Transit
Over ongrijpbare gedachten en hoe je de nacht overleeft.
The story
Transit wasn’t intended to be a project, let alone a book. I guess that life never really goes as planned, and this story starts with that exact life lesson.
At the age of 21, I found myself stuck, alone, and deprived of love in life. I guess I was going through that good ol’ quarter-life crisis. I started to write poems in order to make sense of the situation. I continued because through my abstract poetry I found a way to cope with reality.
Two years later I had written quite a bunch of poems. Life hadn’t stood still and I grew along with it. I had weathered the storm, and now that the sky was clear, I felt that the pain from my past didn’t hurt me anymore. I wondered how I got to that place and decided to retrace my steps. Along the road, I found all my poems. I decided to pick them up and bundle them.
I wondered what purpose they could have and figured they might help others going through the same things I did. I wanted my book to exist in the real world. I wanted it to have a body. I wanted it to get sand stuck in between its pages from a day at the beach, or dog’s ears from someone dozing off in bed. I wanted it to live out its own life without me. It truly felt like having a baby.
Since this was something incredibly close to me, I decided to self-publish it. Every step along the way was done by me, that is, designing, proofreading, selecting, distributing. It was crazy! I printed ‘only’ 150 copies. I feared no one would buy the book and I’d be stuck with them. Surprisingly the books sold out immediately. People kept asking for it, but I couldn’t muster up the strength to print and distribute it again. Transit went out of stock and will probably never return.
Nevertheless, I want to keep the book alive, and share it with whoever is interested. That’s why I’ve decided to make it accessible online for free. You can find the extended version of Transit down below or read more about it in the poetry section of this website.
Transit Online has several new-found poems and eight translations of “Springen van de springplank.” I hope it serves you a purpose, just like it did for me!
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Transit: About unfathomable thoughts and how to survive the night.
Life rushes us by and random events cross paths. When you're standing too close to the facts, you don't see the fiction of them anymore.
Transit moves across a dark trail of scattered memories. It defies the approaching night, without a light or an end destination. The stops in between are these unfanthomable poems. They don't form a guideline through the night, but they do allow to be touched in the dark. Transit reaches for the future and remembers to let the past be.
This was my passage. This is my debut.
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Transit: Over ongrijpbare gedachten en hoe je de nacht overleeft.
Het leven raast ons voorbij en willekeurige gebeurtenissen raken in contact met elkaar. Met je neus op de feiten gedrukt, zie je de fictie er niet meer van in.
Transit beweegt zich langs een donker spoor van afgebroken herinneringen. Het trotseert de aankomende nacht zonder licht of eindbestemming. De tussenstops zijn deze ongrijpbare gedichten. Ze vormen geen houvast, maar laten zich wel betasten in het donker. Transit reikt naar de toekomst en herinnert om het verleden los te laten.
Dit was mijn doortocht. Dit is mijn debuut.
If you want to keep supporting Transit and me, I’ve added a PayPal-donation button down below. Feel free to pay whatever you think the PDF is worth to you.
May your givings return on to you. :))