Climbing Hoerikwaggo

One learns more than just Dutch by studying the Dutch wikipedia. For example, I've learned that de Vliegende Hollander got damned while refusing to get into de Tafelbaai, a bay called like this because situated near Tafelberg, or Table Mountain, also called Hoerikwaggo in the languages of the Hottentots (it is no longer politically correct to call them like this, they are Nama now, and their language is Khoikhoi).

Hoerikwaggo is an extremely useful Nama term to name a particular state of the mind or a particular existential circumstance in my academic adventures.

Climbing Hoerikwaggo is again a metaphor of something I've left behind, thus also a term to name a stage of mourning. 

Hoerikwaggo is a mountain of skulls without the crystal pinnacle. A mountain that is flat on the top!

I spent my Sunday concluding on my Tribal Wife experience. Who is who in scholarship, and what makes the real difference. I looked once more into various pages of Polish universities, things I've read thousands of times before. But now I have this moment codified in the classical Indian philosophy. Among pramāṇa, or the "knowledge sources", they also used to define the concept of non-perception, the illuminating moment of awareness that something is not there. This is what I realised, unfortunately only at the moment of looking back at the stages of my academic journey that are already behind... Human knowledge is very much like this, retroactive.

अभाव, the non-existence... and my freshly acquired perception of it...

What I saw behind me, in a lightning, was a mountain, and people climbing it in their more or less clumsy ways. But the mountain was flat on the top. There was no pinnacle. Only a flat surface of individuals among which none was standing higher than any other by stronger argument than just honours or founding. There was no pinnacle of achievement. 
This is why there was no way to go for me, no track to climb. 

Now, when I look at the idea I've just pinned down, it seems to me I must have observed it before, I knew it. It even seems so obvious. I even vaguely remember have read about it in issue of "Niezbędnik inteligenta" dedicated to elites. Perhaps I only did not know it is called Hoerikwaggo in Khoikhoi.

But how the other stage is called? Is it simply the question of getting to a different type of geological formation? One gets down from the wrong mountain, makes a bit of the way across the lowlands, and then starts climbing again, this time the right mountain? Or there is a secret shortcut to the pinnacle? Perhaps there is a topological secret here I still believe to ignore.

And perhaps it is only a sign of my childishness to believe that the phenomenon of table mountains is typical for Poland and the Cape region, but not for countries like Netherlands and Germany. Perhaps the flat mountains of many skulls are completely different realities, not to be confused with the crystal pinnacles of living intelligence? Perhaps the vertical is the only common denominator? Or perhaps you don't even climb the crystal mountains? Perhaps they are not even mountains? Perhaps they are inverted abysses in which one falls? Attractors emerging out of chaos? Certainly they are something else somewhere else, beyond the horizon of the people inhabiting flat mountains.

Looking back to Warsaw, I remember two moments of supreme silliness. One was the encounter with Nina Witoszek, who was supposed to tell us what topic would be just great for us to study, a kind of brilliant, miraculous idea or key(word) opening the ways in the West. The other one was my encounter in the Polish contact point of the Horizon 2020 programme. When I arrived there and tried to get some illumination about the ways of climbing pinnacles. And the guy looked to me and sighed, and asked me to explain him why the leading scholars were not interested in those grants, never coming to him to take them. It was an encounter of two people just imagining non-existent crystal pinnacles in two different ways... sparkler of crystalline absurdity shining bright...