Call Home
I have been in Athens since the start of February and expect to be here at least until early May, working on a project which I will speak about at another time. I love living in Athens. I first visited the city when I was a few months away from becoming a teenager. My Greek grandfather, my “Popou,” had very generously offered to pay to have me and my cousin Barbara attend a camp in Greece run by the North American Diocese of the Greek Orthodox Church. The purpose of the camp--which still exists--is to reacquaint young Greek Americans with their cultural heritage. I was allowed to attend---or my religious affiliation was overlooked, I'm not sure--even though I had not been baptized into the Greek Orthodox faith but rather into the Episcopalian faith of my mother. The following fall, at the boys school I was attending, a Latin teacher began teaching for the first time ancient Greek. I was one of his four students. It was the beginning of my lifelong involvement with Greek culture
I feel incredibly fortunate now to return again and to be working on an art project in Athens. At the same time, I miss not being able to see my son and daughter, both of them young adults attending college. We’re in touch, of course, through contemporary technology, and, at the same time, this contemporary technology has facilitated my being far away. If I were back in New York City, I would still be far away from each of them most of the time, since neither of them is studying in New York CIty, but I feel the distance much more intensely here, where I am within a short distance of the Acropolis.
Recently, when I was texting back and forth with my daughter about how we should “do a zoom soon,” what came to my mind was the scene of calling home in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968). In that scene, the character Dr Heywood Floyd, dressed as a businessman, calls home inside the booth of a “Picturephone.” His young daughter answers. There is a profound sense of distance between them. and the slightest suggestion that he has forgotten his daughter’s birthday. Rewatching this scene I become aware that, as Dr. Floyd enters the phone booth, the sound immediately shifts in a disturbingly inverted way. The sound
Dr Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) calling home in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968).
inside the miniscule booth feels appropriate for an immeasurably larger space than where he has just left, even though he has entered a vastly smaller space. Visually, this is motivated by the planet we see slowly spiraling outside the window. We have the sense that inside the booth he is closer to the exterior of the space station, barely separated by a thin membrane from the vastness of outer space–the lethalness of which we will witness later in the film. Dr Floyd in the booth is less insulated from this void than in the shared social space from which he stepped away for his private act of making the call. This visual motivation for the change in sound, I would argue, diverts us from its more important purpose, which is to color Floyd’s act of phoning home. The intimacy that might be expected from such a familial scene in a Hollywood movie is transformed in Kubrick's film into an encounter across a space that seems hopelessly uncrossable. In our time of looming ecological doom, doom can also appear in regard to the social link between human beings, as capitalism demands the jettisoning of the remaining vestiges of human solidarity while constantly representing for us various stereotypes of this same social link.
My daughter Ava as Judith Miller, the daughter of Jacques Lacan, in a photo in Lacan's office in my film ADIEU LACAN.
This scene in Kubrick’s film–in which Kubrick’s own daughter plays the daughter of Dr. Floyd–reminds me of Freud’s discussion of technology in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud argues that technology has made each of us like a “prosthetic god,” and, at the same time, more acutely powerless. Especially poignant for the context in which it occurs to me, Freud even takes an example of what he means from advances in travel, writing “If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I would need no telephone to hear his voice…” Other associations come to my mind from the literary works of other writers and philosophers, ancient and modern, who have addressed the ambiguous effects of technology, but still, that scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 holds a central place in my imagination. Of course, the film 2001 was not released in 2001 but in 1968, the same year I turned twelve and first visited Greece. At that time many people were confused by the film and some critics then dismissed it as pointlessly obtuse but at that time I immediately felt I had a grasp for its most obscure meanings and my affinity for this film has never changed. My daughter was born in 2003, so this year, 2024, she turns 21. At the time of her birthday, I expect to still be in Athens. I also foresee that for her birthday my daughter and I will plan remotely to see each other and to speak together.