We are the Beings of Human, but, not the Humans of Being
This opening line pings a way across the digitosphere to your screen: an Artificial, post-Representational Horizon, on which you battle out many of your own existential Armageddons. But, this line is also perhaps, maybe, the ultimate William Burroughs zone-induced buzz-conclusion number two point fifteen, that Buiteboer could draw from the very same poem (GEVOLGTREKKING), many more years hence, now, in the present tense apparent time of the year 2021.
The crux of the story of the poem, GEVOLGTREKKING, is: Around the years 1997/98, the early incarnation of Buiteboer found himself in Paris, France. A brutally cold winter, like Breyten Breytenbach had described in all its potential grotesquery in one of his early surreal mental outcroppings, called “Om the Vlieg,” erupts over Parisian rooftops. The early incarnation of Buiteboer gets himself dismally lost in the inner en-trained entrails of an ever-moving Paris. On the way to this super-important and life affirming appointment with none other than Breyten Breytenbach, the young Buiteboer gets himself detached from himself and his map in search of the correct station at which to disembark and escape clutches of Faustian Parisian underworlds, and thus to bolt forward in time and into the presence of a waiting political/creative icon.
Breyten Breytenbach had agreed to meet this young upstart academic and doctoral student fresh from South Africa, intending to do an interview with him. At the other end of all the subway and French language confusion, a breathing, organically instantiated Breyten Breytenbach, is patiently waiting on a hard and cold and soberingly uncomfortable park bench, for the younger version of Buiteboer’s arrival. This meeting takes place before cellular phones in a park, roughly in the cool side of an artsy-fartsy Paris where he and Yolande, his wife, have been scratching at a pad called home for many decades. It is for sure not Zef turf at the address they call home at the time.
Buiteboer steams into the park spotting the target of all the fuss and train station messinesses at a distance. Maybe it is because of his Praetorian roots that he is so blatantly lost and confused by all the grandiose French-ness. But, moments later hands are shaken and tense apologies tendered. Thus starts a conversation between Buiteboer and Breytenbach, that snaked across many years, cities, and countries. Buiteboer embarks on a maddening doctoral study of the man he had just met, sweating it out, on a brutally cold Parisian day.
But, for now, this update in Buiteboer’s Digitospheric Home intends to do nothing but conclude the story of the poem:
->>>GEVOLGTREKKING<<<-
From a hard park bench in a pissingly cold wintry, stormy, grey, and intimidating park in Paris, Breytenbach escorted the slightly plattelandse bewildered Buiteboer to what he said is one of his favourite places/cafes, to write. At, or in this cafe Breyten Breytenbach asks the young fledgling Buiteboer a question, which, years later manifested in the poem:
->>>GEVOLGTREKKING<<<- … as an answer to the question.
