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My father died six months ago. He fell down the stairs and broke his neck.
While his son surges on, brandishing the book like a binding contract for justice, the ancient
landscape crumbles, tilts, begins to disobey the natural laws carved in stone : the word
is clearly worn, eroded, even unsure. While the father looks back now, because he is the
guide, thus he is the abstract who once was there, about whom all those who have not relinquished
the task, the quest, say speculative things, spread rumours, invent legends, while his
breath is almost inaudible.
The son skims through light and shadow with the most transparent, luscent body, glancing
off surfaces, recording images with virtual tools, screens of light atoms, trapping photons,
because he intuits that transcience is, aesthetically, almost logically, the right medium, so it
has the alchemical formula which must carry the code.
The father looks at the milky way, this is his domain, the excitement for him, after
all, only begins once the shadows begin to lengthen.
The son echoes with wonderment, because in the company of the father, in his religious
observance, he senses that the answers to the great questions will never be known. It
is after all safe to say so, where another has gone, has digested the cosmic silence
and our ignorance. In the company of the father the son is magically
empowered, he speaks with a silver tongue, he leaps and takes flight on wings of wisdom.
He tastes the power to tame.
Who is the man who plants weeds? The man who turns stone into bread.
No-one with the surplus resource we call discretion, is content to believe that what appears to
be the case is really no more than a fairly slow, not too pleasant porridge of mediocrity
called life.
Somehow it doesn't seem to deserve the name life, this mundane routine of pinching ourselves
to see if we're still alive. Life, as opposed to living, seems to demand
definition, and so respectability in the form of a dramatic convention.
So life needs to be invented despite the obligation to use a well-used, even done-to-death, table
of elements.
The small-town is by definition, the setting. Even a farm is a small town, a junction, a
station full of drama waiting to happen.
The hero is he who arrives by dreaming it up. Intrigue comes to life. The dead are animated,
old wounds opened. And yet he is victim.
The task of answering for all this mechanism set in motion is heavy; it's a burden for
one psyche. He believes, just like he did when he dreamed of a world beyond the routine
one, that it is a luxury one could give up, a habit, a bus he could get off.
He resents reminders of his duty; for all he cares, his absent father can go to hell.
He wants nothing more to do with mental inventions and archetypes. He'll stick to his day job.
He is happy, he says, to disappear and leave others to wallow in self-pity and existential
angst. In fact, he is free to go. Yet he does not
leave alone, he finds. Whoever leaves with him appears determined to fill an archetypal
role, one thing. And they appear extremely able to play their role badly. Like stubborn
actors. He is tempted to recast, to rewrite. So he must re-live. And must make peace with the same
old story.
Springbok after dark. Programme about Elvis; George Swanson is watching: George Swanson
knows nothing about my father's death. My father worked for George Swanson.
When the beast suggests its presence just beyond the circle of light, in the twilight,
he cannot countenance that it is a trained dog.
The beast, he says, is too tame. The father speaks the same language as the
sheep-dog. He feels, after all, without his mission to protect, there is nothing to do.
Guiding is the work his life has led him to. The father has softened his contempt for the
tamed. No longer defiant, he listens to another language, the tongue for the translation of
the defiant declaration of the son. Icarus and his father fly on wings of wax
They fly close to the sun. Even higher goes the son
To define for himself uniqueness and brilliance.
The father, as shepherd, has a certain sheepishness, since he cannot claim, relative to the son,
to be doing much more than scouting known terrain, familiar territory. He bears the
mark of the hero who once was.
Imprecise decades have passed since the blade has sliced into the wood around the graphite,
or is it simply no longer a conscious ritual of clearing the way?
Tonight the father sleeps on the rim of the orange, parallel to the river, under a shepherd's
tree, in the yard of an abandoned small-holding. This is where trailer-park people once lived
with dignity as casual labour in the valley of vineyards.
The father can smell traces of human waste on the mild night air, once diluted once only
by a recent storm. What obliges a doctor in his prime to end
it all? What passes the silent curse onto the shoulders
of so young a son? The father, slipping in and out of sleep,
dreams up the answer. The father, lying along the river's axis,
next to his son, is no longer afraid to look the truth in the eye.
The river is a mirror and the mirror is the limit. No human face appears among the stars
and moon on its surface. Why do we not stand in amazement to the energy
of human endeavours when they remain nameless in the universe? How can we justify the nasty
disappointment of death? By deliberate misinterpretation, by false consolation. A man of integrity,
not much of a religious man, has only so much self-deceit in his bones. It takes a saint
to tend to the sick and dying. It takes a fool not to see how futile it is to extend
life. Life, after all, is terminal, without redemption except to the incurably humble.
Life is a death-sentence.
The mosquitos remind me I'm more alive than dead, at least that I cannot,with any justification,
play dead anymore. What did the father expect? To be written
out of the story forever? What, after all, happens except the unexpected?
Do stories not try to limit the apparent infinity of possibilities, and so to proud mankind,
of options we face each dawn? Why therefore is he surprised that he faces
a limit here in the desert, on the banks of the river valley they call the borderline?
In the dream the father weeps as he had not wept or at least shed tears for years. Yet
he's ambivalent over the few he does weep. Since he understands. Since he understands
that finality overtakes him now. He may as well be grieving over his mother's
death. But he leaves few tears. They dry up too soon
it seems. After all we're in the desert, tears are scarce.
It makes sense to terminate one's grief the moment one understands that suffering
is a certainty. It makes no sense where evidence of life's cruelty piles up and must be acknowledged
daily. Where reprieves are rare and small reason for celebration.
Everything we do, even the folly of psychology, with it's invention of other selves to talk
to, must be done with the compassion accumulated from those whose lives we encounter. The subtotal
of a quiet compassion. We are, after all, in the land of the Eland
people.
Beneath loss a gain is concealed. He has felt the turning. The calling has reached its sell-by
date. And now the ideals are cold. Does he have the drive to re-invent himself?
As long as he can master hesitation and self-doubt.
After the late-summer thunderstorm, quite unseasonal, a single drop baptizes him where
he sits digesting the unpleasant truth about life's trick.
Surely we think existence would not squander so well-intentioned a wealth of experience
such as mine? Wait, friend, till you consider how carefully-calculated,
via impersonal forces, organic life is. In the final analysis, the result of millennia
of trial and error. Are dreams unlike stories in that they only
appear to exaggerate life? Or do they subscribe to a programme of positive
propaganda in misleading shorthand, of a larger-than-life cast of archetypes?
Perhaps our one salvation lies in the compassion for the codes and the shorelines which link
them together? Surely we could not make the error forever
of taking it all too seriously?