LAATSTE AANTEKENINGEN VAN E.H. RAMADHOE - een kleine fenomenologie van borsten
(L.P. Boon)
Men heeft mij ooit laten opdraven in een roman van Louis Paul Boon. De paradijsvogel, meen ik. Een goede titel. Alsof men vermoedde dat sommige figuren niet in kooien thuishoren maar af en toe op een tak verschijnen, een paar woorden krassen en weer verdwijnen.
Ik heb het Boon nooit kwalijk genomen. Hij had mij niet uitgevonden; hij had mij slechts herkend. Zoals men een oude bekende herkent in een menigte en zegt: daar loopt hij weer, die Ramadhoe, altijd opduikend waar het over schoonheid en verwarring gaat. En ja, misschien â laat mij dat hier achteloos laten vallen â was hij mij deels zelf wel. Of omgekeerd. Men weet nooit precies wie wie gebruikt wanneer het over schoonheid gaat.
Wat er ook van zij, laat mij dus, nu men beweert dat mijn dagen geteld zijn, nog eenmaal iets zeggen over dat onderwerp dat mij mijn hele leven vergezelde: de borst.
U denkt misschien dat dit een schunnige tekst wordt. Dat is een begrijpelijke vergissing. Maar ik heb nooit de vorm bemind; ik heb de vormeloosheid bemind.
Wat is een borst? Men zou kunnen antwoorden met maten, gewichten, contouren. Maar wie werkelijk kijkt, merkt dat geen enkele beschrijving standhoudt. Zij ontsnappen voortdurend aan hun eigen vastlegging. Wat men denkt te zien, verandert onder een andere lichtval, onder een andere stof, onder een andere blik.
Men begrijpt hier iets wat de filosofie van de horror al langer weet: de diepste ontregeling komt niet van wat men kan aanwijzen, maar van dat wat zich niet laat stabiliseren. Het monster is niet dat wat men ziet, maar dat wat zich aan elke definitie onttrekt. De borst is geen monster â zij is te gul voor dat woord â maar zij deelt met het monster dat vermogen om het verstand zijn zekerheden te ontnemen.
Men denkt dan dat de vrouw die macht bezit. Dat zij de sleutel draagt tot het mysterie.
Maar ook zij staat ertegenover.
Ik heb vrouwen gezien die zelf verstomden onder de kracht die van hen uitging. Zij spelen het spel, ja. Soms met ironie, soms met ernst. Maar zij bezitten het niet. Zoals een auteur zijn personages niet bezit. Zoals Boon mij niet bezat.
Wij projecteren achter de borst een ultieme macht, alsof daar een alwetende instantie schuilgaat. Zoals men achter een tekst een almachtige auteur projecteert. Maar de waarheid is eenvoudiger en tegelijk ontregelender: wij zijn allen in de greep van hetzelfde veld.
De borst is geen godin. Zij is een oppervlak waarop transcendentie zich verraadt in het meest concrete. Dat wat niet te beheersen is, maar zich toch toont. Dat wat zich niet laat reduceren tot begrip, maar evenmin tot mystiek kan worden opgeblazen zonder belachelijk te worden.
Velen zijn hier gestrand. Zij wilden bezitten. Zij wilden doorstoten tot het geheim. Zij meenden dat er achter de vorm een laatste kern schuilging, een waarheid die men kon vasthouden.
Maar iedere poging tot definitieve onthulling onthult slechts een nieuwe verschuiving. Wat zich laat zien, laat zich nooit volledig hebben. âIf you have her, why canât you have her?â vroeg een andere schrijver. Omdat het hebben zelf de illusie is.
Ik heb geleerd het anders te zien.
Erotiek is geen verovering; zij is een spel. Een heilig spel, indien men dat woord nog durft te gebruiken zonder te blozen. Men gaat maximaal op in de illusie om haar juist daardoor te doorzien. Men speelt met de verschijning, niet om haar te ontmaskeren, maar om samen te ontdekken dat zij geen vast fundament heeft.
En daar, in die wederzijdse erkenning, verandert de vrouw van godin in mede-speler. Geen alwetende instantie die het geheim bezit, maar een andere transcendentie, even zoekend, even glimlachend.
Misschien is dat wat ik mijn hele leven heb willen zeggen.
Men heeft mij een borstenman genoemd. Dat is niet onjuist. Maar men vergat eraan toe te voegen dat ik vooral een bewonderaar was van het onvatbare.
Men zegt mij dat ik weldra sterf. Dat is mogelijk. Het lichaam heeft zijn afspraken met de tijd, en ik ben niet iemand die administratieve formaliteiten wil tegenwerken.
Maar laten wij ernstig blijven: wie denkt dat hij van mij verlost zal zijn, vergist zich.
Ik ben nooit uitsluitend van vlees geweest.
Wanneer een borst zich toont en zich tegelijk onttrekt.
Wanneer een beha haar rol speelt en niemand meer weet wie het stuk heeft geschreven.
Wanneer men even niet weet of men bewondert of bewonderd wordt.
Daar ben ik.
Immer de uwe.
ps: Over Boons 'De paradijsvogel' schreef ik eerder hier
I made this short film as an ode to the Diedamskopf above Schoppernau â a mountain that has quietly become part of who I am. Schoppernau itself has become a place I hold very dear, a village where I was fortunate enough to spend three months this winter, and where, over the past years, I each and every time found a warm nest â sometimes just for a few days, sometimes for longer.
I have run up the Diedamskopf countless times. All footage was recorded over the past two months, during repeated ascents from the village to the summit. Every climb has been a gift. Along the path there were so many warm encounters: people stopping for a brief chat, spontaneous high-fives shared in passing, the constant friendliness of those living here. The people in the huts, the staff at the local ADEG supermarket, who welcome me back so openly each time I return and settle here again. The deer and chamois that so many times narrowly crossed my path.
My special thanks go to Marianne, who always offers me a home with an open heart, in her beautiful house in this extraordinary village. And to my Dornbirn friends: Martin, Birgit und Uli. Servus!
WHEN BUYING NEW TRAIL RUNNING SHOES BECOMES A FULL-TIME JOB (OR: WHAT THE TRAIL RUNNING MARKET TEACHES US ABOUT EXTRACTION ECONOMICS AND THE DEATH OF THE USER)
A simple search for trail running shoes turns into an endless maze of hype, choice overload, and artificial scarcity. What looks like innovation is often an extraction logic that keeps users searching rather than serving them well. The essay asks what kind of growth we want, and for whom, in an economy that increasingly optimizes for efficiency over human use.
For years, I bought the same trail run shoe: the Hoka Mafate Speed 4.
It worked fantastically for me. After trying many different models and running thousands of kilometres in the mountains, I knew it with certainty: this was my shoe.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. Improvement is always possible â at least in theory. So when a successor was announced, the Hoka Mafate Speed 5, I was curious. When my last pair of Speed 4s finally died, I ordered the new model with genuine anticipation.
It was a complete disappointment.
The Speed 5 had almost nothing to do with its predecessor. It felt heavier, clumsier, fundamentally different. The geometry had changed. The cushioning behaved differently. Even the sizing no longer corresponded: the size that had fit me perfectly for years was suddenly too small.
And just like that, I was forced back into the market.
The Speed 4 was no longer in production, and finding remaining pairs became increasingly difficult. So I had to start over.
Drowning in the Review Ocean
I did what youâre supposed (not) to do. I read reviews.
And immediately, youâre lost.
Each review introduces new models youâve never heard of. Competitors you hadnât considered. Shoes youâre told are âsimilar but betterâ. Those lead to other reviews, which reference still more shoes. The process is recursive. There is no bottom.
Worse: the reviews constantly contradict each other.
A shoe is described as âplush and forgivingâ in one place and âfirm but responsiveâ in another. It runs âtrue to sizeâ â unless your feet deviate from a norm thatâs never specified. You start cross-checking, comparing reviewers rather than shoes.
Stack height. Drop. Foam density. Energy return. Torsional rigidity.
Parameters that might mean something in isolation but here form a maze with no exit.
Whatâs notably absent is time.
No one writes: after 500 kilometres this foam is dead. That kind of statement would introduce finitude. And finitude is bad for circulation.
So a machine emerges that feeds itself. Reviews reference other reviews. Models are endlessly compared. The user slides from option to option, drifting further away from the original goal: running â and enjoying it.
The Industrial Wasteland of Choice
Once youâre inside this maze, what opens up isnât clarity but a landscape.
Not a poetic one, but an industrial wasteland where each brand has built its own settlement, complete with flags, slogans, and an internal road network readable only to initiates.
Take HOKA. What once consisted of a handful of clearly differentiated models now resembles a genealogical tree without a trunk: Mafate, Speedgoat, Tecton, Challenger, Torrent, Zinal, Stinson. Each name exists in multiple iterations.
At Salomon, the logic becomes abstract. Sense Ride, Sense Pro, Ultra Glide, S/Lab Pulsar, Thundercross, Genesis, Elixir. The names sound like fitness programmes or space probes. They suggest speed and progress. They say nothing about what it feels like to run six hours on tired legs with a descent that just keeps going.
La Sportiva goes further still: Bushido, Akasha, Mutant, Jackal, Cyklon. Shoes named as if youâre not running but role-playing. One is âmore technicalâ, another âmore playfulâ, a third âfor long distancesâ â as if these categories excluded one another. Every season brings something new. Rarely does anything simply continue to exist.
What these brands share is not innovation but proliferation.
Models multiply faster than user needs. Differences between shoes are often smaller than differences in their descriptions.
This isnât freedom of choice. Itâs cognitive overload as a sales strategy.
The effect is predictable. The user begins to doubt their own experience. What worked yesterday becomes suspect today because six alternatives now claim to do it better. Stability is reframed as stagnation. Satisfaction as lack of ambition. If you donât keep moving, youâre falling behind.
Extraction and the Endless Search
Whatâs happening here fits a broader pattern.
As Tim Wu describes in his book The age of extraction, modern markets increasingly shift from serving users to extracting value from them. What is being extracted is not only money, but attention: your search behaviour, your hesitation, your doubt, your time spent comparing. The goal is no longer arrival, but movement.
Cory Doctorow has described the same trajectory as a process of enshittification: systems that begin by serving users gradually reorganise themselves around internal incentives, until value is extracted while service deteriorates. What matters is not whether something works well, but whether it keeps circulating.
In physical markets, this logic does not appear as an interface or algorithm, but as something more diffuse: marketing. Not marketing as communication, but marketing as organising principle.
Seen from this perspective, the trail running market is not a curious exception. It is a clear illustration. Shoes no longer merely need to work. The system depends on uncertainty, novelty, and perpetual comparison. Satisfaction would break the cycle.
When Marketing Eats the Product
Marketing here is not an external layer added to an otherwise stable product. It is the mechanism through which extraction operates.
Visibility, hype cycles, and perpetual âinnovationâ begin to override a simpler question: does this product still serve its user?
Take HOKA. What began as a trail running company is now part of a publicly traded footwear conglomerate. Production is outsourced. Entire product lines are developed as lifestyle sneakers rather than technical tools. City shoes. Fashion objects. T-shirts, accessories, identity merchandise.
The core has been hollowed out.
What was built for runners has been repurposed for people who want to signal running without doing it. The actual runner â the person who needs shoes that function for thousands of mountain kilometres â becomes irrelevant to the business model.
The company no longer answers to use. It answers to its own marketing machinery.
Individual Pricing, Traceability, and the Illusion of Efficiency - Scarcity as Design
The most disturbing moment comes after comparison â when you try to buy.
The model exists. Reviews are recent. Photos are everywhere.
But your size is unavailable. Or only in a colour that costs sixty euros more. Or the price changes overnight without explanation.
This isnât logistical failure. Itâs design.
In a digital economy, prices increasingly reflect not a public standard but individual traceability. Your clicks, your searches, your hesitations are folded back into what you are shown and what you are asked to pay. Economists sometimes describe this as ideal market efficiency. But it is efficiency for the seller, not for the user.
Price ceases to be a shared reference point. It becomes personalised extraction.
Like airline tickets, volatility holds attention. Scarcity keeps you checking. Continuity would let you rest â and rest is dangerous to an extraction economy.
That is why models donât disappear because they are bad, but because they are too good. A shoe that satisfies generates less movement than one replaced each season by something similar enough to appear related, yet different enough to restart doubt.
Markets dominated by hype become opaque. Prices fluctuate. Logic dissolves. The user loses any grip on what is reasonable.
Parallel Systems
Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.
Dating apps promise that the next swipe is better than the last. They depend on permanent incompleteness. A lasting relationship is economically irrelevant.
Job sites display positions open for months â not because no one qualifies, but because the process itself generates data, clicks, engagement.
Social media rewards visibility, not proximity. Engagement replaces relationship. The user stays active as long as they donât arrive.
Even publishers follow trends this way. Not the manuscript thatâs right, but the one that fits the moment. Continuity is boring. Renewal sells.
The shoe story is a prism: a small, tangible example where an abstract mechanism becomes visible.
Growth, Efficiency, and Who It Is For
This brings us to a question that is strangely absent from most debates about economic growth. The discussion is usually framed as a quantitative one: more growth or less growth. But that framing already misses what is most at stake. The real question is qualitative: what kind of growth, and for whom?
We can easily produce economic indicators that look excellent while the actual user disappears from view. Metrics that measure activity but not satisfaction. Transactions but not value. Movement but not arrival. Growth becomes a matter of throughput rather than use, velocity rather than care.
Underlying this is a broader social ideal: efficiency. Everything must be optimised. Time, attention, logistics, choice. Friction is treated as a flaw. Rest as waste. Any pause is a missed opportunity. But this ideal of efficiency is not neutral. It overwhelmingly serves those actors who are large enough to turn efficiency into dominance: companies that scale, platforms that concentrate, markets that tip toward monopoly.
In such a system, efficiency is never for the user. It is for those who can extract the most from the smallest margins, who can leverage data, attention, and dependency. What appears as rational optimisation from above is experienced below as constant pressure: to choose faster, decide better, keep up.
Walk into a Decathlon to buy sunglasses. For running. For cycling. For mountaineering. For water sports. Dozens of variants. It looks like abundance, but functions as disorientation. You are no longer a person with a need, but a consumer confronted with a test you are bound to fail. You havenât done enough research. Youâre already behind. Somewhere, there is always a better option you didnât know about.
The only solution offered is more consumption. Buy again. Upgrade. Adjust. Optimize yourself. But you never arrive at the right product. You leave not feeling served, but subtly inadequate â as if the failure were yours.
This is not an accident. A system organised around extraction cannot afford users who are satisfied. Satisfaction ends movement. Continuity interrupts circulation. A product that works too well, for too long, is economically suspicious.
Rest as a Radical Demand
Seen from this perspective, the deepest problem is not inconvenience but a creeping hollowing-out of everyday life. A society governed entirely by efficiency produces people who begin to live like machines: managing inputs and outputs, optimising schedules, ticking off lists. What gets squeezed out are precisely the things that make life human: lingering conversations, care that takes time, activities that are not immediately productive.
In an economy where attention is constantly harvested, rest becomes a form of resistance. Insisting that something is good enough is almost subversive.
Perhaps the most radical demand we can make today is not for ever-new products, but for products that are allowed to remain. For systems that tolerate satisfaction. For markets that serve use rather than exhaust it.
Sometimes the most meaningful form of growth is not expansion, but restraint. And sometimes the most radical thing you can ask of an economy built on extraction is simply this: let what works continue to work.
PS: For anyone interested in the broader stakes of this logic â from monopoly power to attention capture to the hollowing-out of public life â I cannot recommend enough the wonderful conversation between Tim Wu, Cory Doctorow and Ezra Klein of the NYTimes. It is one of the clearest, most careful analyses of where this trajectory leads, and why the question of efficiency, left unquestioned, may cost us far more than it promises.
SITTING DOWN TOGETHER ALONE - ON POSTURE IN MEDITATION
After a ten-day Vipassana retreat in Lukla, Nepal, Iâve been trying to meditate in the morning and in the evening. Trying is the right word. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesnât. I donât keep score. When it works, it works. When it doesnât, it is just as well.
I mentioned this recently to a close friend of mine, Tis. With his usual infectious enthusiasm, he told me heâd been meditating too, on and off, and that he always noticed an effect fairly quickly. We talked about breathing, naturally. And then about posture. About sitting.
That infamous sitting.
At the retreat they were quite uncompromising about it. You sat on the floor, in an open hall, no walls to lean against, no concessions to the spine. Cross-legged, or something very close to it. Call it lotus, half-lotus, Burmese posture â the names donât matter much when your knees are screaming. It hurt. A lot.
For years I had thought all this posture talk was exaggerated. You could just as well sit on a chair, I believed, as long as your back was straight and you werenât collapsing into yourself. And in principle, I still think thatâs true.
But I had underestimated something.
Tis said there was something special about that posture. Something about how it felt. Maybe energy flows more freely, he suggested.
Could be. I honestly donât know. But what I do know is that also something else is at work there.
These days I mostly sit cross-legged myself. Not heroically. Iâve cheated. I sit with my back against a wall and one or two cushions under my backside, slightly tilted forward. That way my knees donât carry the full weight of my metaphysical and existential ambitions, and my spine gets a bit of help. Comfort matters. Not to make meditation âeasyâ, but to remove unnecessary noise.
And hereâs the thing: even with these small adjustments, the posture does something.
Not just physically. Symbolically.
That way of sitting is a cultural gesture. When you see someone sitting like that, you immediately read something into it: attention, stillness, maybe wisdom, or at least the intention to be wise. The posture carries meaning before you ever inhabit it.
And that is exactly how our self-awareness works. Mimetic. We see someone sit like that. Later we sit like that ourselves. And suddenly we are looking at ourselves the way we once looked at them.
The posture gives you a role you can step into.
When I sit down now, I donât merely sit. I become âsomeone who meditates.â Not through effort, not through discipline, but through form. Through posture. My body remembers before my mind has any opinions.
And it doesnât stop there.
Because that posture also summons others. People I sat with in Nepal. Tis, of course. Bert. Vlad. Akash. Poesp Raz. Divyansu. Miguel. Mareike. Ashish. Lucas. And Teacher of course ;) Via that posture their presence still somehow lingers. Just by sitting like that, they appear. Not as mental images, not as nostalgic thoughts, but as something bodily familiar.
My body remembers sitting with them.
Thatâs one of the reasons meditation has become genuinely enjoyable for me.
And I want to be clear about that word: enjoyable.
Meditation is not a discipline. Or at least, it shouldnât start there. The same goes for running, by the way. People who say they âhave toâ run because itâs healthy are usually miserable runners. That whole moralised cult of jogging â as if everyone should run, regardless of inclination â is nonsense. Do what you enjoy. Skate if you like skating. Swim if you like swimming. Move in the way that fits your nature.
Enjoyment is not frivolous. Itâs diagnostic. It tells you what belongs to you and what doesnât.
Basic Taoism, that.
Meditation is no different. You donât do it because you should. You do it because, somehow, it wants to be done. Because it fits. Because itâs pleasant to sit down and see what happens.
And yes, one of the reasons itâs pleasant, is the posture. It may help energy flow, who knows. But it also helps something else flow: memory, connection, belonging. Through that posture, a whole community quietly sits down with me. Friends, fellow practitioners, a lineage of sorts.
It just makes it, for me at least, a little more alive.
These weeks, I try to sit every morning and evening on my bed, in a small room in Schoppernau in the Alps. And without trying to improve myself, without chasing insight, I find myself in good company.
Theyâre not there.
And yet they are.
My friends. My fellow practitioners. Teacher.
I sit together with them.
And that, honestly, is a very pleasant way to start and end a day.
PS: If youâre curious about how bodily gestures install self-consciousness by creating distance toward ourselves, see my recent philosophical-anthropological essay The Breathing Mind. Or in Dutch: Geestesadem.
Dat is ook de reden waarom ik vaak dicteer (whatsapp etc - tot vaak mateloze ergernis van mijn arme vrienden) in plaats van schrijf. Niet omdat spreken eenvoudiger is, maar omdat schrijven iets anders vraagt. Gesproken taal dwingt voortgang af. Ze laat minder ruimte voor terugkeer. Ze laat minder tijd om te blijven hangen bij wat zich aandient. Schrijven daarentegen nodigt uit tot stilstand, tot herziening, tot reflectie. En precies daar begint het probleem.
Schrijven nodigt uit tot omkijken.
Ik kijk altijd achterom.
Dat gebaar is oud. Orpheus daalt af om Eurydice terug te halen. Hij mag haar niet zien voor hij het daglicht bereikt. Maar hij draait zich om. Niet uit zwakte, maar uit trouw aan wat hij werkelijk wil: haar zien zoals zij is in de duisternis zelf. Precies daar gaat het mis. Wie het onzichtbare zichtbaar wil maken zonder het te verraden, verliest het op het moment van aanschouwen.
Kafka wist dat dit geen mythisch detail is, maar een structurele wet.
In De brug is de verteller zelf een brug, gespannen over een afgrond. Hij weet dat hij zich niet mag omdraaien. Toch doet hij het, wanneer hij de voetstappen voelt van iemand die over hem heen loopt. Op dat ogenblik stort hij in. Niet omdat hij faalt, maar omdat hij voldoet aan de logica van wat hij is.
De schrijver is zoân brug. Tussen een innerlijke spanning en een wereld die betekenis verlangt. Maar een brug bestaat alleen bij gratie van passage. Zodra iemand haar betreedt, ontstaat de drang om te kijken. Wie leest mij. Wat wordt dit voor de ander. Hoe klinkt het buiten mij. Dat moment van reflexieve aandacht is het moment waarop de brug haar onschuld verliest.
Ik heb lang gedacht dat mijn worsteling voortkwam uit perfectionisme. Dat ik de juiste zin zocht en haar telkens net miste. Inmiddels weet ik dat dit een misvatting was. Het probleem is niet dat de zin onvolmaakt blijft. Het probleem is dat ik verlang naar iets wat zich principieel niet laat fixeren.
Wat ik zoek, is samenval. Woorden die niet verwijzen, maar samenvallen met wat ze dragen. De blik op een spelend kind, een moeder boven een slapend gezicht, de toevallige tederheid van een moment. Ik wil dat zulke ervaringen zonder verlies in taal terechtkomen.
De toevallige tederheid van een moment dat zich aandient zonder bedoeling. Vanuit een bepaalde stemming beleef ik dat al als literatuur. Niet als tekst, maar als iets dat wil spreken.
Dat is geen schrijfstemming. Dat is een stemming van ontvankelijkheid.
In zoân stemming lijkt de taal vanzelf te komen. De woorden lijken zich al te vormen. Niet letterlijk, maar als mogelijkheid, als belofte. Ik ervaar mezelf op dat moment niet als iemand die iets maakt, maar als iemand door wie iets heen beweegt. Ik zou op dat moment een brug willen zijn tussen hoe ik dit beleef en hoe een ander het zou kunnen ervaren.
Dat wordt op een bijna karikaturale manier zichtbaar in die bekende ervaring van de perfecte brief die zich aandient in de halfslaap. Alles klopt. De formuleringen lijken exact. De toon is juist. Het voelt alsof de tekst er al is. Alsof hij alleen nog genoteerd moet worden. Maar wat gebeurt daar eigenlijk?
In die halfslapende toestand ben ik nog niet actief. Ik schrijf... nauwelijks. Ik verkeer, of liever, zweef, in een stemming waarin betekenis zich aandient zonder verantwoordelijkheid. Zonder blootstelling. De sociale bemiddeling is er wel, maar ze wordt als het ware nog niet aangesproken.
Maar stel dat er op dat moment een duiveltje zou kunnen meekijken en exact zou noteren wat er âgeschrevenâ wordt in mijn hoofd. Zou dat werkelijk zoân geniale tekst blijken te zijn? Of zou hij, eenmaal uit die stemming gelicht, zijn glans volledig verliezen?
Ik moet denken aan de anekdote over Paul McCartney die tijdens een LSD-trip zijn vrienden vraagt dringend pen en papier te nemen, omdat hij een essentiële boodschap heeft. De volgende dag leest hij wat er genoteerd is: there are seven levels. Op het moment zelf was dit van overweldigende betekenis. Buiten die toestand blijkt het leeg.
Dat leert ons mogelijk iets fundamenteels. Wat daar verschijnt, is geen verborgen waarheid die alleen nog correct moet worden vastgelegd. Het is een ervaring die alleen betekenis heeft binnen de stemming waarin zij verschijnt. Haal je haar daaruit, dan implodeert zij. Zoals erotische opwinding alles kan vullen met absolute intensiteit, tot die opwinding breekt en alles plots betekenisloos wordt.
Die ervaring is niet vals. Ze is reëel. Maar ze is niet overdraagbaar zonder zichzelf te verliezen.
En dat geldt niet alleen voor halfslaap, trance of roes. Het geldt voor elke stemming van ontvankelijkheid. Op het moment dat ik geraakt word door een tafereel, bijvoorbeeld in de trein, wanneer ik geraakt word door het gelaat van een moeder die met een tedere glimlach haar liefde overdraagt op haar slapende kind, beleef ik het al als betekenisvol. Maar op het moment dat ik ga schrijven, verander ik van positie. Ik verlaat ontvankelijkheid en betreed activiteit. Ik richt me nu doelbewust tot een ander. Ik word schrijver voor een lezer.
En precies daardoor verlies ik wat ik wilde bewaren.
Niet omdat ik het slecht doe, maar omdat het niet anders kan.
Het private bestaat alleen bij gratie van het publieke. Het verschijnt in de glans van mogelijke deelbaarheid. Maar op het moment dat het werkelijk gedeeld moet worden, is het al iets anders geworden. Wat overblijft, is geen ervaring, maar een spoor. Geen samenval, maar een afstand die zichtbaar wordt.
Dat is geen tekort. Dat is de voorwaarde van literatuur.
Kafka noemde dit het onvermogen om te schrijven. Tegelijk was dit precies de motor van zijn werk. Niet toevallig kon Kafka enkel schrijven wanneer hij aan dit inzicht kon voorbijgaan, bij voorkeur 's nachts, wanneer de wereld zweeg, opgaand in een roes die weer even de aloude illusoire belofte kon doen opflakkeren. Wanneer schrijven niet een beroep was, maar een inbraak. Iets dat slechts mocht bestaan zolang het geen voltooiing claimde.
Hij wantrouwde eindes. Een afgeronde tekst suggereert dat iets gevonden is. Dat de poort is gepasseerd, de belofte ingelost. Voor Kafka was dat een vorm van verraad. Daarom bleven zijn teksten open, onaf, schurend. Daarom verlangde hij naar vernietiging van zijn werk, niet uit afkeer, maar uit trouw aan wat schrijven werkelijk was.
Schrijven kan nooit volkomen of pure expressie zijn. Het blijft bij uitstel. Een belofte die zichzelf in stand houdt door niet te worden ingelost.
Daarin herken ik mijzelf. OP ALLE VLAKKEN. Want alles is een vorm van schrijven.
Ik heb lang geloofd dat er in mij een kern lag, een ware stem die slechts juist geraakt moest worden. Dat schrijven betekende die kern naar buiten brengen. Dat blijkt een spirituele illusie. Wat ik âbinneninâ noem, bestaat alleen dankzij afstand. Zonder taal, zonder vorm, zonder buitenwereld is er geen betekenis, slechts intensiteit zonder richting.
De pijn zit niet in het falen om iets zuivers te zeggen. De pijn zit in het inzicht dat zuiverheid zelf een fata morgana is.
Dat maakt schrijven niet zinloos. Het maakt het preciezer. Schrijven is geen poging om te sluiten, maar om te dragen. Geen fixatie van waarheid, maar het openhouden van een ruimte waarin betekenis kan blijven bewegen.
Kafkaâs figuren falen omdat zij willen vastzetten wat alleen kan circuleren. Zij willen toegang afdwingen, schuld oplossen, betekenis stabiliseren. Zij wachten voor poorten die alleen voor hen bestemd zijn en daarom nooit opengaan.
Schrijven betekent leven met die poort.
Niet haar forceren. Niet haar verlaten. Maar blijven staan. Blijven schrijven. Blijven falen. Dat falen niet opvatten als tekort, maar als vorm.
Misschien is dat de enige eerlijke poëtica. Schrijven als een brug die instort zodra zij werkelijk wordt betreden. Niet omdat zij slecht gebouwd is, maar omdat zij precies doet waarvoor zij bestaat.
En misschien is dat ook waarom ik blijf schrijven.
Niet ondanks die instorting.
Maar daardoor.
For readers interested in exploring this subject further, I would like to refer them to my book on Franz Kafka: âInto the White: Kafka and his metamorphosesâ.
The Impossibility of Writing (or why I always voice-record my WhatsApp messages instead of typing them ;) - A Poetics
Writing is not, for me, a problem of lack, but of excess. As soon as I begin, no sentences appear, but fields. One formulation opens ten others, each with its own future, each reaching back into a different past. What presents itself is not a text but a moving network in which nothing ever comes to rest. Anyone who tries to choose within it is paralysed.
That is also why I often dictate (WhatsApp, etc.âto the frequent exasperation of my poor friends) instead of writing my text-messages. Not because speaking is easier, but because writing asks for something else. Spoken language forces movement forward. It leaves less room for return. Less time to linger with what presents itself. Writing, by contrast, invites stillness, revision, reflection. And precisely there the problem begins.
Writing invites looking back.
I always look back.
That gesture is ancient. Orpheus descends to retrieve Eurydice. He is not allowed to see her before reaching daylight. Yet he turns around. Not out of weakness, but out of fidelity to what he truly wants: to see her as she is in the darkness itself. That is exactly where things go wrong. Whoever wants to make the invisible visible without betraying it loses it at the moment of beholding.
Kafka knew that this is not a mythical detail, but a structural law.
In The Bridge, the narrator is himself a bridge, stretched across an abyss. He knows he must not turn around. Yet he does, when he feels the footsteps of someone walking over him. At that moment he collapses. Not because he fails, but because he fulfils the logic of what he is.
The writer is such a bridge. Between an inner tension and a world that demands meaning. But a bridge exists only by grace of passage. As soon as someone steps onto it, the urge arises to look: who is reading me, what will this become for the other, how does this sound outside of me. That moment of reflexive attention is the moment at which the bridge loses its innocence.
For a long time I thought my struggle came from perfectionism. That I was searching for the right sentence and missing it by a hair each time. I now know this was a misunderstanding. The problem is not that the sentence remains imperfect. The problem is that I long for something that cannot, in principle, be fixed.
What I seek is coincidence. Words that do not refer, but coincide with what they carry. The sight of a playing child, a mother bent over a sleeping face, the accidental tenderness of a moment. I want such experiences to enter language without loss.
The accidental tenderness of a moment that presents itself without intention. From a certain mood, I already experience this as literature. Not as text, but as something that wants to speak.
That is not a writing mood. It is a mood of receptivity.
In such a mood, language seems to come of its own accord. The words appear to be already forming. Not literally, but as possibility, as promise. In that moment I do not experience myself as someone who makes something, but as someone through whom something moves. I would want to be a bridge, at that moment, between how I experience this and how another might experience it.
This becomes visible in an almost caricatural way in the familiar experience of the perfect letter that presents itself in half-sleep. Everything fits. The formulations seem exact. The tone is right. It feels as though the text already exists, as though it only still needs to be written down. But what is actually happening there?
It is not that those words are pure or private. A private language does not exist. These sentences, too, are fully publicly mediated. They are shaped by language, by others, by everything that has ever been read or heard. There is no untainted interior.
And yet there is a difference.
In that half-sleeping state I am not yet active. I write⊠barely. I find myselfâor rather, I hoverâin a mood in which meaning presents itself without responsibility. Without exposure. Social mediation is present, but it is, as it were, not yet being addressed.
But suppose a little demon were able to look over my shoulder at that moment and write down exactly what is being âwrittenâ in my head. Would it really turn out to be such a brilliant text? Or would it, once lifted out of that mood, lose its lustre entirely?
I am reminded of the anecdote about Paul McCartney who, during an LSD trip, urgently asks his friends to get pen and paper because he has an essential message. The next day he reads what was written down: there are seven levels. In the moment itself this was of overwhelming significance. Outside that state it proves empty.
This may teach us something fundamental. What appears there is not a hidden truth that only still needs to be recorded correctly. It is an experience that has meaning only within the mood in which it appears. Remove it from that context and it implodes. Like erotic arousal, which can fill everything with absolute intensity until it breaks and everything suddenly becomes meaningless.
That experience is not false. It is real. But it cannot be transmitted without losing itself.
And this does not apply only to half-sleep, trance, or intoxication. It applies to every mood of receptivity. At the moment I am moved by a sceneâfor example on a train, when I am touched by the face of a mother who, with a tender smile, passes her love on to her sleeping childâI already experience it as meaningful. But the moment I begin to write, I change position. I leave receptivity and enter activity. I now deliberately address another. I become a writer for a reader.
And precisely thereby I lose what I wanted to preserve.
Not because I do it badly, but because it cannot be otherwise.
The private exists only by grace of the public. It appears in the glow of possible shareability. But at the moment it truly has to be shared, it has already become something else. What remains is not an experience, but a trace. Not coincidence, but a distance made visible.
That is not a deficiency. It is the condition of literature.
Kafka called this the incapacity to write. At the same time, it was precisely the motor of his work. Not by chance could Kafka write only when he could momentarily pass beyond this insight, preferably at night, when the world fell silent, giving himself over to a rapture in which the old illusory promise could briefly flare up again. When writing was not a profession, but a break-in. Something that could exist only as long as it did not claim completion.
He distrusted endings. A finished text suggests that something has been found. That the gate has been passed, the promise fulfilled. For Kafka this was a form of betrayal. That is why his texts remained open, unfinished, abrasive. That is why he longed for the destruction of his workânot out of aversion, but out of fidelity to what writing truly was.
Writing can never be complete or pure expression. It remains postponement. A promise that sustains itself by not being fulfilled.
In that I recognise myself. On all levels. Because everything is a form of writing.
For a long time I believed there was a core within me, a true voice that merely needed to be struck correctly. That writing meant bringing that core outward. This turns out to be a spiritual illusion. What I call âinsideâ exists only thanks to distance. Without language, without form, without an outside world, there is no meaningâonly intensity without direction.
The pain does not lie in failing to say something pure. The pain lies in the insight that purity itself is a mirage.
That does not make writing meaningless. It makes it precise. Writing is not an attempt to close, but to carry. Not a fixation of truth, but the keeping open of a space in which meaning can continue to move.
Kafkaâs figures fail because they want to fix what can only circulate. They want to force access, dissolve guilt, stabilise meaning. They wait before gates meant only for them, and for that very reason never opening.
Writing means living with that gate.
Not forcing it. Not abandoning it. But remaining there. Continuing to write. Continuing to fail. Not seeing that failure as a deficiency, but as form.
Perhaps that is the only honest poetics. Writing as a bridge that collapses the moment it is truly crossed. Not because it is poorly built, but because it does exactly what it exists to do.
And perhaps that is also why I keep writing.
Not despite that collapse.
But because of it.
For readers interested in exploring this subject further, I would like to refer them to my book on Franz Kafka: âInto the White: Kafka and his metamorphosesâ.
