I am always given to literary referencing whenever I start a column or an incidental discourse. It has always provided me with tested metaphors and exemplars of experience which help me elucidate the points I am trying to make.
More than anything, it reminds me constantly that closure in discourse is intellectual death. We do not seek final answers. We seek discussion, opinion and then the discovery of the next question which keeps the fires of critical thinking alive and burning.
My ruminations this week are on the short story written by Washington Irving in 1819, Rip van Winkle. Rip was a Dutch-American villager who has become a byword for the idea of falling asleep and waking to find the familiar world around us has changed. In his case, he had got involved with other Dutchmen while on a squirrel hunt.
They shared a barrel of beer and he fell into a sleep. On waking, he found that his beard had grown a whole foot longer, his dog Wolf was missing and his trusty squirrel-gun was rusted and useless. On stumbling to the village where he lived, he saw that things had changed. On asking how he had voted, he learnt that he has slept for two decades, thereby missing the American Civil War.
That had to have been the mother of all booze-fuelled lost weekends. In my case, I find the research around the story very rewarding, as the legend is preserved in many generic forms.
To this day, the relevance of the story reflects how I have felt since 1994. That is only slightly longer than 20 years. But here is the thing. I wish I had been asleep all that time and had not woken up to a fellow-columnist’s heart-rending piece on the reality that is us.
When Rip woke up, he found that the world had moved on, developed, improved, with lots of bad things gone. Like his nagging wife and a village populated by idle bar-flies and booze hounds. When he fell asleep, the village pub had a portrait of George III, a British king.
When he woke up, the king had been replaced with another George – George Washington. He spent the rest of his life in the old town, but his old town had become a brandnew society of free Americans. The American Revolution had come and gone, the people were no longer subjects of Britain because they had freed themselves from remaining subjects of Great Britain.
I am sure my readers can see where I am going with this story. The telling of the story would take about 40 minutes, depending on the medium of telling. But it is more than a story about a sublime and enchanted sleep. It is the history of the British empire with its unapologetic exploitation, rapacity and dehumanisation.
It tells about a nation’s struggle to unburden themselves from explorers and exploiters who left nothing but human husks. It is the beginning of the notion of liberation in its fullest sense. It is the story of freedom and redefining a nation.
I urge my readers to pursue the tale told by Washington Irving, who broke some serious ground with its publication. For one, he is regarded as the first American writer who could live off the income generated by his writing.
He also gravitated to high diplomatic positions, creating the modern American who was not only concerned with domestic matters, but also were scholars of international political trends. His CV would include short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian and diplomat.
And here is the crunch. Would that we could all fall asleep, and wake to find that our government, with its cataclysmic failures and delusions of Old Testament proportions, its galactically stupid education regimen and record of malfeasance, and its lack of national or international exposure to good governance, has disappeared forever, replaced by men of good standing, for whom public service was the primary imperative.
It needs to happen. Somebody must feed the children.
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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