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.

Travelogue 791 – February 27
Darkness in the Machine
Part Three

The new computer is fine. Data darkness recedes. But it will never abate. That’s clear. There are files I grieve over, photos and documents. Projects are still on hold because I don’t have the heart to start over. Not quite yet.

It comes as a sobering realization how fragile data is. It should. We need the occasional check on our powers, the reminder that darkness is the prevailing state. ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away,’ and all that. It was ever that way with knowledge and our projects. The darkness is shocking when it comes, no matter our strength or wisdom.

A corollary of darkness is contingency. It isn’t something we humans like to admit, how much our lives are the product of accident and darkness. How many butterfly opportunities have flown because I lost letters and CVs, lists and thoughts?

The stark figure of contingency stands in every scene, in every story. That should be understood. We should pencil him in, like the skulls so ubiquitous in Renaissance paintings. He’s been president and pirate, Roman and Ethiopia. And yes, he was a Bolshevik. I find funny this belated hush about 1917. As though the Russian Revolution had let us down. As though it could have ever claimed to have been socialist, Communist, Marxist, or even a revolution. Russian, yes – though it indeed had to be imported.

History is fascinating and beautiful because of its contingencies. The revolutionaries lived in exile in London and Vienna and New York, and they dreamed about revolution. But they could not call the date. When the day came, it was in the midst of a soul-crushing war, and the exigencies of state overcame the dreams of utopia. In these conditions, every decision it came to the Bolsheviks to make as leaders led them away from the ideas of the Bolsheviks as thinkers. They were cornered by contingency.

In order to manifest their dream, the Bolsheviks needed a state apparatus. But the state, and the apparatus, they inherited was on the verge of collapse. Their first mandate was power. The state must function, that their program see the light of day. Way leads on to way, and we never see that first road though the yellow wood again. Ideologues argue. Politicians jockey for position. Lenin has his stroke. Fascists come to power in Europe. They hold forth on the menace of the Bolsheviks. More lines are drawn, more wars to come.

All of it is a fine fable. There was only ever contingency. And so, ultimately, it’s comical that we censor history. All real lessons are lost. They are heroes; then they are disappointments. It’s a silly game, and ironically, it only demonstrates our disregard for history. Observing and measuring humanity by its palpable responses to history, I find that history is an unconscious force far more powerful than a conscious one. In fact, the more that people have no idea how to process history consciously, the more powerful it becomes as an unconscious force.

Travelogue 790 – February 25
My Rabbits

I got a late start this morning, and still the temperatures were solidly below zero (Celsius). I debated my decision to cycle into town as I descended the stairs to ground level. The bicycle won, and I set out. Tears sprang into my eyes at the first cold wind. My fingers through gloves and toes through trainers felt the bite of the chill. But the truth is, though every day at my first exposure to the morning cold I question my resolve, the bike always wins. I enjoy this kind of cold. It comes with bright blue skies and rare sunshine. It’s brisk. It’s exhilarating.

February has been a sunny and a cold month here in Rotterdam. I admit that I’ve felt some relief, after months of clouds and intermittent rain. I’ve been cycling more. I’ve been running. My struggling training campaign for a spring half marathon has revived.

I returned from a run yesterday afternoon, and a neighbour had to comment. ‘Optimistisch,’ he said, not realizing I had already been out for more than an hour. He eyed the shorts, and I laughed. It really doesn’t bother me, the bare legs in freezing temperatures. It may be the dulling effect of age. It may be some genetic recoding I underwent during my years in Minnesota.

As a matter of fact, yesterday was the first occasion this year I felt like a runner. For months, I’ve had to ignore the rabbits, fellow runners placed by Providence to stir the competitive spirit. I haven’t had the strength of body or mind to rise to any challenges. Today, I couldn’t resist. I was passed by a young man who was huffing and puffing and dragging his feet. He looked fit, gym-fit, well-built, but no natural runner. I couldn’t countenance it. I found some reservoir of endurance, and, though I’d already logged a number of cold miles, I put this upstart behind me. A glorious performance. Surprisingly, I paid no heavy price for it. The new pace felt good, and I was mightily encouraged. The half marathon in May might just be within my reach.

At home, I tell Baby it’s time to run. She’s overjoyed. She tells me what needs to happen. ‘I need my jacket, Papa. Where are my gloves, Papa?’ Outside, we start right away. ‘Run, run,’ I say. She holds my hand, and we run a full lap around the whole building, along the first-floor balcony. We stop occasionally, and she blows noisy breaths to signal that’s she exercising. Then we start again. She never seems to get tired, and the cold doesn’t bother her at all. Once home again, she boasts to Mama. ‘Baby goes running!’ Wow! Mama says. One day I’ll be the rabbit, old man with the audacity to be ahead of her.

Travelogue 789 – February 18
Darkness in the Machine
Part Two

One hundred years ago today, the Germans launched their continued offensive against Russia, impatient with Mr. Trotsky’s strategy of high discourse and low delay. The German socialist revolution was not coming, but the German army was. The Red Army, the new Russian army, made semi-voluntary, was going to crumble before them. When Lenin decided there was no choice but to sign for peace with Germany, at the expense of extensive territory, Trotsky resigned as Foreign Minister, rather than sign the treaty.

Several weeks on, I’m still stumbling over gaps in my data, weeks on from the collapse of my own data army assembled in the cheap little netbook that suddenly went black. We hired a baby-sitter for date night, but we paid twenty minutes of wages just trying to buy our movie tickets. I had to retrieve three passwords from three different vendors just to be able to buy those tickets and transfer them to Menna’s smart phone. It’s frustrating to be hostage to such small details.

I’ve wondered why a figure like Trotsky would hold such fascination, particularly in a new era that prefers to downplay the Russian Revolution as an embarrassing bit of history. We still enjoy our Cold War stories, but I wonder how many from the younger generations can link that history back to the wild Bolsheviks of 1917. Myself, I remember quite well my fascination with 1917 during my university studies. I recognize the foundation level of the palimpsest that is my picture of Russian communism, a romantic picture, painted in thick impressionistic oils. The outlines were basic: the suffering, the idealism. Why did I find Trotsky so compelling? Why does the idealistic adolescent of our stereotypes always have a poster of Che on his/her wall?

Trotsky’s career was far from over once he retired as Foreign Minister. Having watched the Red Army’s collapse, he resolved to put Humpty Dumpty together again. He took over the Red Army, and he took it over just as another threat appeared, a threat more frightening than the Germans. In the spring, the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia rebelled when confronted by Bolshevik officials who were protecting enemy prisoners. The officials were bound by the terms of the new treaty to protect prisoners. The rebels overthrew the officials and quickly controlled an impressive swath of territory. Russian officers joined in rebellion against the Bolsheviks, and very soon much of Russia east of the Urals was lost to the central government. The Civil War had begun.

Trotsky has often been classified as the ideologue, set beside the cold pragmatists Lenin and Stalin. But re-assembling this broken army was not philosophy; it was compromise and calculation and hard work. He re-professionalized the army. He recruited leadership from the old regime. Rivals denounced it as betrayal of their ideals. He pressed on, often preserving individual units only by personal intervention, standing in the way of deserters, making speeches. He was true believer, even if only in his own abilities.

We marvel over the feats of our predecessors. We feel the anxiety of the late-comer. We romanticize the past and regret our own lack of opportunity – when our greatest adventure is a dying hard drive. I think it’s perhaps the shadow of the opportunity that has more power, the challenge implicit in the achievements of our ancestors. Would we survive what our grandmothers and grandfathers survived?

I have had occasion to question Freud’s improvisation of a universal death instinct. The theory is emotionally satisfying, particularly in a time of school shootings, but it seems simplistic. I find more potential in an exploration of this late-comer anxiety. How do we navigate our own age, so radically, so palpably different than any other age? How do we reconcile our histories? How do we reconcile our heroes – board room, lab coat, social media heroes – against the volumes of encyclopaedias full of Caesars and Trotskys?

Many ancient cultures had deep-rooted traditions of ancestor veneration. I remember finding that so strange and alien as a young person. I was typically naïve about it. ‘They worshipped their grandfathers?’ I could shrug it off when it was reduced to a formula like that. I didn’t much like my father. I couldn’t countenance someone worshipping him down the line.

But he threatens me. He has the power to speak out of the darkness. Down there is a reservoir of data much harder to re-assemble, a hard drive that hasn’t quite crashed, and yet is impenetrable.

Travelogue 788 – February 1
Darkness in the Machine
Part One

What I've started I've lost. My computer died a few days ago.

I remember I was writing about the darkness. I had read some time in recent weeks that this was becoming the darkest fall-winter season in a hundred years. I hadn't needed to be told; I had felt it like a damp wool suit. My Dutch friends denied it, but locals always want you to believe that the extreme is the normal.

Maybe writing about darkness had imported it into the system. It took over my computer and coated the circuitry like syrup, like coffee. Coffee was the repair man's best guess at what had been spilled on the keyboard and, from there, onto the mother board, extinguishing all life in the poor machine.

I wouldn't have minded - I had already begun marvelling at the long service provided by the inexpensive toy netbook, - but for the timing. But how can I complain? There's never a good time for loss. And bad luck wouldn't be particularly bad without its sense of timing.

Sunk into the syrup of night were also a few shelves of documents. I don't have any catalogue of what's gone. Among the casualties will be drafts of writing that I was lazy about backing up. Even the plays I'm currently rehearsing only exist in hard copy now.

Losing things can feel unexpectedly liberating, when it isn't a house key in winter or something you need urgently. Relief makes for an odd mix with anxiety, with the sobering reminder of human frailty. But there is something undeniably exhilarating about those show-stopping moments when the plot is suspended, and you have no choice but to regroup.

A part of the mind finds the strong language funny when employed about a cheap computer. Our dependencies are so various and many and surprising. These are interesting times.

I was writing about the darkness. And I was writing about the centenary of Russia's dark winter of 1918. The nation was in a precarious position that winter. There was a new regime, new to Russia and to the world. It had taken over during wartime.

Perhaps the most intriguing figure from that era was Leon Trotsky, writer and orator who was destined in the course of this year and the several following to become a battle-hardened general.

As the year opened, Trotsky was the Foreign Minister for Bolshevik Russia. He was on his way to join in the negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. He was going to bring discipline to the negotiation team. He was going to bring socialism to the table of generals and diplomats. His strategy was to delay, in hopes that revolution would be sparked in Germany, inspired by the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg.

Though he did miscalculate, it must be said that revolution was indeed to come to Germany, later in 1918. It was the change in regime that would finally lead directly to the general armistice in November.

Trotsky did miscalculate. An impatient Germany resumed their offensive on February 18th, and the Red Army folded. Within days, Russia had lost even more land, and Lenin was forced to accede to German terms. Trotsky abstained from the final vote on the treaty and resigned as Foreign Minister.

Travelogue 787 – January 18
Questions We Ask
Part Two

The water in the canal is choppy as the sea. The clouds are moving with drama. Ahead is the central station. The wind is high today. At the moment, I find it lifts my mood. I lean into it and look at the sky. I imagine Rotterdammers in past centuries leaning into the wind. I wonder how they managed. I contemplated their closer relationship with the cold, in days before central heating and insulation, before public transit and sick leave.

I’m taking a different route to work. That’s because my place of work has changed, and I mean place. Our old building was declared a fire hazard, and so now we’re working downtown. I have to cross over the canal and head east. The wind gusts sharply while I cross the pedestrian bridge. I have to lean. I have to plant my feet. I make it across, and then across the tram tracks on the other side of the canal, tracks set among healthy grass that separates the canal from a parallel street. I’m crossing the street, when the gusts roar with even more strength. Now I’m being pushed down the street. I brace against a car, and then work my way, hand over hand, to the sidewalk. I reach for a lamppost.

There was a woman following behind me on the bridge, pushing her bicycle. Now, she’s been pushed to the ground with her bike, on the tram tracks. Two men have stopped to help her. None of them can move, all three crouching beside the bike on the tram tracks. A tram has stopped twenty metres away. Further down the street, I see a woman thrown face down into the grass of the canal’s park.

Maybe it was the long tutelage as revolutionary, but Trotsky refused to acknowledge that the revolution ever ended. His and Lenin’s would be the first, and it was their responsibility to ensure it didn’t stand alone. He took his seat at the negotiation table opposite the German delegates convinced that the joke was on them. The socialist revolution would overtake them, and soon Trotsky would be making a deal with new, friendly government in Berlin.

There’s every chance that Lenin believed that the Russian revolution was a holding action. Marxist orthodoxy would have suggested it. The real revolution had to start in the most developed nation. That nation was Germany. These were the strange metaphysics of a Russian revolutionary finding himself at war with Germany.

We grow up with questions. We think through questions. The question occupying me now, during this time so fond of its many historical anniversaries, celebrating simultaneously seventy-year remembrances of World War Two and hundred-year remembrances of the First World War, my question has been, why have we been so quiet about the Russian Revolution, one hundred years on? The anniversary was only a few months ago, and I found the sudden silence disorienting.

Is the silence a new measure of perceived impact? At the fifty-year anniversary, in 1967, there was little doubt in the minds of world citizens that the Russian Revolution was pre-eminent among events of the century. Can we really revise significance? Are we setting mid-century European fascism higher in the history game than the Bolshevik Russian state? Is it simply a matter of simplicity? The war against fascism is simply easier to understand. One can assign values relatively quickly. The Russian Revolution is challenging in its bizarre contradictions. As such, I find it to be a sample of real history, something you can chew on.

Travelogue 786 – January 7
Questions We Ask
Part One

Vacation time is coming to an end. One of the joys of vacation time is waking late and then lying in bed, relishing the quiet mornings before anyone else is up. This is my last quiet morning.

In the mornings, the babies are slow to get going. And when they do wake, they are at their sweetest. It’s at night time that they like to terrorize their parents. The busier we are or the more engaged in a movie, the crazier the babies become. They have an infallible feel for where our attention has settled, and with how much intensity. When they want us back, they cry, they climb, they argue, they teeter dangerously on the edge of the sofa cushions.

They claim their turf. I’ve remarked on Baby’s early sense of possession. I still marvel at how quickly babies become territorial. I don’t remember speaking much in the language of possession, or encouraging Baby to label things as hers. But the impulse arises, like instinct. Now I find myself saying lame things, like, ‘You have to share, Baby.’ Because she has developed a habit of taking toys from the hands of her little sister, Ren. Ren looks up at us, her beautiful, round, one-year-old’s face screwing up into despair, and she howls. Baby also looks to us, with an expectant expression, awaiting our judgement. I find Ren’s disappointment heart-breaking because she follows her big sister around all the time with big eyes of wonder and admiration.

We new parents have questions. We ask the questions when we’re tired, and we struggle to concentrate. Babies change so fast that the answers don’t hold for very long. The stages of child development succeed one another at an unforgiving pace.

Just about this time of year, one hundred years ago, Leon Trotsky was making his way west to the frontier of what only months ago was the Russian Empire. He might have felt like a new parent. He had spent almost twenty years as a revolutionary, and suddenly he was one of a very few people at the top of a dizzying ladder of accountability, responsible for holding together a collapsing nation.

As noted, all idealism aside, the most pressing business for the revolutionaries at the end of 1917 was the German army at the door. The Germans kindly agreed to an armistice, ahead in the game of conquest on the Eastern front and grateful for the respite themselves.

Apparently, the negotiators in Brest-Litovsk had a pleasant enough time of it in December. They ate together and socialized outside negotiations. The Russians were cheered by promises by the Germans that they would not annex any territory. Cheered until, some time after Christmas, the Germans added the footnote that all areas in question, some 150,000 square kilometers of formerly Russian territory, were expected to become independent. This was only fair, the Germans argued, as self-determination was ostensibly a Bolshevik principle.

Trotsky decided he had to oversee the proceedings himself. When he arrived, all fraternization stopped. The discussions became philosophical, and the talks extended through the winter of 1918.

Travelogue 785 – January 2
Sounds of War

There is still debris in the streets from the New Year’s celebrations, the cardboard shells of rockets toppled beside their scorch marks on the pavement, wet piles of pink paper that once housed small firecrackers. All the glass at downtown Metro stations is still boarded up in anticipation of vandalism.

The night was a wild one, reminding all the mild peaceniks in this quiet country of the noise of combat. Everyone in our neighbourhood, Spangen, is a fireworks artist. We put the babies to bed well before midnight, but our own sleep was fitful. Outside, the sound of combat carried on for hours, the stormy crackling of the human libido, party lust, perpetrated on Nature’s night. Sadly, our flat is ill-positioned for watching the show. We are set between rows of buildings, and our view is blocked of all but the highest bursts of colour. So it is that all we can enjoy is the sound. Baby shakes her head and knits her brow. She says, ‘Noise!’ and it sounds like ‘No ease!’

One hundred years ago, the new year dawned on a devastated Europe and on peoples desperate for a cease to the roar of guns and cannons. Dawning over Russia, it discovered a brand new government there, a revolutionary government less than two months old, led by fierce exiles who, a year before, were scattered among a handful of tolerant nations to the west. Lenin made a daring journey from Switzerland, through Germany, Sweden and Finland. Trotsky, the revolution’s wild man, had travelled from New York early in 1917, after the first and milder St. Petersburg revolution in March. He spent his summer in jail, but was free in the fall to take a strong hand in the events of November. Where discussion about the Russian Revolution manages to survive, there is a lively debate to be had about whose revolution it was, Lenin’s or Trotsky’s. Lenin arrived for the final act.

Dealing with the war was pre-eminent. It had torn Russia apart. The country had made significant progress in catching up with the industrial powers, but by the time war broke out in 1914, it was still only five per cent of the labour force that was employed in industry and twenty percent of the economy that was industrial. By the second year of the war, the army was able to supply only one in three soldiers with a rifle. The army could supply one surgeon for every ten thousand troops. One in three Russian men was in the army, so agriculture slowed, causing food shortages and crippling inflation. Desertions were high: an estimated two million had left, a number matched by the number of dead.

Having taken control of St. Petersburg in November, the Communists had signed an armistice by mid-December. But discussions about a treaty had bogged down over territory. Lenin and Trotsky disagreed over strategy. Lenin thought any more combat would be too destructive; they could only lose more territory. Trotsky believed in revolution. He believed their own achievements would inspire the workers of Germany to rise in revolution. He fought to delay the signing of any treaty. In January, he took charge of the negotiations himself, travelling to Brest-Litovsk in present-day Belarus.