Normally on a Tuesday morning, I’d catch the 7:57 ferry across the Ij to get to White Label on the Zonnenplein by 8:10. Coffee, perhaps a piece of banana bread, and I'd watch the young parents drift in as I get to work.
That was the soft plan last night.
But this morning arrived with no umff, no drive, the inner radar I use to tell me where to go kaput. Instead of sticking to the plan, I deviated into doing nothing at all.
The only thing I felt sure of was that I did not want to write about guns today.
Go . . . walk into the city. Something there will offer release, if not of this mood then at least from the couch.
But as I get ready, finally, to leave Mr. Dash sends me a Sujata Bhatt poem about walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. It is 1990 and she recounts the horrors she reads about in the paper and contrasts that with where she walks.
So wherever my radar is, Mr. Dash is out there on the wire.
The most striking stanza is this one:
In another section
of the newspaper I read
about the ever growing problem of refugees.
Who will take them in?
Especially the ones from Vietnam,
a favorite subject for photographers:
flimsy boats, someone’s thin arm in the way—
Who can forget those eyes?
and who can judge those eyes
that vision?
In Amsterdam, even a short walk will invariably take you over one of its 1000 bridges, each one a way to confirm the old cliche that one foot in front of another helps you cross over.
That’s one thing to say.
Another might be about vision generally, how Shakespeare’s theater taught us we could see with the same sense of self as the queen before the photograph, movies, television, and now phones recast our sense of realism and mediation. Certainly, since 1990 we see the eyes of others, and their vision, far more frequently, even if we forget them more quickly too, judge their vision as sport and entertainment.
I was old enough to read that paper too, in 1990. Likely I moved on from the pictures of the refugees to check the score of a game or look up a movie. Maybe I skimmed an article about how this Internet thing would change everything. I would have passed over tragedy to the happenings and curiosities of the day, as people do, telling myself I had direction.