Life Re-Created

Synthetic Genome Brings New Life to Bacterium

I have no father. I have no mother. But I am not an orphan. Technically speaking, my mother is a petri dish and cow, my genetic parent is a computer program at Vita Novis. Practically, my father is a lawyer and my mother a pediatric. I grew up with the people who ordered me, in a family like any other, and received all the love a child is supposed to. My classmates behave awfully immature and call me names. I cannot really blame them, they are only biologically human, some not only are mentally mediocre as a result of their innate dispositions, but suffer from horrible genetic diseases and shortcomings. I can only imagine the torment from such traditional state. Their parents must haves been awfully narcissistic and selfish, to want to pass all the flaws and mutations of their seed on to their children.

Rivers of the Underground: Acheron

I crossed the river of pain. Some say it heals, for only when one passes Acheron, will one no longer fear the flesh of the body. Tightly clenched in my fist, I still hold the coin. This is the realm of the spirit, where I hold angels dear. For many this is the realm of death, where they feel nothing anymore, know nothing. This is a time to greet, for joy, for welcome. The water is a stream that nourishes the dead who only sense emptiness, they, Lazarus, pray like baboons. But I fear not, no need to fall on my knees. I do not shiver, but frivol. Those who think of death as life, those who fear, they pay a price when they cross, they cannot return. But to me, death is in life, with the spirit in which I joy resurrected.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg

“If you don’t love me, it is better that you hate me,” Arnon rebuffed.
“Don’t you care about what people think of you?”
“Of course, I do, I would prefer them to love me, follow me like docile sheep and perform my wishes. But if I am not worth all, I am worth nothing. I am not interested to compromise myself for a little bit of love.”

“Have you ever loved?”
“I have loved, I love and I tried to love at length.”
“Than are you saturated to care so little?”
“Insatiable rather, drops of water don’t matter in an empty ocean.”

“You see happiness is a pitiable state.”
“But more so is sorrow.”
“No, no, there is happiness in sorrow,” Arnon smiled contently, thinking of such bitter joy.
“Maybe you did not try enough.”
“It seems now I failed.”

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (9)

“Hey Arnon, what are you reading this time?”
She asked it with such kind sincerity, that he knew he was going to finish the book this time.

He was, he thought at least, now present here for almost five years, a lustrum, time for celebration, but more so for reflection perhaps. He was however, to say the least, as well uncertain of his time and place that he filled in it. The question of the meaning of being, his very presence, and here especially, of all places, was in question itself, not only by him self, yet until recently very much not certain to be answered. The ontology of being, that was certainly the question.

Sure, sure, there were more practical concerns, but certainly none more urgent. Like there was the question what to eat tonight, how the weekend had been, how he was doing, if he would like anything with my coffee, what was up, what the weather was going to be today and what to wear, etcetera, atcetera. All deeply relevant, sure, but honestly my friends, all trivial, no need to beat around the bush. For all we know, the only knowledge that is not in doubt it the question of being. The essence of our being is first and foremost, a question of being itself, a quest for the ontic value of our presence.

Today was a beautiful day, the winter had appeared to have been thrusted from the stage a few times already, but each time it had turned with a vengeful and moist, eastern wind on us again. More than once this temporary jostle with spring had caused Arnon to suffer from another sinus infection that left a weary sore lingering around in his head. Nature too was not accustomed to the inconsistent temperatures, and many winterdays choked the budding blossoms to fall off. But today, spring had finally revealed itself. Arnon wore a hundred percent wool and laine pair of trousers by Club Monaco, one he recently had bought at Broadway, a withered black t-shirt with a facial silhouette of Putin above the text ‘vshyo putyom,’ meaning ‘we go together’ and navy blue asics tiger sneakers, which he mainly loved for their cheap simplicity. He had gone into town around eight in the morning, ordering a large, black coffee with two sugars, no bag. He was doing fine just like the Bangladeshi coffee vendor, although a little out of breath from running up the stairs, which quite right, was normal with the subway laying so deep here, but since he looked quite young still, and the Bangladeshi vendor worked hard however, they were both going to have a nice day.

He had started reading Heigegger’s Sein und Zeit, mainly because his life had gotten clogged with trite encounters, like life does. He had become unable to resist a boredom so existential that it had to be real and his only escape was a complete abstraction from reality, he was past the simple remedy of a Cartesian doubt, of a shallow negation of the facts, he would have to grasp deep into the muddy pool of thought this time. But the pool was muddy indeed, and he only understood half of what my eyes were absorbing, being easily distracted. The first fifty pages were going to be like this, he realized this, starting in an estranging language again, even though the language of his far forefathers, and having to repolish his presence to his German self. But here lies too the answer to both the ontological question for the meaning of being and the ontic pendant of boredom that dominated Arnon’s being. He was not present here, but could only imagine he was.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (8)

Arnon walked south on LaFayette street toward one of his favorite bars in downtown Manhattan, called Kremlin. The bar was located in the basement of a brown-stone house, its entrance bolstered by an iron-clad entrance with at the top of the staircase leading down, a red lantern with Cyrillic fonts reading kremlin. Here Arnon would sit down at the bar on one of the stools near the wall and he would have Randy the bartender shake him a random, sweet cocktail.

For Arnon it was the ideal location to read and ponder in the late afternoon transgressing into the early evening. Sometimes, he would get hungry and order some tapas, sometimes he drank his hunger surge away with a Bloody Mary. The bar was ideal to spot the crowd for the archetype New Yorker of his age, without portraying the abnoxious, overweight 30-year old ignorant male, which he had no interest for. True, that obnoxious, ignorant yet conceited male made up half the population of Manhattan, but they were not the average New Yorkers. This conceited pig was perhaps imported from New Jersey or had floated to the surface from another location out of New York where it was easy to believe you mattered, a taste of the city they would allow you not.

At the Kremlin the average, modest youth came to enjoy the air, like a climber who sits down on a rock just below the top and resuscitate from the climb. The place had an air of mediocracy, but an uplifted mediocracy, of a height reached not by a long climb or by one’s own merit, but reached by haven taken the ski-lift to half-way and enjoying the view. From such a view the wideness of the horizon is deceiving but real and it was this view of the viewers that Arnon enjoyed.

In a way the Kremlin bar was like a modern setting for Mann’s sanatorium in the Magic Mountain. Here too the exhaustive conditions of the working day and the reposes found cause the New Yorkers to develop a chronic illness of whom none know the true nature except that we all find the treatment extremely pleasant leading us to believe that the illness therefore must be really there. We cannot fight this disease, because it is intertwined in our system and we are helpless against it. Thus, Arnon ordered another cocktail.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (7)

A black man, in a faded black t-shirt and black jeans, shuffles toward me as I walk along the pavement. In his right he holds a makeshift carton box, folded in such a way, that the top covers his chest. His face prostrates behind the top of the carton. The top of his head is bald, the sides trimmed short, but long enough to look fuzzy-wuzzy.

As I approach him, I see him mumbling something, but with such an attempted kind voice, that he speaks too softly for me to hear what he’s saying from the five meters distance from which we still stand. I approach him swiftly.

“Excuse me?” with the typical willingness of the white man’s voice when he speaks to a poor black man, a tone too friendly to be real, but friendly enough to cover the historic guilt with which each white man is loaded without any personal wrong doing. The black man undoubtfully is aware of this overweight he holds, certainly, the man in front of me is.

His left hand slides up toward his throat’s Adam’s apple, and as if trying to grasp it, his fingers and thumb form a stiff grip. He waives his grip gently along his throat, bends his head slightly sidewards, like a dog begging, and repeats his murmur.

Standing beside him, I now see two large slices of pizza laying on the folded carton in his right hand.

“Sir, could you spare a dollar for a soda, my throat is so dry,” he begs while his left hand gesticulates still up and down along his throat.

I apologize, but I am unsure if I apologize for not wanting to help him, or if I seek an excuse to mankind for the type of beggar his character has become. I remember the other black males who beg in my neighborhood. They cultivate a culture of poverty because they are compelled to. They see a white person and their whole body shakes and their veins are filled with adrenaline to ask for a quarter, unable to resist until their breath and mouth forms those words of relief that sooths their minds. Only then are they calm again.

The black man in the wheelchair near the phone booth at Court Street. He has no special need to beg, it is just an extra income he generates. He sits and talks to his buddies, and careless of the passers-by he shakes his paper cup with some pocket money to rattle the passers’ attention. Or like the fat black man sitting near the Duane Reader on the brick wall, when the sun shines, he sits and enjoys the beams of light, and as he strikes a friendly eye, his compulsion to ask for a free quarter takes a hold of him. Or like the slender moustached black standing at the Citi bank’s entrance.

This is what they have become to regard as work. They get up in the morning, have a donut, a coffee and go to work. And like others, they get dressed for the occasion, they say goodbey to their wives, and there they stand. One works the corner of Court and Montague Street, the other holds office at the Citi bank, another is off to meet his buddies at the next corner, and while his buddies sell out-of-sale books, umbrellas, or sun-glasses, they shake their paper-cup. There is no lack of pride, no lost self-esteem, no dependency, this is how they make money.

And truely, who bends deeper for a buck? The white man locked up in his 3 by 4 cubicle, chained by a mortgage and the demands of a middle-class life, or the poor black man, who needs to answer no boss’ call than his inner compulsion to beg and hustle for every free quarter, and whose presence is disturbed by none, but the guilty eyes of the bourgeois sensitivity?

The diaries of Arnon Grunberg (6)

With half an eye Arnon was keeping a close watch on the man who stood in front of the front exit of the subway car. Shortly before 14th Street, the Hispanic man, dressed in black polished shoes with wide noses and a black woollen coat that reached down to his knees, moved toward the exit doors. Arnon knew he had to occupy the spot now if he wanted to prevent himself from causing a stir to his own embarrassment in the halfly full train. As soon as the train had halted he moved without delay toward the doors and grapped to the supports on both sides above his head, slightly spreading his legs apart to steady himself.

But as soon as the train started moving again, shaking left and right, Arnon’s stomach turned unstoppable in every direction, causing a strong pulse upward, outward, thumping in his stomach. His head was dizzy and though his eyes and thoughts were clear, his thoughts were absent from registering anything beyond the sickness that controlled his body, and as his sickness grew graver, his thoughts propelled around the abominate anchor that his stomach was.

“Try and hold out until Fulton Street, suck it up, for two more minutes, not even perhaps.”

But halfway Arnon realized that he would not be able to fight the dominance of his physical condition with the theoretical powers of his thoughts. Cold sweat stood thickly on his forehead, he must look pale as the moon, Arnon thought, but people were either simply indifferent or ignoring his suffering owing to their rudimentary unfitness. Arnon threw their indifference straight back at them.

“This is a dog eat dog world, even if my stomach can’t chew on it today.”

The silverly aluminum with the fluorescent light flikkering, swang to the left and right, the iron parts grinded along the tracks closer to Fulton Street but still too far. Arnon turned slowly around, sensing with the absolute conviction of a seer the sure prediction of his intestines. It was as it was written and his actions were merely reading outloud his predestined fate.

Slowly he opened the car doors, bend his upper body forward, grasping the right outersupport with his right hand, then slowly the left handle, and not even two seconds afterward a powerful beam of yellow brownish fluid gulped out. The noise of the wheels squeezing forcefully over the tracks, pushing forward hundreds of people tens of meters below surface, past trash, rats and darkness, overwhelmed all other perception.

Arnon hang crucified between the two outerdoor handles between the seventh and eight car of the train, the tracks raced rapidly below him passing his eyes barely. Again a new pulse of vomit freed itself and splashed out over the pitch black darkness below.

Finally, it stopped, the train slowed down and Arnon wiped his mouth with a paper handkerchief. As the train came to a stop, he slowly turned around, in control of himself, returning absently the woken stares of compassion that were unable to break through their unfit masks. As he rushed through the opened doors, he felt his cold head turn colder as a fit of sweat burst out on his stirn. He reached for the wooden bench, sat down and bend forward, breathing slowly, recapturing his consciousness.

The diaries of Arnon Grunberg (5)

Watching the New Year’s fireworks, the star spangled skies over the tip of Manhattan, the red colored nightly heavens, from the Brooklyn boulevard, I see the times turn and shift along a primeval consciousness in which people share their pathetic survival, their clinging on to life. Life mysteriously calculated according to an old pattern of astronomical formulas based upon the constant denominator 12 and 60, Roman and Babylonical, squirmed into a Christian Gregorian pattern. So out of date, so obviously out of sync with reality that constant adjustments are necessary to keep track and not fall behind. Yet, our perception loaded with reverence refuses to take on a solar calendar, and thus we celebrate this random day in our wacky calendar. Giving up the Gregorian calendar would be an intolerable admission of the fall of western domination, the control of time, the last symbol in history to let slip out of one’s hands.

It was not time that prescribed us the peaks of the year’s calendar, but it was the calendar that dictated time. The heightpoints in our lives are dated, outdated by western standards. Arnon lived in a time that did not fit his comprehension. In an anonymous place like New York City this was in itself not a problem, but it bothered Arnon unmistakenly, although nobody cared. At New Year’s eve, this became only the more apparent as Arnon did not become aware any sense of importance, and the moment that the fireworks hit off, lightening for a series of seconds the dark night that loomed over the geometrical puzzle of lights of down town Manhattan, was lost on him. Much went lost on Arnon for the very same reason.

Lost was such a loose concept, which itself could not be placed, and this was perhaps the only handhold that existed in life. The world blasted apart, explosions lit up the skies, but Arnon was not effected by it, did he therefore not exist? No he did exist precisely because he escaped the events planned by calendar or coincidence. He was because he was despite everything else, nothing mattered except his escape, his absence. This consciousness gave great direction in Arnon’s life. “Just imagine,” he would think sometimes, “that you are tied to the center of the great events of our time, subjugated to the conditions that defined history, without escape, but so engaged that the whole world turned around you, or rather held you in the eye of the storm, like the gravity of a black hole. Could one exist if there is no escape?

His absence was Arnon’s great proof of being, not his involvement, not his negation, his absence from both, life as the great nothing, the core of the universal space that was filled with absence.
“Clang! Cling!”
Glasses were lifted into the air and friends standing in a circle around each other toasted. “Happy New Year.” The turning of time, the turning of a single page. Plastic cups filled with apple cider distorted the light of a nearby lantern, deforming the bright light into a blurry presence, a weak flame glowing in the center.

The diaries of Arnon Grunberg (4)

In the night of 9 to 10 November 1938 throughout Germany Jewish synagogues and shops were rampaged and burnt down by German mobs. My grandparents did not live in Germany themselves but they had several relatives, one of whom was killed, after being brutally beaten and tramped by members of the SA, the military arm of Hitler’s party. Of course, I was too young to have experienced Kristallnacht as this night of barbarism was named, but every Jewish child was immersed with the fear that was handed down from generation to generation. I therefore have very vivid memories of Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass.

I have memories of a Jewish school being set aflame by seventeen and eighteen year old boys who tore the old Talmud teacher by his beard out of the building, before breaking the man’s back by repetitive and relentless kicking, while the elder comrades of the boys and SA Gruppenfuehrer stood aside laughing and inciting by his laughing the brown vested vandals and murderers to be. A fifth boy painted a white Star of David on the walls, before they disappeared in the night, leaving a dead man and disgrace.

This fear was vivid but it was a child’s fear nevertheless. This fear was no larger than the fear of Santa Claus that I inherited from my playmates in the street. In Amsterdam Santa Claus has Moorish assistants called Zwarte Piet who would put you in their jute bags to take you away to Spain if you have behaved badly during the year, and this legend aroused such fear of consciousness in me, that Zwarte Piet seemed to me endlessly more evil than the Nazi’s even though Zwarte Piet was a racist legend of a white-Christian society.

I later realized that as a Jewish boy I had much more in common with Zwarte Piet than I could imagine as a child. Today, I realize that the Moorish assistants of Santa Claus in Europe are one of the most evil and fascist inventions of European history. Zwarte Piet is the only icon of Nazi ideology that is tolerable in modern schools in Amsterdam, and little children are taught from very early on, to fear the evil that the black Moor represents. It is thanks to the good white Saint Nicolas who submitted the evil black Moor that children are rewarded for their faithfulness to the Church of Christ.

“Schools are burning in Uden, pig heads and Molotov cocktails are thrown at mosques all around the Netherlands. They are collective targets of an ethnic hatred that has been unconsciously premeditated by loosely related websites preaching violence covered by the freedom in which name they speak, individual politicians stirring up the fear on which they thrive, and popular media demonizing Muslims for years. Racist opportunism and extreme right extremists waited for the right wave of the moment that was bound to come. Now they all got their ride, and like a wave their frustrated hatred hit the dikes of tolerance and left governments that for years protected Dutch Muslims from the coup of civic small-mindedness that is so typical of the Netherlands.
The tidal wave of hatred splattered years of bred hatred and disgust, and is set loose by an invisible hand under which cover all act anonymously and remain innocent in its absent working. All who warmed themselves in this heat now are suddenly enlightened by the dark coldness that is exposed and from which they could not be liberated until it broke loose. They are the lost sheep returning to the flock bitten by the fearsome enemy of evil within oneself.”

The diaries of Arnon Grunberg (3)

As a writer you think of the day after your death more often than the average person. This is a professional deviation that all writers share, and it could probably even be claimed that if you often think of the day after your death, that you must have a talent to write. So I write. We man, we all, but writers especially, want to leave an eternal memory of ourselves to the world. Don’t we all see in our fantasy that sobbing circle of friends and family, as our beloved ones whisper their last words ‘we will never forget you.’ Finally, our consciousness slides into a happy oblivian.

Writers are different from philosophers who think more of death in abstract terms. But a writer thinks only of his own death. Writers turn up their noses for philosophers for this reason alone, because they will never satisfy the deeper objectives of their desires. A philosopher denies the very motives in him self that he acknowledges to be the driving force behind the desires of others. No, we writers envy another class of professionals, a writer really envies movie directors.

A movie is the only medium of expression that supersedes the power of writing, the medium of thought. Cinema transcendents writing because it directly appeals to the viewer not only in words, but in sound and vision. A movie is a total work of perception, in which the artist can express himself completely and convey the moment absolutely onto the viewer. Compared to cinema, literature is the incomplete world of thinkers, and its the incompleteness that attracts many people who feel comforted by the reenactment of this imperfection of thought. But cinema is a life’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

One of my favorite movies has long been ‘A Day at the Beach’ by Theo Van Gogh, after the novel by Dutch author Heere Heeresma, Roman Polanski had earlier rewritten it already into a scenario in 1970. The 1984 movie is about an alcoholic, divorced father who takes his handicapped daughter for a day at the beach. But the father gets drunk in a bar close by and ultimately looses sight of his daughter at the beach. The father blows this rare moment of fulfilment on alcohol and looses the most precious part of his life by his addiction to failure. This fate of decay is the nucleus of the movie’s success.

The day after a writer’s death is the most important day of his life. It is the moment of the unraveling of a life’s plot, where the threads of his actions end and begin, this moment is his alpha and omega. The day after a writer’s death the meaning of his life is revealed to his readers. The exact scenario of this day is therefore subject of a writer’s reoccurring dreams. A writer’s doubt is ruled by questions like: do all the elements fall in place, are the right protagonists present, is the moment in the day right, are none of the details missing, does the light fall right on my face when I sigh my last breath and my eyelids close slowly to cover the light in my eyes.

A good death makes all the difference in the memory a writer leaves to his readers. It can be the difference between the branding mark of tragedy and sinking away into a void of romance novellists. The memory of the people is not a remorseful soul but a grinding mechanism, everything has to be right in order to escape it. Einstein knew that without the manipulating forge of the hand of his own genius he would not stand the test of time as the inventor of the theory of relativism that shook the perception of man. Nor did Freud leave it to the invisible hands of historiographers to ensure the remembrance of his discovery of unconcsciousness.

“Theo wrote weekly columns for Metro, a free daily newspaper in the Netherlands. His columns were offensive to most who were attacked by his sharp and cynical pen, but this was his mark, and those not a target loved reading them. He had made a name off of scandal and law suits, and people had grown to adore the attack of untouchable persons in the establishment. His latest series were written to provoke the Islamic immigrants. But immigrants didn’t understand the sharp attacks on their faith and their proud was deeply offended.
‘To offend is the test of freedom,’ said Theo. ‘Your freedom ends where mine begins and freedom stands on the ground of mutual respect,’ said Muhamed. So Theo offended Muhamed and Muhamed’s freedom was tested.
Theo was slaughtered like a pig in front of cafe The Dutchman. Muhamed caught up with Theo, both driving their bikes in front of East Park. Muhamed shot several times, Theo said, don’t do it, don’t do it. Muhamed did.”