Beirut

Today’s entry is gonna resemble the bombed cities of Israel and Lebanon.

I grabbed the title from a chapter in the autobiography of Danish poet, filmmaker, and sports commentator Jørgen Leth. His book came out last autumn, and raised a fiery debate about his morality because of certain confessions he makes in it. A self-proclaimed intellectual lynch mob, clearly caught up in their own inhibitions and regrets of life, angrily accused him of drug trafficking and sexual molestation of a 17-year old Haitian girl.

Truth was at its most relative in those days. Honesty lost an important battle, and the Danish channel two their much-celebrated Tour de France commentator. Jørgen Leth holds a both intellectual and poetic approach to the world of sports which can’t help but rub off on the viewers. Though few can appreciate his 15 minutes close-up of a hand and bat returning table tennis balls, most will be swayed by his epic descriptions of cyclists as modern day heroes crossing mythological landscapes, paying heed only to the achievement itself.

Reading about Jørgen Leth visiting drug lords, and having his body wrapped in a plate armor of hashish before crossing the Lebanese border, made me wanna go right away. Drug trafficking is not my business – I have been taught to think of myself as too important to rot up in some foreign jail – but any atmosphere of sun, dust, and shady deals is. Denmark is a grid. All straight lines and right angles.

Did you know the Danes were just voted the happiest people in the world? I don’t know by whom, or following what criteria, and I don’t care either. It’s too silly by far. But think about it. The happiest people in the world. Probably some of the richest, the most self-indulgent, and the least sincere as well. I wonder who the unhappiest people were. I’d like to go visit them. I’m sure we’d have a whole lot to teach each other.

I’m looking after my landlady’s dog these days. She’s away at a jazz/painting/meditation course on a small Danish island for the next couple of weeks. Her dog is a Springer Spaniel, and one of the least independent creatures I’ve ever met. Every step I take around the apartment, she’s right there at the heel. Often I feel like scolding her, but it’s so hard given that she only disobeys when she forgets herself. Conscious sinning is not part of her repertoire.

Walking her around the block on a leash is humiliating. It’s humiliating for her, and it’s humiliating for me. I feel like a tyrant, and an oppressor. It’s much better when I take her to the fields, and let her run free. There I see the instincts of the wild dog buried deep within her domesticated brain. What beauty and strength when she thunders across the hillocks, barking at the sky, and throwing sticks high in the air! Only then, only when I don’t control her, is she truly my dog.

I heard Israeli special forces raided a hospital 120 kilometers inside Lebanon. I heard Hizbollah shot more than 200 rockets at civilian targets. I believe Beirut is partly in ruins, and I wonder if Hotel Normandie where Jørgen Leth stayed some thirty or forty years ago still stands.