Travelogue 1101 – 29 August
Old As Time
Did Adam and Eve invent walking? That was Baby Jos’s question this morning as we walked to the tram. I didn’t know what to answer. She is usually insistent upon an answer but spared me her habitual discipline because I was sick. I had been up half the night with a stomach bug, and I was miserable. I had been retching so violently the night before my throat was too sore to speak. I was shuffling along behind them, whereas I am generally the one urging them to speed up. “Or did we invent walking in modern times?” The second question made my task easier. Given that choice, it was definitely Adam and Eve. Baby Jos made a good point: they had to be able to walk to leave Eden. “That means,” she said, rolling her eyes in a silly suggestion that she would faint away with the enormity of the thought, “that walking is as old as time.” In a traditional Christian timeframe, she is right.
There is something timeless to being outside when you are sick. To move is to float, and to think is to slide downhill in mud. You haven’t the energy for ranging thought. What concentration you have is tightly focussed: must get to the tram. But the effort of even that is exhausting. Mostly you drift along in a fog. At the hour of school drop-off, everyone in Rotterdam is adrenalized and intent. They hustle and they march and they lean into the winds of their ambition, and the drifting sick man is traversing their red-dotted-line pathways in slow motion. It is dreamlike.
There is something timeless about the weather, this early autumnal cool and these early autumnal clouds. The weather does not vary for days, even weeks. The mornings dawn in grey light, and you reluctantly reach for your jackets. If there is variety, it lies in the unpredictable light showers that catch up to you while you are walking. We caught a few light drops this morning. By the time I had registered it and lifted my distracted gaze up into the mysteries of the grey mists, they had gone.
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Travelogue 1100 – 27 August
Sunday Echoes
I wake to the brassy, slurring voice of a neighbour on his balcony, speaking loudly on his mobile. It’s 7am on a Sunday, the Sunday after our first week of school and work, and, as it happened, not the fun week it should have been: Ren was sick, and I had an unhappy start at work. Opening the front door to investigate, I watch him sway on his balcony, holding the mobile away from him, dancing for his auditor, laughing, waving. The courtyard rings with his shouts.
Above and around him, nature has woken. The sky is light, though full of clouds like grey pillow stuffing. The air is cool with a hint of autumn. The seagulls are whistling and laughing. Below, the pavements are damp. Surrounding him is the usual silence of a Sunday morning. He doesn’t hear the morning; he hears the cackling from the mobile.
The work week could have been better. Our return to our home campus, moving into our new building, was marred by politics - the keynote of our times. We’re sorely understaffed, after management’s budget panic last year. Management itself has been shuffled, and we’re starting the year short-staffed above as well as below. We met in unfinished rooms, taking inventories of people missing, listening to our echoes in the new rooms, where wires still hung out of ceilings and walls. We inventoried our teaching schedules, overloaded to compensate for the decimation. One colleague, hearing me say my schedule didn’t seem bad, ran straight to the only manager working that day to request in echoes that I be given her classes to teach.
Sunday Echoes
I wake to the brassy, slurring voice of a neighbour on his balcony, speaking loudly on his mobile. It’s 7am on a Sunday, the Sunday after our first week of school and work, and, as it happened, not the fun week it should have been: Ren was sick, and I had an unhappy start at work. Opening the front door to investigate, I watch him sway on his balcony, holding the mobile away from him, dancing for his auditor, laughing, waving. The courtyard rings with his shouts.
Above and around him, nature has woken. The sky is light, though full of clouds like grey pillow stuffing. The air is cool with a hint of autumn. The seagulls are whistling and laughing. Below, the pavements are damp. Surrounding him is the usual silence of a Sunday morning. He doesn’t hear the morning; he hears the cackling from the mobile.
The work week could have been better. Our return to our home campus, moving into our new building, was marred by politics - the keynote of our times. We’re sorely understaffed, after management’s budget panic last year. Management itself has been shuffled, and we’re starting the year short-staffed above as well as below. We met in unfinished rooms, taking inventories of people missing, listening to our echoes in the new rooms, where wires still hung out of ceilings and walls. We inventoried our teaching schedules, overloaded to compensate for the decimation. One colleague, hearing me say my schedule didn’t seem bad, ran straight to the only manager working that day to request in echoes that I be given her classes to teach.
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Travelogue 1099 – 20 August
Playing With Dolls
Suddenly, the girls are playing with dolls. They each have a baby doll; they’ve had them for a while, though they didn’t play much with them before. Now the two sisters are very busy together, dressing up their babies, crafting for them cribs and buggies from cardboard boxes and luggage trolleys, and acting out the things that mamas do, lulling the babies to sleep, feeding them, scolding them. And keeping up long dialogues between them, involving mommies and poppies and babies and their sisters. It’s an all-consuming activity; we have trouble breaking in and getting their attention when it’s time to eat. They insist the babies must accompany them to the table. It’s a mania. It’s fun. And I wonder what their subjective experience is playing these games. I contend that the wall in our heads between what is real and what is not real is not so solid as we maintain. By the time we’re adults, perhaps we channel that experience into story-telling, surrendering to our books and movies, "suspending disbelief", as the theory goes. But fundamentally, things can be real and unreal at the same time. Maturity lies in the faith that there is a difference.
Reading the British press, a breaking and disturbing story in recent weeks has been the trial and sentencing of Lucy Letby, a nurse who murdered seven babies while on the job and attempted to kill six more. It’s a bizarre and heart-breaking story. It’s also puzzling, in the usual way with serial killers. There were no indications to friends or co-workers that this rather bland personality – nicknamed the ‘beige nurse’ by the police investigator on the case – was dangerous. A Guardian writer watched the accused during her trial for tell-tale signs of motive. He could reach no conclusion. He did offer some odd observations. During the trial, the murderous nurse didn’t cry at the testimony of her crimes, but cried during recounting of her rather ordinary life and her pathetic affair with a married colleague. She was inspired to a showy kind of pride when questioned about medical procedure. It suggests a disturbing psychological profile. Her parents were in the gallery every day. What were their thoughts?
I was put in mind, when Kundera passed, of the phrase he borrowed for the title of his novel, “the unbearable lightness of being”. I have reason to contemplate it every day. If every age distinguishes itself by finding new ways to be careless with the real lives of others, ours may prove to be one of the more creative ones. We enshrine the narcissistic complex bred by post-war prosperity, we institutionalize it and allow it rampant gambols round the globe, inverting measures of reality, until the interior story of the world is more real than objective evidence. A nurse cries herself to sleep over disappointing romances, and when she wakes she plots the death of innocents. Captured, she pities herself; accused, she pities herself. Shame is stunted. We treat guilt therapeutically so that the ego may have more range for play.
Playing With Dolls
Suddenly, the girls are playing with dolls. They each have a baby doll; they’ve had them for a while, though they didn’t play much with them before. Now the two sisters are very busy together, dressing up their babies, crafting for them cribs and buggies from cardboard boxes and luggage trolleys, and acting out the things that mamas do, lulling the babies to sleep, feeding them, scolding them. And keeping up long dialogues between them, involving mommies and poppies and babies and their sisters. It’s an all-consuming activity; we have trouble breaking in and getting their attention when it’s time to eat. They insist the babies must accompany them to the table. It’s a mania. It’s fun. And I wonder what their subjective experience is playing these games. I contend that the wall in our heads between what is real and what is not real is not so solid as we maintain. By the time we’re adults, perhaps we channel that experience into story-telling, surrendering to our books and movies, "suspending disbelief", as the theory goes. But fundamentally, things can be real and unreal at the same time. Maturity lies in the faith that there is a difference.
Reading the British press, a breaking and disturbing story in recent weeks has been the trial and sentencing of Lucy Letby, a nurse who murdered seven babies while on the job and attempted to kill six more. It’s a bizarre and heart-breaking story. It’s also puzzling, in the usual way with serial killers. There were no indications to friends or co-workers that this rather bland personality – nicknamed the ‘beige nurse’ by the police investigator on the case – was dangerous. A Guardian writer watched the accused during her trial for tell-tale signs of motive. He could reach no conclusion. He did offer some odd observations. During the trial, the murderous nurse didn’t cry at the testimony of her crimes, but cried during recounting of her rather ordinary life and her pathetic affair with a married colleague. She was inspired to a showy kind of pride when questioned about medical procedure. It suggests a disturbing psychological profile. Her parents were in the gallery every day. What were their thoughts?
I was put in mind, when Kundera passed, of the phrase he borrowed for the title of his novel, “the unbearable lightness of being”. I have reason to contemplate it every day. If every age distinguishes itself by finding new ways to be careless with the real lives of others, ours may prove to be one of the more creative ones. We enshrine the narcissistic complex bred by post-war prosperity, we institutionalize it and allow it rampant gambols round the globe, inverting measures of reality, until the interior story of the world is more real than objective evidence. A nurse cries herself to sleep over disappointing romances, and when she wakes she plots the death of innocents. Captured, she pities herself; accused, she pities herself. Shame is stunted. We treat guilt therapeutically so that the ego may have more range for play.
Thursday, August 03, 2023
Travelogue 1098 – 3 August
Humans
The girls have dug up last year’s tails. They’re watching “Trolls” on TV, contentedly stretched out in their life-size, elastic mermaid tails. I’m not sure where the mer-impulse came from, but their whims turn with dizzying speed these days. The tails extend, in their blue and purple glory, from the hip all the way past their toes. They wave the tails like ‘real’ mermaids. “Are mermaids real?” Little Ren asks earnestly.
Maybe the minor mermaid craze arose from Baby Jos’s short obsession with tails. “What if I wake up one day, and I have a tail?” she asked with a big smile. She wished it would happen. “What would my teacher think?” she asked. I’m stumped by questions like those. But I am getting used to staggering amounts of questions from the girls. They are factories of wondering questions. I thought the questions were a phase; that was a few years ago. No one told me the questions phase was … childhood. At the end of the day, when I’m tired, I’m usually two questions behind, answering on a delay, answering the rainbow question when they’ve already moved on to fairies. “Where do fairies live, Papa?” “You can never really find the ends,” I answer. Somehow it all meshes into its own sense.
But I do remember the power of these childhood passions. I am reminded of the things I wished for at a similar age, and wished for with intensity. I wanted to fly, and I wanted to be able to time travel. I wanted to be able to change into animal form whenever I wanted. The possible and the impossible existed together in the same thought. I ‘knew’ the things I wanted were impossible, but it was within a child’s power to believe in possibility. Growing older, I remember deciding that if I believed in something strongly enough, it would be required to manifest. Then I concluded that believing strongly enough was knowing. And knowing something was possible meant forgetting that it was ever impossible. That negated the magic, and I lost interest.
While Baby Jos wanted a tail, Little Ren wanted a unicorn horn. That would give her magical powers. Little Ren is mercurial. She moves from unicorns to sombrely posing the question, “But I just want to know why I exist.” Wow, I say, that’s a big question. When you figure it out, let me know. “Why am I me?” she asks.
Little Ren is the philosopher, it seems. She’s the one who has wrestled with the term “human”. When she was younger, she used ‘human’ to describe adults. There were children, and there were humans. I was a bit mortified by that, but I don’t like rushing in with a negative: “don’t say that!” The word naturally evolved into a descriptor of people – “there are so many humans on the street” – to a somewhat fluid identifier to draw contrast with animals – “fluid” because sometimes nice animals can sometimes be human.
Humans
The girls have dug up last year’s tails. They’re watching “Trolls” on TV, contentedly stretched out in their life-size, elastic mermaid tails. I’m not sure where the mer-impulse came from, but their whims turn with dizzying speed these days. The tails extend, in their blue and purple glory, from the hip all the way past their toes. They wave the tails like ‘real’ mermaids. “Are mermaids real?” Little Ren asks earnestly.
Maybe the minor mermaid craze arose from Baby Jos’s short obsession with tails. “What if I wake up one day, and I have a tail?” she asked with a big smile. She wished it would happen. “What would my teacher think?” she asked. I’m stumped by questions like those. But I am getting used to staggering amounts of questions from the girls. They are factories of wondering questions. I thought the questions were a phase; that was a few years ago. No one told me the questions phase was … childhood. At the end of the day, when I’m tired, I’m usually two questions behind, answering on a delay, answering the rainbow question when they’ve already moved on to fairies. “Where do fairies live, Papa?” “You can never really find the ends,” I answer. Somehow it all meshes into its own sense.
But I do remember the power of these childhood passions. I am reminded of the things I wished for at a similar age, and wished for with intensity. I wanted to fly, and I wanted to be able to time travel. I wanted to be able to change into animal form whenever I wanted. The possible and the impossible existed together in the same thought. I ‘knew’ the things I wanted were impossible, but it was within a child’s power to believe in possibility. Growing older, I remember deciding that if I believed in something strongly enough, it would be required to manifest. Then I concluded that believing strongly enough was knowing. And knowing something was possible meant forgetting that it was ever impossible. That negated the magic, and I lost interest.
While Baby Jos wanted a tail, Little Ren wanted a unicorn horn. That would give her magical powers. Little Ren is mercurial. She moves from unicorns to sombrely posing the question, “But I just want to know why I exist.” Wow, I say, that’s a big question. When you figure it out, let me know. “Why am I me?” she asks.
Little Ren is the philosopher, it seems. She’s the one who has wrestled with the term “human”. When she was younger, she used ‘human’ to describe adults. There were children, and there were humans. I was a bit mortified by that, but I don’t like rushing in with a negative: “don’t say that!” The word naturally evolved into a descriptor of people – “there are so many humans on the street” – to a somewhat fluid identifier to draw contrast with animals – “fluid” because sometimes nice animals can sometimes be human.
Tuesday, August 01, 2023
Travelogue 1097 – 1 August
Summer Vacation?
It’s the first of August. That date is a signal to the mood centres of the brain, a trigger for depression. I’m a teacher, and I’m a teacher in a country in which school years stretch from mid-August to mid-July.
School years in America started in September and ended in June. By the time September came, there was a hint of autumn in the air, you were rested, and you were eager to get started again. In the Netherlands, summer vacation feels just long enough to run some errands, catch up with your team of doctors and dentists, see a few friends … once each, and perhaps squeeze in a rushed and tense trip in order to store images in your phone for winter.
July turns to August, and you find the “vacation” unconvincing. Work is a beast already catching up on you, its hot breath on your neck. And it’s a formidable beast, whose tail reaches deep into the summer of the next year. One returns to work with a half-charged battery. I’ve noticed that European school years start slowly and quietly, taking a good month to build momentum. I remember American school years galloping out of the gate.
It doesn’t help that the last day of July was a rainy one. It was chilly; the rain barely paused all day. The girls and I ventured out to buy last minute party items; it was Menna’s birthday. We surprised her when she arrived home. We lit the candles on the cake, and the clouds outside made the house as dark as though it were October.
Summer Vacation?
It’s the first of August. That date is a signal to the mood centres of the brain, a trigger for depression. I’m a teacher, and I’m a teacher in a country in which school years stretch from mid-August to mid-July.
School years in America started in September and ended in June. By the time September came, there was a hint of autumn in the air, you were rested, and you were eager to get started again. In the Netherlands, summer vacation feels just long enough to run some errands, catch up with your team of doctors and dentists, see a few friends … once each, and perhaps squeeze in a rushed and tense trip in order to store images in your phone for winter.
July turns to August, and you find the “vacation” unconvincing. Work is a beast already catching up on you, its hot breath on your neck. And it’s a formidable beast, whose tail reaches deep into the summer of the next year. One returns to work with a half-charged battery. I’ve noticed that European school years start slowly and quietly, taking a good month to build momentum. I remember American school years galloping out of the gate.
It doesn’t help that the last day of July was a rainy one. It was chilly; the rain barely paused all day. The girls and I ventured out to buy last minute party items; it was Menna’s birthday. We surprised her when she arrived home. We lit the candles on the cake, and the clouds outside made the house as dark as though it were October.
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