Chapter Nine
9.0
As a Lamaze-class graduate, I knew my job was to remain calm. I held her hand, suggested breathing techniques and stayed in contact with the nurses. Not once did I think about the fact that she, a little more than two years before, had sat beside me – not for a single night but for several weeks after I had had a motorcycle accident. As I lay smoldering in the painful wreckage of cracked bone and opium-based medications, I might un-lid a dilated pupil and she would be there. Sometimes she was reading. Sometimes embroidering. During the first two weeks in which I lay in bed, she stitched a shirt with the emblems of our life together around the collar, across the yoke and down the doubled-up panel of blue cloth through which the button holes were cut and sown; she stitched the shoulder of the old button-down oxford with a white bolt of lightening, a purple cloud and rays of orange and yellow sunlight behind. She embroidered the storm on that part of a shirt that would someday cover my broken shoulder.
During the eighteen hours of a difficult labor, what the nurse called ‘back labor,’ I slowly, but systematically forgot all about the baby. As her contractions became more intense, my attention focused more entirely on her: a girl who had all but entered another world. In the delivery room, shortly before noon, as nonsensically and as dramatically as it had all began, it was over. The last crescendo of this life process had been very like a slaughtering of pigs, but now, covered in blood and white slime, he was alive, screaming and my wife and I were smiling. Survival kept giving way to wonder. The violence of childbirth dispersed like a summer squall. Under the bright neon of 1977, we looked at one another stunned and amazed. We had known all along that the events of the evening had been about having a baby, but that did not prevent us from being astonished by the obvious.
Still haloed in a perfect ignorance, I sensed his strangeness. Strange and yet ours. And of course I knew I was supposed to love the creature that had found his way into the world with so much commotion and letting of blood. The striking lack of connection between my son and me, like a vacuum in which I could not quite draw breath, began to fill in one long moment. Happiness, or even pride, shook off bewilderment. There he was howling, breathing, and amending his blue skin to pink. With the same attention her labor had demanded, his mother’s mammalian eye rolled around to him. By the time he was out of the delivery room, we were his parents. We had awakened from one dream and fallen into another.
My parents were introduced at a costume party in Denver and were married in Mexico a few months later. Not long after that they discovered they were fourth cousins. Perhaps they had seemed familiar to one another? Denver was new to each. As it turned out, the bulk of my family on both sides comes from the same county just outside Philadelphia. Our dispersion from that rural county began and ended with my grandparents: none left siblings behind and by the time of my birth all that remained of my family in the county were a couple of spinster sisters, my first cousins three times removed. All four of my grandparents were born in the nineteenth century, grew up in that county and by the beginning of the twentieth were either dead or living elsewhere.
After twenty years together, my parents divorced. My mother returned to New York City where she lived another thirty years. My father wandered for the rest of his life. I was nineteen and out of the house when their marriage ended. My father had always been, even as a family man, restless beyond any easy explanation. Before I had finished my secondary education, I had attended twenty-two different schools and had spent close to a third of my life living abroad. The lives of my children have not been so different.
If either of my sons were to walk along the sidewalks of Mount Holly, a historic little town in southern New Jersey with which they are not at all familiar and to which I have made only a few pilgrimages over the years, they would discover that the names of their ancestors mark graves and hang at the corners of the streets. It has always been odd for me to read the rolls of the two big Quaker boarding schools in the area – so many of the names are my own. What does it mean to be from somewhere and yet be a stranger in that place?
My attachment to the county belongs to an idea I have about myself that has always seemed unnaturally strong. What kind of familiarity with the county do I have? Both my cousins are dead and the rest of my people have not lived there for more than a hundred years. It is not part of my experience to know what it is like to live within a community of persons who knew your parents, your grandparents, who were witness to your childhood, knew you and your place better than you perhaps knew it yourself. I have only imagined such interconnections and yet have felt that such connectedness should belong to me. Where did this should come from? I tend to understand myself as deeply rooted in a county and a family that in many important respects I barely know. But my understanding of my relations to my family and their place on earth did not originate with me.
In the household in which I was raised the importance of family, explicitly and in general ways, was high, perhaps extreme, and as a result, I think, loaded up with a kind of ambivalence if not flat-out irony. My father felt it. I feel it. My brothers feel it. As I have gotten older and my own father has passed deeper into history, I have come to suspect that my father’s hermeneutic character tunneled deep into the foundations of our family and rebuilt the whole of our past brick by brick in that single night of labor called a generation. Have I done the same? But it seems certain to me that my relationship to family, together with all my ambivalent feelings concerning its value, must also have been passed along to my own children. Such passing along is more than a habit of family.
I went to middle school with the brother of my first wife. At thirteen – from the first moment I saw her – I began to slip from something like a stunned fascination with the way she looked towards sexual desire, and did so more quickly or more slowly than I am now capable of gauging. If it is possible to fall in love with someone at first sight, doesn’t that mean that one falls in love with the look of that person? In Greek, ‘the look of something’ is expressed with a word etymologically related to eidos, the famous word Plato uses for his theory of Forms or Ideas, if it is a theory at all. Eidos is also the root of the English word ‘idea.’ To what extent or in what sense does the form or the idea of a person have to do with falling in love? How much my idea of her belonged to who she was is a calculation I am unable to perform. Notwithstanding, I do recall that my feelings were strong and winning her seemed as if it might be the last task I should ever have to achieve. Carried to us on the same stream in which we bathed as children, our family together appeared like a prophet in the rushes.
We might plan for a child – and perhaps it is best that we did – but I cannot have any actual understanding of what it means to want a child until he is here. The whole process is like falling down stairs. At the penultimate moment, and without consideration for any plan we may have had, we were overwhelmed and she became pregnant. Orgasm has been compared to death because at the last moment death also snatches one away from plans and purpose towards something like eternity. For these and other reasons, it seems almost certain to me that the sensuous is or is very close to the origin of the family. Does this mean that sentimentality must rule that from which I arise?
9.1
My idiosyncratic origin is, of course, a family. But who I am has been nurtured by far more vague and general relations to the past. I have many fathers and mothers, some known some unknown, some chosen, some foisted upon me. My past intersects with and functions like the past that seems to belong to everyone else. One name for the past I share with others of my kind, what I have in common with them, is the tradition, or, perhaps better: The Tradition. There is a strange kind of identity between the past and tradition, no matter who one is. The identity between the past and its canon is just as odd. Such identities are the actual enactment of part for whole relations or figures. These enactments are all mixed up in what is world, what is given and so what does not begin or end.
Precisely what The Occidental Tradition is, and so what should or should not be included in it, is an open question. The western canon may have begun with the Old Testament or with Homer; it may have begun with both or neither. Questions of origins or scope are vexed because the content of the tradition, despite the perfection of the past, can never be exhausted. In an authentic sense stronger than is easy to understand, even the most private and anonymous reader lost in time is as much a part of The Tradition as Plato. What thing differentiates the tradition and the past in which it is carried cannot be made clear. One never knows in working the earth when one will uncover the bones of another ancestor. Influence functions in the shadows of a past that is always given. At the most basic level, this means I never know what is going to show up as having been. As something given, how one is to pick one’s tradition, how one is to choose one’s past – even if such a choice is possible – is not transparent. It is not even clear in what sense my past is mine. The tradition is not mine to choose even if I do choose to read certain books. My relations to the world precede me. The tradition is that which speaks with some kind of authority from the past, and it is a voice that everyone belonging to that tradition hears. The tradition, for some, is a pair of shoulders upon which to stand; for others, the tradition may be a voice of solicitude that eases the kind of despair belonging to a life that has imagined it has already failed. And no matter how illogical, the past is all bound up in choice.
The tradition is as dark as the family from which I have sprung. The word itself comes down from a Latin verb that has two distinct meanings: to ‘pass down’ in the sense of ‘to hand down’ and ‘to hand over’ meant in the sense of betrayal. As long as my origin obtains as a problem, the question of where I come from or where I belong seems to be a riddle I cannot solve. A nostalgic undertow tends to pull my understanding into the depths of a confusion and inconsistency that constitutes the mythology of who I am. I belong to a family and a tradition I cannot embrace because I cannot find it. The very family, town and country to which I cleave seem to be the agents of my displacement. That which gives me my identity also robs me of it.
Have I not also been born without a city and left upon the earth without native home? Am I the not the one from elsewhere, from nowhere at all? Time washes out the proper past for which I long, a past in which I have imagined that I might find the foundations of an origin towards which straining nostalgia pulls. And in what seems like a waking dream, I stand at the edge of a New World – much as my ancestors did – but the world before me is both without and nothing but wilderness. Here I feel myself to be a stranger in the very country I took to be my own. In attempting to flee time and fate, I have, like Oedipus – but sovereign in some weak and democratic way – set the world in motion and become the object of my own contempt.
9.2
Irony breaks over the audience like waves, and yet Oedipus feels nothing strange. There is nothing ironic for him in the events of his barely credible life. All he feels is horror and alienation. The shock of who he is has exhausted him like an animal in a snare against which it has worked the whole of a difficult night and now, glazed by pain, pulls into himself, waiting for death as the trapper approaches through the deep snow, club uplifted. Time has stopped. Time looms large and ominous. Static, Oedipus’ imagination has collapsed into the weight of its own mass. In the brightness of his imagination, he has become a singularity towards which the mass of the world is rushing. He sees himself as utterly alone, his isolation so vivid he cannot remember that his way to be is less like a single drop of water than the river itself. He has forgotten the river that gained in the disorder of a pastoral mountainside pelted by rain and covered in snow. Oedipus has forgotten that before the sun warmed the snow that had thickened on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron in the dark and cold months of winter, before the meadow was sodden with blossoms, before the flowing trickle was in thrall to its incurable affection for salt and sea and wandered curiously through the lichen-pattered rock, and then, faster, licked the cuts of the slope, that before any action, before the snowstorm, before any moment of now, there was already a river. Nor can he remember that the river is still extant. Even now its waters – before, later and now – slide into perfect imminence with the sea. The river is neither the water that flows, nor its course, nor its beginning, nor its end. The river is the whole of flowing and enjoys its freedom by conforming to the discontinuous and dynamic topography of a world in which it always had a stake. Time is not so much like a river into which we step as we are like the river on which the world passes by. But this human way to be is only like a river. The river itself is a god.
Oedipus searched for Laius’ killer and found only the killer of the king. When he solves the puzzle of his predicament and discovers that he equals the one he sought, he is revolted at who he must be and turns away in disgust. Jolted by surprise, he does not encounter himself at all. Instead, with the alacrity of a madman, he puts out his eyes, goes through the gates of Thebes seeking isolation and wilderness – a place he dreams is beyond all human contamination. In failing to encounter himself, Oedipus confirms his losses and fortifies his misunderstandings as he fashions his flesh into a symbol for what he has always been: homeless and blind.
Who has not found himself crawling towards what was supposed to be original, not expecting to find one’s history but something new – perhaps the fruits of one’s labor in this world? Oedipus’ plight is meaningful to me and not by analogy. I share his shock in being what he most feared he would be. I share his self-loathing and his propensity to overlook what is remarkable about the obvious. Like him, I have misjudged the strength of my attachment to a world of opinion, of ideas. I have been stolen by the look of it, the brilliant shine of existence and have failed to notice my blindness. Because my self-understanding is never without consequence, it is right to say that who I am is who I imagine myself to be. The failure of imagination is to fail to see that I am the mirror of the world, a failure that has lead me to misjudge the degree of the trauma I suffer in trying to live by the choices I have made and not made. I know Oedipus’ suffering because I also know too much. I know who I am because I also know where I have come from, what I have done and what I have not done.
At bottom, I suspect that my way to be is the city from which I wish to flee, not just once but for a second time – that I too wish to cheat fate. I dream of self-creation, a paradise that lies past the edges of the world. I imagine that I am strong enough to overwhelm the exhausted god, even if he is still living, who, with pitted sword grown cold and dull, sleeps in terror and rags before the doors of a desiccated garden. But if I were somehow able to recover my magical origins, when I finally achieved it, at the very epoch of my success, I would, like the man who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, no longer be who I was. I would lose my way because I would have lost my way to be. Like Lycaon returned to nature and transformed into a wolf, I would, upon entering the origin of my way to be, undergo a metamorphosis and be plucked from the story of my life. I would suddenly become a symbol and a character in the drama of a life I could not live. Nostalgia so often longs for the irredeemable. This longing is a sensation sustained by the impossibility of being rid of itself as it blinds the possibility of getting clear of and about who one is. Inaccessibility is pure theory.
“Know thyself” is carved above the threshold of the shrine at Delphi. Freud read Sophocles through the Old Testament and understood that we are inescapably driven to seek the womb from which we were born, and so he taught that in being so driven a desire is bound to arise to kill the one we meet along the way. To succeed in the seduction of the mother, as Oedipus did, is to repeat the passion, to escape ignorance and so suffer the shock of exile yet a second time. What does Sophocles teach us? His lesson is more modest: that we are likely to find that for which we look and that it is far harder to rid oneself of knowledge than it is to obtain it – harder to do and harder to bear. Perhaps the past needs to be clarified in order for it to happen, and finally be forgotten. It has been my own experience – not the pronouncement of an oracle, a playwright or a therapist – that has led me to wonder how I am to suffer what is given.
9.3
As if brought by a stork, our son seemed to come from nowhere. And yet, there he was. Utterly related. Be it divine will or the magic of biochemistry, it seems to be the disposition of persons and parents to be welcoming. As if in continuation of the mother’s relation to the fetus – has she not been host nine months to her unborn child – my wife and I were almost hysterical ascertaining and meeting our son’s needs in those first weeks. We were so young and inexperienced it was not obvious to either of us how we were to manage keeping our tiny son alive. I called my mother and she came for a week. I am still grateful. My wife’s sister who had two young children of her own came thereafter and helped. Yet new in my hands my son in those first few moments of his life was perhaps the most peculiar stranger I shall ever encounter. He was completely unknown and strange in that he did not yet have a past of his own. How was it that he became so suddenly mine? There is so much confusion about family and home.
Often supposed to be the locus of homogeneity, the last bastion against every difference that threatens, the family also seems to be the place where habituation to difference first happens. How unlike one brother is to the other. One is easy. Calm. Sleeps though the night. The other is agitated. Busy. Sometimes even irritable. One turns inward. The other outward. The family is the first place where we learn that character does not matter nearly as much as we might later believe. The family makes every allowance. It suffers the drunkard. The criminal. Maybe loudly. Maybe quietly. No. It seems likely that the home for which nostalgia longs most has nothing to do with the exclusiveness we associate to kind, but to heterogeneity. What nostalgia authentically longs for is the same openness that comes over a person who has fallen in love or welcomes the coming of a child. No matter how brief this openness lasts. Nostalgia longs to be free, which only means free from bondage to self, and fall into the fearlessness that accompanies being open to every difference, to all that is given. Maybe we all somehow remember that moment out of time – a moment that never really passes – when the father and mother were filled with wonder at the child delivered into their hands.
How is it that as a young man, I did not notice that parenting’s first move was one of welcoming? Perhaps it is best that my plans and ideas about what my children should do or should be were so often frustrated. Whatever I might have thought at the time, it seems certain to me now that my family never cohered through any special knowledge of origin or purpose available to me at the time, but rather was bound by primordial law, a law so fundamental it is best understood as descriptive . . . an irrational law, to be sure, but more original than justice. Indeed, the law of hospitality has proved so difficult to obey that it was once enforced by the fury of the sky.
9.4
Long before my first hunt, a friend offered to sell me his shotgun. It had been a birthday present to him as a child, fired a few times and then orphaned in a closet under a stair for many years. I bought the gun in 1971 for fifty dollars. With the installation of a recoil pad, the gun fit me well. Thereafter, when my brother and I were out to visit our mother, we would often go down to the beach, fling clay pigeons far out over the Sound and try to break them before they hit the water. We had been going out to the end of Long Island for years, but until I went duck hunting, I had not been aware how vast the wetlands are that lie along the center of the north fork.
A friend of my wife’s family had hunted ducks – at least he knew the basics: where to find them, how to hunt and clean them. When he discovered I had some interest, he was kind enough to invite me to go out with him and give it a try. I was twenty-eight years of age. He had already obtained permission from the owner of the freshwater marsh where we were going to try our luck. Because I was on active duty at the time, I didn’t even need a hunting license. It was very cold. I listened to his instructions and tried to do exactly as I was told.
I had picked him up in the dark. The marsh had a skin of ice. We waited in the truck for a half an hour sipping on cartons of sweetened coffee. There were still a few flakes of snow in the air. As the sky began to brighten, we got out and took our positions. We did not have a blind: no decoys and there was no plan to call the ducks in. He had brought us to a natural flyway, a narrow cove in which the ducks were accustomed to land. I was wearing hip boots. Waders would have been better. Nervous about flooding, I stepped carefully into the marsh trying to keep the icy water from getting up over the top of my boots. I moved slowly, feeling with the toe of my boot along the muddy bottom for any holes that might be there. Great forests of phragmites grew at the edges of the open water behind a string of cedars that defined the cove in which we waited. Like a bittern with its beak lifted skyward, I stood gun-up, stiff, motionless, blending into the vertical line of the tall reeds.
The ducks had already started to come in around the point. After watching several flights drop down just out of range, a single drake banked around and came in low over where I was standing. As still as possible I was, but at the last moment the duck spotted me and began to veer off. I keep in my mind a silhouette together with the silent pulse of aft-set wings pumping the air. The duck was backing away from me as if he were being pulled into the heavens by a string. It was at this moment, a half breath before I gently squeezed the trigger, that I caught myself duck hunting. I might have been at home in bed. But I wasn’t. Instead I was standing in an icy marsh and tracing the path of the duck with the long blued barrel of a 20-gauge Ithaca pump. After I had retrieved him, I realized I had killed a black duck. Black ducks were, at the time, endangered. At least that is what I believed and was a little horrified. I was, in fact, more horrified than I could guess. But moments before, in the rushes, as I was swinging the shotgun, following the drake out the length of the long blued barrel, my concentration on the bird did not waver.
Within some burgeoning consciousness of being there, I fired, watched the drake fold and drop into the water. I had during the process of swinging the gun been overtaken by an insight of such outrageous banality I could not help but be struck strange by the familiar-strange realization percolating up from the ground that I am me. Instead of foolish, I felt that I had somehow encountered something like the actual silver of the moon or the real platinum of the sea. But back at the truck, I was uneasy at the heat of the duck’s body under the feathers I was pulling away in bunches. Killing a warm-blooded animal is different from killing a fish. After I opened him up, the stench of his sea-fed gut was more than I expected. The thought of cooking and eating that bird was simply repulsive and I am ashamed to say I never claimed the drake from my friend’s freezer. A week later, I sailed for the Indian Ocean on a ship of war. My eldest son was three and I, still somewhat disturbed by the experience in the marsh, would have a boy on either side of high school before I would try hunting again.