Travelogue 1238 – 16 February
Snow Again

This morning, the snow is all gone. None of it is left on the ground. That was a strange episode, yesterday, dream-like and sudden. I couldn’t even make it home on my bike in the afternoon, the snow was blowing so strongly into my face. The cars were slowly trudging along next to me on the Nieuwe Binnenweg, inches from my shoulder, and I could barely see. I decided to stop.

There was a table available at the Pelgrim beer pub, a table by the window. I slowly warmed my hands, slowly shrugged off the jacket. The snow was thick and wet on my back and my arms. My backpack was wet. The morning had been sunny and moderate, so I hadn’t brought any gear for rain or snow. It had come as a shock to emerge from the Wijkpaleis and encounter the snow swirling the air, the wind sharp in my face, the street covered in snow, the cars slowly crunching their way through it. My bicycle looked shrunken and abandoned, standing locked in the accumulation of new snow.

I had been at the Wijkpaleis reading through a new play with a group of actors. It had been a fun event, and even successful, if success is measured by the amount of constructive criticism. If measured by praise, the play was as successful as I my weather prediction. As often happens in my early drafts, a fine cast of characters find themselves lost in a poorly managed plot. There is a logic underneath the surface, but they stumble over the awkward arrangement of elements and lost themselves in the lacunae, the things unexplained.

I thought it was a sad play, written in a sad season. The actors did not see what I saw, and it made me question myself. Mood is a tricky tool in writing. Mood is a tricky thing in life. It comes and it goes. You cannot really make someone sad with writing. You can remind them they are sad, at the most.

Mood is not a story. Plotlines are not sad or happy; they are tragic or comedic. Characters may be sad. Like most people, our characters will be sad alone. Tragic events are more likely to trigger other things than sadness, such as indignation, curiosity, a thrill of recognition, or contemplation.

Perhaps my characters are victims of a sad season, brought to life against their will, as we all are, by a sad pater. I feel some responsibility. As I rewrite, the same characters will remain trapped in their tragic plot, like a Nietzschean loop, hashing out their sad fates over and over. One ought to have compassion for their characters.

The snow didn’t let up. I had been watching it fall over the canal outside the pub, while cyclists passed unsteadily, covered in layers that are dark against the snow, that made them bigger and clumsier, that made them seem faceless. People on foot were laughing, gathering snowballs. When my triple was finished, I left. I was done with the bike; I would pick it up tomorrow. I bowed my head, and I headed for the Metro station.

Travelogue 1237 – 8 February
The Beautiful Things

The weekend was a pleasant distraction from computer problems. My girls had their moments to shine. Little Ren competed in a gymnastics tournament. This only happens once or twice a year. During the tournament, girls compete in four events over the course of a couple hours, while parents resent each other in the uncomfortable bleachers. It was Ren’s first time trying a floor routine with music, and she was very nervous. I gave her hugs on the way there, telling her everyone gets nervous. She didn’t answer, and upon arrival at the sporthal, she ditched me as soon as she saw her teammates. But she was smiling, and she was fidgeting with anticipation.

All in all, it went well, in that halting, swaying way of young girls. To me, it was a gold-medal performance. She had a few signature moves in her routine, things she had been proud of for years, including the “bridge”, in which she manages to arch backward until her palms lie flat on the mat, and then push with her feet and roll through a handstand until her feet touch the floor on the other side. It’s quite a feat of flexibility, at least for a proud father.

On Sunday, both girls had ballet class, and the lessons were open for parents. I was impressed by how hard they work for an hour each week. Baby Jos is at an age in which the teacher can teach, rather than just show and drill. She pays attention to detail; she corrects; she explains why each move should be executed the way it is, the visual effect and how it flows into the next move. Such a simple thing was moving to me, the passing on of a tradition centuries old, and in such a matter-of-fact way that it was the very expression of hope for me. Of course what we are doing here today is important. Every beautiful movement counts. Every calibration makes the art form work, justifies it, illuminates it, and illuminates our lives. This is important.

They have started working on the bar, too, which warms my heart for some reason. The rows of girls stretch one arm toward the bar, hold the other delicately in position, and they are run through various positions and moves, rising and dipping, and it’s all so lovely. When Baby Jos, the oldest, started ballet, I learned the names for the positions, but I have forgotten. I will have to review them.

Travelogue 1236 – 7 February
Machine RIP

February had a rough start. My trusty old computer died. Picture a cartoon jalopy and the sound it makes as it collapses, like the sigh of an abandoned squeezebox. The poor machine had been pushed pretty far. So far that I had already begun to worry. I had begun with some expediencies in the fall, opening the laptop up, replacing the battery, adding RAM. I was just figuring out how I would replace the hard drive when the thing seized up.

It was a February when I bought the little monster, back in 2019! Suddenly I had to buy a new one. There was no other way. Now an alien machine sits in its place on my desk. We are getting to know each other, the new one and I. She is thinner than the old one, but longer. Her dimensions throw me off. The keyboard doesn’t match the one I’m used to, so I make mistakes. She makes more noise when I touch her, and that is exciting, as though we might go farther.

Years of notes are gone. The desktop is blank. Even my photo of old Rotterdam has vanished, to be replaced by a generic AI image of sand dunes. Apps need to be reloaded. Old files need to be reloaded. Some are just lost. It’s uncertain territory, something like the AI wasteland in the picture, lacking real features. One finds he hasn’t been aware of all the character that was accumulating inside the flat little box on the desk, the box that has a lid that lights up when you open it.

Travelogue 1235 – 31 January
Focus On Them

For better or worse, I’ve been scrolling through social media a lot since Minneapolis was invaded. I have a few tips for content creators.

1: Measure the Outrage
Expressions of outrage and woundedness are not unimportant. They form a genre that should be carefully cultivated and protected.

 

But

 

You risk burnout. Allies are just as wounded; finding sympathetic hearts is rewarding, but acknowledge that there is a next step. The middle-to-right consumer is not interested. If anything, that reader might consider it a good thing that libs are feeling wounded. An unvarying chorus of outrage and woundedness risks consumer burnout and loss of credibility.

 

2: Be concrete

When Katie Phang mentions Trump, she mentions him as a felon, a 34-time felon to be exact. It’s good to be reminded, but it is not so effective as it seems. If the rule of law is in doubt, or in flux, convictions lose meaning. J6 criminals were pardoned; many – even those who despise the J6 insurrectionists – don’t remember what the exact charges were. Don Lemon was recently arrested for charges related to his coverage of the church protest in Minneapolis. The right-wingers who cheered the arrest would not be able to name the charges. He’s just a bad guy who was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, so of course he should have been arrested. My point: we don’t understand our own legal system anymore. That leads to loss of faith. And calling someone a felon means very little to most people.

 

3: Don’t Separate Yourself

“If this doesn’t make you scared, I don’t know what will.” How many times have I heard this line in videos? It’s patronizing. Sure, we are all frustrated by the passivity of Congress and the American people in the face of this crisis. But when you express your frustration in this way, it motivates no one. Allow people to come to their own conclusions when well-informed.

 

4: Morality is Human

Blunt cries that something is immoral achieves very little. The human mind challenges imperatives. Unless you are parroting someone’s previous conclusion, your imperative only arouses resistance in that person. Humans are stubborn and rebellious, and that can be irritating when you are trying to persuade. But if you have faith in humanity, their independence can be rewarding. Place the facts before people and see whether their moral conclusions are the same as yours. Morality is as fundamental to our mental apparatus as breathing is to our physical apparatus; your moral conclusions are not privileged, any more than your breathing is. And, by the way, when someone denies your facts, they are tacitly acknowledging your morality. Declaring that he didn’t do what you say is immoral is an admission that the act is immoral. All that is left is the proof of the fact, not the moral persuasion.

 

5: Focus on Them

All this to say, take yourself out of the message for the most impact. Talk about the wrong-doers. Bring it to them, and speak concretely. Put them on the spot. Let people judge their actions. Maybe I have become partial to Euro-snark, but I found this video to be refreshing.

Travelogue 1234 – 25 January
Keeping Up

The streets are cold. Ice has formed on the canals again, a delicate layer that only the seagulls can step on. A light blanket of frost has descended upon us during the night, and the morning is quiet. Little Ren and I are travelling to her hockey games. We walk slowly through the housing development between our building and the Metro, and up the final stairs to the transport hub at the top of the hill. Beside the stairs the grassy incline is powdered white with frost. The fenced-in, asphalt football pitch is still. The tram tracks shine a dull silver amid their shallow tracks of mud and ice. No one is stirring.

It's never been the most attractive plein in town. While many transport hubs and stations in town are pleasant, thoughtfully designed and clean in their realisation, this one has a feeling of haste; it is function first, and it has the atmosphere of the postwar boom, the thirty or forty years when much of the city we see was actually built. It is a forlorn sight this morning, abandoned and grey, lacking grace.

Little Ren is scheduled to play as keeper, so I have the big keeperstas on my back, the bag with all her equipment. The game is out of town, so we will meet a teammate’s father two Metro stops away, and he will drive us. Little Ren is cheerfully marching forward, plunging into her day. She is happy to be keeper; she likes being useful to the team. She is buzzing with the energy of a new day, chatting busily about cheese crackers and the latest toys her friend Issa has acquired. I struggle to keep up; I don’t want to miss a word. Her voice rises in the cold air, unanswered even by an echo in the empty square, dissipating quickly into the rare Jan sky, no one else but me nearby, listening. Then we are swept into the dank hall of the Metro.

Travelogue 1233 – 23 January
One Must Understand Their Time

Dante lived in feudal times. As a citizen of one of independent city-states of northern Italy, key agents in feudalism’s decline, he saw through the cracks in the system, without knowing what he saw. He himself was something of an agent of the system’s decline, without understanding what he did.

Some see feudalism coming. There are serious thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis who hypothesize that we have already entered an age of ‘technofeudalism’, a new round of lords and vassals and serfs, this time with the tech lords owning everything and the rest of us working their digital land. Their vassals receive rents in exchange for their fealty and their arms.

Some of us catch, like through the holes of a closing net, glimpses of the world to come, but we can’t make sense of what we see. We might even be contributing to the rising new order without knowing what we are doing. While Dante wrote in support of imperial rule of Italy, he could not know he was part of something bigger than emperors, undermining the order that needed emperors.

Then there are others who gleefully advocate for a new feudalism. Greenland is meant to be a test case for a tech-age feudalistic state, if the ghoulish Boys of Paypal and their lapdog JD Vance get their way. These self-appointed gurus of futurity, in between their immortality treatments and the drug-enhanced mystical rites they perform for shareholders and social media, preach from Olympus about how we need this. We the people.

 As the Greenland case ought to illuminate, the tech bros are trapped in their own fantasies, inspired by too much TV and too much time in role-playing games. These are the dues we pay for guilty pleasures like “Game of Thrones” and “The Tudors”. Billionaires with stunted or deformed moral identities start confusing their scifi with their false history. It all seems very glamorous. We will be new kings and lords! We will commute to Mars! The villagers will watch with awe as we pass through their villages. They will worship us. It’s a new age! Et cetera.

It's interesting to note that the romanticism that attaches itself to medievalism is to some portion traceable back to our troubadours and poets. They collaborated on a wildly successful propaganda campaign for the feudal lords, inventing the entire notion of chivalry.

But I do think of the unlucky king, from almost a century before Dante’s time, who did nothing more than he thought were his rights as king, but who died a miserable death in the field, being hounded by rebellious barons. That was King John of England. John was unlucky in his timing, living through an inevitable decline in his family’s fortunes; he was unlucky in his own unfortunate temperament, arrogant and grasping. Unlike the current U.S. president, he was not pursuing wealth for its own sake, but to recover the lands in France that he had lost during his youth, a development that even the most likeable and strategically minded king might have been unable to stop. John was blind to the shifting sands beneath his feet. The romance of feudalism, the glory of being a great lord, it only allowed him so long a tether, and no more.

One must understand their own time.

Travelogue 1232 – 15 January
His Gentle Heart

To return to Dante’s sonnet, “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,” I wanted to consider the last two words of his first line, “gentil core”. He is addressing his audience: to each captive soul and gentle heart. And he is defining them. I had suggested that not every word is equal, and this word “gentil” is fraught with meaning for reader and poet.

Dante wrote the sonnet in 1283 or so. In the thirteenth century, the culture of courtliness and gentility had ripened, an outgrowth of feudalism and the Germanic social codes, stewing with Christian and Latin culture for centuries. Medieval courts, royal and noble, kept poets and musicians as a part of their retinue. This was where our literary movement began, in the telling of stories that resonated within this ascendant culture, what we call the High Medieval, that peaked in the century of Dante’s youth.

Feudal cultures generate a set of ideals appropriate to their structures, valuing courage, lots of combat, service to the lord or king, and religious virtues. In medieval Europe, Christian virtues meant piety, submission, compassion, and humility. The signs of virtue included not only loyalty to the lord, but devotion to one’s lady. This latter, perhaps fusing weirdly with a devotion to Mary, became exaggerated by the poets into romantic and erotic devotion to a worthy lady.

Courtly poetry had a few templates, models based on the tales of mythical heroes. These heroes lived in Charlemagne’s time, some four hundred years earlier, or in the mythical time of Arthur, some eight hundred years earlier. Like most mythologies, this one taught that there was a golden age of feudal values, and that the present times were corrupt.

Integral to the Arthurian mythos was the knight Launcelot, who blindly loved Arthur’s Guinevere. The troubadours, or travelling musicians and poets, worked this model into images of pure, unrequited love and devotion. They resurrected the classical god Amor or Eros as a kind of tutelary spirit, and Launcelot’s hopeless devotion became the sign of real nobility.

Dante’s first stanza identifies his preferred reader, the soul taken (by love) and whose heart is gentle. But “gentle” isn’t describing someone given to soft caresses. It means someone of noble character. Only the noble heart can love, only an aristocrat of the heart. Feudal mores, defined just as the feudal age was faltering, breaking down before the press of incipient capitalism and the rise of the nation-state, feudal sensibility could only define value in the terms of feudalistic nobility. The worthy man was a knight. He had aristocratic blood, perhaps secretly, or perhaps through some spiritual transformation.

It is worth noting that Dante himself was from a noble family. It was a minor lineage, and his father’s line was one of the poorer branches. But he was of noble blood. The opening line of the sonnet is as much a challenge as an invitation: “To every captive soul and gentle heart ….” It is as severe as it is compassionate. Are you worthy?