You can’t always be right, you also have to leave something for the others, and that’s how it happened that after countless debates I saw the word ‘slip bearer’ come up and suddenly thought: I’m going to be a slip bearer. Yes, good idea! But from whom? Whose?
Of the truth, something in me cheered. Logically, we all want that, and in fact, we all are. The truth is a warm rug and we all have a corner. The others the wrong angle and we the right one. But I just wanted to get rid of this tug-of-war, something in me wanted to follow the others, to serve, to conform and to conform, to be humble.
Television showed a nice documentary about Maarten van Roozendaal, containing his song ‘Don’t save me’. It is a powerful, self-assured plea. “Let me put my ass against the crib/ Let me this wicked song/ Raise your hands to heaven/ But don’t save me.” Twenty years ago this was awarded the Annie MG Schmidt Prize, and rightly so, but all those twenty years I’ve wondered something about this acclaimed ‘let me put my ass to the crib’.
In my head, that line at the time connected with the iconic song by Fluitsma & Van Tijn about the fifteen million anarchists in the Netherlands – “you don’t prescribe the laws to them” – and with Annie’s coquettish line of poetry ‘I’m nice and naughty’. MG Schmidt himself. Last year, the Boekenweek theme was added about ‘Rebels and Crossthinkers’. And this year’s exhibition on ‘Freethinkers’ in the Amsterdam Museum, which stirred up quite a bit of enthusiasm in my area about contrariness.
All against the norm, society will learn that! There’s something illogical about such a collective tendency towards obstinacy, I invariably grumble, because it’s hard to get all of them to cross at the same time and then think together against the main direction. It makes little sense to encourage each other to think crosswise as standard. But I mustn’t get too goofy, I thought, for I had just intended to be a pantyhose, a doormat, a foot wipe, an echo, a shadow. But from whom?
on the blog Oilshtgoistad, from a blogger from Aalst (Oilsjt) in East Flanders, I read about the drag carriers at the Aalst carnival. The blogger mentioned Den Oilsjtersen Diksjoneir his favorite book and the word sleppendrauger was bound to be in that dictionary. “As sleppendraugers”, wrote the blogger, “stoon weir ‘t giel joor deer oon the zoi of our candidate princej: from the moment the campaigners were written to the moment of the karamell’n binsht the procession, azoei follow weir the prince in such a way.”
That’s just the way it is and not just during the carnival: someone has to follow, we can’t all lead, and the role of follower seemed just right for me. All I had to do was find a prince and a track. I actually think I got a little bored with all the critical debates of late. From the critical contributions to the identity debate, I understood that every identity counts, as long as it is ours. From the critical vaccination debate I understood that you have to think about the other, at least, if you are the other, then they must think about us.
And I didn’t want to anymore, I wanted to be humble. We can’t all want to be princes. Before you know it, you’re transferring millions from a trust account to your own bank account, so that you can buy a villa with all that stolen money, which will increase your prestige in the office of the state attorney and in the boards of the cultural institutions; all very dignified, but we should not do it all, because the cultural institutions will not survive that and it is also detrimental to the sense of justice.
A certain amount of humility is required. A courtesy to the other. And so this time I bravely swallowed the rest of my establishment critique and made work of my plan to become docile. Servant. meek. A lackey. A mop. Someone had to start following, so why not me?
You can constantly sing a song of praise to your own institutions, to your own circle, to your own attitude to life and to your own transverse thinking, but rather first examine carefully how the main direction of thinking and the transverse direction relate to each other. What culture do we share and share? What is the standard and under what circumstances is it necessary to oppose it? When to follow? When to unfollow?
So I had almost reached the point where I was able to completely agree with the other, I just had to wait and see who.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 2, 2021
#sense #crosswise