Travelogue 1161 – 16 January
A Monster Looms

Musk has entered my subconscious as a monster. He haunts my dreams, a monster you never see clearly, but lurks beyond the horizon. He has the dimensions of a Japanese monster, one you would catch glimpses of over the horizon, lurching through the bay, smirking at the planes buzzing around him. He’s the size of history. The film script requires lots of heroes because they are small, human size. They have grit and humour, but they are doomed.

In the book I’m finishing, a character wonders why recent generations have manifested in their entertainment such a need for superheroes. That character in the book has no answer, but I wonder now if it’s the product of history asserting itself in the generational mind, like a monster on the horizon. The Japanese imagined the biggest monster in postwar cinema, the kind that crushed city blocks beneath its feet. This is the culture that had looked into the face of horrific losses, of a defeat as epic as Troy’s, seen cities incinerated by the atom bomb.

History isn’t alive the way we are alive. It isn’t dead either, in the parallel sense that our parents are not dead, but are active in our minds and morals, shuffling around in the attic, as it were. History asserts itself in the imagination. If it isn’t given proper time and perspective, it moves from closet to closet, polymorphous and faceless. We catch sight of it in mirrors; sometimes it flatters us and sometimes it simply stares. When we think we are thinking about history, we are actually reviewing montages we have viewed in TV movies, montages in shadow.

Even in forgetting history, we never shake it. Remembering it, our negotiations never reach more than momentary agreements. History won’t stand still. It asserts itself in the mind of a people, half-digested stories that demand some lodging in the mind, stories that yield wisdom with time and contemplation, with the perspective of our own years. Too often, received history is TV montage, vignettes on the moors. While, down in the bay, a monstrous shadow looms.

Travelogue 1160 – 3 January
The Alien Speaks

Someone manufactures a video for social media. It is black and white and captions itself as recorded in 1964. The camera never moves; it is an interview scene. The subject is an alien, grey, big-headed, with glowing eyes. It speaks English somehow, though in a spooky, gravelly voice. I wish it were smoking a cigarette. Its demeanour is submissive, as an enemy captive’s should be, and it is longsuffering. But it is wise, and it is willing to talk. Naturally, the interviewer is less interested in where the monster came from or its technology than he is in philosophies of life and death.

The two have spent many hours in that room. Time has stopped. The alien explains in a languid manner how unjustified our existential fears have always been. Everything the gurus have told us is true. Death is an illusion, and love is the force that binds the universe together. The alien stares at the camera, docile, resigned, enlightened, and bored. This is what this particular life has come to. Captured by a benighted species of ape, his dashing days as an interstellar explorer have been cut short, and he will grow weak in a poorly lit prison light-years from home, tutoring his ill-mannered hosts in the basics of the spiritual sciences.

All right, I have the few minutes that the video requests. It is a successful bit of fiction: I am moved by the piece, acknowledging it as sophisticated schlock. I wonder who made the video and why. How long did it take? What was the motivation? I suppose it would be fun to animate a creepy alien figure. Then you have to figure out what it would say. The more the figure moves, the more you challenge belief, and thus the attitude of resignation arises. It is an alien; it is smart. It must say something wise. And the product is obvious. This is exactly the kind of thing we would like a wise and hard-bitten old pilot from Planet X to tell us. Relax, it says, the universe is a game, and you have won before you even started.

The video is posted in the manner of a leak. The audience knows it is fake; the author knows that the audience knows it is fake. We all enjoy the process. Inside, we reserve a secret space from doubt. It might be real. But “real” isn’t the issue, if we are to be honest with ourselves and each other. Social media was never a place to find truth or reality. It is a discursive medium. It is, in potential, a place to discuss truth or reality. That distinction is where our alien video finds its traction. It is a rhetorical ploy; it offers a proposition. Though the video is obviously a fake, it says to its audience, “this might be real”. And even though we all know it is fake, we respond with, “this might be real”. An exchange about reality has taken place, and we feel strangely satisfied.

Going further to examine the evidence that the video is fake misses the point. And it doesn’t affect whatsoever the conditional conclusion of the audience that “this is real”. Furthermore, going on to unpack the argument that “this is real”, to analyse the philosophy, to analyse the implications of captured alien intelligence, also misses the point. It misunderstands the method of social media. It’s not discursive in that way. Social media is made for call and response only. It posits a thought, elicits an emotional response. All other comments are meant only to echo and amuse.

Travelogue 1159 – 1 January
Return to Janus

Once again, we have slid through the gates of Janus. On this side of it, we witness a quiet morning. Only the wind by the door. But around the gate, there were such kinetics and noise that one wondered what purpose remained in the minds of the celebrants. People shouted, and people danced. There was joy, and there were noise-makers. In a snapshot of it, one searched for any sense.

In spite of the excess, the movement across the threshold was silent and internal. It happened, quite without volition, without knowledge, and, despite the atomic clocks, it happened without precision. One blinked to find the other side.

Now people sleep. I am left with the image of the Metro ride home yesterday, grim and portentous. It was four in the afternoon, and the many passengers around me were solemn. There was little sense of celebration, and if there was anticipation, it was the sort that dreads. They were people preparing for a storm.

But all right, let’s find some cheer. I stop by the café on the way to the barber. It’s a new year. The morning is quiet, but the line at the counter is long. Most cafes and shops are closed. Here, the customers wait patiently, and even with good humour. It’s a holiday ritual, of sorts. They stand, and they smile. They chat. After the long wait, there’s a table for me. Next to me is a couple of young women who haven’t seen each other in a while. They hug, and they exchange gifts. They catch up; they check their phones. They run out of things to say, but they are happy to see each other. A family settles at the long reading table. They are loud; their energy contrasts sharply with the subdued morning outside. No one is bothered at all.

Travelogue 1158 – 31 December
Echoes of Change

There have been only twenty-seven hours of sunlight here during the month of December. I have a pretty high tolerance for grey, but at last I find myself sinking beneath the unrelenting mood. This grey spell includes the longest streak since the 90s, eleven days without sun.

The gloom combines poorly with the swell of New Year’s sounds. I refer to the sound of fireworks. The cracking and booming do not communicate celebration under the unyielding clouds, but instead a kind of dread. The sounds assault the nerves. They seem violent; they remind one of war.

Losing Jimmy Carter at the end of a tough year, inheriting only the likes of Musk, it becomes hard to hold one’s head high. The low clouds are taunting us, reminding us we have been abandoned. When the crowds bowed to the orange idol, submitting voluntarily to the degradation of the “Trump Era” – the words feel dirty, - then the gods withdrew their favour. Sometimes children must experience the consequences of their decisions.

Searching the web for holiday activities, I noticed that local venues only published summertime photos. The change in seasons happens slowly so that we don’t grieve. But we evolved without photography. The contrast was too sudden for me; those photos drained my resolve. The clouds had stolen all the colour.

Travelogue 1157 – 27 December

The Tree Tries

Plastic trees have no roots. And yet, the roots of the living Christmas tree present the problem. They do not sustain the organism, and therefore the tradition. We have in the past kept our little, potted trees, replanted them and watered them, and still they do not survive until the next yuletide. How can the tradition survive when the living representative of it cannot?

Somehow, the inert green plastic we have erected in the place of a Christmas tree suffices. It does more than that; it triggers a sense of joy. This is the magic, I suppose, of the simulacrum. The actual and the breathing children singing at the base of the fake tree. My very real girls are changing year to year, and the family honours their maturing and also struggles with change itself, in acts such as this one, the raising the tree beside the bookshelves. We want tradition to stop time for just a moment. Step by step, we are losing our sweet little girls. Outside, the world we know is under attack by the unlikeliest revolutionaries in history. And for one week or two, we hang delicate ornaments from the stiff, plastic branches of our tree, in a ritual of familiarity.

The bleak weather holds. The sun I dreamt of two nights ago has not appeared. In that dream, I climbed three flights in order to find more sun but had to be content looking upon its light from within the shadow. We were attending an execution in that dream, an execution by guillotine. Oddly enough, the execution was scheduled to take place after a tennis tournament.

I write in the mornings before the family wakes. Sometimes I research into history, reading here or there, following links. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are favourite hunting grounds. Yesterday, after waking from that dream, I happened upon the story of the death of France’s Charles VIII. He was on his way to watch a game of tennis when he bashed his head against the top of a doorframe. It was April, in the first blush of spring. The plastic Christmas tree was well stowed away.

Travelogue 1156 – 26 December
The Sun Tries

We are on holiday. The sun has a chance to rise in peace. The Christmas tree stands in silhouette downstairs, its strings of lights switched off. The line of plushies underneath the tree stare vaguely from the shadows, taking form for the day ahead. The sky outside is becoming white.

Before the holiday, the sun has risen so late that we have been well along in our days. The flat has been abandoned by the time first light peeks in the window. And the choice of verb is just right, because the solstice sun is so timid. It has hidden behind mists all Christmas week. Light drizzles have fallen on us on every family excursion, though that has not stopped us from going out. Not has it stopped many other last-minute shoppers and families seeking some sweets for an afternoon.

We went for a plastic tree this year. It stands fully my height, which is a luxury for us. Without a car, we have been limited to potted trees that could be held in one’s lap on the Metro or gripped while cycling. The plastic tree came in a box with a handle. The girls fell upon the box immediately on its arrival home. They would not rest until the tree was assembled and every ornament or trimming hung. They even found precarious perches for their Christmas earrings. They did well; the tree is pretty. It stands proudly in its stance of tradition against change.

The sun shone in my last dream before waking. I encouraged us to climb to the third floor of the structure in my dream, hoping for more sunshine, but the structure itself put our faces into shadow, no matter how high we climbed. The land around us was bathed in warm sun light. That would have to do.

Travelogue 1155 – 6 December
Summer Furniture

Sinter Klaas has gone. As though in mourning, the skies above Rotterdam have released waves of showers that surged all night. This morning, the winds gust loudly. The roving air clings to night, seems to ward off day with its child-like caprice.

I’m as sad about the old man’s departure as the girls. For all I know, this may be the final time before he evaporates into the disillusionment of maturity. It may have been the last time I get to impersonate the fulfiller of dreams, the last time I get to sneak around in the early morning, leaving gifts. I feel grief.

There’s been a tune in my head, something from my childhood, an old Cat Stevens song I had forgotten about, a song I heard recently at a café, unexpectedly, randomly revived from deep memory. It opened a door in my mind, like opening an Egyptian tomb and releasing the air that preserved ancient things. The papyrus turns to dust instantly. I was flooded by impressions hearing the song at the café. Childhood was vividly present, and then it slowly sank back into its place under the desert.

I thought of my eldest brother. Somehow the song is linked to him in the crypt of memory. Long ago, I visited him when he went to university. We listened to music. He wanted to know what songs I liked. The lyrics of the song were mournful. I liked that.

As a child, I worshipped my big brothers. They were heroes; their characters were pure and good. In my teens, they let me down: they became human. We quarrelled. I was heart-broken, and I blamed them. I blamed them for years. I didn’t intend to, and I thought I was smarter than that, but the resentment settled into a section of the crypt for a long occupation. That there could be heroes was a keystone in the arch of my innocence. Nothing wounds us like our own innocence.

The night’s winds have blown through the open mezzanine and balconies of the complex, tipping over summer furniture, knocking plants over, sending empty flower pots and light plastic chairs skittering along the pavement. There will need to be some cleanup.