Chaotic, this was the word my eldest daughter chose to qualify her parents’ life. At first glance, I understand her astonishment as regards our past history. But more profoundly we are all turbulence’s children, driven by the violent winds of history.

Social conflicts have devastated eastern Europe for centuries, as the Tatars systematically captured and abducted hundreds of thousands of slaves in Poland and Russia for their Crimean markets, plundering everything in their way and rendering the vast and fertile plains of the Ukraine desolated and deserted. It is this virgin Ukrainian territory that would call out to my father’s ancestors, of dutch or german origins, who will move there as a community to exploit this abandoned land. Several centuries later, the flow of history will oblige them to relocate to other countries offering similar biotopes , and it is thus that they will leave for the midwest of the United States. They will go through Ellis Island, the major gateway of American immigration, facing the Statue of Liberty. My grandfather’s immigration documents indicate Odessa as his embarkation port. He was two years old. As for my grandmother, the records are even more succinct, her first name is Odessa. The first addresses I can find for them are in the Indian territories of Texas and Oklahoma. Once married, they will continue west and it is thus that my father is born in Los Angeles in 1915.

Other winds are pushing my mother’s ancestors. Oppression and intolerance have pushed them to leave Scotland and England, for some of them in time to participate in the American Revolution of 1776. Misery and poverty forced others from Ireland and Norway. The latter, from my mother’s  grandfather side of the family, took the well established route up the St Laurent in Canada to cross the Great Lakes into Minnesota. All of them will continue westward. And so my mother will be born in Colorado in 1915. Moved by the upheavals of the second world war, my parents will meet in Oregon where, caught by the great wave of hope and enthusiasm which the end of the war unleashed, they will marry. I will be born in Portland, Oregon in 1947.

I began this brief reminder of my origins because I find in this past, in my heritage, a number of values, of qualities, both positive and negative, of atavisms, which have been transmitted from generation to generation and which, to a great extent, make of me what I am today and explain what I have made of my life. These were simple people, hard working, honest, loyal,courageous, ready to throw themselves into the unknown. At the same time, conservative, religious,leaving very little place in their lives for emotions, empathy, beauty, or creativity. Their indifference to suffering, whether it be that of others or themselves, will place constant and imperceptible shackles on my life. This atavistic transmission is still functional in me. It is virtually impossible for me to come across abandoned fields and farm buildings without feeling an irresistible need to clear these fields, to restore the buildings, whatever may be my emotional or professional obligations at the time.

My parents were conservative people, hard working, patriotic, puritain, religious more by convention than by conviction, with that  paralyzing hypocrisy which is characteristic of protestants. They will generate a psychological landscape for me with which I will have to compose to develop my different possibilities. I can only with great difficulty gain access to this period of my life but what comes back to me as a constant leitmotif of my childhood is a rhythm, a systolic pulsation of anguish, rising and falling. A faraway image…. I am laying on my stomach, my movements are reduced to the dorsality of a newborn child. I am in darkness. The door opens, I raise my head , with great effort, so as to see, with this effort dorsal of newborns. A beautiful, heart warming light enters by the slightly opened door, filling me with joy by anticipation. The door closes, silently, and again engulfed in darkness, I sink again into anguish. This schema of a spontaneous ouverture towards my mother which is never met with simplicity but rather responded to with a distanciation, a  manipulating dissymmetry will generate a reaction in me such that all emotional effusions are treated with suspicion and all contacts which tend to establish an emotional exchange, and most especially, any manifestation of suffering, are considered to be a form of manipulation. This « game » if such a word is suitable, subtends our entire relationship,  playing out for birthdays as holidays, Christmas and Easter,with my brother as with my father, who provoked with regularity, would storm out of the house , furious, only to return several hours later, with the penitence of a little boy.

As a counterpoint to this psychological manipulation, which is no doubt the most difficult of all the hurdles confronting a child, a complete pedagogic system which replaced the emotional contact by technology and gave a special emphasis to physical violence as educative. It is thusly that the baby bottle is officially prescribed as a substitute for breastfeeding, that circumcision becomes a medical obligation, as do enemas, always experienced as painful and distressing, that pain becomes an educational tool, whether it be a hidden needle’s prick  to teach small hands not to touch the precious trinkets everywhere on display, or the spankings, applied to our naked buttocks with a specially prepared wooden paddle with enough force to make us howl in pain and plead for mercy.

Yet still, I loved my mother. She used this love to push me as a student, it was she that gave me en enormous capacity for work, the appreciation of work well done, the values of honesty and loyalty. But all that was passed on in such a way that I am inescapably submerged by a wave of anguish at the mere idea of failure, before the possibility of doing something poorly, a disability that has followed throughout my life. Another scene illustrates this well. My family is on a dike at the beach. I have a large emerald green ring on my left hand, much too big and too expensive for a small child, but it is a present from my mother and I wear it everywhere. The ring slips from my finger and falls into the wave swept rocks of the dike. Despite all his efforts, my father can’t find it. I will spend a number of sleepless nights sobbing for this loss. 

And then we moved. I was ten years old and although we were not very far from my old house, I was obliged to change schools.The neighborhood was more difficult and I didn’t make any new friends. This isolation made me plunge obsessionally into the world of books and of study for which I had always been well disposed. Already precocious, I became a very good at all scholastic activities and very poor at anything requiring social skills. The fact that I had jumped a class or two only exacerbated this difficulty and the arrival of adolescence did nothing to facilitate my social adaptation. I was a model student, with perfect grades (all A’s) during the four years of high school. This success won me an invitation to s summer program for advanced students at the University of Southern California at the age of 16. It is here one of those moments where I can see my life bifurcating will occur This study program, which was exciting and stimulating beyond anything I had known in high school, in fact hid a psychological study of gifted students. Nous (the Americans )are in the midst of the Cold War, and the Russians have a certain technological advance over us. After a long series of psychological testing, I am called back for further examinations,for I have been classified as autistic, to such an extent that according to their criteria, I was socially dysfunctional.It is at this moment that a young psychologist who was in charge of these studies will fall in love with me and that one of the most troubling periods of my life will begin. Even today I do not know what to think of this relation. If the Shakespearian sonnets represent passionate love, then Jim and I were a haiku. Our relationship, made of sublimated repressed and hypocritical sexuality on both sides, of admiration for a richer, older, more accomplished, and more experienced man on my part, and of I have no idea what for his, would last two years. I abandoned my university studies so as to work to put aside enough money so as to install ourselves in northern Australia. Our relation unwound itself in a very short span of time, after a relatively minor revelation showed me the mythomaniac nature of this man. Completely disoriented, as a small boat being tugged by a larger craft, I simply cut the ropes and let myself drift away, carried by the current. And in 1966, in the United States, for a young man, the current was very strong. After a year of military preparation, I was apt to go fight in Vietnam.

Vietnam. A puritanical family upbringing, typical of this time, an extreme timidity composed of fear and distrust of all that was feminine, in parallel with this long relation with this man, combined in such a manner that I arrive in Saigon at the age of twenty, a virgin. Stationed at first in the outskirts, and then at Saigon itself, I found myself plunged into this exotic city, teeming with people, full of bright colors, of odors, unknown tastes, of violence, danger, and sex. It was intoxicating for a young man who grew up in an aseptic, sterilized culture.  Retrospectively, I have memories of the brothels of Saigon which is a poorly stirred mix of shame, pity, desire, of an irresistible attraction for this swarming exotic life which was in such sharp contrast with the narrow student’s life that I had just left. To which was added the feeling of belonging, of comradeship,  which came with the shared dangers that the war imposed upon us, and that left behind me my years of isolation off my youth. And, in completion, the great untold secret of the Vietnam war, the exultation, the unbelievable intensity the emotion provoked by the moments of combat.

But after six months, the war would change its appearance for me. I am sent to a new company near the Cambodian border at CuChi where everything would become more intense. After Têt 1968 things became more and more difficult as we fought just to stay in place. That implied a huge increase of physical efforts and the resulting fatigue coupled to the increasing nervous stress of accumulated fear, both  exacerbated by a sentiment of alienation that the evident absurdity of our effort there provoked in us, took their toll. I dragged my machine guns from helicopter to helicopter, worn down by lack of sleep, nervous tension, and once again, a moral solitude. So it was that the days mu fellow soldiers rotated back to the States , having completed their year’s tour, I was in the Yuchi base hospital, laid low by a very high fever, which inexplicably resisted all treatments. Tired of looking for explications, and overrun by an increasing number of wounded soldiers, they sent me back to the States on the first medical plane available. I have very few memories of this long flight. But of the men on it, many. The background sound track was composed of the suffering of all these men, many of them badly wounded, mixed with the throbbing roar of the engines. Lying next to me was a sixteen year old kid who had had his dog tags pushed onto his chest by machine-gun fire, and who spent the entire flight sobbing and calling out to his mother. We at last arrived on the blacktop of Monterey and the plane slowly unloaded its fragile cargo. Some left on foot, limping, on crutches as best they could, many on stretchers, their intravenous bottles and tubes flapping in the wind as a light rain began to fall. One of the last to leave the plane, I see a few old men coming towards us, veterans of some long past war, who try and encourage us with awkward little taps on the shoulders. They had brought with them their granddaughters, teenagers dressed as cheerleaders with miniskirts and pompoms. Manifestly, they had not been prepared for what they were going to discover, for on seeing all of these horribly wounded men they dropped their pompoms and burst into tears. I watch this scene play out distractedly, and then little by little, I am overwhelmed by anger, an anger provoked by the inherent injustice of this reception of these men who sacrificed so much for their country and were thusly welcomed back. Fifty years have gone by since that moment and the anger still remains. That day, I lost my country forever. I was no longer in any sense that implied commitment an American.

The alienation that I had begin to feel towards the end of the year’s stay in Vietnam would intensify once back in the US. The impossibility to communicate with my family, or with my old friends combined to push me to apply for admission at the University of California at Berkeley, near San Francisco so as to continue my interrupted studies of ethnology. There at least things were clear, I knew no-one. It is at Berkeley that will take place the last decisive act of my youth on American soil. More and more perturbed by a variety of easily available drugs ( mescaline, marijuana, LSD) I drifted farther and farther from reality. I entered and exited classrooms to the rhythm of bells (were there really bells at Berkeley in 1968?), like a rat caught up in some sort of colossal sociological experiment.    Occasionally I cross the campus and find myself caught up in violent clashes between police and students, huge protest demonstrations in opposition to the war, shrouded in clouds of tear gas. Like a Shakespearian phantom, I walked through these riotous scenes undisturbed, telling myself distractedly that it was worse than Vietnam here. Things were going to quickly resolve themselves. One sun afternoon, while listening to Kind if Blue by Miles Davis, I am invaded by a feeling of fear of an intensity that I never felt in Vietnam. An interior voice was telling me, « it’s your life, you are free to do what you want with it. » For the first time, I permit myself to choose my own way. My heart was beating at full speed. One week later, having resigned officially from the university, and sold or given all my belongings, I found myself on the edge of the desert outside of San Diego. My mother, who had insisted on accompanying me, will leave me there, the both of us in tears. I would never look back.

This voyage would last five years, with a few stops in summer in Alaska (after two years of travel had emptied my pockets) to replenish my reserves. I loved traveling. All my youthful dreams were fulfilled by ‘the road’. My love of maps, which I had collected since I was old enough to write, a no doubt atavistic desire to see foreign lands, the absence of existential anguish, as long as I kept moving. But there was one more important meeting  that had to take place on my path out of childhood, and it would occur in a small farm in the mountains over St Jean Pied de Port in the Basque country of France. It is here that I will find two books on Treblinka in the tiny municipal library of the village which will telescope into one in my mind. The absolute horror of the German concentration camps of which I knew nothing, the ignominious abjection of the Nazi torturers, would confound themselves in my mind with what I had done in Vietnam and transform my life. An image from Grossman’s book symbolized this complex emotional interaction in me. A young woman and her child, naked both of them, are waiting by night on a railway platform at Treblinka in a scene of indescribable chaotic violence to be led away to their death. 

In the harsh, crude light of this image, literature and philosophy, the two polar stars which guided my searching, faded away and I gave myself the duty of saving this couple, symbolic representation of humanity’s future. I have been running towards them for the last fifty years. To do so, I convinced myself that it was necessary to construct a theory of social evolution,  using Darwin’s theory of evolution as a model et somme principal theme the development of the structural  functions of human violence throughout humanity’s history. Chasing down this holy Graal would have grave and durable consequences for me and those I was closest to. And it is only in the last three years, during a long and very moving journey to visit the different concentration camps, that overwhelmed by emotion at the symbolic platform of Treblinka, I found myself obliged to resign myself to a melancholic acceptance of the fact that this young mother and her child had been put to death well before my birth.

In the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13 of the King James version, he wrote: « When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. » This is how I see this moment of my life, where in this peaceful little basque farm I confronted for the first time, however partially, who I was. Not that in this moment I became an adult, but I ceased to be a child.