In the event, it’s more like a hundred. We are out on the edge here. The new town of IJburg is being built on an artificial island made of sand dredged from the seabed just outside the city. It’s an inhabited building site. Every so often the grid of roads stops abruptly at a wire fence, behind which the ground is churned up by underground works and the tracks of yellow diggers and blue and green cement trucks. There’s sand everywhere. It’s like a frontier town in a western movie. But they’ve got the tramlines in, and the cycle tracks are all linked up with the city so it’s already a suburb of Amsterdam and so suffers from anti-suburb snobbery. But it also slots in to the Dutch tradition of making new land, of which the first inhabitants are pioneers getting life going from raw beginnings – and another dose of snobbery, this time about polderfolk, provincial turnip heads, is heaped on the IJburgers. The double dose induces a community spirit as tough as that soccer crowd. All Fronk has to do is stick a notice in the supermarket window about this lecture he’s giving entitled GLOBESKIN, and he gets a full house.
There are too many for indoors, so we set up in the little square outside, and sit there wrapped in scarves and coats against the cold under a sky blooming with the yellow glow of Amsterdam to the west and sprinkled with stars on blackness to the east. Fronk sets a series of images to play brightly on a screen that gently oscillates in the breeze; images of life lived in nature, not alongside it. In the actual world, not the real one.
The Globeskin of the title is a map drawn on a buffalo skin by plains Indians in North America just before the civil war. The map shows a battle between different tribes, with pictograms of men on horses wearing headdresses of feathers and wielding axes and guns. Fronk tells us that the North American aboriginals of the great plain, those wild-west show Indians with their horses and guns swooping down on circles of covered wagons full of palefaces, were a recent phenomenon. Until the curse of seventeenth century Europe arrived, slashing and burning and clearing and building, native Americans lived close to actuality in cheerful communities that only took a couple of hours a day to gather what they needed to survive and spent the rest of the time partying, singing, dancing and making love. And sometimes, a little bit of war. Fronk makes it sound like student life on the barricades in Paris in nineteen sixty eight. He shows us a picture of a Powhatan party in Delaware painted in 1603 by one of the Early English settlers, John Smith. The aboriginals are dancing in a circle, dressed in branches and fronds, round three naked girls who stand with their limbs intertwined exactly like the three graces in the Hellenistic statue now in the Louvre –did he draw what he saw or what he knew? Asks Fronk. It was the time of the renaissance, after all.
All around, the faces of the audience are lit up by the picture on the screen, their brains churning with the thoughts Fronk is knocking out, a party made not of singing and dancing but of information transmission. I steal a glance at Katrina with Jacob on her lap. She looks like a marble Madonna, until she turns her head and smiles and animates the vision. It grabs my heart. Love is another word for unfinished business, I think. Jacob stares at me from his perch on her lap like a baby owl, and I turn my attention back to the screen.
The aboriginals of the American forest were knocked westwards by the European invasion and moved out onto the plains, says Fronk, where they took up Spanish horses and English guns and became nomadic, following the buffalo herds and living off their meat, and using their skins for clothes and shelter and for drawing maps like the Globeskin, which is the next image.
“I call it the Globeskin because it is a picture of everything,” he says. “Life and death, community, territory, all gathered into the present moment.” He draws our attention to a strange pattern in the top right corner of the battle, a sort of roundel made of dark dots with a red blotchy mass at its centre. “I want to show you what art can be, when it is also close to nature, when it is of the present moment,” he says, and throws up a larger detail of it on the screen. The red blotch turns out to be the headless body of a horse, stuck all over with spears, which bristle like the spines of a broom. The head of the horse, and also the heads of five scalped human beings, are arranged in a circle round the bloody torso, the human faces with expressions of horror, mouths open, eyes open, staring at the sky. The dark dots of the roundel turn out to be the impressions of hooves, presumably where the makers of this gruesome battlefield trophy have galloped round and round it to make a sort of mandala in the sandy ground. Fronk calls it the art of the present moment!
The next picture, suddenly completely different, is a photograph of the blue sky above IJburg, taken that morning, an image fresh as wild flowers – and the sky is laced all over with contrails. The same contrails that I saw this morning setting off for school with Trogo. But for Fronk, contrails carry the same sort of present moment significance as the battlefield trophy does. They are the traces of violent action, the noisy fury of jet combustion, taken in pursuit of human desire. They preach zero carbon and then plunge into debt at the first sign of trouble, says Fronk! Paying it back will keep us carbon heavy for another twenty years! Big cheer. Katrina turns and smiles at me again. Because now we have an IJburger debate on our hands. It is on the pressing subject of our time, climate change. And: what the fuck can we do about it? Or, as the IJburgers say, wat de fuck gaan we doen?
AN OLD GUY WITH A GREY BEARD gets slowly to his feet and announces that he has an answer to climate change. With his red silk cravat and mustard yellow cords and his blue blazer he looks like an old school roué. He says it is a three-step program, and will cost nothing. The preamble is delivered in full Dutch grandfather style, full of gentle humour and a heavily implied expertise in making love.
“Don’t tell me about present moments, Fronk, I’ve accumulated more of them than you,” he says. He rubs his hand across his head. “But you know, all you lovely girls,” – he is older than every woman in the room –“there is only one present moment. Life is made of it.”
When he finally gets to the point, it is tough love. Global warming is inevitable. If human made, it is too late to stop. If it’s another spin of the cycle that produces the ice ages, whatever that is, then it’s too big to stop. Sea levels are rising and the climate is changing. We can measure it and feel it already. So why waste time on trying to stop the world changing when we could be inventing ways to live with the change? “After all” he says, “and you all know this – the world is always changing.”
He imagines life restabilising after global warming has transformed the world. When the humans are pitched into a second dark age, a life no longer illuminated by television screens. We will want less. We’ll have less. There will be no work as we know it, but there will be plenty of digging to do. “And the Dutch know how to dig, am I right?” He says. We will dig to raise the dikes against the sea but also we will dig to make defences against the swarms of nomads who will be released when the bonds of civilisation snap. “So step one: we stay where we are and we dig ditches.”
Everyone there can imagine this. Every Dutch school kid knows the pictures of the work camps building the polders after the Hitler war. Muddy boots, striped pyjamas, tin cups. But then he says: “step one, the ditches. Step two, we start to build cathedrals again.” And how can we do that? How can we set about building another Chartres when we’re starting from scratch?
“The cathedrals were built with cash,” he says. “Built one piece at a time.” When the money was gone, he says, they would stop for a few years, maybe for a generation, until they could afford another doorway, another couple of bays. “That’s why they took two hundred years to build, and that’s why they are so fine; they are an accumulation of present moments. They are old guys.” He twinkles fiercely. “The buildings made today are so highly leveraged and value engineered and paid for with debt that they are rushed into being to earn their living. That’s why they look like kitchen cupboards!” Fronk starts clapping, so do the rest of them. That’s it: after the global warming, we want less because we have less. We spend our time digging ditches, and slowly erecting, piece by piece, the new cathedrals.
Someone shouts out: and where do we live?
“That’s step three. We live like poor people always live. We use what comes to hand.”
“Look at this,” says Fronk. He punches a key on his computer and brings up a picture of a place entirely made out of recycled materials. An African township. All cheek by jowl and open sewers in the red sand of the streets. Corrugated iron and plywood walls, plastic sheet roofs held down with car tyres and rocks, territories marked out with crowd control barriers yanked from the contested streets of Johannesburg, washing lines strung with old blankets of all sizes and colours, the longstanding fruits of western charity. If you try you can see the mirage of the cathedral hanging over this heap of jumble as light as a cloud. “Soweto,” says Fronk, and the old guy practically bursts into tears.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “All that and sunshine too!”
AT THE AFTER PARTY it seems like the whole population of the island is jostling for space. There’s a big bonfire burning, and a table of things to eat, and a long crowded bar table already sodden with spills, and a band playing. Four women hitting their guitars like they hated them. The band is called Morning Wood. I stand and watch, mesmerized by the beauty and aggression of the lead singer.
“Don’t even think about it,” says a voice beside me.
“Huh?”
“That’s my girl,” he says. He’s American. “You know what Morning Wood is, huh?” Looks at me with a leer. “That’s my girl,” he says again. And even at this distance you can feel the heat. Legs like a horse. Arse like a pear. Lithe as a snake. “And is she bright?” He says. “Is she bright? Ask her anything you like, man, she’ll tell ya!”
Suddenly I see a familiar face on the other side of the bonfire.
“Do you know who that is?” I ask him.
“Well he looks like the guy Katrina’s been hanging out with. The pimp. But that’s not him.”
“He’s a pimp? Know that for sure?”
“Well, he looks like a pimp and quacks like a pimp, take a wild guess, man.”
At that moment Katrina comes up and grabs my arm and leads me across the grass like a woman leading a horse.
“He just told me that Bamba’s a pimp!” I blurt out, and she laughs.
“Here! This is Bob. Paul, Bob. Bob, Paul,” she says and I find I’m standing in front of the climate change grandfather. “Bob has something to tell you,” she says, and then disappears back into the crowd. The cold night is lit up by the flames of the fire and the cacophony of Morning Wood mixes with the warmth of the mulled wine.
“Beautiful creature,” says Bob, looking after her. “I’ll miss her when I’m gone.” He looks at me with his eyebrows raised. Where is he going? “I’ll miss myself when I’m gone,” he says. “In fact I miss parts of myself already!” He laughs and grabs my elbow and switches on a little burst of charm, which is so persuasive that I tell him I liked what he said, liked the cathedral thing, liked the Soweto thing as well, in fact liked the ditch thing! I said I liked it all. It’s not some back-to-green-nature sustainability fantasy, it’s fully metropolitan, I gushed. I couldn’t stop myself.
“Katrina told me about your Everything project,” he says. “I’ve got something for you.” And he started to describe the early days of planet Earth, when the gravitational collection of space rocks had formed the sphere, and the heat and brimstone of collision and volcanic eruption had settled down, and the resultant atmosphere was made of carbon dioxide and nitrogen – the only oxygen on Earth was tied up as CO2 with Carbon molecules in the air and as H2O with Hydrogen molecules in the waters of the oceans, waters that had condensed out of the steam of the volcanoes.
“What happened next,” says Bob, staging his words with his craggy old hands while I look on, dumb as a puppy, “was that bacteria evolved to live in the oceans and started to photosynthesize the carbon dioxide and freed oxygen into the atmosphere. You know how big a billion is? In your life your heart beats two and a half billion times,” he says, thumping me softly in the chest with his fist. “And that’s how many years it took, two and a half billion, but gradually they built up reservoirs of free oxygen in the atmosphere, like oases in the desert, until at last they coalesced and there was enough for oxygen breathing animals to start evolving.” Thumps me again, a little harder this time. “We evolved into a created world!” is his point. “You and I, all of us, we evolved alright, but the atmosphere that made it possible was created!”
It’s a creation evolution reconciliation. The world was not created by god, but it was created. By another life form: follows function follows form follows function follows form.
Katrina slides up and puts one arm through Bob’s. “Two of my favourite guys in the same place at the same time!” she says. And there is so much more to say I am stunned to silence. What you can see on the horizon is the spatial equivalent of the accumulation of present moments. Walk, and keep walking, and the horizon changes as life is lived. That kind of thing. And I don’t want to feel Katrina’s ridicule at this moment in time.
“This old guy’s kind of cute, don’t you think?” she says, and gives Bob a kiss. And as I’m trying to frame an answer to this impossible question along comes little Jacob. Way past his bedtime, pushing through the throng of adults like a guppy on the seabed, eating an ice cream cone. He is taking little bites of it and spitting them on the floor. Which is a completely original way to eat an ice cream cone, and an artwork of the present moment if ever I saw one. And sticking out of his pocket is another: a cardboard and sticky tape doll; a little Bob doll.