Into the Slipstream

When Fall comes around, I am reminded of my childhood time in Kentucky. Or rather, when I am in a place where Fall comes around since it didn't really last year when I was in India, and sometimes in Austin it was a blink of the eye, but here in Belgium, Fall is a serious season, spanning several months with a multi-colored display of foliage and the world-famous orchard harvest from the Haspengouw areas. Belgium is replete with trees and when the Fall falls, there are a LOT of leaves.

Today, I saw a group of kids playing in huge piles of leaves that they had made. However, given that this is the Time that it is, they of course were filming it all on smart phones, probably sending uploads to everyone within seconds of having just plunged into the swiftly decaying midden heap of leaves.

Back in the day, in Kentucky, of course we did not have the smart phones to share our experience, but it was such great fun to rake up giant piles of Poplar, Maple, and Oak leaves and taking off like Charlie Brown go flying into them, smelling the damp, musty, earthy aroma that is unmistakably the perfume of Autumn's enchantment.

Though this is no new sentiment, it is again through the eyes of youth that we realize how jaded we can become, how needy we are for entertainment, for something to happen, for something to mean something, for Time to go by and we "got something done," and for the sense of feeling guilty for wanting to do something silly or fun, or taking the Time to rake up a whole pile of leaves, just for the sake of scattering them again, like Buddhist monks spending weeks on a sand mandala, only to whisk it away with a dry branch.

We want permanence in an impermanent world. What is wrong with this picture? I was thinking about what it would be like if one had grown up in an equatorial region and then for the first time, without anyone telling that person what was happening, to then travel somewhere where the Summer turned to Fall. Think about that. It would seem as if literally the entire world was dying! What a shock that would be. It would signal the end of the seemingly permanent status of sun up/sun down at 6 and 6 with the same temperature all year round. Suddenly, the impermanence of Reality would be thrust upon you. Without warning, that would be overwhelming to say the least, not to mention Winter.

I was talking with my daughter the other day about the difference amongst the divisions of Time: seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, etc. We were talking about how the mo(o)nths are related to the Moon and the year to the Sun. There was an eclipse the other day in Australia, which thinking of Twain, is yet another instance of thrusting the seemingly permanent existence of the Sun and/or Moon into a tailspin of impermanence and Chaos. Again, imagine the impact of that if one did not know what was happening...

But, that is like our lives and memories. We try to fix some sense of pattern upon an ever-changing stream of vicissitudes, grasping at the bank of the river of Time as we float on down, having the bank of the Present "seem" to recede in the Past.

And, then, at times, with the smell or sight, those two come crashing together in some Proustian digression, as when I thought back to diving headlong into the leaves in our backyard in Brownsboro Farms outside of Louisville. But, as soon as it was there, it was gone and I was back in Antwerp, nearly 40 years later...

The seasons do bring out reflections if we let them, or they can signal hope, or for others despair. Yet, they will continue, and to stubbornly hold onto the Summer, when the Fall is here, is futile. Let go of the bank and enjoy the ride down the slipstream... 

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.

The Same Pool Twice

I am back in Amarillo again, visiting family with my daughter.

Amarillo is a strange place, to say the least. It is the epitome of America I think, encapsulating nearly every quirk, every good thing, and every questionable thing about my country, all rolled up into one, neat and tidy little ball.

As such, I have had a love/hate relationship with Amarillo over the years, as with America herself. Amarillo was the source of inspiration for the town "Yellow Sands" (Amarillo means "yellow" in Spanish and was thought to describe the dry soil here) that appears in my novel that I wrote in college, Instant Karma Koffie . Not exactly a flattering portrait, but honest to a degree. I would be more forgiving if I were to write it into a novel today, which I will with my current project,  Theodditty , but I wrote what I was feeling at the time.

Heraclitus is known for a parcel of fragments that have come down through the ages and are collected and mulled over by philosophers and scholars of ancient greek alike.

Perhaps his most famous one is: πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει” καὶ "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης
Translated, "everything changes and nothing remains ... and ... you cannot enter the same river twice."


One of the biggest conflicts that I had with Amarillo was the topic of swimming. Moving from the verdant horse country of Louisville, Kentucky to the dry, arid High Plains desert of Amarillo, Texas was a bit of a shock. Being a very shy, and at the time, slightly pudgy young kid, it was a tough transition. Because of a serious of mutual acquaintances, I joined the swim team.


Now, joining the swim team in a small, conservative town in Texas is about the biggest, blatant kabosh one can put on his or her social life and is more or less dooming you as a softy, queer, or whimp, or...pick your redneck pariah designation. Add to that that I was in the honors program in a mixed school and that I was morbidly shy, well, you probably are getting the picture. For some reason, can't imagine why, Goonies was one of my favorite movies...

Well, things progressed rather rapidly with swimming. Within two years, I went from the new kid on the block to the fastest kid in Texas, and rapidly in the country within two more years. We practiced at the Amarillo Town Club with the Amarillo Aquatic Club, AAC, of which I still have a large monogrammed towel from. It is a very, very bad pool with regards to swimming dynamics. Horrible gutter system that causes major splashback, no real deep end, and had massive concrete starting blocks, now removed. But, training in the worst (nearly, Pampa's is by far the worst) pool in Texas gave us an advantage. Basically, any pool was better, and faster. The University of Texas at Austin has one of the "fastest" pools in Texas and it was nothing short of hearing the angels sing walking into that building as an impressionable, shy kid from Amarillo.


However, rising up to the ranks in swimming to now the international level, being ranked in the Top Ten in the World in a few events didn't matter. I didn't play football. By this point, the pudge was gone and I was able to bench press more than any of the football players except for a couple truly neanderthal-looking guys, and the coaches were doing their best to get me to play football. 


Sure, so I could give up international recognition to beat--Lubbock? I think not. 
Kabosh.

Lots more on the swimming, for later, but the point is that I am now back in Amarillo, having also lived on international level as well, and swimming at the pool at, guess where--the Amarillo Town Club. Now, the entire building has been renovated, except for the pool. I went back there last summer as I had not been there for nearly 25 years because of the memories of the place and I was somewhat speechless. It was like walking back in time. Except for the concrete blocks being removed, a couple of doorways sealed off and an observation window gone, and a very, very curious large psychedelic mural of swimming elephants on the wall, nothing seemed to have changed, except me.


I was happy to be back. 


I swam there last summer and this summer as well while I am in town. It is a trip. I can almost here the swim meets from old in there, see my old coaches on the deck, see the old octagon-shaped pace clock that was to be my best friend in Amarillo for many years, but it was all different as well. 


Swimming has given me the opportunity to make friends in all the countries I have lived in or travelled to in various ways, it has been the one constant in my life. I love the water. I swam with a Master's team while I lived in Italy and plan to once back in Belgium after India (already located a pool in Madurai as well). 


There is another conundrum in ancient greek philosophy about a boat (sometimes a pen knife is used as an example). If you have a boat and you replace each part of it, separately, over time, piece by piece, plank by plank, until eventually no piece is original, but the boat looks the same, is it the same boat?


I thought of this while swimming the other day. What if all the tiles had been replaced, one by one, the pool repainted, the water is obviously different, was it the same? Was my body the same, with all of my cells changing over time, leaving only my memory of that shy kid swimming here 25 years ago?


When I checked out, the "kid" (probably nearly 30), who checked me out at the desk saw my name and asked, "Are you the Robert Fulton? You still have almost every record in town!" I think I know how Bono from U2 feels now...


But, good question, am I?