‘But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!’ —The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those who think like that are immature men. Yesterday I had to delete some passages from the third book of my trilogy where I confessed things that I now rephrase and translate into English.
In those deleted pages I confessed that I had had a recurring fantasy at my very mature age: that if it were possible to travel back in time I would be infinitely happy visiting my grandmothers’ homes. ‘What would I give…!’ — I have told myself countless times now that I can no longer see them — ‘to be able to go and visit them as I did as a child and pubescent!’
Their homes were far from the disturbances of my parents’ house, where I lived. Only beautiful and wholesome memories come from those places where many of our grandmothers lived. It is easier for parents to project their psychoses onto their offspring than for mature grandmothers to do so, even if they failed to understand our future parents or treat them well when they were young. With age, the unhealthy projections evaporate.
‘That fantasy I can even have right now, to the extent of perceiving that with their deaths parts of my being have been mutilated’, I said in my diary, where I added that ‘any satisfaction I might have in the present is a pale substitute for the times when I could go to see them when my “I” was whole’. I wrote in red ink that there would have been no folie en famille at home if any of them had seen our family dynamics. This is even more elementary than the Hitler Youth because some unsupervised parents (i.e., without grandmothers or godmothers) can drive a child mad and destroy him before the pubescent child can be recruited into the Hitler Youth.
Today’s Gray cult of individualism and eternal youth is folly in an age that doesn’t understand that senescence is a fundamental part of an extended family (in contrast to the nuclear family). The youth we are to pursue is not the youth of this modern world so blinded by its individualistic obsessions of a healthy body. ‘Man is mortal by his fears, and immortal by his desires’, said Pythagoras. And if we only grow old when we abandon our ideals, it means I’ll never grow old (though I will probably die of old age).
Of course: these thoughts are decontextualised in a mere blog post rather than in an intelligible autobiography. Except for Benjamin, I know that not many are interested in my work on the psychological trauma caused by parental betrayal. But if anyone has questions, although I don’t have the space I have in a trilogy of more than 1,800 pages, I will try to answer them.
______ 卐 ______
Update of 10:30 a.m.
Since I wrote the above post yesterday almost at midnight, I forgot to say the essential.
The fact is that the aberrant custom of the modern world of sending our grandmas to the nursing home results in their grandchildren not having what Alice Miller called ‘helping witnesses’, that is, a friendly ear for the child in families where the parents begin to assault one of them.
The balance that a granny represents in an extended family is fundamental for the mental health of the offspring, and that is cancelled out in the nuclear family that believes in nursing homes.
It is only just becoming fashionable to talk about Family Systems, but it seems clear to me that we should also study the so-called Blue Zones. (People in Blue Zones areas have a diet that is 95% plant-based. Fruits, vegetables, beans, tofu, lentils, nuts, and seeds are rich with disease-fighting nutrients and are the cornerstone of their diets.)
These people live longer, and some even reach centenarians, because they live as extended families where, feeling important, grandmas don’t become as senile as in the West, as they help raise the new generations.
Everything is interrelated: healthy diet and healthy—rural—lifestyles, plus a healthy extended family of the same ethnic group: the exact opposite of Dorian Gray’s lifestyle (I read Oscar Wilde’s novel in 1995, when I was much younger).
None of this, which is vital, I said yesterday because I repeat I wrote it tired at midnight.
9 replies on “Against Gray”
I think I didn’t say it as clearly as possible: It’s not that grandmothers are superior by nature, but that at their age they no longer mistreat children.
Anyone who has seen the film Howl’s Moving Castle could remember how the young Witch of the Waste later transforms into a very sweet granny.
I haven’t read Oscar Wilde but to my knowledge, he was a homosexual? If so, it isn’t a surprise that he would either consciously or unconsciously promote unhealthy views?
There’s much wrong with the current West, not just psychologically or physically but also technologically. I just recently read a book which, while it didn’t outright say it, nevertheless detailed how the ubiquity of air-conditioning facilitated the breakdown of family bonding.
I’m also rather surprised you’ve seen Howl’s Moving Castle. Have you by any chance read or seen The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart? You might like it as it’s about the bonds between people and animals, and saving animals from inhumane experiments?
The point of mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle is that my nephew and I relate Witch of the Waste (“la Bruja Calamidad” in Spanish) to my mother: terrible as a young woman with her children, but as an old woman she became a sweet granny with her grandchildren.
Didn’t you once relate an anecdote of your mother verbally abusing your nephew while you were all in the car which caused him to become agitated and culminated in your sister “spanking” him (as yanks say)?
Did I mention that on this blog (I don’t remember; I thought I only mentioned it in ¿Me ayudarás?).
Indeed: it’s the same nephew. But even though I gave him my trilogy, I’m not sure if he’s already read that page.
You mentioned this in a comment thread on this or rather your erstwhile blog years ago, where the subject of spanking was being debated between yourself and other visitors. I recall you used the words “screamed horribly” or something to that effect regarding your nephew.
I see. My mother treated her other grandchildren well, but not Chris. She only stopped being a bitch with my nephew when she got older.
Almost like he was loosely shaping up to be the next family scapegoat? Of course, in dysfunctional (or even “normal”) families once one powerful member designates someone as the scapegoat there’s typically a domino effect with the rest of the family following suit. I myself was also spoken to by one of my grandma’s in ways she never spoke to my other cousins or my brother so I certainly know what that’s like.
What I detected in the way my mother picked on my nephew as a child (but not as a teenager) is that only my nephew as a child reminded her of the girl she was; and apparently she was repeating patterns of behaviour that my grandmother applied to her (because, you know, trauma demands repetition).
In any case, I, not my nephew, was the family scapegoat who suffered the folie en famille. The first to become infected was my father when I was fifteen and then the sister who follows me in age. My second sister, who died by the way, rebelled against this madness and took my side (she was the only family member that I loved).
I will soon begin to translate the rest of my autobiography. I think it is the first time in history that a writer has done this in such a massive and comprehensive way as I do (a work initiated in 1988 and finished in 2024!).
In order not to bore the reader I recently edited out the part about my surviving siblings who are still in folie, in order to focus on my parents. If there were a publisher who would publish my trilogy to the extent that the editor asked me a sequel, I would surely write an addendum where I would include the material about my four surviving siblings.