7) Bliss cannot be registered

7) Bliss cannot be registered

We live in an age that makes it easy to register almost everything: sounds, images, movements. We can glue these temporary phenomena for eternity to tapes, disks, cassettes. Now image the treasure trove were we to find similar memorabilia of times long gone by.

Seventeenth century Dutchmen looking from the wall that protects their city to the Spaniards beneath. A Neanderthal family in front of a campfire. Romans boating on a lake. Celts gasping at the Colosseum. Just imagine the host of details that will intrigue us.

But our family in front of the TV, paddling across a pond or looking at the Eiffel tower, who would ever find that fascinating? I do of course. I still do. The kids will do so too I hope. So I keep them. But what of a life they have never been part of? My life with Chantal. ‘Look our father with eh, that must be Chantal I think?’

How do our travels start? Before we leave Amsterdam for the mountains Chantal and I read booklets and brochures. Internet does not exist. We ask the people in the travel-shop what they know about our destination. This shop will not be able to cope with Internet and is now long gone.

The people selling cards and maps are travellers themselves. You can ask them anything. When is the best time to go, what not to forget, what to wear. They know or else they know people who know. The door to their shop shows a bewildering array of notes: mate sought for camping trip; who wants to join our group of women cyclists? Tent, only used once.

We read and talk and prepare. Shall we take freeze-dried food with us? Nuts and chocolates? Raisins, high calorie food-bars? No food at all?

A trip to Italy, to France, to Spain. Walking, camping and making pictures. Color-slides in frames row after row that lay dormant for decades show our trips abroad.

And then, after a slide or two you sense already that the most rewarding places and moments have never been photographed. Like when we come upon a small church high in the Italian mountains, the Piedmonte, the foothills of the Alps. The door is locked but one of our books says the key is hidden behind a stone near the door. We find the key and make our way inside.

Wooden stairs lead us to an attic where we lay down our inflatable mattresses and our sleeping bags. We cook a simple meal on our stove. From the attic we look into the valley deep down. A few glimmering lights show where a hamlet is still inhabited. We top the meal with a watery pudding that tastes like sweet chemicals.

Sheer bliss. Impossible to capture in a picture.

So the mountains are important to us. I have introduced Chantal to this world because I have had some experience in  mountain walking.  

6) Roads leading nowhere

6) Roads leading nowhere

Chantal and I are dedicated urbanites. We love Amsterdam and its pubs, movie-theaters and museums, but if possible we try to escape the urban hustle. We make long tracks through the countryside, camp illegally in Holland, Belgium, France and later in the US. We travel by train, bus, plane and even hitchhike.

We make both short time lightweight camping tours nearby, and long journeys in remote areas. From Palawan in the Philippines to Kauai in the States, from the Azores to the Tsisikamma-trail in South Africa Chantal makes pictures of mountains, rivers, waterfalls. Travelling and camping is huge fun for us.

‘But what is the fun-part of travelling?’ my girls will ask me. How can you dedicate a whole life to travelling? What are you looking for?

Let me try to explain.

For instance; after hours of walking a steep path with all your gear on your back you reach a mountain-pass. Suddenly another world explodes into view. A vast mountain range in the far distance offers itself. Is that Italy? You feel elated but you cannot stay long here as cold gusts of wind hit you.

So travelling gives you rewards. But can a picture evoke the pain that has slowly taken possession of your knees and hips? The continuous chafing that reminds you of ill adjusted straps? The gasping for air that comes with ascending for hours on end? The silence save for the wind when you look into the next valley? The taste of a fruit-bar after hours of climbing? The relief your toes feel out of their leather prison when you find for a few minutes shelter behind a rock. You cannot stay long here because you still have a long way to go so back on the track again.

Travelling means to sweat it out; headaches, blisters, arms becoming numb, hunger, thirst and in general tiredness. A picture is flat, full of colors maybe but bereft of the smell of unpolluted air, the murmuring sound of a starting river, the buzz of swirling insects and always a picture hides the sadness of leaving a nice spot.

After a days walk you set up your tent. Lightweight and low in the wind. You have seen a small waterfall, there might even be a spring nearby according to the map and you go looking for it to fill your bottles. The cold that bites into your fingers when the water gushes over your hands. The shadows are growing and the tent is barely visible in the distance. Walking back you relish the promise of warm food. The promise of the deep silence that will cover you when you go to sleep.

Nothing in this cloud of experiences that can be convincingly registered.

Along the paths in the mountains of Europe one finds stones with white and red stripes. These balises lead to wooden signposts on which you can see how many miles to go, how many hours. They are an indication of how the mountains in Europe are tamed. Still these mountains are formidable. Especially when it snows or rains or when gale-winds hammer the land. Of course you rarely make a picture when it snows or rains and the wind is invisible.

I take out a color-slide and I see a wooden pole somewhere on a mountain-pass, stones at the bottom. Two route-indicators, but I can’t read where they direct us to. Don’t even know exactly where or when this signpost was shot. Where does the path I see in the distance lead to? Haven’t the faintest.

This experience occurs continually when you pick up an old agenda confusion sets in. Browsing through it you will encounter a bewildering array of names and phone-numbers of people  long blotted out of your memory.

Cryptic in its brevity every name and date confronts you with a benign amnesia. Fortunately these notes refer to work and one is entitled to forget work. Photos on the other hand are a different story. Forgetting why you have made a picture confronts you with dementia.

Why does Chantal shoot a picture of a signpost? Why haven’t we discarded this image on second thoughts as bereft of meaning? It must be a special place otherwise it would not have been immortalized on a color-slide. But why? 

Unable to answer this question I realize that the death of Chantal has amputated our common past.

5) Critical and selective

5) Critical and selective

Chantal is a critical photographer. More like a sniper than a machine-gunner. Afterwards when we have framed the slides we do some runs before we show them to our friends. We have always been critical.

‘No, this one does not catch the breathtaking scenery I remember we have seen. Away with it. On this one you can’t see how frightening steep it was. Away with it.’ And so on we go through the sledges until only a few slides remain.

In January 1999 a brain-tumor destroys her within weeks. I make pictures of her in the hospital, at home. I make pictures when she is dead, the mourning friends waiting in front of the mortuary and at last the funeral. Together with pictures of our last trip abroad they form a treasured photo-album.

Now it is 2012, I’m happily married and retired. Finally I have assembled the courage to go to the garage and salvage the boxes that contain the color-slides of Chantal. I want to show the children what has been important to Chantal and me. I go looking for existential pictures.

4) The burning house

4) The burning house

‘What will you take with you when your house is on fire?’ How often have I not seen or heard this question asked in interviews? How often do people not say: ‘the family pictures’. That reaction belongs to an era in which pictures were costly in several ways.

Photo’s are normally made of people and places one wants to record or parties worth remembering. At least that is what you think when the shutter snaps. Often you feel sad when you see the results, but sadder still you will be when you lose pictures made with affection. Like Marike and me.

Chantal and I live together, Marike and I get married. A friend makes a movie of the ceremony and the party afterwards. A lovingly made movie we have lost somewhere in transit from one address to the other.

When our first daughter, Mijntje, is born in 2001 we buy a film-camera. We shoot also the first year of Maike 2003-2004. That camera is stolen with the cassette still inside. So much of importance to us alone, for Marike and me now, for the kids later. Gone.

No one will ever find these films of any interest but for us they are invaluable. Gone. Curse the thief who has stolen our memories.

As long as camera’s are expensive family pictures fit in a box. But when I die my kids will inherit a staggering amount of photo’s, both digital and analogue, some movies, hundreds of color-slides. Besides these images there is also all the written material of a very personal character: diaries, official documents, agenda’s, letters and of course in my case all the digital archived newspaper articles I wrote as a journalist for the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.

We are talking about personal data amassed on a staggering scale. Never before in history has man had the opportunity to record his life in such a quantitative way. But to what effect? What do these data tell us?

3) Divorce

3) Divorce

My parents divorce officially when I am four. They are both of mixed European and Asian parentage. Even nowadays in Indonesia Eurasians are called “Indo’s”. My father is dark skinned, my mother is proud of her skins’ yellowish hue.

Their marital life before they get a divorce is characterized by lapses of isolation and separation. He is a forest architect and has to travel from island to island.

My mother follows him from Java to Borneo with me and a few suitcases finally settling in then Dutch New Guinea. Mostly waiting for him to return from the forest. Until in 1951 when she finally leaves him and settles for ever in Holland.

My father has always loved camera’s and shoots pictures by the thousands. I still have an album mainly filled with utterly boring black and white bush pictures.

He marries another Eurasian lady and lives among her kinsmen. I don’t see him very often so I don’t come to know them. The slides he makes when he is in Holland are mostly of Indo’s unknown to me. By throwing away all these color-slides  of smiling Indo’s I have destroyed the very image of a short lived culture in Holland. That of the Indo’s clinging to there kin.

His death makes me delve into his past and doing so I unearth question upon question. To name but a simple one, I am baptised a catholic. According to my mother my father on his way to the registry office for my birthday certificate met a priest who offers a drink to celebrate. A few drinks later I am a catholic.

After the death of my father I find his military passport. It states as his religion: protestant.  I have nothing against protestants, nothing against catholics either, but what has happened on the way to the registry-office? Questions like these give me a sense of obligation to present my past to my children as clear and transparent as possible.

My mother prides herself not only of her light skin but also of having mainly Dutch friends. She is assimilated even before she sets foot in Holland. Had she ever made pictures of her friends I would have recognized these Dutch friends but she rarely makes pictures.

2) To start with the colour-slides

2) To start with the colour-slides

A story like this one starts the day you decide to sort out the color-slides. In my case the slides made by my late, former wife Chantal. She died ten odd years ago.  I have published a book about her death, Chantal, and the kids can read it when they feel like it. But her color-slides are a different story all together. What do they tell me now and what story do they contain for the children?

Of course the girls know me and their mother Marike. They’ll remember the life we all lived together, but they don’t know the life I have lived with Chantal. Maybe one day they’ll want to know: how has your life been with Chantal, what did you do without children? How do you create a fullfilling life without children?

In Chantal I describe how desperate we want to have children. How we decide in the end when all hope has faded to dedicate our childless life to travelling. Travelling and photo-shooting.

Chantal is a gifted photographer. Composition comes natural to her and her charm closes the distance to any subject. Looking at the slides I’m moved. It is her smile I see mirrored in the faces of all these people she has immortalized. At the same time I’m confronted with a problem.

However beautiful these portraits are, be they of shepherds with weather-beaten faces or old smiling ladies in traditional attire, I don’t know who these people are. Don’t know there names, don’t know there histories and I often don’t know where or when they were photographed.

It is not the first time that frustration besets me when I leaf through color-slides. I have had the same problem with the color-slides my father left me. Thousands of nameless faces smiling into the camera. I have kept but one slide-rail and threw the others away. At this point I must say something about my parents.

1) Pictures of my parents

1) Pictures of my parents

My mother will leave me with very little when she dies. A handful of black and white pictures at most. I cannot ask my mother anything about her past as at 92 her memory is dwindling. If you are like my mother and leave your children but a few pictures this book is not meant for you.

On the other hand my father, with whom I had little contact, has left me decades ago with an enormous amount of color-slides. These slides almost all feature people unknown to me. They show that for pictures to be interesting the same rule applies as for milk, they have an expiration date. As I cannot ask my father who all these people are their significance has died with him.

Also if you are like my father and don’t care what your children will do with your pictures, this blog is not meant for you either. This blog is for people who will bequeath their children rather with answers than with questions. Basically this book is meant for my children. 
My children are 11 and 9 years old and taking myself as an example, their age of questioning is still miles away. I am 35 when my father dies and only then it becomes clear to me that his life is wrapped in riddles and question-marks. When my oldest daughter is 35 years old, heavens willing I’ll be 89 years of age. As I’m 65 now I feel it is time to sort out my tangibly visible past.