Television

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	Nederlands Dream 22-03-2003
	1 A little bit older people bought a television from the Macro, or from an other supermarket. The instructions, a fat booklet and some pieces of paper, are lying on the table. Something is wrong with the set, and they asked me to have a look at it.
	2 I go upstairs, to an older woman, and she turns in bed. It is next to the window, overlooking the sea. It is as if the room is located on the beach. I turn in next to the woman and caress her arm. "Oh yes, but not like that eh", she says. After all it is an enjoyable situation.
	3 There was some money at their disposal to pay the TV. Euros in four different envelopes. I open one of them, and small papers appear, and a gold coin with indefinite denomination. Euros with a little hole.
	Free Association 22-03-2003 In the first year electronics we had to make a drawing about 'technique'. It should represent the basic elements of modern technique, en what it meant for us and for the future. Then I made a drawing looking just like to the picture above. Instead of the cat on the lap of the woman I drew a plant, Sanseveria, in the background. "Woman's tongues", in Dutch. The teacher asked me what kind of bullshit I put onto the paper. I said: "From our living room we can see the whole world, thanks to 'technique', something not possible in the past, or at least very difficult". Mister Teacher was satisfied.
	In one of the years of secondary school we had to construct 'sentences', so asked the teacher of Dutch. I remember always the same one: "While people in the past lived round the church, now they live in the world". Mister Teacher Sir was very satisfied. I never found out his interpretation of that sentence. My own interpretation then I know a little bit now. It is as if I stand with my nose up to the window pane, looking out for my aunt coming back from her work, hoping she would take me along with her.
	Obviously I put myself in a box every time, or in a cote, looking through the vent-holes to the outside world, hoping for an escape or deliverance (salvation perhaps). The pigeons are set free at 7 o'clock from Arras, or else they have to wait there: "Dourdan, cloudy, waiting". Information for the pigeon racers on Sunday morning. My father listened every Sunday, and sent his pigeons for the race every time, and sat, lay, stood, was, waiting very often for his birds to come back home. Until his pigeons arrived and he could walk to the pigeon cafe with his clock to carry off his prize, and to hang around there for a wile too.
	Surprising as it is, my father did everything possible to get them efficiently trained, fast, healthy, proud ... to make them fly prizes amongst the rest of the flock, not only around the church in the village, but in the surrounding area as well. They not only went to France, but sometimes even to Barcelona. He was right in being proud of his pigeons which were often among the winners. In regard of me this was a little bit more difficult. In the third year of secondary I (once) was the first of the class, the very winner with a pile of books and even so much compliments when the yearly proclamation was held. My father was in the hall, somewhere at the back, wearing his brewery-duster - not having much time, as he said. He also said, later on, he wept when he heard my name as the first and when I got my prize. Why on earth he stood there weeping? He should have been glad, I thought. For his winning pigeons I never saw him weeping.
	One or two years earlier I wanted to have a new bicycle. I rode with my mother's ramshackle cast-off then. My father said: "If you do the best you can, and, you are the first of the class, then you get a new bike". When we reached the stage, my mother argued that I also should be smart enough then to realize, that it was not the right moment now to pay for a bike, because they had a house to pay off, or most probably had plans for a new one, and that this was far more important, you see. There my bike was gone.
	I imagine my father indeed was proud about me, and glad I did the best I could, but he could not handle that himself. Winning a prize at a race results in social contact, with the connotation hanging around in cafes and drinking. My mother did not want to have anything to do with it, and my father, who knew the way quite well, was kept on the right rein by her. Pa could not manage ma, because he had been terrorized by his mother (and sister) as a child, and because his father died early, and because I like to find a reason for it. When my father, after an evening of playing card, or at the bowling or the archery, won an enormous turkey and brought it home, my mother asked: "Where am I to put that now"? Nothing was ever good enough. Of course my father took part in the game by for example not winning or earning a lot of money, or by choosing his social contacts in the local cafes instead of something more substantial.
nematode television	Perhaps it is not even important what sort of social contact my father preferred, if at least he had been proud of it, without accepting (or pretending) the feelings of guilt delivered by my mother. In this way it was not possible for me to be proud together with him. I always had the impression that his activities hadn't any value, not even his professional achievements. So I could not appreciate my own efforts, not even when I was publicly treated like a king. My mother in addition told me that the teachers 'allowed' me to be the winner, because the other boy, now the second, had been winner the two years before, see, and that the friars perhaps had their eye on me, to draft me into the brotherhood. The dissection of the nematode (worm) in the first year biology, was in view of the possible social contact far to dangerous, the reparation of television sets just acceptable. In the first case I had to outrun my father substantially (pull out his staff, as grandpa said), and make him weep much harder for everything he did not get or grasp in his life, and overturn my mother and let her down by buttering up to some strange fraternity.
	The fragment in the dream about the beach and the woman then. When I was about 10 years old, I sometimes, when it was warm enough, slept with an open window, and then, when the wind blew from the right quarter, could hear the noise of the surf just before going to sleep. Divine music. In misty weather I happened to hear the foghorns from the passing ships, a far plaintive and ever returning deep sound, as if it came from the belly of the earth. To what destination in the world did they sail, this ships, where did they come from? Like a ray of sunshine and the color of a flower, seen through the bars of a prison. Like the smell of freshly baked pancakes when you are starved. One of our class wanted to become captain (of a boat). I was not allowed to agree with it, because of never being at home with wife and children (or mother), because of rough people and, what not all happens in those harbors after several months aboard. Yet I mused on it many times, staring at the horizon of the sea, wordlessly thinking.
	Ca 12 years. Plankton, the shrimp-like animal in the left picture is regularly studied by biologists for example. Professionally the beasts are fished up by means of a fine-mesh funnel-shaped net with a reservoir at the end. The water leaks through the net and the organisms get right into the pot. Students make it with fine tissue, pieces of wire, a small tube and a cork. Excellent material, and I made and used it too, to look at the small animals under my microscope after having caught them on the beach, in the water just beyond the surf. My father was not interested, and my mother slightly amused, because she found it dirty things altogether. My imagination is tickled by the right picture, as if it is something with panty's. Memories about dirty old feelings constructed around tights from the undercarriage of a woman, used to catch dirty beasts, that's all you can dream about. It is like looking at sperm-cells, what in fact I did once in a while.
	From the sperm on the beach to the bed of an old woman, then. When I slept at my grandparents' home, ca 4 years old, I could turn in next to my granny, when grandpa was off to his work. Granny lay down in her bed very often because she was ill, there was something wrong with her heart. Angina pectoris. I woke up early, hoping that grandpa was gone away. I nestled tight to her, then. I still feel her arm, wrapped in a soft silky pink night-affair. She had a bad breath too and a big bump next to her nose, but I did not bother my head about that. It was warm and intimate, and I can't remind me something sexual. Sexual feelings came later on, when I was ten and she very ill. She had to go to the toilet in her bedroom, on the pot, and had difficulties to get back in her bed. Once, when she turned in again, I looked under her nightgown and saw something black, a black hole I should say now, because I did not see anything more than a sort of dankness. My thoughts however were rose-colored enough to burn a big black hole in my little soul. I found myself the only ugly boy in the world having in mind the wish to look under the skirts of his ill grandma, producing dirty feelings in addition. Feelings, not thoughts or fantasies. The presence alone of a 'thing' was enough to link to indecent manners, a guilty conscience and a turned-up nose of my mother, and the deadly sins from the church and the school. I thought the pure-hearted did not suffer at all from this things. Suffering from in the sense of sexual associations on seeing nude sex organs.
	Or associations with the body of a woman, with skin and bad breath and black holes, on seeing a woman. Miraculous how other people think about the Holy Virgin Maria then. Once I played with the idea, and even dreamed, I had an apparition, like on the picture, and I was happy with it too, but even then I felt guilty for letting my mother down for a minute. The box had no vent-holes, nor spy-holes, and just contained television sets to look at the world like Ma wanted it, at Her. No body, no saint, just a nose turned-up in disgust.
	Then we arrive at the department of the money. Something different of course. When the pigeons didn't work that much any longer, because of the diminished fitness of my father, he applied himself to stamps and coins. In fact I no longer stayed at home then, and so it was not of great importance for my emotional education. Golden coins he had too, and he once sold some of them to give me the money because I was in financial hot water. Difficult to understand why parents are ready to loose something of themselves in favor of their children. Now I have my own children, and a granddaughter, I understand it a little bit better. Now I am at the other side of the desk. Coins with holes. My uncle Wise, the husband of the sister of my father, often mentioned 'nuts with holes', something my father called 'shitty' business. You buy something, and then you see there is a fair amount wrong with it. He hoped I should have been able to look after myself, having studied and so, and I earned next to nothing then. But that was much later. What was it before I was twelve? Probably I had the feeling then that it was my fault, seen through the eyes of Ma, Pa did not earn enough for her to make ends meet.
	The outermost franks are older then those in the middle, themselves not the most recent coming before the Euro. How things fit together, I don't know very well, and I should ask it to my father, but yes, he is no more there. When I asked Uncle Wise, with capitals, then he always knew the answer, because there was no doubt in his words. When I asked my father, with small letters, then he knew it too, and he knew that he knew it, and he gave me the information I needed, but it was just as if he didn't know it, or as if his knowledge was not the matter. My father was not important, seen through the lens of the others, mounted in the spectacles he had on his nose, or seen through his own eyes, on the television of the others, or, with his personal feelings from when he was born, tenderly cared for as if it were a delicate flower, cherished by himself and his surroundings, until he became a .. my Pa.