Zomergasten was busy for just under an hour on Sunday evening when Lieke Marsman announced that she was going to jeopardize her reputation as a sensible person. Marsman had been completely fascinated by UFOs for a year and a half. But she was not afraid of a label that she was crazy and believes in weird things. In fact, the belief in UFOs offered her a kind of breathing space. If she could be saved on another planet, she would have loved to be kidnapped overnight.
Poet Laureate Marsman (32) does not know how long she has left to live, but she does know that she will not get better anyway. And that means that even a virtuoso like Marsman does not always have the language to talk about her feelings. That is why she increasingly sought language and meaning in the unknown. In UFOs, but also in religions, which are damn good at giving words to death and life.
The grieving parents from the Netflix documentary series were also looking for meaning Surviving Deathwho lost their child in a fatal accident. They kept looking for signs from the afterlife, but struggled to find it. Marsman recognized herself in the couple, because grief also forced her to look for connections everywhere. Ten years ago she would never have looked for such a sign; now she was just afraid she would miss it.
This is how this masterful Summer guests-episode is mainly a search for comfort, meaning and making the irrational rational. Marsman sat at the table not as a dying woman, but above all as someone who was persistently searching for a new kind of life mandate—in whatever universe. She rightly pointed out that the social trend increasingly dictates that you should ‘learn to deal with death’, but for Marsman that is not an option. She became angry with pity, because the feeling of wanting to continue living is much stronger for her than the acceptance of dying.
That’s why she found it difficult to be ‘that sick poet’, because no one can refuse a young dying woman. And then she was also ‘that poet with one arm’ (Marsman had to have her right arm amputated just five weeks before the broadcast). Abbring assumed that no reviewer would dare to criticize Marsman, but in doing so she underestimated her interlocutor, who is far too interesting, witty and eloquent to be placed in a ‘pathetic’ box, even without the tragic context.
The core of the evening is mainly in the acceptance of disappointment. “It’s okay to believe in something, and then it’s not true. Even if you’ve been disappointed often, it’s okay to keep believing in it.’ Still believing after so many disappointments, that was what made Marsman much more than ‘that sick poetess’. We definitely didn’t have to worry about that.