ALS: 'Rood stoplicht'

Red traffic light

For those who do not know this – Fokke Obbema was dead for a short while. Thanks to a 112 call, firemen appeared at his bedside who managed to restart his non-beating heart. He suffered no permanent damage. Fokke is a leading journalist on the Volkskrant and it seems only natural that he should write about it. He started a series of interviews about the meaning of life. It became a book. Now he gets invited to talk about that book. Since the 40 persons he interviews have highly diverging views about life and its meaning, all the meetings differ considerably. I went along to listen, not for the first time, though nice and close. He spoke a bit about his fascination for Job Koelewijn, an artist from Spakenburg who in his twentieth year broke his neck in a severe traffic accident. Against all expectations, he survived. He became a famous artist. To the question: What is the meaning of our life? he replied: ‘As long as you are still asking that question, you haven’t understood the meaning. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the ecstasy of being alive, without any reason whatsoever. That is, without you doing anything special or feeling in love. If you are touched by that ecstasy, the energy that it brings with it, even washing the dishes is a pleasure. Or a red traffic light – way out!’

I live five kilometres from the bookshop, I always take the road without traffic lights. So as to make up for this to Job Koelewijn, I silently wash the dishes the very same evening.

Hugo Claus: 'The Death of his Ancestor'

THE DEATH OF HIS ANCESTOR

Before his death he has already left us,

six months earlier, dull, broke, musty, broken,

although still whole he walked through our rooms.

‘I have not been happy for a moment,’

he said gasping audibly

for air in the kitchen air.

And was then blue. Like a plum.

He was fond of plums. All sorts,

preferably just ripe. Mother sat alone.

Not that he was dead then. No, he clung

to the chairs, sea-sick.

It was his heart that did not want to die,

the engine. The carcass, the bodywork

were worn out but the engine was still good.

He stayed in bed and was sometimes dead.

The nuns hissed: ‘Yes, his time has come.’

But a hiccup or two and he set off

again: only even bluer.

He was then taken to the room

that is reserved for dying -

where the soul escapes decay.

His head shrank visibly,

about the size of a woman’s fist.

Eyes open. But can he still see?

It is nature. Had nothing more to eat

or drink. Though he still wanted to,

he chewed away. The nuns sang the Angelus.

When they wiped his lips with a

sponge, he bit on it and would not let go.

They pinched his nose and he let go.

No death rattle. The occasional hiccup.

Yes, his time has come. He was cold up to his knees

and his upper part sweat. But the engine didn’t stop.

They no longer washed him. For turning him over

would tip his heart over and cause it to stop.

Eau de cologne, not too strong, on his temples.

No speaking too loud. Not about debts. Nor

about a last signature. Go away, sir.

Son or not, go away. For he hears everything, everything.

His palate was black. His skin, say no more.

With cotton wool the holes in his skin were rid

of the black that crept into the edges, so quickly.

Fist-sized craters in the jaws of his hole,

with black mould. Let out the clutch, a shock,

he overworked the engine. Which stopped. Thank God.

And suddenly collapsed from within.

The man-sized cavity within the truss

was filled up with cardboard and cotton wool.

Straightened out, otherwise he’ll stay bent

and his bones will have to be broken.

He must be laid out fine. Everyone will be seeing him.

No more washing now either. Every form of contact

disperses the flesh, light as pollen in spring.

In the holes: the bonemeal of his fishbones.

Then came the troublesome distress for Sir Wild Boar,

Inundated with family council and solicitor.

And the time of the cart and the funeral.

I was the nail in his coffin, he often said.

Now just a fingernail, as a last gesture

scratching against the walnut of his head.

Lord, take your son in your arms.

The women went on the left (all loved ones)

The men on the right (all sons).

Time of the earth which now ferments in him.

Time of the seasons. A pint of beer, quick.

Many ancestors - and all disinherited.

The opening poem of Lennart Sjögren's 'I grenverket'

The icicle

I am the icicle

and resemble a god in the sense

that a thousand years to me are as a day

and a day to me a thousand years

I gleam in a way nothing else can gleam

I carry on where roofs and what protects end

am pointed downwards

into a different time and in different way of reckoning

am turned upwards

like a dagger I rip with my tip

through the cosmos

I am a live skin of crystalline glass

my insides shake

when I crash down and gain my greatest triumph

then I resemble humans and I know

that the border between life and death

is a random notion

I belong to the elements

I transform myself, I crash down in spring

transform myself again, become meltwater

transform myself again, become autumn rain

I transform myself again to ice

when travelling through the realm of the cold

In crashing I turn into myriads of stars

then I do not count seconds or millennia

I am the sovereign

in falling I break into two, three pieces or more

and when completely crushed against the ground

I arise in the splintering no one has time to count

in a raised foam of silver, iron, copper

in an outward-hurling movement

I then rise up like a small upturned waterfall

Just as you are the one you are

I am the one I am

I was born in the collision between cold and heat

but in actual fact I was not born at all

I have always been and always shall be

I belong to the cyclical

I show myself and cause amazement

children especially show their delight

I succumb, disappear and become

a moment of chagrin in those who believed

I would always continue to exist for their sake

Look at me one more time

when I rise up in the splintering

when I become a star-fall and disappear

return again.

A fourth Lennart Sjögren poem

Much has being going on for far too long

no secret patterns are sensed any more

in entrails or among paving stones

No one was really completely convinced

too many leaf falls had taken place

Last night none of the dead were heard to speak

yet the night offered no place to rest either

up to the surface came that

which unsolved lies sunken in old wells

And then that ticking

not the ticking of a clock but even so ticking

that which belongs to childhood and drawn-out ageing

and which measures time in a different way.

ALS: 'Lichtschip'

lightship

A man in the same train as me. Do I know that man? Of course not, I don’t know anyone when travelling. And certainly not on the journey I often make, Zutphen — Amsterdam. I mumble these place-names, I’m a place-mumbler, I use my forlorn voice: Zutphen — Amsterdam (2x). Sometimes the train goes via Zwolle, sometimes Arnhem, sometimes I have to think of Japanese, sometimes of Chinese, but as far as the time it takes, it makes little difference. Yesterday it struck me that there were frequent announcements coming from the railway personnel. Work underway, Schiphol only accessible by bus, the train waits at unknown stations, is coupled to an auxiliary locomotive, I have to alight, wait for three quarters of an hour. The world has taken over things, I sit on hard benches with incomprehensible Japanese, sometimes Chinese. I’m no good at mental arithmetic, but I give my thoughts a sum to work out. Result: this time the journey from Zutphen to Amsterdam will take four hours. People are waiting for me, I will arrive too late. The railways can’t do anything about it, it’s my own fault. This is a survival from my secondary school, we had a German teacher who always said: Whatever happens, it’s your own fault. Already back then I had the feeling that there was something wrong about this, but I couldn’t forget it even so. The unknown man in the same train sat as I did, seems to be an acquaintance. It is Mathijs Deen, a writer I admire. He talks about the lightships that in former times used to lay off our coast. They were floating lighthouses at anchor. They had a full crew, ready to sail away. But that never happened — the ships had no engines. The crew felt bored on a ship that could not move of its own accord. Mathijs Deen writes about this. He visits old sailors who at some point served on such a lightship. Once the chef had ordered a live lamb that he wanted to slaughter when the time came. But that never happened. Burly seafolk had become so attached to the little creature. We’re approaching Amsterdam.

A third poem from Sjögren's latest collection

The silence after rain

when someone has left

and will never return

or that a child’s just been born

The insects sit there with their rostra

the humans stand there in their shoes

and wait for what is to come

after such a silence.

Another poem from Lennart Sjögren's latest collection

To some extent I think I know humans

and to some extent I think I know animals

we live together after all

can touch and smell each other

have different ways of expressing emotions

Everything outside this is unknown to me

but I am not referring here to monsters

not to angels and not to

so much talked-about demons either

If I were to say that physically speaking

it is smaller than midges

or larger than lions

it would be an insult

both to midges and to lions

I am not even sure it materially exists

But it is there even so

and tells me both day and night

that I must mention it

if at least to a certain degree

I am to speak the truth.

Poem from Lennart Sjögren's latest book of poems: 'I trädets grenverk'

Amongst the tree’s branches

where the days and nights constantly change places

where the foliated and defoliated

find short-lived respites between the seasons

which sometimes give life

sometimes cause the trunk itself to succumb

What I wrote I wrote as one captured

in the enviable situation

between the heat that is unbearable

and the cold no one has escaped from alive

here there is total joy

and no joy whatsoever

In the gasps of the canopy of branches

where life until now has even so been possible

where you and I change places

in the restless night

We long for what is abiding

but do not know what it is.

ALS: Underground

underground

In the 60s of the previous century, I knew a young man who lived under the ground. He was studying biology and was interested in bats. He lived in a cave in South Limburg where great clusters of bats hung.

The student slept on a mattress and worked at a small table, sitting on a wooden kitchen chair. A heavy but portable storage battery provided energy. He had stuck a label with a number on it on the back of each sleeping bat. Whenever they flew in and out they were automatically photographed. The elapsed time was also registered. After a year the sticky labels fell off and back home in Delfzijl he wrote a standard work on bats. I visited him in his cave on one single occasion, after which I had nightmares that took place underground. That’s sixty years ago now, but last night they struck again – a gruesome adventure in the earth. I had been giving a reading in Arnhem at the Hijman Ongerijmd bookshop and had parked my car in an impenetrable parking garage where I found a space in the Dance A section. The bookdealer accompanying me urged me not to forget this code — there were other categories apart from Dance such as Fashion, and you could also end up at B, C and D. It was deathly quiet, there was not a soul to be seen. The cars had been brought to their various places in an unknown dimension of reality without drivers. When I started my hunt for my car towards midnight, it did not surprise me that my worst premonitions had turned into reality. There was not a soul to be seen, all the cars stood waiting there like corpses. I suspected that I would only succeed if I thought intensely of the simplest form of life: running like an innocent child through countryside on the edge of a town. The sun is shining, the fruit trees are in blossom, my mother is calmly watching from a close distance. A man-sized bat lands next to me, I don’t scream, it has a sticky label on its back with the words Dance A. It lifts me up and takes me to my car.

ALS: Nothing personal

nothing personal

In the early daylight the boy walks past the nightspots of the town. Doors stand open, work is in progress, the night is being swept out, some music still hangs around. The boy is terrified, he actually believes (his mother has told him this) that these are the gates of hell. Don’t laugh, stay serious – this is your fellow man. This is the freedom that it is all about: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of dwelling, freedom of holding one’s breath and suddenly gasping. The young man is a boy no longer, he has become a man, erect in life and limb. I got to know him in this borderland area. I understood that I had to leave hell out of consideration. That cost me no trouble – I come from a family where religious belief was never talked about. Just as we never talked about the permafrost in Siberia or the Shah of Persia. We talked about the Kindertotenlieder, because each week my father went to the Concertgebouw. When the boy’s mother had died, I realised that the freedom of religion also applied to him. He was twenty-three years old and, like me, lived in the Rivierenbuurt precinct of Amsterdam. If we happen to talk about freedom, it always has to do with love, that delicate area where the tiniest differences can have the greatest consequences. Since the young man also believed that he here also had a free choice, the reality of the matter was hard.

The girl he wished to approach admittedly belonged to the same church as he did, but after his mother’s death there were rumours buzzing around about his abandoning the faith. The young woman in question had no strong feelings about that, but her parents were implacable. Their daughter got into hot water because of an important characteristic of our culture – being grassed on. She was observed on several occasions with the young man on the edge of the Beatrixpark. They were standing talking to each other, they were not touching each other. When she no longer came, the young man found a letter in the letter-box with just one sentence: It’s nothing personal, I’m not allowed to see you again, my father’s forbidden it. I’ve always remembered the first four words, it’s sixty years ago.