Small Deaths

In a few days will mark the 7th anniversary of my father’s death .

I was living in Castiglion Fiorentino at the time, and had just returned to Austin for a job interview at the Harry Ransom Center, where I would soon become the Curator for Academic Affairs for a few years. During the interview process, of which there were several days, I was walking down Duval street, near where we had lived for many years and were renting out our house and I was staying in the garage apartment, and Charlton, a friend of the family, pulled over in his car and told me that people were looking for me, my father was in the hospital.

He died soon afterwards in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been living, racing cars, teaching surgery, and living hard as he always had. I remember calling my ex-wife at the time, who was visiting Rome with her mother, and just said, “He didn’t make it.”

I flew to the funeral, attended it, gave a eulogy along with my sisters, and then went back to Austin, finished the job interview process, then flew back to Italy, where we were wrapping up an eventful two years, for better and for worse, with a small death of our own, and was about to repatriate to the US for what would just be a couple years before coming back to Europe, this time here in Belgium.

While I was a visiting professor at L’Università di Bologna, I had the pleasure of teaching a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses with the eminent Joycean scholar Rosa Maria Bosinelli, for whom I am grateful for introducing me into the international community of Joyceans in Italy and Europe.

It was during that course that I was able to flesh out the Ulysses portion of my book on James Joyce, and specifically with regards to the chapter that is often colloquially called “Circe” within the novel and is often considered to be the chapter that ushered in the post-modern within the novel. Superficially it is a play within a play, but that is nothing new, and Joyce already makes the cameo of such a literary device in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, directly given the nod to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which itself plays a critical role in the novel, and most certainly in “Circe” as well.

My book is about the relationships of Memory and Death in the works of James Joyce, and how like the Ancient Greeks believed, we die two deaths. One death is the physical death, the small death, but the big one, is if we are forgotten. To truly kill an Ancient Greek was to forget him or her after his or her death.

Thinking about my father this week, there is still something hanging over me, as what happens with Odysseus. Odysseus learns from Circe that he must go to the Underworld and to propitiate a hungry ghost, that of Elpinor, a minor character at best, before he can unlock the lips of the dearly departed to find out more about his own Fate in the world of the living. Elpinor was amongst the partying crowd of Odysseus’ sailors, who in their revelry, got drunk and Elpinor fell to his death from a second-story roof, breaking his neck. The point was, though, is that Elpinor’s ghost was unquiet, or hungry, because he had been forgotten when the ships left again to try and return to Ithaca. As such, Odysseus had to pay homage to his ghost and to appease the Shades of Hades in order to continue with his own life.

Although I buried the hatchet with my father when he was alive as I remember our last conversation very well as it was from a small phone shop in Castiglion and for the first time in my life, instead of asking “why are you doing x, y, or z?” and this time the “x” factor was “living in Italy,” he just seemed genuinely happy for me. I am also very happy with my eulogy and that I was able to deliver one, given the timing of it all.

However, I still have part of his ashes here in my apartment, and there is something that I have yet to do. One of the few trips that I took with my father, and one of the few decent moments of that trip, was to Scotland when I was giving a paper in Dundee at a James Joyce conference there. We traveled some afterwards and one of the places we went was the battlefield of Bannockburn, where King Robert Bruce (whom my father dearly hoped we were named after, me being a Junior to his Senior, though he went by Bob) and his Scottish highlanders gave it to the British in the turning of the tide for Scottish Independence in 1314.

It was on that battlefield that I really sensed the power of place, or being in situ for an event in Time. My father was transformed, and I believe that that day he saw Robert the Bruce and his armies fighting. He was on the battlefield of Dharma , and the godhead of History was revealed to him. It was one of the times that I saw my father cry, though not the self-pitying maudlin crying that he was wont to do after too many beers, but tears of a lost Time and a lost Place.

It was then that I made a promise to myself to one day take his ashes, should he be cremated, which he was, to that field and to scatter them. I am sure that I will bring a recording of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes or have a live piper go with me, for my dad would play that at screechingly loud volumes when he was enthused by the mood, and I believe that then I can put his ghost to rest, or at least the part of him that is with me in my apartment in its small urn. Though a small death in the grand scheme of things, he was my dad, and I loved him, faults and all.

I Saw Something Nasty in the Woodshed

Everyone's got one.

A woodshed that is.

We've all got our own paralyzing fears that have dictated our lives for so long, and we replay them over and over in our minds, injecting a soul-numbing toxicity into our well-being, but for what?

The problem with woodsheds is that we often spend too much time worrying about every else's woodshed instead of our own. We wonder, "what could be in his woodshed?" Or, "I bet her woodshed is dirtier than mine..." And, so on.

I had a woodshed in Austin, Texas, where we lived for many years. Our home was built in the 1930's era by hand by the original German owner. It was, as is typical, a wooden house on a pier and beam construction. Hand-crafted and felt like a home. Soon after moving in, we converted the garage, which was a euphemism for a gigantic cockroach apartment complex, complete with multi-plex theater, full-service gym, a few restaurants, a park for the little cockroaches, and, well, you get the picture. So, I gutted the garage and had Ed the construction guy from North Carolina, along with his hired-gun electrician, John, who inexplicably wore women's underwear and drove a Corvette, renovate the space into a utility area, darkroom, and guest bedroom with bathroom.

In order to not then just have a blank wall where the garage door used to be, I went to Home Depot (which was Builder's Square at the time) and got me a woodshed. (Actually, it was a toolshed, but that doesn't work for this extended metaphor from the movie...so, it was a woodshed). And, with some finagling, I put it together and soon had a bona fide, particle-board woodshed, complete with shingles. I painted it to match the color scheme of the house, which was semi-legendary in our neighborhood I might add, and voilà and voici, there was a woodshed that blended into the house.

However, there was one problem, it was of inferior quality to the house. It looked good and fine on the outside, but on the inside, it was a mess. Try as I might, there was no getting rid of the roaches in the woodshed, and the other myriad of insects, including termites. We had the entire grounds treated for the termites, and it worked for the house, but the damage was done on the woodshed. It continued to rot out over the years, and continued to get junkier and junkier, despite my feeble efforts to clean it out.

So, one day, after many years of having a sub-par woodshed, I emptied it and I tore it down. Razed it to the ground in a triumphant heap of debris and had it carted away with a neighboring construction project. Then, matched the old paint, re-painted the side of the garage and had two window put into that façade. Suddenly, it was a new garage apartment. On the outside, it looked great. On the inside, there was light and air.

Often we try and we try to maintain an old woodshed, or keep shoving junk in there and closing the door, thinking it will just go away, but it doesn't. Sooner or later, we have to tear the woodshed down. Raze it to the ground, and build up something better in its stead.

I admired the craftsmanship of that house, and I insulted it by placing a cheap, knock-off, fake woodshed next to it. A coat of paint won't cover the defects, so it was time to go.

Tearing down the woodshed gave me new perspective on things. You can see new possibilities which were clouded before, and when you don't have the woodshed any longer to throw your junk into, then you stop collecting junk.

Something to learn from the clip below as well. When we are so wrapped up in our own misery, we forget the world around us. Moreover, perspective is a wonderful thing to gain.