A SKETCH OF MY LIFE ************************************* In my formative years I was carefully brought up to be a garbage can Of prejudices, lies, and propaganda. If I understand my fellow Armenians today it may be because once upon a time I was one of them and I refuse to pretend otherwise. * It was very late in life that I realized deep inside somewhere I harbored a human being. * I wasted most of my life trying to please individuals whom I now classify as somewhere between moral riffraff and the scum of the earth. * When I say I loathe dupes what I really mean is that I loathe the dupe in me. The only thing I am willing to brag about is the fact that in my childhood I experienced homelessness, destitution, war, and discrimination in an alien environment. * Did I survive? Who can really tell? I feel more like that English soldier on the battlefield who, when informed by his king that he was wounded, replied: “Nay, Sire, I am dead.” # RECYCLING ************************** To live in oppression means to believe in things that you don’t and to trust the judgment of individuals with the morality of pimps. As a nation we have lived in oppression for so many centuries that we are no longer in a position to tell the difference between freedom and oppression. Hence the saying: “Once upon a time we were slaves; we are now slaves of former slaves.” Progress is our least important product. * One of the most useful tools in criminal investigations is to ask: “Who benefits?” Who benefits from our divisions? * “A bourgeois is a bourgeois regardless of nationality,” Lenin said. So is a divider, a charlatan, and a deceiver. * “You repeat yourself.” So do our dealers in chauvinist crapola. * I don’t write to achieve fame, fortune, and immortality. I write to share my understanding. # WHAT I BELIEVE *********************************** I believe in the Incomprehensible, the Unknowable and in the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness. As for “Thou shalt not kill”: I believe a system that has legitimized the burning of heretics and more recently war and massacre is an invention of the Devil. The rest is metaphysics, mumbo jumbo, propaganda, and taxation without representation. * My aim in life is not to achieve fame, fortune, and greatness but to be less dishonest. * As the offspring of perennial losers, I have a soft spot for all losers even when they are identified as the enemy. # TRASHLAND ********************** If Gogol and Kafka were to come back to life and collaborate on a book about reality in present-day Armenia, the result would be Denis Donikian’s VIDURES or AGHPASTAN, in Ruzanna Vartanian’s excellent Armenian translation (403 pages, Yerevan, 2013). Aghpastan, literally Trashland, is a biting satire and a horror story written with withering wit that utilizes many genres and styles reminiscent of James Joyce. * During a walk two friends discover the corpse of a woman in a garbage dump, an obvious victim of foul play. “I know who she is,” one of them says. “I recognize her by her hair and the undamaged side of her face. We should go to the cops.” The other is outraged. “The cops! The cops? Can you picture me walking into a police station? Walking in is easy. The trick is coming out. And sometimes you never come out.” “But it is against the law not to report a murder. If we ignore this murder and another murder next day, what happens if you or I are the next victims? If you and I and everybody else ignores a murder we become a nation of amnesiacs at the mercy of others.” “Maybe so -- but what happens if we are detained by the police? And when I say detained I don’t mean for an hour or a day but for months. Think of my piglets: what happens to them?” The conclusion is obvious: “Aghpastan” has become a country that swims in crime, criminals, executioners, and their victims. * The book begins and ends with the same two words: “Der Voghormia” (Lord have mercy). #