Travelogue 607 – March 13
Sounds of Soddo
Part Five

I am ready for dinner, though I can’t say I approach it with much anticipation. The menu at the Soddo hotel is limited. There is meat, and there is spaghetti with meat sauce. The meat was tough last night. The atmosphere will be spare. These rooms lose their only charm as the sun sets. There is a corollary to Ethiopian culture that light must be found suspect. Homes and inside spaces shall be dim. Lamps shall be fitted with the lowest wattage. The TV must outshine lamps. The foreign psychology bows under this pressure, becoming either sleepy or depressed. All instincts toward life are suppressed. My companions will be tired from the day’s travels. We will chew our tough meat in silence.

Still, that will come later. There is some lingering light in the skies. The heat of the day has built behind these high windows. The flies are indulging in a final bacchanal before the darkness that must comprise a significant spell of mourning in their short lives. They buzz with quiet and desperate abandon. I place the dry half lime over the opening of my bottle of tonic.

Levi-Strauss mocks the travel writer of his day for peddling false tonics, distillations of heightened experience, appealing to domestic audiences who seek a scent of wisdom come from the wilds of the borderlands, where civilization falls off the edge of the world, like the map did in Columbus’s day. Psychological monsters peer over the edge at us. For several centuries after the discovery of the New World, writers churned out stories about the bizarre monsters found there, the wild tribes, the paradises and the infernos.

Levi-Strauss doesn’t seem to question the existence of the monsters, just the motives of the hunters. He simply impugns the quest for thrills. He prefers the pursuit of real knowledge, travel for purposes of science. Writers for thrills tend to distort, he says. They reflect the common naiveté of travellers. They see, they discover for themselves, of course, and personal discovery is authentic as far as it goes. It’s when they draw general rule from personal discovery that they get into trouble. Everything observed is offered as a first; every sign of culture offered as ancient and unchanging.

I am recording ‘awesome’. We’re riding up the mountain on the back of motorcycles, each one of us riding behind one driver, as we assault the dirt trails winding up the slopes, riding over stones, swinging wildly to catch a dirt groove on the side of the trail, inches from the drop down a steep hillside. At one point, I turn to see a young, tan bull galloping after us, its horns only a couple feet from my back. I’m not sure how scared to be. The bull is persistent, but could be following, playing, fearful, as much as attacking. I’m more alarmed later, as we whip round another bull, black and stubborn, lowering his head to swing his horns. There are six of us on six bikes. Senayit is quite at ease on the back of her bike. She’s turning to take photos of us, while she’s talking on her mobile.

We arrive just below our intended rural literacy site. We have to abandon our bikes to cross a narrow river on the backs of stones. This river, we discover, empties into a waterfall a few meters on, a waterfall so high we can’t see the bottom. Our trail leads up the slope opposite, so that we emerge on a small summit that overlooks the ravine of the waterfall, so that we see the ribbon of it against the rock, still never seeing the bottom, even when we climb down to the edge of the ravine. We gather at the bare summit of the hill, while the teacher points out the villages on adjacent hills, villages whose children will participate in our mobile literacy program.

We ride back down the hill, and one of the foreign guests says, ‘That was awesome.’ I write it in the notebook. I know what made it awesome was the motor bikes. It was indeed fun.

The dust of the road still clogs my nose, still makes everything gritty. I know from long experience that it will be days before I’m rid of it. I accept it. It’s just a kind of duty paid on the travel.

The goats bleat on the notebook page, and I must write some response to them. This is what humans find awesome on their journeys out of the yard, I write. They find dust. They find grass. They find wild trails. I must talk to the goats on the page in their language. It’s a kind of hunger, I say. ‘Awesome’ is like coming on ripe fruit on the ground. It’s like Changeable Nature loves you just then.

The goatherd stands blankly by the side of the road outside the hotel. His several animals stumble over each other among the spare grasses on the blunt hillside. I can tell by the quality of the light that the sun is readying to set.

Levi-Strauss interrupts his account of weightier matters to describe in several pages of lyrical language the sunsets over the Atlantic. This he writes largely from notebooks and from memory. This is the process of thought. He is unashamed of that, always a traveller, even for science.

Travelogue 606 – March 12
Sounds of Soddo
Part Four

I had to buy this notebook on the run. I mislaid my last one. This is a new habit of mine, manufacturing the missing item, usually something important, the list of critical tasks I had laboured over for days, or the paper I had printed so I would always have it handy. I’m missing the latest notebook, with all its lists, so I stopped by the corner mudabbir by my house, local stand stocked with an amazing variety of household goods inside its narrow walls. I asked the boy at the counter for a dubter, and his hand reached instinctively to the stack beneath his counter. These are the small, ruled booklets for primary school students, about 4X6, with always some new fanciful design on the cover. That day’s was ‘Dream Car’, words stencilled in blue outline over pink and blue splotches and yellow lines. In the center there was an orange cartoon of a sports car, the kind in which doors slide up in the fashion of wings.

I’m spoiling another page, drawing goats in ink. I’m sketching out schemata for false ideas. The hotel bar in Soddo is awash in a soft yellow glow of late afternoon. It resonates softly with the cheers of football crowds in England. The flies make no noise as they circle. They are fond of their circuits. I wonder about them, why they want so badly to land where they landed last. Even as I chased them off, did they still have time to leave some trace of themselves, some smack of fly scent, some invisible beacon?

We know about place. We circle, too, in our way. We call the pathways ‘culture’. Humans return to their fires. They built their early fires according to patterns that became ritual. The stories they told at the fires became religion. The masks for characters became worship. So on. It all speaks to me about harsh lives spent in a harsh world, where knowledge is impossibly fragile.

It’s a new age. The fires have proliferated. Bored with the routines of safety, we turn away from ours. We discover other fires, other people circled around their own boredom. We seek difference, and we settle for the immediate signs of it, vaguely disappointed to discover underneath them the same organization around boredom, the same construct of ego fighting instinct with civilization. Difference becomes an enthusiasm for aesthetics. We study cuisine. We study architecture. We study language. Travellers’ discussions become text for footnotes.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that still strikes the senses, strikes them with something more than the cool touch of intellect. I’ve got the notebook open. I’m reviewing the events of this trip. There might be insight.

First, I’ll record ‘unique’. I heard the word one time among the foreign visitors during the trip. I’ve invited RJ on a run into the mountains with some members of the team. We’re running the fiel menged, the goat path through the chaka, or the forest. This is the way the athletes train, following each other single file through the trees, weave and dodge and climb. I have missed it. RJ bravely, stubbornly stays with us. I’m second in line behind Fikre. I’m focussing on enjoying the run, every moment, the liberation inside this style of running, in which every moment is a challenge and a departure from the steadiness that defines city running, from the lulling, from the same and sustained, from the breath held and the eye on the horizon. A glimpse of the sunlight flashing among the leaves above, and then one must concentrate quickly on the root below, the stone, and then right into the pain of the steep, scrambling ascent.

‘Unique,’ he says. I make a note of that.

At the end of the run, as we re-enter the village on top of the mountain, as we emerge from a rocky trail between rows of houses, emerging into the open, dusty lot in front of old Maryam church, I try to find the strength for a final kick. We’ve run for an hour, but I still have something left. The athletes are re-engaged by this, roused by a spark of native competitiveness to sprint with each other to the end. We laugh, and we all shake hands, a kind of ritual.

This ‘village green’ on the mountaintop is a timeless place. I like being here, lingering briefly after the run. Small children gather and mimic our stretching exercises. The beggar, the ascetic, sits on his blanket, and he eyes us. Women guide their school-age children by, and they laugh. The men sit by the road, waiting for work, waiting for taxis, waiting for the afternoon and then the evening. They are making jokes about us. They wave when we wave. Their smiles are both genuine and mocking. I love that sincerity in Ethiopia, the accommodation of all sentiments simultaneously.

Maryam might be the oldest church in Addis Ababa. The emperor Menelik was crowned here in 1882. RJ and I enter the grounds and walk around the octagonal church, austere grey in the walls, encircled by a wooden portico painted in light blue and Ethiopian colours. It’s peaceful. I meditate on the century of worship here, fervent and focussed, its ancient words lifted above the mountain, above the hum of the capital city, where the nation tries every day to write history.

We turn back toward the van. It was the run that was unique. I’ve written it on the goat’s page.

Travelogue 605 – March 11
Sounds of Soddo
Part Three

A blank notebook page is a wonderful thing, a source of hope. We might write many silly words in a row. We may draw pictures. It’s a delusive sort of hope, luring men and women into committing to paper all sorts of follies. We say fatuous things when we’re lulled by hope. And we are proud of them, even knowing they are fatuous. And we know intuitively that for most of us it’s the freedom of the page that counts, more than the value in dried ink. It must be a game to be really worth the time.

We follow the fiel menged. The Amharic comes with an image. We’re running in the mountains above Addis. Ijigu can’t help himself. He cannot run along the dirt road. He must break away and dash through the forests and brush, weaving, climbing and falling among the rocks and roots of the hillside. This is the fiel menged, the goat path. I tease him with this, until I discover the fun of the fiel menged for myself. I’ve been conditioned by years of city running to think of straight lines and destinations. The goat’s way is much more fun, and, finally, meaningful.

I’m watching the goats now, out the window of the hotel bar in Soddo, three of them making their herky jerky way along the side of the road, under the lazy watch of their keeper. They nibble. They lift their heads on long necks, craning, staring through those odd eyes, distorted pupils. Goats never become graceful. They are perpetually knock-kneed kids.

I draw in my notebook a goat with an elephant’s howdah on his back. The man inside is not hunting or leading armies. He’s a man of science with a mortarboard cap and a smile of discovery. He hauls some verbiage behind the filthy goat tail, like a haul of trash, leaving tracks in the dust that has settled on the notebook. I’ve outlined my meditations on the term ‘monoculture’, used by Levi-Strauss in his Tristes Tropiques.

The first tenet, I say, is that the only monoculture is the one that stands inside boredom. As long as we find something charming – goats on the road, the coffee ceremony – we have not entered the monoculture. We are observing it. And it is not an element of culture until the persons performing it perform it absent-mindedly, with that critical attitude of boredom.

Secondly, the elements of said culture of boredom are utilitarian. If the ingredients or order vary from place to place, it is only a recipe of chance among the several mundane ingredients of survival.

We want ‘culture’ to be the coffee ceremony and we want it to be the group of people gathered around it. This equation never resolves. People are not single quantities. They are amalgams of content and motion that only appear as unities. If this is true of individuals, so much more should it be true of groups. More interesting than identities is why we want them so badly.

So, a third law, perhaps: as tempting as it is to extend ‘culture’ to identity, it will always be problematic. Even self-identification, ‘I am the people of the coffee ceremony.’ It is messy. We find it easy to cede the fact of change in our own time, while insisting on a nostalgia for ‘traditional’ cultures as stable, as bedrock. But societies were always fluid and unstable. Classical Greece was a chance and ephemeral amalgam of various local brands with Persian and Egyptian, and others hard to count. Imperial Rome was strata upon strata of cultural artefacts, some enforced, some local, some international, some perverse and signs of rebellion.

But back to monoculture, centred in its ring of boredom. One turns inward and sees little. One turns outward and perceives the event horizon. That rouses curiosity, excitement. This thrill is what fuels the ritual ordeal that Levi-Strauss references. Approaching the event horizon, one suddenly sees the objects of one’s monoculture. One begins to dress them, paint them with designs, create cults from culture. At the horizon, the blood races. One has visions. And then one escapes. One sees a galaxy of monoculture systems, like circles of people with their hands to the fire.

The TV in the bar has begun airing a Premiership game. All eyes fix on the fixture. It’s a passion here. I know any one of these guys could recite names and results with keen accuracy. More important are the loyalties. Hazard is dangerous, and the fan smiles with real enjoyment of the Belgian’s game, and with a feeling that the star plays for him.

I turn back to my game with the flies, protecting my drink with lazy swats. On average, it takes three repetitions to discourage the fly from coming back. I could write a new theology, sprung from the contest with flies. ‘Wave thrice, place one palm over the chalice.’ The flies like my backpack. I debate internally the health hazard of flies on my backpack. Shall I double my efforts, expanding my territory to the adjacent chair, where the backpack sits?

The goat returns to its flock. It has pursued its vision along the hillside abutting the road, following erratic paths. It has found its meagre clump of grass. It awkwardly runs behind, the joints of its legs seeming strung only loosely with string. It falls into formation, its head bobbing, one eye set alertly, inscrutably out toward the street. I return to my drawing, and I play around with the pupil of the eye, such an odd aperture into that box of angles, the goat’s head.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that humankind saw the globe of earth. We still marvel at the sight, at least I hope we do. It features in so many movies, I notice, as a kind of revelatory image. Journalists have tried to attach text, but wisdom from beyond the event horizon isn’t convenient that way. Text doesn’t attach. We see stuff. We know something more, but only in the value-neutral way of true knowledge.

Pour the coffee. It doesn’t speak. One grows bored listening.

Travelogue 604 – March 10
Sounds of Soddo
Part Two

It’s a hot afternoon in Soddo, and I’m trying to read. I’m doing my best to read while also monitoring the flies. I’m sitting by the window, watching the street through the gauzy white drapes. There is a reassuring familiarity to the sounds of the Ethiopian street, the nasal voices crying out, the horns of the cars and rumble of the trucks. The traffic surges with familiar urgency, cars swerving around the three-wheeled bajaj, around the goats. Boys in sky-blue school uniforms are horsing around, shouting, while lanky elders in windbreakers and baseball caps leisurely climb the slope.

Soddo is a town of slopes, arrayed against the side of one green range of hills rising above the surrounding countryside. It’s a pretty setting. It had been Jon’s idea to make Soddo the base for our trip, instead of Hosanna, a city to the north of our school sites, in the Hadiya zone. It was a good idea. There’s an element of peace to Soddo completely lacking in Hosanna, where the streets are madness in dust. The one faranji-friendly hotel in Hosanna, the Lemma, stands like a fortress on a hill. Outside the gates of the Lemma, the van wades through jeering crowds.

I return to the text. Between the erratic attacks of the flies and the senseless slaughter of random words by the e-reader, I find it slow going. The poetic rhythm to Levi-Strauss’s prose is all but lost. I push forward.

With what seems like notable prescience in someone writing in 1955, Levi-Strauss develops a quiet, recurring argument that the boom in population will rob the world of particularity, that, in his words, ‘… humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet.’

It’s not a difficult argument to digest in our times, something we say ourselves with the ease of familiarity, a Time Magazine lament – though I think Time editors might hesitate at the big dose of salt there in that word ‘civilization’.

Myself, I hesitate over the word ‘monoculture’. I begin to wonder how the word should be deployed. I might easily set the concept on its head.

There are few places that can strike someone from my culture as more different and perhaps alienating, maybe disturbing, certainly discomfiting, than Ethiopia. One can thrill at the differences, or one may despair. But ultimately, submerged in the culture for a while, one can hardly avoid the real experience of tedium and boredom. For all the chatter about diversity, as an endangered quantity, as something to celebrate, there is little discussion about how monotonous culture is from the inside, no matter how challenging the entry into it. So which way is the indicator, this term ‘monoculture’, pointing? Or to put it another way, what exactly is the diversity we fret over?

Isn’t it possible that the discipline of anthropology has become as much a relic as the items in its cabinets? Isn’t there something to it, some key ingredient in the mix that makes up its foundation that could only have germinated in the colonial era and blossomed in the twentieth century, a conception of ‘cultures’ as tectonic plates, contemporaneous sets of manners and habits rubbing against one another.as they slowly shift? The researcher creates a taxonomy, and then he worries about the fragility of the species he has charted, a sort of solipsistic method, calling his snapshot the measure, building an institution to preserve it.

Mr. Levi-Strauss makes much in his book about the path in his youth that led to anthropology, how it fit him so perfectly, young man fascinated by geology, history, and psycho-analysis. It was in the youthful science of anthropology that he found the perfect fusion of his interests. But I think I see something in his nature that bridles against the codifying instincts of his discipline. I’ve seen there is a playfulness to the man. He teases and challenges. Theory is the pick-up game after school, rather than theological councils in debate. This is the man, after all, who composed structuralist theory around the trickster figure in mythology, long before hordes of fantasy and sci-fi authors made cotton candy out of Jungian thought.

Dust motes settle among afternoon’s golden light, a sort of African summer shower upon the wings of the flies settled on the edge of my table, and I am drawing spider webs around the word ‘monoculture’, the nib of my pen catching on dust, and I’m sketching out theories of culture in my notebook. I’ve made a drawing of a goat, and on his back balances my contribution to science, a new theory, the boredom index to culture.

Travelogue 603 – March 9
Sounds of Soddo
Part One

I’m in Soddo. The city is the head of the Wolaita region of the Southern Nations, Ethiopia. This is one of the best hotels of the city, but still I’m fighting off the flies. There’s been no water. We’ve been out all day, visiting two schools in the Kembata-Tembaro region. I would have loved a shower. I’ve only been able to wash out of buckets for days now, even in Addis Ababa. Now they have taken the bucket away so, returning from a day driving among the dusts of our roads, I have no water whatsoever.

The sun beats in the window of the ‘bar’, which is a bare room with plain tables that looks exactly like the ‘restaurant’ across the lobby. The flies are relentless. I’m drinking bottled water. Mercifully, they have limes to add flavour, and to cleanse the palette. This much water I can have. I may have to splash down with bottled water later.

I’m re-reading ‘Tristes Tropiques’ by Claude Levi-Strauss. The book had come up in conversation recently at my café in Rotterdam, brought up by the philosopher barista there, the philosopher and professional football player. It seems like a good read while travelling. Claude Levi-Strauss famously opens his book by saying, ‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’

I’m having trouble focusing on the book. It’s been a long day among the dusts of Kembata-Tembaro, and I’m tired. It doesn’t help that my version of the book, adapted for the e-reader, is rather garbled. I have to interpret nonsense text mid-sentence. Often, it’s a matter of squinting my eyes and seeing if some resemblance to a real word emerges. Sometimes it’s context. If it’s a name, I assume it will pop up again somewhere. The names are challenging, anyway. He’s writing about his anthropological work in Brazil during his youth, in the 1930s. The book was published in 1955. It’s a memoir looking back twenty years, and he writes as though it is a time lost in the distant past. It must have seemed so, separated from him by the war and asylum in the States. But reading the book now adds another, longer angle of perspective, if the reader knows that Levi-Strauss died only recently, in 2009, having lived to be over a hundred.

‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’ I’ve been meaning to write a rebuttal to this, though I’m not sure what arguments I could marshal. He spends a good amount of time early in the book criticizing travel writers in particular, and I’m trying to self-publish this travel memoir about Ethiopia, with Troy’s help. I might be a little sensitive. Obviously he makes his case somewhat ironically, embedded as it is in a travel memoir.

He hypothesizes rather broadly that the popularity of the travel story (with real colour photos, in 1955!) is related to the ritual ordeals among certain native North American tribes, in which young people achieved wisdom and power by submitting themselves in solitude to extreme situations outside the norms of their societies. Ordeal scenarios were often contests with elements traditionally seen as alien and hostile to the culture; i.e., wild beasts and cruel nature. The ordeals had to involve suffering, of course, and extreme alienation.

I wonder if the preponderance of flies in this bar will qualify as ordeal. I am suffering a good deal of annoyance. And when I blow my nose, I am still finding dust and blood. I am hoping there is some wisdom for me in this, as reward for my suffering.

Travelogue 602 – March 2
Making the Rounds

Ijigu and Frehiwot are hanging back. I’m leading a small group of white guys down the rocky slope of the dirt road, down toward the stink of the wenz, or river, below, and apparently into danger. ‘You know,’ Ken says, ‘your own staff is saying we shouldn’t go down there.’

I had wanted to take the group as far as the wenz. It stands well below high banks overgrown in sickly brush. You can’t see it, but you can smell it. Like most streams through the city, it is treated as latrine, wash basin, trash dump, and bath for both human and animal, and it is horribly filthy. I remember the wenz from earlier visits to families, stepping with some trepidation into dilapidated shacks of corrugated iron that teetered on the edge of the bank.

We don’t make it that far. I see the brush atop the banks, past the point that our road disintegrates into an abandoned plot of dust and trash. The road was once laid with stones. They form now a broken mosaic of disuse in monochromatic tan tones of summer dust. There is no one around, not even the children begging attention. But there lurks some risk there in the shadowless terrain, I am being warned, and since I must be responsible for the safety of the guests I turn us back, commit us to the sweaty climb back up to the asphalt, where the van can pick us up.

I’m disappointed. I want the foreign guests to see where our students come from. I can’t say why, really. No one in this group funded the Mercato project. But I wish they could see those families the way I have. Maybe it’s a certain loneliness inside my history.

So yes, I am completing the work on a memoir about the first years in Ethiopia. Writing does strange things to my brain. I see double; I see triple. The day merges with other days. Last week I was writing about Ethiopia. This week I’m here. The two Ethiopias aren’t lining up quite right.

It could be that you write your story, and afterward you realize that not all of it is true. That’s not to say any of it was a lie or a fantasy. But a memory is one step from truth, and writing is another step. You’ve said something about a place, and the place denies it. You’ve said something about the Self, and the Self denies it.

We’re visiting the first location of the school. It looks the same to me, standing quietly amidst the chaos of the Mercato, warehouses on one side and on the other the hillside that descends through kilometres of shantytown.

Last year we had to close the Mercato school. It was a sad experience. Two years ago we were forced out of this location by a restless landlord, hungry for commercial projects. We moved into a second house, not too distant from the first but across a line dividing administrative districts. The officials in the new district refused to re-license, stringing us along with ever new sets of conditions.

We stand outside the gate of the first location, and there is nothing different. There is no G+ under construction. There is no banner above the gate advertising grand enterprise. There is no commotion, no trucks moving merchandise, no ring of cash registers. All is silent.

So we tramp back toward the melee that is the Mercato, where all is relentless motion, and into it. We walk single-file among the crowds, past the warehouses, past the trucks, past the streams of people who seem so intent, as though intention has lost its purpose, become the purpose. People push against each other and against us, past the open stalls of merchandise, displayed in piles and stacks, sacks of grain, plastic flowers, and rows of shoes; alleyway of bras, jamboree of carpets, carnival of plastic and aluminium pots.

Travelogue 601 – February 25
What Resounds

I’m walking through the oorlog. There is a lot of debris. Though it is organized and catalogued, it is still debris. Oorlog means war in Dutch.

They have finally completed the work around our Metro station, which is called Coolhaven. For months, the road and sidewalks were ripped up, and sections fenced off, where bricks were piled and where heavy machinery stood mostly idle. The sandy ground underneath Rotterdam lay exposed. Now the brick promenades along the water are restored and clean.

Coolhaven Station is a ten-minute walk from home. It sits beside the Schie River, where the river pools before the locks that allow ships into the Maas River. The station stands below a bridge that crosses the little Schie and offers a nice prospect of Delfshaven to one side and downtown, still a few kilometres away, on the other side. There is a small road that runs underneath the bridge and passes before the station entrance. That is where the brick promenade provides access to the water, accompanying the small road. This is where all the debris lies during construction.

Built into the bridge, so that it is across the road from the Metro station, is a small museum. In front of the museum is a sculpture in grey stone of a fighter plane standing on its tail. The museum is small, fit snugly under the bridge. It documents the experience of the city during WWII, or WOII in Dutch, the O for oorlog.

I’m walking through the oorlog. There is little more than debris on the brightly lit shelves. The museum itself is in great shape, just re-opened after renovation. The debris is also in good shape, cleaned and catalogued. Curators have organized it into displays, and yet debris remains in its nature an accident. Total war leaves behind the pieces of things, melted and bent household objects, shells, bits of stone and brick, paper strewn and burned to ash. War leaves items of its own element, uniforms and weapons.

So the first impression is one of life reduced to rubble. The second impression is one of time. I grew up in a world definitively ‘post-war’. The war was past and removed, but never so ancient and alien as it suddenly seems to me now. The weapons look antique. The uniforms are small and awkward. The posters and signage and headlines make civilization seem such a small endeavour, channelled along such narrow channels. Our contemporary world is something of a different order, made more of complexity and polish.

There are two types of people attending the re-opening, children and the old. The debris registers with each in markedly different ways. That is apparent. For the children it will never be other than history, as alien in essence as the Roman Empire. For the old, there is some personal connection, in memory or in family experience.

The museum volunteers proudly invite us into a room where we will be treated to the ‘Experience’. It’s a multi-media presentation meant to bring the bombardment of 1940 alive. We sit at tables with touch screens. There are projections on the wall. There are tablets programmed with catalogues of exhibits. However nice the media, though, the challenge is the lack of data. For example, there is no film stock of the bombardment, so instead we are given a collage of pre-war photos interrupted by sounds of planes and explosions, images of fire. The sound system is strong, and the media are choreographed well, but I’m disappointed in the interpretation of impact. In an effort to make numb post-moderns feel something of the significance of the event, they turn to the explosions. Terrifying as the bombardment itself was, I question whether the cinematic moment, the fire and screams, is the one that really captures the horror of the event. I would guess that the silence afterward might be more horrible, the shock and the collective effort to assimilate what had happened.

Levi-Strauss writes that some of the islanders on Martinique believed that Hitler was Jesus come back to punish the white race. Funny, sobering. Made sobering most by the ocean, perhaps. It’s the long reach of trauma, the kind of trauma visited on humanity by men like the Nazis, that finally makes the biggest mark.

One leaves the Experience to return to the collection. Maybe it’s the debris itself that offers the hope of most impact, the scanty collection a testament to human lives treated like trash, the scantiness of the collection itself a statement. This is what’s left of a city, it says. One’s mind rebels. One is tempted to smile. It’s not real. But it follows you out the door the way that simulated noise of bombs will not.

Outside, the city is restored. The humble promenade beside the river is neatly composed of its tiles and stones, and it’s been cleared and swept for the city’s families. The spring is coming. Some teens anticipate it, gathering on the benches, shivering in their coats, sharing cigarettes, talking about the silliest things possible.

Travelogue 600 – February 20
Rounding Sums

The skies are teasing us with a semiotics of spring. The clouds are big and fleecy, dodging among the winds as though in spring frolic. There is enough blue there behind them to trigger the cheeriest hormones. And yet one also senses the false promise, uneasily, despite the most sincere exertions to deny it. Winter hasn’t let go of us.

In the morning, there are trails of salt spilled along the roads. The bike paths crunch with salt and ice. There is a sheen to the surface of bridges, and one slows and wobbles on one’s bike, trying to avoid upset. The swan coughs vapours. She drifts quietly on the quiet river, the somber colours of which deny the sky’s dry ruse.

The ride is bracing. I am alert by the time I sign in at my morning café. The temperatures lend vitality to my work. I spend the early morning hour editing, and the work is a net spread wide to catch the whole room. The topic lies in the past, but the writing is present. The writing is woven from a hundred impressions in this moment, becoming past, becoming merged with the topic of the past. There have been so many edits by now the narrative rings with a mélange of captured moments.

I’ll finish the story now, my little memoir, and I’ll put it between some covers, with Troy’s help. And then what? The only result I can imagine is embarrassment. The story is incomplete. Stories never round neatly as sums. And the edits would not be complete in another ten years.

I am made to think again of poor Maximilien, victim of his own strange lights, an intelligence lacking all wisdom, a life rounded so succinctly and dramatically. Perhaps I’m all right with my indistinct story, illogical and starved of violence.

Belloc would hesitate to attribute even intelligence to young Robespierre. He has a poor opinion of the boy, repeatedly asserting his mediocrity. He asserts it so often, one wonders if there is a code to the assertion. Does he resent the boy’s impact on history as undeserved? Does he feel the times were corrupt, as evidenced by their worship of the boy-king?

Belloc is writing in 1905, a time still reverberating with the impact of the Revolution, the post-Napoleonic order beginning to break down, Russia facing its first revolution, European powers positioning themselves for mutual destruction. Einstein is opening a window onto true uncertainty; Freud is opening his window into the unconscious. But political science clings to Enlightenment certainties.

And isn’t that Robespierre’s sin, his certainty? It’s a transgression particularly galling to Belloc, I would think, proud public Catholic intellectual that he was, modern mystic. ‘The Incorruptible’ they called Robespierre in his day, code for consistent, rational disciple of the philosophes. Even when he opposed the most popular initiatives, like war, like the death penalty, he did so with the arguments of the philosophes.

Thinker of dry thoughts, and in over his head, poor Robespierre. Belloc has such a low opinion of him, as most everyone has. What might the unfortunate himself think if a shutter opened for him onto 2015, if he were suddenly present in the bland age of Hollande and Cameron, present to read his biographers? I have a sense he would encounter it with a shrug, with an irritatingly smug smile. ‘I made history,’ he might say. ‘I was right.’ He would find his place. He would dress well. He would work in the courts. He would have the best coffee maker.

‘We knew we may die,’ he would say. I wonder why they didn’t imagine themselves an honourable after-life, these writers of the new order, writers even of religion. It was one of Robespierre’s last acts to re-write the nation’s religion, creating the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’. To be fair, he didn’t start that game. His colleagues had first introduced the Cult of Reason.

It could be they did legislate a place of rewards for good revolutionaries, and he sits there now, reading the Contrat Social one more time, nodding and saying, ‘We were right.’

Travelogue 599 – February 19
Whether Ends Define

It’s all too sobering a feeling, this business of finishing stories, and on a sober morning, a morning that follows yesterday’s beautiful spring day with fog and chill. The grey has returned, and I have forced myself, against a foggy sleepiness as deep as the heart, to get out of bed. My routine propels me outside and onto the old cycle in any weather, to face into the chill winds and the morning’s torpid half-light.

My weekdays start the same. Before the sun has risen, I have to call Addis, or at least attempt it. That done I’m free to write for an hour or so before office hours begin.

I’m finishing the memoir. It’s been a project for years, and now Troy and I will publish it. I’m on the last edit, the last words. It’s a sobering feeling to bring a memoir piece to conclusion. It’s a memoir that begins with a closing. Many do, I suppose. This one opens with Leeza’s passing, so many years ago now.

The seed contains its end. Classical wisdom tells us this, and it goes further. It wants to tell us that the end envelopes the beginning. A story is essentially false until the end has been recorded. We cannot assess a person’s worth until we know the manner of his or her death.

That seems like the philosophy of a hungry people to me. I’m more forgiving myself. I attribute stories with more complexity, composed of multiple strands, some extending beyond the evident beginning and evident end. But that might be facile thinking. I tend to think that most thinking is a matter of convenience.

Certainly I see the application of the end-makes-the-story principle in reading the biography of Robespierre. I know the end already, as most readers would. Indeed, it’s impossible to escape it. The author, one Hilaire Belloc, writing over one hundred years ago, cannot escape it. How does the story arrive here, he asks. It serves as his organizing question.

That the demise of the man defines him in this unsentimental study makes me sad. It’s not that I sympathize with the man’s cold nature, his cold-hearted logic, but I regret that the cold world makes it so with such unheralded regularity. Robespierre stands in for all of us in our coldest hearts, figure of dramatic moment, standing in for all macabre ideologues, in offices and assemblies, school halls and pubs, the dandies with tight smiles that describe our fates.

I continue in my fascination with the French Revolution. Belloc does a decent job of describing the indescribable, the all-encompassing power of it, the purity of the fury. It might be the closest analogue in human movement to looking into the bursting and changing light of the atomic blast.

Is the image too dramatic? It’s a metaphor driven, I suppose, by the mechanism of released energy and power. One pictures the light, intense and consuming. One sees the rings of destruction expanding outward, people bracing for them.

I pause among my edits to study the thin elderly man, regular to this café, dressed impeccably in an autumnal coat, black shirt, and tie checkered in orange and brown. He wears a black fedora. He is reading a newspaper. His lips inside the grey Van Dyck move as he reads, and it seems clear he’s of jolly temperament.

As I enjoy this sight, the café’s music shifts. Lou Reed is voicing his way through ‘Wild Side’. The old man takes no notice. He has lived through Lou Reed’s moment. I want to know what that meant to him then. I won’t know. Chances are, for him, as for the majority of humanity, the moment and the moment’s mood passed with little to remark upon. It’s a trigger for a passing personal nostalgia, if anything.

How strange it is that music was Revolution for my generation and even more so for my older brothers’ generation. How odd that is, how strange it makes our societies appear. Does it imply that our times are more nuanced than Robespierre’s, or perhaps just more watered down? Maybe they did all our work back then, and we are left with the work of adjustments. Mr. Marx might object. Mr. Reed might object.

This is Revolution at its most attenuated, subversion in poetry, undermining order in painted words. The words never quite fade. They change. Generations after pick them up. When perversity has little of old challenge to it, the words still go on. The sign becomes pretty. No one looks up.

Mr. Robespierre did not mince words. Metaphor was a blunt instrument. “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible,’ he famously said.

Travelogue 598 – January 22
Esprit

I’m running in the fog. It masks my path. It masks the river. It designs little mysteries from the stuff of everyday life. Things will emerge in a day or two, wearing the aspect of the normal again.

My joints vaguely ache. I should have worn more gear, something over my legs. But the ache is something for me of Europe. I take it into the body, with the damp air of the mornings. It tells me I’m here, tells me also I’m older. I’m ageing, and this is the place for these years, gliding among sea salt skies, the continent named not for the charging bull, but for the submissive cow.

This is the grim timelessness I’ve inherited in returning to European winter. Europe endures, somewhat like the blinded will in a fog, pushing time aside in its tortoise progress through the mud of continuity. There is even in the perishing of things a continuity. I think I have found it here. There are marshes still here, in this land of drained marshes. The sea gulls find it, and they fight over it, winging crazy circles around each other.

Since returning from Africa, I’ve been revisiting the sites of my European hometown. I’m writing a report on projects in Ethiopia, sitting at a table at the Hopper Café, when ‘Purple Rain’ starts to play, the measured sad strains of it, sweaty little ballad made of Minneapolis in the 1980s. I’ve been reading academic anthropology, about identities of mobility, the slippery notion of community in the post-modern era. I’ve also been reading biographies.

There was a boy once who was captured in the woods while duck hunting. His captors kept him, raised him, and taught them their language and their ways. He eventually broke free again, rejoined his people, forged a new identity among the frontiers. He was an adventurer. He was a trader. He entered villages with his hands raised in the air, and he spoke their languages. He hunted in forests far and wide. Young Pierre-Esprit explored, and he collected furs.

This boy is acknowledged to one of the first white men to set foot in Minnesota. His family name is Radisson. In the 1660s, Radisson with his brother-in-law did much of the early exploration of the Hudson Bay, collecting boat loads of fine furs, and laying the foundations for the Hudson’s Bay Company, established in 1670. The French and English were tussling then over the expanses of land and resources in North America, and Radisson played one side against the other and switched, as best suited him, but he had the wisdom to approach the Brits about business matters. Eventually, trading days over, he ended up in London on a pension.

It was the heirs to the British Empire in North America who established a luxury hotel in Minneapolis in 1909 and named it the Radisson. The boy was nearly forgotten, but his name and memory fit the branding well. The name has now arrived in many cities around the world, raising flags and speaking all languages.

In 2015, I am one weary traveler loitering on the grounds of one Radisson, not to stay, but only for nourishment and for wifi. This is the Radisson Blu in Addis Ababa. This is Kasanchis, a grubby section of the capital, just down the hill from the prime minister’s palace, where the old Hilton set a standard for fine hotels in the day.

While I savour a real espresso, I’m reviewing days spent in the south, where coffee is a heady and gritty elixir, brewed in clay and delivered into any old cup of plastic or glass at hand. It is delicious and powerful, but I am comforted by the dainty little espresso.

We have traveled to far Kembata-Tembaro, where we entered the villages with our hands held high … while children clamoured around us, showering us with shouts and smiles. We wade through them toward the school buildings. The teachers are wearing the white lab coats, as is the fashion among teachers here. They lead us inside the library, under high ceilings of corrugated iron laid on beams of slender eucalyptus, and we are treated to local avocados and bananas, and to some amazing honey collected from village hives.

We are working in this village because one of its own children now lives thousands of miles away in America, being taught our language and our strange ways.

Other children remain, all along this road forever under construction. They shout at us from the side of the road as we make our way back, along the long road laid covered in deep layers of fine dust. They shout at us, and then they pull their shirts up over their noses as the dust overtakes them.

It’s a place of accidents, this world.

‘Being persuaded in the morning by two of my comrades to go and recreat ourselves in fowling, I disposed myselfe to keepe them Company,’ writes the boy from Trois-Rivières, writes the man years later, after the twist of fate – twist that left his two companions dead – has written a story for him. ‘… Wherfor I cloathed myselfe the lightest way I could possible, that I might be the nimbler and not stay behind ….’

Travelogue 597 – January 21
Impenetrable

Where does the fog come from? It might rise from the river. It might rise from the sea. I can indulge in idle thoughts. The fog has robbed me of time. It has rolled in for a long stay. It stays for days. It’s a cold fog. My fingertips burn in a mild but icy wind.

I’m taking a run along the river. The fog hides the other side of the river. It hides most of the river itself. What is left is the one river bank at my side, and the spirals of squealing gulls and terns above, challenging the heights of the cold lamp poles and the heights of the fog itself.

My thoughts spiral like the birds, among my travels and my readings. My readings have led me through the ravages of the French Revolution, through the ravages of jihadist emotion. They lead finally to eternity, like all worldly struggles do.

Fog soaks up the light, and it soaks up time. To say that the fog prompts thoughts of eternity is to be lazy. Eternity is not the same as timelessness. What fog erases does not constitute a positive space, a place where time frolics unbounded.

Even as I move, the fog robs me of the sense of movement. There is no measure as I throw step forward after step. Here shadows are cast by everything and nothing. There is barely light to call the day, nor shadow to call the night.

In days of fog, a part of me remains in sunlight. A couple weeks ago I was in Tunto, in the Kembata-Tembaro region of Ethiopia. My colleagues and I are crowding together in the busy cafe, our knees set round the circular table. The café door and window of the café open directly onto the expanse of dust that separates this set of ramshackle buildings from the road. This is the same road that has tortured us for several days already as we, with only good intentions, have returned to school sites that cleave to this tenuous ribbon of transport, the road that is barely a road. It is a road because the land is cleared along a long, meandering line threading villages and hills, because cars do travel it, but any definition beyond that must be tentative, must be forgiving. No surface prevails, no standard of smoothness. There’s a child standing at the peak of the bank above the road, staring. She is waiting for the cloud of chalky dust from our passage to overtake her. Then she disappears into the trees behind her.

A girl comes to pour us all coffee. She first brings the little cups. She shakes them like shallow porcelain bells, spraying the water in which they were soaked, setting them on the table. She offers sugar, broken clumps of it from a battered little aluminum can, collected in a small tin spoon. Next she brings the jebena, the traditional clay pot. Coffee slops onto the table. She makes a point of pouring to the brim for everyone.

The place is crowded. The crowds are staring. Gruff old men encircling the next table cast long, assessing glances our way. Boys stop by the window, lean into the frame and watch us, with a keen and unselfconscious interest. They inspect my face and my hair and my clothes at length. I’ve been coming to Ethiopia for years; it doesn’t bother me. I’m focusing on Yonas, an enterprising young local, who might serve as a guide for the moment among the capricious ways of Kembata-Tembaro, green hills harboring peoples, at densities high relative to other regions where we work, open grasslands, villages sparse. We would like to know about the schools in the district, from someone outside the system, someone raised and educated here, someone who cares.

We lapse into silence. It’s a comfortable one. We sip our coffee. The café crowds look, and I look back. There’s no challenge. I’m just a visitor. I don’t give; I don’t take. The measured chaos of the town carries on outside the walls, across the town square made of dust. The horse comes to rest, and the family climbs out of the two-wheeled cart. They pay the driver. The horse is sweating, shaking off the flies. It has so little flesh on its bones, and scabs from the work of the whip.

As we prepare to go, we realize Yonas has paid for the coffees without any of us knowing. We are guests.

Travelogue 596 – January 8
Feel the Noise

I don’t like noise. I’m one of those untouchable solitaries who haunt cafes and want no contact. I need people around, but not too close. We’re a miserable lot, who really should give up coffee.

That confession on record, I can say that I understand that noise is necessary. More, it’s desirable. It’s the sensory correlate to happy chance.

Is chance happy? Matter is a product of chance. So says the modern. From the chaotic clouds of rebounding particles and atoms to the accidents of evolution, the material world is a product of chance. Society mimics nature, and we all suffer and prosper by chance collision.

Are we happy for chance? There is that in human nature that abhors the noise of it. There is that that sets the mind to working out how to minimize or abolish it.

Of course I’m speaking about Paris. It seems as though some people can stand no dissonance. The world is their café, and the rest of us shall keep the chatter down. Or else.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, I’ve been reading about the French Revolution. First it was Mantel. Now it’s Thomas Carlyle, oversized author, often annoying author, whose Voice must resound even above the clamour of one of History’s noisiest events. And yet, his style does fit, the Revolution as much a rhetorical achievement as a physical one, an accomplishment of writers every bit as sensationalist as Carlyle himself, (who was writing, it must be said, only twenty years after Waterloo). I speak of the pamphleteers, direct antecedents of the hard-working satirists at Charlie Hebdo.

‘Freedom of the press’ became a rallying cry back then. Practically overnight, there were hundreds of little bulletins and pamphlets being circulated, with vivid cartoons drawn of the fat king -- the ‘baker’ they liked to call him, -- and of his wife, accused of every sort of vice and crime. She’s portrayed kissing one of many lovers. She’s portrayed reaching for a giant male member rearing on horse’s legs. The people consume these publications. They rush to the streets to protect the authors, men like Marat and Desmoulins. They elect them to one or the other of the pinwheeling representative assemblies of the early days of the Revolution.

Days before I’ve heard of Charlie, I’m indulging in some of my own reading from favorite magazines. It’s Ethiopian Christmas. I have some down time. I can sit in the sun and read through the latest Harper’s. There’s an article there by Sam Frank about the occult musings among super-geniuses in Silicon Valley, the Bayesian extropists, extreme believers in the power of mind, to overcome psychology, corruption and poverty, ageing, and even the biological anomaly we call death. It’s an odd little lab for tyranny, somewhat reminiscent of the Jacobin club in the early days of the Revolution, where debate among the best and brightest of the patriots could only lead to finest solutions. Of course, everything is reminding me of the French Revolution right now.

There’s a vicious sort of self-selection at work among geniuses who would serve the world, whether it’s Allah’s geniuses or Rousseau’s or Stanford’s. How exhilarating it must be to discover that everyone in the room (those who have survived the mental shake-down at the door,) all have the same vocabulary and have stumbled upon the same solutions to the world’s ills! It must be providence! Shut out the noise. When we have the strength, we will issue forth from this room. We will eradicate the noise. Our solutions will prevail, and the thousand-year reign of paradise can begin.

Oh, well. I’m no genius. There’s little I can do to avert the next invasion of bright-eyed problem-solvers. (Has anyone studied the influence of coffee on the French Revolution? Coffee houses were all the rage among the political and culture classes of Europe in the eighteenth century. And I’ve seen firsthand the manic pace of caffeine consumption in the Middle East.)

As much as I complain about it, I will miss the noise. It’s distracting, but it is the language of celebration and exultation. It’s the true sound of pain and protest. It is song. It is the language of things spontaneous. Of course we will all be happy under the rule of the geniuses, every move planned by the smartest and the best. But I might just miss the whoop on a Saturday night from the mouths of dumb kids, the outburst of uncouth laughter, the whistle of the girl so happy she hasn’t noticed I’m reading.

Travelogue 595 – January 6
Bugs on Parade

Back in Addis, the Parade of the Bugs has begun. It’s the day before Ethiopian Christmas. Families are preparing for the feast. Bug means sheep in Amharic. Anywhere there’s a bit of open dirt roadside, the shepherds have set up shop. Families stroll among the meager herds, and they haggle. Young men follow their matriarchs home, each holding up one side, one holding horns, one holding hooves, while the big ram squirms against the ropes binding him.

We have made it back to Addis safe and sound, even if exhausted, even if a few of us are still coughing up the white powder of the roads of Kembata-Tembaro. (Driving through a moon-dust landscape, where the powder has coated everything near the road. Children standing at the top of the bank of the channel of the road, arms and cheeks white with dust, staring down at us as we pass, even as we raise clouds of the noxious powder.)

We hit the asphalt road early in the morning, heading north again. We have been bunking in Hosanna, nondescript capital of the Hadiya region. We take to the highway again, the highway being a slim and dilapidated ribbon of asphalt winding around its north-south meridian, connecting Addis to Ethiopia’s southern regions, only one of two main arteries doing so. When we stop in Butajira for lunch, Ijigu goes out to buy sugar cane and a pumpkin for his family.

The rest of us indulge in ‘fool’ for breakfast. That’s a treat. I remember when Leeza’s mom used to make it for us. It’s one of the few Ethiopian dishes with beans. In this case, beans and eggs. We sit outside at a small, bustling roadside café that the driver has recommended. We sit in the usual formation, me in the sun and everyone else, as many as can manage it, in the shade.

The weather has been getting heavier. When I first arrived in Ethiopia the skies were bright and clear. But a haze has been gathering day by day. Horizons fade into the murk of it. A few high clouds drift slowly along, far away. The afternoons are sweltering.

We’re home in Addis. We’ve returned to the office. It’s going to be a busy day. There will be two days off for Christmas, and then I only have Friday with staff before I fly home. I set up on the third floor, in the conference room, a room too cold in the morning and too hot in the afternoon, when the sun beats on the windows. There is a sliding glass door opening onto a narrow balcony. I stand there in idle moments, soaking up the sun, taking in the view over the neighborhood and beyond, to the hills around Arat Kilo.

On the bottom floor of the office compound is the Gebeta library for children. There are plenty of children there in the afternoon. Semhal, our in-house librarian, has arranged a Christmas party. She has set up a small Christmas tree, and underneath it are empty boxes, wrapped colorfully. The children are laughing uproariously. Jessica from Madison is leading them in a game. ‘Run, run, run, four!’ she chants, and the children have to grab each other in groups of four. Whoever is without a group is out. ‘Run, run, run, two!’

The day wheels by quickly in a succession of meetings. When it’s done, I head home to rest. I want nothing more than sleep. Opening the gate to our compound, I see the landlord family has secured its bug. It is tied up in the courtyard, and it bleats mournfully. The dogs in their guard post cages growl at him. It’s no way to spend one’s final hours, but there’s nothing I can do. I know its fate in the morning when the knives come out. Merry Christmas, little guy.

Travelogue 594 – January 4
Powder

We’re traveling in the south. It’s my fifth sunny day in a row, dazzling to someone who has been living in the Netherlands. We are driving west into Kambata. The road changes from asphalt to dirt to a substance in between, a rocky amalgam of earth and macadam. A road all the way to Jima is being cut into and across the hilly landscape. The road has been under construction as long as I have been traveling here. We rarely see road workers. We encounter lonely signs saying ‘Men Working,’ and we take pictures of them.

We go further and whole sections of the road are surrendered to dust. Passing buses raise it sky high. When we pass them, we drive blind into a cloud of it. My throat is burning. I hold a scarf over my nose, but still I’m blowing it so often there are spots of blood.

We pass through Mudula, a town built on hills, a town of mud roads and mud walls, set among country that is a southern Ethiopian shade of green, rich but not the heavy color of jungle, leavened by the yellows of the highlands. The blue skies are still bright and crisp with morning.

We have left the new road now, to travel downhill along a road just wider than our vehicle. We are looking for our teacher. His name is Ananu. He is a local we have hired to facilitate our rural literacy program hereabouts. We are stopping people along the road and asking, ‘Have you seen Ananu?’ ‘Have you seen a guy on a horse?’ The mobile network isn’t working here.

We ask an old man leading a donkey. A young man on his motorcycle stops. Some boys emerge from the trees lining the road, from among the hits and small plots of farmland we see through the leaves. There’s an old man with a naked infant on his hip. There are girls giggling at us. The boys peer into the car windows to stare at me. They whisper to each other, and they laugh.

Someone says Deresho. Look in Deresho. Where is that? It’s a village back up the road the way we came. The driver executes a laborious U-turn in the narrow road, and we’re driving again. We turn onto a smaller road, and we don’t go far before we arrive at the local schoolhouse, two mud and stick rooms alone in a small grassy field grass. We meet the teacher, young and shy, and we peek into the rooms, dark and empty. There is a warped blackboard on the wall, and a few long boards close to the ground for seats. They can accommodate only a fraction of the students. Fifty have to cram into each room.

Nearby is a clearing where the hundred or so young students have gathered to hear stories read by Mr. Ananu. Some elders have gathered, too, sitting in a row of chairs to one side. He has a book of children’s stories in Amharic. He has to translate as he reads into Tembarigna. The children are quiet, transfixed, by the story, by the occasion, by the strange-looking faranj.

I feel as though I’m being a distraction, so I take a walk. I find a small track through the trees, and I stroll slowly in the strong sunshine, by rough patches of ploughed earth, by huts. I am stopped by the decorations on one hut. It is the typical round hut with peaked thatched roof. Some of the huts around here are partially covered with smoothed mud and plaster, painted with designs and pictures. This one has two pictures outlined on either side of its doorway. One depicts a common theme, the roaring lion conquering the hyena, heavy paw on the creature’s head. It’s the other side that is surprising, dissonant: two men sitting in chairs, one with a guitar and the other with a keyboard. One wears little square glasses.

A little girl in rags comes up the path. She stands beside me and smiles. She whispers in reply to my greeting, in accented Amharic. When I pose a question, she answers the same way she did before. She just knows these few words in Amharic. We turn and walk together back toward the clearing.

Travelogue 593 – December 31
And Then, Santa Again, No Snow

And suddenly I’m awaking in Ethiopia. At the Romina Café in Arat Kilo, they are just putting up their Christmas decorations. Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas is the 7th of January. The decorations are strictly European or American in nature, Santa Claus and red felt. There’s a Christmas tree with lights.

I’m jealous of the bits of sunshine that grace this early morning, the first light of day. I’m sitting in the patio outdoors, despite the chill, despite the shadows throw by the trees surrounding the café. The sun is just rising high enough to project warmth, and I’m greedily soaking it in. There are a few spots of it playing in my shoulders.

The street is already roaring with life. Buses and taxis are idling in traffic, spitting out copious plumes of exhaust. People are forming long lines for taxi service, even as they watch the traffic inching forward at half the pace of the pedestrians. Just outside the café patio, the shoeshine boys and the newspaper boys and the parking attendants are goofing around, yelling at each other and dodging cars as the drivers try to maneuver around the narrow parking lot.

There are a few baristas who have been here years. It’s great to see their smile when they see me. ‘Tafah anta,’ they say. ‘you’ve disappeared.’ Yes, Europe has kidnapped me, (or maybe that’s the other way around,) and I haven’t seen much of Ethiopia in the year that’s now passing. I say the addis amat, the new year, will be different. The sun is getting warmer. My face and neck will be bright pink with exposure to the sun by the end of the day. I’m planning on it.

Yesterday, we sat on the tarmac for two hours. The snow was still coming down in Frankfurt. Temperatures were solidly below zero Celsius. We watched from the plane windows as they de-iced the wings. We watched the pink fluids flow down over the windows as they de-iced the roof. Then they seemed to start over. The short and cold and dim German day, the second to the last day of 2014, was spending itself outside, and we remained quiet in our tight little seats.

‘Oh, I forgot,’ says one of the baristas, one of the old-timers, ‘It’s your New Year!’ Yes, I say, it is. ‘Have a good time,’ she says. I will, I will, thank you. The heat is building across my shoulders. Thank you!

Travelogue 592 – December 27
White After Christmas

The day after Christmas is still Christmas in Holland. There’s a first day and there’s a second day. On the second day of Christmas, you might find some places open. Like the Coffee Company at Eendrachtsplein.

It’s one of those holidays within a holiday, half working, half holidaying. There is no Christmas this week in Ethiopia, so they are at their desks in the office. I’m calling on Christmas morning, conducting real work before the family duties of the holiday begin, which duties are supremely challenging: like, eating and accomplishing nothing. The time is made all the more rare and precious by our pregnancy and by the delicate pause between trips. I will be leaving for Ethiopia again in a few days, missing a few more weeks of the rarest of interludes, hidden baby coming, wife glowing, those sorts of things.

On the second day of Christmas, the barista at Eendrachtsplein is singing. He is dreaming of a white Christmas. I ask him and his colleague whether they are sad that there is no white to speak of, and there hasn’t been in a few years. It has been a common theme of conversation in winter in Holland: ‘There used to be snow and ice.’ They debate. It might be four years since there really was a white Christmas in Rotterdam.

It is cold enough for snow. Menna’s fingertips are burning. She’s not used to that sensation. We boldly chose to cycle into town today. It’s exercise; it’s getting out of the house. But there is a price to pay. I’m wearing my cycling gloves, which only go to the first knuckle. They’re the only gloves I have. Menna is suffering. She runs inside while I lock the bikes.

The baristas are dreaming of a white Christmas.

And then, just the next day, we wake up to snow falling. Menna screams. It’s her first snow. We dress as quickly as we can, and we dash outside. It’s a wet snow, clinging to roofs and tree branches and bicycle frames. It’s crunchy underfoot. We have to touch it. We have to make snowballs, and we have to make explode against each other’s jackets. We have to run to the river, and we have to take pictures.

I decide to cycle into town, having learned nothing from yesterday’s ride. I’m wearing the same gloves, and this time it’s worse. I’m really in pain. I’m riding slowly, sliding through the ridges of snow, splashing through the slop. I have no boots; my shoes are soaked after five minutes. Not only my shoes, but my pant legs a good six inches up.

I arrive, and my fingers are past burning. I have to get them back to burning again, holding thumb and finger tips against the espresso glass. They throb with dull pain. I’ve come here to work, but my fingers hurt too much to type for a while. The baristas are no longer singing about a white Christmas. I’m expecting them to be ecstatic about the snow, but they seem unsettled. Maybe they had to cycle in, too.

I watch the morning unfold, while my clothes dry out and my digits regain feeling. I watch the people rush in, smiling, buoyed by the change, exhilarated. They have found something that was missing. They are cold, and they are complete. I calculate the pain I will endure on the way home.

Travelogue 591 – December 6
Northern Solace
Part Four

Necropolis is just the right term for the Cimetière de Montmartre. It’s a city of the dead, wide paved lanes leading among the rows of sepulchers, small alleyways and paths linking one to another, creating little enclaves like quiet neighborhoods. The streets borrow their names from the more famous among the buried.

I pass some of the famous as I explore. I see the poet Heine, the composer Berlioz, the novelist Zola, and the novelist Stendhal. I find the final resting place of one Monsieur Sanson, professional executioner before and during the Revolution, the man who beheaded the king, the man who put over three thousand souls into their graves. His own grave is surprisingly humble and bourgeois. Citizen Sanson might be a shop-owner. Zola’s is marked by an extravagant bronze, imagining for us a leonine visage. It’s clearly a choice that was made well after Emile himself would have had any input.

Nearby, an oversized mask of Jesus sheds tears of stone. And I think of Saint Job again. Wouldn’t his tears be more appropriate? More convincing? I’m thinking that Jesus the Saviour doesn’t have much cause to shed a tear at the death of one Parisian. Shouldn’t he be the one Biblical hero with a smile of reassurance, with even a wink of conspiracy, symbol of all God’s best intentions?

I circle the grounds one more time. I take pictures. I see a few more tourists arriving to join us this morning. They are taking pictures. Everyone is quiet, especially the ones underneath the ground. No one bothers posing. It’s a weekend. Its morning. Most of us are dead. I am not, and I have a train to catch. I leave the new tourists to it, and I pass under the deep shadow of the Rue Caulaincourt on my way out.

I exercise the muscles of legs still oxygenated by a beating heart. I pass again the office of the complacent headstone salesman on the Avenue Rachel, into the cacophony of the city that has forgotten the terrors of Monsieur Sanson’s day. It’s a calm morning; I have no expectation of being beheaded.

We don’t draw pictures of Job. We tell stories about him, and make each other shudder with dread.

I’m reading Hilary Mantel again. The spirits housed in the cemetery, and under the cemetery, might thank her. Given a day to re-order their estates and memories, they might prefer a contract with Ms. Mantel over one with the man on the Avenue Rachel. Ms. Mantel restores something to them. She rescues historical fiction from the vampires and the purveyors of romance and porn.

And yet I wonder if the story doesn’t tell itself. The history is incredible in its nature. Imagining that people lived through it, even made it happen, challenges belief, even as the stories are durable as stone, made to be mythologized. One can imagine how, in a time before writing, these characters would become demi-gods and demons.

I might have wished for an account of my father, Job, wishing for him the voice of M. Danton, who speaks with the truth of tension, about startling events in startling times. (Is every age a wonder?)

The soldiers patrol the Rue de Cordeliers. They point out the house of M. Danton. They eye it with emotion, some with dread, some with admiration. Only two years have passed since the fall of the Bastille, and still it seems as though the fundament of heaven and earth – of Paris – have been disfigured. The time before is hard to recall. It was a dream. The future is dark. Some more of us must die.

The trains are running. The Gare du Nord is the lurid and shattered scene it usually is, people turning as though figures in a broken dance. They check the screens; they run. With the right ignition, they might just scream. They might topple columns and kings. They might loot the pastry stall.

But the crowds part, and I board my train. I cross the frontier without incident.

Travelogue 590 – December 5
Northern Solace
Part Three

The French have left their mark. The capital of Minnesota bears the lasting stamp of the Franks. City fathers were moved to name the outpost after their French solace. In Minnesota, land of desperate winters, solace can mean a lot. And who in the world could ever resist the kind of solace that the French prepare?

Perhaps with genuine gratitude, perhaps with a species of grim humor that months of snow will nurture, the first citizens of the capital wanted to name the city after the local purveyor of whiskey, one Pierre Parrant. The former fur trader had a popular tavern, and he had a bad reputation with local officials, and he did have a catchy nickname, ‘Pig’s Eye’.

One Father Lucien Galtier had other ideas. He provided another variety of French solace in the chapel of Saint Paul. Once the territory of Minnesota had an opportunity to join the Union, (just a few years before the Union was destined to be torn asunder,) and once the site of the capital had been settled upon the young riverside town – a matter decided according to the highest model of rational deliberation, meaning, the physical theft of the draft of a law to situate the capital in nearby Saint Peter, -- the city elders grudgingly acknowledged that the example of the good father might be more appropriate than that of the moonshiner. Saint Paul, it would be, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

So the French left their mark … and left, abandoning the city to the next generation of Catholics, the harder-working Irish. Poor old Pig’s Eye Parrant was forced out of the city, and no one is quite sure where he ended up after that. All possible trails point north. The old French fur trader turned back toward the snows, and lies now in some unmarked spot, perhaps to be discovered under a parking lot like poor King Richard was recently, squeezed into an ill-fitting box, his whiskey-soaked genetic material sampled in order to be strained through some high-science blender and identified as the reprobate founder of the city of Saint Paul.

The temperatures in Paris are more reasonable, the damp more familiar. I’m on my way home to Rotterdam, but stalled by a rail strike in neighboring Belgium. I am staying in a hotel of the Place de Clichy in northern Paris. Just a few short blocks away is the Cimetière de Montmartre.

I pay my respects in the morning, before I have to make my way to the Gare du Nord. The Belgian strike is carried out only one day per week, a show of order and deference that I plan to repay with a tip to the first conductor I see.

To visit the cemetery, one has to walk down the Avenue Rachel, resisting the temptation to follow the larger Rue Caulaincourt. The latter rue rises on steel girders to pass over the cemetery on its way to the butte Montmartre. From the Rue Caulaincourt, one surveys the vast cemetery from above, an opportunity for the harried commuter crossing from one arrondissement to another for healthy perspective, surveying the rows of sepulchres.

On the Avenue Rachel, one passes the storefront of the man who engraves headstones. You see the man already at his station, sitting at his desk with a complacent smile, a chubby man with small round eyeglasses, waiting for business, checking his smartphone.

Through the gate, one passes under the shadow of the bridge, and into the extremities of that strange contrast; seeing overhead the rush of daily life, those with hearts still pumping hastening with eyes set forward, issuing the hum and clamour of unrepentant life.

Inside the cemetery, there is repentance and there is introspection. One finds leisure to wonder about the lives of all who have ended up here, the thousands buried here since the foundation of the cemetery in the mid-nineteenth century, on the site of a gypsum quarry. It was a site already associated with the dead, being site to mass graves during the Revolution.

It is quiet. The family vaults crowd together among the paved lanes, seeming to jostle for position. Some rise high with grandeur and high-minded design. Some hold back in humility. Some names stand in vivid relief, some are already faded into obscurity. And still, among the strident cries for attention, all is terrifically still.

One strolls in reflection. And one thinks of the complacent man selling grave stones. How did he sell this one, the full-scale copy of the Thinker? How did he sell this statue, looking like an Indian scout with a hand up shading his eyes? The older monuments trade on traditional motifs, safely neo-classical or Gothic. But who sold the widow this garish face of Christ with tears in his eyes? These are some of the recent gravesites. With all the resources of the belated, we unfortunate have ample opportunity to make the worst choices. And which shall we repent more, bad behavior or bad taste? When memory of our lives fades, the memorial remains.

Or doesn’t. Once upon a time, there was a rude cross, branches hacked with a bowie knife and tied together with a stretch of leather thong. There was no need for a plaque. The woods being the only witness, there was no need to memorialize. The birds would know this as the resting place of one Pig’s Eye Parrant, French founder of the American state capital … and distiller of some fine whiskey.

Travelogue 589 – December 4
Northern Solace
Part Two

The weather has moderated somewhat. On the day that I disembarked from the aeroplane, temperatures in Minnesota were topping out at zero Fahrenheit, which I have discovered is equivalent to minus eighteen Centigrade. Minnesota temperatures don’t scare me anymore, but that does not mean I’m immune. They don’t serve to shock, but still they hurt. I’ve lost some tolerance. And, moreover, I’ve lost some of my heavy-duty winter gear during the years in milder climes.

I’m thinking again, the French came here for the margin on a few furs. Really? That is cold ambition. Advancing the line of a frontier into the extremes, chasing little animals for their carcasses. Did they wonder how far the temperatures could and would fall? In an uncharted world, wouldn’t there by reason be uncharted pain? I guess you can only freeze once. It hardly matters the exact value of the temperature that got you, unless rugged Catholic explorers might feel entitled to final bragging rights beyond the grave.

Me, I’ll defer that case of frostbite for another day. I dash into the bookstore. I have escaped the snow. I have escaped the distracting sting among the digits. But there’s still a draft to remind me to keep the coat on. I contemplate the brittle layers of masonry protecting us from the weather, the flimsy insulation, the box around our ears that represents the frightening, the decisive ratio, freezing space outside to sheltered space inside.

Winter anxiety. Perhaps it’s the mind that freezes first. Escaping the snow I find easier than escaping the thought of snow. It’s the mind that needs solace in winter. I’m in the right place, among rows of plentiful books. Protected, distracted, there is no threat from the wild atmosphere.

Would the French explorer sneer at our luxury? Would he stand in the bookstore and stamp his feet and shout? Would he challenge us from within his furs? Would distrust the warmth, thinking it would sap him of his best hopes for the afterlife? Or would he smile and shake off the snow, browse the French language shelves and look for an easy chair?

Would he tell stories? Would he recount the meeting with Ojibwa scouts at the river crossing? Would he detail the complex negotiations at the villages? Were there bandits? Was there combat? Could he paint the picture of the moonlit woods on the coldest night, or paint his terror of the wolves? Would he tell us about the long passage across the ocean? Will he go back some day? Is he buried here? Would the explorer have known the way to French heaven from the skies above the Mississippi?

What unsigned graves are there in the ample lands of the Upper Midwest? Might we be standing on one or two here in the Mager’s and Quinn? Am I browsing the grave sites even as I browse the shelves above earth?

Shall I browse the graves? Once back in Paris shall I browse the graves of the explorer’s compatriots, the safe ones, the ones who never left home and hearth, those who did nothing more adventurous than write essays or take up music, code high symphonies.

Travelogue 588 – December 3
Northern Solace
Part One

I was in Minneapolis last week. It was a short trip. I was there only for one week. It was a work trip, and so I was confined for most of my days to the neighborhood of the office, in Uptown. The office is located at the west end of Lake Street.

Lake Calhoun looks to be nearly frozen over. The sun is suspended inside its tight and very low arc over the southern shore of the lake. Snow has blown over the surface of the lake in uneven patches. It is a desolate bit of space, so appealing to me in its emptiness. I’m driving west, where Lake Street curves around the northern shore of the lake, where the street gets bottleneck busy with traffic heading out of Minneapolis and toward the suburbs,

When I leave the office and I want to walk, I walk toward Lake and Hennepin. That intersection is the heart of historic Uptown, a neighborhood so resilient and so stubborn in its identity. I have seen it through a number of phases in almost thirty years. It was renewing itself when I discovered it. It is renewing itself now. The place feels old to me, but must feel new to young residents. That’s a feature of identity the place will not relinquish, no matter how stale perpetual youth may become, no matter how rising property values dress the youth in brands ever more exclusive.

For me, the intersection has one enduring feature in Calhoun Square, the mall built on the busy corner just a few years before I first moved to Minneapolis. It’s rather bland and blandly ahistorical in its appearance, even though built around a few salvaged older buildings. The project was opposed in proposal phases and later while being built, as being an offensive incursion of suburban style into the aspiring urban neighborhood, an area known for its youth and arts cultures. But it did get built, and still it stands.

I’m surprised to see that now Calhoun Square hosts H&M, a chain I’ve become accustomed to in the Netherlands. In Rotterdam, one may just be lucky enough to find multiple H&M outlets on a single block. Now here it is in high-rent Uptown, across from the Apple store. I stand and regard its familiar branding, standing on Hennepin Avenue while a light snow falls. Certainly the old mall has experienced its share of tenant turnover, as it has of facelifts, but somehow I’d become accustomed to thinking that nothing European ever came this way. I take a stroll through the store, and I find racks of familiar styles. They haven’t bothered to Americanize anything, if there is really such a process anymore.

I’m more interested, ultimately, in crossing the street and walking a few storefronts down to the old Mager’s and Quinn, a shop that opened on Hennepin across form the mall some years after I made my own first appearance in the city, and which became a regular hangout. I can certainly recommend this as a stop for any book lovers visiting the Twin Cities, a kind of chapel to an old cult of the independent sellers.