music to go with this story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-VnkCHauyU
Now that the sliding slope we're on seems without end and the mood is accordingly gloomy, many of the twentieth century's doom prophets have come back into fashion. A decent discussion on where it's all leading us can't be held without quoting George Orwell, while William Gibson's and David Bowie's most accurate lines lay at the back of the modern young philosopher's head, with first-hand knowledge of Blade Runner and the Matrix, year of entry 2009, plus whatever came since that is deemed mentionable.
The Subterranean Traveller was in Ruigoord on Sunday 19 May, visiting the Fiery Tongues poetry and spoken word festival. He witnessed his dear friend Peter Palmboom perform excerpts of his new novel Forest in the company of online artist Helen Fermate and then he listened to a number of Netherlands' finest poets, gathered on this wintry cold spring afternoon in a tiny hamlet – two streets and a church – in the Amsterdam Port District. The traveller saw Palmboom and Fermate play out life in 2017, people trying to make it, and then Palmboom told how Forest (Oerwoud in Dutch) seeks to explore what may come of his hometown of Barcelona if current destruction policies are being continued with the same extremist zeal they have been applied with over the last couple years. It sounded convincing enough. The traveller saw Def P. jumping on a damp and ice-cold garden stage. What’s with the weather, people asked each other. Around 1990, Def P. with his band Osdorp Posse was the first Dutch rapper to spew his well-driven witty criticisms in his mother tongue, with a reasonable charts career for some years. The traveller met his old friends Julius Joker and Alfredex, still high waving the flag of freakreation. Wiet had gone into painting, he got to see. Everybody busy, everybody their own way. When they were young their binges had kept them off their careers.
The traveller had not been to his hometown for almost two years. Things had changed, once again. Privatisation of public services had further raised prices, social security was harder to get by, and the merry mood of many long years not so merry anymore. Still, all wasn’t half as bad as down here with us and the neighbours. The subterranean travelled round the country, absorbing as much energy as was needed for a decent account of affairs. He heard they were losing their soil in the north, where two sisters lived. Too much gas extraction had started to create worrisome levels of earthquakes. As of now, the gas dealer promised to offer full damages, nobody knew when that’d get underway.
On Europe, the subterranean learned, voices are diverging according to the impact of Brussels’s policies. On the same Saturday, while El País by virtue of one of its regular contributors begged Berlin to stop shoving the blame and hardship on the shoulders of the Mediterranean working classes, a Dutch newspaper urged the Germans not to fall for the temptation of blaming themselves for everything that's going wrong with austerity – not to be over-protective of the poorly managed countries of Europe's South who only have themselves to blame, these words were to be understood.
But the main event, unfortunately, was the weather. For it was extraordinarily cold that 19th of May, as it had been all year so far the subterranean learned. The traveller had arrived on Friday from an unusual cold Barcelona into a much colder Amsterdam. Saturday gave half relief but new colds would quickly stream back in from the north - always the north, he was told.
On his way back, from an airplane height he saw a thick white carpet hanging over Europe, from northern Spain and Rome up to Denmark and perhaps even further. That is what the North pole must have looked like, the subterranean thought, a vast frozen flatland with the occasional rock and ridge. It seemed to the traveller, the unusual cold gripping Europe that spring (and most of the previous winters as well) had everything to do with the fact the pole was melting. Cold waters streaming southwards had been pushing back the upwards Gulf stream for some years now, and they had gone robbing Western-Europe of its famed mild climate for such latitudes. Climate had finally gone mad. For Spain, the situation brought short term advantages. While being warned for the impending desertification of the Iberian Peninsula, in the eight years of his stance here the subterranean traveller had witnessed Catalunya only getting greener, providing accidentally for the forest revolution old friend Palmboom was proposing in his latest work.
The present staring blankly at him, the subterranean thought of yesteryear. Ruigoord used to be a village at an hour's cycling from the good city of Amsterdam, a church and two streets lined with houses in the midst of lush pasture, both a shipping artery and the old Haarlem dual carriage way not too far off. Then progress moved the port of Amsterdam closer and somewhere during the nineteen sixties it was decided Ruigoord had to disappear and its population relocated. Unexpectedly, progress wasn't advancing quite as swift as progressive minds had professed, and Ruigoord (or rather what was left of it) turned into a ghost town, only to be repossessed on the wave of flower power squatting which blossomed all through the nineteen seventies and eighties, happily riding the surf of minimal economic growth. Ruigoord was taken by artists, painters, sculptors, performers, writers, musicians and people who'd turned living into an art form. It became a centre for art exhibitions, free festivals and unruly encounters between free spirited people from all over the world. With Amsterdam no longer the magic centre of the European hippie realm, at least some of its allure lived on in this lively spot well beyond the ever so slowly advancing Amsterdam docks.
But progress is a poacher, always lurking in the shadows, waiting to gear up events. One day, a new dock was being built, right next to the limits of Ruigoord. As long as no activity were lured to its quays, it was just an oddity, used by Ruigoord's inhabitants and visitors for swimming and fishing. Then, giant docking cranes were installed and new roads were laid out and little by little Ruigoord's pastures were eaten away. Now, in 2013, Ruigoord is confined to its inner core of houses, church and a meadow, bordered by harbours, roads and a string of towering oil deposits. The artists, who no longer possess a permit to actually live there, have been given until the year 2020 to continue their artistic activities. Then, this little haven of peace and true, human progress, will be lost forever. One can only hope capitalism will have run its course well before that date.
