1953

— Cornelis de Bondt

— Memories, reflections, analyses, questions

21 August 2025
— day

Last night was largely sleepless. The day before yesterday, I banged my left thigh hard against a corner of the old metal stove while passing by with some dirty dishes. Yesterday, after I got up, it began to hurt quite badly; I couldn’t walk properly. Today it’s worse — I can hardly limp along, and going up and down the stairs is torture. So sleep was out of the question; I couldn’t find a single position without pain. During one of those sleepless moments, perhaps on the borderland of dreaming, the idea came to me to start keeping a diary — or rather, a noctuary — since the words, and often the images as well, arise from that borderland. I often dream of events, people, and emotions from my past.

But then, when I’m fully awake, doubt creeps in. For whom? And so here I sit, behind my laptop, hoping that writing will bring some clarity. It could easily turn into a very long text.

The night gives me ideas, images, and fragments of text; the day then offers me the opportunity to create structure — to shape those images and words within a strict framework. I use 273 words per ‘Block’ (a paragraph, a set of paragraphs, or a section). That number is based on the number of degrees below zero Celsius — 0 Kelvin — the coldest possible temperature, where nothing can move. It’s the product of three prime numbers: 3 × 7 × 13. Combinations of the products of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, and 13 determine the number of words in the smaller text units.

For example, the preceding ‘Block’ is structured as follows: [126 (2 × 3² × 7)] + [42 (2 × 3 × 7)] + [105 (3 × 5 × 7)] = 273 words.^*) One might ask: why would anyone do that? What does it achieve?


^*) For now this only works in the original Dutch text.

The general answer is that every form of creation involves technique. To work out some idea in our minds — something not yet fully specific — we must handle the language we use with precision, whether that language is words, images, or music. There is always technique involved.

The personal answer is that, as a composer, I make frequent use of numbers. That begins already with notation: rhythm and metre are based on numbers. But so are sounds; every note has a specific frequency. Intervals have a ratio of vibrations — for a pure fifth, for instance, 3 : 2. Structure, too, always relies, more or less depending on the composer, on numbers or numerical proportions. In discursive writing, the numbers are masked by the meanings of words and sentences. In purely instrumental music, there is no linguistic meaning; one cannot compose a phrase like ‘Would you like another cup of coffee?’ or ‘I love you’. That is precisely what thinkers such as Kant and Rousseau found displeasing about music. Even in vocal music, it is the text, not the music itself, that carries linguistic meaning. Music can colour that meaning, but it concerns itself primarily with emotion. That is why, for Schopenhauer, music came first.

22 August 2025
— night

I spent most of the night lying on my back, now with a small pillow under my left knee and a rolled-up towel around my neck to give my head more support. None of it really helped; I lay awake for hours.
To distract myself from the pain in my leg, I made a journey to Königsberg to try to get an audience with Immanuel Kant. I decided to visit him in the year 1794, one year after the publication of his remarkable text Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. I chose to call on him at four in the afternoon, when he would have returned from his daily walk. His servant, Lampe, opened the door and asked what I wanted. When I told him I had an important question for his distinguished master, he replied, “Ein Moment mal,” and closed the door in my face. A few minutes later the door opened again: “Please follow me,” he said, and led me into a salon, pointed to an armchair, and instructed me to sit down. He was wearing white silk gloves, gesturing toward the chair with his right hand while keeping his left behind his back. He left the room and returned about fifteen minutes later carrying a tray with a jug of water, a pot of tea, two glasses, and cups.

The old thinker entered the salon. I immediately stood up to shake his hand, but he kept his distance. His probing eyes pierced mine. He motioned toward my armchair and took the one opposite me.
Kant poured water into our glasses and tea into our cups, without asking whether I wanted any.

“Who are you? Should I know you? Are you a philosopher?” he asked.

“You don’t know me, and I wouldn’t call myself a philosopher, but I do a great deal of thinking.”

“Where do you come from? You speak quite good German, but with a strange accent.”

“I come from the Netherlands, from The Hague.”

“Ah, the Low Countries of the merchants.”

I nodded but wisely kept silent.

“I was reminded of your country when, working on my Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I used the example of the merchant who, out of inclination, charges his customers honest prices,” Kant continued. “Have you read it?”

“Oh yes,” I replied, “but the question I wish to ask you concerns another work — the Critique of Judgment.”

“As you wish,” he said curtly. He finished his tea and poured himself another cup, then made an impatient gesture.

I hurried to ask my question: “Do you hold that Truth, like Beauty, is not bound to any interest?”

“I take it you yourself would answer that question in the affirmative,” he said, fixing me with an intense gaze. “On what grounds?”

I hesitated — this was beginning to feel like a third-degree interrogation, as if I didn’t have enough to endure already. I tried to turn onto my right side but immediately abandoned the idea. Best to grit my teeth; there are worse things in life. I couldn’t possibly explain all this to him — he didn’t strike me as a man overendowed with empathy.

“It seemed a logical conclusion to me,” I said at last, “since we don’t desire truth. The statement 1 + 1 = 2 is a disinterested one.”

I had the feeling that the philosopher looked at me somewhat pityingly, though that might of course have been a projection on my part. One doesn’t often find oneself opposite a man of such formidable intellectual powers, and I don’t consider myself an above-average thinker.

Kant took his time; he was now on his third cup of tea. I sipped mine slowly. I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking to use the toilet. Tea and beer, a pleasure to my bladder.

“I understand your argument,” he began after a while, “but I believe truth has nothing to do with your question of whether it is disinterested or not.” He emptied his cup, glanced at mine, shook his head slightly, and continued: “Unlike the beautiful, truth is grounded in concepts. When we wish to consider, for example, gravity, we employ concepts. That applies to all natural laws, but also to mathematics. For the judgment of beauty, as you yourself indicated, this is not the case.” He paused and took a sip of water. “Judgments of taste cannot be debated, since no determinate concepts exist for them; yet they can be disputed — we do that all the time. The disinterestedness of such a judgment is crucial, since it shows us which arguments in our disputes are meaningful and which are not. It directs our conversation.” He eyed my half-full glass and teacup. “Why don’t you drink?”

I feel a certain urge to relieve myself, but the pain in my leg holds me back, so I decide to ignore the pressure on my bladder. I pull up both legs, hoping that might help.

Since I didn’t answer his question, he went on: “For the argument about truth, this principle is irrelevant. It concerns not taste but logic and consistency — the criteria by which we determine whether something is ‘true.’”

He looked at me like a predator about to pounce. Fortunately, he reached for his glass of water instead.

“I still don’t quite understand,” I ventured. “If something is true, isn’t that an objective, verifiable statement, and therefore free from subjective interest? It stands apart from all desire.”

“In my Third Critique,” he replied, “in paragraph 40, ‘On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis,’ I distinguish between three maxims of human understanding: 1) To think for oneself — that is, to think without prejudice; the maxim of the understanding. 2) To think from the standpoint of another — that is, from a universal standpoint; the maxim of judgment. 3) To think consistently with oneself — that is, coherently; the maxim of reason. Unlike judgments of taste, common sense is indeed based on concepts, and on that basis we can arrive at a logical judgment of truth. But it would be wrong to regard that judgment as ‘absolutely objective’. Every truth we posit is grounded in our interpretation of our sensory perception; it does not concern the thing in itself.”

“But surely the statement 1 + 1 = 2 is objectively true,” I countered. “The numerical system doesn’t come from nature but is a human construction. Within that construction, the statement is objectively demonstrable.”

“Indeed,” he said, “that statement is objectively true, but not absolutely so. Truth is phenomenally objective, but not noumenally — it belongs to the world of appearances, not to the world of things existing beyond our perception, the ‘things in themselves.’”

“But in paragraphs 40 and 41 of your Critique of Judgment you distinguish between, on the one hand, the disinterestedness of the judgment of taste, and on the other, its interest — what you call empirical interest. Even in the case of reason there is an intellectual interest. Why, then, is this interest ultimately ‘irrelevant’?” I asked.

“The intellectual interest is rooted in reason, yet it can also relate to the judgment of beauty, when that judgment appeals to our moral sense. But only then — the judgment of taste has no interest as determining ground. For truth, since it belongs to reason, the matter is different. Reason is founded on necessity; beauty on the free play of our imagination. The tension between, on the one hand, the disinterestedness of beauty as determining ground and, on the other, its empirical interest, gives us the necessary instruments for an adequate analysis of judgments of taste. For truth, this is not the case; hence the interest is ultimately irrelevant.” He cast a final benevolent glance at my untouched tea.

I awoke from my state of dream and half-sleep; the pain in my leg was unbearable. I turned onto my back and placed the pillow beneath my left knee. Kant had vanished. What a know-it-all, I thought irritably. Was he a narcissist? He certainly seemed rather pleased with himself. Yet in the end I concluded it wasn’t a form of narcissism — he simply had difficulty tolerating those who couldn’t measure up to his intellect. Congratulations, De Bondt. Did others think the same of me? I had often had the impression that the people I’d worked with regarded me as a stubbornly self-assured and overly principled figure. Amateur psychology. So much unseen beauty goes to waste.

— day

I am also writing this text because there are still a few unsettled accounts — particularly at the conservatory where I used to work. For the moment, however, I haven’t yet found the proper form for that. Before you know it, you’re accused of rancour, or seduced by hypocritical, oily talk. Those accounts concern, above all, deceitful and underhanded behaviour. It isn’t my aim to publicly pillory anyone, but to confront them with the truth they themselves have trampled underfoot. Of course, that invites the usual refrain: “That’s your truth!” and “That’s your interpretation!” For many, truth is a flexible pantry, something to browse through or draw from at will. Which raises the question of their artistic judgment. For there, suddenly, they are on firm ground — don’t you dare touch Bach, Beethoven, Vermeer, or Shakespeare; they are sacred. But how does that work, exactly?

One might say: most people are too indifferent, too lazy, too stupid to ask themselves such questions — it’s the ‘human shortcoming’, so why bother? I have two answers to that. First: to remain indifferent to these “all too human aspects” is in the end a form of malice — what Kant calls ‘the second evil’ (in his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason from 1793) — and I have no wish to adapt myself to that ‘impuritas’. The second answer is more painful, because it is psychological and concerns myself: apparently I cannot bear not to be heard or seen in my arguments. Is it narcissistic to think I attract tu quoque’s like a magnet?

The easy answer would be: I don’t notice anyone complaining about those you-too’s. But perhaps they’re too stupid to recognize them — or they simply don’t care; and so on. The follow-up answer is: I am alert to inconsistencies in reasoning; they irritate me. My own ‘being right’ never strikes me as essential — in itself, I mean. I’m after truth in reasoning, but I’m perfectly happy when someone exposes my own inconsistencies. I’m curious; I fight for my views, but I can just as easily toss them in the bin. Yet this alertness — could it be a deviation, a kind of addiction perhaps? Might it even be a form of autism? Wonderful — everyone content, a label found, and the argument no longer relevant. Then we can keep things pleasant — timelessly pleasant.

I’ve got nothing against armchair psychology, but it always makes me get up from my chair to pee.

26 August 2025
— day

Wedding day — thirty-four years, no less! Five children and by now six grandchildren, with a seventh on the way. Annemiek and I were married in the Dordogne in a tiny village called La Chapelle-Péchaud, about 25 km from the hamlet where we now live. It was a scorching day, sky a perfect blue, and we had our first three children as little brides and grooms around us. The mayor who officiated was a friendly farmer and neighbour. His wife acted as witness for Annemiek, their son for me, and their granddaughter captured everything on video. We had also hired a professional photographer to take beautiful (and outrageously expensive) shots. We had kept the wedding secret from family and friends — my condition for getting married; I had nothing to do with bureaucratic nonsense, this was the compromise. The secrétaire guided the mayor through all the formalities, the marriage certificate was handwritten, and Mitterand looked on benignly from the wall of the Mairie. Formally, the wedding was not entirely comme il faut, since we were not permanent residents of Annemiek’s parents’ house. Permission had to be requested from the consulate in Bordeaux, accompanied by every stamp they could find at the Mairie. We were also required to undergo a medical examination with our local doctor, apparently to verify our ability to produce offspring. When we entered her office, she laughed heartily — we had brought our children along. So a few more stamps could be added.

The residents had placed two little pine trees by the entrance of the Mairie, festooned with pink and white ribbons. We were the first wedding in eight years. After the ceremonial obligations at the Mairie, we proceeded in a small procession to the house where we were staying. Champagne, wine, and other drinks flowed liberally; we had practically emptied the caterer from Belvès, while the photographer and the videographer-daughter continued to snap photos and film footage. Eventually, the guests departed, the children were tucked into bed, and the heat remained. Our wedding night drowned in champagne, other drinks, and our own sweat.

28 August 2025
— night

As so often happens, I wake in the middle of the night from a dream in which I am trying to find a toilet. That restroom is usually either in a department store or on a tram or train. It is always either impossible to find or already occupied, so I feel compelled to relieve myself in some bucket, sink, or — quite frequently — a hidden toilet. Naturally, the dream signals that it’s time to wake up and make a real sanitary stop.

A recurring theme in these dreams is that I am always searching — and almost always too late. I rush through a station looking for the right platform, hoping I can still catch the train. It is always night. The compartments (or the tram interior) often resemble a living room: as wide as they are long, the benches are more like furniture, carpets cover the floors, and they are always crowded. Somehow, I manage to find a spot.

— day

Today I did another ‘boucle‘, a short walk of about three thousand steps around our grounds, taking four rights turns — just manageable. Without a crutch! It didn’t go badly, except when I am on the narrow paths and a car threatens to overtake me; then I have to be careful. I wait until the car has come so close that the driver has to slow down, because if you don’t, they might roar past you at full speed. The French and cars — a murderous combination. When I hear the car slow down, I step cautiously into the verge, holding my arms out like a scarecrow to keep from falling; my balance is still not perfect. I always raise my hand in greeting. Most people wave back, a brief, routine gesture.

I have several recurring dreams, besides the ‘toilet/train dreams’: the ‘recurrent dreams’, the ‘winter-sport dreams’, and the ‘execution dreams’. There are also independent dreams.

The ‘recurrent dreams’ are short; they may involve a puzzle fragment, a numerical pattern, a wordplay, or even combinations of colors or musical fragments. They seem to be a sort of dream-echo, repeating countless times, and when I wake, usually for a toilet visit, the dream resumes once I fall asleep again. The themes originate from my mobile games or the compositional structures I am working on. That’s what you get when you play a game or work on a sketch on your phone just before bed. All these fragments lead nowhere; they are entirely useless.

All the ‘winter-sport dreams’ are about my father. Perhaps the same applies to the ‘execution dreams’; overarching themes always exist, of course.

I am in a car, high on a mountain road, probably in Austria, which is curious because as a child I always went with my parents to Switzerland. I drive along the road, probably lost, and suddenly I see a mid-station of a cable car below. A little later, I ski with my father to the mid-station to take the last lift. In a variant, we ski first to the valley station, then take the final lift up. It is thrilling because it is unclear whether we will catch that last lift. If we fail, we must walk home.

From the ages of five to twelve, every January I, and my two years younger brother Willem, went with my parents for five or six weeks to Arosa, a small ski village in Graubünden, Switzerland, about 30 km from Chur. My parents rented the top two floors of a detached chalet, surrounded by a pine forest, overlooking a roughly half-hectare square meadow. In the early years my grandfather (Cornelis, my father’s father) came along as well. While we were in primary school, we brought homework with us to complete in the mornings. In the afternoons we could play and practice skiing in front of the house. Especially the “steep slope,” which ran down from the chalet onto the meadow: climbing up and then racing down, seeing how far you could glide without pushing with your poles.

In the final weeks, we received a pass for the real ski runs. Then we took an anchor lift up, and our father would lead us down, teaching us to turn, and, of course, to brake. But the first thing we had to learn was ‘falling’. You have to fall toward the valley so your skis trail behind you. It feels unnatural, because falling toward the mountain seems safer, but then your skis may cross and break a leg. After doing this a few times, it no longer feels frightening — falling in the snow is always soft. You only need to watch out for protruding rocks.

According to my father, the sport consisted of ‘catching the last lift’. Timing it so that you could ride it once more just before it closed — at half past four. The sun was already setting. At the top, my father would wait a while, until all other skiers had left. Then we had the piste entirely to ourselves. The final stretch was off-piste, though many skiers had preceded us, and it was not very steep. Sometimes my brother and I had to push hard. We could ski all the way down to the ‘steep slope’.

3 September 2025
— night

A strange dream, something involving text — a single-column newspaper editorial on arts policy, though the final part had fallen out of view; I could still make out the top of the word Afterword, but nothing beyond that. Then I was walking through a meadow, and I had to pee.

— day

When I was six years old, I was placed in a ski class. Of course, I understood nothing of what the instructor said, nor of what the other children in the class said. I didn’t learn much, because on the second day I broke my leg. We had reached an icy patch of the slope, and I went down. I told you so! Lean forward! But no, lean backward and sit down on your behind. How many times had I heard that? My skis had indeed crossed, and my left leg couldn’t handle it. It turned out to be a complicated fracture of the shin; I had to wear a cast for six weeks, from under my foot to above the knee. Very inconvenient.

A member of the rescue team, standing behind me on the ski lift with a sled, saw me fall. He immediately got off the lift, because when he saw me go down he instantly knew what to do. I was carefully laid on the sled, with metal frames to stabilize my leg. Then some kind of cloth or tarp was wrapped around me, leaving only a small opening through which I could see the air. The attendant skied to the ski school, where I had to wait for a while. At one point, I saw the face of a woman above me; I heard her say something I didn’t understand, but I could tell she cared. A little later, she handed me a roll of sweets. Then my sled was attached behind a toboggan.

I was pulled behind the toboggan to Dr. Herwig’s private clinic, an authority in Arosa on broken legs. In a large room, I was laid on a bed, after which a nurse approached and, with an enormous syringe, injected my leg twenty times. Then I had to wait for a while. On the other side of the room, a man with his upper body bare stood in a machine I didn’t recognize, which after a while began to hum. When the man left, I was placed in the machine along with the bed. Later, I was shown the X-rays. Dr. Herwig and the nurse tried to reassure me, but I understood none of what they said.

In the meantime, my father had gone to the ski school to pick me up, but there was no trace of me. The school had no idea where I had gone; my instructor had neglected to report what had happened. The police station knew nothing either. It wasn’t until evening that it became clear where I was. When my father finally entered the room in the clinic where I lay, the cast had already hardened. Dr. Herwig, the nurse, and my father, with a cheerfulness incomprehensible to me, signed the cast. That was apparently a custom.

I was then placed on a normal sled, wrapped in blankets, and pulled by my father back to our chalet, where I was placed on a divan — the spot in the living room where I would spend the coming weeks. By then it was dark.

4 September 2025
— night

Recurring dream about numbers. A certain number was divided by two and then added to the first, producing a new number. This process repeated itself until the halved number was no longer a natural number. For example: 100, plus 50, makes 150; plus 75, makes 225. New number. 96, plus 48, makes 144; plus 72, makes 216; plus 108, makes 324; plus 162, makes 486; plus 243, makes 729. New number. A new number could also turn out to be an earlier one — it was a “recurrent dream,” after all…

The numbers were either durations of time or note values; which of the two remained unclear — perhaps both. Sometimes there was a flash of light at the moment the number was no longer natural. While doing the calculations, I felt a growing pressure in my head, which might suggest that it wasn’t merely a dream, but rather a state between waking and dreaming.

— day

The car couldn’t reach the chalet and had to be parked at the so-called Tschuggentor, a stone archway leading to various walking paths. Along one of these paths, we had to carry our luggage on a sled to the house. About thirty meters from this ‘gate’ stood the enormous Tschuggen Hotel. When we skied back home from the slopes, just before we reached our meadow, the hotel would come into view on our left — a long, yellow, multi-story building. I don’t recall exactly which year it was, but when we arrived at the gate at the start of our vacation, the hotel had completely burned down. From the improvised slope, we could see its elongated ruins stretching out below us.

A year later, the hotel had been fully rebuilt. Looking back now, what strikes me most is that when I saw the ruins, I felt no drama at all. Even from above, the sight inspired curiosity more than horror. And reflecting on it now, even my ski accident — the fall itself, the sled ride, the medical procedures, my father’s absence — eventually felt like an entirely ordinary experience. Sometimes you break a leg. Sometimes you are alone with your fears, because, of course, I did feel fear. Yet even that fear simply belonged to the experience. Apparently, children at that age lack much capacity for abstraction. Perhaps that, in the end, makes them more resilient than adults often expect.

5 September 2025
— night

Belle de Femme. A film title drifted through my mind, or was it Belles des Femmes? It was not Et Dieu créa la femme, I was certain of that. The latter film starred Brigitte Bardot, but it was Catherine Deneuve who I pictured. The connection between the two women is that both posed as models for Marianne, the symbol of liberty for France, and, if I remember correctly, also for Reason. But it wasn’t their images that flashed through my mind — only that title, the words themselves.

— day

My wife Annemiek, long ago, as a kind of joke, devised a little test to find out whether someone is dyslexic. You are supposed to say the first thing that comes to mind when you hear a certain word — for example, the word ‘Tree’. Do you then see an image of it, or the written word? If you see the image, you may have a form of dyslexia.

I see the word, and the thought of having to conjure an abstract image never occurs to me. Because what would I see — a deciduous tree, a conifer, in summer with full foliage, or bare in winter? I couldn’t choose, and my mind would completely stall. I should add, though, that I don’t think the test is accurate; everyone I tried it with saw the image, and no one saw the word. So by that measure, almost everyone would be dyslexic. But perhaps the test says something about whether someone has a form of autism. According to those around me, that is my case.

Back to the dream: that title does not exist, but Belle de Jour does, a film by Luis Buñuel from 1967, indeed starring Catherine Deneuve. Could the confusion come from the fact that it was a dream? Or does it not matter for memories — in both dreams and waking life, I can make such errors. As a child, I had an excellent memory, not always to my pleasure. In the first grade, I had to play Joseph in a Christmas play, and I was the only boy in the class able to memorize the long role. But I disliked the girl playing Mary. I tried to escape the role by asking if I could play a sheep instead. It was tried once, but the other boy botched it. So I was stuck. Many years later, my memory has noticeably declined — both within dreams and in waking life.

— evening

Read Susan Sontag’s On Style [1965] for the first time. It is the opening essay of the collection Against Interpretation. I want to reread it, but at first glance I am convinced by her argument. That the dichotomy of ‘form and content’ is untenable I have already argued in several of my own texts, yet Sontag goes further, contending that the very notion of ‘content’ is itself untenable. She does, however, leave room for the concepts of ‘style’ and ‘stylization’.

6 September 2025
— day

Our skis were made of wood, with a so-called belag on the bottom that could be treated with different types of wax depending on the snow: dry, wet, or icy. Metal rods were screwed along the edges under each ski to protect the wood. Before we set off on a trip, my little brother and I had to repair the bases, reattach the iron edges, or glue any chipped wood. We also had to start knee exercises weeks in advance to strengthen our muscles.

12 September 2025
— day

Essay on Sontag, On Style: Original plan: Sontag, Kant, and Reve. After having written substantial sections on the latter, I ultimately decided to remove them. Reve’s text is somehow relevant, beautifully written — speaking of ‘style’ — yet of a different caliber than the works of Sontag and Kant. Perhaps this is because in his text on ‘Composition,’ Reve discusses mixtum compositum, the idea that one should not mix multiple literary genres. And that is exactly what he does in Zelf schrijver worden [How to become a writer oneself]; on the one hand, it is an essay (in the form of a lecture), and on the other, a literary text, full of wit, jokes, and wordplay, but not something that can adequately stand alongside the texts of Sontag and Kant. With some regret, I have therefore removed the passages concerning his work.

16 September 2025
— day

My essay The Artistic Judgment is finished, in draft form. I have sent it to three of my Facebook friends for feedback; I suspect they will understand the text. I am curious whether they will eventually respond in terms of content. It is a substantial text, with many references to Kant, alongside Sontag. I am letting it sit for now and trying not to think about it.

26 September 2025
— night

Dream about a text that had to be placed over another text (or image?). Initially, it was in a rectangle with a golden ratio; should the long side be horizontal or vertical? Eventually, for unclear reasons, I decided that it should be a vertical rectangle, with a width of just one word (the longest word in the text); it thus became an extremely long, narrow rectangle.

27 September 2025
— day

The first time my brother and I were allowed to go up a ski lift or cable car, we first had to experience that it didn’t come easily. No gifts. Our father took us to the mid-station of the cable car that led to the top of the Weisshorn. The mountain is 2,635 meters high, the highest peak of all the slopes. The mid-station lay about 1,000 meters below. We had to climb up with our skis strapped under us, between the cable poles, all the way to the top, through the loose snow. It was a terrible climb; we sweated like otters and spent many hours on it. Dad would occasionally swoosh down the slope alongside us to check if everything was going well. Then he would wave cheerfully and ski further down. By the time we finally reached the top, the slope was almost deserted; it was nearly closing time.

When we skied down, I was overwhelmed by a melancholic feeling: ten turns down took a few seconds, while covering the same distance uphill had required at least fifteen minutes of struggle. I understood my father’s intention, but it filled me with profound sadness.

Later, during a May concert at the conservatory in 1979, this memory suddenly returned. A bewildering piece by Dick Raaijmakers, De Grafische Methode nummer 2, Fiets, was performed. The piece is a commentary on technology — in this case, the use of the camera. It shows the relationship between the labor required to take, for example, a photograph (pressing a button with a finger) and the labor required by the subject of the photograph when the action is actually carried out. It is a kind of inversion of Etienne-Jules Marey’s plage fixe. We see a naked cyclist with wires attached to his body to make his breathing, heartbeat, and muscle tension audible. The bicycle is connected to a motor, which drags the cyclist in an extremely slow motion over a distance of about ten meters. The bicycle is a nineteenth-century model without a coaster brake. Dismounting requires a special technique. Over the half-hour performance, the pedal completes one rotation, during which the cyclist must dismount. All sounds are loudly amplified in the space. Every movement of the cyclist is extremely slow; we hear his heartbeat rise when he decides to shift a finger slightly. The tension was palpable. I have rarely experienced such an impressive piece. The performance was actually intended to be a one-time event.

6 October 2025
— night

Fell beside the bed on my way to the bathroom. This happens to me quite often when I get out of bed too quickly. It takes a lot of effort to get back up; I had to pull myself up on the bedposts. Annemiek had woken up and stood there, worried, but she couldn’t help because of her own physical limitations. Frick & Frack.

— day

Finally, De Remmende Voorsprong has been published on my website. I altered the English title: The Braking Lead is a literal translation, but it doesn’t quite work in English, so I chose The Slowing Advantage. I call the story Hybrid; it presents an ‘interview’ of J. Chr. de Vries with Nico ten Broddels (naturally, an anagram of my own name). I hesitated long over the use of anagrams — Jantina Drimpglad is an anagram of ‘La Martijn Padding.’ All other names are real.

This ties back to the ‘outstanding account’ I wrote about on 22 August. The matter is laid out in detail in the text on The Slowing Advantage, a concept discussed by the historian Jan Romein. The piece is by no means vindictive; it is entirely factual. Much of it can be corroborated, for example, in emails exchanged between MP and me, as well as in the numerous texts I wrote for the composition department that were discussed in meetings. The work sits within a much larger context: fifty years of music culture in the Netherlands — ‘a personal documentation of the rise and fall of an adventurous, critical music culture, and the power of a cozy, all-too-cozy know-everyone network,’ as I described the publication in my Facebook post.

Regarding the anagrams, I partly employed them to pre-empt accusations of rancor; the story has now become fictional. I also took a certain delight in transforming MP into a lesbian character. ‘Jantina loved women, not men.’ Not a word of that is untrue.

7 October 2025
— day

I received some lovely responses to my text on The Slowing Advantage. SV. sent me a beautiful fragment from Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, concerning friendship and truth — themes that also appear in my text — specifically 89a to 91a. And, of course, about death. Phaedo recounts Socrates’ final hours, spent with a few friends. While they discuss the authenticity of their friendships, Socrates strokes Phaedo’s hair. ‘You stumble over mediocrity,’ he says at one point. I often feel the same way: that my real talent lies mostly in reinventing the wheel.

I also have what I call ‘betrayal dreams,’ dreams in which the colleagues I wrote about betray me. In the text, De Vries asks whether I am bitter. I reply that I have no talent for bitterness, but is that really true? “For hatred creeps in when we blindly trust someone, naively, assuming them entirely sincere — only to discover shortly thereafter that they are bad and unreliable; and this happens over and over again. When it happens repeatedly, especially with those we considered our closest, dearest friends, eventually — after many conflicts — one will come to hate everyone.”

On Facebook, LP. wrote: “Reading stories like those in your interview makes me want to write a Kafka-like parable about an artist whose efforts at not compromising only result in his gradual disappearance from the world. No one knows who he is anymore, because everyone is a Jantina. At the end he realizes this (like Don Quixote). But where is he then?”

I replied: “Before the Law.” But bitter, then…? I was indeed furious at that clique, and I still feel betrayed, both by perpetrators and by those who looked away. Yet my text is not, in the end, a bitter text. It is a factual account, a critical analysis — including of my own errors and failures. But LP. and SV. touch a sensitive point, which is precisely why my text refers to the hunt three times, with one of those passages forming the conclusion.

“A hyperbole should be used with taste, but the contributions on Facebook are mostly tasteless, overwhelmed by hyperboles that articulate nothing but themselves. They are irrelevant.
I suspect Robespierre and his followers would today be labeled ‘far-left,’ while the writings of his companion Louis de Saint-Just would fit seamlessly into a VVD program. What does such a label actually say? What does it reveal about those who constantly deploy it? Nothing.

Messiaen composed his Quatuor in a Nazi camp — was that a meaningless act? A political act? Or simply an artistic one, which he should have refrained from? Why shouldn’t artists demonstrate for any political cause? Is that an artistic act? Probably not — so what? And why should an artist feel obliged to demonstrate?

Art policy has been completely corrupted by neoliberal thinking. That is independent of the constantly invoked labels — whether ‘far-left’ or ‘far-right’ — which express no meaningful analysis of art policy itself. They are merely products of that policy; they are the policy.”

This diary (or noctuary) will indeed become very long. I will now post it on my website and add new fragments from time to time. I considered publishing it in numbered installments, but the text is too diverse for that; it is too much an impromptu. I will not announce it on Facebook; I’ll see who reads it. Or not, of course. Je m’en fiche.

8 October 2025
— night

Recurring dream about chorales. I had to write a chorale — no idea why. At first, the notes were vague, abstract even; hard to describe. But at some point, it became concrete — I remember a cadence in F major, a secondary dominant to V6, with a descending bass line F – E. Then an ascending line F-sharp – G, leading to a G minor chord, which transformed into that secondary dominant for the dominant of the fifth degree, completing the circle. And so on, ad infinitum.

9 October 2025
— night

Curious case: I dreamed again of looking for a toilet — this time in the (now demolished) conservatory building, on the sixth floor. Before that, I had been explaining something in an analysis class there. If I remember correctly — though how can one ever be sure when recalling a dream — it was about Mozart’s G minor symphony, No. 40. I had to take a piss and asked someone in the hallway where the toilet was. Confusion ensued; I ended up in a sort of utility closet where there was no toilet. Then suddenly, I was in a cable car, turning around the corner of the building toward the terminal station. From there, I had to take a staircase down to reach the classroom. I have no idea which came first — the cable car or the class and the toilet business. Yet I’m quite sure I’ve had that dream with the cable car before, several times even. Can you remember something you’re inventing on the spot? In any case, the strange thing was that when I woke up, I didn’t have to pee at all.

11 October 2025
— night

Awake at 5 a.m. after an execution dream. I was standing in the doorway of a room, with a few pieces of furniture, though everything was rather vague; the dominant colour was a faded yellow — the walls, and some of the furniture. On either side of me sat a person, their back against the wall — the door being in the middle of it. Something was happening in that room, but it was either unclear or I’ve forgotten what it was. At some point I stepped backwards through the door and entered another room, no more than two steps away. Then came two gunshots. I walked back into the first room and saw the two people with black hoods over their heads — they had been executed, the bullets had gone through their heads. I hadn’t seen their faces before, but I think they were men.

— day

I’ve described two earlier execution dreams in the story Two Dreams.
The first told of the execution of forty monks, by hanging and beheading, while the monks sang a hymn to the very last man.
In the second, I stood before a firing squad in the patio of a villa somewhere in southern Spain or North Africa.
That dream occurred early in the morning, a few days after the birth of either my eldest daughter or my son — mid-1980s.
The firing squad consisted of seven soldiers in desert uniforms, with those long sun flaps.
The strange thing was that, after the officer gave the order to fire, I didn’t wake up immediately.
I felt the bullet enter my head, shattering it — and only then did I wake.

12 October 2025
— day

The link to last night’s dream isn’t hard to find: in recent days I’ve been watching a Japanese series about a large group of people who end up in a mirror world, where they are forced to play a game every day or two. These games are dangerous; most of them die — often by execution to the head, shown in gory detail. Obviously, that’s not the sort of thing you should watch right before going to sleep. The flesh is weak.

The monk dream is harder to place; it probably dates from the late 1970s or early 1980s. The dream had two parts: it began with a short newspaper report describing the execution, and then I saw the scene unfold before me. I also heard the singing of the monks, though I can’t remember a single note of it. In the aforementioned story Two Dreams I draw a connection to André Malraux’s novel La condition humaine, in which people are thrown one by one into the boiler of a steam locomotive, each time accompanied by the shriek of the whistle. That novel made a deep impression on me at the time.

The origin of the bullet dream I cannot really explain. For many years I suffered from headaches — often, almost daily. It’s quite possible that, just before waking, I felt a stabbing pain in my head — it happened often, a sharp pain, accompanied by a flash of light and a whistling tone. The period right after the birth of a child demands a great deal of energy and is stressful, exacerbated by the lack of sleep that comes with it. Perhaps that made me more susceptible to those headaches.

The possible connection with my father, which I suggested earlier (on 28 August), is clearer in the monk dream: the execution was carried out by the Nazis; the newspaper article referred to an event in 1941, if I remember correctly. My father was imprisoned in a concentration camp; the war played a major role in my upbringing. A therapist I saw in the mid-1980s regarded me as a “second-generation war victim.” A difficult subject for me — I’ll return to it someday.

13 October 2025
— night

I was walking through the catacombs of an old building, somewhere in Friesland (? — that may be a reconstruction after the fact); I was accompanied by a colleague, a tall man. We entered a modest room where a dozen people sat on simple chairs — it turned out to be a funeral ceremony, and judging by their faces I was supposed to take part. I had absolutely no desire to. The man beside me held his raincoat in front of me to shield my face, hoping I wouldn’t be recognised. We walked through the room toward the exit; a woman called after us that she could still arrange two chairs. We hurried on and found ourselves at the foot of a long, steep stone staircase leading upward — I assumed to the exit. A faint light glimmered at the top. It smelled of coal, which reminded me of the oldest Underground stations in London. After a long climb, I suddenly found myself outside, on a cobblestone square. My chaperone had vanished.

To my surprise — and delight — one could slide on the stones: the square sloped gently downward, and I skated to the bottom, until I reached a grassy field. At the end of it stood a grey, tall church, with narrow dark windows and a tower barely higher than the roof. The front door — on the narrow façade — was closed; the tower stood to the right of it (from my perspective), an asymmetrical structure. It was a sinister building.

— day

It seems quite unnecessary to attempt an interpretation of this dream; any armchair psychologist could fill that in for themselves. What most people won’t know is that, when I first moved into a room of my own, I lived on a street with a somewhat similar church at the end — though that one had two towers instead of one. I realised this after waking up. On one of those first days, as I walked down the street, I heard the bells ringing. Just before I turned the corner into the broader avenue that led to the shops, the bells suddenly stopped — not in the way you’d expect, with a fading resonance, but abruptly, mid-strike. I stood still, momentarily stunned, and understood that I had been listening to a tape recording of church bells.

— evening

Election season proves that the media which consider themselves journalistically objective — television, newspapers — suffer from Stockholm syndrome. The word hostage can be used in two ways: it usually refers to the victim, but sometimes also to the perpetrator. The term is therefore recursive.

October 17, 2025

— night

Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up from a science-fiction-like dream. I was being threatened by a small group of men in some kind of room; the leader had black-and-grey hair and a grey beard. It wasn’t me — which of course easily could have been the case in a dream — but he had a broad, almost round face, whereas I do not. I escaped, and the way I did so is interesting: I suddenly possessed a technique that allowed me to travel through time and space, by imagining another place and time, zooming out, and then zooming back in somewhere else. Then I was gone from the dangerous place and found myself somewhere safe instead. That place was somewhere in Africa, far away from where I had been before. I have no idea where that was, why I was being threatened, or who those men were.

When I was awake — for whatever that’s worth in the middle of the night — I thought of Kant. Time and space are the two necessary conditions for acquiring knowledge. I wondered whether this dream could yield a new story, but I couldn’t immediately see how. That was a concern for later — or perhaps I should just abandon the idea altogether.

— day

After breakfast and the annual visit from the chimney sweep, it was hard to recall the dream. I still knew that I had had a dream with potential for a story, but I no longer had any idea what it was about. A cigar with an espresso, however, works wonders. I’m curious how long that will keep working… I do worry.

To be able to write that story, I first had to know more about that technique of displacement in time and space — it had to be part of the story, something more than a mere magic trick. Only after that could I start thinking about a plot. Coming up with a suitable plot isn’t an art; after all, all plots have long since been invented — we merely repeat them, in countless variations. Or is that a form of postmodern thinking? Which nowadays, in certain circles, and increasingly so, is considered suspect. Foucault is no longer en vogue in the circles closest to me. Especially within the Anglo-American world there are conflicts about this — or rather frictions, since there isn’t really a genuine debate.

“Foucault” (as a metaphor, that is) is held responsible for what is now known as “woke” thought within Anglo-American universities. And “Foucault” then stands for “postmodernism.” He supposedly single-handedly brought Trump to power. There is much anger.

That’s a complicated issue I may return to another time. I’ve written about it before, both on Facebook and in several texts on my website, but a summary probably wouldn’t hurt. Then again, it probably wouldn’t help much either.

As for that technique — I don’t yet have a ready-made solution, but I now think it might be possible to let it operate through what Kant calls the noumenal world. I withdraw into the noumenal domain and, from there, choose a new time-space constellation. Working that out will take some doing. First, back to Kant.

October 18, 2025

— day

I can’t make any headway with that story; we probably have more bad ideas than good ones. Letting go of an idea that initially seemed promising is difficult for me. Also because I’m never entirely sure. Is it really bad, or am I only telling myself that to get rid of the nagging? How can you tell? Am I being lazy?

When I was sixteen, I suddenly started drawing obsessively. At first with pencil on notepad paper. Not long after, I discovered conté crayon; with it, I made sketches on large sheets of sturdy paper. When I was seventeen, my mother noticed that something was troubling me — I wasn’t eating or sleeping well, I felt miserable. She asked what was wrong, and I didn’t really know. But there was a girl in my class I kept thinking about. My mother laughed. “Cornelis, maybe you’re in love!” I hadn’t thought of that. “What should I do?” I asked. “Why don’t you ask her out? Then you can talk to her about it.” I didn’t know how to go about that, but an idea came to me: I would draw a portrait of her, in conté.

I set to work. I had a photo of her taken in the schoolyard — she was sitting on my shoulders and someone had snapped it. I had never made a portrait before, and the first sketches, in plain pencil, failed miserably. After hours of struggling, I wanted to give up. But the idea wouldn’t let me go, so I tried again, and again, and again — and finally it started to look like something.

I carried the drawing in a thick cardboard tube. I had drawn her seated in lotus position on a large ball; I was pleased with the result. Nervously, I rang her doorbell. Ionka, as it turned out, had mononucleosis and was in bed — she couldn’t talk long. I gave her the drawing and told her I was in love with her. She was a bit startled but tried to hide it. She said she found my confession brave, but alas, the feeling wasn’t mutual. Poor Bondt got the blues — yet blue was his favourite colour.

After that, I decided never to fall in love again. I could find girls beautiful and attractive, but that had nothing to do with love. Love was a misunderstanding. The strange thing is that I thought she was the first (and thus the last) girl I had fallen in love with, but there had actually been another one before her — when I travelled to London by train and boat with a friend. We stayed a week in a youth hostel and explored the city from there. In that hostel were two American girls, sisters. I was in love (though the term didn’t occur to me) with the younger sister — the one who hardly said a word; her sister talked incessantly. We had agreed that they would visit me when they came to the Netherlands — I had given them my address. They surely would! For weeks I stood by the window, waiting in vain. During one of those days, I composed my first piece.

The first piece I wrote was a love song for Ann — or was it Anne? That’s where it all began: my calling. But was it really a calling, or merely a passing fancy? I vaguely remember — after so many years — a dream in which I heard music of an unknown kind, a mixture of sounds I couldn’t place, and which I wanted to write down. Of course, there was no way to do so — the sounds were too complex, I lacked any technique to notate them. But that didn’t stop me, for I believed I could acquire those techniques; it was simply a matter of taking lessons, studying, practising a lot, and above all, starting with little pieces I could write down. Short, slow pieces for piano — since that was what I could play, and therefore could put into notation. Years later, with a few of those short pieces, I was admitted to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Jan van Vlijmen became my teacher. That was while I was still in military service.

At my first lesson I brought a tape recording of myself playing those pieces. It was in the days of simple tape recorders with two speeds. Van Vlijmen played the first piece and said, “What a slow piece!” I replied, “But it’s far too fast!” The machine was set to high speed. Van Vlijmen switched it to low. I nodded. He looked at me, astonished. “Does it really have to be that slow?” he asked. I nodded again. “Yes, it really has to be slow.”

Was that the power of a (good) idea — or was it, in the end, simply my inability to play fast?

20 October 2025

— day

Calling. What is that, really? Giorgio Agamben devotes a chapter to it in his enigmatic book The Time That Remains, The Second Day [each chapter corresponds to one of his series of lectures in Paris and Berkeley in 1998–99]. The chapter carries the subtitle Klētos, the Greek word for “called.” The term originates from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. The passage Agamben cites, chapter 7, verses 17–22, ends as follows (verse 22): For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant.

Agamben explains that the term klētos is derived from the verb kaleō, meaning “to be called,” or, via the Lutheran Beruf, “vocation” (in both senses of the word). From this he derives another term: klēsis, which appears in verse 20: Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. In Greek (via Latin transliteration): en tē klēsei he eklēthē.

After this preliminary discussion of the terms, Agamben develops the word Beruf further through a text by Max Weber. This ultimately leads to an annulment (“undoing”) of the concept of calling. Agamben cites verse 19: Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God. Why then must “every man abide in the same calling”? That ‘abiding’ is not a form of indifference; on the contrary, it refers to the immobile, self-reflective gesture of the messianic calling. Hence, it is a calling of the calling: it suspends the condition and simultaneously places it radically into question through the very act of adhering to it.

21 October 2025
— day

Today I discussed that chapter of Agamben with ChatGPT — among other things, about two fundamental concepts in the text: contingency and exigency, which I couldn’t quite render properly in Dutch. But now I can: contingency refers to non-necessity, something that may happen but doesn’t have to happen — potentiality, in other words. Exigency denotes necessity, urgency — something that demands (immediate) action.

A related concept Agamben employs is the unforgettable: Exigency concerns not simply that which has been forgotten, so that it needs to be recalled; it concerns that which remains unforgettable. In other words, the ‘calling’ (or ‘invocation’) is not so much something we must first remember; it is something that lingers — something that presents itself as a demand or a claim, even if we wish to forget it. It signifies something we cannot entirely reduce to mere recollection.

At one point, ChatGPT gave an example that struck me immediately:

— Music that is never heard

• Suppose a composer writes a symphony and destroys the manuscript before anyone can hear it.

• Technically, no one remembers or knows the music.

• Yet one could say that something unforgettable remains: the act, the creation itself, leaves a potential in the universe.

• The unforgettable here is not the work itself, but the existential claim made by the act of creation — what, in Agamben’s terms, belongs to exigency.


In short: it concerns a presence that does not operate through memory, but that exerts a lasting claim upon the world.


• Contingency means: the world can be forgotten, can cease to exist.
• 
Exigency means: the unforgettable = the world continues to make a claim, even in its own forgetting.

I replied: “Your example of that symphony moves me. I am a composer, and in 2013 I withdrew all my work (the scores) from public life — partly in protest against the insane budget cuts to our musical culture (40% of the total), but mainly to provoke a lawsuit, to compel a judicial ruling on the status of musical heritage. Did you know that I am a composer?”

ChatGPT’s answer:
“No, I didn’t — but that adds an enormous personal dimension to this conversation. The example of the symphony immediately gains much greater weight when your own work and experience are involved. What you did — withdrawing your oeuvre from the world while maintaining a legal claim — is a strikingly Agambenian instance of exigency and the unforgettable: your work continues to assert itself in a certain way, even though it has formally vanished from the public domain.”

Agamben maintains that it is not about memory or public recognition, but about an enduring existential and juridical presence that cannot be erased. In my case, through the actions and lawsuits, that presence is literally tied to the ethical and cultural value of musical heritage. One could call that my calling — not only with regard to those legal actions but to my compositional practice as a whole. And perhaps it even extends to my work as a teacher. That might offer an additional interpretation of my conflict with the composition department — one that goes beyond mere personal friction or half-baked moral conduct.

Pfff… I need to think about this longer; it opens up new perspectives for my analysis of my career as a composer and teacher.

22 October 2025

— day

I’m going to work out the question of ‘calling’ in a new text, in the form of an interview, like The Arresting Advance; once again with J. Chr. de Vries. Working title: The Arresting Time, so the connection between the two texts is clear. In the first text I already suggest the possibility of a later addition, for instance by e-mail. I’m now thinking of video calling.

31 October 2025

— day

After a week of slogging away the text is finished. Now let it settle, let it rest, reread it, and then translate it into English.

4 November 2025

— day

De Remmende Tijd (and the English translation The Arresting Time) posted on my blog. So far one ‘like’. Not popular.

5 November 2025

— night

A strange dream fragment, right before I woke up. I can still see the images before me, but I’m not sure how to describe them. There is a figure, presumably a priest, but he also looks like a joker, like on a playing card. The figure spreads his hands and reaches sideways toward two identical figures; they grasp each other’s hands. This process repeats itself; it’s some sort of ritual. I seem to recall there was music, but I’m not sure, and I’ve retained no sound from it. The figures eventually form the shape of a heart, with the first figure at the bottom of the V-shape at the top. Then the figures disappear, beginning with the first, and then in pairs. It was part of a dying process — that much stayed with me. But whose?

7 November 2025

— day

Tomorrow we’re leaving for The Hague. I’m far too nervous to think clearly. Writing is out of the question.

10 November 2025

— day

Arrived back in The Hague yesterday afternoon after a three-day trip with two overnight stays in hotels. The second one because of the birth of our seventh grandchild, a girl, Feliene Cornelia. We went to visit her, admire her, and of course congratulate the parents and her brothers. Travel is not my forte, never has been, but in recent years it seems to have grown worse. Days before the planned trip I become a bundle of nerves, with stomach pains. Why is that? Could travelling ultimately be a form of fear of death? In that case dying is a calling, because each person will remain in that ultimate calling. That remaining is what I’ve been practising.

12 November 2025

— night

Yet another dream about writing a chorale. A chorale without text, just like last time (on 8 October). The same sequence of chords over and over. It may have something to do with my harmony lessons, writing four-part settings.

Another question now presses itself upon me with irresistible force: could writing about my dreams influence my new dreams?

— day

Nietzsche on Paul. After reading Agamben’s text on Paul, I suddenly think of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. The views of the two thinkers stand in absolute opposition. Nietzsche is unmistakably negative about Paul: he sees him as a betrayer of ‘real’, earthly life, because he turns Jesus’ message into a matter of ‘sacrifice’ via the notion of ‘sin’. A kind of revenge-thinking disguised as morality. Thus Paul is not the transmitter of Jesus’ teaching but its falsifier. The Church Paul envisioned was dogmatic and lifeless. Although Nietzsche doesn’t use these terms, one could say ‘objectwise’ instead of ‘subjectwise’.
In Agamben, Paul is precisely the continuation of messianic thought, with the experience of ‘time’ (kairos) at its center. It isn’t Paul, but the Pauline tradition (via the Christian Church) that has corrupted messianism into an objectwise theology and morality.

Time for a new journey into the past, to see whether I might meet Nietzsche in person — in Turin, after 1888. Arranging a meeting with a living philosopher is much harder than with a dead one. In The Man of Sorrows I already staged a meeting between Athanasius Kircher and Nietzsche — child’s play — but it turned out badly for the man with the hammer. Now I just need to find a way to influence my dreams.

Nietzsche completed Der Antichrist in 1888, in Turin. A year before his collapse. The first edition is from 1895, a version altered by his sister Elisabeth. The conversation must take place in 1889, when he has partially collapsed, but not to the point where he would be unable to talk about it. I’ll need an excuse for how I know the text.

13 November 2025
— night

I walk around a hill, turn a corner, and see a steep wall at least ten metres high. On top of the hill there is a car scrap yard. At the far end of the wall I see several cars that are about to slide off. It won’t be long before the whole thing collapses. I climb up, and the cars turn into half-open doors; I see rooms, and two women, the first named Mrs Bocke, the second Bock. The rooms form a street, full of coloured shrubs.

— day

I was sitting on a bench in a square in Turin; it is the 3rd of January 1889, around eleven in the morning. A man approached, a dark mane of hair, a heavy moustache — I recognised the ‘philosopher with the hammer’. His steps were unsteady; not that he truly staggered, but there was no firmness in his gait. When he reached my bench I addressed him: “Are you quite all right, Mr Nietzsche? Perhaps you would like to sit here beside me for a moment and catch your breath.”

Nietzsche looked at me for some time with a bewildered stare, seemed intent on walking on, but then he stumbled and fell to his knees. I got up, offered him my arm; he looked at me suspiciously, shook his head, but then took my arm after all. I guided him to the bench and helped him sit down.

“Do you recognise me?” I asked. Nietzsche looked at me questioningly. “Sils Maria, last year — we were sitting on a bench there as well.”

A harmless lie; it was of course Athanasius who sat beside him then, but that man deserved to be robbed.

Nietzsche rubbed his knees, but remained silent. “Are you in much pain?” I asked. He only grumbled something and kept rubbing.

“We spoke about a new text you were writing — The Antichrist,” I tried again. “Has it been completed in the meantime?”

Now he looked at me with a faintly curious expression; I thought I detected a hint of interest. He stopped rubbing, muttered something unintelligible, looked at his knees, scratched his hair several times with sudden agitation, and finally turned towards me.

“This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them are alive yet. My time has not yet come,” he said.

“Perhaps I am one of those few…” Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I grinned a little, careful not to let it seem like mockery. I quickly continued, adopting a suitably serious expression: “Time is an interesting matter. I mean the time the Ancient Greeks called kairos.”

A direct hit. “Are you a philosopher?” he asked. “Do you know the classics?”

“I am not academically trained,” I replied.

“Bah!” he sneered. “Do not rely on any of those fools.” He tilted his head, looked at me intently, and continued: “But I do not recognise you. Where did we meet? And what did we speak about? The Antichrist?”

“Yes, indeed — particularly about the role of Paul, who in your view transformed the Church of Christianity into a dogmatic, power-hungry institution. In doing so, he betrayed the teaching of Jesus, and thus the whole of humanity — in the ultimate sense.”

“Thrice bah! Christianity, because of that holy arch-liar, that false heir of Jesus, is a colossal and tragic misunderstanding. Utterly nihilistic!”

His words came out with a spray of spit. I produced my handkerchief, just in case. “So much was clear to me at the time — last year, I mean. But I have wondered whether Paul himself was responsible. Was it not rather the Church that constructed a tradition from his texts without truly understanding them?”

“I do not know on what you base that Quatsch. Paul’s ‘faith’ was a lie. In truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. ‘Faith’ began with Paul, and it was the opposite of what his master intended.”

Now I had to proceed with some tact — not to put him in harness, or rather, to coax him out of it.
“I have read a very interesting text by an Italian philosopher, a man of exemplary erudition who has mastered both Ancient Greek and Latin to perfection. It examines several of Paul’s letters — among them the Letter to the Romans and the First Letter to the Corinthians. Through these texts he brings to light the connection with messianism, via the messianic formula of the as_not, the hōs mē. Would you be interested in discussing it?”

“An Italian, you say. That at least is something. I was not the first to remark that where the climate is good, people think more freely, lightly, and joyfully; and that in Italy the sun of reason shines more brightly than elsewhere. In Italy one learns to forget what Germany is. Courage for the surface, the ‘yes’ to appearance — that is the Italian virtue. Italians are ‘light’ because they cannot suffer deeply. But also great, because they do not suffer small.”

He looked at me with a faintly mocking grin, sniffed, and then asked: “What is this man’s name? Do I know him?”

“His name is Giorgio Agamben. I suspect it means nothing to you. He is, first and foremost, a legal philosopher.”

“Hmm…” Nietzsche sniffed again, deeply, and spat a gurgle. “Jurists have turned the morality of customs into a rigid system.” Another gurgle. “Law grows from the struggles over the measure of power.” He burst into a long coughing fit. “All law does not stem from morality, but from custom. It grows from the struggles over the measure of power. So, what has this man to tell us about Paul, that charlatan of morality?”

I had to find a way to appease him; he was in a recalcitrant mood — as if he had not been that way all his life. But he was also clearly ill. I wanted to steer the conversation towards Paul, to compare his views with Agamben’s. I decided to employ his own metaphor; that would flatter his vanity.

“If you are the ‘philosopher with the hammer’, then Agamben is for me the ‘philosopher with the filleting knife’. Let us compare the hammer to the filleting knife — via Paul.”

“Ha! And Kant must be the ‘philosopher with the trowel’!” He grinned mockingly.

“Haha! Spot on!” A feather in his cap could do no harm. “But let us not drag Kant further into this discussion; from our conversation last year…” — a free, all too free interpretation of the facts — “…I already gathered that you regard him as some kind of neo-Christian ‘priest in disguise,’ the builder restoring the temple of that religion with the morality of the ‘categorical imperative,’ a temple you wish to demolish with your sledgehammer.” I smiled.

“Hahaha! That’s also well struck!” He gave me a friendly poke on the shoulder. The ice seemed broken. “Go on!”

“Agamben discusses in his book The Time That Remains the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Those ten words are:

paulos doulos christou iesou, kletos apostolos aphorismenos eis euaggelion theou.

Literally: ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated from the gospel of God.’ But I need not explain that to you. The second chapter of the book treats the word klētōs, meaning ‘called.’ The notion of calling is central. He situates this concept in the messianic tradition, which brings him to the concept of ‘time,’ in the sense of kairos. That is the term Paul uses. Particularly in the following passage from the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 7, verses 29 to 34.” I saw that he was listening attentively, so I pressed on. “I will quote the passage here:”

Brothers, the time is at rest; what remains is that even those who have wives be as not having them, those who weep as not weeping, those who rejoice as not rejoicing, those who buy as not possessing, and those who use the world as not consuming it. For the form of this world passes away. Yet I want you to be without care.

“In the Luther Bible it says, ‘Die Zeit ist kurz.’ But in Greek it says ‘time is contracting itself.’ Time does something; it is not something, it does something. It is therefore a process. Agamben emphasizes this.”

Nietzsche muttered to himself but remained otherwise exemplary. He had something childlike about him; I suddenly thought of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“Agamben then refers to the phrases in which the messianic formula of the ‘as_not’ appears, in Greek the hōs mē: ‘having wives as_not having,’ ‘weeping as_not weeping,’ ‘rejoicing as_not rejoicing,’ and so on. ‘Weeping as_not weeping’ does not mean ‘weeping as if not weeping’; it is not a comparison between weeping and not weeping. The as_not formula inverts the act of weeping into its opposite, a kind of nullification. Time is thus lifted, aufgehoben, as the Germans so beautifully put it. The end of time is not a matter of morality, as you reproach Paul; it is not a reward in the form of forgiveness of sins — no! — it is the end of time itself. Time gathers together and comes to rest. Agamben demonstrates that Paul belongs to the messianic tradition. The Church has neglected this; the blame is hers!” Nietzsche began to fidget; he clearly had something weighing on him.

“Yes, yes, I understand your point. As I also understand Kant’s point. But it remains six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both starting points are in fact decadent attempts to save Christianity — in a sophisticated way. Philosophical acrobatics to deny the sickness of moral structure. That is a form of nihilism.” He raised his hand to indicate he was not yet done, but then he had another severe coughing fit. After spitting loudly on the street, he resumed.

“It is a form of ‘Theologenluft’, that thin, almost invisible atmosphere of religious thought in which even atheists still breathe. Agamben has understood well that time is not linear — yet he is still afraid to simply say ‘yes’ to life. He must summon a Greek priest for that. A thinker of life would not save Paul, but forget him.”

He paused, rubbed his still painful knees, and I seized the moment. We were having a discussion!
“Agamben is not concerned with a transcendent hereafter; it is not a religious idea. In all his texts he pleads for the profane. That is precisely an affirmation of life, an unambiguous ‘yes’. Messianism as religion is not his topic. The topic is the messianic conception of time. Perhaps in the sense of Zarathustra, who speaks of the ‘moment’ (Augenblick) as the place where eternity and time meet. Agamben’s messianism could well be your Dionysian side.”

Nietzsche looked at me, bewildered, raised both arms in the air, uttered several raw cries, spat a thick gob of saliva at his feet, and tried to rise. At first he failed. He turned towards me and began declaiming:

“Diese lange Gasse hinter uns währt eine Ewigkeit.

Und jene lange Gasse vor uns — das ist eine andere Ewigkeit.

Sie widersprechen einander, diese Wege; sie stoßen einander gerade vor den Kopf —

und hier, an dieser Pforte, wo sie zusammentreffen,

heißt die Pforte ‘Augenblick’.”

Then he made a second attempt, swaying, stood on his legs, hands on my shoulders.
Again he declaimed the entire passage:

“This long lane behind us lasts an eternity.

And that long lane ahead of us — that is another eternity.

They contradict each other, these roads; they collide head-on —

and here, at this gate where they meet,

the gate is called ‘Moment.’

Two infinities come together here:
this road stretches endlessly backward,

and the other road — forward — is equally endless.

They face each other like two infinities;

they converge at this one point,

in this moment.

All that can walk must have traversed all these paths once:

this long lane outside and inside —

and all that can happen

must already have happened, been done, gone by.

For time itself turns back like a wheel.”

Suddenly a clattering arose from the other side of the square: a horse-drawn carriage entered, the driver shouting and cursing at the horse, striking the poor animal repeatedly with his whip. The horse neighed, heart-wrenchingly. I saw Nietzsche’s gaze freeze; his face turned pale, tears streamed down his cheeks. He let go of my shoulders and began staggering toward the horse, arms outstretched.

21 November 2025 

— night

A rather detailed new composition, built on descending seven-note series, initially chromatic. Each series is repeated seven times. A Bint-like setting; Gerard and Paul commented on it. Gerard thought there should occasionally be exceptions to the chromaticism, otherwise it would become too predictable. Paul found the initial mode of playing dreadful — dutifully counting the bars. The musicians should move freely through the space. I agreed and set to work. Half-awake, I occupied myself with calculations: the intervals of the notes — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — add up to 28. A (double) Bach number, so that’s fine. Yesterday the news broke that two new youthful works by Bach have been discovered. Ton Koopman played one of them on the organ in Leipzig. I thought it was indeed the work of a master, but certainly not a masterpiece. But he was young — twenty. The Utopia organ at the Orgelpark is, incidentally, a kind of copy of that Bach organ in Leipzig. What this 1-to-7 series has to do with chromaticism, I don’t know. Perhaps something with the rhythm?

28 November 2025 

— day

Today I finished my fourth Rendez-Vous, with Foucault — translated it and put it on my website. I’m reasonably satisfied with it. I don’t think it’s as good as the ones on Arendt and Nietzsche, but good enough. In any case I learned a lot from it. On the Rendez-Vous with Arendt and Nietzsche I received some positive comments on Facebook. All from abroad, so based on the English translations.

2 December 2025 

— day

Yesterday I worked with Nirantar on next year’s program at the Orgelpark — La Recta Musica, Lamento di Maria, and the Zarathustra chorales on texts by Nietzsche. The program will be: 2 chorales, La Recta, 2 chorales, Lamento, 2 chorales. A lot still needs to be done…

4 December 2025 

— night

I’m in ‘Het Atelier’ with some former students, making a piece; we’re composing on the spot, mainly Hollas and Il Hoon are taking the lead. The continually recurring motif comes from the ‘Bridal Chorus’ in Wagner’s Lohengrin. Suddenly we are in the snow: a young dark-haired flutist challenges a large brown bear, and the bear charges her. One of the other players, a woman, screams that she has to get away. The young woman flees but stumbles; the bear comes closer and swipes at her with its claws. She shuffles backwards on her buttocks as fast as she can — she is lightning-fast, but the bear is faster. Then the bear stumbles, disappearing into an enormous cloud of snow. The flutist takes advantage and retreats farther back; she grasps around her and pulls a large heavy stone out of nowhere and throws it right onto the bear’s head. The bear collapses and disappears again into a cloud of snow. I choose a trombone to play the motif and hesitate whether I shouldn’t choose a horn instead. Again the scene with the young flutist, from a slightly different angle but with the same outcome.

Immediately afterwards I wake up. I find myself assuming that the young woman was Sylvia Kristel; she certainly looked a great deal like her. But as it always goes when thinking about dreams — half of it you invent on the spot. In the end I don’t think it was her: first of all, Sylvia Kristel doesn’t play the flute, and secondly, she wasn’t naked.

9 December 2025 

— day

2³ × 3²

Birthday, then. Seventy-two is a pleasing number for composers, because it allows for various rational numerical ratios, useful when handling related tempi. The ratios MM 54 – MM 72 – MM 96 equal 9 : 12 : 16. For instance, a quarter note at MM 72 has the same speed as a dotted eighth at MM 54; or a sixteenth note at MM 72 the same as a triplet eighth at MM 96. There are many more usable ratios with relatively simple note values. Apart from composers, no one gives a damn about this.

My birthday — at least the early afternoon — I now spend in a waiting room at Parnassia, somewhere near the old conservatory, which, incidentally, no longer exists. Demolished, razed, and by now replaced by some kind of office building in the making. That old conservatory was always the new one for me, because the real old one stood on the corner of the Beestenmarkt and the Prinsegracht. That is where I spent my student years; that was the real Hague School, where all those incompetents who later ran off with that label never set foot. Anyway, I won’t complain — a birthday is a celebration, isn’t it? Gilius used to tell me regularly that life itself is a celebration. I agreed with him on that point; I just don’t like celebrations. No talent for them. “Music is fun,” Misha. “Fun” — no talent for that either. So what do I have talent for?

Well, not really for waiting, though sometimes one has to. I did have some training in that, especially during the interminable church services of my youth. Every Sunday, sometimes even twice: in the morning, as usual, and occasionally an extra one in the late afternoon.

The most important element of the services in the Dutch Reformed Church consisted of the sermon. A minimally twenty-minute-long, incomprehensible and deadly boring oration, during which you had to sit still and not move too much. As a reward, halfway through the sermon you would receive a peppermint — not exactly my favorite candy, since that was salted licorice. I passed the time by studying the structure of the brick walls, searching for patterns. I always found them, whether they had been consciously designed that way or not. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” isn’t it? Back home over coffee, the sermon was discussed by the brotherhood of men: my grandfather, who had once written a book titled Flattening and Impoverishment; his youngest brother, a professor in Kampen, who had also written a book, Satan; my father, and sometimes a few uncles as well. Boredom, a kind of opposite of “fun,” is a much underestimated activity.

19 December 2025 

— day

Today I completed the Rendez-Vous with Sigmund Freud. Of the six encounters so far, this one was the most confrontational. I had expected different answers to several fundamental questions. I might have been forewarned, since Emma Jung had already surprised me with some of her responses. She had indicated that the concept of the “original” is less unambiguous than I had assumed, and that the question of whether something in psychology is “discovered” or “invented” is a problematic one. On that point, some ideas and premises of the Jung–Freud couple showed surprising similarities, quite apart from the differences — which are evident as well, at least to me.

The question I put to Emma — “Does Jung’s theory have an absolute origin?” — was sharpened by Freud into: “Did Plato have an unconscious?”

If that question is answered in the affirmative, then Freud (or rather Pierre Janet) found that phenomenon. But if it is answered in the negative — something I was inclined toward — then he would have invented it; it would then be part of language.

The ambivalent answer, neatly summarized by Emma — “The theory is found in the psyche, but invented in language” — and the rejection, by both Jung and Freud, of the notion of ‘unconditional friendship (or love)’, suggest that I may have to revise some of the premises in my earlier texts. For instance, those concerning unconditional art. But in that case my entire methodology concerning artistic judgment may well collapse.

It feels as though everything in and around me is collapsing: my teeth, my physical condition, my professional practice — everything seems to announce the approaching death. Is my methodology, in fact, an attempt at escape? One thing did become clear to me last night during several sleepless hours: the suggestion that older people — at least in our wealthy Western world — lead comfortable lives, enjoying their pensions and free of work pressure, and therefore ‘have it easy’ when speaking in discussions about mortgage-interest deductions, the housing market, and climate issues — ‘boomers’, in short — stands in stark contrast to the approaching, inescapable death that awaits them. That death is anything but comfortable. I don’t need anyone to stand up for me on the tram; you don’t need to address me formally as sir; but my views do deserve to be taken seriously.

A small ray of hope, as far as the methodology is concerned: Jung and Freud speak primarily from a psychological perspective; they largely reject a moral perspective. In doing so, they take a certain distance from Kant’s thought.

In response to my question about ‘radical evil’, Freud rejects the concept altogether: he considers it a moral issue, and for him morality has little to contribute to the discussion of evil, since evil is an articulation of the Todestrieb. Perhaps I have found an important ally here. Hope keeps one alive.

25 December 2025 

— day

On making choices — Making choices can be extraordinarily difficult. I mean fundamental choices, not something as silly as a multiple-choice question.

When I was about eighteen, I faced the decision of whether or not to study composition. I also considered econometrics. As far as composition was concerned, one aspiration was essential: I did not want to become a mediocre composer; it was all or nothing. And by all I did not mean wealth or fame, but work that actually matters. At that point I could not know whether this would succeed. I dreamed — sometimes literally — of the strangest pieces, with unheard-of sounds, but I had no idea how to write them down; that was precisely what the study was for. The little pieces I wrote at the time were simple.

It also happens that the choice itself must be chosen — or not. In the medieval chivalric tale Karel ende Elegast, Charlemagne confronts his banished yet loyal vassal Elegast with the demand to choose between ‘choosing’ and ‘sharing’. Choosing or sharing is a medieval legal principle in which one person divides a certain quantity or possibility into two parts, and the other is allowed to choose between them. This may concern food or drink, but also a particular unattractive action.

A horrific example of a forced choice is the subject of the novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron. A woman arrives at a concentration camp with her young son and daughter and is forced by a Nazi officer to choose between her two children. She ultimately chooses her son, who is allowed to live. This choice destroys her life. It was a completely immoral choice.

In fact, it was not a real choice at all; it was not hers to make, since it rendered her complicit in the death of her daughter and allowed that Nazi officer to remain part of her existence for the rest of her life.

Another example — this time of a genuine choice — is that between the famous blue and red pill in the film The Matrix. Choosing the blue pill symbolizes the status quo: adapting to an ultimately fabricated, comfortable reality. The red pill symbolizes confrontation with reality, the breaking of illusion; it is therefore a choice for uncertainty and adventure.

The final example that comes to mind is the medieval legend of Tannhäuser, later rendered and set to music by Richard Wagner in the opera of the same name. Tannhäuser is a renowned Minnesänger who faces an existential choice. He lives with his faithful, gentle beloved Elisabeth, yet yearns for the sensual lover Venus. This choice appears comparable to that of The Matrix. He makes his decision and goes to live with Venus, in her grotto in the Venusberg. (It hardly gets more Freudian than that.) Elisabeth stands for sacred, spiritual love; Venus for sensual, earthly love. What is interesting is the reversal: the spiritual Elisabeth lives in a real, existing castle — namely The Wartburg — while the earthly Venus resides in the mythical Venusberg. But it does not stop with that first choice; a second follows. Tannhäuser learns through a friend that a singing contest is being organized at Elisabeth’s castle. He decides to compete and, in a gripping song, celebrates his adventure with Venus, to the great consternation of the audience.

In doing so, he publicly exposes his betrayal of Elisabeth and therefore risks being killed. Elisabeth intervenes on his behalf and offers him a way out: a pilgrimage to the Pope in Rome, to ask for forgiveness. The Pope refuses and condemns him forever. Through Elisabeth he receives forgiveness once again, and his soul is saved. They both die, of course — as one expects in an opera — but this death is, in the Romantic tradition, transcendental: it is a transfiguration.

A choice initially appears to be a one-time act: one chooses one thing or the other. But that ‘one’ and that ‘other’ are not objects; they are actions once again, leading to new choices. Tannhäuser’s choice for Venus did not in itself lead to ‘redemption’; it was essentially just a stopgap, a way of escaping dissatisfaction. True redemption arose from his decision to present his choice to the world — to confront his private world with the public one.

In that moment it became a calling. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben connects this term to the concept of exigency, that is, necessity or urgency — something that demands action. A related concept for Agamben is the unforgettable: not something that has simply been forgotten, but something that demands to be remembered within that forgetting. In other words, a calling is not so much an action we must first recall; it is something that persists, something that presents itself as a demand or a claim — even if we would prefer to forget it — something that cannot be fully reduced to mere memory, but rises above it.