EXPERIENCING BELGIUM
Sunday, May 15, 2005
 

Samuel R. Delany's Beard

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:16

It seemed like a curious enough thing to do when I noticed a few gray stubbles showing up in my beard to let my whiskers grow out just to see my natural beard long and full for once in my life. The thing is it is really strange what the impression having a bushy beard growing on my jaw makes for people who know me. I mean for once in my life I want to see what I look like with my beard so who gives if it is not the time of Lincoln and not in fashion? I have this bright copper red beard with a few strands of white hair on either side of my chin. The sides of the mustache are blondish and then here and there along my cheek are quite a few dark reddish copper patches of hair and the occasional darker brown strand. It doesn’t seem to be the curliest of beards which I wish it were but as the whiskers grow some are showing signs of curling though not tightly and others are most definitely straight. When I look in the mirror I see this nearly over sized pubic like bush hanging on my face which is probably what shocks people who know me into some strange priggish sort of judgment. Keep in mind in Dutch pubic hair is called Schaamhaar or shame hair or better yet hair of shame. I suppose I can understand when some people express shock by my not keeping my bush tucked away in my trousers but proudly displaying it on my face! The thing is it is my face, my beard, my whiskers and why have I been shaving them off ever since puberty when they started to grow anyway? On the other hand on the street people who don’t know me seem to have an obvious interest in it. Living among quite a few Moroccans and other Muslims I have this sense that they appreciate a fine beard. Certainly I get a lot of looks from the women in these communities and I sense a sort of camaraderie in the men with beards I pass on the street. The meddlesome Moroccan youths on the streets here which when in groups of three or more are really best avoided, rather than verbally insulting me as they generally would with contempt by spitting out words in French ranging from “Flamingant” or “Pede” now just sort of give me a passing look or nod which is rather nice for a change.

When I made a few Google searches on beards I came across a photograph of an author I enjoy – Samuel R. Delany who in one particular photo has a mammoth beard. Way beyond anything Lincoln-esque or Walt Whitman like. It was a beard that would even humble bin Laden’s remarkable beard. Now I must read another Delany book. I picked up recently on sale a book of his extended essays appropriately titled for this essay about beards called Long Views which I will read out of my fan like appreciation for him and his being such an esteemed member of the brotherhood of the beard.

Despite my rewarding work on attaining a beard I feel a bit depressed this spring which is not an easy thing to admit as I have had a long struggle with melancholia. I realized as an early teen that I had a milestone of depression slung around my neck weighing my life down. Over the years I have tried to deny it and pretend it wasn’t there. I have tried to fight it with pathetic attempts at thinking positively. Eventually this tendency toward depressiveness nose dived and I found myself critically depressed. It was then I realized this condition is not normal and eventually I got some professional help. Even after all that work and all those pharmaceuticals that milestone is still there – who put it there or why is beyond me but living with it as a chronic debilitating condition is all I can seem to do. Some days are better than others but more often than not I am withdrawn and cranky and long to be a normal person for once in my life. Sometimes I just want to escape (it). So much so that at the moment I feel like boarding a plane to the states just to change my skies since I can’t change my mind. But really that is just a reflexive thought as there are many other places elsewhere on this remarkable planet to visit and see. I’d even settle for tickets to the fab new movie Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy if it would open here! I do actually admit I need a bit of help in the professional sense of things. But who knows maybe hanging out alone in Mexique Nouveau or some such high altitude desert would be much more useful than throwing money away on a psycho-anal-ist. In addition to this “condition” I’ve had a sinus headache for over a week now – I’ve forgotten how long - maybe that is why I feel as such all this melancholia:

And that forgotten Infinite Sadness…
Sometimes I think the only medicine for this angst is the desert.
Mojave,
Death Valley.
Utah’s trickster landscapes.
New Mexico high altitudes and arid plateaus.
Arizona red soil under the bluest of sky.
Big clouds.
Little fluffy Orb like clouds.
Take me there.

Even the prairie in far eastern Colorado has a certain something to it. In all that space, under all that sky, beneath all that wind, there is a silence you can feel in your soul. A silence that doesn’t exist here and it is something perhaps that is the cure for what hurts in my soul. It’s a silence that demands to be heard, listened to and felt. In the isolation of the prairie lies the silence of long lost lives without a recorded story, without present listeners. I want to go there and remember the dead from those plains – those deserts. I want to breathe their dust. To remember I will join them in their anonymity. I want to learn to let go and dissolve into this collective oblivion.

Instead of going west in search of this dust of souls for healing, my life went east out of Ohio. Very far east and north across the almighty Atlantic. I first left the states for Europe in ’96 and begun an all too long time of going back and forth between here and there as obliged to by my Visa status. Before my paperwork became established which was a long and tedious process which is in some ways still ongoing thus making it hard to date my arrival to Belgium I date my permanent residency here to the summer of ’99. I always get asked when I actually moved to Belgium but really it is the most impossible question to answer because it was such a process without ever a sense of arrival. I now qualify for a Belgian passport which I would like but even that comes with a bureaucratic Kafka-esque heap of determination and pluck to overcome! I also want to keep my U.S. passport (which is shockingly all to easy in these times to actually loose!) in the hope that things there change back to what the states should be although increasingly I doubt that will ever occur in my lifetime. If I am honest with myself I don’t really think it will ever happen now that the states is in such a freefall of wanton decline.

Although I live in Brussels one of the few European cities with a thriving and affordable café culture like what must have been seen in Paris at the turn of the last century. Unlike Paris café culture today which is just too expensive for Bohemian “wanna” be types like me Brussels carries on this fine European tradition. The thing is I am not such a socializing type and neither do I imbibe in (too much) smoke or drink. Nor do I like smoky cafes so I do enjoy outdoor terraces. In theory I like café life – and you can really flop for hours in Brussels with a good book easily and cheaply without ever getting lonely. The thing is here in practice I don’t like the nicotine air and my only vice is tea and the cafes don’t make a decent cup of tea despite all their apparatus and selections for making coffee. I enjoy my tea vice from home. I am a solitary tea and chai fanatic you just don’t know!

I think my best remedy for my depressiveness is tea and quiet. In reality though I know the best remedy for this chronic ailment of my brain is exercise. I am an enthusiastic walker and urban bicyclist and despise nothing more than automotive based traffic. But like the airplane often times it is an unavoidable contradiction in my conscience. I am of the strictest of opinion that religious people should at least try to avoid the automobile because of its inherent destructiveness but religious people never think of this. What would Jesus drive? Well, he wouldn’t! He’d put those Sandals of his to good use. He would be that solitary scruffy looking bearded fellow along the roadside walking in the dust while all those oversized Middle American religious types obliviously drove by in their super sized SUVs with concealed weapons in the glove box.

Speaking of being super sized I am in addition to my beard getting a bit of paunch. This is not good! So I have to resume swimming which I have let slide over the winter as the pools in Brussels have all been closed at the same time for repair. Brussels has a lot of pools but when you ad up the amount of people who use those pools good ol’ Bru-town just doesn’t have enough pools. Fortunately there is a remarkable bicycling and handsome politician named Pascal Smet who is working very hard to get among many other things more city pools! (He’ll get my votes when I am allowed to vote here!) I’m a very good swimmer and especially with the butterfly stroke but it isn’t easy to find a good pool anywhere to keep my torso in shape. When the pools are crowded when you swim Butterfly like me you are a public nuisance. During open swimming hours lanes are filled with men and women doing their own variations of Breast Stroke with corrective lenses on and not wanting to get their hair wet. When I dive in and do about eight Butterfly strokes to the other end of the 25 meter pool not only am I swimming like a bullet I am getting peoples hair wet. Doing this as a bearded swimmer and the result is there are Belgians here convinced a real Samuel R. Delany Mad Man is on the loose in the pools.

To understand me and my weird Mad Man ideas you might have to look at where I come from. Ohio. I come from that strange state called Ohio: As in Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio”. That May 4th killing anniversary from 1970 at Kent State recently went by unnoticed when then Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes used every means possible back then to eradicate Viet Nam war public opposition to American foreign policy. A skyline building now stands in the state of Ohio Capital memorializing Rhodes shamelessly built in his life time. Ohio is a state that is neither here nor there within the states. Ohioans are not protesting Republican fuel foreign policy wars anymore either. At one time in North American colonialization history Ohio was the rowdy far west. Jefferson (the President) wrote beautiful words about the Ohio wilderness and landscape but when I think of Ohio all I see are cars, and the parking lot tarmac that Chrissie Hynde sang of. When I think of Ohio I see strip malls, housing subdivisions like what RUSH the band once lamented during the early MTV years. Ohio of today more than any other state means extra-large people with rather stifling social views driving to and shopping at Wal-Mart. You just can’t see Jefferson’s Ohio affections these days for they have been paved over with cheap tarmac. After Jefferson and the western expansion of the U.S. government Ohio tried to become more civilized but always a bit cranky and self opinionated if not altogether contrary a virtue sadly lacking anymore. Nowadays when I hear talk of the Old West in nostalgic ways I smile because the state of New Mexico was a twentieth century invention founded in like 1912. So does that make Ohio the forgotten Old, Old West which is rather in the east of the U.S? The other thing about Ohio is it isn’t the north and neither is it the south.

My Mother, God rest her soul, used to say the south began in downtown Columbus back when it’s only skyline was the handsome and solitary Lincoln Leveque Tower. The South, according to Mom, started at the intersection of Broad and High streets: Where state route 40 (Broad St.) the old and forgotten National Road going east to west crossed state route 23 running north south otherwise known in town as High Street. If you were south of Broad you had entered the “South” and things were different from that point. The old dignified and solitary Columbus skyline changed with Reagan-omix into a corridor of concrete, steel and glass overshadowing the old Leveque to become a skyline that could be anywhere rather than somewhere like home. Where is Ohio anyway? My Belgian acquaintances always ask. My answer is always south of the most southern tip of Canada - yet it’s north of the infamous Mason-Dixie line from the American Civil War. There was a time when men and women caught in slavery would dream of making it across the Ohio River into Ohio to reach the safety of the Underground Railroad to freedom. So Ohio has a brilliant history of being rather cavalier like in fighting for ideals the Ohioans believed in and yet by the time of Ronald Reagan and the decline of the American Auto Industry Ohio had been seduced into mindless conservativism based in contemporary retail like religion of a placebo like variety called health, wealth and happiness at the expense of its soul and history. And yet within Ohio are anachronistic farmers of a near pre-industrialist faith. These religions with various sub-sects live to some degree without electric or automotives and live in very isolated and communal societies and to some extent I have often wanted to be part of such a community. Then there are the unseen and unaccounted for or unacknowledged by the powers that be in Ohio of groovy alternative do it yourself spiritual American types with very personal notions of what is actual freedom and democracy – and they are determined behind closed doors if nothing else. But that was Ohio when I was there, now after an absence of a few years it seems more bland, more banal, more like nowhere in particular just an automotive retail world with people trapped in its machinations unaware of anything or anywhere else.

The thing is I don’t ever remember fitting in anywhere so that makes me being an outsider in such a land as Belgium somewhat easy. I am through no choice of my own part of the international community of brother and sisterhood who must live under the guise of a Love that dare not speak its name. All of this adds up to me now here alone and somewhat aloof and most certainly out of place in Belgium. One cannot really assimilate into being a Belgian so if you come here from the outside you will always stay on the outside even though you might find a very comfortable place among and the Belgians. The food is good, the people nice (when they aren’t looking down their nose or being linguistically complicated) but the weather is depressingly cold and damp and windy most of the time. On the other hand the sky is always changing and affecting the light and sometimes overhead the most celestial and awe inspiring illuminated heavens pass overhead mostly unnoticed by the Belgians like a silent kaleidoscope of cloud and light and reflection. One of the more momentous skies you can observe here is after a rain fall when the sky is still low and broken up letting in sunlight which reflects off all the wet terra cotta roof tiles. The light seems to get caught between those roof tiles and the sky over head. When the light hits those wet roof tiles it picks up an orange hue to reflect back onto the low ceiling of clouds creating the most beautiful atmospheric illumination. I don’t think the Belgians much care for these old roof tiles – nor do they notice this play of light on their land. Like everyone else they sit proudly in new German made automobiles and dream of a detached house with attached garages and modern roofing. But when you look out the window and unexpectedly notice this play of light between Heaven and Earth here in Belgium – when you aren’t from here like me – you stop and just observe the fleeting moment feeling a strange and unexpected sense of awe. Everywhere I go and everywhere I look I see the handiwork of God. I tried to be an Atheist or at the least an Agnostic but if I am honest with myself I cannot be. Whether I liked it or not at the time I was raised in a very religious school and perhaps that has shaped my present day awareness with an appreciation and longing for the Divine. (Just not the kind of Political Religious Divine Retail they were teaching us children to believe in!) I wish I were more objectively scientific but if I am honest I am always looking for God and I always seem to find him so I just try to keep this to myself. I only tell you this here now because you want to know or you wouldn’t be reading this at this moment and perhaps you should know that. But please try and respect and accept it as part of me. As far as where I stand in the organized religious sense of things – I am not a fan of organized religion. I am something of a post Christian and pre Muslim with a hankering towards things of a Coleman Barks and his guide Bawa Muhaiyaddeen for a poetic Sufi nature. Yet I firmly believe you can find God anywhere most importantly in nature and within and certainly without any religion.

The thing is I feel I must add that when it comes to politics I am a secularist in the great old bearded Lincoln American sense of that definition: The exact definition of being a governmental Secularist in which Europe seems committed at present to upholding (thank God). What better way to unite religions and ethnic or social minorities than with a Liberal thinking and very well educated Secular Government to represent equally the needs of the great and the small collectives of people. I very much enjoy and defend the two Islamic Republics (Pakistan and Yemen) I have been to in the last year as I see that as essential in respecting their land, culture, society and religion. They are free to do as they please. But multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies seem to need a secular umbrella to shelter their varied and often times conflicting interests. My religious convictions are something very internal and very personal to myself and I see no need to force other people into having these convictions. The way I see it is either something you have or you don’t have – and sometimes even having religious conviction is something of an extra burden in life like a milestone around your neck.

Before I close this transmission allow me one indulgent rant: When will someone tell the Americans what the rest of the world has known for quite some time that the American Empire was on the wane as far back as their warmongering in Cambodia, Viet Nam and Korea? Will someone remind the Americans their Empire has been in a steep and steady decline for a long time now? Will someone just tell the Americans they have so very much to learn if they want to take a responsible and dignified place in today’s complex world? There is no room anymore on the playground of the planet for the overweight, ignorant, American bully.

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