Inscrijvening In Scheveningen

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 13:22

Hey, yeh, hey,

It's another sunny beachful day at the seaside in coastal Western Hollandia.
My meds run out after I take them today so my Flemish Primitive pal Peter will be coming from Villette bringing me the medicine I will need to stay longer. Not that I need to be telling you this just so you know. I confess it is a luxury problem. I almost brought more (meds) when I departed on what was going to be a two night stay but really I thought I would only stay two days and not more... But the quiet in the dunes and the weather have me feeling like I should stay and listen to what the dunes have to say. I would rather stay on here longer getting used to this wickedly strong meds my Villette psychiatrist started me on. I am going along with her plan but am skeptical of starting/needing such strong meds.

...Meanwhile...

The weather is perfect...

So, I don't want to go back to bru-town's inner city air pollution and automotive car corridors unless i have to...

...Meanwhile...

I haven't spent that much money - because the dunes are free so long as you don't break the law here and go off the trails. I don't like fences - because every fence reminds me of Palestine or my sister rotting away in a mid Ohio "Reformatory" for women. Not that I want to forget her - There hasn't been a day in my life in the last 30 years where I have forgotten her. I just don't want to think of the walls of security and control and razor wire and bureaucracy that have her penned in like an animal. Which might explain my sympathies for Palestine and the Palestinians.

I think alot in the dunes here at the beautiful and well preserved coastal eco-systems which Scheveningen (which means leaning - like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy) rests in. These seaside landscapes are like a living Old Dutch Masters painting or so I think when in the protected areas on the barbed wire lined paths - on the other hand it looks and feels like New Mexico. It's more therapeutic than the psychologists therapy sessions my depressive brain requires to keep me functioning in the real world - Perhaps these dunes are doing alot more for alot less money than those psychiatrists and psychologists who know me better than I know me. So being here in Scheveningen is doing me alot of good. I would like to stay through the weekend but not for the weekend masses who will start to arrive tomorrow.

Meanwhile I am having a strange time in my interior life - in my head I mean. I continue with my attempts at no sex (including no solo sex) so I am not confused by other people...

One conclusion I have had in my quiet solo dune time is the realization that we (mart and batt) began building our house together in december '91 - The present physical form is the house that technically rests in Villette which is sadly not in my name at all and never was. I believe we began building that house long before we got married. I still maintain that my inheritance should go into that property investment. Which would help even things out financially though not entirely - but eventually I will be working and could contribute to the household again. So given that my soon to be ex so quickly and freely gave it to someone else hurts more than I can comprehend or articulate.

I am not going to fight it legally either - I am just going to let my material life on this planet evaporate. The fact that my soon to be ex has taken away the our-ness of those bricks and given it so thoughtlessly to someone else by default - is all the betrayal I need to stimulate me to sign divorce papers - an act that will break my heart to do but I will do it. I still believe and will continue to demand for the rest of my life a settlement of some sort - a consolation - not half of the property value but a consolation that takes into account the years from late '91 to early '07.

The fact that my soon to be ex does not want to be included in my inheritance to invest in the property is pure foolishness on their part. I have only pain and sadness about how the virtual side of our house building and homemaking has gone and concluded since we began it at Libby's magical house - (a time and place that has been and will be among some of the happiest times I have known) - I don't expect nor do I want to change anything now - as much as it feels painful to face up to the inevitability of divorce I will run towards it not away from it.

Honestly, I feel betrayed. These feeling are real - deep and valid. I see this is what is going down with the legal edge and say so be it. I will in time accept it and live with it and flourish from and beyond it. But I still believe I am owed some sort of consolation, compensation and settlement of 'x' amount. X being the variable that we choose - but we differ now greatly in everything so now the variable x has to represent each others side of this terrible equation. I think my soon to be ex's rationalizations for for why I get nothing might make sense on some level but I do not approve: It is a matter of ethics and our own personal sense of morality and obligation regarding our private lives together since '91, personal choices and issues that are nobody elses business but our own...

As far as my miserable financial performance these last years in Villette this was something we defaulted into together. Rightly or wrongly and we must share even in that. Now that I am being treated for these defaults we made together as the medical condition they indeed are, that depression illness now only serves to make me feel more violated by our present direction apart. This point of view of ours of late does not include my recovery - which implies we need or perhaps want me sick to impliment another person into our home.

When I think of that home in it's material and non-material sense it feels like it has been stolen and then absentmindedly given to someone else.I know I have been difficult and a handful lately and for too long but I feel betrayed. It is not by having a lover but by giving a lover the part of our life that was not any one of ours - that was only ours and partially mine - to give that to a complete outsider to a 15 year process - this is what I find wrong.This is how I can hold myself up to face a divorce - many times I am sad and lonely and hurt over it all. I know it is equally as difficult the others point of view but as always my soon to be ex has the upper hand, the controlling interest percentage - it never was a completely half and half agreement but that was our decision - choices we made together. If my soon to be ex feels justified because of my quasi religious experience at present - I am sorry - but I had to have some tools to get in touch with myself - time in nature is more effective than time in religion but in brussels, indeed in this part of the world - nature is hard to come by. I needed to reconnect and go full circle with some childhood spiritual and religious community experiences I had to sort out. For me Islam was an ingenios way to do that while making a stand politically against the powers that be in the west.

Despite the contradiction of my life I do very much believe in what Islam is. However this going full circle in a religious sense was important so I wouldn't forget a large portion of my life experience prior to '91 when my life went away with my soon to be ex. It will pass anyway - I am still me - and if anything, I will have accomplished what Allen Ginsberg accomplished politically and personally and artistically in his time and place in history regarding the structures of the world by going all Eastern like. This is easy to understand on an academic level but to grasp this aspect of my interior life is impossible for someone else because neither do I grasp it all and the is the way faith and ritual play out. I must pass through this - I keep telling myself this. Indeed perhaps nothing ruined our home more than getting married. Ironically, for that reason I am all for putting an end to this marriage - to give the freedom and space to sort ourselves out (alone or with someone) I just wish that house and home wouldn't get chucked away to someone else. I never expected things to play out this way. I believe we needed that house as a house to sort out ones self in architecturally and in its precise urban setting of old Brussels vlaams - My soon to be ex's new soulmate I believe is an essential tool for my soon to be ex at this time as is my muslim brothers for me at this time...

I just don't want to be turn me out like this without some sort of material/capital to work with of our mutual property as a parachute to my own autonomous life. It feel like someone took me in a car outside the city and left me on the side of the road with hardly a penny to my name. I want a divorce - and I want at some point the capital to go abroad and further complete myself in a non-western culture environment. This is what I think to get me through these hard time - to go abroad for a year or so. This will in reality not cost a lot of money.

That old narrow house are is the only home I know. It is my only connection to family and place that I have on this planet and my ex doesn't seem to care that I do have quite a claim on it because we began investing in that property from the moment we lived in a borrowed Libby's house. The fact that not surprizingly my ex see things otherwise I find ethically wrong. Yes, it is technically the law - and the law is not on my side. I can understand and accept that my soon to be ex's point of view and I will take it like a gentleman and end up a better person for it. I am sorry so many years in Brussels were wasted in our mutual life by my depressive condition - but I should have been getting mental help earlier. I needed to get in touch with myself and make myself useful again and sooner than I did. I was a sick parasite. But again I feel we made those choices together perhaps by default. I know my soon to be ex is in a much better situation now and I know this because I see it and also especially I see it in the dogs.

There have been many times this year where I really needed not to be alone and without the dogs and nobody were there. Nobody and I learned I am stronger than we both thought. I want to go abroad and see if i can get teaching work to do and fund a year overseas and find out if that is possible...

I would like to see about higher pay work teaching English in the UAE - and I would really like to bum around Maroc or Egypt for a few weeks here and there somehow in the next year. Given the cost of living in those places is not like it would cost to do that in western Europe. Going abroad, it might really be integral in establishing who I am post me and my ex - post depressive - post gay - post married - post american etc....

Muslim, me.

I know I am asking alot of myself and the world we live in but I believe its not just money here I am asking for help in - I am an anomolly - Like Michael Jackson converting to Islam and living in Arabia disquised in modest womens black layers of veiling fabric - I need some sort of belief from in myself that I know what i am doing. I don't need to wear the clothes of a woman though from any culture thank God but I do like Moroccan mens hooded Jalalyba's or thobes. I still want bru-town to be my home base but for the moment I think it is essential that I am not there so much in the next year. Of course I still have to go see dad pa Kettle in Dollville, Ohio and do some time there - perhaps more frequent but shorter stays. Certainly he will help me with the money to do that or so I naively hope. There have been many times this year where I really needed not to be so alone and I just rolled over and went to sleep and cried in my dreams.

Nobody was.

This is what i have learned not from the dunes.

By sitting there watching the dunes move, grow and erode in geologic time has done me wonders.

Everyone should find a place to do the same. This is what I learned from reading Terry Tempest Williams book RED writing about the soul of the Colorado Plateau that every North American whether from there or not carries in them.

To my soon to be ex - if you only knew that the grass, wind, sand, rocks and trees are saying. To anyone who is willing to listen to earth in on its own slow paced geological clock. There are many ways to kneal down and kiss the earth in humility and awe- as that 13th century Sufi poet once wrote... if we only knew, if we only listened to what the earth was chanting.