Desert Air

Posted by Maladjusted on 17/07/2011 · 2 Comments 

My father died two months ago. He died of cancer after a long, terrible year in which his mind and body deteriorated in one of those dignity-stripping, theodicy-confounding horrors whose only saving grace is that they are terminally interrupted. If he’d lived, last Monday would have been my Dad’s 62nd birthday. I loved him. Unequivocally but also in that time-traversing, aching, fragile, yet enduring way that we love people whose features we inherit in ways that necessarily surpass and disappoint both their intentions and our own. Anyway. No human relationship is without ambivalence, but I will go to my own death associating the memory of my Dad’s laugh with hospitality and with kindness: with an open door and a warm, well-lit place which, like any refuge, asks nothing of the person who sits down, because (as the Greeks knew) each of us is, at any time, a guest, a stranger, and a host (xenos) all at once.

I can’t (and don’t want) to say any more than this. I already wrote a hopelessly inadequate eulogy, that I, for a number of reasons, can’t actually remember delivering. So, for now, facts separated by parataxis will have to suffice.

But, why then write anything in this space? Not to entertain my readership, of course. I’ve just felt, for a long timethat I couldn’t go back to writing anything for the blog, without first prefacing it with some at least token announcement of this. I’m not sure why: I have after all, written other things over the last few months in more formal contexts; and I’ve never been the kind of personal, confessional or charismatic writer whose readers want to hear more about them and their lives.

In any case, I am not telling you this because I’m planning to be morbid, nor to suggest, that I’m planning to write a series of endlessly sad, or bitter or self-pitying things in weeks (and months to come). On the contrary, I can assure you that I have built up a back catalogue of more or less silly things to share with you.

It’s just that I felt the need to tell you at least the bare outlines of this, not so that I can turn my little blog into a (poorly selected) forum for grief, or for talking about things that belong to the arcana of families and the dark spots of the soul, but so that I can, precisely, move on to talking about other things without the sense that what makes me do so is glibness, forgetfulness or, worst of all, the weird and slightly obscene shame that many people feel in the face of their own pain.

Instead, I hope, that in continuing, precisely, to…not talk about emotional undercurrents or overtones I’m in some vague way keeping faith, more with at least some of my best my memories of my Dad who was a quiet, unambitious, unpretentious man, who loved small comforts and distracting, funny things. It’s a description, I know, that fits almost any of us, all those unglamorous human beings the world over whose life and death (like all of ours) will pass by unnoticed by the world save for small, bright places in the consciousness of those who knew them. But, of course, for every person, as for reality itself, there is an irreducible excess of parts over elements. And one of those parts in my Dad to which I want to stay most loyal is the sense of wonder that stayed with him for as long as his mind was intact: a sense that is, of course, as Plato insisted, inherent to humanity, but which a sentimental, but not false, convention makes the special province of children, artists and even philosophers — whatever they might be.

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