The Church

In attempting to write about myself and my earliest life I feel ought to make a proper division into chapters, starting with the fourteen years of life I had before the Greek, which I shall call childhood proper; then I could speak about that period of some five years in between Greek, Heidegger and poetry - this is the lyrical age, "Post-Graecum". Lastly I could speak about the Jewish philosophy which comes into this very day, but about the latter I shall refrain from speaking in the years to come, this I do only in order to safeguard myself from travails. The first period is very difficult to retell, since I am left with very little to recount and do not rely on photographs or the corrections of my parents to set it straight; I shall rely only on my very own memories which are very difficult to unearth.

This part of my life is exceedingly rich in characters, some of magnanimous importance and bitter humouristic hues which I shall only clumsily be able to describe. The problem is that I haven't thought about these years ever since they came to an end, in a sort of metaphysical rebellion that dawned upon me for as long as I have known Giorgia, my first Greek teacher. These accounts should not necessarily sound interesting or marvellous like those of my later years but I am not writing this for anyone's sake but my own. A chronological account would be indeed faulty and very tedious, therefore I should only speak of things I consider of major importance. Many years will go by for me to understand what the real meaning of these persons and events have been for my life proper, which has barely started as an adult; I shall say moreover that this account can be written afresh many times in a man's life, but I will grant myself the privilege to be able to compare one version in another until the old age, or at least the last age. Something tells me that the older one gets the more honest these accounts might be, specially when I will be able to encounter again those characters as an adult and conversate (if there's anything worthwhile to discuss over) with them about the unknowing paths of our lives since that early childhood.

I remember myself writing as early as 11 or 12 and always in a foreign language. I had this red notebook with clumsy English verses (before I had actually seen an English poem at all) and I believe myself to have exceedingly spoken about some cousin-in-law; I collected a good number of bad writings which one good day (at the age of 13 or so) I burnt in the backyard of the house a certain night, inside a huge metallic bowl with other things like notebooks from the previous years. I believe to have kept some of those writings for a few years hidden inside yellowing envelopes containing also my mother's documents inside my father's desk. At some point I should have taken them out and then finally in 2002 or so they were lost forever in a carton box in the storage room with other belongings. Among them some highly treasured books, my school books, Greek, Literature, German, and some other obscure texts about things I often read about like clinical sociology, psychology, and hardly much else, oh perhaps I also can count a certain book of Euripide's "Bacchants" and "Medea" in a green hard-cover bilingual and critical edition that should have been worth a lot of money, but I had not bought this book, I simply stole it from my Latin teacher Maria Jesus at the Spanish School.

My theft package also included some interesting book (impossible to find these days) about the sexual morals of the Greeks and a travel guide of modern day Athens. From my own belongings I can recall an orange Greek textbook (now available under the name of "Athinaze" by OUP) for first-year Classics, a very large English dictionary (which I only used to read Shakespeare in a class with Mrs. Simmonson), cheap editiongs of Macbeth and Midsummer's Night Dream, perhaps an unread copy of George Elliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life", some Jewish book I believe (not the Sephardic prayer book which I had sold for a few bucks). Also a Finnish dictionary, some fabulous novel about our local aristocracy whose name I cannot recall now, the texts for Prof. Noel's Greek seminars with notes and vocabularies (Plato's "Phaedrus" and Sophocles' "Antigone"), the "Lingua Latina" but perhaps only the first volume; Greek and Latin dictionaries, a brief grammar (actually two of them), a book of Kafka I received from Phillip and that I never read (Metamorphosis), George Elliot's "Middlemarch" in a two-volume set.

A small children's book in German (of some famous children's author but I can't remember now), a Book of Mormon, perhaps a German novel about some Rabbi, a school's yearbook (I can't be sure about this one), books of Chemistry and Physics for "Abitur", college Mathematics (I had always failed at that), the Diary of Anne Frank, my favourite book as a child: one of Mijail Sokolov, but can't remember the title. Maybe a couple of unread novels from the Spanish school but not my most beloved: "The Tree of Science" by Pio Baroja, this I had given away to a friend. I did not keep either the book of Goethe and Ortega-Gasset on Aesthetics or that beautiful book in Italian about the Nazi Holocaust, both I gave away to Angela. For sure a small book by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (a Spanish saint and mystical poetess), I can't remember any other titles. I forgot (perhaps with intention) all this at a certain cheap hostel in the old quarters of the city. Those books marked the end of a beautiful lyrical age that ended not without a lot of sorrow and new beginnings, radical ones at that even.

Now a brief account: The earliest memory I have of myself I should have been two or three years old travelling in a very tropical setting on a truck with my own mother and with Alicia, granny's maid of many years. I cannot tell for sure whether this is something I imagined or if it happened matter-of-factly. I do remember being in kindergarden you know... it was a very small place with a very kind and loving teacher and I also happen to remember how I loved climbing up some small tree, but cannot remember exactly why. I also remember my uncle John teaching me to write and reminding me all the time what a great poet my mother had always been without having been a humanist by education; he always told me about endless notebooks of poetry she wrote in perfect rhyme, these notebooks never reached me or their whereabouts. Perhaps dad lied about them, perhaps they never existed. But I do remember having been taught to write at least a year or two before my class, also the foreign languages I had been learning since that age.

That place shows how early one can be already a professional Catholic, even as a Jew, the kindergarden is my first memory of St. Francis of Assissi after whom the place was named, if I go on to describe my images of the saint I should be lying or simply inventing details. I simply know for a fact he was present somewhere, perhaps a statue? I don't know, and this is so because I can't remember the classroom, simply can't. But the picture of the courtyard is vividly fresh in my mind even when I cannot remember any of the other children, I also remember it was only a stone's throw from where I lived and that after two happy years therein I was forced to start growing up and move onto the elementary school. I can only dimly remember my parents in those days or my beloved aunt, perhaps the only people I have some faint images of are my grandmother in the kitchen or watching TV in her room and hidding me from my father's strict discipline. I also remember my father and my uncle John, who had taught me reading, fighting with fists and curses, but I was too young to be allowed an opinion about these things of grown-ups.

My room had a hideous carpet and a very big bed, where as my father tells, my mother used to sleep at distimes, perhaps facing a depression or something in that spirit of things. It wasn't the room of a young child, but rather a shrine of order and discipline and except for a chaotic array of lego blocks one could never tell someone under the age of six dwelled therein, specially because I spent most of my time in granny's room. My father gave me at that age one of my only presents: a chess set, I can't remember how much I liked the game or not, but I think I was forcibly compelled to play with him and since my ties with him severed I have hardly set an eye on a chess set at all. My first disappointment with my father wasn't exactly his strict attitude towards me (he always expected me to behave as an adult), but the fact that he was a honest man and irreligious, I would have been very happy to trade him for my aunt, who was allegedly hypocritical but deeply religious, elitist and anti-democratic. My father had too much justice, too much righteousness, too much goodness, those traits I despised since the age of five or six. It was unthinkable for me to be around people who couldn't lie or that if they did, it were only for a "common good". I always preferred to lie to make people falsely happy, and the reason why I lie less these days is perhaps only because I don't have too many intimates acquaintances, I've become too cynical and if not quiet yet reserved outwardly.

I never thought highly of my father, specially in the social aspect. Not because he lacked authenticity or manners, just because he lacked that natural ability to lie in public, to wear masks, to uphold social mythologies, something I did since the earliest of my days in society. Up to this day he still lives, fortunately, yet I've learnt to love him only because I don't live with him, because I don't have to be naturally good, righteous, honest. I think his sense of morality wasn't at all religious and in that sense he might have been a modern Rousseau and also a little Marxist, he believed in money more than God, unless this God could bring the money. For me it is different and has always been, morality for me always had to do with brilliant theatrical performances, with mythologies, public shows and more than anything with immorality itself. I think my father might have actually been the first Protestant I knew, and at that in quite a disgraceful manner.

From these years in between the nursery and the elementary school, are my first memories about the church. I might have gone there with Alicia, the ugly house maid. She had a curly hair more resembling of barbwire and always smoked non-filter cigarettes; I can't recall her voice now or her language but I do remember well the news playing outloud from her room and her smoking endlessly. It might have been obviously Sunday and rather dawning, I remember walking into that half-empty church and sitting by one of the left wings unpatiently waiting to return home. But something I glimpsed into at that age might have stayed with me forever and sealed my marriage to Catholicism so late as now, it was actually the notion that the world is never egalitarian, that one is always expected to act in one way or the other, that one can never be really something but only be becoming that.

More than anything I treasured the hypocrisy of Catholicism and I don't say this with more despise than admiration; even when I had found that years later also at the modern Orthodox synagogue it impressed me deeply as a child and prevented me from embracing any form of Protestantism which I found so terribly distasteful and boring since the most innocent childhood. I might have seen myself rewritten in Mary McCarthy's memoir of her Catholic upbringing, in that it had been the church that saved her, the religion. I had never been religious in any form until my teens and I couldn't care any less for prayers unless I had wanted to pass myself for self-righteous and witty in front of my father's wife, who to me represented all kernels of wordly ignorance and classlessness.

She, like my father was also a lapsed Catholic, but entering the parish in her neighbourhood was a traumatic experience for me in some way. None of the fancy and blatant lie found in the old church where I had been with Alicia, none of the beautiful music and long Sunday sermons, people there really seemed to believe in the stuff and equated in a very mediocre way their religion to their forms of morality. Even their Easter processions only resembles the most pauper shadow of the Italian and German Catholicism I had known before, I think it was called (and still is) Neo-Catecumenal Movement, some cheapened Protestant Roman church. But Alicia didn't take me to church often nor did my father until I had grown up to be an adolescent (and then he grabbed me there almost by force at times), so what I enjoyed the most was attending Holy Mass with my aunt and her husband because the theatrical performance presented was so perfect and sensitive and musical that I could stay there for the whole hour without complaints. Moreover my aunt expected a certain behaviour from me as though I were being introduced to society right there at Mass, my father could never relate to this, he only wanted me to be good and to be myself, but that wasn't my creed. One had to be like Aristotle, a political animal, whereas my father was some sort of Epicurean.

The religion saved me from my father and brought me closer to my mother, because I could sin and mistreat people, be mean and lie, among other things, house the most obscure thoughts, yet at the same time I could just walk into the church, sing, listen carefully to the sermon and laugh people and their confessions. Then just walk back home and be a "new man". My father was all about correctness and ethics, always the "good guy". What attracted me the most about the sermons is that they promised heaven on earth to the believers, they gave you a stronghold, and couldn't be any less concerned with the miseries of everyday life, they were not serious or honest but rather unbefitting always and very intellectual, academic, with beautiful words and phrasings, having nothing to do with real life. I loved how much Catholicism allowed you to lie in public. Only until I turned 22 and I happened to find myself at a Catholic Mass around 1 am in the Holy Sepulchre and in the mother tongue I could experience how much inspiration and philosophical "pathos" I had derived from those early experiences.

Mary McCarthy was right indeed, as a Catholic you know a whole deal of world history and history of ideas by the time you are 13. Also later on when I was a teen I read the Bible a lot but the Old Testament seemed to me always boring, we all knew the creation story and even the dumbest school books for 1st grade natural science spoke about other things, it was all silly and tasteless. The New Testament was very different, even poetical despite of me not knowing (and understanding only in my 20's) that this Jesus guy was but mocking the Rabbinical authorities and speaking to a Jewish audience. I treasured much the reading of John's Apocalypse, because there was around my milieu a well-known provincial assumption that whoever reads the Bible from cover to cover will go mad, and I loved the idea of going mad. This taboo might have stemmed from my Spanish roots and those notions that only the priests could read the Bible, but I was heretical and heterodox by nature, even in my ethical system. I liked to study ethics and books of religion but only in order not to practice anything, you can say it was a childish metaphysical religion of rebellion.

Then early in my adulthood when I embraced the "Protestation" of the philosophers I rejected altogether the eschatological Jesus finding him to be a rather strident antisemite, this of course I learnt from Bultmann. It is not a requirement to be a Protestant to own this Protestation in your own person, you can do it as a Catholic, as a Jew, as an Atheist or as anything you like. It is on account of this Protestation that I allegedly became of myself a "Modern" man in the philosophical sense, but pathetically enough the first "Protestant" of my family was my grandmother and by detour the first "Modernist" even though when she doesn't exactly rejoice in my lifestyles these days, of course herself being the kernel of worldless love and therefore of primitiveness and declasse attitude. I remember myself being a little sophisticated as early as 2nd grade or so and refusing completely to embrace any pauvre-moi attitudes in clothing or eating, I hated the masses and that's why I loved the priests, which my granny detested and as a consequence turned herself over to the pastors and the most existential forms of Protestantism, the evangelic cults and house-worship, product of her life-long illness of course; her mother, a strong and cultivated French woman (the first person to know foreign languages in her town) delayed her betrayal of Catholicism as early as her 80th year when she was no longer of clear mind. In embracing this comic spirituality my grandmother might have been a lot more Modern than I could ever aspire to be. But then again I chose myself for philosophy and she chose herself for Christ, so we could not compete too well.

Remaining in the Catholic Church also assured my social prestige as a kid! and kept me aloof from those unreflected existences of the evangelic; it provided me with an education in things of the spirit and the flesh, with mythologies and folk-tales. Reality proved to harsh at any given time and the church always provided relief. It saved me from the anti-intellectualism proper of my father's worldviews and of his mother's comformism. That family was too used to unremarkable lives, and if at all perhaps it was only in me being a Jew that I could achieve the salvation necessary as not to believe in any salvation at all. I was a very nicely decorated atheist and therefore fit perfectly for Roman Christianity.

I can't remember any of the religious lessons from 1st to 5th grade, but I'm sure it should have dwellt extensively on the topic of Mary's virginity and all other taboos of the Catholic mind which were just as easily broken in the restrooms and in the parties my friend threw for friends and acquaintances, in which alcohol replaced virtue and every woman became quite ownerless for a night. I do remember religion lessons from secondary school but that is something I shall not return to for a while; I think I had been the most brilliant theologian in the class and of course the most poignant advocate of liberalism and hedonism at the same time. Then my father tried to teach me some religion, but I could see in his face how he hated getting up early to go to church and be a witness to that antiquated show, you cannot lie to children when it comes to spirituality and emotions, they always know better. But I played my part just as well. I attended first a very exclusive school for the first and second grade, from the La Salle brothers, and there I excelled in English and religion, always hating mathematics and literature. I was quite lazy and not very organized, and I also remember having a friendship with a boy four grades ahead of me who liked football very much, something I hated.

I do remember a couple of things from that school.... there was a very big courtyard for the boys to play soccer, it was after all an all-boys school, I also remember pissing on my pants many times specially during the English class that took place sometime in the afternoon and as a punishment to my father for dressing me up with jeans, whenever he did so I faked illness and threw up my whole lunch and had to be fetched home immediately. I only wanted to look elegant, with a blazer and wool trousers, a tie, a perfectly ironed shirt. Whenever this wasn't complied with, I rebelled, and threw up my lunch or in the middle of a class made on my pants. I also remember Ashes Wednesday, which remains in my mind as one of the most vivid experiences of Christianity, also because it gave you a free morning without some lessons, perhaps math or something I should have hated. I also remember a very long trip to a place with a big pool, I was happy to get away from home, to be among friends and manage my own time, no homework, no obligations. I can't remember the books I read at the time (for this accounts for age 6 and 7) but for sure it wasn't anything religious and perhaps I didn't read much beyond the school textbooks. My father wasn't too fond of buying me books (an addiction I've kept for the whole of my independent life even at the expense of food, but never at the expense of alcohol or tobacco unless it was something entirely unique like Lev Shetov's "Athens and Jerusalem"), I should have read newspapers sometimes and also women's magazines, or anything I could grab for free at the church, usually not very interesting. I did look into my cousins' books at my aunt's house where I liked to remain for hours and hours.

Her maid was also named Alicia and she taught me writing in the cursive style, but for many years I had been embarrassed of admitting it to my parents so I just told them it was given to me by a teacher whose name I couldn't remember. I believe I should end this account here, without forgetting that these two years in that school speak only for 1st and 2nd grade. I was slightly fat at the time and an outright blond which called to question my origins all the time, specially a friend (already in 3rd grade) by the name of Louise always laughed about my accent when pronouncing certain words and then many of them called me "American", but it would be only several years later that I would come to understand this. I was pretty slow for sports and very much a lover of music but not very good one, only stuff like oldies and ballads, even though soon (at the age of 12 or so) I would cure myself from all possible provincialism except religion. As soon as I entered the school I became aware of my own father's provincial ways and there was a friend of mine (perhaps his name was Cesar?) who happened to have close relatives at president's house and would treat me for presents and house parties. I loved his mother, which somehow resembles my own or at least how I used to think of her, perhaps this boy did grow up to be a militant queer, you could tell from those days already. I have not told everything of course, most of it remains mine and only mine, as far as I can or want to remember much of it, but for now it should suffice for the years 1990 and 1991.