Brussels, circa 2004

On the Intoxication of Youth and Fleeting Infinities

We sowed in youth a mustard seed,/ We cut an almond rod;/ We are now grown up to riper age:/ Are they withered in the sod?/ Are they blighted, failed and faded,/ Are they mouldered back to clay? (the Brontës)

A few luminous sequences in a film can cast a glow over the whole, transforming what might have left us indifferent into something distinct. In A Complete Unknown, within the shoebox dimensions of Dylan’s apartment – especially in those scenes circling the Cuban Missile Crisis – the dust and daylight conspire just so, sending me skidding down a wormhole to Brussels, around 2004, a time suspended in the aftermath of the great alter-globalization and anti-war protests, a moment that, in hindsight, rhymes more with 1962 than with anything that followed (specially after 2008, where everything started to go awry at an accelerated pace).

No television (no one seemed to take notice that it even existed), no internet (or barely: we checked our emails once or twice a week, at a call center, keeping online surfing to a minimum; it cost 50 cents per half-hour, money we’d rather spend on things that actually mattered), a phone, sure, portable in theory but mostly inert (with no cameras in hand, people seldom attempted to capture the living strand: pin-down a butterfly, and its wings forget the sky...).

Nobody seemed to really work. Money, when it appeared, vanished in an instant, funneled into booze & books. But somehow, that precarious edge of existence made everything shimmer. Reading like a beatnik, writing in a fever, making love to girls with names like forgotten poems, slipping in and out of second-hand bookstores where the yellowed pages carried the magical scent of new discoveries, the cinémathèque screening Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or some New Wave deep cut, a jazz jam veering toward the sublime before collapsing into utter chaos, a friend’s apartment swelling nightly with bodies, bottles, and smoke, surrounded by a sea of possibility, moving beyond isolation through bright, bouncing synths, in the wild, surreal glam of moonage daydreams, the city itself, lights that never go out, unfolding in endless late-night conversations, each a whispered conspiracy against whatever dawn might bring...

Life had this lazy, unhurried rhythm, like it was stretching out, inhaling deep. We sprawled across the Grand Place like it was a secret we’d discovered, cheap beers sweating in our hands, the guilds catching the final rays of sunlight, shimmering in a way that felt like a half-remembered dream from some old Flemish painter, no panic about the passage of time, just this quiet, unspoken certainty that this moment, this exact moment, was infinite. 

Our Brussels was a polyphonic mestizo city where the notion of race held no dominion; a fleeting glimpse of a democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic), drawing wandering souls from across the globe: Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Morocco, Martinique, Syria, Vietnam... In the many vernissages, encounters that felt like verses coming to life, fragments of poetry walking, speaking, unfolding in gestures, in glances that lingered just long enough to suggest entire unwritten stories. In the squats, their boots barely leaving the floor, pretty punkettes danced as if channeling some ancient, forgotten ritual. The music then – a collision of intensity, longing, rebellion, and transcendence – sounded like the emotional landscape of life-altering years, a soundtrack of raw desire, poetic defiance, dreamy evasion, pulling at something – an electric current – just beneath the surface of the night. And for a while, we believed – we knew – that we were perched at the edge of something vast, unnamed, vital. A threshold. A signal just beyond reach. Was the belief – that knowledge – the thing itself?

The countless difficult morning-afters, naturally, would perform their usual alchemy, softening the edges, thinning the thing out like smoke drifting on a breeze that never manages to touch the earth. But come nightfall, it would creep back, murmuring it hadn’t gone anywhere, one of those subterranean moods, lurking in the unseen places, waiting, unreadable, to be stumbled upon when the time was ripe, a time that never quite came, always just out of reach, like a horizon that keeps retreating the closer you get, until at last it simply flickered, wavered, and dissolved like a mirage. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Brussels back then, like Fitzgerald with his lost city, my lost city, but looking at it today – overcrowded with tourists, armed forces patrolling with machine guns, the homeless growing exponentially in number, gunfights almost weekly, violent flare-ups between rival soccer supporters on a regular basis, young minds too busy scrolling to imagine a life beyond the screen – it’s hard not to feel a stir, some quiet ache. I don’t mean to veer into deceptive nostalgia, the siren song of better days that never fully were, but damn, when everything’s unraveled into the gigantic quagmire we’re stuck in today, you start to think maybe looking back to times like that isn’t the worst instinct; if nothing else, that half-remembered dream of the possibility of another world – back then still in the air – may whisper of other paths, half-lit and long overgrown, yes, but never fully gone...