I want to be in Cairo or Alexandria, but the train I'm on is stuck in the middle of a field somewhere near the Dutch border. Instead of embedded with the revolutionaries, I'm embedded in an Anselm Kiefer painting. The details of structure and vegetation along the tracks are not meant to be seen from such close proximity. Untended and unkempt, like a person startled out of bed and forced to answer an unexpected pre-dawn doorbell. Similarly, on the highway, every time I've had to make an unexpected stop--a flat tire, an emergency piss--I've felt something of the intruder; awkward among the detritus and details of dilapidation that are meant to be driven past at 100k or more.
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is my favorite book of fiction. Molded from the experience of a place that only exists, at least for me, but I suspect also for a world-wide coterie of literary nostalgics, as the emblem of a mythical marketplace of commerce and culture lost to our more fragmented world. America is the archetypical example of such a place, extant on the map as a geographical demarcation, but alive as global code for freedom and opportunity. This despite the fact that Jacques Brel, in one of my favorite songs, "Voir Un Ami Pleurer," wrote that "there is no more America…"(Il n'y a plus d'Amerique) In 1970. The modern metropolis, with its droves of immigrants and travelers contains the same plethora of faiths and tongues, but interaction is avoided. Diversity is to be respected, not exploited. Better safe than sorry.
I'm on the way to Amsterdam to watch the Super Bowl, America's true national holiday and day of communion. I'll be watching on a giant screen in Holland, with my Russian friend, in the apartment provided by his Haitian employer, after eating at the Morroccan restaurant where he works and attending the art opening of our Italian painter friend. On the train, I run into the Turkish actor I just worked with. And not for a second do any of us feel at home. Not today and probably not all year. Last night I went to the ballet. "Hamlet: The Birth of Scorn." A Chinese director and lead dancers from Uzbekistan and Italy. The company of twenty features Brazilians, Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Japanese, Australians and various other internationals, but not a single German. This, In the heart of Bundesrepublik. But if the idea that is America doesn't exist, Germany, the nation itself, is barely known to the natives who live here. We work and we shop, but we don't sit and think. In Egypt, they also want to work and shop. They want to be like us. Citizens in a democracy. But though I'm definitely grateful for the happy accident of birth that allows me to carry the passport of a democracy, what I secretly wish for is the tumult and confusion, the hurly burly, to borrow from Shakespeare, of something much less clean.
I find watching sport, the obvious simplicity of purpose and unity of passion, beautiful and relaxing. The sweat and violence is attractive too. The purity of the goal is unrivaled in society as an expression of communal action devoid of political machination. You just gotta fucking score. Everything else people do together involves politics. Not team sport. At least between the blows of the whistle. In American football, the purity of purpose when the whistle blows, on both sides of the ball, leads to a collision of stupendous violence, followed by a wake of anarchic madness. I imagine the opacity of purpose and violence of opinion brought to Durrell's squares of Alexandria, nurturing a fuzzier human than today's digitally sharp correspondents. All electric music, (as well as the recorded voice of Jacques Brel), lives on the edge of distortion. The pure buzz of humanity demands the dirt of of a thousand disagreements to survive.
May they all get too drunk to fuck in Cairo.
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