[Below is a translation of the speech I wrote for my father’s memorial service on January 25, 2014. I’ve tried to make it as literal as possible, so it may be a little stiff.]
It’s possible that my speech will offend some people. This is not my intention, but I will not try to avoid it, either. I think people are offended much too easily these days. Or rather: sensitivity is of course better than insensitivity; but, as I always say to myself: it’s no problem at all if you feel offended!
One of my earliest memories is the following. I must have been about three or four years of age. I was at home with my mother, and Rein was not there. The television was on, there was a broadcast of the News. And I pointed at the TV and said to my mother: “Look! There’s dad!” For the newsreader was a white male with dark hair and glasses: Harmen Siezen, whom most of you will probably remember. And to me it made perfect sense that my father presented the News: for who could better tell the world how it was doing than my father, who knew everything and had everything under control!
When I was five I went a step further still. I was in a kindergarten called The Bumblebee, exactly one block further down the Prinsengracht [the canal where I lived], where the Luzac College would later be located. I was not raised religiously, but did know the concept “God”. And one day I’d told some of the other children that my father was God! They did not believe me, so I said: “Just wait until he picks me up from school, then he’ll tell you himself!” So when my father came to pick me up, they exclaimed: “Ollie says you are God! That’s not true, right?” And who can imagine my surprise when my father subsequently denies it! “No, no, that’s not true.” I was actually sincerely surprised. But I immediately believed him: after all, God does not lie…
The aforesaid gives a pretty good idea, I hope, of how important my father was to me. Naturally, as I got older, I saw him less and less as a God, and during puberty I even began to see that he, too, was only human. During puberty I even had a hero who in a sense dethroned my father: the singer of the rock group The Doors, Jim Morrison, with his “kill the father” etcetera. And near the end of puberty Morrison led me to my spiritual grandfather, Friedrich Nietzsche. According to one of my father’s favourite writers, Tom Wolfe, the most famous quotation of modern philosophy was from Nietzsche: namely, “God is dead.” For Nietzsche, “God is dead” meant at the same time something very terrible and something very hopeful. In the first place something very terrible: it was as if the Earth had been torn loose from the Sun and was now plunging into the cold darkness of outer space. But it was also something very hopeful: man was now finally necessitated to really stand on his own feet, to really take care of himself.
One of my favourite poets and painters, William Blake, wrote the following proverb: “The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.” Translated with some liberty, this means: “The fox takes care of himself, but God takes care of the lion.” But if someone who takes care of himself is a fox, and someone of whom God takes care is a lion, then what about God Himself? God takes care of Himself and is therefore, according to Blake’s proverb, a fox. But on the other hand, one can also formulate the statement “God takes care of Himself” as “God takes care of God.” According to Blake’s proverb, then, God is also a lion, for God takes care of Him. That’s how I see my father, too: as a lion as well as a fox. As a child, I always saw him as a lion. But during puberty I began to have grown-up conversations with him, and came to know the fox in him. He personally did not see himself as a fox, by the way, but as a rat. Yes, really. His own father taught him to always think ahead, and he called that “ratting”. He explained to me that a rat in a tight place always looked for exits. And indeed, he had always told me how I was to escape if there should ever be a fire. Thus there was always a rope hanging down the back of our house. And he also repeatedly used the old Dutch proverb “liever Blojan dan Dojan”. That’s short for “liever blode Jan dan dode Jan” [“better cowardly Jack than dead Jack”]. Thus he said, for example, that if there should be a thunderstorm while I was playing field hockey, I should always go to the clubhouse. And if others should then give me a hard time about that, I was to say: “liever Blojan dan Dojan!” It is, by the way, lion-like, that is to say courageous, that he never cared much what others said or thought. The name “Rein” was short for “Reindert”, and "Reindert is of course a form of “Reynard”, as in “Reynard the Fox”; but my father was Reindert the Lionheart.
I’ve been working with the same company for ten years now, and some years ago there was discontent among the employees because my employer did not follow the CBA [collective bargaining agreement]. I talked a lot about that with Rein back then, and he even helped me in my attempts at setting up a limited form of works council. Well then, during one of those talks, I at some point said: “The law is on my side.” And then my father said: “No, Ollie, not the law; Justice!” My father firmly believed in Justice, with a capital J. He sincerely believed in righteousness, and that Justice would ultimately always prevail. In that sense, then, he was truly a lion. For Blake’s proverb literally means: “The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.” That’s a reference to the idea of “Divine Providence”: the lion trusts in God’s Providence, whereas the fox only trusts in his own prudence. And though Rein did not believe in a supreme being, he did believe in what Plato called the Idea of the Good. And that’s basically the essence of the Christian God: the Christian God is the good God, the righteous God. And though my father did not believe in divine right, he did believe in natural right.
I personally do not even believe in that. Properly speaking, then, it’s only for me that God is truly dead. Not only do I not believe that Justice will ultimately always prevail, nay I don’t even believe in the existence of injustice. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus says: “For the god”—and by that he means the Olympians—“for the god, all is beautiful and good and just, but human beings have opinions on what is unjust and what is just.” But although I do not believe in Justice, I do believe in something else. I’m no nihilist, I do believe in something all right. For I believe in the so-called “right of the strongest” [this is the Dutch counterpart to the phrase “survival of the fittest”], in the broadest sense of the word. And although my father also had his weaknesses, as far as that is concerned he will always be an exemplar for me. My father was a real man. If I did not want to go outside because of the rain, he’d usually say: “Bah, those few drops…” And if I’d fallen and had quite an abrasion on my knee, he’d help me, but he’d often say something like: “Bah, it’s just a scratch…” And if food was past its expiration date, he’d often say: “That’s not the expiration date, but only the sell-by date”; and then he’d just eat or drink it… In that respect I will not be following in his footsteps, by the way.
Of course I haven’t seen Rein as a god for a long time. But as long as I live, I will always see him as a hero. And in honour of that fact I’ve chosen the last song of this afternoon—to which belongs another anecdote, by the way. When I was in the fifth or sixth grade of high school [i.e., when I was seventeen or eighteen years of age], I often played records in our living room at the Prinsengracht, when I was alone or almost alone at home. And one day as I was doing that, Rein came downstairs, perhaps to get something to eat or drink. He then put on a song, and said he thought it might well be the best song he knew. That song is the one I’ve chosen, although I’ve still given a personal twist to it. For my choice is a cover of that song by one of my favourite artists.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TFK1zgMaJk[/youtube]
[Nico’s studio performance of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.]