Capetonian Dillon Israel’s dream: on starting out, the unproduced playwright and his city
Dillon Israel is a South African actor, creative, storyteller and an unproduced playwright. He lives in Ravensmead, a quiet suburb in Cape Town, near Tygerberg Hospital. He enjoys cooking, baking cakes, making desserts and he loves the outdoors. He reached out to me. He was looking for a mentor. He has a lot of energy. I can hear it in the sound of his voice as I listen to the voice messages he sends me. I came into contact with Dillon Israel in September of this year.
He is twenty-nine years old and wants to “make it”, like so many people in this country in their twenties, hungry to work in the film and television industry. He loves watching South African television, Chinese films and Turkish shows. He asks me to explain the meaning of his dreams. I tell him that there’s symbolism and meaning behind everything in a dream. We have become friends. He shares with me his hopes and his dreams. I tell him that he was born with a gift, but whether he believes me or not is another matter.
We talk about our struggles and depression, loneliness and hardships, the church, mindfulness, having an “attitude of gratitude” and prayer. We talk about our problems, the major issues in our lives that we have in common, we laugh, discuss the antics of our dogs. We tell each other that our mothers find it difficult to say they are proud of us but that we know they are proud of us anyway. We have brought happiness into each other’s lives.
By day he attends a college situated in Bellville in Cape Town. He loves his mother, his dog, Snowy, watching films on Netflix, his niece, writing, listening to Adele and gospel music, making malva pudding on a Sunday, going to the shops with his mother and, like the North American writer John Irving, being alone. Dillon Israel is a young man who prefers his own company to that of others. He lives faith and has a spiritual outlook on life. He prays, has taught me to remain prayerful in my own life and encourages me in my own faith.
This Capetonian storyteller is soft spoken, thoughtful, highly sensitive, an empath, what you would describe as a dreamer and he thinks before he speaks. Nobody has encouraged him to pursue this dream, writing for the stage. Not his family, not his teachers in high school and not the “drama people” he reached out to in the industry. Most certainly, no one has ever told him to become a poet. When I tell him that he can achieve this, he is nervous. He says that he doesn’t believe me. I hope his thinking will change his belief system.
This is why I text him on a daily basis and motivate him. I want to inspire him as much as he has inspired me. I can’t understand the world we live in where teachers do not encourage their students to read and to write. Both are difficult to master but can increase the learner’s self-confidence and help develop personal growth, improve self and lead to an individual having a fulfilling life. I want his dream to come true like mine did. I don’t want him to struggle as I did in youth in making my dream to become a full-time writer a reality. I tell him he has his entire life ahead of him. That he has enough time for the inner vision that he has for his life to manifest and become a reality. I ask Dillon Israel if he reads. He doesn’t like reading, he says. He prefers watching television and series on Netflix. I can’t relate.
I grew up in a house filled with books, rarely watching television. Books were my university, my school of life. It was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that inspired me to go back to writing after a period of illness and hospitalisation for manic depression. I found a message of hope in Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, in the novels of Fitzgerald, the masculine power of Jay Gatsby, John Updike, and in the poetry of Rilke. These authors, Rilke, brought me back to life. We come from two different generations, Dillon Israel and I. We are as different as chalk and cheese, two polar opposites. I tell him that in this industry you can’t take rejection personally.
I tell him to always be humble and kind, like the country musician Tim McGraw’s song. I give him life advice. I give him writing advice. I tell him to write what he knows, that he should write from his own life experience, that he should make characters out of the people he knows, passersby. I tell him to do a poetry course with award-winning South African writer and poet Finuala Dowling. I tell him that doing an online course in creative writing will help him. Already his English is improving. I talk to him as if he was a younger sibling just about to start out in the world. I talk to him about looking for opportunities, I talk to him about responsibility and the writing life, seeking daily inspiration. He tells me I’m changing his life. When I think of Dillon Israel painstakingly writing in a notebook on his desk I think of the poetic genius of Ocean Vuong.
Today he is listening to Jimmy Swaggart. We don’t have much time to talk. I’m working on a novel with both a modern and historical context and perspective and he has a project that he’s working on for college. I send him links to poetry by Russian Anna Akhmatova (“Memory of Sun”, Austrian-German Rainer Maria Rilke (“You Who Never Arrived”) and the North American Charles Bukowski (“Bluebird” and “So Now”). He is excited about writing. So far, he is making a lot of progress. He has disciplined himself and I am impressed by his confidence, his style of writing and I’m just happy that he is happy, that he’s starting to believe in himself.
It’s such an honour and a privilege to help another person, suffering for their art, to help them achieve their dreams, to tell them that absolutely nothing stands in their way. He might not know who Athol Fugard is, the late Taliep Peterson and Dawid Kramer’s productions that made it to New York and the United Kingdom, but I can inspire him to reach those heights. Maybe one day he gets to “pay it forward” and mentor someone of his own.
I confide in him my love of Barbra Streisand films, Yentl and The Way We Were. He tells me his parents used to enjoy watching films like that. I feel my age. We forget about the lonely journeys that forge our poetic and literary forays. The childhood that we create in our imagination, the childhood from memory. I feel that mentorship is a calling. I fear that people think there is no more reading of books to be done. Now there is the reign of social media that has taken over our access to information. I believe in dreamers. I too was a dreamer once upon a time. I say good night to Dillon and his Snowy and finish watching a documentary on Anna Akhmatova. Afterwards I write a poem on aspects of the personality affected by loneliness.
The music in the poetry speaks to me, speaks to my soul. Tomorrow, Dillon Israel will set off for college, nurture the dream of being a playwright, and writing for the stage full-time in his heart. I’ll be at my desk working on my latest novel.
Departures
losing CO2 in the Jet2 queue,
staining Carhartt with heartache,
barcodes beep & promises pall
between staff & sightseers
& parents cheering up children
& new lovers arriving
chinos & eyes empty
into a grey tray, passing
Saint Peter with an automatic
& cutting through pictureless clouds
to arrivals, you were waiting,
& you opened your arms, like wings
Villa Diodati
like a leaf, you were ambered,
acquiescent, ambling the grounds –
gravel crunched with Converse
& a tableaux daydream:
Byron sailing, or the Shelleys
in love – & then, the villa doors
unveiled untouched antiques
& portraits eyeing every word
like the porcelain it was spoken over –
& sobering outside, ringtones
revealed Omicron will part you,
for months or more, before
the sun left for another city,
& the stars began to emerge
with the shyness of spiders
Geneviève
there you were: star-crossed
& stark, nipping the neck
of Calvinus, flicking Winstons from windowsill,
scribbled MA sonnets
& scrunched love letters smothered
under feet & frown,
Twelve Carat Toothache
cutting the silence,
your rib cage crushing, lungs
heaving in the June heatwave
with undiagnosed pneumonia
& pleural effusion,
coughing blood
& wheezing cheater
Light Years
another spin around the sun, & since, I’ve learnt that every mirror needs light: if light is c = 1/(e0m0)1/2 = 2.998 X 108m/s (James Clerk Maxwell, circa. 1864), it’s the magnetism keeping us close – if light is electromagnetic radiation (Wikipedia), it’s the life of moths – if light is a wave, it's scattering most from our hearts of silvered sand & limestone – if light is The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), then it’s you refracting all my colours – & if light is a distance, it’s always between us, because I have realised there is not a greater love poem than a blank piece of paper, or the cursor, blinking for us to begin, reflecting me in the screen where you have been waiting for light years
there are sounds everywhere that you will never hear again
*** We’ll die of love We’ll die of AIDS Life bets at their highest Prices for graves are rising I kiss your imaginary portrait Rain washes away memory with transparent watercolor I love you like at the very beginning I’m dying without you before and after you Birds meet the winged dawn Meanwhile the cast-iron night in my heart is growing to burst
***
the bird said it would be quiet and the air was filled with no one’s breath
and in the evening on the corner near the lake birds flocked and were silent
I watched the birds and was also silent, unable to move
meanwhile, somewhere far away, very close, people plucked up the courage
to yell when a stranger with the face of death roars artillery at them through the window
*** God looks like you and also like a section of forest burned under the snow The rusty bones of the snowflakes show me the grinding path I step quietly so as not to wake up the little Jesuses – not yet resurrected flowers Nobody knows what will happen at the end of the road Probably at the end of the journey we will all return home After all the earth is cruelly looped by an ellipsoid But now in front of me is a fork of cast-iron milk of the night Where should I go: forward or into the future? Each step seems like a step into the grave abyss The cemetery stuck like a sticker to a shoe can’t be peeled off A snowstorm begins and the voice of the wind begins Celans aria The ivory of the sky dissolves in the eyes I lose strength and reluctantly fall asleep on chest of the wind I dream about you and it seems to me that now you are even more like God My body is covered with a blanket of snow and I’m burning for the last time
*** white tea of the day sugar time cubes
the powder of my views dissolves in your thick boiling water of silence
red triangles of the walls of the long night You don’t /everything is obvious to everyone/
“Ser·en·dip·i·ty- the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”
[Originally published in Fleury’s book “It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories”
Your alarm is going off and you roll over in your bed and turn your back to it all the while cursing it for being so obnoxiously loud and intrusive. It’s 5:30 a.m. and you have to be at work by 8. When you occasionally open your eyes, you can see the sun rise over the nearby lake, hovering patiently waiting for you to wake up and take notice of it. But you went to bed late last night sorting out your bills at the kitchen table before you became totally exasperated, muttered “Fuck it” under your breath and went to bed at 1 a.m.
Once your still hyperactive brain decides to quiet down, you had that dream again. You were dressed in a white tuxedo standing in front of the clergy with your friends and family sitting behind you with seemingly permanent smiles in their faces like the joker. And then their smiles turned to discomfort, embarrassment and their faces express worry when Mark still hasn’t shown up. You two have been together since high school and you’ve been waiting 10 years for this moment, the moment when you’ll marry him and be together until the end of your time on earth. You glance down at your watch and it’s almost 12 p.m. Mark was supposed to be there by 11 a.m. And then you look up into the sky and there is Mark, riding a white winged horse and he looks down at you and smiles, except there is something peculiar about his face. You look closer by squinting your eyes to realize that he has no eyes. His eye sockets are dark and empty and consumed by a hazy rush of fear and distress, you bolt up in bed panting like you were being chased by some horrific looking creature in a sinister forest.
You have tried to figure out what the dream means since Mark has been deceased for about a year now. He died due to complications of pneumonia that went untreated unbeknown to both of you. You did not anticipate this and so there were things that went unspoken because he died so suddenly. And almost every night, you have the same recurring dream and you are feeling persecuted yet don’t feel like you have any control over what happens when you are no longer conscious. You resolve to talk this over with your therapist.
You’ve been seeing him since Mark passed away, for a long time, you were unable to function. You refused to leave the house or get out of bed in the morning. Your sister had to come over and care for you and even helped with paying the bills since you lost your job due to excessive absence. But after 3 months had passed, with the help of your sister and therapy, you managed to get back on your feet, attained another job and started to slowly come out of your former zombie-like state of existence. But your presence of mind is still unconsummated and these days, you are functioning on automatic pilot; just going through daily monotonous routines with no joy, optimism or passion. You’ve isolated yourself from your friends despite how hard they try to reach you by phone or email. You feel angry at Mark for leaving you and so you’ve decided to punish everyone around you, including yourself, because you don’t understand why this had to happen to you. Your once benevolent, sunny disposition has soured into a bitter scowl and an impervious facial expression that conveys indifference.
It is now 6a.m. and you’ve finally decided to get up. Outside, the sun is higher in the sky and you open your bedroom window, stick your head out, close your eyes and take a deep breath of your mountainous surroundings. The sound of the streaming lake uncoils your often convoluted and distorted thoughts and for the first time in months, your usually stoical face breaks into an apprehensive smile. But something in you wants to stay demure and unaffected, so you quickly reverse back to scowling. Yet you feel there is something dissimilar in the air, as if your usual routine is about to take a turn for the best, but you’re not sure you’re prepared for it or even want it.
You make your way into the bathroom and as usual, you avoid looking at yourself in the mirror while you shave and brush your teeth and as usual tears splices down your face. After you’ve downed your carnation instant breakfast, you head out to work at the Blue Blood Department Store, where you are Shift Supervisor.
You like your work, but you don’t welcome the unwanted attention of your female co-workers, who all think you’re a total hottie, even though they all know you’re gay since you used to bring Mark to company picnics and such. You ignore their excessive fawning and just go about your day. And then he walks in. A handsome guy of average height and weight who looks like he may be from Brazil. You practically scurry over to ask him if he needs any assistance. He smiles and says yes and you can see a knowing twinkle in his eyes when he looks at you and as if you two are exchanging secrets codes with one another, you return a knowing smile back at him. And deep inside of you, you know something has changed. You look over his shoulders and outside, you can see the sun setting through the double glass doors seemingly staring at you, knowingly.
Jacques Fleury
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and a literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.
Jacques Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey Towards Understanding Your Authentic Self
