Column | Real birds and depict sorrow

We walked through a polder in Drenthe, sunny white light, yellow reeds, the colors as they are in the late winter if you already feel that spring is coming. We were filled with light and vastness, as if we were characters from Nescio. Cormorants were shouting in a tree, there was a birdwatcher with a telescope along the side of the road.

Have you ever seen a stirring, I asked my walking friend. He doesn’t. Maybe that birdwatcher there – but because of his telescope. The desire to see something with your own eyes is that satisfied? Not really I thought, it is whether you still haven’t done the observation when you see a bird in such a round. On the other hand: you are outside and you know that there actually sees that bird there in that reed, maybe you even hear him. Then it is an experience, more than a picture.

We talked about that, and also about the sadness you feel when Kees Bakels’ father dies, in Kees the boy, or at the death of Jet van Marle from Schoolidyles. Have they become experiences? Not like your ‘own’ experiences we found, although they have shaped you. Or maybe they have laid the foundation for the form of your own experiences.

It is difficult to determine what an ‘experience’ entails. If you go to the movies, you are sometimes deeply moved or shocked – there are films that I never dared to see for that reason, Funny Games From Michael Haneke for example. Just what I read about the film fulfills me with deep dismay, I would rather not have read about the cruel games of the two boys who killed an entire family, but apparently I think I tolerate that better than seeing it. That is ‘however’, even though it is a movie and therefore less real than real.

I heard someone screaming a few times screaming that was beaten, and that experience increases the fear of what I may see and fills what you actually see. Or reads. That is, among other things, why we find our own perception so important – although I have now removed myself very quickly from that innocent birdwatcher and his potential stirring.

But the question remains: do your experiences also from a book or from a movie? There is a scene in a book by Aleksandr Tisma in which a Nazi finishes two sisters in a concentration camp, one after the other, so that the second also has to see and hear – I don’t even want to write it down, I don’t want to read that scene back, I think it’s bad enough that it exists in me. Yet that ‘experience’ has to be because it is, it is different from the real one. My friend at least asked the effective question: « Can you get traumatized from a book or a movie? »

Your presentation world has been supplemented with sensations that you have not had yourself, but that still contribute to your ‘own’ experience, to your empathetic capacity too. As a result, you can better understand possible implications of the news, so that you can want to protect yourself or your fellow people.

And then the joy. You can also just chance that from a movie or from a poem. Is that ‘real’? I think in a certain way. But especially if you recognize something about it.

And never as real as that afternoon that white sky, that birdwatcher, the sound of water against a jetty.

To share

Mail the editors