether one is observant or non-observant. The value is purely therapeutic, it makes one fill good. Maybe like the Zen art of archery. I always wanted to do archery, but I learnt to dance instead, to dance with women, in an erotic embrace. 573. Not to accept testimony from a lone witness—Deuteronomy 19:15

574.

Should the most fundamental things be the most real? Are the fundamental particles of particle physics more real than bacteria, giraffes and ecosystems? In what sense is a quark more real than a turtle? If a quark is not more real than a turtle, then it cannot be more fundamental. 574. Transgressors must not testify—Exodus 23:1

575

To believe in Jesus the Jew has to cross the red line. In Jesus God radically choose the Jew. Why? I don't know. But if God became a Jew then Jesus was the most radical and authentic Jew that ever existed. If God can do anything because God is God then God can become flesh and blood, and so God chose to become a Jew. To become a Jew, God had to be born a Jew and undergo circumcision. 575. Relatives of the litigants must not testify—Deuteronomy 24:16

576

The power of a narrative.

A myth is always a story, a fictionalized account about something, it involves someone saying something about something to someone for some reason or purpose or intention. Whether or not a myth endues depends solely on its narrative power, it capacity not only to excite the imagination but also to maintain its grip on the imagination. The narrative power of a myth always depends on it dramatic structure. As productions of the creative imagination, exposed to infinite possibilities arising from an infinity of situations, myths are infinitely variable not only in their content in their underlying dramatic structure and purpose. This means that the infinite variability of myths cannot be simplified or reduced to an infinite number of versions of what is essentially the same thing whether it is single theme or structure or abstract structural relationships between binary factors. This means the content, claims, and meaning of myths cannot reduced to structural relationships between abstract binary factors or dualisms such as nature versus culture or human law versus natural law or the cooked versus the raw or force versus retrain and so on, where these binary oppositions or dualism exist as rigid or fixed mental states or mental structures within the mind or the physical/material based functioning of the brain. The Lévi-Straussian structural interpretation of myths in terms of their role in the resolution of binary oppositions does not provide any mechanistic/causal theory or insight into how the brain actually works with regard to the generation of mythical narratives about any matter of personal or social concern. The view that there exists a link between the polar binary structure of myths and the structure of mind, and for such a link to exist it has to be physical in nature otherwise there can be no link, the very idea that there is such a link is itself a myth. So in this sense Lévi-Strauss was not only a purveyor of myth, but differentiated meaning and content from structure in order to say something about something in a non-mythological manner, but ended up himself narrating a myth instead. 576. Not to testify falsely—Exodus 20:13

577

Homer-Hesiod-Herodotus-Hebrew Bible

As the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer represents the dawn of Western literary history. He lived across the Aegean Sea somewhere in Ionia in the middle to late eighth century BC. After Homer, Hesiod comes onto the scene in the seventh century BC as the author of the long poem known as the Theogony.

It was Paul Ricoeur who has alerted us to the impeding collapse of the walls which have separated the Hellenic from the Hebraic for hundreds of years. Successive waves of Old Testament studies starting with Spinoza have now opened up the books of the Old Testament to a new way of reading them. Before the Babylonian exile multiple Hebraic traditions existed. The historical-critical method of Old Testament studies could identify the existence of multiple traditions and the fluidity of traditions. The crisis of the Babylonian exile became the occasion for the reassembling of the multiple traditions which preceded the exile into a unified scriptural canon within a relatively short period of time by an elite scribal guild. The different traditions which were unified into what has become the Old Testament canon remained recognizable or discernible. The characteristic literary stylistic fingerprints of each tradition were preserved in the canon allowing for a hermeneutic recovery of a more pluralistic reading of the Hebraic Bible. The Old Testament should be read backwards starting with the guilt-ridden histories of Judah and Israel which ended with the Exile. Next the Mosaic block of writings which concern the bestowal of the Law should be read. After this the writing covering the legends of the Patriarchs should be read. The Patriarchical literature embodies the God's blessing and promises rather than law, transgression, and judgement. Finally, in conclusion the sacerdotal vision of a good creation destroyed by man should complete the readings of the four blocks which together constitute the Hebraic kerygma. Post-exilic reconstruction of what could be viewed as the nascent nation state of the Hebrews was accompanied by polemics and tensions between the development of a theology of law under the sign of Moses and a theology of hope and promise under the sign of Abraham. Confronting these internal theological tensions were the external of Persian and Hellenic culture. Out of these internal and external conflicts and tensions which were associated with an emerging Judaism based on the literature of Torah and the Prophets there arose the literature of the Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastics, Song of Solomon and Job. This literature should be read against the back drop of the founding writings of Hellenistic culture such as Homer, Hesiod, the tragic poets and the pre-Socratic philosophers. The so-called writings of Hebraic Bible should be read in parallel with the Herodotus. Finally the Hebraic Bible should be read in parallel with post-Socratic philosophical writings. It then becomes possible that we no longer see two separate watertight universes one belonging to Jerusalem and the other to Athens, but instead we can start appreciating the emergence and development of Judaism as in inseparable component of the Greco-Roman world in which it was culturally, socially, economically, politically and geographically embedded. With the destruction of Temple and Jerusalem we Judaism retreating from that universe into an inner spiritual exile outside of history. First century BC Judaism was still in state of fluidity with rival religious and theological schools coexisting and the emerging Christian communities were also reading the Jewish writings but in a way that was different from the Rabbinical schools, and the early Christian readings of the Jewish writings which they had taken ownership of presaged the splitting of the Synagogue and the Church which eventually materialized in the birth of a new faith community with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Jesus was the reason for the existence of the Jewish tradition, he was the Logos by virtue of which the Mythos of that Tradition could finally mirror the Telos of God and Jesus was the Telos of God, Jesus was the Hope and the Promise which God had given Abraham, in Jesus the seed of Abraham exceeds that of the stars which fill the Universe. With Jesus the Telos of God merged with human history and Judaism took flight from God's history into the ghetto of narcissism, into the ghetto of the repetition of self-reflections in the hall of mirrors. 577. Punish the false witnesses with the same punishment they were seeking for the defendant—Deuteronomy 19:19

578

With the passing away of Yael the pain of loss I felt was beyond bearable. I could not bear the thought of living without her. I wished for the great nothingness of oblivion which only non-existence could make possible. I wanted so badly to escape the emotional pain. I wanted to be released from life. I contemplated my own suicide. Yael was gone! And I wanted her so badly. I wanted her to be with me so badly. In the dark value of grief I was reminded that passage of time is the great healer, but in the days that followed Yael's death those word sounded incredibly cheap. I would mourn for Yael forever. For the first time in my life I was in a bad way. Kate returned and became my mother. I wept freely in her presence when I opened the door to her persistence knocking. 578. Act according to the ruling of the Sanhedrin—Deuteronomy 17:11

579

And the days, weeks, months and years went by following Yael's passing, and Kate was there the whole time, filling my life with the caring affection of a loving mother. I was not her lover, I had become her loving daughter. Kate was alone. She had no one but me. I felt her great loneliness. I eventually packed all Yael's clothes and things away, and I repainted the flat in soft orange, yellow, plum and apricot shades. It was a public holiday when the light glittering gold everywhere diffused into my bedroom waking me up from a deep and restful sleep. Getting up I prayed 'I thank thee Lord'. After washing my hands I covered my head and prayed the prayers. While eating breakfast l listened to the Aretha Franklin CD, a birthday gift from Yael. I remembered Yael singing the words while we listened to Aretha's rendition of 'Oh Happy Day'. Smiling she sang: Oh happy day...When Jesus washed...' Aretha's 'Natural Woman' was one of Yael's great favourites, and mine as well. With the passing of years Kate had become increasingly devout, and I also reflected on this while drinking a cup of filter coffee after breakfast, sitting in the lounge. 'How have our lives turned out', was the thought which passed through my mind. The intensity and brightness of the golden light seemed to have increased, bathing the lounge in its soft glow. I was feeling incredibly happy and at peace with world. 'I thank thee Lord', I prayed once more. It seem that for a moment that the play of light beaming in great shafts on the walls had filled the lounge with the Shekinah Glory of God. Marvelling at this I prayed once more: 'You are here, You are everywhere, I thank thee Jesus.' And so began the renewal and rededication of my journey of faith and belief in God. 579. Not to deviate from the word of the Sanhedrin—Deuteronomy 17:11.

580

One of the most unexpected results that come out of the human genome project was the discovery that more than half of the DNA making up the human genome was derived from mobile parasitic DNA elements collectively referred to as transposable elements, that is, transposons or jumping genes, which are able transpose or jump or move from one genetic loci in the genome to another loci. Following the sequencing of other animal and plant genomes it was further confirmed that these mobile genetic elements made up the largest component of non-coding DNA sequences within most metazoan and plant genomes. Initially these repetitious blocks of DNA produced as a consequence of the replication and mobilization of transposable elements within eukaryotic genomes were thought to be 'junk DNA', That is, DNA which seemed to serve no function or purpose. 580. Not to add to the Torah commandments or their oral explanations—Deuteronomy 13:1

581

Now that I am well past middle age, going to church has become a great part of my social life. The Powder Puff Nightclub has long since ceased to exist. Saturday night I go to Catholic Mass with Kate and afterwards we usually spend the evening together at Rosebank, taking in a movie and having dinner afterwards. Early Sunday mornings I go to the 7.00 am Anglican Communion service at St Marys Cathedral next to Johannesburg Station. Sometimes Kay and I go a church services at a Gay Dutch Reformed Church. Now and then Jeremy Isaac invites Kate and I to a service or talk at the Messianic Hebrew Church which has become the spiritual home of one of the largest congregations in Johannesburg of Jews who have converted to Christianity. Wayne is also a member of the congregation. Kate and I are always warmly welcomed as the 'Catholic Friends'. The Messianic Hebrew Church has become also become a regular venue for hosting seminars at which prominent international Christian thinkers give lectures. They are usually academics, professors in mathematics, physics, evolutionary biology, philosophy, theology and the humanities from various universities in the USA and from the UK. I was also invited to participate in a Science and Theology seminar hosted for the purpose of debating the various origin of life theories. Theories on the origin of life may be 'bottom up' or 'top down' theories. I prefer a top down approach to the origin of life and for the reconstruction of the Last Universal Common Ancestor commonly abbreviated as 'LUCA'. Warm deep-sea hydrothermal vents bubbling hydrogen gas in an ocean saturated with carbon dioxide was the most likely site for the generation of life from inanimate matter. It rational to assume the existence of LUCA since all life shares the same metabolic machinery for the production of ATP which includes the Glycolytic Pathway, Kerbs Cycle or TCA Cycle and the transmembrane chemiosmosis linked electron transport chain with which we associate the process of oxidative phosphorylation. The evolutionary passage to life in the deep-sea hydrothermal vents was all a matter of chemistry, the kind of chemistry which could facilitate the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry, an event which happened between 4.1 and 4.2 billion years ago. Given the high temperatures of the vent, the gas stream of hydrogen and the surrounding water saturated with carbon dioxide all that was needed was a natural inorganic catalytic agent which could facilitate reactions between H2 and CO2 to generate all kinds of possible hydrocarbon structures. Such natural catalytic agents existed on the surfaces of the hydrothermal vents in the form minerals containing clusters of iron, nickel and sulphur. 581. Not to diminish from the Torah any commandments, in whole or in part—Deuteronomy 13:1

582

It has now been conclusively established that mobile parasitic DNA elements which had colonized and now inhabited both prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes have played a major role in the evolution of genomic structure and function of all living organism by increasing the coding and non-coding genetic repertoire of the host. In this way mobile parasitic genetic element have the key agents in driving the evolution of metazoan and plant genomes. Mobile parasitic DNA or transposons in other words have played a central role in the generation of genetic variability by facilitating various kinds of recombination processes or recombination events during meiosis. Because of their role in genetic recombination transposon played a central role in driving the processes of gene duplication, new gene formation (exonization), transcription regulation, chromosome re-modelling, speciation and adaptive radiation. 582. Not to curse your father or mother—Exodus 21:17

583

Abiotic Fischer-Tropsch-type reactions in deep-sea hydrothermal vents on the ocean bed or hydrothermally beneath the ocean bed can generate formate, methane (CH4) and more complex hydrocarbons necessary for the generation of life from hydrogen and carbon dioxide

583. Not to strike your father or mother—Exodus 21:15

584

Why did the universe start in a low entropy state? 584. Respect your father and mother—Exodus 20:12

585

What is time? What is the real nature of time? Why do we experience the passage of time the way we do? 585. Fear your father and mother—Leviticus 19:3

586

Something 'is' because something else 'is also'. The same question again in a different format: When we explain the existence and nature of X by saying 'X because Z' we don't really make much progress in really explain X, if Z also calls out for explanation just as much as X did. These problem relates to the question of why is the Universe intelligible and therefore knowable. Intelligible lies in the fact that we can explain X in terms of Z within the framework of a causal explanation or what we call a deductive nomological (DN) explanation. Within in this explanatory framework Z could be general laws such which are based on uniformities and regulatories of Nature. But how do we explain or account for the existence of these uniformities and regulatories of Nature. In order to be Law of Nature that need to be constant or invariant, and there in a strong sense 'immutable'. What makes them immutable? How do we know that have not changed before and will not change again in the future? Mere observation cannot establish their immutability because of the logical flaws inherent in the logic of induction. The truth of DN explanations depends on the truth that Z is time invariant or immutable in other words. Causal explanation are predictive. If Z then X. Knowability is dependent of the truth of if Z then X. If we are unable to predict a range of physical events then we are unable to claim that the Universe is intelligible. 586. Not to be a rebellious son—Deuteronomy 21:20

587

Of course no one would disagree that the nature of physical reality determines what kind of activities physics is able to engage in both experimentally and theoretically. The same goes for chemistry and biology. 587. Mourn for relatives—Leviticus 10:19

588

What exactly is it which makes science and mathematics at all possible? What exactly is it which makes it possible for the mind itself to formulate this line of questioning and indeed reflect on the question, and try to find answers? What exactly is it which makes it possible for the mind itself to distinguish between appearance and reality? What is it? It has to be something! The 'what is it?' line of questioning is what constitutes the subject matter of ontology, this kind of questioning is the concern of ontology and metaphysics. What is the nature of reality? What is it about the nature of reality which make it possible to pursue the 'what is it?' type of questioning? This is something in the nature of reality, in the nature of the World or Universe or Existence which makes it possible for this line of ontological and metaphysical line of questioning to emerge or to enter into the state of awareness or consciousness, or into the state of sentience. This line of questioning arises because the thing called mind or awareness or consciousness or mental activity or mental capacity or mental states or cognitive capacity or cognitive power or sentience has emerged or come into being or exists. All this concerns what we associate with mind. But what made the emergence of mind possibility. From what precisely does this possibility emerge? It emerged from matter and motion. Where else could it have emerged from? It has to emerge from something. What does it means for something to emerge from something? It emergence necessarily entails a causal chain of interconnecting events. An effect cannot precede its cause. Effects occur later in time. What about the so-called Block Universe? What is it which makes something possible? It has to a consequence of something, such as a system of causation, because nothing can cause itself to happen. What is the reason for the statement or the state of affairs in the Universe which does not allow for an effect to precede its cause? If such a reason exists then that reason corresponds to way things are essentially in the Universe. This is equivalent to saying that reason intrinsic to the Universe is or reason is inherent in Universe or reason corresponds to the essential nature of the Universe. Effect do not precede causes, this is the way the Universe is. Our own reasoning suggests that this is not possible and thus our own reasoning corresponds to the reason which is intrinsic to the way the Universe is its self. Reason is not one thing and the Universe another thing. They are parts or aspects of the same thing, they exist by virtue of each other, the one is the embodiment of the other.

Kant's work aimed at clarifying the procedures or processes or faculties by means of which the knowledge about something could be produced or by means of which knowledge itself becomes possible. To achieve this the philosophy examines or attempts to investigate the how it possible that the philosopher's mind can generate knowledge which is true or justifiable or certifiable or having the necessary warrant for it to be believed as being true. What makes something true? This kind mental activity or questioning or investigation is what is referred as being transcendental. A thinking about what makes thinking possible represents a transcendental reflection. From such a transcendental stand point or perspective the philosopher reflects or applies her mind or mental capacities or cognitive powers to working out what it is precisely which makes thinking, reasoning, deliberation, inference, cognition and ultimately reasoning or reason possible. So the transcendental reflection or investigation uses reason to explain what makes reasoning possible, in other words it used reason to explicate all the processes and procedures which makes reasoning possible. So ultimately it by virtue of reason that 'what it is' which makes reason possible is explained or comprehended or understood or grasped or revealed or unconcealed or unveiled. This is what is encapsulated in a transcendental analysis or a transcendental reflection. It is the existence of the thing we call reason which makes reason possible. What capacity or what power makes it possible for transcendental reflection? Answer: Freedom! Only within the mind which is free to roam and ruminant and reflect is reason or reasoning possible. In order to have knowledge or acquire knowledge or generate knowledge reason has to be set free. Freedom and reason belong together. The truth will set you free. This statement is equivalent to Reason will set you free. The Logos will set you free. We need to ask: 'Free from what?' Answer: Free from Mythos, free from the Noble Lies embodied in Mythos. For Kant the transcending and reflective capacities of humans was due to the power of reason and the autonomy of reason. However, the 'ultimate object' of transcendental Kantian reflection is necessarily reason itself, but transcendental reflection assumes the power and autonomy of reason. We are trapped in an infernal circle, we assume the truth of what we want to prove.

For Hegel it is through a process of free reflection that mind comes to recognize itself as representing the embodied of reason in the very process of reasoning. In the human mind the possibility of reason depends of freedom in the form of free thought and reflection, that is thought and reflection freed from the bondage of authority, authority founded on Mythos and Noble Lies.

With the rise of a new pernicious Mythos, another form of authority, in the form of scientism, the possibility of transcendence in the form of free reflection and freedom of the will was challenged under the auspices of a certain brand of determinism, mechanism, physicalism, materialism and the tyranny of a general causal necessitation of everything. With the successful rise of modern science a perception of the Universe took root in which the overriding causal and mechanistic determinism which governed the dynamics of the Universe was also perceived to be the very the embodiment of reason itself, a belief which seemed to be consistent with a scientific view of reality.

For Schopenhauer the will having the freedom to exert itself thereby possessed the power to impose itself on the world, an imposition made possible by virtue of being able to impose itself on reason. The power of the will to impose itself on the world was equivalent to Kant's idea that cognition or the exercise of reason was essentially the imposition of the categories upon sense perceptions of the world. The world is thus an idealistic construction of the will which has imposed itself on reason where reason has been reduced to the cognitive facilities of the mind. In Nietzsche the will has become self-consciously aware of itself as the power, the will to power, which shapes our perceptions of the world. The will to power becomes a form of transcendence for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

In all cases, whether it is Kant, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, the problem of what exactly it is which makes knowledge or truth or science at all possible becomes a problem which is solved or dissolved by some form of transcendental analysis or transcendental reflection in which the self places itself in a transcendental relation towards the world or reality and in which reality becomes a construction of mind or will, a construction which is thus ultimately rooted in various kinds of humans experiences which take on transcendental significance. This also applies to Heidegger in a most exemplary fashion. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger are all engaged in some kind of transcendental awareness through which meaning, significance and ultimately truth is seen to supervene on something else, something else which becomes the condition of possibility or ground or origination for whatever they are searching for or wanting to establish with certainty. All are engaged in some form of interrogation of some form of transcendental awareness in the hope of establishing something which ultimately revolves round answering the question: what is it which makes knowledge or meaning or significance or truth possible assuming that these things (knowledge, meaning, significance and truth) do indeed exist as possibilities? 588. The High Priest must not defile himself through contact with a relative—Leviticus 21:11

589

The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD ushers in the historical collapse of the various institutional forms of Judaism which had evolved during the exilic period and which undergone further developments during the Second Temple period. A believable case can be made that the Christian community had already become well established in the decades that preceded the destruction of Second Temple. So in support of the proposals and justifying arguments made in JAT Robinson's book entitled 'Redating the New Testament' there is to my mind no compelling reasons not to accept that the writings of the documents which make up the New Testament were completed and in circulation before the epochal ending events which marked the date 70 AD. Regarding the significance of this singular catastrophic event there is a deafening silence in the New Testament and other first century Christian literature. The fact that it has been ignored as a historical event is strange and not easy to explain. There is only one conclusion which is: there are obviously no records in the New Testament literature regarding the occurrence of these even because they had not yet occurred during the time in the New Testament literature was composed and circulated. The argument that the Synoptic Gospels were written after 70 AD is based on the flimsy argument that the descriptions which seem to correspond to a prophetically predicted destruction of the Jerusalem and the Temple were incorporated as a postdiction made retroactively and written down retrospectively after the event. A critical reading of the putative prophecies do not support the idea that they can be literally construed as a postdictive prophetic prediction of the events of 70 AD. It also reasonable to argue that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke predate the Gospel Mark.

In Mark 13: 14-16 the influence of Daniel is unmistakable: 14 When you see 'the abomination that causes desolation' standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 15 Let no one on the housetop go down or enter the house to take anything out. 16 Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak.

While Josephus makes reference to the cessation of Temple of offerings in August 70 AD, none of the Gospels or other New Testament writings made any theologically meaningful mention of this most significant fact that the sacrificial institutions of the Temple have come to an end. In fact there was talk that Emperor Gaius Caligula did actually entertain in 40 AD the setting up of his statue in the Temple. Given the likes of Emperors Caligula and Nero the desecration and destruction of the Temple loomed as a constant and ever present threat long before the actual destruction of the Temple in 70 D, and this was a lively possibility which almost certainly lived vividly and perpetually in the consciousness of the Jews as an imminent threat that it had become common currency as part and parcel of the inevitabilities of the Roman occupation, and these prospects could have fed the Messianic imagination of the Jews. In the Apostle Paul's Letters to the Thessalonians he similarly entertains the imminent apocalyptic end of the age long before 70 AD. There could not have been better for Jesus to be around. The expectation of the destruction of Jerusalem was definitely in the air in the decades preceding the actual destruction of the Temple. Abominations of the Temple by the Roman occupiers and other previous conquering occupiers had been recurrent events in the history of the Second Temple. Ever since Nebuchadnezzar's sacking of Jerusalem in 586 BC, the abomination and the threatened destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem has always being a political fact of life in Judea ever since the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple. Hence textual images of this prospect in the Gospels should not come as a surprise. In fact it would be greater surprise if they were absent. The Romans occupied the Temple in 66 and 68 AD. The likelihood of earlier undocumented temporary or short lived occupations cannot be ruled out. The prospect that Jerusalem would become encircled by armies and that her destruction was a pre-given under the rule of the first century Roman Empire was never an idle anticipation but real pall of doom which hang over Judea. The expectation of the inevitable is hardly the fulfilment of a prophecy. The literary dramatization of what seems to be politically inevitable is an exercise which should be expected during those times in the context of the preaching of God's judgement on that age. From Jeremiah onwards the idea of Jerusalem's desolation ruled throughout the ages, an idea that was again re-enforced in Daniel, and so according to the prophets foreign armies would always arrive, they would encircle Jerusalem and destroy it. Robinson in his book, Redating the New Testament (1976), has given the following first century dates for the writing of the New Testament and associated literature:

James 47-8

1 Thessalonians early 50

2 Thessalonians 50-1

1 Corinthians spring 55

1 Timothy autumn 55

2 Corinthians early 56

Galatians later 56

Romans early 57

Titus late spring 57

Philippians spring 58

Philemon summer 58

Colossians summer 58

Ephesians late summer 58

2 Timothy autumn 58

The Didache 40-60

Mark 45-60

Matthew 40-60+

Luke 57-60+

Jude 61-2

2 Peter 61-2

Acts 57-62+

1, 2, 3 John 60-65

1 Peter spring 65

John 40-65+

Hebrews 67

Revelation late 68 (-70)

1 Clement early 70

Barnabas 75

The Shepherd of Hermas 85

589. The High Priest must not enter under the same roof as a corpse—Leviticus 21:11

590

The Gospel of Matthew is unmistakeably a Jewish document. The Gospel of Luke could have also been authored by a Jewish writer or by someone who had previously converted to Judaism. 590. A Kohen must not defile himself for anyone except relatives—Leviticus 21:1

591

To be incarnated: What does it mean to be incarnate, to exist in a World as flesh and bone creatures? This is one of the central questions of Christianity and it has direct bearing on our understanding of God's own act of kenosis, the Word or Logos becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us in a World. What does it mean for God to be 'in a World' as a direct consequence of God's own kenosis? We become aware or conscious of various kinds of experiences which are consequential of us being in a World or being embedded in a World. Again we need to ask if we wish to understand Kant and Heidegger: 'What is it' which makes it, in an a priori fashion possible, and therefore in a transcendental fashion, for us be capable of experiencing the World or engage with a World in a cognitive fashion. We have various kinds of experiences which are consequential of us being-in-a-World. There are two sides to the meaning of the word 'consequential' used in relation to us being-in-a-World. For one, the World itself acts on or upon us in many ways and we in turn response to its actions in a variety of ways, and in this process we endeavour to make sense of the World by imposing our mental or cognitive constructions of what the World is for us, in a manner of speaking. On what or on whom do we impose our cognitive constructions of the World? We impose our mental cognitive constructions of what the World is for us in the performative of saying something about the world to someone else or to ourselves. We also impose our mental constructions of what the World is for us in our thinking, in our mental images and in our ideas of what the World is for us. We relate to the World in various kinds of ways or modes in order for the World to be meaningful, understandable, knowable and intelligible to us. We cannot ignore the reality that the World in all its manifestations shapes us, nudges us, influences us and also acts upon us in a variety of ways. While we exert our own agency on the World in a variety of ways and modes, the World also exerts its own agency on us, often in reaction to our own actions. The World acts on our senses through the medium of particles in motion, where light is also a particle. Sound, temperature, odour, texture and colour are all transmitted through the motion of particles.

We are consciously aware of things all the time. So what is it which makes the cognition of things or our conscious awareness of possible, whether as an internal mental object or external objects? To be consciously aware is also to be cognitive aware. To be cognitively aware is to be conscious that the thing which has our attention is recognized as that thing. Something makes the cognition of things or cognitive awareness of things possible. The 'something' is the 'what it is' which makes something possible such as the cognition of things. Or in other words cognition as a process or experience is rendered possible by virtue of something. What is cognition? And what is it which renders cognition possible? We need to remind ourselves what these words mean. Cognition involves mental processes, thoughts or thinking, mind and conscious awareness. Cognition is involved in all the mental processes and mental actions that are necessarily required for the acquisition of knowledge and understanding through thought, ideas, mental images, imagination experiences, sensations and perception.

The 'what is it' is the 'virtue by means of which' something is made or rendered possible. The phrase 'virtue by means of which' represents that which is the means that makes something possible. The Kantian categories represent the means by which something like the process of cognition is rendered possible. For Heidegger it is the modes of existence, the 'existentials' whose analysis reveals what it means to be in a World.

Science is the exemplary empirically rooted endeavour or enterprise of knowledge generation about the nature of the real world which also happens to be the only world that science deals with, which is the physical and material Universes. The empirical method of philosophy which is synonymous with the empirical method of the natural sciences has proved itself time and again to be a compelling and indubitable means for establishing the truth of all claims made about the essential nature of reality. Philosophical empiricism deals with the theoretical and logical basis of the empirical method. Philosophical empiricism as an intellectual discipline supports the truth claim that the empirical method as developed and applied in the natural sciences is the only trustworthy self-sufficient foundation of all statements which can claim to be true statements about reality. I don't think it is necessary or of any value to contest the warrant of this view, it is basically the core belief of scientists in general. In fact we could not do science if we did not accept this view of what science is all about.

Philosophically speaking, the intellectual activity which we call metaphysics and also ontology deals with undeclared non-empirical philosophical assumptions or presuppositions which underlie the empirical method or the claims of empiricism. The empirical method is based on observation. Scientific observations are mediated through physically generated signals which can be registered cognitively either directly or indirectly by means of various kinds of signal detecting and signal measuring instrumentation. Measuring and detecting instrumentation functions as an extension of the senses. All physical signals whether acting directly on the sense organs or indirectly perceived through the medium of instrumentation are caused by the motions or dynamics of particles in time and space. Either way, direct or via indirect instrumentation, in the empirically based methods of science all observations are in the final analysis mediated through the senses. In the broadest sense it is what we can see, either directly or indirectly, that counts as empirical evidence. Evidence in science is based on observation. Also broadly speaking all scientific observation is mediated by the senses, in other words by 'seeing' where seeing can be either direct or indirectly by means of detecting and measuring instrumentation. Scientific observation in the philosophy of empiricism is also what is taken to constitute experience. In this sense scientific evidence is based on experience, an experience of some aspect of the World or Universe, or a thing or object in other words. The thing or object of observation may be something like a state of affair which actually exists in one form or another. So scientific observation deals with things which exist in one form or another. In credibility or verisimilitude or warrant of science theories and hypotheses are based on a correspondence theory of truth. Observation support counts as evidence for something being the case and this is what is basically meant by the correspondence theory of truth.

What would be the ontological or metaphysical assumptions of science and the scientific method? Some of the obvious ones are: every effect has a cause, scientific laws are based on the assumption that certain kinds of uniformities and regularities of nature are invariant in the sense they are immutable and hold across all space and time, things which can be observed actually exist and are real, the Universe can be rendered intelligible and knowable through the application of the scientific method to the study of natural phenomena. We can fish out from these assumptions the belief that what is real exists independently of being observed and is not a construct of the mind. We can also generalize that these assumptions are held by most scientists and in this sense most scientists could philosophically speaking be classified as realists, holding to one or other form of scientific realism. So what is in the mind corresponds to what exists, what is in the mind corresponds to reality.

From a Humean perspective no empirically based observation can establish the truth of necessary linkage between a cause and its effect. All that observation renders is that the occurrence of two events are regularly conjoined, the one followed by the other. In David Hume's opinion the belief in the existence of causality belongs to metaphysics. To propose that effects are the results of the work or agency of causes is a metaphysical proposal. From a Kantian perspective cause and effect exists only as one of the a priori categories of the mind or of the cognitive apparatus which makes reasoning about the World possible or scientific investigation of the World possible. From a Heideggerian perspective the empirically based scientific inquiry into the Nature of the Universe represents what he calls an 'ontic' inquiry in contrast to ontological inquiry. From a Heideggerian perspective all scientific investigation can be viewed as an ontic activity being based on Kantian categories such as cause and effect. In contrast to this all ontological or primordial inquiries revolve round the question of the meaning of being. In contrast to ontic inquiries, ontological investigation are based on the analysis of what Heidegger calls existentials, rather than the Kantian categories of the cognitive apparatus. Where Kantian categories represent faculties of the cognitive apparatus. Existentials represent modes of being-in-the-world. Modes of being-in-the-world are contrasted with categories of the cognitive apparatus. All thinking about what can be known about things which exist have to be thought through forms of thinking which can be construed as the categories which are accepted as being a priori true for any object of knowledge. The categories represent the properties which are a priori true for all objects. 591. Appoint a king from Israel—Deuteronomy 17:15

592

Without recourse to the idea or notion or assumption of causation science as a disciple committed to the noble enterprise of generating credible knowledge regarding the essential nature of the physical and material Universe would be impossible.

592. Not to appoint a convert—Deuteronomy 17:15

593

Writing in the 500 BC Herodotus does not mention Israel or Jerusalem or the Temple. He mentions the Phoenicians and Palestine. Contacts between Hellenistic Greeks and Hebrews were only document after 348 BC. Before that mention of the pre-Hellenistic Greeks in the Old Testament is documented in Genesis 10 were the Table of Nations is outlined as follows: 1This is the account of Shem, Ham and Japheth, Noah's sons, who themselves had sons after the flood.

The Japhethites:

2. The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Mesheka and Tiras. 3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togarmah. 4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittites and the Rodanites. 5 (From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.)

The Hamites:

6 The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put and Canaan. 7 The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah and Sabteka. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. 8 Cush was the father of Nimrod, who became a mighty warrior on the earth. 9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; that is why it is said, "Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord." 10 The first centres of his kingdom were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Kalneh, in Shinar. 11 From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, 12 and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah—which is the great city. 13 Egypt was the father of the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites, 14 Pathrusites, Kasluhites (from whom the Philistines came) and Caphtorites. 15 Canaan was the father of Sidon his firstborn, and of the Hittites, 16 Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, 17 Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, 18 Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites. Later the Canaanite clans scattered 19 and the borders of Canaan reached from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, as far as Lasha. 20 These are the sons of Ham by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.

The Semites:

21 Sons were also born to Shem, whose older brother was Japheth; Shem was the ancestor of all the sons of Eber. 22 The sons of Shem: Elam, Ashur, Arphaxad, Lud and Aram. 23 The sons of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether and Meshek. 24 Arphaxad was the father of Shelah, and Shelah the father of Eber. 25 Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided; his brother was named Joktan. 26 Joktan was the father of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, 27 Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, 28 Obal, Abimael, Sheba, 29 Ophir, Havilah and Jobab. All these were sons of Joktan. 30 The region where they lived stretched from Mesha toward Sephar, in the eastern hill country. 31 These are the sons of Shem by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations. 32 These are the clans of Noah's sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood. 593. The king must not have too many wives—Deuteronomy 17:17

594

The pervading presence of existence is something to reflect on. We can elaborate and expand on Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum by agreeing that we have to exist in order to imagine, have ideas, think, reflect and know, even if we do this without even being consciously aware of our own existence. We also have to exist in order to have any kind of experience. We need to exist in order to experience feelings, emotions and all the sensations made possible by our sense organs, brain and nervous system. Heidegger's philosophical investigations has tirelessly sought to make explicit our inarticulable sense of existing or our vague sense of awareness which we regarding our own existence. The issue in this investigation is not 'what it is' that exists. In other words Heidegger is not asking what kind of a thing or entity a being is, but rather what it means to be at all. Heidegger is interested in what it means 'to be'. He is interested in the question of 'what it means to be'. The question can also be rendered in the form: 'to question what it means to be'. In the formulation of this question and in its interrogation the words 'to be' are interchangeable with the world Being with a capital. The words 'to be' (Sein) can also be translated into a being (Das Seiende) which in turn can also mean a thing, an entity or an existent. Thus a 'being' means something completely different from 'to be'. One cannot figure out what it means 'to be' by investigating the nature 'beings' or existents. An investigation into the nature of being is described by Heidegger as an ontic investigation, whereas an investigation into the question of what it means to be represents an ontological investigation. In Heidegger's 'Being and Time' all ontic investigations are concerned with the essential features of the being or existence of entities (non-Dasein entities) and the essential features regarding the being of entities which represent the terms of reference of ontic studies also constitute what has been called the 'categories' pertaining to ontic inquiries. In contrast to the categories of ontic inquiries we have the existentials of ontological inquiries which do not concern beings and entities but with Dasein which involved humanity and the word Dasein can translated to mean 'being there' or 'there being'. So we have the following set of dualisms: 1) 'what it is' versus 'what it means to be', 2) 'beings' (entities) versus 'being there' (Dasein or Being), 3) categories versus existentials, factual versus factical, and 4) ontic inquiries/questions versus ontological inquiries/questions. Ontic inquiries (science) which are concerned with factual inquiries regarding the essential nature of entities where the inquiry is always carried within certain terms of reference or in terms of the categories.

Are these questions asking the same thing: 1) 'What it means to be?' 2) 'What does it mean to be?' 3) What does it mean to be at all?' Does no the ontic question of 'what it is?' or 'what is it?' also necessarily include the ontological question 'what does it mean to be at all?' What is the difference between the question 'what does it mean to be at all?' and 'what does it mean to be that at all?' The word 'does' is used in a sentence to represent the third person singular of 'do'. The words 'do' and 'does' embody the same idea which is to: perform an action, complete something, achieve something, or behave in a specific manner. We can argue that they are expressing the same proposition. All three questions may be answered by the following question: 'To be what?' There are many ways 'to be'. You can be sick, tired, happy, alive or dead. What does it mean to be alive? We know what it means to be alive. But apparently this statement also includes what it means 'to just be', that is 'being there', it therefore includes an ontological question of 'what it means to be'. One has 'to be' in order to be sick. But precisely was does it mean 'to be' so that you can 'also be' sick, tired, happy, dead or alive? So it seem one has 'to be' first in order for one 'to be' sick. The ontological becomes the condition of possibility for the ontic. In terms of Totality and Ultimacy the ontic is tethered to the ontological. The ontic and ontological are inseparably joined in a seamless fashion, in terms of a system of Truth, in which the meaning and significance of the parts are derived from their relationship to the whole or in terms of the whole or in reference to the whole.

What about the words 'at all'? The words 'at all' convey a negative possibility of 'not being' as opposed 'to being'. 594. The king must not have too many horses—Deuteronomy 17:16

595

What does it mean to be God? If God is really God then God is necessarily infinite, eternal, impassable, omniscience, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnideterminative and omni-sustaining of everything which exists. If God is God then nothing can exist independently of God's omni-sustaining power. In addition no Truth exists independently or separately from God. For this to be true, God exists necessarily as both the full embodiment and the ultimate condition of possibility for the existence of all Truth and all Reality. Taken together all of this means that God's essence and existence converge necessarily rather than contingently. If God's essence and existence converge in God's Being or Nature then nothing whether it be the abstract or physical can exist independently or separately from God. If nothing can exist independently from God then God is immanent in everything which exists in some kind of necessary and essential fashion, which means that all views which hold that God is completely outside and above the Universe are inconsistent with the Essential Nature of God. God's relationship with the Universe has be comprehended in a manner which is consistent with all the preceding claims regarding what it means for God to be really God indeed.

When the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking makes the claim that: 'The universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature...', then he is presupposing the pre-existence of all the necessary conditions which make the existence of the Universe possible without explain the origination of the necessary conditions which otherwise are called the laws of nature.

After making the above claim, Hawking draws the following conclusion: 'We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in...' On the questionable logical strength of this conclusion Hawking then confesses. 'For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.'

As Augustine proposed 'time is creature'. Time exists by virtue of being created. Time is something which comes contingently into existence with space, matter and energy. Time is something which does not exist or cannot exist independently of space, matter and energy.

The condition of possibility by virtue of which the Universe is able to come into existence constitute the system of causation responsible for the Universes emergence from something rather than nothing. The Laws of Nature by virtue of which the Universe comes into existence represents something rather than nothing. Causes exist as conditions of possibility even within the quantum vacuum. The Universe did not cause itself to into existence from nothing. Rather the Universe emerged from a complex pre-existing reality rather than from nothing. 595. The king must not have too much silver and gold—Deuteronomy 17:17

596

Henri Lefebvre in his book 'Dialectical Materialism' deals with the relationship between form and content, where form can be interpreted as embracing things belonging or pertaining to the realm of necessity and content can be interpreted as the realm pertaining to the contingent. Contingency gives rise to the horizon of infinite possibilities. Contingency gives rise to content. Contingency is represents the realm of possibility. The possible become the content. Content is limitless with respect to the infinite horizon of possibility. 596. Destroy the seven Canaanite nations—Deuteronomy 20:17

597

Rational definitions: For God to be God nothing can pre-existence. God's own existence is the pre-condition for all existence. As the pre-condition of all existence, the existence of all possibilities have their ultimate ground in God, because nothing can originate, arise, emergence or come into existence independently of God. This is another way of stating that nothing can be the self-cause of their existence. No effect can be self-causing. Nothing gives rise to nothing. Something is the result of something. For God to be truly God all causation terminates ultimately in God as the pre-existing and pre-condition of all that is possible.

In journal entry 413 I wrote: So we can accept that all particular claims to truth, or in other words all particular truths, are true by virtue of a greater Truth, a greater Totalizing Truth which grounds the truthfulness of all particular truth claims. There can be no particular truth without it being part of a greater grounding Truth. Any particular truth is true by virtue of it being part of the whole Truth. In that entry I also wrote: For a subject to be the repository of the Totality of Truth it has to be everything it knows in a direct undifferentiated manner. So the subject makes 2 + 2 = 4 true by being that particular truth in a direct unmediated manner. So God is 2 + 2 = 4. God is everything that is truth. God is Truth and because God is the Truth, God is also the Way.

By extension of the arguments made in journal entry 413, for God to be truly God, God is necessarily the ultimate agency and for a subject to be the ultimate agency of everything, God is necessarily present in everything which is capable of any kind of agency. God is necessarily present as the condition of possibility of that agency in a direct undifferentiated manner because nothing can act independently in its own right independently of God, otherwise God cannot be truly God. A person is a person by virtue of having conscious awareness and being consciously aware of the capacity of its own agency as the means to realize desired ends or goals. If this statement describes an attribute of personhood, then God is also a person, in the same way that God is the Truth and the Way. 597. Not to let any of them remain alive—Deuteronomy 20:16

598

To repeat once more, from John 14:6-7 (NKJV) we read about the revelation of God who is the Father of everything: 6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. 7 "If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him." From these verses taken from the Gospel of John we can expound on God being the Way. How is it possible that the infinite God has already shown finite humanity the way? The only possibly act of revelation by means of which God's Way can be revealed to finite humanity is through God's own self-kenosis. 598. Wipe out the descendants of Amalek—Deuteronomy 25:19

599

Freedom and contingency exist at the threshold of possibility, possibilities which are created with the dawn of every passing moment. Freedom and contingency c0-exist with the creation of each new moment which ushers in the dawn of an unknown and therefore an as yet to be born future. The future is not a given, it unknown and unknownable, even in a causally closed Universe, because the future is always filled with infinite possibilities, and this is a direct result of God's voluntary act of kenosis, which is the very condition for the possibility of all freedom. It is by virtue of the reality of an open future that an expanding horizon of possibilities can ever exist, and without an expanding horizon of possibility neither the existence of freedom nor contingency nor history would be possible. 599. Remember what Amalek did to the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 25:17

600

Reading Vincent Descombes' book 'Modern French Philosophy, I will expound on many of the criticisms and themes that he brought up in his book, which deal with Hegel, covering his retreat and return, decline and resurgence, and the eternal cyclical reinvention of Hegel. You may ask why this preoccupation with Hegel? Answer: It is part and parcel of our understanding of the dialectic, especially to keep pace with the never ending renewal of our conceptualization of the nature of dialectical reason, which may be course contrary some versions of dialectical reason. Take for example Sartre's ideas of what constitutes the dialectic and what constitutes reason. We need to ask ourselves how many different kinds of dialectics and reason actually exist out there. For Sartre two types or two forms of reason exist, that is, analytical and dialectical reason. How could there possibly be two kinds of reason? The truth may be that analytical reason is dialectical reason, in other words they are the same. If they are not the same, then what makes them different, how do we differentiate between the two kinds of reasoning? What does the dialectical mode of thinking entail? If we knew (but we do know, dialectical reason equals discursive or dialogical or deliberative or inferential or analytical reason, and nothing less than that), then we would surely understand Hegel. If all that is real is rational then how can existence be absurd, and therefore unjustifiable? Reason constantly expands its empire, there is no doubting that. Progress is the hallmark of the work of reason. But progress in terms of what? The Oligarchy persists, yet the sun never sets on the triumphal progress of science and technology. What then is missing in the indefatigable march of reason? In spite of the constant metamorphosis of thought and thinking the Oligarchy persists unshakeable. It persists as the embodiment of 'unreason', the opposite of reason, and as such it represents absurdity, irrationality and madness in the midst of progress, it persists as the decoupling of reason from human life. In the face of the Oligarchy's persistence reason becomes a force, the force of violence, a sanguinary force, against the Oligarchy the work of reason cannot progress without bloodshed. Without bloodshed nothing happens. The Oligarchy persists undefeated. It is not more than symbolic that when Hegel was finalizing the manuscript for 'The Phenomenology of Mind' in Jena that approaching cannon fire could heard. It is false belief that philosophers share complicity with tyrants. It is false belief that reason is on the side of tyranny. If the Truth of reason can only be realized in history, then it faces an eternal postponement, so long as the Oligarchy endures. Truth is always the outcome of the desire to know and desire possesses a constant threat to the existence of the Oligarchy. And this why revolutions are always bloody affairs. It would be perfectly Hegelian and also Marxist to argue that the concretization of philosophy is supposed to be the harbinger of revolution. Of course if you are a Marxist then the concretization of philosophy is achieved through the transformation of reality or the world which is what we understand by the Marxist meaning of the word 'praxis' which can be translated as 'action'. Concretization and transformation is brought about through action and action is something which is agentless, Action is the work of agency or actors. It is a performance or something which is performed. If the concretization of philosophy is realized through praxis or action, then by extension we can argue that truth supervenes on action, and if we believe that truth also supervenes on Being then somehow Action and Being are equivalent or the two sides of the same coin. This would constitute the form and content of the political theology of Marxism. In Hegelian terms, to act so as to bring about the concretization of philosophy or thought or truth or the absolute or totality is to ultimately oppose and remove that which impedes the real from becoming the ideal. Here we have an example of the meaning of the dialectic, to act then is attack the 'reality' of the 'real'. The Oligarchy represents the 'reality' of the 'real'. This is the realization of 'concrete philosophy' and also represents what is constitutive of a political theology of liberation. Concrete philosophy in its Hegelian and Marxist sense represents a revolt against the reality of the Oligarchy. It is necessarily to rehabilitate an activist or revolutionary understanding of 'idealism' and the meaning of the 'ideal'. This rehabilitation is consonant which the following ideas: correspondence theory of truth, convergent theory of truth based on the self-correction of science, the reduction of epistemology to the philosophy of science, truth supervening on being, and action supervening on being. All of this consistent or equivalent to the idea that Hegelian proposition that 'idealism' equates 'being' with 'being known'. Whatever falls into the ambit of 'being known' is always what is desirable and therefore desired, which also represents the passage from the possible to the realizable, which is concretized by the possible becoming the real. This idea resonates with the proposal that essence precedes existence, meaning that something exists only by virtue of its known predicates. The predicates or essences by virtue of which something exists as something can also be said to constitute the concept of the existent. This is the same as saying that something can only exists contingently in terms of the realization or concretization of its essences, where essence stands for attributes, traits, properties, predispositions, powers and relationships, or in other words the concept of the thing or existent. It is the realization or concretization of the 'concept' which makes something 'real', which in the Hegelian sense is the same as the realization or concretization of 'being' in the event of 'being known', it also follows that truth supervenes on being and action supervenes on being. All of this also revolves round the ideas of distinction or difference formulated in terms of presence and absence or existence and non-existence or being and non-being or same and other.

The subject or the person in the equation of 'being' always equalling 'being known' is not reducible to any one concrete individual but is always necessarily communal or intersubjective for it to hold. This also represents a rebuttal against the privilege of an all-knowing elite in the form of the vanguard, the politburo, the Oligarchy, or the institution of democratic centralism. The 'cogito' cannot exist alone, isolated from everyone else in perfect solitude. The knowing subject in the role of the isolated solitary individual or subject or cogito can never be the final arbiter of 'being' in the equation of 'being' always equalling something 'being known'. Who then is the knowing subject if it is not the solitary cogito or tyrant or dictator or leader or ruler or president or prime minister or priest or pastor or pope or politburo or central committee or executive or learned society or elected representatives or vanguard or the Oligarchic elite? The idealism, of the solipsistic 'being' = 'being known', of the solitary ego, as embodied in the various embodiments of the Oligarchy, is destabilized and rendered non-binding or invalidated or refuted or falsified or overthrown or de-centred by the existence of other consciousnesses. The problem of the other in the form of the existence of other consciousnesses is always conflictual within the realm or rule or reign of the Oligarchy. The source or origin of conflict arising from the other, or the reality of the other, is the reduction of the 'esse' or essential nature of the other to the 'percipi' or a representation or a perception or a construction or an ideal. The Oligarchy is intrinsically Cartesian in this respect. The 'I think, therefore I am' (ego cogito, ego sum) as the origin or source and rule of all truth, the truth which inaugurates all truth, which is the absolute truth making all other claims to truth inferior or false, because all other claims to truth are inferior or false because they happen to relative to something else, something which is of an inferior nature. The rule of absolute truth as embodied in super-ego of Oligarchy becomes translated or transmuted into the political rule over all other consciousnesses, a rule which brooks no rivals regarding alternative truth claims. Another consciousness can only exist as a rival to the 'cogito ergo sum'. The problem it that the consciousness of the Other exists as a terra incognita. This serves the Oligarchy. No one really knows what it is like to be someone else. This also serves the interests of the Oligarchy, because the Oligarchy has no interest in what it feels like to be me or what it feels like for you to be you as an individual. Only in an act of solidarity can different consciousnesses come together and act in unison in which we reach out to each other in an empathy based on our share condition. How does one go from the 'cogito' (the I and myself) of the Oligarchy to the 'cogitamus' (the we) of the Republic of Minds or the Republic of Multiple-Consciousnesses. This is the task of the concretization philosophy or the realization of philosophy which finds its Biblical parabolic instantiation or becoming in the injunction 'what you do to the least of this brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me' (Gospel of Matthew 25: 40. 'And the king shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me'). The rule of Oligarchy is always rule based on the subjugation of rival consciousnesses or subjects which threaten to transmute into rival subjects. The rival consciousnesses is always embodied in the Other over which the Oligarchy rules. The rival consciousnesses always exists idealistically in the notion or concept of complaint subject.

The secret life of desire as something positive rather than negative is what threatens the rule of the Oligarchy. Desire as something positive is at the heart of Platonism and Christianity. What we understand by the nature of the positivity of desire, in way contrary to Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Lacan and Gilles Deleuze can be briefly summed up as follows from Plato's 'Symposium' – Desire emerges a complex state of affairs in the life of Eros who was conceived as the child of Penia (representing poverty and lack) and sired by Poros (representing plenty and happiness) is one characterized by the absence or non-possession of the objects of desire, which is associated with a state of affairs which present elsewhere, external to the life of Eros. Desire emerges as a positivity rather than a negativity within the context of the interplay between absence and presence of states of affairs which are desirable. Desire is always the wellspring of action, and action together with truth supervenes on Being.

This is all story-telling at its best. And Hegel is the supreme story teller. And who is more talented in spinning a Hegelian tale than Alexandre Kojѐve in his 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit'. Kojѐve proposed that the end of human history coincides with the end of Action. This means the end of wars and bloody revolutions, plus the disappearance of philosophy. Man no longer has any need to change anything including himself and the rest of the world. Why? Because he would have attained everything which would have make him happy. What makes this possible? The end of history through the realization of Absolute knowledge makes this possible. In the realization of Absolute knowledge the identity of subject and object have been achieved or in other words: the identity of thought and being would have been attained. This thesis represents the hallmark of philosophical idealism, which suddenly gets a realistic meaning or materialist meaning. In realizing through Absolute knowledge the concrete or otherwise realistic attainment of identity between subject and object, there is nothing which can now exist external and alien and estrange and differentiated and unattainable from 'Man'. Because of this there is nothing which 'he' cannot master including himself, society and nature. This means that the end of history represents the end of adversity in all of its forms. Human history alone provide passage for the realization of truth. No other path leads to the truth. In other words there is no truth except in human history. Apart from human history there is no other source of eternal truth. In the course of history all deviations from the truth are eventually resolved through Action. Action and not Being determines what is true and what is false. For Kojѐve a non-transcendental atheistic criterion determining what is the truth exists immanently within history itself. Whatever succeeds in terms of Action is true. In a Hegelian philosophy of action in the course of history everything is eventually resolved dialectically through progressive changes until there is nothing left to change, meaning that all impediments preventing Man from realizing his happiness will have been resolved or removed through a continuous series of successful actions. History ends when there is nothing more left to do, nothing left which requires changing. With nothing left to do or change we have the commencement of what can only be called Post-History which could be characterized as the age of frivolity in which all actions are ultimately meaningless within the fantasy filled realm of endless play, pleasure and enjoyment. If Man is defined by action, the end of history heralds the death of Man. In this sense Kojѐve's idea of the death of Man was prescient as it prefigured the death of God theology of the 1960s.

Man makes history through the Actions or Praxes of Labour and Class Struggle. Like the violence of class struggle, labour itself is a violent struggle, a violent struggle against Nature. All actions are acts against one or other form of adversity. Man also makes history through creative agency, meaning that Man is capable of creative actions, that is, through his possession of powers to create. All actions involve causation, causes have effects, effects which represent changes in the state of affairs, changes in the state of nature or changes the in world or changes in the course of history. While Kojѐve introduces the metaphysical idea of negativity or nihilation into the very causal processes of action, where action produces a nothingness or ends in nothingness, only to form something out of the nothingness, something which did exist, something was created ex nihilo in some sense. However, labour does not involve this kind of negation. Labour is a purposeful, goal directed, transformative process resulting in the creation of utilities. It is never an annihilation or negating action ending in some magical intermediary called nothingness. Yet in Kojѐve's interpretation of Hegel the metaphysical ideas of negation, negativity, nihilation and nothingness are foundational for the understanding of the nature of human action in the human created world. It is the negative or nihilating dimension of human action which results in the humanization of history. It is these nihilating actions which distinguish human phenomenon from what happens in the realm of nature, it is this which makes humanity non-continuous with nature. The oppositional cause-effect actions which we associated with negation, negativity, annihilation and nothingness do not exist outside of the realm of human action. The ideas of negation, negativity, annihilation and nothingness are dialectical. The dialectic is only associated with the realm of human action and not the realm of natural causation. Nature has no history. Nothing happens in nature, everything stays the same from beginning to end, and in nature there is no end or goad or destiny or objective to which nature is moving in terms of its own peculiar systems of self-causation. All things in nature are self-identical whereas humans are never self-identical. Here we have all the elements of dualist ontology. As opposed to the causal agency and kinds of action we associate with the world of nature, human agency or human actions are characterized by the magical insertion of 'nothingness' between the initial and subsequent states of affairs brought about through human actions. This insertion of nothingness, in which nothing will be the same again, magically represents the human ex nihilo creation of something from nothing. In summary, this dualist ontology sees, (1) nature in contrast to history, in terms of natural beings, where 'to be' means staying the same, in a self-identical fashion, and (2) sees history or historicity or historical being in contrast to nature, in the terms, where 'to be' is conceived in a non-self-identical fashion, as in the case of not being what one is, that is, 'to be' in terms of a negation or negativity or through the process involving the insertion of nothingness. Nothing remains the same, no identity is preserved, with humanity is in constant of flight from its self. This the kind non-identical being we associate with the human mode of being. A dualistic ontology denies human continuity with animal kingdom or nature by positing humanity as different in kind and not degree with the animal kingdom and the biological realm. In this dualist ontology two ways or two kinds or two modes of what it means to be are presented, nature versus history, nature versus humanity. Nothingness, nihilation, negation and negativity as an intrusion or insertion into being or into what it means to be represents the insertion of something which is ineffable and completely undefinable. And therefore we can dispose with the idea of negation and negativity in the heart of what it mean to be as something which is intrinsically meaningless and cognitively empty. In doing this the dualistic ontology falls away. Human only differ in degree from animals and not in kind, and human history does not exist external to nature or the cosmos, but exists as a state of affairs within nature. Instead of history versus nature we have evolutionary psychology and biosociology. Evolution changes everything. We are animals, we exist within nature, and our history is the nature-like persistence of the same in the form of the post-Neolithic Oligarchical form sociality. With regard to ontology we need to distinguish between the contingent and the necessary. All finite things including humans are contingent. As humans we might not have existed. In other words there is nothing in our essence which makes our human existence necessary or our mode of being necessary. I find the argument that essence precedes existence ontologically and epistemologically more compelling than the other way round. Ontologically and epistemologically a photon could not exist without have the following properties: a zero mass, perpendicular oscillating electric and magnetic fields and a velocity of 300 000 000 km/s. In order to exist as we know them, photons would necessarily have to have these properties. We could argue that the existence of these essential properties or essences does not entail the actual existence of photons. The properties exist for a photon before that photon is decoupled from matter. We could predict all of its properties before the photon comes into existence, and also in order to exist it would necessarily have to have these properties or else it would not be possible for it to come into existence. Ontologically and epistemologically as beings that are part of nature the same applies to humans, our essence which is the set of our biological attributes, precedes our existence as individuals. Our uniqueness relative to the rest of the animal kingdom is one of degree, we are not different kinds of beings as implied by any Nature versus Human ontological dualism. All of this boils down to the fact that in order for anything to exist it is necessary that specific preconditions which include the possession of essences or essential properties are met. Human existence or the evolution of humans does not depend on the insertion of nothingness into the human mode of being. Why then bother with interpretations of Hegel or with Sartre and so on?

Diversion: the word 'being' is usually understood as something which 'is', the meaning of which corresponds the Latin noun 'ens' which is the present participle of 'esse' where esse means 'to be', and ens means the following: an existing thing, a real thing, an entity. The noun ens also means being or existence of a real thing and not an attribute of a real thing.

Diversion: the copula 'is' functions grammatically as a special kind of verb (a copular verb) that joins an adjective or noun complement to a subject. In general the copula is a verb which joins the subject of a sentence or clause to a subject complement. For example, the copular verb 'is', is used to connect an entity or thing or subject (X) with a predicate (P) in sentence or clause. In the sentence X 'is' P, the copula 'is' in this instance functions grammatically and logically to communicate or define something such as the identity of X in terms of P. The copular verb assigns (a quality or action) to subject or asserts something (a quality or action) with regard to a subject. Apart from 'is' other examples of copular verbs include: be, am, are, was, were, appear, seem, look, sound, smell, taste, feel, become, turn, get and so on. Sentences containing a copular verb are of the form: X copular verb P. Examples include: the dog is black, the dog smells bad, the dog became sick, the dog grew old and so on.

The copular verb 'is' as used in the sentence 'the dog is black' establishes the identity of the dog in terms of it 'being' black. The word 'identity' seems to be very important and is linked the use of the copular verb 'is' in the above instance. The copular verb 'is' as used in the sentence 'the dog is black' includes or embodies by extension the idea or concept of the dog's existence or being, where 'being' is understood as 'that which is'. The word 'being' is an abstract noun that embodies or embraces or incorporates the sense and meaning of the following words: existence, actuality, entity, reality, and presence. So the word 'being' and 'is' carries a huge amount of freight meaning and reference, such as: existence, actuality, entity, reality and presence, all of which are connected to the 'identity' of the subject, which is the dog 'being' black in this instance. In the sentence 'the dog is black' the sense conveyed the dog being black is one of identity, that is, the dog's way or mode of being, proper to its nature or essence or attributes is in the sense of identity. The dog exists as a black dog. The dog's being necessarily entails its identity as being a black dog. This particular dog, let's call him Fido, cannot exist in any other way than as a black dog or as being a black dog. Fido is a black dog. Could this line of reasoning be consistent or equivalent to saying that Fido exists by virtue of being a mammal with black fur? Fido's mode of being or what it means for Fido 'to be' cannot be decoupled or disconnected from his blackness which from his identity as being a black dog. The meaning of being incorporates identity, is dependent on identity. That dog which we know and recognize as being Fido, would not be Fido if his fur were not black. If that dog is actually Fido, then he can only exist as being black. Fido as we know and recognize him as Fido the dog has to be black in order 'to be' Fido. If this dog who we call Fido were not black he would not exist. His identity as a black dog is intrinsically or innately or inherently or essentially an important and significant aspect of his being. It is not a great logical leap to state that being a black dog defines the essence of Fido. He is Fido by virtue of being black. He exists by virtue of his essence which includes being black. It is not a great logical leap to interpret this as a case of essence preceding existence. He cannot exist independently of or without his attributes. In this sense Fido's existence is contingent on him having a suite of attributes including blackness. We would not be able to find Fido as a lost dog at the SPCA without being able to identify him in terms of his attributes. At the SPCA if we were shown a series of lost dogs, we could confidently state that none of them were Fido. If finally we are shown a lost dog which we recognise as Fido, we are able to recognize or identify that dog as being Fido because he is identical to Fido in every way, including being black. In the case of Fido, to be Fido implies that Fido is identical or the same or self-identical always and everywhere, to be the same means that Fido does not cease to be Fido. In what way do humans differ from Fido or dogs in terms of being and identity? Like dogs, humans can be objectively characterized or identified as belonging to a specific species and genus in terms of identifying statements of the form X is P, where P would be the set or suit of attributes, properties, characters, disposition, capacities, powers and relationships. A single individual dog or human could be identified in terms that individual's unique genomic DNA sequence. In this sense, every individual animal or plant remains objectively self-identical or the same at all times and everywhere. To be is to be self-identical or the same in a very fundamental physical or materialist sense. It could be argued that 'to be' is 'to become'. In the biological realm, any individual, plant or dog or human, exists in state characterized by continuous becoming, constantly undergoing all kinds changes while still being the same in terms of identity in a very significant manner. The individual remains the same or identical in terms of a set of biometrics or 'identifying fingerprints' which include DNA. In the proposition X is P, P could include the disposition of aging, and aging involves all kinds of changes including changes in physical appearances. To be could be to be in a constant state of becoming while remaining the same or self-identical. In terms of this perspective 'difference' and 'identity' are not mutually excluding.

In connection with the occurrence of the dialectical idea of negation and negativity in the actual process of thinking and also in the operation of consciousness Vincent Descombes in his book 'Modern French Philosophy' proposes that in thinking, as in the cogito or I think, what is not recognized or other or alien or strange or not the same or not identical intrudes or inserts itself into the very act of thinking or being conscious. In the search for our lost dog Fido at the SPCA kennels we are confronted with many dogs who are NOT Fido. Nihilation or negation or negativity inserts 'itself' as 'something' into our thinking or thoughts or mental state or consciousness in each instance when we observe that the dog presented to us is not Fido. The external world confronts us in the form of a negation. The negation arises when we are presented with the 'existence' of a negative state of affairs which reflect an 'absence' or a state of 'non-being'. The key or central point concerning the real meaning of the dialectical or the significance of dialectic, desiring to be emphasized, or being emphasized, in this situation is to attribute to non-being or negation or absence or nothingness the paradoxical capacity or power or agency to 'present' itself as 'something' to the mind or consciousness, possibly as an insertion or intrusion. Usually as opposed to being we ascribe nothing or negation or negativity with nothing being the case. Nothing does not correspond to anything, nothing corresponds to absence, non-being and so. Whereas 'to be' means for something 'to be the case'. The dog we are presented with is not Fido. We don't see Fido before us. What do we see? Do we see the absence of Fido or the non-being of Fido or the negation of Fido or the nihilation of Fido. Does this mean that the mind or conscious has the capacity or power to 'posit' what is NOT. Posit is an interesting verb, its synonyms include: postulate, put forward, advance, propound, submit, predicate, hypothesize, take as a hypothesis, set forth, propose, pose, assert; presuppose, assume, presume and so on. Descombes uses the word de-pose to mean the following: when in the face of what is the case or what actually is, we posit what is not. This would count as a negation. Our freedom springs from our power or capacity to depose what is the case. This is an action which constitutes a negation or nihilation, and is rooted in freedom. We are free to depose and posit. To depose what is the case could be an action which is motivated by desire. In this sense, the operation of desire, in positing what is opposite, is a dialectical process, involving dialectical reasoning or dialectical discourse. Action or praxis is rooted in desire and freedom and entails the power to depose and posit. To depose the actual and posit what is desired fails if there is no actualization or concretization or materialization of the object or objective of desire and freedom. In this sense action or praxis, plus the corresponding realization of freedom, involves negation, negativity and nihilation. Kojève argues that if freedom is ontologically speaking a negativity because freedom can only be or exist or be realized as negation, which means that freedom is realized through dialectical actions resulting in the deposing of the given and the materialization of the new which has been posited. Freedom represents an act of creation. Kojève proposes that if the act of negating the given does not end in nothingness but in the production of something which does not yet exist, then negation represents an act of creation of something out of nothing. However not all action entails a negation. Maybe it is only revolutionary action which can be construed as a negation, for instance the nihilation of the Oligarchy is a deposing or destruction of the given and the materialization of a new creation in its place, something which can only exists as the negation of the Oligarchy, as a new creation from nothing, as a creatio ex nihilo. The Oligarchy cannot be reformed or transformed or adapted. In the Gospel of John 19: 28-30, Jesus before dying said: 'It is finished.' In the original Greek version of the Gospel the word uttered from the cross was 'telelestai'. The word is derived from the Greek verb 'teleo' which means to bring to an end, to accomplish, to complete. We can deconstruct the verb and the meaning of telelestai further. It points to destruction, to a negation, to an insertion of nothingness, and out of the nothingness of death there new emerges a new creation, creatio ex nihilo, the new creation emerges as an accomplishment, materialized in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, an event which destabilizes everything, putting everything into question, placing everything under the sign of nihilation, which represents the judgement of the given order, the deposing of the given and the inauguration of the new following its destruction or nihilation. Telelestai also means: I have done what I set out to do, this has happened and it is still in effect today. The 'effect' continues to exist as something like a rolling aftershock which continues to destroy, destabilize, negate, nihilate, and also to call into question, to generate crisis and so on and so forth. The verb teleo can be further deconstructed in the aftermath of Golgotha and the East bodily resurrection of Jesus. Teleo embraces by extension and difference the multi-fold idea of the End, such as towards an end, also such as in teleology or as in Telos, and specifically as in the ending of the moral justification of an order such as the Oligarchy, which represents the Telos, the materialization of the Mythos. To reemphasis and reiterate, the words 'it is finished' can be expanded to its full sense, meaning and significance, to embrace the full multifarious meaning of the End as including the end of the Telos, the end of Mythos, the end of a reigning order, the end of a dispensation, the end of the moral justification of the given state of affairs.

Alexandre Kojève's hole in the ring of gold: 'In his book 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel', New York, 1969 on page 485, we read:...'Let us consider a gold ring. There is a hole and this hole is just as essential to the ring as the gold is; without the gold, the hole (which, moreover, would not exist) would not be a ring, but without the hole, the gold (which would none the less exist) would not be a ring either. But if one has found atoms in the gold, it is not at all necessary to look for them in the hole. And nothing indicates that the gold and the hole are in one and the same manner (of course, what is involved is the hole as 'hole' and not the air which is 'in the hole'). The hole is a nothingness that subsists (as the presence of an absence) thanks to the gold which surrounds it. Likewise, Man who is Action could be a nothingness that 'nihilates' in being, thanks to the being which it 'negates'...

600. Not to forget Amalek's atrocities and ambush on our journey from Egypt in the desert—Deuteronomy 25:19

601

The Big Bang which gave rise to the Universe can be viewed theologically as an event made possible through a sacrificial or self-emptying action of God. God's own offering is not only the physical-material existence of the Universe but includes everything which makes the Universe's existence possible such as the laws, uniformities and regularities of nature. The laws of nature, uniformities and regularities of nature which cannot come into existence by themselves through a process of self-causation. A theological and metaphysical case can be made that God 'is' the laws, uniformities and regularities of nature, in the same way that God is 2 + 2 = 4. God's essence includes not only the laws of nature but also all the abstract truths of mathematics and logic. It is necessary to formulate the meaning of the 'omni-extensiveness' and 'omnipresence' of God's Being because for God to be God nothing can exist externally or independently in relationship to God's Being. For example, to be all knowing, as in being an omniscient Being, God is necessarily the Truth. Truth is not something which can exist independently of God. In a similar fashion the omnipotence of God sustains the Universe in its existence. God is also omnipresent within the Universe which correlates to Gods 'omni-extensiveness'. It can be argued that for God to be God the whole of Reality is necessarily overdetermined by his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence which means that God not only ordains all things but foresees and foreordains their existence and their coming into existence. God's Being overshadows all Becoming. In this sense everything that happens, happens because it is predestined to happen in a deterministic fashion. But because God is infinite he creates the Universe as an open Universe, which is another way of saying that even though the Universe is causally closed it still exists as a Universe with Infinite Possibilities because the Future as an expanding horizon does not exist even for God. Which means that God in a self-sacrificing act or in act of kenosis or self-emptying 'offers' the 'loan' of 'freedom' to the Cosmos. Offering the loan of freedom or making good the loan of freedom to the Universe is for God an act of self-denial, self-deprivation, self-sacrifice, self-emptying or kenosis, which in a sense makes God vulnerable. Yet the offering can only be made by God on the condition that God sustains the Universe in a state of freedom and openness on the shores of an expanding horizon of possibilities. So God's act of kenosis is realized through the creation of a Universe which possesses an inbuilt capacity to explore an infinite horizon of possibilities. God's act of kenosis is also realized by allowing the future to remain unknown and indeterminate. By virtue of this the future is always open to infinite possibilities. The existence of freedom depends on the future being open to all possibilities, and the existence of a future open to infinite possibilities is equivalent to rendering the future unknownable and indeterminate even though the laws of nature, the uniformities of nature and the regularities of nature remain constant or unchanging or invariant. This implies that the Universe while being open to infinite possibilities still remains causally closed. So causal closure of the Universe as a physicalist or materialist principle does not place a constraint on things or the future or prevent the future from being open to infinite possibilities, including the possibility that humans may bring evil into existence through an act of creatio ex nihilo. The bringing into being of each moment as a new creation filled with the prospects of infinite possibilities arises as a consequence of God's offering or sacrifice or self-emptying. The ultimate act of God's self-emptying is to become incarnate. The Word becomes Flesh. God can only reveal himself through a self-sacrificial act or by self-emptying, and this also captures the essential nature of the Incarnation. If God is necessarily omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent then in a real sense God in not only transcendent but God is also immanent. What does it mean for God to be immanent? For a something to be immanent means for it be existing or operating within. In addition the range in what it means to be immanent in the sense of something being within something includes to be inherent, to be innate, to be built-in, to be intrinsic or to be essential for something else to be what it is. The phrase 'to be essential for something else to be what it is. Something is what it is by virtue of its powers, dispositions, properties and relationships. These powers, dispositions, properties, and relationships which makes a thing what it is are not self-created or self-caused or brought into existence by the thing itself. The properties, powers, dispositions, and relationships which characterized a particular thing collectively constitute the essential nature of that thing. It by virtue of possessing these properties, powers, dispositions and relations that the thing is able to or has the capacity to exist as that particular thing. The properties, powers, dispositions and relations possessed by a given thing or entity can legitimately be defined as 'essences'. The essences which characterize a particular thing as that thing are not self-caused or brought into existence by the thing itself to which they belong as its defining essences. As essential traits or attributes of the thing their source of origination lies not immanently within the thing but elsewhere and it imposed on the thing as the very condition for the existence of that thing because the thing cannot exist as that particular without having those attribute which are peculiar to that thing. The immanence of God in everything which exists is mediated through the imposition of these attributes or essences. God as the source and originator of these essences means that these essences are included in the essence of God. All finite existence is contingent on God. The contingency of finite existence is mediated through God's imposition of essences and in this manner God's own essence is immanent in all finite things which exist including their powers, energy, dispositions, properties and relationships with other things. This is what is meant by God's essence. In God existence and essence converge. In God they are the two sides of the same coin. In the Universe of finite things the relationship between essence and existence is contingent, contingent on God, and there contingent existence is caused by God's kenosis or God's self-emptying. God's embodiment in the Universe through the mediation of FINITE contingent existence is a consequence of God's kenosis, however while God is immanent in finite contingent existence, God's being is not reducible to or fully embodied in a finite contingent universe. God is INFINITE and therefore transcends all things finite and contingent. The idea of God being immanent in finite contingent existence tethers God's incarnation with God's kenosis. The idea of God being-in-the-Universe is directly conditional on God's kenosis and God's incarnation is already encapsulated in the idea of God being-in-the-Universe.

Neoplatonism, contingency, essence, existence, being and Beings, becoming and the Absolute: I lay my cards on the table, I owe a lot to Leszek Kolakowski. Taking our que from Kolakowski insights into the philosophical/metaphysical kinships or ancestry or lineage or lineament's or foundations which underlie the edifice of Marx's thought, we cannot ignore the radical idea that the entire metaphysical edifice of Marxism rests on solving the problem of the contingency of humanity, or to be more precise, the problem revolves round restoring or resolving the meaning and significance of the radical contingency of humanity with regard to the idea of the species being of humankind. The resolution of the problem revolves round reconciling essence and existence. The solution involves or incorporates or is even based on the idea that whatever is contingently real within a causally closed Universe is contingent on something else which is non-contingently real, something which encapsulates or covers everything that is possible within a finite causally closed Universe. Or in other words, something by virtue of which the possibility of everything else is dependent. Which is equivalent to saying that nothing gives rise to nothing, only something gives rise to something. Nothing can arise out of nothing. If there is nothing to start off with or to begin with, then there is nothing, and there cannot be something as well or even the possibility of something. It is not a tautology that something gives rise to something, and nothing gives rise to nothing. Which means that this statement is not redundant or superfluous or even a kind of repetition and therefore an infinite regress. There is no rational reason why something which gives rise something else should not terminate. There is also no rational reason why the statement 'only something gives rise something else' is not asymmetrical but rather symmetrical. By being asymmetrical we mean non-terminating in one direction only, but terminating in the other or opposite direction. Maybe we can write it like this: SOMETHING → infinity of things. In other words: SOMETHING gives rise to an infinity of things or possibilities. Or SOMETHING is the condition of possibility for everything else which become contingently real, including this Journal. If SOMETHING is the condition of possibility for the infinity of things then that SOMETHING is the Absolute and Absolute is self-identical because in its being, existence and essence merge or coincide, and are inseparable. Which also means that the essence of the Absolute does not lie outside of itself, in other words, the Absolute is self-identical. With regard to contingent things, the relationship between existence and essence are contingent, this means that the essence of the existent lies outside of itself. For anything existing contingently, especially if that thing happens to be an intelligent, self-aware or self-conscious thing like a human, in order to make any sense of its existence it will of necessity have to grapple or wrestle with the significance or meaning of its own contingency. The significance of its own contingency includes its essence, or in other words its nature, which in turn means the kind of being that it happens to be. In Marx's words, it's species being. To understand what kind of being it is, it will need to wrestle with the origination of its essence or its nature. Included in the idea of its nature would be everything: evolution, genome, anatomy, physiology, metabolism, biochemistry, reproduction, mind, intelligence, consciousness, emotions, behaviour, nutrition, pathologies, psychology, sociality and knowledge of reality or the nature of reality, and so on and so forth. To repeat, the essence of what it means to be human is something which arose contingently, which means it lies outside the human capacity for self-creation or self-constitution. Humans are products of contingencies which are imposed by external conditions, events and forces. In this sense humans are not self-identical, meaning that what is constitutive of being human is not something which has been self-imposed or self-created or self-constituted, rather, humans as non-self-identical beings, have become constituted (or evolved) as beings through the agencies of external conditions, factors, events and forces, all which are contingencies. For an individual person to understand its own essence or nature in an ultimate sense involves acquiring knowledge or comprehension of the origination of everything that is real and the nature of that reality. For any human to resolve her own contingency requires the acquisition of complete knowledge or ultimate knowledge of the nature reality, which boils down to acquiring absolute knowledge. To resolve her contingency as a finite being requires the actualization of absolute knowledge in her own mind, but only the Absolute (God in other words) can be self-identical, so the actualization of absolute knowledge in her own mind is to become self-identical with the Absolute. This could count as a materialist restoration of the Absolute, an endeavour which both Hegel and Marx sought to achieve. This restoration of the Absolute could count as salvation. Through communion with the Totality, the Ultimate or the self-identical Absolute, she the infinite human, is able to resolve her own contingency, which encapsulates her salvation, her redemption, her judgement, and her reckoning, and so on and so forth. The verb 'to resolve' means: to settle, to solve, to find an answer, to fix, to work out, to straighten out, to deal with, to put right, to rectify, to reconcile and so on. This gives us an idea of the soteriological linkage to the idea of resolving her own contingency. Soteriology deals with the agency by means of which salvation or redemption is accomplished. In Christianity that agency encapsulates the kenosis of God in the person of Jesus. John 14:6-7 (NKJV): Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.' In the Triune view of God, Jesus is self-identical with the Father, the Father is God, God is self-identical with the Totality, the Ultimate and the Absolute.

If X is identical with X then X is self-identical. Is this an empty statement? Frege concluded that to assert X exists is to assert its being self-identical. He defined existence as being self-identity or self-identity. Going back to a previous question/issue in this Journal: Can 'being' or 'existence' be a property of something? With regard to something that exist, is the property of being or existing empty or not? The property of being or existing cannot be treated as meaningless or empty, if we can argue that the property of existence or being is something which is exemplified by X, especially if X is actual or present. Frege denies that being or existence can be is a property of something. A property is something which can be exemplified. The word exemplified is a verb. To exemplify is to epitomize, to embody, to demonstrate or show. Is 'being' or 'existence' something which shows itself or something which is embodied? Is 'being' something? Is 'existence' something. What does it mean for something 'to be' something? Are these questions mere empty or insubstantial or trivial word play? I don't think so.

Again, what does it mean to be the same? Possible answer: To be the same is to be self-identical. To be self-identical is to the one and same thing, which means to be the same as itself. To be self-identical is 'to be' equal to itself. If something exists then of course they must be self-identical, can anything exist and not be self-identical? Can we argue that something's existence is not equivalent or equal to their self-identity? Can we argue that something's existence is the same as or equivalent or equal to their 'being there', and not their being nothing, or in other words, something 'being there' is their reality or the basis for their reality? To be nothing means not to be there or having no existence or actuality or reality or presence. Is it a fallacy to jump to the conclusion that if something is self-identical, it cannot be such unless it first exists? Something can be self-identical without existing. But if something does exist, then it can only exist by being self-identical. If it is not self-identical, it cannot exist. Does this get us anywhere?

I don't see why we cannot state that if something has essences, then they cannot fail to have self-identity. So something having essences such as properties, dispositions, powers and relationships and so on and so forth, then they have self-identity or sameness in terms of possessing these essences or essential properties. The notion of essences or having essential properties is surely what makes something the kind of thing that it is. An individual electron is self-identical and all electrons are identical in terms of have the same essential properties such as having the same electrical charge and masses.

If X 'exists', then X 'exists' by virtue of 'being' Y = [K, L, M, N, O, P...], where Y is the set of the properties K, L, M, N. O. P..., which X has to necessarily possess in order for X 'to be' X. Is there anything logically problematic about this state? Let's go back to Fido. If Fido 'exists' then Fido can only 'exist' by 'being' a mammal, by 'being' a member of a specific species belonging to the genus Canis and 'being' black and so on and so forth.

In the dualist ontology of Kojѐve which emerges out of Kojѐve's exegesis or hermeneutics of Hegel's 'Phenomenology and which is assumed to be implicit in Hegel and by extension also implicit in Marx (and the various Marxisms), we are presented with the following ontological and also by extension epistemic contrasts: Humanity (or Man) is contrasted with Nature. History as the domain or realm of human action is contrasted with Nature. It follows that Nature has no history. Which would suggest that nothing happens in Nature. Nature is self-identical. A stone, an electron, a photon, a tree or a dog is what it is and nothing more or less. Its nature (its essence) prescribes its identity as being the same or self-identical.

In the same dualist ontology, as embodied in Hegelianism and by extension in the various version of Marxism, we are presented with following picture: Nature produces itself independently of any human action, which means Nature produces itself non-dialectically, since its self-production or activities or agencies or even actions do not necessitate an obligatory negation or nihilation or an intrusion of nothingness within the causal change and mechanism of natural processes which typify what happens in the realm of the Natural Universe. We need to qualify this statement with the following caveat: natural processes do in fact involve the transformation of states of affairs which give rise to innovations which did not exist before as is evident in biological evolution. In terms of this ontological dualism it can be argued that nothing happens in Nature because in a natural process the state of things at the end of the process remain the same as they were in the beginning, very much as would be the case for cyclic process. With regard to the entities belonging to the natural realm or the order of Nature or what we can refer as natural being, for such entity 'to be' means that it remains the same in terms of self-identity. We know that this is not true. In the case of humans we have what is referred to as historical being, where 'to be' is defined in terms of negativity, which means not remaining the same, no self-identity is preserved as would be the case for a non-cyclic process. However, this we can rationally conceptualize the so-called historical being of humanity as being cyclical in which the same is reproduced or versions of the same are reproduced in a cyclical process with self-identity remaining fixed. During the pre-Neolithic epoch human remained in a nomadic hunter-gather state of social being, whereas in the post-Neolithic epoch humans have remained in an Oligarchical state of social being. In both epochs, in terms of social being there has been no change. The cyclical reconstitution of the Oligarchy does not represent a negation or nihilation or an intrusion of nothingness, instead it typifies the rule of an iron law guaranteeing the repletion of the same. If humanity produces itself through action, the result of the action is always the same in the form of a reconstitution of a hierarchy of social domination. On a gross historical scale the essential characterizing features of post-Neolithic human sociality and the nature of the post-Neolithic polis, are the same in terms of inequality, non-egalitarianism, social stratification and hierarchical systems of social domination. Where does this leave us? It leaves us with the mythology of Man's so-called historical being. In reality so-called post-Neolithic Man is subject to a trans-historical law in the form of the rule of the Oligarchy. In a real sense Nature has engulfed what we call the Historical Being.

601. Not to dwell permanently in Egypt—Deuteronomy 17:16

602

The immanence of God is all the power, all the space and all the time of the Universe as His Body or as His Embodiment. Which means that God cannot fully reveal His entire Being, Existence and Essence to a finite being. God cannot only reveal himself by means of an incarnation, such as the metaphor, the Word became Flesh. In this sense God's revelation is a sacrificial offering, an act of self-emptying, an act of deprivation and diminishment. This makes the request of Thomas so poignant. Addressing Jesus he request –'Show us the Father and we will be satisfied'. Jesus' answer is along the lines: 'The Father and I are One, if you have seen me you have seen the Father'. You can now appreciate why the early Christian community were forced by logic to invent the theological idea of the Trinity. Judaism and Islam cannot grasp the problem that Christians were addressing. So materially Jesus is the sacrifice of God and the sacrifice of God is the coming of the Messiah. This is what the Messiah is ultimately about. On the cross when Jesus said 'It is finished'. This is what he meant. God and the significance of the Universe had been disclosed once and for all. 602. Offer peace terms to the inhabitants of a city while holding siege, and treat them according to the Torah if they accept the terms—Deuteronomy 20:10

603

Kenosis or the act of self-emptying through which God as an omniscient being freely chooses to recognize the pain and suffering as manifest in the face of the 'Other'. I say freely because God is under no compulsion to place a moral value on suffering and pain. In similar fashion an alien intelligence having an extra-terrestrial vantage point of view when looking down on us from outer space may also view our lives on planet earth as having no intrinsic moral or ethical significance. From God's side evil cannot exit as some independent phenomenon outside God's control. Saint Augustine also argued that Evil is nothing, no 'thing'. In addition a materialist or physicalist holding to an ontologically consistent materialist monism would agree with this. Ontological consistency involves the exclusion of things like the reality of evil. Where does evil come? It is a creatio ex nihilo which only exists for us by virtue of our interactions with fellow human beings. It is an emergent property which cannot be reduced to the motions of molecules or biophysics. The causal chain of evil does not belong to the material realm of physics, chemistry and biology. Hence we do not live in a Manichean Universe. Matter in itself is not evil or a source of evil. Evil can only exist as psychological-social construct. But even as a construct evil is still revealed to us through what we call the 'face' of the 'Other' by virtue of our capacity for empathy and conscience, which gives us the ability to see in others their pain and suffering, which may be man- caused or caused by Nature. Ironically this capacity to see what we construe as evil may be rooted in our biology as something which evolved by natural selection as an adaptation necessary for human modes of sociality. Conscience, guilt and empathy is the cultural-emotional-psycho-social lens or prism though which we are able to perceive evil and violence. Yet we could still build a theology and metaphysics of evil-violence-redemption problematic. Theological and metaphysical premise: In the suffering and pain expressed in the face of the Other we come face to face with what can be called evil. Moral principal: The face of the Other becomes the foundation for human ethics and morality. Morality is founded on empathy and conscience. We could argue that this a Naturalistic Morality. Reason: It rooted in our biology.

Theology: God in an act of self-emptying which reaches it paradigmatic exemplification in the form of a flesh and blood incarnation, becomes the 'face' of the 'Other' in solidarity with the whole of humanity. This is what is meant by the coming of the Messiah if we feel the need to talk about what the coming of the Messiah really means. In becoming for us the face of the Other in an act of solidarity with humanity the reality of God's redemption in the face of our experience of cruelty, violence, suffering, hopeless, depression, and pain becomes manifest. 603. Not to offer peace to Ammon and Moab while besieging them—Deuteronomy 23:7

604

Why am I a Jew? Judaism is a religion of merit and favour. It is based on earning merits or favours through a system of exchange which constitutes a salvific commerce. There is a commercial dimension to Judaism. Judaism is a religion in which the salvific dimension or framework or system of belief is based on exchange, transactions, covenants, loans, bonds, debts and repayments. But also at the heart of the Judaic or Hebraic salvific system is the idea of God's own kenosis by virtue of which the salvific is able to exist at all. In fact God's own kenosis is the centre, the pivot, the fulcrum or the axis round which the salvific system of Judaism articulates. In the act of self-emptying God ceases to be the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, and thereby becomes the personal God of a people who He/She has elected. To be elected is to be chosen. To be chosen is to be made special or placed in privileged relationship. Hidden as something unthought in the salvific theology of Judaism is the dialectic of sin, merit and favour which can be interpreted and expanded also as the dialectic of election, covenant, bond and debt. The dialectic of sin, merit, favour, election, covenant, bond, debt and release from debt articulates ideas and concepts which have salvific meaning and significance with regard to the Hebraic relationship to God. In the dialectic of election, sin, merit, favour, bond, debt and release from debt, it is God who, without any prompting or persuasion or lobbying, elected to make a covenant with Abraham out of His/Her own volition. God does not need to make a covenant with any person or people. There exists no transcendental necessity for the Divine Being, the Creator of the Universe to make any kind of covenant with any party or thing. But God elected to make a covenant. That God elected also means in a pregnant fashion that God necessarily condescended to the making of a covenant with Israel. In this context, condescending, becomes an act of self-emptying or kenosis. God condescended precisely because the Divine Being had no need to make any covenant with any party. God elects to act because God is free to do so. Kenosis is an act of God's freedom. If God was not free to act God would not be God. God freely makes a promise to Abraham and to Israel which made it possible for Israel to serve God. To make possible, means to enable, to empower and thereby to allow Israel to serve God, even though God does not need anyone to serve Him/Her in any kind of way. If God needed anything or was dependent on anybody God would not be God. The paradigm for serving God in Judaism takes the form of sacrifice. In Judaism God is served by offering sacrifices to God on an altar. Sacrificial offering are made on an altar for the One who has no needs and who cannot be given anything. To give anything to the One who has no needs implies that the One who is served a sacrificial offering is someone in need of something, it means that the One who has no needs acts as One who is deprived. In order for God to be served in any manner means that God has to act as one who is deprived and to act as one deprived necessarily involves an act of kenosis or self-emptying in order to receive. In order to receive one has to be in a state of not having, to be in a state of need, to be deprived, to be in a state of deprivation.

God's acting as one who is deprived, God's kenosis and God's self-emptying, is God's gracious condescension. In God's gracious condescension God becomes the debtor, the one who borrows or receives loans from all. God becomes bonded to all. Through God's free act of condescension or self-emptying, God becomes engaged or enters into a relation with humanity based on exchange or based on a form of commerce. In exchange for our prayers and observances God blesses us. Prayers and observances are not works that earn merit or favour from God, they are ways of giving something to God in the form of loans. All offerings made to God whatever their form, whether they are observances, prayers, acts of mercy or acts of kindness, all constitute loans or bonds made out to God. In giving alms to the needy and the poor we are in fact giving a loan to God. In all these various forms of giving and serving we have the reassurance that God will make good on the loan or the bonds. There is a seamless covenantal relationship between God into which is woven observance, belief, confession, faith, sacrificial serving and the granting of loans and bonds. Semantically speaking the one who issues a loan becomes a creditor or is called a creditor, and the word 'creditor' is derived from the word credere which also means 'to believe'. Within the salvific economy there is no difference between issuing a loan and performing an act of faith. Loan and faith are inseparables. Giving and faith are inseparables. Without giving you have no faith. Also without faith you cannot believe anything. Doing so-called good works is synonymous with believing, we believe by doing works of observance, prayer, act of kindness and mercy. Works, faith and belief are inseparable in the economy of exchange which constitutes the salvific commerce of Judaism.

In the context of the salvific commerce of Judaism Deuteronomy 15:10 advises: 'Give to your needy neighbour readily and have no regrets when you do so'. In a summarized version of a Midrash on this verse in Deuteronomy a philosopher asks: 'Surely a man who gives will end up having nothing and will need to be supported himself?' Rabbi Gamliel answered the philosopher with a series of questions which revolved around the conditions on which a loan will be granted to someone in need. The philosopher agreed each time that a loan can be granted if a deposit is made or if someone of means agrees to stand surety. But someone without means cannot stand for surety on a loan. So if a mere ordinary mortal with means can offer surety for a loan how more will God's surety stand for a loan when God's word brought the whole Universe into existence, for does not Proverbs 19:17 state: 'He who is generous to the poor makes a loan to God'. 604. Not to destroy fruit trees even during the siege—Deuteronomy 20:19

605.

Why am I a Christian? The seamless tapestry which joins Judaism with Christianity is fundamentally the same weave which pictures Judaism as a religion based on the salvific system involving exchange, transactions, covenants, loans, bonds, debts and repayments. Embedded in the very heart of Christianity is the self-same Hebraic salvific system. A salvific system necessarily founded on the idea of God's own kenosis. It is by virtue of this fundamental idea that the Judeo-Christian salvific economy is able to exist as a serious truth claim within a physically closed Universe in which man exists in evolutionary continuity with the animal kingdom and the whole cosmos. As in Judaism, so in Christianity, God's own kenosis stands at the centre, the pivot, the fulcrum or the axis round which the salvific system of Christianity articulates. 605. Prepare latrines outside the army camps—Deuteronomy 23:13

606

Why the hell did James Joyce write something like Finnegans Wake without a translation and a commentary? Anyway, the other question which needs to be posed, concerns how it was at all possible that from within a causally closed Universe a book such as Finnegans Wake could have emerged. How do we explain its coming into existence as a contingent cultural artefact if we accept that the cultural order is irreducible to the natural order? We don't have to accept that the cultural order or history or human forms of sociality are not irreducible to the natural order. We could take a naturalist stance on these issues. What is central to the idea of the irreducibility of the cultural order and human history to the natural order is the question of dialectical reason with its concepts of nothingness, negation, negativity and nihilation providing the grounds for freedom and actions. Freedom and the freedom of action always existing as possibility by virtue of the intrusion or insertion nothingness from which irrupts the event of creatio ex nihilo. The event of creatio ex nihilo emerges from nothingness forcibly as an eruption. But there is no nothingness, nothing gives rise to nothing, so nothingness has be equated with pre-existing conditions of possibility which may be latent in the order of Nature. By latent, we mean conditions of possibility, which exist within the order of Nature as: dormant, quiescent, inactive, untapped, unused, undiscovered, hidden, unrevealed, unexpressed, concealed, unapparent, indiscernible, imperceptible, invisible, inert, covert, unseen, veiled, masked, lurking, undeveloped, unrealized, unfulfilled, potential, not activated, inoperative, in abeyance, suppressed, repressed, possible, likely, underlying·inherent, innermost, immanent, inchoate, unacknowledged, subconscious, unconscious or sleeping, and so on and so forth. With respect to this fairly comprehensive list of adjectives the two which are of particular importance are potential and immanence. Immanence is constitutive of potentiality and the order of Nature is also an order of constitutive potentiality, in other words it is an order which embodies the realm of possibility, in fact, infinite possibility, in which freedom exists by virtue of there being infinite possibilities, possibilities which are latent within the order of Nature. Immanence as constitutive potentiality can be associated with the existence of the kinds of states of affairs which have the power to establish something or are able organize something. This power may include logic or the capacity to reason or act or respond rationally in a manner which indisputably depicts the cognitive ability to reason. Infinite possibility exists as something rather than nothing. A potential is something rather than nothing. Being now exists as the ground or condition of infinite possibility. In his Book 'The Descent of Man' Darwin believes that animals possess reason, and evidence for this demonstrated by their capacity to deliberate, acting or behaving in ways which are seemingly independent or undetermined by innate instinct. In animals the non-instinctive performance of rational actions or rational responses is a reflection of the immanence of constitutive potentiality within biological systems for reason and logic. This implies that the rules of rationality and logic do exist externally to or independently of, in a non-immanent fashion, biological systems capable of agency or responsive behaviours. Everyone has to agree that something called Reason or the laws of logic do in fact exist. Where do the rules of reason or the laws of logic come from, especially with regard to the behaviours and processes of biological systems? We could argue that they evolved as adaptations under the pressure of natural selection. The capacity for animals to reason is something which evolved, this much is fairly obvious. The capacity for reasoning could have or would have evolved, because the latent constitute potential for reasoning was already present within or built into the nature of the machinery out of which animals are constituted. From a Darwinian perspective all capabilities in animals and humans including cognitive powers are biological characters, representing adaptations, and as such they have evolved, which means that the latent potential for reasoning and applying the laws of logic existed from the start immanently within the machinery out of which animals and humans are constituted, hence the idea of immanence as constitutive potentiality, especially with respect to emergent properties such the cognitive power to reason about the nature of the world or history or reality. The capacity or power for reasoning and applying the laws of logic, even at the highest level as with humans, is something which emerges or comes into existence in the form of a biological adaptation to the environment through the process of evolution by natural selection, or in other words, evolution by descent with modification. It is in the essential nature of the properties, capacities, powers, dispositions and relationships embodied in the stuff out which biological organisms are composed, which makes it possible for the evolution of all biological adaptations, including the cognitive capacities such as consciousness and reasoning in animals and humans. It is also through this medium of biological structure and function that the materialization of reason and logic in the form of action (praxis), agency and responses is realized or concretized or actualized within a causally closed Universe. The stuff out of which biological organisms are constructed can be conceived hierarchically with regard to degrees of complexity in terms of atoms, molecules, cell organelles, cells, tissues, organs, appendages, bodies, populations, communities, trophic cascades and ecosystems. 606. Prepare a shovel for each soldier to dig with—Deuteronomy 23:14

607

Why does the Talmud intrigue me? Quick answer - Because it can be read as a colossal compendium of metafiction. We will never know how and why the community of authors ended up generating the written works which constitute the Pentateuch or Torah or the Five Books of Moses. We cannot even reconstruct the literary genesis of the Pentateuch. All we know for sure was that the canon of work was consolidated as a written text during the Babylonian exile for a very specific political purpose, which can be bluntly stated as the ideological justification for the existence of a certain nation state during a time when nation states were coming into existence. In fact the Pentateuch/Torah and much later the Talmud are integral to the founding of an ethnic based nation state. Of course we are dealing with role of Mythos in the ideological justification and hegemonic role in the founding of political oligarchies. The Greeks, Assyrians, Persians and Romans all sought ontological warrant in a founding Mythos. The same goes for the Bolshevik narrative of the October revolution as a founding myth deeply rooted in Marxism. Where am I going with this? The Lipstick Lesbian literature is a critical literary exercise using the vehicle of metafiction to engage Moses, Marx, Darwin and Lenin. 607. Appoint a priest to speak with the soldiers during the war—Deuteronomy 20:2

608

Metafiction is a fictional genre which embeds the fictional narrative inter- actively in a body of translation, interpretation and commentary. Fictional writing becomes a self-consciously embedding of the work of fiction in a World, where Truth and World are inseparable. The Lipstick Lesbian writings exemplify this. 608. He who has taken a wife, built a new home, or planted a vineyard is given a year to rejoice with his possessions—Deuteronomy 24:5

609

The lipstick lesbian writings acknowledges the Hebraic and Hellenic debt regarding the entanglement of the search for Truth with the living in a World, Truth and World are the two sides of the same coin - which is also a Heideggerian/Marxist insight. Of course the Lipstick Lesbian engages in a theological - ontological resolution of the Truth and World relationship. 609. Not to demand from the above any involvement, communal or military—Deuteronomy 24:5

610

This is my body! Steve Biko and Che Guevara engaged with the entanglement of Truth and World which left no doubt regarding their commitment to Truth and the world transforming power of Truth. In this sense they were exemplary individuals who forsook all to engage with the World so as to transform it. They had no money or wealth, they owned nothing, all they had was their bodies and the minds which emerged from their bodies. Like Jesus they gave up their bodies, because they had nothing else to give towards the struggle for freedom. 610. Not to panic and retreat during battle—Deuteronomy 20:3

611

'You make me feel like a Natural Woman' - the victory of the Patriarchy emblematically realized in the libidinous gaze of a male which constitutes a woman as a woman is precisely the negation of the feminine as its own self grounding realty - opinion of the lipstick lesbian. 611. Keep the laws of the captive woman—Deuteronomy 21:11

612

The relevance of the lives of Solomon Mahlangu, Steve Biko and Che Guevara in relation to Martin Heidegger's being in the world can be comprehended within a conceptual framework in which the question of 'what is truth' can be resolved with respect to their lives. The question of 'what is truth' can only be resolved by realizing that the idea of truth requires a world for its meaning and significance to be grasped and understood. When Jesus said I am the truth, what he meant needs to be grasped in the context of the relation between Truth and World or World and Logos. The world is always the world of facts - and the world of facts is what constitutes the truth, hence the link between the idea of truth and world. In the Gospel of John we have a Midrash of the entire Biblical Canon, in the simple statement that in the beginning was the Word or Logos, and the Gospel links world and logos or world and truth, and instantiates this in the formula of the Word or Logos or Truth becoming Flesh. Here we link the body and truth and we can play with words 'the body of truth' with this is my body. This is my body is a foundational statement of commitment in Christianity and it is in this context that it also becomes the foundation of the Mass as sacrifice, that is the real meaning of this is my body, Logos and World, Truth and World, linked inextricably to the Paschal Lamb. This is my body is an ontological foundational statement 612. Not to sell her into slavery—Deuteronomy 21:14

613

After Yael had passed away Malcolm invited me to a family braai at his home. He said that he could now disclose information which I needed to know. I immediately guessed correctly that it had to do with my arrest. I had be drawn back into the bosom of my family. I was now the much admired aunt of my nephews and nieces. Everyone in the family knew that I was a lesbian, and that their great Ouma had also been a lesbian who had danced with other women to big band music in Malvern while her husband was fighting the Nazis in the Sahara Desert of North Africa. In 2016 it was no longer an issue to be gay. I had become the wonderful aunt who was held in awe by her nephews and nieces. I was the communist, the person who was in the underground and had fought against apartheid, I had been jail, I was a professor of zoology, and I had caught cobras and mambas with my bare hands and I had scuba-dived amongst sharks. They don't know that I am terminally ill. I am dying of cancer.

I followed Malcolm to his pub, he poured two double scotches and we sat down at the bar, and I listened to what Malcolm had to say. This was the gist of the story: On his flights to Zimbabwe Benjamin Schlossheimer made a point of visiting Scott Everton and it was Scott who told Benjamin that he suspected that I was involved in terrorism. When Scott died Yael, Benjamin and I got together for coffee. At a later date Benjamin meet Yael in Hyde Park and they had coffee, and Yael mentioned the fact that I had a massive Xerox machine in my flat and she found this very puzzling. Benjamin also had commercial intelligence business dealings with Sheldon Swift who had immigrated to Israel. Sheldon also traded in information which may have intelligence value to various governments. He passed on information to Benjamin that a Coloured woman from South Africa was having a lesbian fling with the daughter of the Governor of the Province of Inhambane in Mozambique. Malcolm became the eventual recipient of all this intelligence information which the South African government had paid over a million rand for. Through the South African security police spy network in the ANC movement and FRELIMO government in Mozambique Malcolm were able to identify the Coloured woman, who turned out to be none other than me his sister. What was I doing in Mozambique was the question Malcolm asked, and the only answer was: on Communist Party and terrorist business. I was identified as the link to the underground and was put under twenty four hour surveillance. It was his job to join all the dots which led directly to me and through me to the underground movement. If Yael had not seen the Xerox machine then they would never have been able to arrest us. Benjamin had shopped me for money. It was Yael who had inadvertently pulled the plug on my comrades and me without ever knowing it.

Malcolm smiled his ironic smile and I shrugged my shoulders. It did not matter anymore. It was water under the bridge. Yes I would have another scotch.

Malcolm smiled his ironic smile and I shrugged my shoulders. It did not matter anymore. It was water under the bridge. The children were splashing in the pool, laughing, shouting, having great fun. I yearned for nothing, I desired nothing, I was at peace with myself. I felt no need to hang onto life. I did not feel sad. Yes I would have another scotch. But before we got up to join the rest of the family outside by the braai I needed to tell Malcolm something. It was a beautiful day. Malcolm had made his disclosure, now it was my turn.

'I also have something to tell you which is going to change your life'. I said.

I paused for a moment. Malcolm was a man with a sixth sense. He knew immediately that I was going to show a full flush of cards, I savoured the moment.

'I have officially been Coloured since 1990. To be honest with you, in my heart during the struggle in 1980s I began to self-identify as Coloured, it was this that kept me going, it was this which motivated me to take the huge risks. I wanted to be Coloured, I wanted to be the progeny of miscegenation. I fell in love with the word 'miscegenation'. Anyway to cut a long story short. After my detention I reapplied for an ID book and in the application forms I recorded by identity as Coloured. And then in 2000 I had my DNA analysed. You, Elsabe and I are genetically Coloured we are a mixture of Dutch, Cape Malay, Khoi San and Xhosa. We are not white genetically speaking nor are mom and dad or Oupa and Ouma. We are all Coloured'.

'Fucken Hell! So we are not white? Let's have another dop, double or triple scotch, what do you say. I don't know whether we should celebrate this or what? Anyway I am going to get drunk, this is wonderful news!' Malcolm said as he sloshed scotch into our glasses, and then chucked in a load of ice cubes. Our glasses clinked as we toasted the new family status.

'Fokkit ons is now fokken kleurlinge, kan jy dit fokken glo! Man here comes affirmation action big time for my security business, no shit!' Malcolm exclaimed as the whiskey made his face glow. His eyes twinkled I watched him process all the advantages of not being white in the new South Africa. He saw this as an unexpected wind fall. Who the fuck wants to be white anyway when being black means a cash bonanza. I could see he understood that with the scientific evidence no one could take away his blackness. He was now a black man, fuck he had hit the jackpot, this was a typical example of Zeeman luck if there was ever such a thing. God we have the blood of the most ancient people in Africa flowing through our veins, fucken hell, and this blood is gold if anything, it is worth something, fuck it. I have black blood flowing in my veins! Every lost drop is worth its weight in gold, thank God for apartheid, let the fuckers pay for all the shit we have suffered,' he laughed at the irony which seemed to favour the fortunes of the Zeemans.

'That fucken Dutchman, God bless his fucken soul. Hell I will have to let this all sink in. I don't think we should break the news to Elsabe yet.'

Malcolm became ebullient. His face was flushed. He was pleasantly inebriated. I would see he was reliving that same opiate-like euphoria which washes the souls of the living following the miraculous survival of yet another intense and bloody fire-fight. The broken bodies of the vanquished lay lifeless scattered under the unforgiving sun hovering over the savannahs. They were black and they had died and he had survived, now he too was black, and he could once more gasp that sweet breath of life, he understood that he too now stood on the threshold of renewal, a second chance had fallen into his lap. Malcolm was the ultimate player.

'Ek is nou 'n fokken kleurling.'

Malcolm fiddled with his sound system and selected Wilson Pickett's '634 5789'. The music of Wilson Pickett got him through the bush war. He poured himself another whiskey. I declined a refill, I had had enough.

'You remember that phone call'.

'Will I ever forget it?'

613. Not to retain her for servitude after having relations with her—Deuteronomy 21:14

And finally:

Whenever you perform a Mitzvah who gets the credit? Answer: You do. In what form do you get the credit? Answer: Increasing Godliness. What happens when you observe the mitzvot? Answer: You amass Godliness. What happens when you perform the Law of Moses embodied in the Mitzvah 514 which states: Canaanite slaves must work forever unless the owner amputates one of their limbs—Leviticus 25:46? Answer: You earn a credit from God, you amass Godliness. You amass Godliness by an act of cruel inhumanity to the one of the least of God's brothers. This is absurd. How much more of the Mitzvot is absurd? For each Mitzvah the Gemara gives several interpretations regarding its observance, meaning and significance, making the performance of the Mitzvot ambiguous, contrived and open ended with regard to its correct interpretation, if it is at all possible for there to be a single indisputable correct rendition of the Torah, which means its teachings. To be an expert on the Torah is to be in reality a sophist. Yet Jewish texts, especially the Torah and Talmud are the lifeblood of the Jewish Nation. They are the treasure of the Jewish Soul. The Mitzvot as a product of Mythos is inimical to Logos. What happens when you die? What does it mean to have a relationship to God? What does it mean to commune with God?

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