Exceptional Excerpts: The Power of One

Here are two scenes from the novel The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay.

The story is about a small English boy in South Africa-- Peekay-- who is just beginning an Afrikaaner boarding school during the second World War. He has been sent alone on a train with only his few belongings, leaving behind his beloved Nanny and his pet rooster, called Granpa Chook. The porter on the train, Hoppie Groenewald, is well known along all the stops as a welter-weight boxer. He introduces young PeeKay to the sport, as well as how to bet on it. This meeting changes Peekay's misfortunes as a victim of school bullies and leads to his fate as a tough fighter in a politically tumultuous part of the world. The prose is a pleasure to read as we follow the hard blows and victories of our small but resilient hero.

"The light which fled past the compartment window was still soft with a grayish tint; soon the sun would come and polish it till it shone. The landscape had changed in a subtle way. Yesterday's rolling grassland was now broken by an occasional koppie, rocky outcrops with clumps of dark green bush, each no more that a hundred feet high. Flat-topped fever trees were more frequent and in the far distance a sharp line of mountains brushed the horizon in a wet, watercolour purple. We were coming into the the true lowveld. 

I sat up and became aware of a note pinned to the front of my shirt. I undid the safety pin to find a piece of paper with a ten-shilling note attached to it. I was a bit stunned. I'd never handled a banknote and it was difficult to imagine it belonged to me. If one sucker cost a penny, I could buy one hundred suckers with this ten shillings. On the piece of paper was a carefully printed note from Hoppie.

Dear Peekay,

Here is the money you won. We sure showed that big gorilla who was the boss. Small can beat big. But remember, you have to have a plan-- like when I hit Jackhammer Smit the knock-out punch when he thought I was down for the count. Ha, ha. Remember always, first with the head and then with the heart. Without both, I'm telling you, plans are useless!

Remember, you are the next contender. Good luck, little boetie. 

Your friend in boxing and always,

Hoppie Groenewald

PS Say always to yourself, First with the head and then with the heart, that's how a man stays ahead from the start. H.G.

I was distressed at having left the best friend after Granpa Chook and Nanny that I had ever had, without so much as a goodbye. Hoppie had passed briefly through my life, like a train passing in the night, I had known him a little over twenty-four hours, yet he had managed to change my life. He had given me the power of one, one idea, one heart, one mind, one plan, one determination. Hoppie had sensed my need to grow, my need to be assured that the world around me had not been specially arranged to bring about my undoing. He gave me a defense system and with it he gave me hope."

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Second Scene:

"The fierce afternoon sun beat down, and below me the town baked in the heat. When was it all going to stop? Was life about losing the things we love the most as my granpa had said? Couldn't things just stay the same for a little while until I grew up and understood the way they worked? Why did you have to wear camouflage all the time? The only person I had ever known who didn't need any camouflage was Nanny. She laughed and cried and wondered and loved and never told a thing the way it wasn't. I would write her a letter and send her my ten shilling note, then she would know I loved her. Granpa would know how to do that.

As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bush veld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.

I knew they would be back, but that for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords which bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness. Not the kind which laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled with heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant.

You may ask how a six-year-old could think like this. I can only answer that one did."

The Slump, the Block, and the Import

Slump block.

That is the actual name of a building material. It is used extensively in the Southwest in place of bricks. It is a form of rough concrete that is compressed into slabs that are approximately two feet long and ten inches high. It is stronger than adobe, and not as smooth as cement. Its mold is made to look like rough hewn stone.

by Southwest Building Blocks

Even the name of it-- slump block-- always made me think of a big scoop of mud that had finally given up and lain down with a thud, flattened and elongated, with a sigh of "I give up."

1900 Life Magazine Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson

When I have a slump in creativity, or a block, or however we might describe the feeling that is the opposite of "oomph", it is usually because of pressure-- too much or not enough. Deadlines and crises are notorious for generating bursts of inspiration. Without them, our creativity can lie dormant and unformed until that feels like the way it should be. It takes a lot of convincing that what we could produce is important to the world. If it only seems important to ourselves, then we have to rely on a huge dose of ego to get going with it. 

One Man Band from polarity records.com

But for most people, ego alone isn't very convincing. In our hidden heart, we may fear that we have nothing to add of any importance. So the first thing we must look at is that word "important". That's the concept we do battle with every day. It's a descriptor for our actions, given to us by others. If a critic were to say of our work, "it's not perfect, but it's important," that would be like caviar and champagne flooding us with relief that our work, our time spent, their time spent, and our time on earth were all worthwhile. By contrast, a judgment of "well-crafted, but ultimately unimportant" threatens a sea of defeat with bitter saltwater.

The ego can fairly taste the champagne as it is working away, mere minutes from being the toast of the town. The heart fears with each sweaty beat that if one thing goes wrong, all will be sunken and lost. That tension can lead to slump block quicker than anything else I have experienced. It seems to me that if we get rid of "important" then we can eliminate the problem of having too much time with no deadlines, or not enough time to devote to our work because of too many competing deadlines. The word itself is helpful to look at so that we can dispense with it, at the levels of design and development.

Import: something that is brought in from somewhere else. Right there we see that importance is a value added to a work after its completion. If we try to add it into our work while we're making it, then that is like anxiously tasting and salting our cooking spoonful by spoonful as it bubbles, hoping to please. By the end, the salt is overpowering and it all has become inedible. It's better to allow the ingredients to show off their full flavor and then the guests can salt to taste at the table. Harsh criticism is like watching a guest shake all sorts of seasoning that they brought with them. Helpful criticism is like seeing which parts of the meal were left untouched. It doesn't feel negating, but challenging. We don't feel like slumping onto the couch laid out, but a little warmed up,  knowing that we can do better next time, and that will be fun.

Having fun in our work, or enjoying it, is vital. When something is truly fun, it isn't always pleasurable. But the fun is worth all of the unpleasant moments. If we're doing something only as long as it brings us pleasure, then it won't have much value for anyone else apart from the voyeuristic. That is when someone's production is deemed as navel gazing or worse, the dreaded "masturbatory". We see and hear examples all around us, of people tickling themselves by ranting against perceived competitors rather than providing critiques for evaluation. If they have not laid out a substantial argument, but simply wind up and then wind down and conclude-- because they have gratified themselves, or run out of steam, or time has run out-- then we know that someone has simply trotted out whatever they find pleasurable as an exhibitionist. Nothing was created or built upon. We're simply seeing an ego factory at work, that requires tricks and cheap thrills and shocks to keep it going. It is DOA, and not fun or enjoyable for anyone involved. 

Zobo Instrument Company advertisement

Creativity is enjoyable and brings us moments of satisfaction, but we keep working at our work because we are creative beings, not because we are important. Deciding ahead of time that the work we do isn't worthwhile, because it won't reach the higher echelons of importance, is too much pressure for anything to grow and offer up its flavor. Deciding that we might have work that could be important to people, maybe someday but not now, is not enough pressure. A creative block won't continue indefinitely unless we are colluding with the block and pouring energy into a really big one that can't be refuted. Even so, slump blocks are limited and even they can be made useful and into solid dwellings. Use it all, especially pent up frustration-- which equals heat and pressure-- and as you go, you'll see that it is good. 

Brut Champagne magazine ad 1915