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?
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.
Bubbles, a new lens on the dynamics of cultural change
When two people join their imagination they create a bubble together, and the direction they take is called the Way. So ‘I’ plus ‘you’ makes a world. It is brittle, it does not last. Their way peters out, and changes into something else.
But others may see the way they’ve made and swell their numbers. The bubble inflates, and is more durable. So here the order is changed: first there’s a way, and then come not only ‘I’ and ‘you’, but also ‘we’ and ‘they’.
A time will come that so many people are joining the bubble, that the Way stops meaning the same for different people: sub-groups now form within the bubble, like chambers. Crossing from one chamber to another becomes increasingly difficult.
It also happens that the membrane between two chambers pop, and they merge. Some mergers keep accessing ‘foreign’ chambers, and get bigger and bigger, until at one point they, in their turn, pop. This must happen. It’s not a question of ‘if’, but a question of ‘when’.
One may visualise this process by imagining soap beaten into water. The caveat here is that someone inside a bubble cannot imagine anything outside the bubble: such is the nature of the bubble. So neither can it be aware of the Witness, who is part of the person, but outside the bubble.
The Witness it is who connects a person with both the stellar- and the underworld, and also to presences in the wider world of men. The Witness cannot directly inform a person in a way that contradicts a person’s bubble-knowledge, but there are indirect ways.
You may have dreams, déjà-vu’s, sudden inspirations, any apparition that can be explained away afterwards in familiar logical worldly terms is possible. The terms here refer to 3D plus Space and Time. The epitaph ‘logical’ here, however, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Only ‘familiar’ does …
It is baffling sometimes to see really good scientists formulating laws that explain reality, at the same time stubbornly adhere to familiar perspectives that they call ‘common sense’, which totally contradict their findings. Schizophrenically saying that their scientific findings ‘do not make sense’!
In our familiar world we humans are in perennial contact with other perspectives without crediting them. We think we are in charge of cats, but cats don’t think so: they adopt humans. Similar with dogs. What of crickets, what are they chirping about? What with bird calls? Water-wells? The weather?
Different cultures ‘know’ things that we don’t. A drumbeat guiding their feet, a shaman with a snare-drum, rattling sea-shells. Warriors going before the mast, calming hurricanes with their spear. Legendary leaders who are over 30 meters tall. People projecting mountain-ranges and song-lines.
Such cultures may employ other senses to grapple with the world: tongues, ears rather than eyes, smell, feet, abdomen. Many will navigate the world in wildly different ways from us, telling stories that we scoff at, calling them ‘primitive’ or ‘superstitious’. We do so without any firsthand experience.
Until recently most ‘other’ cultures were outcompeted through western material goods and technology. Now, in the middle of the 2020s it is clear that the west is going downhill fast, politically and economically. At last a significant section of the public is turning away from materialistic concerns.
There is a lot of fear, of course. Our world was never a safe place; even the bourgeois well-to-do circles harboured many secret perils. Curiosity has awakened everywhere, and new paths are being travelled, new friendships sought. Old scars are not nursed as much and new perspectives loom …
So where are the bubbles and the membranes now? They’re so hazy. Are they actually there? Of course not: 3D + time +space is extremely limited. What do flies with 400 eyes see? What about the colours we don’t know about? What about 20 Million crickets who in concert boil water instantly?
There are many more dimensions than we can even imagine. Of course the ‘aliens’ have been with us all along. The world of your mum and dad is no longer there for you, their memory a melancholy song. We’re on our own now, it seems. We’re out of our reckoning, we might be lost altogether …
Fortunately nothing is ever lost. It changes only. At an increasing pace. What goes through a person’s mind when he realizes he taught his children nothing that they would need? He’ll hopefully find that he taught other things that he didn’t know he was teaching. The Way is always forward.
We’ve come a long way since the Neandertals, who revered and sheltered their old men - the rememberers and instructors - who guarded and passed on traditions for thousands of years. Our family memory does not reach beyond three generations, if that. Our survival is dubious.
Their survival techniques were connected over vast geographical areas, with communal hunts every two generations, exchanging brides and new knowledge carefully evaluated by the council of elders. A scarce populace of small groups (15 - 30 individuals), averaging an age of about 20 per generation.
Their knowledge was deep, using kinnine (birchbark) and even antibiotics (mushrooms), levallois technology, hafting, coocking, preserving food, medicinal use of plants, techniques to build shelters and make fire in an instant, and going deep underground for some of their rituals.
When their connectivity was finally broken by a volcanic eruption, they were doomed. Pockets of survivors, both Neandertals and AMH, many of which went rogue, were wiped out during the height of the last Ice Age, presenting rather a sorry picture to modern-day archeologists.
So now it is us. We put our old people into care-homes, and invest in our children. Looking forward with blind eyes and exhausting our resources, choosing leaders who put up a show of responsibility, surrendering our interests to a small number of predatory power-brokers. Humanity gone rogue?
Well, there has been an undercurrent in our society growing steadily, with ups and downs, looking both backward and forward, aiming to somehow reconnect. Bubbles popping and new formation is in the offing. Human numbers will fall dramatically, but some forms of civilization will arise.
Many dreams that are irreconcilable will divide up our present nightmare, and old and new enemies are emerging that look different to different people. It was always like that. Some of our myths and legends will surface again, some will sink beneath the waves. And nothing will be quite lost forever.
Canope
As the sun and the wind play with the branches and the leaves
The openings in the canopy glitter and twinkle,
Like stars in the night sky
Beneath it there are rooms where sounds may be muffled,
But they may also be echoing
Blackbirds make these rooms audible with their song
And below those sounds there is a slow heaving, and a moaning
Where the trees take the stresses down into the stony ground
And the water up to the foliage
Mind you, the trees are uncomplaining: branches may snap
For no apparent reason, sounding like a pistol shot, but no outcry
It is an existence both unsentimental and forgiving
And the fluster of the foliage reports the whereabouts of the wind
That moves like a train through the forest; it tells you
Where the engine is and where the cars
Amidst this tree-majesty the twinkling light comes down to you
To invite your weightlessness to take to its wings and fly up
And join the stars in a moment of eternity
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