High in the sky, up among the hopes and dreams
Have one for me, South Africa, whatever the outcome of yesterday’s game against the All Blacks,
We’ve all made mistakes in our life that we regret. Some of these mistakes require public apologies, some threaten careers or cause aeroplanes to crash. I have made all of those mistakes, but none so painful as the mistake I most recently made. I haven’t been able to speak about this, not even to myself, but it’s time to face facts. I’m writing this on Wednesday. On Saturday the Springboks play the All Blacks in their first match of the Rugby World Cup, and I’m booked on an international flight that takes off 10 minutes after kick-off. I don’t know how this has happened. I realised it only last week, as I looked at the date and time on my ticket and thought, “Hmmm, that rings a bell.” And then I sat staring into space, feeling the vertigo of simultaneously occupying two realities that cannot coexist, feeling as a madman in a sanatorium must feel when he bumps into an inmate wearing a three-cornered hat and claiming to be Napoleon.
“But this man cannot be Napoleon,” he thinks. “Why are people addressing him as Napoleon? He is not Napoleon, for I am Napoleon!”
Saturday’s game means a lot to me, and not just because it’s the World Cup, or New Zealand, or because for once there’s a spirit of barely suppressed hope. (Some people decry hope — they say hope is the thing that kills — but for me hope matters more than the outcome. Hope is the stuff of life, the medium in which we must live. The outcome is just a headline in the newspaper.)
It also isn’t just the sense-memories the occasion will conjure of 1995, when the world was one year old and people thronged the streets after the final and a huge black man I didn’t know made me drink beer from a big plastic rugby ball with the top cut off, and we believed that the past could change and the future too.
No, it’s because I wanted to share this experience with other South Africans, on South African soil. (By that I obviously don’t mean going into a public place and the literal company of other people. That would be gross. No, I mean sitting on a sofa with the windows open, yelling at the screen and being connected with an electric circuit of hoping and swearing and cheering and possibly weeping. I mean being home.)
I suppose there is another sense in which this might be the best of all possible worlds for me. It’s a long commute I’m taking — 12 hours then a layover then several more hours to a faraway place that doesn’t watch rugby. If you’re reading this on Sunday morning, I still don’t know the result: I exist in a space sealed off from the narrow actions of this temporal plane. The match yesterday was Schrodinger’s rugby match: until I finally look, we have won and we have lost, and drawn, and a hurricane or a swarm of bees has swept through and the game was suspended. All realities are true for me right now — I am suspended in a blissful state of possibility, and maybe that’s no bad place to be.
We are in some ways a ghastly, seemingly doomed country. We’re a place where men do unthinkable things to women and children and each other, where the police services have been hollowed out by money and politics and sheer goddamned incompetence, where commissions of inquiry make recommendations about rape units and family violence centres and fat-arsed police authorities ignore them for five years, where thousands of civilians mobilise to show their disapproval of gender-based violence and wave signs and selfrighteously argue on social media about whether or not men are indeed trash, without thinking to come up with a single actionable demand to take practical advantage of this moment and achieve a goal, however small, that will actually make life even a little bit better for anyone.
A rugby match won’t change any of that. Ninety minutes or a month of dedicated, Kolisi-waving, flag-onyour-sideview-mirror rainbow-nationing won’t help repair the system or change the fundamentals, but every engine, however malfunctioning, could do with some fuel from time to time. I don’t think that we achieve good things by feeling bad. I think progress comes from hope not from gloom, and we could use a respite during which we pass some clean current through our twisted, corroding circuits and recharge ourselves, however briefly, however naively, with that sense of being bigger than ourselves, and remember again that gorgeous, joyful sensation of being South Africans together in a good way. It doesn’t happen often, and for the rest of my life I will be sorry that when it happened yesterday I was up in the air with a bunch of strangers.
Maybe we won yesterday, maybe we lost. In the end it probably doesn’t matter much except that winning might hold off a little longer or at least dilute the intensity of the sniping and the hating. I’m going to miss you this month, South Africa. Be good to yourself.