Travelogue 874 – October 22
Frog Days

Out the window, above the roofs of Piet Heinstraat in The Hague, I see only blue sky. There isn’t a cloud in sight. The sun is low. Cyclists rushing home at day’s end along the narrow brick street are squinting into the western sun. It doesn’t slow them down. They cruise along, never hesitating at the speed bumps. And everyone is bundled up, though it was nearly fifteen degrees all day. It’s as though we were impatient for the ambiguity of summer’s long farewell to be done. When autumnal clouds moved in, we threw on our best winter coats and raced into the showers on our bikes. Still, we haven’t seen any temperatures remotely approaching freezing. In fact, now the forecasts say that the weeks of daily rain may be coming to a close. Certainly, those blue skies I see are heartening.

The view out the café window is far more involved than clear skies. The quaint clutter of this neighbourhood predominates, a clutter made up of three- and four-storey structures, lined up in close order along the tiny lane that is crowded with bikes, bikes moving or bikes parked in messy rows. Each narrow building is fronted with brick of yellow or red, and fitted with humble but distinctive features, whether gables or square jutting bay windows or Jugendstil stained glass or tiles.

Another lane empties into this one, just opposite my window. It’s just as narrow, but long and straight. It diminishes into distances washed in brick red. The houses there are more uniform than the ones on Piet Heinstraat. The latter is like a hip high street, blessed with boutiques, health foods, collectibles, and expensive coffee. On the corner outside, there is a store advertising comic book paraphernalia, toys and apparel, DVDs, models and books. In a transom window upstairs, above a balcony door cracked open for a fresh western breeze, there stand a family of wooden toy horses, painted pink and black. Above that transom window rises a simple gable, chimney-like and straight-edged, set inside mansard roofing shingled not in tile, but in asphalt. Decorating the highest metre of the gable is a crude relief of a rising sun’s rays. Set upon the very top ridge is a celebrant Kermit, raising his plastic arms toward the south, as though exultant that the sun has survived another tilt of the planet and even now warms the backs of his cousins in equatorial lands.

Travelogue 873 – October 10
Thousands Must Die

“Kurdish,” is her answer. I teach an evening class for adults. Before class starts, before most students have arrived, I’m asking what languages are represented in the room. Among four students, we have four mother tongues. L tells us, “Kurdish,” and my heart sinks. I know already she’s from Syria. I didn’t know she was Kurdish. She has replied without any emotion.

I ask her if her family is safe. It’s an intrusive question, and I might not have asked it if I had thought about it first. But I felt bad for her immediately. I felt guilty about our president. I felt ashamed by this one man’s shamelessness, and about my nation’s powerlessness to provide the slightest check. Policy is whim in the White House, and so little guided by thought, or really any recognizable internal process, that I wonder whether the best check might not just be a twenty-four-hour snooze function. Chances are the man wouldn’t recognize his decisions the next day. He would denounce the same as liberal plots. Meanwhile, thousands must die because we can’t figure out what impeachment means.

I utter some mild words of solace for L’s benefit. No one else in the class seems to understand our conversation. It could be they didn’t hear her. Maybe they are confused by her bland tone. Maybe they aren’t following the news, or don’t know what Kurdish signifies. L doesn’t respond any further. She is occupied with her phone, and I’m thinking it might very well be an effort to find out some news about her family. She may just be texting about her evening plans. There is no affect at all to judge by.

We are studying language in this classroom, and I’m reflecting during these quiet moments before class begins that language is only one plane of communication. L is very effectively communicating what it’s like living in the world that men like the U.S. president and Mr Erdogan seem intent on fostering, a world of random cruelty and persecution with impunity. People find themselves targets suddenly. Old prejudices flare. Overnight, alliances shift, and, just that quickly, their families are on the run - again. The failure of reason to explain reduces all values to survival and vendetta. Expression is reduced to flight and silence, violence and passivity. That’s how the ninety-nine percent were born to live. So says Don Jr at the country club, with an indifferent shrug. The waiter quietly prays for justice behind an impassive face.

Travelogue 872 – October 8
The Random and the Lost

“I want to say this with great solemnity,” Pat Robertson announced yesterday, “the president of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen.” He’s speaking about Trump’s sudden abandonment of the Kurds in Syria.

These times defy easy analysis. We can say the televangelist’s god is a capricious one. Indeed, that seems to be the central message of the god of our times: I am Random. Which is more random, the sudden pronouncement of Trump that the Turks have free reign in Syria or the pronouncement that this is the trigger for Robertson’s god’s displeasure? But these are just details in a sea of senselessness.

The sea here off the shores of Holland feels no need to provide sense to humanity. The sea doesn’t bow to thought. It bows to the winds and tides. It provides us only the wisdom of water, water set free to the skies, water for the clouds and the rain. These are the real principles of our lives.

We’ve left the house already when I realize I’ve left the rag. Baby and I are walking past our neighbour’s doors. Baby is holding my hand and singing. She’s got her jacket on; she’s got her helmet. I’m relieved we made it out of the house early. I run through the long catalogue of things I must carry with me now that the weather has turned. It’s been raining for about three weeks already. You would think I would have this routine down. But there are so many details. It’s not raining at the moment, but it rained during the night. That means everything is dripping. That means the bike seats will be wet. That’s right, I need the rag. I don’t want Baby to spend the day with a wet behind. We turn back. We’ll be late again.

That’s the depth of philosophical principles here. Maybe we lost the “mandate of heaven” long ago. That’s why the rain never moves on. That’s why no one alerts us with these pronouncements when we get close to the line, when we might “permit” things to happen.

“ … if he permits this to happen,” Robertson says about Trump. It’s a strangely passive phrase, given the circumstances. The president is no witness to disaster here. Disaster has been his fiat.

Robertson is a man serving a god. He unleashes nothing unholy on the world, does he? He accepts his fate from unearthly forces. His flock fall in line with faith, or they permit awful things to happen. They make history with these sorts of demure gestures. They submit. Five times a day they surrender. Things happen. Mandates are granted; they are taken away. Masters are feckless; ministers are fey. The days turn. More clouds.