Études

1.

There is nothing gentle about the winter here.

2.

There is this thing in the EVS, the Youthpass, and it is talked about like the Resurrection: in mentions, vaguely portentous terms, and no one ever really knows anything.

It is, purportedly, the list of capacities that one manages to acquire during the EVS program.

The keyword is non-formal learning, and the list of competences, starting with obscure concepts like “communication in mother and foreign tongue”, and ends with the similarly fuzzy “cultural awareness and expression”.

I am not even sure why I think about this now, but the whole thing makes me feel indistinctly uncomfortable.

3.

They say that the sad truth about all this is that you may be pretty and smart, but that will not necessarily make you a good person.

I think the only sad truth about all this is that the concept of good has run out of substance in our postmodernist times.

4.

The thing I learnt that will not be on any certificate: to reconcile postmodernist thinking with religiosity, new age spiritualities and activism.

The latters are in fact so similar that it is rather disconcerting.

5.

My friend’s third appeal for status was denied.

I don’t think I should ever learn to cope with this one.

6.

Everyone with some academic background tells me that the place where I live is an ethnographic goldmine. I did start writing up some kind of a furtive clandestine field note, but the thing is that life here is actually quite mundane, so doing anything of sorts is pretty difficult.

But: I started a research project with the refugee centre, and I am very much excited. There will be proposals and methodology and results and conclusions, and I will be going around collecting stories legitimately. I don’t think it will contribute anything to my “character development” by me overcoming a “personal challenge”, but “becoming a good person” doesn’t speak much to me on these terms, so I don’t really mind.

7.

The hearsay is that the picturesque Egmond Binnen where we reside has a brazen nightlife with what you might call a pub culture, so Ildi and I ventured in town at night with all the swag of nameless revolver heroes after having watched some subversive neo-Western haze. We had fun.

8.

I seriously intend to write something informative for future volunteers. You know, we carry on, our present lives, our broken Dutch.

- Thuy

dear Indian,

i feel the lack of our cancelled meeting already. i am still talking to you sometimes in my head - now i try to convert a part of it into written text. hm. perhaps it is even better that i can share pieces of the chaos in my mind that i am continuously trying to organize only now, since i can give account of a basic change happening these days in my attitude towards perception.

to make it clean-cut, i have got into my stride to perform all my plans and tasks. i do not wait for myself  to be mature, prepared and well-skilled anymore. i wake up in the morning and it is just somehow natural that my day becomes so structured by its end without the smallest effort of constructing it -  i find it entertaining.

taking it by and large, my attention is divided into three more or less equally present projects (i do not like this word but now i am too lazy to figure out a proper alternative for it).

in this frosty weather one can hardly feel, but the spring is closer and closer, the time when we will start creating our garden and glasshouse in the yard of the monastery. i have no idea about cultivation. in turn, i have great wishes. this fact presses me to start an investigation on the related methods and techniques.

in the case of the kitchen garden i plan to construct a permacultural site with native species of plants and animals which needs to be planned carefully in the beginning, but becomes almost completely self-sustaining with time. I guess you know the system, but if you have some free time (i know that you rarely do) check this site: http://www.green-shopping.co.uk/ebooks/free-ebooks.html . this afternoon i'm gonna check the farmers in the neighbourhood, in the hope i find someone who is working with permaculture here. we have a common ground, soil and weather features - their experience is most precious. and i love to chat with farmers, indeed. ripping company.

the greenhouse: along with the plants i want to put fish inside. this set-up is the aquaponics that i was talking about to you in Toldi last time. if i really happen to start it, i will write you how that is going.

my other focus is on the work within the refugee camp. we have a lot of fun with the children in the open handcraft workshops, though we communicate in Dutch that is not my second language in fact. we have got to like each other. i have thought of inviting them for some afternoons to work with us in the garden. or rather playing around in the yard.

after discussing it with the sisters it seems that we, volunteers can be a link between the camp and the convent. i am glad that the community of the monastery is open to be involved in activities with the refugees though it is not that all clear yet exactly how. it is something that we have been working out these days.

i discovered after having started to work with these people that i have got to be committed to their case. it is something that just happened. i feel responsible.

the third subject of my focus is a concept that i have been working with in the ceramic workshop. it is related to fish with human heads. but for now this is all i want to say about it.

well, i got bored with writing. but you know that i have never really been fond of it. yep, one more thing... in this past few years that we have known each other i was rather motivated by the activities without taking care of their outcome. i discovered that i am interested in the results again. 

i hope it is going fine with you. write me when you feel like it. please email me your postal address - there has to be at least one postcard that has success in reaching you.

big hug,

ildi

ps. i am still not able to stand on the board.

This one doesn't have a title.

There is a certain inconceivability that pushes at my consciousness: a challenge, a demand – a constant quality.

Budapest is rumbling with student protests, but the drones of discontent fail to reach me.

This silence is a loaded one though, I should think. It is a wail, sometimes, a roar.

Someone once said, the suffering ones are without voices. Give them bread – give them words. Everything outside the discourse, by definition, cannot be conceived of; therefore, wails become real when are moulded into linguistic structures, given meaning, provided author and audience, congruity with the cultural history and the social narrative.

I hear many stories though. And stories beget stories beget narratives from which discourses (lives) evolve. There are some about fragmented pasts; others about resettlement and restitution. Also: fathers and sons, brothers, lovers. Man is a pair of limbs, broken bones, a huge existential void, and Meaning always residing just out of grasp.

I have nothing to add to the margins. Just that: right, maybe it’s true and everyone suffers a bit, and let us "convert neurotic suffering into an acceptance of everyday common misery".

But, there is this,

My dearest Sixsmith;

Unfinished is maybe just evolving and there is space for the unspoken.

I don’t know much about gods, but I reckon that ineffability is no joke.

 - Thuy