Berlijn

As you well know, I have an opinion about everything. Even - or especially - about the things I know hardly anything about.

Thus, despite never having visited Berlin, I could participate in conversation on this German Capital. Berlin, I used to say, was more like Brussels. The Tale of Four Cities. You had Paris and London on the one hand, glamourous & rich, decadent & gorgeous, and Berlin and Brussels on the other, hodge-podge eclecticism, an assembly of a convoluted history and a bustling present.

Like they say, even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
So guess what, turns out I had an actual point.

Berlin Is like Brussels. Be it a lot bigger.

You have ugly buildings wedged in between temples of the past. You have gargantuan squares surrounded by fake reconstructions. You have a troubled past.
You have, in short, a city to fall in love with.



And I think I did. Like so many before me, I have grown to really like Berlin, despite the shortness of my visit.

This liking grew gradually. The overcast skies did not prevent us from seeing some (for it would be preposterous to think we saw even a glimmer of the wealth of Berlin) of the highlights.


The click however, came in a moment of unplanned queasiness. I passed on a museum visit my entourage was to engage in, and instead elected to wander around a bit. I sat listening to some street artists (violin & guitar playing, amongst others, the schlinder's list theme), I walked around, I wandered. I roamed. I was at peace.


I will be back.

Festivals

De Morgen (Flemish News Paper) claims that Pukkelpop has gotten a lot stricter in its policy on drugs... hehe.
'nough said.

Sun. Dust. Sunburns. Sweat pouring down, slowly taking on the colour of the surroundings. Free hat, head is grateful. Music. Atmosphere. Rhythm. Bouncing beats crashing our sense of self & direction.

It seems we have gone back to the most tribal (most human?) form of dance. Rhythmic swaying back and forth. Head bouncing, shaking. Arms flaying wildly.
The only thing missing is fire & body paint.

Music.

Rhythm.

Sounds.

Sun.

Happiness

What is happiness?

Happiness is not something commonly experienced in the "active" sense. More often it will be a vague realisation, more often than that a sense of loss. Happy is usually something that you were, the lack of which is felt more clearly than the presence ever did.

On those few occasions, however, that the happiness is realised, it is to be seen as a sense of contentment.
It is acceptance.
You look at the world around you - your world - and feel at peace with it.

True happiness isn't anything world shattering - to the contrary, in fact -, it is a sense of inner peace.

Inner Peace is the - very personal, intuitive - idea that you have not committed any sins that you have been insufficiently punished for.

Sins are not to be seen as a Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other religious concept. The sins in our mind are those mistakes we have made in the past that we are sorry for. Things that we feel we shouldn't have done. These may, and often will, be dictated by the society we live in, but are first and foremost a product of our own values and worth. Killing a man to obtain bread may not be a sin, whereas looking at your wife's sister may. Not being able to buy the special addition Barbie (c) for your baby girl may be a torment.
The important thing is that You, individually, feel that you have done wrong.

The same logic works for the Punishment. This does not have to be - and usually isn't - a physical form of punishment. It may come in the form of self-abasement, of self-denial, of fast, of donating vast amounts of money to people who will never know who their benefactor was. The ways of punishment are as vast as there are humans. For every human being, there are sins, for every sin, there's a punishment.

Inner peace is achieved when the sins and the punishment are in balance. You do not owe a debt to anyone, anything, and least of all to yourself.

Happiness is that easy. And that Difficult.

---

Truly happy people will not be remembered. For they will not be the ones doing great deeds. Great deeds are a clear example of punishment. People pushing themselves to the brink of life, striving for the greatest, are seeking Inner Peace. The moment they have achieved it - though, don't worry, they rarely will - their momentum is stopped. The Perpetuum Mobile that is Sin & Punishment will have come to a standstill.
It isn't surprising that the most active, reactive, creative, productive people are teenagers. Who else could be less at peace?

A society where everyone is happy - the society mankind has officially strived for for ages - is doomed. Luckily - how ironic a word - this will probably never come to pass.

The Favourite Feeling

Though perhaps it would be better to call it the absence of feeling, more than the presence of one.

Sitting in a bar
coffee and tobacco
close at hand
book in

There's no future
There's no past

And most importantly
perhaps
No present


http://hotguysreadingbooks.tumblr.com/

On Fate

When facing questions, who do you turn to?

Do you turn to your parents, your brothers, your family?

Do you turn to your friends or lovers?

Do you turn to yourself?

Who of those should you trust the most? If any?

Your family, for they can not but love you and will support you in all your endeavours, however grudgingly? Or are they to be mistrusted, because they may attempt to live through you, realize their half forgotten dreams of splendour through their offspring; or even begrudge you your shot at those dreams, where they blew it? Are they not human?

Your friends, for they love you because they can; and they stick to you because they want to? Will they be willing to let you go when they realize they should? Who’s to prevent them from subconsciously attributing their own reasons to you? Are they not human?

Yourself? That treacherous wretch that has to turn to others, even imaginary meta-others, for salvation, for solutions? That weakling who is incapable or unwilling – which one is worse? – to make the choices posed upon him as a member of society, as a participant of the eternal rat race? Are you not human?

When things go wrong, when they go right, who will you blame or thank? Why blame or thank someone who did not consciously do wrong? Why those who are only human? Do they or you control the tempestuous whims of life? We did not, could not, do not, will not affect the events that occurred, occur and will keep occurring.

Why turn to the helpless?



Is it not much better to let the fates decide? To let them spin the yarn of time, measure it, and cut it at will? Is it not much better to float the tides, being thrown hither and dither like the flotsam we truly are?

We are but actors, playing out the roles set out for us. The most the atheist can hope for, is that he won’t forget his lines. The most the believer can hope for, is that the prompter does remember them.


The Dancer by Otto Dix

On Trains

How people can sit on a Belgian train alone & not be moved to higher thoughts, I do not understand.

I mean, sure, there’s the exception where you’re wedged between two other people and you are barely able to move – I suggest a trip to india to put this in perspective, by the way. But apart from that, people who travel the railroads of our glorious country alone have no excuse not to be soaked in metaphysical slumberings.

You see the houses zooomming past. If you’re aimed in the “forward” direction, this will give you a sense of the future speeding up to you and flashing past. You will see new vistas loom on the horizon, rapidly approach and be history already. A history of which you will not have to think about, when sitting in the “forward” direction, unless you are of an exceptionally gloomy mind. No; when sitting in the “forward direction”, your thoughts will go to future expeditions to the north pole, to the moon, to that girl you fancied in that pub once. You marvel at the colourful shapes present in the skies, as they are in the daring expressions of youth, the graffiti. You witness growing fields, strong trees and the current almost leaping of the electricity poles in delight at your approach. You are in anticipation.

When sitting in the “backward” direction, however, you will be confronted with your past. It will, fittingly, be too painful to turn your head to the future, your eyes will remained locked up the things zooommed past. People and houses getting smaller, churches and pitiful clumps of shrubberies are receding in the distance. Your mind will wander towards those things both ancient and recent past. Thoughts might meander in the realms of the dead, thinking about a loved or hated one, they might take a stroll towards the trip you took yesteryear, with all those funny people that you vowed to see again and haven’t heard from since. You’ll witness the ugly building sites, the cranes looming over them, not as storks carrying the new born, but as vultures patiently waiting to pick the carcass of its last shivering flesh. Already the meat seems pervaded with fungus and crawling bacteria, the tribal art and its producers.

Of course, there is no need to let the mind wander outside the confines of the train space. The train in itself, the moving vehicle, snaking through the country and through the cityside, always moving, always still. We’ve all witnessed the station slowly leaving our train behind. The unmoved mover.

The train is like a log, slowly braving a quick-witted river, playfully nibbling at its haunches. The passengers are the small animals, the vermin, temporarily seeking shelter from the bristling brook, only to realize, after a while, that the nature of the log is defined by the water they seek to evade. They will then cast themselves back into the water whence they came; jettison we are and to jettison shall we return.

This little peninsula of temporary peace is generally inhabited by other members of our lustrous race – I refer, of course, to the more general human race, not to any Caucasian or Negroid subspecies - and are thus somewhat comparable to an early 20th century Zoo. Think : big Iron Fences. Think : observing the Other from a safe distance. Think : being equally observed by this distant other.
The human species is a relatively interesting one in comparison to most of the living world, especially when you are not in possession of a microscope and a vivid imagination – which I, coincidentally, happen to have, but I dare not presume that to be the case for you. It will talk with unrelentless passion, despite not having anything to talk about – yes, pot, kettle, haha –, it will gesture wildly when on the phone, seemingly unaware that the recipient of those movements isn’t, in fact, receiving them. It will gaze ponderously outside, thinking about imminent past and former future.

When observing the myriad examples of our species, these fellow participants of the great marathon called life – in which you gallop towards the finish whether you intend to or not –, how can one not be moved to deeper thoughts, as I am, on the social, the political, the economical, the psychological and everything? One, unless one is blessed by the absence of a conscious mind, can not.

Welcome Back

Back in Belgium.

For realz this time.

Realz².

Arrived in the Ghent station at 17 past 1.

Was met by a friend of Italian/German/Belgian descent. We had agreed to meet there, at that time (though, perhaps, slightly earlier) in order for a transaction. She was to give me the keys to the apartment of my brother and to that of my parents - I wouldn’t have said no to answers to the fundamental questions of the universe, but she, apparently, wasn’t up for that - without which I would have been doomed to roam the earth aimlessly for years to come; or spend the night in Brussels, whichever came first.

After the transaction was conducted, we boarded a tram. “boarded a tram” does not at all convey the last minute rush we experienced when perceiving the tram in the distance, considered the weight of my (rather heavy) bag, and then turning into a pair of scrambling fools; but it will have to do. We boarded the tram. It, however, did not follow the usual route, as I was soon, to my great horror, to discover. It took a left instead of a right (a bit like socialism, but different, I guess). This meant we were not headed towards the apartment of my brother (conveniently close to the station) but instead towards the centre of the city (not particularly conveniently close to anything but big crowds of drunkards). We were stranded on the Island of civilization with nothing but the need to get home quickly and safely. Which isn’t much, considering. We didn’t even have a personal servant named after one of the days of the week.

We harassed a couple of potential carriers. Not the medical kind. Carry a 30 kg bag in exchange for three beers & three cigarettes. They weren’t convinced, however.
After finally dropping the bag at the parents’ place (and take a shower and get changed) we headed out into the city. It didn’t sleep. So neither did we.
We talked to people. We did knock-knock-jokes with random strangers (who, for some reason, found the concept enormously difficult to grasp, so we were forced to enact both knock-knock-roles by ourselves. Needless to say, we did very well).

We
basically
had a lot of fun.

At about 9 AM (Monday morning, Belgium time) we decided to head home and, after, perhaps, a night cap, go to bed. The night cap was oddly enough accompanied by deep discussions on metaphysical questions, on potentiality. Is, or isn’t, there a pregnant man in the box? And is the cat in the box a metaphor for the repressed femininity of the European female? It is possible.

After a few refreshing hours – four to be exact – we headed out again. I was reunited with long-lost friends (Mr. Chilly & Mrs. Hangover) and I also met up with Flore, which I hadn’t seen for a few months. This last day of the Gentse Feesten ended earlier (at a ridiculously early 7AM (Tuesday, Belgium Time), I am shocked to admit). We had breakfast on the street. I had my first chocoladekoek in ages.

It’s not at all easy to imagine a better welcome to Belgium. Rather difficult, in fact. I’ll keep you posted if I come up with something.