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Donations are welcome..
It may appear to be a habit, but in the era of consolidation it simply is another step to put most eggs into one basket. Thus this here blog has been moved to the Blooger (Google), and all updates happen there (and there have been quite a few).
There are several variations of the past for everyone, even for the most linear of lives. Naturally the selective memories we use to shield our mostly fragile egos with are on top of the heap, skimming our mental surfaces ahead of the more official, so-called historical version of the times gone by.
Somewhere below that, in the muck left behind by our own editing reside the personal, qualified admittances we cannot avoid no matter how hard we may try. Here the mind, the consciousness - call it what you will - forces brief bouts of honesty into our lobes. These maybe highly private and obviously hidden, still, they regularly betray us through emotions, expressions, and these unguarded moments when we feel we need to connect with someone in the "real" world.
And then there are those fragments of the past packaged in the memories others have of us. Tinted just like our own spurious perceptions, but along another, somewhat alien spectrum, they tend to represent a more critical history of ourselves, laden as they usually are with the onlooker's own value sets, emotive ballast, and chanced content brought about by our own fallacies or glories.
Finally there are, for a few of us, the written words from all those yesterdays. If you have ever subjected yourself to the re-discovery of juvenile diaries or dusted off a yellowed bundle of love letters written three decades earlier, you know what I am talking about. Not only may you have forgotten (translation: denied) the existence of such words, but now you suddenly need to deal with the poignant realization that the writer (or in the case of letters, the recipient) of these pages no longer exists. He or she may still have a physical presence bound by gravity to this, our long since skewed reality; but that is were the semblance to us usually ends: the personality of the scribbler or reader has since undergone enough transitions while travelling in time to the here and now to make X-Men seem normal.
It is precisely such a sudden flood of words, penned in part some fifteen years ago on the other side of the globe, that triggered this here entry: two days ago Christina presented me - among numerous other surprises - with some hundred and eighty odd pages of "written history" log thought lost and certainly forgotten. Divided into three neatly bound and well preserved volumes, these pages represented a short story and three chapters of novel I once intended to write. Had she told me I had a fifteen year old son or daughter, I would have been far less stunned!
I was awed, not only by my own, awkward language and atrocious grammar then, but even more by the persistent perseverance and preservation of the "collector". These were not embarrassingly gushing words penned by some love-lorn teenager, but an attempt of my middle age to write down the multitude of stories that used to invade my feeble mind like small swarms of biblical locust. In that they were, naturally enough, a version of a younger me and thus served as a direct critique of me today (a complaint repeatedly underline by Chris, the collecting and preserving curator of these words).
Where was that "budding writer" now? What happened in the intervening decade and half that led to the abandonment of the stories and characters that were once so familiar to me? I did not put the pen down entirely; I have written since. Yet the investment, if you will, is an entirely different one: less ardor, a lot less believe in my own words and work.
I cannot yet write about the woman who is responsible for the saving of said words and paragraphs. The emotional distance is too small, the usual protective crust too thin to permit the "literary license" of selective memory. What can be made public though, is the undeniable fact that I wish I could pick up where I left of, certainly in terms of the words on those pages.
But who would believe in that writer?
Half a dozen years should not (sic!) amount to all that much in change. It really is not enough time for historically sloven and entrenched systems, such as our continental institutions and societies, to effect much in terms of "progress". Of course, there are always the gestures and grand motions, often loudly proclaimed on whatever media happens to be en vogue. Nevertheless, all in all I had reason to expect to find the old continent largely unadulterated. I was wrong, as usually.
However, my somewhat idealistic expectations presumed that there would be one surviving constant: the social environ of our most liberal, our most advertised country: The Netherlands! I could have not been more wrong.
"I find it kind of funny, kind of sad
that the dreams in which I'm dying
were the best dreams I ever had."
(from a song I heard in a movie..)
Naturally, as the serious side of age sets in and slows your footfalls, you start thinking less about taxes and more about the other certainties. Ok, so I never really thought about taxes, especially not as a forgone conclusion. And so much of my past life seems still rather close at hand, as if it only happened a week, or a month ago, that thinking about the ultimate inevitability may appear foolish.
Still, I've always argued that in order to live you must be mobile, both in mind and body, and able to remain curious. There are plenty of folks out there who can do all three even though they - literally - cannot move a muscle. Good for them, I wish them all the best from hereon-after. I will never be one of them. And although most of my muscles are surprisingly intact, almost as if they survived in spite of my living, I truly am immobile. I could not be more paralyzed if you gagged me and bound me into a broken-down wheelchair.
The absence of curiosity about tomorrow and the year or century thereafter leaves you transfixed, unable to move, and forever looking back at yourself; with each passing moment your inner eye paints ever more glorious pictures of the past, until it can be recognized by no-one but yourself. Until one day you appear to be waking up, it need not be morning in your mind, and you cannot help but ask yourself if you did not simply dream it all!? Did you really ever meet J., and K., and C.? Did B. truly exist as the unabashed genius you seem to remember her? Were R. and D. actually men seemingly large than life, as the saying goes? Did you indeed traverse continents and oceans passing through cities and wastelands without ever having a destination?
The scars, both outside and in, seem to confirm the tales. What is missing, though, is the ultimate proof: a legacy, no matter how small or insignificant, that would remind someone, somewhere, of a life without regrets.
And that, friends and enemies alike, I cannot find.
For a while - a very short while - I tried to run this here blog on my own site. Even wrote a bloody piece of automata software to update it. Only, I got caught inthe common trap of working for a living and thus generated little more than a lot of white space. AKA: silence.
Now that I am about to hit the road again, this ready made format makes simply more sense. Ergo, I am back. Maybe even for more frequent updates, who knows. And thus all other sites are about to be closed down, at least for the time being.
Where am I going? All I know is that "Wherever" lies west of here - I'll tell you once I find out more..
Television! The number one disseminator of misinformation, and not just in this US of A. However, the American networks seem to push this maxim to an all-time high nearly every night. And that's just the advertising.
Perhaps the most entertaining segments are the spots showing of the wonders of modern-day pharmaceuticals. Small wonder this is a pill-popping nation par excellence! One miracle drug after the other blares its miraculous cures on the air night after night - all followed by officially required disclaimers. And it is right at this moment they tend to hit the funny bone. For each and everyone of them comes along with as many (and often more) side-effects than cures. I am certain that one day there will be an all-curing laxative whose "mild" side-effect will include the demise of its user! Not surprising thus that such pharmacology is often followed by spots enlightening the viewing public to its need for life insurance - in particular for those viewers over fifty - since their rather expensive death looms just around the corner.
..the gallery site has had its long overdue make-over. New exhibit and all. Nothing too fancy, I might add, but I like it. For now.
The Mac, if you believe the fanatics, is impervious to virus attacks; never crashes, and can be operated by anyone with an IQ higher than his or her shoe size. Having owned a G4 PowerBook for a little over a year now - after spending nigh two decades in the Windows' camp - I find the self-proclaimed ultimate in computing cool no better (but also no worse) than an equivalent PC laptop. Only a lot more costly. And don't speak to me of "cool" - this errant design from Steve Job's henchmen gets hotter than a toaster most of the time.
..to go back to the bookstore, another whopper lands on your preferred news page. Right on the heels of the James Frey versus Oprah debacle, The Da Vinci Code and its author, Dan Brown, are appearing before the powdered wigs of a London court. The charge: plagiarism!
The hugely successful Mr. Brown, whose intrigue-laden opus is about to hit the silver screen, is accused of having lifted the idea from an early work by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", who sued Mr. Browns publisher, Random House. Which, incidentally, also published their book. Naturally, Random House denies the claim.
It all centers around the idea, certainly put forth in Mr. Baigent's and Mr. Leigh's book, that Jesus went ahead and married the foot fetishist, namely Maria Magdalena, the gist of which also provides a center piece in The Da Vinci Code. And thus the battle begins. And while the available jackpot was already huge prior to the sale of the movie rights, the two gentlemen's timing coincides nicely with Sony's imminent cinema release (starring none other than Tom Hanks), thus making the ensuing court battle all the more pecuniary.
Of course, there is really nothing new here: the literary battles focused on Shakespeare's alleged copyright infringements are already legendary (though not yet litigated); Art Buchwald once successfully extracted half a million dollars from Paramount's coffers for their "borrowing" his ideas for the making of "Coming to America". And who could forget Kunta Kinte of "Roots" fame, whose author, Alex Haley, had not just copied ideas but entire paragraphs from an earlier book. He apparently settled out of court.
Almost makes you wish you had something in print, never mind how obscure or obtuse, so Hollywood or some hack on his way to the publisher could steal it and thus make you rich.
I wonder, though: will Yahoo sue me for copying part of my second paragraph above straight from their news page? Or for getting the idea for this entry from one of their horribly construed headlines?
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