Sometimes nature does what words cannot do: set you right.
Sometimes, all the good advice in the world, all the homilies, parables, and
goodly pious sayings cannot seep through your eardrums and into your
consciousness as easily as the veldt unfolding before you, majestically, in
great undulations of corn, cattle and pixellated pink and white cosmos. Land is
linked with sky as streams, rivers, water holes and dams stud the swathes of
farmland and try to pull down a sky so vast it merely puffs back the most
enormous cumuli and carries on. Giant poplars, cypress and eucalyptus
occasionally spring up - mere shrubs in the scale, emeralds among in the
citrines, ambers, agates, bloodstones and aquamarines.
The veldt goes straight to the heart. It fills it with awe and then bursts
its membranes, for there is no way the human heart can contain the pulverising
majesty of such beauty.
How, I marvel, does it do this? The veldt, after all, is but a plateau
grassland. It offers neither the drama of cliffs or mountain ranges, nor the
graphic starkness of desert, and certainly not the soporific lushness of
tropical climes. It is neither decidedly vertical nor relentlessly flat. And
yet it is superlative in its own horizon smashing idiom. Almost like a record-busting giant orchestra with half the players on trombones.
I travel through it, of course, on wheels of rubber and steel powered by
liquid black gold. Bitumen- smooth asphalt slides me along, gulping up
kilometres in a way no hardy pioneer ever dreamed of. For them the seemingly
endless tufts of grass were not giant lawns to trundle over in ox-carts. They
were fraught with pits and gullies and snake holes and flies and small boulders
lying in ambush. Days might stretch into months before a destination was
reached. Death might overcome them before a land claim might be secured. No
twee hedgerows here to offer a sense of possession. And beefy bovines reduce to
fleas on the coat of some shaggy, behemothic creature. Vague notions of history
add to my awe, but don't explain what the veldt does to my heart.
Firstly it silences it. I want to take it all in. Then sometimes I confess
some silly ooh-ahh statement wants to erupt from my mouth - 'Just like a
painting!'
Why must we compare stunning landscapes to paintings? What is this perverse
inversion? How can we compare something natural with a copy of the natural, as
if by doing so we ensure we can consume a third degree removed semblance of the
original. Its almost as if we hardly look at the beauty face on, but prefer to
do so obliquely, after a painting has rendered the landscape almost as
beautiful as itself. The remove makes it bearable. Shades of the 'Verse of
Light'? The Niche, layers of glass, light refracted and reflected?... Ok, you
got it.
Were we to look at it head on, we might vanish. The 'we', the 'me', doing
the looking might just get snuffed out by sheer awe and beyond-descriptionness.
But I like to stare at it. I insist on trying to take it all in. I want to
let it flood me. And at times it has. I have encountered sublimity by doing so.
Its another form of
fana'.
Fana' fi'l-vista. Obliteration by the
view. The self dissolved in the scene. Seamlessly at one with the land, sky and
grass.
This therapy for the separated self I discovered many moons ago, while atop
the highest hilltop in Belfast, Mpumalanga. And in between I forget its power.
And every now and then I am lucky enough to taste veldt therapy again.
A Fatihah please for Bibi (Fadhila Mehdi Hamoodi, my grandmother), for she
too lies buried there, in the Veldt.
Inna lillah wa inna ilayhi raji'un.
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