Travelogue 820 – September 12
School and Dinner

The school year returned, and it rushed in with force. I was vulnerable, indulging as I was in my writing idyll. I was actually, vaguely, looking forward to the start of classes. But one anticipates with the imagination, and imagination without work requires little strain. One actualizes with the body, the poor body that rises early, submits itself to the Metro, mounts the stairs when the lift is filled to capacity with students. The poor body stands at the head of the class for long stretches, wearying the back and the vocal cords in courageous shows of futility.

Priorities shift. Progress in writing my little book has slowed to a crawl. I am happy to add a few paragraphs at a time. Sometimes all I do is open the Word file and review where I was, edit a few sentences. I wake in the night, and I scribble ideas, things I must remember. Sometimes I find those notes. Sometimes I find them a second time.

Writing comes second when duty calls, as nagging and insistent as the voice of the book may be. They say that delay makes fulfilment sweeter. It adds philosophical depth to any enterprise. I’m not sure I can corroborate, as I have no points of comparison. I mean, life has never stopped for my creative work.

When dreary duty calls, I answer. I resist, but I answer. That seems fundamental to the human condition. We submit; we surrender; we resign ourselves. But the precondition to those noble acts is resistance. I imagine I can hear the truth in the word ‘work’. It isn’t a melodious word. It sounds like the short grunt of effort, effort made in an attitude of stolid and Spartan realism.

Baby has decided that eating dinner is her work. She must resist. I find it funny. I can’t remember ever feeling like that about meal time, but maybe it’s common among children. Her tactic is to demonstrate what the alternative is, what she should be doing with her time. “No, papa,” she says. “I have to play.” I protest, and she shushes me, placing a hand over my mouth. I laugh. Mama doesn’t appreciate that I indulge Baby, but I have to admit that I’m won over by the creativity she brings to her resistance.

Last night, her game was to hold up her hand like a crossing guard and announce that she would be right back after she slept. She calmly slid off her chair and went into the next room. She returned after only a moment, and climbed onto her chair, only to repeat the ritual before we could get a bite of food into her. My wife sighed. I made an effort to remonstrate, but it was half-hearted. I was smiling.

The trouble is, little Ren worships her sister, and she mimics everything Baby does. She holds up her hand, and climbs off her chair, even as she’s chewing her food. Ren has no issues with eating; she just wants part of the game. She bustles off into the next room, and Mama gets that weary look in her eye. I smile apologetically. I scold the girls from afar. But I’m enjoying my meal.

Travelogue 819 – August 23
Fall Coming

Time re-asserts itself. The summer heat wave is long gone. Clouds are allowed to roam freely about the skies, capriciously cooling the thirsty lands below without yielding a drop of rain.

Streets are crowded again. I can’t find a seat on the metro in the morning. My work email has come alive again, abuzz with September energy. Co-workers return refreshed from abroad, writing chipper emails about planning meetings.

I’m judging that my perception isn’t quite aligned with theirs. I stayed in town, and it’s only been a few weeks, after all, since we all traded gloomy emails about closing down the last academic year. It’s jarring. It would be better if I left town next summer. I might return as cheery as my co-workers. I might experience the new year as new, rather than a sort of ghoulish rising from the grave.

But leaving town would mean missing the blessed peacefulness that descends on the city. I do quite enjoy having some space while strolling around downtown, foregoing the constant negotiation that crowds require, particularly ones that are raised to stare dully ahead and offer no quarter.

I learn to appreciate cycling across town without the adrenaline rush of those brushes with death. I appreciate the empty seats at the cafes, the ones that separate me from the sound of video on smart phones. This is the real food for modern zombies, flashing light and the tinny lo-fi replay of voices. Outside, the parks offer open spaces, even on sunny days.

But the zombies are back, re-populating public transit, pouring onto the bike paths, weaving drunkenly and riding the wrong way. Maybe they will be slow to discover the parks.

It might have been summer’s return yesterday. The clouds gave us some respite from their sport, and we leapt at a chance to take the girls to the park. ‘Leapt’ here should be read in context of parenthood. Leaping takes hours, getting babies dressed and supplying the buggy for a major journey.

Once we had leapt, all was good. We strolled among banks of flowers toward the open space of grassy meadows, where the girls could run and tumble. We brought the inflated kickball, and they chased this with great glee. I took them to the pond, where we watched the baby ducks run after flies. Little Ren immediately sat in duck poop. Mama scolded Papa at length about this, but the mess didn’t faze the girls. They chased the ducks some more, enthusiastically accumulating more poop on their shoes for deposit on Mama’s slacks.

They pretended to climb trees, while I lifted them up to the leaves. They found rocks to climb, with Papa’s help. Repetition is key to infant enjoyment, so Papa donated his back to their happiness, lifting them again and again. It was very important to Baby that she got to dismount from her rock by sliding down the side of it, again with Papa’s help. Papa prayed for distraction, but these girls have admirable faculties for focus when playing.

Once the babies’ energy had begun to flag, we recommended cookies and they cheered. We guided them toward the outdoor café, following them with aching backs and clothes stained with duck poop. We gratefully occupied the deck chairs and submitted a rush order for pacifying sweets.

While I could, I enjoyed the prospect of open spaces, grass in sunshine, untrodden by the spring masses or the winter cold. Free space, warmed by sun, a vestige of summer. Baby had the same thought. She took off suddenly, running toward the grass. I’m up and running after her.

Travelogue 818 – August 19
The Tracks of Time

I was listening to a recording I made of Baby in April. She’s singing a song her mama had taught her. I remember that stage of pronunciation, the testing of words, the lisp and the lovely round vowels. I remember the loving repetition, her joy in singing. It seems much longer ago than April. Things change so quickly.

Quite suddenly, a few weeks ago, Baby started speaking in Dutch. She had experimented with isolated words before, but one afternoon she addressed me in full sentences, quiet out of the blue. She smiled slyly at my astonishment, as though this had been her intention. Then she repeated what she was saying, something about the provenance of one toy or other, which was hers and which her little sister’s.

I was speechless. Where did that come from? She’s in no school this summer. She has no little Dutch friends to play with outside. Does she absorb that much from the short spells of cartoons dubbed in Dutch that we allow? She certainly brings to those viewing sessions real intensity. For weeks she had cried for more reruns of ‘Peter Konijn’, her favourite.

Time asserts itself with authority. It never ceases to inspire wonder in me. There is no forgiveness, no soft spot for the beautiful moment. Baby sympathizes with time. She would pause for nothing along the way. She doesn’t seem sentimental at all, simply ready for the fray.

Sentiment is not something one sees much in nature, is it? It’s perhaps a cultivation of the effete, a sublimated form of grief or fear for those who haven’t kept up with life somehow. If that’s true, then I was running among the last in the race of life from the very start. I remember always being sentimental. Sentiment is linked powerfully to one’s experience of time, and I was aware of time at a tender age. Very young I decided I wanted time to pass as slowly as possible. I wanted every moment, joyful or painful. I decided life was about appreciation. Even the very worst of times I would accept without haste, accept and appreciate. That seems like a fairly sophisticated conclusion for a little boy, and recalling it is not the first time I have felt that I had much more wisdom as a boy than as a man.

The decision to respect time and appreciate life might explain my years as a dedicated slacker. There is no better way to slow the sensation of time down than to have nothing to do. When I had great ideas, I preserved them only in the mind, turning them over like gems in sunny windows. They prompted no action. In mid-life I seem to have lost my determination to achieve nothing and appreciate everything, perhaps succumbing to the shame we like to heap on slackers. I became busy. Time gathered momentum, and now I’m not sure what to do about it. Time is a runaway train, and I am no engineer.

Travelogue 817 – August 10
A Thousand Years
Part Six

The English found themselves victors on the field of Crecy. They had matched chaos with their chaos and prevailed. Froissart wrote, “This night they thanked God for their good adventure and made no boast thereof, for the king would that no man should be proud or make boast, but every man humbly to thank God.” Adventure here doesn’t have its modern meaning, and yet I find it appropriate in any sense. It wasn’t history, but the work of the moment.

Churchill famously said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ But the obverse may pose the real danger: ‘Those who learn from history are doomed to try to repeat it.’ Bullies parse history for their purposes, intentionally misreading it and nursing it for their own gain.

Churchill’s great adversary, the tyrant Adolf Hitler, proclaimed the thousand-year reich. He referenced the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire, and modelled himself on the thousand-year Roman Empire. He had his people greet him with the salute of the ancient Romans.

The Romans might have recognized the salute, but I doubt they would have recognized much else. The simple cruelty in him, perhaps, and the hubris. These sorts of dramas are always written in blood, they might have said, shaking their heads as they left the theatre. I sense that tragic madness didn’t appeal to the ancients the way it has to modern European cultures. And Hitler’s ideas about race and nation and purity and destiny just wouldn’t have registered at all.

The thousand-year reich of the Nazis lasted just about the time it took to breed one generation of Aryans. History wasn’t on Hitler’s side, it would seem. At least, things didn’t turn out as he predicted.

There is a sense of humour to things. It’s written into the code of the universe. The joke is, nothing goes to plan. The plan produces a prodigy, something monstrous. The thousand-year reich fell in twelve. And the survivors wrote their stories, only to have younger generations interpret them for their own purposes. The joke cuts two ways.

Another aphorism attributed (probably wrongly) to Churchill was, ‘History is written by the victors.’ All too often being the victor requires little more than coming along afterward, like the Renaissance scholars writing about the Middle Ages. In Churchill’s case, in the case of the Allied armies, it was a battle won. Something like Crecy, but on a scale that would have made the medieval knights think they had sunk through the mud into hell.

As the Russian troops bombarded Berlin and took the city block by block, Hitler took his own life. There doesn’t seem a clearer admission of defeat than that. But does defeat in battle mean recanting? As he prepared his suicide, he probably still held a flattering idea of his place in history. Our own day’s fascists would never have hung his portrait in their dirty clubhouses if he had admitted defeat, surrendered, and saved a million lives. That would have robbed him, and them, of fascism’s great victory.

If the victors write history, then who are the victors? Definition is the trapdoor in that phrase. Perennial victory is the beauty written into the code of fascism. Categorically, it never loses. We have no further to search for examples than Trump. He has never had occasion to reconsider, doubt, regret, or apologize. It’s a wonderful life. Even if he dies in a jail cell, his self-image will shine with righteousness. Amazingly, he will tell himself, I was always right! I was the best there ever was! And a chorus of followers will affirm it, hammering the evidence of tawdry defeat into gilded symbols of triumph.

Travelogue 816 – August 1
A Thousand Years
Part Five

Today I ignored the forecasts. I checked the sky. The heat has moderated, though it is still hot and summery. The sky has resumed a Dutch character, changeable and varied. Now white clouds ride imperially through the blue sky. It’s a classic summer sky. I have no idea what the clouds intend to do. It’s happening now. They’re not acting out a prediction.

I’m writing a story based in the Middle Ages, so I’ve been doing some reading. Mr. Huizinga has provided the scholarly perspective. I’m supplementing with Jean Froissart, a fourteenth-century historian. And a good complement he is, providing a wide-eyed account of events that Huizinga’s cool cultural history sidesteps. It’s nice to hear the voice of a story-teller.

One of the stories Froissart tells is the one about the Battle of Crecy in 1346. King Edward III of England has decided that he has as good a right to the French throne as Philip VI. Already the English king is lord of several provinces in the southwest, inherited from his forebears.

Before Crecy, there are only skirmishes and the minor battles. In 1346, in response to some French encroachments in the south, Edward lands in Normandy. Apparently, he has the element of surprise with him because the country lies completely open to him. He marauds unopposed for four months before the French king can pull together a force and march north. He’s marching toward disaster.

The story reminds me of nothing more than Monty Python, the chaos and disorder, the unwarranted, almost nonsensical, violence. Edward and his troops have to stop at the coast to arrange ships to take back to England all the loot they have accumulated. And prisoners: peasants and the rabble in the towns are expendable, but any nobility is worth keep alive for ransom.

In the story of the battle, we witness the end of the age of chivalry as clearly as we do in any of Huizinga’s more abstract illustrations. The English army, drastically outnumbered by the French, wins the day by pitting archers and infantrymen – and even primitive cannons – against knights on coursers. The result was absolute mayhem for the French, and the beginning of nearly a century of bullying and invasion by the English.

But significance doesn’t indicate destiny. Crecy is a big name in history, but it doesn’t mean much to the English archers hunkering down in the fields. They don’t see how fight leads directly to Joan of Arc and a new French nationalism eighty years later. They don’t know they are acting out a rough version of Monty Python’s Platonic ideal. They are camping in a field, scared or excited. They are praying for a simple victory and some spoils. They’re not planning to make history. They probably wouldn’t have been able to relate to Froissart’s version and wouldn’t at all understand our analyses of their events.

Churchill famously said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ But the obverse may pose more real danger: ‘Those who learn from history are doomed to try to repeat it.’ History can’t be repeated, try as you might. Reading imperfect histories as templates leads to disaster.

Travelogue 815 – July 26
A Thousand Years
Part Four

I’m running every day this summer. My pace has slowed considerably during the heat wave, but I’m still running. There’s some hope the heat may break today. The forecast says rain in the afternoon.

It’s afternoon, and I’m running. The sky is white with haze, though in the north are some darker clouds, a hint that there might be a shower coming. That’s what they’ve predicted.

I’m watching the sky as I run. The heat is interfering with brain activity. I find I’m getting impatient with the clouds. Let’s have that rain already, I’m thinking. Get with the program! The forecast said rain. The rain never comes, and I complete another summer hour of exercise in extreme heat.

Sitting outside afterward, putting down a large glass of cold water with lemon, I’m looking up at the hazy sky again. I had a script for the day, and Nature had other ideas. To be precise, as I watched, Nature departed from our script. In that moment, addled by the sun, I felt a sense of confusion.

I find the experience fascinating, reflecting on it over my glass of cold water. The human script had superseded Nature as reality. In essence, what I was watching in the sky during my run had already happened, when the prediction was made. So departure from the script felt like a disconnect from reality.

This is how the mind works in this age of science, prediction, and information saturation. Objective reality comes with a delay. It’s done already. So where is the nexus of our experience? Has our experience migrated to the template of the experience, and thus we actually live in our anticipation? Or have we failed to displace the real moment of experience, and therefore functionally live in the past? Did we create today’s warm sun? Do we enjoy it more because it was our plan to enjoy it?

These are the subtle powers of the mind. I’ve been studying history. And I’ve been questioning our labels for times past. The starting point was Huizinga’s study of the Middle Ages. I’ve wondered first about the patently silly name of the time period. ‘Middle’ hardly makes one think of a civilization lasting a thousand years. It makes it sound like a tram stop or two on a long line, far from anyone’s real destination. ‘Ages’ robs the period of coherence, even if it comes under one rubric. It’s not one ‘age’, it’s a hodgepodge of them, collected here for convenience.

The term, as we’ve seen, is an expression of disappointment, coined by the historians coming immediately afterward. The point of contrast was Rome, preceding the Middle Ages, victim of the Middle Ages.

What I’ve found most enlightening about Huizinga’s study is the possibility that there was far more coherence to medieval culture than it may be popularly credited with. The decaying values he finds in the ‘waning’ of the civilization, are, by extension, defining values for a thousand years.

The culture of chivalry, for example, that was self-parody in the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century was innovation in France centuries earlier and was nascent when Germanic tribal values mingled with Mediterranean Christianity.

Rome itself lasted a thousand years. We see coherence there. It’s one civilization. That’s made easy for us because there is one political entity to reference. But would a citizen of the early Republic have recognized the late Empire? It was already Christian. It was already proto-feudal.

By contrast, would, say, a seventh-century Lombard have had as much trouble recognizing the cultural values of a fourteenth-century French knight? I admit I don’t have the expertise to judge. But I do wonder.

When the clouds don’t form, when the rain doesn’t come, we are startled. That is a wake-up call. Which reality am I living in? Similarly, it can be refreshing when history surprises us. It forces us to re-examine the locus of experience. What exactly is the image we are studying?

Travelogue 814 – July 20
A Thousand Years
Part Three

In his study of the Late Middle Ages, Mr. Huizinga looks at cultural phenomena that define the time. Among other things, he looks at the popular preoccupation with death. The memento mori is a common religious trope, a reminder that all things pass. We’ve all seen the skulls in funerary sculpture and in Renaissance paintings. But this is something different: poets and painters taking great care to represent the decay of corpses or describe the agonies of dying.

Pictures of corpses may be edifying, I suppose, and that’s how they were understood at the time. Mr. Huizinga is less indulgent. He calls it ‘macabre’, and he says it’s no more than the dark side of the sensuality of the culture.

Wondering how people could become so entranced with ugly symbols of death, I couldn’t help thinking about our own bizarre obsession with violence. I think about our capacity to watch violent TV every night, play violent video games, and then join in emotional debates about gun ownership. It strikes me as manifest fear. I’m not the only one. Michael Moore argues eloquently in his film “Columbine” that the US is an extraordinarily fearful society.

A compulsive need to be reminded of death strikes me as a symptom of fear. Mr. Huizinga argues that the fear is one of passing youth and ephemeral pleasures. It seems to me like a strong tonic for a mild sort of sentiment. Rather, the corpse thing reminds me of the feeling of not being able to tear one’s eyes away from something terrible.

There is one parallel between their time and ours that seems to me valid. Maybe it’s a stretch; you will judge. People living in the year 1400 lived only a few generations after the times of the Black Death, when, indeed, corpses were everywhere. We live a few generations after World War II, the greatest show of violence in history. There’s something of the psychology of survivors that endures long after historical trauma, whether we are aware of it or not.

Survival translates into anxiety. Why did I survive? Why was I born into a time of peace, but my grandfather wasn’t? How do we know it won’t happen again?

We don’t. We are powerless over history. We are close enough to sense its magnitude, but far enough away to have a hard time imagining. We are overawed by the thought of it. Remember “Saving Private Ryan” and its effort to make the horror of war real? There have been a number of movies like that, trying to make us feel the war – bullets whizzing past, friends dying next to us in gory ways. We have a thirst for the virtual experience of large-scale violence.

Then there’s the ambivalence we feel about having benefitted from the suffering of others. Europeans in 1400 were materially better off than their ancestors of a hundred years earlier, simply because there were fewer people to share the wealth. This led directly to the slow collapse of feudalism, millions dead and the new scarcity (and value) of labour.

World War II kick-started the world economy and created the revolution in technology still being played out. Many of us were raised in times of peace and prosperity that were designed and zealously guarded by people who had lived through the war. They wanted to build a world order that would safeguard stability above all else.

Could this have been the real close of the Middle Ages, I wonder: the Black Death, and the years of trauma following? History doesn’t follow such simple schematics as that, but it’s interesting to contemplate.

Travelogue 813 – July 18
Hands Up, It’s Summer

It’s been hot and dry for weeks. The grass is uncharacteristically brown. This kind of yellow brown is just not a Dutch colour. The deep brown of mud in winter, yes. But this shade of desiccation, this is a California colour. The sight of yellow grass and dry leaves must make a Dutchman feel ill at ease. He peers into the skies, searching for signs of rain.

The heat makes me slow, and I embrace it. During every long month of a particularly hectic work year, I imagined exactly this: the long days of summer taken at a lazy pace. I imagined the bright sun in the windows early in the morning. I imagined getting out of the house later and later every day, after leisurely playing with the girls. I imagined writing nonsense for hours in a comfortable café. I imagined wasting plenty of time on a book idea I had years ago, something frivolous. I imagined taking long and very slow runs every day.

I set out very slowly. Just outside our building is the sleepy little canal. I can jog along the gravel path beside it, warming up with an easy pace. Here, bordering the water, the grass is still green. A few ducks will be sleeping away the afternoon, nestling their beaks into their wings, making themselves inconspicuous among the reeds just canal-side. There’s a willow tree by the small bridge with long leaves that dip down as far as the surface of the water. Right under the bridge, there is a nest where a mama coot sits patiently.

The girls like taking walks by the canal. After my run, I will bring them out. We’ll cross the bridge slowly. I will lead one girl on each hand to be safe. On the other side, we’ll look for the ducks again. Little Sister will waddle after a rabbit that dashes into the bushes. Baby will talk to me; she will explain the world to me. She likes making indicative statements like ‘We don’t eat trees,’ or ‘We don’t eat grass.’ I say, ‘No, Baby.’ She continues with, ‘Not good.’

They will both want to run screaming up and down the path. I find the sight particularly affecting, the girls running and laughing. Baby will run back toward me with a joyful grin, her arms outspread. I’ll take her in my arms and swing her around. That image of her smile: it will never fade, I am very sure. It’s becoming a foundation stone for life, something that defines, confirms, justifies.

I wish I could surrender to that kind of joy when I run. It’s not easy for someone with so many years and so many worries. But I can attain the adult version, I’m judging, which is something like peace. I settle into a moderate pace, never too fast, and I can let the rhythm take over. The heat is calm and constant. The sense of passing time drops away; the day is timeless. The city is quiet. People are away on vacation, or they’re escaping the heat. At twenty minutes, the hypnotic rhythm and the endorphins take over and I can access a little bliss.

Would it come back to me, the joy of a child, if I threw my hands up and screamed and ran as fast as I could? It’s not likely to strike anyone as very cute. It might scare a few people. Is the cuteness the efficacious element of the run? I’ll try it anyway, one day when it’s not so hot.

Travelogue 812 – July 16
A Thousand Years
Part Two

Some things don’t change much from one historical age to another. I’m reading how the aristocrats of the fifteenth century became infatuated with pastoral or bucolic literature. It became a pastime of the elite, trading precious rhymes about the simple life in the fields and playacting as shepherds and country maidens. According to Huizinga, it as just another eroticism of sorts, an alternative to the prevailing game of knights and ladies, with the added value of criticizing life at court. How horrible, all the posing and backbiting at court! They whispered their disdain as they circulated among the courtiers at the ball with shepherds’ crooks under their arms.

Each age has its silly masquerades, and its own signs of decadence. That’s nothing new. But Huizinga doesn’t stop there. The author of “Homo Ludens” explores how playfulness has its dividends. Posing as shepherd boys may signify no real appreciation for country life, but it did accomplish something else: it inspired the development of an extensive language and vocabulary for describing nature. That seems timely, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.

Sometimes, language is all we have. We play with words, and revolutions come about. It might seem as though the revolutions couldn’t have happened without the vocabulary. Could the French Revolution have happened without the philosophes? What revolution have we been preparing for? What seems obvious is the information revolution. We’ve spent several generations cultivating a language for computer technology and experience. There is probably an extensive gaming lingo by now. That would match Huizinga’s philosophy of play as human development.

I might argue that there is a post-Cold-War surfeit of rhetoric about democracy and free markets that is almost entirely empty and tailored for posturing. We all pose as democrats (small ‘d’,) like shepherds at the royal banquet, full of indignant passion, even as the rhetoric and the institutions themselves seem more and more hollow. It’s eerie how hollow. But this over-sophistication of political language and vocabulary must serve some purpose in the big picture. It creates possibilities.

Anyway, the ages do change, and we name them as we see fit. Somewhere in fifteenth century, the baton was passed. The Middle Ages became the Renaissance. It seems to have happened first in Italy and then moved northward in a wave, following the ideas of humanism and a new devotion to classical antiquity. It arrived in Northern Europe only just ahead of Luther’s revolution. The greatest of northern humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam, spent the last twenty years of his life grappling with the explosion of Protestantism. He debated with Luther in letters and treatises that circulated across Europe, and he urged moderation.

In truth, it becomes hard to untangle the two phenomena, the Renaissance and the Reformation, at least in the north of Europe, and one is left wondering what to do with the categories. What is the Renaissance? Is it an event? If so, how do you localize it? Is it a movement? If so, does it involve more than a thin social layer of intellectuals, artists, and eccentric patrons? Is the category really a time period? Then how do we adjust for the wave effect, arriving at different places at different times, and how does it fit between the other categories? The term Renaissance has been problematic since the humanists first called their own time one of ‘re-birth’, feeling inclined to divide history into three parts: the great classical era, the intervening ‘media tempestas’, and then their own era. To them, it was crystal clear. Artists and scholars may have bickered; statesmen may have engaged in constant warfare; but they could all agree they lived in a new and enlightened era in the history of humankind

Did the citizens of the ‘Middle Ages’ identify themselves as such? ‘We are the great people of the Middle.’ No, ‘Middle Ages’ was a term invented by their descendants, the historians of the Renaissance. It was not a complimentary term. Before the Renaissance, all was dark. Civilization was lost. That much was universally understood by people of the new age.

Travelogue 811 – July 14
A Thousand Years
Part One

I’m writing a piece that is set in the Middle Ages, so I’m doing some background reading. One of my sources is “The Waning of the Middle Ages” by Johan Huizinga. It’s a classic and written by a Dutchman to boot. “Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen” was the book’s original title, and I wish I could say I was reading it in Dutch, but I’m not. It would have been rewarding, as the author takes a close look at the Dutch, Flemish and French cultures of the era.

Maybe next time. I’ve been picking up my Dutch study again. It’s no easy thing learning a new language. It takes so long. Proper language study is taking on a way of thinking. Language is like a schematic for a culture. And a history.

Clearly Mr. Huizinga spent a lot of time in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his mind: I’m not speaking of time travel, not yet. But his intensive research must have felt like immersion. How much of the era did he take on board? Does it explain his rambling style, his colourful choice of themes, his subtle conclusions? Those centuries were a time of ornately subtle philosophies. It was also a time of high moralizing. Did that influence his air of authority? I kind of like his self-assurance. It’s refreshing in our age of excessive deflection and qualification, apology and deference. It might have been the general tone of scholarship in 1919, when the book was published.

Huizinga was a cultural historian. He wasn’t looking to rehash any litany of battles or royal succession. He was interpreting cultural cues, fashion, literature and the rituals at court. What he found underlying them were a set of core principles that informed centuries of medieval culture, now decked out like a high medieval lady, in layers of richly ornamented garments, kirtle, chemise, and houppelande; fur and black velvet; crespine, chaperon with liripipe, kruseler, wimples or hennin.

He studies Burgundy. These were high times for the Burgundian dynasty, and in truth they were themselves a phenomenon unique to the times. Their ascendancy was short-lived. Being entirely unique to the times, they represented them well, with the most stylish and colourful court of its time. All the richest rituals of the times were in evidence, processions and banquets and jousts where ladies wore scarves for their knights. Chivalry was the secular moral philosophy of the age, and the dukes of Burgundy were exemplars. Books were circulated that detailed their manners as much as their heroics. Treatises were written about their how their table was set.

Huizinga puts all this on displays to illustrate a point. The exaggeration in fashion, manner, and ritual were all evidence to him of the decay of the principles they served. This was the end of an era. Like many young historians, he had begun his research looking for the signs of great things to come. Many had studied the same era looking for the first signs and first causes of the Renaissance. But he quickly realized that the more interesting study was the autumnal story unfolding in his texts, not the vernal. This was the end of something big, as much as it would become the beginning of something new.

Travelogue 810 – June 30
Assumption into Heaven
Part Five

After my theatre trip to Venice, I have been contemplating the old Commedia dell’Arte, Venice’s contribution to Renaissance theatre, and finding the power of the masks and the types engaging. At a time when politics is caricature, when Hollywood has retreated into a dark hole of digital reality, when dramatic fiction can’t sell without death and violence, I find particular relevance to theatre as cartoon.

The relationship between stories and reality has always been a tense one, governed by a fragile and unstable boundary. A story has to be fantastical and real in the same moment. Meaning, no matter how imaginative, it must be ‘believable’. Somehow that mandate allows for Dada and ballet and the Dark Knight. But theatre finds itself in an awkward balancing act. Film, with so much more capacity to capture reality, strays further into CGI fantasy, while theatre, an art form patently artificial – confined to one stage and one ‘take’ – has to be convincing to be taken seriously.

The Commedia dell’Arte made no effort to be realistic. In the sixteenth century, it didn’t matter too much. Two centuries later, as a cultish feeling for rationalism swept Europe, silly walks and masks were in questionable taste.

One critic was the great Venetian playwright and librettist, Carlo Goldoni. He was no stranger to the Commedia dell’Arte. He wrote comic plays, and so he wrote in the tradition. But he quickly tired of the conventions. He spoke for the new turn of mind that wanted faces and characters that were more familiar.

If the Renaissance art form represented a world of wealthy merchants and country peasants meeting in markets and busy squares, Enlightenment era audiences preferred to see themselves, the new bourgeoisie, meeting in drawing rooms and salons. The humour could be more that of manners than of slapstick; the bungled romances played out with words more than stunts.

Goldoni infuriated the traditionalists of the Granelleschi Society, particularly one Carlo Gozzi, who published cruel satirical verses about him. In 1762, Goldoni left Italy. He was fed up with the quarrel and frustrated with the resistance to new forms. He moved to France and never returned home again. He was successful in Paris. He was appointed to a position in the king’s court and made director of the Theatre Italien.

If you’re looking for a moral to the story of Goldoni and Gozzi, you won’t find much satisfaction. Gozzi was no Salieri, and in fact was successful and admired in Venice. Adapting a fairy tale to the stage, largely just to taunt Goldoni – he even wrote a parody of his rival into the play, -- Gozzi stumbled on a formula for great popularity. His series of fairy tales for the stage went a long way to reviving the Commedia dell’Arte, and earned acclaim outside Italy. Goethe himself staged one of the plays. Purists would argue that Gozzi had in fact strayed from Commedia dell’Arte tradition as much as Goldoni. His sin was in providing scripts. The Commedia dell’Arte was an improvisational form.

And so we see the clash between two eras in the arc and decline of the Commedia dell’Arte. What was it about the first age that appreciated the masks and stylized choreography? It has a lot to do with the stage itself. The Commedia dell’Arte was an outdoor sport, played to the crowds at the markets. Eighteenth-century theatre was very much an indoor sport, and thus allowed for some refinement.

But I wonder if there are conclusions to be made about values. The Renaissance saw the West’s first shift toward humanism and the value of the individual over the type. But it took centuries to filter down to the foundations of society. The day-to-day experience in the streets of Europe would resemble the Middle Ages for some time. And the steady medieval belief in types had plenty of momentum.

I have had many occasions to wonder whether we aren’t well into the swing back into the love of types over people. It wouldn’t take much to see the trend in the conduct of our governing classes. Are there signs in philosophy and the arts, too, where the change began in the early Renaissance?

Travelogue 809 – June 24
I’ll Touch the Ceiling

‘I’m growing up! I’m growing up!’ Baby shouts. She’s just woken, and it’s the first thing she has to say. She’s suddenly wide awake, and she’s celebrating her glorious future. She sits up and looks me in the eye. ‘I’ll touch the ceiling,’ she announces. She reaches up happily toward the ceiling.

It’s Sunday, day of slow starts. We stayed up late last night; we’re getting up late. I remember vaguely that I had a lot to accomplish today, but I’m reluctant to call up what exactly it was. I’m occupied with trying to sit myself up in bed, then with getting going. ‘Yes, darling,’ I say. ‘You will touch the ceiling.’ Meanwhile, my ambitions are restricted to reaching toes to the floor.

After a few false starts, I do get myself out the door. On the bike path, there’s a boy weaving back and forth on his bike as he struggles up the hill of the bridge. He has his sister on the back of the bike. I pass them, careful to give them a wide girth. They pass me on the subsequent downhill. We meet again at the light. They are arguing, bickering and laughing. They disagree about which is their way. ‘Die kant,’ the girl insists. The boy is dismissive. He mocks her. The light changes, and he charges ahead, in his own direction.

I pass the old church on the Beukelsdijk. It’s so quiet, though it’s Sunday, the holy day. The only sign of faith has been Baby’s zealous pronouncement: all is good. I will grow up!

Last week, we were attending a service at the Bath Abbey. Baby and her little sister were none too reverent. Even when the choir was offering beautiful song, they were indifferent. This meant extra duty for Papa. We occupied ourselves with toured, tripping over the well-worn black stones in the floor, many of them grave markers. We examined the lovely baptismal font. We looked at grave monuments. I wondered about the lives behind the names.

I reflected on how the Greek Hades had been explained to me once upon a time, as a place where our shades dwelled until the last people who remembered us had passed … or had forgotten us. The ancient world’s devotion to glory and fame served a pragmatic purpose. As I suppose the expensive grave marker did for our nearer ancestors. Did some shade flicker back into life as I read his or her monument?

There was one rather large monument dedicated to a US Senator who died in Bath in 1804. This was William Bingham, merchant, mentor to Hamilton, and delegate to the Continental Congress during deliberations over the new Constitution. His mounted guard escorted Washington through Pennsylvania on his way to assume the presidency. It might be unfair to revive his spirit during such a dark time for American democracy. It would be just one more form of torture for a disembodied shade waiting for eternity.

We are far from Trump Tower here, under the graceful fan vaulting of Bath Abbey, looking up at the high stained glass of the western facade, artwork dating back to the end of the nineteenth century and stories to the Old Testament.

The girls are profoundly uninterested by the service. Some of the congregation give us indulgent smiles. Some are annoyed. I decide we will have to conduct our own worship outside. Here’s what babies do to honour God. They run back and forth across the flagstones of the small square under the south wall the abbey, chasing pigeons. The breeze is chilly, and the square isn’t too crowded. Most benches are unoccupied. An occasional tour group crosses, stops under the abbey for a lecture in Spanish or Japanese. The babies have eyes only for the birds.

Travelogue 808 – June 21
Hesitant Light

It’s the beginning of summer and the longest day. Our windows are full of light, many hours running. We are blessed with good exposure to the sun in our flat, collecting its light in the morning on one side and in the afternoon on the other.

For Baby’s birthday party, we took down our heavy winter curtains. In their place, we put up window film, the kind held to the window by static electricity. This is a common Dutch look, open windows obstructed only by bands of the patterned film.

Menna chose a pebble pattern for the film, which I’ve discovered has an interesting effect at night. It captures the light of street lamps in intriguing star patterns. A lamp becomes like a child’s drawing of the sun, with long rays radiating from the centre. The rays are static. They don’t shimmer or change. It has a hypnotising effect when you can’t sleep. Why would light radiating more or less equally across space be collected into these rays? And what explains the precise placement of these rays? No doubt there is a set of formulae to explain how light is concentrated into rays by the lens. Who practices this kind of whimsical science? It seems like something a nineteenth-century aristocrat would have done in idle hours.

Yesterday, Baby and I walked to the market. We were stalled on our way by a series of storefront windows filled with prints of huge pictures or solid colours. Baby admired her reflection cast into the various colours behind the plate glass. ‘My blue face!’ she shouted. ‘My red face!’ I was envious of her innocent pleasure. I found it hard to disengage the critical mind. The power of explanation was so overpowering, it blocked the obvious visual effect.

The days around the advent of summer have been disappointing throwbacks to early spring, cloudy and cool. While missing the sun’s warmth, I do confess to a fondness for the light on days like this, scudding clouds above and the sharp seasonal angles to the sun. Everywhere has its light. Ethiopian sun, unimpeded and varying its angle little throughout the year, has its spirit. But I enjoy the playfulness of the light here.

We were in England recently, and the skies were performing similar tricks, sun dodging clouds to throw its glinting light onto the brilliant spring greens of the ivies and trees and hedges.

We did discover a few hours of uninterrupted sunshine to take a family walk alongside the Kennet & Avon Canal, counting the locks and admiring the many gardens. It was the weekend, and families were out in numbers. Some took to their canal boats. They waited patiently in the locks, waiting for the water, turning the cranks on the sluice gates themselves. Baby dashed ahead and then dawdled, fascinated by the sparkle of the water, by the bees, by the shining leaves.

Travelogue 807 – June 10
Assumption into Heaven
Part Four

I was in mid-meditation about Zanni, wasn’t I? Zanni were characters in the Renaissance Commedia dell’Arte, characters with long noses and an awkward gait. They demonstrated an amusing mix of cunning and naivete and simple avarice. They were country folk, often from the mountains around Bergamo, working for rich families in the big city. They were good foils for Pantalone, the lascivious old merchant.

The Zan was a type, and such a fertile type that he quickly sub-divided into multiple characters. One of them was wily Harlequin. It wasn’t unusual, during the two centuries of Commedia dell’Arte’s popularity in Europe, that an actor proved so charismatic that his or her creation became a stock character that endured afterward. Examples would have to include the creator of Harlequin, Tristano Martinelli.

Martinelli was one of the theatre royalty in Europe, a living proof of Goncourt’s claim that the artist had unusual opportunity in the age of aristocrats. As an actor could never threaten a duke, the two could be friendly, as Martinelli was with the Duke of Manta, Ferdinando Gonzaga. The Duke declared Harlequin the supervisor of events in the city-state. All performers were to apply to him for permits … and pay him the appropriate fees. Martinelli had these sorts of relationships with the high and mighty all over Europe. King Louis XIII held one of his children at christening.

This didn’t always make him popular among other actors. They seemed to resent most the sudden primacy of Harlequin on the stage. Traditionally, the Zanni were supporting characters, and leading roles were the lovers and Pantalone, who was the controlling father of the female lead.

Important adversaries of Martinelli’s were the Florentine theatrical family, the Andreini, owners and stars of the famous theatre company, I Gelosi. This family produced great characters of its own. Most interesting might be two of the wives, the women who married father and son, Francesco and Giambattista. The youngest was Virginia Ramponi, who created the character Florinda, la prima donna innamorata and star of a popular play of the same name, written by her husband. Her greatest moment came when she was cast in the title role of an opera by Monteverdi, ‘L’Arianna’. The only piece that has survived is a lament that was sung by Virginia, and it survived because her performance made it popular enough to publish separately.

Eclipsing all the women on stage during her day was Virginia’s mother-in-law, Isabella Andreini. She joined the Gelosi when she was fourteen, and quickly established herself with her wit and improvisational skills. Later in life, she performed her own piece before King Henry IV of France, the famous ‘Pazzia d’Isabella’, in which she showcased her skill as actor and linguist, quickly cycling through multiple personas onstage in a fit of madness. Isabella was also a recognized poet and scholar, participating in literary societies and publishing a collection of sonnets acclaimed by many respected (male) poets of the day. Isabella died giving birth to her eighth child, and she was mourned all over Europe. ‘Isabella’ survived as a stock character in the Commedia dell’Arte.

Travelogue 806 – May 30
Interlude on the Meuse

We had our first thunderstorm yesterday. It didn’t come on strong. I was just finishing a run when it started, a gentle rain with fat drops. The sky was heralding stronger weather, growing dark as twilight. I was safely inside when the heavy rains came, and they came as a welcome relief. The humidity had become stifling. We don’t have air-conditioning, and we had been suffering. We kept the door open while it poured outside, hoping for a quick cooling effect.

When the rain was heaviest, I grabbed Baby and ran outside. We danced and shouted in the rain. Menna and the little one came next. Nothing fazes Little Ren. Whereas Baby and Papa flinched at the first touch of the cold rain, the little one just looked up in the sky in wonder. She and Mama held hands and turned circles and laughed.

Not long afterward, the storm brought hail. We still had the door open, and bits of ice bounced into the entry. Baby picked them up to watch them melt. The sound of the downpour was overwhelming. Baby shouted when the lightning flashed.

The summer rain put me in mind of the half marathon I ran a few weeks ago. The race was down near Maastricht, just across the border in Belgium. The whole family travelled, and we took a few days to see Maastricht together, a beautiful town on the Maas.

The day of the race was the only rainy day in a week, and that was fortunate. It would have been too hot otherwise. I wasn’t in the best shape. If I needed reminding of that, it was available in the video of my finish. The video is hosted on the race’s website, a kind of promotional bonus. Vendors try to sell you photos and mementos.

Mine was not a glorious finish. But it’s hardly a ‘glory’ sport. There is little vanity in watching yourself finish a half marathon. Maybe the elite runners manage some dignity and grace in the sport, but most of us, after twenty-one kilometres, are just awkward and haggard.

There are other reasons to watch the video. Seeing the finish again is recalling the day and recalling the scene. The video brings back the low skies and the sultry, misty atmosphere. The camera was set beside the finish line to catch runners as they approached, and so we get a view of the main street of the small town that hosted the race, the quaint brick buildings and bistros lining the street, the park where the tents were set up for the event. The street carries on for only a mile or two, hosting a number of old beauties from times past, ending at the site of the small Church of Saint Hadelin, pretty with its flint facing. Beyond that, the town ends as it runs up against rocky bluffs that face the river.

By the time you’re finishing a race that long, your scope of observation has narrowed considerably. It’s nice to have the video as a mnemonic and be able to relive the moment without the pain. I do remember well the scenery of the first half of the race. The course circled twice through town during its first few kilometres. On one swing though the centre, I detoured into the café where Menna and the babies were sitting to steal a few kisses.

After that, the course headed out into the countryside. It lead north and south along the Maas River. The river valley is broad, bordered by low-lying bluffs, and occupying the rich land in the valley are green fields and orchards. The running there is very peaceful. Here and there, like reminders of the industrial history of the valley, there are mysterious factories on the tops of the bluffs, standing like the castles you might see in other locales.

And it all passed so quickly. I counted the kilometres as I went, checking my watch to confirm how poorly I was performing and then shrugging mentally. I took in the scenery. After the seventeenth kilometre or so, my focus shifted to the road and finishing. Another twenty minutes or so, and there I was, tripping across the finish line, with little accomplishment and less grace.

Travelogue 805 – May 27
Assumption into Heaven
Part Three

Harlequin made his first appearance some time around 1570. Tradition says it was one Zan Ganassa who introduced him to the stage. Zan is a stage name, Zan for Zanni, which was the man’s specialty. While playing Zannis, he also managed a company that toured in France and Spain. The character Harlequin was picked up by one Tristano Martinelli, who spent years developing it for the pleasure of audiences in Paris. Harlequin, created by Italian actors for the Italian Commedia, was essentially French in character. He was Harlequin before he was Arlecchino.

That seems fair, given Harlequin’s French roots. It’s likely he is descended from a mythical figure in French and northern medieval folk tales named Hellequin, Hellequin was either a ninth century count who died fighting the Normans or a spirit loosely identified with the Wild Hunt, or both. He might even be a variation of Herla, king of the Britons, who might himself be a variation of Woden, the king of the Nordic gods. The Wild Hunt was a haunting of the north coast of France and North Sea cultures. A ghostly king led his ghostly entourage on a hunt in the dead of night, and whoever was unfortunate enough to see this phenomenon was doomed.

Either way, Hellequin became a devil figure in the passion plays of medieval France. Over the years this devil figure evolved into something more of a trickster figure, and then into a clown.

I enjoy little histories like these. There was a time when I would have found much that was tantalizing here, in the story of the devil who became a clown. I would have suspected insights into the soul, clues to greater meaning, clues probably of a Jungian nature, in the Campbellian tradition. Now I just laugh and enjoy. It’s debatable how suggestive these sorts of details are, how well they capture something universal. But one thing I can be certain of: human beings can’t help but love the characters they create. Put the devil onstage, and sooner or later he becomes loveable. That includes a metaphorical stage like Milton’s. Milton’s Satan was notoriously sympathetic, which was not likely to have been Milton’s intention.

In any case, I find myself drawn to the style and method of the Commedia dell’Arte. I’ve been experimenting with farce for a few years now, and I’m intrigued by the aesthetic of the French and Venetian stock characters. If it all seems primitive, the masks and the costumes, the broad comedy brought quickly home by clownish movement, take a minute to consider our addiction to superheroes. How is it we know which is Deadpool and which is Spider Man? Why is there a right way to swing Thor’s Hammer, and a wrong way; a right way to swing from one thread from a spider web? Why do we debate about Batman’s voice?

The fact is, there is great freedom in type. It’s a guilty pleasure for the modern mind. Maybe less so for the post-modern mind, which goes to great pains in apologies for its creeping medievalism. How can narratives and characters so scripted as those of the twentieth-century superheroes yield remake after remake? It’s because there is great latitude for aesthetic invention inside the strict frameworks; just the same as there are many, many ways to paint the Assumption. In significant ways, creative freedom is enhanced inside narratives already understood.

Each type of Zanni has its stance and walk. Broadly speaking, the Zanni stands with knees bent and feet splayed. Back arched and elbows bent. When he moves, his centre of gravity is low. He moves his head like a pecking chicken. He kicks when he runs, feet pointed in front of him.

Travelogue 804 – May 21
Assumption into Heaven
Part Two

Below the tower of the Chiesa di Santa Margherita, the cafes were buzzing with chatter. I had taken my seat just below the forlorn tower. The church building, holding down one corner of the campo, was long ago converted into a university building. At ground level, the architecture of the tower is more entertaining than at its heights. Stone gargoyles guard its entrances. On the campo side there’s one door framed by pillars in relief. And just above the entrance, a dragon’s head is laughing.

The students stopped at the cafes and carried on in their cascading Italian, punctuated by many exclamations and giggling. Then they were off again, joining the streams of foot traffic crossing the spacious square. The students and the tourists formed most of the body of these ant trails.

There were locals, too. Men were setting up their tables in the square, where they would sell fish. Neighbours greeted each other, stood together and chatted. An old man caught water from the public fountain in his hand for his dog to lap up.

Refreshed and caffeinated, I crossed the square, pausing to admire the Scuola dei Varoteri, a fourteenth-century building, free-standing in the southern side of the square, built for a brotherhood of furriers, and serving it for four hundred years. I’ve read that in Mussolini’s day the building was briefly dedicated to a school of mystical fascism, a bizarre outgrowth of the times, a movement trying to marry the personality cut with mythology and the teachings of the usual rogues of nineteenth century philosophy.

I took to the alleys behind the square, looking for bookshops. It was a university neighbourhood, so I was confident I would find some good shops. I discovered in one alley a row of workshops producing masks for Carnival. The masks are handmade, and each workshop is small. The masks they produce are colourful and distinct. They represent a tradition that is centuries old. Carnival in Venice can be dated back at least seven hundred years in Venetian documents, and it’s undoubtedly much older than that. The masks are just as old, as far as anyone can tell. And they served more purposes than Carnival. They were generally accepted as a way to travel anonymously through the city.

In the sixteenth century, masks were put to use in a new way, in a new form of theatre that came to be called the Commedia dell’Arte. This was a form of farce brought to public squares, in which travelling troupes performed a host of stock characters improvisationally. Such stories as there were existed as guides for character cues. The art form became very popular in Western Europe, more popular in France in the next century than it ever was in Italy.

Over time, the masks for the Commedia dell’Arte evolved. Characters evolved and split into multiple varieties of their type, each with a specified mask. An example might be Zanni. This character started as the simple-minded but cunning servant, based on the impoverished ‘Giannis’ who came into Venice from the countryside.

The mask for Zanni was a half mask with a long nose. The longer the nose, the more stupid. Zanni’s stupidity was important. It’s what eventually split his personality. The plays needed clever Zannis and stupid Zannis, and these became the First and Second Zannis. Masks adapted. So did his costume. Zanni’s poverty was important. One Zanni wore patched clothing. The patches became stylized, and the character took on his own personality. The new Zanni became more acrobatic. He was a clown more than a participant in the plot. He took the name Arlecchino.

Travelogue 803 – May 17
Assumption into Heaven
Part One

I was drawing many verbal sketches while I was in Venice, taking notes. One day I discovered the Campo Santa Margherita. It seemed a very spacious square for the tiny city, and therefore a good place to find a place to sit in the sun. I took full advantage of that, finding rest there during several intervals in a long day.

The square is close to the great Frari church, a site I was eager to visit again because of its art treasures. The centrepiece is Titian’s ‘Assumption’, considered by some to be the masterpiece of the era. It was painted for this altar, and still hangs there. One has to admire it from afar, since it hangs above the altar. But the painting was drafted for that space, for that distance from its congregation. It stands almost seven metres tall. It is a beautiful piece, expressive and colourful, composed in three tiers, Mary rising above the heads of the apostles toward God the Father above.

There was more to see at Frari Church. I took particular interest in several of the tombs and monuments. There was, for example, the ghoulish opulence of the monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, erected in the mid-seventeenth century and set with a large host of allegorical statuary, including two black skeletons that would be the highlights of any carnival’s haunted house.

My first draw to the Frari was the monument to Antonio Canova. The piece stands out in this house of Baroque art. It was built in the 1820s by disciples of Canova, built according to a design Canova had drawn for a monument to Titian. The monument is a smooth marble relief of a pyramid. Placed on steps leading to a single plain doorway into the pyramid are allegorical Neoclassical figures portraying great grief. Inside is entombed the artist’s hand. So they say.

Canova became one theme for my trip. There was an exhibit at the Accademia dedicated to Canova and several contemporaries, opening a window into their shared time in Venice, and including works they gathered to send to Vienna in 1818 in honour of the wedding of Emperor Franz I. Pre-eminent among those works was Canova’s ‘Polyhymnia’. Visible in this sculpture was everything sublime about Canova, the sheen, the sensuality, and the beautiful line that captured the real sense of skin or textile, chair arm or pillow. I spent some time with the sculpture, enduring the camera flashes of drive-by aesthetes, every one of whom paused only long enough to take a photo.

Back at the Campo Santa Margherita, I ordered more coffee. I took stock of the great architectural variety on display in the square. Behind me was the (decommissioned) church that gave the campo its name. Now it belongs to the Ca’ Foscari University. The tower is unmistakably medieval, rising in faded brick, the wall facing the square broken only by two lancet windows.

It’s surprising how poetic a simple, unadorned wall can be – poetic in the sense that it says so much with so little. Time and weather have had their impact. The community replaced sections of the wall. They used what bricks were available. The surface became an aesthetic composition in texture and colour, made by humans, but accidental in its final state. I love architecture, but there’s more to my appreciation of old buildings than architecture. The effect this wall has on me, for example, is to create a silence that stands apart from the rumble of activity below.

Travelogue 802 – May 7
Walking Sketch
Part Two

The first church on this site was built in 1028, built as a monastic chapel. It was dedicated to St. Helena, one of Christianity’s great mother figures. Helena was mother to Constantine, the Roman emperor who made Christianity legitimate in the Empire.

Some historians have suggested Helena converted her son; some say the opposite. I’m inclined to think the former, based on my ten minutes of scholarship. It just feels right, maybe because of the strong class barriers to Christianity during the early empire. The cult was strongly rooted in the lower classes. Helena’s own roots were common. Se was an innkeeper when she met the Roman general who was Constantine’s father. It’s not certain the two were ever married.

In any case, Helena was devout, and she performed some services for the church that were never forgotten. In her old age, Helena travelled in the Holy Land. She built churches, including one at the site of the Nativity in Bethlehem and one on the Mount of Olives. She had a temple torn down, Hadrian’s temple on the site of Jesus’ tomb. She dug there for relics and miraculously found the True Cross and the nails of the Crucifixion. These she brought back to Rome. This alone made her a folk hero for a thousand years. Her relics proliferated through the Middle Ages, until splinters of that cross were traded across all Europe.

Helena herself became an artefact for the church in Venice. Her remains were reportedly stolen from Constantinople in 1211 by a monk and carried back to Venice. A side chapel was added to the church for veneration of the sainted mother. It’s still there. There is a glass case under the altar with the shape of a body inside, in gowns and a silver mask. What is under those gowns is an open question, as legends about the body piracy speak of an urn. (Sailors found themselves repeatedly run aground near the island that is home to Sant’ Elena. Only by unloading the urn could they escape. She had found her home.)

It’s a pleasant enough resting place. It’s very peaceful. There were very few visitors on the day I chanced upon the church, and they were as careful to be quiet as I was. There’s something about the place that encourages reverence. You sense the age of the place. The walls are weathered and bare. Much of the adornment for these walls has been moved to museums. Part of the cloisters remain, outside the door opposite Helena’s chapel. It feels like a ruin, but one lived in. There are benches. There are potted plants. It’s a nice place to sit n a hot day. It’s a rare place of rest in Venice.

Travelogue 801 – May 5
Walking Sketch
Part One

The seasons have turned here in the north. I arrived back in the Netherlands, and it was raining. I had lost my jacket during the trip, and so I was victim to the chill and the fat drops of spring rain. I couldn’t have scripted it better. The transition was perfect.

This morning, though, the sun is bright, and I have no need of a jacket. As I coast down the hill on my bike, down the far side of the bridge over the Schie, I pass the micro-grove of trees between roadways, where only a few weeks ago the cherry blossoms had been in glorious bloom. Now there are no flowers, but thick foliage. In a matter of a few short weeks, the trees have full bodies of leaves.

I’m put in mind of the wisteria petals and the strong sun of Italia. I had been looking for a place to stop on my trek east along the Riva degli Schiavona. I had made it as far as the Giardini della Biennale, a very Italian public park, walled off and dotted with statues of nineteenth-century heroes. I could have sat in the grass, but it would have meant foregoing any nourishment, and I had been doing that for hours. Finally, I spotted a café set next to the boardwalk.

I sat at a patio table lagoon-side, with only the patio wall separating me from the Riva. The slanted roof of corrugated iron didn’t shield me from the sun. Neither did the trellis and climbing wisteria. The warm light fell across my lap, fell across the pages of the history of Venice. The pink petals dropped onto the pages, and every so often I had to sweep them away.

Sated and rested, warmed by the sun, I left the garden behind. I was drawn to see the eastern frontier of the island city. I discovered that farther east, the city’s original nature asserted itself, its nature as a confederation of isles. At its farthest reaches, several isles are held to the commune only by a few bridges, trailing behind like seaweed caught on a fish’s tail. And as superfluous as the extra isles seem, they have strong claims in Venetian history. Take San Pietro di Castello, for example. Though the current basilica dates to the sixteenth century, there has been a church on that little isle since Venice was nothing more than small islands in the marshes and Venetians only refugees, farmers and fishermen.

I let curiosity guide me. Past the gardens, I found only quiet neighbourhoods. The gaudy wealth of old Venice had been overtaken by the mundane. The housing was humble. The tourist crowds had dwindled. In their stead, in the park that curved along the furthest edge of the island, local teens were playing ball, local parents were walking their infants and their dogs. And my pace slowed to that of a weekend stroll. I was enjoying the peace.

Finally, there was only a military campus, forbidden to civilians. I turned to follow the canal. Past the military compound, there was one final bridge, crossing to the easternmost island. The place was so quiet, I doubted myself. But I followed the path toward what was clearly a church ahead.

Travelogue 800 – April 30
A Sketch
Part Two

One side of the campo is set with ageing buildings that house the neighbourhood’s little bars. The other side is set with the medieval church. In between, the children run and yell. A few of the boys have gotten their hands on a baseball and glove. One boy is shouting out instructions to the mysterious game, running three bases in the wrong direction.

One of the boys belongs to a couple sitting at a nearby table. He’s younger than the others. He might be four or five. The father looks Japanese. He and his wife seem to trade off between English, Spanish and Italian. The boy is suddenly forlorn, standing alone in the square and crying. The father just smiles. I measure my own likely response – to run to the child – against his serenity, and I can’t say which is right. The boy makes his way slowly to the father, and the father picks him up.

Later I encounter the father inside the bar, waiting for his drinks. I tell him his boy is very cute. He smiles and thanks me, but doesn’t look me in the eye,

Past the father’s seat outside, I have a view of the right side of the campo. The closest building there is one of those square medieval towers I enjoy, raised in dark brick and set asymmetrically with small arched windows that might climb with an internal staircase. Set somewhat randomly in the wall is a white medallion depicting a Madonna with child.

Next to the tower is a humble bit of Renaissance architecture, rectangular windows set in regular order in a field of plaster once painted lime green. This building also has small white medallions, though these are placed with mathematical regularity and feature allegorical or purely decorative themes.

Turning one corner of the campo, we encounter the church opposite. And further along, after crossing an alleyway that enters the square, there is an unremarkable building, more modern, distinguished only by its maroon colouring, a building that reminds me for some reason of Rome, of the miles of apartment buildings in the southern stretches of the city.

The other side of the campo seems to be the upscale side. There is pretty bit of Perugian pink, with mullioned windows and lovely balcony. The building now houses a hotel. Next to it is something yellow that seems more seventeenth or eighteenth century, with inscriptions on tablets on the second floor, under modest curving gables. The first floor, with its balcony white French windows, seems to weigh heavily on the plain ground floor. The building sags on one side, as though weary.

This is Venice, city of campos. Only a few short blocks from crowds of tourists on the Riva degli Schiavona, we are enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon. The tourists are taking in the dramatic view of the Palazzo Ducale, the Salute, and San Giorgio Maggiore, monuments on three spurs of land in the Venetian lagoon. Here, families are having drinks and chatting. There is no drama.

There are a few drops of rain, and the children run toward shelter. The owner of the café comes out and stands beside me to crank open the awning. I move a few inches for shelter, lazy enough to suffer some light rain rather than move. The rain doesn’t last long. But the spell is broken. The children have gone.

Travelogue 799 – April 29
A Sketch
Part One

I’m composing a sketch, taking notes about the campo. Campo means field, and originally this town square was a field. The campo was one of the essential elements in the consolidation of this city in its early history. Every community needed a parish church. The church required a field, and the field a well. Communities thus established grew and met each other, merging into one city.

I’m spending a few hours of my last evening in the city at an outdoor table in this campo, drinking Campari spritzes and reading a lengthy history of the city. Across the campo is the founding church of the community, the church of San Giovanni Battista in Bragora. It’s a modest church, its facade a simple, three-part brick arch. The central section features a rose window of no dramatic beauty. No single feature of the old church is impressive, but the whole is beautiful. It could be the tone of the old brick. It could be the simple bell tower behind it. It’s hardly a tower. It’s more of a high wall with three open arches for the bells. It’s a modest church in a city of grandeur.

The church dates to when this little community was an island. All this part of the city was a broken set of marshes and islands. The island was settled. A church was built, a well sunk, a field cleared, and houses built for the new families. Everyone was a refugee of sorts, fleeing the waves of invasion that characterized the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The building that houses my café faces the old church. It has a shabby air about it. It has felt the hand of Time. Above and behind us are pinkish walls of peeling paint and plaster and sad balconies, outlined by bell-shaped railings.

I share the few café tables with local families. They all have children. Some are crying in their carriages, Others are playing in the square. There are several dozen children out there, running after footballs and shouting. A few fathers and grandfathers play along, chasing the balls, kicking them, or blocking imaginary goals. It’s Sunday, and it feels like timeless tradition.

Between the café and the church lies the campo, laid with uneven grey flagstones, flagstones to judge by their state that must be generations old. In the square is the white cistern head, familiar to every campo in town. There is one tree with benches underneath. And a war memorial with a flag pole.

The campo is no longer named for the church, but for several patriots who died for Italy in the nineteenth century. In a concession to the city, so many times older than the modern state, the signpost painted onto one campo wall uses both old and new names.

The church is humble and doesn’t beg any recognition. Its self-effacing silence – underscored by the weeds growing from the high brickwork and by the chipped stone in the tower’s pediment – is appealing. It has a kind of early Christian sensibility. The ornament at the top of the central section could almost be a dove.

Travelogue 798 – April 16
The Butterfly with Feathers
Part Two

It’s mid-scene, and I’m exiting the stage. The lights go out, and I stumble. One actor is left onstage, and the scene is supposed to go on. The lights come back on as I reach the curtain. The actor picks up with his lines.

I only had ninety minutes to confer with the technician, to set lights and to run through light and sound cues. This is the reality in small-time theatre. There are going to be mistakes. And every one of our four performances is in a different venue, so this will happen every time but with different and unpredictable mistakes.

Offstage, Maria helps me with a costume change. ‘Backstage’ is simply the rest of the café. I’m changing pants, but no one is paying attention. Actors backstage pace and mumble like extras in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, too focused on their next entrance to notice what anyone else is doing. Maria very sweetly wipes my brow for me. I had forgotten how hot those stage lights are. Sweat has been trickling down to my collar.

During a short monologue, an audience member abruptly stands and rushes off stage. The way to the café – and the toilet - leads across stage. I stutter and hesitate. I drop a line. I recover, but the performance feels marred. An actor shouldn’t let anything get to him.

Performance time flies. The show is over before I’ve found the moment to place myself: this is the premiere of two new plays. It’s the culmination of months of work. There is too much to process, so much to do to make the simplest play start on time, that there is too little space for enjoyment. Performance is a pinpoint of time.

Maybe that’s why theatre people return again and again to the scene of something essentially insane, the enactment of absurd lyrics, jotted down like notes from dreams recorded in bars and Metro stations, each scene an orchestration of chaos. We return to try again to be present during these rare and fleeting experiences.

We blink, and the show is over. We pat each other on the backs. We leave the green room to join our audience in the café. I’m handed a glass of wine, and I’m grateful for the timely tether to earthly things. I’m not really an actor so these rituals are disorienting.

I’m still disoriented, days later. Opening night is a type of magical rite, and I’m recovering. How do the remaining performances go? Will it be more routine the second time, just taking care of business? Will I have a cooler head and be more present? Or will time still resolutely race, while I find different mistakes to make? After all the shows are done, will I have memories of stilled motion, images of heightened moments? Or will the experience resist and remain a blur?

I’m sitting quietly. Another type of performance begins in an hour. I have a class to teach. I’m watching the street outside. It’s a bright spring day, and I can see the delight on many faces.

Life is a set of projects. That’s how we moderns live. And each project has its key moment, the performance, the result. Conventional wisdom has it that life is about the long intervals in between performance points. That’s obvious. That’s comforting. But where’s our philosophy of performance? In a society driven to reality TV, extreme sports, and extreme politics, where’s our understanding of the moment when the stage lights are raised?

Travelogue 797 – April 14
The Butterfly with Feathers
Part One

“Hope is the thing with feathers.” I used to share this poem when I taught developmental reading at the community college. It led to great exercises in the understanding of metaphors. That was a long time ago. Now, instead of teaching poetry, I’m writing an exam testing vocabulary for business English. Put this noun phrase in order: job and dull extremely an laborious.

I like how Dickinson’s poem manages to say something very simple about hope, the very simplest thing: how it endures. It’s simple but nonetheless mysterious. How does it endure? Strip the question down: does it? Its resilience is integral to the definition of hope. Or is it? Is hope just a feeling that comes and goes, like all emotions, fleeting, powerful and yet without substance?

I miss hope. It’s not the sprightly little bird it used to be. I can’t say why. Maybe hope requires wider horizons than I have at my age. Maybe hope, which ‘sweetest in the gale is heard’, doesn’t bother with the fortunate. I’ve been fortunate, and I knock on wood. Or is it just that the song of hope takes on a different tone in life’s long second half, something softer and more indirect?

What I seem to have replaced for hope is anxiety. I have written two plays and they debut this evening. Rather than anticipation or soaring expectations, I just feel a dull ache in the heart, something like disappointment. Hope encourages risk. But risk does nothing for hope. Hope looks only toward the future. Take enough risks in life, and you might learn to dread success. The let-down is the same whether in success or failure; the success just messes with your mind.

I’m nervous. I should never have agreed to act. I’m no actor. I had a fancy that I wanted the camaraderie that actors have. Admittedly, it’s been fun. But I would like to opt out of the performance, please.

It’s funny that I should wrestle with hope. I have founded several organizations with the name of Hope. Should I be an expert? Or, in this era of ‘campaigns’, isn’t it best to see the campaign manager as the one most driven by the puzzles inherent in the pursuit? I have needed to know that there was hope. Many good people have answered the call and taught me.

Still, I seek today’s rescue in my morning coffee. The spirit of the café reaches out to me. The barista shows me a photo of his colleagues meeting with the king. There’s a march outside, people and their noise-makers labouring for change. I am always learning. I am telling people’s stories.

Travelogue 796 – April 8
The Course of Rivers

Was the church built to resemble a castle? Under the onion-like domes of its spire, the brick tower is square and fitted with lancet windows. Each corner on top has a small tower with triumphant little flags that shine golden in the intermittent sun.

I’m back in Overschie, the little town on the Schie that has been absorbed into Rotterdam. At the village’s centre is this fortress of a church that rises high above the rest as a landmark and a time-piece. I have a road race coming up in mid-May, so my training is allowing me to reach longer distances. Improved endurance opens horizons. I go farther, see more. I visit old friends like the Grote Kerk in Overschie. The church still stands at the sharp bend of the Schie, where the river jogs quickly east before continuing north toward Delft.

When I run north to see the old church, I run along the river and then down the quaint streets of Overschie’s small town centre. The church grounds force a curve in the road, like a boulder standing in a stream, before the road turns left as the town follows the river. But I turn into the cobbled lane that runs behind the church and, just for twenty metres or so, overlooks the river.

Soon I will have to say, ‘This is where the river used to be.’ Currently what you encounter when you jog along the cobblestone is the prospect of several kilometres of piles of displaced earth. It has been decided to redraw the map. This particular dog’s leg in the course of the Schie must have been a nuisance for barge pilots. Heading south, the river’s curve as it passed the church was relatively gentle. But thereafter boats were forced to negotiate a rather sharp turn to continue south, passing under a low old-style bridge, the control of which was housed in a small and quaint structure that was a contemporary of the seventeenth-century church. For all I know, this dog’s leg survives from the earliest days of the church. The map of the town certainly suggests so.

Running home, I follow the path along the other side of the river. There, I overlook the new river bed, being laboriously dug from the soil. The evidence of the dig is there, though I’ve never seen the equipment. The trench seems nearly complete, left silent amid great stands of raw dirt. A few metres of water stand at the bottom. A swan floats lazily there, preening itself, the one sign of peace. I can see the course of the trench as it aims directly for the old bridge. The barge pilots will be happy.

I marvel that the map can be changed so easily. I don’t know how long the river ran the way it did, but I’m guessing a good long while. In years to come, people will question the strange jog in the street map. They will see in the plan of the old town the vestiges of something gone. The piles of earth will probably be replaced in quick order by new types of construction, and in years to come there will be new homes. The church spire will stand over their yards.

This has always been the story of Holland, a steady re-shaping of the lands and waters. Everything we see has been moulded and cultivated, excavated and then sculpted. To some degree it’s the story of Europe. It takes centuries to execute this scale of architecture in town and country. America’s story is one of amazing, dizzying, frightening development, and yet Americans settlements still have their rough edges, and the wilderness makes its quiet incursions. This sort of detail in the milieu can have decisive effects on character.

Travelogue 795 – March 30
Songs for Children

I’ve been listening to Dutch children’s songs. Sometimes Menna starts up a cycle of YouTube videos. We sing together. Baby dances, and Mama and Papa practice their rude Dutch. There’s a particular series we prefer. It’s a mix of cartoons with videos of teachers singing with their small students. The teachers are dubbed over with professional voices.

In one catchy tune, the cartoon boy starts with, ‘Ik ben ik, en jij bent jij.’ That means, ‘I am me and you are you’. The song introduces each member of the boy’s family. The cartoon boy is quite a happy little character. He runs into the arms of papa, mama, grandparents, sisters and brothers, all with manic smiles.

Baby watches with rapt attention. And so do I, for that matter. I’m finding the world of children’s art mesmerizing. The first objectives of children’s art are pedagogical, of course, and therefore peculiarly resonant. Since it is likely that all art, literature and philosophy is pedagogical in its roots, when we indulge in children’s art or song we are exploring the building blocks of thought.

Children’s songs name the things of the world. Here is your family, and this is your house. Here are cars and buildings. Here are the animals. This is the set, and this is the cast of characters for a lifetime, for a lifetime of lifetimes. The furniture of the mind is the mind itself. While I sing with Baby, it’s like taking a tour of the beams and girders and foundations behind the six walls of consciousness, before the room is finished and decorated, before we outline some story on the bare plaster.

If pedagogy is the first priority, form is still the first contact. It must be sweet as honey. The hooks are unflinchingly cute and alluring. Melodies are catchy. Cartoons are silly and the characters adorable. Stories are structured like songs, with beats and rhymes and refrains. In full stride, it is great art in its ability to captivate. After only a few viewings, ‘Ik Ben Ik,’ was imprinted in my mind, image and melody, indelibly. I am singing it to the rhythm of my bicycle. I’m am whistling it at work.

And children’s art must be funny. It’s surprising and how daring children’s humour is. We grow up and our horizons contract. Watching TV, it would seem as though penis jokes were the very cutting edge of humour, but this is more childish than childlike. Children’s humour cuts much deeper, challenging reality and society at their underpinnings with the lightness of immortals. It recalls the cruel pranks of the Greek gods.

I’m more convinced than ever that the most profound philosophy is the philosophy of things. The basics are the mystery. No matter what age, how old and wise, the human is forced to wonder at the simplest things, stare out the window at the mad city and wonder what each simple form could mean. Take the human form, ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. No evolution or physics can give it significance. The science of colour doesn’t make green less wondrous. It doesn’t add a thing to the joke and the subversion of Green Eggs and Ham. One does no justice to the thing, abstracting it into Platonic form. ‘Suffer little children.’ The gods always put wonder and humour above all else.

Travelogue 794 – March 25
Elections

Last Wednesday was election day for municipal councils across the Netherlands. The Dutch cast their votes for council members in 355 municipalities, choosing among dozens of local and national parties. Party placards still litter the city, reminding everyone of their civic duty long after the races have been decided. Non-citizens can vote in these elections, though only after five years’ residence, so we fell just short of eligibility.

An actor in one of my plays was running. I should correct to say ‘campaigning’, since parties can run, but not individuals. He was principal founder of a new local party, so he probably would have been first to take a seat in the community council. They didn’t win any seats, as it turns out, but they did run a strong race.

This is the time to start a local party. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in the success of the local and the new. The post-war party system has seen significant decay in Western Europe. This was perhaps best dramatized by Macron’s victory in France, winning the presidency with a party of his own making. In a country where political traditions are so strong, this was remarkable.

In Holland, the template may have been set by the GroenLinks party, or ‘Green Left’, founded in 1989 during the Green Party craze and still going strong. Wednesday they won more seats in Amsterdam than any other party. The party polled well in the national race just last year, under the leadership of a charismatic young man named Jesse.

These days, new parties crowd the ballot. One of the most popular is the Party for the Animals. It may sound comic to an American ear, but they have a complete platform of left-leaning policy statements and are taken very seriously. Founded in 2002, they have five seats in the national legislature, and Wednesday captured 33 council seats.

Rotterdam is a conservative town. The biggest winner was the party that has dominated for some time, Leefbaar Rotterdam, ‘Liveable Rotterdam’, a populist party founded by a controversial figure, one Pim Fortuyn, who was an early example of a type that we are so familiar with now, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 by a Dutch environmental activist, a non-Muslim. Fortuyn’s party carries on, stronger than ever.

One very new party is named ‘Denk, or ‘Think’. It was founded in 2015 by two Turkish-Dutch members of the House of Representatives who left the Labour Party to found a group more directly committed to the issues of immigrants. They have done well, winning seats in 13 cities. They won three seats in Rotterdam. It shouldn’t be surprising that there has been some grumbling about this party. It is rumoured to be an extension of Erdogan’s political machine, keeping tabs on the Turkish-Dutch community, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, including many who can still vote in Turkish elections.

My friend didn’t win his seat, hut he’s optimistic. The new party will go on. He’ll campaign again. He’s very young and has a lot of energy. I’m still not sure what his party stands for, if not simply for youth. He speaks like a 90s third-way centrist. He questions the EU, but in thoughtful ways. He questions the role of government. He mocks Trump. These are the times.

Travelogue 793 – March 17
Pursued by the Machine

Yes, it’s time to start selling tickets for my plays. But things aren’t that simple anymore. Once upon a time, I would have visited a printer and walked out with a roll or a stack of paper tickets. I would have accepted cash money in the palm of my hand, and with my own fingers I would have passed one entrance ticket to the eager audience member.

Now everything is cybernetic. Tickets exist in the ethers. I’m supposing those are the same ethers as those that harbour our money. Access is granted by one machine or another. You type in codes, or you produce plastic cards that are meant to be swiped across magical surfaces or inserted into magical boxes, and then entrance is granted you. You may never touch a paper ticket, but the gatekeepers will know it’s you.

I’m superstitious. I want to take cash and give a paper ticket. I mention this to my cast. The twenty-year-old just stares. ‘Why?’ she asks. To her, it must sound like I’m going to translate the play into Klingon. As it happens, there’s no easy way to get paper tickets. Because Matteo has signed up for online sales, he has to request and print tickets for me. He has to drive to Rotterdam on the weekend to drop them off for me. Once I have tickets, it’s in no way easy to sell them. When I pitch to colleagues, they search for cash in their bags and wallets as though it were an old coffee-drink discount card. ‘I was sure I had it …’

I’m just wrapping up a short run on a cold day. I’m stretching and pacing in the courtyard of my apartment building. The familiar face I see belongs to Matteo. He’s been pacing the grounds of my complex seeking entry. The first floor is accessible by intercom and buzzer only.

He looks me up and down in disbelief. It’s not the shorts in the cold. It’s the fact that I would run at all. There’s an old-world Italian courtliness to him, the kind that may believe in duty and hard work but still finds exercise distasteful. He produces from his rucksack a folder with twenty printed tickets. I’m embarrassed that he had to deliver these by hand.

He tells me he was looking for a mailbox, somewhere he could drop off the tickets. ‘How does mail get delivered?’ he asks. I say the mailman drops it through the slot in the door. ‘He must have a key, then.’ I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, he must.

In good Dutch fashion, the mailman delivers on a bicycle, outfitted with saddle bags in the colours of the Dutch postal service, orange and blue. He’s friendly enough, shy and soft-spoken, looking a bit beleaguered, as no doubt anyone would delivering mail in this weather. And still, nice enough as he is, I flinch a bit at the sight of him. The mail he delivers is never good. Most of it is invoices. Those invoices might be from utility companies. They could be from any of the myriad government agencies who collect taxes. Said agencies have each a signature coloured envelope, and the sight of those colours is likely to give me hives as time passes and debt compiles. They pursue me with the coldly efficient persistence of the Dutch temperament, and their threats are never idle. They are quietly executed on exact timelines, and there is no escape from enforcement, as residence here is allowed only on strict terms of accessibility in your profile. One must be plugged in to be Dutch. Bank accounts, addresses, wages, insurance, visas, taxes, and government benefits are all wound tightly together in citizen identity. It’s an effective system, and we are easy prey.

Still, it’s a benevolent system, better represented by the mailman’s deferential manner, really, than by the stern and unadorned language of Dutch bureaucracy. If this bewildering network of governmental agencies hadn’t proven to be more forgiving than first appearances, I would have been bankrupt and abandoned back in Minneapolis by now.

Travelogue 792 – March 10
Change in the Machine

Nobody has change. We’ve stopped at the grocery store, at the café, and at several bars. No one can break the fifty.

It’s funny how few Dutch people actually use currency. I know I don’t. I rarely have cash on hand. Even small change. If I want to leave a tip, I have to remember to ask the cashier to add it into the charge on my card.

Living on electronic money certainly makes life easier. Transactions are fast. Everyone has card-readers. And most are the kind you can simply swipe. Once in a while the machines will reject a swipe and ask for a code, just the occasional check against fraud.

It can trigger anxieties. Your heart might skip a beat when the machine rejects your card, especially when you are new to the cashless economy. Have you been hacked? Are you bankrupt? Has the account finally been emptied? Somehow spending money with a card exaggerates the sense of burning through money. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe that’s unique to those who grew up spending cash.

I only wanted to sell a few tickets to my upcoming play. I wrote two one-acts that I’m directing and producing in April. And the old-style promoter in me wants to sell paper tickets in advance, to make sure we fill seats - or at least to try to break even early. Friends are willing, but they have no cash.

I accompany Teresa to the grocery store at lunch time. She buys a sandwich with her card. She withdraws a fifty from the cash machine. We walk from storefront to storefront trying to break it. Finally, we give up. She leaves the fifty with me, good friend, and leaves it to me to break.

Later in the day, I pay for coffee with the fifty. It feels awkward. The barista stares at the bill a moment. She has trouble counting the change. I’ve embarrassed myself presenting cash.

If I feel vulnerable without paper money, it’s probably only my age. Was my money safer when flesh-and-blood bank cashiers counted it out for me? Were the cashiers or bank managers more responsive in crisis? Isn’t that the core anxiety in a world of machines, that there is no one to hear you scream – in rage or in distress?

I am curious about the story of the failsafes that were developed before banks set up their first ATMs in the mid-1960s. The procedures and tests must have been extensive, trusting money to unmanned machinery.

Now I realize if I want to accept cash, I need some sort of mediating machine. I will need to invest in a card-reader. It’s an odd accommodation, a form of cybernetic adaptation. My hand is no longer adequate equipment for receiving payment.