Column | What it is like to be here, now

How the village is there! I want to take my phone out of my pocket to take a picture, but still see it. Nothing of what will now be visible to me in that photo, it will show the bare field, a piece of asphalt road, a few village houses and still fairly bare trees along the street. On the other hand, I see shimmering greenery, just as it can be seen in the spring, the trees along the street in transparent shirts, behind it the sun -protected mill – I see spring, a swamp of small spots. My eyes wander over it and make all this to an experience for me, well, a little one, such a delighting small sensation that you sometimes have on your daily walk.

The photo would be the truth of the camera that the mill places so far away that it is not there, which gives the field full pounds while I look over it. What I want is a painting of this sight, something impressionistic, may also be pretty abstract, I want the feeling of spring that your senses penetrates with light and smell and color and the soft air on your skin and the silence of the morning, I want everything I already have now. Homesick for the present.

How easy we sometimes believe that all the equipment of ours knows better, as if the photo would really be true, and not my sensation. Although a good photographer could capture a lot of these impressions in his photo, different from me.

Why do you so often long for an image, but the right words would also be welcome, a poem, if you experience something that can very well put it without extra words and images? To hold on of course. But also: to deepen the experience, to get even more out of it.

When I see a painting that records something of such a moment, sometimes a Benner with fresh green and bright blue and lit white, like a clear spring day, or a set table under a linden of Bonnard, sunlight spoting on the tablecloth – then such an image arouses a huge desire to be there and it seems to be better at the same time.

What do I want to know. What is it like to be me now here?

You better want to know what it is like to be someone else, not here, but in other circumstances, I grumbled well and sincere against myself. I think so very often, at least, try that, but how to imagine, really imagine that this village here with its glittering and his mill, his sometimes ugly, sometimes quite beautiful houses in a mess after an air attack, that the roof of the tower with extremely violence had come down, that you see nothing about the house of the neighbors. Or from your own house. I walked outside, but where is my husband? The panting panic with which you would run to the place, nothing in you would ask for poetry, you would scream or pray oh god oh god don’t let it be true oh god …

And the dust would lie down, and reality would reveal itself in all its ram pood and you would remember when you walked there on the Molenweg, the spring morning on which you didn’t want to take a picture. How it was like.

To share

Mail the editors