Too hot to handle

Ambrasia Kurtz | Culture and politics | December 3, 2009

An essay written by a South African Artist living in Ireland

The nineteen eighties. Hillbrow – a social fomenting pot on the rise above Johannesburg City. On a street over the hill, the unassuming door of a narrow bookshop would welcome the regular traffic of a select, discreet clientele, secretly seeking to consult specific reams that could lead their delving though a great unknown of subjects that were otherwise deemed no-no.

That Sending’s anti-heroine found herself there, staring at the titles on those shelves in the early nineteen nineties, requires some kind of insight of a type of metaphysical science that could explain why, who of the species happens ever to go where in the divergent pathways that open for some to lead them on extensive foray through cavernous membranes that cajole between different dispensations that jostle in contra-distinctory disarray in worlds between worlds of converging eras in societal display of diversity within humanity on 4.5 billion years old planet Earth.

This girl had been primed by cross currents of influencing factors to develop into becoming a charismatic, evangelical, born-again, with her hand-clapping, “praise the lord” shining-faced beneficence, ironically, blending an eclectic way through the stronghold of church mainstream, where she miraculously survived and thrived in the politics of theological game.  On and forthward, straddling the internal, partisan schisms, she’d ascended in leadership to national level, though well-to-do at the time, eventually locating her passion for the practice of human kindness within the caucus of anti-apartheid believers.

During the build up to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, some songs had started coming through her mind, out of her voice into the mic, off her fingers onto pages and keys.  She didn’t understand them necessarily, nor could she fathom the outpouring that was happening to her, initially she had no reference to the images, concepts: Stonehenge, Avalon, the Pyramids; a kind of heavenly, white bird woman being in the sky, urging people not to get on a train that would ride them to, well, hell; the sensations of suffering in Romania under Ceausescu found their way into the lyrics.  There was a number about being on an edge and falling off into a fun fair park which would fade into illusion* and then there was the proverbial relationship break-up, so a love song . . . as if on another ice flow in a cold ocean, she’s calling to him and he doesn’t hear her, he’s just drifting away – “reaching out, with hearts too small, we fall, we fall”.

She took a plane and a hired car and went off by herself, walking on a beach to try and sort out the songs she’d been dreaming, the religious ceremonies she’d been leading, the dogmas that had wanted intelligent feeding, the people laying claim to the prerogative of laying claim to the absolute, and her family, who were not necessarily concerned that one should even be concerned about being concerned about any such deciphering activity – they had definitely pronounced her to have lost the way because she was looking for it . . . . she always said to her gay friends, “you’re lucky, you can go home and say, ‘Mom, I’m gay’ and, even if she doesn’t like it, she’ll know what you’re talking about.  But how do you go home and come out with, ‘Mom, I’m an artist, empath, seer, intellectual sensitive, teleological, psychonaut, tree pixie,’?  The response you must reasonably expect is, ‘a what dear?’ and an immediately dismissive change of subject”.  It was an extreme learning curve, but eventually she just got to know that there are certain things that you must regrettably leave inside the closet.

A couple of years were like a sudden, fleeting glance and she awoke in another life.  A wife.  Again.  Now with an emergent toddler.  Books, wooden blocks, newspapers, toy trucks, her shaggy dog was familiar, a teddy, a jersey, little socks, a tiny shoe or two, strewn across settee, the carpet of a confined living room covered in all the habitual remnants of a day or two of domestic traffic . . . and, the nightmare was over.  Apartheid was ended.

Three years earlier, she’d been walking on the cream grains of a Cape strand where there was this voice, out of the blue, but not of the sky or sea or from someone close by, the beach was deserted; she was alone, or so she had thought, until she heard the words, “don’t worship me, be like me”.

Well, who wouldn’t freak!  She certainly did.  Never mind that she was hearing disembodied voices, but what of the implications of the authorship of such a speak . . ..  She had no one to confide in, no one to talk to, who would explain or understand, where was help she could seek?  But that some intangible threads were in the weave, she found her way to view the array of books in the Aquarian shop in Hillbrow and those writings would become her mainstay for passage into quantifying other realms she was seeing.

Home alone, with her intrigued toddler, none of her protesting compatriots near any longer, she’s trying to contain her sopping sobs at the TV screening the Nelson Mandela Presidential inaugural scene live; triumph, overcoming, all that was wrong, bad, brutal, painful, evil and horrific was over and all would be right with the world.

She’s kneeling on the carpet, valiantly trying to make sense of the household’s rising chaos and, peeping out from underneath the settee, a card, obviously in her own handwriting it occurs to her, but she is without recall of the moment of its transcription where she must have been combing the data on the pages of a catalogue-type new age magZine and, in a bout of inner space meticulousness, noted a book, “Rising Out of Chaos”!  The timing of her own, well laid, circular plan just seems too much of a coincidence and the rest, one could say, to be clichéd in a trite option for brevity, is herstory.  Fast forward: she gets the book hours later, reads it, non-stop, while stirring pots and washing pots and playing blocks with the toddler, she contacts the author who does tours of Stonehenge, she begins to wish, funds materialise and then she’s standing under an umbrella at Stonehenge in a flurrysome ride.

Across the centuries, there have always been those who have known or seen, those who have sought to discern if, within the veritable infinity that does constitute a vast reach of ‘reality’, there is something other than the version they have been told that would verify their own untoward experience.

In the last 40 years, it is said, there have been more than usual who have known something; ‘in their bones’, in some type of weird sensation, in a vaguely heightened perception that they can’t quite define.  Some are aware of faint rumblings through chance meetings and conversations with unlikely strangers who pop up, and in more commonly and publicly emerging off-beat print, via niche distribution outlets.  For example our protagonist discovered after the fact, that her weird encounter on the Cape shore had taken place following a globally acknowledged and celebrated event called Harmonic Convergence which had seen many people engaged in Sacred Geometric Energy rituals on Table Mountain.

As if having a loosely lined esoteric leaning isn’t punctuation enough: Robert Coon, Simon Peter Fuller, Rob Nairn and other Buddhist exponents, non-dualist teachers like Krishnamurti, Greg Braden and the energetic proponents, Kahlil Gibran and literary philosopher poets like Robert Graves, Walt Whitman, Blake, Yeats for firmament’s sake, the healer health fundis like Deepak Chopra, modalities ad nauseam- aromatherapy, herbal cures, Reiki, Kinesiology . . . nature spirits and phenomenon gardening as at Perelandra and Findhorn, indigenous culture wisdom as in Shamans of various global tribes, time and calendar studies . . .

It’s but wishful editorial to project light précis on her story, as, unfortunately, her physical arrival at Stonehenge was situate, only, in about the 3rd or 4th major canto of unravelling tale. She hadn’t even been aware that money was paper that didn’t represent anything and that it didn’t just fly in because you simply lived. Fiat was a car. Gold, Federal Reserves, Fort Knox, Basel Banks, fillings in teeth, coins, nanotechnology? A lot more and else was also filling the inside of her head beyond songs and visions and conversations on the dialogue of self and soul with the poet and some other auspicious disembodied characters, like the strange appearance to her of The Hag at Silbury, and later, as she began to go exponentially deeper, to try and just clear up a few more little discrepancies, some rougher stuff began to emerge as the plot got hotter.

So, an innocent encounter with the volumes by archaeological astronomy scholar author, Zechariah Sitchin – the setting, ancient Sumeria, the God most of the western world has come to know and love, according to translated tablets, might actually have been a dude called Enlil who came from a line of warring factions from some outer zone and his brother Enki, a scientist, cloned the human race to serve as slave miners for gold extraction. ‘The Terra Papers’ by Robert Morning Sky, a North American Indian, seems to echo this account of origin of the species. As if that slight change of alignment were not enough, onwards and upwards the thermometer!

The world wide web has meant explosive spread of subject that has often been classified as wild ravings of demented heads. Indie media, collaboration sites; individual, profiled, cyber celebs; these can all be doused with goodly, necessary doses of scepticism, except there are also experts, scholars, scientists and seasoned journalists getting a whiff on the wind that all is not as it seems, when they regularly add up real data that is transparently acquired by the automatic duty of their professional tread. Uncovering, naming, publishing detailed denouement, reporting actuals of hush-hush event, supplying documentation, analysing, predicting the roll out as it comes to the point where there is truth in what has been said:

Gaza – Palestine, Diego Garcia- national evictions; Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Central and South America . . . . . overtly supremacist and official subterfuge interference in sovereign nations to the point of total decimation and subsequent domination;
mind control manipulation development and deployment of multiple personality disorder slaves in international intrigue to the highest levels with national agencies implicated;
aliens, ufo’s, the confusion between sub-species inhabiting the planet via genetic engineering, the propaganda, cover-ups, bases on Mars (?!);
money making rackets of big pharm through lies and deceit about commonly accepted diseases; an esteemed French Canadian woman doctor losing her licence for exposing medical incongruities; she corroborates journalist Jane Burgermeister’s singular brave stance and action in exposing and suing in the arena of the swine flu’ vaccine, the multiple bogus ‘war on drugs’, interestingly it is suggested that the chap who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953 was high on acid;
water treatment poisoning, chemtrails, microwave radiation;
food additive poisoning and monopolistic control of growing and supply, leading to totally restrictive global domination by a few corporations through imposition of codex alimentarius laws, at a rate one can’t quote for fear of such ludicrous sounding statistic, Indian farmers committing suicide because of buying into the crop failure devastation of GMO seeds, animal feed lots;
elitist families, 13 major ones apparently, bloodlines, the top monied wealth, not out of healthy self-interest or fair play, but determined roguery, wilful, cheat thuggery, the controversial “Protocols of Zion” are sited as blatant tutelage for definite intent, the origin of the banking systems, forged (pun intended) out of the illegal scam of personal income taxation, who are these Bilderbergers? That the global warming theory is being slanted to set the introduction of more taxes and the herding of people into urban reserves; ah, at sweat point: daily human sacrifice, blood drinking and sex rituals, the constant and consistent, inexplicable disappearance of thousands of children world wide to supply this activity – human trafficking apparently alive and well?

The conscious engineering of schooling systems, John Taylor Gatto being one angle into this for instance;
surveillance- citizens photographed 300 times a day in an English village? the growth of martial law;
national entities in arbitrary kidnapping to foreign detention at whim- rendition, torture in the extreme, using Rock music nowadays!
terrorism?  Now whose theoretical versions of 9/11 and 7/7 are the non-conspiracy ones that should be believed? Independent scientific analysts across many fields who agree on the details that don’t tally in the official versions, or the parading politicians who have obviously got a lot of cushy to live in that they need to protect very well? The monopolisation and quashing of energy systems, global resource plunder;
geographical unions towards central globalised control of the many by a few wielding the tools of a completely micro-chipped population;
the military profitry industry, the force behind all sides in both world wars, the reasons, the schemes;
even the most avid conspiracy theorist, hobbyist or serious follower/member, might deem a little old woman a fanatical religionist, for tracking railway tracks that lead to internment camps that have been established all over the US for the past years. But she’s not the only one talking about it.

The human appetite for sensationalism has heated this ‘thing’ upwards.  Audience, readership, commentator demand, stirring it to a raging, frenzied, swelter point. Whatever it is that might be real and actually happening, throw it all out across ratios of infinite possibility, and some‘thing’ is definitely going down. How many are cognizant by now?  Who knows the sum counter of hits in ratio to the planetary population?  Sites like, Rense, Icke, Alex Jones – the big, flashy American style sales pitch- always guarantees entertainment, Henry Makow, Jim Corr, theirishsideofthemoon blogspot . . .?

Those watching anonymously, voyeur-like, screening their thoughts as they perambulate privately from their own viewpoints.  Then, more flagrantly, the groupie forumites, in one or other dissenting camp, throwing their virtual identities subjectively into the thick of radical fray. There’s slagging and slamming, flaming and trolling, debate verging on carnivorous, as well it may do; if the accumulating declarations indicate any hint of truth, stakes are high.
Claims and theses are impulverous to chew, large to swallow. Finding the bi(y)tes, deciphering all the constituting bits and putting them all together takes long hours of many a digital day and night across years, leaving one feeling as though one has been surfing on melting ice, like one is only just precariously balanced without palatable victual, on the edge of a crevasse that might collapse at any moment.

If nothing else, it certainly warrants use of the term ‘mind fry’.

Sendings tries to peer into this miasmic rise through the eyes of one woman who started taking a look. A woman who instinctively read books like, “Women Who Love Too Much” because she ended up by loving too much anyway…But then, doesn’t the Mother of all mothers love too much by allowing this rampant species and its rulers to inhabit her surface, and her innards – if the stories about underground dumbs are anything to go by? Sophia origin stories, Gnosticism, Meta History offer salve to the ply.

What is reality? If one even asks that question.

At a university that still sports the name of a villainous servant who stole all of a country’s diamonds and gold for his masters thousands of kilometres away and through this entrepreneurship continues, posthumously, to sponsor prestigious scholarships for restricted fields of study, there’s a Physics Professor, in his little turquoise Golf, driving himself and his trumpet to a weekly Dixie gig, with lewd jokes and lots of beer on the band stand.
Ask him, do you ever see yourself in a larger picture, from above, the road in front of you a ribbon across the moors, a strip somebody gouged into the big ball that you live on that’s hurtling through space?  He would think you balmy since his world is only what he sees through his windscreen at any given moment with the pints at the end of his ride, and the question has to come up, how and why you found the question you asked him when he did not find it for himself, and also why, as a physics professor, he can’t even comprehend any of these questionings.

Lots of crowd cheering, vehicles revving, on screen, a track official bends down to the tarmac, gathers and picks up bits of broken car side mirror, smashed as the last Garnish drifting contestant rolls his mini truck. The official, with the pieces in his hand, walks to a picturesque stone wall and tosses the bits of car trash mindlessly into the verdant grass of rolling hills overlooking the exquisite bay.
The DVD viewers, just four of them, hold their heads and screech in outraged agony, bending in a back and forth rock at the shock of what they have just witnessed: a nonchalant negligence that has no self awareness of its own destructive concept – doesn’t he love his own grass hillside? Does he know that someone is coming to clean it up the next day? What’s his reality? What’s the reality of the viewers in paroxysm at his actions?

A toothless illiterate, squatting by a hut, over an outdoor fire for basic heating and cooking, on the expanses of Africa. Has he heard of Afghanistan and the foreigners’ military escapades there? He wouldn’t have come across the big questions as raised by controversial Zechariah Sitchin in his Earth Chronicles series: who are we, what are we, where came we from, where are we going to? Does the toothless illiterate even think those questions, communicate them? Although a town born, illiterate street busker and musician can talk, without access to books, the internet and visiting esoterics who charge R1000 for a weekend workshop, about what ‘God’ has told him about ‘the end times’ and one would think that he has read Sitchin and Icke.

Likewise, Zulu prophet Credo Mutwa seems to pull speak connected to infinite source out of the sky and ground, eloquently regaling listeners: about where we came from, the origins of people’s languages, ancient histories, commentaries on alien species, agendas of the ruling elite?  In a little hamlet in the first world, an Irish born woman, raised and lived only in that one, small enclave, without access to internet, books, cell phone, doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t have spending spree to go on expensive courses, attend fancy seminars . . . she talks on subjects beyond the ‘normal’ frame of reference, claims to have had contact with ‘aliens’ since her early years, and can speak confidently on all manner of content to do with the phenomenal world – tallying with records on the internet? Where did she get her reality? A hillsman in the US. Speak to him about Scotland and he might frown with non-recognition, so you say, well it’s near Paris, and there’s a faint glimmer of recognition, but ask him about nature and he will be full of predictive present speak which can be corroborated by the most eminent scientist.

The girl who started to take a deeper look into Apartheid and found that that was only where the entry gates fell, wonders where the roll of the gullible die most hotly falls. With her, or with the many, fast lane, regular, avid readers of internet ezines who haven’t even heard of these supposedly conspiratorial things, let alone taken a substantial while to check them out, just in case there’s some vague substance to the rumours?  One just has to sit on the rainy streets of a small European city at two o clock in the morning and watch the wretched stumble of desperate, poor human beings retreating from thwarted seeking for fun and meaning to know that all is not right with the world.

Who can one trust? One has to locate sources that pass through one’s invigorated discernment. If no one else, there’s film maker journalist, John Pilger. His research texts stumbled her onto the pack of lies that had bred her childhood fear of bands of thousands of marauding, machete wielding, savage, black Mau Mau’s. Pilger suggests it can be substantiated that their number was more like 80 and it was British aggression over annexed interests in Africa that caused the cost of thousands of local lives.

Victors write history? It’s time for good people to win the task of scribes. The nightmare is over? As the doors of Apartheid broke open, one could say, she had only just begun to open her eyes.

Meantime she’d be interested if there are any takers to head off to Garnish to see with their own eyes, the bits of car trial trash and rubble lying in unsuspecting hills of the green isle.

*  “On the Edge”, a song, from the album and staged show: “. . . and on the way I dropped it.” 1993

about Ambrasia Kurtz

has written 19 posts in this blog.

• View all posts by Ambrasia Kurtz →
• Blog