Bob Dylan is 67 when, on tour in Canada, he decides on a whim to visit the house where his friend and colleague Neil Young lived as a teenager in the 1960s. Where he kept turtles, fantasized about a future as a farmer, learned to play the guitar on a plastic ukulele and composed his first song. The stunned residents – is that really Bob Dylan? – show him their daughter’s room decorated with Justin Bieber posters and pink wallpaper, where, of course, there is no trace of Young. But for Dylan, it’s good. He stands in front of the window and looks out. “I wanted to see what Neil saw,” he explains later. Writer and program maker Roel Bentz van den Berg writes about this in his recently published collection of essays: ‘A larger, more modest, more loving tribute to a friend is hardly imaginable.’
What Dylan felt or saw and what the room contributed to that remains a mystery. But Bentz van den Berg likes to guess and let Dylan look hundreds of kilometers away in front of the window, at other rooms: to the room where he laughed and sang with his childhood friends, assuming that (he later sang in Bob Dylan’s Dream) it would remain so forever; to the hotel room in New York where he was happy with Joan Baez (“we both could have died there and then”, Baez sang in Diamonds and Rust† to a later hotel room in London where he was mostly self-occupied and treated Baez doggy.
Dylan’s rooms
And so a history is formed on the basis of Dylan’s rooms from the past, of desires that are ultimately frustrated and of the nostalgia that those rooms evoke later. It also brings Bentz van den Berg back to his own boy’s room, how he listened to with friends Bob Dylan’s Dream and already has a clear vision of how he too will later look back with melancholy to the moment when they sat there so uninhibited: ‘A déjà vu of the future. Difficult to explain but not difficult to understand: everyone has a room like this somewhere where they keep their own childhood, and occasionally stand there and look out the window.’
Difficult to explain: that is for many of the more than thirty short and longer essays by The street value of the soul the connecting factor. Explaining is also not the style of Bentz van den Berg. He circles, searches and suggests and thus tries, with surprising leaps of thought and impressively whirling sentences, to put the darting finger back and forth on what intuitively presents itself, but resists pinning. Such as how to imagine the complete Nothingness (for centuries mainly an abstraction, but since the introduction of the atom bomb that can be operated with one finger, a concrete challenge for the imagination). Or which possible interpretations can be released on the lyrics phrase Take me down to your dance floor. Or what we still have to do with the term ‘soul’ in modern times.
Ode to the city
The soul is never far away from Bentz van den Berg, not even in earlier collections of essays. And then of course not the soul of the church or of spiritual drifters, but the soul ‘as a symbol of a vital dynamic summarizing all human emotions’. Or something. Because pinning down is impossible for the soul anyway. In this last collection, the soul is most explicitly present in the essay ‘Street Value’, from which the title of the book is derived, and which can be read as an ode to the city. It’s nice to get away from that city for a while, to catch your breath, but then back quickly: ‘It is especially in the chaos and chaos of the city that the soul comes to life and there is also constantly fresh soul is ‘created’.’
Bentz van den Berg grew up in an acting family in Amsterdam, studied philosophy, made countless music radio programs for the VPRO from 1984, wrote for NRC about music, film and literature, published (among other things) an autobiographical novel and made a documentary with Hans Keller about his father, the stage actor Han Bentz van den Berg.
All those facets of his life—music, philosophy, literature, childhood and childhood dreams, his mother’s sharp gaze, the death of one of his two sisters, his father’s voice—come together in his essays like a swirling slurry of erudition and experiences. As a reader, that sometimes makes you gasp (and google it, ‘which lyrics then?’) but it is also very stimulating.
Roel Bentz van den Berg: The street value of the soul. Atlas Contact; 288 pages; €22.99.