The misspelling of the last word suggested their main-interest and indeed the collaboration of former staff-members with the kidnap has always been suspected but was never proven. After being held hostage for four and a half month a loyal bookkeeper paid the ransom and the boy was set free.
The money was never recovered and with most of the family fortune gone, the nine-year old boy was send to an orphanage in Kampen (the Netherlands). The contrast between the very sober and disciplined life there, and the dreamlike world of his earliest years could not have been harsher.
Trying to survive the company of his fellow orphans, who saw in him - a semi-foreigner - their perfect object for humiliation, he escaped into a fantasyworld. Making up stories about himself and other people, drawing, writing and acting. On the stage and in real life.
At the age of twelve he wrote his first novel "kidnapped".
With a typical ironic twist of history it turned out to be this book that in fact set him free. Although the revenue of the book was withheld from him by the orphanage, he managed to escape their attention whilst on a promotional tour in the city of Amsterdam.
There, age 13, he embarked on an oceansteamer. Doing all kinds of jobs, and pretending to be older than he was. For the next five years he travelled the world allways in search for, as he wrote in his autobiography "the continuation of a past that probably no longer was mine". On two occasions he nearly made it to Hawai, but bad luck frustrated both attempts. In "Shadows of my Youth" his much acclaimed autobiography he writes: "(...) during the second failed attempt I started to realize - after the sadness and anger were overcome - that there would never be a real way back. I realized that the nearest I could come to the island of my youth would be looking at it from a safe distance. For not only geographical barriers stood between me and my past, but, more fiercely and impossible to cross, the past itsself."
Doomed into exile for the rest of his life he decided to make this weakness his strenght. "Never again trying to set foot ashore, unless it were in a land of my own making. For only there, in a purely artificial and constructed universe, I would have the power and the moral right to adjust time and events as I saw fit."
After he disembarked for the last time in the summer of 1980 the young man had left behind him "the concept of a single life, a single identity, and yes, even the notion of a single reality".
In a letter he wrote to me in 1995 he confessed:
portrait of Dick Tuinder in Ministeck by J. vander Snaak (1996)
Still, the man who wrote this had a single name and an adress to wich I could reply. Yet the central-ME he calls himself is itself already enigmatic and dualistic. Writer, filmmaker and artist with a multitude of works and opnions that could easily supply an ensemble of psyche.
What than is left for his other "identities"? Entities working their way out of the central-ME that, as Dick Tuinder once staded in an interview, can hide anywhere. Among his closest friends and worst enemies. So who are they?
What about Willem Halbertsma, the respected dutch politician, aged 79? Could he be a spin-off of the central-HE? Possibly. But why would a dutch broadcasting company (RVU) make a documentary out of his life if he were a fake? Arthur Dauphin than? The French filmpioneer who is most renowned for being the first man who ever waved at a camera. Why not? But why would a documentary on this mans life recieve a serious review in the leading Dutch moviemagazine SKRIEN, and be shown on a filmcourse at the university in Florida if he were fictionous? Surely not Ramon dos Santos. Writer of the epic poem "Selfportrait of the 20th Century as a Brain" and in everyday life a respected employe of the Universal Parcel Service (UPS), downtown Manhattan.
All these people (and there might be many many more!), different as they are, seperated from eachother by space and time, share one thing. They are all related in one way or another to the man who calls himself the central-ME. Dick Tuinder. Currently writing a biography on Halbertsma, working on a film based on dos Santos' poem, and in fact being the maker of the documentary on Arthur Dauphin. But of course all of this is just assumption. Coincidence.
Or is it?
I myself even find it hard, sometimes, to remember my life as it was before I met the central-HE. Just as if his personality has sucked mine into his being. And he never seems to forget anything about the events in my life. Seems to know more about me, than I do myself. Even though I know for sure that it is me who writes these words, sitting on my 19-th century balcony, overlooking the Atlantic ocean, it is hard to escape his presence.
Thinking about his works that are known to me, the stories, exhibitions, drawings. His facination with nature and death, the former being of course the primal life-soul, the latter its' brotherly counterpart, I cannot help thinking about a nuclear reaction. A nuclear reaction recorded with a speed-motion camera and projected in slow-motion. Inside the explosion worlds are created and destroyed at the same time. It is hard, if not impossible, to grasp the meaning of it. But the beauty and power of it is awsome and sometimes just plain beautifull. The essence of the explosion seems to be the explosion itself. One can only wonder how many worlds and entities are still hiding there, inside the nuclear storm.
Jacky vander Snaak,
12-03-01, Santa Cruz de Tenerife
Canary Islands, Spain.