Kathryn Koromilas' This Absurd Life

Part I:

Part II:

Palimpsest was launched at Gleebooks 17 April, 2010. Vrasidas Karalis and Ed Spence were there to speak about the book and Zoe Rodriguez was the charming MC for the night. The novel was born as a real book on 18 April by Australian Scholarly Publishing and is available for sale via their website or Gleebooks and other bookshops in Sydney.

Here is the paper I gave at the launch:

They say that an author’s first novel is autobiography disguised as fiction. Yes, everything in my novel is true – but nothing is fact. Everything is fiction. For the moment an author begins to write, everything changes. I began writing with many things that I knew, but continued writing towards the things that I did not know, the things I needed to know. I soon understood that the novelist is no lover of facts; the novelist is a lover of truth, truth through invention. And invention is the creation of something new resulting from study and experimentation.

And so, I invented many things in this novel – I invented a village in Greece; I invented an ancient Greek philosopher; I invented an ancient Greek demigod; I invented a father and a daughter; I invented an entire story. And the more I invented, the closer I got to the truth. It seemed I was digging more than writing; excavating more than composing and all the while I discovered that the story I was writing – by virtue of being invention, a type of spectacle exposed – it was this thing that was able to reveal what I wanted to see and learn and, finally, understand.

In writing this novel I wanted to understand one thing. I wanted to understand how the virtue of philosophy, how enthusiasm for ideas and wisdom and knowledge could somehow devolve into its opposite: ignorance, confusion, obsession, fanaticism.

This is a story about a daughter – Kally Palamas – and her father – Akindynos Palamas – both philosophers; the daughter is an academic, the father an autodidact. He has taught himself. When the story begins Akindynos is found dead and Kally travels from Coober Pedy in Austalia to Zelopolis in Greece, to bury him. There she learns that her father’s noble ambition to become a philosopher has devolved into a dark, fanatic plan to restore the life and traditions of the ancient city of Zelopolis. Her father’s dream was not, as one might have expected of the village philosopher, to attain the world’s knowledge, but to rewrite it to suit his vision of how his world should have been. Not philosophy at all.

I’ve met – and in some cases known quite intimately – numerous real, factual persons who have enthusiastically read and sought knowledge only to become selective and obsessive scholars, selectively receiving information about the world, selectively believing some truths about the world and denying others. And it was this that I wanted, not to record simply as fact, but to write through it as a way of finally understanding why this was so.

I once had a friend, called Constantine, you might like to know that he is the core of the fictional character Akindynos. Constantine and I became friends during a philosophy lecture in 1988 and ended out friendship twenty years later, not long after he read the manuscript of this novel.

I summarised the novel in the following way: Palimpsest is a story about high ideals and low obsessions; about what we believe and what happens when belief degenerates into fanaticism.

Constantine knew I was accusing him of fanaticism.

But he wasn’t always that way. In the beginning, Constantine was an enthusiast of Greek philosophy. And so was I. Together, in those early years at university, a kind of ecstasy for both of us. Enthusiasm, yes. We were new to the realm of rationalism and logic and unschooled in such methods we could only work on the force of our emotion and enthusiasm until such passions were tamed, until our minds became the stronger force. It was philosophy that would train our intellect so that we could see things as they were and not as we imagined they should be. It was in philosophy that we were going to encounter this thing called understanding, this thing called truth. We felt elated; we were intoxicated; we became immortal. The world as we knew it had suddenly expanded and it was this new thing that had touched us, this awesome new thing. Knowledge. We felt a kind of awe – there was so much of it – and a pride – it all began with the Greeks, our own ancestors. We did now know why, we hardly admitted it in the beginning, but there it was, coming from the undisputed expert, from Bertrand Russell himself. One only needed to turn to Chapter One of A History of Western Philosophy to confront this extraordinary opening paragraph:

In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, and had spread thence to neighbouring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them. What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody, but what they did in the purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional… What occurred was so astonishing that, until very recent times, men were content to gape and talk mystically about the Greek genius.

Like all Greeks living in the Antipodes, we had experienced a lifetime of being told just how superior we were to all other races. Our parents – who had left poor old Greece in the Sixties, with nothing more than a suitcase filled with a change of clothes and a thousand dreams – had nothing more to offer us than hard work, monetary support towards our studies and the mysteries and potential of belonging to a race that had invented ‘everything.’ We were happy to be Greeks and Constantine was quick to identify with those great ones that Russell spoke about, our distant ancestors, and not with the poor, migrant, modern ones from whom we were direct descendants.

Constantine became zealous about the ancient Greeks. And he very quickly dismissed everything that was not Greek. I read widely and encouraged him to do the same, but he would not.

“There is nothing more to it than this, Kathryn,” he would say. “Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato. We don’t need to read further. We have everything we need right here.” “When you read philosophy,” he once said, “you discover that the revolution of the mind occurred with the Greeks and there has never been another revolution since and there will never be another revolution in the future. Clearly the Greeks were like no other humans on this planet. For no other race has ever done what the Greeks did and no other race will ever do what the Greeks did. Where do you think they came from? Surely the Hellene was not born of this earth.”

And so, Constantine became contemptuous of everything that was not a Greek idea. And the more I encouraged him to move on from the Greeks, the more he accused me of being anti-Hellenic.

As our friendship became more and more impossible I began writing about a man, who finally transformed into Akindynos Palamas.

We are encouraged to be enthusiastic about our pursuits. Today, the word ‘enthusiast’ is dispensed with its positive meaning, identifying the person who is active with interest, the aficionado, the devotee, the ardent lover, the optimist. ‘Enthusiasm’ is the absorbing emotion that drives human beings to achieve things, to do great things. These days we prefer the meaning that Emerson gave us when he pronounced that, “every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.” But before Emerson, Dr Johnson had given it another meaning, a meaning closer to the original Greek meaning. The enthusiast for Dr Johnson was a man “vainly imagine[d] a private revelation; one of violent passions; one of elevated fancy.” Instead of ‘enthusiast’ we use a synonym of the word, we use the word fanatic. We use ‘fanatic’ to accuse one not just of excessive devotion to a cause or an idea, but of obsessive devotion. ‘Fanatic’ is defined as “irrational enthusiasm.” But this is a tautology, for enthusiasm itself is irrational. Enthusiasm is grounded not in reason, not nourished by the intellect, but is incited by human intuition and imagination. And this is why Voltaire warned us about ‘the monster, fanaticism,’ who ‘still exists’ and he warned us that ‘whoever seeks after the truth, will run the risk of being persecuted.’

And so, Akindynos Palamas, and my friend Constantine, in their pursuit of truth were indeed persecuted by that monster fanaticism. And Kally palamas, the academic, knows that she too is at risk, that we all are at risk of losing reason in favour of enthusiasm. And so, through this novel, I sought to explore these concerns.

Now all of this needed a rather strong physical, tangible foundation. And that foundation is the land of Greece.

My title is Palimpsest. I’m not the first to give this title to a work. Gore Vidal’s memoir is titled Palimpsest, another Catherynne has written a fantasy novel called Palimpsest, there are poetry collections, a movie, photography exhibitions, a literary magazine, a printing house.

Google has a Palimpsest project and Linux HAS A harddrive utility called Palimpsest.

The idea – both literal and metaphorical – absolutely tormented and enthused me. And so, ‘palimpsest,’ a ‘manuscript that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible’ is one meaning of the word. But in my novel I explore the second meaning of the word, ‘an object, place, or area that reflects its history.

It is this second meaning that motivates the novel. George Orwell said that All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. Nikos Kazantzakis saw the face of Greece as ‘a palimpsest of twelve major overlapping scripts: the modern, 1921, the Turkish Occupation, the Frankish occupation, Byzantium, the Roman Empire, the Hellenistic age, the Classical age, the Doric middle ages, the Mycenaean, the Aegean and the Stone Age.’

For this I thank Vrasidas Karalis, because I read his book Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History and it was only after I read this that the idea of history as a palimpsest absolutely blew my mind. At the time I was living in Greece, in Preveza, near the ancient city of Nikopolis. A Roman city. When the Romans fell and the Byzantines rose, the latter began building on top of the Roman marbles, which had friezes chiseled on them. The Byzantines built mosaic images of their Saints on top of the Roman friezes. Now, this was a real palimpsest, two layers, the Roman and the Byzantine.

This layering of history on one’s land is akin to the layering of history on one’s body. Jeanette Winterson wrote about codes written on a body like braille. And I talk about the layering going under the skin. In my novel Akndynos Palamas sees himself as a palimpsest – and asks his friends He’d point to his chest and say, ‘scrape me, I am a palimpsest, come here and scrape me! You know what you will find? You’ll find some Kolokotronis! Scratch me, scrape me here! Here you’ll find fragments of Alexander! And here, scratch me here,’ he’d say, pointing to his temple, ‘here you’ll find Zelodotus.’

Maybe my idea of the human palimpsest is more akin to the Thomas de Quincey’s idea of What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.

Akindynos loves the layering of history on his land and within his body and mind, loved how each layer added or subtracted, affirmed or rejected, revealed or hid the past.

And so, finally, as you’ve all already guessed, this novel is also a palimpsest for while writing this new text I have called upon so many previous images, feeling and ideas that had fallen softly on my brain. I called upon conversations I’d heard, places I’d visited and lived in, people I’d met, writers and thinkers and historians – ancient and modern – I’d encountered.

And so, I must now thank everyone and everything that led, directly or indirectly, to the composition of this novel.

I acknowledge and thank:

The ancient Greek storytellers and historians whose stories helped me write my own stories about Zelos and Zelodotus.

All the philosophers I refer to explicitly or implicitly.

Nikos Kazantzakis

The author J.M. Coetzee – whose opening sequence in Elizabeth Costello served as the model to my prolegomena.

Vrasidas Karalis – for his Palimpsest and, of course, for joining me here tonight.

Edward Spence – for grounding thing so nicely in philosophy and for joining me here tonight.

My friend Zoe Rodriguez for being so kind as to MC this evening.

Greece, the ancient city of Nikopolis and the modern city of Preveza and Panos Dimatas who introduced me to it.

Kostas Karyotakis – the poet who served as the model for the copycat suicides.

Nikos Dimou – Greek intellectual.

Friends who stood by me, giving words of encouragement – Jorge Sotirios is here today, most are not, they’re in Greece or online somewhere, and there were those who were there next to me making a coffee or lunch while I worked – Gonzalo Rodriguez thank you.
Nick Walker
Rachel Hazelwood
Antoinette Ecklund

and finally, I thank my parents, I want to say their names last, so they can linger and be remembered….
Christos and Alexandra Koromilas