Jaap's
Paintings & Poems & Ideas
Jaap is retired,
and now cooks and paints and writes,
and enjoys life to the full
Jacob's Ladder
Meditating on a visualisation of the way
The trappings of creation
Morning Scene
Two chairs in their pyjamas
with the morning paper
on a sun-drenched terrace
One leans a bit on the other
They look reasonably happy
Don’t they?
The assumptions about the World
Our assumptions about the World Are formed in childhood We tell ourselves childhood stories About who we are and Who they are Our assumptions know not The real self knows Knows who you are Knows the stories as dust or clouds Or whorls in nothingness Knows you, my Maker, Knows me, my Maker A meter above the crown of my head The real self starts and extends Light-years into eternity Where among the stars Deep dreams unfurl Into eternal friendships
Some recent moments of import
When watching a TV-interview from the sixties with JRR Tolkien, he suddenly looked up straight at me, saying: ‘It is all about death, of course.’ I immediately stopped watching to let this sink in, and have since refused to look it up again. Tolkien was referring to the omnipresence of death in his childhood and his early manhood. My childhood does not remotely resemble that: in my early life death was something that happened to others. But this funny moment did wake me up to the notion that my vision of ‘star-travel reversed’ causing nausea was about my fear of death. Not so for my 75-year-old self, who envisions the utter blackness as welcoming and caring. * When I was painting the star-painting, I was trying to pinpoint the ‘hands-off moment’, when any continuation would not really make anything better, and thus no further improvements are likely. When to decide: leave all the imperfections be. So I went to sleep over it, and in my dream someone said she had a brother who knew an alien, and she would inquire about this picture. I was then shown a bridge being built over a stream that would extend way over its bed with heavy rainfall. The material being used was big Lego-blocks. One of the blocks did not quite fit, so some bit of thin cardboard was inserted at one end of it. I then got to view this on a map where the piece of cardboard was marked with a green spot, and arrows indicating a constant pressure on the bridge structure. And I was made to understand that at some moment in time the construction would cave at this precise point. To the alien it looked ugly. He then showed me things that he thought beautiful, mostly seashells and conches brought by my relatives out of Indonesia long ago. He said if you want to depict cosmic architecture, this is not the way! I woke up to realise that my picture was awful, probably beyond rescue. It took many days of waiting to make the final alterations that removed the objection the alien had had ... * That the objection had been nullified did not render my picture beautiful, like the conches were. It was just no longer disgusting. Too many different perspectives were being mixed here for the alien to show any particular interest. But to me the light of the ‘stars’ lit up tenfold after these changes, and the colours became more telling, more shiny, more wholesome ... And the recipient of the painting ‘saw’ a part of the painting that meant something to him personally. That part had not struck me as of particular interest. To me it is finished, I cannot improve on it. But he is still in the flow, and my prayers are for that to last ... * Does that mean this painting could die? Yes, it does! When the colours shine no more it can join the rubbish heap for all I care. Just let us see what happens!
What if?
What if a civilisation survived for millions of years? That would not be impressive, would it. Bipedal apes have survived 7 or 8 times that ... So let us step it up: billions of years. Imagine a civilisation that has overcome all the ups and downs in its initial stages, and has reached a stability, an inner harmony, that looks like lasting forever. Is that at all conceivable? And if it is at all conceivable, what does it take to reach such harmony? What would the social structure look like? Economy? Demographics? Medical care? Life duration? What if a population has overcome fear, competition, even death? Would the speed of life go up, or slow down? Boiling point? Or the slow processes of rock-formation? It would hardly be life as we now know it, would it? Would there be languages, communication, emotions, relationships? Music? Or would these needs have been outgrown? Would we even call it life? The concepts we use in our present situation, such as civilisation, culture, development, growth, universality, individuality, origin and fulfilment, circularity ... Would any of such concepts be even remotely relevant? Personnally I wonder about friendship, something that crops up unasked for in all my thoughts and dreams and speculations, in short: my musings. There are a lot of objects floating about in our universe, there is a lot of radiation. Is our universe alive, breathing, whispering, listening, caring? And since this my question is utterly unanswerable, is it a choice? My choice? The human choice? How I view humans? Yes, that rings true to me: friendship floating about in the melee of other objects. That is me! Very mortal. Passing on the candle to who come after me, whosoever may be willing ...
Fever dream of a 7-year-old
As a child, somewhere in the 1950s, going to sleep I would zoom in on the glitter that gradually appeared centre focus. I would then enter this glitter, body, bed and all, and get immersed in a world of colour and light and music. The light would be the stars, who were my friends. The colours were everywhere, at times just transparently, at times blocking the starlight. The music was of the street organ type. Medleys of popular tunes, delivered with a lot of Boom-Cha’s, as well as the rattle of metal money-boxes that the organists would shake before the passers-by, asking for their copper coins. Inside those boxes there were little metal chains to give the impression (when shaken) that there were already coins there, so you would not be out of step adding some of yours. It was a standard pastime that I was treated to when the lights were switched off in my dark attic room. As these are a child’s memories, they are not precisely ordered. Rather more randomly. One of these is a bout of pseudo-measles with 41.6 fever. All memories are sort of swimming about in the pond that I now call my early childhood. So I cannot tell when guilt entered this picture. I can only assume that it came after I had tortured the cats. Tortured is too heavy, teased is too little. But I caused them inconvenience very deliberately. Growing up in a large family with a female dog and a lot of cats, cats were among my first teachers. I say this because now that I am 75, I think that my mother could not possibly have supervised all of my upbringing. The cat’s eye! At some point I became aware of a cat’s eye seeing me, and knowing all about me! Suddenly I could no longer play around going among the stars, because the cat knew. And I realised the cat could see me, could see the very fibre of my thoughts. And that was the end of my star-play. It must have happened during high fever, because I remember more than one street-organ playing shrilly and frantically at the same time. The thing is I started to fall backwards, causing me an unbearable nausea. I went straight down in stages, boom! Down another, boom! At excellerating pace, while the light condensed into a far-away pinpoint, fading as I fell. It felt totally horrible. From then on, when the glitter appeared before my eyes at light-out, I would go No! No! No! And never again have I been capable of entering the glitter ... In the picture you will not find the cat’s eye, and the colours have been adjusted to fit my present project. Nor do you see the rust-coloured metal structures down which my bed rolled down to hell. But seeking a connection with the text that was ‘given’ to me somewhere in the early 2000s ‘The assumptions about the World’, this was the best I could come up with.
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