Lost in Myself

Did you see that gust of wind?

I thought I had brought a thousand stories with me. And perhaps I did, but not of the narratable kind. Instead I have a thousand stories in my head that are incapable of being shared. To try and describe my experiences is fundamentally useless when the story doesn’t have its own intrinsic value. Pure anecdotes are not for me. Good stories do not, ever, represent true life, just as no good painting represents an existing visual entity, be it a landscape, a vase of sunflowers or one’s creepy dentist and his wife holding up a hayfork in front of an old barn.

A large proportion of the stories I brought suffer from the ‘you should have been there’ syndrome, which makes my experiences no less valuable, but useless for writing about them.

Other stories held more public potential, I thought, but at coming home, tired and de-enchanted, back under the sterile sun of the north, while reading my notebook, I see I had overestimated the quality of those notes grossly. Walking through a park in Nice, being surprised by a statue of the unlikeliest of people at that place… Louis Armstrong. I thought I had struck narrative gold with that. But I didn’t of course. It’s what’s known in the trait as a ‘Useless Fact’. It comes from nowhere and has no place in the story whatsoever. Another example. I was walking through Le Cannet, a suburb of Cannes. I had visited the Pierre Bonnard Museum and wanted to see the rest of the village. It was during siesta time and the roads were completely disserted. Silence was absolute but for my footsteps. Then I saw a completely black cat with one white foot. Muttering to myself, I walked on. Around the corner I saw (in these surreally, disserted streets with the voodoo cat still fresh in my memory!) a bona fide Charlie Chaplin impersonator, costume & everything, who, no doubt, went home after a gig at the Cannes film festival. You can’t tell that! Not only is it a useless fact, destroying the story of the sleepy, old-timey French city, but purely of the ‘you had to be there’ kind.

Further browsing my notes I see that a whole lot of them are only somewhat palatable in Dutch and will suffer greatly from translation. And the rest is mostly rough, semi or completely crazy, unfinished gibberish, incantations, curses, hymns & abstract imagery, written in almost complete darkness while the wine was flowing and the bats were flying around all over the place... Well, perhaps I can work with that last stuff after all.