Travelogue 1129 – 13 April

Bombs in the East

Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)

Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.

Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly to cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.

There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.

But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.

The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.

Travelogue 1128 – 30 March
On the Water

It is Easter weekend, and the town is quiet. The early morning is particularly subdued because a drizzling rain is falling. I decide on a trip to the store before the girls wake. I throw on my running gear because it is easily available. I pull rain gear on over that, and I am ready for the bike.

I enjoy cycling in this weather, provided I don’t have far to go, provided I am not pedalling toward my work. A light, misty spring rain is refreshing. It dampens sound, and it slows time. It is contemplative. I slow as I cross the Beukelsbrug, taking a moment to catch my breath and look at the river. I see something there in the surface never still.

When I return, Little Ren is up and no one else. She is busy drawing. She has found a cartoon of a fairy that her big sister finished yesterday. In the quiet of the morning, she wants to replicate it. She asks my help. She stops me when I’ve done enough, and she carries on. She sings while she draws. She can’t sit still. She rolls back and forth on her knees. She tosses her head to the left and the right.

I feel obliged to record every stage of our girls’ growth. Things change so quickly. What I find to be the essence of this little girl now, aspects of her that I can’t imagine ever changing, her songs, her restless fidgeting, they will slip away. I’ll be reminded of them years from now, and I will be overcome with gratitude and sorrow, regret for things gone; we are allowed nothing in the transit of time.

When she has done something well, when she has played a song well for her piano teacher, when he praises her, Little Ren has a smile that is radiant and innocent. It is burned into my imagination. I think it is a part of everything I do. It’s an image floating on surface of the river in the morning.

Travelogue 1127 – 20 March
Lighting the Set

Napoleon never woke up with “Ziggy Played Guitar” looping in his mind. I’m comfortable saying that this experience separates me from the Emperor of the French. I don’t remember where or when I heard the song, but the central guitar riff has become lodged in my brain, and I cannot let it go. I sing the song to my girls in the mornings as we prepare them for school. I sing, “Oh yea-ah, Baby plays vio-o-ol.”

There are more substantial life circumstances, you may counter, that separate me from Napoleon Bonaparte. I have never led an army, it’s true. I’ve never been to Corsica. I have not yet been chased out of Russia. But then again, I could be. These are things I could do. Though the odds are so long that they approach infinity, the chance remains. And still there survives not one chance that Napoleon heard David Bowie sing. He never once heard an electric guitar. Through all the shouting and screaming in battle, he never heard an electronically amplified voice. He famously pleaded with Goethe to join him in Paris, but he never even once asked Bowie.

That guitar riff is my privilege, living two hundred years later than Napoleon.

I can think of another person who never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Old Scaliger pottering around his garden in Leiden in the early seventeenth century never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Maybe he whistled some old folk tune in the morning, a hymn, or a madrigal that haunted him when he woke. I like the image of the ageing professor alone in his garden, kneeling among the cabbage, poking at the dirt, pulling up weeds. In the garden, he might grumble about politics among the faculty. He might labour over some point of Latin grammar. Or he might just feel the dirt between his fingers, breaking apart the clods, looking for signs that Death had been creeping around his window again. He glances up at the misty sky, wondering how long he has.

I don’t know if anyone else has the impression that each century of the second millennium has a characteristic light. I have been to too many museums, I think. The seventeenth century is definitely darker than most. The light is Rembrandt’s and Caravaggio’s, full of shadow. The weather is Dutch, attenuated daylight under scudding clouds.

The nineteenth century is also dark. It’s Neo-Gothic and Heathcliff-on-the-moors dark. The exception would be Napoleon’s era, during which the atmosphere is early-spring-morning-before the-battle. It’s a holdover from the summer of the eighteenth century.

Travelogue 1126 – 15 March
Napoleon in a Wig

Baby Jos is bringing home news from the world. She is old enough to be learning names and facts and ideas. She has told me about Keith Haring, of all people; she has told me about dresses during the Victorian era. She has told me about rain and condensation; she has told me about planets and stars. She is telling me about Napoleon.

“He was selfish,” she says. “He brought back slavery.” This is what her teacher has told her about Napoleon Bonaparte. It is an interesting pair of factoids about the Emperor of the French. Neither factoid can be discounted, but the historian in me is instantly irritated. “Tell me more.” There is one more: many people died in war.

Coincidentally, the Little Corporal has been on my mind. I had had a certain fascination for the man when I was a child. And the recent trip to Paris has brought him back to my thoughts. It is hard not to think of him at the Louvre (named the Musée Napoléon during the Empire) even if only in the salon with the huge canvases by Gros and David, depicting grand battles and the glorious coronation. (“That’s the Empress Joséphine!”)

“Napoleon was a selfish man,” she said. That is true enough, Baby Jos, but please just remember that history is more complicated.

Why does it bother me so much? I get protective. History is like the abandoned house where kids cannot help but play reckless pranks. People are children when it comes to history; they are seduced by their power over it. They emotionalize history; they sentimentalize it. They gather facts under umbrellas to make pretty terraces among the wild garden. They psychoanalyse historical figures. They twist history into morality tales.

This latter, the moralizing, is the trend of our day. It is an embarrassing and a frustrating practice; embarrassing because it is the most transparent and clumsy sort of editorializing the human mind employs. We are in a sad state if we think we have an edge on the people of eighteenth-century France, whether in wisdom or in experience. And it is frustrating because it occludes clear sight. Moralizing is the woman with the tall wig at the theatre, succeeding less in getting attention than in forcing everyone to crane their necks to see around her.

Travelogue 1125 – 3 March
A Spring Cloud

Thermometer readings are slightly different than they have been. The clouds come and go. But it’s a Sunday, and there are a few hours in the early afternoon when the clouds retreat into a haze, and when the sun imparts a certain warmth on the back. The people of the city respond incommensurately, shucking jackets, appearing in shorts, sitting on terraces outside. They sense a change. Elianne’s papa informs us, before ballet class, that meteorological spring, unlike astronomical spring, begins on the first of March. It’s spring! That’s certainly the consensus of the people outside, to judge by their behaviour.

Change is like that, a judgement formed by impressions, impressions founded on vapours.

Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is already dead, that we are living in a new age. He cites a historical example. The Greek writer offers the year 1776: all evidence surrounding the observer would suggest it was an age of feudalism. There were kings and queens, lords and ladies. Lords lived on great estates of land, worked by peasants born to peasant families who had worked the lands for hundreds of years. The nobility seemed to be in charge of politics and of all opinion and fashion. By outward signs, it was a feudal society, but in fact the capitalist age had dawned, and was already firmly in charge of humanity’s destiny.

Change is like that, the germ inside constancy. Every moment steals in under guide of sameness.

Varoufakis has a theory he’s promoting, and the narrative serves that purpose, but it does still make sense. His theory is that we have entered another feudal age, effectively falling back in evolution. But this forma of feudalism serves a different set of lords, this time the tech aristocracy. Effectively, according to Varoufakis, doomed capital opted to take its own life, funding the turnover itself. It’s a theory, and not a very romantic one. But it’s as good as any other. There’s obviously something in the air, meteorological, if not astronomical. Consider the dubious Lord Musk, nudging the Ukraine war this way and that with his satellite services, offering them to one combatant and then the other in a partisan bid to seem above the fray, far above, high as the spring cloud.

Travelogue 1124 – 26 February
Beweeglijkheid

It’s a still morning. It’s always a still morning after a holiday, isn’t it? At least if you get up as early as I do on a workday. The streets outside are quiet. Even with the equinox approaching, the mornings are dark. The windows are blank, suggesting either hope or depression, depending on the inclination of one’s mind. I sense the weight that depression has put on while I was away, chewing anxiously in anticipation of the return to the mundane, but I can balance her sway with a renewed will. I will turn resolutely toward hope. I don’t need the day to be a lark; what I need is to see that it unfolds with purpose. The week must be set on a steady course.

We arrived home on Saturday. Sunday morning, the girls had ballet. There was no rain, so I tossed Little Ren onto the back of my bicycle. By ten, we were rolling alongside the Westersingel in the centre. The Westersingel is a nineteenth-century canal that now features a small sculpture garden along its banks. The last sculpture we pass is my favourite, Rodin’s “L’homme qui marche”, an armless and headless body in bronze, a man stepping forward. We just saw another version of the same statue by the same artist last week in the Musèe d’Orsay.

It's a lovely piece. It's quiet, and it’s still, as most statues are, but it was created as a study of movement. The torso turns; missing its arms, the motion seems awkward. The torso was left unfinished. I quote from Dutch prose about the Rotterdam piece, because Dutch is the language for rough exteriors: “Door de afwisseling van lichte vlakken en donkere schaduwen zorgt de lichtval voor beweeglijkheid in het beeld.” Roughly, that means that the rough surface creates a feeling of motion with its alternating light and shadow.

Travelogue 1123 – 18 February
Plus Ça Change

We’re off to Paris in a few days, so why not break out a few words in the beautiful language? Add a few more, and you have my entire French vocabulary. I’m not proud; the Parisians will be sure of that.

It’s spring break – though it’s still winter, - and the girls still have ballet classes in their calendars. We still dress in our layers and our jackets, and when we leave the flat, we bow our heads into the light rain and a chilly wind.

The ballet school is in the city centre, upstairs in a small brick building near Eendrachtsplein. It’s a small old building, with small, old rooms. We ride the cramped elevator, and, walking down the narrow yellow hallway, we pass a locker room, and we pass a few open studios with bars and mirrors. At the end of the hall, there are some steps leading up into a foyer serving a set of small studios for children’s lessons.

We enter and we are greeted by familiar faces. We’ve been attending weekly for more than five years. One of the new faces is an old face, a girl who attended school with Baby Jos but then transferred to another school. I sit with her father, and he shows me the spreadsheets he’s working on. His daughter takes two classes, so he spends a good part of his morning in that bleak room.

We work and we play. The two activities are colours succeeding each other on a pinwheel, accelerating, and finally blurring.

During breaks in my own workday, breaks between classes, I take walks. Nearby is the Erasmus University campus. Even among the brutalist architecture of the university, I find spots of charm. There’s a long reflecting pool in the centre, surrounded by lawns, and divided in the middle by a curving pedestrian bridge. I enjoy walking around the perimeter. Beyond, there’s a canal, and, beside the road along the campus’s verge, there is a gravel walking path among saplings and grass. That path is for long breaks. I don’t get many of those anymore.

Sometimes I stop to reflect during those walks. I say to myself, “I woke up this morning, and I am still here.” It’s a generic thought. It could be said with contentment or disappointment. It might refer to Planet Earth or might refer to Rotterdam. It might refer to the state of living. I say it with one meaning or the other; I say it with all meanings. I don’t know.

I think change is like that. It is the germ inside constancy. There is no stasis, in fact. Every same thing stands in a different moment; every moment steals in under guide of sameness.

Travelogue 1122 – 14 February
Attentive

There’s been a change in the air, something subtle, something gentle: a slight access of light, a brighter shade among the clouds, a shot of colour, a shot of oxygen, maybe. One can breathe a little more easily. I have seen a few crocuses among the grass. I have noticed birdsong in the courtyard of my building. I look up for birds among the dark skeletal branches of our trees.

This is how things start. Small signs are stirring, and you notice. It helps if you are quiet and attentive. Voices change.

Baby Jos has brought home a variety of new tones this school year. Out of the blue, she will reason with me like a young adult. The tone catches me by surprise, and I smile. She frowns; she wants to be taken seriously. I adjust, and I listen. She’s got so many things to say. In other moments, she’s a girl again. She imagines things, and she tells stories. She observes things as we walk, and I have to be attentive. Her vocabulary shifts almost weekly. A great number of things are now “adorable”: small dogs and children and toys and cartoons and jewellery and styles. Then, “come on, girl!” she declares. And she can chatter all the way there, all on her own steam, pausing only to shush her little sister when Little Ren dares to contribute.

Travelogue 1121 – 31 January
This Is Europe

I’m shopping near the university, in a cosy little neighbourhood of Rotterdam known to be on the posh side. Posh or not there’s a man who is tottering and mumbling. He is dressed fine and groomed, but there’s something wrong with him. He confronts an elderly pair sitting on an outdoor bench. They are speaking in Italian. He interrupts them and starts in a reasonable tone, informing them that they are in the Netherlands, advising them they should speak Dutch. The couple are confused; they question; then they protest. He raises his voice. “Oh, Dio,” complains the woman. This is Europe now. It’s a tiny country on a continent that is a patchwork of languages, but, sure, Holland for the Dutch! To be sure, this man was unbalanced in some way, and he was put in his place by a few locals, in Dutch. “Sod off,” yelled one ordinary-looking bystander in Dutch. “They’re in the Netherlands,” the poor man replied, thinking we needed one more reminder.

In Italy, meanwhile, a museum director in Florence complains that tourism has turned the city into a ‘prostitute’, and this brings down upon her head a frightful torrent of outrage. Maybe that was to be expected; it was strong language. But the story becomes confusing when you look at who complained loudest: a lot of right-wing allies of Italian Prime Minister and Mussolini fan, Giorgia Meloni. It might have seemed at first blush like a sentiment they would applaud: damn those foreign interlopers. You wonder if it might have become economic. Tourists provide profit. But no, you only need look as far as the museum director’s surname: Hollberg. It turns out that Meloni’s government has been trying to push non-Italians out of top cultural jobs so they can be filled by sympathetic cultural warriors. Ms Hollberg chose a bad moment to voice her opinion, especially in such colourful terms.

Travelogue 1120 – 20 January
Twist and Shout

We will be tortured for ages by the image of Trump awkwardly dancing to “YMCA” on rally stages. We will be tortured for generations by the memory of Trump recommending bleach for COVID.

I’ve always wondered about the paradigm established among the shouting social media cliques for evaluating the COVID response. It was always a question of who was right. As a topic, that’s fair enough: in retrospect, both sides ought to be able to admit they were wrong on some points, medical and historical. But what an odd sum to take as the final measure! Right and wrong are material for discussions about lessons learned for the next time, not for moral judgement of humanity, or leadership, or the medical establishment struggling with crisis and fear.

The fact is, we succeeded. We succeeded in caring. The world mobilised to protect men, women, and children. The details of implementation pale in importance next to this singular achievement. The efforts made to save lives were authentically remarkable.

The social compact relies on the impulse of charity. And, yes, charity does exist. It’s not the time to hash over adolescent debate topics like “altruism is really ego in disguise”. There was never a need to make great efforts to dress up greed as charity, as the fleshy former president demonstrates for us every day.

Please, with one internal eye always on the horror of Trump’s herky jerky Twist, let’s give our academic cynicism a rest, when all that’s good is already under attack. Let’s forego the self-conscious poring over brain scans for the chemical signature of caring; let’s take a break from the tiresome campaigns to impugn everyone’s honour and intentions. Everyone’s doing the best they can. And the finest human systems are still flawed. Corruption and ignorance and waste find their way into any environment, and good people can do no more than minimize it. Baby might still rate more than the bathwater, say.

I’m not Christian, but I think of a Biblical author. Paul had his moments. He wrote, “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.” He also wrote, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Children shout over each other; adults ask them to stop and listen.

Dancing Trump is a totem of bad times. Dancing Trump is the gargoyle. Cement him into the wall of the temple as a reminder. Look upon him and shudder.

Travelogue 1119 – 18 January
Just a Drop

When in Holland, look for signs of change in the forms of the water. Now the water has become white, and when it falls, it falls in pellets. On the ground it crunches and causes hazards. On playgrounds, it lies in patches of white. On the canals, there are thin sheets of ice on the surface. Seagulls stand on it, looking uncertain.

Big changes, we describe in terms of floods. Floods of immigrants, for example. Or we whisper about the literal tide predicted with climate change, quite possibly the final one for low-lying towns like The Hague.

But a big change is already upon us, isn’t it? Flood tides rising and threatening to overcome their barriers and run free. They swept over Iowa this week; we spot them in Europe, too. These are the waters of Narcissus, rising to their highest mark in decades. They claim a few inches every month, a few dozen souls every week, victims of the Narcissian malady, the crippling trance of self-regard. Victims are mesmerised by their image, hypnotised by their voices, enraptured by their opinions.

Liberals have loudly declared – and, bless them, the libs can be counted on to be loud, in all seasons – that Trump is a threat to democracy. That begs the question: do you believe them? The Trumpist right has only two answers to choose from: no we don’t, or yes but we don’t care. It’s a tragic binary, both sides founded on discord, distrust, defiance, and nihilistic abandon. It’s not the most inspiring political programme: there’s little to recognise as optimism there.

The “Trump or democracy” dynamic seems familiar to me, parallel to the dynamic formed during the COVID crisis. Do you believe in the public health officials responding to the crisis? No we don’t, or yes but we find it very inconvenient. It’s dark reasoning. It has some parallels with the bedrock position of Republicanism: do you believe that paying taxes provides for the public good? No it’s a conspiracy among civil servants, or yes but we don’t want to pay.

In none of these litanies is space allowed for a pause. Narcissus responds without hesitation, self first with immediacy, self first without reflection.

Society might require an antidote to the Narcissian waters. In crisis, one must care first for the welfare of others. One forgets the self for a moment, releases ambition and self-expression, sets aside righteousness, and settles a gentle focus on the needs of other human beings. No need to proselytise, no need to debate.

I’m prescribing a drop from waters of Lethe, the peaceful sleep of forgetfulness. We do so love our “ideas”; and they will return to us once the medicine wears off. There is nothing to fear.

Travelogue 1118 – 7 January
The Orthodox Holiday

We successfully negotiated Janus’s gate. We are in a new year. As though straining to differentiate itself from 2023, January’s temperatures have taken a dip. Last night, I detected a taste of Minnesota as I breathed deeply of the crisp night air over Rotterdam. I could see stars. That was itself a delight in this season of clouds.

But the calendar still plays its tricks. In an act of mirroring worthy of two-faced Janus, or perhaps of all the water still on the ground, today is Christmas. It’s Orthodox Christmas this time. We, in our exhaustion, defy the mirror. We spent our energy early, starting with the Dutch holiday, Sinterklaas, in early December. There’s little left for December’s Christmas, and less for New Year’s. Orthodox Christmas is just a pleasant occasion for wishing everyone well.

Is Janus still watching? Every day is a gateway, after all, and this is his month. The two-headed god is charged with gates and transitions. What moment is not a transition? His very physiognomy suggests his function, with four eyes to watch. So we must be seen nearly every day, tripping through a doorway.

Furthermore, everything we pass has a god or goddess attached, the trees, the banks, every field buried under a street, every river. Understanding their function is challenging. What did the ancients imagine their gods did from day to day? Did they live in Olympus or were they everywhere? Did they form the essence of the thing they represented? Was Janus simply a deformed citizen of Olympus, or was his spirit inside every doorway? Or maybe both? Why not? Was he just a bureaucrat, a manager of sorts? Was it his job to ensure that doorways didn’t malfunction, perhaps turning people back the way they came? Or was he some sort of Heisenbergian observer, making everything possible just by his eyes? Would the gates dissolve without his gaze? The mystery formed a part of their divinity, I suppose.

One hardly knows what to reverence anymore. On these cold mornings, so slow to warm into day, one ventures out in layers against the weather, and a longing dawns inside, as slowly as the light, to offer devotion, to find the loitering god like Janus and leave something at his feet. It arises from one’s vulnerability, and it only seeks the worthy object.

I hear the answer that is obvious to the secular group mind: reverence everything. Love all, tread lightly, be gracious. And I admit it makes sense. I also admit I make a rather poor model of these virtues, especially during Janus’s own month. I am irritated with city life, and, as far as I can tell, so is everyone else. The winter has become unkind, and it lingers too long. Not even the tardy Orthodox Christmas has much power to lift spirits.

Travelogue 1117 – 3 January
God of Gates

Janus looks forward and back at the same time. At midnight of the new year, I wonder what there might be to see. I imagine only tunnels of wind in both directions, rippling through the veils of rain. One year becomes another on a wet, winter night, and old Janus presides.

Newscasters make the most of the change, trumpeting the drama of our times, but they discover the truer note when they drink on air and enact silly sketches. Joy becomes enjoyment, and celebration becomes self-indulgence. Fireworks are a handy substitute for hope.

The first day of this year offered us one small and singular note of optimism. It was right away, as we left the house. To get to Metro, we have to pass through a narrow square of sorts, a span of pavement between two low buildings of residencies. It’s a depressing stretch, usually littered with trash. On New Year’s Day, in particular, it’s an unpleasant sight, full of the remains of fireworks, remains that decay in the rain into an ugly sludge.

That morning, and it was early for a holiday, we encountered a sole neighbour with a trash bag in one hand and a garbage picker in the other, moving methodically across the plein. He had clearly begun his work much earlier; the plaza was uncommonly clean, even for a regular weekday. He cut a lonely figure in the heavy air of a morning after. But he had a patient smile, and we were sure to give him a salute for his service. Here was my first hero of 2024.

He continued his labours as we carried on, emerging from the plaza into the broad open space before the transit centre, climbing the wide steps up to the tram lines. Janus is the god of gates; we advanced under his watchful eye. Our neighbour lingered behind in the shadows of the square. Had Janus seen him yet?