The Color of Spring

I live in Zurenborg, which is part of Old Berchem, which has become over the years, part of southern Antwerp. Layers upon layers, upon layers. Here are some things which caught my eye today as Spring tries ever so valiantly to invade my neighborhood, stirring dull roots with spring rains, hoping to one day prove Mr. Eliot wrong.

The Sweet Here, After

Today a nation mourns.

At 11 am, GMT +1, Belgium held a moment of silence for the victims of the tragic bus accident that occurred this Wednesday in Sierre, Switzerland, killing nearly two dozen school children and six adults on the way back from a school-sponsored ski trip.

The unthinkable became thinkable to many this week, to bury your own child. It is a horrible thing, and something that happens every day, everywhere, in every country and every time. But, that makes it no less the easy concept to conceive. I have known several friends and acquaintances that have either lost a child, or nearly, and it is heart-breaking.

What makes such events even more difficult to bear is when there just is no rhyme or reason to it. The concept of Theodicy is the explanation of how there could be “evil” in a world that was created by a perfect Godhead. How could there be such imperfection at the hands of perfection?

This tragic story brought much to my mind these past two days. There is a movie called “The Sweet Hereafter” by Atom Egoyan from 1997, which tells the story of a tragic school bus accident in a small, Canadian town and the aftermath that ensues. The community is ripped apart by guilt, blame, and utter loss and confusion as to how this could happen. One of the parent’s actions are put into question about the potential cause of the accident. Families and friends are torn asunder. How can you continue living after such an event?

I had the privilege of meeting Judy Collins several years ago when I worked at the Harry Ransom Center and part of my job included meeting with several famous people. Without a doubt, Ms. Collins left the most lasting impression upon me though. She spoke with a candor and sincerity that is so rare in life, and when she spoke to you, you would feel like you were the only person on the planet. With her piercing, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes and flowing mane of shock-white hair, she gave whomever she was speaking to her total attention. One of the things she spoke about was the suicide of her son, Clark, who suffered from alcohol abuse and depression, which often go hand in hand. She spoke with such clarity and understanding, and most of all, acceptance that one would almost doubt her words if they were merely written. But, to see her and hear her in person, there was no doubt.

One of the things that she said in a similar interview with Bill Moyers was that when she got through the “fog” of his death, she was able to see that the world was a funny place and that there are the very, very simple things in life that she can enjoy and that make it possible for her to continue, including her sweet music, especially a song that she wrote about her son.

I have had to confront my own mortality and mistakes that I have made in my life that could have cost the lives of my own family, that of my young daughter and her mother several years ago. I was responsible for a single-car accident in which they were with me. To this day, I know that had I been alone, it would have been worse, or fatal, for I do believe that it was so mild because something was looking out for them, not me. But, it did happen, on a small dark, country road in Italy, when I should not have been driving after having had wine that evening, even though it was merely a short drive down the road.

But, it did happen, and I lived that night over and over in my head for years, knowing that I had been responsible. The next day, as we were part of a large project that involved many students and faculty members, I walked the grounds of the project for several hours, speaking to every member and student in person, face to face, telling them what had happened and that it had been a direct result of my irresponsible actions, and that I was sorry that they had to be a part of that experience. My life was never the same after that event, for many reasons. The nightmares eventually ceased, but the agenbite of inwit, or literally the re-morse, the re-chewing of the conscience will perhaps always be there, as is the case for all traumatic events in our lives.

What was initially, however, a negative, bitter chewing at my conscience, eventually became sweet. It became sweet because I had been given a chance to live a different life, with the constant awareness that our lives are always in the balance, sometimes from our own foolish actions, as was the case in mine, or from the capriciousness of accidents, such as what has happened this week for Belgium. Both are stark reminders that our lives are limited and that the children are unfortunately the innocent victims of both negligence and fate.

My life and my relationship with my daughter are blessed in many ways, and there is so much sweetness in our lives. I will, when she is older, need to talk to her about the issues of negligence and consequences of being responsible, both from my experiences and from those of others that I have learned vicariously through: with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, with honesty, with ... fill in the blank, but I will also speak with her about the sweetness of life and how, as Ms. Collins says, that it can be funny. It is hard to think that life is funny in times like this, because I find no humor in the thought of this week’s events nor from that dark night in Italy. There is no-thing funny about them.

Yet, there is an After, and in that After, the only consolation sometimes is to seek out that Sweetness, and to embrace it, in spite of the Bitter, Bitter indifference of the face of Death. It may take many, many years, but it is our only Hope as humans with a conscience and with memory.

May they Rest in Peace.

And, if interested, Ms. Collins says it better than I could, as with her song at the end.

A Very Sad Day for Belgium

My deepest sympathies go out to the families and friends of the victims in the horrible bus accident in Switzerland today.

This is a devastating tragedy, and a very dark day for Belgium.

My deepest condolences.

I Hear Voices

The vogue for the past few years on television in Belgium  (and elsewhere is seems) revolves around three major themes as far as I can tell: housing (usually surprise renovations or extreme cleaning sessions), eating, and singing. Throw in the unbridled and uninhibited, shameless racism and sexism that permeates almost any prime-time program and you pretty much have covered the spectrum of what you will find while zapping the digital airwaves here.

However, leave it to Belgium to inject the political rift between the French-speaking Walloons and the Flemish-speaking Flemish in a way that clinically would only be known as schizophrenia, leaving me to wonder if that is in fact the diagnosis for this “country.” Why the quotation marks you ask? Well, if you know anything about Belgium identity, it is that there is no such thing as Belgian identity, except for well, being born within the borders of the UN-recognized, sovereign state currently known as Belgium. A tautological conundrum, to say the least.

So, if you are living in the northern, western provinces of Belgium, chances are you speak Flemish as your native language and consider yourself Flemish (meaning there is a good chance that you share some political sympathies with a leaner, meaner Bart de Wever) before Belgian, and certainly European before Belgian, usually. But, we’ll get to that in a moment. Furthermore, if you are from Ghent or its environs, chances are you may have even grown up also speaking French, but the only place you would most likely ever dare to speak is in France, because if you are truly Flemish, when you go to predominantly French-speaking Brussels, which is neither really feline (Lion), nor fowl (Rooster), you will often begin in Flemish because, by God, Belgium is supposed to be tri-lingual (we’ll leave the poor German-speaking stepchildren alone for the moment).

Yet, when you quickly become annoyed that the Brussels denizen does not speak Flemish, primarily because nobody in Brussels is actually Belgian (see definition above of “Belgium”), but rather from northern Africa, Turkey, eastern Europe, western Europe, Asia, America, or anywhere else BUT Belgium, then you will resort to French or English begrudgingly, but all the while secretly feeling superior because you also speak Flemish. Snarky and snide? Absolutely. Comes with the territory.

However, on the other hand, if you live in the southern part of the region of Belgium, you will most likely speak Walloon, a very antiquated dialect of French, as you first language and are probably more or less comfortable calling yourself Belgian and/or Walloon, without too much anxiety either way, and you are wondering if your compatriots, using that term very loosely, are really series about establishing a Confederacy without you, even though for the first 100 years or so of the sovereign state of Belgium, it was the South who carried the North on their backs. How quickly we forget.

So, when it comes to television, the lines are drawn equally so ferociously and never the twain shall meet. For, if you live in the North, you are eagerly awaiting the impending finals with Bert, Glenn, Silke, and Iris of the singing show, The Voice van Vlaanderen (The Voice of Flanders), while in the South, you would be watching the The Voice Belgique (The Voice of Belgium), which airs on the French-speaking network La Une. And, what’s more absurd? Neither show acknowledges the other one on its website, and as you will note, the majority of the songs sung by the contestant are in English. This pretty much sums up the dilemma here.

There is no cooperation, no compromise, and as a result, one is left with petty regionalism to spite the other. Bart De Wever and co. have called for a Flemish Confederacy (I will suppress the Kennedy Toole temptation for allusion here) yet again, after finally the country deciding upon a government. Excuse me, Neem me niet kwalijk, Excusez-moi, or Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte, but is that not a bit counterproductive? To spend over a year establishing a government and before it even has a chance to be proved effective or not, not even a year’s probation of sorts, he is already clamoring for secession.

There are many Voices here in Belgium, and unfortunately they are often talking to themselves, and not looking at the big picture, but rather choosing for the fractured, factionalized schisms that plague this country. My question, I guess, is what show the German-speakers chose to watch?

Or, is there yet another Voice in my head?

Wot's Uh, The Deal?

Belgium has a new government, finally. After over 500 days of bickering, stalemating, posturing, and finally compromising, Belgium can re-join the hallowed league of nations that, at least superficially, try to settle problems in a quasi-democratic process.

This past year and a half has completely made a mockery of the so-called “Belgian Compromise.” It originally meant that Belgians were viewed as being able to reach acceptable compromises that are mutually beneficial, though the jejune fight between the Flemish-speaking North and the Walloon-speaking South has perhaps exposed the not-so-compromising truth that maybe the Belgians aren’t so agreeable as once thought.

In what became a travesty of diplomacy so long ago that we stopped counting that at least, the government of Di Rupo I, named after Elio Di Rupo, the Walloon politician who in my opinion, and that of nearly everyone except for most Flemings, has emerged as one of the most level-headed, positive-thinking politicians on the European political stage.

Bart De Wever, however, the Flemish-speaking spokesman of the antagonist party of Di Rupo’s party, has merely emerged larger in girth and less so in respect. He typifies the “Ja, Maar...” attitude that has plagued this entire process from the beginning. Oh, but he is so-o-o-o intelligent cries the Flemish fanfare. Fine, he is intelligent.

To that I say, “Big, Fucking Deal” to paraphrase Garfield’s kinder, gentler "Big, Fat Hairy Deal." As one of my aunts is fond, and rightly so, of saying, “Intelligence is a gift, we have nothing to do with it. It is how we use it that makes the difference.” Well, according to De Weveresque attitudes, intelligence is what you flaunt in people’s faces, using it to expose only the negative, meanwhile allowing the atrophy of the positive to go unchecked before yours and everyone else’s eyes.

With each referendum, De Wever would bloat and gloat about his unvanquished striving to look out for the Flemings’ best interest. Last time I checked, there were a scant 5 million of them, and Belgium’s financial security, believe it or not, has seismic proportions when it comes to keeping the European Union afloat. So, having your country go without a plausible, (much less risible) or even feasible, government because you are looking after the benefits of one of the wealthiest regions in Europe, while literally the sky may be falling around you, is in short, arrogant and ignorant, not intelligent.

So, we have a government here. Does that stop De Wever from whining incessantly and from stomping his leaded foot down and saying that he does not value Di Rupo’s government and that the situation has been downgraded in De Wever’s far-from-humble opinion from “total catastrophe to catastrophe.”

Wow. Catastrophe, really Mr. De Wever? Surely you’re joking, right?

But, the scary thing is, is that he isn’t. His perception, and that of many Flemings is that this really is a catastrophe that the French-speaking party may have actually finally breached the abyss of pigheadedness and is on the way to at least putting some things into action. It is a bastardization of the word when true catastrophe are unfolding around the world greater than the fact that the Flemings might have to tighten their belts, or loose some allegorical weight...

But, the “Ja, Maar...” must go on for some apparently. At what point, when a deal has been struck does one side need to continue to bitch and moan about any prior injustice? How long is too long? Belgium is a laughing stock of diplomacy in some circles because of this fiasco, but like a spoiled child, which is really what it boils down to, the likes of De Wever continue to call foul and taunt the winning side. Well, I don’t know if De Wever ever played any team sports, which is dubious given his selfish demeanor, but when the game has been declared over, it’s over. As I used to tell my water polo team when I was coaching, “Even if it was the fault of the ref that the game was poorly called, it was not the ref’s fault that we lost the game.”

Mr. De Wever, as I would say to my teammates after such a loss,

“Sit down, shut up, and work towards the future, please.”

And no more “Ja, Maar...”

River Swells.

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s...

So “begins” Finnegans Wake, or at least the first five words that one encounters when opening the book.

Finnegans Wake, or simply, the Wake as it is most often referred to amongst Joyceans (namely those of us hopelessly afflicted by being aficionados of the Irish Bard...) is arguably the most important book in my life. Or, at least one of them, but its presence in my life is ominous, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Likewise, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha shares the literary pole position in my heart for favorite books. Both could not be more different, yet more the same, so it goes. The former is considered the most difficult, confounded, self-absorbed, narcissistic exercise in futility of language, while the latter is often scoffed at being too simplistic, naïve, and claiming to be a quest for losing the self, becoming the anti-narcissistic book. So, what then do they have in common? All, and no-thing, but most importantly, they are both about a river.

Joyce’s postmodern linguistic Frankenstein is topically about the River Liffey that runs through Dublin, though simultaneously about every river on the planet, condensed into no less than 800 different rivers in the well-known chapter on ALP, the universal Mother. Siddhartha, on the other hand is a “tale from old India” with a focus on an unnamed river, which teaches Siddhartha the magical power of the sacred syllable “OM.”

When I was young-er (I still feel young, despite being 42), and dumb-er (still dumb, but just aware of it now), then I gave a talk in Zürich, Switzerland at a Joyce Symposium, my first of many to follow over the years, about the relationship between the Wake and Siddhartha, arguing that they were more or less the same book, just different.

Having given, what I thought was a dazzling presentation for a young whippersnapper, complete with one of my in/famous Fulton diagrams (if you know me, this needs no further explanation, though I will post a picture of the original when I can find it again for a visual aid), I put down my felt-tipped marker and waited for shouts of “bravissimo, bravissimo, encore, encore.”

Rather, silence. Crickets more like. Only, unlike Beethoven , I wasn’t deaf, it truly was silent.

Now, silence is good and bad, and with a presentation, there is a fine line between death and victory, a hair’s breadth.

The silence was broken by Fritz Senn, the über-Swiss Joycean, who is in/famous for making or breaking young Joyceans on the spot, the former usually being sprite, young good-looking female Joyceans, the latter often look more like me.

In his typical faux-Socratic self-deprecating irony , Mr. Senn threw out this chestnut, more or less, as such, saying, in his Swiss manner, “Now, it is my humble opinion, and I don’t claim to know anything about anything, but there is one thing that I have noticed about the Wake and that is that there is a uncanny ability for people to talk a great deal about the Wake, but actually not understand it at all.” That was the first and last comment of the presentation, and I sat down.

Well, some twenty years later, having worked much more extensively on Joyce and having read Siddhartha several more times (I taught myself German to read it in the original, so it must be important to me), I would give the exact same presentation, the echoes of Mr. Senn’s deprecation notwithstanding.

Which was: the two books are the same, and they are about a river, and in that river, everything happens all the Time at all Times and covers all Space and it is contained in the sacred syllable OM, though protracted to the tesseract of A-U-M-Silence (hence I tell myself the silence at the end of my presentation was actually fortuitous...always look on the bright side of life, “whistle, whistle/whistle, whistle”) as described in the Advaita Vedanta classic, the Mandukya Upansihad...

Sunday was a beautiful day in Antwerp. Though 99% of the denizens might disagree evinced by the dearth of human beings out that morning, I found it to be phenomenal, to use my daughter’s favorite adjective.

It was very cold, grey and foggy as Dickens’ London. I was tooling around my bike in the Waste Land of avenues and streets and ended up on the banks of the Schelde, the river that made Antwerp a viable metropolis for hundreds of years. Down towards the South, where it becomes more river and less commercial property, I sat by the river, and wept silently, though not out of sadness.

Sitting there for some indefinite amount of Time, watching the muddy swells roll plashing against the nearby hull of the good ship Helenic, listening to the plaintive, feline calls of the gulls, and feeling the cold, damp caress of fog on my cheek, I sat, and tears did in fact come to my eyes, though I did not even notice when, how, or why, yet, I wasn’t sad, not at all, but rather I just was, and I was indeed a lone a long the... 

God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream?

Several years ago, when we moved back to Antwerp from Austin, Texas, I was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the Universiteit Antwerpen. How I ended up there is a story in itself, having been a foreign exchange student nearly twenty years prior, with the same professors who were now my colleagues, during which I began my lifelong (from that point at least) love affair with languages and James Joyce. But, that, as the talking tree, the Sprookjesboom says, “dat, lieve kinderen, is een héél ander verhaal...”

One of the courses that I taught was called, “God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream?” I had been asked to teach a course on American Drama, something I had never done before, so I put on the old thinking cap, and I thunk, and I thunk, and I thunk.

What defines America?

The time period was in and around the two World Wars, and I had chosen Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

And, like casting the runes or spreading the Tarot Cards, the answer emerged: God, Fear, and Booze. And, of course, the American Dream, or was it?

Living and traveling abroad I am constantly confronted with stereotypes, both ones about Americans and ones that I have as an American about others, say, for example, Italians, Belgians, and Indians, just to name a few. Stereotypes raise the hackles of many immediately, but, in a sense, they can be useful. An incorrect stereotype is just as helpful in learning about a culture as a correct one, just as a negative experience can teach us as much as a positive one.

So, that was the course. The first day, not wanting to be shy, we dove right in and I asked the students, who were all Belgian, what stereotypes do you have about America and Americans?

Some of the answers which filled the chalkboard:

Obsessed with Religion

Christians

Drink too much when they come to Europe

War (there was another President in the White House at the time)

Xenophobia

Ignorance of geography

Hollywood endings

Problems with Racism

Freedom

Skyscrapers

The American West

Cowboys and Indians

In short, God, Fear, and Booze: The American Dream? I was not too much off the mark. Americans drink a lot of alcohol, both at home and abroad. Americans are quite preoccupied with Religion, specifically Christianity, and we Fear the Unknown as much as anyone, yet, behind it all, there is the promise of the American Dream. I can do anything that I put my mind to.

When people meet me, they will often say, “You’re not a typical American, are you?” To which I usually answer, “Yes and No.”

Personally, I have had my battle with booze, though have come out victorious . Questions of religion and spirituality are on my mind constantly, but not necessarily Christianity. I have had to conquer many fears in life, and have had to overcome prejudices and stereotypes of the Other, and I have learned about three different cultures on a deeper level than even some of the people born and raised in those cultures. I have believed in the American Dream and I have lived it, and I have seen it falter at times.

Much has happened in my life since I taught that course. I have lost much, and perhaps, in some ways, I have gained more. I have wrestled with the demons of my mind, of being American , of being a foreigner, of being a Man, of being a Human, of just Be-ing.

And, now, here I am, back in Antwerp having spent a phenomenal 10 weeks in India , which suddenly, like the thick mist of today’s autumn shroud, floats ghostly before my eyes, flickering. shifting, changing, fading, and eliding my thoughts, taking me back to that first day in the classroom, asking the question, “so, what comes to mind when you think of America?” Because, suddenly, again I am here, back in Antwerp, as an American, coming equipped with a bit more experience in life than when I left it in August.

For logistical reasons, Antwerp, or at least Belgium is my home for the indefinite, foreseeable future. I am a foreigner, and I am an American, living abroad. But, I have returned to Antwerp with perhaps a new pair of glasses, or better, a lack thereof. It is a new city for me. Though it has been part of my history, suddenly it opens before me, new, to be dis-covered, to be experienced from a new perspective.

I am American. I am a typical American, both in my typical and atypical ways. It is who I am, and it is who I will be when I die. For, to be paradox of a stereotype is about as American as it can get, and so, here I am.