Travelogue 1049 – July 5

Description

“Her brother was not handsome; no, when they first saw him, he was absolutely plain, black and plain; but still he was a gentleman, with a pleasing address.”

It’s a fun introduction to a character. The passage is from “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen. I started in on Austen recently, part of an enthusiasm for eighteenth-century literature that was sparked by my fling with Alexander Pope. No: now that I think of it, I had a brief crush on Joseph Addison before Pope. I’m a fickle reader, with so little time for dedicated reading this spring.

Of course, Austen wrote in the nineteenth century, but she wrote during that very retrograde period we call Napoleonic. Her voice owed much to the classical style of the previous century. She was hardly a Romantic.

When I started in on “Mansfield Park”, I had to change gears a bit. There’s something very specific to Austen. I felt at first like I was reading a legal contract. That’s the crisp and precise air of the eighteenth century’s rationalism. Human beings may be irrational, but there was no reason to be anything but rational in describing their irrationality.

I noticed, especially when I contrasted Austen’s work with novels written only a generation or two later, that Austen was very sparing with description. Her prose is overwhelmingly dialogue or narrative, and her stories are driven by the pendulum swing between them. Put another way, we learn about characters through what they say and what they do. That’s what makes the passage above about Henry Crawford stand out. We know right away that this character is special, and that his character has particular importance to the plot.

Consider the rest of the passage, and note that we still do not get free-standing description, but we must see him through the estimation of others: “The second meeting proved him not so very plain; he was plain, to be sure, but when he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by any body. He was, in fact, the most agreeable young man the sisters had ever known, and they were equally delighted with him.”

Travelogue 1048 – June 29

Job Follows Achilles

I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been reading for pleasure much. Still I’m swimming in the written word. I’ve been labouring under piles of corrections for months. It’s the deal I’ve made with management this spring to have time to heal. My personal dose of Job this winter and spring has been long-COVID. I haven’t lost my cattle, but I’ve lost my health.

At 5:30am I start on student papers. If I ever get through this workload, I will convert the 5:30 timeslot into writing fiction. In midsummer, that early hour is a special one. The sun is up, and the birds are singing. I stand at the front door breathing in the fresh morning air, finding a pleasant way to wake myself up.

I sit at my desk, joining Sisyphus with Job, undertaking every day to roll the boulder of syntax and logic up the steepest hill in Holland, which is the tortured concept of business education. The routine is wearisome, and I don’t mean only the work routine, sitting in front of the computer hours per day, correcting dozens of the same assignments. I mean also the routines of human error. The students, bless them, seem to conspire to make the same mistakes as each other and the same mistakes time and again.

Somehow, my love of language survives. During my desperately short breaks from work and family, I play on Duolingo. I scribble passages for stories in the little notebook that fits in the palm of my hand. I look up poetry on my phone’s browser. A recent poetry project was to dive into Pope’s Iliad. I didn’t have the time to get far, but the poem is an inspiring enterprise. The story is timeless. The language is gorgeous. The old trope likening language to architecture is just right. The poem is Hawksmoor or Wren. Better.

Travelogue 1047 – June 26
A Drizzle of Job

It’s been a bit Book of Job around the house, with ill health and ill fortune falling like a steady rain. Well, let’s call it a drizzle, and admit that ‘Book of Job’ is hyperbolic. But we’ve been tested.

One of our trials was the chicken pox. The pox took one girl down, and then, in a proud show of force, waited until the first girl was just healed to take down the other one. So this ordeal went on for a full month, and for a full month one of the girls was home while her parents tried to focus on their work.

Chicken pox in memory and in the public imagination is something almost adorable, a gentle children’s rite of passage, during which they get pimply and itchy, during which they stay home and watch TV in their pyjamas. The reality is more like a horror show. Little Ren had pox in her mouth and throat. She had pox in her nose and under her eyelid. Baby Jos had pox under her skin and on the bottoms of her feet. They were crying in pain during the worst of it and couldn’t sleep. Their parents were in shock. This parent was never very good around illness. Now he was monitoring pox that were leaking pus and pulling back eyelids to check his girl’s red, leaky eyes.

All things must pass, and these do. They have scars, but those will pass. We sink into the couch, and we stare vacantly at the TV screen, while bodies slowly heal.

Travelogue 1046 – May 28

The Price of Pearls

Memory is a set of pearls on a thread.

Last night, as I was putting Little Ren to bed, she said, “Poppy?” She was sleepy and had already been drifting off. Her sister and her mama were getting ready for bed. They were in the bathroom, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Little Ren alone. I lay next to her as she curled up under the blankets. “Poppy,” she said. “Can I say something?” This is a conversational formula the two girls have adopted lately. “Yes,” I answered. “I love you,” she said, and she fell asleep.

These moments make a parent’s life. My little girl fell asleep, and in the hush afterward, I felt connected to a string of moments that had some kinship to this one, quiet and tender. I don’t often think about those moments. They might have slipped away forever if not for being recalled by Little Ren. In these latter years, my life has been an active one, and my attention to the softer side of life has been neglected. 

The issue here is value. How do we assign value to memories? The good news is, the price of pearls is fairly high in our age. We cultivate memories actively, documenting everything, collecting hard drives full of photos. The bad news is it might be an era of inflation. When there are so many pearls on the market, how do we maintain value?

An interesting corollary: how do we value the real moments? The ones generating the memories? We laugh at the tourist who snaps photos without pausing to look at the site with their own eyes. Are we better? Do we know and feel the value of the experience without its pearl, without the memory? Are we living vicariously, through ourselves? Meaning, are we living direct experience, or are we methodically diverting the experience into something to be assigned value later, in the pearl market?

Travelogue 1045 – May 26
Why Do Artists Love Workshopping?

I’ve written a few short plays, and I’m organizing a little event this spring to introduce them to my eager public. My little event is not a stage performance, though. It’s a reading and a discussion. It’s a step toward performances in the autumn, and, strangely, I find this workshop just as exciting as the final performance.

Why do artists like “workshopping” so much? I think a lot about artists and writers, wondering why they do what they do. They are like an exotic species, and I must observe to figure them out.

You might be tempted to compare art to any other product. Perhaps the artist is even freer than other producers. They are licensed to be eccentric and innovative. Isn’t it enough to reveal the final image, idea or dance and delight the world? Why reveal the process? Doesn’t that risk disenchantment and boredom?

But I don’t think the traditional business model quite fits here. Art work as a consumable product is a failed analogy.

To be fair, I don’t think a “traditional business model” exists anywhere. The idle right-wing fantasy of the world being run like a Ford plant is based on warped nostalgia. Ambitious young businesspeople today long to be creatives. Everything is workshopped; every project incorporates agile methods. It seems to me that the 80s devotion to free-market economics – promoting business models as “efficient” – was essentially an anti-democratic movement – painting democracy as “inefficient.”

Anyway, art, like democracy, is a messy process. We do art because we love doing art. The love for making art speaks to art’s definition. In its roots, art means skill. In Greek, artizein meant to prepare. The focus of art was always on the process. We share art most when we share the process.

Art is thinking out loud. It’s a public conversation, a project in transparency. The art object captures human instinct and thought. Why are we so curious about, say, the mechanics of sculpture? How did he or she do that, we ask, and we are quite stirred by the thought of that individual chipping away at stone for weeks or months. We feel flattered somehow. His or her hands represent our own.

Theatre is the messiest of the arts. We love theatre because we love the mess: actors, writers, technicians, possibly musicians and visual artists, all hashing out some very tentative and fleeting moment on the stage. The making of it is the making of a community. The members of communities quarrel; they disappoint each other. They inspire each other. It’s a lot of stress for something so fragile. But the “product” is the work itself. The work challenges, and it rewards, and it educates. It ennobles people because it brings them together in realms of speculation.

There it is. We love workshopping. Every rough draft is a final. Each audience response is art. An art lover should never hesitate to attend a workshop, thinking they want a finished product. Finished theatre is just the curtain and the applause. Would you buy a ticket for the final bow?

Travelogue 1044 – May 22

A Soviet Star for Trying

 

What is satire? I’ve written a short play that might be broadly classified as satire. It’s about an anonymous dictator who is deciding on whether to invade a neighbouring country. I wonder what might have inspired that! It’s a silly play, meant to entertain, and it really only communicates the obvious, that dictators are despicable human beings. So where is the satire in that? Shouldn’t satire tackle broader topics? I’m curious.

 

The first definition to come up for me on Google is: “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”

 

Merriam-Webster says satire “is a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” All right, so we can now call late-night TV ridicule satire. Is that enough?

 

Something makes me hesitate to use the word too liberally. Is it enough to mock the powerful? Trump and his army of the brain-dead, Putin with his cold-as-ice Bond-villain persona, they make ridicule redundant.

 

I see, scrolling down further, another angle on satire: “(in Latin literature) a literary miscellany, especially a poem ridiculing prevalent vices or follies.” The Latin, satura, is described as meaning “poetic medley”.

 

This I like better. This suggests two elements as gatekeepers. Does the satire have some artistic value on its own? And does the comment have a broader social relevance? The satire says something – in an aesthetically pleasing or interesting way – about people and society in general. I think of “Candide”.

 

Well, my piece is anything but “Candide”, and it does not qualify as satire, according to my own little exercise at definition. But it’s still a fun play. Having standards does not negate anything. It just raises the bar, clears the mind, issues a challenge.

 

We can feel two things at the same time. We can be proud of what we create for its own merits, and we can appreciate traditional categories for arts. What do we gain when we label a cheap thriller a “novel”? What does the book gain? It can still be a fun read without being shelved next to Tolstoy. Are we giving stars, like in kindergarten?

Travelogue 1043 – May 6
Standing By Roe v Wade

Little Ren is in a loving phase. She loves everything with an equally approving regard. She loves the flowers of spring. She loves the rabbits and the ducklings. She loves our neighbours, and she loves the ants that occasionally make it into our apartment. She plays with imaginary babies of all sorts, baby unicorns and baby kitties and baby humans. Everything that is alive, and everything that she pretends is alive, is the object of her benign attention. It’s a kind of Christ-like phase, in which everything is blessed in her sunny mind.

They will grow up, my girls, and great realizations will continue to dawn on them, fashioned by the greater complexity in their lives. One day, they will stumble upon an idea of human dignity. It’s an idea that comes in waves, first as a noble intention and then as a pragmatic intention. Dignity means something more after every betrayal, after every insult, after every hard exigency. It’s not easy for human beings to live together in society.

Little Ren fights with her sister constantly. The two girls often declare each other ‘stupid’, and they vow they will never play with the other again. How do we develop respect? The visceral only accretes. It grows a layer of intellectual protest; it grows another layer of moral entrenchments and righteousness. Adults walk the streets with tickertape commentary about everyone they pass scrolling through their minds. Everyone is offensive on some level. How do we develop respect?

One strategy seems to be empathy. The realization that life is a miracle comes in a flash; the realization of what it means to live any single life takes long years of listening. It takes maturity.

Little Ren’s “sanctity of life” phase I have loved. Every phase my girls have enjoyed, I have loved. A part of me mourns the passing of each, but I know there are more developments to enjoy. Even the hard ones I will love. Maturity is in some mysterious way an end unto itself. These are principles bound up in the larger one of human dignity. That is a lifetime.

Travelogue 1042 – April 21
Keep Your Workplace Tidy

Rotterdam is a dynamic place. There is construction happening everywhere in this city. It never ends. The roads are being dug up everywhere. Every week, you can count on some regular route of yours being disrupted. The city does provide fair warning online. I should be looking it up every morning: wegwerkzaamheden.

I took this photo out the window of the hospital. This old building that they’re tearing down was once part of the hospital complex. You see rooms on the bottom floors opened to the air by the demolition. With war in the news, it’s tempting to say this looks like photos from the warzone. But it doesn’t at all.

Look how neat the site is. That is what drew me to take the picture. It seems so Dutch to me, contained and tidy. That little bulldozer looks like a toy on its neat, sandy track.

Look at the style of the building. It’s typical for Rotterdam, this stacked look in light colours, with domino windows and shallow balconies like the trays you stack on your desk. This is the post-war city standing inside the booming millennial one. On the left you see the sterner style of the new hospital buildings.

Travelogue 1041 – April 18

An Easter Day

Easter this year was a dazzling spring day. It was stunning, both in its beauty and its emotional impact. We’ve had our sunny days before this one, but the benevolence of this Easter Sunday’s rained down on us like something altogether new. I don’t know how many of the other Rotterdammers who were walking the streets yesterday felt as grateful as I did, how many had experienced the winter as unusually long, but there were certainly a lot of smiling faces to mirror back my relief.

As a family we took a walk downtown, along the Westersingel canal, admiring the sculptures there – climbing on the sculpture’s pedestals, in the case of the girls, – looking over the glinting surface of the water, and watching all the people go by. There were many who had had the same idea, all of them lightly chatting and strolling on in full contentment, with ‘not a care in the world,’ as the old phrase would have it. It’s such a comfort that we are allowed days like this.

In early evening, I managed my own walk, along the humbler canal behind our building, the Spaansebocht canal. It’s a ragged little park, but my attention was swept up as I walked slowly along the paved pathway, swept up into the brilliant sunlight in the new leaves above, into the varieties of cherry blossoms still blooming, red and white among the spring greens, and into the intermittent little melodies of the birdsong. In the canal, I saw my first ducklings of the season, tacking across the calm canal water in the wake of their mother, who skittishly eyed the human who had stopped by the water’s edge. There were four babies, one yellow and three black. As though obeying a quiet edict of the season, the pair of swans who had made their home here all winter were nowhere to be seen. The canal was left to the ducks raising their broods.

Travelogue 1040 – April 13
Flying the Ukrainian Flag

My American friends are curious how the Dutch feel about the war in Ukraine. My replies to them are brief and unhelpful. The Dutch are not the most emotionally demonstrative of people. I’ve seen no one shouting at the TV or recruiting for a Dutch Donbas brigade. I don’t really know how they feel about it, or how it differs from responses in America.

We did raise for Ukraine at my girls’ school. I think the parents felt good about choosing that for the year’s fundraiser. Honestly, though, it did little to alleviate the anxiety and tedium involved in events like these. We had to dream up activities with our children and then become the primary consumers for their performances and crafts. It sounds fun, and some of it is. For example, the kids who were musicians got to play outside the entrance to the school on scheduled mornings, the Ukrainian flag rolled out in front of them, with buskers’ caps open for change. That was a pleasant way to start the day.

Those of us whose children made crafts, though, were forced to submit to the market experience upstairs, cramming into the narrow hallways of the top floor of our school in order to stop at every table among a suffocating crowd and coo lovingly over the beautiful creations. Children swarmed around us, while parents pushed their own lovelies to the front of the line in a desperate bid to get business done and over with.

That was about as personal as the Ukrainian experience has been so far. Otherwise, it seems like we’re all just watching from afar and feeling the same dread, whether we’re Dutch or American.

And commenting, and commenting, and commenting. I’ve noticed that comments about Ukraine follow a similar pattern to those about ‘The Slap’: “Sure, it was wrong, but ….” Those first four words buy hundreds more. Will Smith and Vladimir Putin have a lot in common, it seems. I wonder if this sort of chatter bodes ill for the rule of law. We seem to be forgetting that justice is blind. Not even nice fellows, or emotionally wounded fellows, get to assault other human beings. Not even all the accumulated moral trespasses of NATO members, and there have been quite a few of them, buy poor Vlad a free pass to invade a free nation. Full stop.

What if we exercised the full stop more often? “It was wrong.” What if we bit our tongues on the wise disclaimers? It might be liberating. It might taste a little like humility.

Travelogue 1039 – April 1
Één April

It’s April Fool’s Day and Nature’s trick has been to leave a blanket of snow over everything during the night. The girls were excited, looking out the windows and shouting. Once we were outside, and on the way to school, they wanted only to run and leave tracks.

It’s a moody climate, and it’s a moody people. On the tram, you read the weather in people’s faces. Yesterday, as clouds gathered, moods had soured. Passengers were sullen and withdrawn. They scowled, and they slumped in their seats. This morning, there is something else, a brightening of sorts. It’s not a sunny good cheer, but a kind of exhilaration. The sharp cold, and the sight of snow may not have been what anyone wanted at this time of year, but it was a change, and the change was exciting.

Approaching the school, we could hear the children screaming. The snow had turned to slush on asphalt and pavement, but it had accumulated on the artificial turf under the playground toys. The kids were running in circles, scooping up snow, making snowballs and chasing each other. My girls were shy, only standing and pelting each other.

When Baby Jos comes home after school, she tells me stories. Did I know there was a fish with human teeth? Did I know there was a tiny forest animal that was made of deer poop? Did I know there was a dog who could fly? My job was to say, “Really? I didn’t know that.” I had to be coached to respond in the right way. Then she shouted, “April Fool’s!”

Travelogue 1038 – March 31
And the Winner Is …!

Why should I be the only one with no comment to make on the biggest event of the week? Never mind the war or the pandemic or the economy. Never mind the political infighting that makes Lincoln’s election look like a game of softball. The event of which I speak is, of course, “The Oscars Slap”. I could hardly be taken seriously if I did not publicly wring my hands over what happened on that Hollywood stage, could I?

Well, who did not like the two of these men before the Slap? Two more genial and likeable superstars could hardly be found. And who did not feel a bit disappointed after watching that video clip. Even before forming a judgement about who was right and who was wrong, who did not experience that familiar queasiness, the signal that humanity had disappointed you again? And not in the predictable way, like when you see Marjorie Taylor Greene creeping up to a microphone. You know she will leave a mess on the podium for the rest of us to clean up. No, this one was not supposed to happen.

More important to register is the tide of disgust rising underneath the individual disappointment in Smith or Rock. The Academy really botched this one. Ninety-four of these shows, and they cannot see their way to a clean performance. This ninety-four-year-old house needs some work on its foundation. Ricky Gervais was singing it to them from the stage of the Globes. Everyone rolled their eyes.

We might have been the ones given a good slap, the kind that gives you sight. Suddenly there were two middle-aged rich men on the stage, posing like they would duel, and the house was full of people in eighteenth-century costume and made up garishly, and they were gasping theatrically. Suddenly we were extras on the set of “Dangerous Liaisons”.

This is just the glimpse the Academy does not want to offer us. It’s on this platform of disgust that radicals of the left and right meet. It’s where the jihadist and the militiaman from Idaho become acquainted, where they discuss the degeneracy of Western culture.

Much of the right-wing position is a lament. Is it any wonder that the Right gathered so much steam, just as Clinton and Obama allied the White House with Hollywood, just as worldwide media and entertainment congealed like pools of paint that have spread across the floor and become one uniform sheet? Two things have happened. First, we see everything: we no longer have the power to dismiss the Right as the sad cranks they are. They were always there in the shadows. FDR had to fight them off, for God’s sake. We can’t believe that our age created the brand.

Secondly, media and entertainment have evolved into kind of a creepy aristocracy. Just about everything they do confirms the Right in their assessment of our civilization. The media-entertainment ‘Meta’ world insists it is our mirror, and it is inescapable. Earth is their funhouse, and many people are repulsed. While Clinton and Obama were fine with affirming that Hollywood was a part of the ‘liberal establishment’, in fact, there have always a number of right-wing kooks in Hollywood, like Voigt and the Sandler gang. And no wonder that many of them remain silent now. The association of ‘liberalism’ with the ancien régime is a very handy one.

Travelogue 1037 – March 23

The Wolves

Little Ren wanted to tell me something. She took my cheeks in her hands and made me look at her. She told me that when I grew up, I would be given a sword. The purpose of that sword was to protect her from the wolves that chased her in her nightmares. I replied that I understood, and that I would be ready for that responsibility.

Yes, the world has become a scary place. We wake to scary headlines every day now, pandemics and dictators running amok. Whither the halcyon days of healthy Barack staring down pallid Vlad, when we were all so secure? Maybe it was a media dream. The world impinges upon our restful sleep. We need someone to stand guard with his or her sword against the wolves.

People say the darndest things in times of stress. Several friends have commented on how quickly COVID became a non-issue, when all media attention swung toward the war in Ukraine. “It’s a propaganda machine,” was one’s summation. The state of the world can be dismissed that easily. “I don’t read the news anymore,” they say resentfully. “It’s too depressing.”

I would challenge the logic. What is the opposite of propaganda? I don’t think it’s cynical relativism to ask. We’re a political species, and therefore a rhetorical one. Everything we say, even in a spirit of objectivity, has a purpose. Is that good or bad? Neither. How is it that the same person who has fortitude enough for the big, bad world just the way it is faints away at the vagaries of the press? How is it that dictators are human, but journalists must be … more. It’s odd.

If we admit everything is propaganda, then what’s our basis for condemning press coverage of COVID or Ukraine? COVID was a public health crisis. Even if the crisis was exaggerated – which remains far from proven, – who shall we fault for going “too far” to save lives? And why shame anyone over Ukraine coverage? I hear people mutter, “Well, people are suffering everywhere in the world. Why so much attention on Ukraine? The same has been happening in Syria for years.” It’s all political, they complain. Um … yeah.

It’s 2022. We’ve been passively watching for nearly a decade as right-wing strongmen advanced their agendas around the world. Now the European press reports a European war, launched by a right-wing strongman, and are we really going to complain about bias? Maybe the mutterers are too young to remember when the civil war in Syria dominated the press? It did so for quite a long time. Maybe it’s their attention span … which is all the fault of the media ….

Travelogue 1036 – March 17 

The Real World

I picked up a second-hand book the other day. It’s a collection of essays from 2007. It’s one the Best American Essays series. Why would I read essays from 2007? I don’t know. I like essays. Some of the essays from 2007 didn’t age well. Some are very good. One of the longer ones was about the Iraq War.

I remember the Iraq War; I was alive then. Many of us were. When I think back to 2007 in my own life, it doesn’t seem so far away. Why does the Iraq War seem like ages ago? There’s an urgency to the essay that only serves to underscore the remoteness of the event.

The incompetence of Bush seems almost quaint beside Trump’s. The bluster of a Rumsfeld seems light compared to the legion of Fox News zombies we endure now and the snakes like Stephen Miller or Ron Johnson. Cheney’s evil seems to pale next to Putin’s.

The truth is, there’s more alike in the circumstances separated by fifteen years than we would like to admit. Iraq and Ukraine were both brutally invaded with slight cause, at a great cost in human life and property. A horrifying number of people died in Iraq, and the reasons for invasion were as vague and unsatisfying then as Putin’s are now.

Weirdly, Putin was around in 2007, too, smirking and staring out from the Kremlin like a gargoyle on the face of Saint Basil’s. (No, I don’t think Saint Basil’s has gargoyles. It’s a flawed metaphor.)

The world seems worse, but perhaps the only difference is a key change in the press-saturated West. Trump and Brexit, COVID and inflation, and now Putin’s war have made us feel like the hard and painful “real world” was back, like millennial peace and prosperity were caving under the pressure of a natural order of struggle and strife. But has there really been a qualitative change? In some areas of the world, the round of disease, war, and corruption has never really let up. One war looks like another, and integrity in government is like sunshine in Holland: it breaks through the clouds rarely and unexpectedly, and you simply enjoy it while it lasts.

Travelogue 1035 – March 9
Smart

Recently, John Oliver taped a segment about Alexander Lukashenko, president and dictator of Belarus. During what’s shaping up to be another memorable era for dictators, this segment serves as one more reminder of how ridiculous, in fact, the run-of-the-mill dictator is. The average dictator is a bundle of idiosyncrasies and cruel tics with a tinsel-sheen of charisma, someone born to be a bully when young and a revolting buffoon as he ages. To be fair, all humans do poorly with unquestioned power. We act foolishly, and we slide into regrettable behaviour. But then, for most of us, that wouldn’t extend to killing innocent people.

Let’s address – again – this myth of the genius of dictators. Simply because Putin doesn’t act like a clown, hug flag poles, wear ridiculous hair styles, squeeze Steven Seagal’s knee, have public affairs with porn stars, or doctor weather maps with sharpies, he looks like a genius among his pals in the dictator club. It doesn’t mean he is one. I might feel like an Olympic athlete if I ran a 10K against third-graders. Might!

Why does this kind of rhetoric get any traction? The deployment of the term “genius” is often as not an admission of laziness or ignorance. That’s never truer than in the praise of a mob boss of one sort or another. The primary virtue of a mob boss is audacity, the sort usually granted by trauma or chemical imbalance in the brain. Law-abiding citizens don’t expect violence. They are easily surprised by violence. That does not make the good citizen stupid and the aggressor a genius. Why does this need to be explained?

Just because you can’t imagine yourself, say, beating a child senseless doesn’t mean that you don’t think you’re smart enough to do it. You are not saying you lack the technical skills or the strength to beat a child. You are simply saying that you find it difficult to picture. You find the idea repulsive enough that you have difficulty giving it shape in your imagination. Do you think that makes you stupid?

At the time of 9-11, I was puzzled by the admiring rhetoric. How smart they were! How courageous! They threatened passengers with violence, took over a plane. They aimed it at a building. Such vision! That must surely put them in the same league as Shakespeare and Newton and Caesar!

Success in life does not mean genius. Do you think your boss is a genius? Does anyone think Biden is a genius? Does it matter? Genius is even less a factor in the world of thuggery. Putin was trained in the use of intimidation and violence. It works well among societies that are (more or less) used to law and order.

The various memes of Trump calling Putin “smart” will survive into a future that holds the both of them in contempt. The memes will survive as tragedy and as an embarrassment to everyone who is not a part of the shameless Trump family. They survive as a singular display of personal gain over dignity, and of Trump’s ugly disdain for his own children. What father leaves such travesty as a legacy for his children? No wonder the Trump kids all seem so soulless.

Travelogue 1034 – March 6
From the East

Cold winds are blowing from the east, and the skies have cleared. It’s like Nature is providing commentary on events in the Ukraine. Cold winds are blowing from the east. What is life in the post-2016 world without fresh disasters? 2022 began with altogether too much hope. The skies have cleared. Usually a symbol of hope, clear skies can also signify unclouded sight. Our Uncle Vlad has shined a torch at the rotten beams in our security ceiling. And as a final flourish, he has held the torch under his face and lifted his mask. That was cruel blow. As much as we had suspected the smirking face was a mask, we had found it attractive.

March has brought us clear and cold skies, both literally and figuratively. The literal skies have been a pleasant break from the dreary clouds and the exhausting windstorms barrelling in from the English Channel. Though the temps might barely be above freezing, the Dutch have flocked to their outdoor tables at cafes and restaurants. The sun’s warmth feels like a cure for misgivings.

It doesn’t do much to cure history. Dire images and messages flow to us from Ukraine, and every day we try to assimilate what’s happening. We struggle with disbelief. This doesn’t fit with our conception of the world order. How does this happen?

We are even tempted to learn lessons. Lessons we’d forgotten, like war is not a movie or a video game. It drags on in a distressing way. It challenges the romances we had with political gamesmanship and with military fantasies. It profoundly undermines ideas of victory or glory.

There are lessons about dictators. We idle away the years we feel safe chuckling at gremlins like Trump and Carlson, who tell us inverted fables with inverted morals, how might makes right and how most of the human race appears to be expendable from the prospect of their imaginary thrones. But then we suddenly feel the shadow of the real thing, a real dictator.

If any episode from the past week illustrates that we can no longer afford dictators in the twenty-first century, I think it ought to be the Tale of the Shelled Nuclear Plant. It’s worth re-thinking, the notion that sovereign states are untouchable, like enchanted lands we tell stories about, like places where nesting dolls come from. The cold winds from the east might be carrying more than charming folk tales soon.

Travelogue 1033 – February 21
And The Shocks After

The winds haven’t abated. If anything, the city looks more of a wreck today than immediately after the storm – if such a moment could ever have been defined. Dumpsters are tipped, plastic chairs lie on the tram tracks, shreds of plant life lie strewn here and there, clay shards from flower pots are sprinkled along the pavements. And the winds are still blowing. It’s as though Eunice were the roaring spirit – wingspan as wide as the English Channel - who ripped the membrane between worlds, opening us to an invasion of smaller sprites flying in her wake. I thought I spotted a few this morning, white cloaks in the air, snapped up into the ethers when I turned to my head to look.

But I’ve been having nightmares. Maybe I’m just seeing ghosts of them in the morning. I have unsettling and restless dreams, hopeless chases and endless piles of refuse that I’m responsible to clean. It must be that part of the animal brain that corresponds to the dog’s instinct to pace and whine before a storm. Or it’s the electricity in the air, making us all edgy.

I’m not the only one who is edgy. When I left the house this morning, a neighbour was shouting. There was a policeman outside his door. This neighbour has a history of walking round the complex in the middle of the night, spooking other residents. These wind spirits proved to be too much for him. When I returned the police were gone, and so was he. His door was boarded up. In the rain gutters beside his door, a pool of dirty water stood stagnant, its surface rippling with the wind. Debris from the storm had blocked the drains.

Travelogue 1032 – February 20
Eunice the Sprite

Storm Eunice has gone her way. She swept up the northern European coast, blowing and wreaking havoc, pushing things over like a drunken bully at a chess tournament.

Eunice has gone her way, but still there’s a wind advisory. It’s set to rain all day, though Eunice herself brought barely any precipitation. When the storm crossed borders, she changed names. In Germany, she was Storm Zeynep. In Denmark, she was Nora.

The name-changing and shape-shifting is an entertaining European phenomenon. The same street can change names every kilometre. And, in this region in particular, the same river changes names many times. Heraclitus would have been delighted: there had never actually been an object we could reliably call a river. Even if I had crossed it every day on one stable bridge, it might have last week been a foreign river and next week some other body of water altogether.

Eunice blows by and becomes Zeynep. She leaves behind something like the real storm in her wake. We wonder where the storm begins and ends. We wonder whether storms (and streets and rivers) are not spirits some to visit, whether they are not geesten, whether they are not ghosts. We were witnesses. We saw the wild nature spirit, Eunice blow by. Winds were her broad sleeves and rains her long skirts. She leaped and flew, veered and dove, roaring and laughing. Then she was thunderous Zeynep, severe Hanseatic matron, spreading her dark cloak over the towns. She became Nora, a capricious playmate of Loki, slapping ships in the harbour. And then what will she become? Will she fly inland to become artillery smoke over Ukraine?

Travelogue 1031 – February 19
After Eunice

I was out early this morning. The winds have died down; Storm Eunice is gone. Or nearly gone; winds are predicted to pick up again later. It’s hard to define Eunice; she’s powerful but elusive. She brought us only wind. This morning, the skies were clear. Only looking up, it could have been an Ethiopian sky, pale blue and set with clouds of summery virtue. But at ground level, you felt the blustering breezes and the drop in temperature. You saw the debris, the killing fields for potted plants, the tipped and scattered bikes, like skeletons at Pompeii.

Air is my tragic element. I was born under an air sign, and I live under skies. I love and dread my skies. I admire them and I assess them every day. Weather forecasts are like throwing bones. Various practitioners of naturopathic medicine have told me that lung problems were a sign of grief, and I so I was born bereft. I have struggled for breath my whole life. Since COVID, the struggle and the pain have become more acute. I use my inhalers; I rest; I see doctors, lots of doctors. I feel better, and then the winds bring me another petty virus. I’ll be coughing a lifetime. That’s my air; that’s my wind. Winds cleanse, they say. I don’t know. They rob me of breath when I face them. They collect air, and they sweep things up into the sky. They tip us over. They close our eyes with sand. They wipe our memories clean.

Travelogue 1030 – February 18

Eunice

It’s mid-afternoon, and we’re waiting for Storm Eunice. Workplaces and schools are closed. Public transit has been stopped. Wind speeds are mounting outside.

February is the time of winds. Sure, Holland is always a windy place, but February is a wind sculpture, twisting airily, balletically. February has pressed itself in my body memory as work, making life strenuous and electric.

The winds have been coming all week, knocking potted plants over, sprinkling the parks with twigs and branches. They overtake over you as you cycle, turning the front wheel precariously, or sweeping you forward suddenly so that you coast without pedalling.

The big winds are coming today. They roar outside already, whistling at the windows and rattling the door. Already, random items are bouncing down the walkway outside, plastic flowerpots and watering jugs. Anything left loose outside will come tumbling past our door. In the street below, cans and bottles are rolling. People have secured themselves indoors. Above, white, shredded clouds are scudding quickly by, despatched inland, admitting sharp glances of sunshine from overhead.

February is the tiring time of winds. You bow your head when you go outside.

Travelogue 1029 – February 9

A Day With Ren

My friend asked me for funny stories about my girls to cheer him up. At the time, I couldn’t think of any. Now in the middle of the night, I’m thinking about my funny Little Ren.

She was home yesterday because the day before she had fallen from the playground equipment at school, and she had split her lip and bumped her head. We were advised to watch her closely for a day. In the morning, she was sullen but by afternoon she had cheered up.

I was working at the computer at home, and she was playing by herself. She was so used to playing with her big sister, she longed to find a playmate. She reached out to me. I agreed, and she happily circled a length of curled and elastic plastic around my wrist. I was to be her pet. She told me to come along; she was going to take me to the doctor.

At the doctor’s office in the kitchen, Ren bid me sit quietly and wait for the doctor. She advised me that now she was going to be both my mother and my doctor. When she came back, she put a toy cup to my chest and said she was measuring my heart. She counted to two, and she decided my heart was doing fine. Then she rolled a hair band around my hand and up my forearm. With that she checked my blood pressure and judged that it was good.

Now she needed more specialized instruments. She counselled me to wait patiently while she went upstairs for her equipment. The first one of those was Duckie, her favourite ‘snuggly’. With Duckie’s bill, she took a blood sample from my arm. The results came quickly. She told me there was no fat. She was bound to return the blood she had taken, and so she pressed Duckie’s bill against my arm. There, it was back. She brought a bowl, and she bid me close my eyes. She was going to take my eyes and examine them. It took only a minute, and she was able to inform me that there was no fat in my eyes, either. I was in very good health!

The doctor’s examination was over. She gently put my leash back on, and she led me home, where my laptop was. “Now you can play your games,” she said. And I did. I went back to my games, feeling reassured about my condition. My Little Ren returned to her own games. She likes to imagine all sorts of adventures for her toys. While she does, she narrates in a sweet voice little voice, sometimes singing the story. The sound of her play makes my time with her ineffably happy.

I reflect in the middle of the night on my love for her, how my desire for her happiness and safety is like an instinct, like a fire in my not-fat blood, like a hunger. I want her to play happily day after day, without a care. I would watch over her and Duckie for a lifetime, content and charmed.

Travelogue 1028 – January 27

Civitas

Lockdown is over, and the city is a magical place again. You can walk into a shop where they sell you a cup of coffee, and you can sit down to drink it, on the premises! People enter like timid forest animals, and they flinch at the hospitality of the barista. Under their masks, those baristas are all smiles. I’ve rarely seen Dutch people so genuinely happy to encounter other human beings. The customers sit, and they relax, slowly remembering the old rituals. They look over their shoulders uncertainly, never sure that normal is still normal, that they have recalled their manners correctly, that the rules haven’t changed. They pay, and they share such a melting look of gratitude with the barista that the barista is astonished into uncharacteristic politeness.

The lesson of lockdown for most of us was how much society, and its metonym, the city, were refined and educated tastes. They were the artifice we took as nature. When COVID pulled the plug on daily routines, we were confronted with the ugliness of the city. Is this where I chose to live, this shabby alley of dirty lanes and old brick walls? Is this the place we found so romantic, the smeared windows and the littered curb? The city was always a construct in the imagination, animated by the activity on the street and by our interactions, the shopping, the entertainments and the meals in public spaces. Very suddenly, the structure was stripped bare. It was like a green screen malfunction.

These were thoughts as I took my walk last week while Baby was playing hockey. I wandered out past the edge of the city, into the blank fields in the shadow of the massive Van Brienenoordbrug, plots of tired grass divided by roads and bike paths leading elsewhere as expeditiously as possible. I reflected on the quick breakdown of the urban illusion.

Anything attractive about a city is a magic trick, order conjured by a spell and beauty printed like circuits on a board. It radiates from a centre, or from several centres, toward the edges. It forms, or attempts to form, one coherent design. The edges are not hemmed; they are left open, and they fray. There you find the clumsy boundary with nature, where nature is crushed, like the grass in a field where a festival has been held. Join me there at the edge, and you see the river flats by the River Maas, where nature once breathed.

I learned a lot about cities from my time in Addis Ababa. When I was there, the city hadn’t the resources of my American cities. Efforts to beautify the city had been relatively limited. I walked and walked my first few years in Addis; I explored many neighbourhoods. I realize now that I was occupied by a search for an aesthetics. I was puzzled. I found isolated bits of beauty; I found accidental beauty. I found human beauty and natural beauty and spontaneous moments of beauty. But there was no plan overarching, no design beyond function, at least one that I could apprehend. The result was a raw uniformity that met my eye, road after road and mile after mile. The edges were the middle.

Travelogue 1027 – January 22

The Edge of Town

This season’s suffering happens at the confluence of winter’s cold and the lockdown. I take Baby to hockey practice twice a week. The hockey fields are not only far away; they are situated at an edge of town where the city bleeds out into the river flats of the Maas. There the River Maas curves lazily, swollen with new waters from the Hollandsche Ijssel, and flows toward downtown Rotterdam.

The area is rather desolate. Even though the sports complex is a nice one, it feels as though its access street continues on into blank space, like an unfinished drawing. Even if there were no lockdown, there would be nothing to do nearby and nowhere to find shelter. During lockdown, it’s not even worth trying to travel to look for something. During lockdown, parents are not allowed to watch practice, so we have to kill an hour outside.

Baby and I have taken the tram this afternoon. I don’t have my bike. I pull my hat down over my ears, I zip up the jacket, and I set out for a long walk. There must be something to see. I stroll off down the street, off the edge of the world. The pedestrian pavements disappear. I’m walking along the bike path beside sprawling car dealerships. Then I’m under the mass of the Van Brienenoord Bridge rising high above the earth before soaring over the wide river. Beyond that I’m following a lonely bike path through muddy lots beside the grey pillars of the bridge, under which forklifts noisily rearrange building materials.

I’m fascinated by how quickly the city deteriorates into raw, muddy spaces and ugly industry or infrastructure. I’m crossing narrow roads where pedestrians on foot seem never to have been seen. Finally, I’m by the river, where the wide waters are the only natural things to be seen. The rest is bland function. On my right is the impressive span of the bridge under its arches. On my left, I can see the confluence of the two rivers, making an expanse of water like a placid lake. Set along all the banks are the kinds of buildings that are raised from the earth with only commerce in mind. It’s like they all have their backs to you. If these buildings had smiles to show, they would only show them the landwards. It feels lonely standing here.

Travelogue 1026 – January 15

God’s Teeth

Little Ren is a philosopher. Her mother is Christian, and so she is quite curious about the deity. I usually defer all religious questions to the kids’ mama, but I must admit, sometimes it’s fun to debate the undebatable. Little Ren is quite adept already at philosophical discourse.

Last night, Ren was wondering whether God had teeth. I tried with the old dodge that God doesn’t have a body like us, but she would have none of it. She said God must have teeth; otherwise, how could He chew? I countered that God might not have to eat food like we do. She conceded the point, but shrewdly changed tack. If God had no teeth, He would not be able to speak properly. Then no one would listen to Him. I gave her that one.

Furthermore, God would not be able to smile properly, and His friends would make fun of Him. An interesting point, I admitted, but God should know better than to have friends who would laugh at Him based on His looks.

Ultimately, I could never really question a child’s musings about God. Children are supposed to be closer to God. Maybe God does worry about His smile. What do I know? We all worry about our credibility in the eyes of others. Maybe God does, too. Would that extend as far as His looks? Does God get laughed at by other gods? Or by angels and saints? Does anyone else get close enough to have the opportunity to laugh at Him?

I would welcome a deity Whom I could blame for the weather. When we finally got a break from the rain, the temperatures dove. Then the fog came. We’ve had days it, cold and damp. Weather like this takes on the appearance of mildness, all misty rain and soft, billowing fog. But it gets under your skin quickly, and you suffer.

This morning Baby Jos and I went to hockey practice. I was teamouder, so I had to stay on the pitch the whole hour. It was fun – I cheered the girls on; I acted as an inept goalkeeper for them; I corrected their technique, (with my five months’ experience in hockey,) – but halfway through Jos was in tears because her fingers hurt. I held her gloved hands in mine, and then encouraged her to go on. Other girls had no gloves at all. The Dutch are hardy.

Cycling home, I was the one in tears. A few fingers were numb, and I steered the bike with one hand while the other hand recovered in my pocket.

Shall I blame the deity? Judging by history, no god would stand for it. They are great at projection. It would be my fault somehow, once all was said and done. I had created my own experience, through sin or through lack of imagination. It’s best to keep it secular, I suppose, safely impersonal.

Travelogue 1025 – January 11
Cold Morning

The morning sky is vibrant with colour. We’re out early, walking together toward the tram station before the sun rises. Light is breaking slowly, and the clouds are painted with the day’s first warmth. The girls are very excited to see so much pink in the sky.

School is back in session. We’re getting up before dawn again. We’re packing lunches and dressing up for the cold. We’re milling around at the tram stop, trying to stay warm. People seem awfully cheerful for a weekday morning after a long vacation has ended. It could be a sense of relief that we’re done with holidays for a while. But, no, that’s probably just me. It’s likely the chill in the air. Northern folks like all things brisk. We’re back to work, and it’s freezing; life is good.

The girls are excited to start school again. We managed a few play dates while school was out, but they really want to see their friends and teachers. There is no hesitation at the doors to the school. Those days are gone.

The intersection of narrow streets in front of the school and next to the playground are a nexus of Dutch briskness. There are children and parents crossing, bikes coasting in. Some of the bikes are those unwieldy bakfiets, cargo bikes with the huge boxes in front for children to ride in. Cars are edging around the corner. No one hesitates, but it all ticks along as though it’s choreographed. I join in the dance, crossing the street and weaving among the families.

I walk along the River Schie before I cross and head for the store. Along that quiet stretch of river side, I encounter two groups of people training. In one case, there is a gym with a street-side door like a car mechanic’s. The door is wide open, and people are on the ground in formation, stretching and working out. It’s one degree over freezing, but they’ve got their butts on the cold brick of the pavement, and they’re grinning like it’s the first day of spring. Music is pumping from inside, and their coach is shouting. I haven’t seen a group of Dutch adults this happy since the last time I saw a group of Dutch adults drunk. Lockdown has made some of us giddy, I suppose. When we get a chance to spend time together, we’re like pre-teens at their first party.

Travelogue 1024 – December 30
The Sounds of Lockdown

We’re deep into holiday break (and lockdown) and the city is quiet. I enjoy getting on the bike during holiday breaks. The city seems calm and human. There are some exceptions, of course. There are the kids and forever pre-teens who are setting off bomb-like firecrackers from Poland in the dead of night. And there is the weather. Even when the people of Holland are still, the sky is not. There is a rushing wind under the grey sky that actually pushes me uphill on my bike when I’m crossing the Beukels Bridge. Pedalling up the other side on my way home is another matter. I’m pushing against the wind at a pace that I could beat by walking. But in a perverse twist on laziness, I don’t want to bother dismounting from the bike.

After doing some shopping, I stop by my favourite café. It’s owned by a young couple, half Brit and half Dutch. The Englishman is manning the front today. There’s only the front to man during the lockdown. They’ve had to let everyone go, and they run the place themselves. They’ve blocked off the whole space beyond the front counter. In the back, you see that he’s set up a tee and a chipping net so he can practice his golf game. It’s one of the few outdoor activities still open.

We talk about the pandemic, and we talk about the new year. He thinks the lockdown was a good idea. It’s nice to talk COVID in reasonable tones. 2021 has been a year of shrill voices. Maybe we get to be tired of wild-eyed ranting in 2022? That would be nice. He’s planning for a quiet New Year’s, as much as possible among the fireworks. He has a rooftop garden, where he and his wife will share some champagne and watch the adult fireworks shows.

Down below, the rest of us will be hiding behind locked doors with pillows over our heads, while the streets are surrendered to the communal lizard brain. The police have been clear that, though fireworks have been banned, chasing down incels with explosives will be low among their priorities. Fair enough. We wait to feel the hope of a new year dawning until the sun has risen and the smoke has cleared.

Travelogue 1023 – December 20
If We Had Been Saved
Part Three

It’s easier to imagine a world in which Hitler won the war than it is to imagine a world in which Hitler never was born. That’s fascinating. Why would that be so? I’m guessing the answer is a simple one. There are tangible measures for the first case. Hitler is a known quantity. The war is a familiar narrative.

If it’s ‘easier to imagine’, does that lend it some moral value? No, it’s clearly easy for our species to imagine dystopias and nightmares. It’s almost a specialisation of the human psyche. As much as historical speculation can be made to serve a moral purpose, it is neutral at its core. The what-if game can be quite a callous one. Concept exists in its own sphere, free of values. History is an objective study, in which the human experience is reduced to a series of formulae.

‘High concept’ is popular in fiction these days. Speculation, whether about history or future, has become a ubiquitous confection for readers and film audiences. Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes fears the collapse of Western Civilization, but the hero prevails, and disaster is averted. Reality then becomes the counter narrative: August 1914 is an anomaly. Sherlock Holmes has already saved us from that. If every what-if makes of our reality its shadow, then by now we are living in the counter narrative removed many, many times from the intervention of the first what-if.

Speculation becomes a habit of the mind, leaping right over the obvious. If the world wars had been averted, the most salient effect would have been that some sixty million more people would have been alive in 1945. Our minds may run to the playground of big ideas, but the graveyard is still plainly in sight.

Is this the symptom of something deeper? One needn’t look too far to see other signs of our callousness toward human life. I think of the recent Rittenhouse trial. Whatever the reason, there is no dispute that this kid shot two people dead in the street. Who remembers the victims’ names? Who expresses remorse for the lives cut short? I’ve had to remind myself who they were, so seldom were they mentioned in the international press. Neither victim was armed. Both were concerned that a teenage boy was moving freely among protesters with an assault-style rifle. Every so often the term ‘death cult’ is applied to the Trumpistas. I wonder if it’s confined to them. Maybe they’re just the dumb kids who say it out loud, and, feeling dumb when we laugh, say it louder and louder.

Human life has never meant more to me than since I became a parent. It’s a miracle. We are blessed when we grasp this simplest principle. My girls teach me every day. We have so little of real value to cherish in this short existence. We manufacture silly placeholders when we feel empty, things like religious or nationalistic dogmas. We search for justification for the gift of life: a god’s design or success according to various yardsticks. But life is its own value. When we show ourselves careless with that treasure, we reveal something truly ugly in our nature. No pretty idea disguises it.

Travelogue 1022 – December 19
If We Had Been Saved
Part Two

We’re back in hard lockdown. I had no idea it was coming. My doctor friend didn’t see it coming, either, so I don’t feel too out of touch. Suddenly this morning we’re locked down until mid-January.

“Mensen worden moedeloos,” declares a local story. People are down. Yes. I have less reason than most to feel down. Lockdown has very little effect on my lifestyle, sad to say. We don’t go out. I don’t work in a market. The promulgation of a hard lockdown should be of little consequence to me. Instead, I find it depressing. As a public health measure, it’s an act of hope. As a government pronouncement, it’s like an admission of defeat.

It finally feels, two years in, like history. It feels like the Battle for Britain, a battle of endurance and attrition. It’s a dark time, months of deprivation sandwiched between Trump-Brexit and … God knows what. With the supply chain meltdowns we’ve seen, we may even see rationing to complete the World War II analogy.

Is this the collapse of civilization that Downey Jr as Holmes warned us about? Seems rather delayed if it’s a result of the world wars. But I’ve already been forced to admit that I have little notion what the difference between a saved world and an unsaved world might be. Professor Moriarty tried to plunge the world into total war in 1891. Holmes saved the world that time (according to Guy Ritchie,) but apparently was unable to in 1914. As it happens, Holmes himself did survive the war. As much as we like to think of him as a nineteenth-century character, he did appear in stories until 1927. Therefore, he and Watson entered with us into the fallen state, the dreamy historical miasma we optimistically called post-war.

My imagination failed me when I attempted to visualize a world that had been saved from Moriarty’s evil machinations and had avoided all world war. Would we have been free from climate change? Probably not. Would we have avoided the spectre of nuclear war? Probably not. Would we have been spared K-pop? Not likely.

Then I realized the premise was wrong. In the same way that Guy Ritchie’s movie (innocently) makes something of the Holmes canon that it was never meant to be – Arthur Canon Doyle had never dreamed of steam punk, – the brand of historical speculation that (not so innocently) forces nature into shapes it was never meant to hold (high-concept what-if propositions) has another purpose than accurate portrayal. It’s fun to entertain grandiose schemata of civilizational glory and decay, punctuated by once-in-a-millennium events, and suggesting Boschian scenes of disaster to the imagination, but, of course, few are privileged to live through tectonic civilizational shifts, and fewer realize it’s happening. Those who lived through the decline of Rome would have only dimly been aware of that decline. Those alive during the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455 A.D. were shocked, but they lived in a world in which Rome had already been lost in every sense but the final one, its safety behind ancient walls. Rome was no longer even capital of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

Travelogue 1021 – December 12
If We Had Been Saved 

Part One

Now I use our Netflix accounts to watch cheesy old films, films like the old Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies. They’re like candy to look at, and the humour is just as sickly sweet. The dark sets are Gothic, and so are the villains. In the second Holmes movie, Professor Moriarty is planning to ignite the First World War a generation early, in 1891.

At one point, Robert Downey Jr is declaring that they need to stop Professor Moriarty and avert the collapse of Western civilization. It’s just a movie and just a throwaway line – these days, no villain worth their salt aims for anything less than the collapse of civilization. Why bother with a bank heist? We hear about the civilization’s demise every few hours on average. It’s somehow integral to every group fantasy of ours. But this spin on the old trope made me think.

World War I was destined to come, despite Sherlock’s genius. So … has Western civilization collapsed after all? It certainly would be a relief to know it was over and done with. Villains might be left without a sense of purpose, but the rest of us would be happy to get on with our humble, medieval existences, bowing to our half-witted leaders and watching the televised jousts from the UFC.

But what if the world wars had actually been averted and civilization saved? What would a saved Western civilization have looked like? Science and industry were already developing quickly. Population was ready to boom. Culture was overshadowed by Freud and Einstein, well before 1914. Would the post-colonial world have looked any different? Would it have been post-colonial at all? Would China have become any less of a juggernaut? Would Europe have retained more power, more dignity?

Russia might have retained its empire. Maybe there would still have been some Romanovs lingering on, celebrities with no power. A young Vladimir Putin might have died protecting a minor Romanov prince from anarchist bullets. Or perhaps perished in a skirmish with the Bolsheviks, who resurge every few generations in a wild run at the government in St Petersburg.

Assuming my mother still found my father attractive without his uniform, and assuming I still found my way into this tired old world, what would I have found? Being an American would have meant something different. No doubt, without being called upon to lead the “free world”, America would have been both lesser and greater, less noble and less corrupt, frivolous without needing to be self-righteous. Where would MAGA be without the narrative of a ‘great’ America? Sleazebags like Gaetz and Greene would have been free to be the offensive real estate agents they were born to be, chasing money instead of MAGA glory and bullying minority parents at PTA meetings.

This is a fun what-if game to play, but I’m surprised to find myself struggling to come up with tangible ideas about how it would have been different. It’s a game that seems easy to play until you try. I’m not even sure how to interpret the challenge it presents.

Travelogue 1020 – December 5

How Baroque

It’s hard to resist thinking back to our trip to Rome in October. It’s probably the last time we saw the sun. To say it’s been rainy here would be to insult Holland’s genius for gloom.

One sunny morning in Rome, we ventured across the Tiber to see the Vatican Museums. Though it’s been years since I visited, it was all so familiar, those astounding halls with all their wonders, and the peculiar exhaustion that creeps up on you and embraces you. That place demands a very specific sort of stamina.

COVID had made some changes. The biggest difference was our unregulated time in the Sistine Chapel. The last time I visited, we were marched in in groups and given fifteen minutes to enjoy. This time, the crowds were thinner, and we were allowed to freely enter and leave. In fact, we passed through the famous chapel twice, after I spaced out and led my family right past the Stanze di Raffaello. We had to circle back, seeing Michelangelo twice in order to see Rafael once. I would say that was a fair trade.

For me, Rome was the city of Michelangelo. Invariably, I visited Michelangelo when I visited Rome: the Pietà, the Sistine Chapel, the Campidoglio, the tomb of Julius II.

After some time, as though from the periphery, there entered another artist to contend for the soul of Rome. That was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini came a century later, and he never cut the romantic figure that Michelangelo did, but his claim to the Eternal City is undeniable.

Bernini is everywhere. He’s at the Vatican. He’s scattered here and there across the centre, perhaps mostly famously at the Pizza Navona. He’s in museums, most prominently in the Galleria Borghese. Bernini was the son of a sculptor, and he was a prodigy whose talent was recognized early. He was the favourite of a string of popes, and he spent the majority of a long life contributing to the beauty of his city, in sculpture, paintings, architecture and monuments.

Unsurprisingly, as I’ve grown older, I’ve become drawn to the artists with long careers. I have a new regard for those survivors, the Berninis, the Rembrandts, and the Shakespeares, the artists who lived undramatic lives and who produced huge bodies of work. As much as Michelangelo is regarded as a brooding outsider – and to a good degree he was, – he was also, like Bernini, spotted early and favoured through much of his life by the popes of his time. He lived to be 88 years old.

Bernini’s art isn’t to everyone’s taste. He is father or midwife to the Baroque style, and to the extent that the centre of Rome stands as a monument to Baroque, we owe a tip of our hats to the overwhelming genius of Bernini. You may not like the drama and the grandiosity, the anguished faces and the gilded rays of Holy Spirit, but it was the art of its time, and Bernini was the master.

Travelogue 1019 – November 28
Santa Maria in Trastevere

The story of our food experience in Rome unravels quickly after its humble beginnings. We’re increasingly in the thrall of two overpowering forces, parenting fatigue and the charms of the city. These forces combine to make daily planning nearly impossible. By dinner time we are fine finding somewhere nearby for ease. We also want something more local and less touristic. Our solution is to cross the river and stroll around Trastevere. This is how we discover the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.

This is a lively area of Rome. It wouldn’t be fair to say it was “Roman” in the sense we hoped for. There are just as many non-Italians here as in the Campo de’Fiori, but in Trastevere they are expats living or studying in Rome. In that sense only, we’ve graduated to something more local. We return there for dinner several nights in a row.

The piazza is old. The fountain in the centre dates back to the eighth century, though what you see is the work of Bramante. The basilica on the piazza was first founded in the third century. Much of the current building dates back to the twelfth century, notably those mosaics along the top of the façade. The church is long and squat, in the style of many basilicas in Italy, offering a somewhat blank face to the piazza, despite its embellishments, with a tall and square campanile in the back. The weight of so many centuries settles on this square with a sobering effect. Despite the piazza’s reputation for nightlife, the spacious square, laid with fanning cobblestone and lined in Renaissance colours, still feels a bit forlorn and quiet.

In the piazza, or along one of the nearby lanes, we tried pizza al forno and tried more pasta carbonara. We sat outside when we could, watching the night overtake our new little quartiere. We watched lovers sitting on the steps of the fountain. We watched the young lady chase a purse snatcher across the piazza. We watched the police van lazily pull into the piazza some ten minutes later. We placated our restless little girls, promising them gelato if they would sit still a few moments longer.

Travelogue 1018 – November 21
Rommel

I’m grading papers, digital piles of digital papers. Students are reporting their research findings, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations. I’m reading with an evaluator’s eyes, judging language, capturing errors, and tracing the arc of thoughts in flight, like the darting of starlings in mid-air. Perhaps it’s more like turkeys taking flight in some cases. But it’s quite a task, when you think about it, this construction of cases, this logic by numbers, this raising of towers with bar magnets and steel balls. It’s a kind of miracle. How do children manage this? I mean, developing to this sophistication of thought?

I turn away from essays for a moment to watch my girls. I wonder at the journey ahead of them. I imagine them consulting with me about argumentative essays and rhetoric.

Baby Jos was recently reciting to me a silly rhyme she learned from a friend, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.” I laughed with her, enjoying her pride in having acquired this verbal toy. She repeated it all evening. Little Ren, meanwhile, was insisting that I call her “sensei”. She showed me how I should bow to her. Her big sister had helped her craft a black belt from paper. How long will I be able to share these small triumphs with them? How long will they include me?

Can it be possible that these thoughts experiments, my girls’ rhymes and their playacting and the three-letter words in their little books, will compound over time and evolve into essays for teachers like me?

Baby’s teacher recently posted a video of their classroom. Overnight, everything had been overturned and the room was a mess. The children entered with their mouths open in wonder. Clearly, the school had received a visit from Rommelpiet. Rommelpiet is one of the more entertaining of Dutch Christmas traditions. Sinterklaas comes to the country at this time of year. (Sinterklaas is NOT Santa Claus. Santa has a closer analogue in the ‘Kerstman’.) And when Sinterklaas travels, he does so with a retinue of ‘Piets’, who, unfortunately, are conventionally portrayed as black sambos. The Piets are tricksters, but none more than Rommelpiet, who likes to sneak into schools and turn everything upside down. ‘Rommel’ means mess in Dutch.

I wonder if Rommelpiet requires an ‘inside man’ at each school. I would like to volunteer. Imagine the hallways littered with essays. If only they were still on paper.

Travelogue 1017 – November 20
I Made This

Just a block away from the Caffe Sant’Eustachio is the one of my favourite sights in the centre of Rome. You come upon it quite suddenly, because this part of Rome is really the medieval city, where buildings crowd in and huddle against the cold centuries between ancient and modern. These are the streets north of the Palatine and Capitoline hills, where, during the Roman Republic, armies were called to duty and were trained. The fields there, collectively called the Campus Martius in those days, lay outside the city walls. Once the Western Mediterranean had been conquered, and Rome’s wars had become long campaigns fought far away, the armies were encamped and trained outside the city, often outside Latium. During the Civil Wars and Augustus’s reign, the Campus Martius became a place to build. Pompey built his theatre there. In an ironic stroke of fate, this would be where Pompey’s greatest adversary would be assassinated four years after he himself had been called to Hades. Years later, Augustus Caesar’s great general, friend, and son-in-law Agrippa would build the Pantheon in the old Campus Martius. No one is quite sure of the original function of the building, beyond it being a temple, hardly a novel purpose for structures in ancient Rome, where gods and goddesses abounded.

Walking from Sant’Eustachio, one approaches the Pantheon from behind, the first sight of the building offering hardly a clue to the significance of the place. One is positioned too close to recognize it. The wall could almost be the side of an old prison. There are a few small, irregular barred windows. Otherwise, it is blank, solid brick, old, eroded and reworked many times. One sees the remains of archways, filled in with brick. One sees the remains of mysterious walls and floors. One sees square peg holes where supporting beams must have been wedged. People are sitting on the low wall that surrounds the base of the building. The original level of ancient buildings is significantly lower than the streets today. Inside that boundary wall is a kind of dry moat surrounding the Pantheon. A narrow alley runs along the back wall, where tour groups shuffle along, blocking foot traffic, oblivious to anything but the voices in their ears. One eventually finds one’s way round to the imposing façade, where an ascending piazza allows for perspective. It’s a dramatic sight, high columns holding up the pediment of the temple’s portico, the pediment engraved with Agrippa’s name: in letters that can probably be seen at half a kilometre. “M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT,” it says. I made this thing.

As it happens, the Pantheon we see was probably not made by Agrippa. The original was likely wholly destroyed in a fire. It was restored by Domitian and then later by Hadrian. It’s even possible that the amazing dome that tops the Parthenon, still a model for architects more than a millennium later, was Hadrian’s innovation. It’s hard to say what the first temple looked like, aside from the awe-inspiring façade that proclaims that Agrippa lived and built.

Travelogue 1016 – November 13
Deer in the Headlights

I didn’t get far in recounting our food experiences in Rome. I started about our dinner in the Ghetto district, and then my mind was drawn back to the Tiber. But that’s how Rome is, city of distractions.

Let’s talk coffee. I was quick to ask Carolyn about coffee, and she recommended the Caffe Sant’Eustachio. That venerable establishment, open since 1938, is located in the Piazza Sant’Eustachio, just behind the Pantheon in the centre of the old town. The coffee is fantastic – they are famous for their secret blend, – and we enjoyed sitting lazily in the piazza. There’s nothing much to look at in the piazza, beyond the life of the piazza itself, and it wouldn’t be Italy without the beautiful chaos of the piazza. The place, the plein, the platz, the square, the piazza: warm images come to mind, whatever the culture. But the Italian piazza is a special one for me, informed by the taste of caffe and brioche and by the noise of a hundred conversations overheard.

A piazza like Sant’Eustachio would hardly seem a space worthy of the name. It’s more like the wide bend in a stream, where tiny rivulets converge. The space is irregular, uneven. Outdoor tables seem like awkward claims on space where the ‘stream’, as it were, eddies. There is no boundary between caffe space and the street among the fan-patterned cobblestone. And the caffe itself is as much a touristic sight as any ruin, a vestige of the mid-century Rome that showcased its unique cultural alloy of exquisite taste with the disarming disarray of the Italian street.

The one sight on the piazza, might be the church of Sant’Eustachio. There’s been a church on the site at least since the eighth century. In the back, off the piazza, stands its twelfth-century Romanesque bell tower. The façade on the piazza dates to about 1700, and includes a captivating deer’s head with a cross set between its antlers, high above the entrance. It’s a reference to the saint’s conversion, which involved spotting a radiant deer like this one while out on a hunt. Eustachio was an early martyr, a Roman noble who abandoned all to join the Christians.

Travelogue 1015 – November 10
Ghettoes

I want to report about our food experience in Rome, because our friend Carolyn was so generous with good advice about where to go. I’m afraid it will be a dubious homage to Carolyn’s good taste and her graciousness, though, because I am so underdeveloped as a foodie and because our schedule for fine dining was curtailed by the little girls holding our hands.

We made a good effort. We had dinner in the old Ghetto district, not far from our hotel, where we were able to taste some real Roman cuisine, including pasta Cacio e Pepe (cheese and pepper) and Carciofi alla Giudia (artichokes fried as ghetto residents apparently did). We ate outside, under umbrellas tilting on the cobblestones. The girls were more excited about the Fanta than about the Roman cuisine, I’m afraid, but we managed to keep them seated long enough to enjoy our own meals.

We had not arrived in the Ghetto district from our hotel, but from the direction of the river, just at the end of the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. We had toured the Forum Boarium and then walked along the river, beside the pretty Isola Tiberina. The Forum Boarium was a cattle market during the Republic, on a spot that would have been right next to the river. Located in the ancient market are two of the oldest standing temples in the city, dating to the two centuries before Christ. They are small but pretty. It’s a quiet spot, a pleasant opportunity to contemplate the ancient architecture.

Across the street, it’s not so quiet. There, tourists line up to take their pictures at the ‘Mouth of Truth’. No one is quite sure where this huge circular mask came from, though it probably served as something like the manhole cover it looks like, possibly originating in the floor of one of the temples across the street. Now it hangs outside the church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, parts of which date back to the 8th century. A superstition grew around this spooky mask that, if you uttered a lie while your hand was in the mask’s mouth, you would lose that hand. Standing together with all hands in the mask’s mouth is a popular family photo.

If you stop there, be sure to spend a few minutes inside the church. It’s lovely. You can spot decorative elements from a variety of eras, like delicate ancient columns, early medieval tile work and frescoes, and the Romanesque bell tower. There are suggestions of its Greek roots, as the church was founded while Rome was under Byzantine rule and set in what was then a Greek district of the city.

Travelogue 1014 – November 3
And We Protect Them

I’m looking at the disappointing results in Virginia this morning. The case against Trumpism has become so plain that making it begins to feel redundant and alarmist. It has become clear that this was never about principle. It was never about what was fair or what was right. It was never in question whether the Trump partisans in the public eye were anything but despicable. We were fools to argue it. All we communicated was that we were old school. That we were the real conservatives and the Trumpistas the (fascist) revolutionaries. I blush for people who still try to shame those operatives on Twitter. I blush a little even for the pundits who continue to deploy reason, though I admire their efforts to document the facts – fundamentally for future generations.

There was a moment, squandered by now, to suppress them. For decades, I’ve questioned America’s interpretation of free speech, as a protection for hate speech and sedition. We don’t feel shame for suppressing physical violence, but we do for suppressing the ideological kind. More people than we would like to admit respond to displays of raw power and disdain for the rule of law. By conceding legitimacy to the fascists, in the name of a false principle – that hate speech is protected speech – we have allowed them shows of power. People are excited by it, drawn to it. To people who think, it appears lemming-like, this crowding to the precipice of fascism. We reason that power for power’s sake benefits a very few people. Let’s be frank: the supporters of these fascists believe that the punishment will stop with immigrants and LGBTQ people and minorities. The police will beat on blacks. They will never beat on us. Those of us who reason things out realize that fascism has no boundaries.

I do believe in common sense. I do believe in reason. And some of us will continue to talk about these unfashionable tools of the human mind. It will be embarrassing in a world of flashy violence. But my optimism is long term. I think America will have to rediscover democracy, but I do believe it will. The question is only, how much suffering is required first? A depressing number of people need to be reminded that force and power for their own sake are thrilling only for a very short time. Power feeds on inequality. There have to be a lot of people under that thumb. ‘Minorities’ will not suffice. Power needs millions and millions of shoulders to bear its weight. It requires all their money, all their words, all their physical vitality. Ultimately, it needs all the last resources of a failing ecosystem, the system that provides food and water and air. All must be sacrificed for the pleasure of watching other people wield power with impunity.

Travelogue 1013 – November 1
The Campo

After our delays in Paris, we arrived in Rome late at night. We were exhausted, so we opted for a taxi ride into town. That was terrifying, a shot of adrenaline to wake us. It was a reminder of our many travels in Ethiopia, when our lives were in the hands of crazed taxi drivers, kilometre after kilometre on unlit highways at night, the headlights turned off to conserve the battery. But the trip into Rome was a short one, and we did in fact arrive, clasping our children to us in gratitude.

I was the first up in the morning. I went out for supplies. It was a sunny morning, and I was immediately struck by the casual grandeur of the place. We were staying a bit south of the Campo De’ Fiori, so I headed toward the famous piazza. It used to be one of my favourite spots in Rome. But it wasn’t as though I needed wait until the Campo to see the beauty of Rome. It was everywhere, the cobblestone alleys winding among palazzi and churches in every direction. This was exactly what I wanted to share with Menna, who hadn’t been to Italia yet. And I was rewarded a few hours later, once the girls were up and washed and we’d had a little snack. We stepped outside, and Menna was instantly enchanted. We needed no ambitious agenda of sights to see. The city of Rome was itself the sight, lane after lane, piazza by piazza. She hasn’t stopped talking about Italia since we returned home.

One theme for the trip was going to be coffee. Our first coffee was there in the Campo de’ Fiori, at an outdoor table where I could sit in the sun and the ladies could all sit in the shade. We have lots of specialty coffee in Holland, but there’s something special about coffee in Italia. I had been anticipating that first taste, and it didn’t disappoint. We sat for a while, watching the activity of the market in the square, regarding the lovely buildings surrounding us, some with rooftop gardens, and commiserating with poor Giordano Bruno, sixteenth-century philosopher who was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and whose statue stands at the centre of the square.