Written after a jaunty visit for New Year's Eve 2005 in the lyrical literary style of the Italian master Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities.
After a long swim in the Atlantic and a choppy hike over sand dunes and sinkless dykes one arrives in Amsterdam, city of gezellig and ghosts.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the Dutch capital, 15-feet below sea level, features both companionable, sociable, convivial gezelligness and the karmic footprints of secret and adventurous lives lived.
You see them when squinting to shield the sun's reflection off streetcars or with a sudden spin of the head to catch a fleeting glance of one hanging from those hooks on top of deep, narrow houses used to move grand pianos in through windows the size of casio keyboards. Really these purposeful hooks are there to snag the shirt collars of nasty apparitions in nasty moods before they drift down to the streets to whisper sweet nasty nothings in the ears of some poor susceptible traveler intent, but suddenly failing, to keep proclivity for temptation in reasonable check. That's of course why everyone has an Amsterdam story they won't tell anyone, or at least they change it in the telling.
You see the swirling entropy of Amsterdam -- the culture, the drugs, the coffee and Heineken, the sex, the diverse architecture, the art, the hundreds of drawbridges passively threatening to lift -- is really contained at all times within a single moment, within a single dot of life on a landscape portrait of one of their great artists.
Subtle trickery bedevils this fact, like the way the canals studiously reflect the sky to give an illusion of space, but look more closely and the observer becomes the observed. As you are jostled by crowds or stampeded by the all-too-close herald of a 3-speed bike bell on the congested streets, look over shoulders at the angelic muses and dapper dans that flutter wings to provide the gusts of cool air keeping the city alive and in motion.
Gaze from any point and you gaze from all. Just watch out if one those slippery tricksters is freed from a house hook and finds comfort on the shoulder of your mind. Sweet nasty nothings are still nasty after all. In a Gezellig kind of way.
