From the Notebook Last Bits (part 2)

• I’m observing with unfocussed eyes a caravan of ants on the ground and feel bad and guilty about the smile that lady gave me just now. She smiled so sweetly. Doesn’t she know how evil I am? And thy, ant folk? Dost thou not know either? I may not trot on thee, or on thine offspring, but thy should not expect rain from me either.

• When I close my eyes, I see little balls of gold. No, not gold: a material more beautiful than gold. Shinier, yellower, pearling with a powerful opalescence… and yet it has to be a metal. But it is alive too! That element should also exist in reality: I feel it is an injustice that only I can see it with my fictitious eyes.

• Sometimes, I see in my imagination everything going really fast… mountain ranges shooting up, plants taking root, crumbling down the rocks to gravel and boulders. Rivers, chafing the pebbles into fine sand, washing it down to the bottom of lakes, where it clumps together and forms new minerals with dead beasts encrusted inside. All in a matter of seconds.

• Yes, the plants are in bloom. The carousel is happily spinning round. The girl with her wet hair puts on a little warm vest now that the evening is creeping in.

Palms are waving and colourful boats are bobbing up & down in the Harbour. [A man, who looks uncannily like Eric Cantona, has rolled a cigarette from which gallant tufts of tobacco are sticking out.]

Families are sitting on the beach and laugh… but before you know it people get transported in cattle wagons again.

• I think I haven’t laughed all day today, except just now when I saw a photograph of Barbara Cartland carrying a Pekingese dog under her arm.

• 'M.'

It is a city like a city. With folk traipsing past rotten windows. Poop and plastic on the streets and here and there an angelic girl…

Whereas I was thinking of sinister bars, filled with thugs and bullies, unshaven, barbaric and silent… Of given-up lives, and people who didn’t want to be found… I was thinking of whores and violence… tormented looks, lustreless consciences… And mythical idolatry… worshipped statues dragged into the streets… Wild women following their gods with flaming eyes.

But instead, I see tourists, sun and churches. I spy with my little eye uncle policeman… the old harbour, a kitschy golden statue on a church on a hill and a few beggars more than usual.

• A whole month alone in the countryside… it’s a one-way ticket to the funny farm.

From the Notebook Last Bits (part 1)

• It is raining. Clouds are hanging low over the hills.

• Painting over a piece of marble, or wood, so that it looks exactly like a piece of marble or wood respectively.

• The white line / and floating shadows / of depraved colours / of crude sinners / Give me those pliers, that blade /and let me peacefully lose my holiness

• T-shirt text: ‘Talking about Peanut butter!’

• Has anybody in here ever heard of a rhetorical question?

• Huge gust of wind… my beer is almost blowing out of the can.

• Opposite on the campsite are two young men with a tent who talk English with each other, but neither seems a native speaker – I’m guessing a Latvian and an Austrian, or a Belgian and Ukrainian guy – but what’s important is that one of them is talking in a ‘funny voice’, which is exactly like the voice in ‘Revolution Number 9’ that says ‘they are standing still’. [Note: listen at around 3’40’’ in the song for that line.]

• ‘How many ants do you take in your coffee?’

• T-shirt text: ‘Oh well…’

• Today the pigeons are calling ‘rood plastic – rood plastic’ and ‘la porte – la porte’ and ‘la plage – la plage’… what elaborate vocabulary those birds have, don’t you think, boys & girls?

• There’s a lot of French rap music on the radio. I like French rap: you can’t hear how moronic the lyrics are.

• Maybe next time I should go to a place where it’s less idyllic, east Poland or something. It’s very beautiful here, but the people are so FULL… full of sun, culture, love and life… So rich and enviable, not for their wealth but for their lives.

• The pigeons are calling ‘ka-torze – ka-torze – katorze’

• When did drunken sluts stopped being funny and became sad and annoying?

• No matter how I like nature, I’m a city person: I like to be on my own.
• T-shirt text (or fictive band name): Fling Your Beavers Aloft!

• Judging by the characteristic clook sounds of decorktations that surround me on the campsite, the other people here drink just as much as I do. That most of them travel in groups of 2, 3 or more people and I’m alone is not an argument to my disadvantage.

• T-shirt text: Give The Bag To Bozo!

• My hair is long and curly, my glasses darkly rimmed. People are looking at me with interest and I keep wondering whether it is with admiration or repulsion.

• I wonder if they have developed a smartphone app for the measurement of ball distances at pétanque already… to see which ball lies closest.

Lithography

From the Notebook Vol. 9

(On a walk to the village.) I suddenly understand it! The phrase ‘the French touch!’* Everything, literally everything in this country is, to an absolutely astounding level, bungled together! I suddenly notice it. And now that I have, I see it everywhere I look. Nothing makes sense. A sidewalk where pieces of rocks are sticking out (they were too lazy to hack it out); a zebra crossing, carelessly painted willy-nilly over the street at the last minute, over manhole covers and all; a wall, plastered only halfway up; a crooked fence with two non-matching halves; irrational holes in the ground; crumbled down curb stones; cover plates rusted and broken; a self-painted nameplate; trees in the wrong place; things grown over, sagged, fixed… improvised. This whole country is in a bizarre way slapped together. And that’s why I love it so much. Everything is interesting and alive, not perfect & boring (like Holland or Switzerland). I should make a separate photo-book of it.

*In the Netherlands, this is a common expression for something done half-assed, carelessly or thoughtlessly, although I’m sure the French call it the Spanish touch and the Kazakhs the Uzbek touch.

From the Notebook Vol. 8

They say that having a litter is good for the character of the bitch. This was definitely not the case with my boss. It was only after she had a baby that the paranoid madness truly went off the scale. She became cold and selfish. And weird! When those paranormal ‘radiation trackers’ with their phoney Eastern European accents came by to rid the office of mystic presences, I shouldn’t have shrugged my shoulders, stand by idly and whistle the Ghostbusters theme...

Nice Postcard

Nice, 2 June 2012

Mon Chérie,

I amuse myself into smithereens over here. First a week in good old Aix-en-Provence (lots of tramping through nature mostly) and then off to the Côte d’fucking-Zur. There are uglier places than this, but how busy and luxurious it is everywhere! I just try to laugh at it and enjoy myself thoroughly. Far from Dutch finicking... Yesterday folding biking to Monaco, today to Cannes. I completely destroy myself: monstrous days. So that’s nice. Weather not too hot alas, but okay. The women overhere are very prudish, as can be seen on verso. So you can imagine I miss you very much. Amai! Stay as cool as you are and be having some of the old monster raving fun at your own vacation later. Lots of love, Martijn.

P.S. Death to Get Set Inc. & Long live Love! (Give S. my regards.)

From the Notebook Vol. 7

[…] One of those dreams was amazing. I was a man whom I observed in the second person (I could see myself act). I looked like Niles Crane. The exact procedures have escaped me by now, but I appeared to be a scientist whose career had completely dried up by a serious nervous breakdown. Then I find a ‘thing’ in the ground, a beautiful but strange metal apparatus, and I walk around with it, marvelling and examining the item.

Inside the silky, shiny, silvery exterior, that looked like being made from a tuba horn, were hidden, like in a Swiss army knife, all kinds of other mysterious instruments, some recognisable and mundane, others that hinted at some supernatural background or mysterious religious practices. When I begin to realise the scientific importance of the thing, I go frantic and start running like a madman over the university grounds looking for my desk – to investigate the object. I punch people that stand in my way in the mouth, make death threats, huff & puff (see Stan Laurel with his whip in Chumps at Oxford) and, in a loud booming voice, demand my desk back! This thing was going to be ground-breaking!

From the Notebook Vol. 6

On the camping. I overheard a conversation between the posh neighbours from across and the guy with the military moustache and his curly wife. They were talking about Monaco. First man said how utterly amazed he was how densely the city was built. He drove into Monaco and saw… wait for it!… he saw an underground roundabout, my oh my!

I didn’t gave it much thought, but now, ruminating those words, I remember I was there myself. I drove my bike through that long, dark, quite scary tunnel and over that underground roundabout into the city. But I couldn’t care less at the time. It didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary to me… as nothing ever did for many years, as I’m now realising. Telephones with which you can make photographs… so? Extrasolar planets… footballers making a million a week… a building 1, 2 or 5 kilometres high… people eating raw horse manure… snowfall on the Acropolis. Nothing.

Literally nothing can astonish me these days. Even if the Amazon would dry up, the IJsselmeer would turn red, people would learn the art of flight, the discovery of extra-terrestrial aliens, or a race of hairy, purple, three-nippled deep-sea people, parallel universes, a way of making gold from base metals, the Fountain of Life or a secret population of unicorns… a talking beetle… okay, maybe some things would strike and excite me. But not a lot!

From the Notebook Vol. 5

What’s unknown to Holland are the evenings of existence thickening. The windless, motionless evenings of warmth, silence and an inescapable Absence Threat. Yes, we do know them… but they are too rare to form a tradition, a School and, therefore, the magic gets denied and they’re called ‘a pleasant summer evening’.

Here I sit again. The swallows have been relieved of duty by the bats. A perfect solitude with anagram ghosts to comfort me. A. and S., my ‘Sisters Karamazov’. Quietly singing to myself… O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. Now, let there be lines… and colour… and thought. Of a dog that keeps on wagging…

From The Notebook Vol. 4

Salad With Cuscus and Tuna

- An onion, finely cut
- Bit of garlic
- Capers
- Sambal chilli paste
- Ready cuscus from the supermarket
- Salt, cayenne pepper
- Fresh thyme picked from the mountain
- Can of tuna
- Cucumber
- Tomatoes (cherry ones, in quarters)
- Bit of salad dressing

Yumm!

Dwarf elephant

My ‘Indian name’

From the Notebook Vol. 3

[…]

No shortage of living today… capital L! Wandering about like a Lost One. Like a Born-again One. The sand of the beach, the brown burned bodies. Unwiggleable, lickable. The boorish coastline, filled with disfigured villas & animal flats. The Sun... and the Shadows. Bend over, pounding on the pedals, over ran-down asphalt and painted tar. On! On! Forward!

You know, this writing of mine is complete shite of course. Once upon a time, I could write like bewitched. Especially something like four years ago, on dirty grey notepad paper, disposable paper... in places like Arles and Lisbon. Words flew out of my pen like barbarous & colourful swarms freed from the aviary. And even though it proved later to be worth very little, or was often completely embarrassing tripe, by alcohol intake and corresponding sentimentality, still… I mean, still... I could write!

These days, when I want to write… I begin to think first. Classic mistake: he who ponders, blunders*…  Quite ugly wordplay this too, come to think of it. So I go Thinking… then Rethinking, whether or not it makes any sense. It rarely does of course, but that’s not something you should ask yourself. Just create like a motherfucker and ask yourself later if it can be knead, cut & kicked into something sensible! […]

The shadow falls on my paper/ and the steps/ her ankle/ and the hollow knee

-

The immaterial becomes dust of yellow and blue, stone and oil

-

As if one is scratching at the scabs of layers of callous and worms and strings are severely strung over combs of tuberculosis, of suckling and sway over deeply depraved reason. Wanting Priests... ghosts. Folk wanting stones with two tongues, preferably dead, better than alive. But my forms and my toes are rocking like drunken macaws. White macaws with preposterous yellow crests.

This is a way to live… overlandish.

To trot, rebellious, pure, a lichen tamer**, greenly in love and greyly liberated from the King who came over the Mountains. The animals who licked themselves after a short, wild sigh, yawning.

Like that.

*Orig. ‘wie denkt, verengd’= he who thinks, narrows.
**Orig. ‘meeuwentemmer’= seagull tamer, as opposed to ‘leeuwentemmer’ = lion tamer.

Alas, I no longer have the possibility to scan my drawings so you'll have to make do with primitive hand-held camera shots...

From The Notebook

For the so manieth time I returned in the late afternoon to the public garden behind Rue Van Loo. To sit  amongst the roses, sultry folk and thickening air. I knew something was wrong with the flaming cypresses. I counted them and I was right: ten… even!

Beautiful elder ladies, conversing from behind gallant sunglasses, little girls walking around with a lolly pop and a teddy bear, boys chasing lazy pigeons, and further beyond, some teenagers – first class scum of course – are sitting on a bench, frenching. Straight ahead a girl sunbathing and smoking... gracefully smoking. It should all be captured and fixed… I don't mean on paper, photo, or film… It should really be FIXED.

A father who, for a laugh, with a perfect choreography, kicks at one of the pigeons. On top of the house with the closed shutters, obscure ‘things’ are dangling from the washing line.

An elder couple takes place on the bench next to the frenching pair. And voilà, a very black negro with large headphones comes on, looking surly but walking with a swinging gait. He must be fixed too! Stay forever! And the swallows too. And the people carrying long breads.

Exit the frenchers. On comes a woman in white summer dress and some muscle parading gorilla with millimetred hair in a wife-beater. He looks too seriously. The little girls play panthers on the lawn and gesture wild horns and clawy attacks. Papa acts crazy. Mama polishes her sunglasses.

The Doves Go...

(From the Notebook)

La Bourse
La Bourse
La Bourse
La Source

Ya Hourte
Ya Hourte
Wa Hourte
Ma Hourte

La Bourste
La Borste
La Borste
L’Aborte
L’Aborte
L’Aborte

La Bourse
La Wurste
Da Wurste
L’Aborte
La Corse
La Corse
La Bourte

Fla Mouse
Fla Mourte
La Mourte
L’Amourte
La Morte

La Bourse
La Boorse
Ro Booste
Ma Booste
Ta Booste
Ma Source

O Porto
O Porto
Sau Dade
Sau Dade
Sau Dade
Sau Dade

La Source
La Source

Ma Source

The Dove

There was a dove. One day it came walking over the gravel of the campsite towards me. As I was eating a piece of baguette (‘stick bread’ as the Dutch aptly call it, in appreciation of the shape as well as the texture) I threw some crumbs to the bird. It ate well and looked completely at ease with me. After a while, it even took the bread right out of my hands without flinching. It looked dozy and poorly, but I had hopes for its recovery and christened the poor bugger Lazarus. I even sang to it. I sang: “Lazarus dansar i Rotterdam, hei, en så lustiger dans!”

Every day, the bird would come crawling out of the bushes or from underneath my car. It grew weaker though, ate less, dozed off all of the time and wanted most of all to sleep in peace. It became more and more depending on me, for food and water, but mostly for protection. When I fed it, some of the other doves would come and, given the chance, would peck Lazarus ferociously in its neck. I threw little stones at them to chase them away. (I knew it was ridiculous and contra-evolutionary and would bring me closer to hugging abused horses in the streets while breaking down in tears… but the bird had chosen me, so what could I do?)

During the day, it sought shelter and when I came to my tent it stepped towards me for bread and peace and sat underneath my chair while I made watercolours. But she (I renamed her Suzanne when her chances looked waning) grew weaker & weaker. Then she stopped eating at all and just sat there sleeping, sometimes opening an eye to see what I was doing, or when other doves would scream at her. Next day she didn’t show up and I never saw her again. No more dansar i Rotterdam.