Travelogue 1060 – September 28

Rainy Day Sophistry

Out one café window, it was raining. Out the other, it was not. I swung my head one way and then the other, trying to make sense of it. The barista watched me out of the corner of her eye, wondering what new variety of strange behaviour she had to witness. But it was true: sunny one way and showering the other. Cross the street and you were dry. She shrugged and knocked the grounds out of her portafilter.

Life is a game of adaptation. Before I take the girls to school, I check the skies; I check the forecast; I gather our rain gear. I gauge the movements of the clouds. I time our exit like a surfer catching a wave, hoping the lull in the rain lasts just long enough for our trip. I have developed a fine barometric sensitivity for rain. I smell it coming. I search the skies continuously like a fugitive.

A skill is a measure of change. It was formed as a response to the world. The human, as a bundle of skills, is the measure of all things.

It was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was a sophist, according to the historians. In two different dialogues written by Plato, Protagoras the Sophist was put in his place by Socrates, the Non-Sophist. I’m sceptical of the labels. I’m also sceptical about Plato’s Socrates. I don’t think it detracts from Plato’s incredible achievement to admit that he very likely created a version of Socrates that fit into his program.

This is what I think about the sophists. They have come down to us in historical record as somewhat despicable figures, having lost the long-term propaganda war. They are portrayed as relativists, if we can be allowed borrow a modern pejorative.

It’s not enough to accept the caricature. Young men wanted what they had to teach. In societies in which business and policy were decided in the marketplace and the forum, rhetoric was a necessary skill. The thrust of their teaching was skill-building: rhetoric and applied logic. Skills teachers focus on problem-solving and the solutions are pragmatic, not theoretical. Skills teachers focus on pushing boundaries and asking questions. They all had their different methods and their different styles, but they agreed on empowering students to handle debate, public speaking, and critical thinking. Several made extravagant claims about their own knowledge. Imagine, a teacher who lives on tuition fees bragging about his knowledge!

Let’s compare now the Socratic method, setting aside the conclusions that Plato forced Socrates to reach. The method consisted of questioning, defining terms, pushing boundaries, and applying logic. The outcome? He was charged in the courts of impiety and the corruption of the youth of Athens. I think the line between Socrates and his competition is less categorical and more one of branding. He was perhaps just the best of the sophists, after all, not the alternative to the sophists.

Travelogue 1059 – September 24

The Measure is Man

I’m still reeling from the final episodes of “Better Call Saul”. No spoilers: it’s not because of any specific plot twist or surprise. It’s because the whole series was so affecting, and the final episodes so perfect in their logic. The writing in this series was truly impressive.

Result: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Saul. Surely more attention than a TV show deserves. Or is it? We are still a species that tells stories. Just because we tell them digitally doesn’t mean they are fundamentally more evolved than cave paintings. More sophisticated and complex doesn’t mean categorically different.

Reading about the ancient Greeks and watching Saul has led me to thoughts about the sophists. The sophists were public philosophers in sixth- and fifth-century BC Greece. History’s main charge against the sophists, Plato and Aristophanes here playing the part of 80s Republicans, was relativism. The sophists called themselves teachers, and what they taught was rhetoric, and what they taught about rhetoric was that any point could be argued. The conservatives cried foul.

The early sophist Protagoras famously said, “Man is the measure of all things.” When I first read that, years ago, I confess that I didn’t think too deeply about it. It seemed one of those cryptic ancient Greek aphorisms that read simply like a paean to humanity.

There’s more to it. Study the larger context, study the language of the passage, and it seems to be a statement that the individual human determines his or her truth. There’s apparently some debate about whether Protagoras meant that the human mind determines fact or determines value. For example, there’s a difference between declaring it’s winter and declaring it’s cold as winter. (If there are any real philosophers reading this and cringing, please forgive me.)

I’m a fan of Plato, and yet I find myself wanting to defend the sophist. Maybe it’s because they were teachers, among the first in history to make more than a fleeting appearance on the stage. And the impression they made was far-reaching. In some senses, the main thrust of all that beautiful Greek culture and wisdom that we have taken as foundational for two millennia was pedagogy. They were a race of teachers.

Travelogue 1058 – September 12

A Sense of Taste

Starbucks wouldn’t have been our first choice. We were on our way to an evening hockey practice. We were running early, so between Metro and tram we stopped for a snack. As soon as we were in the open, we were caught in a rain shower. We ducked into the Starbucks at the central library.

We were among the first in the rain-shower line, and so we scored a nice table along the wall. Much of the place seems worn and sweaty. Starbucks cafes seem to age more quickly than other cafes. Is it an illusion of the décor, the dark colours and the wood? Best to keep café interiors bright, particularly in this climate.

Three weeks of perfect attendance for both girls is a big achievement. We’re celebrating. It’s been a very positive start to the school year. Of course, it’s only the beginning of the year, and the temps are still warm; three weeks now doesn’t mean what it does in November. But still. We’ve already had one near-miss. Little Ren’s teacher came down with COVID last week.

Baby Jos wanted a chocolate muffin. I wanted a chocolate cookie and an espresso. We watched the rain come down. We munched on our snacks. At some point, I had an alarming realization. I took another bite; I took another sip. I wasn’t tasting anything. I panicked. I called Menna. “I’m not tasting anything!” “Oh, no,” she cried. Should I pull out of the hockey practice and run home? Menna thought I should.

I mulled it over after the phone call. Baby Jos would be disappointed. And I didn’t want to set the wrong tone at the start of her hockey season. I had no other symptoms. The rain was passing. I resolved we should try. If at any point I felt feverish or short of breath, we would turn back, even if we were at the gateway of the hockey club.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. The rain had ceased. Baby Jos ran onto the field, and I snuck away to the clubhouse. There, I decided on an experiment: one coffee and one of their very tasty brownies. In fact, the brownie was yummy as ever. The coffee wasn’t bad, either. Aha, I thought. I was going to be fine.

The moral to the post-pandemic story: it’s not COVID; it’s just Starbucks.

Travelogue 1057 – September 5
Turning On the Lights

First there was light. That was on my mind. In summer, when I awoke, there was sunlight. Now I have to turn on the lights.

In the eastern windows there is some light in the sky, the faint start of the day. But outside my door, facing west, the sky is dark. This is my first sighting post-solstice of stars in the morning after I awake, when I open the front door. It’s sobering.

Today is predicted to be the last hot and dry day before storms move in. You feel the tension and suspense. There’s a crackle in the air. Hazy clouds are coming and going. People are enjoying the weather, riding their bikes to work, sitting on their balconies. With a change in the air, the Dutch are relishing the last of the ending period before preparing for what’s coming.

The news from Germany is the passing of a €65bn package to help families and companies with energy costs this winter. This tops the news on British news sites, but I have to scroll surprisingly far among the headlines of Nos, my usual morning Dutch source, to find the same. I have seen little about Dutch government plans for the looming energy crisis.

Sometimes, even in the presence of beauty, I marvel at the resilience of the human psyche that finds within itself as a mass, and within themselves as individuals, the motivation, the hope, yes the energy - the light on a winter’s morning, – to see their way to the front door, to the Metro station, to their workstations. The metaphor is the end of summer. Or, more likely, we are the metaphor for the season.

Travelogue 1056 – August 30

Drijvend

There’s a building on the water! When did that happen? Have I been gone that long?

I’m on the seventh floor, waiting for my students in the classroom, scanning the view out the window. Our building overlooks the Rijnhaven, an old and abandoned port that lies like a reflecting pool in the midst of this up-and-coming borough, high-rises and construction ringing it on every side, with a cute little pedestrian bridge connecting either side of its narrow passage to the River Maas.

And now there’s a building on the water! I looked it up online. Indeed, there is now a drijvend kantoorgebouw on the Rijnhaven, a “floating office”. It was placed there back in February. Have I been away that long? I’ve had to work at home, convalescing from long COVID. This is my first day back in the classroom.

It’s both heartening and amusing to work in this buzzing little buurt, amusing because we so clearly don’t belong here, the awkward little business faculty, placed temporarily among the dynamism while a humble building of their own is being raised in a sleepier district a few kilometres away. My less-than-fashionable students are down below, poolside, finishing their cigarettes, quite unaware of their awkwardness, while I self-consciously drink in the high-rent view that I don’t deserve, and noticing that there’s a building on the water! Amusing how the history of cities is written on the landscape. It’s an arcane script, decipherable only by the urban elites who read real estate like psalms and participate in perilous investment games.

The River Maas takes a turn here so that, looking out the mouth of the Rijnhaven, one looks downstream. It looks like every boat has come from the Rijnhaven or is approaching to enter it. And yet, the harbour is empty of ships.

Xenophon recites rivers as though punctuation for his march. Who knew Mesopotamia was so awash with rivers? I suppose the T&E need their tributaries. Every time they come across a river, he records how wide it is. It makes sense. They are formidable obstacles.

“After three days march, we came upon the Nieuwe Maas. It is three hundred metres wide.” What if he had written a chronicle of crossing the Netherlands and he described his progress according to bodies of water? It would have been a very long march. “After ten minutes, we came across the Herengracht. It was thirty metres wide. After ten more minutes, we came upon the Keizersgracht. It was also thirty metres wide. After ten more minutes …”

Travelogue 1055 – August 27 

Come and Take Them

Their competitive spirit is growing. Last year, when they were six, they ran more or less randomly around the field, knowing vaguely they had to hit the ball with their hockey sticks, knowing vaguely there were goals to aim for. Some had more sense of the game than others, and when they had the ball, they moved it in the right direction. Goals were haphazard.

This morning, the girls had more direction. Some still looked dazed or bored. Some spaced out mid-field while others gathered around the ball and swung sticks. But the ball was moving down field and up, and goals were scored. The girls celebrated their goals. Baby Jos scored twice herself.

They’re named after a famous king. This whole club, one of four major hockey clubs in Rotterdam, is named after a king. Guess his name. He was seventeenth in his family line. He was descended directly from Heracles. He succeeded a half-brother who went mad. He was succeeded by his son after ruling for ten years. He led his army against the superpower of the age, who were attempting to invade, and he was killed in battle. One of several famous quotes attributed to him is, “Come and take them.” (His response to the superpower king when that king ordered him to surrender his arms.) Can you guess yet? Final clue: this king was played by Gerard Butler on the big screen. How many kings can claim that? Furthermore, this king was married to a woman named Gorgo. In the same film, Gorgo was played by the actress who would later play Cersei Lannister in “Game of Thrones”. This kind of star power makes it real history. Can you guess?

Okay, yes, this is a continuation of my obsession with the Greeks. Clearly, the universe is speaking to me when my daughter’s hockey team is named after a famous Greek king and when the pro football club in my neighbourhood is called “Sparta”. The universe is clearly directing me toward a destiny that can only be fulfilled by a portion of ouzo on a Greek beach under a fiery Greek sun, and my order for that ouzo delivered in flawless Greek.

Isn’t it wonderful how friendly the Fates are? How much more clearly could they have spoken? The times are friendly ones. We are no longer forced to read the entrails of bird and beast to understand the divine will. Why, we need look no further than the names of local sports clubs for impartial prophecy.

For the moment, there is nothing more to be done than to celebrate Jos’s goals with a lemonade in the clubhouse with her teammates. We shout, “Yamas!” and “Death to the Persians!”

Travelogue 1054 – August 24

The Desperate March Upcountry

Everything Greek is in fashion at my house this summer. It started with news of a wedding in Athens. I entertained a fleeting thought that I might attend. I started playing Greek on Duolingo: modern Greek; I had (very casually) studied ancient Greek when I was younger. I began refreshing my memory about ancient Greek history. I read, I found podcasts. I found my copy of Pope’s Homer. I started reading about the history of Homeric manuscripts. (I suddenly wondered, how does a 2,700-year-old poem come to us?) I grazed among other classics.

Xenophon was stranded with an army of ten thousand in Mesopotamia when Cyrus, a contender for the Persian throne, died in battle. The only fight ahead of them after Cyrus was dead was to get out of hostile territory, pursued by a vengeful king under the hot sun of Tigris and Euphrates River Valley. It’s one of the greatest adventure stories in history.

Xenophon had consulted no less a personage than the philosopher Socrates about the invitation to join Cyrus’s army. Socrates had advised him to consult the Oracle of Delphi. After Xenophon asked the oracle the wrong question, Socrates washed his hands of the silly boy. Months later, Xenophon stood before the desperate army of Hellenes, when all seemed lost, to offer then a plan to get them to safety.

My own Anabasis involves getting two little girls back to school. It takes place under a hot sun in the Maas River Valley. We are attempting to escape the wrath of an angry taskmaster who feels betrayed: Summer itself. He is a god jealous of our attentions. He has no patience for those who turn their backs on him. His season, after all, is still in full swing. This was slated to be the year for corrections in the calendar, yanking forward the launch of the school year after a succession of years in which it drifted downstream toward autumn.

Summer’s tactics are ruthless. Turning one furious eye upon us, he bleeds us of energy; he burns the skin; he distorts even our thoughts and emotions, turning virtues into their opposite, patience into impatience and tolerance into aggression. Interior landscapes are as scorched as the brown grasses in the Dutch parks.

But being a parent is no ordinary responsibility. We must maintain the posture of virtue at all costs. We stand scattered around the schoolyard, waiting with our children for the doors to open, or waiting for the to emerge in the heat of the afternoon. Composure must be sustained. The stakes are high.

It’s a new school year, and there are new parents. These new faces are keen reminders of the passage of time. We were the new faces so recently. Now who are we, whose eager and proud smiles have faded with experience. Summer laughs maliciously from the glare of the sun off the car windows. This is what comes of defying gods. If only Socrates has warned us. But that’s not his way. When will they open those doors?

Travelogue 1053 – August 22

A Summer’s End

Yesterday was the last day of summer. The girls returned to school today, and I’m back to work. Vacation time is over, no matter how summery still the weather.

It was a happy summer. It was a summer of hot days, ice cream, and afternoons in the inflatable pool. It was a summer of visits to the beach. It was a summer of local museums and walks under canopies of tree leaves.

And still there’s a shame in returning to work without stories of international travel. It’s an autumn ritual here. Colleagues are comparing travel stories within minutes of first greetings. There is always a polite but gloating, “Oh!” awaiting any admission that my family and I stayed home for summer. I’ve learned to deflect the judgement with a threat of counter-judgement: “We chose to focus on the children.” I return the condescending smile while theirs waver, and the conversation moves along.

I think of Kant, who famously never travelled. I think of the stillness of the COVID years. I think of everyone re-evaluating travel now, post-COVID, while the climate has gone wonky. People are rediscovering the local. I count myself among this new breed, but cautiously and with lots of qualifications, like: well, it’s somewhat involuntary; and, well, I’ll travel when I can; and, well, I’m still travelling, even if locally. Our trips to the beach still consume some portion of the fuel burned by trains between Rotterdam and Den Haag.

On the final day of summer, I made one last trip to the beach. I can say with a touch of pride that my footprint was minimal. I cycled to the train station, rather than use the Metro. At the other end of the train trip, I rented a bicycle to pedal all the way from Den Haag Centraal to the beach.

The occasion was a birthday. The weather was lovely. My claim to be championing the environment was suspect, I admit, undermined by every degree in temperature and every minute of clear sunshine. The ride was short and easy and very pleasurable, leading through the elegant streets of Den Haag, through peaceful parklands after that, and through the posh outskirts of Scheveningen.

I discovered old Scheveningen, tucked into a pocket south of our usual tram stops, and south of the beaches we frequent. It was refreshing to see the historical town, still alive and kicking under the late summer sun, the old lighthouse standing red and tall on its hill, and the old church at the base of that hill, standing at the end of the town’s shopping street, so forgotten it displayed no plaque or sign describing its centuries of history.

Travelogue 1052 – August 8

Derivative

I’ve been teaching in the afternoons this week, standing at the whiteboard in a stuffy third-floor room overlooking the busy Herenplaats square near the Blaak, while summer’s clouds mark the regular, muted progress of long middays.

I introduced conditionals into the muggy air of today’s lesson. We use ‘would’ in the future unreal; we use ‘would have’ in the past unreal. I had students imagine life after winning the lottery. They imagined what might have been had they done things differently. Lack of vocabulary keeps our dreams and regrets very tame. They were excited to learn the word for yacht.

Though I’m working, it’s still summer. In the mornings, I try to plan family fun. My plans do battle with summer laziness; occasionally they win, and we make it out the door. Today we made it to Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. This small museum is housed in a nineteenth-century mansion that stands a stone’s throw from the much-larger modern art museum.

It’s an old-world museum, full of specimens and short on text. Rotterdam’s Maritime Museum is far more child-friendly, with its interactive exhibits and play areas. But my girls are quite entertained by it all. Seized by a kind of restless, galloping wonder, they dash from one animal to another, issuing comments and questions in a rapid stream. We struggled to keep up.

For my part, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a natural history museum. I’m enjoying it. In the same way that I find myself reading more biographies and history of late, I find myself appreciating the taste of reality. On my own, I’d only pay for a museum ticket if art were involved. Here I am, admiring nature’s creations. And I like it.

Afterward, I regard the city’s art and architecture with slightly altered sight. The products of human imagination appear as little more than distortions of nature’s. All we’ve ever come up with is interpretation.

Travelogue 1051 – July 28

Morning and Afternoon

Early in the morning, I open the front door. It’s one of the first things I do. The fresh air is the ensoulment of the day; the day doesn’t start without it. I stand outside, and I breathe deeply. I listen for songbirds, and I gauge the clouds. The temp is 14˚C. I debate long sleeves for the first time in weeks.

I feel something like gratitude in the first moments of the day. I shouldn’t qualify; it simply is gratitude. I just can’t name exactly what I’m grateful for. I could say, “everything”. I could say, “for seeing another morning”. I think of the old prayer, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” I have been kept for another day. Maybe that’s enough.

I’m thinking there’s more. There’s the quality of things once taken for granted. It’s the air itself, refreshing and life-sustaining, that satisfies. When a youth enjoys the fresh air, the fresh air is a thing made wonderful by his or her attention. It hardly matters that the air was fresh before he or she came along. An older person has become more the grateful witness to a wonderful world. Every thing is discovered; every scene is entered in medias res.

By afternoon, the shape of things is set. The day is ripe. I’ve breathed the air. I’ve converted my time into good little achievements, and bad ones, too. I have an accounting to make.

It seems to me that the other side of the coin we call gratitude is a quality we call forgiveness. These terms I find slippery, so forgive the frequent qualifiers. Feeling blessed can come hand in hand with feeling unworthy, at least for some of us. Letting go is more than releasing. It’s acceptance, and it’s living with the things and people that don’t please. Forgiveness is not a process of getting rid of things, but a process of settling in with them. It makes a richer, rather than an emptier, more sanitized, existence.

The day has become populated by small thoughts and events. They are all with me as I sit on the terrace outside under the white, humid sky. The neighbourhood is quiet, even as it hums with all the thoughts and activities of the neighbours. We live with each other; we live with all our deeds together.

I’m thinking each quality loses definition without the other. The forgiving person understands and feels gratitude. The ingrate is stingy with forgiveness. World views built on power collapse in on themselves on this very point. Master races do not forgive. At best, they tolerate, look past, give calculated pardons. At worst, they turn to violence as a way to cleanse the world of what can not be accepted.

Travelogue 1050 – July 25

More Heat

Last week’s heat wave has had aftershocks. Temps reached 30 again, and I was helpless. I could do little but nurse my humidity headache. I think I caught a pinch of Little Ren’s stomach virus. It’s funny how quickly we are brought low, made helpless.

We thought we had ridden the heat wave fairly masterfully. It had been predicted that we would have two bad days. The first day would be less intense. So we were up early and off to the beach. It was mid-July; all of us were finally on holiday.

It was perfect. The beach was crowded, but we arrived early and staked out a perfect spot on the sand. We waded into an unusually calm sea. The girls can’t swim yet, but they are not afraid to jump into the shallow waves. We ran back through the hot sand to our blanket. We were gone before the mid-afternoon rush.

The second day was the rough one, with temperatures reaching almost to 40. But we were forewarned, and we implemented every survival strategy. We had soft drinks in the fridge. We inflated the pool for the kids. We had placed two fans in opposite corners. We started the day early, and we surrendered all ambition in the afternoon, finding our places in the house to rest.

The aftershocks have caught us unprepared. We had plans, and we over-exerted. We didn’t drink enough water. We struggled to sleep at night. Because there were no headlines about the temperatures, we worked one more hour than we should have in front of the computer on the table set in the strong sun. Suddenly, we were dizzy and nauseated.

I’m a student of human behaviours on the street. I think all immigrants are. It’s a survival mechanism. The hottest days don’t bring out our better angels. I am no different. I study the change in myself. The heat drains my energy, and I have less patience with the people around me. It’s better to stay at home. It’s a reminder that hatred is a relapse. It’s the layer you find beneath fatigue.

Travelogue 1049 – July 5

Description

“Her brother was not handsome; no, when they first saw him, he was absolutely plain, black and plain; but still he was a gentleman, with a pleasing address.”

It’s a fun introduction to a character. The passage is from “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen. I started in on Austen recently, part of an enthusiasm for eighteenth-century literature that was sparked by my fling with Alexander Pope. No: now that I think of it, I had a brief crush on Joseph Addison before Pope. I’m a fickle reader, with so little time for dedicated reading this spring.

Of course, Austen wrote in the nineteenth century, but she wrote during that very retrograde period we call Napoleonic. Her voice owed much to the classical style of the previous century. She was hardly a Romantic.

When I started in on “Mansfield Park”, I had to change gears a bit. There’s something very specific to Austen. I felt at first like I was reading a legal contract. That’s the crisp and precise air of the eighteenth century’s rationalism. Human beings may be irrational, but there was no reason to be anything but rational in describing their irrationality.

I noticed, especially when I contrasted Austen’s work with novels written only a generation or two later, that Austen was very sparing with description. Her prose is overwhelmingly dialogue or narrative, and her stories are driven by the pendulum swing between them. Put another way, we learn about characters through what they say and what they do. That’s what makes the passage above about Henry Crawford stand out. We know right away that this character is special, and that his character has particular importance to the plot.

Consider the rest of the passage, and note that we still do not get free-standing description, but we must see him through the estimation of others: “The second meeting proved him not so very plain; he was plain, to be sure, but when he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by any body. He was, in fact, the most agreeable young man the sisters had ever known, and they were equally delighted with him.”

Travelogue 1048 – June 29

Job Follows Achilles

I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been reading for pleasure much. Still I’m swimming in the written word. I’ve been labouring under piles of corrections for months. It’s the deal I’ve made with management this spring to have time to heal. My personal dose of Job this winter and spring has been long-COVID. I haven’t lost my cattle, but I’ve lost my health.

At 5:30am I start on student papers. If I ever get through this workload, I will convert the 5:30 timeslot into writing fiction. In midsummer, that early hour is a special one. The sun is up, and the birds are singing. I stand at the front door breathing in the fresh morning air, finding a pleasant way to wake myself up.

I sit at my desk, joining Sisyphus with Job, undertaking every day to roll the boulder of syntax and logic up the steepest hill in Holland, which is the tortured concept of business education. The routine is wearisome, and I don’t mean only the work routine, sitting in front of the computer hours per day, correcting dozens of the same assignments. I mean also the routines of human error. The students, bless them, seem to conspire to make the same mistakes as each other and the same mistakes time and again.

Somehow, my love of language survives. During my desperately short breaks from work and family, I play on Duolingo. I scribble passages for stories in the little notebook that fits in the palm of my hand. I look up poetry on my phone’s browser. A recent poetry project was to dive into Pope’s Iliad. I didn’t have the time to get far, but the poem is an inspiring enterprise. The story is timeless. The language is gorgeous. The old trope likening language to architecture is just right. The poem is Hawksmoor or Wren. Better.

Travelogue 1047 – June 26
A Drizzle of Job

It’s been a bit Book of Job around the house, with ill health and ill fortune falling like a steady rain. Well, let’s call it a drizzle, and admit that ‘Book of Job’ is hyperbolic. But we’ve been tested.

One of our trials was the chicken pox. The pox took one girl down, and then, in a proud show of force, waited until the first girl was just healed to take down the other one. So this ordeal went on for a full month, and for a full month one of the girls was home while her parents tried to focus on their work.

Chicken pox in memory and in the public imagination is something almost adorable, a gentle children’s rite of passage, during which they get pimply and itchy, during which they stay home and watch TV in their pyjamas. The reality is more like a horror show. Little Ren had pox in her mouth and throat. She had pox in her nose and under her eyelid. Baby Jos had pox under her skin and on the bottoms of her feet. They were crying in pain during the worst of it and couldn’t sleep. Their parents were in shock. This parent was never very good around illness. Now he was monitoring pox that were leaking pus and pulling back eyelids to check his girl’s red, leaky eyes.

All things must pass, and these do. They have scars, but those will pass. We sink into the couch, and we stare vacantly at the TV screen, while bodies slowly heal.

Travelogue 1046 – May 28

The Price of Pearls

Memory is a set of pearls on a thread.

Last night, as I was putting Little Ren to bed, she said, “Poppy?” She was sleepy and had already been drifting off. Her sister and her mama were getting ready for bed. They were in the bathroom, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Little Ren alone. I lay next to her as she curled up under the blankets. “Poppy,” she said. “Can I say something?” This is a conversational formula the two girls have adopted lately. “Yes,” I answered. “I love you,” she said, and she fell asleep.

These moments make a parent’s life. My little girl fell asleep, and in the hush afterward, I felt connected to a string of moments that had some kinship to this one, quiet and tender. I don’t often think about those moments. They might have slipped away forever if not for being recalled by Little Ren. In these latter years, my life has been an active one, and my attention to the softer side of life has been neglected. 

The issue here is value. How do we assign value to memories? The good news is, the price of pearls is fairly high in our age. We cultivate memories actively, documenting everything, collecting hard drives full of photos. The bad news is it might be an era of inflation. When there are so many pearls on the market, how do we maintain value?

An interesting corollary: how do we value the real moments? The ones generating the memories? We laugh at the tourist who snaps photos without pausing to look at the site with their own eyes. Are we better? Do we know and feel the value of the experience without its pearl, without the memory? Are we living vicariously, through ourselves? Meaning, are we living direct experience, or are we methodically diverting the experience into something to be assigned value later, in the pearl market?

Travelogue 1045 – May 26
Why Do Artists Love Workshopping?

I’ve written a few short plays, and I’m organizing a little event this spring to introduce them to my eager public. My little event is not a stage performance, though. It’s a reading and a discussion. It’s a step toward performances in the autumn, and, strangely, I find this workshop just as exciting as the final performance.

Why do artists like “workshopping” so much? I think a lot about artists and writers, wondering why they do what they do. They are like an exotic species, and I must observe to figure them out.

You might be tempted to compare art to any other product. Perhaps the artist is even freer than other producers. They are licensed to be eccentric and innovative. Isn’t it enough to reveal the final image, idea or dance and delight the world? Why reveal the process? Doesn’t that risk disenchantment and boredom?

But I don’t think the traditional business model quite fits here. Art work as a consumable product is a failed analogy.

To be fair, I don’t think a “traditional business model” exists anywhere. The idle right-wing fantasy of the world being run like a Ford plant is based on warped nostalgia. Ambitious young businesspeople today long to be creatives. Everything is workshopped; every project incorporates agile methods. It seems to me that the 80s devotion to free-market economics – promoting business models as “efficient” – was essentially an anti-democratic movement – painting democracy as “inefficient.”

Anyway, art, like democracy, is a messy process. We do art because we love doing art. The love for making art speaks to art’s definition. In its roots, art means skill. In Greek, artizein meant to prepare. The focus of art was always on the process. We share art most when we share the process.

Art is thinking out loud. It’s a public conversation, a project in transparency. The art object captures human instinct and thought. Why are we so curious about, say, the mechanics of sculpture? How did he or she do that, we ask, and we are quite stirred by the thought of that individual chipping away at stone for weeks or months. We feel flattered somehow. His or her hands represent our own.

Theatre is the messiest of the arts. We love theatre because we love the mess: actors, writers, technicians, possibly musicians and visual artists, all hashing out some very tentative and fleeting moment on the stage. The making of it is the making of a community. The members of communities quarrel; they disappoint each other. They inspire each other. It’s a lot of stress for something so fragile. But the “product” is the work itself. The work challenges, and it rewards, and it educates. It ennobles people because it brings them together in realms of speculation.

There it is. We love workshopping. Every rough draft is a final. Each audience response is art. An art lover should never hesitate to attend a workshop, thinking they want a finished product. Finished theatre is just the curtain and the applause. Would you buy a ticket for the final bow?

Travelogue 1044 – May 22

A Soviet Star for Trying

 

What is satire? I’ve written a short play that might be broadly classified as satire. It’s about an anonymous dictator who is deciding on whether to invade a neighbouring country. I wonder what might have inspired that! It’s a silly play, meant to entertain, and it really only communicates the obvious, that dictators are despicable human beings. So where is the satire in that? Shouldn’t satire tackle broader topics? I’m curious.

 

The first definition to come up for me on Google is: “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”

 

Merriam-Webster says satire “is a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” All right, so we can now call late-night TV ridicule satire. Is that enough?

 

Something makes me hesitate to use the word too liberally. Is it enough to mock the powerful? Trump and his army of the brain-dead, Putin with his cold-as-ice Bond-villain persona, they make ridicule redundant.

 

I see, scrolling down further, another angle on satire: “(in Latin literature) a literary miscellany, especially a poem ridiculing prevalent vices or follies.” The Latin, satura, is described as meaning “poetic medley”.

 

This I like better. This suggests two elements as gatekeepers. Does the satire have some artistic value on its own? And does the comment have a broader social relevance? The satire says something – in an aesthetically pleasing or interesting way – about people and society in general. I think of “Candide”.

 

Well, my piece is anything but “Candide”, and it does not qualify as satire, according to my own little exercise at definition. But it’s still a fun play. Having standards does not negate anything. It just raises the bar, clears the mind, issues a challenge.

 

We can feel two things at the same time. We can be proud of what we create for its own merits, and we can appreciate traditional categories for arts. What do we gain when we label a cheap thriller a “novel”? What does the book gain? It can still be a fun read without being shelved next to Tolstoy. Are we giving stars, like in kindergarten?

Travelogue 1043 – May 6
Standing By Roe v Wade

Little Ren is in a loving phase. She loves everything with an equally approving regard. She loves the flowers of spring. She loves the rabbits and the ducklings. She loves our neighbours, and she loves the ants that occasionally make it into our apartment. She plays with imaginary babies of all sorts, baby unicorns and baby kitties and baby humans. Everything that is alive, and everything that she pretends is alive, is the object of her benign attention. It’s a kind of Christ-like phase, in which everything is blessed in her sunny mind.

They will grow up, my girls, and great realizations will continue to dawn on them, fashioned by the greater complexity in their lives. One day, they will stumble upon an idea of human dignity. It’s an idea that comes in waves, first as a noble intention and then as a pragmatic intention. Dignity means something more after every betrayal, after every insult, after every hard exigency. It’s not easy for human beings to live together in society.

Little Ren fights with her sister constantly. The two girls often declare each other ‘stupid’, and they vow they will never play with the other again. How do we develop respect? The visceral only accretes. It grows a layer of intellectual protest; it grows another layer of moral entrenchments and righteousness. Adults walk the streets with tickertape commentary about everyone they pass scrolling through their minds. Everyone is offensive on some level. How do we develop respect?

One strategy seems to be empathy. The realization that life is a miracle comes in a flash; the realization of what it means to live any single life takes long years of listening. It takes maturity.

Little Ren’s “sanctity of life” phase I have loved. Every phase my girls have enjoyed, I have loved. A part of me mourns the passing of each, but I know there are more developments to enjoy. Even the hard ones I will love. Maturity is in some mysterious way an end unto itself. These are principles bound up in the larger one of human dignity. That is a lifetime.

Travelogue 1042 – April 21
Keep Your Workplace Tidy

Rotterdam is a dynamic place. There is construction happening everywhere in this city. It never ends. The roads are being dug up everywhere. Every week, you can count on some regular route of yours being disrupted. The city does provide fair warning online. I should be looking it up every morning: wegwerkzaamheden.

I took this photo out the window of the hospital. This old building that they’re tearing down was once part of the hospital complex. You see rooms on the bottom floors opened to the air by the demolition. With war in the news, it’s tempting to say this looks like photos from the warzone. But it doesn’t at all.

Look how neat the site is. That is what drew me to take the picture. It seems so Dutch to me, contained and tidy. That little bulldozer looks like a toy on its neat, sandy track.

Look at the style of the building. It’s typical for Rotterdam, this stacked look in light colours, with domino windows and shallow balconies like the trays you stack on your desk. This is the post-war city standing inside the booming millennial one. On the left you see the sterner style of the new hospital buildings.

Travelogue 1041 – April 18

An Easter Day

Easter this year was a dazzling spring day. It was stunning, both in its beauty and its emotional impact. We’ve had our sunny days before this one, but the benevolence of this Easter Sunday’s rained down on us like something altogether new. I don’t know how many of the other Rotterdammers who were walking the streets yesterday felt as grateful as I did, how many had experienced the winter as unusually long, but there were certainly a lot of smiling faces to mirror back my relief.

As a family we took a walk downtown, along the Westersingel canal, admiring the sculptures there – climbing on the sculpture’s pedestals, in the case of the girls, – looking over the glinting surface of the water, and watching all the people go by. There were many who had had the same idea, all of them lightly chatting and strolling on in full contentment, with ‘not a care in the world,’ as the old phrase would have it. It’s such a comfort that we are allowed days like this.

In early evening, I managed my own walk, along the humbler canal behind our building, the Spaansebocht canal. It’s a ragged little park, but my attention was swept up as I walked slowly along the paved pathway, swept up into the brilliant sunlight in the new leaves above, into the varieties of cherry blossoms still blooming, red and white among the spring greens, and into the intermittent little melodies of the birdsong. In the canal, I saw my first ducklings of the season, tacking across the calm canal water in the wake of their mother, who skittishly eyed the human who had stopped by the water’s edge. There were four babies, one yellow and three black. As though obeying a quiet edict of the season, the pair of swans who had made their home here all winter were nowhere to be seen. The canal was left to the ducks raising their broods.