Cremer, Jan. Ik Jan Cremer. De Bezige Bij, 2014. ‘I cup my hands in water, splash water on empty space water drunk by empty space Look what thoughts will do Look what words will do from nothing to the face from nothing to the root of the tongue from nothing to speaking of empty space’ From 'Makeup on Empty Space' by Anne Waldman When Ik Jan Cremer was published in 1964, it both shocked and enchanted its conservative Dutch readers: the uncensored tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll by the enfant terrible of the Dutch art world, Jan Cremer, sold millions of copies and was simultaneously branded ‘an atrocious cruelty’ by a Dutch prime minister and a ‘dungheap’ by a national newspaper (The New York Times, in a more level-headed review, called it ‘a pop book’). Reading it in 2017, I struggled with it. I found his rebellion bordering on the tedious. Take, for example, his ten-page rant on the virtues of taking a shit in public spaces, preceded by the announcement ‘I am sitting on the toilet of an international train and the Dutch landscape whizzes past underneath my ass’ – at one point, the reader runs out of steam. More problematic yet: Jan Cremer’s rather loud writing drowns out any and all female voices; his novel is a masculine landscape peopled with hundreds of mute lovers. At best, the narrator Jan Cremer’s diatribe on shit (and sex, and prostitution, and travel, and of life lived at the expense of himself and others), is a tool of defiance, a reaction against the mores of conservative post-war Dutch society; at worst, his thinking has not evolved much past Freud’s ‘Anal Stage’ and he believes his various forms of shit are ‘gifts’ we readers are more than happy to accept (Freud’s theories, not mine). Or maybe I have become tired of the category ‘Men That Must Speak Loudly’, subset of ‘Universal Gifts to Mankind’: Freud, Jan Cremer, Trump, Kevin Spacey, the man at the Post Office, Rupert Murdoch, our new minister of Justice, the man who told me where not to park my car. But this is not a review, nor is it a rant. If you would like a review, Google will do just fine (I just finished reading a rather inspired summary of Ik Jan Cremer by a high school student, in which they call it the most ‘fascinating book they have ever read’ but complain about the small size of the font). If you would like more ranting about loud men, pick up any liberal newspaper or spend a few minutes on Twitter (exclamation marks always do the trick). This is what I learned from Ik Jan Cremer: big mouths hide small hearts. Or rather, it is a familiar wisdom the novel re-confirmed. This is a family axiom as well as a family grievance, most often aired by my mother after social gatherings; we are usually on one line and the saying does not need to come with a name in order for both of us to know whom it concerns. Freely interpreted: loud statements, louder talking, aggressive conversation, posturing (the works), are often compensation for a heart harboring a lifetime of uncertainty. It is the glimpse of hesitation when the shouting gets loudest; it is the unexpected emotion when arrogance seems the only option; it is indecision when they have so loudly declared to have everything figured out. It is applicable to both men and women; admittedly, however, it is more often seen in and applied to the former by my mother and I. And it is this saying which formed a chorus in my head while reading Ik Jan Cremer, and one which would not accept disregard. Because amongst the whoring, and the posturing, and the drinking, and the shitting too, the reader is unexpectedly shown a different side. Cremer joins the Foreign Legion (he reckons the pay in the Legion will allow him the opportunity to ‘eat, drink, drink beer, drink a lot of beer, delicious cold beer, and go to the movies’), and while on duty in Algeria he says: 'Where do I feel at home? I have been running after myself for four years. […] I am a shy searcher. At night, when I am keeping watch, it grows quiet around me. Then I no longer know who I am. […] The world is so spacious. Do you reckon we are living on top of the earth or inside of it?' In this passage, and other rare passages like it, Cremer shows his reader the small heart behind the big mouth, the moment of hesitation when the brawn seems absolute. The question where on earth we reside as humans is disarming: might it be our planetary hegemony is an illusion? And it is these passages that made me think: where do big mouths come from? Surely, we are not born with them: infants are born free of the wily ways of adults, the capability of hiding feeling behind talk – so at which juncture does a big mouth become a necessity or a reality? Which brings me back to Freud. Not the man himself (admittedly, my relationship with his work, and particularly his attitude towards women, is frosty), but rather, to two researchers who engaged with and nuanced his work and his legacy: his youngest daughter, Anna Freud, and her partner (in life and in work) Dorothy Burlingham. Burlingham lived and worked with the Freuds in Austria; they were forced to leave continental Europe in favor of London as World War II approached and the Nazi party grew in power. The women focused their research on the childhood years, and spent many years running the Hampstead Clinic. Freud and Burlingham took a psychological interest in the mechanisms of war: in 1943 they published War and Children. Written during wartime, it show a conscious engagement with the effect war has on the psyche of children: quietly revolutionary if we consider that now, more than 70 years after the end of that war (and countless in the meantime), small and large traumas are still being revealed daily, and we are continually re-assessing the long-term impact of war on psyche. War and Children and Ik Jan Cremer: an unexpected and asynchronous alliance, with the former shedding light on the latter. Jan Cremer (the author and the narrator) was born into and grew up during the same war which forced Freud and Burlingham to desert Austria. The very young Cremer and his mother are imprisoned several times: her thick Hungarian accent and foreign heritage mean both the German occupier during the war as well as the Dutch Resistance liberators after the war distrust her. In captivity, Cremer asks his mother what kind of game the ‘minders’ are playing with the prisoners they occasionally separate from the rest of the group. His mother says ‘it was a very dirty game (and I thought it dirty too, but not as dirty as picking your nose)’. Read in the context of the book, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that this comparison of a wartime ‘game’ and picking your nose approaches the irreverent. After all, Ik Jan Cremer is carried by its own irreverence. In Freud and Burlingham’s approximation, however, this episode would have taken on deeper meaning: according to their theories, a child’s moral compass develops in early childhood, and experiences with the outside world may sway the compass this way or that. They state: 'Instead of turning away from them [instances of destruction] in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction raging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness which rages in the inside of the child.' My interest is less in the hard psychology this reading might provide (or even if this psychology theory still has medical traction today), but more in the moral repercussions. Are children born wild and aggressive, or innocent? Certainly, in war, this timeless philosophical question is apt to raise its head: are we born essentially evil or essentially good? This dilemma is an underlying current in politics, religion, philosophy; a quandary which continually crashes up against the boundaries of human thinking, from Classical Greece to the Enlightenment to modern philosophy. Much is at stake: does society save us from ourselves, or does it corrupt our innate innocence? Are we (humans as a group, humanity as a whole) to blame for the evils of war, or is it rather the result of some inborn flaw we have a hard time controlling? I digress: these are all, in some way, pre-lingual concerns. Nature versus nurture – a conflict at the very start of a life when wants and needs cannot be yet expressed in words. In any case, Freud and Burlingham err on the side of nature: how will a child learn to control its wild and aggressive impulses if, they conclude, ‘confirmation [is] given from the outside world that the same impulses are uppermost in other people’. In his early years, Cremer is faced with German jailers, Dutch jailers, soldiers in different guises, and teacher after teacher punishing him, castigating him, telling him his art is better exchanged for a rifle and a helmet. The world shows violence; what response can he give, but violence? Violent cursing, violent partying, violent writing of the loudest kind: his big mouth hides a small heart, crucially shaped by the war, by the injustices served to him and his mother, by the post-war vicissitudes of the Netherlands. Posturing obscures doubt. Better to paint the walls and floors of your workshop red, so that the blood of the virgins you take home stays concealed, than to admit that ‘ultimately, I have been chasing myself for 8 years’. I still struggled with Ik Jan Cremer. But I struggled because it was obvious that it was a case of ‘big mouth, small heart’, and a little more self-awareness on the novel’s part would have made it easier to read with compassion. Or at least with understanding. And if all else failed, it would have broken the monotony of the rants on public defecation. But Jan Cremer chose to speak loudly, as many of my contemporaries have. Trump, Putin, Kevin Spacey, Ruper Murdoch, the new finance minister. They too are products of their own times: mid-century America, Russia, Australia, the Netherlands. They are men that were once little boys. I am not asking they be entered in the chronicles of the misunderstood. Compassion may be two or three steps too far. There is always the chance that they are, indeed, narcissists: big mouth, no heart. But there is a chance that they, too, were exposed to violence as a child: organized, domestic, psychological, destructive. There is a chance the world served them castigation, and harmony was nowhere to be found. I am not an idealist: I am not sure redemption is possible. The correct course of action is impeachment, political and social. But a conversation might be had. Freud and Burlingham may yet travel further across the century, from 1943 to 1964 to 2018. I look around me, and our political and social system is run by loud-mouthed men and a masculine sense of order, and underlying this, by violence. Still run by the masculine, would be the plaintive of feminine and queer theorists of the past five decades (here is looking at you, Kristeva and Cixous). Loud mouths, small hearts. A small thinking exercise: who will Barron Trump become if this sense of order remains the norm? Destruction meets destruction. Freud and Burlingham conclude that ‘it must be very difficult for [children] to accomplish this task of fighting their own death wishes when, at the same time, people are killed and hurt every day around them’. Even more difficult if the death and destruction comes from the hand of a parental figure, tasked by the very dint of your birth with showing you the way the world works. But I spend a good amount of time wondering whether, if we chose to do things differently, our world might look different down the line: small heart first, big mouth second. Leading with a different and more vulnerable foot. If we met the challenges ahead of us with our uncertainty, our pain, the basic human condition of ‘I don’t know’ - would the global need for violence diminish? But these are futile thoughts: who amongst us is brave enough to show vulnerability when it is inevitably met with brutality? Read on: Jan Cremer, Ik Jan Cremer Anne Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, War and Children Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ Anne Waldman, ‘Makeup on Empty Space’
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