“In order to write about life first you must live it.” – Ernest Hemingway
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Life for lust (Part 1)
Part One
I’m going to do it. Otherwise, I will jump on every human being who looks me in the eyes and smiles or better laughs at me, while I’ll give my whole soul and it would be sucked dry only to be extinguished like a cigarette butt afterwards. I don’t want to enter a relationship like that. Not with the first person who just wants to dive into bed with me, if there would be one.
I want a woman who will suit me, who will understand me, hold me and love me as I will love her. Anyway, that could take a long time before this really happens. The woman I encountered where so far out of reach or troubled by their past, that my good looks only wouldn’t have a chance to change their mind. So, in the meantime, I am going to indulge not my romantic ideals but my lust in the city’s many galleries.
This kind of bullshit haunted throughout my thoughts, because that drive, lust for life or better the life for lust didn’t let go and demanded all my attention. My neanderthal brain of a highly aged adolescent has been thinking only about … that. Yes, I just want that touch, that contact and to go just a little further than, a sweet smile and a “you’re a good listener.” I want to hold, love, and have sex!
‘Roses by dEUS’ screamed loudly throughout my room as I tried to grasp my desires and explain to myself why paying for sexual contact doesn’t hurt.
Meanwhile, my fifteen-year-younger autistic brother, Eugene, was stuck like a gum to my sister, Christine, who did get bored to the bone. They can neither with nor without each other. Two wonderfully complex beings, perhaps more complex than terrible me.
I am their adopted brother, half, my mother remarried. My real dad left us when I was five and my new dad adopted me. And then twelve years later, welcome sister and after her, welcome brother. But neither of them tolerates anything from each other, cat and dog is still too light a phrase to use. So, I sent Eugene to his room, with muted aggression, for it’s always the same. It made me sometimes half mad, and then I hoped the weekend was over soon, so I could flee to my room in Brussels.
dEUS was now screaming even louder through the domestic corridors, if one is allowed to scream, so may I, and I turned up the volume some more.
Silence.
I had solved it. She polished my bike for a fee and he sat down in his favorite chair complaining into my old handheld voice recorder, record after record.
Finally, back to town.
My father drove me to my room at the campus. It is one of the few times my father and I really talk or rather complain about social problems, trying to make comments about people around us in the most cynical way, call it our way of putting social pressures into perspective or just intellectually bullshitting. This kind of “car bound” quietly grew, it felt like two peers, me in a pre-midlife and my father in a similar real midlife crisis.
But now it was time to have a real father-son conversation about the delicate subject: is it okay to go to a sex worker?
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Stunned
you pound headstrong
with regained violence against closed doorsbeing free as you thought
pushes you unexpectedly to places you already cameour stupid heads bangs itself
against broken fortresses until it explodesyou lay the remains to rest
where no one has come yet, heroism lies far awayand you bash and you bash and you cash in
and you hit backand smack down
even getting up hurts -
Back to Odessa
The bus drives through large puddles of water. Rain falls from the sky. It drives towards my hometown. I can still hear her voice in my head, a voice that crackles a little, but otherwise neatly conceals all emotion. I turn on the sound of my earbuds, louder, it doesn’t help, I turn it off, pause.
“I’ve got to tell you something. I’ll be away for two weeks.” I looked at Lena as she sits here for her weekly extra language lessons. She’s from Ukraine and want to become a famous filmmaker, like Eisenstein. But in the daily lessons, she still suffers with the language.
“Me and my mother have to go back to Odessa.”
“Why?”
“Because of papers, for our house and my school.”
“Can’t they do it online?”She shakes off, not. Silence.
“I hope you will be safe and will be safe back.”
She nods. A somewhat awkward silence falls down.
“You’ll see your family back?”I try to comfort her. She lets a small smile escape.
She is going to a dangerous area, by bus 48 hours away, she said. Also for her school there, as she combines school here with that in Ukraine. For when she goes back, she doesn’t want to lose time and wants also a degree in her country. Lena takes classes online since the war started, sometimes she even has exams at the same time as us and combines them. These are periods when you notice she is on the verge of a breakdown.
She has a pale face, large eyes and a hidden smile. I knew her for some weeks now. Helping her out with translations. We follow the same creative writing classes.
I didn’t question further. I continued to give some more language tips and asked if she is going to keep a diary. She immediately said: “yes, I already do”. I gave her an encouraging pat on the back. Like old friends do.
“And send me some photos with the point of view from your house to the sea,” she told me that their flat has a balcony overlooking the Black Sea, “and from the Potemkin stairs.” Yes, she was definitely going to do that.
“Only when it is safe outside.” I emphasize to her.
That port is very important, both for Ukraine and Russia, and the rest of the world. The rain keeps pouring down. I have to be careful not to lose control. There is a war nearby and far away in the world and here there is flooding, a consequence of our industrialized society, just like the power and greed of so-called leaders that causes the rest of this misery.
I wave the thoughts away and turn on the volume of the music.
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Tied up like Cupid
It is urgently time to write my story.
I’m studying at the film academy. Screenwriting, because I love cinematic stories, and I prefer to write them myself. My friends are better with images behind the camera, I with images on paper. I’m in my hundredth year, at least it feels that way. It is as if time has no hold here, and I am forever locked in an endless course of writing lessons and pale encounters.
I sit here with a bunch of frustrated storytellers, and in the meantime you must make your own way. And you do what you can, with the resources that aren’t there. You have to find those on the street, your best learning curve as a writer. Meanwhile, I gasp and long for love, because at night in my room I feel absent, as if no one would notice me if I dropped dead.
The streets are crying. It is Brussels. I decide to go out, to wander. I like it, even if I am willingly offered drugs that I refuse just as willingly. It remains a metropolis that is real, no masks, dirty, somewhat clumsy in construction and renovation, but with a masterful history.
I wander around and hope to find them, my muse, my inspiration. The love, the laughter and yearning. For now, it’s just a heavy suppressed craving, like Cupid tied up in a cage watching what isn’t there or maybe never was.
So it’s time to write my story.
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Train wreck
Steaming heat from the countless holes collides and jumps with the cold, screaming children's voices, an electronic sound swells like tears from hell, they play up, from the restless animal, monotonous noise, silences thoughts, and lead the way home.
I leave the waiting room, while a woman right in front of me slams the door. Dragging suit and bag, I wait on the platform. An electronic voice tells me that the train has been delayed and how it will come, that I will also miss the next connection. I will arrive late at my parents’ house. As always on Friday evenings.
Children playing, running around and crawling under Dad’s legs, pushing each other off the platform, no fear of being run over. I only seem to have that fear. I fix my eyes on an old pot with green moss and a cactus in the middle, standing proudly upright as the lone rectified thing being pleased by the wildly rushing wind.
A big lady can't explain my strange behaviour, when I stare, with endless gaze, at that dirty old pot.
The iron wreck stops and pulls me in.
Again children, innocently calling on daddy, and I think, yes, I want lots of children later. I will populate this greyed-out world with children, young blood to combat old mistakes. As I stare out the window, I suddenly see that I no longer have eyes, only 2 black holes, empty and soulless…. I get hot and cold, sweat imprisons me, my heart pounds senselessly, I try to keep breathing, just breathing, try to think of my little room, where I will talk to images that should give volume to the empty feeling.
I look at myself, quietly alienate, no longer knowing what and why I think, why I am and why it feels that everything I do, is on repeat.
Shot from “The General” with Buster Keaton. -
Met de trein naar huis
Hitte uit de talloze gaten botst en springt met de koude, gillende kinderstemmen, een elektronisch geluid zwelt als tranen vanuit de hel, ze spelen op, vanuit het rusteloze dier, eentonig geruis, doet denken verstillen, en leidt de weg naar huis.Ik verlaat de wachtzaal, terwijl een vrouw vlak voor mij de deur laat toevallen. Sleurend met pak en zak wacht ik op het perron. Een elektronische stem vertelt dat de trein is verlaat en hoe het komen zal dat ik ook de volgend aansluiting zal missen. Ik zal laat aankomen bij mijn ouders thuis. Zoals altijd op vrijdagavond.
Kinderen spelen, lopen rond en kruipen onder papa’s benen, duwen elkaar van het perron, geen angst om te worden overreden. Die angst heb ik blijkbaar alleen in hun plaats. Ik richt mijn ogen op een oude pot met groen mos en een cactus middenin, trots rechtop als het eenzame geërecteerde ding dat zich laat bevredigen door de wild stoeiende wind.
Een grote dame kan mijn vreemde gedrag, maar niet verklaren, wanneer ik met eindeloze blik, naar die vieze oude pot zit te staren.Het ijzeren wrak stopt en trekt me binnen.
Weerom kinderen, onschuldig roepend op papa en pepé en ik denk, ja, ik wil later veel kinderen. Ik zal deze vergrijsde wereld bevolken met kinderen, jong bloed om de verzuring tegen te gaan. Terwijl ik uit het raam staar zie ik plots dat ik geen ogen meer heb, alleen 2 zwarte gaten, leeg en zielloos… Ik krijg het warm en koud, zweet houdt me gevangen, mijn hart bonst mateloos, ik tracht te blijven ademen, enkel maar ademen, probeer te denken aan mijn kamertje, waar ik zal praten met flikkerende beelden die het lege gevoel volume moeten geven.
Ik kijk naar mezelf, om stilaan te vervreemden, niet meer te weten wat en waarom ik denk en ben.
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The end of my acting career
My fingertips were chapped and my eyes half cut out by the cold, dangling from flexible stalactites as I reached my dorm, cursing. Just back from acting class.
We were about to start rehearsals, because on Friday (the thirteenth) we would perform. Now it was important that we rehearsed every night. But three of them, from what we considered the hard core, didn’t show up. Devastated, we sank even deeper into this dismal carnage. Instead of a party mood, there was this funeral mood. We all tried to smile, and sarcasm was supposed to comfort us:
‘Good for the reputation,’ said our two sympathetic acting teachers.
‘Good that we announced it sober, now we can cancel it sober.’Before we fully realized it, we were back in the theatre café, the cross-cultural semi-intellectual bar we had rebranded as our regular pub during this slimming course.
I took, as intended for the new year, a non-alcoholic drink, hot chocolate. Poor idea, I immediately ran to the toilet, licking my burnt tongue under running water.
I started these classes because of the stories and inspiration it could give me, writing can be improved by playing scenes with others in words from others. But so far, this experience.
An anti-climax put its end to this performance, the performance that was supposed to be called ‘Suffering’. And our suffering was empty. Stranded and landed in a pointless place. The theatrics became realistic and translated some of the emptiness I found myself in. It was time to fill that emptiness, but how?
Myrna Loy in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) -
De laatste theaterles
Mijn vingertoppen waren gesprongen en mijn ogen half uitgesneden door de koude, ze bengelden aan flexibele stalactieten toen ik vloekend mijn kot bereikte. Net terug van de theatercursus.
We startten met repeteren nu we de teksten kenden, want vrijdag (de dertiende) zouden we optreden. Het was belangrijk dat we iedere avond oefenden. Maar er waren er drie, van wat we als de harde kern beschouwden, niet komen opdagen. Gesneuveld, we zonken nog dieper weg in dit troosteloos bloedbad. In plaats van een feeststemming was er een begrafenisstemming. We trachtten allen nog wat te glimlachen en sarcasme moest ons troosten:
‘Goed voor de reputatie’, zeiden onze twee sympathieke acteurs.
‘Goed dat we het sober aankondigden, nu kunnen we het ook sober afzeggen.’Voor we het goed en wel beseften zaten weer in het theatercafé, de interculturele semi-intellectuele bar die we gedurende deze afslankcursus tot stamkroeg hadden omgedoopt.
Ik nam, zoals voorgenomen voor het nieuwe jaar een niet alcoholische drank, hete chocomel. Slecht idee, ik rende meteen naar de wc, likkend met de verbrande tong onder stromend water terwijl voorbijgangers me aanstaarden.
Ik nam deze lessen vanwege de verhalen en inspiratie die het me kon geven, je schrijven kan verbeterd worden door scènes te spelen met anderen in woorden van anderen die je leren hoe wel of niet te leven en te handelen, vaak in sober en krachtig proza. Een taal die je dan als acteur naar je hand zet en speelt vanuit je personage, om zo een gelaagdheid te creëren die het alledaagse overstijgt, kunst met de grote K. Net als schrijven, en kunnen de kunsten elkaar zo bestuiven. Alleen duurde deze ervaring minder lang dan gehoopt.Een anticlimax bracht een einde aan deze voorstelling, de voorstelling die ‘Leed’ moest heten. En ons leed was leeg. Gestrand en beland op een zinloze plek. Het theatrale werd realistisch en vertaalde een deel van de leegte waarin ik me bevond. Het werd tijd om die leegte te vullen, maar hoe?
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try
this is a new era
of throwing back the lines
of hunting sharks
and counting crowsthis is a new era
where I will find my soul
craving inside as a little boy
where I will decide how to
listen to the earths voicethis is an era
when shit will happen
and (in)humanity isn’t
so far awaythis is an era
when we will learn
how to break its raging rhythm
and try to become, in pace(please, try harder)
Fastfood romantics 