Anna Luyten



Anyway, we are no more than impudent whippersnappers

Anna Luyten in conversation with Panamarenko

Translated by Hans Theys



I was playing with my electric train when suddenly I felt a spine-chilling shadow falling over me. "Little boy…" A whispering voice from the crepiest crypts of hell! The Black Widow! "Little boy of mine," my mom whispered in my ear, "Boy? Did you ever ask yorself, did you ever spend one second asking yourself what you want to make out of your life, later?" Those words burnt through me like thunderbolts. I will never forgive my mother for this.

All what I ever did was part of a fight against this philosophy of the workers. Relentlessly I had to cope with the fear they inspire their children everyday: that children had "to become" something one day. But the meaning they give to this "becoming" is so teeny-weeny, so short-sighted, that it seems one supposedly has to become someone who is pleased to kiss the boots of some buffoon of a carpet factory owner.



Our greatest influence is the social environment we grew up in: mom, dad, the children in the street, the schoolmasters. They tell you How and What. They determine what you have to do. Even if this contradicts your inner being. You havre to do it! And you do it. And it lasts fifty years before you realise that you cannot do shit with these directions. I had to kick it all aside. I had to kill it to be able to be something more than a zero.

Pope, director of a bank… I have never imagined to find but one job in the world that would really please me.

I have worked in a telephone company for one day. They kicked me out. Not because I was a pain in the ass, but because they discovered that I still had to go to the army. I participated in an entrance exam. I was a rather good draw. I also had spent every day in the library of the Conscienceplein instead of attending the classes at the Academy. I had always been busy with electronic stuff, because I have been a whippersnapper looking for novelty at the time of the invention of the transistor. Those people of the phone company suddenly met a boy who could draw telephone relays as if he had invented them himself. But the flipper machnes I had built for pubs to earn some money, worked on those relays. The company hired me immediately. I became the head of ten other people. I came directly from school, but they treated me like a kind of bisshop.

I was very lucky to have been thrown out there, because it demands a tremendous effort to sack oneself.One is struck immediately by the creepy stuff you would have to go through working for such a company. And it is not for one day, you don’t do it for fourteen days, you are not on a holiday, you have to do it for years! One has to forsake oneself. If it’s your goal to reach the centre of the milky-way, anyhow.

It would have been worse if I had had a family. I never was very fond of the idea. Neither having any children — I am able to play with them, but I don’t want to have them around all the time -, nor having a wife - I am able to play with them as well, but I also don’t want to have them around all the time. It would bring restlessness in my life. Maybe this might sound pretentious, but the women I met didn’t have my level. Which is not necessary, of course… I dindn’t understand them either. I didn’t know what to say to them or what to do with them. I was too proud ti sit around bulshitting. So I thought: "Silly ninnies." And having a wife is not for fourteen days either! It lasts so long.

If al those things like jobs and women would have come out fine, so to speak, I would have been less proud and far more conceited. I would have felt flattered by all that attention. Now, if one or other Marilyn Monroe would have rang the doorbell at that time… But I have always tried to free myself from conceit. I think that everything one does has to coincide with one’s pride.

I never had regrets. It’s true this attitude implies that I can talk to almost nobody.I always try, but after five minutes I get sick. Most people proclaim nonsense that everyone has read the day before in the newspaper. Staggering! Just like your own family always made you stagger, altough they are your schoolmasters. Then you go: "How is it possible that someone can grow so old without ever learning anything? How can one always remain a drooler and a follower of other people’s ideas?"

People want to be mediocre and their highest goal is to play boss in mediocre clubs, parties and other junk situations. That’s what’s so aggravating about all those politicians. They’re not stupid, they’re shallow. Whenever they do something, it’s fake. It’s all just like chess, a game of which one has to learn the rules by heart, combined with the language of a law clerk. Then one seems to be a very intellectual, wonderfully diplomatic chap. Thanks, but I’m not interested.



•



Birds! I thought they were beautiful! I copied them from New Year cards. And Bambi, that was something sweet! The movie Bambi just came out. When I was ten it was fashionable to have thick wall paintings in one’s corridor. My mom asked: "Can you draw a Bambi like that?" Always tempting me, my mom. I said: "All just junk." And she: "If you know so much about it, why don’t you draw a Bambi like that in our corridor?" "No sweat," I replied. My mom and I mixed breadcrumb with linseed oil and I painted Bambis and sweet robins and trees and knotty stumps in pastel colours and a stork on top of it. The complete corridor. Our house in Deurne-Noord looked like a fairy-tale. Like Grimm’s fairy-tales. I had painted the wall-paper from back to front. In very bright colours. One had to get used to it, but it was very well done. It was a nice thing of my parents to allow me such things. They gave me complete freedom in that respect. A totally spoiled, only child.

I never moved out. It’s perfect! It all depends on your parents, of course. One day you have to convince them you are the "man" in the house. It will take some time, but afterwards you are treated like a prince.



•



My mother dreamed to be the boss of a laundrette. She used to iron in one of those place. We sold our house in Deurne and took over a laundrette. Until I saw what it all boiled down to! Nothing so weary as a laundrette. One has to drive all over town with an old crock of a van. One has to be friendly with the customers, because their’s a lot of competition. And a laundrette stinks! It stinks like a urinal.

But one you buy something, you’re stuck with it. For the young man I was at that time it was not easy to break all those contracts. Luckily the former owner felt homesick for his laundrette. I managed to convince the firm that sold us the laundrette to annul the sale. We only had to pay some 5000 pounds.

But the people of that firm told us: "Maybe we have something that will suit you better. More something for a no good son of hard working people. You can take over a shoeshop." So I started a shoeshop with my mom. My only goal was not to have to work. I already had worked at the docks. That shoeshop wasn’t such a bad idea of mine. Nothing interesting about it, but it gave me time and opportunity to make chance turn for me. I called the shop "Little Goliath" and I put a big boot on the pavement.

I’ve never met any customer. My mom took care of the shop. Her sweetest son strolled through town with a military cap on his head and holsters on his hips. Het sweetest son just finished Academy and drove a Cadillac through town. My father kept on repaiting ships in the docks. He wasn’t useful in the shop. He was too shy.



•



He was furious and ran up to me. He tried to choke me. It only lastes for one second. I had thrown over a small desk in the backroom of the girls who helped in the shop. My mother had asked me to put it back, but I had simply gone off. When my dad came home from work, he knew he had to do something. I told him: "Cannot you strangle any harder?"

My father had always had a very tough job. He was a quiet man. He worked as an electrician, taking care of the lighting of the ships. He had to pull cabels in icy-cold boats. At home he was always working on electric stuff. My father had a tremendous admiration for radar equipment. In the fifties they started installing radar on the ships. He told us stories full of admiration for those powerful radars on the big automatic ships (?) in die vrieslijnen, the generators and diesel engines with pistons that had a diameter of one meter, screw propellers with a diameter of seven meters that lay on wooden (?) shaftbearings…

In fact I never think about my dad. But now I’m thinking about it, I realize he was the most intersting and intelligent man in my family. Why? Well, because he loved the ships and the docks and everything that went on there, technically. Not one member of my family shared this interest. Actually it was this interst of his that made him a clown in the eyes of all my clerky and schoolmastery uncles and aunts.

But my dad never really understood anything of it and he never really tried to understand it. For it’s common to almost all people that the will to not knowing is far more powerful than to will to know.

I wanted to know how all this functioned. I thought it couldn’t be so complicated that one had to be mythical about it, as if people from our social class wouldn’t be able to grasp those things.

"To be able to do all and know all!" That’s my motto. One person cannot know everything, but you can always try.

In the art world things get separated and valued differently. They distinguish between technique, science and art. Bull! It’s all just one giant soup with which one can decide to have fun with or not. It can be beautiful or look like nothing. If you separate different fields it starts looking like a stamp collection, a collection of Dinky Toys or a glass menagerie. Some people say: "I know nothing about mathematics! I don’t know a thing about technique!" As if they deserved a medal for their laziness!



•



It’s strange. It’s still there, that feeling: I have to go home to check on mom. But it’s been more than a year sle lives in an elderly home. She lived with me until she was 92.

Whether I miss her? She was bananas.

Yes, I always took care of her. But not any longer. I even cannpot go and visit her. Yes… I spent my whole life with her. Until it had become impossible. In the end I couldn’t leave the house anymore.

I never pay visits to her. I don’t think it’s any use. I don’t know how much she realises or remembers. I don’t know whether those visits are not just something one does for oneself. Children that visit their very old parents once a month, with tears in their eyes. I think it’s suspect. I always wondered about people who can cry at appropriate moments. I think they are leading sad lives. To be emotional once a month, to pay an emotional visit once a month.

For years I have delayed the day on which I had to send my mom to a home. So when I finally decided to let her go, it was really unavoidable and necessary. That’s why it would be no use to go and pay her a visit… Though she might still recognize me.

Het body was still sound. She kept herself busy. Though she didn’t realize what she was doing anymore. I have seen it happening during a period of twenty years. It always got worse. Mentally she slipped completely away. It started when she quitted smoking. Ze smoked a lot. Two packages a day without filter, inhaling everything. Suddenly she quitted. Without noticing. From then on she became demented.

Before she was quite acute. Sometimes she made sharp-witted remarks, just like that, out of the blue, for exemple when I was making something. She was able to discern what was well-made about it. She never developped it, but she had a sense for that kind of stuff. Without ever havinh had any practice, in view of the eternal human law of not wanting to know anything. She also drew drawings for the wallpaper. She immediately covered a complete paper. It was prettier than the paper in the palaces of the Queen of England. Those Bambis, that was mostly her idea. She invented, I executed. She had a taste for those things. The right colours, the right material. I mean it. But nobody ever stimulated this. We were considered to be two lunatics.



•



Imagine: Slightly different parents, slightly more strict, slightly complete assholes, knowing a little bit more, proving all their lives that they’re worth shit, but never realizing it. If such parents force their will upon their children, they go wrong.

In my family things went like in the movies, everything was possible. She said: "You have those artists at the market place who draw portaits." I say: "Yes, ugly." She: "Is it? If you can do better, why did you never draw my prtrait?" And I did her portrait. Our little house was like the house of gods.

But it was hell as well. I wish she hadn’t been so nervous. My mother was a very nervous lady that went around pestering averybody all day long. Especially my dad, whom she suspected to go with other women.

Everyday stupid quarrels, mostly over me. I arrived from school, I opened the little gate in front of our little garden and I wondered: "What will it be this time? I just got rid from a bunch of assholes and now I have to meet the next lot of them." Apart from her good taste and that beginning of that being "creative", though in a somewhat awkward sense, my mom was a scary witch. My mom was a real Wicked Witch of the West. She had made my dad’s life into misery through some eccentric ideas about intimacy and finally she would also have destroyed my life if I hadn’t stopped her in time.

She invented quarrels. For years she could go on nagging about things that had happened long ago and that were of no significance whatsoever. Once a policeman rang at our door. He warned my mother that I was playing with fire all the time. I had a magnifying glass with which I lit pieces of celluloid film, bits of Laurel and Hardy movies. That policeman came to complain about this. That story has served for ten years! It served as a starter for every quarrel. Something that even hadn’t existed. There never had been a fire or something. Just a policeman that went ringing at all the doors to tell the parents that their children shoud stop playing with magnifying glasses. In my case this incident turned into a personal drama: "You’ve always been trouble, always troubles with the police…"

Later things smoothened. I gave her some medication. I made beautiful bottles with expensive names only containing pure water. They had the same effect als all those expensive tranquilizers. It just takes some suggestive power…



•



Because of this constant fighting and the eternal fear of never finding a proper job, I was forced to find an escape route. I had to escape the values that govern such a family and that governed all our town. They govern all over the world. They govern CNN. If one can watch telivision for more than tenty minutes without throwing up, then one is an uncultured prick. It’s all just incredible. How can all such rubbish come into existence?

Now it seems normal that I resist all these influences. Who could make me believe that everything these people say can be of any significance? But as a young man it took something special to escape all this nonsense. And in my case this meant: drawing well.

My parents didn’t know academies existed. I got their by accident and due to my personality. During the first years of secondary school I drew better than all the others. I also wrote better compositions. I was good at things that were fun, but I couldn’t remember when Cromwell was born. So the drawing teacher told me: "You should become a shop window designer, it’s a many-sided job." I went to a school where one could study to become a windowshop designer, a publicity guy or a hairdressser. It was a very rough school, always fighting going on. I wasn’t a softy either. So I got kicked out of school. There was only one possibility left: join the Academy. I thought: "There are all the people who really can draw." I thought that was the place where the face of the earth was changed! It was the most influencial school, though the teachers were worth shit. Except for Marsboom. I was the best, in every subject. But that didn’t mean anything. The most important for me was that I could imitate Picasso’s painting and that I discovered the existence of art. As a young man of eighteen I was not only able to see art, I even could make it myself! Copies that couldn’t be distinguished from the oriiginals. They were originals! Suddenly I realized that those things came out of your unconscious. Before it all had been misery and xxx.

I discovered technique. Technique is a means to adventure, a means to a kind of beauty. One can also be technocratic moron, only occupying oneself with a narrow part of a technique. I won’t discuss that kind of people, though they might be necessary, to repair cellular phones.

Technique is nothing more than imagining how things might function and trying to makes this insight part of coulour and form, of everytrhing that crawls and grows around us. By doing so, one arrives in worlds that are unknown to yorself and to art. It offers access to that unconsciousness whence one has to grab everything one can get.



•



I wake up, in the middle of the night, and through the dormer window I notice a bird as big as a cow, sitting on a television antenna! I tell myself: "I must be sleeping. This is too silly." I look again and the bird is still there! As big as a dining room table. The antenna bends like a reed. I think: "Isn’t that this short antenna of the neighbours, on their tiny roof? And it’s carrying an enormous bird from another planet! The antenna will never hold!" I also thought: ‘Now I’m really getting insane." But this bird was really there! The next day all the people from the zoo were standing in front of our house, with nets. It was a very big vulture that had escaped and in the moonlight she had looked as big as a cow.

It must have happened in ’66. We were still living above the shoeshop.

Things like that have an influence on ones work, of course. You bet! Why is that bird resting on our neighbour’s roof? In front of my bedroom window? On my balcony. On my antenna? It was our neighbour’s antenna, I admit, but our neighbours didn’t see anything!



•



Where flying is concerened, one has access to all the regular solutions. One finds them in books. But there are also other solutions, that tend to unify more esthetics, looks and use, solutions that are closer to realizing a dream than the flying junk that already exists.

If you tell me thazt one has already found solutions to fly, I’m not interested. I want to find solutions of my own. Walking on the bottom of the ocean with a plastic bowl over your head, lead in your shoes and a manual air pump to keep you alive brin,gs a very pleasurable experience and way of knowing. It’s far more beautiful than saying: "Listen, give me a scuba-bottle, fill it with 50 kilos of air, put an automatic snorkel on my asshole’s face and I’ll join all the others."

Under water, in certain parts of this globe, one can see marvellous fish in all kinds of colours and fantastic schools of barracudas that swim around you. But if this beauty joins the beauty of your own self-made, rickety apparatus that continually refuses to function properly, than you really experoience the adventure of inventing your own diving suit.

It’s a rickety apparatus and a rickety train of thought, but the resulting feeling is all but rickety. All those people with their ready-to-go-bought-in-a-shop-suits, that’s what I call rickety. Their experience is limited. They have no contact with the real problems. They live in a self-evident world of smoothness.

The same goes when you descent a mountain with skis. I’d rather that skis had never been invented. I would bind two bookshelves to my feet and I would break my neck, but I would prefer that mess to joining a bunch of morons to a ski resort with specially designed jackets that this time say "skiing" instead of "jogging".



•



If somebody asks me about my profession, I’m ashamed to have to reply: "I’m an artist." For I consider most artists to be retarded. They always work in relation to the galleries and museums. This goes for all art, of course, art can only exist in relation to museums and galleries, but why should it depend completely on it? 50% should have a reason of its own as well. It should also have been made if the art world with all is crap wouldn’t exist. Most of the time one sees art which is 100% dependent. I absolutely dismiss all of it. My position is very neutral with regards to the general ideas about art. It’s easy. It relieves me of the question how to be anarchistic. It comes without saying, because otherwise I couldn’t make any good work. Without this dismissal my work woeldn’t be free and it wouldn’t contain any attempt of adventure. What a burden, all those stupid galleries and museums! One should analyse these people who have organized art shows for half of all the artists. One really wonders what artists are looking for in the neighbourhood of such jerks.

Of course I often felt abused by this system of galleries, but I to take abuse of them also. An artist can never say: "No, you cannot organize a show with my work." I always say: "You can organize a show, but it will cost you something." I have always asked them to buy something first, something really expensive.

During the last fifty years I only met two artists who were able to make me believe that human kind isn’t hopelessly lost forever: Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers. Some artist almost attain the same level, bt there’s always something wrong with their endurance. Nobody seems to have the guts to make something if it’s not immediately integrated by the well educated, pre-cooked elite circles. Nobody makes something if it’s not going to be considered ‘cultural’. It always has to show some connection to an institute, as if artists were a kind of scientists.For scientists this is a normal situation, they have to be part of an institute because otherwise nobody listens to them. Somebody who is not linked to an institute is considered to be an idiot.

I have always tried to understand what kind of people gallerists and museum directors actually are. I gave them marks. You can do the same with scientists. Don’t be scared when they start using mathematics. That’s only camouflage. You can learn everything yourself. You try to analyse what they’re up to and pretty soon you’ll find out that you’re trying to analyze a clerk who didn’t discover anything in all his bloody clerk existence. How could it be? Science doesn’t allow this.Science is no fancy fair where everybody gets a chance.

Never believe that scientists are all very well learned people. They’re not! Some of them are, but you have to find them. And you won’t find them in the newspaper.

Art boils down to saying: ‘I think this is good. Why? I don’t know, but I feel it.’ It’s an unconscious common sense. The only thing one can admire about intelligence, is the passage from conscious intelligence to the ability to tap knowledge from your unconscious. As long as one diesn’t tap from that source, one isn’t an artist.



•



For about a year I have been trying to make magnets hover, freely, without strings. According to the books this was mathematically impossible. I thought: "Electromagnetically it has to be possible. I’ll let this magnets have a go at it." In those days my mom wasn’t completely silly yet, so she says: "What are you up to now. Don’t you see it will never work? How can you expect this thing to hover? How can you lose so much time on such crap? One day you will become insane! But one day it works! It hovers freely! A metal plate in complete balance, thirty centimeters above the machine. To show it on photographs I put an egg in an egg-cup underneath. I tell my mom: "Look now! It works!" She glances at it and she says: "Oh yes… So what? Fancy another cup of coffee?"

For the moment I’m working on a big, fast boat called "Scotch Gambit". On top of it I’ve put two aeroplane engines that never were started before. Everybody will ask: "Do they really function?" If I make them function and I make some rounds on the River Thames, they will say: "Oh, yes, of course." If it becomes trivial by making it function, why would I go through all this trouble? Those machines function from the moment I know they can function. They contain their function! Al my things function, all of them. They contain my personal experience with a certain subject matter. Unfortunately, most of them just sit somewhere. Thery don’t seem to be alive. Whe, I was forty years old, I thought my things would change a lot and would contribute something to people. Now I believe the result will be bitterly meager.



I want my works to convey an absolute value, the experience that one really can see when something contains beauty or not. Without restrictions or conditions. Do you want to make a submarine? Make a submarine, go for it 100%. Don’t make an artistic submarine. Maybe it won’t function after all in the end, but that’s not our main purpose. The thing is to respect the nature of such a machine. It’s no sculpture-submarine and it’s no oil-on-canvas-submarine. Because you made it yourself, you who love submarines, you who think submarines are great, your submarine will behave itself like THE SUBMARINE, just like my planes transport the idea of THE AEROPLANE. That’s the message. For me your submarine can stay in the docks. But people have to be pulled by the nose to see it and some lamps have to light it from the right angle, otherwise the magic is gone for the people. That’s one of the important roles of the museums and galleries: that ones works can be shown there like in a church, for people to feel that it’s sacred, that they are witnessing a miracle. If one doesn’t treat these things with enough respect and elegance, they are crushed.



•



Two flying bombs almost fell on my head.

As a little boy I always felt anxious between people. I always looked up to watch the sky. Suddenly I notice a small, blach aeroplane with a red tail, approaching the roofs of some nearby houses. Me and my mom were strolling about a market-place. I pointed in the air and yelled: "Watch! An aeroplane!" Everybody lied down. My mom pulled me down as well. I saw how that smùall aeroplane came near, like a big black cross ejecting flames. At some twenty meters away the engine stopped. That thing started falling down like the leave of a tree. Zigzagging. Right above the roof of the house near the cemetery the engine restarted and the bomb flew away. It flew by the church. Then it exploded in a nearby park. The people were already standing again en suddenly we felt the impact. Boom! Everybody went down again. December 1944.

Fourteen days later. My mom was wearing a coat of rabbit fur. I’m sitting on her lap in a corner of tram 12. We arrive at the stop next to the Katelijnevest. The V1 falls in the middle of the street. Without any sound the tram is lifted from the rails and, four meters further, gently put on the ground again. The people who were waiting at the stop have been evaporated forever. The windows of the tram had blown to the outside. We had been sitting in a vacuum. We saw a big pile of debris with red people crawling about. Everything was covered in blood.

That’s what I remember from that period. And also that the only egg we had, had fell over and run out on the table under which we had been hiding in the coal cellar.

Memories like these flow into ones work. I saw very powerful planes. I saw them as a kid, I still see them as a kid. It had nothing to do with the nazis. I didn’t know bad intentions were involved. They were conceived to… make life more agreeable. I didn’t conclude that people were horrifying creatures. For me such a flying bomb, such an aeroplane, was a beautiful, emotional, thrilling and mysterious thing.

All other thoughts are ugly to me. Even if there are thousands of sickening things like terrible diseases and everywhere all sorts of very serious, superstitious idiots who want to kill other superstitious idiots, it will take a childish mind to find solutions for it. For we are no more than shameless whippersnappers, after all.



•



Now I’m trying to grasp the mystery myself. A piece of the mystery known to nobody. I’m full of great dreams. My greatest dream is that it would turn out that the sun and all the stars are kept in their orbits through the milky-way by my Toymodel of Space. I would like the Panamarenko-insight to lead to the development of a propulsion for spaceships. Until now nobody has invented a spaceship that’s worth something. I would like to invent one. I’m busy with it. Technically it must be feasible. We don’t need any scientific research, that’s a side issue. It’s an invitation to adventure. Spacetravel without scientists! That’s a voyage of discovery! Life on Mars? We don’t need any life on Mars! What we need is a Captain Cook on Mars!



At the moment I’m building a flying saucer that really functions! Which means: a loony technical apparatus that alows you to do everything-you-can-imagine or completely nothing, but that will prove at the same time that all my crap about the real forces in the universe is correct. Which means we’ll be playing in another league than Einstein and Max Planck.



Your aim can never be high enough. Things start procuring pleasure when they are out of reach. And then one has to think: "I will make them surrender." At that moment something starts that gives wings to your lunacy. It gives a euforic feeling which makes you believe that everything has meaning. What could be the meaning of the grasping of such things, if the Totality is meaningless? If it’s true, the way I think, that all human endeavour on this globe is insignificant, than my choice is the highest possible. I’m flying so high, that I only can fall very low, but once you’re so high, you cannot leave your orbit before everything on earth has long vanished.



•



Being lost nearby our house. That’s my first memory. The first three years of my life we lived in a puppet-size manor of the kind that became very expensive later. One has to be a millionair to live their now. Our next door neighbour was an old lady that every day went gathering sticks in the wood. We were in the middle of the second World War. As a boy of three I always kept an eye on her. When she left, I followed her with her tricycle and she allowed me. One day I saw her leaving. She was already far away. She hid. I thought she hid to play with me, but she didn’t want me to come along with her. "There goes that annoying boy from nextdoors." I ran after her and I got lost. To me it seemed that day as if I were already alone on Mars. And I thought: "What a bitch!"



•



Al those corrupt and fat bastards around you make you vulnerable. Happily my skin grew very thick… They call me asocial. But I’m not lonely! Can you imagine? A guy that is satisfied with a life only accompanied by some parrots and a dog? A! You cannot imagine how great I feel. And all those plans I’m making… For nobody. But why not?

If one has constantly to ask himself what he is doing in this life, he already knows the answer. He is continuously being nothing. And continuously one is free to make something out of it. Everyday has its little troubles: toothache, stomachache, a heart that stops ticking… You’re worth nothing and at the same time you know everything and you can make anything you want. Frailty! Sure as hell! We live in a body made of jelly. Today or tomorrow I get the flu and hop!

My dad died of pneumonia when he was 76. But his death didn’t destroy my life. I am able to imagine things like that before they happen. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if I would die tomorrow! This system is so complex and so fragile that it’s a miracle that we live so long. Dying is the easiest thing in the world. But I don’t want any honorable man to give a speech on my grave!



•



To know where the trouble starts, that’s the art of living. I know where it starts. I always had to fight against my family, their way of thinking and everything it implies. It only blocks ones way if one has a mission.

My mission is: to make flying saucers. My mission is: to reach the stars through the creation of a possibility to leave the earth. We have to leave this absurd globe with its absurd societies and its faked values. We have to get rid of all these dictator games, al that so-called intelligence that’s nothing but shrewdness, all that shallowness! We have to get into the infinite world, with true power. I wouldn’t be satisfied with a Nobel-prize. They have to declare me God himself before I’m finished. And not by some lunatic Messiah, I have to think it justified myself… I think they never considered me to be a lunatic. I used to think so, but not any monger.

Ha!

Last month I remembered the following:



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I was working on my submarine. My mom comes down the stairs. There was just enough room for her in the place where I was working.



Sais she: "What are you up to now? All that noise!"

I was hitting steel plates with a sledgehammer.

I say: "Yes! How do you want me to bend steel if I cannot hit it?"

"Do you always have to be so noisy?", she asks.

"No, no. I’ll be finished in a minute or so."

(She forgot everything anyway.)

"And what are you building now, if I may ask?"

"A submarine."

"Ha, a submarine! Why don’t you ever make something beautiful?"

I tell her: "It

’s going to be very beautiful."

She yells: "NOBODY THINKS IT

’S BEAUTIFUL!!!"

I yell back: "EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD THINKS IT’S BEAUTIFUL!!!"

And then came the last sane words my mom said to me: "Yes, because they wouldn’t dare not to".