Travelogue 1176 – 30 March
Sunday Morning

This morning, the cloud cover has returned, and there is a wind rising. The temperature is up, the day starting at 10˚C. The first birds that I hear are crows. That’s neither a good sign nor particularly cheering. But behind them come the distant cries of seagulls, reminding me that the beach is still out there. It’s probably as quiet as the city. People are desperate for sleep; you can feel it, like a fog over the region. Ramadan is entering its final days. The day’s earliest sun, especially on a Sunday, strikes with withering force, even in misty Holland, when spring fever combines with Ramadan. People are shrinking from it, turning over in bed. The night was all too short. Shorter still because the clock changed last night. One hour of sleep evaporated into Daylight Savings Time.

Yesterday was sunny. The city was lively. The cover story from February’s Atlantic magazine has been telling me that we’re lonelier than ever, but you wouldn’t have observed it yesterday. The centre of the city was crowded with people promenading, shopping, gathering on terraces to have a drink. Here in our apartment complex, one couple sets up a pop-up café on Saturdays. Outside the window where they take orders, there is a terrace with half a dozen picnic tables. In the afternoon, that terrace was full. No one sat alone. The cheerful buzz of conversation carried across the broad plein at the heart of our complex, and I wondered that this was the same place that grey winter had rendered so dreary.

But that is the Dutch way. Anywhere, if the café has enough space – often when it doesn’t, there is at least one table where strangers sit together. They may never do more than greet each other as they open their laptop, but they share the space. More often than not those tables host some lively chatter, even in winter.

Travelogue 1175 – 23 March
Blind in One Eye

My daughter made a cheerful observation yesterday that I found strangely chilling. We were descending on the roltrap toward the Metro platform. Apparently, she had been mulling over a quick conversation that we had had days earlier. The topic had been, “How would a blind person describe blue?” Now Baby Jos asked me, out of the blue, “Can someone be half blind? Can they see with one eye?” I answered that it was possible, and she asked how that happened. I didn’t really know how to answer. “Can they be born that way?” I guessed it was possible. She happily came to her conclusion. “Then that person can know what colours look like with one eye and what nothing looks like with the other eye.”

I was stunned by the thought. Taken literally, the statement may not stand; once a person has seen colours, they cannot unsee them. But I didn’t refute the thought because the moral truth of it was overwhelming. Yes, we could both know and not know the colours of our world, and, in fact, it wasn’t just true. It was the overwhelming truth of our existence. We are able and unable, wise and unwise, and we indulge ourselves in elaborate play between our two natures. I gave Baby Jos a big hug, and praised her, but I didn’t say much. The thought stood complete. She was proud of it, and I was oppressed by it. The image captured our misfortune as a species, the stubbornness of Nature, the stark brutality of existence.

I woke from a dream this morning. In the dream, I had been standing at the window of a vacation rental, overlooking a beach. Scrolled over the beach scene was the word Peace. Inside, the roses had wilted from lack of water. The ceilings were stippled, and among the patterns there were scribblings of regrets. Tears were coming to me as I stood at the window with a view of the sea. I had only to move to the door and leave, take a walk along the beach, but I stood at the window.

Travelogue 1174 – 15 March
I’m Not Your NPC

If a Dutch student is especially adept at English, if their accent is near perfect, if their vocabulary is impressive, I’ll ask them how they became so good. The most common answer is a surprising one: video games.

The video game world is so alien to me, I can’t imagine how language skills factor in. I imagine kids sitting at consoles for long stretches in trances. But the answer I get is that they develop international communities via the games. They make friends around the world, and English is often the lingua franca.

When video games became popular, we sensed there was something amiss. The way it took hold among the young was scary. We all wondered what ill effects might manifest in tender psyches nursed on the violent fantasies there, in the games. Debates and studies ensued. Conclusions and cautions were issued and forgotten. Some advocated for the games, saying they enhanced intelligence and motor skills. Other still felt ill at ease.

It reminded me of the debates about violence in the movies. In the action movies of my own youth, unnamed thugs and cops were gunned down by the hundreds in a single movie. The victims were the very image of dispensability. People wrung their hands about the violence back then, too, reaching no clear conclusions. Common sense just suggested that it wasn’t healthy.

We may have arrived at the moment in which answers are provided. The gaming dweeb who would be emperor of the world is making of himself a live chyron on the state of our cultural id.

Most revealing might be his weird metaphysics. Heather Cox Richardson writes, “ … political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as ‘NPCs.’” NPC, she has to explain to me, “refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players.”

“If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” Muisk has tweeted. Disregarding the adolescent tone of the stunted boy trying to mansplain, the assumptions behind the statement – the programming, if you will – is troubling.

It was never the violence that was the problem. It was the consistent, unvarying reinforcement of the notion that other people are objects. There is something in the primitive mind that reduces people to obstacles and threats in a black-and-white struggle for survival.

It’s a very natural impulse, difficult to abandon entirely, even for the best of us. And yet, it is, almost by definition, the enemy of civilization. We expect our thinkers and artists and leaders to fight against the impulse to objectify people. We expect it from them for a reason: we need civilization. We believe in it. We expect them to protect and advance it.

There are dark, Lethean historical moments in which we falter, lose or even reject our humanity. But our impulse toward civilization also runs deep. We sense that something is wrong. Even in the grip of wild selfishness, the diminished voice of conscience is trying to be heard.

Travelogue 1173 – 8 March
Hope is the Thing with Feathers

I awoke at 5am, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t think the songbird woke me, but I didn’t mind if he had. He was close, perhaps perched on the roof above our window. He was loud, and he was enjoying himself. He scarcely took a break for the next hour.

The songbird made my thoughts sweet, lulled my mind into a few shallow dozings threaded with pleasant dreams. The song became accompaniment to light imaginings: meadows and street fairs, places my daughters would have enjoyed.

Baby Jos is a chatterbox in the mornings. On the way to school, she voices all kinds of musings. One day she was curious about feathers. Why were they so light? What were they made of? Would they float forever if they were light enough? I tried to explain the Emily Dickinson line, “hope is the thing with feathers,” but the sense of it was elusive. She wanted something more concrete. Poetry might have to wait.

Is spring a time of hope, or a time of fatigue? If the bird is a metaphor for hope, is it a metaphor for spring? Or would mine be rather a fox at dawn, having dashed here and there all night, blinking in the new light? It’s hard for me to tell anymore, whether light brings dark or dark brings light. The line of shadows turns upon itself, and I get turned around.

The songbird is helping me to figure things out.

Travelogue 1172 – 6 March 

Make Me Again

It’s been sunny. Near freezing in the mornings, but warming up to 15˚C or better in the afternoons. People are stumbling around like they’re dreaming. Comfort feels like a guilty pleasure here. And one treats it with either abandon or the delicacy of trying not to break a charm.

Still it is chilly in the mornings. I wanted to stay warm in bed a few extra minutes. I dozed again, and I had a brief dream. We wanted some photos for some reason. In my dream photography became “ridefia”. I was delighted when I woke: such a beautiful word! I broke it into pseudo-Latinate pieces and interpreted it as the art of being God again, God the Creator. Photography was, in fact, a re-creation, a re-imagining, a re-making.

Swipe the phone carelessly, and I get the “Siri Suggestions”. Among the apps offered automatically is the camera in selfie mode. It’s hard to get rid of that screen. Inevitably, I end up recording a shot of my hairline trying to get rid of it. Just like that, I am re-imagined. Without a nose, or a chin.

Selfies are a routine for many people. It’s stunning how integral the mechanism is to millions: focus and shoot. Include the many who use the camera as a mirror on the train in the morning; it’s a rehearsal for the big click, the re-imagining, the Great Awakening – every morning, – the Great (re-)Shuttering. Make me again!

I’ve been indulging in some photographic browsing. I like street scenes. The algorithms give me more and more, and I always stop to admire them. Cities are conjured, re-imagined in a flash, and one can admire them as new things, while they are nostalgic for old things. Interestingly, these street scenes are almost always sterilised of people. The streets are quiet and abandoned.

Travelogue 1171 – 25 February
Close-Up

The Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam is a large public square, laid with colourful concrete. Here it was painted a grassy green. It was raining today, and we watched out the window of the tea house as the showers swept across the city, raindrops splashing on the concrete meadow. It’s a meditative scene. Except for the drunk pacing just by the door, shouting into his mobile in some Slavic language.

This is no ordinary tea house. On Little Ren’s insistence, we are trying bubble tea for the first time. I did my daddy’s due diligence, looking up where to go in Rotterdam. I wanted to be sure it was the best and, more importantly, the cutest. Cute it certainly was, walls painted pink, with rows of hearts, balloons and neon rainbows, light fixtures hung with fluffy cotton to look like clouds. There were pink menu boards with loads of options, and a sweet barista to help my girls make their choices. Little Ren was starstruck. She was walking in a dream.

There is a Schouwburgplein in many Dutch cities. That is usually where the town’s theatre stands. On either side of Rotterdam’s square is the city’s concert hall and the city’s main theatre. (The theatre was first established, I’m reading, in the eighteenth century!) But what catches the eye is the Pathé movie theatre, with its huge sign and garish advertisements. We couldn’t resist. It was vacation time. We ran across the rainy square and into the warmth of its high lobby, volumes of space resounding with movie scores, flashing with the reflected light of previews and ads for snacks.

We chose the film “Flow”, a Latvian animated film about a cat stranded in a flood. It was a beautiful film. We sat up front, and we enthusiastically dove into our snacks. I was swept away by popcorn and animation. The animation style was different, unusual. The figures of the animals glowed. Their features washed out the closer they came to the “camera”, detail giving way to the glowing topography of their hides. Only the glowing eyes stayed consistent. I found this technique engaging, reminding me how paintings of striking realism break down into brush strokes up close; reminding me how my own weakening eyes interact with the universe; reminding me of Slavoj Žižek lectures about reality being unfinished, comparing it to the architecture of video games.

Job well done. The cartoon cat survived. We survived. We made it home alive and puffed up with bubble tea and popcorn. The girls refused to drink from any cup but their plastic bubble tea cups for the rest of the evening. And they spent hours playing kitty cats.

Travelogue 1170 – 17 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Five

Polite and softening language are standard parts of the curriculum in Business English. Polite language shows respect. You say, “would you please?” instead of “give me that!” because it establishes respect. It lends power to your counterpart, establishes equality and camaraderie.

More important is the softening language: “I’m afraid that won’t be possible” and “we were thinking differently” instead of “never going to happen.” It signals regret and a willingness to negotiate. It signals an acknowledgement that adversaries in a negotiation have valid concerns and interests. That keeps people at the table.

Students balk. How is this lesson useful? Why can’t we speak directly? I like being blunt, they say. “Blunt” has become a favourite word of mine. Dutch people deploy it quite frequently, and with pride. Yes, you enjoy being blunt, don’t you? How do you think your interlocutor likes it? Answer: everyone likes it. They know where they stand. Yes, I say, indeed they do. They stand next to someone who will always go through the door first, who will never offer a seat on the Metro, and who is never going to think about a conversation a second time. So how do you think that will influence their business decisions about you moving forward?

I’ve been picking on poor, happy-go-lucky Mel Gibson, who let drop his wide-eyed observation about Trump coming to California after the fires, that it was like daddy arriving, “and he’s taking his belt off.” There is something sweet and innocent about Mel, even when he’s letting these sorts of inanities fly. Rogan and his ilk indulge poor fools like Mel, milking them for every half-thought. The right sets these fools up to be shamans because they live in a stream-of-consciousness dream. In Mel’s press packet, “blurt” is his official verb of attribution. One moment he seems profound, the next we’re cringing. And Mel is just shaking his head at the wonder of it all.

There’s privilege to being a right-wing shaman. You get to shout down your network interviewer with savage righteousness. You get to swagger into government offices, chase employees out, and shut them down. You get to call people names. Not only do you get to victimise innocent people, tearing up their employment or procurement contracts, you get to circle back and call them names, encouraging your bros to rain terror down on them. How cool is that?

“So cool,” murmur the basement-dwellers who idealise Trusk and Mump. They shake their heads with wonder and call them master politicians. In reality, the two co-queens have no idea what politics is. They play to exclusively to their own audience. They reach out a hand to no one. They burn every bridge. There’s no coalition. There are the rich bros, their sweaty shamans, and there is the mob.

Obviously, these guys don’t expect any real election in the future. They have made clear that they think the age of democracy is over. But the people haven’t spoken. Who is tracking all the enemies made in only one month in power? Even among their own audience. Most of their constituency are simple-minded ticket-holders to the circus. What happens when the big tent gets cold because there’s no one manning the heater? What happens when the wild animals get loose because the trainers have taken a NASCAR break? If they start grumbling, is daddy going to take off the belt?