Why will bombs soon be fired at Brussels? Why not? Things never belong to you until they found you
‘And? Has anything else happened in the world?’ we normally ask the other person at home when he is scrolling on his phone. It’s an actual question to do, the actual thing to do, actually something happens.
The answer to the question is always ‘no’. Not that nothing happened, timelines and newspapers are full of important something that have happened in the world, terrible accidents and corruption and births and dreams and indignant neighbors who instead of suddenly look out on a blind wall of meters high. It is only possible to start with a hierarchy, baked puff pastry in a layer is ready to use.
It is precisely this incompatibility that preoccupies me when I stroll past the antique shops in the Blaesstraat on Sundays, looking for a good table, for the writing studio that R. and I are in. The neighborhood is busy, everywhere people are having lunch on terraces, sipping coffee or beer. The atmosphere is so freely elated that it makes me uncomfortable.
‘Hello everyone?!’ i want to do. ‘There is nothing to celebrate, there is a lot going on in the world!’ But I’m sure they know that too, there’s really no one – except deniers and little children who need to be spared – not taken seriously at the moment, the idea that we are teetering on the edge of an abyss, Europe has pieces on the chessboard war and a climate catastrophe is approaching that will wipe all pawns off the table.
I am amazed at all this worry and ambiguity floating cheese cubes in the sun, and at the same time I am clear. I’m against writing fun here, and I can’t read it either, how every table I come across projects onto one of the photos I saw this week, inside a bombed-out building, tumbled out after joists collapsed. All I like would be that they should leave, even if that is a vain thought, wish that there would soon be fired at Brussels, but then why not? Things never receive you until they receive you, and you cannot buy them off by imagining them beforehand.
I smile kindly at the couple who answer the possibilities of a coat rack, and bang, they get a shot in the neck. The carafes of wine, the croque-monsieurs and the omelettes also exploded.
Weren’t we always good at this, at ambiguity, at ambiguous life? It has never been anything other than against your better judgement, than a lightly burning look in the dark so that one fairy-tale character can say to another: there, in the distance in the forest, is a little house for shelter.