Travelogue 1111 – 29 November
Messy
It was a jarring sight. Teachers from the girls’ school were gathered in front of the main entrance, sitting on the ground in a semi-circle. They had set small tents up, and they sat in sleeping bags. As the children began to gather and stare at them, the teachers sang songs. The children were entranced.
My girls had to explain to me. The teachers were camping out here to prevent Rommel Piet from getting into the school. Sinterklaas arrived in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. The saint travels with a coterie of ‘Piets’, who are his assistants. One of those Piets is notorious now and may be known to my readers: ‘Zwarte Piet’ or Black Piet. Because he has become so controversial, Zwarte Piet keeps a low profile these days, at least in urban Holland. Another of the Piets is Rommel Piet. ‘Rommel’ means mess, and Rommel Piet likes to steal into homes and schools and leave a huge mess, mischievously tipping chairs over and hiding things. Every year he seems to break in somehow, to make a 'rommel' of the classrooms, and every year the teachers try to thwart him.
I enjoy this small survival of the trickster in a culture so dedicated to order. It speaks in some way to my soul, so lost in the thicket called November. What was so jarring about the sight of teachers sitting on the ground was the season. It was near freezing, and chilly showers had been coming and going. Seeing them on the ground was to empathically feel the cold and wet concrete against one’s tender morning skin. And yet, those dedicated teachers smiled and welcomed the children, and they cheerfully offered up songs about the saint.
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Travelogue 1110 – 28 November
Candles
Dante is reciting from the “Inferno” from the shelter of an open portico. The cobble stones in this piazza tilt upward, as they did in the last one, and as we follow the incline, past the steps of a medieval church toward a passage between the side of the church and the shops lining the lane, we climb to another piazza at another level. Two high, square towers rise above us, like a medieval version of New York’s ill-fated Twin Towers. We are nearing the top of the hill.
Is it a dream, Dante reciting for coins, and tourists queueing up a hundred metres for gelato? No, this is a memory. I am recapturing bits from my trip in October. This is the hike through the village of San Gimignano, a funny and lovely little place an hour or so outside Florence in Tuscany, where the burgers of the Middle Ages competed with each other to build the highest tower. At one time there were 72 of them standing on this Tuscan hill. These days, it’s the tourists fighting for attention, shopping for boar’s sausage or elbowing in at a vista for their selfie. But still it’s a beautiful village with long views of the green hills and their vineyards round about.
Like consciousness itself, memory occupies an ambiguous position between light and its shadows, retreating one way from noxious fogs generated by stress or virus, retreating another from their abrupt seizure and distortion during sleep, advancing toward the light whenever the force of neglect threatens to drown it forever in the unconscious.
As in the case of the mysterious unconscious, memory inspires all manner of theories. Whole memories exist somewhere, like Plato’s perfect forms; memories are glimpses of a universal tapestry, containing all the data of life; memories suggest in their ephemeral nature the final extinguishing of self. They are special sight; they are psychic rubbish. But certainly memories come to comprise so much of the content of thought that they assume a special place in the day. We come to be living in memory as much as living in experience.
Perhaps one day, sorting through the bits and bobs of childhood, I find a trapdoor. And I open the door to see Scaliger looking back. Is he as lonely as I am, he in his time, and I in mine? He has celebrated his last Christmas. It’s grey winter, and he sits alone in his study. Young Heinsius has been by to check on him, but now he must return to his work. Instead, he studies the wavering flame of a candle. He does this to recover his focus. The house in Leiden is gloomy in winter, even in the afternoon. He has one candle against the darkness.
Candles
Dante is reciting from the “Inferno” from the shelter of an open portico. The cobble stones in this piazza tilt upward, as they did in the last one, and as we follow the incline, past the steps of a medieval church toward a passage between the side of the church and the shops lining the lane, we climb to another piazza at another level. Two high, square towers rise above us, like a medieval version of New York’s ill-fated Twin Towers. We are nearing the top of the hill.
Is it a dream, Dante reciting for coins, and tourists queueing up a hundred metres for gelato? No, this is a memory. I am recapturing bits from my trip in October. This is the hike through the village of San Gimignano, a funny and lovely little place an hour or so outside Florence in Tuscany, where the burgers of the Middle Ages competed with each other to build the highest tower. At one time there were 72 of them standing on this Tuscan hill. These days, it’s the tourists fighting for attention, shopping for boar’s sausage or elbowing in at a vista for their selfie. But still it’s a beautiful village with long views of the green hills and their vineyards round about.
Like consciousness itself, memory occupies an ambiguous position between light and its shadows, retreating one way from noxious fogs generated by stress or virus, retreating another from their abrupt seizure and distortion during sleep, advancing toward the light whenever the force of neglect threatens to drown it forever in the unconscious.
As in the case of the mysterious unconscious, memory inspires all manner of theories. Whole memories exist somewhere, like Plato’s perfect forms; memories are glimpses of a universal tapestry, containing all the data of life; memories suggest in their ephemeral nature the final extinguishing of self. They are special sight; they are psychic rubbish. But certainly memories come to comprise so much of the content of thought that they assume a special place in the day. We come to be living in memory as much as living in experience.
Perhaps one day, sorting through the bits and bobs of childhood, I find a trapdoor. And I open the door to see Scaliger looking back. Is he as lonely as I am, he in his time, and I in mine? He has celebrated his last Christmas. It’s grey winter, and he sits alone in his study. Young Heinsius has been by to check on him, but now he must return to his work. Instead, he studies the wavering flame of a candle. He does this to recover his focus. The house in Leiden is gloomy in winter, even in the afternoon. He has one candle against the darkness.
Friday, November 24, 2023
Travelogue 1109 – 24 November
Nothing
I was too hopeful, it seems. We all were in thinking that the nominal centrist Pieter Omtzigt would be the big winner on Wednesday. Instead, it was Holland’s longstanding crazy uncle, Geert Wilders. It only made sense. Rutte had spent most of his career fighting off the steady encroachment by Wilders into the mainstream. We had placed too much faith in centrism and too little in Rutte’s political skills. So the genie of hate is out of his bottle. It will be hard now to dismiss him as a crank, but it does remain to be seen how stable any government Wilders could assemble would actually be. His sort of provocative rhetoric plays well to a crowd but may not get him far in negotiations with serious politicos when the press is outside the room. It’s a corollary of the new politics, best demonstrated by congressional Republicans in the U.S. ‘Vote for me, I’ll achieve nothing!’ could be their slogan. They still win elections. The twenty-first-century electorate is made up of cackling masochists. Modern voters seem to take as their model 80s football hooligans, happy to trash their own stadium for a laugh. There’s no shame the morning after. It’s part of the game; it’s someone else’s job to clean up.
I woke again to the pitter-pat of little raindrops on the dark panes of our windows. I’m up hours before first light in this season, and my first task is Sinterklaas duty. The girls’ shoes are in the entryway, and I have to quietly drop gifts into the shoes. First, I get to read the heart-breakingly sweet notes my girls have written to the saint. Little Ren is just learning to write, and her notes are sometimes cryptic, always illustrated with her drawings, asking for some gift, astonishingly cute. I am alone in the morning with these notes in the morning, wishing time would stop.
In some sense time has already stopped. The month of November is a kind of sinkhole of consciousness, even when it doesn’t begin with convalescence from COVID. November is always a convalescence, existentially, a convalescence from itself, from decay. Its darkness is a course of treatment, a round of waters from Lethe, a dip in chilly waters, a subsidence of consciousness. We are reminded that living is experiencing the shifting boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. We spend the years explaining that moving line to each other. The unconscious is inside us. It is the divine; it is the true consciousness. It is the blackness from which consciousness miraculously arose and which will swallow us again. It is a source of wisdom. We own it. God owns it. It is literally nothing. All these things we tell each other, explaining a mystery that – if there is in fact design to the universe – was specifically designed to be unknowable.
Nothing
I was too hopeful, it seems. We all were in thinking that the nominal centrist Pieter Omtzigt would be the big winner on Wednesday. Instead, it was Holland’s longstanding crazy uncle, Geert Wilders. It only made sense. Rutte had spent most of his career fighting off the steady encroachment by Wilders into the mainstream. We had placed too much faith in centrism and too little in Rutte’s political skills. So the genie of hate is out of his bottle. It will be hard now to dismiss him as a crank, but it does remain to be seen how stable any government Wilders could assemble would actually be. His sort of provocative rhetoric plays well to a crowd but may not get him far in negotiations with serious politicos when the press is outside the room. It’s a corollary of the new politics, best demonstrated by congressional Republicans in the U.S. ‘Vote for me, I’ll achieve nothing!’ could be their slogan. They still win elections. The twenty-first-century electorate is made up of cackling masochists. Modern voters seem to take as their model 80s football hooligans, happy to trash their own stadium for a laugh. There’s no shame the morning after. It’s part of the game; it’s someone else’s job to clean up.
I woke again to the pitter-pat of little raindrops on the dark panes of our windows. I’m up hours before first light in this season, and my first task is Sinterklaas duty. The girls’ shoes are in the entryway, and I have to quietly drop gifts into the shoes. First, I get to read the heart-breakingly sweet notes my girls have written to the saint. Little Ren is just learning to write, and her notes are sometimes cryptic, always illustrated with her drawings, asking for some gift, astonishingly cute. I am alone in the morning with these notes in the morning, wishing time would stop.
In some sense time has already stopped. The month of November is a kind of sinkhole of consciousness, even when it doesn’t begin with convalescence from COVID. November is always a convalescence, existentially, a convalescence from itself, from decay. Its darkness is a course of treatment, a round of waters from Lethe, a dip in chilly waters, a subsidence of consciousness. We are reminded that living is experiencing the shifting boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. We spend the years explaining that moving line to each other. The unconscious is inside us. It is the divine; it is the true consciousness. It is the blackness from which consciousness miraculously arose and which will swallow us again. It is a source of wisdom. We own it. God owns it. It is literally nothing. All these things we tell each other, explaining a mystery that – if there is in fact design to the universe – was specifically designed to be unknowable.
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Travelogue 1108 – 21 November
Self-Determination
When we emerge from the Metro station, there is a collection of campaign workers ready with leaflets and smiles. They represent half a dozen parties vying for seats in Parliament tomorrow. They are friendly. The stakes in this election are higher than usual because of the resignation of our long-time premier, Mark Rutte, who seemed like the old oak tree of politics. It’s a moment of change. But the mood among the campaign workers is light. They aren’t aggressive. They are enjoying themselves.
Pieter Omtzigt seems the favourite to take Rutte’s place, presenting himself as the amiable face of centrism. The Dutch can’t really countenance extremism, after all. They flirt with it, but they can’t yet stomach the wild narcissism of a demagogue like Trump. Sadly, being a centrist in our time means taking positions that used to be solidly right-wing. For example, he has to be tough on immigrants. Further, he has to be sceptical about international education. There’s a whole choir of demagogues who want to limit higher education in English. I’m not sure who forms their political base here; in more than ten years, I’ve never met a Dutch person who was at all bothered about the ubiquity of English in Holland. If anything, they seem proud of it. But self-defeating nationalism seems the cause of the day.
Today Little Ren starts her day at the gym, which stands apart from the school building, across the small courtyard and playground. Because we usually arrive early, she stands among a small group of young ones at the door, waiting for the gym teacher. She says, “Papa, please wave to me by the school.” I don’t like leaving for work until I see the gym has been opened, and the children are safely inside. And I always kiss my girls before they go into school, and we wave to each other every day. “You can stay, but stand by the school, Papa.” She’s embarrassed to have me stand with her at the gym. My heart breaks a little, but I say all right. She stills gives me my kiss, and she waves good-bye as she walks across the playground and toward the gym.
Pieter Omtzigt seems the favourite to take Rutte’s place, presenting himself as the amiable face of centrism. The Dutch can’t really countenance extremism, after all. They flirt with it, but they can’t yet stomach the wild narcissism of a demagogue like Trump. Sadly, being a centrist in our time means taking positions that used to be solidly right-wing. For example, he has to be tough on immigrants. Further, he has to be sceptical about international education. There’s a whole choir of demagogues who want to limit higher education in English. I’m not sure who forms their political base here; in more than ten years, I’ve never met a Dutch person who was at all bothered about the ubiquity of English in Holland. If anything, they seem proud of it. But self-defeating nationalism seems the cause of the day.
Today Little Ren starts her day at the gym, which stands apart from the school building, across the small courtyard and playground. Because we usually arrive early, she stands among a small group of young ones at the door, waiting for the gym teacher. She says, “Papa, please wave to me by the school.” I don’t like leaving for work until I see the gym has been opened, and the children are safely inside. And I always kiss my girls before they go into school, and we wave to each other every day. “You can stay, but stand by the school, Papa.” She’s embarrassed to have me stand with her at the gym. My heart breaks a little, but I say all right. She stills gives me my kiss, and she waves good-bye as she walks across the playground and toward the gym.
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Travelogue 1107 – 18 November
The Toggles
The Netherlands is a caricature of itself in this year’s November, dripping, drizzling, grey and dark. It never stops. I rode home on the bike this afternoon, all the way from Blaak, struggling with the hood of my rain jacket. The jacket is a voluminous thing that wraps around me in such an excess of material that I can rarely identify the ends of it. It flaps as I ride, something like Batman’s cape, or so I imagine. It is probably less romantic than that to fellow cyclists, more of a nuisance. And the hood is a shapeless sack that refuses to cooperate. More often than not, I have to hold it closed at my neck with one hand as I ride, adding that much more to my nuisance factor on the road. Why can’t it simply snap shut? Instead, there are two odd little toggles on strings that tighten the rim of the hood but then release it when you let go. I’ve tried too often to tie these accursed cords together while riding, entirely unsuccessfully. But that is daily life in rainy Holland, raingear on and off, fiddling with zippers and toggles, carrying a bag of raingear everywhere I go, jackets and pants for myself and the girls, just so I never find myself wanting. I’m running to work, or I’m picking girls from school, rucksacks and gym bag hanging off me. That is daily life in the rain and cold, constrictions and weight on your back. I wonder if native Nederlanders who grew up in this climate feel the burden. I wonder if their sight is unchanged. I can’t help the feeling of horizons closing in, the rain pushing my head down, the fogs and clouds obscuring distances, my errant hood pulled tight around my head for as long as I can manage, eyes on the road so I don’t splash or slip. It’s the physical analogue for the work COVID did on me after coming home from Italia. Memories are weakened as much as the lungs, and the boundaries of life and consciousness close in. What is it to be alive? One wonders when those horizons contract, when one hardly sees past the first three metres before your front tire.
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Travelogue 1106 – 14 November
But, Soft!
And the skies closed in again. One day of (qualified) sunshine was enough. The rats had received their rewards, their small pellets of psychic sugar, and then it was back to the maze. Fogs returned, as though rising from the ground, while clouds were driven eastward over us, driven by the darkness at their heels. They brought mists and showers.
Time gets lost in these vapours. Was it summer once? When did school start up again? It seems as though I was always getting up at 5:30 and preparing lunches. My girls and I have walked together, hand in hand, for an unending series of mornings, through the misty air to the Metro, while rush hour surged around us. But, soft! what light through faded memory breaks? Just one month ago, we were leaving for Italia. Jumbled pictures emerge from the clouded mind, the cold and echoing space of Schiphol, a narrow, cobbled lane outside a small hotel, the fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. But the dim Dutch light of the day won’t sustain it. The memories dissipate.
The vapours and the showers have collaborators. Now I recall: the day we returned from abroad, I was already sick. I was in bed for three days with COVID, and, by the time I stood again, the beautiful trip had faded among the feverish dreams of unhappy returns. I was straight back into work, braving the heavy shadows of November.
But, Soft!
And the skies closed in again. One day of (qualified) sunshine was enough. The rats had received their rewards, their small pellets of psychic sugar, and then it was back to the maze. Fogs returned, as though rising from the ground, while clouds were driven eastward over us, driven by the darkness at their heels. They brought mists and showers.
Time gets lost in these vapours. Was it summer once? When did school start up again? It seems as though I was always getting up at 5:30 and preparing lunches. My girls and I have walked together, hand in hand, for an unending series of mornings, through the misty air to the Metro, while rush hour surged around us. But, soft! what light through faded memory breaks? Just one month ago, we were leaving for Italia. Jumbled pictures emerge from the clouded mind, the cold and echoing space of Schiphol, a narrow, cobbled lane outside a small hotel, the fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. But the dim Dutch light of the day won’t sustain it. The memories dissipate.
The vapours and the showers have collaborators. Now I recall: the day we returned from abroad, I was already sick. I was in bed for three days with COVID, and, by the time I stood again, the beautiful trip had faded among the feverish dreams of unhappy returns. I was straight back into work, braving the heavy shadows of November.
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Travelogue 1105 – 12 November
Rain Shy
The shreds of blue sky were a surprise. The bits of sunshine on the pavement were disorienting. The sustained appearance of the sun – all day! – left us startled, standing still with an anticipation of disappointment, something like dread. If we were not careful, we might drive away this strange advent of luck.
The wind and the rain had been plaguing us, following us for weeks, rarely leaving us in peace. Glancing outside while preparing to go accomplished nothing but the awakening of curses. If the air was still outside the window, the rains would start before we made it a hundred metres from home. If it was raining, it would only persist, while the wind pulled at our umbrellas.
Venturing out into the sunshine was unnerving. There were clouds on the horizon that caused us to flinch. We packed all our rain gear. But even when we were furthest from shelter, crossing the widest square, circling construction sites and diverted by malfunctioning doors, the skies stayed benevolent. I stopped to stare at the patches of blue. Was this a new style of torment? Watch the rain-shy dash for cover for no reason, just as a trauma reflex! It would have amused a cruel god.
Resentment aside, it was a day of wonder. The forecast for the morrow was gloomy, but we enjoyed the moment. Some people showed a doomsday instinct, acting recklessly, wild gleam in their eye. But most of us walked in a daze, not sure what to do with the good fortune in November.
Rain Shy
The shreds of blue sky were a surprise. The bits of sunshine on the pavement were disorienting. The sustained appearance of the sun – all day! – left us startled, standing still with an anticipation of disappointment, something like dread. If we were not careful, we might drive away this strange advent of luck.
The wind and the rain had been plaguing us, following us for weeks, rarely leaving us in peace. Glancing outside while preparing to go accomplished nothing but the awakening of curses. If the air was still outside the window, the rains would start before we made it a hundred metres from home. If it was raining, it would only persist, while the wind pulled at our umbrellas.
Venturing out into the sunshine was unnerving. There were clouds on the horizon that caused us to flinch. We packed all our rain gear. But even when we were furthest from shelter, crossing the widest square, circling construction sites and diverted by malfunctioning doors, the skies stayed benevolent. I stopped to stare at the patches of blue. Was this a new style of torment? Watch the rain-shy dash for cover for no reason, just as a trauma reflex! It would have amused a cruel god.
Resentment aside, it was a day of wonder. The forecast for the morrow was gloomy, but we enjoyed the moment. Some people showed a doomsday instinct, acting recklessly, wild gleam in their eye. But most of us walked in a daze, not sure what to do with the good fortune in November.
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