Getting turned on

Banality and kitsch for the win

The bookshelves at Tomb Tattoo in Cape Town. PHOTO: Karin Schimke

Walking on the beach early this past Sunday, we came back the way we’d been and Sam’s footprints were still in the firm sand, but I couldn’t see mine.

It reminded me of a bookmark I had in my Bible during my brief and desultory whirl through the Methodist church. (My spiritual development was left to the fates and the Valley Methodist Church in Pretoria was one of them.)

The bookmark had a photo of a set of footprints in the sand. There were some lines on it from a poem about how Jesus was always walking beside you, but if suddenly there was only one set of footprints, it wasn’t because he’d abandoned you. It was because he was carrying you over the rough parts.

I don’t know why that bookmark shook me. Maybe it was the first time the power of allegory hit.

Maybe it was because I had just given my heart to Jesus. It seemed gauche not to offer it to him when this, clearly, was what one was expected to do after a while. Then you would earnestly declare the transaction and a new seriousness would come over you.

My heart being with Jesus and all, the idea of him carrying me when the going got tough was kind of sexy. My reaction to the bookmark’s message was pretty much an eleven-year-old ‘Phwoar!’ I would have used the mind-blown emoji if I’d been able to text my bestie-in-Jesus a photo of the bookmark.

‘I was blown away!’ I told Sam.

He was amused.

He said the first time he remembered having existential feelings stirred by words was when he read Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

‘Hey, no ways! Did you know that that was the book that made me want to be a writer?’

He said yes, he did know that.

The fact that he was moved by JLS made me feel infinitely better about the corny beginnings of my career as a writer.

But how was he spiritually moved by the book, I wanted to know.

The grainy pictures from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull were taken by Russell Munson PHOTO: Found here.

Oddly, for someone who loved the book, the movie and the Neil Diamond soundtrack for the movie about the gull with ambitions, I discovered during Sunday’s beach that I might actually have missed the whole point of the story. I’ve since skim-read it and realised what a crosshatch of religious messages it contains.

That part went over my head when I was fourteen.

What I remember most about the book was that JLS had strange desires (to fly very fast) that were anathema to the flock. His outsider status turned to outcast status, and the poor old birda non grata had to keep up his speed training in the lonely looking sky*.

For me, it seemed like a story about the courage to be non-mainstream and unpopular.

Having spent most of my primary school years feeling lonely – possibly the reason Jesus got my heart – I related hard to JLS’s struggle to be understood.

‘Jonathan is a great Rorschach test,’ said Ray Bradbury, the famous author of Fahrenheit 451. ‘You read your own mystical principles into it.’

Bad taste is better than no taste

Later on Sunday, I read an article in The World of Interiors about what it means to have ‘taste’ in the sense of discernment and a sense of quality and aesthetics. We’d spent the morning pondering the delicious kitschiness of allegory that made us get into our deep teenage feels, and here – ta-da! – was just the right reading to round it all out.

The columnist outlined how good taste had been thought of through the ages. In modern times, good taste has been seen ‘most commonly – and somewhat conceitedly’ as a ‘sensitivity to the invisible (and indeed visible) threads that hold together aesthetic tableaux’. One might imagine, she says, tastemakers humming like tuning forks until they hit the right note, while ‘those less blessed blunder through life like bulls...’

Do you know what I think is bad taste? Literary snobbery, that’s what.

Reading lots – good, bad and banal all – is more important than living up to someone else’s standards of an exemplary reading life.

The World of Interiors columnist (Alice Inggs is her name) quoted the author Arnold Bennett: ‘Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.’

Reading lots, including what is considered rubbishy, is a good way to live, I think. And it hones you so that you get better at finding what you like.

‘Having taste, whether good or bad, says Inggs, ‘requires decisiveness – a forcefulness of character to choose the things that one really wants to live with and to know why.’

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Further reading

This ‘Footprints in the Sand’ and Jonathan Livingston Seagull sent me on some delicious rabbit holes this week.

The authorship of the footprints poem is disputed – hotly and passionately – in a three-way argument between three women. You can read about it on Wikipedia.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull remains in print 56 years after it was first published. The author is still alive. In 1972, Time magazine featured the author (and a gull) on its cover and, inside, an amusing and well-written feature about the book and its author. You can read that here.

I’ve listened to the soundtrack* from the Jonathan Livingston Seagull movie twice this week. You can find it on YouTube and on Apple Music. The music was composed and the songs performed by Neil Diamond.

Turns out I still know all the words of all the songs.

Jonathan, the seagull, stole my heart from Jesus, the saviour.

Other things I’ve written about reading that may interest you

• I wrote here about there was no high-mindedness in my parents’ house about reading, but that that there were always book.

• I wrote here about books and solitude.

• I wrote here about what might be happening in that strange interior place when you open a book and are swallowed by it.

• I wrote here about my make-believe argument with Janan Ganesh, columnist for the Financial Times, after he wrote about how one should read.

• I wrote here about finding it harder to stick with books and my theory about that. (Incidentally, this same piece contains my best reads of 2025, if you’re in need of some inspiration).