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.”
It seemed to me 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 felt a certain urge to relieve myself, but the pain in my leg held me back, so I decided to ignore the pressure on my bladder. I pulled 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:
- To think for oneself — that is, to think without prejudice; the maxim of the understanding.
- To think from the standpoint of another — that is, from a universal standpoint; the maxim of judgment.
- 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 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) also came along, as did my brother Willem, two years younger than me. 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. S.V. 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, L.P. 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 Larson and Samuel 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.