The Big Read: The river that runs through us

There's something about a river. As we speak I’m on the balcony of my suite on Uniworld’s SS Antoinette, surely the loveliest river boat in the world, cruising up the Rhine towards Basel, with Germany on my right and France on the left and the setting sun turning the water a burnt umber while on the shipside of the bowwave the wave’s own low shadow dances and unfolds like a dark flame, like ink in plasma. It is utterly silent.

There’s a white swan on the water.

On the far French shore a man in a cloth cap walks with a dog.

When Huckleberry Finn wanted to escape his life and light out for freedom he took to the river, and he knew what he was doing: a river is somehow apart from the land it flows through. You can never step in the same river twice, said Heraclitus, it’s always in flux and always passing, but when you’re on the river you pass with it, you’re always on the same river in a constant unchanging happy present and the rest of the world changes around you.

You can beat time. It’s soothingly strange to be so beautifully removed from the gnash and niggle of South African politics and the mish-mash of social recrimination that passes itself off as politics.

 I managed to log on for a few minutes the other day to catch up and found myself blinking in puzzlement at the screen. So a person wrote a — what? A blog about white men? That he didn’t really mean? And then people became angry? Then other people became angry with those people? Then — what?

They all became angry with each other? Then that man had to resign his job, which had nothing to do with blog writing? Then other people resigned from their jobs? And eve r yo n e ’s angry with everyone else for having different opinions? I saw two friends of mine — broadly on the same side — fighting with each other on social media, slapping and belly-butting like a pair of ancient drunken walruses. It made me sad. I turned off my computer.

I thought how nice it would be if this river would just keep going forever and I’d never need to get off and I could just stay suspended in this beautiful liminal space. I felt a hardness in my heart, a desire to turn away from my own country and the squabbling, blinkered, half-brained stupidity that I sometimes associate with it. W h at ’s the point of trying to speak gentle words in a place and time that wants no truck with gentleness?

But that’s why art and stories exist: to reconcile us with the real. After dinner last night I turned my laptop back on and watched a movie that’s opening in South African cinemas this weekend: Beyond The River, directed by Craig Freimond, who’s a friend but also a splendid filmmaker.

As an artist he has always been infatuated with Johannesburg, with its light and skies, its streets and people, its particular nagging energy.

His film Jozi made me fall back in love with Johannesburg at a time when I was struggling to live there, and Material s h owe d me a part of it — and a part of myself — I’d never seen before, but in Beyond The River he has discovered water, how the light falls across it and issues forth from it, how it unfolds alive and breathing through the hills of KZN in bright bands of pewter and silver, turning concrete and mercury beneath the clouds, how droplets flung from a paddle catch the sunshine like sparks or scintillas or like the bright edges of a million small dreams trying to come together.

And the landscapes are lovely but it’s not just the land: his films are filled with people who talk to each other and share the ragged edges and corners of their lives and are prepared to make themselves uncomfortable in order to make connections with the people they encounter, even in the face of the social pressures trying to keep us apart.

Lemogang Tsipa is terrific, and in one scene with Grant Swanby at least one grizzled old cynic had a little cry as he rolled down a dark waterway towards Strasbourg.

And as I watched I began slowly to believe again in the power of believing, of taking the knocks and trying to make something that will touch other people, and as I looked up from the Umsindusi on the screen to the Rhine outside my window I felt the sudden, peculiar desire for this river to wind into that one, and take me home.

We can’t be on the river forever; sooner or later we have to step back on land and try, while we still can, to do something.