“the crumbling of a world” : Dad’s Clues
Dad’s been gone for eleven years now. Every year, I remember, as winter turns to spring. April showers invite the flowers around the corner, the earth waking, the world a stage, reminding me of the date. Prufrock and the women “come and go, Talking of Michelangelo" throughout the cruelest month, spring break around the corner as the school year winds down. I recall the week he passed, almost a dozen years ago, shuffling from this world into the great unknown. I’ve spent these years recalling, trying to make sense of who he was, what he read, how he contained his multitudes of contradictions, the temper and poetry, the friendship and cruelty.
It's part of the rituals of spring, toasting to Dad at El Quixote, remembering him at his home in New York City, singing at Marie's Crisis, singing ‘Day by Day,’ looking at an old photo album, taking snapshots of Dad on the farm, in the classroom, officer candidate school, reading on the patio, through the stations of his life from Thomasville to Cambridge to San Francisco, to Ft Benning and the world.
Gone but not gone, the clues and reminders are everywhere. I see them in truck stops, Dolly Parton tapes, the drive through Cambridge, dropping my kid off, along the Charles River, across from the poetry bookshop he used to frequent, where one of his army buddies from his years in Ft Benning in Officer’s Candidate School, is still teaching.
There were countless chapters of our years together. I’ve explored a few of these recollections, the road trips and journeys through the south, through these stories. One that I have not really explored happened in the mid-1990’s, between my San Francisco and New York years. Will and Dad met me in San Francisco, driving me to Chicago, to begin grad school in social work. Concurrently, Dad was in Chicago, living and studying at Chicago Theological Seminary, both of us neighbors and grad students together in Hyde Park. I’d drop by his house a few days a week for coffee or dinner or just to listen to old Bud Powell records and chat. As always, Dad was trying to make sense of his life, the stroke which debilitated his academic career, derailing his time at Princeton two decades prior, the faith that got him through it, that humbled him, opening up countless questions, roads less traveled, the Sunday school lessons that took him further than any of us could have imagined, from a confession, to a promise. He made a commitment to this unknown after surviving surgery, still looking for that space between poetry and the sublime, shaping a distinct theology. “Substitute God every time Freud says unconscious and unconscious every time St Augustine says God in City of God,” he said again and again. Studying at the seminary, Dad hoped to parlay his engagement with psychology and religion into a last chapter as a Jungian analyst. Over time, his mentor, Robert Moore talked him into becoming a preacher instead. That sounded like a disastrous idea to those who had known his explosions through the years. Still, Dad thought about it all there. And if there was one thing he was good at, it was being a graduate student, at Harvard Law, Princeton English, and Chicago. And we shared that, there in Chicago. For a brief moment, we were back as we had been in high school when Mom, John and Will moved out, Dad and I remained in Texas together.
“I wish it could just go on,” he lamented, as I said goodbye one night that fall of 1995. He seemed to recognize the fleeting nature of it all as the evening of conversation, about narrative theory and self psychology, anti-poverty policy, Clinton and social work and theology, came to an end. Chicago’s intellectual life, its non pretentious rigor and rough climate seemed to match Dad’s sensibilities, encouraging him to disavow the racism of the South in favor of a philosophy of action and engagement. Doing so, he connected his love of his heritage, hunting, and poetry into a sort of deep ecology of faith.
Of course, the year would pass soon enough, with Dad moving West to accept a position as a preacher in Long Beach that spring. I spent one more year there, before finishing social work school and moving to New York. I’d thought of completing another year at seminary, but all that talk of god. It was time to leave. I’d spread a year in Long Beach myself a few years later as a faculty member. By then Dad had moved back to Texas for good.
The stories, the chapters of Dad’s life were many, with the library as a through line. I think about it in the piles of poetry books, a random email from his old friends and their trips across the world, decades ago, his beat poetry collection, novels, and theological tracts. Every year, I try to make sense of one of his marked up books. Last year, I explored The Upanishads, the ancient Sanskrit texts. I wasn’t sure which to explore this year. A quick glimpse through my piles of his dusty books, stacked in my office, offers countless favorites from this period, Blumenthal's' Facing an Abusing God, Carter Haywood’s Touching Our Strength. Each book was a long conversation after Dad read them. Digging about, looking for William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, lost in the piles, I stumble upon a well worn copy of the Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillick, that Dad first read in 1995 while studying at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and re read in 2003.. “Tillich is generally considered one of the century's outstanding and influential thinkers.” Dad was drawn to his engagement with existentialism and faith, exploring human finitude, anxiety, and a search for meaning in an absurd, impersonal world. After teaching theology and philosophy at various German universities, he came to the United States in 1933… he was Professor of Philosophical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, then University Professor at Harvard University… Shaking of the Foundations was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1955 ....”’
Dad devoured his work, marking up copies of Systematic Theology, the New Beginning, as well as Shaking of the Foundations. Dad seemed particularly drawn to the first sermon in Shaing of the Foundations. Page after page trace life’s “existential implications.” Toward the end of the first essay, Dad underlined: “only two alternatives remain -- despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith.” Still “...in the doom of the temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal…. they were certain that they belonged within the two spheres, the changeable and the unchangeable… the foundations of the earth do shake. … may we rather see, through the crumbling of a world, the rock of eternity and the salvation…”
Between theology and poetry, moving from city to city, away from friends and commitments, ever isolating himself, Dad read as much as hs could, sometimes Kinky Friedman, sometimes beat novelist Charles Bukowski, bonding with our friend Matteo, an Italian exchange student, on the raunchiness, the beauty of being on our own.
Says Bukowski:
“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me….Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!”
Dad was always one to drink more wine, by himself, with his books.
Tillick put it a different way in The Eternal Now: “Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”
I like to think he was in solitude, but I know the former grasped at him, the two ever vacillating within him; still he found something.
“Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being,” wrote Tillich in The Courage to Be. Dad knew that joy, but as much as anything he felt its opposite, the despair.
In Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Existence and the Christ, Tillick seems to paraphrase Walt Whitman’s poetics, writing, “man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity… The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.”
Dad saw both, the contradictions, free from freedom as well as failure, the surrender of our humanity. Dad saw surrender everywhere he looked. I can see Dad pouring over Tillick’s words: “We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.”
As the years went on, Dad stumbled and stumbled again. In between it, he seemed to find something in the failure, a meaning there, connecting with others between, in sharing the stories of the space he found along the way. Instead of Princeton, he found something in Sunday school at St Michael’s in Dallas, a faith in a, “state of being grasped by an ultimate concern,... which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life."
Did you ever seen it, Dad?
RIP
Thanks for the dusty books.
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