Bruxelles, Belgique

Brussels is the first stop for me on a four-city tour of potential jobs for my partner Catalina. Potential job means potential home, and while she interviews and is interviewed, I have a similar but much more free-form conversation with the people and structures and cultures that we pass through. There are dramatic in their differences, and perhaps equally dramatic in their sameness: oil has made car owners (or at least desirers) of us all, and these European spaces, designed and built hundreds of years ago, simply do not translate well. They seem to hiss one thing with their modern tongue, but sigh about something else with their next breath.

I had expected and did not find good food, artistic savoir faire, grace.

Who knows why we create the fantasies we do? Or where the assumptions come from: yet there they are, guaranteed disappointments if you hold them tightly, the moment you step foot over the border. Brussels did not convince. What my jet-lagged eyes and heart saw: lots of people looking at their watches, lots of people hurrying, lots of people apparently occupied with what lots of other people thought of them. I saw a city deeply uneasy with itself. Maybe becoming the seat of the EU hurt it, somehow. Maybe self-importance was thrust upon it, when before they might laugh at themselves and mock the pomposity of the French, now they share it.

Bruges old town, which we also visited, was amazing, but crawling with the likes of me, passers-by or passers-through, the wrong kind of energy, a superficial scuff on roads built around the turn of the millennium: last millenium.

So there you have it – or probably you don’t. I can’t explain it well to myself, and much less be objective about the reasons I deeply disliked my stay in Belgium. I bet there are wonderful corners where I would be met with open smiles. But I certainly won’t spend precious days of my life looking for them.

Surrounded by the city-sea (whose waves of traffic unceasingly crash along its shores) le jardin botanique: near-deserted island, green retreat

A new trolley tumbles by metallic and staccato, while a thousand cars grumble at one another in stage whispers that, taken together, form a roar (as a bird a-twitter invites attention, the whole flock calling overwhelms the senses)

… invades, I would say, the peace here cultivated. Two sentries stand guard — have stood two hundred years, I suppose — sycamores as tall as the surrounding buildings, whose boles I could not reach around. The breeze that rushes over the commuter’s noise spins the leaves, and sighs. I know: it is a human feeling placed inside a tree. Maybe the sigh was mine, and the trees will stand another bicentennial.

The people are of this time, but the place is of another. The buildings here survived the war. They are cracked and a little eroded, and special for that, and dear. Even so, I’m not sure I like the history self-evident in the air, or the Bruxellian rush from here to there. Fine to visit the beautiful gray histories, but live among them? Maison-cimetière.

Ah, the traveler’s injustice, makes a city of what one feels, right now, jet-lagged, struggling to recover similarly time-eroded French.

The lovers kiss on the opposite bench. Life pushes up through the cracks in the paving stones. That’s something deeper than the stony surfaces, it goes right down to the earth, and joins us together in one permanent, unfolding spring.

A small gallery of images taken from my brief walks about town:

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