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Resistance by Andre Platteel , May 4th

Chairs stand empty in a bar packed full. Evening has fallen. A warm spring night lies ahead. A waitress pushes her way through the crowd outside, picking up glasses, those offered and those left on a brick wall. Leaning against this wall, he talks with his friends. Nothing particular. Just subjects arising in mind. Women. Careers. Unnoticeably, as usual, he is competing. When it starts to rain, no one tries to go inside. Knowing it will pass quickly, they shelter beneath an awning. Too many people. The sudden heavy rain drowns out voices and he loses contact with his friends. He finds himself looking into the face of a young woman he had not seen minutes ago when he was scanning the crowd. She is carrying a baby on her belly, wrapped in cloth that is knotted around her neck. He makes space, but not enough. They stare into each other’s eyes. She looks away. She puts her arms around the cloth, around the baby who is visible through the curves in the cloth. ‘I hate this’ she says, the words bouncing back from the ground and hard to hear. When she lifts her head again he asks if he can help. In the redness of her face, her eyes move quickly and her jaws are tight. The moisture on her forehead does not come from the rain. ‘Just talk to me’, she pleads. He does not know what to say. There is silence. ‘Talk’, she commands. He thinks of questions, but immediately realizes that she is not looking for a conversation. She needs words only as distractions. She tries to + more Chairs stand empty in a bar packed full. Evening has fallen. A warm spring night lies ahead. A waitress pushes her way through the crowd outside, picking up glasses, those offered and those left on a brick wall. Leaning against this wall, he talks with his friends. Nothing particular. Just subjects arising in mind. Women. Careers. Unnoticeably, as usual, he is competing. When it starts to rain, no one tries to go inside. Knowing it will pass quickly, they shelter beneath an awning. Too many people. The sudden heavy rain drowns out voices and he loses contact with his friends. He finds himself looking into the face of a young woman he had not seen minutes ago when he was scanning the crowd. She is carrying a baby on her belly, wrapped in cloth that is knotted around her neck. He makes space, but not enough. They stare into each other’s eyes. She looks away. She puts her arms around the cloth, around the baby who is visible through the curves in the cloth. ‘I hate this’ she says, the words bouncing back from the ground and hard to hear. When she lifts her head again he asks if he can help. In the redness of her face, her eyes move quickly and her jaws are tight. The moisture on her forehead does not come from the rain. ‘Just talk to me’, she pleads. He does not know what to say. There is silence. ‘Talk’, she commands. He thinks of questions, but immediately realizes that she is not looking for a conversation. She needs words only as distractions. She tries to focus her eyes, wants to find rest in him. He reads the fear he himself knows so well. Not a particular fear, not a fear for something or caused by anything. ‘Not now. I must take care. Not now’, she repeats. He makes the space smaller between them. Without thinking he puts his arms around her and the baby. Carefully. Trying not to create a misunderstanding. ‘You are bigger than the fear you feel right now’, he whispers. And he also thinks: whatever happens, I’m here to take care of you and the baby. He doesn’t speak this thought, knowing that it would sound pathetic. Worse, the intimacy would spark this energy she is fighting with so intensely. She makes small kicking movements with her legs. She is losing ground. He feels shaky too. He holds her loosely, but firmly. His grip is telling her that he is here for her. And also that she is strong enough to cope with what is happening. He looks to the sky and sees a bird flying through the rain. The bird is already grounded. He looks back at her. She is crying. Her body is shaking. There is no resistance anymore. She is becoming grounded. Soon, the fear will leave her. He feels tears welling up in his own eyes. And in the back of his mind an uninvited voice hopes that his friends have not been paying too much attention to him over the last few minutes. - less tagged:   fear   silence   mind   Body    permalink  read: 2061  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

Arrogance by Andre Platteel , April 26th

He had climbed for such a long time and felt proud to have reached the top that only a few men had reached before him. He felt proud to have listened to the inner voice that had told him to climb the mountain and meet silence there. He felt proud of the sensation of his muscles, proof of persistence and strength. From the top of the huge mountain he saw the world stretched out before him, far away and out of reach. And again he was filled with pride, this time from seeing that the world is, indeed, nothing more than a picture, just as the sages had seen before him. He waited for silence to come. He took off his shirt, revealing well-trained muscles to no one (but you never know, maybe God was watching and would be filled with pride, seeing this son). Silence came with thunder. In an instant, he was lifted up and felt rocks hurting his body. It had taken him months to climb that mountain. And years of meditation to arrive at the idea of climbing that mountain. It had taken him the biggest part of his life to find silence. And now he had finally met Silence, he saw the world approaching in just a few seconds. Blood poured out of his body. Silence bent over him; anger in his eyes, his claws sharp, his posture like that of a beast ready to attack. “Would it take more pain and blood to kill the arrogance of a man who wanted to reach out above the world?” Silence roared at him. Our hero, afraid and shivering, didn’t dare to look into the face of Silence. His strong body and + more He had climbed for such a long time and felt proud to have reached the top that only a few men had reached before him. He felt proud to have listened to the inner voice that had told him to climb the mountain and meet silence there. He felt proud of the sensation of his muscles, proof of persistence and strength. From the top of the huge mountain he saw the world stretched out before him, far away and out of reach. And again he was filled with pride, this time from seeing that the world is, indeed, nothing more than a picture, just as the sages had seen before him. He waited for silence to come. He took off his shirt, revealing well-trained muscles to no one (but you never know, maybe God was watching and would be filled with pride, seeing this son). Silence came with thunder. In an instant, he was lifted up and felt rocks hurting his body. It had taken him months to climb that mountain. And years of meditation to arrive at the idea of climbing that mountain. It had taken him the biggest part of his life to find silence. And now he had finally met Silence, he saw the world approaching in just a few seconds. Blood poured out of his body. Silence bent over him; anger in his eyes, his claws sharp, his posture like that of a beast ready to attack. “Would it take more pain and blood to kill the arrogance of a man who wanted to reach out above the world?” Silence roared at him. Our hero, afraid and shivering, didn’t dare to look into the face of Silence. His strong body and enormous muscles seemed to shrink. “I do not accept people looking away from me,” Silence said, and with that used his sharp claws to rip open our hero’s heart. “Look at me, you wanted to meet me, this is what I do,” Silence continued. “I will hurt you so badly that all your ideas of what I am will be destroyed.” Silence walked away, leaving our hero trying to stop the bleeding by covering his heart with a red hand, shouting for help. But no one seemed to hear him, not anymore. - less tagged:   arrogance   silence   body   meditation    permalink  read: 2103  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Mother of all memories by Andre Platteel , June 1st

It was almost finished: the detailed model of the memory he had spent the last few years searching for. A search begun after a short but terrifying moment one particular night (a night thus far unmemorable). The night had gone something like this: woke up; realized the reason he had woken up was a lack of breath; reached for oxygen that his body failed to absorb; opened his mouth only to find nothing there, nothing that was willing to fill his lungs; noticed he had left his body and saw himself choking into nothingness, just white, recently washed sheets around him. And then, out of nowhere, something, a little sound (he thought), or at least something that sounded like a sound, something not so trivial, a vivid but veiled memory that made life flow again. That which had brought life back into him had not only brought back his body; his body was brought back into something, something full and sweet, something he knew he knew, but was forgotten. He became obsessed with the sweetness and fullness he felt connected with, something that he called ‘it’. Immediately the same night, the night now made memorable due to what had happened, he crammed his ideas and thoughts about what ‘it’ could be onto small, sticky pieces of yellow paper. He was tracing ‘it’ and felt how he was coming closer and closer to knowing it. There were moments when he thought he would embrace what he was looking for in a split second, something ‘just around the corner’. But always, the thing he was chasing found a way to escape. The harder he tried the more he seemed to forget what ‘it’ exactly was all about. He changed his strategies; he surrounded ‘it’ carefully and peeled the mystery from the thing he wanted to know so obsessively. That’s actually how the idea of a model began. Since ‘it’ had hit a memory deep inside him, ‘it’ had to be something in his brain, he thought. He created a copy of his brain with its collective memories represented by the sticky yellow notes, by images he had drawn or torn out of magazines, and by sounds he had collected. Sometimes (almost always when he was not so busy chasing) images entered his mind that resonated with ‘it’. He wrote them down and stuck them into his model: jigsaw pieces of a puzzle soon to be whole. + more It was almost finished: the detailed model of the memory he had spent the last few years searching for. A search begun after a short but terrifying moment one particular night (a night thus far unmemorable). The night had gone something like this: woke up; realized the reason he had woken up was a lack of breath; reached for oxygen that his body failed to absorb; opened his mouth only to find nothing there, nothing that was willing to fill his lungs; noticed he had left his body and saw himself choking into nothingness, just white, recently washed sheets around him. And then, out of nowhere, something, a little sound (he thought), or at least something that sounded like a sound, something not so trivial, a vivid but veiled memory that made life flow again. That which had brought life back into him had not only brought back his body; his body was brought back into something, something full and sweet, something he knew he knew, but was forgotten. He became obsessed with the sweetness and fullness he felt connected with, something that he called ‘it’. Immediately the same night, the night now made memorable due to what had happened, he crammed his ideas and thoughts about what ‘it’ could be onto small, sticky pieces of yellow paper. He was tracing ‘it’ and felt how he was coming closer and closer to knowing it. There were moments when he thought he would embrace what he was looking for in a split second, something ‘just around the corner’. But always, the thing he was chasing found a way to escape. The harder he tried the more he seemed to forget what ‘it’ exactly was all about. He changed his strategies; he surrounded ‘it’ carefully and peeled the mystery from the thing he wanted to know so obsessively. That’s actually how the idea of a model began. Since ‘it’ had hit a memory deep inside him, ‘it’ had to be something in his brain, he thought. He created a copy of his brain with its collective memories represented by the sticky yellow notes, by images he had drawn or torn out of magazines, and by sounds he had collected. Sometimes (almost always when he was not so busy chasing) images entered his mind that resonated with ‘it’. He wrote them down and stuck them into his model: jigsaw pieces of a puzzle soon to be whole. One night, a night when sleep would not come, he went downstairs, switched on the light of a room that was once his office space but which now provided space for the model that had outgrown the size of his brain by at least twenty times. He saw how the light brought life to the fragments and realized, out of nowhere, that all the different pieces could never unravel the memory he was so obsessed with. All these fragments could never add up to what he was seeking. How could he have thought that he would discover the totality of ‘it’ by isolating fragments, by analysing memories? Not a single piece of what he had gathered said anything about what was so important to him. Every connection he had tried to make, every effort to connect two or more fragments together, had created only the idea of something that was about to become whole. He had been tracing something that could never be revealed by assembling fragments to serve as a manual. And yet it did. He was about to leave the room when, for no particular reason, he turned back with an almost unnatural faithfulness. He flicked the light on again and saw how his model of many fragments had come alive. It could have been something about the artificial light, or the sleep that was about to knock him out, but he saw how the fragments not only told their own story, he saw ‘it’ in every fragment. ‘It’ was not a particular memory; ‘it’ was omnipresent. He saw how his model became a hologram, 'it' being present in all the different parts of his model. And fragments he had not connected became connected by ‘it’. He turned off the light again, went to sleep and dreamed about what he had seen. He knew that what he had seen was something that can never been seen by the eye, and yet is present in everything we see. He slept well that night, heard the sound of light, and felt how the memory that is embedded in everything made all memories come home. - less tagged:   light   spaciousness   connectedness   life   Body   mind   memory    permalink  read: 7047  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

Born to adore This by Andre Platteel , January 17th

My body is dancing To allow me to become awake To another world What makes difference in what ever stays the same? My body is crying For morning light In everything, in every heart What light makes all eyes turn wide open? My body is wandering In rivers that never reach their ends When it is simply circular, Where do waves return to? My body is opening To a secret that we know That we don't know how to talk about Can you have mercy for all that we don't know? My body is becoming All that I experience You are all that I am How does it feel to be a walking mountain? tagged:   body   love   light    permalink  read: 7309  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

The hidden promise by Andre Platteel , August 6th

There were grass and trees on both sides of the railway, with stones between the railway and the greenery – a kind of a path but never meant to be used that way. I rode my bike twice alongside the tracks to go back and forth from my house to school. Both times during breaks. It was a dangerous route, but the shortest and the only possible means to be back in time for when school began again. One day someone came out of the bushes. He looked like a farmer. He had an axe in his hand and was shouting at me in a language I couldn’t understand. He came after me, axe in the air. I peddled as hard as I could but the stones stopped me getting my speed up. His shouting grew louder and I raised my left arm to the heavens in surrender. But when I looked over my shoulder, there was no one to be seen anymore. I still heard his voice, the language still feeling unfamiliar. During the four years that I rode that route, I quite often heard bells ringing, announcing that a train would come along in just a few seconds. Somewhere, not far from me, barriers would come down to stop the traffic. I had to hide myself in the bushes, but I must have been visible to the train driver. A loud whistle blew me away. The draft caused by the speed of the train was so strong that I had to dig my feet into the mud. Via this route it took me twenty minutes to get home and twenty minutes to get back to school and lock my bike just before the bell rang to summon the kids back to class. I really never became friends with the other kids, because I never had time to actually meet and play with them. It didn’t matter if it rained, or snowed, I needed to go home during breaks for that one moment: when I knocked on the window of our house, I saw my mother looking surprised to see me (but I knew she was acting); we waved, she blew me a kiss, I laughed and felt light, and I rode back to school. When I got home from school for the day, we never talked about my short appearances in front of the window. And she never asked me not to come home during breaks; she knew those visits made going to school possible for me. I needed to see her as much as I could, as if every moment with her was precious. "I always thought of myself as a gypsy boy. But since she was my mother, I could never be too far away from home." “How much older was she than you are now,” he asks. “Two years.” + more There were grass and trees on both sides of the railway, with stones between the railway and the greenery – a kind of a path but never meant to be used that way. I rode my bike twice alongside the tracks to go back and forth from my house to school. Both times during breaks. It was a dangerous route, but the shortest and the only possible means to be back in time for when school began again. One day someone came out of the bushes. He looked like a farmer. He had an axe in his hand and was shouting at me in a language I couldn’t understand. He came after me, axe in the air. I peddled as hard as I could but the stones stopped me getting my speed up. His shouting grew louder and I raised my left arm to the heavens in surrender. But when I looked over my shoulder, there was no one to be seen anymore. I still heard his voice, the language still feeling unfamiliar. During the four years that I rode that route, I quite often heard bells ringing, announcing that a train would come along in just a few seconds. Somewhere, not far from me, barriers would come down to stop the traffic. I had to hide myself in the bushes, but I must have been visible to the train driver. A loud whistle blew me away. The draft caused by the speed of the train was so strong that I had to dig my feet into the mud. Via this route it took me twenty minutes to get home and twenty minutes to get back to school and lock my bike just before the bell rang to summon the kids back to class. I really never became friends with the other kids, because I never had time to actually meet and play with them. It didn’t matter if it rained, or snowed, I needed to go home during breaks for that one moment: when I knocked on the window of our house, I saw my mother looking surprised to see me (but I knew she was acting); we waved, she blew me a kiss, I laughed and felt light, and I rode back to school. When I got home from school for the day, we never talked about my short appearances in front of the window. And she never asked me not to come home during breaks; she knew those visits made going to school possible for me. I needed to see her as much as I could, as if every moment with her was precious. "I always thought of myself as a gypsy boy. But since she was my mother, I could never be too far away from home." “How much older was she than you are now,” he asks. “Two years.” It feels as if my body has not been my house for so long. I long to be in it. “Experience this,” he says. And without explaining what ‘this’ is, ‘this’ starts to take over my body. It is shaking, it is sweating, it is hurting, it is suffocating. It is said that Jesus cried when the nails went through his body. He experienced the pain. What is the cost of experiencing fully? Losing one’s body? “Is it my body that is shouting?” I ask him. “You know it is not your body, else you wouldn’t ask. It is a hidden promise within your body. It is your body becoming conscious of that hidden promise that does not belong in your body. It is your body relaxing to create an exit for the hidden promise. It is the hidden promise that does not want to leave because you have not become fully acquainted with it yet. Look the hidden promise in its eyes. See what it is.” I try to see. Its face is black like everything else. Something inside me is eating me like a lion. And it is roaring inside me. I was waiting for her outside when she came home from her first appointment with the doctor. She walked gracefully. I fainted. Blackness. Through the blackness it becomes slowly visible, this hidden promise. “Stay with it,” he says softly. “The darkness will also reveal its light in the end. And it will have a brightness in which every darkness can arise.” I see it through the darkness, the hidden promise. It has no name. It wants to prevent me from seeing that there is no need coming home to her. “Allow yourself to live beyond every border," I hear him saying. His lips do not move. The light, you know, it turns the darkeness into such a sweetness. - less tagged:   body   consciousness   brightnes   mother   light   home    permalink  read: 4950  print  forward  comments: 1  add comment      name:  Greta, August 6th • Your restraint is a wonderful thing. I want to know what happened to the mother, but also don't. Thank you.

Photo: André Platteel

Dr. Feelgood by Andre Platteel , May 13th

“No, that’s nothing; no need to worry about that.” Five seconds and a fear that had stayed with me for years, vanishes. Just like that. I am already lifting myself out of the chair when he says: “You are trying to love this, aren’t you.” On ‘this’ he spreads his arms, and I think I see a twinkle in his eyes. Now fear has left me, my system is more open to really looking at this doctor, this doctor with the practice deep in the woods. And he looks funny. Early fifties, grey hair, glasses, white coat, of course, jeans, sneakers – also white, with three white stripes, barely noticeable. Actually, he looks a bit like Dustin Hoffman. “So, what I notice is that there is a certain resistance in your system, making it hard for you to be fully open to this moment. Is that right?” He is leaning backwards. He is enjoying this more than the investigation of some small bumbs on my head, a few seconds ago. “Listen.” Bird sounds. “Feel,” he says, striking his cheek and pointing his head in my direction, encouraging me to do the same. I feel a bit embarrassed. “What is it that prevents you from being fully open to this moment? This is all we have. Now – this moment – isn’t it?” Without waiting for me to answer he grabs a paper and a pen and gives them to me. “I will ask ‘it’, and also for you to come up with something that will support you in becoming fully available.” He puts his hands behind his head, letting it rest in them. “Please write down...” His breathing becomes louder. He closes his eyes, opens his mouth, but nothing comes, not yet. A few seconds later: “Love and happiness are what the world will give to me...” He is breathing loudly through his nose and takes a little pause, “…I am part of all that is happening, every moment. What could please me more than to receive love in the deepest of my being. Everything is so easy, and the reason why is not important.” He stops. Opens his eyes and meets mine. I put down my pen. Unexpectedly, his mouth issues more words. “What a pleasure it will be to allow love to ground me, to form the basis of my being.” He asks me to repeat what he has just said. I do. Quite fast, feeling a bit strange. “Again please.” I do. Then: “Could you do it one more time, but take your time for the words to blossom in you.” In the slowness of repeating I feel the words finding their way into my body. “I know this is quite unusual. You go to a doctor, and well...” He lifts his arms and opens his hands. “For thirty years I have been a doctor: what most doctors do does not help one bit to make you become more fully alive.” He gets out of his chair and walks a bit. His office is quite big. “Are you okay with this?” I am. + more “No, that’s nothing; no need to worry about that.” Five seconds and a fear that had stayed with me for years, vanishes. Just like that. I am already lifting myself out of the chair when he says: “You are trying to love this, aren’t you.” On ‘this’ he spreads his arms, and I think I see a twinkle in his eyes. Now fear has left me, my system is more open to really looking at this doctor, this doctor with the practice deep in the woods. And he looks funny. Early fifties, grey hair, glasses, white coat, of course, jeans, sneakers – also white, with three white stripes, barely noticeable. Actually, he looks a bit like Dustin Hoffman. “So, what I notice is that there is a certain resistance in your system, making it hard for you to be fully open to this moment. Is that right?” He is leaning backwards. He is enjoying this more than the investigation of some small bumbs on my head, a few seconds ago. “Listen.” Bird sounds. “Feel,” he says, striking his cheek and pointing his head in my direction, encouraging me to do the same. I feel a bit embarrassed. “What is it that prevents you from being fully open to this moment? This is all we have. Now – this moment – isn’t it?” Without waiting for me to answer he grabs a paper and a pen and gives them to me. “I will ask ‘it’, and also for you to come up with something that will support you in becoming fully available.” He puts his hands behind his head, letting it rest in them. “Please write down...” His breathing becomes louder. He closes his eyes, opens his mouth, but nothing comes, not yet. A few seconds later: “Love and happiness are what the world will give to me...” He is breathing loudly through his nose and takes a little pause, “…I am part of all that is happening, every moment. What could please me more than to receive love in the deepest of my being. Everything is so easy, and the reason why is not important.” He stops. Opens his eyes and meets mine. I put down my pen. Unexpectedly, his mouth issues more words. “What a pleasure it will be to allow love to ground me, to form the basis of my being.” He asks me to repeat what he has just said. I do. Quite fast, feeling a bit strange. “Again please.” I do. Then: “Could you do it one more time, but take your time for the words to blossom in you.” In the slowness of repeating I feel the words finding their way into my body. “I know this is quite unusual. You go to a doctor, and well...” He lifts his arms and opens his hands. “For thirty years I have been a doctor: what most doctors do does not help one bit to make you become more fully alive.” He gets out of his chair and walks a bit. His office is quite big. “Are you okay with this?” I am. “Look, we can investigate what it is that is bugging you. We can also ask this great intelligence (lifting his arms again, opening them to receive) to show it to us.” He closes the office curtains. Some workers have arrived to fix something and can see in. “I don’t like people watching me when I’m doing this,” he says, moving to the middle of the room. “I will ask this intelligence, or love, or consciousness, or whatever we want to call it, to show, through me, who you think you are at this moment. After that I can ask it to show, through me, who you really are. Let’s see if there is a difference.” He takes off his white coat, revealing a blue polo shirt. A man on a horse. He concentrates. His body begins to change. He starts walking with his chin slightly tilted, chest pushed out. All in slow motion. He raises his arms and puts them in front of his chest, his hands becoming claws. His feet move heavily, stickily. He walks for two, maybe three minutes, doing circles in his office. Changes in his posture, but not significantly different. I am watching myself in a mirror. He breaths out, heavenly, and lets me out of him. “Okay.” One word to close session one. He walks to the centre of his office and closes his eyes. He makes contact again. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, he bursts out in a laugh. “This is funny, this is so funny. Look.” He begins to pace again. He touches his heart with his right hand and then makes a movement with it as if sowing seed. He doesn’t stop giggling. His acting out of ‘me’ goes on for minutes, encompassing different movements and poses. I cannot help but burst into laughter too. It doesn’t disturb him. He keeps on acting me, and my systems recognize what it is that wants to show itself. A few minutes later I am standing at the door. We shake hands. They feel good: his and mine, both hands. - less tagged:   body   spaciousness   consciousness   knowing   spirituality   love    permalink  read: 5748  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Snow will fall by Andre Platteel , April 14th

“Snow will fall this night. When you wake up everything will be white. Up till your knees you will disappear in the fluffy white. And your voice will be silent. All the voices will be. Have you ever noticed that the snow steels them, voices? With snow all your secrets are safe. It prefers to talk with your feet only; in a strange way only snow understands.” After a two hours flight, and a small taxi ride, I am arriving at Hell station, Norway; a deserted station, two lines of rusty metal and a little house, above the door of the house the name of the station painted black. There is no place to hide. The wind is too strong for my jacket. The cold too strong for my eyes to keep them open completely. Squinting: a landscape vision. I take the train for another two hours I had never expected to arrive, and I am crossing the night and the border with Sweden. Snow. Still falling, like little white shelves, folding themselves within other white shelves creating a carpet of heaven. Up until my knees I disappear. “First we are going to learn how to stop.” I am eager to learn how to stop. The skis on my feet don’t feel natural at all, just as the steepness of the hill. I glide and fall. I had crossed my skis and walked over my own enlarged feet. Fifteen years ago I tried to learn to ski for the first time, invited by a friend to come along with him. I took lessons in a group: a macho teacher, wearing a moustache and an orange ski overall, like he had just stepped out of a seventies Swedish Erotica movie. Ten girls as students, and one guy, me. Like now, I fell after two seconds, gliding into a gate, my skis entrapped in it. I asked Mr Love for help, but he was already gone, with his group of ten girls, leaving me to play for half an hour or so to get my skis out of the gate again. And to get me out of the skis. This time I have decided to be persistent, to not give up. Charlotte is the name of my teacher, in the winter she works here, and in summer she is an entertainer in a hotel in Mallorca. Her English is funny. Her body packed in red, labelled with the name of the ski school. Of what I can see, she has a particular Swedish face: quite round. There is no group this time. One to one. After I have learned to stop we take a steeper hill. I look down and feel fear. And I feel ridiculous seeing kids no older than four taking the hill graciously. Although I have learned to stop, I fall and fall and fall, over and over again. I am going to fast to stop. The ground is too slippery. I project my falling already going up the hill in the elevator again. The first lesson is a disaster. I feel less like a child. That night I cannot catch any sleep: my feet feel being on slippery ground. Someone is moving my feet through me, and it is not I. The whole night I fail to imagine my feet being grounded. My mind projects images of things going fast: a bullet been fired; a cockroach on a tilled floor; a plane crossing another plane; an arrow in slow motion, still going fast. I try to slow down the speed of the arrow as much as possible. Does the arrow actually move or is it fixed in any moment of time? + more “Snow will fall this night. When you wake up everything will be white. Up till your knees you will disappear in the fluffy white. And your voice will be silent. All the voices will be. Have you ever noticed that the snow steels them, voices? With snow all your secrets are safe. It prefers to talk with your feet only; in a strange way only snow understands.” After a two hours flight, and a small taxi ride, I am arriving at Hell station, Norway; a deserted station, two lines of rusty metal and a little house, above the door of the house the name of the station painted black. There is no place to hide. The wind is too strong for my jacket. The cold too strong for my eyes to keep them open completely. Squinting: a landscape vision. I take the train for another two hours I had never expected to arrive, and I am crossing the night and the border with Sweden. Snow. Still falling, like little white shelves, folding themselves within other white shelves creating a carpet of heaven. Up until my knees I disappear. “First we are going to learn how to stop.” I am eager to learn how to stop. The skis on my feet don’t feel natural at all, just as the steepness of the hill. I glide and fall. I had crossed my skis and walked over my own enlarged feet. Fifteen years ago I tried to learn to ski for the first time, invited by a friend to come along with him. I took lessons in a group: a macho teacher, wearing a moustache and an orange ski overall, like he had just stepped out of a seventies Swedish Erotica movie. Ten girls as students, and one guy, me. Like now, I fell after two seconds, gliding into a gate, my skis entrapped in it. I asked Mr Love for help, but he was already gone, with his group of ten girls, leaving me to play for half an hour or so to get my skis out of the gate again. And to get me out of the skis. This time I have decided to be persistent, to not give up. Charlotte is the name of my teacher, in the winter she works here, and in summer she is an entertainer in a hotel in Mallorca. Her English is funny. Her body packed in red, labelled with the name of the ski school. Of what I can see, she has a particular Swedish face: quite round. There is no group this time. One to one. After I have learned to stop we take a steeper hill. I look down and feel fear. And I feel ridiculous seeing kids no older than four taking the hill graciously. Although I have learned to stop, I fall and fall and fall, over and over again. I am going to fast to stop. The ground is too slippery. I project my falling already going up the hill in the elevator again. The first lesson is a disaster. I feel less like a child. That night I cannot catch any sleep: my feet feel being on slippery ground. Someone is moving my feet through me, and it is not I. The whole night I fail to imagine my feet being grounded. My mind projects images of things going fast: a bullet been fired; a cockroach on a tilled floor; a plane crossing another plane; an arrow in slow motion, still going fast. I try to slow down the speed of the arrow as much as possible. Does the arrow actually move or is it fixed in any moment of time? “Do not try to look down. Just follow me down hill. Face the trees on the left, face the tree on the right”. The surroundings are stunning. “Move you whole body along with your face.” I am learning to make some turns. “All your weight on the outer ski. Push. No weight on the inside ski. Look how easily I can raise the inside ski.” It feels unnatural to lean with the weight of my body downwards. And as soon as that thought comes to me, I loose ground and fall. I try again and have the feeling to be after something that keeps on escaping me. How can I get grip to something that is so fluid? “Feel grounded”, she says, reading my mind. “Feeling grounded means feeling grounded at any ground. No ground is solid. Everything is always moving. Just move along with it. Trust your skis. Trust the earth.” My ski teacher suddenly turns out to be a teacher of a different order. For years I have practised grounding, at least that was what I thought: standing in a single position, feeling my feet touching the earth, being fed by it. This is a totally new exercise to me. I am in a moving position and on a ground that doesn’t easily stick to me. Finally, I have come to a ground I have tried to escape for such a long time. It hits me how easily I have mistaken my many hours of standing: it is not the stillness that makes me come really alive; it is the movement within the stillness that actually is life. “Now don’t push to hard with your outer ski. Make the movement round. Pushing hard makes you come to a stop. You don’t want to stop that much. For you to enjoy, you have to glide. Glide.” And I do. The days after I practise on my own. I glide. I fall. I glide again, and am enjoying the gliding. I gain trust, and I feel the hills have arms, embracing me, lifting me up: a shivering through my body. Now I feel like a child. Tears are aloud. Moments later I fall. I twist my ankle. I have to rest. I try again, I glide, I hate it, I fall and something comes to me that looks like if I am actually learning to appreciate slippery ground. - less tagged:   snow   fluid   fear   grounding   Body   understanding   trees   grip    permalink  read: 5151  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Northern Lights by Andre Platteel , March 28th

Today, I am quite immortal. I open my eyes and see a sky full of stars; a landscape that’s totally silent. Wide open. Dark background deepened through the ages. No time. There is no time that can make darkness as deep as this. A thought escapes: this does not exist. It does. Even if I was nothing more than air. I make a meaningless sound. Wait. Make another sound. Not loud, just for myself. I am trying to follow the rhythm of light and dark above me. And wondering: Is the darkness the silence between words or is it the light that represents silence? It makes a completely different rhyme. There is no distance between my eyes and the stars; their light burns my retina. My eyes fly. Anything further than ‘none’ falls off the edge of my vision. The Northern Lights are radiant tonight. It’s as if they are leading the other stars in a flight so fast that movement becomes invisible. How can lack of movement be so moving? I go into the living room. A big space. I see wood that makes a table. The table makes the living room. The living room makes the house. The house makes the street. What if this house decides to move somewhere else? The light outside has decided to shine on some garbage that’s acting silently, hoping to be left alone. I clean, light some candles and think of her and of the last time I saw her. There is a hole in my thinking. A sound. And with it returns the memory I failed to retrieve a second ago. I push a button. A short distance away a door is opening downstairs. A few seconds later she knocks and opens the door of the room, leaving me no time to answer. Long hair; a waterfall of gold. There is a dark blue fly on the table, and the moment she enters the room it takes off, flying like a lost child. She passes me, speaking with her eyes. My legs are burning. She walks to another part of the room. I had no time to see how she is dressed. There is a wall between my eyes and her. Thin. I could blow it away with my mind. She walks back, heading my direction. Stops half way. Undressed. She stands near a cupboard, a few metres from me. She impresses me. Outside, the future is humiliated. She curves her body, her arm resting on the top of the cupboard, her legs crossed, one of her heels curved upwards. She knows her classics. I could liberate her from her pose. Paradise is just a few steps away. To stand here, watching her, seeing her breathe and shape her body, makes me want to be air. “I can never love you,” she says. “I could never hurt you.” She sounds sure but feels unclear. There are shadows between the words, shadows that behave like time stretching endlessly. Words can create such a feeling of powerless. Still, I feel more than I can see or hear. + more Today, I am quite immortal. I open my eyes and see a sky full of stars; a landscape that’s totally silent. Wide open. Dark background deepened through the ages. No time. There is no time that can make darkness as deep as this. A thought escapes: this does not exist. It does. Even if I was nothing more than air. I make a meaningless sound. Wait. Make another sound. Not loud, just for myself. I am trying to follow the rhythm of light and dark above me. And wondering: Is the darkness the silence between words or is it the light that represents silence? It makes a completely different rhyme. There is no distance between my eyes and the stars; their light burns my retina. My eyes fly. Anything further than ‘none’ falls off the edge of my vision. The Northern Lights are radiant tonight. It’s as if they are leading the other stars in a flight so fast that movement becomes invisible. How can lack of movement be so moving? I go into the living room. A big space. I see wood that makes a table. The table makes the living room. The living room makes the house. The house makes the street. What if this house decides to move somewhere else? The light outside has decided to shine on some garbage that’s acting silently, hoping to be left alone. I clean, light some candles and think of her and of the last time I saw her. There is a hole in my thinking. A sound. And with it returns the memory I failed to retrieve a second ago. I push a button. A short distance away a door is opening downstairs. A few seconds later she knocks and opens the door of the room, leaving me no time to answer. Long hair; a waterfall of gold. There is a dark blue fly on the table, and the moment she enters the room it takes off, flying like a lost child. She passes me, speaking with her eyes. My legs are burning. She walks to another part of the room. I had no time to see how she is dressed. There is a wall between my eyes and her. Thin. I could blow it away with my mind. She walks back, heading my direction. Stops half way. Undressed. She stands near a cupboard, a few metres from me. She impresses me. Outside, the future is humiliated. She curves her body, her arm resting on the top of the cupboard, her legs crossed, one of her heels curved upwards. She knows her classics. I could liberate her from her pose. Paradise is just a few steps away. To stand here, watching her, seeing her breathe and shape her body, makes me want to be air. “I can never love you,” she says. “I could never hurt you.” She sounds sure but feels unclear. There are shadows between the words, shadows that behave like time stretching endlessly. Words can create such a feeling of powerless. Still, I feel more than I can see or hear. The fly is back on the table; it knows it belongs there, for now. With those few words she has erected a whole world between us. I wait: which of us will give the word ‘distance’ another meaning. Two steps, three, and a small one. Behind her back it’s the wood that disappears first, followed by the table, the room, the house and finally the street. It is snowing in summer. I feel I am not nothing, not anything, but that I am alive. I once bought a little box in a Chinese shop near my house. It was the size of a small button. When I opened it, stars appeared. I took them out, one by one, right hand placing them in the palm of my left. As I did so I was thinking what to do with them. After some time I still had no clue. I decided to put them back. The man who sold me the box, a tall dark guy, certainly not Chinese, said that the box held a secret. The box weighed next to nothing. I look at her: I can see that darkness and light are both silence and sound simultaneously. Her hands are tight to the sky. “What are you afraid of?” She becomes transparent. She falls off the edge of my vision but I know she is still there. “Can love cause pain?” she says without asking. “Are you in pain?” I ask. She giggles and I read: Not after the moments just gone. “Are you sure you are not in pain?” I ask. She stops giggling and moves her head in confirmation. Serious now, as serious as a little child. I call for the sky and the stars to be my judge – the Northern Lights are beside me, already here. - less tagged:   body   stars   mind   life   darkness   love   fear    permalink  read: 5740  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Motherless Child by Andre Platteel , March 3rd

She was having difficulty breathing – the crises always came at night. She awoke and suddenly she knew what was going on: her dreams had shrunk. For days she had measured them while dreaming and she was sure of it. What, for weeks now, she had expected to happen, had happened: her dreams had become smaller. In that particular dream, that particular night, she had heard a noise in her mind: the disturbing beginning of dreamtime. And despite being asleep, she was aware that the sound hadn’t come from outside; it had come from within the dream. She followed the sound. She left the space she was in and stepped into a forest. The sound was doing strange things to her. Movements in her body like waves. Salt water. Foam. The sky hanging above the trees was heavy. Graphical. A dark Mondriaan. The trees tall, standing tight. No horizon, just tree upon tree with leaves like needles, trying to hurt. As she walked, she felt her feet becoming light and the sensation of her body becoming white from the inside. Spacious, not weightless. And not empty either. The space within her grew. She felt the needle-like leaves gathering around her heart. “There is no longer any difference between outside and inside,” she thought. And knew that there had never been a difference between the two. And that knowing was not part of the dream. She followed the sound; felt increasingly disorientated as she did so. She was getting lost, for sure. But the sound was too seductive to stop and turn back. She thought she was ready to lose everything. “Am I?” a voice asked. The forest became darker, her insides whiter – and still she felt not the slightest difference between inside and out. Deeper in the forest she lost track of herself, just as the noise became louder. She had listened, carefully: the noise was close. She took silent steps so the sound would not move. Closer. About to catch it now. Hands in the form of a cup. Then the realisation that she has invaded her own heart. No entrance. Guided by leaves. Awake. A dark room. Where’s the light switch? The space is hot. Moist. Damp bodies. A woman scrubbing our flesh. Clay. I watch my small, dreaming girl. She stands in the middle. On one foot; swopping to the other every few seconds. The floor is too hot. The woman pours water over her head. Two feet now, to deal with the weight of the water. To soak her feet in. Her long blond hair hangs straight down, covering her face and breasts. Drops trace her body, all the way to her feet. Long feet. But small. Long body. Swan. + more She was having difficulty breathing – the crises always came at night. She awoke and suddenly she knew what was going on: her dreams had shrunk. For days she had measured them while dreaming and she was sure of it. What, for weeks now, she had expected to happen, had happened: her dreams had become smaller. In that particular dream, that particular night, she had heard a noise in her mind: the disturbing beginning of dreamtime. And despite being asleep, she was aware that the sound hadn’t come from outside; it had come from within the dream. She followed the sound. She left the space she was in and stepped into a forest. The sound was doing strange things to her. Movements in her body like waves. Salt water. Foam. The sky hanging above the trees was heavy. Graphical. A dark Mondriaan. The trees tall, standing tight. No horizon, just tree upon tree with leaves like needles, trying to hurt. As she walked, she felt her feet becoming light and the sensation of her body becoming white from the inside. Spacious, not weightless. And not empty either. The space within her grew. She felt the needle-like leaves gathering around her heart. “There is no longer any difference between outside and inside,” she thought. And knew that there had never been a difference between the two. And that knowing was not part of the dream. She followed the sound; felt increasingly disorientated as she did so. She was getting lost, for sure. But the sound was too seductive to stop and turn back. She thought she was ready to lose everything. “Am I?” a voice asked. The forest became darker, her insides whiter – and still she felt not the slightest difference between inside and out. Deeper in the forest she lost track of herself, just as the noise became louder. She had listened, carefully: the noise was close. She took silent steps so the sound would not move. Closer. About to catch it now. Hands in the form of a cup. Then the realisation that she has invaded her own heart. No entrance. Guided by leaves. Awake. A dark room. Where’s the light switch? The space is hot. Moist. Damp bodies. A woman scrubbing our flesh. Clay. I watch my small, dreaming girl. She stands in the middle. On one foot; swopping to the other every few seconds. The floor is too hot. The woman pours water over her head. Two feet now, to deal with the weight of the water. To soak her feet in. Her long blond hair hangs straight down, covering her face and breasts. Drops trace her body, all the way to her feet. Long feet. But small. Long body. Swan. She tells me about her dream. “Not quite small.” But for her it is. Her dreams had always been endless. But recent dreams had stopped. Suddenly. Ended in a jolt. So hard, she felt asleep while awake. We change places, she on a chair, me on hot stone. Wet. Clay. Water. Scrub. Red. Purple. She is watching me now. Her body radiates. Snake-like. “I feel lonely,” she says. Steam forms into drops on her cheek. “I cannot understand the way he has left me.” They had made a pact decades ago. Motherless child and he. No more tragedy. Never again pain. A promise. A fairytale. A small version of the horizon. The sun appearing every day. Not a cloud in sight. But horizons change. The surface of the water had rippled. He flew to the other side of the horizon. Picked up another stone. Bound himself with promises of new fairytales. A pebble. Circles rippling out from small to big, the bigger ones becoming less and less distinct. And suddenly no circle left to bind the promise he and little-motherless-girl-with-smaller-dreams had made. He had fallen from her body like a drop of water. “I know that the promise was ridiculous in the first place.” Sometimes you need something to help, even if it later becomes your biggest burden. She sits there, hands on knee, legs crossed, becoming one loop of body. “Turn around please,” the woman says. She scrubs hard. Her arms move quickly in long strokes. She wears a T-shirt with a blue circle and no text. And swimmers. My skin glows. Her face is gentle but stern. No thought of not turning around. My smaller-dreaming girl has her eyes closed. I see her dreaming. I see it because of the steam coming from her head. In her dream she looks into the sun. It is so bright that she has to half close her eyes, only enjoying half of what is visible. The sun puts her in the spotlight. Everyone sees her. Something she had loved many times. This time it’s different. This is no place for her to play and make mistakes. Sometimes you need shade to really enjoy the sun. She wants to walk away. A strong wind puts her back in the centre again. At noon. The sun at its strongest. And again. Again. She feels lonely and cries to herself, silently. Avoiding, not seeking attention. The sun doesn’t like tears, she thinks. Don’t tears dry quickly in the sun? And while she sits there, her hands before her eyes, hiding, not seeing anything anymore, she hears that sound again. She knows what it is now and that nothing can stop her finding it. She is concentrating on entering her own heart now; the leaves are just a pleasant place to take to the shade when the heat of her heart is too hot. “Stand up please.” I get up, a bit dizzy, wiggling legs, water bringing me back down to the ground. And through the flow of water I see her enjoying her dream. An endless dream, I guess. - less tagged:   dream   leaves   sun   tears   promise   horizon   stone   swan   life   body   endless    permalink  read: 5747  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

Growing younger by Andre Platteel , February 20th

The photographer was writing his memoirs. He had gathered up all the work he still owned and offered them for sale in a little gallery in a city he had lived in for many years, more than two decades ago – back in the time when his work was still considered art, not something for which you could be convicted. He felt old, not because of his age, but because of the culture he was living in. Our paths crossed by chance. My girlfriend and I decided to go to Paris. A spur-of-the-moment decision that took us to the railway station, and five hours later, the City of Light. We only had one day, so we decided not to sleep but to wander through neighbourhoods we had never visited before. In a small area full of bookshops, art galleries and little hotels, we stopped in front of a window, our attention caught because it revealed nothing, curtains forming a wall of dark-coloured cloth. The door was open and a white-haired older man with young twinkling eyes stood in the passage. He seemed pleasant. Without saying so, he asked us to come in. We hesitated; our eyes focused on what there was to see inside. No people, just small photographs with little lights above them, so you could see what was being displayed. We went in and began walking past the photographs: portraits of girls – or were they young woman? – posing innocently, supposedly unintentionally exposing parts of their bodies. The girls were not completely naked. And the poses were not pornographic. The photos gave the impression that what was portrayed had occurred by accident. There was a photograph of a girl eating an apple while her dress was casually falling open; a photograph of a girl arranging flowers while wearing see-through pyjamas; a photograph of two girls practicing ballet without wearing tops. Cliché-like scenes; soft-coloured, soft-focused images. The pictures appeared to be innocent. The girls posed as if unaware of the sexual connotations of their nakedness, as if their nakedness was nothing but natural. It was like they were saying: “Moments ago, my body was that of a child no-one paid attention to; suddenly it appears to have become an object of desire, something I can do nothing about.” Somehow I felt ashamed of looking: I felt like a voyeur being aroused by forbidden fruit. The girls were no older than twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t allowed to see this, was I? At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I felt aroused. Because of that, I didn’t know how to react. Could I take my time looking at the photographs or should I pass quickly by? What was I going to say to my girlfriend, also looking at the photos? Could I confess what the pictures were doing to me? And what, exactly, was seducing me? + more The photographer was writing his memoirs. He had gathered up all the work he still owned and offered them for sale in a little gallery in a city he had lived in for many years, more than two decades ago – back in the time when his work was still considered art, not something for which you could be convicted. He felt old, not because of his age, but because of the culture he was living in. Our paths crossed by chance. My girlfriend and I decided to go to Paris. A spur-of-the-moment decision that took us to the railway station, and five hours later, the City of Light. We only had one day, so we decided not to sleep but to wander through neighbourhoods we had never visited before. In a small area full of bookshops, art galleries and little hotels, we stopped in front of a window, our attention caught because it revealed nothing, curtains forming a wall of dark-coloured cloth. The door was open and a white-haired older man with young twinkling eyes stood in the passage. He seemed pleasant. Without saying so, he asked us to come in. We hesitated; our eyes focused on what there was to see inside. No people, just small photographs with little lights above them, so you could see what was being displayed. We went in and began walking past the photographs: portraits of girls – or were they young woman? – posing innocently, supposedly unintentionally exposing parts of their bodies. The girls were not completely naked. And the poses were not pornographic. The photos gave the impression that what was portrayed had occurred by accident. There was a photograph of a girl eating an apple while her dress was casually falling open; a photograph of a girl arranging flowers while wearing see-through pyjamas; a photograph of two girls practicing ballet without wearing tops. Cliché-like scenes; soft-coloured, soft-focused images. The pictures appeared to be innocent. The girls posed as if unaware of the sexual connotations of their nakedness, as if their nakedness was nothing but natural. It was like they were saying: “Moments ago, my body was that of a child no-one paid attention to; suddenly it appears to have become an object of desire, something I can do nothing about.” Somehow I felt ashamed of looking: I felt like a voyeur being aroused by forbidden fruit. The girls were no older than twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t allowed to see this, was I? At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I felt aroused. Because of that, I didn’t know how to react. Could I take my time looking at the photographs or should I pass quickly by? What was I going to say to my girlfriend, also looking at the photos? Could I confess what the pictures were doing to me? And what, exactly, was seducing me? Seduction lay not only in the girls’ nakedness: I see more bare flesh on primetime TV. What had hit me were the girls’ expressions. They did not seduce the way a fully sexually conscious woman would. The look in the girls’ eyes showed they were coming from pure innocence, beginning to becoming aware of a new world opening up with and through their bodies. Becoming aware of an impending fullness of life. Theirs was an expression of naïve innocence, as if they were eternally impervious; I was being seduced by a pure, clear power that was flowing straight to my heart. It was neither intrusive nor clearly visible. Despite their obviously staged poses the connection felt natural – so natural that I almost forgot what natural is actually all about. It was virginity that was arousing me. Not the girls’ sexual virginity, but their life virginity. As if they were on the point of encountering a new wellspring of life – as if life itself was about to unfold in them. Isn’t that what being young is all about, I thought: fresh encounters with things that make us feel more fully alive? Isn’t that what we are looking for our entire lives: a means to make love with life itself that will deepen our relationship with others and ourselves in the most intimate way? And is the fear of becoming older, I sometimes experience, actually the fear of losing this virginity – the fear of losing openness to encountering life afresh and anew? As we are about to leave the old man walked up to us. He introduced himself as the photographer. I knew his name: a celebrity two decades ago, now an outlaw. “You know,” he starts, “I don’t know how to express it exactly, but somehow these girls have made me grow younger.” A minute later my girlfriend and I were back outside the gallery, adjusting our eyes to the sunlight. - less tagged:   innocence   consciousness   body   life   photographer   virginity   youth   connectedness   pornographic   Paris   shame    permalink  read: 5965  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

The outer layer of the mind by Andre Platteel , February 15th

I get out of the plane. No corridor to greet me, just stairs down to the tarmac. Quite a walk. Kerosene, citrus, rubber, sweat. Once through passport control I see someone holding my name. I drive with him through the night, into the desert. Many stars above us; more and more as my eyes adjust to the darkness. I can see deeper, with each breath expanding what is above me. The key to my room is red. A large sitting area. Lavender, dates, roses, mint, honey. Walls plastered with red leather and dark grey tadelakt. Transparent, off-white cotton curtains, deliberately too long. A soft desert breeze through a half-open shutter turns them into vertical waves. A large bath opposite the bed. Grapefruit, lemongrass, oranges. I’m hungry. Food on the roof terrace. Below, the city square. Pillars of smoke. At least a thousand food stalls. The faded sound of knives, magicians and storytellers. Someone is bringing my food. Greens and browns. Couscous, aubergine, nuts, olives, pumpkin mouse. “Just arrived, Sir?” The next day his hands mould my body. Clay, steam, Argan oil. In my calf, the sural nerve shoots pain. No softness, no relaxation. My body as raw material. As he’s not relaxing me, I try to relax into the pain he is causing. His head near my ear, he whispers in a strong voice: “What are you stressed about, Sir?” Eucalyptus, calendula, peppermint. Cover-ups for urine, vomit, blood, fear. “It is all here.” He touches my stomach. “You thought it was here”, he puts his hand on my neck, “here”, hand on lower back, “and here”. His fingers again press into my sural. “But it is all here.” He giggles, puts me on my right side for a few seconds and then back on my back. I feel transparent to him. And more. Butterfly light. “I want you to relax maximum now.” No touching or pressing. He leaves the room. A splash of sunlight blindfolds me. Potatoes, grease, green peas, coffee, nicotine, sugar, beer. I see someone vague, then familiar; someone I haven’t seen for a long time; someone I have known so well; someone I have been longing for. He hasn’t grown older. Of course not. I follow him through the rooms of a house I also once knew well but seem to have forgotten. The house feels new to me now. Because of him. Maybe. + more I get out of the plane. No corridor to greet me, just stairs down to the tarmac. Quite a walk. Kerosene, citrus, rubber, sweat. Once through passport control I see someone holding my name. I drive with him through the night, into the desert. Many stars above us; more and more as my eyes adjust to the darkness. I can see deeper, with each breath expanding what is above me. The key to my room is red. A large sitting area. Lavender, dates, roses, mint, honey. Walls plastered with red leather and dark grey tadelakt. Transparent, off-white cotton curtains, deliberately too long. A soft desert breeze through a half-open shutter turns them into vertical waves. A large bath opposite the bed. Grapefruit, lemongrass, oranges. I’m hungry. Food on the roof terrace. Below, the city square. Pillars of smoke. At least a thousand food stalls. The faded sound of knives, magicians and storytellers. Someone is bringing my food. Greens and browns. Couscous, aubergine, nuts, olives, pumpkin mouse. “Just arrived, Sir?” The next day his hands mould my body. Clay, steam, Argan oil. In my calf, the sural nerve shoots pain. No softness, no relaxation. My body as raw material. As he’s not relaxing me, I try to relax into the pain he is causing. His head near my ear, he whispers in a strong voice: “What are you stressed about, Sir?” Eucalyptus, calendula, peppermint. Cover-ups for urine, vomit, blood, fear. “It is all here.” He touches my stomach. “You thought it was here”, he puts his hand on my neck, “here”, hand on lower back, “and here”. His fingers again press into my sural. “But it is all here.” He giggles, puts me on my right side for a few seconds and then back on my back. I feel transparent to him. And more. Butterfly light. “I want you to relax maximum now.” No touching or pressing. He leaves the room. A splash of sunlight blindfolds me. Potatoes, grease, green peas, coffee, nicotine, sugar, beer. I see someone vague, then familiar; someone I haven’t seen for a long time; someone I have known so well; someone I have been longing for. He hasn’t grown older. Of course not. I follow him through the rooms of a house I also once knew well but seem to have forgotten. The house feels new to me now. Because of him. Maybe. He lifts the tablecloth so I can see what is underneath the table. Canyons, horses, desert, nomads, fire, fish. He walks to a bedroom: the room we shared almost twenty years ago. He directs me to look under the bed. A fox, an eagle, flying people. We walk to the dining room. The house is small and I feel too big for it. I have to bend my back to move around. A chess board. Odd. We didn’t play chess. One King remains. White. He grabs a black pawn, puts it on the board and hits the King from a position that normally poses no threat. He lets me see what is under the dining table. Stars, comets, flowing water, a heart breathing without a body. He lifts up the carpet the dining table is resting on: gazelles are escaping. Under the carpet lie stairs that he wants me to take. I enter the darkness. I want him to follow me. It is too dark to see him behind me. I am in my own house now. Much bigger than the one I used to live in with him and others. He is no longer there. I can see the lines of my house, as if it is painted and I am outside, watching it. It is big, yes, but like a painting, it has a frame. The house is restricted. I pick up a carpet: an elephant being chased and eaten by lions – something they don’t normally do. I don’t have to look further: although I don’t know what to expect, I know it can be anything once I let go of the limitations of my ‘house’. “This is good. This is maximum relaxation.” My head is resting in his big hands. It feels like a peanut. His eyes are close to mine. His words don’t come from his mouth. “Now you choose for this life. Choosing this life is letting go of old life. Please swear me not to stress anymore. It is no use.” He lets me swear two times, the second one comprehensively. His hands are caressing my body, tenderly; not erotically but faithfully. “Your body is the outer part of your mind. Clear your mind. Let no thoughts hold your mind; let your mind hold just one thought: to choose this life fully.” Sulphur, swan, snow. Silence. Surrender. - less tagged:   Butterfly   mind   body   erotic   faith   life   stress   space   house   plane   travel    permalink  read: 5704  print  forward  comments: 2  add comment      name:  Tom, February 16th • Heavy, beautiful, clear, dangerous. Spark. Greta, February 15th • This is quite beautiful. The listings of sensations woven throughout are like little poems. I love the way the past is suggested but not revealed. Tha... + more Greta, February 15th • This is quite beautiful. The listings of sensations woven throughout are like little poems. I love the way the past is suggested but not revealed. Thank you. - less

Photo: André Platteel

Watch for the wind to blow by Andre Platteel , January 3rd

It is long since dark but still early in the evening. There is no wind or rain: outside is nothing. I’m sitting round a table with a few other men and our host, an old man who has been kind enough to give us shelter. The old man has boiled some water to make tea. Just as he’s about to pour it, the electricity goes off. It is dark, completely dark – nothing to see. The electricity can be shut down at any time of day. Someone told me the other day that the former communist regime used to shut off the electricity as a punishment: many people didn’t pay their bills, and since under communism everybody was to be treated equally, everybody was punished for those who didn’t pay. I hear the sound of something being placed on the table; I hear someone walking away from me; I hear the sound of a door; I hear someone opening a drawer; I hear the sound of objects being moved around by a hand that is searching for something. Seconds later a candle splutters into life and I can see that it was the old man who was their source. Silence again, and a bit of light. He must have lived here for a long time. The old man is barely able to walk anymore, though he managed to avoid hitting any of his many bits of furniture during his search for a candle. Although there is no wind outside, I see the wind inside playing with the candle’s flame. It makes the flame longer, stretches it. And it makes the flame go out. Darkness. I hear the sound of a man stand up and a door being closed. A moment later the candle gives us light again. The old man starts to talk: he cuts-up his story carefully, so the translator can do his job properly. “If you listen to the wind carefully and follow it precisely you will be led to what gives you warmth, to what is most dear to you.” You can see he enjoys talking. He uses his hands, slowly, to craft his words, as if his hands are shaping the sounds more precisely before they reach our ears. “When you find what is most dear to you, a fire will be lit inside of you. It is a strong fire. It is the only fire you need. It will keep you warm in the darkest hours, in the coldest nights. ” + more It is long since dark but still early in the evening. There is no wind or rain: outside is nothing. I’m sitting round a table with a few other men and our host, an old man who has been kind enough to give us shelter. The old man has boiled some water to make tea. Just as he’s about to pour it, the electricity goes off. It is dark, completely dark – nothing to see. The electricity can be shut down at any time of day. Someone told me the other day that the former communist regime used to shut off the electricity as a punishment: many people didn’t pay their bills, and since under communism everybody was to be treated equally, everybody was punished for those who didn’t pay. I hear the sound of something being placed on the table; I hear someone walking away from me; I hear the sound of a door; I hear someone opening a drawer; I hear the sound of objects being moved around by a hand that is searching for something. Seconds later a candle splutters into life and I can see that it was the old man who was their source. Silence again, and a bit of light. He must have lived here for a long time. The old man is barely able to walk anymore, though he managed to avoid hitting any of his many bits of furniture during his search for a candle. Although there is no wind outside, I see the wind inside playing with the candle’s flame. It makes the flame longer, stretches it. And it makes the flame go out. Darkness. I hear the sound of a man stand up and a door being closed. A moment later the candle gives us light again. The old man starts to talk: he cuts-up his story carefully, so the translator can do his job properly. “If you listen to the wind carefully and follow it precisely you will be led to what gives you warmth, to what is most dear to you.” You can see he enjoys talking. He uses his hands, slowly, to craft his words, as if his hands are shaping the sounds more precisely before they reach our ears. “When you find what is most dear to you, a fire will be lit inside of you. It is a strong fire. It is the only fire you need. It will keep you warm in the darkest hours, in the coldest nights. ” His body moves a little. He appears to me to become weightless, as if he is letting the wind – barely noticeable to my body but strong enough to blow out the candle – carry him. “Once the wind has guided you and led you to the fire, the wind is no longer needed. The wind will come back, but only to put out the fire again. For the candle to keep burning, to see it burn, it is important to shut the door, to shut out the wind.” He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. You can see that he is using his entire body to breathe. His lungs are the engines that enable the body to breathe fully. “Of course, fire needs oxygen to burn. But it does not need it from the wind. If the fire burns inside, it will create oxygen itself. We do not need to breath for it; good breathing happens because of the fire.” There is no conversation – only he talks – though I feel my body respond to his words. There’s a dialogue. “Know the quality of fire: it will destroy and it will create. It will destroy what has appeared most dear to you. What it will create has and always will be most dear to you. Is you.” He has a funny face, this man. With every word he speaks he seems to recreate himself. His appearance is fluid and at the same time solid. Grounded. He puts his hands around the candle’s flame. The flame seems to want to go in all directions and becomes bigger; the fire is trying to reach his hands. - less tagged:   understanding   fire   wind   flame   heart   dialogue   body   punishment    permalink  read: 4334  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Video: André Platteel

Where the heart is by Andre Platteel , November 27th

As I sit in the back of the four-wheel drive and look down through the window, everything looks upside down. Things I usually look up to see are now far below me: houses and mountain roads are all down there. The only other time I have been this high is in a plane. The boat that was to bring us back didn’t go. Why is not clear and, at this moment, almost on top of a 1600-meter-high mountain, no longer relevant. We have decided to take the mountain road instead, a seven-hour trip through an astonishing, empty landscape. Our driver has never driven this road before. This road is the reason people use the boat. It’s a road that isn’t really a road, more a surface of dirt and mud barely wide enough for a car. It’s raining outside. We drive slowly, slipping and sliding. The driver tries to reassure us, telling us he’s concentrating to the full – he wants to see his wife and children again. But somehow his words do not reassure me. How close do you have to get the edge of the cliff before you decide to jump and test the powers of gravity? The road’s height and narrowness play an interesting game with my mind. The road is just wide enough to hold the car, but for some reason I begin to doubt the solidity of the mountain itself – will the mud and stones hold us? And although I am sitting on a solid seat, I also begin to doubt the solidity of the car: what if it suddenly decides to grow? Then another question starts to bug me: Why do mountain roads always go so high? One of the reasons becomes visible after we make a sharp turn: the rain has moved on from this side of the mountain and the view is unbelievable: I see a huge lake with five rivers entering and leaving. Various dams form ‘compartments’ that control the flow of water. The rivers come down the mountain into the lake then leave it again to continue their journey, to discover the land. The image resonates with my picture of the human heart: blood from different veins and information from different cells flowing into the heart, welcomed within the different chambers of the heart. Blood and information brought together, momentarily becoming one then immediately leaving as separate flows once again. The heart – the organ that welcomes differences – both brings together essence and accepts that this essence will leave again via different, separate routes. + more As I sit in the back of the four-wheel drive and look down through the window, everything looks upside down. Things I usually look up to see are now far below me: houses and mountain roads are all down there. The only other time I have been this high is in a plane. The boat that was to bring us back didn’t go. Why is not clear and, at this moment, almost on top of a 1600-meter-high mountain, no longer relevant. We have decided to take the mountain road instead, a seven-hour trip through an astonishing, empty landscape. Our driver has never driven this road before. This road is the reason people use the boat. It’s a road that isn’t really a road, more a surface of dirt and mud barely wide enough for a car. It’s raining outside. We drive slowly, slipping and sliding. The driver tries to reassure us, telling us he’s concentrating to the full – he wants to see his wife and children again. But somehow his words do not reassure me. How close do you have to get the edge of the cliff before you decide to jump and test the powers of gravity? The road’s height and narrowness play an interesting game with my mind. The road is just wide enough to hold the car, but for some reason I begin to doubt the solidity of the mountain itself – will the mud and stones hold us? And although I am sitting on a solid seat, I also begin to doubt the solidity of the car: what if it suddenly decides to grow? Then another question starts to bug me: Why do mountain roads always go so high? One of the reasons becomes visible after we make a sharp turn: the rain has moved on from this side of the mountain and the view is unbelievable: I see a huge lake with five rivers entering and leaving. Various dams form ‘compartments’ that control the flow of water. The rivers come down the mountain into the lake then leave it again to continue their journey, to discover the land. The image resonates with my picture of the human heart: blood from different veins and information from different cells flowing into the heart, welcomed within the different chambers of the heart. Blood and information brought together, momentarily becoming one then immediately leaving as separate flows once again. The heart – the organ that welcomes differences – both brings together essence and accepts that this essence will leave again via different, separate routes. I don’t know if this image of the heart does it justice biologically, but it does justice to the way my heart feels. When open, my heart is an instrument to receive information from the world, information that comes from different sources, different people all expressing their uniqueness in their own way. At the same time – and inspired by consciousness – the heart sees the unity within these differences. Yet in seeing unity, the heart does not attempt to make all things one, it simply accepts the expression of Oneness within the differences. As we drive further I see that one river is drying up. A bit further still and more inland, another of the other rivers is also drying up. Yet it seems as if the first river is trying to help the second: it has divided itself and appears to be trying to reach the same place that the other river is trying to reach. But thanks to all this splitting and dividing, both streams of water have become weak. The translator tells me that one of the dams in no longer functioning. This sends my thinking, or is it my heart (a doctor recently told me that in the process of thinking, there is more activity in the heart than in the brain), off in a new direction: What if the heart is unable to bring back the flow released by one of its chambers and cannot create unity in the first place? - less tagged:   heart   flow   fear   wholeness   oneness   consciousness   body   river   unity    permalink  read: 5193  print  forward  comments: 1  add comment      name:  Frank F., November 30th • Is my hearth the centre of my thinking?

Photo: André Platteel

Culture of fear by Andre Platteel , October 16th

What happens if fear comes to you while you are in your most comfortable place? What happens if fear, instead of coming from something outside of you, ‘out there’, comes with no warning from inside you? We seem to live in a culture of fear. The media landscape surrounds us with pictures that feel anything but relaxed. It isn’t only the fear of terrorism that makes us feel unsafe, there’s the fear of global warming, which makes us fear for the future, or the fear of other religions invading our bubble-like Western society, with its hard-fought-for values. Brands that promise a better world are also trading on fear: we are not beautiful enough; we are not friendly enough; we are not clever enough; we don’t have enough friends; we are not safe; we are not adventurous enough; we don’t smell good enough – unless of course we buy the brand that will enable us to enter a world in which all our shortcomings are compensated for – and more. Marketing not only uses fear, it creates fear as a means of seduction – not accepting us for who we are, and so in fact continually insulting us. My view is that fears are ‘created illusions’ that look convincing, put there to make us consume – a product, an ideology, an event, a whatever that promises to make the fear go away. Since most of these fears-slash-illusions arrive from ‘outside’, we can see them coming – sooner and sooner, actually, because the system of manipulation-through-fear leaves tracks that we increasingly recognise. But what if the fear is not coming from outside, but from somewhere more unexpected, a place that we inhabit ourselves: our body-mind system? Lately, I have met many people who are being terrorised by fears from within. The fear of losing: oneself, others or the world. I have met people who no longer want to travel, who do not want to go out anymore; who do not want to fall in love anymore; I have met people who have stopped watching the news, watching CSI, watching Six Feet Under. The presence of fear is probably nothing new, something that’s existed throughout the ages, but it is new to me. Not only do I sometimes encounter strong fear; I have never met so many people who start talking about their fears openly. It seems too difficult to reason those fears away as mere illusions. What is fear I ask myself (often to figure out my own fears)? For me, David Lynch is a director who plays around with fear quite cleverly: you never know what to expect, what will come next. His characters don’t follow a logical psychological pattern: a guy who seems to be the nicest uncle can suddenly become extremely violent – because of nothing, out of nothing; a cowboy who seems to be a red-neck killer turns out to be an intellectual and an interesting debater – something that doesn’t, however, make him less fearful. + more What happens if fear comes to you while you are in your most comfortable place? What happens if fear, instead of coming from something outside of you, ‘out there’, comes with no warning from inside you? We seem to live in a culture of fear. The media landscape surrounds us with pictures that feel anything but relaxed. It isn’t only the fear of terrorism that makes us feel unsafe, there’s the fear of global warming, which makes us fear for the future, or the fear of other religions invading our bubble-like Western society, with its hard-fought-for values. Brands that promise a better world are also trading on fear: we are not beautiful enough; we are not friendly enough; we are not clever enough; we don’t have enough friends; we are not safe; we are not adventurous enough; we don’t smell good enough – unless of course we buy the brand that will enable us to enter a world in which all our shortcomings are compensated for – and more. Marketing not only uses fear, it creates fear as a means of seduction – not accepting us for who we are, and so in fact continually insulting us. My view is that fears are ‘created illusions’ that look convincing, put there to make us consume – a product, an ideology, an event, a whatever that promises to make the fear go away. Since most of these fears-slash-illusions arrive from ‘outside’, we can see them coming – sooner and sooner, actually, because the system of manipulation-through-fear leaves tracks that we increasingly recognise. But what if the fear is not coming from outside, but from somewhere more unexpected, a place that we inhabit ourselves: our body-mind system? Lately, I have met many people who are being terrorised by fears from within. The fear of losing: oneself, others or the world. I have met people who no longer want to travel, who do not want to go out anymore; who do not want to fall in love anymore; I have met people who have stopped watching the news, watching CSI, watching Six Feet Under. The presence of fear is probably nothing new, something that’s existed throughout the ages, but it is new to me. Not only do I sometimes encounter strong fear; I have never met so many people who start talking about their fears openly. It seems too difficult to reason those fears away as mere illusions. What is fear I ask myself (often to figure out my own fears)? For me, David Lynch is a director who plays around with fear quite cleverly: you never know what to expect, what will come next. His characters don’t follow a logical psychological pattern: a guy who seems to be the nicest uncle can suddenly become extremely violent – because of nothing, out of nothing; a cowboy who seems to be a red-neck killer turns out to be an intellectual and an interesting debater – something that doesn’t, however, make him less fearful. Is it the unknown that we fear? But how can I be afraid of something I don’t know? If I don’t know it, I don’t recognise it and so it can’t touch me, can it? If I were afraid of death, would I be terrified of death itself (which is unknown to me), or would I be terrified of losing everything that I know, of death ending my relationship with all that’s known? I think it is the known that makes us afraid. Fear comes when we are afraid for something that we know will go away in the future: our body, our loved ones, our parents, our children, our status or our money. Instead of enjoying what we know and have right now – things so dear to us (because otherwise we would not be afraid losing it) – we worry and are afraid of losing it in the future. At the same time, strategies to prevent bad things happening seem only to add to the fear because, once again, we are creating something we know – and which therefore we will be afraid to lose. If fear is known and related to the future, what could the remedy be? The only thing I know that helps me, but only if I do it wholeheartedly, is to be present at – consciously open to and aware of – everything that happens without forming any judgement, even when it involves fear. Rather than seeing fear as something that is not part of me, something to be got rid of, I must accept that it is part of me. Fear is something of me and can be welcomed within me. Which isn’t to say that is easy, especially when fear is knocking uninvited and from within. Everything that enters our consciousness becomes known, becomes an idea that is inherent to change. Consciousness itself is more spacious than anything that may arise and is always present. In being the space that we truly are there is no thing that could make us run; even fear is just another interesting guest to be welcomed. - less tagged:   fear   consciousness   merketing   brands   Lynch   TV-series   seduction   body   spaciousness    permalink  read: 4712  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Superheroes don’t age by Andre Platteel , September 26th

He fights for her to get better again. She has embraced her death and she becomes, as she describes it, ‘more full’ – every breath bringing her closer to the end. As a scientist, he doesn’t accept her death; he doesn’t accept death in general, describing it as a sickness that must be defeated. She drinks from the fountain of eternal life, knowing from what she experiences in her state-called-sickness that death must be no more than a transition to a different form – a different form of life. After discussing mind (in his film Pi) and body (in Requiem for a Dream), director Darren Aronofsky has chosen spirit as the theme of his latest film, Fountain; spirit: the endless source of life that cannot end in death. I am having dinner with friends in Manhattan. Earlier, an Amsterdam friend who was born and raised in New York and happens to be visiting at the same time I am, takes me to a fashion show for the company he works for. About twenty models, all young and beautiful, show the latest designs of a global fashion brand. The public is young and beautiful too. Afterwards, during dinner, we are joined by his two brothers and friends (still living in NYC). One brother is about to get married. His girlfriend describes how she envisages her wedding day and who they have invited. He tells about the day they met. They were at the Jukebox, dressed as superheroes. She wore a Catwoman suit with leather gloves – her fingers sticking out. He was dressed up as the Green Hornet. His eyes sparkle and illustrate how blessed he feels to have met this super woman. Someone asks if they met on Halloween. “No. When I go out I always dress up as a superhero,” he confesses without shame. “I love superheroes. As a child I loved to go to school in different superhero outfits. And at St Marks, there are plenty of places where you don’t look silly going out dressed up, even in the middle of summer if you want to.” His brother makes a cynical remark, something along the lines of “You’re too old to be a superhero now.” But superhero brother doesn’t understand this at all: “Superheroes don’t age,” he states. Everybody laughs but he – he knows. + more He fights for her to get better again. She has embraced her death and she becomes, as she describes it, ‘more full’ – every breath bringing her closer to the end. As a scientist, he doesn’t accept her death; he doesn’t accept death in general, describing it as a sickness that must be defeated. She drinks from the fountain of eternal life, knowing from what she experiences in her state-called-sickness that death must be no more than a transition to a different form – a different form of life. After discussing mind (in his film Pi) and body (in Requiem for a Dream), director Darren Aronofsky has chosen spirit as the theme of his latest film, Fountain; spirit: the endless source of life that cannot end in death. I am having dinner with friends in Manhattan. Earlier, an Amsterdam friend who was born and raised in New York and happens to be visiting at the same time I am, takes me to a fashion show for the company he works for. About twenty models, all young and beautiful, show the latest designs of a global fashion brand. The public is young and beautiful too. Afterwards, during dinner, we are joined by his two brothers and friends (still living in NYC). One brother is about to get married. His girlfriend describes how she envisages her wedding day and who they have invited. He tells about the day they met. They were at the Jukebox, dressed as superheroes. She wore a Catwoman suit with leather gloves – her fingers sticking out. He was dressed up as the Green Hornet. His eyes sparkle and illustrate how blessed he feels to have met this super woman. Someone asks if they met on Halloween. “No. When I go out I always dress up as a superhero,” he confesses without shame. “I love superheroes. As a child I loved to go to school in different superhero outfits. And at St Marks, there are plenty of places where you don’t look silly going out dressed up, even in the middle of summer if you want to.” His brother makes a cynical remark, something along the lines of “You’re too old to be a superhero now.” But superhero brother doesn’t understand this at all: “Superheroes don’t age,” he states. Everybody laughs but he – he knows. Francis Ford Coppola has made a new film, the first he has directed in ten years. The man who racked up great successes like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation (and not-so-great movies like The Cotton Club, One from the Heart and Peggy Sue Got Married) had stopped directing films because he regarded himself as being too old. He preferred to speak of his children’s films and his pride in their work. Yet here it is, a new, Coppola-directed movie. The title: Youth Without Youth. Youth Without Youth tells the story of an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after bring struck by lightning, becomes young again. His body is restored to that of a 30-year-old man who is immune to the effects of time. However, due to his experiences and newly gained memories, he has wisdom. The film speaks to the longing many of us have: What if you could go back and start all over again and again, without losing the wisdom and experiences that come with age? In an interview, Coppola states that the script has made him young again. “I want to make this film the way a student would,” he says in the New York Times. I walk into a bookshop and on the back of some covers I see the faces of the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Both of them write and know that they are not only a form – a body – but that they are also and simultaneously consciousness: the Fountain from which Life emerges. Both of them are old; both look like young boys. I wonder: How will bodies look 100 years from now? Consciousness, the Fountain of Life, is endless. This is a Fountain that cannot dry up. If we all begin to embody the knowledge of consciousness then will age and death be no more than a thought? How will that knowing transform our bodies – our forms? The future superhero will not be a body with superpowers that end with death; the future superhero will be a body that knows and embodies endlessness. Superheroes don’t age. - less tagged:   hero   Manhattan   death   consciousness   Aronofsky   Coppola   body   NewYork    permalink  read: 4419  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Unity in diversity by Andre Platteel , September 4th

I’m in New York. The city of Woody Allen. I turn on the TV in my hotel room and watch Zelig, a mockumentary, or fictional documentary. For anyone who hasn’t seen it (you should), Allen plays the title character, Leonard Zelig, a man with the ability to transform his appearance so he blends in with the people around him. Put him with doctors and he becomes a doctor. Put him with overweight people and he starts piling on the pounds. Among Orthodox Jewish men, he sprouts a beard and his clothes transform into a black suit. To those around him, Zelig is the "human chameleon". To doctors, he’s a puzzle: no one understands how he can be constantly someone else. Enter Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), a psychiatrist, who establishes that the cause of Zelig’s condition is his overwhelming desire to ‘belong’. So overwhelming that it leads him to forget his own identity and assume that of the people around him. Zelig’s mind – his thoughts – determines his appearance, his physical form. Dr. Fletcher sets out to help Zelig trust his own identity. Who he is. It works, but there are problems. When Fletcher’s boss makes a casual remark about the weather, for example, Zelig doesn’t just disagree with him, he beats him up. Zelig’s self-trust is now so strong that he can’t accept other people’s opinions any more. It doesn’t take long before Zelig starts to feel the consequences: his whining, his insistence on being right, makes him unloved. No surprise then that his desire to be loved + more I’m in New York. The city of Woody Allen. I turn on the TV in my hotel room and watch Zelig, a mockumentary, or fictional documentary. For anyone who hasn’t seen it (you should), Allen plays the title character, Leonard Zelig, a man with the ability to transform his appearance so he blends in with the people around him. Put him with doctors and he becomes a doctor. Put him with overweight people and he starts piling on the pounds. Among Orthodox Jewish men, he sprouts a beard and his clothes transform into a black suit. To those around him, Zelig is the "human chameleon". To doctors, he’s a puzzle: no one understands how he can be constantly someone else. Enter Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), a psychiatrist, who establishes that the cause of Zelig’s condition is his overwhelming desire to ‘belong’. So overwhelming that it leads him to forget his own identity and assume that of the people around him. Zelig’s mind – his thoughts – determines his appearance, his physical form. Dr. Fletcher sets out to help Zelig trust his own identity. Who he is. It works, but there are problems. When Fletcher’s boss makes a casual remark about the weather, for example, Zelig doesn’t just disagree with him, he beats him up. Zelig’s self-trust is now so strong that he can’t accept other people’s opinions any more. It doesn’t take long before Zelig starts to feel the consequences: his whining, his insistence on being right, makes him unloved. No surprise then that his desire to be loved soon re-establishes itself and he falls back into his old ways. But this, too, isn’t the answer; in fact it creates so many problems that he has to flee the U.S. After a long search Dr. Fletcher finds Zelig in pre-World War II Germany. Zelig has embraced the Nazi Party. It’s there, the mockumentary voice-over declares, that Zelig can go about his life unnoticed. Like Zelig, the Nazis have abandoned their individuality, their trust in themselves, for a group ideal. Dr. Fletcher doesn’t give up, however. During a speech by Hitler, she manages to get Zelig’s attention and they escape in an airplane, being welcomed as heroes when they land back in America. After watching Zelig, a couple of questions bubbled into my head: How can you interpret your unique place on this planet – a place no one else can interpret and which can feel lonely at times – and at the same time accept the ‘places’ of others? Places and interpretations that differ from our own, sometimes to the point of being poles apart? Should we accept that we share a common cause with others who, like us, are trying to understand their place in the world? Doesn’t unity derive from our differences more than our similarities? Is togetherness really a form of unity in diversity? - less tagged:   Allen   NewYork   Zelig   body   patterns   Nazis   uniqueness   wholeness   connectedness    permalink  read: 4954  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

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June, 2010 Dutch Political Leaders Receive book Our World		May, 2010 Resistance Decadence New Book: Our World		April, 2010 Arrogance Naivety Ignorance		June, 2009 Mother of all memories
May, 2009 Come again, and again, and again		April, 2009 The Wolf		March, 2009 The three voices		January, 2009 Born to adore This Dancing with the Beloved
December, 2008 Listen carefully		October, 2008 A fragment of a circle God’s Gods You, me and everything else		September, 2008 Man with powers		August, 2008 The hidden promise Crazy for love
May, 2008 Dr. Feelgood What’s the limit of love		April, 2008 Spring Snow will fall The Cleaner		March, 2008 Motherless Child What I am made of Falling upwards Northern Lights		February, 2008 Glass-made-mind The outer layer of the mind Growing younger On Holy Ground
January, 2008 Watch for the wind to blow How is Diego Maradona doing? What are we guilty off? Everything is what is besides language The eagle and the condor flying together In the heart of Otherness		December, 2007 The man who loved too much The dark brightness The windmills of our mind To make two mountains one, gone Bigger than the stars		November, 2007 Act of passion Making love Life has no meaning Where the heart is Oneness is never the same		October, 2007 Mind blowing Becoming authentic Coloured Mind Hide and Seek Culture of fear The man on the bench The Swordsman
September, 2007 What is thinking? World happening Unity in diversity Smell no evil Going in all directions without beginning or end Alternative routes Superheroes don’t age No place like Utopia? Fog		August, 2007 The Wholeness of being Spirit through matter Looking in the mirror A new heart Is matter what matters? World of opinions. Spaciousness for a flower to grow