Travelogue 913 – May 30
Spring Update

The grass is growing high. The dandelions are old and spent. Treetops are full of leaves, bright green with spring sap. The first red poppies have bloomed. The sun has been shining without much intermission for weeks.

The girls and I walk along the raised path that follows the abandoned train route. We monitor the wild growth along the sides of the path. We’ve watched the wildflowers cycle through their various seasons, the daffodils and daisies and the dandelions. In summer, the thorny bushes will bear their little blackberries. Little Ren runs and runs. Baby Jos is more cautious. She’s afraid of the big bees. She wants me to carry her past them.

If we go late enough in the day, the shadows are long and the horizontal sunlight strong. In the cooling shade of the wild brush, the insects swarm. We bring bites back on our exposed skin.

When the sun is highest, it shines on the stretch of concrete in front of our front door, freed from the impediments of one building or another. We fill the blue plastic pool with air and then with water. The girls lie in it; they splash each other; they pour cold water from one container to another, little pitcher to little cup, little cup to clear glass. Today they played with water balloons, carrying them around for long minutes as prized toys before tossing them into the air.

On my own walks, I see that football practice has begun again. I see the young boys running and kicking, doing drills, some in blue jerseys and some in black. I walk by the pitches under sun that’s getting hot and in shadow that is still cool. The spring weather has been ideal, sun and temperature balanced as ends of a beam on its lever. I stop in the sun to write on a little pas that fits in my back pocket.

The sheep are progressing now along the other side of that road to Schiedam, advancing patch by patch of unruly grass toward the west, and now they’re grazing on the strip of land separating the road from the train track, in the shadow of the elevated Metro track. They are migrating toward Schiedam, inching toward that train-and-Metro station with the zig-zagging roofline. When they have purged the area, will they board a train back to Limburg?

Travelogue 912 – May 29
Sad Days

My thoughts go out to the people of my old hometown, Minneapolis. There’s nothing I can say about the tragedy that hasn’t been said, and still, there are times you have to say something, nevertheless.

The political situation in America becomes more egregious every day, and, though it’s thousands of miles away, it weighs on me. I’m particularly downhearted today. It’s a depressing time to be American. Power has been seized at every level by the very worst the country has to offer. Of course there are honourable cops and even honourable politicians in America, but the agenda is being dominated by the most revolting and amoral of people.

Regarding the police crisis, my wife said it best, shocked as she was by the Floyd video, that a stray dog in the street would be handled with more human feeling than this poor man. What has happened to these policemen that they feel entitled to be monsters?

When Trump was elected, we might have been tempted to strike heroic poses; we will overcome, we said. Day after grinding day, year after year, we find ourselves more disgusted and demoralized, less heroic.

Trump, for his part, spends his time telling us in startlingly clear language that he will honour no election that doesn’t provide him four more years of power. He orders his Stepford Press Secretary, who has voted by mail-in ballot many times, to argue against mail-in ballots. He comments quite openly that Republicans would lose any election in which all the people have a vote.

Nobody wants violence. So provide people with options! How do you suppose people should respond to a system that kills them randomly and with impunity; that breaks the same laws they hold citizens to; and that openly tells citizens that any vote against them will be nullified?

Republicans, it’s clear you enjoy the game. It’s clear you enjoy winning. When it’s increasingly clear you can’t win without cheating, be careful. Most grifters don’t advertise they’re cheating and then gloat. Okay, that’s just your style. Best to think twice, though, before you back people into corners who have reason to fear for their lives.

Travelogue 911 – May 27
Catharto Auto Bio

I’ve been writing about story-telling again. It’s hard to say what I find so absorbing. I feel sometimes I’ve been working for a lifetime through that one reference in Aristotle to the catharsis of tragedy. Maybe it signifies nothing more than this: that the stories we entertain are the angels and the demons of our own stories. A superficial example might be my partiality to mystery novels, perhaps symptomatic of a vain belief that there are answers to be found for those who search. I also love sci-fi, which might just be a theatre for those who still believe in theology.

But what I do know is how complex our relationships can be with our own stories. We embroider our stories. We soil them. We iron them and fold them. We bleach them, and we dye them. What we can’t seem to do is hang them in sunlight and see them all of a piece with the sure eye of a critic. That’s what the gods and judges are for.

I spent years writing memoir, trying to fashion truth from autobiography, or from a wrenching chapter of it. I can tell you how valuable it is to try, and how foolhardy it is to expect to achieve truth.

One product of that effort was my book, “Careful So”. Five years ago, I published this memoir about my first two years in Ethiopia. My friend, artist Troy Zaushny, created the fantastic cover art for the book. He also created a beautiful companion piece, a print called ‘The Promised’. I never really promoted the book; I was too self-conscious. But I’ve been thinking about it again. Please, dear reader, take a look at Troy’s site. The book is also available for e-readers on Amazon, Lulu, Apple Books, and Nook. A link to the Lulu edition is helpfully provided to the left.

Travelogue 910 – May 25
Blade Runner and Game of Thrones

I don’t remember seeing Movie 5 from my Facebook movie series when it came to the theatres in 1982. I’m pretty sure I did; I just don’t remember it. The effect of this movie grows over time. I believe everyone feels that way about “Blade Runner”. It had a rather lacklustre opening, and now it’s recognized as one of the greats. Rules for the challenge: No specific image that had impact. No top ten list.

There is so much to cite critically, from Philip K. Dick’s story and influence; to Ridley Scott’s youth, vision, and script work; to Vangelis’s score; to the individual performances – Ford’s star power and Hauer’s elegance. The film gathered narrative and visual themes that would fuel sci-fi cinema for decades: the clones and AI; the aesthetics of dystopia; the noir stylings; the menace of runaway tech.

My engagement is with the beauty of this film. Critics lambasted its pace in 1982; I applaud it. Ridley found the riches inside the story. Most of what Hollywood does wrong is suggested by the early criticism of “Blade Runner”, capturing plot and surface personality and leaving all the powerful latencies in a narrative in a rush to print. This film is simply beautiful. The composition of one scene can still move me deeply, quite independently of the plot.

I think a lot about story-telling. In a different genre, the TV series “Game of Thrones” tutored me in similar techniques. The first three seasons were masterfully done, populating a relatively standard fantasy world with compelling characters and investing an arbitrary ‘game of thrones’ among unappealing contenders with some urgency and emotion. Martin deserves a lot of credit; I’m not thrilled by his books, but he drew the blueprint. I learn similar lessons to those I learned from “Blade Runner”, the care for atmosphere and detail, the generosity with time. The characters are incessantly on the road in the first three seasons, and we travel with them. Sure, Martin is a genius with the surprising plot twist, but more compelling was the time spent with characters. One very obvious difference between early and late seasons is how quick the travel becomes. John Snow sends a text message from beyond the wall, and the dragon is there in minutes.

I’ve spent almost two months writing short comic scripts for Zoom productions by my Hague-based theatre group. The premise is a satire of “Game of Thrones”. Even in these silly, throwaway scripts, I see the same principles at work. There’s precious little plot to speak of and the characters are two-dimensional caricatures, and still there’s engagement and involvement. Actors are enjoying the characters and the unfolding story, absolutely meaningless as it is. It’s a kind of divine quality in the human, I believe, to invest lifeless landscapes with movement and passion. To quote another movie classic: “Life will find a way”.

I don’t want to close this blog post leaving the impression that I put “Game of Thrones” on equal footing with “Blade Runner”. The difference lies in that transcendent beauty that the latter achieves. The Romantic poets might have called it the Sublime. Maybe it’s a sad state of affairs that we find the Sublime in sci-fi movies, but, then again … it was Mary Shelley who wrote “Frankenstein”.

Travelogue 909 – May 18
The Apartment

I was living in Minneapolis. I was working for the school district, and I was sharing an apartment with Scottie on Dupont and 28th Street. Domestic life was basic. I had no furniture. Our kitchen was bare. But we had a TV, the kind that was more console than screen. In my mind’s eye, I see a TV like an old station wagon, capacious and lined with fake wood panelling. That TV is where I first happened to see “The Apartment”, the 1960 Bill Wilder film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

“The Apartment” was Movie 3 for my Facebook challenge: “Ten images from movies over ten days that had an impact on me.” Rules: No specific image that had impact. No top ten list.

I was writing a lot of poetry at that time. What I saw in “The Apartment” was an artful and polished comedy, relying on witty dialogue and smart acting. The premise was provocative, but simple. The production and sets were beautifully done, but pointedly not epic, as the times favoured. (Ben Hur was the previous year’s big Oscar winner.) The success of the movie was primarily in the writing. Wilder’s work has been called a ‘cinema of words’. It was a theatrical movie in that sense, reading something like a play. And that movie, that evening, inspired me to write plays.

I had been working on a long poem dedicated to the memory of a friend who had died of AIDS. The poem had been through many revisions. The subject was painful, and it haunted me. The poem had evolved by that time into a kind of dialogue among grieving characters.

The day after watching “The Apartment”, I started changing the poem into a play, my first play. That play is still one of my favourites; I reprised it here in South Holland a few years ago, and I self-published it with a set of stories and short memoir a few years ago because it fit so well among my reflections of that earlier period of my life. The play is nothing like “The Apartment”. The inspiration lives solely in the choice of form.

I wouldn’t claim too many favourable points of comparison between Wilder’s writing and my own, beyond a fondness for the snappy comeback (and his are better). What inspired me were the efficiencies of his art. At the time, he was noted for his breaks with the conventions of the art form, but what I responded to, nearly forty years on, were the efficiencies within the form. I had stumbled upon a master, and one who achieved much of his effect through the power of words.

Travelogue 908 – May 14
A Space Odyssey

My friend Marcus nominated me on Facebook to post ten times about ten movies. I doubt I'll make it to ten.I see these Facebook challenges come and go, and I don’t think much about them. But because it was Marcus, and because it was film, I gave it some thought; I'll give it a try.

This is not supposed to be a Top Ten, or a collection of beautiful stills, but an inventory of movies that had an impact in my life. That makes it interesting. I’ll post some here in my blog, since not everyone is on Facebook. I can a little more substance. Facebook is not somewhere I can ramble on.

I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the theatre when it came out. I was just a kid, and it was the first ‘grown-up’ film I remember seeing. Imagine the Kubrick classic being your first impression. I still remember the experience. I remember the monkeys fighting, of course, because I was a young boy. I remember HAL’s voice. I remember the sense of wonder inspired by the scenes in space. We were a family that watched all the moon launches on TV. I remember the music and the stately pace of the film. I remember my father complaining about the film. It was too slow; it didn’t make sense. But it was a beautiful and a challenging film, and it stayed with me.

It’s odd to call up this memory, which floats relatively free from attachments. I don’t really recall the theatre, the trip to the theatre, the popcorn, the seats, anything else. Other movie memories are tied to more tactile impressions. My memory of “Oliver” comes with a few other clips, of the car ride, of my parents laughing at me as I tried to reproduce one of the songs in the parking lot outside. But “2001” stands starkly alone in my memory, just the power of the imagery and sound. And then my father’s complaint.

I imagine he expected more from the film; something more conventional. He was an engineer and a believer in science. He was an enthusiast of the space program. If he had lived long enough, we would have gone to see “Apollo 13” together, and he would have been completely content. ‘That’s what a movie is supposed to be,’ I can imagine him saying. And still, my memory paints him as surprisingly mild in his critique of “2001”. It would have been more in character to rail or dismiss. But my memory portrays him offering calm and rational criticisms. Not ones I would agree with, from my privileged vantage point, more than fifty years later, but reasonable ones. The film took a lot of risks, and certainly not all of them were going to pay off for the average movie-goer.

Travelogue 907 – May 10
Sheep on Grass; Sun on Sheep

For a month or so, someone has been rotating the sheep among the grass verges around our little neighbourhood. We lie in a kind of bowl between the Sparta football stadium and the Metro station. And all around are small strips of open grassy space. Apparently, the city and the shepherds have found some common ground among the unruly grasses of spring.

The sheep first show up on the grassy inclines that lead up to the level of the tram station, first on one side of the staircase and then a few days later on the other side. There look to be about fifty of them. There’s no one minding the sheep. They are confined within flimsy fencing of coloured twine. In a few days, those sheep trim everything green right down to the ground. It’s efficient.

It’s also refreshing. It breaks the hard divide between rural and urban. It eloquently expresses the Dutch commitment to pragmatism and middle ways. It also captures the sense of community so important to the Dutch. We all live together. The sheep show up every spring in this very urban neighbourhood. People pass and smile, or they register nothing.

I like seeing the sheep. They contribute a different element to daily life, a different colour. I stop and watch them. They live at a slower pace. Their job is eating grass. When they’re not chewing, they’re resting; they’re staring. There’s a timelessness to the sight of the sheep in their fields. I know we humans joke that we have lost track of what day it is, but in actuality we are keenly aware of the moment. History is very much present. It takes the form of an airborne virus. It prompts us to watch the headlines every day, count the days, count the casualties.

Every few days, the sheep are rotated to a new field. Eventually, they show up among the small grassy knolls beside the pitches that figure into my daily strolls. The short twine fence appears in my path to interrupt my routine. I stand and watch the complacent sheep munching on their grass.

I feel no resentment. Healthy communities are always in flux. There are tides in urban landscapes, and thhe tides bring noise and inconvenience. It’s best to give way. I take another path, following the dirt paths and then the bike paths. I cross over the busy boulevard that is one border to my small district. I stroll through an abandoned playground, follow the dirt paths around another construction zone, and then along the curving line a canal makes through this neighbouring city village. It’s different. It’s the same. The spring sun still shines on me.

Travelogue 906 – May 9
Guns in the Neighbourhood

We share the planet; we share the virus. Even so, we humans inhabit a variety of different worlds. One reminder came a few nights ago, in the middle of the night. We were woken at 2:20 in the morning by the sound of gunshots. Within minutes, there were police vans cordoning off a section of the street within view of our windows. A few of them were searching the surface of the street with flashlights, looking for bullets. The next morning, I saw the bullet holes in the window and doorway across the street.

We lead our lives in parallel planes. I’ll try a Zoom analogy: we’re all invited into the same Zoom call, but we make our way into different breakout rooms, with different codes of conduct. One room chooses rules of confrontation and strife; another chooses rules of peaceful co-existence and cooperation.

In the same neighbourhood, some people have been living by much more savage rules than the rest of us. And just because it bubbles up once in a public way, like a shooting in the middle of the night, doesn’t mean that their rules are less violent on many other, quieter occasions. This case just rose to the level of our attention.

World events can provide those glimpses into the deeper coding of other rooms. The COVID-19 crisis has offered a rather stark view into the code underlying American society, revealing it as peculiarly tribal and violent. Everything is a contest of wills. The vehemence of the reaction against public health controls was surprising. When it took on the language of war, we understood. Everything is strife, and the U.S. response is to suffer and fight. Life is a Rocky movie. We take our hits. We are knocked to the mat. Our glory is rising again, against all odds, taking a dozen more punches to the jaw, bleeding profusely, but somehow prevailing, if only by dint of our … what? Our size, our ugly charm? Preventive measures are for the weak. Pandemic response in America was never going to be clean or efficient.

There are people with guns in the neighbourhood, and the guns are just the code made manifest. If we had known their lives were so fraught with danger, we might have advised them that life could be easier. But they wouldn’t have listened.

“For who can hope to alter men’s convictions?” Aurelius counsels. He is rounding off his thought that humble goals are best. Aurelius consistently reminds himself, the reader, that all human aspiration is social. There’s a lot of wisdom in this.

Travelogue 905 – May 6
Notre Jardin

“…[D]o what nature is asking of you at this moment,” Aurelius write in Book Nine of his Meditations. Here we find a beautiful passage about humility. He continues, “ …and no glancing around to see if you are observed.” This part reminds me of Matthew 6, written about a hundred years earlier than the Meditations, and which includes this great scriptural line (in King James English): “Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men.”

Imagine there were no bragging. It’s easy if you try. Imagine no boasting, no selling, no posing. These days, nothing is real until it’s being sold. Imagine no proselytising, no pitching, no preaching, no convincing. Contentment is no virtue in our world. We must exult and shout. We must see our own enjoyment in others’ faces before it’s legit. Barring that, or even in preference to that, we must see judgement in others’ eyes. It galvanises us and informs us that we are on the right side, by virtue of opposition.

“…[D]o not expect Plato’s ideal commonwealth,” Aurelius advises. “[B]e satisfied if even a trifling endeavour comes off well, and count the result no mean success.” I’m doing my part with trifling endeavours. When the shutdown forced my theatre group to cancel a performance, I suggested a Zoom project. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, taping two-minute episodes in an ongoing satire of Game of Thrones and posting them. It’s embarrassing, but it’s been a show of life during a time of restraint, not in protest but in simple celebration of life despite the sombre threat. It’s fun; we spend precious time in a trifling project, and I’d say we derive a certain Aurelian pride from its silliness.

These are such great people. I’m amazed every time they schedule precious time for something as trivial as this. But they do it. And when they pop up in Zoom, I am so gratified. We laugh; we have fun. We produce something ephemeral, but the camaraderie is the reason. What does move us as humans, after all, and what proves most satisfying? Are we most content producing enduring work at great personal expense, or deeply enjoying the production of something fleeting, like the perfect spring garden?

Voltaire famously ended his “Candide” advising us each to cultivate our own garden – after having tracked the misadventures of the book’s naïve hero in a wide and cruel world. This seems the hardest thing for human nature to do, to accept small ambitions. I would hardly suggest I’m an exception to that rule. The mirror and the microphone are dangerous daily temptations - for us all. We crave approval; we want to be seen and heard. We act out, testing our voices in the wind. Who turns their head?

Lacking approval, some of us are happy to be reviled. We march with guns in front of state capitol buildings, and we bask in contempt. To be clear, protesting COVID shutdowns with a gun in hand is no Rosa Parks moment.

Travelogue 904 – May 2
The Biggest Ever!

It’s a different age. My anxiety dreams used to be set in my school or on stage. I would find myself rushing to class and realizing I had no lesson prepared. I would show up to rehearsal without a script. Nowadays, I dream that I can’t get Zoom to work.

Everything is channelled through eye of the internet needle these days. And so much of it is routed through only a few platforms, namely Zoom and Teams and Skype. It’s unnerving to have so much at stake when working in computer environments that are essentially akin to magic, at least for people like me. I used to worry about the power that the masters of local transit had over my life. This is another level.

This is not to suggest a conspiracy. Evil programmers don’t appear in my anxiety dreams. Bill Gates doesn’t dress like Thanos and snap his fingers. Why do I feel compelled to add this disclaimer to every complaint I make these days? An item is missing in the supermarket, I don’t blame Bill Gates. Am I naïve?

It’s another indicator of the age. Conspiracy theory is like ice cream or candy. We show no restraint.

I had some more warnings on Facebook. Trump was right all along about the fake media. Look at these videos of real doctors telling you the coronavirus is a hoax. Death figures are being fudged for profit.

I enjoy this kind of moxie. As though there weren’t enough personality or individuality among the thousands of people working in the media to fill a thimble, but among the few dozen contacts of the conspiracy theorist were all the great mavericks and free-thinkers. As though we couldn’t find a few cranks with geology degrees to say the world was flat. As though hospitals were corporate scams and Fox News were a charity. As though anyone could claim with a straight face that the hospitals have been the centres of excess and abuse during the corona era.

There is something endearing about conspiracy theorists. They dream big. You don’t hear many conspiracies about local elections, or about the goings-on in the neighbourhood. Or can we call gossip conspiracy theory? No, conspiracy always has to be big. It’s the richest men trying the ballsiest gambit to control the whole world, trying to gather all the money ever printed, exploit all the data ever generated, persecute the greatest president and run the greatest nation. And it never stops, either. Conspirators never tire. (And they never seem to win, either. Otherwise, why do they always have to start over?)

Of course all this reminds me of a quote from Aurelius …