About Me

 

Shakespeare and the Elizabethans are not exactly part of my expertise, but I do know that the Elizabethan theatergoer crossed the Thames and dropped his copper into the box at the Globe in order to be entertained. The audience could be an unruly lot and they were quick to heckle and boo. For the ponces in the galleries the unwashed rabble standing in the lower rank was just as much part of the entertainment as Juliette’s soliloquy and from their snacks they spit the pits and shells at them. Shakespeare drew most of his earnings from the profits as a producer of colorful spectacles, not from any royalties as a writer. His work impressed some of his colleagues, who wrote envious libels and gracious obituaries, but for the average Elizabethan his plays were as significant as toothpaste, a pageant; the best show in town of course, because it was pretty much the only show, apart from the appearances of the Royal cavalcade galloping through the streets.

These days, most people like to listen to popular music and from morning to evening fill the air with unrelenting repetitions of the same jingles. They turn up the volume oblivious of their neighbor, who has a deadline to catch and tries to focus. For most of my life I have tried to blank out the noise. I do love prolonged periods of total silence, but ours is not a silent world; silence has become something of a luxury.

Nevertheless, I won’t deny that quite a few of those airwave polluters are very-, some even exceptionally talented people. Whole armies of syndicated agents, prop departments, designers, writers, PR people, makeup-artists, lawyers, personal physicians, fitness trainers, bodyguards, pushers, pimps and fan-clubs help staging their gigs in football stadiums and public parks; the industry monopolizes the distribution of their singles and albums. The big money is not even in the music, but comes from endorsements and movie contracts. A singer is a business. Televised talent shows single out what could become the flavor of next season and there is no shortage of raw recruits. In the rare moment of reflection even the star himself may wonder what’s the meaning in all this and what his songwriter is going to jerk off for the next season.

I remember, back in the seventies and eighties, we had so called protest singers, people who were able with nothing but their guitar to cause a riot because they and their audience agreed on their opposition to the war in Vietnam, their cry for freedom from Franco, or shared the same hatred of “consumerism.” I don’t mean to be nostalgic, but misguided as they and their audiences may have been, these singers didn’t jerk it off. They meant it. Then Bob Dylan came along.

On camera he insists that he is just a musician and that his early image of a protest singer was a misunderstanding; that he has always been just a performer. I have no doubt that this is true. But I also know what company he’d kept in his early days. Then as now, performing as if you mean it is part of the act and considered a talent. Dylan is the example for picking up the attitude at a time when fucking a Japanese woman in public was considered an act of defiance. Dylan and Yoko Ono saw the opportunity and turned it into a salable commodity.

Don’t get me wrong! We all have to pay our bills. And for people who have to work for their living, to sit back and entertain a serious thought is already a luxury they can only afford at church. But this doesn’t change the simple fact that this, our so-called “pop culture,” is a complete jerk-off – – – and that is quite alright. It really is. The Victorian critic who had invented the term “high seriousness” was a bit of a jerk himself. Being serious is not a medal to be pinned to the chest. Here as in everything there is a fine line between the extremes. It is not the veneer with nothing underneath that is the problem, but the nothing underneath when you scratch away the veneer. The inventor of the “Nouvelle Cuisine” joked that the secret of his cuisine is to put nothing on the plate and everything on the bill. If you constantly feed on this kind of fare you eventually will starve. In other words – and I repeat, it is just my prejudice – I seem to be allergic to jerk-offs, except of course, for really giving your dick a workout.

Yet as far as the exercises of mutual masturbation in the academic world are concerned, or books written merely to meet the deadline of the advance, I can’t help myself and ask for substance, for food, for real food. I have become something of a film-buff, but my generation is still attached to the book, the printed cipher and the often-subliminal effect of the written word.

Words are as contagious as viruses; yet the way they have taken possession of our minds over the last four centuries and given direction to our thoughts would be unthinkable without the abstract image of letters on the page. My training as a typographer has instilled in me a sense of mood, created by the shape of a typeface, and many of my early reading experiences are linked to the presentation on the page as much as to the story told. I still remember my professor’s design of a typeface used to set a hymn of Hölderlin. Not two of the letters had the same direction and size, the lines were uneven, and yet when put together on the same page it became a unity, an image that in a mysterious way summarized the poetry, and the impression was unforgettable. The guys designing advertisements know exactly what I am talking about, in other words, the medium is more than a mere conveyance – it manipulates the mood of the recipient. Yet I am afraid, for the printed medium, this, too, is the end of an era. In the age of blue-ray-DVDs and home computing, books are distributed like cheese in the supermarkets, as a product of limited shelf life, and if it occupies the space for too long, it will be marked down and end on the bargain table. And in the wings is already waiting the electronic reader; although the design still leaves much to be desired, within a few years we will be able to carry an entire library on us in the shape of a slim and elegant touch screen. More than ever writing as a profession is tied in to market forces and consumer habits. Many know how to write, but there are fewer who should write, and only the fewest who must write. For them it is a matter of life and death, the only escape hatch. But there were early signs of the coming changes already before the Great War, when moving pictures and Marconi’s invention were barely more than a funfair curiosity.

Franz Kafka never lost the feeling that his work was a jerk-off end to end: “Childish games, I deliberately cultivated a facial tic, or would walk across the ditch with arms crossed behind my head. My writing began the same way” (Diaries 1/24/1922). By 1915 this grimacing and strutting had earned Kafka the Theodor Fontane Award – 800 Reichsmark, a considerable sum. He was as eager as every author to get published. His literary model – Flaubert – labored over every page as if he was squeezing out a turd, a very hard turd, but he and Kafka didn’t depend on writing for a living, unlike the supposedly middlebrow Balzac and the supposedly lowbrow Dumas père. Yet this is not about low- and highbrow attitudes; this is not even about talent. The old Jehovah of Russian literature – Count Tolstoy – characterized a colleague of his as a “racehorse, good looking at first but on closer inspection it won’t do,” followed by a couple of choice observations on Dostoyevsky’s “reverse-clichés,” (people pale in his books when their cheeks should be flushed and vice versa). Not very kind to Dostoyevsky, but I know what Tolstoy meant. The Hollywood cliché of the journalist chasing his story is just risible – it is the story that is chasing you, or you shouldn’t be writing at all. Talent is a bonus and essential for the quality of the product, but it is not a guarantee of success.  

Late in life Franz Kafka has recorded a memory from his boyhood. Visitors had coffee with his parents while the boy sat in a corner, chewing on his pen and writing something into a notebook. Somebody asked: “What is he writing?” His father took away the notebook from under the boy’s hand and looked: “Oh nothing, the usual stuff” (Diaries 1/19/1911), he said. The moment twisted a dagger in Kafka’s heart; it was his point of departure into literature and helped him keeping his momentum because he felt rejected.

His work became a lifelong libel against his father, a long missive of what he couldn’t say to his father’s face: “The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing” he wrote, “was, for once, welcome to me. My vanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing the arrival of my books: "Put it on my bedside table!" My writing was all about you; it was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you. But how little all this amounted to! In the place where I lived I was spurned, condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was an enormous exertion, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable for me” (Letter to the Father, trans. Kaiser and Wilkins). On his deathbed Kafka corrected the galley proofs for a new collection of stories: A Hunger Artist. The title story allegorizes the writer’s predicament: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now” (The Hunger Artist, trans. Muir). Yes, we do indeed.

My mother was the daughter of a Holocaust victim. She was what the Nazis called a “mischling.” Her mother, too, had problems to certify as a person of an Aryan pedigree; she was raised in an orphanage in Baden, a spa in the South of Germany. Granny was tenacious and indestructible and very loud. When I slept over in her place, she was living with a Polish refugee, a rabbi and tailor of fine clothing. Why everybody was calling him “Schlemiel” is not quite clear, I don’t recall his first name. When the two of us talked, it was always about the shaggy mare he’d left behind in Poland. How her head used to vigorously nod up and down with every step. Horses were the chosen topic between him and me and visiting him was my alibi when I went out to play with the other kids in the rubble of the ruins. After Schlemiel’s death, already in her eighties and bent over her cane almost at a right angle, granny still made her own arrangements and traveled unaccompanied to India, the country of her honeymoon and years of happiness, before her first husband, old Cohn, had made his fatal decision to repatriate to the fatherland. It gives an idea of her mental toughness and how she managed to keep her three surviving daughters away from the unwanted attention of the Nazis.

After the war, in 1946 or 1947, her youngest daughter fell in love with an allied officer. The first time they laid eyes on each other was at the cinema where she worked ushering the people with a torch to their seats. After five weeks the two did something that was strictly against the rules in occupied Berlin. They fraternized. In 1949, this became the cause for my existence.

According to Aristotle, we are not yet fully human before the fortieth day after birth, the moment when most babies learn to gratify their parents with a little peal of laughter. I do remember been wheeled about in a pram, but this was of course later, when I already was a toddler and grew up to become this insufferably cheerful boy on the photographs with blond curls and ringlets running down to the shoulders. I once overheard my mother talking of the winter in ’49. The cold was murderous and tore off the flesh from your bones. There was nothing money could buy to heat the home. So my mother and her friend, Frau Nolte, went out on a pillaging spree. The friend was a neighbor living in a studio further down the corridor. I still recall a very tall woman, smelling of marzipan and mothballs; now and then she gave me a drop of milk in a tiny demitasse and our dog once stole a fish from her. The two women had to travel some distance before they found a fence with enough planks left to tear off, break and kick the wood to size and pack it underneath me into the pram. My contribution was to lie on top, swaddled in blankets, and look cute. My first career-move as a thief! It was a long way home and the two women lugged the pram down the stairs to the underground. A cop noticed, and, as friendly servant to the public, he offered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted his end of the pram he realized of course that something here was wrong. Our neighbor saw the change in his face: “Yeah,” she said, talking down on him with a booming voice, “it’s a heavy baby, isn’t it?” The law looked up to her, kept quiet and continued helping the women down the stairs.

Our home was once a baron’s city mansion. Along a windowless corridor, we and five other families occupied rooms with tall ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubby little boys. The loo was an improvised affair outdoors in the backyard.

From time to time some kind of hiss, a drizzle from somewhere behind or inside the wall would send a reminder that the structure was crumbling. Nobody heeded the warning until one day a patch of stucco fell from the ceiling and missed my mother’s buttocks by a hair’s breadth as she bent over at the stove. I saw it from my high chair by the window. Behind the house the court for drying the laundry and beating the dust out of the carpets opened to a weed infested bombing site. Beating the stuffing out of your carpet is a rather therapeutic activity – much better than a session on the couch of Dr. Freud. My mother took down the carpet at least twice a week for a comprehensive thrashing; I could hear the thumping echo ricocheting in the narrow confines of the backyard. Towards the bombing site, at the bottom of an improvised and rather steep stairway, there was a flowerbed fringed with bricks set in a jagged saw-pattern. I slipped on these stairs and fell, hitting my head on one of those pointy bricks. When I came around the chauffeur living upstairs was already driving me in his delivery van to the doctor. I received stitches on my forehead; the scar is now barely visible.

My earliest out-of-house memory is a sports event my father took me to. I still have a sharp visual image of a boxing ring and two guys in olive green shirts throwing punches at each other with something, at the end of their forearms, that looked to me like the brown earthenware vessel my mother used for storing her salt and honing her kitchen knife on the vessel’s rim. I had never seen a boxing glove before. The light in the ring was harsh and the cheering all around never stopped. I had a good view of the faces, and the guy on the left had received a jab to the nose and swiped over his face with his boxing glove, before blocking another straight punch to the ribs. The man in uniform next my seat, jumped up, shouting and snapping his fingers towards the ring. This uniformed man was my father. He was a member of his unit’s boxing squad and he also played ping-pong. He had ambition and a good forehand while I only play a so-so backhand and somehow lack the killer instinct. But I do like to watch a good bout in the ring. When Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay he was truly a picture of grace, and fast, unbelievably fast. It’s a pity that they don’t show the old black and white reels more often. The scene at the boxing ring with my father was in the years before I went to school; I must have just crawled out of my infantile amnesia. Strange! Why don’t we remember anything from before the fourth year – after all we don’t forget how to walk or speak!

My biggest impression from this period of the awakening mind had a stealthy gait on four gigantic legs like the pillars of a temple. His name was Shantih and he had bristles on his furrowed forehead and slightly smelled of urine. My grandmother had found a job at the zoo, and on weekends I was brought out to visit her. 

We met at the elephants’ enclosure and the women were talking when they brought out Shantih and geared him up for the day ahead. The animal was employed as a people carrier, lumbering along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. Standing close to the elephant, I reached out and began to pummel his enormous leg with the palm of my hand. Suddenly I felt a tight grip around my chest, lost ground under my feet and was lifted up towards an inspecting eye. I was too surprised to feel fear and Shantih had a good hard look at this bundle of stunned petulance before he gently set me down again. He and I became friends. For the rest of the season I saw him almost every morning and he lifted me up to his back and patiently listened to what I had to tell him. I liked to pull at his bristles and his ears. He didn’t mind. One day his handler didn’t allow me to get near. The animal was in the must and incessantly weaving from side to side. The smell was intense; it was the last time I’ve seen Shantih. My father transferred to a base in Bavaria and I entered primary school.

Bavaria was (still is?) a catholic country with a capital "C" and no anti-clerical tradition whatsoever. Well, that is not quite true. Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748 – 1830) was born in Ingolstadt. Weishaupt was the founder of the Illuminati; his godfather and educator was a prominent figure of the Enlightenment in Bavaria, the rationalist Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt (1702 – 1776). So many names, so many unknowns, I am afraid, but the man left a mark on our world, and none less than the great George Washington has confirmed that “it was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am,” and very well he might – the first president of the United States was a Free Mason and Illuminati himself. After Weishaupt went public with his intention, “to do what the heads of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities ought to have done by virtue of their offices,” and “at a time, when there is no end of abusing and making game of secret societies, I shall make use of this human foible for a real and worthy goal, for the benefit of people,” he had to leave Bavaria and settled in Gotha, half an hour’s walk away from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s home in Weimar. Weishaupt published a Complete History of the Persecutions of the Illuminati in Bavaria (1785), and An Apology for the Illuminati (1786). None of this ever filtered down to us kids in school. Nor did anybody mention the strict Catholic upbringing of many top Nazis coming from this region, like Heinrich Himmler. The intensity these lederhosen people habitually attached to religion could be pretty scary. On every wall there hung a crucifix, at school, in the shops, at the crossroads. The schools segregated the denominations, I was the odd kid out and for lack of a better alternative they first cramped me together in the same room with the Lutherans, before the protest of my parents earned me an hour of freedom twice a week, when the other kids received religious instruction. I guess my crush on Buddhism at the age of nine was a reaction to all this.

The infatuation ended in yawns over the endless litanies to prevent suffering by dissociating yourself from your attachments. My attachments define who I am. If I suffer for it, well, that is the price to be paid for being anything at all. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The motto on the Sympsons’ coat of arms is “nil desperandum,” never give up, and not: “Better don’t try.”

On the public holidays my parents and I watched underneath the window the Catholics in procession follow their priest, a balding man decked in heavy brocade. He seemed to be hiding his face behind the monstrance, a reliquary with nothing but a wafer in it, supposed to be the Christ’s living flesh. When the procession had past, the road was clear to cross over to where our car was parked and like almost every Sunday we set out for – what was the expression – “a spot of motoring.”

Along the way we stopped for lunch in the towns surrounding the area. Towards the South you could see the Alps looming, sometimes letting through the Sirocco from Africa. It causes changes in the local air pressure and many people have a headache on such day, the hospitals even suspend surgery. Only many years later I discovered that our weekly excursions – by whose design I cannot tell – more or less followed the itinerary of Monsieur Montaigne who’d traveled the very same region some four hundred years earlier. His book made me realize the changes this once hospital region of Bavaria had undergone since the religious wars. After eating we indulged my mother and stared at the loud colors and histrionic displays of the local Baroque churches. Well, they are pretty. “Look at this flatulent angel; this one, he blows the horn,” my mother said. I thought of the chubby little boys with tiny penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin. My father didn’t bat an eyelid. I think it was in 1959, when my father went to a jewelry shop to buy my mother a ring. The shop belonged to a goldsmith living in the flat on the ground floor of the same apartment block where we were living; a man with a ruddy complexion, watery blue eyes, and as soft-spoken as a hummingbird. The patter of small talk over the merchandise on the counter took a turn to politics and this neighbor dropped the unguarded remark that “next time there will be not that many left.” My mother overheard this, and she made a fist – not threatening just hiding the thumb under the fingers – something I have often seen her doing, when she felt insecure or uncomfortable. We left the shop rather suddenly. Later my father found out, that in a former life, the hummingbird had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer. (This was the only time ever I saw my father uncertain of what to do next. My habitual indecisiveness is not a trait I've inherited from him.)

School was not my favorite thing. I assimilated letters rather slow and with dyslexic quirks in the “q,” “p,” “g” and “d” department, and not just when writing longhand. These letters are still my most common typos. I sometimes heard voices shouting at me. I turned around, but there was nobody. The episode ended after I had managed to finish reading my first book at the age of seven. It was Cooper’s Deer Slayer.

In secondary and at Grammar school I developed a habit of doing my homework in the last ten minutes of the previous lesson behind the back of the boy or girl sitting in front of me – there was no gender separation. Naturally the teacher craved my attention and sometimes bombarded my desk with a well-aimed missile of chalk (it’s actually gypsum). But I really couldn’t help him there; I had to finish homework. I therefore followed the teacher’s suggestion and transferred to a desk right in front, and guess what: I was suddenly in a zone of calm and could work on my homework undisturbed, although everything was open to plane sight, yet the teacher was far too occupied with supervising the desks in the back to pay much attention to what was happening right under his nose – a valuable lesson in applied psychology.

I began perusing my parents’ rather odd collection of books, most of it unsuitable for children; my father was a voracious reader of mysteries and crime stories. There was a disheveled Youngster’s Encyclopedia from 1928, with photographs from the interior of a gigantic zeppelin and blueprints for a winged box kite of about my own size that carried a camera and could do aerial photography. Mind you, 1928! A little later I read Emil and the Detectives. It was followed by Tintin’s Adventures in the Jungles of the Andes, a comic book. The next book was an enormous tome, and most of it was not meant for young readers. It comprised a translation of the Völsunga Saga; the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Legends of King Charlemagne, Musäus’ ironic and dry Legends of Rübezahl, Gottfried August Bürger's Wondrous Tales of the Campaigns and Adventures at Sea and Land of Baron of Münchhausen, mixed with often lewd legends from the crusades – I got erections over Monica in a story of a ménage à trois. The death of Bayard, the battle charger of Count Raymond, moved me to tears. Bayard was a horse of miraculous strength; he could carry all four of the brothers who resisted Charlemagne in their castle of Monte Alban. One of the brothers was a wizard, practicing black magic, but Count Raymond was the brain.

In the end the sedition had to yield to the overwhelming force of the emperor Charlemagne. The terms of surrender required killing the horse that had carried the brothers so often safely out of danger. With millstones around Bayard’s neck and feet, the stallion was pushed into the river. Bayard emerges from the water, turns his head to look for his master and whinnies. The looks of the horse and of the count meet, and the horse struggles back on dry land. So the King orders Count Raymond to look away next time. They burden the horse with even more millstones and push it back into the water. Again the whinnying Bayard emerges from the deep waters. His master is weeping but turns his back to the scene. Bayard realizes he is abandoned; he loses his strength and drowns.

The “Völsungensaga” was my first lesson in cosmology. I learned that the world was created from the corpses of the first sentient beings, a giant and his wife, killed by the gods of “Asgard,” the celestial fortress. The Babylonians and the Canaanites have told similar stories; traces of these are preserved in the Bible. "Tehom" (Gen.1: 2) the dragon of water-world threatened to drown the tribe of the Elohim (a plural but not the Pluralis Majestatis) in high heaven. So the warlike "Yahweh," the god of thunder, mounted his chariot of fire and assailed Tehom with hail and lightning, slaying Tehom’s son “Leviathan,” and cutting to pieces an unidentifiable "Rahab" (Ps. 74: 14-15; 89: 9-10; Isaiah 51: 9-10).

Yahweh shouted in triumph and the waters subsided. Like the gods of the Völsungensaga, the Elohim then shaped the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars from the slain carcass, stretching out the skies like a tent cloth (Job 9: 7-8, 26: 13), thus hiding behind a veil the abyss underneath of Earth and their own secret dwellings above the waters of high (Job 26: 5-10). Moon and Sun are set to divide day and night. And the stars were singing in a chorus (Job 38: 7-8), while in the heroic age of intercourse between the immortals and the daughters of men many heroes and mighty men of valor left their mark on Earth (Gen. 6: 4). I was nine, when I read the Bible from cover to cover out of sheer curiosity, nobody asked me to.

God’s command not to “boil a kid in his mother's milk” struck a sympathetic chord, but Jesus’ curse of the fig tree left me singularly unimpressed. It still does. The thing is naively presented as an example of miracle working and where it can get you if you have faith, as if destroying a tree isn’t something everybody can do; make it bloom and yield out of season, that would have been the miracle. It has left me singularly unimpressed with “saviors” and “prophets” of any kind.

When you apply for a job they let you fill out an application form and ask you to give references for your qualifications. Shouldn’t we be at least as diligent in matters of our supposedly immortal “soul?” My dentist in London is telling me he trusts only a colleague in Newcastle: "But I am supposed to trust you?" – "Of course, you don't know shit," he says. So when it comes to matters as important as our supposedly immortal soul, shouldn’t we be just as concerned about qualifications? I wouldn’t let a plumber treat my appendicitis. How does an autistic refugee, sought for murder by the Egyptian police, fill in the blanks? How does this “prince of peace” qualify, who came to bring the sword while living off the “substance” of married women? Or that merchant from Arabia, illiterate, high on hashish, robbing caravans “in self-defense” and poisoning water-wells? The discrepancy is glaring. Already 800 years ago, Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstauffen (1194 – 1250) and his opposite number in Egypt, Sultan Al-Kamil, shared a joke about “the three conmen, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.”

The next book I read was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I went through 600 pages in one sitting. After my second small pocks vaccination I ran a high fever and became delirious, holding on with both hands to a copy of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. In panic my mother called our practitioner from across the street, Dr. Löw. With some difficulty she pulled the book out of my hands and I never finished it. I still find the gloom in Dickens overpowering: “These tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery, breed a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards, and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing evil in every footprint” (Dickens, Bleak House). Much later I made the acquaintance of a London spinster; she was in her twenties and just back from a trip to Central-America, mosquito bitten and suntanned. We all know the type, bony, with a shrill laughter under a head of wiry blond hair. I am fairly tall but she can look down on me with ease. This woman had an uncanny eye for the little ticks of each and everyone and from my window she pointed out the whole bestiary of Dickensian characters parading underneath. Mr. Podsnap is working on the stock exchange and during the current recession his flourish has came in very handy. The friend’s crash course in Dickensian humor, however, didn’t do much to diminish my reservations. The skies in Dickens’ world are hidden in a “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” Just by reading this I hanker all the more for the radiant blue sky and the sleepy heat of a Mediterranean summer at noon. Can you see the nodding donkey hitched to an olive tree? He must have a naughty dream. “Look at him!” my wife cries out. The donkey’s ears twitch in alarm, and the offending extension between his hind-legs disappears; embarrassed the animal looks away.

At the age of twelve, I began reading my first real philosopher, Plato, and developed a habit of sleeping in the buff under open window curtains. In the light of the stars I dreamed of suntanned Greeks debating ‘arete’ and ‘eros’ under marbled porticos. I mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendental cookie cutter. Best of all, I liked Plato’s tale of universal inundation in Timaeus. Unlike the one-off-event in Genesis, Plato speaks of forever recurring floods, survived only by the illiterate herdsmen in the mountains, while “those who live in the cities are swept into the sea.” So “just when the nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the requisites of civilization, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those alive who are destitute of education; and so we have to begin all over again like children.” The idea of previous civilizations and of already advanced people, gone extinct without a trace, is not entirely absurd. The layers of sediment on the ocean floor give evidence to eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years when our ancestors already had been around. The “nuclear winter” following a caldera eruption, some 70,000 years ago, reduced these forbears to less than a hundred individuals. 

You may have guessed it by now, I liked reading, but even more I liked to be out with the other kids. We used to be away from home all day long and I often missed the curfew and got a good talking-to.

One day, already running late, I was about to cross the street and had no eyes for the lorry rushing at me from the left. It would have squashed me to pulp had not from behind the hand of a stranger grabbed my arm. A matter of split seconds – I came sooo close, I could feel the vehicle’s slipstream pulling me towards the road. Then the anonymous hand loosened its grip and the hyperactive boy scooted across the street without even looking back or saying a word of thanks. I never told my parents. But should the person who saved my life read this, I extend a belated, a very belated, “thank you.” Bless you Sir, or Madam. Thankfully there were not too many inquiries about my whereabouts. Almost every day our gang used to meet on the river under the weeping willows. The girls were at least as intrepid as the boys. As a test of mettle we crossed an out-of-town bridge on the outside of the handrail; lose your grip and you drop ninety feet into shallow water, the rapids running only inches over the rocks. Not that we didn’t appreciate the danger. One of us, and it wasn’t one of the girls, looked down and froze and it took some coaxing to get him to the other end. (No, it wasn’t me, either.) With our bicycles we toured the hamlets, straining upwards towards the Alps. Late in afternoon we turned our bicycles around and trundled down the falling altitude, barely stepping into the pedals.

On weekends I was allowed to stay up late and father and son bonded over a common interest in astronomy. My father was an engineer – how come that Scotland is such a fertile ground for this kind of talent – and he was not shy to express a healthy disrespect for academic and metaphysical baloney. Engineering has to get it right or the wheels won’t spin. So, pretty early I came to the realization that this Universe is a tad to vast, to be “created,” although the element of time may raise questions about the odds of things to happen, even if it is a very old Universe.

Partly this is, because most of us have a poor understanding about the nature of chance. When you play the lottery your chance of hitting the jackpot is a very, very long shot, but the more players participate, the odds for somebody to win shrink in inverted proportion to any individual player's personal odds. In other words, the critics of evolution base their doubts on their anthropocentric bias. So, before we get all giddy over the “fine tuning to our needs of the Universe” – also known as “anthropic principle” – somebody better explains why he thinks it is not us who are fine tuned to given conditions. Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the only one holding water would be the empirical proof that things cannot work on their own without “his” intervention, that an external agent is needed to help things along; an intervention that is contravening the laws of nature (otherwise you can't tell whether there is any intervention at all). Proclaiming the “existence” of a non-interventionist god merely sitting on the fence and twiddling his thumbs while gravity, air-pressure, leverage, isotope-decay and Mendeleev’s table of elements run the show on their own, is pretty pointless. A word of caution however: “What mortal could look with his eyes on any god who did not wish to be seen either coming or going,” says Homer (Odyssey, 10: 574-5).

It was on an overcast morning, east of the isle of Echinades during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Suddenly the crew of a merchant vessel heard a mysterious voice coming from the haze on the distant beach. The invisible voice repeated it three times: "When you reach Palodes proclaim the Great God Pan is dead" (Plutarch). Except for Plutarch’s testimony, no mentioning of the incident in the Aegean Sea has come down to us. Where did this voice in the mists of morning come from?

Was it just the mischief of a drunken reveler? Was it an actor who trained his voice, using his mask as a bullhorn? Could it be a quote from a lost play by Euripides? The ancients knew that gods could die. In Egypt, Isis resurrected her husband although she couldn’t resurrect his erection – poor Isis – and in Bethlehem, the alleged birthplace of Christ, there was, according to St. Jerome, an ancient shrine of Tammuz. Every year the women there would weep over his death and beat their bare breasts. The Great Pan, however, was a symbol of life itself, the great eater of death, the obstinate endurance in the face of adversity and destruction, even when the whole cosmos seemed in decline. It was a real disappointment for my old man that in the end classicism and Virgil’s elfin world of nymphs and fauns had gotten the better of me. C. Schneider’s hymn on the Hellenistic world in two mighty tomes (Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967 – 1969) has never lost its lure, even now when this glow lingers on only as a memory.

In the last year at grammar school, four of us graduates began pooling funds for an old Mercedes. We planned to take the route through the Balkans, Anatolia and Iran to Katmandu, then sell the car and from the proceeds pay for the flight home. That was before the Russians had invaded Afghanistan and smoking pot was a still untried adventure.

On the way we stopped at the ruins of Persepolis, the old capital of King Cyrus (580 – 529 BC.). A barren plane, the sun beating down on solitary columns and the denuded "cella" of the royal audience hall; in the cloudless sky a huge bird is drawing circles. Once floor long silk curtains, translucent and flapping in the wind, had shielded the King of Kings from the glare, the dust and the heat. The people here were poor but hospitable and always up in arms over some age-old feud, trading bullets from rooftop to rooftop because once upon a time the one guy's granddaddy had had the temerity of leering at the other guy’s granny when she was washing her face; a story without a happy ending. The village elders invited us to a meal and our guide motioned to the roofs to cease firing and let us pass. They had cooked a sheep’s head and offered the best part – the eyes – to the guest of honor: me. Soon after, I fell ill and had to say good-bye to my companions and take the plane from Kabul. I never made it to Katmandu.

Back home I first went into advertising and then studied French history before I dropped my somewhat superfluous thesis on Cardinal Richelieu and after consultations with my professor switched to Roman archeology and English literature. At night I worked shifts as a subeditor for a tabloid, helped along with uncounted cups of strong coffee. The brew of a colleague of mine truly deserved the name “infernal.” The very first cup left me stunned, literally. Psychologists on the campus paid me a fee for serving as guinea pig in their studies on sleep deprivation. I saw spider webs in every corner and expected the walls to warp under my touch. In the foliage of the trees and in the grain of my wooden furniture I felt lurking dryads peeking at me; they became very real. In my shattered state I flinched from the imaginary swipe of fluttering hair on my face. How I found the time to engage in a study of Immanuel Kant is now a complete mystery to me; most of my reading was done while commuting on train and bus. I think Kant’s philosophy is still holding up.

It was a time when we students communicated in “doublethink” and “newspeak,” without actually living in a dictatorship. This was still the Cold War. Everybody’s language was infected with socialist terminology like a dog with fleas, and spewing sociological gobbledygook counted for having a social conscience. People were actually capable of taking terms like "consumer terrorism" seriously. I read the classics of Marxism. It didn’t make me reject the capitalist economy – I lean towards Mandeville and Sir Carl Popper – but I did realize that capitalism is not a free lunch, the wished for utopia of unstoppable progress. The beast comes for a price and especially the lower incomes time and again are the ones to pay with layoffs and misery in the inevitable downturn of cyclical boom and bust. In my opinion Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England should be required reading for everybody. To escape the squalor in those days, the rural surplus labor flooded in to Manchester seeking a better life, a journey from poverty to misery. Something I later observed first hand in the just opened “special economic zones” in China. Although it started the biggest boom in Chinese history the transition from the rural ambience to industrial discipline and the punch clock was pretty painful for a workforce recruited from the rural population.

During my final semester I assisted in Yugoslavia at the excavation of a “Mithreum” – a chapel of Mithras – the bull slaying redeemer of the Roman soldier, and then joined up with a team in Tunisia and Morocco, photographing and mapping Roman epigraphs for a new survey. A veteran of the French legion assisted the team and liaised with the authorities and the natives.

In his youth he had joined the Legion the old-fashioned way; he was seventeen when French recruiting officers in civvies shanghaied him from a coal mine across the border. That was his story and he stuck to it. Now he looked forward to retirement and a little home in the Loire Valley. He introduced me to a sheikh (or “Amenokal”) of the Touareg. They call themselves the “Imouhar,” the free people. A formal visit was arranged; I showered and in my best outfit drove to the camp, accompanied by the veteran as the interpreter. The reception was friendly and I was asked to take a bath first before the meal. I said, I had already showered, but the Veteran didn’t even bother to translate my reply; this was the kind of offer one is not supposed to refuse. I was led to a man-sized cauldron with a blazing fire underneath and was asked to undress. Was I to become the meal’s main course?

Water is on a premium in the Sahara, and only a shallow puddle steamed at the bottom of the bathtub, practically singeing my testicles. An assistant with a couple of missing teeth in his smile and, as I soon realized, with a pair of very strong hands, did the actual cleaning.

Without using soap he began massaging the dirt out of my epidermis. It was a humbling experience, even with the excuse of an hour’s drive through the desert in an open jeep. I thought I was clean, but the man collected from my skin a ball of gunk the size of a walnut. The following meal was a spicy affair, but the legionnaire’s experience got me through this: don’t try washing down the heat in your mouth with water; instead ask for bread and chew it slowly! The meal ended with tea in tiny thimbles, the kind of tea that enables you to speak fluently in fourteen languages at once.

A good visit for the project, but for me it did not become the beginning of an academic career. I had some experience in chemical analysis and a manufacturer of chemical products offered a position with the opportunity for worldwide travels on expense account. I took it.

Before I could go on the road my contract required me to do six months in research and development. So I donned a white smock and checked in into the laboratory on a Tuesday. Chemistry had always been my least loved subject before an informal chat with a physicist (sic!) had opened my eyes. Chemists never speak about electrons on the outer shell of an atom. But chemistry, it seems, is all about the right number of these electrons when atoms interact. The researchers in the lab were after a new photosensitive compound and by trial and error the team time and again tabulated dozens of substances according to their “radicals” (the little dot to the right of the symbol). At last I got ready to do what I was hired for.

My first assignment was to a client in communist Czechoslovakia. Almost at midnight I entered the outskirts of Prague in my company car. I knew that a hotel room was waiting for me, a moldy time capsule of gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. The maids, instead of dusting and changing sheets, would rather have coffee with the headwaiter. Guests were invited to join. I was still miles away from such invitation, however, threading my way through the suburbs. Not really a difficult task; the lights of the city’s approaching downtown floated assertively across the windscreen. Underneath these lights socialist tourists from East Germany made themselves obnoxious. They used to feel like the cream of communism in those days, and everywhere strutted about with a big chip on their shoulder. I was feeling my way through some pitch dark streets and suddenly was caught in a crossroad that seemed to receive one-way lanes from every possible direction. It was eerily quiet. Prague is the hometown of the writer Franz Kafka and the moment gave a whole new meaning to the word "Kafkaesque." I tried backing out, but I already knew what was going to happen next. There would be a cop waiting to give me a ticket. And so it was.

Asked to wind down the window, I got a nose full of exhalations from a cigarette accompanied by the sour scent of stale beer in the breath. The man steadied himself with one hand on the roof of my car. The law clearly was in need of a shave, but he was the authority, and I understood that there was no point in protesting my innocence. So I paid and didn’t ask for a receipt. Lost in thoughts the man continued holding on to the roof. I waited. At last he took off his hand and gave way. The film director Milos Forman used Prague as location for his film Amadeus with the secret police as extras on his set. Most of them were in it for the American cigarettes and the cans of pineapple. Time and again Milos had to remind his American crew to “forget logic! This is Czechoslovakia.” Actually Forman used the wrong word. It was not the lack of logic that was worrying. The next day, my contacts directed me into a yellow haze of dust. It came from factory stacks and burning dumping sites, which surround Prague with a ring of sulfur, like a circle from Dante’s hell.

After my assignment in Prague I was sent to Italy, Portugal and Spain. In a restaurant in Madrid I shook hands with a man in an expensive suit, a bit on the stocky side, well fed, soft skinned, articulate, a handshake like a wet sponge. He arrived in a motorcade and introduced himself under a generic name – “Senior Muños.” Everybody else in the room knew him as the king’s chief of security. Before the soufflé he passed around the table his identity card and his Beretta. The document showed his photograph and a number with an endless row of zeros followed by a six at the end. This seemed to be the point. Only the royal family had figures that low on their ID. The Beretta was a macho thing. They do this in those countries. After this encounter my firm thought I was ready to represent them in Los Angeles. I landed for a stopover in New York and decided to travel the remaining distance by car on the Interstate 80. I wanted to see America. A friend provided me with an old Cadillac.

She was put together from two wrecks from the fifties and although the paint was not great – I would lie if I said it was pink – the tail fins were as flashy as ever. It got me safely across the continent, although the handwritten license plate on a piece of red cardboard in the rear window raised more than one patrol officer’s eyebrow; but it was perfectly legal. After arrival in L.A., I lined up to open a bank account; I presented my passport to the girl at the counter and received a lecture that in America only the driver’s license is a “proper ID.” This settled I went out for lunch. There was a humble hot dog stand where the rich and beautiful used to eat, reclining in their Lincolns and Porsches, with relish and mustard dripping on their diamond rings. Good sausages, real good!

The weekend was scheduled for a much-anticipated trip to Nevada. From the distance and at night, Las Vegas is like a mirage.

I had retired the Cad and in a Buick Skylark, red as a fire engine, drifted through Nevada’s nocturnal void, with patrol cars lurking left and right to catch you speeding. On a good day, a car studded with antennas, like a porcupine with spikes, would overturn you, tailgated by an entire convoy inviting you to fall in with them. The porcupine in front carried illegal radar detecting equipment. By and by, something that looked like a fully lit airstrip was filling the windscreen from left to right. For a long time it hovered there, motionless.

That night I was determined to make 10,000 at the roulette. That was my target. Oh I was good! I could set myself targets. I started with five hundred and in a very short time I piled up stacks of chips before me, worth a trifle more than 5,000. It should have been the signal to leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’t of course.

The croupier and I were the only people at this table. My target was ten thousand. The croupier looked at me and barely noticeable shrugged his shoulders when I placed my next bet. Two hours later I left the Casino without my American Express card. Cold turkey. Never again the clinking of chips and the nervous patter of little thuds hurtling across the crap table. No more sympathetic noises from the young man next to me who says he admires my game. A typical night on the strip. The trance of neon lights, people sliding by in their cars like in a fluorescent fish tank. The chills after the adrenaline crash when stepping out into the street. The aimless walk before backtracking to the car park. A drop of water from some air-conditioner hitting the face. I still had a car key and a car fitting to the key. Back in L.A., I was offered a career change and I can’t deny that for a moment it got me thinking. The offer came from a mild mannered man with the looks of Mahatma Gandhi – without the loincloth. Kirby, his Doberman, was positively infatuated with the man.

Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar (the car) in each garage and was married to a woman in her first pregnancy. There was a blonde mistress and her just born baby, and a Japanese ex-wife, the mother of an already married son, who was serving with the Marines. They all were living within a mile’s distance of each other helping one another changing diapers and buying a dress for the party tonight. Gandhi’s firm was registered in Switzerland. Most of his business he conducted from his fax machine in the bedroom. Do you need a tank or a fighter plane? Gandhi is your man. For handguns go to Walmart. In the end I thought better of the offer and stuck with my employer. He sent me on a new assignment to South East Asia and China. That's where I met my wife and decided to settle down, teaching and studying.

China inflicted a bit of a culture shock. At moments the surrounding suddenly shrank to a chaotic congestion of screeching traffic, of shop signs I couldn’t read, of disintegrating concrete and an unspeakable, roach infested ugliness in the utilitarian architecture. But after midnight the city was able to exude an intoxicating magic. We toured the abandoned streets on our scooter, a red Vespa, the drifting dust from the numerous construction sites had settled, and despite, or perhaps as an effect of the polluted air, the krypton lights disseminated the gentle luster of a gigantic jellyfish hovering in the greenish, slightly hazy, translucence of the sky, dangling countless tentacles onto the empty playgrounds. Now and then we stopped there for a moment on the swings; from the chains our hands rubbed off the slimy sweat of the big city. At this late hour even the home was quiet. Chinese families are a noisy and temperamental affair; the headlight over the door to your room is left open, the clan would be very unhappy should one of their own drift out of earshot. In the eighties privacy was still a foreign concept for China.

Among the colony of expatriates I made the acquaintance of a Jesuit from Australia. He helped me to find my way through the Chinese classics. It taught me respect for the Jesuit’s touch in these matters. These guys really study a foreign culture from within and they develop sensible theories. Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong SJ (1912 – 2003) is a book I return to, time and again. It was a time of quiet content. “That which befalls men befalls the beasts and man has no preeminence. Wherefore nothing is better than to rejoice in your own works,” says Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 3: 19-22). The one Chinese writer whom I consider as an absolute must read is the Han historian Ssu-ma Ch‘ien (Sima Qian, 145 – 90 BC), a stupendous storyteller with the temperament of an anthropologist. His emperor gave him a rough deal. When Ssu-ma stood up and defended the integrity of a colleague in office, they castrated him.

Ssu-ma’s work was written before the innovation of ink and paper. With untiring patience, his clerks singed signs with read hot needles onto uncounted slabs of bamboo, 1,500,000 words altogether. Ssu-ma was not your typical Confucian gentleman, uptight, polished and slightly bigoted. In fact it would be difficult to rubricate Ssu-ma under any philosophical school. He was a sensitive individual with loyalty high on his agenda. Status and influence however came for a price; it was a life under tight supervision. The court officials were confined in dormitories and given leave only once every five days to wash their hair. He did not think of his treatment as an injustice; by standing up for Li Ling, who was not even his friend, Ssu-ma knew he had it coming, and his refusal to commit “honorable” suicide marked him as an outcast in the eyes of his peers, but he could not bear the thought to leave his work unfinished. He certainly is deserving of our admiration. My favorite Chinese poet is Su Tung-po (1037 – 1101) – his penname; his real name is Su Shih – a free spirit as far as this is possible in China. He also was the political adversary of the economist and reformer Wang An-shih (1021 – 1086). Wang achieved the rare feat of being hailed as a political forerunner on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. He was an opponent of free enterprise and advocated a strong state and intrusive paternalism, which was straight down the lane of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. Yet instead of easing the burden for the peasantry, his measures achieved exactly the opposite and the impoverished farmers abandoned their fields causing a countrywide famine. Wang retired from office. 

It was around nine o’clock in the evening after rush hour. The street under the windows of my apartment block was empty and barely lit. My wife should have been home for over an hour; who knows what was keeping her. I decided to take a leisurely walk into the direction from which I was expecting her arrival, as I had done before. About half a mile further down the road the street became utterly desolate except for a parked pickup with a load of protruding scaffolding poles. The poles extended towards what seemed a large puddle of axle grease on the tarmac. I noticed the wreckage of a red Vespa on the sidewalk but refused to register the report of my senses. I suddenly realized I'd stepped into the puddle; her blood was on my shoes.

Later that night, a friend – the chief surgeon of the local university clinic – helped searching for my wife in the hospitals and morgues up and down the city. We found her and when I was asked to identify her they kept her upper body covered; they said it would be better not to look at her face if I could help it. In 1991 I returned to England and settled in London, in Neasden, where H.G. Wells in his novel says the Martians had landed.

In 1997 I began a correspondence with the person who became my sweetheart and whom I have to thank that this website ever materialized. If the reader wishes to thank her, do feel free to drop an email. Dawn and I first moved to Florida and in the year after 9/11 we went back to England, and, with the blessing of the immortals, we shall live happily ever after in Kent. We first moved into an apartment overlooking the River Thames. Only a hundred yards away from my desk was the crypt where Pocahontas is laid to rest. This desk has now moved to a place deeper in Kent where we have purchased property, surrounded by green and trees and a quiet life.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received? My aunt insisted that there is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be said in plain language so that everybody will understand. My last wish? I would like to end my life in France, in the light and smells of the South, the Occitan, the ancient land of the troubadours and the Cathars; or perhaps at Avignon, in the glare of primary colors, where the winds breathe the lavender and the drifting dust settles gently on the car’s bonnet.

© – 1/1/2010 – by michael sympson, 10,200 words, all rights reserved

To be continued