Travelogue 555 – April 10
Derrida and the Pelikaan
Part One

The sweet April spring is in abeyance. The winds are up, and I arrive home with saddle -soak from the bicycle seat. I can wait out the brief showers, but my cycle is parked outdoors. The temperatures have fallen, but not to winter standards. It’s chilly, but not cold. The air is fresh. The birds give me heart, the sea gulls crying and the swans taking baths in the calm waters of the Schie. These things lift my spirits.

Menna was up before sunrise, retreating with her textbook to the other room. Exams are coming too quickly. She studies all the time. My race is coming too quickly. I train every day. The race will be a morning race. I need to shock my body into morning performance. Menna has woken me at a painful hour. No pain, no gain. I suit up, and painfully make my way down the steep staircase to the street.

I take to the banks of the Schie, jogging like a man who’s been in bed for six days rather than for six hours, jogging across the bridge and then around to where the Schie joins the Maas. It’s not until my last straightaway along the Maas that I feel something reminiscent of grace in my stride. It’s humiliating.

The day starts at the old café, my café from former times. I’ve had to take a leave of absence while they went through a minor re-brand. It’s been an awkward transition for them, and none too convenient for the regular.

The barista today is the football player. He’s a husky guy, blonde and good-looking in farm-boy style. He’s older than the other baristas. Most unusual is his good cheer and the way he engages in conversation. I’ve learned not to expect much from the Dutch in the way of personal engagement. But when this guy turns his attention on you, it’s with an intense sort of thoughtfulness.

Our first conversation was about Golden Earring, the Dutch band that produced ‘Radar Love’ in the 70s. I know my look makes people here think I’m a musician. He was testing me. I knew the song, though I hadn’t known the band. I approved his taste, and he was pleased, singing the song and bobbing his head as he worked the espresso machine.

This morning, his mood is sour. The oven is not working. He has been forced to apologize: there will be no croissants. I force myself to take it gracefully, though in fact this is a major setback for me. He is shaking his head. His English is not strong, so he has to take a few runs at the explanation: the cord can’t take the voltage of the oven. This re-brand has been rough.

I’m philosophical. He rewards me with philosophy. He tells me about a French film he’s seen, a film that featured the philosopher Jacques Derrida. This pop philosophe was speaking about paradox, and happy it would seem to manifest it in himself, protesting throughout against the authority being invested in him by the format of the film. I have no special knowledge he says, and then he lectures.

I laugh to be suddenly talking about Derrida. One discovers Europe in the oddest places. The jock barista is quoting Derrida. I’m grateful for that. I ask him how his season is going. He’s member of a local squad, based in Zwijndrecht, close to Dordrecht. ‘Okay,’ he says, qualifying it with a thoughtful pause. He has had some injuries this year, and he wants to tell me how he hasn’t regained all his strength yet. ‘I don’t have my body,’ he says, and he shrugs with discomfort. I know how he feels, when you can’t find the old ease and grace, when your movement is clumsy. I know it. ‘I’m sorry, Mister Barista.’

His club, called Pelikaan, has an important game coming up on Saturday. I tell him I’ll try to show up.

Travelogue 554 – April 3
Taking the Train
Part Three

The train settles into the station with a small groan, with only that sound, and otherwise so quietly. No one says a word. The doors hiss as they open, and I step out. The station is spacious and sun lit. The station is Leiden, university town. Just outside the station doors is a wide brick plein, in which people stand and drift and smoke, and they sway while they chat, and they fiddle with phones and music players, and they walk briskly toward destinations clear in their minds, and they study each other with silent hostility, all the things people do when they have space. There is a bike path painted in white lines across the plaza, lines painted right on the brick, but no one observes the rule. Lone bikes cross in every direction.

There is a collection of high buildings around us, set in a loose line along the rail line, demarcating another of those dead zones left by the bombing in WWII, but raised in none of the neat order of Rotterdam, and lacking the depth among them to really say ‘city’ properly. They stand around the station as heralds of a somewhat transparent modernism, failing to mask the enduring quality of the town, symbolized by the eighteenth-century windmill standing preserved not far from the station, now a museum, perhaps a source of irritation to the architects of the modern. The fact is, Leiden has the most extensive Golden Age town center outside of Amsterdam. And those narrow streets, set among a prolific network of canals, begin only a few hundred meters from the station.

I’m wondering today, stepping along the uneven brickwork of the street, how the architecture has survived our politics. Humans are creatures transfixed by their psychology. Every crisis is a flaw in the lens, playing itself out in the world outside the window. Politics is the passion play. We create beauty and we destroy it all as caprice. These are the same lands that saw the iconoclastic furies during the Reformation, when mobs broke into churches and trashed all the art there that smacked of idolatry.

These little houses, (now shops and now sandwich places,) were signs of status, and now they are signs of heritage. They might easily have been seen simply as signs of bourgeois complacency, symbols of class oppression, decadence and clutter. They are, after all, the vestiges of one of the world’s first independent bourgeois classes, a nation of merchants who warred against feudalism, as represented by the Spanish crown. In turn, they might have been upended by a new working class order. This is a university town, home to all sorts of political fancies.

Maybe it’s my own irritation that narrates these scenarios, as I make slow progress among the crowded streets. There is only room for two abreast on the tiny pavements of the tiny streets. When a bus passes, all foot traffic is made to pause. A truck unloads, and cyclists are desperately trying to see around the obstruction, slowing, stopping, blocking other bikes.

It is a pretty city. I’m here for an appointment, and only have time afterward for a short walk along one canal and another. I steer quickly away from the busiest streets. It’s just enough of an interval to quiet the thoughts of busy days, calm the strife of the mind. The tonic lies among the modest charms of the small Dutch town, modest lines of gables curving along canals, canals in gentle motion among their manmade banks, small bridges spanning them at intervals.

The streets were not built to ease the minds of overstimulated moderns. If anything, these streets were intensely active ones for the time. Farmers coming to market would have found them very exciting. The gabled houses are pretty, but to claim a universal aesthetic might be mistaken. If the architects built to an aesthetic, it was different than ours, triggering different pleasure responses than ours. It’s an alien setting, admirably adapted to modern needs.

Last week I was in Dordrecht, another set of pretty alleyways, but somehow more dim and more contained, as though the sun hadn’t penetrated quite as far into the brick as in Leiden, as though the brick facades in Leiden are healthier, rosier. There is a feeling of optimism in Leiden, as though it invites the sky in.

Trade is the reason for any medieval town’s success in the Lowlands, but for Leiden a new purpose was devised in the sixteenth century, with the establishment of the university. In Dordt, (as the Brits took to calling Dordrecht in centuries past,) identity is defined as sharply as the town itself has been by its surrounding rivers. Though it may be an island, though I have seen so much of it from the elevated train, the distances confound my exploration.

Just outside the Dordt station is the modern city. The way to the historical center is clear. It follows first the wide boulevard, which leads to the shopping street. Most Dutch towns are furnished with some version of Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, the pedestrian way dedicated to brand name clothing chains, boutiques, parfumeries, and all. In Dordrecht it’s not so high-end as all that, making way for department stores and fast food. From there the smaller streets branch off, the brick streets, and the buildings shrink into age and lean in toward each other.

I’m looking for the Grote Kerk, passing peaceful plazas next to canals that are set deep in brick channels. The spring is young. The outdoor café tables facing the memorial statues in the squares are mostly empty, though the morning couldn’t be nicer. I am marching down long streets, by art galleries and antique dealers, and by places dark and abandoned. The narrow ways allow no vantages to see beyond. I must stumble upon the big church, led there solely by the logic of small town streets, coming upon it suddenly, from behind, as though I’ve stalked a massive animal. The ancient brick walls behind the altar are set in graded sections of a half circle. These are the oldest existing walls. That becomes clear as I make the tour around the whole edifice, the brick therein a fairer pitch of pink, many of them chipped, many eroded, some replaced in different colors, the wall a puzzle with pieces forced in from the intervening centuries.

In front of the church, under the funny, squat, unfinished clock tower, there flows the river, where the boats of merchants would have drifted in, looking for harbor. They would have sighted the tower from miles away, and they would have said, ‘We’ve made it.’

Travelogue 553 – March 30
Taking the Train
Part Two

Dordrecht is one of the oldest towns in Holland. In fact, it holds the distinction of being the oldest town in Zuid Holland to be granted city rights, back in the day of William I, Count of Holland. Before that the town flits through history, appearing under a number of variations of its name, all looking like phonetic puzzles. Its first appearance in history comes under the name Thuredriht. This appears in a history written in 1120 about the ninth-century incursions by the Vikings. This makes Dordrecht older than its big neighbor, Rotterdam, by a few centuries.

In its heyday, even as the villagers on the Rotte were debating putting up a dam to control the pesky flooding, Dordrecht was one of those high medieval Dutch and Flemish success stories, leveraging their access to waters and more waters to become a trading center for the resources critical to happy life in the feudal societies of northern Europe. For Dordrecht those goods seem to have been grains, wood, and wine.

The city occupies an island formed among the intertwining strands of rivers that make up the marshy delta lands of Holland and Belgium. This little island alone is apparently touched by no less than five different rivers, the Oude Maas, the Beneden Merwede, the Nieuwe Merwede, the Hollands Diep, and the Dordtsche Kil.

It’s fun to consider that, in all likelihood, most people who have approached this town, have done so by water. We rarely think about how our understanding of a place is shaped by the aesthetic experience of the approach. Maybe it’s one reason I love train travel, and by extension, European travel. Swinging through American towns on raised superhighways can be exciting, but it’s clearly different. The impression of the place is infused with the adrenaline of maneuvering among lanes at high speeds.

Coming into Dordrecht from the north is a descent from the heights of the bridge over the Oude Maas, and a slowing descent. You see the Grote Kerk by riverside, a stolid piece of Golden Age work, the tower of which is memorable for its four square clock faces at the top, like the open flaps of a box lid. You see all the historical town bunched in miniature, and you might, surveying the town this way, just feel you know it already. In contrast, I imagine the approach in water, during which the town would loom above. The church by the water might tower properly; streets might open alluringly onto the riverside, enticing by virtue of the veil drawn by perspective. The town would open up at eye level. Disembarking from the train, with the bird’s eye view in mind, you’re tempted to believe in the map in your mind, and the tour is an impatient exercise in connecting the dots.

You glide past the historical district on the train, and on past the long streetside façade of a modern shopping mall, descending to nearly street-level as you go, and pulling into the station. The station here is niets bijzonders, as they say, nothing special, just the long shelters over the tracks and one small station building, neat and clean and functional, but no occasion for celebration.

In Rotterdam, the celebration over the new station subsides. We take it for granted already, the high angled wing over the plein, shining silvery in its metal panels. Actually the new station’s dramatic outline has been in place for well over a year. The opening is a formality; the celebration is a farewell to the construction crews. There is little to remark on about the approach to Rotterdam. The train rolls through plain suburbs, and along flat routes into the city, largely without feature. The impression says ‘city along the way’, perhaps even if it’s your destination.

At least two long-time Rotterdammers are dismissive. We are returning to the station one evening, and they are recalling the long years of construction. The previous station was closed in 2007. ‘It’s all right,’ they say about the new one, with a shrug. ‘We’re happy the construction is done.’ They remember the previous station, built in 1957. They are similarly unimpressed with the old station. Maybe it’s Dutch reserve.

I’m disappointed they don’t recall the old one fondly. I’ve only seen it in pictures, so maybe I don’t have a right to say it, but I kind of prefer it to the new one. It may have been relatively bland, but it fit into the feel of postwar Rotterdam, its concrete chic, best exemplified now by the old Groothandelsgebouw building (photo above), which stands next to the station. It was built in 1953, based on the design of the art deco Merchandise Mart in Chicago. It was one of the first major builds post-war in Rotterdam. It was built on the site of the old city zoo.

Then again, the reserve of the native sons seems appropriate somehow. There’s something about old Rotterdam that invites deprecation. Its civic spirit dresses for grim business, and prides itself on the contrast to frilly Amsterdam.

Dordrecht has less at stake. It gets to be the small town at the meeting of rivers. It has no big agenda for me. I take to the humble streets, and I head toward the Grote Kerk.

Travelogue 552 – March 29
Taking the Train
Part One

The day starts at Fundame. Fundame is a café by the central train station. Well, actually Fundame is a town in the Kembata-Tembaro region of southern Ethiopia. The name of the café is Lebkov. Menna and I go to Lebkov often to study and to work. We also go to the café on the other side of the station, which has a long and complicated name. We just call it Azedebo, which is actually the name of another town in the Kembata-Tembaro region of southern Ethiopia. The two towns are near each other, and host twin kindergarten programs that we have implemented in recent years. It’s nice that we go to Azedebo and Fundame almost every day. We don’t get to see the four hundred children singing songs and reciting the alphabet. But we get nice croissants, which is something we couldn’t do in Ethiopia. All in all, it might be more fulfilling to see the children, but the croissants are a nice comfort.

It would be fun if we could pick up and go to Ethiopia, spend the day. I could pass on the croissants for a day. I was supposed to have gone about three weeks ago, but my dental meltdown pushed that off the calendar.

I like movement. Maybe that’s why I like hanging out around the central station. I like seeing the trains coming in and heading out again; seeing the people rushing to their platforms, eager for their journeys; reading the display of departures; reading the names of destinations.

And the station is a pleasant place to hang out now. After years of construction, Rotterdam’s Central Station is finished. The city celebrated its grand opening a week or two ago. The city planners have achieved their new, space-age look, and I hope it brings them the distinction the city deserves. But to my mind, the greater achievement is the convenience and comfort. The extensive plaza in front of the station is suddenly free from impromptu fences and holes, free of the men in orange and yellow work suits, free of the resounding clamour of heavy machinery. Just in time for spring, there is wide open space and places to sit beside grass or flowers, all with the prospect of downtown’s buildings at arm’s length.

Underneath that plaza is a vast parking ramp just for bicycles, space for several thousand bikes. Cyclists park in racks on the ground or in raised racks, in which individual slots roll out like drawers and tilt down so bikes can be rolled up and into position. The dry parking space is another attraction, living in a place as wet as Holland.

I usually get going early in the morning, and I take refuge somewhere like Fundame while the tremendous wave of morning activity overtakes the city, the good burghers of Rotterdam stirring and racing to their stations of daily service to the economy. I like movement, and weekday mornings are a study in the mass release of energy, croissants and coffee converted into fuel and fire, into a fury of intent. I’m working, and I’m watching. The lines at Fundame’s counters suddenly swell. Voices weave together into a chorus of subdued enthusiasm.

I like movement, and sometimes the temptation of the trains is too much for me. Today, after the comfort of my croissant, after one long work session, I stroll over to the ticket office. I’m going to take a short trip, just to feel the train pull away from its platform, just to watch the sun take us window by window as we emerge from under the vast shelter of the station. I love the gentle motion of the train. I love the spaces it accesses, letting go of the buildings and the streets, taking the track that bursts from the confines of the architects. I see grasses. I see rivers. The see the unfolded sky, the birds wheeling there in their flocks.

I’m going to neighboring Dordrecht.

Travelogue 551 – March 18
Stem!

Just as the signs of spring have overtaken us, flowers blooming and the smiles so like the awakening of babies; just as the first ducklings appear among the grasses beside the canals and the bicycles multiply on the bike paths; just as the bars see their roadside tables fill with new crowds of a Sunday afternoon and casual runners find the pale legs to propel them unsteadily on and past; just then the signs also abound that the season of elections has come to the city. One doesn’t need to know the candidates, the parties, the issues. One recognizes the signals. In politics, the signals are common across all cultures, I think, the bold acronyms in primary colors; the faces blown large but without fashion, without sex; the language of symbols that are favored by the political classes, bound in ribbons and banners; and the simple commands hung in empty spaces. ‘Stem!’ the signs say. ‘Vote!’

‘Stem’ also means voice. Speak! There are billboards saying, in Dutch, ‘In Rotterdam, we speak Nederlands.’ I’m assuming this is a conservative voice in the dark, shoring up anxieties that whisper, ‘We are losing our country.’ This is a potent appeal everywhere in the world, and lately it has special power in Europe. It means little that the history is available to provide perspective: there was only fleetingly ever a country for anyone to feel ownership over, especially the more tightly one attempts to define that country. It is true that Dutch represents one of the oldest manifestations of the Germanic languages that moved in during the time of the Romans, probably closer to the Ur-language than High German. But the lands with which that language have become associated have never been united. The Lowlands, in fact, have historically been those marshy delta lands in between other important places, through which all types of people have traveled in pursuit of trade. It has rarely, in two millennia, been a place that could afford to snub the speakers of foreign tongues.

But there’s little I can say with credibility, especially in Nederlands, because my own language studies have made excruciatingly slow progress. I, who used to excel in languages, have made a poor showing during the years I’ve lived overseas, when a facility with languages would have provided so much benefit and comfort. My own language is such a formidable stronghold and haven. ‘In America, we are stuck with English.’ We find it hard to explore.

Rather than Nederlands, the commanding voice in recent weeks has been pain. Since the operation that removed one more piece of wisdom from my head, pain has been an insistent voice inside my skull, rarely letting up. The post-op recovery didn’t go so well. I developed what they endearingly call ‘dry socket’, a stubborn wound that will not close and leaves the whole lower jaw vulnerable to the sparking current of irritation. The joys of spring mean little to that voice. It finds all that to be rubbish. It demands fealty, and the fealty is leads to a darker shade in the spectrum of seasons. It harks back to winter; it murmurs of age and failing powers. It represents the stark bare branches, rather than the budding ones.

At the central train station, the partisans are out, wearing T-shirts with party symbols and carrying clipboards in the crooks of their arms. They accost the people of the city as they are rushing to depart or arrive, the commuters and the pleasure travelers. They are cheerful, and they are mild. Politics is a friendly sport. Inside the café, partisans taking a break join the partisans from opposing camps at their tables. They laugh in indulgent ways, possibly laughing at themselves, laughing to message: we’re laughing. It’s all good.

We are fortunate that Nature cares little for the voices of humanity. Whether they speak Nederlands, or whether they say nothing at all, listening instead to the internal rantings of their autumnal pain, Nature will tend the cause of youth, the new leaves and the hatchlings. ‘In Spring, we speak Green.’

Travelogue 550 – March 6
My Dentist

I have been meaning to lose weight for my race, fast approaching. I suppose my dentist felt she should do her small part. She advised I have a tooth removed, and so I consented, thinking of the extra milligrams I won’t be carrying across the finish line, thinking of the kindness of my dentist.

We’ve been seeing a lot of each other this year, my dentist and I. She’s short and she has small dentist hands, so well adapted to her profession. She understands my aversion to pain. She says reassuring things as she draws up her tray of fine metal instruments. She says them in a French accent, because she is from France. She tells me that Dutch people often refuse novocain. I make sure she knows I’m not Dutch.

Isn’t this a corollary of the Stockholm syndrome, the peculiar bond of trust and sympathy with the person who is forced by fate to torture you? Maybe there’s a more specialized name for those who dig around in your head. I mean, how could many people have been literally inside your head? It’s a story of bonding. The bonding in breaking.

From where I sit in the dentist’s chair, I can see inside my mouth in the mirror overhead. I can also see out the window, see the Mathenesserlaan on a sunny day. Spring has come to town this week. That means only a thaw of a few degrees and some sustained sunshine. It’s been a strange winter, the only thing frozen being the thermometer, holding at five degrees or so for months, and the barometer, holding steady on the threshold of light rain under heavy clouds.

I gaze longingly out the window as the novocain takes effect. I gaze lovingly upon the dirty old street, wishing I would have enjoyed my hours on that avenue more, wish I had strolled the wide pavements like a drunk, like a lover, lifted my head to the skies, let the rain wash my diseased teeth. If only I had appreciated the numbered days I had had with that tooth.

But now, it’s only a matter of minutes. In her caring French accent, the dentist has explained the state of that poor wisdom tooth, a dead and broken wreck now at the back of my mouth, left there at peril to my future health. It will become the bad house on the block if I leave it. There is no choice. The deadening agent spreads through my lower jaw, and I will yield to the cold instruments on her tray.

These are moments in which we console ourselves with unvoiced comforts, vague reminders that we have survived previous procedures, false memories of procedures that turned out to be painless, vivid pictures of what we will do afterward.

This was not to be one of those reassuring experiences, the memory of which will steady my nerves the next time around. The wisdom tooth is reluctant to leave this world. The dying nerves inside the poor tooth fire with the same daydreams as the mind has, reminded of the ephemeral nature of life, longing for the feel of fresh air, for the touch of Holland’s spring rain along its enamel surfaces. The dentist has a struggle with it, finally having to break it into pieces in order to pull it out in bloody bits. It’s one of those bitter leave-takings that leave the bereft only exhausted and unable to rise to any sentiment.

My dentist quietly offers her condolences, and pats my hand with hers, encased in latex. She gives me gauze, and she gives me pain-killers, and she issues kind cautions in my healing. I must not take anything hot or cold; I must not spit.

Outside is the same spring day as bloomed an hour before, but of course advanced by that one crucial step on the clock, shadows grown and light spent. I have left behind my several milligrams. I have emerged with my wound. It’s odd to consider how humans can voluntarily enter into transactions that wound, can submit to injury, armed only with the logic that it is the right thing to do. We make friends of the people who habitually administer this pain. It’s unusual.

Travelogue 549 – February 21
Old Sint Baaf, Part Three

The Esco Bar is open again. It’s open early, while the city is awakening. It is re-opening, actually. The proprietors were on vacation when we first arrived in town. I stood sadly outside the window on that day. Today I get to sit inside, beside the window, watching the traffic on the narrow street outside, on the Quellinstraat, Antwerpen. I drink coffee from a dainty porcelain cup, lifting it from its saucer by the delicate handle, too small for my finger.

I assume he is the owner, the man behind the counter. He is tall. He wears the garb of a modern hippie. He wears a short, black beard. His smile is genuine. It is what they call ‘disarming’, a term that suggests the danger most of us feel lurking inside sincerity. What’s more, it’s a smile that may never fade. One feels obliged to turn away, maybe only to protect him. The name of the place suggests a Latin theme. Our sunny owner has Latin worked into his dress. He drops salsa into his playlist. And yet, one can never forget one in northern Europe. Perhaps it’s precious porcelain ware; maybe it’s the neatness and domestic comfort of the interior.

The place bustles, perhaps with the energy of renewed activity. Suppliers are bringing in piles of crates of fruit and dairy products. The window-washer has arrived. Clearly everyone has accustomed themselves to the smile. They are friendly and cheerful in ways that make you realize you’ve never wondered before about the emotional life of the blokes behind those huge handcarts, shoving their way in and out of the doors of convenience stores and restaurants.

So I revel in the Edenic peace of the Esco Bar, and I review the sights in Ghent, paging through the guide book I invested in yesterday. These low-end guides are masterworks of rushed editing and cheap production, items of instant sentimental value and of real aesthetic value, I’d say, kitsch reflections of our dreams of escape, of travel, of history. They make the places we go significant. They validate the expense of travel. They confirm the drama of our heightened impressions, and they do all this with perfect correspondence to the callow sensibility most of us bring to the enterprise. They’re wonderful.

At center of sight-seeing in Ghent is the old Sint-Baafskathedraal, Gothic cathedral with a tall square tower, a structure almost three hundred years in the raising. Inside are familiar high stone vaulting, radiating chapels behind the altar, and a beautiful carven choir before the altar. Coming upon the cathedral from the station, from behind, it seems as though it was set down at an inconvenient angle compared to the rest of the town, turning the orientation of the town toward the Leie River, toward the old Gravensteen fortress, and toward history.

There is art. There is a Rubens with the conversion of Old Saint Baaf as its theme. And there is the great altarpiece, which is these days kept behind glass in the front chapel. When it was painted, Ghent was at the height of its powers, though standing unknowingly at the threshold of its decline, already suffering from the distant rages of the stale Hundred Years War, and the bitter War of the Roses, both occupying English energies and dampening the free flow of wool and cloth.

When the van Eyck brothers were at work on the altarpiece, the cathedral was in its second stage of growth, being built above and around the old Romanesque structure from the twelfth century. The first part to go up had been the choir section. Now, while the altarpiece was in progress, so were the radiating chapels at the back of the church. The altarpiece itself took a dozen years, a process that had to survive the passing of the older brother and draftsman of the piece, Hubert, and the return of the younger brother, Jan, from diplomatic missions on behalf of the Duke of Burgundy in Spain and Portugal. The altarpiece was finished up just in time to take its place in the Vijd Chapel, which was to be its home for nearly four hundred years, before the time of conquerors. Jodocus Vijd, merchant and loyal Burgundian, was patron of both the chapel and the artwork. On the day the altarpiece was consecrated, the Duke’s son was baptised in the cathedral.

The van Eyck retable is perhaps the finest and best known among Flemish masterpieces of the period, one of a few select pieces that may be said to define the period in art history, the great Ghent Altarpiece, or the ‘Mystic Lamb’, as they advertise it here. They call it that because the center panel features Christ as the Mystic Lamb, who stands on an altar and pours blood from his chest into a chalice, while holy men and women stream in from all corners of the earth to witness.

It should be noted that this is the first major oil painting in history. Before this, the favorite medium was egg-based tempera paint. It could be that Jan meant this as a showcase for the new technique. Every bit of the twelve panels of the art piece is endowed with van Eyck craft and detail, with a fine subtlety allowed by the oils, and with a shiny gloss that excited wonder.

The retable, or reredos, serves a religious purpose, standing behind the action on the altar, where everything at the heart of Catholic worship happens. All evidence indicates that the Van Eycks took this very seriously. The older brother, Hubert, had probably taken orders. And they were adept enough at mystical symbolism to fascinate study for centuries, even tickling the strange fancies of Mr. Hitler.

The lamb faces the viewer. If a lamb may be said to have an expression, we would call this one impassive, even as blood pours from its breast. The wound is a voluntary sacrifice. The chalice accepting the blood is tantalizing real. It reminds us of the power of the Holy Grail. Above the Mystic Lamb scene is a traditional ‘Deësis’, featuring the figures of God the Father, Mary and John the Baptist. God the Father, (who might just be Jesus – it’s been a controversy through time.) Each figure is drawn to fine specifications of symbol and ritual. The brothers had an advisor in theology, one Olivier de Langhe, who was prior of the Ghent church.

But the artists felt they had room for religious purpose and also for detail to the mundane, the real, the human. God the Father is wearing a jeweled robe and crown that are painted with amazing clarity. His eyes are steady, measuring, compassionate. Side panels feature musical angels, a popular theme in the jolly Middle Ages, and you can tell which angel sings which part. The medieval organ is faithfully, accurately portrayed. In the fields around the lamb’s altar, there are forty-two varieties of flowers represented.

We leave the cathedral, and we drift across the square, still under the spell of the masterpiece. We will have to re-enter our time gradually. We walk toward the river, past landmarks of Ghent’s medieval prosperity, the Belfort tower, the cloth hall, Sint-Niklaaskerk, sights that the van Eycks might have marveled at during their own first visits to Ghent. They were small-town boys, after all, even if they were children of gentry. Small town boys made good.

Would they have wondered at the sources of this wealth? Most likely they would have accepted it as part of the order of things. In the way Christ the Lamb did not flinch when he offered up his life’s blood, the peasants and the humble traders offered up their taxes, and the knights suited up for war.

The French are bouncing back, they say, inspired by the visions of a peasant girl. The English had her burned as a heretic, just last year. But will that stop the French? At stake is a crown. It’s been crafted for one head only, bedecked with precious stones, adorned with precious metals. It is worth a fortune in itself. How many harvests would it take to buy? How many shiploads of English wool?

The walk back to the station leads through the modern parts of town, by structures that represent far greater absolute achievements in human civilization than even the Sint-Baafskathedral, if one thought about it. The engineering is more impressive, in aggregate, the credit and the benefits more equitably spread. But the eye still dazzles at the productions of the past, when resources were strained through the tightest channels of power, and the results were things impossibly concentrated and fine.

Travelogue 548 – February 20
Old Sint Baaf, Part Two

The night after the burglary, we find it hard to sleep. There is something jarring to the psyche, I suppose, waking to find a stranger in the room, and a stranger who means you no kindness. I’m waking on a regular basis through the night last night and peering around the room.

In daylight, I’m shrugging and looking at the burglary as an episode of income redistribution. Someone now has money for drugs. I have a little less with which to create the meager art called my life. So it goes.

In its day, Ghent had recourse to income redistribution, though none of the equalizing varieties. Rather, generations of town fathers set themselves the task of making sure the wealth of the region passed first through their hands. Various privileges accrued to the city in the High Middle Ages, granted by an assortment of lords and councils. It was a fertile period, during which the many players in an increasingly complex society were breeding all sorts of innovation in the name of self-interest. It was the towns that were the engines of most innovation, with guilds, churches, nobility, laborers and merchants vying for influence and lucre.

Business theory presumes a level playing field, but business practice never allows one. One must talk free trade while one labors relentlessly to undermine it. In the Middle Ages, privileges were the devices of choice to gain advantage.

Ghent stood at the confluence of two rivers, and it became a center of trade early on. But there were plenty of towns with geography. Ghent had the advantage of favor.

In its heyday, Ghent had some handy privileges to assert the town’s advantage. One allowed them to force ships containing grain to store a quarter of its load in one of their own storehouses in the harbor. The local bakers and brewers had first dibs. Then what was left could be sold at market. Another privilege, called the ‘lastbreken’, forced ship owners who were not members of the local guild to load their freight into the boat of a Ghent sailor to bring into town. The guild had monopoly over the Rivers Leie & Scheldt, & the canals Sassevaart & Lieve.

Ghent was in fact an industrial city. Most of the workers of the city belong to one of four guilds, a type of union, in fact. These were the weavers, the fullers, the shearers, and the dyers. These were in constant conflict with the rich bourgeoisie, (who, in all likelihood were the ones who arranged for the privileges that earned everyone a nice living). Strikes were common.

And meanwhile the profits were spent to make a beautiful city. It is success that paid for the pretty buildings and success that paid for the Flemish revolution in art, success protected by cunning and diplomacy and muscle. Does that temper one’s appreciation? Does it perhaps heighten it?

Interestingly, one of the patron saints of Ghent was Saint Bavo, or Sint Baaf in Flemish. His story seems written as a Christian answer to the Buddha story. He was the son of a rich Frankish lord in what would become Belgium, born in 622. He was a reckless lad, selfish and undisciplined. He became a soldier and led a dissipated life.

There was a famous monk making the rounds then, converting the hapless pagans of the Frankish kingdoms. He has come to be known as Saint Amand. He was a big hit in northern France and Belgium, responsible for many new Christian communities and monasteries. He was not a man to mince his words. In 630, he was temporarily expelled from France by an angry King Dagobert I, whom Amand had called upon to repent for his many sins. Later, Amand was recruited to convert the heathens of my own beloved Slovakia, but apparently was not received well there. They are such a hospitable people, I can only blame Amand’s lack of tact and, no doubt, humor.

Saint Amand had a message for young Bavo. After hearing him preach, Bavo converted. More, he gave away all his wealth to the poor, and he followed the preaching saint. He addressed skeptical crowds in France and Flanders. He settled as a hermit in the countryside around one of Saint Amand’s monasteries, and when he died he was buried there. The abbey became known as Saint Bavo’s and the pilgrims came to see him.

In the 800s, the Vikings came along, and they laid waste, as those Vikings enjoyed doing. The abbey was rebuilt in the 900s. The first count of Flanders also built a fort on the river. The Ghent we know and love began to take its shape, commerce awakening, guilds forming, privileges sought and won.

On our way from the train station into town, we walk by the grounds of old Saint Bavo’s Abbey, or what’s left of them, the cloister garden and a few buildings that are among the oldest in town, old grey stone under the grey sky. In a strange twist of fate, Saint Bavo’s Abbey was ordered torn down in 1540 by Ghent native son, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to make way for a castle full of Spanish troops. Some of the buildings survived, but the institution was destroyed.

It’s a good 20-30 minute walk into the center of town from St Pieter’s train station. We aim for the church towers, and we arrive at length at Saint Bavo’s Square. Now the center of town, it was no more than a sandy hillock in Bavo’s day. Little more than that in the day of the first count of Flanders, when the first structure was begun, the humble, wooden Chapel of Saint John the Baptist.

Two hundred years later, this chapel was expanded in a Romanesque style. Three hundred years later, work began on the cathedral we see today. The work itself took three hundred years, coming to completion in 1569, some thirty years after Charles V had had the abbey destroyed. Loyal patriots renamed Saint John’s for the dishonored patron saint. The church became Sint-Baafskathedraal.

Travelogue 547 – February 19
Old Sint Baaf, Part One

I’ve never met a cat burglar before. It’s a funny experience to wake up and see someone you don’t recognize in your room. I’d been enjoying some nice dreams, the first good dreams in a long stretch of bad ones. It had been weeks since I’d had a chance to smile at a dream. And then I had been listening to some shuffling across our floor. There was a moment of confusion as I figured out that Menna was still in bed beside me. I looked up, and there was a guy bending over an arm chair where I had carelessly flung some clothes. I didn’t recognize him, an unremarkable young guy in a puffy jacket. He could have been Ethiopian, the way he looked. There was a pause as I regarded him and tried to put the picture together. When that didn’t happen, I woke up altogether, and I shouted. Our cat burglar was a bit slow. He turned and apparently was stunned himself. It seemed to take him a good couple beats to lean into his escape. Ill-advisedly, I jumped up and gave chase. But not too far. I returned to the front windows to watch him run across the street and down the stairs there that lead to another street below.

Maybe it was the adrenalin but I found the incident rather comic, tempted to laugh out loud once the lad had run; that is, until I found that all my cash was missing from my wallet. My discarded pants were the first thing he had found. Nothing else was missing, including my shiny, still-new iPhone, sitting openly on my work table. ‘Wasn’t that weird?’ I say with a smile, settling back into bed. Menna didn’t find any of it amusing. ‘We have to leave this place,’ she says. She’s scared.

We have just returned to this place. That’s what makes the incident so strange. We have just spent a few nights at a friend’s in Belgium. My first thought was that the guy in our room was my friend getting ready for work. But the elements weren’t adding up. My friend, but in our room, in the wrong town. This isn’t Belgium.

We had a mission in Belgium. Travel always has a mission. I mean a mission beyond the pleasures of seeing good friends like Yohannes, and enjoying the company of his lovely wife and new baby, Hilina. It was Christmas the last time we saw them, and Hilina was so much younger then. Antwerp was colder and darker back then. There had been something more ancient about her, as though Europe were drawing herself into its cloak of ages against the gathering winter.

This time the town has gained in light, and the light reveals some Parisian grit among the jumbled Flemish architecture. I’m exploring the streets some more, the streets between Yohannes’s nondescript northern neighborhood and the city center. The streets and the pavements are narrow, the pavements are uneven stone. One passes one’s neighbors in single file, close to the sides of the buildings. These buildings are not high, just a few storeys; the rare Flemish sunshine still has purchase.

But Antwerp isn’t the secret mission. This time the mission is Ghent, a half hour’s train ride west. Old Ghent, happy Ghent, a town that saw its heyday some six nor seven hundred years ago, when wool and cloth were king, when the meadows around Ghent were dotted with fat flocks of sheep.

One is forced to wonder, tracing the history of art and thought, at how dependent and how vulnerable culture is to the ebb and flow of business and politics. Great beauty arises in prosperous towns, a plum to be stolen, marks of status funded by the food taken from the mouths of the weak.

The patrons with the most distinguished taste were still no more than patrons, powerful and gluttonous men who all too often came to blows with other powerful men. One discovers it in the biographies of artists, whose lives are often unsettled. They are gypsies, moving often as they follow elusive peace and elusive prosperity. In the early fifteenth century, one monitors their peregrinations among Den Haag, Maastricht, Ghent, Bruges, Dijon and Paris.

The big dog among patrons during the second quarter of the century would have been a man known as Phillip the Good, the most powerful in a line of dukes that ruled one of the most powerful realms of Europe in that day, a color on the map that has since disappeared into history, the realm of Burgundy. This wonderful patchwork duchy, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, lasted in this form only as long as the reign of three Dukes, grandfather, father, and son. Some perspective might be achieved by noting that, while Phillip might have been ‘Good’ – even though he handed over young Joan of Arc to the Brits for judgement – both his father and son were called ‘the Bold’, as though only the Bold had any shot of making a go at a venture like ‘Burgundy’. As it happens, when Charles the Bold dies in battle, Burgundy was dissolved and parceled off among France and the Germans. And one immediately sees the utility of a fairy tale kingdom of Burgundy, if only it could have held France and Germany at bay for another five centuries.

Travelogue 546 – February 6
Tricking the Bomen

The phone calls home are sounding similar themes. The winter in the U.S. has been a rough one Everyone I talk with is enduring some stage of siege, their towns set upon by snow, by bitter cold. They grin about it. Here, I tell them, the thermometers have had little work to do. The snow ploughs have stood idle.

It's almost ten degrees this dark morning, and the people of this good city are being pulled forward by headlights, by umbrellas, by the bright square lights of their phones. They have been deposited in tram cars that are lit inside. It might seem as though humans would be inert otherwise, shadows dropped roadside, like the cars and bikes there, like the poles and the poor bomen, the trees. The pigeons might have more color to them, more twitchy life. One sees, in dim weather like this, how humans have no light to them, no luminescence to skin, fur, or feather; no lanterns in their eyes like wolves. They manufacture light, assembling it with their magic hands.

The poor bomen, or trees, are guided by the simplest signals. They don't take counsel with anyone, and their decisions have a fateful finality to them. This warm spell, defined by the drift of only a few degrees, has tricked them into sending forth buds. The citizens of the city are worried for them. They don't have as much fodder for weather talk as my American colleagues. They reminisce about colder years. They worry about the bomen.

Menna has made me a doctor's appointment, and I have even shown up to it, led like a trusting specimen of livestock. I have no specific complaints to make. I have symptoms, signs of uncertain glitches and misfires among the systems. I tell the doctor rather stupidly that it is the season. My age seems to dictate some form of care. He nods. His English is halting. He peppers it with many jarring interrogatives, 'ja?' jumping out of sentences like a sort of bad code or virus.

He is telling us why certain tests cannot be administered in Holland. He tells us why certain ones will be. He is giving me a vial for stool, along with an big plastic envelope in which to hide it. He is giving me a checklist of tests for the lab, which is closed today. I have to come back next week. I can't eat before I come in. And I mustn't forget my sample.

We emerge from the clinic into the gloom of the day. This is Menna's clinic, close to the university. We are not far from the river, where the Maas makes a big turn around the southern bank of the city. We stand above the water and look at downtown. It's a funny angle. Though we're beside the river, the tall downtown buildings rise beyond the turn in the river, marching in a dry line heading off along a forty-five degree angle toward the left. Perspectives make surprises.

One of those buildings stands on the southern bank. It's called the Vertical City for some reason. The one building is three, rising up in an imposing manner, and incorporating staggered overhangs so that it appears that the gap between buildings shifts halfway up.

We visited that building the night before last. Jan had an exhibit in the design show in the lobby. We breezed through the show somewhat surreptitiously, because we forgot our tickets at home, and were admitted only to say hello to Jan. The show made for a fun and rarefied atmosphere, everything devoted to style, exhibitors dressing to the task with as much studious care as applied to the art. The exhibits themselves were bits of impractical furniture and challenging décor, all fashioned as a tease, it would seem, but with a delightful sensitivity to texture, as an aggregate ode to odd fabrics and surfaces, metal and wood and plastic. The colors were bold, and the environment stark and clean, like no home or office could ever be, as exercise in art for its own sake, self-aware and celebratory.

Turning away from the river, we will walk back to the tram, passing by the nineteenth-century brick water tower that has become symbol for this area of town, called 'De Esch'. It's nice that a society would devote decorative architectural skills to a water tower. I grew up in towns in which water towers rose like UFOs on stilts, dull metal signifiers of utility. The only decoration might have been block letters shouting the name of the town, the kind of rude declaration one might expect locals to print on big banners to raise upside down at football games. Here the tower of De Esch stands, always elegant tribute to civic spirit.

The tram here is the twenty-one. It's an odd corner of town, so quiet. There is no one at the tram stop. The wind is blowing, and we retreat into our jackets, meditating on the riffling surfaces of the standing pools by the water tower.

Travelogue 545 – February 5
The Hammer Spirits

Spirits were high. We had three days of sunshine. Temperatures were reaching 50 in Fahrenheit. One of those days was a Sunday. People were taking strolls with their prams, with their dogs. The swans in the canals were floating with regal carriage, telling us that the weather was their gift to us. The geese in the park were chasing old women, honking with their long necks extended.

The clumsy spirits of noise were awakened. We live in a row of attached buildings half a mile long. We are on the second floor, between four other flats. At one time or another during the last year, there have been periods of hammering in every one of them. They have overlapped. As this year opened, the flat downstairs had been occupied by a new tenant, who was intent on improvement. And the entire building next door was being gutted.

We were moved to celebrate the days of sunshine. At the Wester Paviljoen, we ran into Moges and Franco. Moges is an old friend, the first Ethiopian I met in this city. Franco is an old man born in Eritrea. He is half Italian. His skin is light. He has a smiling face and a nervous geniality. He greets us with chuckling hellos. We greet in Italian. He doesn't speak Amharic.

Did Mr. Franco make it down to Asmara, we ask. In the fall, he had booked a ticket to Eritrea on impulse. Moges laughs at his friend, and Mr. Franco shrugs with a rueful smile. He lowers a shaking hand toward his glass of jenever. He likes his jenever, a Dutch hard liquor like grappa. He will put away the contents of a number of those glasses. He will shuffle out for frequent smokes while we discuss the topics of the day with Mr. Moges. Will Franco shuffle home and book another airline ticket? We worry about him. Moges laughs.

We were moved to visit the movie house. Our movie houses have been shut for us, hosting the annual international film festival. We were not able to participate in that festival, since subtitles were in Dutch. We were excited to be back, the festival over, but were dismayed to see the doors barred shut. There were no crowds to follow; maybe the town was exhausted with film. We had to work out for ourselves that the side entrance was open. The lobby of the theatre was under construction. Plywood walled off the majority of the space. The place had the gritty feel of a construction site. I had the opportunity to reflect that one does go out to the movies for more than the movie. One expects carpets and high windows and glossy posters. One wants scents more enticing than sawdust.

The movie was despairing, a kind of 'Deer Hunter' for the Obama era. The hills of PA were never innocent. Along the rivers are encampments of rusting iron, shells of old industry, something like the henges of our race, smoking with deadly prophecy. We raise there our sons for sacrifice.

I was moved after the film to remark that this is almost precisely how I feel when I'm in America. Perhaps exaggerated for theatre, but those are the same shadows. It has always struck me as a remarkably sad place, as though sorrow rises like a vapor from the earth.

We were to be reminded again, as we walked out of the theatre, of the builders. One wonders sometimes about the signs that follow him, like talismans. What is this insistent hammering? What have the wizards been trying to tell us? In reality, it is no more complex than Dutch restlessness, a national compulsion to build. The whole country is constructed space. There are no wild hill districts like PA. But in the psyche one crafts stories. The builders are following me. Their hammer strokes are a code. Life is messaging, and this is the text: 'You live inside a wooden frame, and the elves that read the silken threads of Fate are busy with their renovations. You will live inside a new house. We will build it around you if you will not move.'

Travelogue 544 – January 30
Kazimir and the Cloak Room

It feels like the big city now. Going to Amsterdam, it's not the quaint and historical that I see. I see the crowds and the dirt. I stand impatiently at the tram stops, eye on my watch. On the train, I'm seeing the long strips of corporate parks, and I'm seeing the factories on the horizon, the smoke stacks across the Ij River.

I have business in the big city. Specifically, I need a notary for US-based paperwork. My research into notaries in Rotterdam hasn't turned up much. The few that I find are charging over a hundred for one signature. My only option seems to be the US consulate in Amsterdam. Even with a train ticket, the price is better than anything local.

There's one thing you should know about visiting the US consulate in Amsterdam. They don't allow mobile phones. No, don't just nod and dismiss this one. They really don't allow mobile phones into the facility. At all. Like, you're standing outside on the sidewalk, in the cold, if you are carrying a mobile phone.

Now, I have the advantage going into this of years of experience abroad, dealing with bureaucrats who wear every stripe of stupid. I saw something about their mobile policy on the website, and there was a spark in the back of my mind. They might just be that stupid. In Addis, they will also refuse mobile phones into the embassy, but the guards at reception will kindly let you check them in.

I arrive early at the consulate, and the minute I see the angry faces of people standing outside, shuffling their feet in the old, I know the score. I ask in any case, and I am scolded in a stern police voice. I tell the guard I'll be back.

The consulate is located on the Museumplein, the open park between the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. There are a few other museums situated alongside this park, including the Van Gogh Musuem. I toss the backpack over my shoulder and start running across the park. The closest museum turns out to be the Stedelijk. I stand in line and buy a ticket. I enter and go straight to the cloak room to check everything in but my paperwork.

The notary process goes fine afterward. I raise my right hand for the notary, and he examines me skeptically. There is something about government service that arouses the worst instincts in people. Can one be on the people's payroll without hating them, I wonder?

So the lemonade to this story of lemons is that I get to know a new museum and a new artist. The museum is the Municipal Museum, (now privatized,) devoted to modern and contemporary art and design. It opened in 1895, a scheme hatched between an heiress, Sophia Adriana de Bruyn, and the city as part of a 'modernization project' dreamed up by the good citizens of Amsterdam as early as 1850. The original building, which one still sees streetside, behind the flashy new addition from the last decade, is typical Amsterdam for its era. 'Dutch Neo-Renaissance style' they call it, high brick walls rising in stripes of red and yellow, set with modest towers.

The new artist is Kazimir Malevich, a big star among the Russian moderns. That I hadn't become acquainted with him before is only a measure of my relationship with modern art, which has always been tense. I resented her pretensions, and she sneered at my ignorance. I used to think that abstraction was an affection – or affectation – of the young. I've come to think differently, and my suspicions are only confirmed by a quick study of the crowd that Kazimir has attracted – and it is no small crowd. The average age is well above mine, I would say, and the old-timers are very engaged. By contrast, the teens brought in on buses are slack-jawed and stunned by boredom.

Mr. Malevich was prolific, producing theories of art almost as manically as he did pieces of art. The theory he settled on in 1915, and the one he is best known for, he called 'Suprematism', and as far as I can understand, was a call for complete and perfect abstraction. The 'grammar' of the Suprematists, according to Mr. Malevich, was to be geometric form. His most famous work seems to have been a black square.

But his collected work displays a much wider accomplishment, rooted in early experiments with realism and Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. My favorite is the 1913 opera, 'Victory Over the Sun', for which he designed the sets and costume. In one room we get to view a production of the opera, and it is hilarious, as only the dated avant-garde can be, a kind of sci-fi Wizard of Oz cum Ubu Roi.

Sadly, the savage and humorless new roi of Communism, Mr. Stalin, ruled that abstraction was bourgeois and had Mr. Malevich arrested and held briefly. Mr. Malevich was forced to return to representational art for the remainder of his life, but he carried on heroically nonetheless, until his death in 1935.

I am thus enlightened by the abstruse machinations of bureaucrats. I collect my bag, stowing away safely my stamped papers, and I return to my century.

Travelogue 543 – January 23
Cats at Play

People are faceless shadows at this time of the morning, in this weather. The sun hasn't risen. The city is a play among headlights and the blue and the grey reflected from the clouds. Shards of yellow from the street lights play in the puddles. People are shadows. They run to shelter. They sail along on bicycles, in capes and glistening rain gear. Their faces are cloaked. They move with heads down, hooded eyes set on the road beneath them. There is no speech. They cough.

For the rain it raineth every day. It might be that late January has its own lessons. Knowledge is a thing hard won. Can one know rain without spending a winter close to the North Sea? I can't imagine I ever knew it before. I could describe it. I could watch it. I could taste it. What is knowledge?

The swans do not run for cover. Their white forms drift among the waters to the right of the bike path. My ten-speed flies along this stretch of smooth path. Water is thrown back at the sky from the spinning back tire. It will paint me a stripe along my back. But, being a citizen of rain, I have made provision. Below my backpack, below the line of my windbreaker, I have tucked a plastic bag into my belt line. The spray will still reach the hard-working hamstrings, but in a diffuse and ineffective pattern. At the end of the journey, the bag will serve to protect the bike's leather seat. Rain people love plastic.

What is knowledge? It's in the skin and the teeth and under the fingernails. It emerges in one's sweat. Hey, ho, the wind and the rain. It will stain one white as a swan, and then it will mask one in shadows. The night stands high on rotting timbers.

Mildly as the gentle rain, one defies it. We dressed up for a night on the town. We unlocked the cycles, and we braved the perpetual mists. I rode behind Menna, watching her cut her way through the dusk and the weather on her little brown Batavus bike, heels on the pedals, her blue Jackie O wool coat, the red cap on top of her wild Ethiopian curls; intrepidly she advances into teeth of the lamps and the sky tears. This is her impetuous strength in sum, and I have to follow.

We are looking for the jazz club. The roads weave in and around the train tracks just east of the station. We test many alleyways looking for the club, passing under the tracks in a pedestrian passage luridly lit. Finally we find it behind some muddy construction. The band is sound testing as we shiver, the door admitting the cold with each person.

If one could portray knowledge as a cat, one that excites a lot of talk by its colors, then the season leads to a riddle. If cats don't like water, how well could they know the rain? Those are different matters, the answer goes. It could be very well.

Travelogue 542 – January 13
Muhammadan Sun

My trip to Ethiopia is going to be a short one. Too short for twos. Troubles come in pairs this month. Since arriving in Ethiopia, I've been sick twice, twice in one week laid low by some stomach bug. One time is pasta, one time is meat. Twice I'm up most of the night with stomach cramps and nausea, spending intimate time with the toilet.

Twice I've been visited by religious holidays, cosmic birthdays. Last week it was Christmas. Today it's Muhammad's turn. The cannons go off at sunrise, as they always do on a Muslim holiday, sounding like a boy kicking a football against the cement wall of my room, a boy with a very regular stroke. The cannons are a celebration. Or maybe they are confirmation that, yes, the holiday is today. Some Muslim holidays are contingent on a sage spotting the moon. I kind of like the corollary ethos that holidays should be heralded by clear nights. But isn't this insistence on blue skies kind of redundant in Arabia? A Dutch religion demanding cloudless skies for sacred occasions makes sense. In any case, we can say there's a big-sky appreciation for the astronomical, which I like. Does that hark back to the pre-Muslim sun and moon religions? I tend to think these are beautiful little features to religion, like the decorations on a Christmas tree.

Not everyone likes these speculations. Do they merit beheading? I'm not sure I've understood well the logic to the beheadings. Is there an index somewhere of sins punishable by beheading? It might be good to publish that. There are plenty of us with good intentions and sentimental attachments to our heads. We don't mean to offend. I work in education. I think education might be a good way to avoid these messy misunderstandings. We like healthy, functioning heads in my field.

In any case, the holy day comes, as it does every year. Every lunar year, I might add. That means about eleven or twelve days earlier than in the last Christian year. This time, it puts Mawlid a week behind Christmas. Next year, it will upstage, coming a few days earlier. Meaning, if my math is correct, that in the European solar year of 2015, the prophet will be born twice. Born again … and so the twain shall meet.

These calendars upon calendars seem to describe time so much better than any one of them by itself, describing disjointed movement, grinding one against another, like gears failing out of alignment. Calendars are an attempt to bring order, and as such, a noble enterprise, but the proliferation of decimal points as we strive and strive for accuracy should make Allah's point very poignantly. 'My ways are inscrutable.' Add here a Buddha smile.

It seems that current archaeology pinpoints the first calendar in Scotland, where the moon may be sighted roughly once a quarter. Aren't calendars more properly the concern of people who need instruments to fly? It's cold and the days are short; therefore, we know it's winter. But damn if we know which day it is. We haven't seen the sun or stars in weeks. Let's dig some pits oriented to the stars. We will set up stones. We will count.

The days are long. They start at six. When I leave the house, there is sun on my shoulders. I stand a moment in the courtyard relishing the warmth, enjoying the blue sky. I lock the door, twice. It seems that our landlord is a petty thief in her spare time. She hasn't transferred the TV to her house yet, but it's a matter of time. Menna's sister has modified the door so it will accommodate two big padlocks.

The days are sealed from the ones that came before by one day in airports and airplane, breathing the conditioned atmosphere, mixed with sedatives and depressants. The day stretches like drug-induced sleep, stretching calendar days out of proportion. By the time I have arrived, the day has become a week, and the departure point has receded into mists.

Oddly, illness has the same effect. Hours in bed contemplating one's misery has a similar power to warp calendar time. Scottish clouds gather, and one loses track. I'm missing my wife and my home, and it could be that I've only been gone a few days. The clouds won't tell me. It has been a long time. I know it. And so long since I've tasted food.

I think about food. Rice is made from sunlight. Dark bread is made from moonlight. Fruit is fresh water. I am hungry. It's a hunger like love. In my delirium, I see quite clearly how life is made from love.

I think about the prophet's strictures about food. Actually, I don't know what those strictures may have been, in all their wisdom, in all their complexity, but I know about Ramadan, which could be a boon to either glutton or anorexic, depending on whether one is centered in the long, hot day or the plenty of sundown. The only constant is food. I dream about sweet dates.

In the morning I stand outside my front door, soaking up the sunshine. My legs are trembling with the effort. It's surprising how quickly the lack of the food debilitates. I take my time in the healing sun, only hefting the backpack onto my back when I've forgotten the chill of the sick bed. I open the compound gate to the bright eyes of passing neighbors. I step into the lane, the sloping road made of rocks, and I step into a new year. I make my way toward food.

Travelogue 541 – January 7
Christmas Again

I'm listening to Christmas music again. It's my second Christmas this season, a season of doubles. I'm thinking of how I had to close daylight savings time twice this fall. Apparently there is a lag of one week between the change back to standard time in the US versus the Netherlands, and I crossed the Atlantic during that week. I've always had a hard time comprehending daylight savings time. We were saving daylight somehow. But it's still not completely light in Holland until nine in the morning, and it's dark by five. It seems as though we're putting a lot of it in the bank now.

Since the solstice, I've been tracking the time of sunrise and sunset, counting the minutes as they are peeled back from the dominion of winter night.

Last night I saw the sun go down in Khartoum as the plane sat on the tarmac at the airport, refueling, allowing on new passengers. I'm looking at my watch, still set at Holland time, and I'm thinking, this is when the sun is going down in Holland. But I'm two time zones east now. I'm very confused. It's all about latitude, as though there were a cone of light, wide here in the south and constrained there in the north. But here I am, faraway and experiencing sunset at the same time as I would have at home.

I slept in today, until seven. When I awake, the sun is up. That is a change from Holland. The landlord's family is bustling in the yard. I peek out the window. The sky is blue. There are no clouds. That is a change.

I've just arrived, and I have the day off. It's Christmas today, according to the Orthodox Christian calendar. It's just as well. I'm feeling sluggish. I had Menna's sister Mimi take me to the Airport Motel last night. The food on the flight was spare, and I had been forced to start my travel day at five. I was hungry. They make a good, spicy spaghetti at the Airport Motel. I wash it down with just a touch of gin, and I watch Italian football, while Mimi and I catch up on family news and family plans.

What are we left with, after all, but rough meditations about cycles in cycles? It was January the first time I came to Ethiopia, ten years ago. I was coming here to meet family, to grieve with family. This time I celebrate Christmas with Menna's family in her stead. I celebrate the cycle in itself.

The same sunshine greets me as I leave the house, as greeted me ten years ago. I'm setting out with no special purpose. Family time won't be until afternoon and evening. I climb the hill, on the road made with stones. Children are excited to see a faranj, and they run to have a chance to shake my hand. 'I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?' they recite, and run away laughing.

Shimeles is waiting in his taxi at the top of the hill, at the asphalt. We set out. The town is quiet, but never too quiet. We speed along the relatively free roads. Around Urael, the streets are chopped up. This year, the road work is about a rapid transit train system being constructed. Roads that I watched being installed for years are now being torn apart for the train. Traffic in the city is more jammed up than ever. Electricity and water are still as spotty as they were ten years ago. The improvement projects themselves are now the excuse, for the span of an entire generation, it would seem.

The people on the street don't seem to be troubled about it. They gather and they sit, and they amble along as I remember them ever doing, as though Time were as content and anonymous on the street as all the rest, satiated by its raids into the realms of the private. Here on the street we're safe, among all the same people.

Shimeles and I are happy to see each other, though we don't have much to say. I have lost so much Amharic, it's as though I have reverted to the state of my first arrival. I brought with me then only a beginner's knowledge of the fidel, the alphabet, and some phrases.

But I didn't know Shimeles back then. I didn't know his little Lada, its shuddering accelerations, and the clicking of its gears. I didn't know this hill, sloping down from Shiro Meda to Arat Kilo, and didn't know just about every shop front along the way. I didn't know the sounds and smells of morning. I didn't know the quality of the sunlight in the morning, as I do now, and the shadows it casts. That's the slip in the circle, memory becoming knowledge.

Travelogue 540 – January 2
Explain the Señor

It's 10ºC and the sun hasn't risen yet. The clouds are tentative. They have made way for the beginnings of light, allowing us a primitive shade of blue. I'm riding the bike into town, for the moment riding toward the point of dawn.

I've been in a mood. New Year's is for setting the clock anew, but I've been thinking too much, and thinking evokes the past.

That layer of dark blue is like a fog on the eastern horizon. It represents a new day. But I've got too many old days behind me. One thing reminds me of another, kicking off odd chains of association.

This shade of blue reminds me of Señor Dali. It must be a shade he favors, because it often brings him to mind. I spent some time only a few days ago with the grand Señor, at the Boijmans. But the work of his that comes to mind is housed in Glasgow, at the Kelvingrove Museum. I saw it in May. That piece is the so Spanish, so solemn 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross', in which the viewer's perspective is from above the Savior on the cross.

The shoulders of the crucified man are powerfully drawn – Dalí hires a famous stuntman to hang from a gantry, – powerfully lit by an eastern sun, though not the sun rising over the scene below, which is a lake among bare Spanish hills. The suns, the sources of light, are at variance. Christ's sky is black space, and below are the shades of sunrise. The angles are odd, as though the cross may be flying over the land, foot first.

I see I have made some tactical errors in approaching New Year's, one of them being the visit to the museum. Another might be my decision that we should watch 'Donne Darko' on New Year's Eve. Menna hated it, and it spooked the both of us. Outside, Rotterdam was going mad with fireworks, like a kind of war in the city streets.

I'd seen the film before and enjoyed it. I enjoyed it again. But it doesn't inspire the brightest and most hopeful thoughts. There's something primal that moves inside the production, something I'm not sure the writer-director had in mind. The writer's plot is something fantastical and complex, parallel universes sparking against each other, and so on, but what is really happening seems much simpler and more primitive, a struggle against death, even after the fact.

Can we posit that an artist might succeed unconsciously in delivering an unintended message that is nonetheless powerfully felt by all or most of his/her audience in a common way, even if not entirely comprehended?

Perhaps I have just paraphrased the mission of the Surrealists? Shall we ask the Señor? Some would object if we consult with him. Wasn't he drummed out of the club in the late 30s for being too much of a keener, for being too fond of the spotlight, maybe even for an unhealthy willingness to be decipherable?

It was bright and early in the Freudian day then. And maybe the unconscious seemed like a delightful treasure trove. But it occurs to me that, by definition, the unconscious is an entity that we cannot reference. We cannot choose to speak from it or to it. And it certainly seems to me that, say, Mr. Magritte reveals absolutely nothing about the unconscious when he paints a blue sky in the place of a human face. One can only accidentally give voice to the unconscious. Even once it's done, one feels helpless before it.

Dali's painting was inspired by a drawing made more than three hundred years earlier by St. John of the Cross. The monk had drawn it from a vision in a dream. It's just a change of angle. We are seeing from above. There is something compelling; we can't say why.

As the film opens, Donnie wakes. He has a problem with sleep-walking. He's waking up further and further from home. Here he is in the Hollywood hills, or maybe the Spanish hills, lying in the middle of the curving road, his bicycle beside him. His fate, which has already been fulfilled, is to die in bed. He lies undisturbed in the middle of the road.

I pedal forward into the dawn. The color shifts very subtly. Quickly, I pass beyond the vantage of the long canal and into the city, where buildings block my view of the sunrise. I don't see the colors anymore, except in reflection. It's refreshing to pedal in the cold air. My body knows which way to go.

Travelogue 539 – December 28
Living in The Dorp
Part Two

And so I'm clocking aesthetic avarice as she turns circles in the room, as she is blown through the door and into the next room, where she turns new circles. She wields her iPad. She dances a dance of Shiva and she captures all.

I am reminded of our Christmas Day excursion. Menna and I took the afternoon on Christmas to cycle around the quiet old town, watching folks on their strolls toward church or toward family, family strolls undertaken simply to enjoy the fine weather, our mutual good fortune this holy day. Menna and I have found a Turkish cafe, the only cafe open, and we have indulged in warmth and in coffee. Then we have cycled across the river to the Lantaren theatre for an afternoon film. What has seemed appropriate on the day that Jesus finds his way into form yet again is a film called 'Samsara'.

Samsara, the cycle of rebirth, the soul's fancy for illusion, is the putative theme of the film, and we must be treated with images of Tibet right away in order to be properly oriented in mente. The director renounces all subtlety, and it is good. We see message well before it arrives and are free to enjoy the stunning imagery, which was the correct labor for the man behind the camera, something that consumed him for five years and carried him from prospect to prospect around the world – much like my greedy camera bug at the museum.

On Versailles silver, the director treats us to panorama beauty and panorama ugly. He brings the faces of ancient mummified children, and be brings the stilled countenance of the deceased young man on his day of interment. He is lying in a coffin built in the shape of a revolver. Nobody laughs. We are treated to sandblasted and abandoned homes in some disaster zone. We are treated to Shanghai pauvre and to Dubai riche. We visit a vast disassembly plant, where animals are taken apart along conveyor belts.

Salvador Dali likes to trade in body parts. In the second room of his exhibit, there are sketches of all sorts of strange contortions of form. Humanity is a playground. So are the fundamentals of the household. In display cases we see a variety of divine experiments, including the lobster phone. There are experiments in photography, variations on Dali's theme of flying people, flying objects, and Dali himself arching his satyr's eyebrows.

I'm missing my shutter girl. She brings to us vitality, doesn't she, with her twitching youthfulness and stunning detachment? Her unconsciousness inspires a giddy disorientation, perfect for contemplation of the moderns. How to signify without her?

As we move into rooms deeper inside the museum, we move back in time. In the nineteenth century, we have discovered the painters of the Hague School, who had themselves re-discovered the Dutch Masters of the Golden Age, and then applied a Parisian filter. They had re-discovered the Dutch landscape, and its Impressionistic possibilities, and set about capturing images that we jaded come-afters find hard to see without shades of cliché: the polders, the canals cutting through their fields, the spotted cows, the windmills.

How do we learn to see again? Do we need the belabored intensity of Samsara, making things grand on super 70? Or do we take a lesson from shutter girl, that strange indirection, the glib mediation? The iPad collects, and we trust that the sorting systems inside the machine will assign meaning. The hard drive is ours to possess. It has a mapping mechanisms that make it like a museum. The hallways lined with art from the ages are like text to be scanned and then produced on demand. But what is the demand? Implicit is the faith in the cue. There will be a moment when the images will be produced, the validating moment, when shutter girl is a good and smart girl. Or maybe the moment never comes, and perhaps that is even better, a relief.

We return to the dorp after every journey, a place of significance. The photos will prove it. The goose – a pretty picture – stands ready to bite – a funny picture – beside the canal – a pretty picture – and we were there – group shot – in the dorp – proof in the picture – where people live – blurry picture – people who live in different houses – see here – and speak funny – see the signs. What a big, big, crazy world! It's all right here – scrolling, scrolling.

Travelogue 538 – December 27
Living in The Dorp
Part One

I have a few neighbors. They live in the little park beside the Schie River. This park is only a few meters of grass along the riverside. But it suffices for these two geese. They are a couple, I would say, though I can't tell which is the male, which is the female, or if it's that kind of couple. Either way, they are always together. One is brown and mottled, and one is white. They are like any other neighbor, hanging out, minding their own business, picking at the grass. They exhibit something like my attitude toward neighbors, hissing when they get too close, threatening to bite, waddling at them in attack position.

I pass them in the morning, coasting by on my bicycle. Before the sun has risen they are already awake and standing at the kerb, as though waiting for a bus. The park occupies a corner at the intersection of waterways, the Schie and one of the canals that connects it to the Maas River. It's nothing more than some grass and park benches facing the Schie.

A sculpture has been erected by the water, perhaps to honor the faithful goose couple. It's a kind of bench or love seat made of wrought iron curled and tangled like thick wire, painted cherry red, shaped into a canopy in the shape of a heart. There's a stand a few meters away, made of the same stuff, for couples to place their cameras, set it on auto, and capture themselves in the heart, with downtown spires in the background. Couples have attached padlocks to the sculpture.

The canal beside the park runs underneath the road to my flat. On the other side, it bypasses historic Delfshaven, leads past the windmill that is almost three hundred years old. There's a parallel canal some several hundred meters west that dissects the historic district. Old schooners anchor along the sides, sails stown away.

It's still a village, after all, still the dorp. The geese serve as a reminder. The village may have become urban, or been swallowed by the urgent necessities of sprawl, but still it is a village.

I've had occasion to watch tourist encounters with the geese. These are tourists to the neighborhood. They may be from abroad; they may be from across town. The geese charm them with their misanthropy. I hear laughter as I approach the group. I see the flash of cameras at work. Dad has pulled up a pant leg, and he's rubbing the spot where the goose has struck. He guffaws into the camera.

It's what we do when we visit the dorp. We take pictures. We can sense something different. Is it a sense that we are encountered with something to be preserved? Is that the reflex that reaches for the camera?

I'm wondering about that impulse to preserve. I'm watching her. She embodies it, reflex without thought. She makes a circuit of the small room. She has her iPad deployed, the cover folded back, the tablet held at the ready. At each station she stops to raise it and click. It matters little if there is anyone there first. She takes a moment's position right next to him or her and clicks. She keeps going. I'm taking a break from my original purpose just to watch her. She might be an exhibit herself.

Menna and I have finally made time to visit the Boijmans, the city's art museum. We have entered through the modern first, making our way through a series of small exhibit rooms devoted to twentieth-century art, two rooms for Surrealism because Dali is in town, a room for oddball pre-war realism, then rooms organized primarily by donated collection, bits of Kandinsky, bits of Mondrian, prints from Picasso, and assorted contemporaries.

Then there is herself, the flesh-and-blood tribute to the raw impulse to collect, mobile and restless, never stopping to admire but only to document on her deadly little tablet. I'm fascinated. I could imagine a chuckling and fey Salvador Dali writing this script. Though it would be so much better if some of the bystanders had no faces, or if the walls would melt.

There is nothing melting in this exhibit. The Dali paintings in this exhibit are as melancholy as I've seen the master. There are landscapes of his native, war-torn Spain, dry and desolate, with figures that emerge in mysterious and incomplete forms. Or there are uncomfortable groupings of distorted beings in midnight blue, a tearful or frightened face introduced as one more strange object, but also as extracted comment on it all.

Click! It is captured. And nothing cheers me more than the thought of its future home among unlit circuits, finding more peace there than ever in three dimensions, secure among thousands of images, not only of artistic peers from all ages, but among thousands more from budget beaches in Portugal or Croatia, where not this boyfriend but the one before, or maybe it was two before, passed out with sand in his eyebrows, remember that, and wasn't that hilarious when we painted his cheeks and his lips and then he came to and OMG he was so stoned and disoriented, we practically had to carry him, and God he was so stupid, and God he made me cry.

Travelogue 537 – December 21
The White Bear

I didn't expect the statue. I expected a lot from this town, but not the celebration of this illustrious figure so close to my heart, memorialized here larger than life, standing in costume period and pose heroic.

We have become confused among the winding, cobble-stone streets of this burg, and ended up in this pretty square, not one so unique in this town acknowledged as the prettiest in this part of Europe. The square occupies an unusually open space among the medieval alleys of the town, looking east over a stately canal running away toward its appointment with another canal. Mr. Van Eyck, with a nineteenth-century vigor, granted to him by his nineteenth-century sculptor, has turned his back toward the canal, and turned toward the life and bustle of the town, in particular toward the building that now houses an academy of fine art. Off his right shoulder, across the boulevard that runs alongside his square, is the medieval toll house, built in 1477.

We're standing in middle of the pretty square, and the rain is coming down steadily. It falls steadily but it may not strike steadily, as the raindrops are tossed around by gusts of chilly wind. Our umbrella doesn't serve us very well in winds like these. We stand regarding the Toll House, and next to it, the Poortersloge, or Burgher's Lodge.

The fifteenth century seems to have been the height of prosperity here in Bruges. The town had flourished for a few centuries already, the busy port and markets paying for these lovely buildings we enjoy, for the churches and the guild halls, and for the art that drew the commissions for names like Van Eyck.

The well-to-do citizens assembled in the Burgher's Lodge. The emblem of their jousting association still adorns the facade of the structure. The emblem portrays a bear holding the Bruges coat of arms. The bear is a symbol of Bruges. They say that the first count of Flanders, a congenial chap by the name of Baldwin with the Iron Arm, first visited the site of Bruges in the 800s, he encountered a brown bear. Of course, Lord Baldwin engaged with the bear, and after a long struggle, managed to kill it. This explains the small stone bear standing a niche in the facade of the lodge. This bear is white, and he's harmless. They dress him up for special occasions.

All this Menna and I contemplate as we stand quietly in the rain. 'So pretty,' we're thinking. Menna is shivering. My wife is cold. I have to take action. I urge her forward and onward.

It's surprisingly difficult to find quiet little places to sit in Belgian towns. We walk along the canal behind Mr. Van Eyck's back. Even in this emergency, I cannot help but admire the scenic streets, lined by quirky gables and the occasional stone trinket, erected by cheerful medieval landlords in a time of colorful caps and banners, a time when God still cherished us.

We finally come upon a pub. Inside, we hang dripping coats on the backs of chairs. We shiver at the wooden table as a waiter brings us strong Belgian beer, sweet-tasting and heady, shining the color of summer fields of grain, shining even when there is no sun. I am rubbing the tips of Menna's fingers.

Travelogue 536 – December 14
Do Not Disturb My Circles

And what would old Archimedes have thought, arriving from Syracuse, perhaps on a freighter shaped like a huge bathtub, a kind of iron village set afloat, a ship that has steered its mass into the mouth of the Maas River? What words, what cry would suffice for this discovery?

The shores of the river open into port after port, the length of the waterway lined with the mechanics of freight. Etched into the white northern sky are the sober, metallic outlines of machine after machine, cranes, cranks, chains, and the frames of giant swings. It's a vast outdoor physics lab.

'The simple machine changes the direction of a force ... increasing effect …,' he mutters, standing at the helm, as though he were standing before his students.

The Greeks identified six simple machines. The Renaissance scholars, keen students, multiplied these into the hundreds, combining them into compound machines, into thousands of applications. Their Protestant great-grandchildren turned these into profit, into whole cities of steel.

Would this river cruise be a delight for old Archimedes, or would it be an assault of insight, deadly to consciousness, a cacophony of thought, two thousand years in a tidal rush? We are a busy species, always building. There is a lot to see at the end of 2013.

In this town of cranks and gears and pulleys, this modernist enclave of commerce as industry, jewel in the crown of a country of problem-solvers, I indulge in a jog beside the River Maas, the color of steel. It's a day one is forced call sunny at this latitude, though in fact the sun in its ten degrees of glory only lights the dome of the sky with a tinny silver sheen.

I've discovered an esplanade riverside hidden from the road, a spread of concrete located behind a series of housing projects. This bit of river extends west from my usual runs, pushing toward the watery border between the wedge of little Delfshaven and Schiedam.

I like this stretch of unexceptional asphalt, set with squares of dispirited grass, set with odd sculptures looking like big paper hats, but folded in iron, standing on legs like hobby horses. They are painted in colours that just aspire to the scale of cheerful, but achieve only curiosity. I like this place for its air of abandonment. I like it for the prospect of the western ports of the city, miles of industrial age landscape, horizon of machinery changing force, water resuming and resuming again its nature, its peace, among the churning commerce.

I've been marking our progress toward the solstice, marking with interest the inching forward of frosts and shadow. We seem to have been granted a yuletide break from the incessant rains, a time to emerge into the dusk and contemplate. I'm thinking about poor Archimedes, wandering the Rhine delta, looking for that final proof he was working on before the Roman soldier cut him down, harmless old man playing with circles. His ghost is now thinking of other matters, questioning himself in the face of what the industrial age hath wrought. He is captured by wonder, which is no less than what one hopes for for old ghosts.

I turn at the furthest point, where another small haven, or harbor, interrupts the path, and I jog back the way I have come. I discover that a barge has parked' beside the esplanade. One man stands on land while two others stand on the deck of the barge, chatting with him, operating the shipboard crane, which is set just at the bow. If I were Archimedes I might wonder how a boat supports great amounts of weight not from the center, but at the extremity of the bow. About ten meters above the man onshore hangs suspended his car. The man's shift on the barge is over. It's time to go home. He'll take his auto with him.

Travelogue 535 – December 7
Darkness

So we engage in the struggle against darkness. It's December. We have slid northward, away from light, and under a polar cap of dense cloud. We know we must push forward, as into a headwind, heads down and hands protected. The mornings are dark until eight, the light coming in a slow and diffuse way difficult to describe as dawn. It takes so long to become day, and one can't be quite sure, under cover of mist, when the ambient illumination has achieved full daylight.

Yesterday we saw our first snow, or something like it. Something, in fact, icy. What falls are small white hailstones. They start coming down while I'm out on a run. They bounce off the sidewalk, and they roll in the cold wind. They sting against my cheek.

The winds have been formidable. Menna walks her bicycle home from the Metro station. I return home from my run with numb fingers. Because the still-air temps are still above freezing, I haven't started wearing the black tights yet. Instead, I come home with thighs and knees bright red and raw.

Yesterday we hear that Mandela has died. The news is a sign bittersweet: a life lived well, lived in principle and with virtue; and an era passing, for better or worse. The times of father and son in only my family have witnessed since the ravages of the Depression genocide in Europe and apartheid in Africa. Hitler made his rage and hatred into an international crisis. Mandela made his fight an international matter of conscience.

The esteemed Paul Theroux writes in a recent article that our work in Africa is more or less ineffectual, mere 'telescopic philanthropy', a phrase he borrows from Charles Dickens. What's more it has all been done before. Of course, I too am a huge fan of the author of Ecclesiastes, who wrote 'there is nothing new under the sun' a few millennia before Mr. Theroux felt the sun of Malawi on his shoulders. Like Solomon, Mr. Theroux has been there, and so why should anyone else?

It's popular to debunk NGO work these days, and God knows it deserves a bit of the old debunk, but every generation does the best it can. Shall we feel foolish now because we're helping people in a faraway place? I find myself peering again into the shadowed minds of the secret paternalists of our time who say that one type of person cannot know how to, or have the right to, help another type (word from wise, developed-world sage). It's an odd viewpoint, that geographical distance and culture invalidate the fundamental human instinct to help.

And our embarrassment should be based on logic like this: people are poorer than ever in Africa; therefore, aid work has failed. As a show of thoroughness, let's support with one example, from the thousands of agencies working across the continent: Jeffrey Sachs. Yes, that is a case that cuts right to the heart of my work. I feel exposed.

After declaring general failure, Mr. Theroux offers a few radical tips, should we care to continue with our futile work: 'Seek input from locals. Demand responsible management.' Here is the soul of innovation. Quite right that he should take to the soap box with gems like this. We dast not shade a light like that.

But this is the standard of critique these days, laying down the fifth ace: your work is immoral, but I know how to do it better. But wasn't it immoral? No, not if you're innovative. Ah, like demanding responsible management. That is deep innovation. I've got another one for you: look both ways before crossing the street. Now you've got it. But one question: how innovative is poverty? We have never 'won' against poverty. Ergo, we have 'failed'. The work is failing, and must stop. Astounding.

No, here's the news today: we're not going to solve poverty. We're human and we're going to try. We go where we feel we can make a difference. Someone will always know better, and will say so. We get up every morning and we try harder.

Today's news, the day after the day. It's winter. We will buckle down, and we will go out the door when it's time to work, even though the sun doesn't seem to have stirred. These are the times during the year when the primeval within us wonders whether God has forsaken us. We shiver to consider what is asked of us, even if it is only logging a few miles in the ice of a long night. We still do it.