Meteorites Mâkhi Xenakis
To write this short remembrance, perhaps it’s best to be in Corsica, as I am today, for my recollections here show this very particular man in another light. He chose Corsica in 1951 as the place where he would renew himself every summer, alone with my mother and me. Corsica replaced Greece, where from 1947 to 1974 he was not permitted to travel because of his former political activities. In Corsica, he could calm his fears and shed his anxiety for a month, in a hand-to-hand confrontation with the wildest aspects of nature that he could find. The more I speak about him with my mother these days, the more we become convinced that, although during the rest of the year my father showed every evidence of a very erudite and rational mind, linking music, architecture, and mathematics, the main motor of his acts was linked to a deep wound, a profound suffering that grew familiar to us and whose traces we find in most of his music. This suffering certainly stemmed from the tragedies he lived through during the civil war in Greece, but also from his childhood. When he was five, his mother, in the course of giving birth to a baby girl, died. Brutally deprived of his family cocoon, he was obliged to construct himself alone. I believe that he struggled to exorcize the stunning shock of this death through his music and during every instant of his life. One of the things he said to me most often was, “Mâ, do you realize that we’re meteorites; almost as soon as we’re born, we have to disappear?” As I write these lines, I have close by me one of his many small notebooks, where he jotted down with his finest pen an idiosyncratic
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