This is NOT a Bucket List!

Dedicated to L.B for his never ending support.

Dear Guy,

While we are still not done with the retrospect on the important stages of your life till this day, I could feel, these last months, how you’re longing to give sense to a foreseeable future with the knowledge that your time left, is shortening.

A few years ago you took the decision, with the support of many, to go to Rwanda to fulfill a longtime dream to create a professional entity for dance over there.  For some, it looked like it was your last major undertaking. Probably influenced by the many obstacles you have faced, your mind has, in its still never ending creativity, build a slight different outcome of what is commonly known as retirement. The poor involvement of certain first hour supporters has left you very disappointed and we all know that no one can tell you to be patient and repeat it over and over when you are convinced that there is no more time, neither for you neither for Rwanda’s dance heritage. Patience has been probably the hardest to achieve goal of your personality during all your life and someone telling you to be patient, is as defying the devil personally! Fortunately, you have met new fellows and companions and one in particular has understood from the first moment which are your goals and he supports them fully as if they were his own for the sake of the cause.  While your dream is far from achieved and many hurdles are still to be taken we can be hopeful for the nearby future.

We both know and all those around you, that you will not sit down and contemplate with satisfaction what you have done in this almost sixty four years. Only at your last breath you will end to make plans and frankly I’m not even sure about this as you will not take the risk to arrive with an empty basket on the other side of the Rubicon.

Nevertheless you told me that sometimes you would like to be one of those anonymous fans on a soccer game on a grey icy Saturday, having a beer if your team won the match and also having one if the match was lost and going thoughtless to bed later that night instead of reviewing all the coming problems. Indeed it must be blissful starting the night with the only thought that the next day you will have a lazy Sunday afternoon.

You hate the name bucket list as it suggest that it contents ten thousand things you want to do before you expire. Your arguments against are, that most certainly you rather wanna do that ten thousand and one thing and that if you only achieve a part of the list you will be left alone with bitter thoughts. Another argument is that the plans for such a wish list never consider the mental and the physical decline. At the end the longlist can become an unsightly shortlist. Despite that you became very restless these last months as you really want to undertake some actions that you have postponed because there was still time…

You want to see ‘Rigoletto’ in Torino, ‘Peter Grimes’ in London, ‘Faust’ in Paris, ‘La Fanciulla del West’ in Napels, Bellini’s ‘Norma’ in la Scala and taste the cocktail with the composers name in Catania.  You cannot die before having seen so many places and not only Napoli’s bay. You cannot stop fighting before your dancers have found a place to perform and you cannot leave this planet without returning to Procida, or do you!? Neruda will never forgive you and you would never forgive yourself.

You can’t imagine dying before you were dancing Salsa in Cali, Cumbia in the Colombian Caribbean and Tango on a square in Buenos Aires. You wanna visit the old conga master Alberto Cortez in Peru. You have to smell the air and seeing the light of places you have been before, at least  to see the memory confirmed. And once and for all you want to be cured of that unbearable syndrome of not being able to say goodbye by paying a final visit to those who have played a major role in your life during all those years.

After reading all this, you know now, that this only can be achieved by giving you a second lifetime or by making choices. Yes, I know Guy, this is the most difficult part of the job. It is the essence of what you have said all those years to youngsters you have worked with. It has been probably the most difficult task and yet you have to submit yourself to this exercise again. You cannot postpone Guy because, as you said yourself, there is no more time left.

So let me give you this last advice, the one that you also gave to others on different occasions… a lot can be achieved with a little help of your friends…. don’t forget to ask them.

Yours always,

Guy.

PS:  Before I forget, there is that other moment you have waited for, thirty eight years already, to wake up one morning next to the woman you have always loved. But that brings us back to patience!

_

A visit in time… the Geuzenberg (*)

Dear Guy,

I don’t know why today, my thoughts were taking me on a fanciful long distance flight to the kitchen at the Geuzenberg. We know how much you liked the warm incandescent light over there, reflected by the yellowish orange kitchen cabinet. You preferred to make your homework at the spacious kitchen table, rather than on the varnished writing desk in, what was in your eyes at that time, a huge living room. One day you shared the thought that from all the places you were living, that apartment would be your preferred choice to visit.

You know that you had your bedroom above the kitchen, at that time still decorated as a real children room with an animal decorated balatum (*) and similar printed wallpaper. Yes the nylon curtains must have been printed with animals too. The windows of both the kitchen and your bedroom were quit big. Unfortunately the sight was reduced to the backside of other houses and their dreary courtyards. As you started to hate the childish decoration of your room and being already a voracious reader, you were conquering the ‘chaise longue’ in the living room, at least during winter.

Also the Lego city map was deployed in the living room on the writing desk and meant for rebuilding endlessly the same buildings till the moment you started to deploy your own creations. I’m sure you will never forget the negotiations with the under neighbor, the landlady, who one day gave you a huge spiced biscuit for your sinterklaas. You were slightly disappointed and you have asked her to exchange it for a small box of black flat Lego bricks. She accepted the deal and I think that this was the only time you remember having seen your mother embarrassed.

I’m sure you have also the remembrance of having spent several hours in the landlady’s kitchen while waiting for your mother to come home, making some homework, watching the big pictures of the Lourdes Grotto. Yes the landlady was extremely pious!

There was an obvious reason why you were banned from your favorite kitchen table to the godly kitchen of the neighboring bigot. In what was probably one of your first artistic lightning experiments you had decided one day to create a Christmas ambience with candle lights, at the wrong moment of the year. I know that a fire was avoided in the nick and that you’re mum, in a comprehensible hysteric mood, dropped all the Christmas decoration into the canal in front of the house. Charles the Fifth (who ordered the digging of the canal, centuries earlier) must have turned himself into his grave seen his canal abused as a holy waste dump.

The only place we still have to visit is the attic. In the summer it was your favorite games area, as for years now you are trying to remember what you were exactly doing there apart from reading. It was like an inside cave of robbers but with only one  brigand. The most exciting part was the small dormer window at the backside that gave you a wider view on those courtyards and sometimes you could see her, the girl next door, at a glimpse…

The neighbor girl.

She accepted a few times to accompany you to the swimming pool.

But one summer later she had other interests.

@ Mireille

Geuzenberg 5

9000 Gent.

Dear Guy, let’s visit other places soon as we have to make some haste … time is threatening us.

Yours always,

Guy.

(*) Geuzenberg (Beggars mountain) = street name; Geus = beggar or a infidel or unbeliever (religious)  

(*) Balatum: Balatum is built up from a smooth floor coverings with bitumen impregnated felt and provided with a printed decorative wear-resistant top layer. The product was developed in the 1920s and produced by the Manufacture du Nord Balatum to Baisieux, founded in 1923 by three industrialists including Auguste Lannoye owner of Papeteries de Genval. Product name and were protected by a patent. Balatum sold in rolls had its greatest popularity in the middle of the last century when it was a cheap and easy to apply an alternative to linoleum and for the emergence of, inter alia, carpet, vinyl flooring and laminate flooring.

10th of March 2015

The Ghostwriter

Dear Guy,

Let’s stay actual once more. I will not use that raw, challenging, unfriendly language from my previous letter. It was only meant for a temporary physical exertion of your, or my, feelings at that particular moment. We always agreed that these letters are made for our mutual eternity. When friends told you to write down your life you always answered that you would need a ghostwriter for that. With these letters we found that ghostwriter in yourself.

Last week we have seen a fantastic interview with Howard Jacobson, a British Jewish writer who figured twice on the long-list of the Man Booker Prize and who won that prize with ‘The Finkler Question’ (http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/media/335431). One of his assertions that intrigued you the most was how he said that outside of a book an author should not express his thoughts, opinions etc. Outside the novel the author should not exist, he/she should not be there talking to an audience. How much you also endorse this, you have the irresistible urge to justify yourself beyond what you write, say and think. More and more you are using the word while you still prefer the movement because a body can express so much more than words; those cursed words captured forever on paper, always restrained by language barriers and hostile opinions.  

I want these letter being part of a landscape: ‘A house with a red roof and a white substructure. You can only see the top of the doorframe therefor you can’t see a window as most of the house is hidden by trees along a perfect tight lined empty road. A forgotten piece of paper with words from the past, thrown against a tree by a Flemish gust of wind, waits for its total impermanence..’ You would have liked Hopper still to be alive to commission this as an oil on canvas.

A different image is that of a frozen movement of a dancer as you were always wondering why dancers love to move as soon they hear the first note. You ceaselessly try to explain to dancers that they should wait a bit longer, that it’s them who decide when they start to move not the composer who finished his job once he created the composition. Those composers; they should be happy that we use their creations and they should not wish to be involved in what is done with those afterwards. They should realize that performers are giving their work a second life.

Did I hardened my tone?

Guy, I just want to keep that image of a theatre curtain that opens; a soundtrack that starts and dancers and audience giving each other the time to get used to each other. No moves, we are watching that landscape like a visitor exploring a painting or a photograph in a museum or on a wall in someone’s house; dreaming away, and now, let the dancers dance.

‘You should dance with the thing you hate and fear’… was another statement of Howard Jacobson and that inspired your dreams that night. It gave you that idea that your body is the thing you hate the most now you are aging and the fear for further decay.

That body, your each day friend your always being there enemy.

That body, old yes, but still sending the right messages about its condition. The message it delivered after you came back from Rwanda was straight to the point. Within a few hours after your arrival you knew something was wrong. You had neglected the messages you got while you were in Africa, but now you couldn’t escape anymore. Even if you had fully enjoyed the weeks in Kigali you had to confess it was not something you could label as holidays. So be it. You are still recovering and I hope you will acknowledge that 59 + is really sixty.

Do I sound patronizing?

Let’s dream about listening to Bach’s violin Chaconne from Partita No.2 in a small, sunny desolated street in August in Gent. Dancers are entering and leaving the houses and no they didn’t move at the first string motion.

They got the message!

Did you got mine?

Yours, most dedicated,

Guy.


-

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.

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