The world is gone, I must carry you.
—Paul Celan
If my father was not the kind of person he is, it would be a touchy subject. It bears many names. Radiates in different directions. Call it purpose. Call it success, fulfillment, privilege. Part can’t-help-it calling, part must-do-for-me, part self-care. All words he’d never use when discussing who he is. It’s not for discussion anyhow. Ask him about anything else in the world, and he is quite the conversationalist, asking questions of genuine interest. You will have his full attention. But he is not the kind of person to tell you who he is; you will be met only by a silence that took his own children years to wade through. It’s not that it’s a sensitive subject; it’s that his ideas of self and prosperity conflict with almost of all our various modern day understandings of both.
Had things been different, his family members say, had his father not died when my father was young, had his mother not had to go to work, had he not spent so much time alone and with only his books, had he not joined the army to escape his community, had he more than a GED, had he not married my mother, had he not grown so attached to her Mexican family, had he not stopped regularly wearing his tallit and then his yamaka as observant Jews do, had he not strayed from a true Jewish path, he would have done so much more with his life.
They’ve said these things while he’s still very much living.
These comments seemed to wash over him; I remember the fixed, emotionless stare of his eyes behind his glasses. These comment still crush and anger me. Not only because my debt to him is numerous, but because it is cosmic. How much he has always believed in his children. It is especially perplexing to his family that his daughter decided early on she has a can’t-help-it calling. Equally perplexing is that he nurtures her love for writing, and of all genres, poetry. That she knows, even at a young age, the financial risks of such an undertaking. She can’t help it, she tells them. And it is not a phase. Later, she rejects the many outside talks about a career in business, medicine or law, or something similar, something with stability and resources so that she might take care of her parents, so they can retire by 60.
That time has passed.
Both her parents are both still working.
Now an adult, she feels the weight of selfish, self-defining endeavors. She helps out as much as she can. He’s reluctant to take help, wanting her to save what she can for the future. He worries about her future. He never discusses his.
It crushes her when he saysr: the future is for younger people.
She says: I can’t see the future without you.
He lets the silence speak what he cannot say.
Instead, she hears her debt to him continue its exponential cosmic growth.
It keeps her up at night.
It keeps her going through the roughest of times.
It is, above all, a conversation without beginning or end.
*
There was a period where my father worked two jobs, and didn’t sleep very much. He did this for years, and yet when he was home, he’d sit down with me to study Torah, to go over homework from both secular and Hebrew school, no matter how tired he was. It was him to whom I asked the difficult questions— on Palestine, the end of the Cold War, why there was no distinct heaven in Judaism— although he often answered my questions with questions. He always had an interest in what I asked and took me seriously in a way that adults do not often take children seriously. I’m now seeing this wonder repeated with my older brother and his daughter: she wasn’t more than four years old when my brother explained to her what a labor union was. My niece absorbed every word, asking questions when she didn’t understand, wanting to know more. It is, through conversation, that she’s learning forms of both self and self-reliance.
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-reliance lately and how it is taught. In Marianne Moore’s “Silence,” the speaker’s father, in attempting to teach a rather extreme form of self-reliance, tells the daughter that “superior people” don’t trouble others and show “restraint” even when she hears “speech which has delighted” her. He tells her that his house can only be her “inn,” to which she concludes: “Inns are not residences.” He believes by teaching her to do for herself so that she might find on her own “Longfellow’s grave/ or the glass flowers at Harvard” without his help— or from anyone else. Showing emotion, above all, will betray one’s sense of superiority, and would reveal only one’s shallow depth and not “the deepest feeling.” Yet this is not a poem about what Moore’s father might or might not have taught her. This is a poem about a man’s protectiveness not of his daughter but of his space, of his own sense of self. His resistance to what ever changes fatherhood might bring, its messiness and uncertainties. Its complications.
Then there’s a particular scene in Margaret Edson’s play Wit, which Vivian Bearing recalls her father teaching her the meaning of the word “soporific” so that he can avoid having to engage in “boring conversation…after dinner.” The source of that conversation putting him to sleep? The young Vivian and her endless questions. He asks her to “carry on” her reading— alone— a story about bunnies, utilizing her new word (“the effect of eating too much lettuce is soporific”). With this new knowledge, her space is then severed from his, although they are in the same room. The adult Bearing believes this conversation jump-started not only a life of self-sufficiency but also her own study of metaphysical poetry:
“The illustration bore out the meaning of the word…just as he had explained it. At the time it seemed like magic. So… imagine the effect the words of John Donne first had on me.”
While through Donne and self-reliance she achieves much success in her field, Vivian Bearing also dies alone from terminal cancer, which slowly strips of her hard-earned titles and accomplishments. She is alone with herself in an entirely new manner that no amount of education or status can aid. The one saving grace is a visit from her mentor Dr. Ashford who offers solace not in reading Donne, but Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runway Bunny, a gift from Dr. Ashford’s great-grandson. In the end it’s not Dr. Ashford as the acclaimed scholar who rescues Bearing’s former scholarly self— her cancer has progressed too far gone at this point in the play and she has asked for a DNR. Dr. Ashford is no longer mentor but companion, and it is not Donne but a children’s book that offers Vivian comfort, a sense of peace and perhaps most importantly, a real human connection that she never received from her father. Empathy. Understanding.
A more difficult kind of comprehension that allows for weakness, vulnerability.
For not knowing what a word, a world, like death can mean.
*
Both father figures in Wit and “Silence” reveal self-assured, highly academically educated men belonging to the dominant culture, a world that my father does not. There is a particular sort of wealth in the language that these men use, in which they mean to pass on— but not share— with the daughters, and I think this is an important distinction.
My father worked at Wal-Mart for years until he left to work at an auto parts store. Recently, I’ve been studying the Zohar with him. We have no set schedule, as his hours change every week, as do mine, giving freelance work and readings, in addition to teaching. Often he tells me of his interactions with customers, and he’s very matter of fact about their sometimes condescending behavior toward him. I had witnessed this at Wal-Mart when my mother and I would go to pick him up, and she’d send me inside the store, as he often stayed late to help customers find what they were looking for, having already clocked out. Sometimes, though, he was still on the register, and once a woman said to him, after paying her bill, “poor man, I know they treat you horribly here.” I was so enraged upon hearing this that I said loudly, “Then why are you shopping at Wal-Mart, if you know that?” Everyone in line turned to look at me as the incoming cashier was switching out tills with my father, who said nothing but asked me to wait for him outside with my mother. When he joined us, he said nothing of the incident to her. Neither did I.
We’ve never discussed it—meaning it with all its complicated, numerous names, as discussed at the beginning of this essay— until recently, until these recent terrible days of this terrible new administration. Of course my father won’t talk directly about it like I do.
The cosmic debt, I begin to tell him, has been weighing on me. Especially now.
I am greeted with the usual silence, which is not, has never been, the same silence of Moore’s poem. It is a silence that he always wishes to break, but in his own “Aba way.” By telling me a story. An incident which had occurred this past week. An incident he hadn’t shared with anyone else, not even my mother.
A man came into the auto-part store, and approached my father’s register, ready to pay for a soft metal bolt which he’d found at the self-service station. My father looked at it, and asked him what he was going to use it for. It turns out the man almost made a life-threatening mistake: he would’ve put the wrong bolt on his break pad. If he had done this, it would have sheered right off and the breaks would have gone out. He wouldn’t have been able to stop his car.
The man laughed it off, and thanked my father in a joking way, and then in a more serious one. My father has never liked the self-service station because people can make the slightest error and it can cost them their life. My father knows a lot about cars, but then again, this is the same man who sat down with me in high school and helped me with my Calculus and Advanced Chemistry, having never taken those courses in his life. We couldn’t afford tutors. He enjoyed helping me. But he also said it was something that “just had to be done.”
That’s why, he says to me now, when you know something, even if it’s just about something small, you should talk with people. Ask questions. Share what and where you can.
My father never said he saved a man’s life, though he did.
He was telling me without telling me: purpose is in the living itself.
Photo: The author & her father on her wedding day.