Amsterdam Twenty-Nine: Beauty and the Beast

BEAUTY

BEAST

Indexing all day Sunday. I walked to Bloem late afternoon for a meal and a few beers. It was cold and rainy. As I stomped in the front door, shaking the rain off my shoes, I saw only one person eating at a table. A tall, thin young man, possibly 6’6’’, was working. I walked to the middle of the bar to sit near the beers on tap. I ordered La Chouffe and the young man filled the glass, removing the overflowing foam with a knife.

I ordered a simple ham and kaas broodje mit tomaten en sla. The young man said, “Ja.” He gave me a funny look and asked if I was American. Must have been my pronunciation. I took a drink and said yes. I asked where Daniel was. He said, “Oh, you know Daniel?” I said yes, that I had met him as well as Anabel and Nina a few nights ago. The young man nodded. We chatted for a bit and he told me his name was Isa before going to the kitchen to communicate my order to the chef.

It was a lazy night. I talked with Isa on and off as he worked. He was an economics major at the University of Amsterdam. Apparently, everyone but Daniel and possibly the chef was a student at the university. Isa mentioned that Anabel and Nina were grad students. I hadn’t realized that, but it made sense. They hadn’t come across as undergrads at all. I asked if Daniel would be working later. Isa said, “No, it’s just me tonight.” My broodje came out and I ordered another beer. After eating, I thanked Isa for the beer, the food, and the conversation. He said, “My pleasure,” and I left.

The rain and wind had died down; it felt less cold. I thought of walking around the neighborhood, but I didn’t want to catch a cold days before my flight departed. Instead, I walked toward home, a little dejected I hadn’t been able to see Daniel. I liked Isa, though. I sent Vanessa an SMS to see if she had to work. It was still early—for her—so I didn’t expect a response right away.

I arrived at the apartment, possibly my last night in the place all to myself. Vanessa had promised to come over Monday night. I had an abundance of cannabis left so I loaded a bowl of Hawaiian Snow. I waited before smoking, though. I walked around the apartment from room to room. I turned on the lights in the kitchen and wondered at its contemporary décor and technology. I ran my hands on the granite countertops, appreciating the coolness. My eyes sunk into the woodiness of the cabinetry. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the lights, and looked at the giant shower. “I will miss you most of all,” I said. Now I’m talking to inanimate objects, I thought. It’s just a place.

I knew that was bullshit, though. This was more than a “place.” This place inhabited me as much as I inhabited it. I became human again in this apartment. That shower, along with some shrooms, had given me one of the great sexual experiences of my life. I realized I had never showered with Vanessa; I needed to correct that mistake.

I went to my bedroom and picked up The Architecture of Happiness. I had flagged pages and underlined passages that spoke to me, that described in words what I had not been able to capture while being in this apartment or out and about in Amsterdam. I came across a few sentences that helped me understand how I felt about my apartment, my street, and the city from the very beginning of my stay:

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

I put down the book on the coffee table when I heard the buzzer of the dryer. I removed the clothes and folded them in the bedroom. I said to the room, “Well, you weren’t as spectacular as the rest of the place, but I did make love to an incredible woman on this bed.” I thought about that and stopped folding clothes. I sat down and my mind went back to that night. Before I could sink too deep into thought, though, I made myself get up. “Too much nostalgia.” I was talking aloud now instead of thinking to myself.

I walked into the living room said, “Hello, again. You have been good to me: The music, the coke on the coffee table, making out on the couch with Vanessa, and dancing throughout the room.” I walked to the side of the blinds and pushed the button. “You gave me this wonderful button, too. Open. Close. Open. Close. Open.” I left the blinds open and looked at the canal lit by street lights and lights from the windows of the condos across the way. “I can’t believe I’ve been living here for over a month.” I was momentarily stunned. “Has this really been my life?”

Despite myself, I was becoming nostalgic. I tried reminding myself that I would be coming back in less than two months. “But not to this apartment. These are my last days here.” I felt a sadness oncoming. I rested with it while looking out a window I would soon never look out again. “Thank you for the view.” My home was about to revert back to an apartment again.

I received an SMS from Vanessa. She had to work so I picked up the pipe and took a few puffs. I sighed, picked up The Architecture of Happiness, leafed through it, and found this snippet:

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

It was as if he was describing the land I couldn’t find a way to call “home,” a land of diseased architecture and urban design, a land where bland and ugly thinking led to gigantic parking lots and huge box stores, a land decimated by tract houses and industrial farming, a land buried under an obsession with possession, status, and money, a land where the quality of sensory experience held little value. I didn’t want to go back there. Why would I? The culture was unhealthy in nearly every way a culture could be unhealthy.

Meanwhile, I was in the land of the living, an urban space designed to ensure a higher quality of life. There was imagination evident everywhere in the city, from the architecture to the street and canal layouts to the types of transportation the design encouraged (walking and cycling) to the tolerance embodied in laws and regulations that acknowledged persons as adults capable of making their own decisions whether good or bad to the preponderance of different sized and shaped parks and to the art that existed in voices whistling and singing, in the bodily movements seen in public, in the diversity of clothing styles and colors, in the paintings and sculptures in the endless galleries and museums, in the diversity of clubs and music venues, in the interior designs of homes and shops, in the spirit abounding within the abundance of cafés, and the spontaneous performances of living art.  

The city and its inhabitants filled in the gaps that I, as a person, lacked. It was not possible to remain static as a being in such an environment; constant change was the only possibility and it was easy enough to focus change toward living well, with or without money. What other goal to life is there but to maximize the quality of the experience of living? If the surrounding environment played such a vital role in the improvement of my quality of living then obviously the quality of the lives of others around me were as important as my own. The Dutch understood that truth and the evidence could be seen in the physical environment, the cultural environment, and the governmental and legal environments. Even the economic environment played relatively well with the other environments, but that was primarily because it was not the primary force of change and development. It played a role just as each environment did. The culture, law, government, and physical environment (whether developed or undeveloped) all contributed to decisions about what would happen to a particular space at any given time. Thus, the city and much of the country was fucking beautiful! As de Botton wrote,

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

If I wanted to turn to an environment with the capacity to staunch the disappearance of my "true self" I wouldn’t go to a Walmart parking lot, but I would go to Leidseplein, Vondel Park, the Dam, Oosterpark, Westerpark, Seven Bridges, anywhere along Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, or Herengracht, in most of the Oude Zijde and Nieuwe Zijde, throughout the Jordaan, De Pijp, and Plantage, Amsterdamse Bos, and probably even Nieuwmarkt if I could ever find the damn place. When I first came to Amsterdam, I wanted what my inner self lacked, to be filled with the beauty that surrounded me. It worked. The question was whether that beauty would remain within me once I returned to an environment that was absent such beauty. Why was it absent such beauty? Why were fools allowed the power to make an ugly mess out of what was beautiful before it was developed? Alain de Botton wrote:

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.

The idea was so simple, so easy to understand and completely feasible to implement. The Dutch had done it and were continuing to do it. Flawlessly? No. They built in the 1980s, too. Nothing built in the 1980s anywhere in the world is beautiful. It was the ugliest decade of construction in global history and the United States is defined as much by that sad, sorry decade as any other. Amsterdam, meanwhile, was in the midst of a new Golden Age, one that in many ways rivaled and surpassed the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, not just in architecture, but in thought, feeling, culture, law, and governance. A profound environmentalism was married to a rich humanitarianism. Beauty remained as important as social welfare and was, in fact, recognized as vital to social welfare. Integration and interconnection was understood to be reality; thus, nothing was believed to exist independent of everything else.

The “isolation disease” infecting the culture of American individuality led generations to believe that ugliness was okay because it was “someone else’s property.” Hog confinement concentration camps dumped shit into streams, rivers, and aquifers that negatively impacted environmental integrity and water cleanliness that in turn affected innumerable cities and tens of millions of persons. “Well, that’s them theres property so if they done wants to dump millions of tons of shit in the water every year ain't my bizness.” Water defies any notion of property rights and ownership as it moves according to gravity. Water doesn’t remain on the land where shit or toxic waste is dumped; it flows away from that land in a number of ways and carries the shit and toxic waste with it. Only fucking idiots could fail to understand something so simple. The United States, unfortunately, has produced a tidal wave of fucking idiots.

I put another bud of Hawaiian Snow in my pipe and puffed, my mind rant depleted. I realized it was caused by my impending return to the U.S. and my sadness at leaving such a wonderfully invigorating environment and culture. I reminded myself I would be gone for less than six weeks, but then I remembered that everything I had experienced in Amsterdam occurred in a little over five weeks. Fuck, six weeks suddenly seemed like forever. I took another puff, put down de Botton, and picked up Sailor Song. Better to listen to tunes and read a novel the rest of the evening.