Brief report of the first Salon Nieuw-Zuid

1. The Poem and the Sea

Thus began our first Salon Nieuw-Zuid — with a song.
I read my own translation of Wallace Stevens’ poem The Idea of Order at Key West —
that poem in which a woman walks by the sea and lends it her voice.

The sea has no speech, yet its silence calls for a mouth.
Beneath the woman’s breath, the waves become language,
and the formless turns to rhythm.
The human voice imposes on the abyss a measure —
and within that measure, a promise:
the promise of a world shaped through song.

I had transposed this idea of order to our own horizon,
to this quarter of glass and wind that is Nieuw-Zuid,
where light itself seems sometimes like a thought in search of a sentence.

We read.
We listened.
And in the slow ebb of words, each of us felt a kind of accord —
not consensus, but a shared murmur,
as though silence itself were breathing through us.

The prepared questions were like buoys scattered across the sea of conversation.
They gave the evening its contour,
but the speech itself drifted freely,
like a sailboat following the wind:
intimate, philosophical, by turns grave and playful.
And everything, mysteriously, found its place.

2. Does Imagination Create Order in Chaos?

“Does imagination,” we asked, “create order in chaos?
And is that order a liberation, or a golden cage?”

So began our first debate.
Imagination is the hand that shapes the invisible,
the breath that seeks form within the confusion of the world.

I spoke of my uncle, who lives near the Antwerp ring road.
One day I asked him, “Doesn’t the noise drive you mad?”
He simply replied:
“No. I listen to it as if it were the sea.”

And suddenly all was clear.
The tumult was no longer an enemy, but an ocean.
The world changes through the gaze that beholds it:
what we think we endure, we recreate by listening differently.
On the Spanish coast, that same sound we call noise becomes comfort —
the identical wave, depending on the soul, a storm or a lullaby.

Imagination, then, is not escape but power.
It remakes the world in the image of our longing for order.
But order is never neutral: it bounds, it captures.
What we name, we enclose.
What we fix, we lose.

To create is to free — and to restrain.
Every harmony carries its shadow:
the silence it has subdued.

3. Art and Reality

The second question rose like a beam of light:

A painting that captures light differently makes the world itself brighter.

I recalled a scene.
A colleague once showed me an odd piece of art — a tangle of copper wire on a wall.
“What do you see in it?” he asked.
“Perhaps a fragment of wiring,” I replied.
He smiled, switched on the light —
and on the wall appeared, in gold and shadow, the words Ars Aequi — The Art of Equity.

It was a suspended moment.
Light became revelation.
From the ordinary arose the hidden sign,
as if reality itself needed illumination in order to speak.

Art does not alter what is seen — it transfigures the gaze.
Beauty lies not in the object,
but in the tremor of the one who contemplates it.

From that moment came a question:
is our thirst for order a hunger for meaning, or a will to control?
In that tension dwells law itself —
that secret art of balancing human chaos without smothering it.

We let this thought linger in the air,
like a fragrance we did not wish to fade.
The conversation remained open, breathing,
with art as anchor and as breath.

4. The Voice of Nieuw-Zuid

“Is architecture a kind of grammar?”
The question rose like an echo.
If a city speaks, we said, its walls are its words,
its shapes the syntax,
and its light the breathing between sentences.

From my loggia in Palazzo Verdi,
I told them, I see other balconies open like faces:
lines crossing, glances brushing,
a lateral intimacy forming between them —
a grammar of proximity.
Voices respond,
like parentheses opening one into another.

Elsewhere, in a vertical tower,
the floors stack without seeing one another;
the air feels heavier, more solitary.
Yet in another tower, equally tall, harmony reigns.
So perhaps architecture does not dictate connection —
but lends it its consonants,
its windows like commas left ajar.

Our Salon took place in the shared hall of Schelde 21,
a space that itself seemed to invite dialogue.
We came to see that stone too speaks,
writing our days like sentences we inhabit.

5. Community as Clan

The word clan surfaced —
and suddenly it flared like an ember revived.

Today, the word carries suspicion,
yet once, in Scotland, it meant warmth, loyalty,
a hand resting on another’s shoulder.

So our talk turned to belonging.
We spoke of messages and groups,
of the invisible threads woven among neighbours —
networks like filaments of light.

We are not a village, nor a tribe,
but a shifting constellation:
those who love to live here,
in this fragment of sky beside the river.

Perhaps that is what a clan means now —
not exclusion,
but fidelity to a chosen place,
the wish to recognise, in another,
a reflection of one’s own home.

6. Silence as Order

“Silence,” someone read, “is the whiteness of the page on which meaning may appear.”

We let the phrase fall,
and each entered it as into a sanctuary.

Some said they need silence before speaking —
that silence is where words ripen.
Others confessed they find it heavy,
an overlong waiting;
yet often it is there that the new begins.

We discovered different rhythms,
different breaths to honour.
Silence is not absence:
it is listening.

In art, silence is sacred —
a quiver before illumination.
In law, it becomes defence —
one keeps silent to protect oneself.

Two faces of the same enigma:
in art, silence opens;
in law, it closes.
And in shared life,
it is silence, sometimes, that speaks the final word.

7. Language, Poetry and Law

“Poetry opens meaning; law closes it — for a while.”

We smiled at the thought,
familiar yet disquieting.

What would happen if law spoke more poetically?
If it let the human pulse shimmer between its lines?
Some said it would lose rigour.
Others — that it might gain justice.

Perhaps both are true.
Poetry and law seek the same horizon:
a balance between clarity and mystery.

Poetry opens possibilities;
law arranges them for a time.
Between the two, we speak —
human beings suspended between dream and rule,
in that fragile space where language hesitates
and meaning begins.

8. Makers of the World

From Stevens’ line —
“She was the single artificer of the world in which she sang” —
came our next question:

Are we co-creators of the world we live in,
or merely its listeners?

Thus began a conversation woven of languages and accents.
We spoke of the idioms of our neighbours,
of words from afar,
of the foreign breaths inhabiting our streets.

Nieuw-Zuid, we said, is a polyphony.
Each voice carries a fragment of the world.
Tones cross like birds over the river —
different, sometimes dissonant,
yet all essential to the common music.

And each of us, in that moment, felt a little like a poet —
not one who invents,
but one who listens and weaves.
We saw our neighbourhood as a poem in the making,
a collective work written by many hands,
each life adding a verse,
a gesture, a light to the evening.

9. Architecture, Space and Harmony

We returned to stone, sky, and breath.
In Nieuw-Zuid, geometry converses with light.
Terraces open like eyelids;
loggias hold the breath of wind.
It is a city of air and green,
a place of porosity and shared silence.

And yet so many roofs remain unused.
The hanging gardens sleep beneath the dust of days.
Why? Time, habit, fatigue —
or perhaps a fear of too much sky.

We spoke also of shadows:
of lamps that shine too harshly,
of corners where the gaze hesitates.
Even in the ideal city, light can wound.

Still, the tone remained serene.
A quiet pride flowed among us —
the pride of living here,
of still learning how to dwell together.
Every new quarter is an alphabet to decipher,
and we are slowly learning its grammar.

10. Final Reflection

We ended the evening with Stevens’ words:
“In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

A line like a blade of silence.
It tells how clarity is born of the vague,
how precision rises from the murmur.

Such was the ending of our Salon:
not a conclusion,
but a lingering resonance.

No one felt unsafe;
there was warmth, curiosity,
and the quiet joy of being together in language.

We left the room knowing that order is not silence,
but accord —
the art of letting differences resound
without breaking.

That was the spirit of the evening —
the echo of Stevens’ sea
in the voices and silences of Nieuw-Zuid.