It has been a bit of a whirlwind few months. It has of course been longer than that, but the last few months can act as a microcosm. Just expand, and amplify...
A few weeks ago I started writing, in situ, “Yesterday I arrived in Den Haag. I’m here for, first, a conference (work), then some more work; then, another few days of work. So, it’s a work trip. Yet I’m in the Netherlands. It’s an interesting city, in a Northern European way. It’s damp, grey, organized, curious, like a well-oiled machine. A week and a bit ago I was in Copenhagen (yes, I’m not getting much done at my new place of work….but more of that later…) for three days (of more work). That was the same as here, but somehow without actually being interesting. I tried to find it intriguing, warm, attracting, or endearing, but I couldn’t. It was cold, it has to be said, which may have coloured my judgement but, in the end, it was just grey. I worked, I saw some interesting things in the evenings. That was all sandwiched inbetween various aeroplanes and airports, and it all became a bit of a blur. It was only a week and a half or so ago and, even though I can clearly picture things, nothing much figures. A friend of mine once said, in the middle of a discussion, something I had to write down (she quizzed me lightly about why I was writing it down, but I just knew it would be extremely pertinent at some future point), which it was,
“It has all the ingredients to feel real, but it isn’t.”
That’s what I thought about Copenhagen. I think it is also true of Den Haag, yet the surreal intensity of the place, the literal and figurative ‘openness’ of the place, marks it out as, for the moment, not being like Copenhagen.
However, it’s also the case that Copenhagen came just a few weeks after a long trip to Madrid (more work…but with a couple of days of not-work either side…) and, ever since I visited it twice last year (April and June), I have fallen in love with it again, almost 25 years after living there for a year, and almost 20 after last going there, save for a day after getting back from a month in Cuba, so Madrid then was a bit like having the bends after deep-sea diving (which I have never done, incidentally, but I get the impression that the experience can be described in such terms…), so it doesn’t count….). After having just moved from one Mediterranean country (Lebanon) to another (Greece), Madrid fitted the pattern. I have, between June and a few weeks ago, spent three weeks in Toytown, Switzerland (actually it’s called Saas-Fee), a week in a town/village in Southern Germany, a couple of days in Paris and a over a week in La Loire, followed by Copenhagen, then ten days in The Hague, followed by another week in Southern Germany, so my references are a little scrambled at the moment but yet, the default sensors are set for warmth, la bonne vie, good food, unpredictability, and a lot less concrete than I am currently experiencing…”
I started writing all of that and, as is often the case, never really got around to finishing it. It’s one of those cases where life, reality (that which has all the ingredients and that which doesn’t….) overtakes, and what one wanted to stay gets lost in the moment….
At some point, I did (have to) stop and take stock of surroundings: three demonstrations, jet-black anarchists and not a few Molotov cocktails on the streets of Athens and, inbetween times, the daily detritus (work, shopping, living…). More or less a month of not travelling, and it all began to feel as if this staticity that most feel as normalcy felt like the most unreal thing in the world.
It’s now Boxing Day, and I find myself once again in Beirut, having had a brief stint in Amman. Back ‘on the road’, as it were. Not exactly George Clooney in ‘Up In The Air’, but remembering where certain things are in airports that one hasn’t been in for a while is unsettlingly settling. I haven’t really been able to catch up with myself in the last few months, and haven’t been able to have anything other than a hyperreal handle on my own life, let alone life itself.
Being back in a place I lived in for so long, after only leaving it a few months ago, is odd. I am trying to find it strange, and I should, but somehow it doesn’t, and I can’t. The metaphysics of it are a little peculiar: it feels like one of those 3rd person ‘X-Box’ games, where one is meant to be the person that one is controlling, but what you are actually visualizing is constantly behind you. You are in control (bar the things that one can never control, of course…), and the life that you are living is undoubtedly yours yet, still,
“It has all the ingredients to feel real, but it isn’t.”
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