History

I like the smell of old books. And, very definitely, I love to let my eyes swerve over those endless rows of covers stacked upon shelves. The sense of standing before a magnificent amount of knowledge is dazzling, provoking a mental frenzy that I can only contain by pulling books out left and right and seeking out style and print type and table of contents. When I make my way through the isles of the library, the isles being mere alleys between blocks of books, en route to an entrance that lies hidden in some corner, the awareness of possibilities standing out in endless titles almost makes me stop at every moment. I hesitate forward. The entrance, the specific work my mind is bend on, when reached, stands small and insignificant in the towering city of text, but mental mapping on my side had singled it out long before. This is the moments entrance, its looks already have me when I retrieve it from the shelve. I walk back to the reading room through the isles, now oblivious of the surrounding.

This library is the university's oldest and most dignified, not equipped with sponsored information columns, not fit out with rows of computers. Portraits of eminent thinkers cover the thick walls in quads, low arches separate the uniform rooms, and the light from the very few windows falls broken past cast iron stiles, onto the carpeted floor. It's exceptionally quiet in here. At the heavy woodtop table in the center of this white plastered reading room I pour over books. A dozen or so lie scattered in front of me, a selection of works on 19th century cities in Europe, and the impact of modernity. I take notes all the time and switch books at a rate that doesn't seem fit in a place where many many ages demand long lasting attention. I'm on to something. Call it 'history', it's all about quick switching.

They spoke of Paris as 'la ville qui remue'- the city that never stops moving, Benjamin (193?).
I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep. What is sleep but a state of stasis? Still, movement continues outside of the one asleep. The city saves the sleeper, when he wakes up things will have changed, all he has to do is get out of the house and find out. Imagine the loner who stays indoors always. Really God in a universe, but a finite one, and once he has exhausted all the possibilities- the piling up of dust balls, the rot of wallpaper.
Dickens… could not remain in Lausanne because, in order to write his novels, he needed the immense labyrinth of London streets where he could prowl about continuously… Thomas De Quincy…, as Baudelaire tells us, was 'a sort of peripatetic, a street philosopher pondering his way endlessly through the vortex of the great city', Jaloux (1936).

The streets of the city are novel, every day. The city as novelty came into being, in the keen eyes and minds of a few, in the 19th century. At the same time the interior turned stale. The bigcity dweller is the first individual driven from a home where he remains forever alone. Outside everything happens, inside nothing goes on but for sighing and coughing. The city as labyrinth, as vortex, where individual dwelling places are lost, no one can find out another but on the street, by pure chance.

In the East, in the West, in the South, as far as the eye reaches, a sea of houses, towers and buildings, an endlessness of roofs, chimneys and fronts. No trees, no meadows anymore in the distance, but roofs, houses and roofs and roofs again… everywhere a new city! Van Maurik (1860).

Hegel hangs right in front of me. He looks away to the right, in black and white, towards some nook of the room, or some corner of the frame he's caught in. From this copy of the 'Cambridge Companion', which lies on the table, he stares with the same big eyes. Excerpts from his works, fused with contemporary commentary. Hegel ain't mine, this book belongs to a girl who sat working across the table from me, till she got up and disappeared under the arch into the isles. I'm taking a break myself. I leave the library through the glass door, a sign of modernity there after all, and slowly descend down the staircase, rolling a cigarette. Outside in the courtyard its lovely and still, some bird's sing, a little fountain trickles. I sit down on the bench and catch some last rays of sunlight on my face. The scent that girl was wearing overwhelmed me completely. I'm looking for her to come down the stairs and enter the yard, transformed. She was someone I have known years ago. While I sat scribbling away she had entered the room and transformed everything. I didn't dare look up, but I couldn't work on either. I just sat there, numb, and felt the past flush over me like a mist. The books were gone, so were my notes, the reading room, the tables and chairs, nothing could last, her scent brought on a presence of love gone by, and I loved her, but could not look up and face my reflection in her eyes.

I remember entering a shipyard, along the quays of the Seine, outside of Paris. It was a cloudy day, one of the last of my stay for that summer. The yard was abandoned and littered with wreckage. The iron fence encircling the few shacks and wooden boats, and the drive that let to the pier and the water, had sagged, the gate stood wide open. Two things came together, or rather, one pair of things brought on another. There were the boats, two of them, one left, one right, resting on thick poles along the waters edge, and in the middle of the driveway, nothing more then a gravelled mud track, a pile of dark yellow sand. I hadn't talked to anyone for weeks, I had been thinking, reading and writing in a tiny sub-urban Paris apartment, locked away from the world. The small boats in my view, freshly painted, green keel and red build-up and brown keel and green build-up, upon sight transformed into dream vessels. A sandpit carried myself and my brother, twenty years ago, and we struggled for the little blockwooden boats to stay afloat on the waves of yellow water, the dark ocean that we roamed upon. The sky bore nasty clouds that hid the sun completely, it was not to be an easy exploration for sure, but we were determinate to save our vessels for breaking and sinking away in the deep. We poured hands of dust over the ships, we made ramps of sand for them to scale. The pit smelled of stale soil, our faces were red from the streaming wind in the drive by the house, we had tiny cuts all over our hands, smarting broken skin. We must have been playing until it started to rain.

1800 1850 1900

Towards the end of the 19th century the big city dweller is more and more thrown back onto himself. Not only does physical insignificance make itself more felt (imagine the individual passing through the Boulevard Hausmann, dwarfed by height, width and length of what completely surrounds him, while streetcars and other vehicles pass him at great speed) but also does the sheer number of faces, and opportunities there in, bewilder him to the point of paralysis. The dweller of old turns into a striding maniac, everything around him has been magnified, everyway he can go ends only at the horizon, and every opportunity that arises is copied a hundredfold the following moment. As he used to leisure through narrow, winding streets, taking in the activities of venders on the marketplace, and the faces and speech of ladies and gents passing by, so now he is besieged by the straight line that disappears in the distance, and the parole of brokers, clerks and bankers, and workers from the factory floor, a mass of milling bodies from which so many faces appear that the whole becomes blurred and singular, without head or tail for him to catch on to. All he can do is rush on like the rest in the hope that behind the horizon, or in one pair of eyes that does not merely reflect his destitute image, lies finally salvation.

The girl's perfume still lingers in the reading room, devoid of people but me. I try and work some more but the slightest impression, a blue stain on my hand, dust swirling in a ray of light, a bend corner of a book, carries my attention away. Memories press on to me through every ephemeral phenomenon. The stain recalls the many moments of boredom, back in class, the dust, so many afternoons of imposition, the crease, Les Fleurs du Mal.
"Greenhay": -A country-house built by my father… separated from the last outskirts of Manchester by an entire mile; but now, and for many a year, overtaken by the hasty strides of this great city, and long since (I presume) absorbed into its mighty uproar. De Quincey (1821).

Good old De Quincey pulls me back to crazy days, a loft at the Rue de Madame, Paris. I read his Opium-Eater by afternoon light, streaming in through the open balcony door, and at night, roaring drunk, declared I was gonna be a writer like him. Next day, I composed my first poem there. Rue and Avenue / People, lights and endless street, / Glittering, shining Seine. Dubois (1997)

Part 2: The city

How beautiful the street! (Diderot 18??)
Aimlessly I wander through the streets of the city. I take in everything. The crowd and the streets are sometimes one, sometimes lone figures appear as specks in front of giant building fronts. By chance I run into a square, where terraces peripherate a theater of artists and charlatans, and waiters in black and white wind their able bodies through the crowd, leisuring under parasols. Cafe names stand multicolored against the redbrick facades, underneath pours music from a dimmed interior, the square is wild with sounds and motion waving to its center from all sides. I walk on, taking it all in; shopping streets beckoning buyers with advertisements flashing in grandiose vitrines; wide boulevards, where masses rush, and cabs and trams whiz by; backwater alleys, where mushy walls hide windows hiding drugs and lust; business districts where at luchhours sad faces munch away on camembert sandwiches, and ties flap up from white shirts in the wind; the market where everything happens at once. The city itself is my aim, the faces that appear in the crowd a destiny that moves away indefinitely, jumping from apparition to apparition.

I wake up around noon and find the room around me desolate. A bundle of cloths cover the chair and the desk is littered with paper and cigarette butts. Everything is creased, the clothes, the paper. I make coffee, I shave in front of the dirty mirror, I tend my hair with wax. In between all these preparatory activities I stumble about the room, looking for things that might be relevant for today. What I find, a CD with Charlie Parker recordings, a book that reps about poetry, a dark green piece of printed paper announcing a bachelor party, all of that I discard in the pile of possibilities. I open the window, sip coffee and smoke, sensing the street underneath. Opposite all the windows are closed, most curtains are drawn, a lone man watches TV. A bike rattles by, someone whistles on the corner not far of. I can hear the hum of traffic covering the boulevard behind the blocks of silent buildings. I shoot the butt out the window, pack my bag with nothing but paper and pen. I leave for the library, when my feet hit the pavement the day begins its rolling motion.

Modernity rose to juxtapose several new aspects of the city. Capitalism had liberated so many during the nineteenth century. Here everyone was, spending his time and his money out on the streets. Whether a dandies bottomless allowance or the weekly wage, sourly materialized on a factory floor, of a perpetual weekend drinker, the city, vaster then ever and its consummerate possibilities having increased to a level of indecency, lured every penny to return to its bosom, its banks, its specialty stores, its salons and galleries and workers cafés. Money and inventivity brought on big toys. That's the cars crashing by over asphalted streets, that's the trams and buses bulking public around the city. The divide lay there. Two parts were added to the make up of big city life. The wide-open road coming to belong to transitory speeding, the covered or partly covered area to satiate a will for spending and strolling and flirting.

Adventurous shopping
Hooked on shoes?
Midseason actionsales
Streetexperience
Enrich your life
Where everyone's a winner (Kalverstraat 2002)

When I stop to scrutinize a display of leather shoes, momentum, dragging on, almost makes me topple. People bump up against me every unguarded moment and the shoes waver in my view. I don't halt long. Resuming my walk I turn my head left and right to get a sense of the commodities offered all around. Only now it is clear to me that 21st century shopping also demands speed. Almost crossly does a high heeled, pinkly dressed blonde swerve from vitrine to vitrine, deciding, it seems, in the instance the articles flash by, whether to shoot into the store or carry on her ferocious clicking motion. I am caught up in the throng and it sweeps me along. Like the pink lady, dozens of others wind in and out of this mass, filling sandwich bars, pouring into sales, filing through the racks and stacks of offers, stuffing plastic bags and asking for another one, yelling at the counters for a coupon, all at the same time.

In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking (Benjamin 193?).
Escalators are rare opportunities to relax while maintaining motion. Nevertheless relaxation is lost on most people, and the usual scene at metro station escalators is an ordeal of rushing versus catching breath, with people clinging to the rubber banister and others squeezing past that bulk of bags and bodies. None of that in the mall. Motion, out in the street singular and head-on, disperses inside the shopping mall. In the center there is a shaft, an open space going all the way up, passing several stories, to the roof of glass. The three-dimensional space unfolds possibilities that are unthinkable in the linea recta shopping street. First of all, one can go around, passed vitrines and store entrances, keeping the shaft of light in the center as a bearing. But one can go up as well, by means of the escalators, suspended in the shaft and carrying one, if desired, all the way to the top of the building. People riding the escalator stand still, looking about incessantly, posing for those onlookers down at the plaza, or up along the balconies encircling the shaft in which the escalator moves. In the daytime city the mall is one of the few places where flirting occurs as a passtime.

She brings me my coffee with a smile. I thank her, she goes off to another table inside. I sit back and light a cigarette. I have deliberately chosen this cafe on the ground floor of the mall, its terrace extends onto the plaza. From my seat I watch the people go by and go up and down the escalator. At the entrance to a jeans-store stands a girl in blue and red sponsored outfit, she pars her nails and leans against a rack of multicolored pants. When people pass her she doesn't look up, even when they enter the store, practically tripping over her feet, she maintains working her nails. I watch her. She's a bit fat with a puffy countenance, she appears rather unsmiling. While she pars she purses her lips, the double motion, of fingers, of lips, in keeping with a kind of ritual. She looks up suddenly when a loud group of boys descends the escalator. She purses her lips once more and slightly angles a knee, also she takes in her breath. The boys, schoolboys, loud, jesting, fooling around, take notice of every female in the vicinity, and approve, or disapprove, with sounds and gestures supposedly meant to mean something unique, but rather clumsily, turning out as obvious remarks to the extend of hot or not hot. They enter the plaza, they turn around on their heels, the girl purses at them, looks down, turns red at a remark one of 'em makes, lights a cigarette, looks back, one of the boys approaching, just when he comes to her being laughed at by the rest, turning back, the girl smiles wryly and takes another deep breath. On the escalator coming down now, a dame. She holds her narrow nose in the air, her peroxide hair falling in waves over her bare shoulders, tight top, long dress down and heels high and fine. Slowly her eyes scan the balconies above her, but as she nears the bottom of the escalator she gazes down through long coal black lashes, at me. I look for the colour of her eyes, hard to distinguish in the light from above she moves in. She seems amused. I scan her breasts and see that with one hand she caresses the top of her dress, only just above her décolleté. In her eyes there is only haughtiness. In her gait as she steps onto the plaza, there is style, but it is artificial. I release a little smile on her, she winks and disappears from my view, followed by a bunch of hooting schoolboys. I smoke another cigarette, finish my coffee, look at the people coming in, going out. Some smile, some scoff, some ignore, some girls smile, some make gestures I try to define as sensual. The girl with the apron comes around, I smile at her, ask for the bill, she smiles, I pay and ask to use the bathroom which she points out to me very kindly.

What's News-
Sotheby's to be sold
Chrysler sold 4% more vehicles in May
Rapist cuffed and chained again
Police unable to reduce street robberies
Cocaine-transport intercepted at airport Telegraaf (2002)

I beat around the blocks, increasing my tempo at every corner. The shopping district I have left behind, cars and trams overtake me all the time. I come to an intersection, everything is jammed, an accident took place only minutes ago. A whole lot of people have halted on the sidewalk, I squeeze my way through. At the lights lies a motionless body, traffic goes slowly around. A car with a dent in the hood stands a few meters away, its driver behind the wheel, gesturing vehemently. I cross the street and leave the scene quickly. As I go along into an alley I pass a little boy, crying, looking down at the asphalt before him. From a distant part of the city a siren wails, closing in, now and then disappearing. At the intersection a crowd of cars and passersby has now completely surrounded the body, the boy sits down with his feet on the asphalt and buries his eyes in his hands. A cop comes around and asks him, not unfriendly, what does he think he is doing. I walk on. The city closes in on me. Many faces appear and I try and commensurate local architecture with countenances. Fin de Ciecle building fronts loom behind contemporary expressions. Boredom, panic, haste, appear in quick succession, overhead windows are decorated with cast iron balconies, a whole row of them to the end of the street. A couple of blocks later a prostitute raps the glass pane that separates her from me. I smile at her eyes, she flutters and wriggles her tongue. Everyone turns faces away, meeting head-on in the street. When I hold a pair of washed bleak blue eyes, coming up slowly and seemingly transcended beyond 21st century streetparables, a moment later the blue turns blank and subsequently she averts her head. The city leaves me no room, not even a momentary dream to believe in.

Part 3: The opium den

The hasjies spreads in the muscles and nerves ever so slowly. My legs extend across the floor in the manner of an uncoiling snake, my arms sag sedately into the cushions, and my head tilts backwards gradually till my sight touches the ceiling. The coffeeshop is low and narrow and runs deep away into a number of unknown rooms. The interior consists of drab walls covered with fantastic drawings, and along them people recline on couches. Knee-high tables with square glass tops are scattered through the corridor, little oil lamps spread squirts of wavering light around. In the back there must be a bar, but the tea was brought to me and the hasjies I had carried myself. The ceiling draws ever so low and appears completely uniform. Outside, I know, the night has begun to pass by. I long to smooth my way amongst her many lights, but I wouldn't know how to angle my approach to the outside, starting from the door of this concealing den.

City swarming with people! City crowded with dreams! Baudelaire (186?)
Where was I? Metropolis as it came into being in the 19th century has been dealt with in an endless number of ways. Its people have been called monads, waves, ants, workers, beasts, particles, apparitions, crowd, mass. Her face has been plastered in so many ways, layer upon layer of transparent make-up, new stones, new buildingblocks, new and always contemporary architecture. But her structure remains, and from a bird's point of view the city never really becomes new, only greater, expanding.

Dawn in the city is the murmur of an empty seashell, Caroutch (19??). What about dusk? What about every split second myriad actions are carried out, and ten thousand looks interweave in the streets?

Fragments of the 19th century city remain in the streets of today, their contexts leveled, their stories told anew by tour guides. Going around the city, everywhere really, the 19th century shines through. The history of asphalt, of malls, of broad Boulevards, of street etiquette, of traffic-veins and umbrella's and scenic tourist tours, all of that date's from the age of the birth of metropolis. If I'm not mistaken first in the 19th century did prostitution come around as a public exploit, and did opium den's sprout up underground.

On the wall, opposite, several nymph-like creatures stroke one another's breasts and sex. Only their fantastic outlines are given, and their eyes, either wide open or closed, and their lips, parted. From my reclining position I watch how they slowly undress, and I am aware of their giggles slowly tuning to soft sighs. One of them, a slender white body of fine black lines, dances for me. She dances snakelike and smiles indefinitely at my red eyes. I see her glowing nipples out of the wall and her belly rubbing the atmosphere, her swaying thighs hold my head, steady, unsteady. Brown smoke circles under the ceiling, draperies are drawn all around me, I smoke and watch, completely my own, the rhythm of fabulous bodies.

Where am I? Some stranger talks to me, an incomprehensible babble protrudes from his face, which is hidden in shadows. After a long time only, he leaves. This place seems abandoned, I roll another joint and ask a passing girl for tea, to my surprise she brings a cup and a whole basket full of choices. I ask her to pick one for me. She leaves the basket and says something that I forget immediately. Now, I feel like going outside. The city illuminated, what a change! Cities before were as forests at night, dark and impenetrable. Imagine the fearful loner seeking out a place for the night, dark enough and concealing so that no evil might befall him while he rested. But exactly every such spot would be a danger in those very aspects, no rest for the lone man out at night! Only when gas lighting came around, at the close of the 19th century, did the nightstreet become a possibility for prowling about. How the market jumped at this newly disclosed stretch of time! See now, how living does not come to a halt at any point anymore, how day and evening and night have hooked arms and forever pass on activity. A surge passes through me as I turn my gaze to the street. Neon's grasp my retina with force, the billboards across the street flash up immaculately, all the figures passing by are in some magnificent way alight, blazing with electrics from behind, above, all around. The city is alive with light, swarming with volts of electricity injected into a luminous dome that covers the stars.

I return to her regularly. She is my goddess of absolution, cast in bronze, forever. Tonight she is the only one left to turn to. I crawl along the streets, sinister, silent, thinking of her and inevitably moving in her direction. The hasjies intoxication has begun to wear off. Every image that an hour ago was bright and revolutionary, original and mine completely, has turned redundant and ridiculous. I forgot so much already, now I only walk and look for real things, solid, always there outside of me. The city lights are true beacons, the scattered drunks have real stories to tell if only they would manage to untwist their tongues, the haunting cabs are right demons, driving me on. I come to the arches, peripheral to the center of the city, and instead of hesitating I quicken my step. The passage lures a weary traveler, it appears from a distance to possess a security, in its lights, in its concealing walls and domes. There is a man inside. He's always there, halfway through the corridor. He wails as usual, and plucks his guitar in between, sad, incoherent tones. At the end of the passage shines another part of the city. Music halls, theater grounds, a half pipe and museums of art, from contemporary to golden times, gardens, a basketball court. The wailing subsides, belonging to that part of the city that I left behind, and I step from under the arches. The grand scala of constructions and deliberate space in between leaps out at my eye, separate sources of light connected by mists of condensation, and angular shapes in halfdark hold the horizon. This cityscape that opens at dawn for a leisuring public only holds torches and tombstones at night, flooded by that ghostly fog over the stretches of space, an ancient burial ground at the edge of urban life.

She stands away to the left, in front of a small garden. Behind her sprouts a fountain from a pond, edged by green, steel benches. The moon rests above her head, but she looks down. In the light of a lamp, attached to the building front beside her, she carries an urn, and a robe barely covers her shoulder. She stands at ease, her right knee bend forward, her left straight and steady. She is naked but for the robe, more naked then the moon with its scars and dark patches, she is naked and smooth, lustrous in the light. I lean against a pillar and watch her, that's all I ever do. The sound of the water clattering behind her makes me thirsty for the contents of the urn, from which I will never drink, knowing that it will only return to rubble at the moment I imagine I will. She is real, standing there. I am real standing over here, my back to the pillar. And yet we won't meet, ever. I admire the artificer who created her and sometimes wonder what imperfect creature would have been a model for him, and his imagination, how great. I keep my distance and absolution follows, tracing her curves, her stance, her place here at the edge of life, and every dream unfulfilled I lay at her feet, not in deed, not even in phrases, but by the grace of her perfection and distance, it doesn't matter, I just let it flow. She looks down at it, unmoved, smooth, forever.

^

Biography

I have been a student at the university of Amsterdam for two years now, mainly following courses at the department of philosophy. Lately, I have picked up English to improve my writing skills and learn more on the English
language literary tradition. Since my first language is Dutch I do have a lot to improve upon when it comes to writing in English - stubbornly I persist. After finishing highschool I travelled around for a bit, and made a living
in Jerusalem and New York, for a good three years in all. Jack Kerouac and Hemingway did it for me, first when it came to adventuring, and gradually for creating's sake also. These days I read a lot of Walter Benjamin, not to
mention Joyce (Ulyssus- trying hard) and Dos Passos.