Ten years after…

Ten years ago I was knocked out in tram 14 at a stop next to the Portuguese synagogue in central Amsterdam. For no reason whatsoever. Not because I cannot figure out why that fist hit me, but because the perpetrator had probably no reason for a hostile attack – against me or whoever else. And that was a shock. Trained in a Kantian worldview I was acquainted with a world where everything – good as well as evil – happens for reasons. We, though, are not rational. The uppercut broke my lower jaw at three spots. As a consequence I had to eat everything through a straw for weeks. A diet, one could remark, if I only needed one. I mixed all food with full-fat milk, butter and sugar, supplemented by a daily dose of milkshakes – McDonalds has the best straws for these sorts of things. The other wake-up fright was the indifference I met in the tram – blood gushing while the perpetrator ran off – the hospital and the police station. After a few days, when I was released from the hospital, I temporally broke of my studies to just wait and get better. Only after, I realized there were more scars. Fear and anxiety when walking around the city’s streets. Fear and anxiety only ebbed away slowly. I wrote dozens of poems. Starting off with a piece of poetry reworking the base ‘facts’ stated in the police report. However, there are things, to speak with Wittgenstein – whom I discovered at that time, that cannot be expressed. Fear and anxiety are perhaps too much of a personal nature. While white lines are part of the form that gives meaning to a poem, leaving a reader with only a blank sheet of paper is no poetry, let alone meaningful. In that period I also made photographs – mainly night photography, mainly self-portraits. Ultimate narcissism was leading nowhere. I would swim laps in a confined pool and take a portrait. Well, that was then. It made me whom I am now. So, it is good that it happened. The ‘accident’ is no longer accidental – not forgotten, not forgiven, no revenge, no resentment. (Nietzsche as psychologist.)