Becoming-Fatherless: The Codex Savvas – A Deconstructive Reading

It’s in your hands. Your logbook: 8×9 Perforated Notebook 87 Lined Sheets Navy Blue Cover. Wrinkled at the corners, the cover faded and stained, some pages weathered. I ask to see it, but you tighten your grip. You’re bending the cardboard and the wire-o binding rings are contorting. A five or six lapses, and, hesitantly, you hand it over.

Number + Minus

Your writing on the first half of the notebook bears no language. There are no words and no letters; just signs and numbers. The first page typifies the subtraction of nihilism and negation, as I call it, for most of your numerical pairs either equate to zero or minus: zero minus zero and one minus two; two minus two and zero minus three. A six wide and circular, a four and a one separated by a hard line at the top of the page. A zero squat and sloped.

This the record of your life: you become the payment calculator for bills, mortgages, insurances and their exchange rate.

All your math includes the minus sign. This code, gravitated around the minus sign, makes sense only to you. This symbol of deduction and decreasing in your Mayan codices. Can I crack it? Here, a “2-20-1” with no number for what it equals, there, a “1-0” and “5-0” dangling at the bottom of the page with no answer in sight. These numbers times those numbers equal what? What did you add? What did you take away, and why? What’s the intention behind the underlined equations? I jot it all down and attempt to do the calculation: I fail miserably.

Crack the code. How? Him and his work and his days: indecipherable. What am I trying to interpret? The psychic processes of the mind? The chemical compounds comprising his consciousness? The core of his being? Here, let me spin this neuron-thread into that web of synapses. Am I getting there? Who am trying to fool? I give up, conceding defeat. I cannot follow the math; I cannot follow you. You are a language I cannot translate.

Your brain holds the cipher to this language you only know, your knowledge is that which men have sought after for decades: chiselling through the walls of pyramids wondering what these odd markings designate; all in the efforts to discover and pin it down to a single interpretation, narrow it to a one-way production of meaning.

On the page, I’m lost in translation and it’s alright. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret. Your writing spurts from a whirlwind of rigours and forces, aiming to bring into existence, to create, and mobilise – not to construe or to judge.

‘I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect’ (Jacques Derrida).

So, you do you, paps.

Don’t go with the flow

I am little and you play teacher with me. I blurt out boorda for all things culinary, and somehow you know the difference. You know when boorda means fork, you identify the times that boorda stands for spoon. Pamma is marmalade, and also tennis.

In August 2002, during lunch, we share the following exchange:

Maroula, you say pointing at chocolate bar on the table. Spell sokolata. Pamma? You chuckle. No, my darling. Sokolata. So-ko-la-ta. So-ko-la-ta. Well done, now write it down. Remember, so-ko-la-ta.

You smile and wait. I take my jiggly Spongebob pen and strike out the word in my blue reversible sequin notepad. I spell it wrong. I got wrong all the spelling tests that followed. Seven months later – in February of the same year – and during our trip to Tremithousa with the local bus, you do it again.

Maroula, you say pointing at the orange tree outside the window, Spell portokalia.

I’m shifting our dialogic markers – along with your expectations – and begin to write on the window’s steamed up misted glass. My scrawls gradually dissolve as the steam reclaims territory, but this time I spell it right. You laugh and ruffle my hair. Those teeth so straight, your splendid greyish-green eyes, blazing; all perfection.

That’s my Maroula! Always remember, never go with the flow.

A reminder, scribbled on the back of the grocery list that mum keeps at the fridge up to this day:

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

Tabulation + Rhizome = Affect

Then, I riffle through the other half of your notebook, another formally extraordinary layer of your writing: the written word. Uneven lines prevail the page: slanting, swerving, and untamed. Place it in a different context and it can serve as a remarkable installation, worthy of all the money in the world; deserving to float around the globe for people to marvel at and applaud.

Perpendicular breaks arrange what it seems like gibberish to me into differing tables. Here, a set of capital letters, there, a mixture of both, punctuated by numbers in Latin; all of which indicate difference in voice intonations. Where “CHARLTOW” and “FALKIRK” are loud and pompous, “town” has a voice barely audible. And then there’s “CLERmont Foot” that varies in sound patterns. There is order to your method and logic to your thought – a breath of segmentarity that is stratified and organised – but there is also discontinuity and dislocation, something always eludes capture and meaning. It’s a rhizome with multiple entryways. I see arborescent trees and lines of flight tying back to one another, coexisting in a vis-à-vis on a single piece of paper. Some may call this mode of thinking and writing schizophrenic. I call it artistic.

You don’t merely undo the old age Cartesian body/mind divide; you synthesise the body in the mind. It’s a site of positive difference, where an embodied engagement with the materiality of your writings opens up new possibilities for the reader: a becoming-with the language which understands the subject – that is the reader (me) – as porous. Your writings do not stop at the boundary of the skin. Rather, they seek to spark an affective reaction in me:

‘the tremolo, or the vibrato that makes the indicated affect reverberate through the words’ (Gilles Deleuze).

You’re drawing the attention not only to material conditions, but particularly to the body and the intensities that traverse it. You stand in the middle: too governed, and too immobile at the same time. You occupy the middling line of making and not making sense all at once, and, quite often, this in-betweenness seems like the most radical place to be.

Do not go with the flow you advised me. When you were still alive and I was a teenager – with mounds of raging hormones and bumpy roads that come along with transitions – it was harder to guide me through the non-mainstream route. I had to squint to see the direction you were pointing at and, at times, I had to squeeze my eyes so tightly that I saw nothing at all. Life felt easier when I merged with the mainstream; when I allied with the norm in order to fit a given identity attire. In hindsight, I would have steadied myself on mapping my own cartography of rhizomatic processes from early on. I would have fixed my eyes on the creative possibilities that await me – had I stashed bombs to the dominant forces and discourses that bogged me down – and carved out my own pathway much before you left me.

I want to learn your language and rehabilitate your distorted image of a nihilist for that of a man of joy. There’s an entire civilization in these torn and worn pages. Writing is for you a fertile terrain, on which you seed your idiosyncrasy and watch it flourish and expand. I want to elicit speech effects from it and undertake a vast phonetic and lexical enterprise.

Like Kafka and Beckett, you invent a minor use of your major language – English. It may pass as an overly simplified statement, but this is how I see it: in the cases of Kafka and Beckett, the difference between major and minor rests in the moorings of performance; different registers and tools of “doing literature”. Thus, I proclaim you as a minor writer. Why? Because you conflate heterogeneity and incoherence with uniformity and coherence so that to rework and transform the major from within. And the outcome? Of course, the production of something new that resists whoever and whichever wants to corset it in stifling taxonomies.

Yes, you didn’t with the flow, dad. I’m diggin’ this ‘kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois but a becoming-other of language’ (Proust).

Highfalutin jargon

An intruder into your logbook. Logocentricism, as exemplified by “A.G.M Restaurants Ltd’’, has carried its language of rhetoric and ideology with it. It tries to impose it on you. That man of authority, signing under the name Antonis Miltiadou, reiterates the “arc” of State parlance – that is, the language of officials and bureaucrats.

He integrates the multiplication sign into your logbook; the lingo of profit that turns you into number: 501708. Where all your math is reduction, theirs is multiplication. Your ink output is a consistent lessening and theirs is an ongoing act of amplification. Yours is a math of disappearance and theirs of proliferation.

Did you give your logbook over willingly to these oppressive power structures disguised as humans? Or did they take it from you to categorise you, to stratify you, to homogenise you under an ID number (501708) and erase your singularity, limit your potential? To think you had no choice but succumb to their instructions fuels my rage.

You call yourself illiterate, and I hate when you do that. Really, illiterate? Your smarts and intellect rival and, I dare to say, outweigh that of Plato, and Sartre, and Heidegger, and Foucault. Those men, who have pressed their pens so hard the ink bled through the back of the page, tried to standardise their judgement on a world they viewed from a vantage point, their armchairs. Armchairs of comfort: well-cushioned and upholstered with the finest of fabrics by a beleaguered world of war and colonial terrorism and slavery and genocide. I average each other’s score of brains and you outcompete, for yours is a knowledge gained from the experience of living in your tiny town – Paphos.

Becoming– Derrida: A deconstructive reading of Cortex Savvas

You are the speaker and writer of a drifty, murky language. Not to imply that you had no respect for the temporality – the linearity and neatness – of everyday existence. Quite the opposite: you epitomise the everyday, the banality of being an Ordinary Man. I emulate your handwriting hoping to extract some meaning. This contorted patois, from which the curved “L” for Poland can be faulted as “U”, unravels a constellation of portmanteau-words of the Lewis Carol tradition. Bliss.

‘Language trembles from head to toe' (Gilles Deleuze).

The ground shudders with the concussion of the blast from your words. Is “N” in “SANDHAUSEN” in a state of shock? Or is it because you’re pulling its tuft of hair? How about the “y” in “Ross country”? A playground of consonants that have been toppled and stretched to a limit. Your typographic ligatures, where “s” huddles together with “l” for company and “a” unites with “s” to form “slask”, are unparalleled; one of their kind. Their relational ontology and symbiotic relationship are evident at every level.

Some may say: fix your handwriting Savva, it’s gross. I oppose: keep it as it is, Savva. This conscious decomposition of language is what this world needs. Shake it up and rupture it then.

Scribbles – ‘Make a map, not a tracing’

Scribbles made in marker. An ambivalent pigment occupying the milieu between blue and black – I cannot tell. Some spirally, some circular, those doodles formed when testing out a new writing instrument or when striving to get the ink back into the point. Does it glide along the page, or does it drag and catch on the paper? What an urgency to write…

Translate him, I say to myself. Make sense of his modus operandi. But how? I can bear your labyrinth-like mind and the reference turning up on page without its companion referent. But how am I to approach these random shoots sprouting from uncountable nodal points in their sprawling fashion? It’s as if you are not content to simply streamline your thoughts in a single flow of letters and numbers; you also want to create, establish your own a-signifying system that operates on its own – like a little autonomous machine. This your own collective assemblage of enunciation, where infinite entryways make space for fields and vectors of knowledge yet to come. This is your cartography, your map-making, your diagramming (you name it) which, by resisting mimesis, sets out on its odyssey of an ‘unremitting deconstruction of representational‘ readings, while expecting my affective response (Felix Guattari). Your diagram stands out. It unleashes ‘deterritorialized polyvocity’ which asks to be taken as distinct from the images of letters and numbers. You’re surpassing signification altogether, acting on your do-not-go-with-the-flow mantra. Your diagrams ‘are no longer, strictly speaking, semiotic entities.’ They’re not on a quest ‘to denote or to image the morphemes of an already-constituted referent’ but to create them (Felix Guattari).

You don’t represent thought, you generate thought. Your mind is not a striated space but a smooth one, which weaves together diverse times and spaces in a network of intersecting lines: a map, not a tracing.

One of the spirals begins with what looks like a horizontal P. Six letters at the top of page spelling, “Oφείλω”, the Greek word meaning to owe. This writer in your logbook – that same bureaucrat – must have trespassed on your personal sphere and jabbered in a tongue alien to you that you pay these numbers or else…

Black over blue

My finger along the letters on the page. The skin skimming the paper communicating—what exactly? I try to contextualise and concretise your writings: recipes, notes taken from cookery books. You’re straining to become the best in your domain: a chef par excellence.

The black cross-outs are neither a correction nor a tracing over and over with the aim to regress to something intelligible – something pre-existent and already-known. It bounces off a kernel of thought that flees from both correction and tracing: it’s your own map-making of a territory in an attempt to tread the zone of imperceptibility.

On the command to illuminate, you choose to obfuscate; on the demand to clarify, you choose the darkening of words. A smudging, a black mass making your meaning, your intent, your mark upon this world imperceptible.

Your signature

Your heavy-handed script with granite pen. I’ve seen it before: on my birth certificate, and on several official documents they forced you to sign. This is from your forged passport: three jerky, zigzagged Ss, the calligraphic As, the Vs lopsided. The toiling at writing so that you may float between borders – nations and geographies, continents and landscapes.

You give me a nudge and say: move on from this. New thoughts lay the groundwork for new projects. Antique markings folded in a dossier and tucked away in my drawer, a PDF saved in my Mac — they will remain just that: files and archives.

I hover my mouse over a few of them and think: a century, a millennium later and these remnants of our history, our mode of writerly expression will be left at the disposal of future generations. I wonder what they will make of us, paps. What narrative of our lives will they conjure up? A student will peruse and highlight rows of scrawled handwriting to contemplate the authorial intent of our work. Researchers will follow the trail of arrows pointing to smaller notes on the margin of the page. They will zoom in on the cluster of cryptic codes to a life they will try to explore.

A paper and a dissertation and a monograph based on stains and jottings and marginalia. Our extinction, being father and daughter, there, in some document, some well-ventilated library room, our residue of data and mash under their scrutiny.

---

Becoming-Fatherless: The Codex Savvas – A Deconstructive Reading last modified: 18 December 2020

#poststructuralism #creativewriting #experimental #memoir #father #Radical #philosophy #literature