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

Happy Sinterklaas.

Oh, and by the way:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/05/black-pete-race-netherlands

Enjoy.

- Thuy

This is my ode to the azc Alkmaar.

Prologue

Strange are the days, stranger the tides.

I.

I tell people at home that I’m working at a refugee centre.

Sometimes that makes them think of me as an angry social activist.

In fact, my work involves making music with cool people, and eating free food. Go, figure.

So, I ended up teaching violin, regardless of the fact that I haven’t touched one for years. Apparently, learning to play the violin doesn’t have to be about practicing scales and being fascist about off-key notes.

Intermezzo

No one will ever be truly capable of knowing the full extent of human suffering. It doesn’t make it a secret for one to keep though; nor is it the kind for one to share.

II.

There was a brawl last week, a rather nasty one at that. Rehearsal was fun until it wasn’t, and, guess what, the Middle East is not the homogeneous Republic of Islam Fundamentalists and of Women in Burqa.

And when being away hurts, but being home is outright deadly, then national pride or the lack thereof is a button you really, really shouldn’t push.

Understanding is not approval, and this is not the time for judgements.

I spent the night reading about the history of Afghanistan. There is not much else one could do, really.

Epilogue

Let us spend a silent moment to cherish the U.S. citizens’ sense re: 6^th of November, and be appreciative of the fact that the nuclear winter is, hereby, postponed.

- Thuy

intro

when i was a kid, one of my faves was for a Sunday lunch to have plum dumplings - not only for their gorgeous taste, but because it was a family process to make them. sitting next to the kitchen table at the age of six, packing the pieces of those blue fruits into potato coat, I would have never thought that the first round of plum dumplings made on my own would be served to a few benedictine monks in the Netherlands...

...but it happened, it happens, i am living now next to the Northern Sea with a few catholic sisters, a brother, and Thuy (- you may have already known her otherwise read the previous posts they worth it. ohooo, by the way, do not expect from my entries a similiar style - she knows how to write!).

what is: dwelling in a huge complex of a monastery, equipped by a good bike and a nice romantic attraction to farm life, i have found myself in the exact middle of nowhere (though the sea is acting somewhat like a border). going out to the sand dunes i have an impression that i am standing in the center of the universe. i guess it is just a silly joke of the clouds lining up in a circle tricking me to feel that. however it is, not a bad state at all.

so, what is the reason that one, this one has left all her life (a nice life) and Tolsztoj (my mongrel dog) back in Hungary to devote a year to volunteering at a Dutch convent? amongst many, the main one: is to experience silence in all the ways. a silence which can manifest by words, by the sound of rain, by the smile of the sisters as well as by real physical silence. a silence that is hard to understand but easy to feel - and sometimes the other way round. and a silence that will hopefully accompany all my life.

from this point of view, my situation is quite advantageous. i have left behind all the anxiety of my beloved city, my schedules, duties and roles -  most of the activities that i had found necessary to sustain a life. this gives an exceptional opportunity for a European to face with a deeper existence day by day. living open and simple.

otherwise, do not think that i am sitting still in a meadow with cows doing nothing other than meditating. there are several nice tasks to do as a volunteer. activities that hold real meaning to me. if you are still interested, follow my posts, you have a chance to get to know more about them later.

ildi

Of Gods and ___

“Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot.” 

Richard Rorty

When I was six, I brought home a children’s Bible, distributed at school – beautiful stuff with gorgeous illustrations. My dad saw it, and told me that Gagarin was up there, and found nothing. And that was that – my first, rather one-sided discussion about religion.

What followed was years of secular education and, with that, the systematic deconstruction of faith, belief, and religion. I did get a hold of the Bible though, a ragged copy of the first Hungarian translation, but the concept of the holy keeps escaping me, and what remains are stories of gods and men.

It’s awfully difficult to (lie if one doesn’t know the truth) discuss the spiritual, having been indoctrinated with post-structural ideas. I have a fleeting sense of its meaning, but it always stays out of grasp. I have no god: I have no science to oppose him to. I have no belief, for I do not care for the dichotomy between real and mystical.

It’s awfully difficult to discuss anything transcendental, and, for the first time, I experience it as a struggle. This is not my discourse – my language is inadequate, and my vocabulary falls short. For the first time, I am out of words.

Before I committed to this project, a friend had told me it would be difficult, which is why I needed it. To put it quite simply: this is not the place where being a smartass gets you friends. Academia gets you only so far – and then you’re facing people who’ve been through hell and back, and you should be there to offer a hand, and it simply won’t do to tell them, dude, your identities are so fragmented. I will look them in the eye, and I will find that I have absolutely nothing to say to them.

So, I’m here to learn, and humility pulls no punches. My brain feels like a panzer tank. 

So what is inner peace anyways? 

I will embrace all doubt, insecurity, confusion, assess and reassess. It is time for reconciliation, I think; let this be my credo for the following months, and then pain shall be my rite of passage.

- Thuy

God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children -- less.
But adults he pities not at all.

He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.

But perhaps
He will have pity on those who love truly
And take care of them
And shade them
Like a tree over the sleeper on the public bench.

Perhaps even we will spend on them
Our last pennies of kindness
Inherited from mother,

So that their own happiness will protect us
Now and other days.

Yehuda Amichai