An abandoned railway bridge; an inaccessible harbour master’s house; a blocked doorway to a rundown apartment: in the port city of Rotterdam, Dirk Vis finds hidden portals to spirit entities who will speak to whoever will listen, echoes of the city’s rich subcultures. They whisper to him about his lover who lives abroad. News from her is news from home – because being loved is being home – in a conversation about desire becoming devotion.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
1
Abandoned railway bridge in Spangen
(51°55’07.9”N, 4°25’48.1”E)
I like to walk over the desolate railway bridge because it no longer connects places; now it connects times. The path takes me through bushes with defunct railway signalling hidden within. There is no one else here. Whispers quiver through my belly: ‘You will never hurt me.’ Not a command, not a prediction, but a timeless fact. Circular time is called kairos, and kairos speaks in tingling sensations: its sentences stretch throughout a lifetime. You are far away in another city in another country. No bridge connects us; we drift freely, outside time. I tell my younger self that that part of your thigh was and will always be the most exquisite piece of flesh I’ll ever witness. You walk past your future self, you walk through her, surprised, and you hear from her: ‘You will feel it warm up your heat, flourish inside your growing; infinite relationship energy.’ On the bridge connecting nothing to nowhere, it’s cold, dark and windy. Time separates our minds, not our souls.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
2
Neon letters at Blaak
(51°55’08.1”N, 4°29’17.0”E)
I look at the light sculpture of a single sentence on the top of a building. Language is ancient, advanced technology. When language itself speaks, it uses not words but a dance of colour – it radiates and shines. In the dark, in the drizzle, the letters radiate a colourful mist, the size of a skyscraper: now a red burst, then orange transparent, purple iridescent. Fleeting, fragile, like everything of value. I walk through the cloud of light, as it moves through me. Large, living letters that speak of the space in between the words, where I find our endless nights. Language licks me from the inside without a tongue. As it touches body parts, blood vessels and nerve endings, new words emerge: ‘Sometimes you need lips, sometimes teeth.’ More thoughts come up about how Dutch likes to be spoken by you: your mouth feels new to the language; the splotches and growls of someone coming. The fog evaporates, and the language extinguishes, as it looks forward to being reborn in you.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
3
Empty Maasvlakte 2
(51°56’50.8”N, 3°58’51.9”E)
The harbour of this city is far from the centre, and it is without people. Humans are barely allowed here: it takes a lot of hassle and a special permit. After successfully entering this alien land-scape – mountains of minerals in the distance, kilometres of cranes and containers on a machine beach – it takes a while before I hear what emptiness has to say. The void conjures images: an earthen cave, a crystal chamber, your hands holding galaxies, your tongue tickling stars, your mouth biting nebulae. ‘You keep making love. The universe continues to expand.’ Your body holds all my bodies, I love the way you don’t respect my space. If you look within your own emptiness, you will see a lunch table in the Mediterranean, the plates used and empty, echoes of satisfied guests, now gone. Any relationship can grow only where there is a void. Finding emptiness allows me to return from it, transformed. Coming back, I’m now free to choose my compulsions. And when I forget how to get back to endless emptiness,
I only need to remember that it exists, to find myself there again.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
4
Wild polder De Esch
(51°54’14.3”N, 4°31’37.6”E)
In De Esch’s abandoned wilderness, I feel the absence of primeval forests. Here, in this city, we might be furthest from nature’s primal touch. I can feel alone here, the way monumental trees in the city are alone. I stop in front of a centuries-old ash tree. I cannot see beyond the branches and buds, and behind them I imagine all the old growth that is not here. The longer I stay here, the more I forget about words, and the more comes up in me that isn’t mine.
‘I marvel at the fact that you can move. Let me rustle inside your head; I’ll become the adjective to your mind.’ Shocked and still unsure of what spoke inside of me,
I felt a shiver. It’s a dryad, a tree spirit, that tells me to stop categorising things with names; to stop chopping up things with words; language separates while it pretends to connect. I realised I stopped reading the natural world long ago, but am relearning it now. Shoots grow from my feet, something dark green and brown protrudes; the spirit
of the forest is a constant becoming; the tips of my fingers, now verdant, reach out to you in that other lonely city; attention is a form of touch, intention is
a tree in me; again you will climb my branches.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
5
Fenced off doorway to a rundown apartment block in M4H
(51°54’48.4”N, 4°26’01.7”E)
The doorway has been sealed for years; the abandoned apartment block’s renovation plans have long since faded. The locked door is boarded up with plywood and fenced off. The spirit of wilderness, Inanna, laughs at these all-too-human attempts to keep control. An anonymous artist spray-painted a graphic pattern on the panel; someone hung an abstract poster; this ornamental portal has unintentionally become a shrine. I sit on the pavement and stare at the beauty of this door. Inanna appears as a horde of pantherous beasts, tender and rough at the same time, their bellies and hinds riding me. ‘Have you ever witnessed the birth of a cosmic creature, an unfathomable, bluish, slimy, fluorescent birth, that is simultaneously conception and death?’ Innana, the sprite of the hunt, likes to sometimes experience what it means to be prey. I can feel her wildness rage within me. She enjoys the presence of all these other entities and spirits – there are many of them – and the poly-spiritual link I have with you. And even with a sea between you and me, between our cities, I know you feel it too.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
6
Disused bridge master’s house in Wijnhaven
(51°55’05.8”N, 4°29’28.5”E)
In this city, the wind has a life of its own, and everyone has learned to surrender to it. I pass the desolate bridge master’s house, now without a bridge and without a master. It sits lonely on a stone tower in the water, inaccessible by land. The wind has free rein there. I would like to work in it; seen by others, but only from a distance, visited, but only by the wind; some places are accessible by breath alone. With you, I felt the air reach the tips of my toes and the crown of my head. Your breath traverses my entire body, and you seem to know how to breathe fire. What does breath know? ‘To become breath is to let go entirely, even of letting go itself, surrendering hard-earned discipline. To become breath is to wake up to a nature that knows you better than you know yourself.’ The wind in this city is never finished; I’m all air now; I feel you more than I feel myself; this is what it feels like to be coming for a hundred years. If after this life I ever get the chance to come back to this world, I will want to return as a named hurricane.
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PORTAL OF DESIRE
No:
7
Weena at dusk – a canyon of coloured light
(51°55’26.0”N 4°28’29.9”E)
The street is busy with traffic. It features a fountain and high-rise buildings, and it convinces me this city is really a city. Magic hour, the fleeting moment between day and night, renders city screens powerless. The evening sky radiates a colourful glow that no camera can capture.
At this time, everyone looks up at the sky, disregarding their devices. For a moment, I forget the secret religion of light that runs our lives, that tries to distract us ever so successfully from the light coming from within. Yellow, orange, purple, pink and
red are reflected throughout the street. The colours fold, shoot plumes, explode in towers, obscure the stars, quiver and flood. Colours speak in silent warmth. I focus on what I see with
my eyes closed: you slowly open your legs, right now, there in London; allowing a ray of light, widening, to cover your belly; a beam that sees me. Like a shameless sun, I come up in you. Your eyes radiate. You and I; two particles, one wave, until we’re nothing but light. I don’t know what praying is, but I do it with you.