Travelogue 857 – June 30
The Big Map
The first room in Gent’s city museum, or the STAM, as it’s called, is the map room. Laid out on the floor is an aerial view of the city, covering three hundred square metres. Available for comparison are smaller historical maps of the city from previous centuries. Several of these maps I’m already familiar with. In fact, there is a lot I recognize among the features of the city.
I’ve been studying maps of Gent, current and historical, since I started working on this book. In my odd relationship with this place, I can say the map has pre-dated the city. While it’s true that Gent is older than I am, and while it’s true that I had visited Gent before I started the research for this book, real acquaintance began with the maps. Previous trips had been too brief. It’d been impossible to form a coherent sense of the town based on the route from the train station to Sint-Baafskerk.
I circled the museum’s floor map, studying the details. The outline of things was familiar, the town’s shape determined by the course of rivers and canals; the town’s orientation according to the compass. I wanted to drill down into the picture, see the paths that became the streets, see the public buildings that shaped the centre and the rows of houses that rose and rose again among the areas less central. I wanted to follow the canals that had shaped the city’s history. I did follow the miniature of the long trench of the Terneuzen canal, dug in the nineteenth century to link the city to the Dutch port on the Scheldt estuary, twenty miles away. I was thinking it would be a nice cycle ride.
Of course, I could identify the museum in its own map, situated in the Bijlokesite complex, once a convent and, for centuries, a hospital. The large complex also houses a concert hall and an academy for opera. Each building seems to come from a different era. The museum building includes the old abbey church and a dormitory for the nuns.
Outside the map room, my interest waned. I enjoyed some of the artefacts, the medieval crossbows, for example. But the historical background was general and offered me very little that was new about my period of interest. I lingered in the rooms devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eras that I hadn’t studied as well, times of Spanish dominance, slow decline and decadence.
I also enjoyed the room dedicated to the mystery of the panel stolen from Van Eyck’s ‘Lam Gods’ triptych in the 1930s. It made for an engaging story. Seven months after the theft, the likely thief died of a heart attack, and only left a cryptic clue in his desk about the whereabouts of the panel. No one has ever found it. One theory ascribes the theft to the diocese itself, hard up for cash. I had a good time looking over the contemporary headlines and watching video clips from news reels and later documentaries.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Travelogue 856 – June 23
Solstice 19
It was approaching midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I opened the front door to the flat to let in a breeze. The evening was cool.
There was still a tint of cerulean blue in the sky, making shadows of the rows of clouds in the west. I experienced a double sense of wonder, inspired by the lingering sunlight at that hour and by the beauty of the colour. I took in the fresh air, breathing out a wordless prayer of thanks for the season.
I’ve been taking the girls to the local park about every other day. We walk hand-in-hand to the canal. They run across the bridge to climb the stairs on the other side. These steps lead to a dirt path that runs along the ridge of a man-made hill. This once was a railway line that brought freight cars to the Van Nelle plant. Now it’s like a wall that divides one district from another. On our side there is a canal with its narrow margins of grass. On the other side is a playground and petting zoo. These days, we can’t see much on either side because of the spring growth.
Along our path, the wildflowers and berry bushes have been growing noticeably. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers. We’ve seen the season’s first dragon fly. This is our little nature walk, and I try to make the most of it. We stop to call out the colours of the blooms. We stop to check the shade of green in the blackberries. The girls know they will get to taste them when they turn purple. If we spot a ladybug, we set it on Baby’s finger to crawl up her arm. Little Ren will squat over a train of ants, and she knows not to squash them. Further down the path, we descend another stairway, the stones of which are being pushed out of position by the roots and grass underneath, and we run to the playground on the corner.
That day, I told Baby Jos that it was the first day of summer. She’s been longing for summer, when she and her sister could play in the water. She never really got the concept of spring. Sunny days were summer, and cold days were winter. I pointed out the budding trees and the new flowers, attempting to link spring to fall, when the leaves fell. She repeated, ‘it’s summer!’ with some relief.
It was the solstice. I had watched the long day unfold, waking at four to briefly appreciate the brightening colours in the sky. I had enjoyed every hour of sunlight, morning into afternoon. And, as midnight approached, I stood outside my door to marvel at the final colours of the calendar’s happiest day.
Solstice 19
It was approaching midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I opened the front door to the flat to let in a breeze. The evening was cool.
There was still a tint of cerulean blue in the sky, making shadows of the rows of clouds in the west. I experienced a double sense of wonder, inspired by the lingering sunlight at that hour and by the beauty of the colour. I took in the fresh air, breathing out a wordless prayer of thanks for the season.
I’ve been taking the girls to the local park about every other day. We walk hand-in-hand to the canal. They run across the bridge to climb the stairs on the other side. These steps lead to a dirt path that runs along the ridge of a man-made hill. This once was a railway line that brought freight cars to the Van Nelle plant. Now it’s like a wall that divides one district from another. On our side there is a canal with its narrow margins of grass. On the other side is a playground and petting zoo. These days, we can’t see much on either side because of the spring growth.
Along our path, the wildflowers and berry bushes have been growing noticeably. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers. We’ve seen the season’s first dragon fly. This is our little nature walk, and I try to make the most of it. We stop to call out the colours of the blooms. We stop to check the shade of green in the blackberries. The girls know they will get to taste them when they turn purple. If we spot a ladybug, we set it on Baby’s finger to crawl up her arm. Little Ren will squat over a train of ants, and she knows not to squash them. Further down the path, we descend another stairway, the stones of which are being pushed out of position by the roots and grass underneath, and we run to the playground on the corner.
That day, I told Baby Jos that it was the first day of summer. She’s been longing for summer, when she and her sister could play in the water. She never really got the concept of spring. Sunny days were summer, and cold days were winter. I pointed out the budding trees and the new flowers, attempting to link spring to fall, when the leaves fell. She repeated, ‘it’s summer!’ with some relief.
It was the solstice. I had watched the long day unfold, waking at four to briefly appreciate the brightening colours in the sky. I had enjoyed every hour of sunlight, morning into afternoon. And, as midnight approached, I stood outside my door to marvel at the final colours of the calendar’s happiest day.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Travelogue 855 – June 22
Citadelpark
In Gent, we stayed at a hotel beside the Scheldt River, just inside the bounds of the medieval city, close to the city’s southern gates (demolished a long time ago). It was a neighbourhood that appeared to be more of a legacy of the imperial era of Belgium, when the industrial revolution had brought something of the old mercantile energy back to Flanders. The houses were snug and stolid, set with humble bits of Jugendstil ornamentation.
One morning, I woke early to make a museum trip on my own. I walked west across the breadth of old Gent, across the Scheldt and across the tongue of land between the two rivers. It only took me fifteen minutes to travel this distance. I traversed the Citadelpark, a generous tract of green urban park set on the site of a post-Napoleonic citadel built.
The park occupied part of a hill that rose like a ridge along the spine of that tongue of land between rivers, a hill that contrasted so starkly with the surrounding Flemish flatlands that it had a name, Blandijnberg, and a long history in the defences of the city. In the age of the Citadel, it must be said, history seemed to have found its rounding off. The French sent no more conquering armies. And the wars of the twentieth century made of the greatest nineteenth-century fortresses quaint hallmarks of futility.
Actually, the French did send one more army, in 1832. But it was in defence of the new Belgian kingdom, rather than in conquest. A year after Belgian independence, the Dutch king invaded. He wanted Flanders back. While the other powers dithered, it was restoration France that came to the rescue. No one outside of Holland objected. It seemed that neutral Belgium had quickly become a vital buffer for the countries in the region.
Well before the Kaiser’s generals projected campaigns across the Belgian frontier, the Citadel had become irrelevant. In the late nineteenth century, when Belgium was eager to count itself among the industrial and colonial powers of Europe, Gent re-imagined the district of the Blandijnberg. The park was planned. The university moved in with new buildings.
Crossing the park, I found a path that led behind a small, artificial waterfall. The park had that kind of moulded feel, like other urban parks surviving from the time before world wars, when park spaces had been designed as sites for the amusement of the city’s families, and the city’s lovers. Designers simulated and enhanced nature, dreaming up a kind of romantic pastoral. I’m sure it would have seemed absurd to simply allow nature to reclaim the hill. Nature for its own sake was not the point.
Crossing the park on the paved roads, I had to dodge cyclists careening around corners with the casual lack of concern for safety of students everywhere. I’m reminded with every adrenaline spike how this district is now, above all else, a university district.
Past the park and back in city streets, the rest of my way was downhill, past facades of the same era as eastward, down to the humble Leie River. The river was crossed in a minute, and I’d arrived at the Bijloke.
Citadelpark
In Gent, we stayed at a hotel beside the Scheldt River, just inside the bounds of the medieval city, close to the city’s southern gates (demolished a long time ago). It was a neighbourhood that appeared to be more of a legacy of the imperial era of Belgium, when the industrial revolution had brought something of the old mercantile energy back to Flanders. The houses were snug and stolid, set with humble bits of Jugendstil ornamentation.
One morning, I woke early to make a museum trip on my own. I walked west across the breadth of old Gent, across the Scheldt and across the tongue of land between the two rivers. It only took me fifteen minutes to travel this distance. I traversed the Citadelpark, a generous tract of green urban park set on the site of a post-Napoleonic citadel built.
The park occupied part of a hill that rose like a ridge along the spine of that tongue of land between rivers, a hill that contrasted so starkly with the surrounding Flemish flatlands that it had a name, Blandijnberg, and a long history in the defences of the city. In the age of the Citadel, it must be said, history seemed to have found its rounding off. The French sent no more conquering armies. And the wars of the twentieth century made of the greatest nineteenth-century fortresses quaint hallmarks of futility.
Actually, the French did send one more army, in 1832. But it was in defence of the new Belgian kingdom, rather than in conquest. A year after Belgian independence, the Dutch king invaded. He wanted Flanders back. While the other powers dithered, it was restoration France that came to the rescue. No one outside of Holland objected. It seemed that neutral Belgium had quickly become a vital buffer for the countries in the region.
Well before the Kaiser’s generals projected campaigns across the Belgian frontier, the Citadel had become irrelevant. In the late nineteenth century, when Belgium was eager to count itself among the industrial and colonial powers of Europe, Gent re-imagined the district of the Blandijnberg. The park was planned. The university moved in with new buildings.
Crossing the park, I found a path that led behind a small, artificial waterfall. The park had that kind of moulded feel, like other urban parks surviving from the time before world wars, when park spaces had been designed as sites for the amusement of the city’s families, and the city’s lovers. Designers simulated and enhanced nature, dreaming up a kind of romantic pastoral. I’m sure it would have seemed absurd to simply allow nature to reclaim the hill. Nature for its own sake was not the point.
Crossing the park on the paved roads, I had to dodge cyclists careening around corners with the casual lack of concern for safety of students everywhere. I’m reminded with every adrenaline spike how this district is now, above all else, a university district.
Past the park and back in city streets, the rest of my way was downhill, past facades of the same era as eastward, down to the humble Leie River. The river was crossed in a minute, and I’d arrived at the Bijloke.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Travelogue 854 – June 11
Gefeliciteerd!
And I interrupt the Gent program again to report on events, momentous events. We celebrated a birthday on the weekend, the fourth birthday of my dear girl, Baby Jos, no longer a baby, but a tall and loud and forceful little girl.
Humans live to be surprised by each other. Habits are comfortable and efficient, but novelty is nourishment. Children have great versatility to surprise, growing so quickly, graced with such stores of energy. Discovery is continual, and it’s mutual. I mean that children’s discovery becomes conscious through the mirroring of adults. And children make the mundane new for adults.
Jos has grown so quickly this year. I am surprised by simple things. I am surprised by how heavy she has become to carry. I am surprised by the muscle in those lithe arms and legs. I am surprised by her humour, a child’s robust and subversive humour. She makes faces; she crosses her eyes; she makes up funny dances. Intelligence glints in her eye.
My Jos is passionate. She howls when she doesn’t get what she wants. She tells me she loves me, and then she tells me to go away. She laughs with joy when cartoon characters sing on TV. She cheers when I bring home treats. All of it I enjoy without reservation, encouraging her to enjoy.
My Jos is not shy. When the guests arrive at her birthday party, she greets them herself. If they have brought gifts, she asks about them right away. When it’s time for photos, she is quick to take a pretty pose. And when it’s time to blow the candles out, she’s excited and exhibits no stage fright. When people sing for her, she is openly delighted.
Baby Jos anticipated the party for days, thinking often of the cake and ice cream and gifts. She spent days reasoning forcefully with her younger sister about the privileges of birthdays. “It’s not your birthday, Ren. It’s mine.” Little Ren is unconvinced.
The two share everything, though not always peacefully. When there is peace, it’s often due to Little Ren’s idolization of her big sister. They play games together; they pretend. Baby Jos comes up with most games, and Little Ren repeats.
One morning, they’re playing dress-up. They’re rubbing Legos across their faces. It’s lipstick, they explain. They’re banging the Legos against their palms. It’s face cream. They rub their faces again. They apply the cream to their hair. They behind their backs and over their shoulders. They’re dressing, they say. They are perfect mimics, and it’s clear they have watched their mother putting on her bra.
Four years old and starting school soon. I am overcome!
Gefeliciteerd!
And I interrupt the Gent program again to report on events, momentous events. We celebrated a birthday on the weekend, the fourth birthday of my dear girl, Baby Jos, no longer a baby, but a tall and loud and forceful little girl.
Humans live to be surprised by each other. Habits are comfortable and efficient, but novelty is nourishment. Children have great versatility to surprise, growing so quickly, graced with such stores of energy. Discovery is continual, and it’s mutual. I mean that children’s discovery becomes conscious through the mirroring of adults. And children make the mundane new for adults.
Jos has grown so quickly this year. I am surprised by simple things. I am surprised by how heavy she has become to carry. I am surprised by the muscle in those lithe arms and legs. I am surprised by her humour, a child’s robust and subversive humour. She makes faces; she crosses her eyes; she makes up funny dances. Intelligence glints in her eye.
My Jos is passionate. She howls when she doesn’t get what she wants. She tells me she loves me, and then she tells me to go away. She laughs with joy when cartoon characters sing on TV. She cheers when I bring home treats. All of it I enjoy without reservation, encouraging her to enjoy.
My Jos is not shy. When the guests arrive at her birthday party, she greets them herself. If they have brought gifts, she asks about them right away. When it’s time for photos, she is quick to take a pretty pose. And when it’s time to blow the candles out, she’s excited and exhibits no stage fright. When people sing for her, she is openly delighted.
Baby Jos anticipated the party for days, thinking often of the cake and ice cream and gifts. She spent days reasoning forcefully with her younger sister about the privileges of birthdays. “It’s not your birthday, Ren. It’s mine.” Little Ren is unconvinced.
The two share everything, though not always peacefully. When there is peace, it’s often due to Little Ren’s idolization of her big sister. They play games together; they pretend. Baby Jos comes up with most games, and Little Ren repeats.
One morning, they’re playing dress-up. They’re rubbing Legos across their faces. It’s lipstick, they explain. They’re banging the Legos against their palms. It’s face cream. They rub their faces again. They apply the cream to their hair. They behind their backs and over their shoulders. They’re dressing, they say. They are perfect mimics, and it’s clear they have watched their mother putting on her bra.
Four years old and starting school soon. I am overcome!
Monday, June 10, 2019
Travelogue 853 – June 10
Processions
We had had good luck with weather. Our days in Gent had been the sort that make you want to sit outside, gathering the spring sunshine while you had it. Outside Sint-Baafskerk, as I’ve said, the square was bound on one side by a long line of cafes, and all of them had rows of tables outside. The tables and their wicker seats were packed tightly into partitioned areas nearly as big as the spaces indoors. And each café had outdoor heaters, installed above the storefront windows for the first row of tables or set upon poles for the tables further from the doors. I was quick to convince the girls they wanted juices and snacks, so I had an opportunity to have a beer and recuperate in the sun.
There’s a lot I wanted to see in this town. The trip was research. I’m writing a book set in Gent. But sightseeing was tiring work.
Fortunately, all was close at hand. Following the curving line of bars in Sint-Baarsplein, we passed the Lakenhalle into the next square, and then onto the street called Botermarkt that led up the slight hill to its intersection with Hoogpoort. Here, the Gothic broke out like ivy gone riot all over the buildings. Most of it was self-conscious nineteenth-century restoration. But I was not unaware that this intersection formed, in actual fact, one hub of the Gothic town itself.
I speculated that it was on the site of the kitschy old bar on the corner that the old guild of crossbowmen, Sint-Jorisgilde, had been housed. Through the town’s glory years, this guild, one of the oldest, had led in war and they had led in civic and religious processions.
I would have given a lot to have had a window opened in time so I could watch a medieval procession in this era, when the civilization of the Middle Ages was at its most codified, when ritual was most elaborate, and when the independent city states in northern Europe were at their freest and proudest. Originally processions were church occasions, but they evolved into expressions of local pride. The bridge between church and city was often the city’s patron saint. No self-respecting city could do without a relic of the patron saint, and some story linking the saint to the city’s history, no matter how improbable. On the saint’s day, the city and its mythos were celebrated.
The processions provided timely applications of glue to hold together enclaves like Gent, standing against titanic nation-building forces like the good dukes of Burgundy. I read recently about one of Gent’s many rebellions against the feudal authority, in 1467. Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was making his first entry into the city after his father’s death. It was the ritual acknowledgement of his new authority over the town. Unwisely, he chose to make his entry during the city’s favourite religious festival, a two-day procession to the nearby town of Houtem to honour Saint Lieven. Hundreds of townspeople retuning the day after the duke’s entry, started rioting in the Vrijdagmarkt.
Processions
We had had good luck with weather. Our days in Gent had been the sort that make you want to sit outside, gathering the spring sunshine while you had it. Outside Sint-Baafskerk, as I’ve said, the square was bound on one side by a long line of cafes, and all of them had rows of tables outside. The tables and their wicker seats were packed tightly into partitioned areas nearly as big as the spaces indoors. And each café had outdoor heaters, installed above the storefront windows for the first row of tables or set upon poles for the tables further from the doors. I was quick to convince the girls they wanted juices and snacks, so I had an opportunity to have a beer and recuperate in the sun.
There’s a lot I wanted to see in this town. The trip was research. I’m writing a book set in Gent. But sightseeing was tiring work.
Fortunately, all was close at hand. Following the curving line of bars in Sint-Baarsplein, we passed the Lakenhalle into the next square, and then onto the street called Botermarkt that led up the slight hill to its intersection with Hoogpoort. Here, the Gothic broke out like ivy gone riot all over the buildings. Most of it was self-conscious nineteenth-century restoration. But I was not unaware that this intersection formed, in actual fact, one hub of the Gothic town itself.
I speculated that it was on the site of the kitschy old bar on the corner that the old guild of crossbowmen, Sint-Jorisgilde, had been housed. Through the town’s glory years, this guild, one of the oldest, had led in war and they had led in civic and religious processions.
I would have given a lot to have had a window opened in time so I could watch a medieval procession in this era, when the civilization of the Middle Ages was at its most codified, when ritual was most elaborate, and when the independent city states in northern Europe were at their freest and proudest. Originally processions were church occasions, but they evolved into expressions of local pride. The bridge between church and city was often the city’s patron saint. No self-respecting city could do without a relic of the patron saint, and some story linking the saint to the city’s history, no matter how improbable. On the saint’s day, the city and its mythos were celebrated.
The processions provided timely applications of glue to hold together enclaves like Gent, standing against titanic nation-building forces like the good dukes of Burgundy. I read recently about one of Gent’s many rebellions against the feudal authority, in 1467. Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was making his first entry into the city after his father’s death. It was the ritual acknowledgement of his new authority over the town. Unwisely, he chose to make his entry during the city’s favourite religious festival, a two-day procession to the nearby town of Houtem to honour Saint Lieven. Hundreds of townspeople retuning the day after the duke’s entry, started rioting in the Vrijdagmarkt.
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