{"id":15438,"date":"2021-12-17T10:38:04","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T09:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dirkvanbabylon.com\/uncategorized\/probing-month-approach\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T17:02:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T15:02:56","slug":"probing-month-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dirkvanbabylon.com\/en\/sprokkelmaand\/probing-month-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Sprokkelmaand: Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Life Slices<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Tranches de vie<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Ssst, Adriaan is asleep while I write this.<\/span><\/p>\n

He must not wake before six o\u2019clock, because he has to rest before the journey. How it came about that he is now dozing in my bed is a long story. He got in touch again after years, at a very particular moment, just when Ibrahim had been admitted.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wide-screen shot<\/h3>\n

Flashback to the psychiatric institute:<\/span><\/p>\n

The institution for the mentally ill consists of pavilions planted in a green park, with at most one floor, so as not to give the residents the idea of jumping down from high windows, which in any case cannot be opened. Ibrahim was locked up there and had his own anxiously clean room on the ground floor.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was an additional reassurance. The population of the pavilion of the unconscious did not look very encouraging. A worn-out tribe of Neanderthals from the earliest toothless age of dentistry shuffled and trembled through the corridor in slow motion, helped along by the handrail, and gathered together at feeding time around the trough of the refectory.<\/span><\/p>\n

What a place of humiliation and extinction it was, and of bad breath, where a great deal was smoked. Valhalla, seconds after the twilight of the gods. Ibrahim is conspiratorial, currying favour, and ready for anything in order to get out again, yet he keeps that wild look in his eyes that shows you he means none of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was humiliating to go there. Tormented to the joints and the bone, you would return home shaken after the disappointing visit to your sick husband, with little prospect of improvement. What can you still do? Long meditation, to reconsider the events and sort them out, into a folder of bewilderment and a notebook of dismay, and store them away in the dark winter of the heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

So this is what remains of what was once my husband. We move away from each other, and it is as if the light itself were darkening. In him, whom I loved so much, I can no longer discover any illumination, and I set out on the road of acceptance, of separation, but that will still require many steps.<\/span><\/p>\n

It has become a memory, loosely rooted in shifting sand. I now sit here happily alone without you to spoil my longing. I was quite beside myself in those days. The bad news was choking me. With my mystical inclination I did not find it devoid of significance that suddenly that young man called, Adriaan, whom I had not seen for more than ten years, the last time when he was about eleven or so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adriaan<\/h3>\n

He is now more than twenty, shaped like a Greek god, taller than I am, with a slender and precisely defined body, a few very blond curls on the chest, symmetrically and harmoniously built. A little like Cowboy Henk, plastically transforming himself into a beautiful and peaceful little son, as he lies there snoring so charmingly on my mattress.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately I managed to persuade him to go to sleep after I told him a little story. That way I can recover for a moment from the tremendous evening I experienced here at home with him. Every now and then I go and have a look at him. Has he never known a father who came to sit beside his bed and read him a story?<\/span><\/p>\n

Has no one ever loved him as he is, utterly and completely Adriaan? Probably not. He remained excited until the very end, but let there be no misunderstanding. Adriaan is a special son who has nothing to do with the internet and whom I have never put into the bath.<\/span><\/p>\n

He is a boy who is perfectly heterosexual, young and attractive, and vulnerable. A class in itself, and papa respects that. I have never washed him, so he does not appear in the bathroom statistics, but he is very close to me, in heart and soul. And he always returns, like the cat in the song.<\/span><\/p>\n

We differ by a quarter of a century in years and are each other\u2019s opposite in everything, yet it is an exciting interaction. Suddenly he is sitting there at my table and we drink tea and we have a slight quarrel about the length of the string attached to one of the tea bags. During the conversation, which lasted for hours, everything came back about what he used to be like.<\/span><\/p>\n

Always first in line, yet constantly bumping and hurting people, a little boy who saw no boundaries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adriaan as a child<\/h3>\n

By earlier I mean very much earlier, when he was still a child.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back then he was a stunningly beautiful blond boy of ten. A lively whirlwind with impetuous impulses bubbling up, against the background of the early nineteen-nineties. I must have been in my early thirties. Little Adriaan was still an ash-blond rascal with frank little eyes and a mischievous smile, a Dennis the Menace, a tumbling scamp who could hardly be kept in check by his mother.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the very first day this rudderless child made an indelible impression on me, and there seemed to arise between us a bond that has proved indestructible, strong enough to bring him to take contact again now that we have both become adults. He has developed into a handsome young man, with large hands and large eyes that look at me and do not look away.<\/span><\/p>\n

And somewhere inside that man there is still that unruly boy from back then. He is heterosexual and I am homosexual. I mention it explicitly because it explains part of the tension. A powerful attraction, but also boundaries set out that must not be crossed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those boundaries were drawn even more sharply when he was still a child, and one day I asked myself whether the attraction he exerted on me was appropriate within the relationship between a child and an adult.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was painful. On the one hand I wanted very much to behave in a fatherly way, on the other hand there were also erotic undertones that troubled me. I spoke about it then with his mother, who immediately broke off all contact, even before I could say that I hoped to keep my impulses under control. Perhaps that was the wisest thing at the time, because such matters must never get out of control.<\/span><\/p>\n

It did hurt. But still, now that he has returned as an adult and is sleeping in my bed tonight, without my being allowed to touch him, while I sit here drowsily typing at the little screen, I nevertheless always feel a little like the papa. Then I want to cherish him spiritually and protect him, and at the same time educate him and endow him with holy fire. Then I want to surround Adriaan with care and good advice.<\/span><\/p>\n

They are my own phantasms. But there is more going on. His discourse filled me with nostalgia and with longing to return to that special friendship that existed in those earlier years between his mother and myself, until the fatal telephone conversation took place. A strong woman with a good career and a powerful personality.<\/span><\/p>\n

It happened in the rare happy years that Ibrahim and I experienced together. We were inseparable. We appeared on television and enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame in that period. Yes, what a time. There seemed to be no end to it. My husband still functioned reasonably well and we had prospects.<\/span><\/p>\n

The business grew and flourished and we could make new plans. But let me not begin about the past. In the meantime much has happened, to Adriaan as well as to me. I suddenly realise that I have become a solitary old aunt, with bad habits of life, and oversensitive to mystical experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adriaan has become a sporty young man, delivered complete with everything. He still has that wild look, but despite everything he has been tempered and has learned a great deal. He has also come physically very close to me. He embraces me when he comes in. He takes my hand while he is explaining something, or bumps against me in passing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The whole evening it seemed as if he wanted to take possession of my attention. To dominate my field of vision. And again and again he tried to stand at the centre of my interest. Physically he constantly places himself between me and the walls and occupies all the space. Now and then he is ambiguous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet something has also changed. Listening was not always his strongest point. But now! He listens far better than before. Again and again those eyes look at me and seem to question me, emphasised by a slanting smile or a grin. I cannot deny that it has an exciting effect on me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I could kiss him, but I must not begin that, because then I might not be able to restrain myself. I would do better to keep my mouth shut, although I cannot get enough of the beautiful man he has become, with a slender athletic figure. Adonis, a dazzling fellow who could cause havoc among women if he wished, and we may reasonably assume that this happens regularly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inquiry reveals that this is indeed the case. It is his life of course, and who am I that I could compete with the young girls of today, full of life-juice and with empty heads. Navel piercings, low jeans. Goatish chatter with the smell of teenage girls.<\/span><\/p>\n

I can easily imagine that all the women of the world would like to surrender themselves to that large body with those long arms that now lies there. The whole of Adriaan, who only moments ago was still sitting creaking on one of my precious chairs.<\/span><\/p>\n

He talked and gestured and told without stopping about how things used to be and how they are now, and everything that has happened in the meantime. I cannot get over it. That unwashable boy who is visibly stormed by his hormonal outbursts and who comes to disrupt the written procedures. That untouchable body that now lies sleeping on my only mattress.<\/span><\/p>\n

By way of reaction I begin again to reflect on his rather unusual course of life. Flying from one subtropical country to another in recent years. He always wants to travel, and always new plans for something else. Let us hope it turns out well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Madness<\/h3>\n

\u201cI was an ADHD child.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The letters ADHD stand for the English words <\/span>Attention Deficit Hyperkinetic Disorder<\/span><\/i>. Those are many difficult words. I still prefer to call it hyperkinetic behaviour, because so many people have heard the term and recognise the image of a child who cannot sit still.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was a restless child, in short. Even now Adriaan is still restless. On the edge of the psychotic. Always intensely engaged with his space-occupying personality. That fierce and vehement quality already stood out then, something I could not explain.<\/span><\/p>\n

At that time it was not yet as common as it is now to speak about ADHD children. In the literature they still spoke about minimal brain damage, or MBD. The theory at first was that these were brain-damaged children with birth injuries. I think they are leaking membranes through which electrolytes seep and the sodium pumps spin wildly, and it is often hereditary. I will say no more about that. It would lead us too far.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is this a form of delusion or madness? Is it curable or treatable? Because of the conceptual confusion that had arisen, the medical world was initially difficult to convince of the existence of the hyperactive childhood disorder. It required considerable persuasive force on the part of Adriaan\u2019s mother, mobilising all her maternal strength, to ensure that the care system produced the proper help for the troublesome little son when things were not going well with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

A wise and thoughtful mother, who quite rightly worried a great deal about her strange cub, whom she defended like a lioness in any case, let us not forget that, with all the sacrifices that demanded of her. Even if she may have doubted it at the time, it has certainly been good for something.<\/span><\/p>\n

Little Jan<\/h3>\n

That difficult little boy of those days, that brat of ten or eleven, has not disappeared.<\/span><\/p>\n

He has not vanished into thin air. He lies there essentially snoring on my mattress, unfolded into a full-grown adult, and I am the guardian of his secrets, and I cherish his trust. Much could still be improved in the quality of care. The pain has partly been spoken out, though not erased, during the conversation we held.<\/span><\/p>\n

It became a mutual confession. Many slices of life were discussed tonight and we played strange songs. Wrong music. As in the song that begins with the words:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLittle Jan had a little rabbit that was his best friend.\u201d Thus begins a serious life-song by <\/span>the Singer Without a Name<\/b>. This irreplaceable interpreter of the Dutch song has now died and been entered in the register of divine memories.<\/span><\/p>\n

When papa was still young, the Singer Without a Name was for more than twenty years a star beloved by the people in Flanders and in the surrounding Netherlands. This icon of low-country pop culture humbly embodied the singing Mother-Virgin, without the slightest sexual radiance, but with a dignified phrasing and endowed with a voice capable of withstanding the microphones of those years, the grooves of vinyl records, and the primitive loudspeakers that sometimes pierced through bone and marrow.<\/span><\/p>\n

She did not have a great voice, but in return she had a great deal of feeling, and she sang it out across the polders. She knew how to choose the right texts. This anonymous singer was a lively woman with a generous heart, driven by an indomitable concern for the welfare and suffering of human society.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus she denounced the dangers of alcoholism in <\/span>\u201cDear Father Please Don\u2019t Drink Anymore,\u201d<\/span><\/i> or warned early on against the risks of excessive speed in the blood-curdling <\/span>\u201cDrive Carefully, Think of Me.\u201d<\/span><\/i> I still know entire stanzas by heart. Also about loss: <\/span>\u201cGone, gone, you no longer think of me.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

All emotionally charged relationships appear in these sung slices of life, between parents and children, lovers and partners. Her oeuvre is a legacy of care and suffering. <\/span>\u201cWhy did we always remain childless? We were together, yet still alone.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Sometimes plush stuffed animals play a role. At the beginning of the song still unattainable in the shop window of the toy store, like the teddy bear that at the shocking end was laid by a heavily afflicted mother on the fresh little grave, among the desolate children\u2019s tombstones, in memory of the little darling who had crossed the street so carelessly.<\/span><\/p>\n

The deluded little girl imagined in a moment of hunger-hallucination that she saw her beloved teddy bear across the street, which she had never possessed in life because of poverty. She crossed and was run over by an automobile in the early nineteen-sixties.<\/span><\/p>\n

Little Rabbit<\/h3>\n

There was a profoundly sad song on a gramophone record that was lost during a move, a moving story in which a living cuddly animal played the hero.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLittle Jan had a little rabbit that was his best friend,\u201d begins this sorrowful life-song that I hold close to my heart because it expresses my feelings so well, and which I still know entirely by heart. \u201cEvery morning before going to school, Jan cut grass for his little friend,\u201d we immediately learn.<\/span><\/p>\n

We find ourselves transported here into an idyllic past where children formed friendships with rabbits and rose early enough at the break of dawn to mow free grass for the rabbit along the roadside.<\/span><\/p>\n

The youth of today can hardly imagine that anymore, carried on the luxurious back seat of a flashy car to the clerical school. One cannot expect it from Prince Sixteen. He belongs to the purple-cow generation. At my age I can still imagine what it was like in the countryside at that time.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my youth you could still easily cut grass for your rabbit. I myself once cut roadside weeds for a sniffing little creature that belonged to my big sister, during one of her fleeting enthusiasms for a passing cuddly housemate who was promptly locked in a cage. When her enthusiasm passed, I was allowed to take care of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I never mastered the scythe, but I could handle the sickle, somewhat clumsily, but always cutting away from myself and paying great attention to the fingers of the other hand, which I did not wish to lose. Today that would no longer be possible. Now you would already have to take the car to find somewhere grass that can still be cut. Because you are no longer allowed simply to cut grass anywhere. Certainly not in the Brussels canal zone. Who knows whether it is poisoned with heavy metals.<\/span><\/p>\n

At this point, however, we can return to the song: \u201cAnd when he came home in the evening, Jan would call loudly: I\u2019m here, Mother! Beyond that he had no time for anything else, Jan had to go to his little friend.\u201d In this way the emotional bond between Jan and the rabbit is finely drawn, but it goes even further: \u201cFor hours they played together. They crawled about on the bleaching field.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Het bleekveld<\/h3>\n

We are apparently here on a farmstead, where there was a bleaching field available, used on washing days to bleach the washed laundry in the sun, in the late summer. On the days when no washing was done and no linen lay bleaching, the child, as appears from the text, was allowed to crawl around on that bleaching field with his rabbit. A horse, for example, could not have been on such a bleaching field, but the rabbit was allowed.<\/span><\/p>\n

We must see it with the eyes of that time. Children now live in apartments where children\u2019s play is forbidden, and they can no longer easily imagine a bleaching field. Our heroes, on the other hand, are here entirely caught up in the illusion, or rather the imagination, for fantasy plays tricks on the little boy: \u201cLittle Jan was an animal tamer and the rabbit was lion or dog.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Here they are training one another, the ravenous beast within us and the moving relationship of care in the other. The taming makes it for both of them, and for all of us, much more real. Here, however, the story takes a sad turn. \u201cIt was in the last days of December that Jan was seized by fright. Nowhere could he find his little friend any more, the door open, the hutch empty.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The musical accompaniment ends on a deliberate discord. The emotional charge surrounding the absent little furred animal bursts into tears over an unacceptable loss. The sniffing cuddle is simply gone. That is a very intense and frightening disappearance all of a sudden, after so much careful love and friendship.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFruitless was all his searching. But he did find something else: on a nail in the little shed there hung a rabbit skin.\u201d Personally, I have indeed seen such an inverted rabbit skin hanging in the shed on my grandfather\u2019s yard, and then you knew: we are eating rabbit, with gueuze and prunes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pelt of the little victim is not cut open but stripped off like a sock, turned inside out and stuffed with straw, or, if straw is lacking, with newspaper, to give it a bit of volume, and it hangs eerily drying from a nail in the shed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The inverted rabbit skin that actually hung there, in my grandfather\u2019s yard, under the ridge of the shed, at the beginning of the 1960s, perhaps explains why I have such a particular bond with this little song.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rabbit skin looks frightening, bloody, turned inside out like that, with quivering membranes when it is still fresh. Obscene in its nakedness and hairlessness, for all the hair lies on the inside and the veins and arteries on the outside, a faithful imprint of the anatomy of the slaughtered fur animal, of muscles, bones and tendons.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet you can still recognize the fluffy little tail between the hind legs. There that inverted skin hangs from a nail in the shed. Yes, that is a fright with a capital F for dear little Jan, who is being sung about here. It is only the beginning, for it becomes much worse. We pay a visit to the potato eaters.<\/span><\/p>\n

We see the simple family gathered around the festive table at Christmas. The father or the mother\u2014we shall never know which of the two, but I assume it was the father\u2014addresses the inconsolable boy harshly:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now you must stop blubbering, I don\u2019t like sulking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However you spell it, it is no longer Dutch but a primal cry of a primitive human being. And now comes the majestic part. The Singer Without a Name, whose real name was Mary, stops singing for a moment and adopts a speaking tone: \u201cFold your hands, give thanks properly,\u201d and then, with a heart-rending tremolo in a restrained undertone, sings it out: \u201cFor the delicious rabbit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That was a great deal of emotional fissile material for the late adolescent that I was when I came to know the work of this virtuoso of language, the warm-hearted woman of the Dutch popular song. So much cynicism in that tone, so many harsh lessons of life are condensed here. I was shattered when I first heard it, and I know it by heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJantje never forgot it, and however old he may become, I fear that for the rest of his life he will never again trust father and mother.\u201d The song addresses a broad audience, you must understand. The educational value of the intelligible moral lesson must not be underestimated, considering the rough working class of those days.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is why the work of this singing mouthpiece of the laboring people deserves lasting recognition. I am poorly placed to judge otherwise. I bought the 33-centimeter vinyl record of the Singer Without a Name more than twenty-five years ago because at the time I believed myself to be an up-and-coming intellectual who would indulge, with much malicious amusement, in this popular figure, a misguided Nether-Bianca Castafiore who seemed adorned with kitsch and camp like fake jewels and who performed bad music.<\/span><\/p>\n

How differently it turned out. I was seized by her voice and her message, and I still know several of her songs by heart. I do not know why, but I have never forgotten it, no more than little Jan has. In later years the Singer Without a Name clearly speaks out in favor of homosexual rights when she sings: \u201cSo dear boy, feel free to love your friend.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Those were courageous songs in those days. Even today this nameless interpreter of songs possesses an indestructible mystical power. \u201cStand up for your rights, fight for them if necessary.\u201d She is a woman who lifts me up in my weaker moments. Papa must always keep all the agreements that have been made, and that sometimes makes it so difficult to be papa, but there are also pleasant moments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such as the moment when a little hatch opens. If you look long enough, a window always appears again, and then you see the little problem the son desperately wants to solve, and then you discreetly help the intended goal along. What satisfaction when you notice that he has understood it.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the joy of being a father. We are now writing July 2003 and I look back at that strange month of February when so much happened to me, and all the aftermath of it, until suddenly it appeared that the most fantastic summer of the century had begun.<\/span><\/p>\n

How I have enjoyed creation and it of me. Dry earth in a dusty desert thirsts for rain beneath drifting fleeces of sheep-wool clouds sailing past under a blazing sky and dropping not a single drop. Beneath the blazing sun many sons and one converted daughter wander about who are actually looking for the right papa. This papa clearly sees the needs and requirements lying there, but how to satisfy them is another matter altogether.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can only put one son in the bath at a time; that is the limitation of every papa. The need for affection, the need for care cannot be encompassed. The horizon trembles with it. Everyone must help to carry the burden a little. That yearning for fatherly guidance that rises from the suffering population\u2014I sometimes think about that.<\/span><\/p>\n

It brings me back to my moment of paralysis and despair.<\/span><\/p>\n

Relief<\/h3>\n

As I lay there, half-paralyzed, on the second of February, I thought of you, my dear little prince, when I could not move, and how good you had been to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I could not refrain from humming a little piece of the song of Little Jan now and then, as far as I had breath. I could not believe it. During the lowest points of the rescue process, my dear Little Jan\u2014pardon, my little prince\u2014I could not prevent myself from thinking of you.<\/span><\/p>\n

The lowest point was still the beginning, during the crawling, the lying and half-conscious waiting of that first hour, when from time to time I again threatened to doze off, thinking of that far-reaching telephone sex of ours. I lie there on the wall-to-wall carpet of my new dwelling of one hundred square meters, my cozy little loft.<\/span><\/p>\n

The telephone. I must find the mobile phone. Eventually I find it in the farthest corner, near the computer. I wonder whether I will be able to speak. While with the good hand I press the number, I try to pronounce a few words. It goes with difficulty. I have a hoarse croaking voice, and the sound of my own voice seems strange to my ears. I pray and wait. \u201cThe bunny that was his best friend.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I receive a response. The person who answers, in the emergency center, is friendly and speaks Dutch. He understands that I am half-paralyzed and that this creates an urgent situation. He gives me good advice while doing what is necessary to send a team to the spot.<\/span><\/p>\n

I manage to hoist myself onto the desk chair with wheels under it, so that I can gradually roll myself toward the front door, in a much easier way than by crawling. And I wait for help. Life is waiting. In this way there were many empty moments to think and to see whether things might not be otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\n

After all those years of suffering and care, trouble and misery with that scoundrel Ibrahim, I therefore think that perhaps a little piece of happiness might still be reserved for me\u2014but suddenly you get a paralysis, were it not for modern medicine, which will heal me without sequelae, without residual symptoms, loss of function or sagging of organs. Otherwise I would no longer have been here to tell the tale.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was very strange to be wheeled around in a bed through long corridors and via elevators, and then later, when things improved and I could stand and sit, to sit several times on the other chair, that of the supplicant\u2014the wheelchair, let us say. Then you begin to see the system of care with different eyes, for now it concerns yourself and your own health.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since then life has only become more intense. That is why I must once again think intensely of you, my little Prince. And what is to become of us now? Yes, how did it come about and what must change? Since the moment you entered my life, it seems as if it is taking a new direction, that it is going somewhere after all, and no longer in all directions at once, as with Ibrahim.<\/span><\/p>\n

But who could suppose that anything could come of it between an almost-elderly general practitioner of soon forty-seven and a boy of barely sixteen? During the hellish journey through the hospital the thought of you did not leave me for a single moment. While I sat waiting on a machine, or lay inside one, it was as if you gave me a sign that I had to return to life on earth because you still needed me once more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I may consider myself fortunate that I was allowed to think of you when it happened to me. What a chain of events has unfolded from it. Fortunately, after my call an ambulance arrived that brought me to a real hospital and not to a homeopath or an acupuncturist\u2014or a faith healer. As a physician I am sufficiently imbued with fear of helplessness to seek care of the best quality, according to the present state of science.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alternative healers stayed far from my bed. Long live modern medicine, I would say, for it has ensured that I can still sit up and type, just as I could type before, and even better. Quickly and effectively and with minimal use of resources the disastrous condition that threatened to lead to the loss of a hemisphere of the brain has been reduced to a passing episode.<\/span><\/p>\n

So far all examinations have proved spotless, from Doppler ultrasonography of the neck vessels to CT scan and angiography, to trans-oesophageal echography of the heart, etc. I am still healthy. How it could have come so far is quite a story. I am more inclined to say: how did I endure it so long?<\/span><\/p>\n

It was mainly my profession that kept me upright, alongside spiritual prayer and literature, and in the final sprint my virtual love for Prince Sixteen in that acute moment. Glad that it passed quickly. I returned to professional practice as soon as possible. That idea dominated all others, even the feelings of love. To work again.<\/span><\/p>\n

My profession is my life. It is perhaps the most beautiful trade in the world: care among people in their homes. I am a general practitioner by calling and profession, through and through. The suffering and the trust of the many unfortunate people who come to find me every day with their small and great problems, or whom I go to visit, give me the strength to bite back my own pain.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is why every morning I stand there again, searching for meaning and purpose in the bewildering days through which one sometimes has to struggle. What astonishes us in the field of care is how the real world and the planet of delusion circle around each other without penetrating one another. From a demented elderly person to a derailed drug user, from urinary to emotional incontinence\u2014too much urine or too many words.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes dozens of people in a single day, each with his story, each with his own form of suffering. In each of them you try to see a reflection of the light, the fragment of the suffering Jesus that glimmers there, that tear of God. You must continually see how you should act. Some struggle with reality, others with delusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the entire difference between neurotics and psychotics, but it would take a book to explain it, referring to the existing literature. Delusion and truth pull at each other, yet they also keep their distance. Of course you can never go along with every fantasy. There must be a standard.<\/span><\/p>\n

It can only continue to work if I assume that reality is ultimately stronger than delusion\u2014assuming that there is such a thing as reality. Many authors doubt that. In daily care practice, however, we cannot permit ourselves to remain perplexed for long. There is a great deal of work to be done.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Bathroom Method<\/h3>\n

Fortunately, after the end of the working day there is the bathroom method.<\/span><\/p>\n

Papa comes to rest by occasionally putting a boy in the bath and suffusing the moment with a fragrance of Christian cultural history. And if there is no boy, then in the evening there is the computer, online chat, on the cheerful boys\u2019 network of the worldwide web.<\/span><\/p>\n

I regularly throw myself completely into it there. I always try to put something of myself into it. The bathroom service that I offer is my signboard. The chat lends itself very well to self-expression. You can express what you are and what you desire. You are given a little field where you can fill in your CV. In this way others can read what you are engaged in.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can also put photographs there and even sound, though I myself am not very technical or very musical. <\/span>My only interest is to bathe good boys, virtually and sometimes in real life, if one ventures close enough to me. The method has proven remarkably effective.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quite a number of boys respond to the proposal. Washing and being washed\u2014everyone can imagine something about that. Many find it an original angle. I adopt a caring attitude but do not present myself as servile, for that is something entirely different. What I have in mind is the promotion of general well-being and public hygiene with the help of skin-friendly soaps.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am simply a person of care, and I must be able to care for someone, otherwise I do not feel right.<\/span>I only feel at ease when I can take on simple tasks like washing boys. They have to be clean, that’s the bottom line, and it’s an immense task that has to be performed every day, considering the exceptionally delicate skin of thousands of hard boys in Flanders and the Netherlands.<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to contribute to public happiness by occasionally giving a boy a bath.<\/span> It is my contribution to world peace. Nothing spectacular needs to be imagined about it. No cameras come to watch. It will usually proceed very softly and tenderly and without giving rise to many excesses.<\/span><\/p>\n

I embrace my son when he comes in and when he leaves, and in the meantime I am entirely at his disposal without exerting any pressure or using any force.<\/span><\/p>\n

Papa May Do Everything<\/h3>\n

But it no longer works.<\/span><\/p>\n

The whole feeling of insatiable loss now rises again within me, now that this evening I have once more spent a full two hours on the chat for nothing. It no longer works, I said it already. Prince Sixteen no longer appears and I think I have lost him entirely. It is a terrible thought, but I shall have to live with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead I encountered a new Prince, twenty-three, attractively built according to the numerical formula I was allowed to receive, a new boy whom I was allowed to put in the bath virtually. He does not object that I declare myself to be his papa and that I experience a deep spiritual need to cleanse him at once.<\/span><\/p>\n

That one son in the bathtub then symbolically takes the place of all the sons. That is how you must see it. That evening I went on the net with the message: \u201cInconsolable because I have lost my little prince.\u201d Apparently the new slogan is a good invention, for among others Prince New responded to it and was quite willing to take a bath, provided that I joined him in the bath.<\/span><\/p>\n

I become almost excited by you, my new little prince. I am remarkably fond of you, also because you prove to be by far the best writer of all the sons, with witty answers and new turns, and a lively imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n

As long as you use no violence, neither coercion nor threat, you may do everything with one another. \u201cBetter to die than to be unchaste,\u201d to quote the blessed Maria Goretti, who died when she resisted her rapist. That happened at the beginning of the twentieth century or so. And we complain about violence in our present society.<\/span><\/p>\n

In earlier times there was much more violence, but it was permitted, provided that you belonged to the upper class. Nobody thought about it. There was far more risk than now, yet not a soul said anything about it. Fornication was not allowed, although it did happen, but it was looked upon very strictly within a narrow definition of the term.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now those standards are arranged very differently. Sex is no longer unchastity unless violence or coercion or deception is involved. There are now many other things that are not allowed. Apart from sex, little is permitted. You may not ride a bicycle without a helmet and you may no longer light a fire in your garden. In those days you could.<\/span><\/p>\n

We have all become so fearful. You notice it in the boys as well. <\/span>They are often scared and they look anxious, no matter how sweetly I pretend to be the friendly, young elderly caregiver with a goatee, who asks for nothing more than to give a boy a bath and to care for him with skin-friendly soaps and soap-free bath products.<\/span><\/p>\n

With most boys it usually remains simply at talking, although a chat session on the internet can already be quite exciting. This is not unchastity, because it concerns unilateral masturbation with mutual consent, and masturbation is healthy. The great advantage is that no life fluids\u2014let me repeat, no life fluids\u2014are exchanged, since the encounter takes place via the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be continued\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shhh, Adriaan is asleep as I write this. He must not wake up before six o’clock, because he has to rest for the trip. How it came to be that he is […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":12322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[151],"class_list":["post-15438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sprokkelmaand","tag-dirk-of-babylon","authors-dirk-of-babylon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSprokkelmaand: Approach - dirk van babylon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Shhh, Adriaan is asleep as I write this. 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