Muttersprache

At times my childhood might seem fantastic and dwarf-like to most people who would bother to read those musings that serious philosophers and men of letters are able to recollect only in their latter days when the shadows that those citron-resembling smiles produce on one's body as though it were bending a branch from the sickly tree in which our life's stakes rest peacefully waiting for a saviour of sorts.

For that very reason I hold myself from writing about my upbringing, but not only; I also harvest a fear that I will follow the clean path of Rilke and Nietzsche in finding my own life's pivoting point only in order to see it waft and disappear in a blueing-like motion almost vertically, in the same way that one addresses prayers to God that are meant to remain unanswered for one's own good sake.

I cannot remember that well details from those days, at least those that I would like to retell simply because they lack that vantage point in one's redeemed life-picture and because they're so close home that in order to tell them again I would have to invent them as to make them readable in some way; therefore I dwell on those theoretical assumptions that come with the philosopher's withdrawing from the world... it turns my own childhood into a functionalist picture in which only the details have learnt to count for themselves, whereas the persons of flesh and bone remain hidden in the coffins of everyday life, puncturing my letter-box with unanswered musings about days never old, never by-gone.

Rimbaud for one finished writing his whole oeuvre at the age of seventeen, but I am unfortunately condemned to a different type of modern imagination in which the language is unable to describe any reality that is possible in the world; that is why I have to continue writing and following Schlegel in that life is writing itself, as though its only purpose was to furnish the writer's vice with evidence of his own miscarriages and a natural drive to lament his fate without the slightest desire to mend anything; for a Jew it is called "witnessing".

It is also difficult when you have murdered the mother tongue for good and you are left with nothing but crosswords that at times provide some clumsy information about your life, it lacks the depth and the pathos that is necessary not only for writing but for philosophy and for authenticity, even for a truely honest morality preposterously indicating one's choice of himself as a human person with all what this can mean post factum. With the mother tongue not only the life experience commits suicide but also the people that have furnished your life with language and events of any kind; you disappear as a person, as a subject, and despite yourself cross over the lines.

One cannot really know what it means but you are left with the feeling that you have lost something irreparably and you prepare yourself existentially to face the consequences; you hide yourself behind a mask that contains places and people that fade away as easily as they come in, untimely but betraying visitors, commodities, solitudes in the choir of one another. Yet this abscence is always pulling you back to a "Gestalt" of your own humanity that is unreachable because it does not expressly exist in worldly forms, it is merely a musing lost in between reading rooms, baskets of assorted biscuits, cigarettes and second hand newspapers. It is like when you cut out newspaper articles to adorn a wall and upon your return from a long journey you can no longer relate to the good tidings they purport to offer you. It is a calm abandonment from which there is no release but death, yet you do not crave for this sweet companion but wage a war, "γιγαντομαχια περι τους ουσιας" to use the Platonic Heideggerianism that gathers the question of being - "A battle of titans concerning being".

Sometimes with the glimpse of an eye you seem to retrieve those stories as to compose a mythology of your own life and then a theology; but it is not possible, you are not surfacing an age-old problem and soon return to those wishes, kernel of your worldliness, built artifacts and thingly sensations. Only in imaginary flights and dettachments you find that warm space to create worlds and really be like God. You always feel a little funny, because the foreign language always sounds a little cold and even ungrammatical sometimes. It fails to portray you unless you are erudite enough to lose yourself amidst the oceans of quotations and perplexities that only distance and exclude what you want to say, it never replaces it, there is no obliteration.

You speak to your father on the phone and the words seem to transform themselves into perfect verses in the foreign language, into Greek wisdom, virtues, values. It is all what you can read in books, you can imagine, you can invent, but never retrieve. It resembles that Chinese woman who grew up in a Communist country and upon her immigration to America while still a young woman became a prolific writer in the foreign language. Everything was a mistranslation of life, except the longing... because when the language only inflicts you with the severity of pain, as an artist you can only seek refuge in the tongue of the "other"; it is always easier to speak, to pain, to pour your feelings as though they had been raining over the camp of the foreign army for so long that they can only grow used to fetch them sentences as to make some sense of them.

This speechlessness is so impossible "eo ipse" that you can only turn to philosophy, no matter what your age is, once you have discovered the problem at stake there is no solution you can provide, you can at most tend to your discovery with compassion and be a witness, even of your own childhood being written anew in a foreign language as though it were the story of a boy somewhere in Amsterdam or New York.

At times you also retrieve friends from old but yet they can only be remembered in the foreign language and just as easily forgotten. You look at yourself with the despise of oblivion and sometimes this becomes a very sophisticated form of hate, some constant run-away from everyday's language into a palace of delicate phrasings and city-lights that can encompass you all despite the inaccuracy, impossibility, indefiniteness, of the foreign tongue. But I guess that as long as this remains so, one should never keep himself from writing, perhaps one day the poem will sound slightly better, it will sound natural, it will sound yours.

Oftentimes nonetheless this is not befitting either, there are personal crimes too, and misendeavours, things you would like to forget, to keep in one hand for a second or two just to feel it afresh, you want to draw imaginary landscapes to wear yourself inside them. Sometimes as a schoolboy, sometimes as a table or as one of those happy moments in which love and the mother tongue will become one, or already became. It is not so for me, I do remember all the grammar rules and some of the books that gave me away to philosophy, to Plato and to Hoelderlin. Yet for many a year I spoke to my father in the foreign language and composed letters to my aunt, who could hardly read it, this was highly impersonal.

Even the first love, under the bridge and the rain drops reciting "Heidelberg" even when I had never been there at the time, remembering proses in the ancient tongues and expressing words of love in that foreign tongue. This makes the whole affair to look a little empty and funny. I could have loved my father or my mother or my first lover much more so, but the German language and the English language prevented it. I tried to atone with some Greek lines, but it did not work either, it turned my earliest loves into dense prosaic statements that did not lose sight of earthly live, of cotidianity, but never reached it either.

I might have deeply loved my friend Mario, who did not speak any of the foreign tongues and whose clear sensibility threw me outright into the mother tongue. Him perhaps I miss, and this I say in a grammar that sounds tired, weary from the Latin and evocating an old sentence from Goethe. In fact it seems to me that unless I discard the language altogether I shall never be able to write letters with love to my friends and others; perhaps one can compose books and rhymes, but letters? diaries? I don't know. I for example shall never be able to tell my parents of my appreciation or even my hatred, things in the foreign language sounds like a shopping list for a hotel lobby, whereas my sentences in the native tongue are seemly feigned and just as "touristical" as the foreign ones.

Once when I was 14 I met Giorgia while we both stood to smoke a cigarette and I told her I had always wanted to learn Greek, but my first Greek lesson was not in the mother tongue or in Greek itself; it had been in German:

Hast du Verstand und ein Herz, so zeige nur eines von beiden,
Beides verdammen sie dir, zeigest du beides zugleich.

Yes. A poem of Hoelderlin. Even Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt when she journeyed to Greece that it was the homeland after all, and I do not know how late I heard that but it seemed to encapsule my experience of the earliest years. The ability to scream outloud my own experience had been taken away, I could not scream because I did not know what I was, what I had been.... otherwise if I knew that I would not need to write. There was no relief at the time but there was consolation; that was so much more important. "Die Schwer gefaßte Entschluß", of Beethoven, even though I had learnt this from Kundera and even so years before I encountered Kierkegaard. I had made existential choices, but so unknowingly that I could tell how daunting they would become.

I never really like the mythologies and the stories of heroes and sagas, but I loved the Greek poetry, and then the tales of saints and their deeds, I loved their lack of wisdom. More than anything else I loved the Greek poems in German. It constituted back then an existential solution for my speechlessness... I lied to my parents and wore a school uniform but all what I did during my day hours was learning Greek and then in the evenings to look for friends who liked poetry. Once my Latin teacher wanted to speak with me, and she made the signals from above inside her office through the window, but that was perhaps the last time I saw her. I left and went to learn Greek, like an adult poet. It was at the time the most important knowledge in the world, the most important thing that a man had to know, but I had little discipline, so for some eight years already I am still learning Greek. But the Greek is not useful to read Greek poetry, it is only meaningful to read German poetry and to be Christian, yet the former is not mine and the latter I am not.

Those little poems contained all the drama in the world, and per force of necessity were also very religious, so religious that I could ponder them over for a whole day; yet this was very difficult without Till. There was also Cecilia and even Liad, but they both spoke to me in the mother tongue and this had little meaning for me. The ship of Hellada had already left, back to Lower Saxony and I would never find this boat but several years ahead; when the Greek poetry had become too sad and the man with too much self-security to read poetry again. I am particularly fond of remembering those about Greece and also about Heidelberg, oh! an Diotima! The first philosopher! Now I've been reading Rilke for a while, in a language that is yet not mine. It is the pivoting point... in which you search for yourself only in order to run the risk of losing it. But this somehow else reminds me of Nietzsche in that there's always a war going on somewhere, there's never peace and Kant was allegedly wrong together with all the pietists, rationalists and positivists. There's always a war going on where, the world is never peaceful, there's always a war with somebody, inside somebody... so that boredom like technology, will not take over. In the meantime the mother tongue remains lost, between Jerusalem, Heidelberg and Bogota. Eveline might have got it right (united in memory, that's how she and me might be, if I dare to describe this all), in our generation all thought is only translation or an attempt at it, this is what Rosenzweig taught. Bonhoeffer spoke once about the difference between emigration and exile, and by having said that I could say that there're no guilty characters here for it was an entirely personal choice, at least in my case. And as far as the German goes, who if not Hannah Arendt to write to Jaspers about it in 1948 "Aber wie Juden sind nicht oder nicht mehr Exilantedn und haben zu solchen Traeumen schwer ein Recht", at about the same time she composed in her diary a poem based on some lines of Rilke that read "Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat, er sieht sie noch in Traumen".

This poem I knew by heart at the age of 14, this was all the Greek I knew at the time:

Da ich ein Knabe war,
Rettet' ein Gott mich oft
Vom Geschrei und der Rute der Menschen,
Da spielt ich sicher und gut
Mit den Blumen des Hains,
Und die Lüftchen des Himmels
Spielten mit mir.

Und wie du das Herz
Der Pflanzen erfreust,
Wenn sie entgegen dir
Die zarten Arme strecken,

So hast du mein Herz erfreut,
Vater Helios ! und, wie Endymion,
War ich dein Liebling,
Heilige Luna !

Oh all ihr treuen
Freundlichen Götter !
Daß ihr wüßtet,
Wie euch meine Seele geliebt !

Zwar damals rief ich noch nicht
Euch mit Namen, auch ihr
Nanntet mich nie, wie die Menschen sich nennen
Als kennten sie sich.

Doch kannt ich euch besser,
Als ich je die Menschen gekannt,
Ich verstand die Stille des Aethers,
Der Menschen Worte verstand ich nie.

Mich erzog der Wohllaut
Des säuselnden Hains
Und lieben lernt ich
Unter den Blumen.

Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß.

Eight years later I seem to know little more about that language, and even less about myself. But at least I do want to understand and to be able to gather some compassion. That is perhaps what I often spoke about philosophy's "love's work". I only study philosophy because I want to learn how to write letters, to write about the first fourteen years of my life, before I had become a person and a Greek at that, way before being or becoming Jewish held but little meaning for me. But all life is indeed becoming, "Queastio Mihi Factus Sum" said Augustine, "I've become a question to myself".

"Through rememberance man discovers this two-fold "before" of human existence... This is the reason why the return to one's origin (redire ad creatorem) can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one's end". (Hannah Arendt on Augustine).

This could perhaps mean I shall not feel anytime soon that I am reaching my harbor and my memories can live for a little longer as to make sense of their own phrasings. Life is always becoming, that is why I shall leave these memories for a while now with a slight optimism about that tongue, in between Heidelberg and Jerusalem, these days. "Alle Freiheit liegt in diesem Anfangkoennen beschlossen". (Arendt)