by Daša Drndic
Listen, Andreas,
the whole secret is to know how to get started, to be able to concentrate the mind on a single point, to attain a sufficient degree of self-abstraction to produce the necessary hallucination and so substitute the vision of the reality for the reality itself. I tried. In the long run the experiment was unsuccessful, but it brought peace.
Jean, I have already concentrated my mind on a single point to the degree that neither dreams nor hallucinations can reach me, nor can nature.
All right, nature has had her day; the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes have tried the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!
One should have a lot of paintings.
I sold my paintings. Now I wander through deserted landscapes getting lost.
You see, I sensed such a degree of stupidity, such hatred of all my own ideals, such contempt for literature and art and everything I love, implanted and firmly fixed in the mediocre brains of these tradesmen preoccupied to the exclusion of all else with schemes of swindling, that I would rush back home in a fury and lock myself up with my books. Worst of all, I hated from the bottom of my soul the new generation of self-made men, the hideous boors who feel themselves bound to talk loudly and laugh uproariously in restaurants and cafés, who elbow you, without apology, on the sidewalks.
Oh, yes, the new types, for most of them life is so simple and shallow. I had students who had not heard of Sartre, of Freud, of Darwin, one girl told me that the Second World War had begun in 1945 and ended in 1950, another that Camus had lived in the eighteenth century. There are those who believe that The Bridge over the Drina is a five-act play, that Hamlet is a novel. For some the middle ages lasted until the nineteenth century, which is, all right, a fact one might accept. Eighty percent of my students had never been to the theater, 99 percent had never gone to a single art exhibition. What have I wasted my life on?
I too suffocated from the torrent of unnecessary words that kept on coming, constantly repeating themselves and indicating nothing, showing nothing, from that impoverished lexicon of suppressed and monotonous colors, from the dull gaze of dead eyes, that followed me like molting, half-wild stray dogs, I found it all painful and nauseating and in order to survive I made my life into a game.
A game, what kind of game? A wild game, an uninhibited game or a game with rules you had to follow? With strict or not so strict rules, with sensible or senseless rules? With your rules or theirs? A game in solitude, a silent game? Your games require money that I do not have. Paul Virilio states: The future lies in unimaginable solitude — one of the elements of which is play, which sounds nice but is blasé and pretentious, because playing in poverty does not bring any comfort — it brings destruction, self-destruction, disappearance and extinction.
So Andreas Ban sits on the floor of his already half-empty living room, in his tuxedo, and for the umpteenth time leafs through his library, arranges and rearranges books, transferring them from one pile to another. He ought to have carried out this triage long ago, twenty years ago, when he sent that rickety six-ton truck loaded with his packed-up life to his sister’s Croatian address so that he would not appear suspect to the authorities.
A hundred and eighty-two packages, large boxes, packing crates lined with straw — for oil paintings, engravings, rugs, ornaments and for a yellow Chinese porcelain dish, as fine as tissue paper, transparent — all that arrives preserved, pointlessly whole and displaced:
According to the Law on external commercial trading, article 118, Implementation of ruling on temporary control of import and export — paragraph F,
According to the instruction to customs, posts 01/5 D-4803/1 of 11.05.1992,
List of personal effects for export/removal
Ada Ban — from Serbia to Croatia:
box 1 books
box 2 books
box 3 books
box 4 books
box 5 books
box 6 books
box 7 sweaters
box 8 sweaters
box 9 curtains
box 10 books
box 11 books
box 12 books
box 13 books
box 14 books
box 15 books
box 16 shoes, winter boots
box 17 books (encyclopedias)
box 18 books (dictionaries)
box 19 records
box 20 records
box 21 books
box 22 books
box 23 books
box 24 books
box 25 books
box 26 books
box 27 glass, ornaments, Leo’s books
box 28 kitchen appliances, electrical
box 29 records, cassettes
box 30 books
box 31 books
box 32 books
box 33 books
box 34 books — Leo
box 35 books — Leo
box 36 books
box 37 books
box 38 shoes
box 39 toys
box 40 quilts, pillows, bedding, tablecloths
box 41 books, manuscripts — America
box 42 books
box 43 ornaments
box 44 bedding
box 45 bedding
box 46 shelves
box 47 shelves, chandeliers, lamps
box 48 sound system, speakers
box 49 clothes
crate 50 engravings
box 51 Leo’s record player, towels
box 52 chairs, quilts, blankets
box 53 various
box 54 books, Leo’s
box 55 glass, writings, criticism
box 56 criticism, prose, documents
box 57 literary texts, essays, documents
box 58 items of furniture, dishes
trunk 59 furniture, glass, ornaments, glasses, towels
box 60 crockery
trunk 61 rugs—Bukhara, Tabriz, Shiraz
crate 62 mirror, crystal
trunk 63 ornaments, glass, lights, TV, framed, glazed posters
box 64 glass, tumblers
box 65 winter clothes
trunk 66 suitcases, clothes
box 67 clothes
box 68 cases, clothes
box 69 slides, books, theater
box 70 photographs, kitchen pots
box 71 gas bottles
crate 72 furniture
box 73 lamps — table and standard
trunk 74 rugs — white, Kashan silk
box 75 lampshades, cushions
box 76 small rugs 3
box 77 coats, jackets
78 washing machine
79 refrigerator
80 freezer
81–90 kitchen cabinets
91 sink
92–95 tables: desk, kitchen table, Biedermeier table, low cherry coffee table
96–102 chairs
103–105 shelves — antique, standing
106 skis 2 pairs
107 bicycles 2
108 antique bergère
crate 109 oil paintings 5
crate 110 oil paintings
trunk 111 engravings, glazed 10
and so on, beds, wardrobes, antique chest of drawers, stove, vacuum cleaner, heaters, space heaters, Opemus 4 enlarger, armchairs, settee, stools, Louis XV-style chairs, up to number 182.
Signature:
Ada Ban
Ranka Tajsića Street 40/IV
Belgrade, May 14, 1992
Passport no. C 513211 Belgrade
His professional books Andreas Ban puts aside (after all) — for the secondhand shop.
Mikloš Biro, Suicide: Psychology and Psychopathology
Mikloš Biro, The Psychology of Post-Communism
Hermann Broch, Poetry and Cognition
Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
Oh, a series of books by the once-respected psychiatrist Vladeta Jerotić who in the 1990s goes completely insane and, along with his nation, sinks into the murky waters of mystical and religious madness:
here are Jerotić’s
Psychoanalysis and Culture from 1974, then
Sickness and Creativity
Between Authority and Freedom
Neurotic Phenomena of our Times
Neurosis as a Challenge
Psychodynamics and the Psychotherapy of Neurosis
Man and his Identity, Andreas’s last Jerotić, bought in 1989.
Then,
L. L. Thurstone on intelligence,
Alfred Kinsey (an old, first edition, Marisa’s book),
Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, who also researches the importance of dreams,
here is Abraham Maslow and his humanist psychology, A Theory of Human Motivation,
then Chomsky, several titles,
here is Rollo May, “the father of existential psychotherapy,”
and the renowned Leon Festinger (A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance), who researches the way in which disharmony between belief and behavior leads to psychological tension that makes people change their convictions to justify their present behavior, which many of Andreas’s former colleagues acknowledge, while at the same time they succumb to farcical proselytism. Festinger also writes about how groups exert pressure on the individual with the intention of breaking him, of compelling him to succumb to their collective norms and aims, the “schooling” that Andreas Ban has been through several times, including now, at this university.
William McDougall on human behavior, then
Gordon Allport on personality psychology and on various aspects of opportunistic behavior.
Adler, a heap of Adlers on individual psychology,
Ellis, Albert Ellis — The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT),
four books by Karen Horney, two in English, two in an appalling translation into “Montenegrin.”
He could give someone this Milton Erickson on hypnotherapy,
the behaviorist Hans Eysenck had never interested him,
Harry F. Harlow studies the behavior of monkeys and children’s psychology — for the trash,
the complete works of Freud, in the original and translations, also individual editions, too much Freud,
Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious,
Kurt Koffka, Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt Theory,
William James, Principles of Psychology I & II,
Jung, lots of Jung, scribbled on, with comments in the margins, why was all that Jung necessary?
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, and several other Russells not in this pile, where are they?
Oh, Gustav Le Bon, and his déjeuners du mercredi with Valéry, Bergson, Poincaré and others, The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind,
then old Abraham Myerson — The Foundations of Personality,
here is the now blind Elliot Aronson with his famous books The Social Animal and Social Psychology,
Fromm, complete works, some in Serbian: Psychology and Religion, The Art of Loving, Escape from Freedom,
some in English: Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths, The Sane Society, Socialist Humanism, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and so on, bye-bye, dear Fromm,
and here is R. D. Laing,
stop, Andreas, enough.
It is getting dark, Andreas’s back hurts, he stirs himself with difficulty, turns onto his knees and crawls on all fours to the pile of philosophical titles, here are Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic), here is Heidegger, Being and Time, Husserl is here, and David Hume, and Descartes, oh, Lord, le temps perdu, and Marcuse, and Merleau-Ponty, and Marx, and Kristeva, and Todorov, and Bauman, and Kołakowski, Kierkegaard and Jaspers, to whom Andreas Ban returned a few months ago, he kept going back to many of them until recently, until three or four years ago, so many people had sat on his shelves and called to him, talked to him, so many years, forty, spent pointlessly, in having frightened students gaze at him inanely, stare at him and mouth incoherent phrases they had learned by heart, students who had no clue what he was telling them (because that was not in the curriculum, in which most of the content had been absurdly curtailed, ground up, modified, disconnected, the whole world presented out of context, out of time, senselessly), and so Andreas Ban sees his petty teaching career as a thirteen-year act of self-defecation, as the ultimate destruction of his physical, psychological and intellectual being.
What Andreas Ban would most like now would be to burn all these books together with their authors, most of whom are in any case already dead. Today there is barely room for them in the world. Trash is squeezing out his fellow travelers, just as it is squeezing out him, Andreas Ban, too. In many homes there are ever fewer shelves, and if there are any they are used for displaying little gondolas, model churches, ashtrays, pebbles and miniature cacti. Booklets, hundreds of booklets are now loaded onto e-readers, which their owners peck at in airports, on beaches, in cafés, to pass the time.
Why bother with the secondhand shop. His books might be bought by some other lost souls, already damaged, half deranged, but most probably they would not be bought by anyone.
Andreas Ban opens the window of his room high up on the fourth floor (no elevator) and from the nearest pile of rejected books he takes one at a time and starts to tear out pages. Off goes Dostoevsky, off goes Bernhard, off goes Montaigne, so Andreas Ban dismembers his former companions, philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, poets, off goes Tsvetaeva, off goes Gombrowicz, off goes Kafka, like weightless black-and-white birds they all fly toward the polluted sky, then abruptly plunge onto the flat space in front of his building where the garbage bins stand. Andreas Ban could fly off after them, fly with them, but long ago, in the twenties of the last century, in the smoky Paris cabaret Au Lapin Agile, Pierre Mac Orlan whispers to the despairing Utrillo: My dear Maurice, melancholics don’t kill themselves, so Andreas Ban declines.
He feels like playing, but he has nothing to play with. In the course of his life he collected no objects other than books. And glasses. He has a collection of old glasses from everywhere, bought at flea markets all over the world and in upscale antique shops. He sometimes washes them and admires their sheen. Through these glasses Andreas Ban looks at reality which curls and twists gaily, in which objects and phenomena of various colors dance, distorted as in some surreal dabbling. What a collection! Goblets, odd wine glasses, robust tumblers for water and chunky beer glasses, delicate little liqueur glasses, champagne flutes, all in different dimensions but all with fine, thin rims, there are Bristol blue glasses, a tall black and a tall white glass of avventurina, a lattimo glass water tumbler and one of Andreas’s favorites: a pink glass made in 1896 for the Millennium Exhibition in Budapest, bought with Elvira, for Elvira, in a remote shop in Szentendre one autumn of love.
He shuts his cabinet.
He did not even collect stamps, or brochures, long ago he used to collect postcards with reproductions of the works of famous and not so famous painters, at the time when he still visited international museums and exhibitions, three large boxes lie in the storeroom, he dragged them too from Belgrade! Oh, Andreas.
Benjamin collected objects, Benjamin collected toys. They say (experts write) that this was B
enjamin’s creative project. Bullshit. They say Benjamin as a collector was filling some kind of void, what kind of void? In their repetitiveness, Benjamin’s “voids” resist any collector’s passion, ever present, no collection can be placed inside them other than the ruins which they had always been. The “wise heads” rattle on about “the life story” that pulsates in collected objects, about memory, about history. They say Benjamin wants to reify the past, Benjamin sees in the collector an obsessive compulsion toward the reification of the legacy of the past, transforming it into a vast wealth of valuable goods, goods that have no monetary worth but nonetheless represent invaluable treasure. Oh, Lord.
Benjamin is playing, Benjamin is evoking childhood, and in the objects he collects, shifting them in his hands like pieces of a broken puzzle, he tries to step out of the world of memory into the world of dreams, which turns out to be impossible. For two cold winter months, from December 1926 to February 1927, Benjamin walks around Moscow digging up his days in search of a sense of existence, to save himself, rescue himself, redeem humanity — and into his intimate collection, his jumbled collection, he inscribes both the past and the present and his doomed future:
When he is not resting in his Moscow room reading Proust and nibbling little marzipan sweets, Benjamin visits toy stores, besieges toy museums, searches the streets, finds, examines, buys and stores in his trunk (in his memory):
carousels with movable figures of horsemen,
a little girl on a swing,
a wet nurse with a baby in her arms,
dancers made of clay and wood,
musicians made of porcelain.
He buys a miniature wooden sewing machine whose needle is moved by a special handle,
a little lacquered box for various trinkets,
he buys a papier-mâché doll that sways on top of a music box
I saw a boy on the street carrying a board with stuffed birds