Ι. Father as a necessary evil
(or: that child)
Very often I ask myself: how old are you?
And for a moment, a single moment I remain perplexed, not quite sure about the correct answer.
And may I ask, dear inaudible and invisible audience, why is that? Why for a few seconds my mind does not press the OK button on my real age's digits and seems so disconcerted that it cannot pronounce the simplest of all facts?
Honest answer: Because I am of no age. And if I need to define with scientific accuracy my age I will lie. Lie. Die.
Because in fact I am of the age of that far born child.
The child that loved colored beads and dresses buttons and colored papers and colored pinball images and glass marbles and illustrated (Marvel books) classics and posters. The child that hated the school discipline from the first day to the last. From elementary school to post-graduate studies. The stubborn child that for this very reason has chosen to be self-taught in foreign languages, painting, photography, driving, typewriting and computer programming so that he could avoid tutoring! The stubborn boy that entered a French university (for a post-graduate studies diploma) knowing only English so that again it was “obliged” (to his deep though untold satisfaction) to improvise a self-course of French on the spot! And prepared (and passed) his thesis without asking for (and not getting) the slightest help from his supervisor!
The bad boy that was beaten for the slightest stupid mischief by his ex-cop father until the age of 14. The boy that has never been accustomed to the Greek custom of spending fruitless time with family. The boy that decided not to invite his parents at the frugal ceremony of his first marriage (to which he was compelled otherwise the expected baby of his companion would not be considered legitimate by that time's state institutions). The child that read more and played less as a boy, the child that couldn't agree more to the famous Theodor Adorno's citation: He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange.
All my life I have remained that Adorno child: offering paintings, drawings, photos, stories, poems, essays, articles, theory, sympathy, tenderness, love – that nobody wanted to buy. Not even my close ones. Not even them. Against my will? Oh, God, no! But against social custom and proper civil behavior and decent family habits and… – speaking about family, I have been a terrible father. I have offered parental love and affection which was not bought back. Very probably because I did not give it the right way: it was not appropriately served on the Sunday family table, with proper care, cake and tenderness –letting soft killers mothers and sisters and fathers/mothers in law overlook it– and with a proportionate sum of money to accompany decently the (dis)proportionate sum of my meager parental love. I have been that monstrous child. Not a decent father to my daughters whom I love and respect (more than most "standard" fathers pretend for theirs). So, probably for them I have been most of the time: Just a necessary evil. Oh, dear! Oh, James! Freedom from exchange. Oh, dear!
A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in the months that followed his father's death... But the corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night, as does King Hamlet. No. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only be-getter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the Madonna... the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
(James Joyce, Ulysses, 9th episode)
P. S. I don't pretend to be (and I hate to be considered as) still a child. No. If this is what you have understood from the above, you have to re-read my words more carefully. No. Identifying myself with the age of that child is a straight declaration that should not be understood as a sentimental disorder of any kind.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
And for a moment, a single moment I remain perplexed, not quite sure about the correct answer.
And may I ask, dear inaudible and invisible audience, why is that? Why for a few seconds my mind does not press the OK button on my real age's digits and seems so disconcerted that it cannot pronounce the simplest of all facts?
Honest answer: Because I am of no age. And if I need to define with scientific accuracy my age I will lie. Lie. Die.
Because in fact I am of the age of that far born child.
The child that loved colored beads and dresses buttons and colored papers and colored pinball images and glass marbles and illustrated (Marvel books) classics and posters. The child that hated the school discipline from the first day to the last. From elementary school to post-graduate studies. The stubborn child that for this very reason has chosen to be self-taught in foreign languages, painting, photography, driving, typewriting and computer programming so that he could avoid tutoring! The stubborn boy that entered a French university (for a post-graduate studies diploma) knowing only English so that again it was “obliged” (to his deep though untold satisfaction) to improvise a self-course of French on the spot! And prepared (and passed) his thesis without asking for (and not getting) the slightest help from his supervisor!
The bad boy that was beaten for the slightest stupid mischief by his ex-cop father until the age of 14. The boy that has never been accustomed to the Greek custom of spending fruitless time with family. The boy that decided not to invite his parents at the frugal ceremony of his first marriage (to which he was compelled otherwise the expected baby of his companion would not be considered legitimate by that time's state institutions). The child that read more and played less as a boy, the child that couldn't agree more to the famous Theodor Adorno's citation: He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange.
All my life I have remained that Adorno child: offering paintings, drawings, photos, stories, poems, essays, articles, theory, sympathy, tenderness, love – that nobody wanted to buy. Not even my close ones. Not even them. Against my will? Oh, God, no! But against social custom and proper civil behavior and decent family habits and… – speaking about family, I have been a terrible father. I have offered parental love and affection which was not bought back. Very probably because I did not give it the right way: it was not appropriately served on the Sunday family table, with proper care, cake and tenderness –letting soft killers mothers and sisters and fathers/mothers in law overlook it– and with a proportionate sum of money to accompany decently the (dis)proportionate sum of my meager parental love. I have been that monstrous child. Not a decent father to my daughters whom I love and respect (more than most "standard" fathers pretend for theirs). So, probably for them I have been most of the time: Just a necessary evil. Oh, dear! Oh, James! Freedom from exchange. Oh, dear!
A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in the months that followed his father's death... But the corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night, as does King Hamlet. No. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only be-getter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the Madonna... the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
(James Joyce, Ulysses, 9th episode)
P. S. I don't pretend to be (and I hate to be considered as) still a child. No. If this is what you have understood from the above, you have to re-read my words more carefully. No. Identifying myself with the age of that child is a straight declaration that should not be understood as a sentimental disorder of any kind.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
II. Self-made hero
(or: what's love got to do with it)
This is at the end what A.M. has achieved in life. To have no close ones, but very few – and that happened lately. No friends, no relatives, no companions, nothing. A.M. is the personification of loneliness without the dandies' charm (see the short video clip Melancolia I below). A.M. made a lot of things throughout his lifetime working on material from himself, by himself, for himself, considering that all this multimedia creativity was per se sufficient for people to get to know his work, to read and reject, to read and accept, to read and discuss, to see and visualize, to feel and understand. Freedom from exchange as aforesaid. But exchange is what this society is based upon. And A.M. was never good at that. And since he was obliged to work hard from early youth to earn his living he never succeeded to combine both: work for his living as well as for his art. Only very lately he has partly achieved that – as he became co-publisher with other colleagues in the book business.
Women have played a primordial role in his life. To understand in depth this apparently simple statement you have to think again of Aris' s inspirations: Marx, Joyce, Picasso, Duchamps, and add in the list some other literati as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac even Charles Bukowski. (Also a Greek writer: Andreas Embirikos.) After so many years he has come to believe that most of these women, that is most of his ''serious'' relationships, did not put the slightest effort to understand him as a man and as an artist. And yet he has spent time, money and brain hoping to control their avid desires to dominate and their gluttonous appetite to consume all his being.
This explains why for a short period of his life he even came to behave as a misogynist. He has written a whole book, True Love, a novella, where he tries, probably in vain, to describe his traumatic experience with women and his relevant attitude towards them in the secret hope that other men, younger than him, might benefit from his story.
Women have played a primordial role in his life. To understand in depth this apparently simple statement you have to think again of Aris' s inspirations: Marx, Joyce, Picasso, Duchamps, and add in the list some other literati as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac even Charles Bukowski. (Also a Greek writer: Andreas Embirikos.) After so many years he has come to believe that most of these women, that is most of his ''serious'' relationships, did not put the slightest effort to understand him as a man and as an artist. And yet he has spent time, money and brain hoping to control their avid desires to dominate and their gluttonous appetite to consume all his being.
This explains why for a short period of his life he even came to behave as a misogynist. He has written a whole book, True Love, a novella, where he tries, probably in vain, to describe his traumatic experience with women and his relevant attitude towards them in the secret hope that other men, younger than him, might benefit from his story.
…So, women have always made their appearance in my life like Spring showers of rain, enough to live a short “romantic” story that would last a few days, weeks, months, one – fine, fine – two, or three years at the utmost. Small vixens they are: you savor their joys for one, two – fine, fine – three moments and then, whoosh! They are out of your sight and into the forest with small cute leaps.
For no woman’s sake did my face ever display the duration of feelings, the stability of family hypocrisy or the security of institutions given to us – not even as a prospect. Never so. The women who staked their expectations for a typical house economy on me lost everything. This is why all those who wished to keep something from me ended up with lifeless tokens of our life together (refrigerators, expensive sound systems, ovens, nice sets of plates and glasses, TV sets, cars, house plants, beds with their sheets on, full dining room suites, bookcases with no books in them etcetera); I did not allow them much room for vivid memories: my disappearance from our shared life had the semblance of the cutting of an umbilical cord (in the best of cases), or of the instant severing of a vital body part, a lobotomy or a tectonic gap.
It is true. My secession from our walking side by side in life always resembled decapitation, amputation, hysterectomy, an earthquake. But I would forever be the amputated party. The whole edifice of mutuality that I had fantasized to be true would crumble to pieces at once: in me, very deep inside me, in that dark cave of my primal, fundamental faith that the world is not that bad, not so inhumanely fake, so needlessly clad with money and so much poor in the end, which leads to the conclusion that, yes, one can by all means lay the foundations for something strong with the help of another soul; this primary faith, that quite resembles a bel canto melodrama or a Mills and Boon romance story at a superficial glance, never abandoned me. It’s just that every separation shattered one more piece of it. In my fifties, following a number of consecutive amputations, the foundations of this edifice look like vestiges of a prehistoric temple. Only special archaeologists / psychiatrists may assume that something memorable used to stand here once upon a time…
Excerpt from True Love.
Go to True Love >>>>>>
For no woman’s sake did my face ever display the duration of feelings, the stability of family hypocrisy or the security of institutions given to us – not even as a prospect. Never so. The women who staked their expectations for a typical house economy on me lost everything. This is why all those who wished to keep something from me ended up with lifeless tokens of our life together (refrigerators, expensive sound systems, ovens, nice sets of plates and glasses, TV sets, cars, house plants, beds with their sheets on, full dining room suites, bookcases with no books in them etcetera); I did not allow them much room for vivid memories: my disappearance from our shared life had the semblance of the cutting of an umbilical cord (in the best of cases), or of the instant severing of a vital body part, a lobotomy or a tectonic gap.
It is true. My secession from our walking side by side in life always resembled decapitation, amputation, hysterectomy, an earthquake. But I would forever be the amputated party. The whole edifice of mutuality that I had fantasized to be true would crumble to pieces at once: in me, very deep inside me, in that dark cave of my primal, fundamental faith that the world is not that bad, not so inhumanely fake, so needlessly clad with money and so much poor in the end, which leads to the conclusion that, yes, one can by all means lay the foundations for something strong with the help of another soul; this primary faith, that quite resembles a bel canto melodrama or a Mills and Boon romance story at a superficial glance, never abandoned me. It’s just that every separation shattered one more piece of it. In my fifties, following a number of consecutive amputations, the foundations of this edifice look like vestiges of a prehistoric temple. Only special archaeologists / psychiatrists may assume that something memorable used to stand here once upon a time…
Excerpt from True Love.
Go to True Love >>>>>>
III. Money versus Time
Money. For most people the meaning of life has always been a question of money.
A truth I have never been completely aware of.
A truth I have never been completely aware of.
|
I have never understood in full the value of money. I had rather never work. But I have had no money from home, no family property, nothing. So, since my early youth I was obliged to earn my living as almost everybody in this world of the few rich and the many poor. In doing so I have followed the stream, the mainstream course of things, the society manners.
It was not plain money I was after. I have just wanted to live a decent life with my books, my cinema, my trips here and there. That is all. No excesses of any kind. The world is too vast to see, to read, to enjoy it in a lifetime. And it is almost for free. Spending time for getting more and more money, compared to this enjoyment, is a foolish waste of time. Free time is what I have valued most in my life. And I have been lucky enough that all my jobs (and there have been many) did not force me to follow a strict 9 to 5 programe. I could never manage that. So whenever a job helped me satisfy the basic needs of my modest life and offered me the opportunity to have control over my free time I was considering myself very happy. For this same reason, however stupid it may sound to hear this, I have scarcely felt the need of making serious complaints to my boss. I have always done my job as expected without making much fuss about it. I also have been lucky enough in another respect: all bosses understood after a couple of months at the job that I was industrious to the point of being indispensable to them and paid me the most they could afford for the specific occupation. It goes without saying that some bosses tried to get an extra surplus out of my ignorance, of my indifference to money's value, of my "immaturity" in terms of capitalist political economy. But it did not bother me. As soon as I understood their indecent behavior towards my work I have hasted to resign. I was happy enough that I earned my living without being anxious about the things other people cared about. I was happy not to bargain a lot, not to buy a lot, happy that I just had my basic needs fulfilled. Most of all: I was happy enough not to be charmed by the acquired needs of other people. All those needs that money can buy meant nothing to me. Consequently I have never understood why I should buy a house of my own, why I should accumulate money to a bank account, why I should work for extra money, why, in the end, I should sacrifice my dearest, precious Free Time. |
A portait of the author as a young man (aged 39) by Popi Assargiotaki (1987).
My only complaint all these years has been but one: that I have never had a chance, apart from holidays, to get really, practically, fully lazy, to enjoy a long term interval, not having to go to work, let's say, for six continuous months. That is a serious complaint. I must do something about it. Late? Never is too late. |
IV. The Celestial teapot
(Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return)
In hard times I have never asked for an assistance that exceeds what people around me can afford. I have never believed in whatever immaterial power, in anything outside the palpable, concrete world we live and die in. I don't believe in magic, metaphysics and so on. There's a well known Bible dictum in whose very pragmatic truth I firmly believe since my early childhood: «In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris» (Genesis 3:19 in the Latin Vulgate Bible): «In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return» (Genesis 3:19 in KIng James Bible). So, whenever someone brings up the God question I simply refer to Bertrand Russell's famous teapot. Here's an excerpt from his critical reasoning.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time…
Bertrand Russell, Is there a God? 1952
But of course, for the politically aware people of our humble world, Religion, God, etc. is an issue that serves primarily the dominant state of things of exploitation and hypocrisy. Marx has explained that very artfully since a long time ago:
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844
Collected Works, v.3. 1976, New York.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time…
Bertrand Russell, Is there a God? 1952
But of course, for the politically aware people of our humble world, Religion, God, etc. is an issue that serves primarily the dominant state of things of exploitation and hypocrisy. Marx has explained that very artfully since a long time ago:
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1844
Collected Works, v.3. 1976, New York.
