Saying goodbye to everything good.

Like many I became aware of the seemingly inevitable decline of the natural world of creatures, plants and unspoilt planet Earth at a young age. It was a preoccupation of my very earliest thoughts. The houses built on the hill above where we lived looked to me like a tartar or a plaque on the beautiful surface of the world and that is the way it has been with me for the duration of my life.

As a boy I became a  truant and spent my days in the hills on the southern outskirts of Johannesburg. Yes, the uranium and cyanide filled mine dumps but more the natural hills. A little further afield. Where I was definitely not allowed to be wandering. The fascination of my life, this quest for new and virgin terrain. Fortunately South Africa, the land of my birth, is the inspiration for so many tourist brochures that its hard to describe it now without sounding like one.

The country is very beautiful and I went feral in it for the love of freedom. Like a dog run off its leash I roamed all of South Africa. On foot, on my lucky (sometimes) thumb and on a bicycle. On paddle skis and canoes and tractors trucks and cars. Even in the air once or twice. Anyway those first hills to the South of Johannesburg are gone now. Trucks literally came and removed them. As I write I realise why I am a goodbye child. Why I am saying goodbye rather than celebrating the life of the planet and its people. I look that direction. I see death. I understand that the joy is only real because it has to fade. So I say goodbye. As I grew up our family suffered losses. The deaths of those we loved and I guess if it happens to you enough you just adapt and become…more ready to say farewell. You have to accept it. You took the beauty and loved the hills and when they are gone it is necessary to continue to live, or to die. But to remain in love with the lost and the past is to cease to be yourself and so it is necessary to say goodbye.

With this strength I look at the life I lead. My opportunity to see up close the Lycaon Pictus I always wanted to see, to paint, to know about, thrills me. Yet that opportunity is provided by the desperate plight of the dogs and our human capture and of course removal of the dogs to safe places in hopes that they breed. More goodbyes. Disturbed thus the dogs seldom breed well. We need to give them plenty of space that we don’t have. I say we but I am as always a mere spectator. Watching the dogs going away. Some into the madness of their protracted and unnatural isolation. Endlessly pacing. Others hopefully to a new pack and a better roaming and breeding ground.

All this saying of goodbyes to the dreams of a lifetime. The animals. The veld. All this takes place in the continuing context of the removal of the landscape. The mining. Not twelve kilometres away from where I sit (I’m usually wrong about things like that it’s probably twenty or something) there is a gaping hole in the ground where a place called Mapela used to be. Not uncommon. I am not strong enough to stop them and I can only say goodbye.

Goodbye Child. Goodbye Father. Goodbye all you dreams of this world. I will love you until you are gone or I am.

So that has become my art. The art of goodbye.

Goodbye Child