Yesterday was King’s Day in the Netherlands, the day the country goes mad celebrating the king’s birthday. It was a beautiful day, and it just so happened that, this year, the king was going to celebrate in Rotterdam. So we dressed up in orange, and we went downtown.
The crowd wasn’t so bad at Blaak, where a stage had been erected to host hours of bland music and five minutes of royal presence. We squeezed through the people and found a spot where we could just see the stage and the two jumbo screens beside it. In good Dutch style, the king was (almost) on schedule. We didn’t have to endure for too long the carefully forgettable band filling time till he arrived. One of the screens followed the king’s progress as he and his family walked along the central streets, seeing sights on the way to us. (Imagine Charles III strolling through Manchester and waving to his people!)
Some ageing pop star mounted the stage just ahead of the king, leading the crowd through a few old standards, one of which, oddly, was in English. Then the king and queen and their several princesses appeared, waving at the crowd. Unexpectedly, I was moved to wave back, as were hundreds of others. It was a strange feeling.
Europeans sneer at the American fascination with royalty. But it is, objectively, a strange and fascinating phenomenon. In this age, royalty is an abstraction. What is a monarch? It’s an expensive indulgence; it’s an intriguing institution. At best, the royal family forms an interesting dialectic with elected officials, perhaps standing for history and decorum. At worst, they are a domesticated breed of narcissists, who entertain with their foibles. But words don’t resolve the riddle at the centre of their longevity. How do you explain it? Even at their height of power, kings and queens were not all-powerful. They were pawns of history. The most powerful among them were keen individuals quick to read and manipulate the much more powerful forces around them.
We encountered my British neighbour after the event. He seemed stunned that we would have gone to see the king. He was at pains to hold his tongue, I could see. The Brits are drearily literal on the subject of royalty. I suppose they have cause, what with recent events, what with the sheer expense of their royal house. But it’s disappointing. There are much more interesting discussions to be had about royalty than the rather obvious tut-tutting over items in the news.
Royalty came late to the Netherlands, installed after Napoleon was pushed out. But its roots reached all the way back to the sixteenth century and the Dutch fight for independence. It reached back to Willem of Orange, known as Willem the Silent, stadtholder of Holland. The latter position became a hereditary position for his family and a subtle form of royalty among the staunchly independent Dutch. Something about the Napoleonic experience made them ready to call their king a king.
The era of Willem the Silent is endlessly interesting to me. The Reformation was still raging on. Indeed, it provided the first impetus for Dutch rebellion against the Spanish. Religion was redrawing the map of Europe. Aristocracies continued their post-medieval grabs for status and territory, aligning and re-aligning with each generation. The scientific revolution was underway. Combined with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this is the classical era of European civilization, when it was most vital and weirdest.
Friday, April 28, 2023
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Cracking my head on the pavement gave me more than a pretty scar. It left me with a small lesson in complacency. It’s so easy for the human mind to forget things. If anything puts paid to a philosophy based on human wisdom and the human capacity to learn, it’s the balancing capacity to forget.
I’ve had my challenges in recent years – dealing with the short and the long versions of COVID, for example, – but none of my challenges have upset the safe home. The day-to-day in Holland is a far-cry from the primeval struggle to survive that may be our common heritage. I’ve become lulled by inactivity and safety into a kind of sleepy confidence in my own physical coordination. I have plenty of memories of clumsy accidents and the feeling of helplessness that accompanied those, but it took an effort to summon up that sense of falling, out of control of one’s own body. Until a few weeks ago.
I was trying a little stunt, skipping to one side on the scooter as I tried to escape getting tagged ‘it’ by Baby Jos, and suddenly I was falling. A part of my mind watched the fall with fascination. Somehow my limbs became pinned or tangled with the scooter, or with each other, and so I had no way to brace myself as I fell. During that instant, I was reminded what it felt like to be helpless. The laws of physics do take precedence, after all, over human ideas of justice and what’s commensurate. “I was just playing around,” doesn’t fly in the court of gravity and concrete.
It's a good reminder. We hurried to the hospital, and the girls watched the doctor delicately sew my face together again. I got to see a monster in the mirror for a week or so. That part was fun, and a harmless lesson that there is plenty of harm to be had. There will even be lethal harm some day.
The final struggle forms our hearts from a distance, the event that is, in fact, no event for the self, but a ceasing of events. It forms our perspective on “the other”, being perhaps the most frightening among the ranks of others. Perhaps he’s their general. He is strange, and we can't be sure how deeply his strangeness has permeated things.
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
It was Easter weekend, and I was playing with the girls out front. Things got out of hand, and I took a dive while riding one of their scooters, bashing my head against a concrete curb. I had to get a few stitches and wear lots of bandages. Now my eye is black and swollen. I look into the mirror, and I’m fascinated by the new face. This kind of accident really does change your features, temporarily. My wife looks at me in wonder. Who is this guy?
I’ve always thought it a bit tedious to see the same face in the mirror every day. Does anyone else feel that way? I observe the mania for selfies, and I think not. In any case, this little injury is kind of entertaining as an exercise in variety. I want to enjoy it, but when I go out, I feel compelled to hide it. I don a cap and look at the ground. I cover the bloody stitches with bandages. I turn away from people I have to talk to. We do these things instinctively: injuries are shameful. We might be marked for culling from the herd.
Do we read history like a mirror? Are we looking for different versions of ourselves? Sometimes I feel most fascinated by the most alien and the weirdest in history. But even then, it might be a drive to assimilate what I see, shape it into comprehensibility, make it a version of myself. It’s a metaphorical search for the self.
Some people shove past the metaphor. They literally see themselves in the faces of historical figures. Those faces they call past lives. “I have lived before. I have lived inside those faces. That is me.” It’s such an interesting form of appropriation. It reminds me of the Biblical literalists. Every religious program must have its literalists. “That really happened. That is me.”
As you open the programs of these religions, you find plenty of code designed to appropriate the other, from conversion to conquest to submission, extending to the ethical claim of the Golden Rule. Ethics itself could be read as a means of assimilating or appropriating the other. A literal claim to be the other becomes just a matter of degree.
Sunday, April 09, 2023
Travelogue 1084 – 9 April
La Scala
Part One
I had no idea what a fun pastime looking for past lives was! I found one buried in the seventeenth century, and I was quite excited! And I’m not even sure I believe in reincarnation.
Believing is a mysterious act. It comes easily to some people, but, for me, belief is something down a long road. Concepts, like stars, need to align. So, a soul passes from one life to another, learning lessons as it goes. That seems simple enough. But there are lots of assumptions underpinning the idea that I find difficult to gloss over, assumptions concerning linear time, evolution, and consciousness that behaves like indivisible atoms.
I’m a teacher. If there is a metaphysics built on learning and evolution, I should have one response: “Sign me up!” But beliefs are jealous little genies, and they don’t like giving up secrets. Souls are born to learn, but what are the yardsticks, if most of existence is unconsciousness? What are the incentives? Is the reward really beating the system thousands of years from now? Why does it take so long? The range of human virtues seems to me so narrow, I can’t imagine what occupies us for thousands of lives.
My thoughts about religion are naïve. I know they are. It’s one reason I gave up. No matter what religion I approached, something like the reverse side of Woody Allen’s dictum applied. He said that he would never join a club that would have him. The religious version might be: a religion could never open the door to someone who was outside to begin with. I just couldn’t manufacture the feeling of faith or the correct spiritual experience.
Maybe it’s just the spirit of the Easter Egg Hunt, but I was pumped to have found a past life! And it was much easier than I thought! I had no clues. I had no evidence, not even the ethereal sort that sails over the bar of most believers. No dreams or flashbacks or goosebumps. My only supporting evidence was a cool bio.