A 700 years old tower

23 august

At the start of trying to write this, I tried to find a sense of describing what 700 years are. What happened around 1300 that provides a sense of scale? Around that time the Inca empire begun to conquer the mountains of South America, but despite my name that means little to me. The Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (called Mexico city nowadays), but I feel no connection here neither. Weirdly closer to home that was also the time that Dante begin to write, that Giotto painted, and that japanese theater coalesced around Noh. A long time ago. 

And of course, that was also when the Dom tower of Utrecht’s cathedral was build. 

So tonight Ch. got me to the square in front of it, where we sit with some few hundred more persons, and heard a birthday concert. Utrecht’s official carrillonneur, a lady with the fantastic name of Malgosia Fiebig, was accompanied by piano, cello, trombon and a singer, to interprete a piece specially written for the occasion by Spinvis, a dutch pop musician. The down side was that we could not see the tower, nowadays surrounded by construction scaffolding due to maintenance work. The upper side is that the concert itself was called “scaffolding”, dedicated not quite to the tower itself, but to the persons that build it, the persons that maintain it, and those who will maintain it in the future. The Dom tower is since quite some centuries the sign of Utrecht, its profile present today in whatever graphic that refers to our city. Yet Spinvis tells us that it is not the tower what bind us, but actually the scaffolding’s. They are build and operated by us, the persons that build the tower, but also the persons that keep on repairing and rebuilding it. Once upon a time, all what is the tower will have been replaced, but then the scaffolding’s will keep on being used. 

People, us Utrechters, sat then in the street, allowing ourselves to be lulled by poetry and music, coming from centuries old metal and years old electronics. Now and then I looked around, and I saw us, the people of the city. The bored faces, but also the transfixed, the dreaming ones. The group of friends, having time out together, moving with the ease that people that know each other since long have when together. Beer and chips, and here and there bottles of mostly bad wine. A couple, loosely curled around each other, his hand almost unconsciously caressing her back, with the fingers moving in patterns long time ago decided, and enjoyed. A group of young men, latecomers, that decided to settle uncomfortably close to an older, and single, lady. They didn’t notice her shuffle, and her fleeting grimace at their loud talking. But they settle and anyhow all of us are close to strangers, closer than what we would like, so she relaxes again and hears what there is to hear. An uber-delivery boy has also settle in the middle of all this, and distractedly takes some food out of the big green bag and shares it. And all over the square, like two strange herons walking around a field ripe with frogs, two photographers armed with their long lenses, scanning the crowd for the face that tomorrow will make the front page. 

Independently of whatever my third passport says, I am not dutch. But sit asides my love, sharing this time with people of all sorts, that just like me have come to live in this place and call it home, perhaps tonight I was a bit of a dutch. Hearing the crowd softly chatting, hearing Spinvis played in centuries old bronze bells by a polish lady, I wondered, not by first time and certainly not by last, if perhaps being dutch (or venezuelan or argentinian) is not much more, and not much less, than this. The celebration of a 700 years old piece of architecture that somehow is a celebration of ourselves. 

Perhaps.