Travelogue 862 – July 31
A Nice Breeze
I welcome the cool breezes. The weather has turned. It will rain today. We won’t be able to ride bikes, but we’ll have the relief of some fresh air to breathe and some cool air against our skin. We’ve been through two record-breaking blasts of heat already this summer.
We suffered in the heat. It felt like we would suffocate. Menna made the comment that we look forward to summer through the damp chill of winter and spring, making for too many months of anticipation. Then when the summer comes, we suffer. This kind of heat has a debilitating effect on me. Cold can be dispiriting, but mind and body still function. If anything, they are stimulated. Heat slows me down. Quick thoughts congeal into a thick syrup. My skin breaks out in heat rashes. When I run, there is little pleasure and my times are embarrassing.
These intervals of cool sea breezes feel like awakening. The walking sleep of hot summer can start to pall, like a nap that’s gone on too long. You’re more tired than before the nap; you have a headache. Cool air is like a tonic.
The rewards of hot and sleepy summer are tied to the lazy passage of time. My girls love the sunshine. Their energy levels don’t suffer. And we have time to play. They lighten my experience immeasurably.
Yesterday was muggy. It wasn’t the hottest day, so I felt like I could move. The hot sun was broken at regular intervals by lovely white clouds. It was a picture of the best kind of summer’s day. If it hadn’t been preceded by such extreme heat, it would have been perfect.
We made it perfect, anyway, walking together to the ‘Dakpark’, a park built onto the roof of a kilometre-long strip mall. It’s a surprisingly pleasant stretch of green grass and clean walkways. In the middle, there’s a fountain where children play, a long shallow basin in dark stone fitted with small fountains shooting water straight up in random order into the breezes. The girls were enchanted. They waded tentatively into the water. They followed other children as they ran, smiling to watch their antics.
One parent was filling water balloons from the fountain nozzles. Baby Jos held hers in both hands like something precious. She brought it home with us, and only then did she throw it against the pavement to watch it burst, laughing with pure delight.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
Travelogue 861 – July 26
The Toilets
I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman History. For anyone interested in a deeper study of Roman life, there was also a Classics Department. The purpose of that department was a study of ancient languages and civilization. I would have liked to have taken more courses in classics, but I was a history student. There was something of a friendly rivalry between the departments. Classics students studied Roman toilets (so we said,) while we serious history students tackled the big issues. Still, I was somewhat envious. I found immersion in an ancient language and culture very tempting.
In Gent, I thought about the Roman toilets. Civilization is made of its details. An understanding of it requires making time for the toilets. Four years in university is so short. As a history student, I had four years to find my way through several millennia of European politics and culture. No time to smell the roses, or the sewers, as it happens. It’s too bad. It’s the knowledge of the day-to-day that transports us, creates real understanding and empathy.
Setting aside medieval Gent, an example: many of us have absorbed an outline of Muslim history. It’s topical and relevant. We read short histories, and we understand something more than we did before. That’s good. But how many have heard the call to prayer – not in movies, but in person? The adhan is integral to the mundane and tactile experience of Islam. I’m guessing it would be difficult for someone who grew up in the Middle East to separate historical Islam from the sensory Islam, the sound of the adhan, and the prayer itself. Taking the thought further, how many have heard the call often enough and in enough settings to have a feeling for how it changes according to country, area, city or village? What do we know about Islam, current or past?
Making a decision to write fiction, I have been confronted by this old (false) dichotomy between history and civilization, between events and experience. A story about Gent can never be a true accounting. Research is an effort to align fiction with reality as closely as possible with finite resources. They never merge. They just hover near for an instant.
In the city museum, I had walked across the huge floor map of Gent. It was a reminder how my study started. The city was born in the mind as a map. Landmarks were discovered, in time and space. Maps were histories, and histories were maps. Continuing on, I inevitably wanted to feel the ground of the place under my feet. Detail is a kind of descent into the map. Detail is infinite: shadow and texture and the passage of every minute of the day.
One fun feature of the castle at Gent are the toilets, apparently a luxury for the counts and their families: private toilets built into the castle walls. The toilets hung over the moat, and waste was thus disposed of immediately. Bored commoners could watch from the road for noble faeces dropping into the water.
The Toilets
I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman History. For anyone interested in a deeper study of Roman life, there was also a Classics Department. The purpose of that department was a study of ancient languages and civilization. I would have liked to have taken more courses in classics, but I was a history student. There was something of a friendly rivalry between the departments. Classics students studied Roman toilets (so we said,) while we serious history students tackled the big issues. Still, I was somewhat envious. I found immersion in an ancient language and culture very tempting.
In Gent, I thought about the Roman toilets. Civilization is made of its details. An understanding of it requires making time for the toilets. Four years in university is so short. As a history student, I had four years to find my way through several millennia of European politics and culture. No time to smell the roses, or the sewers, as it happens. It’s too bad. It’s the knowledge of the day-to-day that transports us, creates real understanding and empathy.
Setting aside medieval Gent, an example: many of us have absorbed an outline of Muslim history. It’s topical and relevant. We read short histories, and we understand something more than we did before. That’s good. But how many have heard the call to prayer – not in movies, but in person? The adhan is integral to the mundane and tactile experience of Islam. I’m guessing it would be difficult for someone who grew up in the Middle East to separate historical Islam from the sensory Islam, the sound of the adhan, and the prayer itself. Taking the thought further, how many have heard the call often enough and in enough settings to have a feeling for how it changes according to country, area, city or village? What do we know about Islam, current or past?
Making a decision to write fiction, I have been confronted by this old (false) dichotomy between history and civilization, between events and experience. A story about Gent can never be a true accounting. Research is an effort to align fiction with reality as closely as possible with finite resources. They never merge. They just hover near for an instant.
In the city museum, I had walked across the huge floor map of Gent. It was a reminder how my study started. The city was born in the mind as a map. Landmarks were discovered, in time and space. Maps were histories, and histories were maps. Continuing on, I inevitably wanted to feel the ground of the place under my feet. Detail is a kind of descent into the map. Detail is infinite: shadow and texture and the passage of every minute of the day.
One fun feature of the castle at Gent are the toilets, apparently a luxury for the counts and their families: private toilets built into the castle walls. The toilets hung over the moat, and waste was thus disposed of immediately. Bored commoners could watch from the road for noble faeces dropping into the water.
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Travelogue 860 – July 18
Status of Seasons
I go for my walk with the girls. It’s evening. This is later than we usually go. We’re giving Mama some time with her guests.
It’s been chilly for summer. Clouds come and go, never freeing the sky entirely. The girls have on their jackets.
When we get to the park, Baby always races ahead, while Little Ren stops at the bridge to look for ducks. Children enjoy their rituals. And I enjoy what they enjoy.
Watching Baby running makes me so happy. I can’t say why precisely. It could be the sense of freedom expressed in a child’s run. It could be her pride. She likes showing me how fast she can run. I look forward to this moment whenever I we get time to go out.
At the top of the stairs, I present them with their lollipops. That’s the ritual. Then we walk along the path where the train tracks used to be, becoming quite narrow this time of year, crowded by the brush on either side. We talk about what we see today, the flowers and the insects and the rabbit poop.
Much of the brush crowding our little path consists of blackberry bushes. Little Ren fell in the thorns once, so now we are very respectful of the long shoots the bushes throw in our way. We have been watching the progress of the berries. Many are ripe now. We pick a few samples. Some are tart. Baby makes a face. She calls things that are tart ‘winky’ because they make her wink.
The sun is lower than usual because it’s evening. Its light is filtered through the heavy foliage of the season. When we emerge into sunlight, we stand still and absorb the warmth. When we resume our walk into the shade, we are chilly again.
The details define the moment: the angle of the sun, the chance weather, the progress charted by the season. Every week makes a difference in the state of the season, its leaves, its fruits, the blossoms and the insect populations.
None of that accounts for the subjective experience of seasons. Because I work in a school, seasons have their cycles of stress and release. Summer is becoming sweet just now, the relief of approaching vacation time blowing in like fresh spring air.
The accumulation of detail feeds any scene. Fiction is composed of setting and experience. So it was that my every step in Gent counted. How might the sun strike the cobblestones of one narrow street, say a small alley running east and west? How would the line of that sun divide the brick wall rising to the north? How would that line rise through the afternoon, and how would the warmth stored in the brick feel to the touch? How would the complex of colours in that small space be affected? How differently might the brick have looked then?
Status of Seasons
I go for my walk with the girls. It’s evening. This is later than we usually go. We’re giving Mama some time with her guests.
It’s been chilly for summer. Clouds come and go, never freeing the sky entirely. The girls have on their jackets.
When we get to the park, Baby always races ahead, while Little Ren stops at the bridge to look for ducks. Children enjoy their rituals. And I enjoy what they enjoy.
Watching Baby running makes me so happy. I can’t say why precisely. It could be the sense of freedom expressed in a child’s run. It could be her pride. She likes showing me how fast she can run. I look forward to this moment whenever I we get time to go out.
At the top of the stairs, I present them with their lollipops. That’s the ritual. Then we walk along the path where the train tracks used to be, becoming quite narrow this time of year, crowded by the brush on either side. We talk about what we see today, the flowers and the insects and the rabbit poop.
Much of the brush crowding our little path consists of blackberry bushes. Little Ren fell in the thorns once, so now we are very respectful of the long shoots the bushes throw in our way. We have been watching the progress of the berries. Many are ripe now. We pick a few samples. Some are tart. Baby makes a face. She calls things that are tart ‘winky’ because they make her wink.
The sun is lower than usual because it’s evening. Its light is filtered through the heavy foliage of the season. When we emerge into sunlight, we stand still and absorb the warmth. When we resume our walk into the shade, we are chilly again.
The details define the moment: the angle of the sun, the chance weather, the progress charted by the season. Every week makes a difference in the state of the season, its leaves, its fruits, the blossoms and the insect populations.
None of that accounts for the subjective experience of seasons. Because I work in a school, seasons have their cycles of stress and release. Summer is becoming sweet just now, the relief of approaching vacation time blowing in like fresh spring air.
The accumulation of detail feeds any scene. Fiction is composed of setting and experience. So it was that my every step in Gent counted. How might the sun strike the cobblestones of one narrow street, say a small alley running east and west? How would the line of that sun divide the brick wall rising to the north? How would that line rise through the afternoon, and how would the warmth stored in the brick feel to the touch? How would the complex of colours in that small space be affected? How differently might the brick have looked then?
Friday, July 12, 2019
Travelogue 859 – July 12
Stone by Stone
I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman history. His focus was late Empire, but his courses covered all the thousand years or so of Roman history, and quite a bit of historiography along the way. The old question, ‘when did the empire really fall,’ for example, prompted all sorts of questions. If the Byzantines called themselves Romans; if Charlemagne called himself a Roman Emperor; if Latin was taught in the schools of the British Empire until the twentieth century, then how do we define the empire and Roman civilization? Was Constantine more recognizable in a Byzantine context than in a pre-Augustan context? Et cetera.
We can agree that Rome changed, though we can’t agree on what precisely Rome was. We can agree that Rome fell, though not on when, or even on what we mean by ‘fall’. I love history. I love its riddles. The mysteries keep us engaged and add a human element. Behind the gradual change are everyday decisions, like the collective shrug over another accusation of rape on the part of the president of the U.S., let’s say.
Gent had its rise and its fall. The rise was gradual, the product of generations of good trading decisions and hard work, and the result of many successful negotiations with the counts of Flanders. One can imagine the expediency in each decision. Families knew each other. Merchants traded with people they knew and trusted. The counts had more important matters to attend to, like pressing campaigns to pursue against neighbouring nobility, marriage alliances to negotiate, hunts and banquets to arrange. No decision happens in a void. So city-states like Gent gathered piecemeal rights and privileges that gave them monopolies of wealth and influence. With these, they made themselves an irritation and an indispensable asset to the counts.
In the thirteenth century, the counts acknowledged the importance of Gent, building the castle Gravensteen. The name means ‘count’s stone’, a proud reference to the counts' contribution to a city being rebuilt in stone because of its new wealth. His was going to be THE stone house. It was suitably impressive, towering over the town and its bustling port on the River Leie, surviving more than seven centuries until my family could arrive and our girls could run madly along its ramparts.
The place didn’t serve long as a place of residence. The counts of Flanders were a peripatetic lot, as were most medieval nobility and royalty. They visited less and less often, and within two centuries, the castle was used primarily as a court and prison. This was its manifestation in the era I’ve been writing about.
Stone by Stone
I studied history in university. My mentor taught Roman history. His focus was late Empire, but his courses covered all the thousand years or so of Roman history, and quite a bit of historiography along the way. The old question, ‘when did the empire really fall,’ for example, prompted all sorts of questions. If the Byzantines called themselves Romans; if Charlemagne called himself a Roman Emperor; if Latin was taught in the schools of the British Empire until the twentieth century, then how do we define the empire and Roman civilization? Was Constantine more recognizable in a Byzantine context than in a pre-Augustan context? Et cetera.
We can agree that Rome changed, though we can’t agree on what precisely Rome was. We can agree that Rome fell, though not on when, or even on what we mean by ‘fall’. I love history. I love its riddles. The mysteries keep us engaged and add a human element. Behind the gradual change are everyday decisions, like the collective shrug over another accusation of rape on the part of the president of the U.S., let’s say.
Gent had its rise and its fall. The rise was gradual, the product of generations of good trading decisions and hard work, and the result of many successful negotiations with the counts of Flanders. One can imagine the expediency in each decision. Families knew each other. Merchants traded with people they knew and trusted. The counts had more important matters to attend to, like pressing campaigns to pursue against neighbouring nobility, marriage alliances to negotiate, hunts and banquets to arrange. No decision happens in a void. So city-states like Gent gathered piecemeal rights and privileges that gave them monopolies of wealth and influence. With these, they made themselves an irritation and an indispensable asset to the counts.
In the thirteenth century, the counts acknowledged the importance of Gent, building the castle Gravensteen. The name means ‘count’s stone’, a proud reference to the counts' contribution to a city being rebuilt in stone because of its new wealth. His was going to be THE stone house. It was suitably impressive, towering over the town and its bustling port on the River Leie, surviving more than seven centuries until my family could arrive and our girls could run madly along its ramparts.
The place didn’t serve long as a place of residence. The counts of Flanders were a peripatetic lot, as were most medieval nobility and royalty. They visited less and less often, and within two centuries, the castle was used primarily as a court and prison. This was its manifestation in the era I’ve been writing about.
Sunday, July 07, 2019
Travelogue 858 – July 7
The Count’s Castle
Baby Jos was very excited to visit a castle. It was our first stop in Gent, the Count’s Castle, or Gravensteen. We stood outside the high grey walls to take pictures together, documenting our first real castle. Inside the gates, the girls ran back and forth across the rough flagstones of the courtyard while Mama and Papa listened to audio guides. We entered the buildings of the castle, and we moved slowly from chamber to chamber, absorbing what we could of the setting and history while reining in the wild enthusiasm of the children.
Little Ren wanted badly to play the small harp standing in the countess’s tiny chamber. The instrument was likely a sturdy replica, but, no, we couldn’t let her play. Museum guests stood in semi-circle, frowning as they listened to the same audio passage, frowning at Little Ren in her distress.
Baby Jos wanted to race up the narrow, circling staircases, regardless of who stood in the way. At the top, between slats guarding the crenellations, we could see the sprawling town. At that height, our babies panicked us at every turn. They continued making dashes one way and then another, as though possessed. We captured them; we led them by hand back to the stairway. Down again we wound, down the cold, constricted wells of spiralling steps, where the air was close and smelled of ancient stone.
Standing at each vantage point, my task as papa was to track racing, tumbling babies. My task as writer was to see the living map, to make the floorplan come alive and speak to me. It’s a tremendous challenge, actually, seeing through time. It requires much more than a vacation day with the family. It takes concentration and imagination. It takes a freed mind, a capacity to daydream. That’s not easy while monitoring crazy children.
I sigh now to think, ‘I chose to write fiction.’ How foolish. That’s life: we choose things without knowledge of them. That’s how it works with time and matter. We choose, and then we learn. Fiction requires varieties of work and commitment that feel somewhat alien, alien to my character and alien also to the zeitgeist.
Of course it requires work. In these days of triumphalist and angry capitalism, it’s no great challenge to conceive of art as hard labour. Anything good must emerge from labour and pain. That’s quite easy to get. But there’s another side to creation that excites more suspicion. Stories also require time spent in active imagination. And imagination is known to keep company with lazy fellow-travellers like ‘reflection; and ‘daydreaming’. And who can abide all the time that authors spend reading? The only reading worthy of our age happens in airports. And frankly, it’s better if the books are Harvard-edited manuals of business management.
So it is that I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I love stories. I feel guilty that I would spend precious vacation time in a place like Gent. I should be more functional, building status with names like Ibiza or Tuscany. I feel guilty about moments stolen in medieval alleyways, when I ought to be earning money or muscle tone. I feel guilty even about the time I don’t have, the hours that exist only in longings, time I would invest in dreaming, contemplation, meditation, speculation, reflection and wonder.
The Count’s Castle
Baby Jos was very excited to visit a castle. It was our first stop in Gent, the Count’s Castle, or Gravensteen. We stood outside the high grey walls to take pictures together, documenting our first real castle. Inside the gates, the girls ran back and forth across the rough flagstones of the courtyard while Mama and Papa listened to audio guides. We entered the buildings of the castle, and we moved slowly from chamber to chamber, absorbing what we could of the setting and history while reining in the wild enthusiasm of the children.
Little Ren wanted badly to play the small harp standing in the countess’s tiny chamber. The instrument was likely a sturdy replica, but, no, we couldn’t let her play. Museum guests stood in semi-circle, frowning as they listened to the same audio passage, frowning at Little Ren in her distress.
Baby Jos wanted to race up the narrow, circling staircases, regardless of who stood in the way. At the top, between slats guarding the crenellations, we could see the sprawling town. At that height, our babies panicked us at every turn. They continued making dashes one way and then another, as though possessed. We captured them; we led them by hand back to the stairway. Down again we wound, down the cold, constricted wells of spiralling steps, where the air was close and smelled of ancient stone.
Standing at each vantage point, my task as papa was to track racing, tumbling babies. My task as writer was to see the living map, to make the floorplan come alive and speak to me. It’s a tremendous challenge, actually, seeing through time. It requires much more than a vacation day with the family. It takes concentration and imagination. It takes a freed mind, a capacity to daydream. That’s not easy while monitoring crazy children.
I sigh now to think, ‘I chose to write fiction.’ How foolish. That’s life: we choose things without knowledge of them. That’s how it works with time and matter. We choose, and then we learn. Fiction requires varieties of work and commitment that feel somewhat alien, alien to my character and alien also to the zeitgeist.
Of course it requires work. In these days of triumphalist and angry capitalism, it’s no great challenge to conceive of art as hard labour. Anything good must emerge from labour and pain. That’s quite easy to get. But there’s another side to creation that excites more suspicion. Stories also require time spent in active imagination. And imagination is known to keep company with lazy fellow-travellers like ‘reflection; and ‘daydreaming’. And who can abide all the time that authors spend reading? The only reading worthy of our age happens in airports. And frankly, it’s better if the books are Harvard-edited manuals of business management.
So it is that I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I love stories. I feel guilty that I would spend precious vacation time in a place like Gent. I should be more functional, building status with names like Ibiza or Tuscany. I feel guilty about moments stolen in medieval alleyways, when I ought to be earning money or muscle tone. I feel guilty even about the time I don’t have, the hours that exist only in longings, time I would invest in dreaming, contemplation, meditation, speculation, reflection and wonder.
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