Queen's day

Today, the 30th of April, is Queen's Day. The queen will visit one or two towns somewhere in the country to be the special guest of the events and entertainment activities, taking her nearest family members with her. Traditionally, today everywhere markets are organised where everybody gets the opportunity to sell their redundant things such as toys, furniture, bric-a-brac, etc., all surrounded by music, entertainment and snacks.

So we did today, but we also paid a visit to two sailing boats in our hunt for the best sailing boat for the cheapest possible price. It's a training in self-discipline because when you are eager to sail it's difficult to radiate casuality and desinterest, like the seller must have an image of "I already got ten phonecalls today" and "this is the best you can buy for this money", and not to agree with a too low offer just because he wants to get rid of the burden a boat can be.

Anyway, the first boat was out of the question because you would be busy with delayed maintenance during all summer, and not be sure that there were no irrepairabilities. Best advice to him: give it away for bringing it to the junk heap would cost you more money. The second boat was attractive. Many things were lacking: motor, electricity, a third or fourth sail etc. but that made it cheap, the state of maintenance was quite well, and you don't run a chance that devices present would appear broken or malfunction afterwards.

I was enthousiastic but Janine was "interested". She withholds me from stupid things but this time I am sure it was a good bargain.

So we went there again so Janine could convince herself, and... we bought it, yes!!

Next time something more intellectual and less "bourgeois".

A nice Saturday

Today Menno's girlfriend stayed with us. Menno had to take part in a judo tournament in a Frisian village some 15 miles from here, but we didn't expect much from it because he didn't practice too much, and what we expected turned out to be the terrible truth: he lost all three games and got only the third price in his weight category. Of course he was dsappointed but he had so much on his mind these days: his first communion, horseriding, a theatre play of his school class, his homework, etc. So nobody found it a big deal, except he himself because you take part for winning, don't you after all?

In the evening he already had forgotten all disappointment which makes him a good sportsman, because we had a nice barbecue in the backyard.

Next time a longer text on among other things our proceedings in looking for a sailingboat we want to buy, second hand of course. Sometimes I feel like a millionair, but the cheapest kind. I don't know if a millionair with his yacht in Monaco has more pleasure of it than a modest teachers' family has with a 7-8 meter boat. Nobody who never sailed on the Waddenzee (the piece of sea between the islands North of the Netherlands and the Dutch mainland) with such a boat can tell about the feeling it causes. Number one: constant alertness on tide, wind, current, waves. Number two: a vast emptiness around you only filled with water and sky. Sometimes you sail along a sand bank with seals and gulls. Then you want to flee for low tide and sail into a harbour on the nearest island. Bad luck: the red flag indicates that the harbor is full, you have to stay outside. If your boat is a flat-bottom (no keel, but "side swords" like most ancient Dutch boats have) then it's no big deal, you simply fall dry in the low tide behind your anchor. If you have a keel, the you have a problem, if you don't have enough wood on board to sustain the boat so that it doesn't fall on its side.

bad news

This morning I read in the newspaper that in South Africa 80% of all children gets victim of rape. This figure is based on research and reliable estimations, because many rapes are not officially reported. How can this be consistent with my credo published in the right upper corner of this blog? As a matter of fact, the reapers are just as much to be pitied as their young victims are. Often they are young themselves and “simply” imitate what has occurred to them, that’s what the reporters of the bad news tell us. So the evil is passed through the generations. I also read that a company saw profit in it and sells a women-condom with sharp little hooks in it which can only be removed from the male organ by a doctor. But that doesn’t seem a solution, it can be dangerous because the raper can take revenge immediately.

The only thing we can do is put pressure on our politicians and support the international organization “rape crisis”. Their South African Department can be found on: http://www.rapecrisis.org.za

In the meantime we can only “reason by subtraction”: keep being positive, because if you don’t, the problem will be worse and nobody will be helped. It’s a challenge. Improve the world, start with yourself, is what I say to myself.

My aunt's birthday

Last Sunday I went to my aunt’s 80th birthday. She is a sister of my mother and I very much appreciate my contacts with her because she reminds me of my mother, and is also a very good woman. She is one of those people who seem to bother only about other people and never about herself. In her life she was en is a member of voluntary organizations such as the National Rural Women Organisation (originally an associations of farmer’s wives but nowadays a far wider organization of women caring about spiritual and general education and charity), the church board, helping individuals who need it, and always with a big smile and a joke. She followed a regular, recognized course in her forties just to better be able to help people in social need. Her husband died many years ago after a long lasting, incurable illness during which she intensively took care of him. She never criticizes people but always stresses their good characteristics. If I had to be a woman, then please let me be somebody like she is. And now she has become 80 years of age with a fine dinner for which I also had been invited, from 1.00 – 6.00 PM. Between the courses (which were very modest so we didn’t feel over-eaten) a powerpoint-presentation was shown and one of the family-members had been busy for many hours to amateur together a professional-looking film documentary about her life. During dinner everybody was talking, chatting and discussing so it was very vivid. My other aunt was sitting next to me (she is aged 82) and noticed with black humor that this kind of events enhanced the contacts so that we wouldn’t see each other only at funerals. You have to know, she had one sister and two brothers older than she is, and one sister younger than she is: her younger sister was celebrating her birthday that day, and her older brothers and sister passed away exactly according the sequence in their age rank order. If this would be the rule, then she would be the next one, which she reminded and she invited us for her funeral. One of the other guests answered that this wasn’t something to be discussed right now, let’s not think about it now, she said. But I find (I didn’t tell for I didn’t want to spoil the joy) that people approaching the end of their lives are free to utter anything about death, and teaches us that this time will come for us as well if we are not suddenly raped away from here by an accident or worse.
As a gift for her birthday my aunt asked to give something in a collection box for children in need. But I couldn’t help to give her something personal. One of my hobbies I used to practice (nowadays I’m too busy with photomania) is calligraphy and I had calligraphed a poem about what “time” means for an older growing human. They know that time proceeds, the see backwards a vast area of experiences and episodes, and in the future they also see something but also know it’s a fraction of what lies behind them. I found this Dutch poem (which I translated as well I could) expressing this feeling very well:
Also the photograph of seedfull dandelions is symbolic of aging: the hair color, the seed of many given examples and wisdom, the strong flower during youth, etc., and last but not least the late-afternoon sunlight scattered through their “heads” making them appear as little lamps.
A rich and satisfying experience indeed.

The poem is by the Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, I translated it as follows:

Time

Time – it is strange, strangely beautiful, too
Never to know what it is
And yet, how much of what lives within us is older
Than we are, how much will survive us

Like a newborn child looks as if he were looking
At something in himself, sees something there
Which he’s got with him

Like Rembrandt looks in his last portraits
Of himself as if he were watching where he goes
A far-away beyond our eyes

It is strange, but strange too, to realise
That one day nobody will know anymore
That we have lived

To realise how we now live, how here
But also how nothing our life would be without
The echoes of the unknown depths in our heads

It’s not time that passes, but you, and I
Outside our thoughts no time exists

This summer we were standing on the edge of a valley
Around us only the wind

Rutger Kopland
Translation: Erik Tjallinks

Three of my most loved pictures

In the moderate climate area of the world late spring is maybe the best season for taking wonderful pictures of nature because of the subtle play of the tender-green between the twigs, leaving room for light shining through them. In summer everything is a tight pack of ripe green. I took the first one standing on one side of the bridge, with the sun about 60 degrees from behind. Then I crossed the bridge and turned back to call my dog who was busy with a branch he got out of the water, and I saw the beautiful deep tree shadows against the light, which called for another picture. The same bridge you can see on the third picture, from the North side looking at the South. I love this romantic atmosphere, suiting so well to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other composers from the romantic period. And yet, it's a very simple village park, a few streets far from home, just like the small lake with its marvellous sunsets.. ahhh...

Conceptual art

One of these days I read that a 4 meter shark has been put in preserving liquid in an enormous glass container. See here. Some multi-millionaire bought it for six million pounds and noticed that the shark was decaying because of bad preservation work . See also http://www.felixsalmon.com/000344.html. He didn’t get angry but simply asked for a new one, better preserved this time.
The artist is Damien Hirst, the seller Charles Saatchi who bought it for “only” 50,000 British pounds, and now multiplied that amount in his selling.

You understand this is conceptual art, a kind of revival of Dadaism. The shark in its container is not the piece of art, but the idea and its realization are. That’s why it was no big deal to replace the original rotting shark by a new one, which would be impossible with a rotting Rembrandt.
This raises several questions: first, isn’t it ridiculous, not to say a shame, that these amounts are spent to something only because a group of people agree that it is art? Second, what exactly is art? Third, should everybody agree on what is art and what isn’t, and if not, how many should agree, then?

I will try to answer these questions. In Western culture we have art since the ancient Greek (Thanks Conrad for having corrected me on this point). Art had to be the product of skilfull people and had to be admired by all who watched the piece. Producing something that wasn’t admired by most people was nonsense: it simply wasn’t produced, because there was no reason for it. At least, not until the 19th century when questions were raised by groups of artists about the criteria of what makes art art. These criteria were established by the artists themselves, not by art enjoyers or clients. The artist became a kind of prophet, teacher, or priest, and, really, we learned a lot from them as an audience: beauty of expression of emotions, events, situations, life itself, in unusual colours, composition, shapes. The dissatisfaction with their clients’ taste among the artists already began with artists experimenting and studying on their own subjects in their spare hours when they didn’t have to work on assigned, paid-for projects. This artists’ emancipation evolved further and further, until now, in the 19th century, groups of artists started to produce art in a supply-market instead of the pre-19th century demand-market: like it or leave it. It became a desirable goal for an artist to turn down assignments he didn’t like to perform, or to be rejected by the museum-visiting audience. He gradually formed his own elite-audience of rich people and musea, and a certain “clothes of the Emperor” - effect seemed to creep in. Is it a shame that somebody pays six million pounds for pieces of art that seem intended to be innovative, because all other means of expression are exhausted? Much of such art is around the theme of excrements (produced by a machine, canned, in glass cases, etc.) and decay (rotting cow head, with flies around it). Other pieces are more focused on senselessness (dada, an electricity pylon stuffed with loaves, etc.) or are nice moving constructions that are now called “art” because in the old days nobody would think about making them, but now you are called an artist so you make them.
No, I don’t think it’s a shame that artists or art-owners get millions of pounds for their shark preservation work, nor is it a shame when a multi-millionaire pays these amounts for these kinds of products: it is art, because the newspapers and the self-appointed groups who determine what is art and what isn’t, call it art, period. Our free society leave them doing their things. Jealous? Do as they do, but first become accepted by the self-appointed groups and join them.
What I don't find a shame, but a pity, is that “great art” seems to be dead. Maybe that’s what the dead shark is symbolizing. We watch dead corpses of humans who voluntarily made their bodies available for artistic processing, we watch a dead shark, excrements, decay, and call it art. We? Or is it groups of people who produce, buy and sell these things against astronomical prices? I think “we” continue visiting exhibitions of more traditional artists and enjoy their masterpieces. The other two questions now have been answered as well: art has no definition agreed on by all people, but has different meanings to different groups and cultures. That’s I think what most people agree on, and I also have the fullest right, like everybody else has the right to define a heap of shit as art, to get disgusted by death and decay-showing “art”, at the same time tolerating it. The taxes will get their share.

First Holy Communion

In May 2006 I decided to go back to the Roman Catholic Church, after my visit to the Benedictine Abbey in Vaals (see my report of it on this blog here). It will take too long to elaborate on my feelings and emotions to do so, and I don't want to evangelize, so I will leave it with this sheer announcement. I discussed it with my wife, who is not R.C. but religious nevertheless in e very spiritual way and she agreed on having our son baptized and having his first Holy Communion. This happened yesterday, it was a very heart-warming event. Two of our friends agreed to be godparents, and they appeared not to have agreed just for doing a favour to us. What an experience, what people can mean for each other in this world where it seems they only can compete and fight! Menno's girlfriend (his "foster-sister" he says) who had never been in a church before, also attended the service. The only thing she suffered from during it was sitting still (she is eight years young).

I also notice that since my photomania after the purchase of my digital camera and since the warm weather has started, I feel less urge to hold long philosophical deliberations on this blog, but as soon as I get more time (holidays) these will return, I promise. At the moment I'm still thinking about evolution and all that concerns it, and reading the essays of Stephen Jay Gould (he is imbatable as an essayist) and asking myself if everything is just a cause-and-effect product or can intentions be identified in the development and processes of nature? Of course, there is one Great Intention (otherwise I wouldn't be there, I refuse to see myself as a cause-and-effect product), but can intentions be discovered in an observable way? Gould wrote an essay about "male nipples" and showed that these have no intentions given to them by nature, but that they simply are by-products ignored by nature because they don't harm any reproduction or surviving facility. He convincingly shows how people and cultures are so deeply immersed in this intention-idea: everything must have a function in God's creation. When I was a teenager a broke my head about the "function" of mosquitos, what good did they bring to their living environment? A creationist would say: they fertilize the flowers, but now I doubt: if there were no mosquitos the flowers would have "invented" other ways to reproduce such as the wind, other animals, etc. No, mosquitos have the right to be a great nuisance, I realize now, as part of creation and we have to accept them (within limits, of course). I think (until better insights) the same holds for other aberrations of "functional" nature such as homosexuality, and I know that the official Roman Catholic doctrine doesn't agree, but I'm sure that's not what it's about in religion.