Waiting for Mr Wright. Chapter 6: White Queen, As It Began...

Music in the Mists of Morning – Landed Gentry and Land Value – Reality versus Realty – Gardening and Getting Lekker in a Modern Era of Battery Operated Toys

Glenora, the Original Homestead, Somerset West, Cape Town

ILLUSTRATION © Geoffrey Wright

Misty morning…

A mist this morning, Mister.

A mist that makes me look inward for clarity of those who would steal my family land… and offer tuppence and homelessness as compensation.

Myself, mind set in a mist… in writing…

Oh, what a gracious dawn is this, arms around us of the lightest mist.

I sit alone… in writing.

Subconscious has gifted me a lyrical memory to the tune of White Queen by Queen…

“On such a breathless night as this.

Upon my brow the lightest kiss.

I walked alone.

And all around the air did sway.

My Lady soon will stir this way

In sorrow known.

The white queen walks,

And the night grows pale.

Stars of lovingness in her hair.

Heeding, unheard, pleading, one word.

So sad, my eyes, she cannot see…” *

White Queen (As It Began), Queen

Statues in the gardens at Glenora.

PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

I see my Mother, walking in the age of her retirement. Walking across the borders of our land through The Lemon Orchards, the gold of another age. Walking in her Golden years. Walking through the darkness, wearing her white robe. Walking alone except for her white dog, her Retriever faded from Golden. Her white robe is but the denim faded from blue, the cloth favoured by the labourers before Levi, the fabric of hard labour, faded from years of toil. Her robes faded. Her gold stolen. Yet still she walks in the darkness. Yet still she walks in good faith and with out fear.

“But, Madam. You walk alone. Yes, Madam. It is dark. No, Madam. Even the childrens is not playing barefoot and carefree in the streets no more. It is not safe.”

Even the vagrants care for her, their growing concern falling unheeded, their warning is not needed.

Views from Glenora across The Orchard, to mountains surrounding The Helderberg and False Bay. PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

So alone.

In a perception of quality. In an appreciation of what is the value in life. So, as such, I’m not alone. I have my music. It is my memory. I write in tandem with the songstresses of Queens and Mercury and we nod and wink and acknowledge each other. That kinky kind of magic moment of no time when time is all there is. Transposed from the lineage of griots Kora of twenty one strings of Mali by classical guitarist Derek Gripper. * * * * * * Or written in the English of clear class confrontation and division by song-master and spokes-person for his generation as the Mod-father Paul Weller. * * * * * * * That living musical moment when performer and audience participate in equal parts… The live music moment we all strive for with surround-sound in our private homes, survive the tube to work underground burying our noses in the gig guide with the gangling noose of little white ear-pods dangling from our skulls, leave me alone in the crowd with big and blatant noise cancelling earphones excluding the outside world, with psychotically approved as sound reasoning the insanity of consensus reality to keep all other life at a remote distance, we switch our selves OFF to FUNCTION in polite society… We do the detached waltz to formula, do the deranged ballet to wealth. Passionless patterns of polite conversation, and pretend so hard that our sweat does not have odour, that our hard work is not labour, that there are times it all gets so hard, and that sometimes getting hard is such hard work instead of a labour of love.

Of love…

Cat soaking up the rays of morning sun outside The Kitchen and “The Dog’s Hotel” at Glenora.

PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

“Ivory Madonna dying in the dust,

Waiting for the manna coming from the west.

Skin and bones is creeping, doesn’t know he’s dead.

Ancient eyes are peeping, from his infant head.

Politician’s argue sharpening their knives.

Drawing up their bargains, trading baby lives…”

“Food For Thought” UB40 * * * * *

Whatever will the experts say?

“Split your land. Split your family. Split the profit.. then split the country!”

Screw the experts!

Whatever will the authorities say?

Labour twenty four seven.

Then you have no need of a home to lay your head.

Love, marriage, divorce, split the profit and split the childcare and split the loss.

Pay another black woman to look after our children.

Pay another white man to look after our elders.

You have land? Landlords only have neighbours, where there is no love lost.

Forget the authorities!

Whatever will the neighbours say?

“Your property is dangerous! Your property makes my property look bad! Your property devalues the value of my property!”

Fuck the neighbours!

Whatever will that cow without any udders say if I milk the situation and mention that instead of throwing insults coated in neighbourly concern over the fence of official threats to official town councillors in this little village of walls, instead of calling her out perhaps I said:

“Bitch! Stop baying at the moon! Stop this diatribe! What is your real complaint? What is your real need? My neighbourly advice is to go and get a life! Go grab a big Dick-tionary and look up “clemency”. Go snatch a big dildo! Go go go in good health! I wish you good vibrations!”

Happy Pussy and Bitter Lemons, on The Kitchen window sill, at Glenora.

PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

Balancing on tip-toe-top of the ladder for recent weeks, I have been cutting away at the overgrown barrier of thorns which my mother has in purposeful neglect let rise and grow and surround our family land. For years. There is a fairytale for children of all ages, to hide behind a barrier of thorns, to hide in neglect in the majesty of the castle, to hide from the unscrupulous eyes of the people in the market place. The people who leave their hovels, put on a make-up face, put on perfume, and put on airs and graces, to grace us with their with their presence in the market place. They arrive early to get the best vantage point and dominate the space with their skills and their signs advertising their wares like prostitutes in white lacy panties and pink feather boas and dark leather studded metal G strings. Lies in black suspender belts.

My jaw drops.

I do not want to know what they are covering up and hiding. I do not care for their wares at whatever price.

I do not come at a price.

These land prostitutes have never experienced a passionately coloured sunset evening from my family land.

These lovers of land and gold have never had their eyes sparkle like the light of the “starry starry night” * * * painted in my palette of preference on the dark canvas untainted with light pollution stretching the imagination over my familiar skies.

These land merchants have never listened to the silence of the sunrise morning here at my family home.

Signage, Glenora Redemption.

Signage and PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

“High tide, mid afternoon

People fly by, in the traffic’s boom

Knowing, just where you’re blowing

Getting to where you should be going

Don’t let them get you down

Making you feel guilty about

Golden rain, will bring you riches

All the good things you deserve and now

Climbing, forever trying

Find your way out of the wild, wild wood

Now there’s no justice

Only yourself that you can trust in…”

Wild Wood, Paul Weller * * * * * * *

This morning is coated in white lace mist. Fingers probing with great sensitivity between the leaves and branches and the stalks and the stems of the overgrown garden. This morning is coloured in pale mist with every tangible object of desire given only the monotone of silhouette. This morning, silenced as if the mist has strangled all sound…

There is only silence. First a sonata-allegro to solicitude. Secondly, a slower movement, though more lyrical, a “Suburban Hum” * * as the squeaky clean white suburbs yawn. Suddenly scherzo! A third movement, minute by minuet, some bird upon wing is boisterous in believing that the joke is on me. This ain’t rock ‘n roll til the rollicking finale and I’ve finished my plunger full of coffee. Again I blend into it all, but with detachment…

A Writer’s Corner with Cat, A Hideout in what was a Hedge, at Glenora.

Landscaping and PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

“Outwardly, in the market place, be with the people.

Inwardly, be with God.” *^*

I breathe it all in.

All in symphony. All in harmony. All in fine form. In the pine needles… with no strings attached. In the trees, the timbre… the woodwinds. In the rhythmic repeat refrain of the doves coo… the brass. In the domestic dogs bark and beat answer from different directions… the percussion. In the falsetto melody of some feathered friend. The composition subtlety introduces isolated soloists. The movement of a silhouetted stranger taking a shortcut across The Orchard listening to some local soap-opera as they step closer into their role as the servant in the soapy dishes and the soap-opera ‘swallow life” of some foreigners summer retreat.

I am in nature.

I am in my element.

The morning mist is soundless and timeless. There is no sing along chorus refrain. There is no pending rain. There is no drumroll driving the expectation of any moment that is not now. There is no crescendo building excitement towards a future which may never be…

“Now I understand…

What you tried to say to me, how you suffered for your sanity, and how you tried to set them free…

They would not listen, they did not know how… perhaps they’ll listen now?”

Vincent, Don McLean * * *

No thunder…

No lightning…

Until the cold creeps in. I feel my discomfort. No, I do not want this reminder. I feel cold. I’ve been reading and writing this morning’s story, but not reading between the lines. It is written in the stars above. The black and white guinea fowl parade by, stop only to scratch in the soil for bugs and worms and scraps of food. I’ve been loving living on the soil. Landed a full season and a half ago from another land… Yet I am only just scratching the surface. Landed gentry with genuinely not a penny in my pocket. From my lofty position I am above falsehood and looking down on False Bay. Landing back home from London I am cutting back the falsehoods. I am cutting back the barriers that have stopped the outside world seeing what is deep within. I am opening the curtains to the views. The twinkling lights of the city… The mountains steadily ranging away to a far distance… The thunderous roar of the ocean deep ever eroding away at their mountainous base, loudly like an unruly mass of peasants, relentlessly murmuring dissatisfaction at the feet of the Emperor elite. We are not untouchable here on our mountainous land mass. My self, I have a touch of madness. My sanity and my syndrome, yet to be defined. My self, I have been handcuffed for an honest response to the police law enforcement to protect the public peace, yet they imprisoned me for their ridiculously racist wrong perception to my passionate politeness.

My mother has been touched by the criminally insane.

Her perpetrators and their Police, yet to be confined…!

A Big Gum Tree, at Glenora. Known by local farm folk at the “weduweeboom”, the widower-tree, the deadweight of a branch falling with no warning has been know to kill a man outright, and make a widower of his wife.

PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

“And in the naked light, I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

And no one dared

Disturb the

Sounds of Silence…”

Sounds of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel * * * * * * *

Writing for The Self versus writing for others.

Writing for My Self versus writing for another.

I am prising away the protective layers which kept things in place… And mostly displaced.

I am opening up this place and creating new spaces to new experiences, and new marketing opportunities, and a new era.

Garden at back before The Food Garden. Red Rust Roof before Black Paint. at Glenora.

PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

The cold creeps in. I had expectations that the mists would lift and a quiet calm warm sunny day would appear. The cold fact dawns. The cold from the dark ocean masses. I have had experience of the quality of life to which the Masters are blind. Again the cold light of challenge. How to communicate value when there is zero as a common point of reference? A lifestyle of choosing the undefined mellow… only enrages and invigorates the authoritative to change it or to take it away. This concrete century and this season spews blinkered builders and stone masons, with their political, private profit and policy prostitutes, whose experience of quality is nought but what the market place has on offer this day.

“Misty morning.

I don’t see no sun.

I know you’re out there somewhere, having fun.

There is one mystery, I just can’t express.

How can you ever give your more,

to receive your less?”

Misty Morning, Bob Marley & The Wailers * * * *

Fruit Blossoms, at Glenora. PHOTOGRAPHY © Geoffrey Wright

In the mist, I see my Mother, solitary in her knowledge that her lifestyle and her home have value… Letting her castle deteriorate, allowing the wall of thorns to keep the growing town of Somerset West at a safe distance, telling stories of this once beautiful town losing its tradition. Her home here for over sixty years. My Mother, letting go reluctantly, then… going reluctantly. Now less than two years from this land and she feels divorced and detached. Lost in the tolerance of letting this land go to the highest bidder… Losing this land for my family and the 7 generations to follow…

In this era it is not safe for our children to run freely in our streets.

In this home it is not safe to have the wind blow freely through our open doors and our windows and our corridors.

At this age it is not safe for our blood to run freely in our veins.

Then it must be time to open the doors to change, to let the blood for health and for healing, to let blood flow freely in the streets, down to the corridors of the powers that be… and take back the key to self authority.

“Heeding unheard, pleading, one word…

So sad, my eyes, she cannot see…” *

Written by

Geoffrey Wright

Glenora Redemption,

Cape Town, South Africa

Doreen and Geoffrey, First Avenue Retirement Hotel, Fish Hoek, Cape Town, January 2024

DEDICATION :

This work is dedicated to:

Glenora, the old farm land and homestead, “the only home I have ever known”.

Doreen Wright, my Mother, my nurturer and my nemesis, throughout all her hard work to keep Glenora our home.

Greg Wright, my blood brother, for sparing my childhood musical evolution the downhill dance from ABBA, by his introduction to the rock and rhapsody in the music of Queen.*

Ingrid Kirsten, who in South Africa “had to let my house go” but did retain and relocate to Vienna “my furniture and paintings… and each piece… connected with their spirit their energy… have the right to be here… my house is a place of peace and love and warmth. I love that. And it’s true.”

The Parents, Brothers and Sisters, whose children were slaughtered by their countrymen on this day 21/03/1960 in Sharpeville sixty four years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre

The massacre was photographed by photographer Ian Berry

Bob Marley & The Wailers and the Marley family, who strive constantly to “free the people with music…” and do the work through the Bob Marley Group of Companies, Tuff Gong International and the Bob & Rita Marley Foundations.

They continue the good works via many organisations including Rita Marley Foundation https://ritamarleyfoundation.org,

Bob Marley Foundation https://bobmarleyfoundation.org

SOUND TRACK :

Waiting for Mr Wright. Ch 6: White Queen, As It Began