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.

Through A Prism Darkly

While teaching in Castiglion Fiorentino, I had one class that I called, “A Portrait of the Student in Exile,” for at some level, studying abroad can be seen as a sort of exile if you will. Exile can be imposed from the society, or self-imposed as James Joyce famously and infamously declared his freedom from Ireland as an exile who was escaping the nets of Irish paralysis in society with silence, cunning, and exile. The result was that Joyce ended up writing about Ireland even more than many of his compatriots who had chosen to stay.

One of the books that we read in the class was Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, Nessuno e Centomila.) In the first-person narrative, he goes into a spiraling self-analysis of “who he is” and the results are rather unsettling at times. Hermann Hesse wrote in Steppenwolf that “Man is an Onion.” Thinking of the various layers of the peel that surround the hidden “Ego,” we try to peel them away, seeking to find out what is at the center. Ultimately, the center is empty, or at least it appears that way. Is a negative space ever really empty? That is the No One of the title.

With Pirandello, the layering also goes the opposite way as is suggested by the title. It is the age-old philosophical question between the One and the Many that flourished in Ancient Greece with proponents of Unity such as Parmenides, whose fragments include “Hen to Pan,” or “All is One,” on the one hand, and Aristotle on the other who began the system of taxonomy for all intents and purposes, going about from identifying characteristics that distinguish rather than unite. The character realizes that everyone in his life has constructed a different person in his or her mind about who he is, and none of them correspond. The Hundred Thousand.

Pirandello’s book, however, struck a deep chord with the students who were experiencing being in a new culture, many of them for the first time. I had told them that they would have a hard time going back home for a variety of reasons. Most of them would probably meet resistance, skepticism, and even hostility if they went on too long about how great Italy was. A common reaction to this from those who have not experienced such a new angle in life is “What’s so great about Italy? Why do you hate America!” Which are two very different things. You can love Italy, but also still love America, though this seems to be lost on many.

Another problem one has after living abroad is the inability to actually describe the events that have happened abroad. I know that many times I have just not talked about my experiences because they sound so trivial when I try to relate them, whereas when they happened, they were so visceral and alive. Seeing the looks on others faces when I start explaining, I realize that I will never be able to truly express the dynamics of the experience, and for that matter, it is mine alone.

With Pirandello, the narrator’s analysis follows a similar line of thinking in that he says that we are multiple people, all at once, though which one is our “true” self, because they can be quite contradictory. Who are we when we are with our parents, our children, our friends, our lovers, our spouses, with strangers, or alone? Each one of these identities is quite different and can at times be completely at odds with each other as well. So, who are we? Pirandello’s conclusion is rather bleak in that the ultimate result of this is that most people will never really “know” each other, and likewise, the vast majority of us will never even “know ourselves.”

I have experienced this disconnect many times in my life, though I know that I am not unique in this, but the book did resonate quite deeply with my own situation. Though it could easily, and erroneously, be said that I have “created” these disconnects, it does not matter if we travel or sit at home all our lives, we will still be different people when in the company or absence of other people. The person that I am in India, is not the person that I am in Italy, or Belgium, or America, but at the same time it is. The person that I am with my mother, my daughter, friends and loved ones, strangers, and alone are all completely different, yet, with the core of a “self” in there at some level.

I know that returning to Belgium in a month will be a challenge, as well as when I travel to the US next spring, for I have added yet more complexity to the person that I am with myself and/or with others. However, this is not a fear that I have, but rather a blessing that makes life so much more enriching and fascinating for me. Regardless of the miscommunications that I have had in life with some people who refuse to acknowledge the “multiple me’s” as a result of my “self-imposed exiles”, I would not change these experiences for the world. They make me who I am.