Ancestry 35 - Existential Thoughts: Postcript

A great antinomy in the existence of this tragically conscious being, who is capable of sensing and thinking until his last throes, a contradiction which lurks and then comes to the fore of conscience with a frequency in proportion to our years, can be detected in the awareness of the finitude of existence whilst conscious -and the unconscious void ahead, the recognition that, as there was a beginning, there is an end approaching. Secondary to the struggle with this antinomy, I add the acknowledgement of the relative insignificance of individual existence against the backdrop of infinity of space and time, even though the subject and its conscience during life finds itself at the center of what is happening around him: each human being, during existence and only then, is positioned by default due to conscience at the center of its environment, on a pedestal so to speak, however more as a spectator and a bit-part actor, with small own potential to affect superior social and historical forces.

Given these uncertainties and irreconcilable contradictions (and alas to those who have not at least fleetingly heeded them), what is left to our beings is to embrace the unique life, within nature and the busy societies of fellow human beings: its aggregation of thoughts, feelings, experiences and impressions imprinted in the memory -of what is the ‘being-in-itself’ of philosophy; to attain a ‘closure’ of existence with the knowledge gained in the paths that life has taken. There will be nothing left for posterity, just a flickering glow; perhaps, a little joy from a fleeting sense of satisfaction a few moments before the last breath like a last look of self at an internal mirror; perhaps, some tears before the last farewell. In those moments, when the dialectical synthesis of life and death into nothingness occurs, the ‘being-in-itself’ and existence are summed up in their entirety and concluded. These last-minute flares of conscience are more than good reasons for the venture of recapping a life in writing, in its apparent futility and self-centredness, even dull when compared with other undertakings. For the time being, I subscribe to Sartre’s saying: "From now on, my freedom is clearer: the action I do today will have neither god nor man as eternal witnesses. I must be, today and forever, the only witness of myself."

I carved many stories and events out of my past, images and conversations, sensations and feelings, accumulated in memory after each passing day, such as in life from an inquisitive child (a “nosey master breaker” as grandmother used to call me) until today, as I had found an inexhaustible interest in dismantling gadgets, looking into drawers and cabinets and wardrobes, without necessarily a purpose in such explorations, simply out of curiosity. Later in life, I was reading books down to their last word, underlining phrases, obsessively taking notes, filling the margins of books with own thoughts. And there I was, trying to put all this back together: with my hands if they were dismantled gadgets or with my mind if they were thoughts and feelings: in a new order and structure, as much as I could with the little dexterity, in the former case, or the even less creativity I was endowed with, in the latter. But I have been admittedly tenacious until a conclusion and a closure: in reassembling and rearranging, in correlating and combining, without necessarily much originality, let alone added artistic value. To think and analyse incessantly was good enough in most cases, even without a positively creative accomplishment. A simple juxtaposition, comparison and enumeration of thoughts, experiences and feelings, details, as in a Proustian “search of lost time", without hierarchy, without special emphasis or intense emotional regressions, though certainly with nostalgia for what happened and passed and courage against what is left to come (as I learned from denouement from Camus' "The Outsider”) is the synopsis of admittedly average and ephemeral lives of my ancestor’s and ultimately mine. It is like a memento mori. All records will disappear into the void of time, reduced to nothing like all lives they chronicle.

Ancestry 34 - Existential Thoughts: Reasons for Justification (What is to be Done?)

And so, starting from a few primordial thoughts, often borrowed from the writings of great thinkers or gathered from common sense, even from the clichés of our everydayness, I began to retrieve, from the abysses of memory, from conversations with own people and friends, from collateral and tangential stories, the threads that brought me to the here and the now and untangle a labyrinth ultimately leads to the moment of death. The conundrum of life, of this little and insignificant life, is impossible to unravel no matter how deep in the past I venture or far from home I travel, in search for the ends of some of the threads that still weave it. The beginnings of everyone are lost in history and the expanses of the earth. And what are the expectations from the end-result of such an investigation? Absolutely none! There are no and should be no expectations, merely because one day I will perish and disappear from the face of this earth along with the few lines of recorded thoughts and the ethereal emotions I experienced whilst putting them down.

Charles Dickens reminds us that man brings nothing into this world and gets nothing when he leaves it. Most of us realise it without having read Dickens. In fact, although a universal truism, many fear this round, post-existential nothingness, and fewer refuse to accept it until the very end. Despite this tragic essence of existence, we feel all along a longing for answers, for elucidation and harmony and order, we seek an illusion of unity in a world fragmented and seemingly disorderly and chaotic, where no one seems to know where it is heading -if that matters. We are constantly striving to take a small step in understanding our existence and ourselves, to search for a flickering light in the abysses of the soul, to answer the why and we are being ourselves, while we exist and our minds are alive. Yet, such longing remains largely unquenched, despite the awareness of death and the step into the void at the end.

I feel that this longing for self-discovery becomes stronger the older I get, as my end approaches monotonously and inexorably, irresistible, unsurpassed. This is possibly due to the diversity and quantity of experiences life itself accumulates and hoarded in memory: the conversations, the readings, the travel, the incessant thinking in solitary moments. Perhaps, this longing exists latently, but just as insatiable, in most people, no matter how they express it. After all, philosophers, at least those who earn our respect by preaching by example or adapting their lifestyles to their philosophies, agree on one thing: life is presented to every mortal as a unique challenge and an opportunity to live, to think and feel to the frontiers of one’s intellectual ability, and to create – material things and ideas. He must seize and live it to the maximum possible depth and breadth offered by his time and place he achieved in the world.

Ancestry 33 - Existential Queries: Our Lives

The life of every human being deserves more than sporadic appeals to fate or the unwilling or passive submission to the chances presenting themselves along the way, and which, as pointed out, amounts to a renunciation of all resistance to forces exerted from one direction or another, a suppression of creative thinking, and a depletion of the will and spirit. Despite its relative insignificance within the wider human landscape the individual life is unique. One can argue that nothingness in a sense contradicts uniqueness. This contradiction is indeed latent in our existential concerns, especially when evaluating life and querying its meaning. With the exceptions of the geniuses and the great personalities of history, who, in their lifetimes, acquired fame or accumulated power or wealth or both, because either of inherent talents or inherited privileges, and whose paths left a notable trace in history and their theories and praxis contributed into universal knowledge and the progress of civilisation, on the other hand, the uniqueness and value of the lives of common people will bear no ecumenical witnesses and recognition in posterity. However, this does not necessarily contradict our individuality and uniqueness, even when the only witness of these attributes is our own conscience.    

Here are some more truisms: the existence and consciousness of any human being appears fleetingly on our earth, for a few instances of historical time, a drop in the vast ocean of living and dying souls. It traces trajectories parallel or intersecting with other beings and their minds through an inconceivably complex web of interpersonal and social relations. The unique being, whose body and mind is bearer of the legacy of previous generations, that is, the knowledge they accrued and the material things they created and left behind, perceives and captures moments of his existence through consciousness, enriches it and moulds it into a life. Beside the fact, as one can maintain, that individual life is at large hetero-determined and shaped through relations and interactions with other beings, influenced in its behaviour and actions by the social environment and milieu.

Answering the who am I, striving to obtain a sense of my being and existence –for as long as I am in the here and now, immersed in the world, as they say, should begin by chronicling and examining the lives of people I was related with in a way or another, probing into their minds and conscience, and, further, recounting the experiences of the places and societies where I grew up, was educated, fell in love, worked, lived. My very being in its nowness and place in society is determined by events that occurred in the deep past, well before birth, and until the present moment. This existence can be discerned, dare say justified, and acquire a recognizable meaning -exclusively within and for me (often sufficient for all intents and purposes), by simply recollecting the experiences of the past I had in the societies of contemporary fellow human beings. This recounting of individual experiences, along with the attempt via conscious reflection for an elementary understanding of the wider social environment hosting my existence and the parallel historical process, both prerequisites for the understanding life, add value to my own life and those who left or those I will leave behind when my turn comes; little value, the truth is, but nonetheless finite and for the eye of the beholder. If anything, while I write and whatever I write cleanses the soul of the taints of everyday life and grind the unconscious over long spans immersion in the world with many trivialities and vulgarities.

Ancestry 32 - Existential Queries: Chance

Yet, many a time our intelligence, in its attempt to seek logic and order, seems overwhelmed by a perceivable chaos in the world and frustrated by its incapacity to rationally explain phenomena or projecting with an acceptable degree of clarity their evolution in the future. The question of the effect chances (or ‘fortune’ in its positive acceptation) have in our lives remains a valid one and lingers throughout life, despite the law of causality and the historical determinism many of us adhere to; and that regardless of the strength and efficaciousness of our will, that is our potential to punch above our weight in our struggles, and influence, if not the course of history, at least somehow that of our lives and those of the people close to us. Acknowledging and assigning a cardinal importance to chance, that is resigning ourselves to the perceived randomness of circumstances and events and phenomena on our paths in an apparently chaotic world, suppresses the innate thirst for knowledge and explanation and is not conducive to bring balance and harmony to minds and souls. Onto a personal level, using the intellect to reduce this randomness of much of what happens around us and affects as a result our thinking and feelings, our behaviour, contact and actions, that is to rationalise the apparent chaos, brings along not just an element of order in our thinking process and perception of the world, but it moderates and effectually manages various emotions inherent in human nature: regret, remorse, the joy in success, the feeling of fulfilment, etc.

Nevertheless, many of us who wonder: “why things happen this way and not another” are often tempted to take a short cut and effortlessly answer without much thought: “Oh, it happened by chance!” or with the proverbial: “Because of bad (or good) luck!” But what does chance and luck mean, in a world that to the human intellect is rudimentarily connected and elementarily coherent, but inherently always causal and deterministic, in which behind each effect often lurks complex and virtually infinite sequence of causes, and each phenomenon is the result of several conflicting forces, often unidentifiable by the most intensive and thorough human analysis? However, despite the randomness that seemingly characterizes small or large events or clusters of events into phenomena that make up short or long human stories of personal or social nature, such stories can potentially be analysed, delineated and described by observable and sometimes the measurable result of forces, whether obvious or inconspicuous, whether invisible at first sight or latent.

Reduction of the occurrence of an event to chance, then, stems from nothing more than the inability for explanation or the unwillingness to seek one; from a rather unconditional surrender to the power of these forces, a disclaimer of knowledge and responsibility, an aversion to reality, a fear of the consequences and of what will come next. Chance seems, after all, a word devoid of content, either concrete or abstract, whose invocation is of no practical benefit. At worst, it becomes synonymous with the evasion of an exegesis and betrays weakness or ignorance or simply indolence. At best, it suggests an inadequate degree of understanding of phenomena in social and human relations. It is a white flag raised by the perplexed and resigned individual, when confronted by the question of the meaning and reason of his presence on this world, of his ancestors and descendants, no matter how insignificant and brief. In effect, it nulls past and present life, on the pretext of this limited capacity to provide an adequate rational explanation of what is happening around us and, indeed, within us, normally as an effect of the former. Admittedly, we are constrained by the amount of the knowledge humanity has thus far accumulated, the even less of the most knowledgeable individuals and machines possess, that is, on the conquests of the intellect of previous generations in the short history of the human kind. And, thus, for what appears sublime and incomprehensible in history and by ourselves, our mind and soul, we summon up chance for an effortless escape, as a relief from the mental torture that search for answers entails.

Although life unfolds before and around ourselves as a sequence of unconnected and random events, it is in fact no more than pseudo-random, in the sense that every event and each turn individuals or societies take in one direction or another, are potentially explicable by multiple causes of different weights, over an enormous breadth and depth of time and space, so that their classification and evaluation as factors in the outcome appears practically impossible. Despite this, aiming at least at a rational explanation, even at a credible approximate interpretation, no matter how rudimentary, no matter if fruitless at the end, is worthy every bit of the intellectual strain that it demands. Hegel’s statement: “What is real is rational and what is rational is real” still holds strong. Let us try to explain our lives and get to know ourselves, before we perish, even if the odds appear overwhelmingly against the success of such an endeavour. We will get a bit closer to the meaning we are looking for, and that might be just worth the effort.

Ancestry 31 - Existential Queries: Fate

Once upon a time, in some obscure and poor neighborhoods of old Salonica, the seeds of Father's life and, by extension, those of mine were sown. Lives in their uniqueness, as much as their insignificance and infinitesimality, with the infinite and the inconceivable majesty of the universe in the background, beyond the grasp of our comprehension; ephemeral lives in confined geographies and of a time conceived and its days measured only whilst existing. Our minds, which barely and on occasions (during the scarce introspective reflections and “calls to conscience”) manage to perceive and touch upon our delimited existence, are often overwhelmed and thoughts and ideas are swept away by forces and events and phenomena, whether invisible and trivial or distinct and broader of social and historical proportions, occurring, and coalescing into the moments of our lives. In striving to make sense of our existence and lives and being in the world that we have thrown in some fundamental questions of existential nature always linger. Are the lives, like the ones I endeavored to write about, guided at every step and turn by an invisible hand of fate, as some say, by omnipotent forces stemming from nature and history or even a supernatural god? Do even the common and, in a grand scheme of things, insignificant people have a say in their aims and can they influence noticeably their directions and paths in life? Can and do they embrace or deflect situations, utilize or reject the so-called chances that are presented with along their routes in life, and depending on each incremental decisions, shape their lives and those of the next generations in different individual ways?  Can apparently trivial choices amongst alternatives at any stage and turn, when people are called or compelled to decide and exercise their will and act accordingly, produce distinctly divergent life states and forms?

In the fate, as something predetermined, as a course defined from something above or outside ourselves, transcendent and supernaturally regulated, I have never believed; naturally as a scientist whose methods of thinking adhere to the principle of causality, or even as an unaccomplished revolutionary. There are still a few usually religious or superstitious people who with backward thinking remark: "it was meant to be" or “it was pre-ordained by fate,” unable in their ignorance or insulation to explain the how’s and the why’s of their being, as it is crystallised into a “being-in-itself” during a lifetime by personal and social relationships, education, employment, marriage, child bearing, health, sickness and death; in short, the how’s and why’s they lived the life they eventually did. Most people, even when they fleetingly or inadvertently refer to fate because either of a momentary mental weakness or an incomplete or lack of understanding of the factors that led to an event or the inability to breakdown a phenomenon to its causes, do not adhere, in truth and deep down, to the notion that there is an invisible all-powerful guiding hand above all. But in moments of introspective reflection, of analysing and the recounting of the past, in every "call to consciousness", they seek and agonize about these how’s and why’s. They sometimes ponder about what is to come -originating from the present moment and situation, referring to past experiences and the acquired knowledge, and speculating or conjecturing about the future. These are scarce moments of individual freedom in a generally repressive world; not seeking answers, but succumbing to a pre-ordained fate, even acknowledging it as a notion, amounts to the absolute defeat of the human spirit and the imprisonment of thought.  

Admittedly, humans possess variable deposits of individual or collective will, small or large depending on their position and relative power in the class societies we are destined to grow up and live, a will that may somehow influence the course of own lives, with slighter or wider deviations from principal pathways, which are seemingly presented exogenously as choices, at life beginnings or its later stages; that is, pathways within the borders imposed by the historical era and the environment: materialistic and social, national and geographical. Of course, it goes without saying that the more wealth and power one possesses in a class society, the wider the scope and reach of the individual will; it is nonetheless innate to human intelligence. The argument that the history of societies and their economies follows a deterministic course, which is described, and perhaps even prescribed and preordained by distinct, long-term underlying historical tendencies and laws, falls beyond the reasonable scope of any dilettante philosopher’s essay. The phases and stages of an historical process, as they succeed one another, often with regressions and setbacks and discontinuities from revolutions and wars, cover a period of several generations, and transcend in time orders of magnitude the span of a lifetime. Only with a wide view through the lens of an historian from the distant future, they can possibly be perceived, analysed and verified from accumulated historical evidence. However, even with external, apparently insurmountable, forces exerted upon oneself by an all-powerful socioeconomic status quo, there is still an array of paths the so called ‘free’-will (rather erroneously) can opt to walk; even escape routes to different destinations or back to the origin can be explored and exploited along the way. If the laws of nature that determine the functions of our bodies are impossible to defy without the help and implementation of counteracting engineering based on the same natural laws, the established social forms and norms can be individually or collectively negated and, to an extent, the pressure from exogenous socioeconomic forces can be moderated, even deflected controlling an individual’s life. As far as myself and my existence are concerned, I would rather paraphrase Sartre's rebuke for the effect of historical process and determinism in shaping an individual’s life: "We must live without a veil or make-up this heartbreaking, unbearable condition called 'human fate'... A man's secret is the frontier of his freedom."

Ancestry 30 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: Under the Family Auspices

Grandmother Eudoxia was not in possession of a special beauty, but her face and mien had a few distinct attractive features -in view of the norms of her milieu, and her coquettish nature added some extra charm. As we would expect from a seamstress, she paid due attention to her appearance and developed a good taste in clothes despite the scarce financial resources. In old photographs from her youth, she showed a thick dark wavy hair cut short at shoulder length. Because of its unforgiving thickness, it was cumbersome to straighten with natural means, tidy it up around her small face or tuck it behind the ears. It turned gray early in life and virtually into white by the time she was around sixty-years-old or since the age I started to retain memories as a child. Her eyes were deep and rather small in an also small facial outline, suppressed down by a narrow forehead, but they were iridescent and bright, even when the cataract blurred the color of her iris, which faded toward the greyish-blue hue I remember. The line of her thick eyebrows fell on the eyelids, somehow enlarged the eyes in their sockets, and gave her gaze a rare and attractive depth and penetration. To the outside world, her face, worn out by time and hardships and mainly the eyes -the “window of the soul” as they say, radiated a determination and a strong-will, an immediacy and straightforwardness in her behaviour, along with kindness and sincerity, certainly a dignity; one could perhaps add that it even projected a fleeting sense of magnificence despite the humblest of roots and lack of formal education. She was rather self-aware of those eyes of hers, which she passed down almost unchanged in shape and depth to her eldest son, Father. How many times did she proudly mention in conversations the whispers she eavesdropped from two heart-throbbed girls passing in front of the gate of their house in Toumpa in Father’s late teenage years: "Here lives, the one with the big, beautiful eyes, Maria!"

Eudoxia was a petite woman, but by no means stunted despite the periods of malnutrition in her life as a child. Most of the Kampakis’ family members were rather short in stature having taken after their father's side, whilst their mother, the ‘Stork,’ stood out with her tall stature well above the family average. Grandmother was also a sickly woman, the result of the vicissitudes in her life, the years of hardships the refugees endured in the shantytown of Toumpa, followed, a couple of decades later, by the general privation the German Occupation brought about. She contracted tuberculosis sometime before the war and the discovery of streptomycin, when the disease was treated with pneumonectomies and artificial pneumothorax and spells in a sanatorium. Yet, the means available at the place and time proved effective in healing the consumptive grandmother, thankfully for her children and grandchildren. She survived the disease, which led many, including her youngest brother, to a premature end, but without half of the lung her God endowed her with. As expected, given the experiences that affected her childhood, she did not acquire any sort of elementary education. Whatever basic reading skills she managed to attain were patchy and incremental - admirably, through autodidacticism from newspaper and magazine headlines, from signs and picture captions. We have not found out how (perhaps from newspapers that Leonidas brought home, perhaps from her church diaries or the pocket Bible she kept at home, perhaps from the telephone directory or the very few printed documents one could find in their flat, perhaps from occasional assistance she received by her two sons), but to everyone’s astonishment she had managed to compile a handwritten phone book, complete with names, numbers, and sometimes addresses of family members, relatives and friends. In short, the rudimentary reading and writing skills, which proved sufficient to keep her afloat in the world, she owed it exclusively to self-learning.

A childhood friend from the years of their resettlement in Salonica, Dimitra, who escaped from the misery of the slum ahead of grandmother and settled a little further down, in the Fleming area where I grew up, endeavoured to make the matchmaking of a young neighbour, Leonidas, with her old childhood friend Eudoxia, the seamstress from Toumpa. (Such friendships could only have been broken by death and grandmother’s yelling from her balcony every time she saw Dimitra passing from our street below: "Dimitra, come up, καλέ, for coffee!" still resonate in my ears.)  Although one or two layers down in the social stratification of the city, the nearly lumpen Eudoxia, the refugee girl from a town in Asia Minor, with no dowry, no education, but a poorly paid job as a part-time seamstress, was accepted by great-grandmother Katina, the de facto head of the slightly more affluent, if not bourgeois, Melnikian Ibrişimci family, and the two younger siblings of Leonidas still living under the same roof. Katina was convinced, after meeting Eudoxia, that a marriage of Leonidas to the quiet and humble refugee girl would somehow calm grandfather down. Leonidas was clearly a difficult person to be with; frequently edgy and irritable and with a neurotic disposition, that later in life developed into some form of neurasthenia. Dimitra’s matchmaking was set up in the old family home of Deligiorgi Street (Eudoxia’s dwelling in Toumpa was not fit for purpose), with coffee and vanilla “submarine” and spoon sweets, and proved successful -at least, against the simple criteria that lower strata of Salonica’s society judged at that time the success of a marriage between two strangers from different walks of life and of different personality, which an unlikely concurrence of events brought together. Eudoxia tamed Leonidas’ nerves for the best part of their lives and made him a reasonable person. Katina’s instincts were vindicated.

Indeed, Eudoxia proved to be a distinctively stoic and patient character. A good housewife and, more importantly for a male family, a capable housekeeper and excellent cook -without the aid offered nowadays from recipe books or the internet or the technology and accessories of the modern house. The traditional recipes with their elaborate secrets were stored in her mind as they were passed down from the past generations that inhabited the Byzantine and Ottoman ruled Anatolia and Izmir. They were refined and enhanced by the mingling with the different cultures coexisting in Salonica’s cauldron, the Sephardic, the Slavic, as well as the omnipresent European influence, and culminated in a sublime fusion cooking: stuffed vine or cabbage leaves, giant beans, Smyrna meatballs, giouvetsi and braised meat (in later periods of relative prosperity which bringing meat to the table became affordable), and deserts, like revani cake and melomakarona, were recorded by her daughters-in-law and survived into my generation, along with the sumptuous flavours I enjoyed as a child -having been fortunate to be raised close to grandmother.

Therefore, Eudoxia and Leonidas complemented each other well, coexisted, and lived the rest of their relatively poor and unsung lives in an ostensible harmony; with the nervous disposition and disorders of the latter being accepted with patience and stoic sighs or resignation, but not with confrontations, from the former. With Leonidas struggling to earn a living from poorly paid jobs, Eudoxia took up the occasional sewing jobs for wealthier neighbours. They managed to raise and their two sons commendably and have them educated, under unfavourable conditions and with the several stumbles along the way through years of privation and wars. Notwithstanding my existence on this earth, I owe Eudoxia the solace and comfort she offered selflessly and passionately on occasions of trepidation and tumult naturally associated with growing up. She did as well, before me, with her two sons, although without the due appreciation