Dad, the Upaniṣads and the Dead Poets Society.
In the last few years of his life, Dad put an inordinate amount of time into reading the Upanisads, ancient texts from India, drafted from oral narratives in Sanskrit, from 700 to 300 BCE.
Thinking about the Upanisads, of course, I think of Dad, especially as we navigate these last winter days through the stories of Lent, from mid-February through March when he took his last breaths a decade ago. After he died, I took home his beaten-up, well marked copy of the book, Digging through the notes he underlined, I encounter a continuing set of clues unfolding every time I open it. Reading it and the stories that moved Dad, I think of the story of his life as a story of poems.Ten years without and with Dad, my mind trails off through countless books we talked about, the dreams we shared, active dialogues we had about Faustus, death and life, poetry and theater, the road from Georgia, through New Orleans, south to Mexico, back through Texas and California, out into the ocean, the infinite we tried to make sense of as the road extended into the horizon.
I think about the Tempest and Ariel’s song, tracing a metamorphosis into something rich and strange, by the sea, raging into the night, reading Whitman, Yeats and Jung.
I recall the pain he lived with that we live with, that none of us really shake. Ten years later, you can talk to anyone who knew Dad and their memories of him inevitably involve a meltdown, a tantrum, conniption fit, or whatever else they would see fit to call it.
He certainly had one after watching Dead Poets Society, the 1989 American film directed by Peter Weir and written by Tom Schulman, a prep school drama about poetry and life choices, the protagonist is forced to go to military school rather than the theater. He takes his own life. It all hit a little close. Dad stormed out of the theater, unable to handle the explosion of feelings, crashing through him, the ebullition gushing inside, his old demons raging, encountering those Ike-era teenagers, searching for a bit of themselves in poem after poem, Dad battling his own father’s shadow, American fascism, the one-dimensional thinking he felt, Marcuse knew was enveloping our consciousness.
There was always an explosion, Dad storming out of party or dinner or a football game, rushing out of our house into the snow after watching Shakespeare in Love, when we couldn’t make the volume work for him, leaving those remaining wondering what happened? What had they done?
Conversely, the kind part, I think about Dad and Paris with mom, reading Jung with Bev, driving through Georgia before we left.
Growing up, Dad was here and he was gone, in the hospital, or traveling, working, leaving me at home with Fred, who talked with me over Indian Buffet after we saw “Trip to Bountiful” with Geraldine Page, missing the South, and the idea of home, that I never really got back after we left. “I've been trying to get on that bus for Bountiful for over five years,” said Geraldine Page. “Maybe I had to wait twenty years cooped up in a city before I could appreciate getting back here.”
Still we explored the remains, listening to “Soap Soup Salvation,” with its refrain from the spiritual, “when the road is called up yonder i'll be there,” going to see Jerry Jeff Walker and Cafe Noir at Poor David’s Pub senior year in high school, three years into our time, just the two of us, after the family dissolved, Will moved to prep school, John to college, Mom to grad school.
Dad would soon enough move out of our house on Nakoma, in Dallas, settling into a small apartment on Travis near downtown, where he shot guns in the parking lot and chatted with his hallmate who went to Harvard. And moved in with Bev, the two of them making their way to Plano and Chicago, and Long Beach and New Mexico, back to Houston, where she descended inside as Alzheimers grasped at her and Dad started picking through the Upanishads.
More and more Dad came to visit us a lot in New York, and we watched a lot of movies, his favorite, Shakespeare in Love, when he wasn’t yelling, adoarting Gueneth Paltrow playing both Romeo and Juliet, George C Scott in Patton and True Romance, the Big Labowski, the dude abides.
The big break in consciousness for Dad involved poetry and Jung, whom he came to idolize and then to reject. For many years, he read Jung, viewing him as a bit of a sacred voice, a way to encounter an authentic self, a way to reconcile with love and death, spirituality and the self. Through his writing dad explored a sense of a soul and a cosmology that would help him make sense of things, looking for meaning in lost love, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
As much as anything, he found something on the road, smoking a cigar, listening to Jerry Jeff Walker’ “hill country rain” and Dolly Parton driving around Texas, “Good Hearted Woman” with Waylon and Willie, playing on the tape deck, talking about Bastrop, southeast of Austin where his grandmother found an education, and Galveston by by the beach, searching for something in ourselves, something elusive in the stories of Robertson Davies, mythology, the sacred and strange in Shakespeare, in revolutionary possibility of William Butler Yeats, and old stories about Pete Seegar and Allan Ginsberg and City Lights bookstore.
Now ten years later, all these stories flow through my mind, thinking about the conversations we had about Goethe and Christopher Marlow, chatting about Bull Durham and the Razor’s Edge, the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, drinking Moxitos at El Quixote at Dad’s home away from home in New York on 23rd Street, retracing The Upanishads and their disembodied poetics, Dad reading to me from his beaten up copy:
"These rivers, my dear, flow – the eastern toward the east and the western toward the west. They arise from the sea and flow into the sea. Just as these rivers, while they are in the sea, do not know: ‘I am this river’ or ‘I am that river.”
Life and death, peace and war working their way through him, opposing dialectic forces clashing, I think about walking downstairs in Dallas and finding Dad drinking watching our VHS copy of Patton, with General Patton’s opening lines delivered by George C Scott.
“Be seated. Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle…Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time… Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Now, an army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap… Now, some of you boys, I know, are wondering whether or not you'll chicken-out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you will all do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do….You know how I feel. Oh, I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. Thats all.”
Drunk, Dad sat watching the movie thinking about the space between World War II and Vietmam that constituted his formative years, the former a war that robbed his father of his compassion, the latter his country’s sense of a self. Still he felt an obligation from his father, who participated in the Good War, a sense of sadness about his great-great-grandfather, who was part of a losing effort, the Civil War that left him starving and hobbling home, fed a potato and salt by a freed slave. He felt a shame about what they had done. Dad was lost there, battling his father, who told him not to fight in Vietnam, although he did in WWII, leaving Dad, feeling estranged, forever rebelling and returning, from the Upinishads to Patton, beat poetry back to Ft Benning, Officers Candidate School to Harvard, backward, forward, throughout the days of his life, poems and kids, the wives and journeys, and afternoons with the The Upanishads, thinking about now and forever, throughout chapter 25:
"That Infinite, indeed, is below. It is above. It is behind. It is before. It is to the south. It is to the north. The Infinite, indeed, is all this. "Next follows the instruction about the Infinite with reference to ‘I’: I, indeed, am below. I am above. I am behind. I am before. I am to the south. I am to the north. I am, indeed, all this. …"
I think about Dad sitting reading on the farm, after a breakdown, trying to make sense of his life. His brother Kirk’s wife called and asked what he was doing. Why didn’t you call to tell us you were here, she asked. I’m having a nervous breakdown, he explained. Well I do not accept that, she replied. Well I do not care, he retorted, hung up, went on reading Jung, meditating on his life, the journey he’d taken from Thomasville to Alexandria Virginia for prep school, to Florida for beach vacations with his family, to Cambridge, Atlanta as a lawyer, Princeton as a professor and administrator, back to Atlanta as a Lawyer, to Dallas, for more of of the law, something disappearing between those summers in San Francisco and Ft Benning. Jung wondered:
“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you - are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. …Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you.”
Lean into the shadow Dad told me, paraphrasing Jung, who counseled: “You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.” I’m not sure he ever produced that divine sense of madness, that merger, but he walked the line between meaning and meaninglessness every day.
We spent countless afternoons chatting, reading, drafting letters on the farm, and walking out with the cattle. I recall those long conversations, the joy and the angst of it all, the pull of the land, of history, driving down red dirt roads, around Texas together, getting lost in the sunset, the light that shined in the window into his home in Houston, that reminded him of beauty, even when he felt alone, and the feelings came rushing back, recalling friends who shuffled off early, Rod and Fred, who lost their minds. Still he kept looking, preying for a merger between chaos and the beauty, something that he might be able to hold for a second looking at that sunset in Houston, in the rivers that flow, between the madness, ever polishing the soul, the Shakaespaere soliloquies he could recite with me until his last days, The Upanishads, and their drama of the human condition caught in an endless round of death and rebirth (samsara), consequences of actions (karma), the divine of the Infinite, the Pure Being (Brahman), the path and prescription (yoga) and liberation (moksha). I’m not sure Dad ever found that liberation.
Ten years later, we’re all looking for some of that. After Dad left, our family spent five summers hiking through Spain, Italy, France, Asia, a pandemic slowdown, when darkness descended, and then back to Sarajevo, Berlin and beyond, reading Faust. They opened everything for us, those journeys, still thinking of the old man, struggling between “meaning and meaninglessness.” I wished I could call and tell him about it all.
Past and present, growing up and wondering what it all meant. I think of those days of going to St Michael’s in Dallas, every Sunday to church for years and years, the beginning of a lifelong habit, of meditation on the unknowable, the space between poetry and the sublime, god and the unconscious Dad explored throughout his days, from college, through dark days the hospital after he got sick, when he promised he would not forget what helped him, who helped him when he survived.
Sunday at Judson, we meditate on it all, Dad still with us, modern and ancient texts dueling through time, on Palm Sunday, holy week ten years later.
My friend Ken reads the Ancient Testimony III “Where is the Door to the Tavern?” by Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky “Where is the door to God? In the sound of a barking dog, In the ring of a hammer, In a drop of rain, In the face of Everyone I see.”
I know Dad would have smiled.
Modern Testimony from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
Every year around Dad’s departure anniversary, I pick through his old books, looking at poems that meant something to him. This year one stood out. “Under Ben Bulben” by Yeats, one of his last, is particularly marked up, the lines ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!’ Yeats’s epitaph, finding their way onto his grave.
Ten years ago, we read “Ulysses” by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON in Houston, Dad telling stories about his journeys to Troy, running on the beach. I imagine Dad reading it and telling us about all of his adventures, our adventures, his story blurring into all of us, into everything, one poem after another, in him, for all of us:
“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore
“'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
…
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
To think about Dad is to think a history of poems, navigating between the sublime and gutter.
Throughout the Upanishads, human nature and the universe are viewed as mutually mirroring microcosms and macrocosms, collective forces pushing and pulling in a vast sea of consciousness. I think of those life forces, the death narratives and life forces, thanatos and rebirth, Christ and his disciples, ever shining light on each other, mirror images of the self, lost and found, dueling through time, recalling you Dad.
The night Dad was departing, I sat in Brooklyn eating a meal with my family, the spring full of abundance, the garden growing. A strange feeling overtook me, a sense that something was happening, Dad taking a final mind breath perhaps reciting the opening lines of the Upanishads one last time.
“That is full, this is full,
From that fullness comes this fullness,
If you take away this fullness from that fullness,
Only fullness remains”
Onward into the Infinite, with Ulysses, rivers that flow into the ocean.
So thrilled I stumbled upon this. Thank you.
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