For The Love Of Being...

Part ONE

I

I make my appearance at the beginning of the second last year of the fifties , thanks to my parents and to the euphoria of the universal exhibition of Brussels in 1958. Maman suffers from mononucleosis during her pregnancy. The doctor advises her to remain on her back in order to have any chance of keeping me, which she does willingly. Her father, Achille, who has no one else any more at that time, suggests she lets nature take its course. For once, Maman does not listen to him, and takes this pregnancy to term. She thus gives me life for the second time. As a result of her illness, I am born with a cardiac malformation. Professor Blom operates on me at the Akademisch Ziekenhuis university hospital in Leyden and gives me life for the third time before the age of six. This operation is only possible at that time in South Africa and in Holland. For obvious reasons of economy and pure logic, my parents choose the Netherlands. It is very interesting to note the presence of South Africa in the options proposed for this open heart surgery. This is the very first time that this country presents itself as part of my destiny. This is its first gentle attempt at interference with my child’s heart.

I start my school career, like my brother Andre, close to home in a small local private catholic school, next to the church of the parish of Rosaire. I remember having been lucky enough to come first in class, for the first and only time in my life, in my second year of primary school. My friend, the pupil I dethrone in so doing, cannot cope with this insult and leaves the school. I am really hurt by this. Nonetheless, it is with real nostalgia that I remember Madame Roger, our teacher from the Congo, who enables me to accomplish this feat at that time. Thus Africa enters my life for the first time in the pragmatic sense, hand in hand with Madame Roger and her devotion to teaching and academics.

My brother and I share our room and our games until he starts university. He is profoundly good. His intelligence and his curiosity are insatiable. He has a voracious appetite for any kind of knowledge and does not hesitate to venture off the beaten track which he often considers far too comfortable. Listening to others becomes his default mode and will later take over his files and his office. Order burdens him. The combination of this curiosity and his sense of others makes him as surprising as he is unpredictable. He maintains an uncompromising idealism. He will never give up nor be able to accept the poverty of our condition and chooses thenceforth to always believe the best of everyone to lessen his pain. Up until not long before his death he gives his ear to the most desperate by volunteering, amongst other things, on a night-time telephone helpline once a week. We are proud of one another and remain so. He departs surrounded by those who love him, prevented, thanks to the decline of his faculties, from being mentally present at his own demise. Andre will never see himself leave, or be aware of his departure. He entrusts life to Augustin, Nicolas, Jerome and all of theirs to come. Thank you, Sophie, for having helped him in this.

As he leaves the church, the place he chooses to bid us goodbye, a spontaneous standing ovation sends him on his way and my tears flow. Born of sadness, they take shelter almost immediately in emotion and in pride. Thank you, Carine, for having loved him so much.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

I am twelve years old when the virus strikes. I remember the tramway and its smells of wet dog mixed with fetid emanations of the flesh. It allows me to wander from gallery to gallery in the centre of Brussels and to shorten my journey as I dodge the wind, the rain and the storms.

At the time I am unaware of the deep, primordial, ancestral reasons for this mad journey, even though they are rooted in me, as if predestined, going back several generations.

It is during this time that I meet Andre Szabo. He is exhibiting some of his works of a moribund surrealism at the L’Ecuyer gallery on Avenue Louise. Owing my recent awakening to art, to this movement and more precisely to Rene Magritte’s masked apples and Salvador Dali’s melting watches, I am delighted to find him still in his prime, gliding along our pavements. Andre Szabo has a studio in rue de l’Arbre bénit , sheltered by the roof of a typical Brussels house. I visit from time to time. Each time he throws me the keys from the fourth floor so as not to have to climb up and down the stairs each time the bell rings. One Sunday morning he draws my portrait and, in the process, places a Rembrandt van Rijn-style hat on top of my thirteen year old boy›s hairstyle as his way of giving expression to my desire to be the sort of artist I will unfortunately never have the courage to become. I have just rediscovered this little portrait at my parents› home, with joy, tenderness and melancholy. [ 251 ]( page number of the artwork ). It is part of my initiation to this world which was about to envelop me.

André Szabo decides it is high time that I start attending the Sunday morning pictorial technique course at the academy. However, he wants me to remain as free as possible in the midst of this rather academic training. We make an appointment with André Lyre, the director of the fine arts academy of Bois-fort, during which André insists emphatically that I should be given total creative freedom. Monsieur Lyre confirms that this is possible. Almost every Sunday morning for two years and in complete freedom, I draw and paint apples, bottles, hands or funeral masks, oblivious to, or unaware of, the beautiful, voluptuous women undressing nearby so as to confront us with their proportions, the movement of their beauty or the curve of a breast. I have wonderful memories of this time as well as of the magnificent and very specific smell of the painters› studio which is added to the smell of hospitals at this exact time in my olfactory pantheon. Without any doubt, this period forms an integral part of the foundation of my future emotions.

At dinnertime one evening, in the midst of a family conversation, I talk about an exhibition which has particularly excited me. I mention the artist’s name and Maman asks me to tell her about this man she does not know. With the insolence of youth I retort : ‘Maman, don’t tell me you don’t know him ; don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him.’ These words really arouse Maman’s interest and that evening she decides there and then that she will never let me take her by surprise like this again. I am unaware that I have just engendered forty years of passion. Maman immediately starts doing courses on contemporary art. She will continue to do so for over thirty years. Today her knowledge is immense. Nevertheless Maman always remains discreet, reserved and quiet. She will only answer a question when addressed to her. She is invited by Herman Liebaerts to apply to become a member of the commission he heads up : the Commission for Art in Travel Infrastructure. This commission has to give its opinion on all art projects in the regional networks of Brussels. Maman courteously declines. She can’t see herself defending a work in public, addressing journalists or being criticised in the press for one or other of their choices. Maman chooses to remain private and I totally respect this decision. Nonetheless, her adventure in the discovery of contemporary art has allowed us to share a passion. What a privilege for a mother and for a son !

I play a lot of bridge and follow the instruction dispensed by the Jesuit Fathers at the College Saint Michel from my fifth year at primary school. These two very different and yet complementary pursuits do wonders for my early learning. The foundation for the latter is secured by my parents’ attentive monitoring, by their love and by their example. I will always be grateful to them, to cite but one example, for having stood up to the head of the college with a moderation matched only by their firmness. He had called them to discuss a concern he had on my behalf. He tells them at the meeting, without any preamble, that the atmosphere at the tennis club we frequent is in strict contrast to the ethical views of the college they have chosen for my brother Andre and my-self. He asks my parents directly to consider removing us from this perverse and loose atmosphere. My parents respond by telling him they are extremely grateful for the quality and the quantity of the teaching given by the college between the hours of eight and five. However, in their opinion, it is also important, that we be exposed to other sounds, tastes and sights and that life should confront us with other angles, approaches and relationships, whether it be at the fine arts academy, on the tennis courts and football fields or around the bridge table. At the time, I am not aware of the importance of this parental determination and refusal. I do not realise the role this will play in helping me get my sea legs to enable me to face the storms of life.

The choice of a college for the education of her sons takes precedence for Maman over the choice of her husband, our father, Papa. For this I will remain forever grateful to her. There is no doubt that the school and college years are seminal and essential. They give us a broad outline of ourselves and make us into the people we will become. University, on the other hand, for a limited number of us, delivers amongst other things a certain approximate knowledge of the manuals specific to our chosen or recommended sectors of activity, just as technical training serves as apprenticeship for artisans and those in services, agriculture or industry. The deep foundations of the developing person, the core, are for their part determined by education, family, the socio-cultural milieu and circumstances. They are very often solidly anchored in us before the age of eighteen. Thereafter this developing person will be able to grow and consolidate, find their place or their role within the mesh of our society in qualifying for a chosen field, provided they can gain access to it and maintain it.

The Jesuits, Greco-Latin Humanities and my failure in the finals of Rhetoric, as much as my family, my friends and my aspirations, all generously helped to lay out the rough plan for my future. Art would be my passion, Architecture my profession… and being my reason for living.

II

The asteroid Chicxulub has just shattered the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. We are…. We are already in the process of becoming. We are sixty six million years ago.

This impact leaves a crater about two hundred kilometres in diameter and to the best of my knowledge precipitates one of the first, if not the first genocide on our planet. This catastrophe, coupled with the climate change caused by the volcanic activity at the time and the resulting release of vast quantities of sulphur and CO2, signs the definitive death warrant of the dinosaurs, eradicating them forever from our fauna. The milieu is no longer able to support their existence; it is no longer compatible with them. Chaos, in a constant state of flux, always ends up surviving, give or take a few victims. Such is life.

None of us can at this stage foresee or realise the importance of this event. We are still in too premature a stage of our genetic evolutionary gestation. It remains, nonetheless, the key element in our prehistory which will one day enable ‘Little Foot’ [ 193 ]or the brothers of the Taung child [ 37 ]to aspire to assert their claim as dominant species and ‘First General Caretaker’ of our planet Earth. This seize of power, this signing on, will take time. Day after day, almost sixty three million years separate the disappearance of the dinosaurs from the crowning of ‘Little Foot’, contemporary of Lucy, and the Taung child, five hundred thousand years later as new masters on our northern portion of the old rock. An in-depth study by the French National Institute for Archaeological and Preventive Research ( INRAP ) and the University of the Witwatersrand was recently able to establish and conclude with more certainty, by examining the different traces in the surrounding environment, that ‘little foot’ goes back more than three million years. This study, along with the conclusions of Laurent Bruxelles of INRAP, facilitates a better understanding of the biped and allows us to situate the

‘cradle of humanity’ not in Ethiopia but in South Africa. ( source : L‘Express 19 March 2014 )

The Taung child disappears at an early age, preyed on by leopard or golden eagle, depending on the source, some two and a half million years before our era, if we use the birth of Christ as our chronological point of reference, as is customary for most of us in our small part of the globe.

It is more or less at this time that the Ples family finds itself in Sterkfontein.

It only takes a million years, give or take a few, for their progeny to learn to make fire. This new technical prowess is then quickly adapted to numerous uses. Amongst other things, it enables them to protect themselves and to distance themselves, literally as much as figuratively, from other members of the animal kingdom.

Barely forty thousand years ago some amongst them, authentic precursors of our high priests, ambassadors interceding with a ‘Chaos of a Higher Order’, immortalise their talent. They draw, conceiving the desire to be known, to be seen by who knows what benevolent ‘Grand Architect’, on the walls of their caves in the cradle of humanity. They express, share and celebrate their shamanic trances as if interceding with some supreme authority to bring success to their hunting. His expertise, regardless of the realm of their request, of our quests, must be infinite, since such is our ignorance.

Fear of tomorrow or of others, fear of losing our tenuous hold on daily necessities, our environment as well as our joy of living, already urges us to intercede with one who is ‘outside the limits of our puny level of perception’ lest we lose ourselves, lest we lose our very reason for being.

So the high priests set about drawing with flare, painting on the bare rock whilst others invent our first Gods to calm the clan. They are watching over us. Do not fear… the rain will bless us and the next hunt will enable us to feed the clan.

These fears, arising from our ignorance about death, suffering, climatic, terrestrial or marine conditions, are the real mothers of our gods. It is essential, vital to calm the clan. A group can quickly become unmanageable if it remains without recourse. This fear of the unknown, fear of the other quickly induced us to name every thing and every being, to label them. This act of putting into boxes, putting into drawers, into files, pigeon holes, computer files reassures us and offers us the illusion of calm which we continue to crave. This act of naming or defining allows us to reassure ourselves and convince ourselves prematurely that we have made progress in our knowledge or in our levels of perception. However, the essential questions live on and remain fundamentally unanswered. This gulf remains infinite.

Amongst many other reasons for being, the animal scenes depicted in our rock paintings reveal this need to identify the other, whatever the species, so as to no longer fear them. We know them; we can recognise and identify them. By drawing the animal, cousin Ples subjugates it in a sense. The hunt will now be easier and the clan will be spared from hunger. Furthermore, a new kind of distance , following on from the distance created by fire, is thus clearly affirmed and expressed. The high priests that are our first artists henceforth accede to their extraordinary place in human society. They are, to paraphrase Wiener, nothing less than a pure and simple necessity .

Already, in the cradle of humanity, art is political. It addresses the clan so to increase its chances of survival, to facilitate its permanence, and still today it continues to raise questions and makes us think, more than forty thousand years later.

The successors of the brothers and sisters of the Taung child and of the Ples family become the people we have recognised or defined as San, Hottentot or Bushman, hunter gatherers in this region for the vast majority of the time which separates them from our era.

It is only around the beginning of our era, approximately, that the good life on the southern tip of Africa starts to wane. Until that time over the course of four or five hundred centuries the San and their predecessors develop a vast knowledge of the flora and fauna around them. For over forty thousand years

they live in a state of harmonious imbalance with their environment. Some could call it Paradise, but this word has too many implications today for me to use it here. What is certain is that they, alone, can claim to be the people of South Africa [ 258 ]. All those who follow them, regardless of race or origin, will only do so by migration, invasion, oppression, coups, struggles, war or strife.

Forty thousand peaceful years after the first rock paintings, the frugal and perfectly adequate modus vivendi of the little people of this part of the continent becomes exposed to a terrible new threat : socio-cultural interbreeding. Successive hybridisation will, on the one hand condemn the San to mix, integrate or to a large extent disappear, and on the other hand to give in to what we have jointly and too simplistically termed progress, allowing us to confront in small doses the fabulous and devastatingly sad realities of today. Only a few small groups of San still survive. Nevertheless, they remain one of the fourteen original groups of individuals from which every man currently present on our planet descends.

Our technological, medical, industrial and scientific progress is largely the result of this cross-breeding, further accelerated in our era by the immediate access to information which the latest advances in communications technology have facilitated. Even the need to travel to attend a meeting, an interview or an exchange of ideas has all but become obsolete, although nothing can replace real human contact. What does it matter how fast we reach New York from Paris, Brussels or Johannesburg if we are not greeted with a smile on arrival ?

…but the dwarf answered : No, something human is dearer to me than the wealth of the world. Grimm Tales

Cross-breeding has had the effect of providing answers to so many unasked questions at the cost of a slow, progressive and profound merging of groups in a frenzy of consumerism fuelled by the dictates of a vulgar and totalitarian capitalism.

Each day we lose a little more of our identity and we become mired in a global mass, constantly searching for a socio-economic or political solution. This mass that I refer to is the mass of the entitled , those on welfare, spawned by populist, customer-driven politics ( practised throughout the world ), each day increasing our dependence on a system condemned to serve its own sentence : a total collapse.

Politicians, male and female, have only one obsession once in power: to be re-elected. This way they are able to guarantee their economic survival, their pseudo raison d’être, as well as their well-being and the preservation of their clan. Even if they lose power for a cycle and spend a term on the sidelines, an established rule of reciprocity ensures that, by tacit agreement, they will be given other positions to sustain this livelihood they have monopolised.

They will then occupy European posts, head up commissions, become Prefects, sit on the board of a parastatal company or be hired by the most powerful companies in the country as indispensible Machiavellian lobbyists.

This is a far cry from the one true DEMOCRACY, born in Greece, the source of its etymology : the power of the people . During the Athens era, the Bouleutai or council of five hundred, were elected by lottery. They could only be elected for two non-consecutive mandates, thereby excluding the possibility of making this their career. They were guided by the interest and long term future of the group and not by the hope of being re- elected and remaining in power. Whenever those in charge of managing or organising a social system are able to be re-elected, they will work out exactly what to do to ensure their re-election. They will quickly identify which people to buy so as to guarantee their own survival.

Which of our politicians or political parties have envisaged a new kind of society, be it in Johannesburg or Paris? Which of them has had or will have the courage to question the foundations of a system which allows their clan to carry on with impunity while wrecking our children’s future ? Indeed, which of them will cut the branch they sit on so that a fresh new society can blossom, in which being will be able to regain its noble place ?

Who else would dream of granting themselves such improbable economic latitude? Only our rulers can negotiate the debt spiral with such agility and impunity, never having to confront their bankers, creditors or judges. They neither seek nor receive psychological help to escape the bottomless pit they dig for themselves, puffed up by overconfident complacency and self importance. These well diggers from all parties, ministers and presidents alike, have bought our loyalty, with allocations, subsidies, sickness and disability insurance, birth incentives, free education and pensions. ( This list is obviously far from complete ). They do not have the slightest outline of an idea how to slow down this runaway train without precipitating mass protests and upheaval in the streets. What are the masses waiting for ? Let them protest. Let them break free and learn to walk without crutches, like before. We need to regain our autonomy as a matter of urgency, to once again become responsible for and beholden to ourselves, society and the life which has been entrusted to us.

It is high time that we change direction. The systems have been exhausted and will be incapable of keeping their populist promises. It is time to put the horse before the cart again and to regain our humanity by getting rid of the poles propping up our dependence. It is time to replace the global responsibility vested in society or in those who govern it with our own. We must as a matter of urgency change What can society do for me? into What can I do for society? as JFK proposed over fifty years ago in his inaugural speech on becoming President of the United States. Let us forget our welfare mentality and let’s find within ourselves the individual resources and capacities to personally participate in the best possible future for man, with passion if this still resonates within our hearts. Let’s again learn how to be, before we learn slavishly to do so as to have….

Let us also learn day by day to practice goodness, compassion, tolerance and respect for others as well as non-interference. Let’s begin to re-examine each of our gestures, our actions. Let’s assess them qualitatively. Let’s forget the quantitative. This way great poverty lies. As Saint Augustine advises, let’s learn to always want what we have been given and what we therefore already have.

Let us, as soon as possible, abandon this buffet mentality which has been ours for centuries. Most of us, confronted with a buffet, will help ourselves to a gigantic plateful, Gargantuan, dare I say Pantagruelian. It›s free! Everything is free. Let›s eat and drink. Leaving a half full glass and a plate still laden, we go home hardly proud of ourselves to spend an uncomfortable night at least, or worse to contemplate the pieces of evidence of our indigestion.

Let us not treat life and its precious imbalance with its environment like our plate at the buffet table. The future of man, of humanity, of the life that has been entrusted to each and every one of us depends upon it.

Day after day our governments strive to diminish us, to make us dependent, to turn us into human wrecks, or flaccid molluscs, to the point of betraying ourselves three times before the cock crows. They think they can keep us in this state of systemic dependence.

They go as far as to perniciously use teaching to this end: inscribe, engrave, and anchor firmly within us and as soon as possible a belief in our enslavement, our incapacity and our dependence on the all-powerful system which they represent, as our only recourse. They even have the audacity to try to mislead us under the false pretext that the eradication of a potential elite would lead to more equality. What nonsense ! What a lie ! What hypocrisy ! What a crime ! What treachery ! How vulgar ! How base !

They have the effrontery to summon us to the polls, to give us the impression of choice, the idea that we have any influence at all on the way our countries are governed, with an arrogance that is deeply ironic [ 34