PARIS, FRANCE
JOURNAL
This Journal is for a Japanese documentary film maker so that we may have an opportunity to go to Japan.
PARIS, FRANCE
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Awake to Florin asking me who I am. I do not reply and he tells me I'm the arch angel Michael who's come to protect the people of Israel from a dark and dastardly army. "If that's a metaphor and my working presence on the planet is supposed to be for fighting then those people are in trouble man. I'm getting hurt man. I'm desolate." I say with one eye open.
Florin shakes his head and smiles. "No. No. You will see."
I leap off the couch and take to the floor in the opposite corner of the room to do the morning monk exercises. Florin attends to his computer and begins listening to the song "Telling the Story of the Evening Sun," which is a song by me. It's a sweet thing to have someone actually enjoy your music and think you're a spiritual warrior spirit like I used to listen to the Doors, and Bob Marley when I was a baby nerd. Further a lot of my life choices depend upon a great deal more people sharing Florin's enthusiasm, but part of me still finds it very funny and also very weird. I laugh and raise my feet up to the ceiling and levitate like a bat on an invisible branch with a gauche smile and my arms dangling above the black stone slabs of the floor.
Eric walks in all sleepy eyed on the scene and raises one eyebrow. I tell him offhand while hanging upside down that I'm hungry and drop to stand with two feet on the floor. We decide to go out get some breakfast.
Florin lights weeds on fire and tells us he has a meeting and will be ready to film our podcast in the early afternoon. We tell him we'll be back to the apartment by three. He gives me a generous stack of bills and says to buy groceries to cook with. I am slightly perplexed but accept.
Out of Florin's front door down the dark hallways with gilded mirrors. Down the stairway with its wrought iron railing decorated like a dragon's tail. Mosaic tiles on the stairs. No lights. Cobweb covered candleabras.
Shiny floors and large mirrors of the lobby. Brass bars on glass windows at the threshold. Outside it is morning and glorious sunshine. We check our tiny car beneath the long diagonal row of housing buildings that look like a grand castle wall that over a thousand years a hundred thousand bird beings turned into a million haunted houses. The tiny car, wedged between the back of an aging luxury sedan and a city garden is unmolested. We peer nervously in through the windshield. Both of us are holding guitars like farmers carry rusted tools that begin to look a part of the landscape of their worldly being. A moslem man comes out of an underground portal with a gentle, welcoming presence. "All is well in Brussels" he says with a smile, "Enjoy."
I nod and thank him and feel safe that our car won't be towed like it would in San Francisco and that the people in Brussels understand the value of bards and minstrels and the like. We wander off with our guitars and find a strange restaurant that serves a fixed price menu very affordably in a garden between the high walls of the abandoned fortress of the city. The whole operation of the restaurant, like that of the city seems beyond the self conscious mania of codes and laws.
There is no frivolity but the food is artfully prepared and nourishing. The waiters and waitresses tiptoe backstage and have a laugh at the sight of us with our shabby, monochromatic, barefooted, hooded garb and guitar cases leaned up against the ivy crawling up the cracked wall toward the rusted fire escape too high for any one but a burglar to escape from. Eric and I know we are laughed at and think critically about our state of affairs while sipping tea from delicate white cups. Are we remnants of some kind of childish 1960s ideal? Who can afford to go on tour of Europe playing music when the banks gambled away all the money and no one owns houses and the forest is getting cut down and the dirt is washing away into the sea.
"Who can afford not to?" I respond to the doubting voice in my mind. You are here to live your life, to hone your craft, and hopefully to provide inspiration to far away strangers. And yet I wonder if the rate at which I'm accomplishing any of these tasks is satisfying to Eric who has his own life to lead and his own race to run. Breath deep and continue on. There are babies born without food all over the globe and how many wars are going on and you're a traveling musician who makes no money? Will becoming a paralegal make this situation better or worse Michael? Focus. Breath. Go forward.
We pay our bill and walk under the street trees and the warm spring sunshine to find a park to practice our music for the filming to take place in the afternoon and the show we'll undergo in the evening.
Through a corridor we pass back into Florin's neighborhood and stare upward at the pointed tower tops of a preposterously tall church. The church is a sooty gray and black. The sky is bright blue.
After a hundred more paces of walking along the train tracks we find a park shaded by old trees where we pick out a bench and sit down to play the music. We begin to practice a song that begins "I know I have a skeleton, how'd you like to see me try to use it, tell the truth and try and prove this hangman's noose is purely useless," when a strange girl approaches and begins speaking to us familiarly in French.
We respond haltingly, somewhat reluctant to be distracted from our practice but she asks us for a song and we give her one. We play the "The Dictionary is the Book of Love" song and not the Skeleton one. Our new friend applauds and asks for another and another. After the end of the third song she tells Eric that she's a singer too and gives him a beat and hums a melody. Eric then begins strumming cords and she rhyme sings rapidly in French in a way that is very impressive. In the back of my mind I'm aware of how my default reaction was to wish this person away as an imposition to the work flow when in fact the ground of living, and particularly living as a musician is composed of such interactions. The nervous and unexamined way in which my work ethic has become a tyrant is being revealed on this trip. By and by our guest leaves us and promises to watch tonight as we play at the Live Music Cafe. We watch her as she walks away slipping earphones over her ears and off to catch a train.
After she is disappeared Eric and I finish practicing a few more songs and then walk across the park to a corner produce market to buy groceries for Florin. In the process of doing so we revisit the question that first entered into our mind in the morning when he gave us the money: "When are we going to 'cook' this food when we have a show tonight and leave for Paris tomorrow morning?" We wonder if Florin imagines we will stay for days and weeks and usher in the mystical way of being with him as the stars of mystics switch places with the misguided stars of technocrats. What a complex man our host is and how simple a small town hustler on the run I am. Angel? Angel to me means some girls on dewey grass of wild lands that don't exist anywheres but the tidy sanctity of my dreams. This here grimy urchin under siege from the merchants isn't going to bring any angels into the mess of being much less the falsely romanticized fantasy of warfare.
We buy fruit and yogurt. Walking in the sunshine back to Florin's we ponder whether European junk food is less processed than American junk food. Back up the steep flights of stairs along the dragons tale, the darkness, dusty candelabras, and gilded mirrors to the threshold of Florin's door which is locked. We knock and he opens and the smell of burning herbs and spices seeps into the hallway. Inside on the couch is a tall man dressed like a lapsed intellectual with gray hair who Florin introduces as a comedian. We give Florin his change from the grocery transaction and show him what we have purchased which seems to sadden him somehow.
Eric disappears to ready himself for the afternoon and I sit with Florin and the comedian. At length I ask Florin what time we should plan to film with him and he looks at me as if I've missed several trains and answers inscrutably in poetry. I smile at the comedian who watches me like a mildly volatile participant in an otherwise gentile tennis tournament.
Meanwhile Eric re-enters the room and appears restless. I get up from my seat and summon him to the chamber where he slept the night before to make our plans. "I'm not sure Florin intends to film us." I say.
"Why not?" Eric answers, clear eyed and measured.
"I think he's offended we didn't buy the kind of groceries one cooks a communal feast with." I reply.
We debate the possible truth of my perception and decide to travel downtown alone with the intention of meeting Florin to shoot a movie. If he appears great, if not we'll street perform and make our own movie. Moreover, we will plan to stay downtown for our show in the evening and as such should have our bags readily packed so that we may leave early in the morning for Paris. Accordingly we quickly rearrange our belongings to make this possible and transfer to my daypack the camera and recording equipment for the afternoon.
We then leave the bedroom and enter into the apartment's main room to present our plan to Florin. He and the comedian are smoking and deep in conversation and Florin agrees to the idea of meeting us by the Maison Communal at six o'clock but it doesn't seem to me like something he intends on in reality.
None the less Eric and I pick up our instruments and recording gear and disappear once more from the apartment, on our feet again, walking long and far over the cobblestones, under the trees and church tower rooftops and the blue sky. Over a bridge and a wide green river with rusted cargo ships bobbing by the stone platform of the shore. Past an imposing statue at the center of a traffic circle. And then along the dense traffic of a thoroughfare ransacked by modernity. Eric listens to music on his headphones and I walk deep in thought until we arrive at a grocery store where it occurs to me to purchase batteries for our portable amplifier. They do not carry C batteries and we travel on.
The thoroughfare ends at the top of a hill and we are back in the hotel heavy part of town where we finally found our way after being lost the afternoon before. We cross the hotel street and make a right down a polished alleyway of shiny stone and cackling, sparking glass. The old fashioned bazaar cast over to the shopping mall. There is an apple computer store and I try to find batteries there and am unable but am able per Eric's request to purchase an eighth inch cord to plug his digital jukebox into the car stereo. (A silly errand it seemed at the time, but a powerfully good decision in retrospect)
We continue on through the bazaar. Shiny people. Vacant eyes. Large advertisements. Sex. Youth. Wealth. Law. Order. I am tired. I am a thief.
The mall spits us out on an old street with dirty stones where the foreigners are at home and speak their language and the sounds of the city catch their breath and there's other birds besides brainwashed pigeons.
Coughing buses growl and and wheeze. Taxi drivers throw elbows and and little business men and ladies scoot through and think reflexively on the status afforded by their educations. Eric and I veer off the big road and down a diagonal puppet show alley that goes back in time five hundred years instantaneously. The people have on the new costumes but the buildings look down like they ate the library and partied with dinosaur bones.
We travel through the alley and arrive in a wide cobblestone square where they used to have farmer's markets and public executions to prove that the authorities know the lord above and what not. It is almost three o'clock and we decide to walk over to the maison communal on the other side of the square and wait for Florin.
Florin does not appear at three and we talk and reflect on the beauty of the architecture in the bright light and stretching shadows of the spring afternoon as we wait.
By and by we decide there's no need to wait any longer and to set up a scenario to make our own movie.
Alas, with the camera set up on the tripod framing a beautiful shot and the marantz audio recorder ready and recording and the guitars all tuned we begin to play a song that sounds really good. Then a policeman comes and tells us in French it's illegal to make movies in the square. He is a kind and respectful man and we have a nice human interaction and then turn off the camera. As the sun sinks lower we wait for Florin to come and create the documentation we were unable to.
We wait a little while longer. The sun begins to sink below the rooftops of the square and we decide Florin must not becoming.
We discuss the matter as we walk out of the square, down the diagonal time traveling alley and onto the sidewalk shores of the bustling street of relative modernity. There the students are smoking and drinking on the steps of a grand old library like building that Eric says looks like the unbelievable scene in the cover photograph of a middle school french text book in America. After a diversion across the wide road in a bourgeois happy hour land we return to the french textbook scene and attempt to play a street performance set. No one listens nor pays much attention of any kind much less contributes to our coffers. I feel as if Eric is frustrated and disappointed in me and I imagine myself simultaneously to be an obsolete carnival attraction, soon to be prostituted for the last few bits of life force until they finally grind me up and feed me to the donkeys that pull the train that carries the vaudeville to the next town where the up and comers are still care free and able to carry on. What a shame I didn't have any kids to play catch with and a garden for a scarecrow.
Rats. Poor Eric is stuck in an operation with a crazy, crazy man I lament for a moment longer. Then the old steadfast quality that is good and pure operating from a remote location tells a body to breath deep and get it under control. Strap on a smile son. Get up and dust off. Just as I'm almost back to earth a group of children of children of the sixties approach with long hair and guitars and chat us up. They want to know where we're from and what kind of music we like to play. They invite us to their farm a short train ride out into the countryside to play music in the barn. We show appreciation for the invitation and make vague efforts to stay in touch in the future. Really though Eric and I are tired and hungry, not quite vibrant and in place enough to connect with strangers at the moment. We bid farewell to our fleeting friends who are off to a party in an abandoned palace, and make our way to the Live Music Cafe to take our evening meal.
Neo, our saintly savior, cheerfully brings us menus, water and beer. We order salad and pasta. Soon all is well with the world again. Life is so simple really. People need to eat, drink and sleep and not just work hard or live up to whatever ideas take up residence in the place where hindu people look and corporate war lords throw bombs and genetically modified sex symbols.
We eat and drink, then play a very beautiful set of music. Neo and the music booker Frederick smile and applaud enthusiastically. There is also some shy girls in after work clothes and a skinny kid from France who looks like and actually turns out to be a lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse keeper sits down with us and tells us he's a singer. Frederick and Neo bring us rounds of drinks. For whatever reason I'm feeling festive and drink up the drinks. A cover band is on stage playing slightly insincere versions of good old music and Eric's polite and humble way of being seems a little under pressure as the lighthouse keeper tells stories of busking in his local market and the hour approaches midnight. By and by it becomes clear it's time to leave. We must drive to Paris early in the morning and it's a long walk back to Florin's apartment. We bid Frederick and the great Neo farewell and I photograph the grandeur of the ballroom chandeliers that illuminate the hall we played the first time I ever played in Belgium and I wonder if we'll ever return. I hope so.
The walk home is joyful and also illuminating. Eric explains to me why he was bothered by the cover band. I feel irresponsible putting it into words. It was really beautiful to hear and it made me start to see my traveling friend in the same way I perceived the beautiful scenes of nature as well as human creation that were all along the path of our travels. To make a beautiful building, or a pine forest on an expanse of sand dunes above the sea, or a city around concentric canals, or the airplane that flew us there for that matter, one must have a great deal of faith. The mind must be resolved, and focused enough to stay with a purpose for a very long time. And so the artist, to do this meaningfully, and responsibly, must sincerely love the art form. Or put another way, if one truly dedicates their life to something then a powerful result will be yielded. So we are all better off if the creator is dedicated truthfully and with something beautiful in mind.
We also, aside from the spiritual meanderings, make fun of each other's mothers and lament the lack of traditional spoils of the rock and roll lifestyle thus far. The long walk goes by quickly and I feel the trip changing powerfully for the better. By the time we ascend the long and gothic stairway to Florin's apartment I am feeling very good. Strangely, the door to the apartment is hanging halfway open and Eric and I look at each other with quizzical grins. Then we walk into the apartment to see Florin partying like it's his birthday. He is seated with his son on the couch burning weeds with some wine bottles on the table.
The son greets us alertly and politely. Florin seems surprised. He remarks that he thought we'd find women in the beautiful city. I cannot tell if he's serious or if his feelings are truly hurt because I'm a hustler and not an angel and we're leaving tomorrow without truly traveling into deep mysterious territories. I sit down on the window ledge and peer down at the side walk many stories down below and the rooftops just above. Florin begins interviewing Eric about what he saw during the day. Eric is a good sport and partakes in the weeds.
"What did you see? Tell me. What did you see?" Florin asks.
Finally, Eric answered. "The rooftops of churches and a very blue sky."
Then he bid us all goodnight.
I stayed up a long time later talking with Florin and his son. What a strange and generous man. He told me about ancient rabbis and how the geometry and the meaning of language spiral outward in tandem. I asked him earnestly why he didn't come to film us and if we'd hurt his feelings by being stern minded travelers as opposed to spiritual emissaries. He responded partially in riddles and partially in his jovial, endearing way that when I think about it now seems like a really honest answer.
"We are all learning what it means to be here all the time. You will find out who you are one day and when you do, you will know who I am, and we can talk about it."
Then he disappeared from the room, presumably to sleep for the first time since we'd made his acquaintance. His son and Eric had long since gone to bed. I lay on the couch watching the moonlight shine on the rooftops of the city.
NETHERLANDS - BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
We reverse the car out of Flora's parents lane and I wave at her standing on the sidewalk as we drive away. Out of Heiloo we go along the the railroad tracks over the tiny canal and onto the two lane highway back to Castricum. Flower fields. Fields of vegetables. Late morning light.
We stop in Castricum for a pastry and a coffee, then stand in the shadow of the sun shining on the tower of the stone church. Pass by the shaded graves in the wooded yard on the way back to the parked car, sipping coffee. Follow the voiced directions of our robot GPS lady who in a demure english accent commands us to "take the motorway."
We take the motorway. Eric takes out his melodica and plays the songs we've been working on. I chatter out suggestions that he notes on a notepad with his right hand while playing the song with his left. The rural coast is left behind for inland factories. Clumsy juggernauts on the horizon lacking the charm of the rusted railroad bridges and sooty churches that form the foundation for their existence.
We recall Flora's anarchist politics and ruminate on the responsibility of a being in society to rebel. Musician: Inferiority complex or self importance? Eric monitors our English robot lady, and suggests that sincere devotion to any craft leads to authenticity. Then he turns into a DJ and starts to play some very beautiful music.
Our mood grows sleepy. The sun is hot. Our car is going tremendously fast. The scenery turns back to rural farm fields that unroll as the trucks and shiny, tiny cars blur by unreal. Suddenly we are on the industrial outskirts of Brussels listening to Nina Simone, sweating, wondering where to meet the man who will take us to our evening show or no show.
The motorway deadends. Traffic. Can't figure out how to work the air conditioning. Eric listens to the voicemail on his phone and reports that our show is back on again and Florin wants to meet us at the venue. He has left no address nor directions.
The English Robot Lady guides us out of the traffic to a wide cobble stone street between two rows of crumbling wharehouses. Then we make a left and turn onto a road that winds through a park. We are headed downhill and the left side of the road is bordered by a very old and well constructed brick wall. The scene reminds me of New York's central park when summer first takes hold.
We leave the park and enter into Brussels itself. Tall rows of three story gingerbread houses. A feeling of lawlessness under the tired watch of withered authority. Poverty and decay of a beautiful realm. The English Lady gets lost and leads us to a place where there are many north African people and people from the middle east. We drive awkwardly through the neighborhood on streets clearly not designed with cars in mind as fussy business people honk their horns and colorful trolleys screech on rugged tracks.
I grow frustrated with our guide who seems confused and turn left up a sunny hillside past some mosques and wig stores and wind up in a very strange red light district. The biggest rat I've ever seen is trotting unabashed down the sidewalk with an abandoned billboard clamped in his rather menacing sharp and yellow teeth.
The ladies behind the smudged glass of the dingy stone buildings wear victorian lingerie and swivel around in modern office furniture that appears plucked from the ashes of burned down buildings that my father used to call insurance fires. Eric and I discuss the demographics of the would be clientel and feel queasy about the reality of where these ladies came from from. Terrible poverty and war crime lords in Africa and places that Russia tried controlling after Joseph Stalin won the craziest drunken chess game for money and sex slaves in history. (My grandfather said that Stalin wasn't a real russian, and some of these poor ladies are probably Georgian, the ones that aren't from Algeria, and Morrocco and Uzbekistan and Yemen and the Ivory Coast and Senegal) What would our tiny, sweet, beautiful, blonde, intellectual, nymph, anarchist lady, from just hours before have said? Oh Flora how far away already you seem to be.
Michael stop day dreaming! Poor Eric is getting very hungry. I can tell from the shadows forming behind the pale blue irises of his eyes. We know by names where we are but have no idea how to get where we are going.
Navigate wrecklessly out of the fetid harbor of savagely sacked sex slaves. Spray painted anarchy symbols and Emma Goldman quotes on all the dumpsters. Same giant rat shakes his sign at us as we leave. (I'm talking about an actual rat. Yes. I don't like calling people animal names and having it mean something bad. If you call a rat something to do with a person well that's a fucked up rat....but not vice versa)
Pull over by a large building. Squatters have taken over. Strange and shady business inside. Smashed open grandfather clock on the green mosaic tiles of an empty lobby, mold covered walls and bare wires in smashed open holes in the plaster. Eric is being swept away. I try on my computer to find the address of the venue. I did not write it down because the original plan was to meet this man Florin at his house and he was going to take us there. But now he has a business meeting so he cannot meet us and take us there. I fear Eric is growing frustrated that I planned a tour that will not work out. I fear that he feels that I am wasting his time. I fear that I am losing my chance to become the musician. My talent and energy per time unit was too little. We are stuck in a wasteland sweating. Will return home dirty and broke to an occupation I dread doing but must because I have to.
Tyrant of my inner life and fairy godmother bodhisattva play good cop/bad cop momentarily in the mind:
"Enough cowardly frivolity! Stop crying and do what you're born to do or you going to die crying! I'll kill you and drink your blood and then ritual style dance on your tombstone with the ghost of the child version of yourself that you have shamed." (rage, skeleton stretching out of skin)
"Deep breaths and compassion. Love your troubles til they disappear." (slowly trilling notes on an underwater piano played by non existent omniscient nymph being.)
"Destroy all weakness in your soul. There is no love but the wild animal's love to live." (Focus. Fangs. Blood. Breath. Oscillating light.)
"No one is going to do it if you don't do it." (bright Light. Furious rage. Bliss. Eternal Blackness. Silence. Clarity)
Anyways...standing up straight again...fierce look in eyes, stare back at shifty character standing outside empty market on the corner across the street until his shoulders slump and he looks away. Then on Eric's phone I call Florin, our host, who answers and tells me that the live music cafe where this evening we are supposed to play is in the center of town next to the name of a building I can't understand. He hangs up.
Eric wanders back to the car from some kind of weary errand and I report the situation. He does not look well.
I smile and we enter the car. For a while we play the game of listening to the English Computer lady send us through traffic and hot sun in circles. Then I turn her off and park in an alley and enter a smokey bar asking in broken french for directions to the center of town. The people look at me rather amused and a hard living bartender lady sweetly gives me clues that logically make no sense but appeal to my intuition.
I return to the car and report to Eric that we're on the right track. He looks skeptical. I drive us out of the alley fast and far away from the circular hub that duped our mapmaker to the shadow of an imperial looking building at the top of a hill and across the street from a beautiful park. We park the car beneath the building and skeptically ascertain that the time for putting money in the meter has passed and our car can exist unmolested for the remainder of the evening.
It is six thirty PM now. The afternoon is over. The northern sun of late spring casts long and lazy shadows of trees in the park below. We are due to load in at seven. Eric is very fastidious about being on time. Somehow the sweet hard living bartender lady speaks in my spirit to walk towards the park and then go turn northward down the hill. We go.
At the bottom of the hill the park ends and there is a four way intersection with hotels on every corner. We cross the street and head into the lobby of the hotel on the northwest corner. I ask the man behind the counter in my hazy french if he knows where the live music cafe is. At first he acts very stand offish and then somehow I scare or charm him and he snaps into a very accommodating frame of mind to tell us that all we must do is leave the lobby and make two rights. We will be there in ten minutes.
Outside in the bustle of the warm evening we are tired and dirty carrying all our instruments for the show through the crowds. We walk for a long twenty blocks or so and pass a beautiful old hall with grandiose steps filled with students socializing and Eric comments that it looks like the picture on the cover of his middle school French textbook that he heretofore had found unbelievable. Then he spots the cafe.
Relief. We cross the street and walk inside. My name is not on the chalkboard that lists the evening's entertainment. Behind the bar is a smartly dressed young man, handsome, and unassuming. I introduce myself to him as the musician who is scheduled to play this evening and he introduces himself to me as Neo. Immediately he makes a saintly presence.
He directs us to a table on the sidewalk terrace where the people walk by and the sunset colors slant over the gothic rooftops through the leafy trees to the seedy street. He brings us cold, clear glasses of waters. Then he brings us food and beer. We are very relieved.
Eric seems as if he has discovered some further secret of existence and our roles reverse. I no longer feel like the intrepid parent and he no longer seems like the fledgling pup. Now I'm the little one and he's revealing further what it means to be the musician. A musician when the world was new and a musician in the absurdity of human being life with robotic commercial warfare and bionic sexuality.
Eric illuminates that the humility I mistakenly inhabit as a saving grace is really just the tangled tendrils of ego problems like insidious insecurity and wounded vanity. You had it right the first time when you were a little kid he tells me. Before the intellect. Before the false tyranny of tastemakers. Remember when you really believed in rock stars? Those people actually were wonderful despite how embarrassing it may seem at weak moments out of context and after the fact. Going up on stage and describing the world for people is a ridiculous thing to do. The only chance one has of doing it well is to be as outlandish as one actually feels and sees. It is not an entertainer's function to be obsequious.
We eat well and enjoy laughter and each others company. Eventually our host arrives. A bearded man with a pony tail and his serious son of an advanced fourteen years of age. The father's name is Florin and he carries a bag with a well calibrated movie camera. His mind is filled with ideas about biblical angels and the shifting of consciousness to realize a new age. He points his camera at me and Eric Kuhn as we saunter onto the stage of a half emtpy room with high ceilings and mysteriously stately looking chandeliers.
Eric plays a kick drum and the guitar and a tambourine simultaneously and I play the crazy ghosts I had formerly turned over to the censors of the soul. It is ten thirty at night in Brussels, Belgium. I am too old to be playing a room so small for so little money and so far from home at such a great price. My career is an objective failure, but for this moment in time on this date there was no greater concert anywhere on planet earth.
Neo the bartender smiles warmly and polishes glasses. The girls seated beneath a gilded mirror in a seashell shaped booth snap photos. The booker, a young man with deep sadness and hope twirling so clearly to me above the haunted halo of the chandelier twirls an actress across the splintered boards of the dance floor while Florin films from his table.
After the show everyone is excited and buys us drinks. Eric and I take a moment to go for a walk outside and it feels so much like we are children. I leave him for a few minutes to go get some cds for the girls out of the car. I break into a run and cut through a questionable neighborhood. I wonder if what I'm doing is unsafe and then am strangely startled to peek my reflection in the glass of darkened storefronts and see a hulking wild figure sprinting beside me stride for stride dashing through the dapper gangsters on the sidewalk who tip their hats and part a path.
Feeling refreshed from my run I return to the cafe Neo and give the girls some cds. Then Florin takes us through the haunted alleys of the old city. Everyone eats a late dinner of greek food while I listen to them talk and nurse a beer. The world is changing Florin says. "Soon you will know who you are. Soon you will you know."
After eating Florin films Eric and I playing a song in the old square. I dance like an assassin and fall to the cobble stones. Then finally we make our way back to Florin's car. He drives us to our car and we follow him back to his home. It takes a million years to find a parking spot and I have to wedge the tiny fiat panda between someone's bumper and a flower bed.
We make it into the apartment carrying all our heavy bags of instruments monochromatic clothing. Florin's room is on the fourth floor. Enter through the open door: Oil paintings of angelic ladies in wispy clothes on picnics. Mirrors. Elaborate computer set up. Fancy dining room table. Large, comfortable couch. Florin wants to smoke weeds and talk about the universe. I take a shower and return to the main room to find Eric exhausted trying to summon the good humor to navigate further cosmic places in a day that has been full of them.
There is no entering the conversation for me. For a long time I stand by the open window and look far down below and feel the moonlight and night wind enter in. Then, though there is chaos and strangers all around and no time to make sense of what happened or what's next I walk over to the couch, close one eye, and fall asleep.
Florin smokes weeds and types on the computer and asks me if I know who I am. Birds sing in the trees below. The moon shines. Eric departs for the guest bedroom and Florin's son wanders into the kitchen.
Good night.
HEILOO, NETHERLANDS
I woke up at 6. Bright blue light was pouring diagonally through the window into the triangular room. The yellow checkered curtains were swaying in a light wind from the sea. Birds sang loudly. Eric was sleeping soundly.
I tip-toed out of the room and down the extremely steep stairs for three winding stories to the ground floor where the kitchen and family room were. A few hours earlier we'd all been having a conversation about metaphysics and unconscious intellectuals.
My broken, floating early morning of too little sleep for days and days laughs at the sight of middle aged men wearing medallions and beckoning young things into the vortexes of public baths while Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, seventeen harlequins in blackface, six harpies in drag, one thief in a priest's robes, and Simone de Beauvoir circle in the form of vicious, fetid cats to scratch the light of cognition off of undefeated eyes.
"Michael, no one wants to read pretentiously worded hallucinations." says the editor.
"Give me all your money or die." says Michael.
Back to the story:
I perform my morning mountain monk exercises and then write in the black book about the miraculously good choices made in returning the dogs of desire into wolves apprenticed to emptiness and beholden to no one. No knives. No beautiful reflection. No lofty library of the mind with polished rails and ancient halls of varnished wood.
All the house is asleep and by the time my writing's done and I feel my left eyelid twitching. So I decide a little more rest would be wise and slip up the steep and winding stairs and then back into bed. Eric opens his right eye from the trundle on the floor and looks at me suspiciously.
"Flora is still asleep." I say.
"You need to sleep." he says.
"I will. I will. One more hour; then it's breakfast." I say.
"Oh my god." he moans with great exhaustion and surprising humor like a precocious, selfless, warrior's apprentice teenage girl.
We sleep til 9. Then both of us are up, making the beds and scurrying down the stairs. This time Flora is awake, putting croissants into the oven and cleaning strawberries. She laughs and bids us the brightest of good mornings then pulls out a topographical map of the Netherlands and shows us how the contours of the coastline have changed according to the appropriation of land by the merchants of dead kings fom the sea. Then she shows us the land later reclaimed by calamity of wind and ocean water crashing powers over people houses in the wrong time and place.
Nature is the way that moves of itself. High Five to ancient Chinese Philosopher. Smash vase in the face of editor.
After the map is thoroughly observed the croissants have risen in the oven. We help Flora carry berries, jams, coffee, butter, and a basket of croissants out to the cheery table in the center of her parent's garden under the bright blue skies of the late spring morning.
We have a delicious breakfast and the sense of our sweetly fleeting friendship serves to banish sleep deprivation and the looming unknown of the coming days to the distant periphery. It is difficult to remember that we are not children. I pace backwards from the breakfast table and aim to take Eric and Flora's picture. Eric will not remove his face from the leaf shadows cast by the overhanging limb of an apple tree. Flora is slightly less bashful than the night before. (I love how I'm supposed to be the impossible and eccentric diva of this bunch.)
After breakfast we clear the table and Flora insists on attending to the dishes as Eric and I pack our belongings and prepare to travel on. It is then that I decide to act on an impulse that has impelled me since childhood. This impulse was and is: whilst traveling far from home, find the ocean shores you have never swum in and take a swim. It will heal you. Oh yes.
Somehow, Eric, who has come into focus on this trip as a mirror of my nurtured nature of workaholism is convinced with surprising ease of the import of this seemingly extraneous side errand. Beautiful ladies make the world go around more than money, ideals, and other manifestations of the ways of the lord. Oh lord.
We must be in Brussels by 6 to meet Florin, a man who is promised to film an episode of his Stolen Concert podcast with us the following day. The show we had scheduled for the evening has been on again and off again and is presently off. So...it now being ten thirty in the morning, we decide that if we're back at Flora's by one we'll have plenty of time to make the three hour drive from Heiloo on the North Sea to Brussels in Belgium. Flora is characteristically unconcerned about all the superficial particulars and gives the simultaneously very attractive and very vexing impression that she knows the viewed from a mountaintop version of our story. Present. Past. And Future. She smiles and laughs and waits for the travelers to be ready.
We pack our instruments, swimming uniforms, and movie camera gear into the car and Flora navigates us to a National Park referred to as "the dunes" as far as I remember and can understand. The sun is bright. Flora sits in the front seat in her red checkered shirt and tightly braided blonde hair. We drive through flat expanses of rich green fields divided by hedge rows and lilly pad canals.
Arriving at the parking lot. Eric takes the guitar and I the camera. Flora leads the way under the blue sky and the warm late morning sun of northern spring time to the sea. My heart beats with anticipation. I love swimming in the ocean. The birds sing.
Eric and Flora walk ahead of me and talk as I linger a distance behind, mesmerized by the beauty of the bright sun shining down over the windswept dunes covered by an array of intrepid grasses, scrub brush and small trees all colored a color green I find perfectly beautiful in the way it inhabits the blue of the sky and the yellows of the sandy soil.
The wind blows with fantastic force. I follow Flora and Eric and enjoy the distinct sensation that my life as I knew it is being swept further and further away.
Halfway to the Sea, Flora leads us off the path and into the forest where we make a movie of two of our songs. While we play the music for the camera and tape recorder, Flora rolls in the leaf litter in a beam of sunlight ever so slightly out of sight.
After we are done filming in the quiet forest shielded from the wind, we return to the dune grass path and continue our journey to the sea. Just before arriving at the foot of the giant dune that clearly marks the impending appearance of the giant waters, Flora pauses and veers off the path towards a pond. "Here," she says, "there is something you will like."
Immediately I am pleased at the thought of making the acquaintance of foreign frogs, which similar to swimming in foreign seas has been an essential traveling ritual for me since childhood. It is confusing for a moment to try and figure out if Flora read this off my mind or if I had told her and just forgotten about it.
The wind blows and frogs chirp from the pond. I let myself be swept further away, letting go of the dissatisfying practice of understanding everything in forced order. Flora leans down over the water and extends her finger towards a funny green frog and speaks to him in frog language. The frog climbs onto her finger. Eric shakes his head in that way he does when something is too splendid to be witnessed. I make the face I have in stock in accordance with the same circumstance. Flora looks up at us, bubbling with laughter and says: "This is the time of year they look for love."
Then it is onward to the sea and all three of us grow quiet like we're entering the cathedral where no civilized people ever know to go. The true sacred place speaks to children and outlaws.
Over the top of the dune and we travel on down to the waters edge and there we place our instruments in the sand.
The water is welcoming and healing. Eric and I rush in for swim as Flora watches from the beach. I let the waves crash over me and sink quietly to the bottom separating myself from myself and becoming one with all living things. The waves pass over and the water rumbles and gently whispers. Darkness and twirling spindles of light.
After seven days in daydream years I surface and find myself alone in the cold waters of the North Sea. Eric is wrapped in a towel next to Flora on the sands of the beach. Both appear tiny and very unreal in the distance. I body surf some windy waves and surface in the shallow water watch them look like two people I used to know. The water splashes its chanting wild all around me. Then I scamper and swim back out for another wave.
Eventually I emerge and join my friends on land. Once dry we walk dreamily back the long and windswept path through the dune wilds to our Fiat Panda. Then we drive back through the farmland to Flora's parents' house in Heiloo, pack the car and bid our magical host farewell. She gives me a long embrace with a meaning that will beguile me for years to come.
As she turns to say good bye to Eric the mechanism of my emptiness saunters slyly back like the silent film star and the focus of my eyes turn from the beautiful girl standing in the early afternoon sunshine to the illusive imperative of the road ahead.
I am such a crazy animal. Looks the flowers. Is the serpent underneath. Busts out fangs and bites a philosopher who tries stepping on me and by the laws of sorcery must soon change into someone else. I am the philosopher and likewise the dragon robbed of wings and given voice by charlatans.
How can one profess to be an atheist and stand honestly in the presence of the sea?
CASTRICUM, NETHERLANDS
Wake up and do my mountain monk exercise dance routine. Write in the black book reminding myself not to turn into a goblin.
Eric awakens and we walk through a windy morning under gray skies to find breakfast. All the businesses are closed on Sunday. We wind up at the bagel place by a draw bridge where we first ate in the delirium following our arrival. On this morning I have a moment with our waitress. She has on black tights and not very much of a skirt, and a plaid button down shirt underneath of her apron as if she came to work after a long night. Don't get the wrong impression though: She looks like a sleepy young elf person...innocent face and willowy limbs...a weary look in her eyes. We make long eye contact during a pause following a question about how much coffee.
After she leaves I tell Eric I have rediscovered the possibility of love like how born again Christians find the lord and he doesn't believe me. (he believes I'm being sarcastic, which admittedly is often how I sound.) We have a nice breakfast by the canal as the wind blows and rain begins to fall. I never get a chance to say good-bye to the love of my life.
Back to the apartment, pack the car and drive to Castricum. A tiny town on the Sea. Along the way the wind and rain subsides. City vanishes. Windmills. Cows. Sheep. Grazing along canals in grassy fields filled with flowers. Stone houses with thatched roofs. Hope and good will pay visit to our journey. Eric feels himself slip into a transcendent mood and decides to suggest the issuance of an edict/dare: Can Michael make it twenty four hours straight without saying something sarcastic?
If I succeed for twenty four hours I'm allowed to be sarcastic again and both of us will have something lost returned. If I fail the clock resets and I have to try again to make it twenty four hours eternally until I succeed.
My first attempt ends after about an hour when we see some sheep out the window and I inquire if they're concerned about the possibility of suburban sprawl or global warming effecting the price of wool. I claim I'm being sincere when Eric calls me on it and then get into an argument debating the shadow of myself which effectively ends my grounds for dispute.
After that I make it about twenty minutes before voicing a come hither remark to the English lady's voice that speaks from the GPS machine on loan to us from the theblanktapes.com.
Eric laughs and shakes his head as I am distraught by my lack of discipline. Soon after we arrive in the tiny seaside town of Castricum. We park the Fiat Panda on the edge of town and walk towards where the show will be. There is a carnival is breaking down in the misty bright light of late spring afternoon.
The venue for the show is is a tidy black room in a brick building with glass doors owned by 100 anarchist kids. There is a Dutch cover band playing rock and roll fantasy music across the street. One of the anarchist kids sees us through the glass and unlocks the door to let us in. He is very kind and soon our host appears...
....a beautiful, tiny, sprightly, powerful woman named Flora.
Not really a woman though. Strike that and here's my explanation:
I know a lot of women who get mad when you call a woman a girl....but I want to call this woman a girl. By this I don't mean to indicate that she's unsophisticated. On the contrary...she turns out to be one of the wisest people I've ever met in the Swiss cheese universe expanding in the illusory conception of personal consciousness.
She's was so very young and informal. Calling someone like that a woman for me confuses the issue. Also when I hear the word "woman" society's attack on my childhood has me thinking about distasteful images of makeup and high heals from nineteen eighty two. So...I'm saying "girl."
Fight? Please get in line.
Anyway, so this girl Flora, elfin, beautiful, genuinely cheery beyond belief helps us situate our instruments/amplifier and coordinates the time of the evening with the eventual sound person and bar tender. Then she leads us out the door of the club across the brick streets and through a narrow alleyway to her home behind the churchyard.
The sun is slowly going down. The sky is changing from blue to green like it does only in the deep north in the springtime evening.
We open the broad plank of polished wood that is the front door and ascend the steep Dutch stairs that are actually closer to a ladder...a consequence of tax evasion from some king a long, long time ago. Upstairs Flora's elfin brother is playing a video game where you shoot people while two rappers from Chicago pack up their belongings and prepare to travel to Amsterdam where they will have a show later in the evening. The MC has dreadlocks and is built like he's done a lot of hard work. The DJ is very slender and sleepy. They are kind to us and show us their stack of vinyl which is tastefully decorated.
The MC tells horror stories of French train rides and waxes enthusiastically about the generosity of Denmark. Then in a strange cloud of smoke they suddenly disappear and it is Eric and I alone with Flora and her brother the elf assassin. Presently he puts down his remote control weapons and we begin to have a conversation in the kitchen while Flora prepares dinner. Fried fresh potatoes, salad of garden greens, and we snack on morning picked cherries while the food is cooking.
The elf assassin has been a counselor at a Portuguese surf camp as well as a youth prison facility in Amsterdam. He is a strong, intelligent, mysterious young person.
We eat dinner and it is perfect. Then we do the dishes and Flora tells us exactly how water gets from the clouds, is purified, and into the Dutch reservoirs. She then points out that she swims in the reservoirs.
We walk to the club for the show. The sun is nearly down and the sky is going from green to orange and purple. Flora walks us from her house to the car to pick up a few items we are missing. On the way back a cat meows from the thicket of a garden. Flora meows back and then the two are in a conversation.
"What's the cat saying?" Eric asks, quite sincerely.
"Why don't you call me?" replies Flora instantaneously with flashing eyes.
I think to myself that I would have been sent back to the beginning of time for that remark and also that this girl is top drawer.
Once the equipment is set up Eric and I make a set list and go for a long walk alone along the canal the runs parallel to the train tracks that head out of town. I contemplate jumping into the water among the Lilly pads and bullfrogs. Eric points out that this would please Flora. I decline on grounds of the maintenance of my personal wellness.
Then as we turn and head back for the club I get into an argument with myself about the effective value of my presence as an entertainer without submitting to an overtly self destructive destiny....and curses! Eric points out that this constitutes sarcasm. I respond with a wicked sarcastic condemnation of his desire for me to be sincere and alas, the twenty four hour clock resets and our prize must wait. Eric shakes his head and laughs joyfully. I fall to the brick street and stare up at the dwindling light in the beautifully colored sky.
"You made it five hours!" Eric says.
We walk back to the club and find a young anarchistic lady writing with immaculate handwriting the names and prices of the drinks on the chalkboard above the bar. It seems a humorous show of devotion seeing as how on this Sunday evening in a small town we all have the feeling that the prospects of a crowd are decidedly unlikely.
Regardless, Robert, the kid who does the sound man job takes equal pride in his craft and has us sounding really good. He is so friendly and professional all at once. We feel very lucky.
Then, by and by, a small group of Flora's friends along with the anarchists on staff and a few strays from the town gather at the foot of the stage.
We play very well. The tiny audience listens with genuine discernment and joy. The girl with the immaculate handwriting has a romantic moment with a a former lover during our "Dictionary" song.
Robert the sound man is especially mesmerized. Afterwards he laments that people should be hearing what we're doing and promises to gather a crowd if ever we come back. I hope in the bottom of my heart that we do come back. I talk for a long time to Robert about music. Eric talks to Flora. I take their picture and both are bashful.
Then I go and get a beer from the bar scribe and return to find Flora sitting alone on the floor. We gradually get into a debate about the nature of the Dutch class system and the appearance of post colonial culture in America. Flora is clearly very educated and intelligent. She knows this and knows I know this. Furthermore, she knows I'm just a former kid turning into an old man from a provincial/rural place in the United States with considerably less worldliness than herself.
However, she doesn't know that I come from the streets of the wilderness and my father was a con man. And as far as being beholden to someone because of their gender and beauty...
...that function of this being has been broken off and abandoned since Nam and many subsequent moons.
And so I will not budge in our argument. Dutch people have an exploited "guest labor" situation just like the United States does. I saw those poor people painting the airport girlfriend. They were brown skinned and not born in the Netherlands. Dutch people have and do allow an unexamined nationalism impede cultural evolution as well as a nuanced sense of social justice. I saw the uniformly luxuriously attired after investment banking party people glaring at me from the tapas bar cause I was dirty and carrying a guitar. Finally, I'm the first to decry the embarrassing behavior of America.com and capitalist society and all the rest of it. And yes the healthcare/social welfare situation in the Netherlands is superior. However, let us not forget that no one naturally belongs to such a large group of people or mass of land. You've got to have pride in the place where you come from and not be ashamed. That's deeper than intellectual ideas of right and wrong in political spheres and superficially rendered borders across two dimensional paper maps. So I represent that place inside Baltimore County Maryland that has no name but for the memory of my old family and friends and the wild animals that live their proudly and will not give in or bow down to the somewhat feisty entreaties of this formidable and rather comely emissary for me to do so.
Flora notes my intractability and seethes on a boat in the sea of her natural ebullience. (Is that last sentence pretentious? See the Fatman waiting at the end of the fence if you wish.) I wonder if her notable desire for me to acquiesce is primal or calculated like a game. I started reading Joseph Campbell's The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces on the airplane and I read the Odyssey when I was in high school though. So I know that when you're on a journey far from home and you meet a lady like this you can never ever give in or you're going to have to gouge out your eyes with the pin that keeps your clothes from falling off.
Now, with Flora and I clearly at an impasse in our conversation and relationship, she summons her dear old friend Yarus, a slender and puckishly handsome fellow who also happened to be terribly intelligent, but in a sweetly sad and self depricating way. With Yarus in tow, Flora heads for the door and calls out for Eric and I to follow.
We walk through the darkened streets and Eric mentions to Yarus and Flora how I have repeatedly failed to avoid sarcasm. Flora shoots me a sideways glance and then notes how the level of irony in California during her last visit was rather suffocating in dance classes and art shows she attended. I mumble a sarcastic remark in response to Flora's observation and Eric begins to laugh and resets the clock to receive freedom and our prize. I shake my head in resignation and ask Flora if she knows where she's going because the root to the car she's taking seems a bit off to me. She is annoyed by this and I smile at her as she explains that not everywhere has civilization plotted out in rectangles.
We reach the car as our guide has promised and the kids pile inside. Then I begin to drive. I navigate using the force from the spirit world as Flora, Yarus and Eric have descended immediately into a deep discussion on the nature of particles and the nonexistence of matter and the flexible nature of time or some such things. Yarus says he reads books about high minded things because it raises his self esteem for himself.
Finally, we are back at the home of Flora's parents in Heiloo which neighbors the town where the show was. It is a quaint and tastefully furnished house with well stocked bookshelves and self portrait paintings on the wall by a great Uncle who was an official of the Church.
Flora brings to the table in the warm glow of the family room a bottle of scotch and a plate of chocolates. She pours four glasses and proposes a toast. At the conclusion of the toast I drink my whole glass.
"Darling," she says, "that's twelve year old scotch."
I raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Everyone else is sipping their drink. She smiles brightly at me and pours me a generous second glass.
We talk late into the night. Eric and Flora suggest that my tendency toward sarcasm stems from an overly intellectual way of living. They assert that I analyze too much.
"You need to take the wet path." Flora says.
We laugh. I don't know what she means. I feel like Yarus looks at my with sympathy.
I love these people.
Yarus and Eric retire upstairs to sleep at four in the morning or something.
Flora takes me into the kitchen garden and shows me a wall of stones. The stones in the wall were all collected by her father as he walked the beach....some of which from a medieval town that crumbled when a storm came and broke down the dykes.
Maybe I'm confusing stories. Please don't be confused if you're reading this. I do struggle with sarcasm. And I do notice the martial arts perspective of human relationships in a room.
But my conclusion....what was real about this night...if I'm being sincere like Eric in his well intended way would want to hear...I would have to say that Yarus and Flora healed us and awakened possibilities I thought was ghosts three times over.
I fall asleep in the attic next to Eric. We are in two trundle beds. Curtains blow in the early morning breeze. Birds sing. I am astonished at our good fortune and grateful to be alive.