Thoughts on Belgium Part 2

A tale of two tour guides

Sometimes your impressions of a place you visit become even more memorable based on the actions of the guide who showed you around. And sometimes it’s not what the guide tells you that is the most memorable; it’s the guide himself (or herself).

Biking from Bruges to Ghent on Sunday, dark clouds hovered over us. The rain finally made its appearance as we entered Ghent, still about 15 minutes from our destination, the town’s famous Gravensteen, “Castle of the Count,” an imposing medieval wonder. We had gotten a late start that morning, and Rolf, our biking leader, was trying to hurry us, so we wouldn’t be late meeting our city tour guide, who was to show us the castle and the other attractions of the town’s main square (Grote Markt). We would soon learn a valuable lesson: you should not piss off a Belgian tour guide—at least not Osvald.

Wet and winded, we arrived at the castle at around 3:30 instead of 3. “We must hurry,” Osvald said. “You have only 2 hours now, and you really need 3 hours just to see the castle, which is the heart of Ghent.”

Ghent's Majestic Gravensteen

Soon, we were scampering up one of the steepest spiral staircases I’ve ever been on and rushing into a Chamber of Torture, among other wonders. All of the time, Osvald was lamenting our too-brief stay at the castle.

Then one of our group really irked him by suggesting that we leave the castle soon in order to spend what time we had left with him on other (implied: better) sites in the city. Osvald seemed horrified but at last complied. He led us outside and took up a place along the canal to tell us about Ghent’s historic buildings and canal, its guild houses, and its trading and warring history. He spoke with great animation, waving his arms and modulating his voice in an almost singing manner. He was wondrous. But he still let us know that we should tell our tour company that if we could spend only 2-3 hours in Ghent, we should just forget seeing the castle, which takes 3 hours to see properly all by itself. The castle was his special domain, and he wanted it treated with respect.

Osvald nearly takes flight

Osvald reminded me of an earlier guide we had enjoyed on a trip to southern Italy several years before. He introduced himself as “Professori” and shared with us the wonders of Paestum, a town founded by Greeks in the fifth century BCE. Paestum has a temple to Athena similar to, but in better shape than, the Parthenon in Athens. We were entertained with great enthusiasm by a man who combined knowledge and ego in equal parts.

When we got back on our bus after leaving Paestum, we asked our own tour guide, who had been leading and cooking with us so excellently all week, in which university the Professori taught. “Professori, eccch,” she said contemptuously. “He is just a tour guide like the rest of us.”

From my experience, a great tour guide is as priceless as a great city you have come to visit and often more memorable.

Biking into Dendermonde, in the Flanders region of Belgium on August 6, we saw a brightly colored sign advertising Little Woodstock outdoor (and indoor) music festival.

The festival had ended the day before. Once again, as in Bethel Woods 43 years ago, I had missed Woodstock. From pictures I have seen posted on a festival website, this Woodstock was cleaner, dryer, and less crowded than the first one. But it also featured Belgian fries and mayonnaise. So you have to take the good with the not so good. The attendees also seemed old enough to have been in Bethel in 1969. Of course, so am I.

In Flemish, Little Woodstock was described as  "een festival met GRATIS TOEGANG voor alle optredens en fuiven!" (With Google's help, the Flemish seems to say it was a festival that was free of charge to enter in which all could play and celebrate.) That's pretty much how the lucky 1969 attendees felt, or so I have been told.

In January, Pete Fornatale, veteran DJ and rock music chronicler, spoke at my synagogue about Woodstock (the original, not the one in Belgium) and his new book Back to the Garden. Sadly, Pete died just a few months later. I miss his unique style of putting a radio show together (no one made a playlist like he did) and his knowledge of 60s and 70s rock stars and their music.  I also regret that I never got the chance to ask him that day which version of the song “Woodstock” he considered the most fitting for the 3-day seminal event – Joni Mitchell’s slow and haunting or Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s upbeat and rocking. I guess it depends on your mood when you put yourself into a Woodstock state of mind.

All of which makes me wonder if Woodstock is not so much an event as a celebration of being young (or not so young anymore) and open minded and willing to get muddy if the occasion arises. Or even to ride a bicycle through central Belgium with 14 other 60-, 70-, and 80-year-olds behind a German tour guide who was always in a hurry and sometimes got a little lost.

In the Introduction to Back to the Garden, Pete quotes Abbie Hoffman’s testimony at the trial of the Chicago Seven in 1969. It's a pretty funny exchange of miscommunication between the generations.

Hoffman is asked, “Where do you live?”

His reply: “I live in Woodstock Nation.”

When asked where that is, Hoffman says, “It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind.”

When he is pushed by a befuddled prosecuting attorney to explain in just which state Woodstock is located, Hoffman says, “It is in the state of mind, in the mind of myself and my brothers and sisters. It is a conspiracy.”

I love that word conspiracy. I don't think I have ever really been involved in a conspiracy, but if Woodstock counts, then maybe. . . 

Last weekend, while browsing through the best browsing place I know -- the Book Barn in Hillsdale, NY -- I found a slightly weathered copy of James Baldwin's short story collection Going to Meet the Man and bought it so I could pass along the story "Sonny's Blues" to my son Brett, who spent part of his formative years experiencing the joys and pangs of a musician.

My own musical "career" (clarinet and tenor saxophone in school bands from grades 5-12) was, at best, checkered. But I do remember one wonderful evening when I was 16 and asked to provide background notes for a small jazz group at an academic summer program in Georgia. The musicians in the group set up a dialogue in which they each took a melody line, molded it, refined it, expanded it, and then passed it along -- from saxophone to trumpet to guitar to piano to drums and back. Meanwhile, I played four notes -- middle to high to low to lower and back. I kept my eyes closed and just listened. I couldn't believe I was part of this creation, even in a passive sort of way. I didn't know how music could feel from the inside.

Then I read "Sonny's Blues," which is a story about brothers, love, missteps with drugs, and rebirth, all wrapped in a blanket of music that is both warm and scratchy. It's a loving story and a painful story. It's a story that makes you feel more than think. And it brought back that summer evening to me.

Here is the climax of Baldwin's story, as we English majors say. Or it's the crescendo, as Sonny or his brother might say:

photo by Jef Jaisun

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing---he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I saw on Sonny I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there. . . .

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.