Er is een griep epidemie. Maar dan, op z’n Nederlands, in één woord: griepepidemie, een eigen entiteit. Eigenentiteit. Omdat het elk jaar terug komt, omdat er speciale huisartsen zijn die precies bijhouden hoeveel van hun patiënten echt de griep hebben (maar die dan geen huisartsen meer zijn, maar Peilstations), omdat ze haar eigen website heeft. Ik lees op Google dat epidemie een vrouwelijk woord is, maar ik weet niet of de griep dat ook is. Ik denk het wel. De zes letters van Google zijn blauw, met witte ijspegeltjes. Een seizoensuitgave.
Voor sommigen is deze epidemie fataal, zij komt en neemt. Neemt te veel, want dat heet dan weer oversterfte. Over sterfte, over nummertjes. Maar voor de meesten (volgens de overheid is dat iedereen onder de 75), is ze niet fataal, maar acuut: koorts, hoofdpijn, spierpijn, dat uitgestelde telefoontje naar de baas, de hernieuwde intimitiet met de wc, de bank, de tv, de donkerste uren van de nacht, het klepperen van de brievenbus als de krantenbezorger is geweest terwijl je uit slaperige wanhoop een nieuwe foetus houding zoekt. De deurbel gaat. De jonge aantrekkelijke bezorger kijkt niet eens op van mijn verschijning, midden op een werkdag met mijn pyjama binnenste buiten aan, maar drukt mij de grote envelop in mijn hand. Ik zal wel niet de eerste zijn die zo de deur opendoet. Buiten schijnt de zon en even voel ik de koude winter wind op mijn rode wangen. Zij voelt als een waterbad die mijn misselijkheid wegwast, mijn gedachtes aan andere steden, een ziekenhuis, een infuus met luchtbellen even verzacht. Zij herinnert mij om mijn pen weer op te pakken.
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Cremer, Jan. Ik Jan Cremer. De Bezige Bij, 2014. ‘I cup my hands in water, splash water on empty space water drunk by empty space Look what thoughts will do Look what words will do from nothing to the face from nothing to the root of the tongue from nothing to speaking of empty space’ From 'Makeup on Empty Space' by Anne Waldman When Ik Jan Cremer was published in 1964, it both shocked and enchanted its conservative Dutch readers: the uncensored tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll by the enfant terrible of the Dutch art world, Jan Cremer, sold millions of copies and was simultaneously branded ‘an atrocious cruelty’ by a Dutch prime minister and a ‘dungheap’ by a national newspaper (The New York Times, in a more level-headed review, called it ‘a pop book’). Reading it in 2017, I struggled with it. I found his rebellion bordering on the tedious. Take, for example, his ten-page rant on the virtues of taking a shit in public spaces, preceded by the announcement ‘I am sitting on the toilet of an international train and the Dutch landscape whizzes past underneath my ass’ – at one point, the reader runs out of steam. More problematic yet: Jan Cremer’s rather loud writing drowns out any and all female voices; his novel is a masculine landscape peopled with hundreds of mute lovers. At best, the narrator Jan Cremer’s diatribe on shit (and sex, and prostitution, and travel, and of life lived at the expense of himself and others), is a tool of defiance, a reaction against the mores of conservative post-war Dutch society; at worst, his thinking has not evolved much past Freud’s ‘Anal Stage’ and he believes his various forms of shit are ‘gifts’ we readers are more than happy to accept (Freud’s theories, not mine). Or maybe I have become tired of the category ‘Men That Must Speak Loudly’, subset of ‘Universal Gifts to Mankind’: Freud, Jan Cremer, Trump, Kevin Spacey, the man at the Post Office, Rupert Murdoch, our new minister of Justice, the man who told me where not to park my car. But this is not a review, nor is it a rant. If you would like a review, Google will do just fine (I just finished reading a rather inspired summary of Ik Jan Cremer by a high school student, in which they call it the most ‘fascinating book they have ever read’ but complain about the small size of the font). If you would like more ranting about loud men, pick up any liberal newspaper or spend a few minutes on Twitter (exclamation marks always do the trick). This is what I learned from Ik Jan Cremer: big mouths hide small hearts. Or rather, it is a familiar wisdom the novel re-confirmed. This is a family axiom as well as a family grievance, most often aired by my mother after social gatherings; we are usually on one line and the saying does not need to come with a name in order for both of us to know whom it concerns. Freely interpreted: loud statements, louder talking, aggressive conversation, posturing (the works), are often compensation for a heart harboring a lifetime of uncertainty. It is the glimpse of hesitation when the shouting gets loudest; it is the unexpected emotion when arrogance seems the only option; it is indecision when they have so loudly declared to have everything figured out. It is applicable to both men and women; admittedly, however, it is more often seen in and applied to the former by my mother and I. And it is this saying which formed a chorus in my head while reading Ik Jan Cremer, and one which would not accept disregard. Because amongst the whoring, and the posturing, and the drinking, and the shitting too, the reader is unexpectedly shown a different side. Cremer joins the Foreign Legion (he reckons the pay in the Legion will allow him the opportunity to ‘eat, drink, drink beer, drink a lot of beer, delicious cold beer, and go to the movies’), and while on duty in Algeria he says: 'Where do I feel at home? I have been running after myself for four years. […] I am a shy searcher. At night, when I am keeping watch, it grows quiet around me. Then I no longer know who I am. […] The world is so spacious. Do you reckon we are living on top of the earth or inside of it?' In this passage, and other rare passages like it, Cremer shows his reader the small heart behind the big mouth, the moment of hesitation when the brawn seems absolute. The question where on earth we reside as humans is disarming: might it be our planetary hegemony is an illusion? And it is these passages that made me think: where do big mouths come from? Surely, we are not born with them: infants are born free of the wily ways of adults, the capability of hiding feeling behind talk – so at which juncture does a big mouth become a necessity or a reality? Which brings me back to Freud. Not the man himself (admittedly, my relationship with his work, and particularly his attitude towards women, is frosty), but rather, to two researchers who engaged with and nuanced his work and his legacy: his youngest daughter, Anna Freud, and her partner (in life and in work) Dorothy Burlingham. Burlingham lived and worked with the Freuds in Austria; they were forced to leave continental Europe in favor of London as World War II approached and the Nazi party grew in power. The women focused their research on the childhood years, and spent many years running the Hampstead Clinic. Freud and Burlingham took a psychological interest in the mechanisms of war: in 1943 they published War and Children. Written during wartime, it show a conscious engagement with the effect war has on the psyche of children: quietly revolutionary if we consider that now, more than 70 years after the end of that war (and countless in the meantime), small and large traumas are still being revealed daily, and we are continually re-assessing the long-term impact of war on psyche. War and Children and Ik Jan Cremer: an unexpected and asynchronous alliance, with the former shedding light on the latter. Jan Cremer (the author and the narrator) was born into and grew up during the same war which forced Freud and Burlingham to desert Austria. The very young Cremer and his mother are imprisoned several times: her thick Hungarian accent and foreign heritage mean both the German occupier during the war as well as the Dutch Resistance liberators after the war distrust her. In captivity, Cremer asks his mother what kind of game the ‘minders’ are playing with the prisoners they occasionally separate from the rest of the group. His mother says ‘it was a very dirty game (and I thought it dirty too, but not as dirty as picking your nose)’. Read in the context of the book, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that this comparison of a wartime ‘game’ and picking your nose approaches the irreverent. After all, Ik Jan Cremer is carried by its own irreverence. In Freud and Burlingham’s approximation, however, this episode would have taken on deeper meaning: according to their theories, a child’s moral compass develops in early childhood, and experiences with the outside world may sway the compass this way or that. They state: 'Instead of turning away from them [instances of destruction] in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction raging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness which rages in the inside of the child.' My interest is less in the hard psychology this reading might provide (or even if this psychology theory still has medical traction today), but more in the moral repercussions. Are children born wild and aggressive, or innocent? Certainly, in war, this timeless philosophical question is apt to raise its head: are we born essentially evil or essentially good? This dilemma is an underlying current in politics, religion, philosophy; a quandary which continually crashes up against the boundaries of human thinking, from Classical Greece to the Enlightenment to modern philosophy. Much is at stake: does society save us from ourselves, or does it corrupt our innate innocence? Are we (humans as a group, humanity as a whole) to blame for the evils of war, or is it rather the result of some inborn flaw we have a hard time controlling? I digress: these are all, in some way, pre-lingual concerns. Nature versus nurture – a conflict at the very start of a life when wants and needs cannot be yet expressed in words. In any case, Freud and Burlingham err on the side of nature: how will a child learn to control its wild and aggressive impulses if, they conclude, ‘confirmation [is] given from the outside world that the same impulses are uppermost in other people’. In his early years, Cremer is faced with German jailers, Dutch jailers, soldiers in different guises, and teacher after teacher punishing him, castigating him, telling him his art is better exchanged for a rifle and a helmet. The world shows violence; what response can he give, but violence? Violent cursing, violent partying, violent writing of the loudest kind: his big mouth hides a small heart, crucially shaped by the war, by the injustices served to him and his mother, by the post-war vicissitudes of the Netherlands. Posturing obscures doubt. Better to paint the walls and floors of your workshop red, so that the blood of the virgins you take home stays concealed, than to admit that ‘ultimately, I have been chasing myself for 8 years’. I still struggled with Ik Jan Cremer. But I struggled because it was obvious that it was a case of ‘big mouth, small heart’, and a little more self-awareness on the novel’s part would have made it easier to read with compassion. Or at least with understanding. And if all else failed, it would have broken the monotony of the rants on public defecation. But Jan Cremer chose to speak loudly, as many of my contemporaries have. Trump, Putin, Kevin Spacey, Ruper Murdoch, the new finance minister. They too are products of their own times: mid-century America, Russia, Australia, the Netherlands. They are men that were once little boys. I am not asking they be entered in the chronicles of the misunderstood. Compassion may be two or three steps too far. There is always the chance that they are, indeed, narcissists: big mouth, no heart. But there is a chance that they, too, were exposed to violence as a child: organized, domestic, psychological, destructive. There is a chance the world served them castigation, and harmony was nowhere to be found. I am not an idealist: I am not sure redemption is possible. The correct course of action is impeachment, political and social. But a conversation might be had. Freud and Burlingham may yet travel further across the century, from 1943 to 1964 to 2018. I look around me, and our political and social system is run by loud-mouthed men and a masculine sense of order, and underlying this, by violence. Still run by the masculine, would be the plaintive of feminine and queer theorists of the past five decades (here is looking at you, Kristeva and Cixous). Loud mouths, small hearts. A small thinking exercise: who will Barron Trump become if this sense of order remains the norm? Destruction meets destruction. Freud and Burlingham conclude that ‘it must be very difficult for [children] to accomplish this task of fighting their own death wishes when, at the same time, people are killed and hurt every day around them’. Even more difficult if the death and destruction comes from the hand of a parental figure, tasked by the very dint of your birth with showing you the way the world works. But I spend a good amount of time wondering whether, if we chose to do things differently, our world might look different down the line: small heart first, big mouth second. Leading with a different and more vulnerable foot. If we met the challenges ahead of us with our uncertainty, our pain, the basic human condition of ‘I don’t know’ - would the global need for violence diminish? But these are futile thoughts: who amongst us is brave enough to show vulnerability when it is inevitably met with brutality? Read on: Jan Cremer, Ik Jan Cremer Anne Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, War and Children Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ Anne Waldman, ‘Makeup on Empty Space’ Solitary walk through a yet-to-wake city: the metal shutters of the wine shop are down, the Cabernets black shadows through the glass; there is a small gaggle of people waiting in front of the bank for it to open; a truck has been parked haphazardly on the sidewalk near the Irish pub, in anticipation of being unloaded; the owner of the New Age store reaches into the window display to dust the pink tops of her magic crystals. But I avoided these walks for a long time. I did not like walking through the city I was in. In fact, I hated it a little bit. I lived here when I was younger: between 11 and 15, the age in which a growing awareness of your own body explodes into adolescence, all awkward limbs and endless zits, an unhappy crush on an older neighbour, discomfort with your own voice. And now, I am back, and I am destitute. At least, as destitute as it gets for a white, well-educated, relatively wealthy 27-year-old woman: I moved back in with my parents. Yes, this is a position of privilege. But it was also an involuntary position, a reflection of my unstable mental health, and above all, a position I resented. And along with it, I resented the city in which I found myself. Devoid of the charm which bigger Dutch inner cities have (The Hague! Utrecht! Above All, For All, Amsterdam!), it was also too big to be classed an attractive town. My relationship with cities (in general, as in the noun city, the plural cities; and specifically, the cities I have lived in across the years) is not stable. By which I mean to say, it is not discernibly constant: at different times in my life, I have appreciated and found beautiful a dot-on-the-map of 500 inhabitants, a town of 80.000, a city of 150.000, a capital of 9 million, a metropolis of 13 million. These are only numbers, but they tell a story without pattern, one that does not discernibly answer whether I prefer mid-sized or over-sized, this century or the last, modern or industrial, nostalgic or utilitarian, grey or sand-coloured, brick walls or walls made of cardboard and corrugated iron. But the story was decisive and damning when it came to my (new) former hometown. As I walked through it, I cast upon it only infrequent troubled glances, focusing instead on my shoes plodding onwards, or on the piles of dog shit left behind by unknowing dogs and their inattentive owners. Surely, dogs shat in more charming cities too, but that is not something I considered. It was a box of uncomfortable associations. Grey, industrial, messy, cold. But those adjectives describe my mental state as much as they do my environment. And I wondered: to what extent is the city we see a reflection of ourselves? How much of our surroundings are created solely by the kinds of eyes they are seen through? Happy, sad, confused, resentful: do the streets look a little greyer, or a little cleaner, or a little more chaotic, depending on your disposition? Charles Montgomery asks something similar in his book Happy City, Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. He writes, ‘The city […] can be a reflection of all our best selves. It can be whatever we want it to be’. Conversely, it is possible that the city becomes a reflection of our not-so-best selves, our selves in chaos, confusions, our selves in pain. During my final year of my undergraduate degree in English I took a course called Writing the European City. The class was taught by a soft-spoken, razor-sharp professor with a German accent that lent everything he said a prosaic weight. We read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, amongst others. In Calvino’s work, Marco Polo describes the cities he encountered on his expedition east to his host, Kublai Khan: 'Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.' The places we read about were very often dirty cities (in Pamuk’s memory of Istanbul, the houses carried ‘the mildewy hint of rotting wood’), with miserable inhabitants (Joyce’s ‘ragged urchins’ of the Dublin streets), anonymous and industrial (Döblin’s narrator would rather return to prison than be set free into the ‘swarm of people’ in Berlin). But as Khan, I discerned a pattern underneath the frequent grime of the twentieth century: a feeling of melancholy. It was a beautiful melancholy, often graceful. And it was also slightly unrealistic. Pamuk, in Istanbul, engages with it but in the same gesture warns us: melancholy is prone to the melodramatic, to nostalgia, to exaggeration. It is, above all, a feeling which looks backwards, and is not of this time: the right to write lyrical praise infused with melancholy ‘belongs only to those who no longer live there’, in a city of dreams. It belongs to those who live in a different present and often, a different location. I thought this literary trope could not offer me solace in the now and the here: the melancholy pattern I had discerned in those urban texts was a privilege, afforded by distance and time, and would not save me from the daily drip of grey which my current city was feeding me, slowly but surely. I have changed my mind, of course. If you are a passionate reader, you will surely be cheering (Literature Triumphs Once Again!). Barthes wrote that the best text makes itself heard indirectly, and that when we read it, we look up often, we are distracted, our attention jumps and flits off and on the page. ‘It can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand’. Melancholy cities twitched my neck suddenly and slightly, and when I looked again I saw what I had not seen before, or had not understood at the time of the course. Underneath the melodramatic I found it: compassion, a compassionate melancholy, a love for the respective cities that escaped the gnawing of termites, time, taxonomies of sadness. The word is out: compassion. Anyone who has spent any time with modern psychological and/or spiritual practice will have had it thrown at them at some point: compassion, or, better yet, self-compassion. It has certainly been chucked at me (and often) in the long months I have spent picking myself up off the couch and (re)fashioning of this skin of anxiety a functioning human being. But I had always wondered, what does this self-compassion mean? I don’t think I truly understood it, until I saw it in the light of the city. Because self-compassion is so much more than self-care, with which it is often confused. A candle-lit bath while watching Star Trek (true story) is self-care, but this does not begin to approach self-compassion. This, above all, requires empathy. And empathy requires a whole new degree of science fiction: it requires you to ‘transport oneself to the interior of an object in order to coincide with its unique and therefore ineffable quality’, as Henri Bergson puts it. It requires you to acknowledge the person or object in front of you, and instead of just looking (and judging), you must really see and feel (with) them. Compassion is ‘I see you, you are beautiful/suffering/unhappy’. Compassionate melancholy, for a city, is the same but in the past tense and performed through a slightly melodramatic haze: ‘I see you, you were beautiful/suffering/unhappy’. Empathy, and in turn, compassion, are not easy. In fact, Brené Brown concludes, ‘It is hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off balance’. Or: it is hard to practice compassion for others when our own self-compassion is off-balance. Because self-compassion is: ‘I see me, I am beautiful/suffering/unhappy’, a self-reflexive move which is almost impossible, as impossible as properly seeing the space between your shoulder blades in the mirror behind you. And only when I properly see me, can Star Trek and candle-lit baths be the correct balm. Otherwise, it is just meaningless lotion applied to the surface. And when I first moved back in with my parents, that is what I did for months: meaningless lotions, balms, massages, Netflix, chocolate (solid or liquid), naps. Turns out you can throw yourself all the self-care in the world, but it won’t make a degree of difference if you are throwing it without compassion. Which leads me to my city. My moment of compassion for the city; my moment of compassion of myself. A classic case of the chicken and the egg. I was walking the dog around the corner. It was five o’clock, which means that in the Northern Europe winter the cold and the dark have descended and despite the din of the night-time commute, the world’s colours have been silenced already. The dark is deadly, a shadow-world where any good mood built up throughout the day is flipped over and hung upside down and shook around and tested for its stamina. Will it last through the shadows or won’t it? I hated the dark, damp streets. The sidewalks were uneven, the park smelled like stagnant water. In front of me, a darker imprint outlined the shape of a hanging willow. An insignificant tree by daylight, slightly sad-looking with branches hanging in the shallow pond water. But from within, birds began singing. Not just two or three birds, a flock of them. It was as if the tree was singing. They were starlings, and the noise they made was high and then low, calling to itself, chattering onwards and upwards. It was friendly, like a group of elderly ladies meeting over coffee, and it was hopeful, a flock of little throats struggling to keep themselves warm in the winter. And suddenly, the noise stopped: the tree lifted itself off the ground with a rush of wings, and the shadow of the murmuration was darker against the dark night-sky. I felt a strange compassion for the flock: they sounded beautiful, and I realized they also struggled with the turning of the season. And I felt for the tree, which with their departure was left a little bare. And I felt for the park, because people never bothered to clean up their dog’s shit. And I felt for the pavement, but at the same time was happy that uneven flagstones kept me sharp. In a strange, roundabout way, and via a series of inanimate objects, I felt compassion for the city. And at the same time: I felt compassion for myself. I knew my good mood would not last the night, because its stamina had been undercut by an unintentionally judgemental remark by someone who cares and an anxiety I had carried around all day in the pit of my stomach. I saw myself, and it was okay. A classic chicken and the egg scenario, as you would agree. Had I seen the city with compassion because I was finally learning to see myself with compassion? Or was seeing the city with compassion allowing me to finally learn to do the same for myself, for this body and this mind? I am not sure. But I noticed that on solitary walks through a yet-to-wake city, I saw the beauty in things. Beauty in beauty, beauty in decay. The flower-shop is selling tulips the colour of rubies; the rubble of the torn-down parking garage is patterned like a cubist painting; the cracked glass of the shop front looks like a six-fingered hand. And I saw myself: the gum-spotted railway platform where the older neighbour had pretended not to see my fifteen year-old self; the weed-studded parking lot where a man shouted something nasty at me from his opened car window; the brown brick wall where I had my first kiss; the street corner where I cried just a few months ago when I felt I couldn’t breathe. I see beautiful, and messy, and anxious, in love, and scared, and hurting. The city has become textured with my own self-compassion. The city is still grey, industrial, messy, cold. My mental health is very often also those things. But I do not hate walking through it anymore. As Michel de Certeau wrote: ‘Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’. I am re-writing my own story, or rather, I’m beginning a new one. And as I write mine, so I re-write this city’s. Read on: Charles Montgomery, Happy City, Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul James Joyce, Dubliners Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection Robert Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People |
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