That evening, after reading, his father came up to the attic, which he hadn’t done in years. The son was shocked to see tears in his father’s eyes. “You have a great talent,” his father supposedly whispered, pulling his son into a rare embrace. “I’m sorry to have doubted you.”
According to court transcripts, the son was so bewildered by his father’s reaction that he simply said, “You have just dismissed Kafka,” and struck him on the head with a large wrench. The father died hours later in a local hospital.
Probably as a result of the trial publicity, a national magazine actually agreed to publish the murderer’s short story next week. I’m eager to see it. It is reportedly hugely derivative, but not of Kafka.
54: EXPLOITATION
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A leading American photographer of the latter half of the twentieth century, whose artistic career had been financed by his father’s once-famous but now-shuttered Fifth Avenue department store, Kern’s, achieved his greatest success with a series of frank, ruthless photographs chronicling his father’s senescence, including that legendarily wrenching shot of the frugal old man scrubbing, without the slightest show of emotion, his soiled undergarments in his bathroom sink. In a brief artist’s statement the photographer said simply that the work was an attempt to “understand my father and my relation to him.”
Thirty years later, the photographer, now roughly the age his father had been in those photographs, declared that he intended to buy back from galleries, collectors, and museums each and every one of them. He spent the rest of the still-considerable Kern’s fortune in doing so. Then he piled the photographs in a barn on his Berkshires farm and set the barn on fire.
The media descended. Every newspaper in the world tried to interview him. He turned down all of them but his local weekly, the Lenox Ledger. Here the photographer explained his realization that under the guise of trying to “understand” his father, he had merely exploited him. Throughout his career, he told the interviewer, whenever he said that he wanted to understand something (through his art), he really meant that he wanted to exploit it (for his art). There was nothing to understand about his father, there was only something about him to exploit. There was certainly nothing to understand about death, the other ostensible subject matter of the photographs, only something to artistically exploit. And so forth. Everyone, he said, but in particular artists, humanists, journalists, social scientists, and natural scientists, ought to banish the word “understand” from their vocabularies and replace it in every instance with the word “exploit.”
The photographer died of a brain tumor the following week.
The world consists of nothing but cheap ironies: really, only the cheapest. So no sooner had the eminent photographer excoriated the concept of “understanding” and died of his tumor than the world — especially the art world, the media world, and the academic world — erupted in attempts to understand him and his motives for destroying his greatest works of art. (No one, needless to say, took him at his word.) A couple of neuroscientists emerged to explain, more or less, that the photographer’s tumor had impinged on the portion of the brain normally responsible for preventing people from burning down their own art-filled barns. A woman with, inexplicably, a TV show conjured up out of almost nothing several decades of child abuse, both of the photographer by his father and by the photographer of his own son. But the most convincing explanation — convincing, I admit, even to me, despite my sympathy for the photographer’s rant — came from one jaundiced critic writing online at the New Yorker. Drawing attention to the man’s declining reputation in recent decades, including the almost total neglect of his career retrospective the previous year at MoMA, the critic suggested that the destruction of his greatest photos was actually the photographer’s final exploitation of his father — one last, desperate bid for immortality, which he’d come to realize would not issue from the photos themselves. By burning the photographs of his father, he was trying to ensure his permanent notoriety. The critic proposed seeing the photographer’s career as three successive exploitations of his father and his father’s department store: first as funding, then as subject matter, then, finally, as “combustible material for his eternal flame,” which, the critic predicted rather coldly, would actually “burn out within ten or fifteen years.”
55: PEACE PLAN
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The insane son of the Israeli prime minister and the insane son of the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, patients at the same Jerusalem psychiatric hospital, have accomplished what their supposedly “sane” fathers have never been able to: they have agreed on a peace plan for the Middle East. Although the peace plan makes little sense and seems not to refer to the world in which we live, the simple act of these two men, one Jewish and one Muslim, both profoundly psychotic, meeting in the TV room every single day and shaking hands for up to twenty-five minutes at a time while chanting, in unison, at the top of their lungs, the demented terms of their “peace plan”—this simple act may, we hope, serve as an inspiration to their fathers.
56: THE INVERTED PYRAMID
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In January, the Stupendous Bosches, a family of acrobats celebrated for their “inverted pyramid” trick, collapsed while performing the inverted pyramid at a circus in Bremen. Six Bosches across three generations were killed.
Only the bottom Bosch, the tip of the inverted pyramid, survived.
This happened on the very same day, at the same hour, that Professor Pasternak, the distinguished mathematician whose family had long ago formulated the Pasternak Problem in combinatorics, leaped to his death from the top of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
Professor Pasternak was survived by his son, a fellow mathematician.
There was, of course, no reason to suspect a link between these two tragedies. But when Bremen police spoke to the bottom Bosch, and Petersburg police spoke to Professor Pasternak’s son, they made an unlikely discovery: the bottom Bosch was a Pasternak, and the last Pasternak was a Bosch. Police in both cities were stumped, and neither Bosch nor Pasternak would say another word.
Berlin’s best detectives were sent to Bremen. How had a Russian mathematician infiltrated their nation’s most beloved upside-down acrobatic configuration? Moscow dispatched its best detectives to Petersburg. How had a German acrobat infiltrated their nation’s most esteemed mathematics department?
Eventually it emerged that Bosch, the youngest son of the Bosch acrobatic clan, and Pasternak, the youngest son of the Pasternak mathematical dynasty, had met by chance on a riverboat cruise of the River Daugava in Riga, where one (Bosch) had come to perform with his family’s circus act, and the other (Pasternak) had come to speak on his family’s problem at a combinatorics conference.
According to a Latvian computer programmer who was also on the cruise, the two men were initially amused by their physical resemblance, which was striking, Bosch’s beard notwithstanding. They started talking, comparing their respective responsibilities as the most recent offshoots of two legendary families.