22nd of February 2015

I just decided to.

Dear Guy,

Shall I call this letter an interim letter?

I do not like to interrupt processes but some important occurrences can modify well prepared and planed ones. I think that you, me, should reflect on what’s going on in your life now, at this very moment, after you came back from Africa last January.

I know, you didn't want to go back to Europe while at the same time you were satisfied about your so called ‘holidays’. Six weeks of teaching and involvement in your project to create a vocational dance school made it clear for you. You want to go there, you want to stay there and you want to realize what you think is your last big-gest project in this lifetime. Don’t you think it is never or it is always your last big project? Age has nothing to do with it as age has everything to do with it. You have this idea that if you don’t succeed in this one you will wake up the next morning twenty years older or at least facing yourself in the mirror and being confronted with your real, actual, age.

Yes, you have done and you are doing everything to succeed but some uneasiness about some people in some situations are making you mad, sad and that, apart from not feeling well physically, creates that discomfort. Your dedication towards your job received a big blow, a deep bite, when you have seen how some people with many times your salary are destroying a project you always cherished. You came to a point where you are hating them so much that it also slows down your recovery. You have to talk to people that you don’t want to talk to. Normally you wouldn’t even have a glimpse on them but now in the name of I don’t know what you speak to them and even smile at them.

Till yesterday.

You expressed, while eating your diet soup, loud and clear to the few walls surrounding you: “I just decided to!” not “I just decided” but “I just decided to”! All is in those two letters that make a word, t and o, to! The next word, do, was not even necessary. There was no need for ‘to do’.

This letter is not that intermediate!

This letter is the expression of a new start, a new beginning. It explains what “I just decided to” means. It contains a clear message to all those who think they can tell you whatsoever and do to you whatever they want, who are thinking and even acting as they can humiliate you by backstabbing you. You just decided to declare war to them, to fight them with your words. You will accuse them and tell them they are rats, scabs, scurfs. Because this is what they are.

It’s too easy to handle the expression ‘Le Nouveau Beaujot est arrivé…’                           

Let’s talk about Guy Two Point Zero. It’s new software the hard way. You will act as a virus and malware. They better are warned. If they thought they could do whatever they want with mister nice guy… they should read this letter before acting.

Can I say you are threatening them? No, because as you never threaten you will act impulsive, as you always did. That is what kept you alive all those years. It’s your force and your weakness. It is you.  

This letter is not interim.

This is letter is an accusation, a warning and the accused know who they are. If some readers think it is written with hatred let them be assured that the hate was gone while writing it.

Guy, while facing this campaign, let’s write about different and better times and about people you love and who are loving you.

This is what we should also decide to.

Sincerely yours.  

Guy.

21st of July 2014

Lost memories

Dear Guy,

You have referred to it in Maybe (http://reportedlyreported.blogspot.nl/2012/07/maybe.html) and the absence of pictures in your journey throughout the years here has been a lifelong traumatic experience, and a returning distress, since the day you found the empty spaces in the so called family album(s).

One had a bordeaux brown cover, the other was dark green; both leather, meant to sustain at least a lifetime. While the first one had some carved leaves decoration the latter was anonymously smooth. If you still wonder why the thick black ecru carton pages were separated by thin transparent interleaves, it was meant to avoid the pictures to adhere to one another. Photo corners were used to display the small b & w pictures with jagged edges inclined or right-angled depending on the creative mind who had compiled the album.

Till there your albums were comparable to any other 20th Century photo album.

The unusual part was that once opening them you were confronted with a lot of empty pages only decorated with lost photo corners. Sometimes people are taking a photo to show to friends at the office or at school but it was clear that in this case we could speak of a systematic purge of pictures with probably a specific topic or portraying (a) certain person(s). Do you remember the forgotten texts under most of the stolen tableaux, carefully written with a white chalk pen? Spa 19XX.  Nonceveux 19XX. Le Ninglinspo 19XX. Stoumont, l’Ambleve 19XX, Remouchamps, les grottes 19XX, Coo, cascade 19XX and then some leftovers of an empty motorcycle and a lonely little boy playing with a twig in a puddle of rain water, a cage with a canary, yes, it’s name was Pitchou.

It ends with a mother saying that the father took the photos when he left, but vaguely you remember a forgotten envelope in the corner of a drawer... To each their own truth.

After your mum’s dead, an event that came to your knowledge one year later as you broke with your mother, years before, you had to find out that all of her possessions were sold or burnt by a wholesale buyer. Despite a six month seal on the apartment where she was living in the last years of her life in a self chosen solitude, a lawyer company designated by a district judge decided that they couldn't find you and ordered the emptying of the flat. Certificates, diplomas and yes the photo albums all perished probably in an oven or a stove. Ashes to ashes. Or considering the, at that time faded- but previously recorded beauty of the ol’ maam, you can maybe find some remains on a flea market in Brussels or in Gent.

Would you be ready to repurchase your own past? You probably would as now sometimes you feel coming from another planet, an alien with your own Lara Lor-Van mother and Jor-El daddy. We have to confess that you’re far from a superman and, as far as we know, you got more of your mom’s characteristics than your father’s.

Oh yes you have a birth certificate! The archives of the Gent’ city administration are preserved since we had no war anymore in this part of Europe after your birth. Count your blessings!

Shortly after you knew that your mother died you contacted the Gent’ Police as your father was a police officer to find out more about him. It is still a guess to me why you waited that long to investigate about him? A silent respect for the woman who raised you solely?

You knew already the circumstances wherein he died but thanks to Steven de Smet, Police Head Commissioner from the Gent’ Police Force you got more details about your dad’s family, yours (?), your half brother and throughout all this you received some pictures.

Recognizing the physical resemblance creates a good sense and photos are an invaluable medium in that process. For the rest you felt as an intruder in someone’s private life and the contacts you had with his relatives were short, unsatisfactory and they petered out.

The absence of photo material of your mother is equally frustrating as by absence of the physical resemblance it is very difficult to tell the world her beauty as for her character build of passion, incalculable, tough…

You have only the eyes of your best friends to testify but after all those years building a robot photo would be a caricatural exercise.

For now, Guy, I know how pictures of your beloved ones are important to you. Undeniably important as you are so frightened to loose someone’s image that you love. The age of digital photography is a god send for you, but having the printed pictures framed all around the corners of your living space witnesses the need to never forget your relatives as you didn't choose to end your life in loneliness.

Kind thoughts,

Guy. 

3rd of November 2013.

The dovecote or dovecot? 

Or is someone keeping pigeons in an opera house?

Dear Guy,

After all the turmoil I created in my previous letter(s) about how your love for dance started I like to remind you that your first theatrical love was probably the opera.

I know that you think that the only similarity with your father is a physical one, with unmanageable hair as the principal component, but I can assure the other readers of this letter: "There is more!" It is not a secret that you would have preferred inherited rather a part of your mother's beauty than her sometimes insufferable personality traits. She hated opera as much as she disliked red cabbage and that says it all. With her, you discovered Edith Piaf, Juliette Greco, Salvatore Adamo and the Lecuona Cuban Boys; not the heroines of Puccini, Verdi or Wagner.

During one of your holiday stays at your godmother you brought her almost to distraction since you didn't want to go to bed until you've heard the last note of Verdi's Rigoletto. At that time, probably because they didn't make the link, nobody told you that your father had sung in the Royal Gent's Men's Choir, were Gent's stands for, from Gent!

At the age of fourteen, you first attended an opera performance in the Royal Opera House in Gent, chaperoned by one of your mother's few friends. As a revenge for mammy's indifference about your dad's decease it could count as statement. At that time you did not notice the dramatic inaccuracy of Rodolfo, one of the main characters in Puccini's " La bohème", singing about how cold Mimi's hands were - she's the other main character - addressing the audience from the front of the stage instead of her, standing at least ten meters behind him. Later you always referred to this preposterous situation in your own acting or when you where staging some performances. But then, during that very moment through the music you discovered how love should be expressed ...Love, according to Puccini and Guy! Something comes up to my mind while writing this; remember how, not so much later during an Eastern holiday's camp you gave your gloves to a much older girl (...), with icy hands. You decided to suffer instead of her, as your first personal weltschmerz (world-weariness) experience.

Not so sure anymore if it was at sixteen you decided to take a season subscription to the Opera House in Gent? Anyway during that period of fighting for your independence and rebellion against your mothers way of living you had that irresistible urge to compensate The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the Black Sabbath's and Deep Purple's of the world with what you considered in that time something more consistent for your juvenile artistic and emotional needs. You chose a seat on the second balcony in a side box to see the stage, a part of the activities behind the stage drops, and a full overview of the orchestra. While I know, that now you are analyzing the light colors, the staging, the props use and the director's or choreographer's vision, in that time you were floating on an emotional bubble of Bel-Canto "beautiful singing" and, yes also, the alleged sensuality of the ballet.

Before the doors opened and during the intermissions you always observed the presence of two policemen walking around seemingly uninterested and looking bored. That reminded you of stories, which origin can't be determined anymore, but describing your dad, volunteering for this duty rather than walking the streets or doing desk work.  Once the performance started he left his colleague and took a place in what you consider the most sacred place of an opera house, now called disrespectfully "the listening seat balcony" but in ancient times was known as the dovecote or dovecot. It should be written with a capital D to indicate the difference with a "duivenkot" as the place where pigeon-fanciers are keeping their pigeons. I believe the opera visitors also called it "le Pigeonnier" obviously with a capital P.

One evening you decided to look up from your seat. During Mephisto's Golden Calf aria in Gounod's "Faust" your eyes diverted from the stage to the Dovecote and yes there he was, sitting on almost the last row, next to a wall opposite to your seat. You were wondering why his eyes were closed, he could not see the stage anyway. Probably it intensified his listening experience. You were disappointed, he was not looking at you, showing his approval that you inherited his love for opera music. Before the end of the aria his effigy disappeared and your eyes were fixing an empty seat. A waltz 'Ainsi que la brise légère' accentuated that sacred moment and the breeze of the dance took your thoughts as in a reverie.

From that day, before and after a performance, you saluted unnoticeably that seat. You always had the feeling he was there, watching over you. You were sad to leave the place for the summer closing, leaving him there alone while waiting to hear his music again, and when a new season started your excitement was intensified by the feeling that you will meet with the ol' man.

Guy, I think it's high time to buy a ticket. Someone is waiting for you to share a music lover's experience, and maybe more, with you in the Dovecote. Don't forget to comb your hair.

Yours,

Guy.

-

1st of September 2013.

Read in About  1st of September 2013:  Acknowledgments & research.

Song of a Wayfarer.

How a dance influenced forty two years of a lifetime.

Dear Guy,

You are seventeen now and we are at the end of an average summer. The train ride brings you back from the seaside to Gent. Seated opposed to the driving direction you see the coastline getting smaller till it disappears totally as if it was a delusion. You don't realize the scene is a metaphor for what is really going on; the farewell to your youth, wherein youth differs from innocence, a rare commodity you had renounced long ago.

Your thoughts are now behind that fading out border... The girl who washed the dishes in the brasserie was at least five years older. The words of Michel Delpech's  song "Pour un flirt", the latest summer hit, are scrambled with Mungo Jerry's "in the Summer time", the previous year's top chart. Your last coins ended in the juke box.  It all looks a bit like a road movie.

A few hours later you are in the Gent Opera House. It's not Maurice Béjart's  'Rite of Spring' that impresses you the most; John Neumeier's version,  a few weeks later will affect you a lot more, but what leaves you flabbergasted at least for weeks if not for months or years, is  that mind blowing dance between two of the best classical dancers at that moment, Nureyev and Bortoluzzi.

Even now, when asked,  I'm telling that this is the best dance I have ever seen in my life and "The two blue eyes of my darling", the last part of Mahler's 'Songs of a Wayfarer' are etched forever in my brains. 

At that time, you did not know why it affected you so much neither that it will take you years to find out. Apart from a highest level dance performance on both technical and emotional level it had all the ingredients of your personality that has developed your further life till what it is nowadays.    

May I remind you, for a good knowledge, the dance shows the two or more personalities of a human being. That dualism in each of us is expressed by two human bodies e.g. two dancers.

So this is you! Or is it me? It was and it is both of us. It is you at twelve p.m. and me twenty four hours later. It is you trying to express your doubts with my body; it is me writing with your voice. It is my despair against your hopes. It is my resignation as a counterbalance for your restlessness. It shows us,  taking care of the others while not capable to look for ourselves or let me rephrase, it is me wanting to protect my beloved ones but desperately in need for their concern. It is the power of knowledge confronted to the powerlessness to execute. Above all it is the need to express the paradoxes within ourselves and trying to understand the struggle of the individual confronted with his environment. It is me against the 'hostile'-world. It was you thinking the year Two Thousand was ages away while now it is far behind me. It is again me, facing unfinished business before quitting for a final destination.  It is the eternal nomad wandering in our fantasies, now and then, uneasily troubled.

You see, Guy, I didn't betray you till now and that will never happen as this is the essence of my existence.

Guy, I do not know if you feel uncomfortable now, as I feel a bit guilty about this confrontation of your future and my past. If so, I apologize for harassing you with something that once will be described as my life. As a reader of this you should know that probably tomorrow I will feel uneasy but the wayfarer in me will continue to wander packed with my acts and feelings till Terpsichore comes to invite me for the last dance.

Eternally yours,

Guy.

-

15th of August, 2013.

Dedicated to my Latin American Friends.

Dear Guy,

Maybe you are wondering why I never told you how I came to 'Dance'.

Probably I didn't because it's a long story that started in January 1963 when a famous Latin American orchestra was performing in my native city, Gent. The venue was a music hall in the centre of the city, and its interior is hidden since forty-five years behind cardboard walls of a drugstore.

The orchestra was playing there for somewhat eight weeks till carnival time. During one of those carnival shows I ended upon the stage between the singer Enrique Fontana and the dancer Nadia Crystal. I could only find Fontana in The Search Engine, but I can assure you, all of a sudden the posters of Sylvie Vartan decorating the walls of my bedroom were fading away, Nadia existed and how!

Came the sensation! The feathered, follies lookalike, dancer started to rub her feathers in front of my face and between the wipes, being on the right height, I was admiring for the first time in my life the curvy bum of an adult woman. Are these the words we were using in those years, tell me?

This was the day I originated some interest in dance, being it for the wrong reasons. Guy, be reassured, I got more noble thoughts later but some germ was sown.

As for the orchestra I can tell you this, it was founded by and named after the legendary Ernesto Lecuona, the composer and pianist of e.g. "Malagueña". Tidbit... I will create my new solo dance on it. All the best soloists from Latin America where part of the 'Lecuona Cuban Boys' orchestra and if I got the privilege to see all their shows it's because my absolutely crazy mum fell in love with the trumpet player, Saul Torres from Venezuela. A while ago, when I was at the pre carnival party at the Gaira Cafe in Bogota, despite Nadia's absence but largely compensated by some neighboring señoras, chicas sounds not very respectful in this case, I felt the same excitement as fifty years ago. Fontana became Vives, and the most fantastic conga players reminded me the Peruvian, Alberto Cortez, the best of his generation.  To finish this roundup of that bunch of best of Latin America's musicians I end with the man who's a monument in Afro Latin Cuban and Jazz music, Bebo Valdés. My whole life I will remember that tall black man, bandleader at that time,  seriously laughing, sitting at his piano and showing his appreciation for the solo performances by other musicians by clapping the thumbs instead of the hands.

Dear Guy, I hope I was not browbeating you too much with this enumeration of names and facts. I only wanted to remind you where your love for Latin America was originated and the first seeds of your passion for dance. I didn't want to go into details how your mother's love story ended. We both know that Micky, as she was called by her past and future lovers, forgot soon about one trumpeter for another.

'Someone', named you once ' hopelessly monogamous'.  You have taught yourself faithfulness and loyalty in absence of a model. We'll talk about Someone later.

After all this turmoil; for now, allow yourself a peaceful sleep.

Faithfully yours,

Guy.

P.S.

As in every important letter, a P.S. can't be missed, but it's a sad one I have to write. In my research for this letter it came to my knowledge that Bebo Valdés died in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22, 2013. He became almost ninety five years old.

http://youtu.be/Y4z1avxgJfY

No, the dancer on the cover of the record is not Nadia Crystal.

-

24th of April 1966.

Dear Guy,

I am now two weeks before my twelfth birthday and yesterday when I came home from the boarding school a strange event or shall we call it an incident took place.

It was sunny and warm for the time of the year and I was sweating a bit, not unusual at the beginning of your adolescence I would say, while waiting for the bus.

I don't remember if I was using my key, I don't even remember if I had a key of the house, or if my mother came down the stairs to open; did I ring?  Maybe she threw the key holder from the window upon the staircase.  I remember walking up to the living room situated above the garage. I was still sweating.

What I also remember, this because of the returning action that takes place every week, is the embarrassing embrace with my mum, an act that breathes something erotic, but again on the verge of adolescence, corporality gets a different significance.

I'm not sure but I could notice a degree of nervousness with my mother but after forty seven years this can be a late interpretation of a convulsive movement.

After exchanging the usual trifle she announced on a fake key tone that she had something important to tell me. Faster than the announcement I was told my father died and meanwhile buried. It was clear that the time between the two events must have been as short as the speed the words were pronounced.

Silence.

Not sure if my later love for opera finds its origin in that moment yesterday.

Certain is that when I was attending a few years later some opera performances I was enjoying the dying heroes' long aria before the slow curtain drop.

The next phrase, or was it a mixture of words in a random order, sounded something like (There is) bread (and) spreads ... kitchen cupboard...

Well, Guy, it was yesterday two weeks before my twelfth birthday, on the edge of my adolescence and the sweat suddenly was ice-cold.

I wish I could remember if the spread was sweet or bitter but I know the knife moves were filled with hate.

Yours,

Guy.