Me, The Insect Inside Her Womb

The Anouncement Of My Birth 

When my mother was pregnant with me, my father said to a friend of his, ‘I wish she bumped with that belly onto a train. I wish that insect inside her womb died.’
I suppose no one could stop me from staying alive. If my mother told me my father had said these nasty things, she always smiled and added, ‘your father was such a special man. He just hated kids.’
This is the announcement of my birth. As you can see my parents were very confused. The announcement says they have found a new house, a new cat, and a new telephone number. There is a P.S. that says, ‘we have another child.’

Cocooning in Amsterdam (two)

Our Cursed House In Amsterdam 

On the third floor of our house lived a woman with a face that looked like a painting of Picasso. Her face was asymmetric. Her right eye, closer to her forehead then her left eye, always gazed across the canal, while her left eye, closer to her nose then her right eye, was watching the tip of her nose all the time. Her face was a brainteaser, and her name was Sensy.
Sensy made a living as a prostitute. When I first discovered she had sex with men for money, I was even more intrigued by her asymmetric face. I asked my mother why in the world men would pay to see her naked, and my mother answered, ‘don’t you understand that? Sensy is just the kind of woman men can’t resist, because her mouth is always open.’

Sensy committed suicide on the age of 53. She took a whole bunch of aspirin with two bottles of Sherry. Then she jumped of the roof of our house and landed in our garden, where she looked like a bigger brainteaser then ever.
In her goodbye letter she wrote: ‘Men want to fuck with women’s heads.’

Cocooning In Amsterdam (one)

Picture Of A Happy Evil Writer At The Age of 11 

We lived in the basement of a big house in Amsterdam. I remember the smell of moldering bricks. My mother said the whole building was cursed because no one had ever been happy between the walls. At night we heard each other moaning and suffering, or we heard our neighbors trying to kill each other. In the gardens cats were howling. At night, spooky shadows created devils on the walls of my room.
On the first floor my father had his atelier. The windows of the place were covered with black velvet curtains as if he strived to keep the real world outside. I didn’t even know there was a real world. In front of the velvet hung big rolls of paper in all kinds of colors and as broad as the walls. My father used the paper as backgrounds for his advertisement pictures. I had to pose for him day after day. If I think back on my childhood I see nothing but pictures. Pictures of a little girl with make-up on her face, eating Saroma desserts, drinking Fanta or Coca-Cola, wearing pop-art dresses or modern coats from the firma Voss. A girl, eating fish fingers produced by Iglo, a girl, sucking ice-cream after ice-cream, shaped by Ola. A girl, captured in settings of happy fake families, who always had discovered some kind of new product that had made their life perfectly perfect. I see a girl that was always smiling to mammies and daddies that looked almost real. I fed them, I hugged them, I did it all while I didn’t move. I just exist there stationary, smirking at my father who had only one eye, a mechanical one. I was so cute, my childhood is frozen in adorable poses that kept me there. Behind all these fixed faces of the many girls I was, I learned to write. I wasn’t allowed to move for so many years, I traveled with words while I didn’t budge a millimeter. Now I stick people with the point of my pencil. I let characters of the past suffer in my stories. I’m evil.
I’m sure my mother was right. The whole bloody house was cursed.

Golden Shoes Will Change The World

Picture Daphne Buter 

My oldest girl wanted golden shoes. All she could talk about was the day she would stride on her golden shoes. She actually believed the world would be a better place to walk on, if she had golden shoes.

A Couple Of Evil Dutch Nuns

Picture Daphne Buter 

Our first child had just been born, a girl, and we went for a walk on the beach. It was springtime and the sun was out. The beach was forlorn. Amazingly calm was the sea - like an endless shiny sky. The firmament was cloudless and motionless. We walked between rotations. We were so happy we had no words for it, just smiles and tears of happiness. I had our perfect daughter in my arms, and her eyes were swallowing us. She was wearing a white satin dress and a little sunhat with ribbons.
Suddenly two nuns showed up on the shore. Their black dresses fluttered behind their bodies like mantles of devils. They walked over to us to observe the baby.

One of them said: ‘What a funny little boy.’

‘He goes after his father,’ the other one said, ‘God bless him.’

They walked further and we watched them vanishing in the distance.

Every God knows how much I hated those evil Dutch nuns.

I Would Kill You And Eat Your Meat

Picture Daphne Buter 

One day during a Christmas dinner, while my stepfather was chewing on rabbit meat in cranberry sauce, he said to my mother: “I was thinking. If you and I were without food and afloat at sea after a ship accident, I would kill you and eat your meat.”

My mother looked at him in confusion and started to sob.

“Do you really mean that? Would you kill me and eat me?” she asked upset.

My stepfather just kept chewing the rabbit meat in cranberry sauce and answered somewhat annoyed, “don’t react so emotionally. Of course I would murder and eat you because that’s how nature works. It’s called the survival of the fittest. It is nothing to get emotional about because we aren’t afloat at sea, are we? We are in Amsterdam celebrating Christmas and I’m eating rabbit meat, not yours. So why in the world do you react so emotionally? For God's sake woman, don't spoil our Christmas dinner...”

My Father's Great Friends

One of my father's closest friends. Picture Hans Buter 

When my father was a kid he had a tame Jackdaw who obeyed him. During his life my father never could keep a friend. Sometimes he talked about the Jackdaw of his youth as the only friend he ever had trusted. If he talked about the bird he had tears in his eyes.

When my father was an old man, all he did was taking pictures of Jackdaws. When he died he had no friends left, no contact with his children, and for 15 years he had lived in solitude on his farm, obsessed by Jackdaws. He left us more than 10.000 pictures of his great friends.

Too Much Food In The House

It is evening and the night is knocking on your windows with shapfire nails. Your obese husband has fallen asleep on the cauch and he looks so much like Jabba the Hutt that you recently advised him to join the carnival in the south. The clock goes tik-tak-tik-tak, until it drives you nuts.

You are driven nuts. The night is blooming in the garden now. The clock still goes tik-tak-tik-tak, but it doesn't bother you no longer. Jabba the Hutt snores so loudly that you think you can hear from the sound that he ate too much chocolate earlier that day. For a second you feel like a detective, but only briefly, and then you smile desolate.

This is my life, you think sighing, and brave, and next you leave the room to go to bed and you let Jabba the Hutt behind, dreaming of food, on the cauch. You notice that a brownish fluid drips from his mouth to his clothing while words like the ghosts of butterflies, flutter from his troad.

You are in a bed in a room in a place on a planet in space, and yet you cannot sleep. The other bed is empty and you think about the brownish fluid and you begin to wonder if you saw it right, if it was chocolate. What if it was blood? you keep thinking.

The voice in your head is a lingering mantra.

It is almost morning and you feel like a piece of wreck. You stumble downstairs, your heart pounding, prepaired for something horrifying. You enter the living room and you scream a scream that would have killed Alfred Hitchcock if he was still alive, because you see Jabba the Hutt, swollen and pale and cold on the couch; but awake and desperately graving, swallowing chocolate bar after chocolate bar...

I mean, how bad can life be if there is too much food in the house, man?

On The Inside Of An Empty Perfume Bottle

The Bottle My Mother Kept Since 1967 

My father bought my mother a bottle of perfume on his trip to Paris, maybe because he was there with his mistress. When he came home my mother told him she wanted a divorce. Nevertheless, she accepted the perfume and when the bottle was empty she kept it for the rest of her life as a trophy. Sometimes, when she had another argument with my stepfather about his lethargy, she held the empty bottle in front of her tearing eyes and gazed through it, seeing something only she could see. I can still picture my mother, gazing through that bottle, her eyes searching for all that had vanished.

About A Swedish Male Virgin

Sometimes the Swedish guy pops up in my mind. His first name was Per. We had fallen in love in Amsterdam and he was bone skinny and blond and his eyes were blue and translucent. His honest character struck me; he never lied. He did visit me twice a year and he wrote me funny love letters in between. We never made love. He explained to me he was a virgin and he wanted to keep his virginity for the woman he might marry, later. It was okay with me because I didn’t like bone skinny Swedish male virgins in my bed anyway. So, the last time I saw him was shortly before he left Amsterdam to go back to Sweden. He suddenly looked kind of fat around his middle. I asked him what he had been eating and he answered, ‘I ate a lot of Dutch stuff.’

A few weeks later he wrote me a love-letter from a top-security prison. On his trip to Sweden he was arrested and later he was convicted in Stockholm, because he had indeed eaten a lot of Dutch stuff.

That’s what I liked about that Swedish virgin; he always spoke the truth.

Where Are Those Afternoons?

Where are those afternoons in which we walked beneath whispering trees among pastures? Where are those afternoons, drifted in their springtime blue panels and gently shoved into stockrooms full kernels? Where are those afternoons, hiding in the one you came home and smiled... In the afternoon you died... stands now a stationary table.... A table like a wooden eye... Where are those afternoons and why are they gone...? Where are those afternoons, bursting of reye?

The Best Butt Of Holland

I sometimes visit a Lady that gives lessons in nude sketching. I’ve sketched several butts. This is the butt of Coco. I believe Coco has the best butt of Holland.



Coco's Butt 

Wonny-Wanda's Heavy Dutch Butt

Well look who we've got here. It happens to be the butt of Wonny-Wanda. Wonny-Wanda insists on it that we call her Wonny-Wanda, not just Wonny or Won, or Wanda or Wan, no, Wonny-Wanda. The butt of Wonny-Wanda tells us at least one story: she sat a lot on the thing.



Wonny-Wanda's Heavy Butt 

A Bad Butt

Butts are very interesting and I believe they tell a lot about people. This is the butt of Madeline. Madeline is an old lady with a moody butt. And as you can see Madeline's butt is a selfish butt, too. Her butt is a pain in the ass, but her face is even worse.


This is the butt of Madeline 

I Look Forward To Nothing

Today I tried to imagine nothing. Not that I tried to imagine nothing at all, no, I tried to imagine something we call nothing. Nothing worked. I can imagine things, but I cannot imagine nothing. Conclusion: nothing is nothing to me. To me the universe is endless because there cannot be nothing around it. If there can be nothing around it, anywhere, I can’t imagine nothing.

I would highly appreciate it if anyone who reads this, with the brainpower that can imagine nothing, gives me a definition of nothing by Email. I look forward to nothing at all.

FIN

He Wrote Sixteen Pencils Empty

The book of my husband is growing into something grotesque. He has eight large suitcases full of notes now. He filled all of our suitcases with thoughts. He filled more than 15.000 pages with his thoughts, he wrote 16 pencils empty, and all this material was only used for the beginning of chapter one, of a book that will change the world.

This morning he sat at the table, surrounded by all those suitcases. He opened one, sighing, and put a heap of papers at the table.

"The suitcases are full," he said.

"I agree," I answered, "your manuscript is too big. Maybe you should organize it."

"Shut up!" he reacted annoyed, "you always see things different from me. Is the world organized? No! So why in the world should a manuscript about the world be organized? I'll just buy some more suitcases today to deal with this minor problem."

Just Write A Story

Write a story. Don’t’ ask me what kind of story. Just write a story. Any story. A story about nothing if you want. I know a guy who makes up stories all day. If I ask him ‘how are you?’ He tells me he’d just made a trip around the world, walking, on his bare feet, with a dog named Buddy Hopper, who protected him against some aliens with odd sexual desires.
If I ask him ‘and how’s your mom doing?’ He tells me she kind of died some weeks ago but just before she was buried she knocked on the cap of the coffin, which he had made for her, and therefore it was a gold plated coffin because he’s doing so good with his business in granite tiles lately, he doesn’t know what to do with all the money he makes, and this is how they found out his mother was still alive. If I ask him: ‘Are you happy?’ He says,‘I don’t like to tell you the truth thus I'd better not lie about it.’
He’s awesome. I think you should write a story about him.

All Those Dull Dutch Travelers

The Inside Of Lover's Rail, Where I Waited For my Readers to never appear. 

When my first novel was published I traveled a lot by train. I traveled a lot by train because I had read that Dutch people read mostly in trains. I looked forward to seeing all these dull Dutch travelers reading my first novel, sitting side by side in compartments, laughing their heads off and crying their eyes out about the things I had written.
Interesting enough I never noticed a traveler reading my first novel. They weren’t even reading at all and they never laughed or cried. All they did was gaze outside the windows of the train, whining about the rainy weather.

Do You Want My Pets?

I have a cat named A Dog and a dog named A Cat. Now, the dog is barking thus I have to beat up A Cat. If I beat up A Cat the dog will bite me. If the dog bites me I hate A Cat and if I hate A Cat the dog is unhappy. I'm so tired of pets like that. Do you want them?

I'm Just Really Straight

Once I had a obese friend who was a real funny hoodwink. I thought of his life as one big adventure. He told me he wasn’t straight and that his boyfriend was a movie star in Hollywood. One day I had an appointment with my boss in a restaurant. My friend, the hoodwink, dressed up as an oil magnate from Arabia, with a white sheet wrapped around his head, and he went to the restaurant too. He kept sending my boss messages and expensive drinks by the waiter. Messages that said: "I’m an oil magnate from Arabia, can I buy that blonde woman from you for a 1000.000 dollars?"

My Boss said it was bloodcurdling.

One day my friend the hoodwink told me he was in love with me. I was surprised since he had convinced me he wasn’t straight. He kept sending me messages and flowers, messages that said: "I’m no oil magnate from Arabia, and I have no boyfriend who is a movie star in Hollywood. I’m just really straight."

No One Detects It

This morning, when I woke up, I tried to look at my life. There were no dreams to hold on to. There was nothing but this big silence inside me. I tried to look my life in the eye. The silence inside me was much like a huge storm. I sat on my bed and I thought: ‘My life is a tempest. This tempest lives inside me and it destroys me but no one detects it.’

I went downstairs and made a black coffee. I looked through the window of the garden and I saw a frantic bird with paralyzed wings.

A Man Named Jupiter

A man named Jupiter told me my name is Io. He wants to touch my radically different surface and feel my volcanoes erupt for him. I like his rings. His sparkling material simply gets denser with depth. I could see the top of his clouds towering in his atmosphere.
We floated into the universe and found a dream where we could be real together.

I just woke up beside my snoring husband. I feel like molten rock.

Thinking About Nothing Special

I sat in my garden and watched the skies. I saw nothing but clouds, and some blue fragments of the never-ending universe. Some birds, on the edge of their life were hovering below all this. I watched the skies and I thought about nothing special. I thought, I just sit here ignoring the fact that my body is dying since the day I exist. I’m like the birds in the skies. I just live my life until it’s over.

Vaguely I noticed the sound of rustling trees and I thought, the trees do the same without thinking about it. Then I started to wonder how I could be so sure trees cannot think. Right. How can I be so sure? I’m not God. I’m an atheist who seeks for answers and if I seek for them I start to pray.

Listen, I sat in my garden and watched the skies, thinking about nothing special.

The Invention Of The Hexagram

Today is a very special day, because my husband invented the hexagram. I have to admit that other great thinkers invented the hexagram before him, but my husband has the habit to invent things that are already invented by other geniuses, so, again he wrote history today.


A Picture Of The Amazing Hexagram My Husband Invented 

Drowning Is Living In France

I was 3 years old when my mother and my sister and I, and a friend of my mother with her children, lived in France. It was the first time my mother had left my father. We lived in France for maybe 4 months. Every day the sun was sizzling our skin. We never saw a cloud.

I hated France.

I hated the apartment with walls of stone, white as chalk. I hated the bedstead I had to sleep in, while the Atlantic Ocean was howling day and night.
Our faces looked moderated but beautifully tinted. The sand of the beach was hot as a heater and our feet had blisters; our lips had cracks and our shoulders were loosing skin, like snakes lose their skin.

We were snakes in the blaze of France.

My mother was crying every day. She walked up and down the shore of the beach, looking for shells, sobbing. That unbearable summer she collected thousands of shells and dead crabs and pieces of twisted wood. When she walked up and down the shore I followed her like a little crippled shadow. She never looked around. It was like she didn't notice I followed her for 4 months. I can still see her black back; I can still hear her screaming her sorrow over the water.

The Ocean was aggressive and dangerous, and large salty tongues of water were thrown into the sky and dragged back into the mouth of the Ocean and the voice of the sea was thundering non-stop.

I wasn’t allowed to go into the sea alone. I decided to go into the sea alone. Bulging waves opened their jaws and swallowed me in a second. I was transported to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and I looked around me. France was gone and fear could not get to the bottom of the sea. The water was cool as a breeze and I saw the clean sand and some animals that crawled there, and I didn’t feel any consternation before I lost consciousness.

I woke up at the beach, surrounded by legs of shouting adults. The sun burned my salty face and blinded my eyes. I had to throw up water and shells and crabs and light and hatred.

I knew I had nearly died but I longed to go back to the silence under the surface of that French hell. I started to cry, saying I wanted to go back to the bottom of the sea. I hated the adults that stopped me. I hated my mother for crying I almost died.

I just hated France.

Sometimes I still long for the bottom of the sea. Drowning is living in France to me.

Old People Seem To Like Me

Old people seem to like me. Today an old man came to my house and handed me some flowers. I asked him why he brought these to me and he said he wasn’t sure because he had forgotten who I was. I said it didn't matter because I didn't know him either. He was shaking like old people sometimes do. I took his hand and asked him to come into my house.
We talked about his life. I liked to observe the contours of his skull under the skin of his tormented face, when he talked about a love that was denied now more than 40 years ago. He said his tears were still behind his eyes. When he said this I could see him holding back these tears. I think we both cried that way about what life does to people who cannot be together for whatever reason. If I cry I cry like an old man.

This Read Can Be A Bird

This read can be a bird...

Because, sometimes I am running in a dream of feathers
I don't know where I'm going....
I enter space after space after space, trying to get out of the place... Colors are haunting me...
Something is behind me, whispering... It is the imagined rainbow of my imagination...
Kaboenk, kaboenk, kaboenk...
goes the echo of the shadow of my heart...my heart has no color in the gap of my chest and no ground has my road... I hover there...among voices of voices and chants of chants
captured by endless mantra's
of a returning reverie...
am I a prisoner


of hope ...

I Live In A Frozen Metropolis

I look outside my windows again. I see the sky that looks like a black lake. No wind. No waves. I see the rigid skeletons of trees. I see birds, stationary, in an unmovable painting. Across from my house is a home for elderly people. Behind the windows I see some pale faces. Ashen and frightened masks that glow in the dark. If I try to smile at them, my lips won’t move. The eyes of the masks just keep gazing at me like none of us exist . Nothing moves here. I live in a frozen metropolis. We have no time.

The Heaven Of Amsterdam

When I was a child I thought of our garden in Amsterdam as heaven. I experienced everything around me as magnificence. I saw magnificence in the birds and magnificence in insects that buzzed through our garden full of smells and flowers and mighty trees. I was still so immature, I thought God lived in our dusty barn. In the beginning I didn’t have the guts to go in there. We had a cat with one eye who didn't fear God, it walked in and out the barn all day. When I was eight I was ready to meet God myself. I went into the barn and gazed at sinister shadows to look for Him. Suddenly I could feel Him watching me and I saw one of His eyes gleam up like a little yellow glistening sun. Now only I knew just one of God’s eyes lived in our barn. I’d run outside the shelter of His eye to save my soul. I looked into the azure sky and looked God in the other eye and blinked at Him.

My Grandmother's Wooden Dog

My grandmother's dog hung in the corridor of her house in Amsterdam. It was a nasty little wooden fellow and she called him Axel. My grandmother used to say that Axel came alive at night. He ran through her dusty rooms and he barked and bit in my imagination. His eyes, red and glistening, gazed at everyone at any time. My grandmother survived her husband and all her friends, and she was very proud of that. She died at the age of 94. Shortly after she had died, I was alone in her house. My dead grandmother lay on a bed in the living room, with a content smile on her face. I touched her hands and they were rigid, like they were made of wood. Axel gazed at me and gave me the creeps. His eyes seemed to glow red. A few days later my father gave me the pet. He said my wooden grandmother wanted me to have it.

A Great Dutch Writer

I know this great Dutch writer. Great, in a logic, he is huge. I’ve never seen such a big man, that’s what I mean. He’s a giant. It could be a coincidence, but his first name happens to be Goliath. You should see his sections to understand how big he is. His legs, for instance, his legs are like trees. And his shoulders – I’ve thought about his shoulders maybe too often. I couldn’t compare them with anything, except with the shoulders of God. And he has this big voice, if he talks, it sounds like heavy thunder. The funny thing is, he has two eyes, but only one of them is big.

That Old Man And Me

I’ve just been out in the rain here. It is hideously cold and the rain was just as cold. I wanted to feel it. I just let the rain wash my face. Then I saw an old man, and he smiled at me because I probably looked a little funny standing in the rain and enjoying it. That man was about seventy years old and I said ‘hello there, how are you today?’ He said he was fine but cold. I said I was fine but cold too. I started walking and he walked with me. I said, 'can I take your hand?' And he said, 'that would be very nice.' I took his old hand and that is how we walked, that old man and me, hand in hand in the rain, until we both had to go in another direction.