A Memoir of Our Father

“I should never have left home,” he told us on more than one occasion, his eyes glinting with tears. After that, we could never look into his eyes. Often we heard his voice, a voice that convinced on the surface; but when we didn’t, we would ask each other “What’s going to happen now?” and we couldn’t find an answer. His glare alone was enough to destroy people. There was a long, vertical crease on either side of his mouth. Black looks were his stock in trade; he was puissant and cussed in equal measure. He had a strong disbelief which eventually turned into devotion. The simplicity of design of the monastery buildings, the flat, earth tones and shades of beige, all of this had an early and profound influence on him. He was only born in that house, moving away when he was three months old, so it was unlikely that the mahogany-framed bed on display was in any sense “his”. All his life, he had a recurring dream in which he was a little boy in a city at night. This took place within the hidden compartment. Saw a lamb in the midst of the abandoned racecourse, and the little buff aeroplanes turning in the sky, just before he fell off his bicycle. The remnants of a goose touched it. Tops nestled in hay. You can’t really blame him for not having a childhood: black angels hounded him all the way to Christmas. Soldiers marched past. The village was later burned down. As a student, he ate baby birds. Night after night, he would be engrossed in the theory of bundles. Gradually, he became less interested in doing further research in genetics, as an enthusiasm for administration developed, culminating in his being appointed as the Secretary General of the University. It is little known that he was the author of books on normalcy, obsession, and genetics. It is believed he lost a testicle when injured on the battlefield in 1916, the same year that the future Nazi leader is said to have suffered his own, much mocked, loss. There was that later business with the pole dancer. What if that were true? After further trouble with the police, he joined the staff of a local newspaper, and wrote a novel that was never published. He was firmly implanted in the world of learning and applying business technology to small businesses. This cheap transcendentalism offered a kind of fake consolation, an apolitical quietism where communication failed and actions were meaningless. Amphetamine withdrawal caused the spidery network of his nervous system to hover free of his feverish body. His dance routines mainly derived from martial arts movies he had seen on Arabic television. He was seen chasing our mother round the garden. If his anal fistula was ever spoken about, it was only in hushed tones. He made a name for himself leading attacks against nationalist insurgents and in 1927 was promoted to full general and made principal of the Military Academy. All opposition was ruthlessly dealt with. It was the fervent wish of many that he would pay for his crimes. In the dying weeks of the civil war, with the government on the verge of collapsing and the rebels advancing, he held his position. He stayed loyal and tilted the army during those tumultuous days in April, paving the way for a return to power and restoring democracy. Everyone followed him. Those were the days of his puissance. His headquarters in the Grand Hotel were ringed by police gondolas, and detectives might be found in every corridor. His cruelty was legendary. Later, he was stripped of power and faced corruption charges that could have kept him in jail for decades. They killed people in front of his face; it’s difficult to know just what he experienced. He sought political asylum in Peru. He always maintained that God is a racist. He was arrested in Osaka, western Japan, days after it was revealed he had attempted to transform his appearance by undergoing extensive plastic surgery. His hair was thin and straggly and he didn’t look well. Then he covered his face with a blanket. Surgery was not completely effective. He crawled into a cave in order to have a religious epiphany. On the third day, he rose again and helped to stabilise the economy, which had been ruined after the civil war. Not only did the economy improve during his administration but many people who held other beliefs were killed. He took no interest whatsoever in political or ideological matter. He was a small, weasly kind of fellow at that time. There is no reason to doubt that he was sincere when he portrayed the war as a conflict of civilisations. Mistakes increasingly plagued his life, and increasingly unnerved him; he became obsessed with how they had slipped in or why he hadn’t noticed them. Dead poets were audible in his words and rhythms. In his spare time, he was a photographer, interested in language and images. A theorist and player of microtonal jazz, he reinvented the octave. There was little more to be said; but still he said it. Someone described him as “a lark with rented feathers”. He moved quickly. It is these invisible qualities, the ignored moments and gestures, that give his life its beauty. No, that would be wrong. His vastness was exaggerated, and actually pretty stupid. His thoughts were collected, before being dispersed for profit. His language skills were excellent; he even read a whole book by Ted Hughes. Golden in his skin he was, an example to the neighbourhood (in some accounts). Using a camera with night-vision equipment hidden inside fake rocks, he brilliantly captured evidence of the fishermen’s dirty secret, and with it the chicanery of those who profited from it. On his birthday, there was a big evening performance in the square involving candles laid out in the form of hearts, a huge PA and sentimental singers warbling melodiously against pre-recorded backings; and the square was thronged with adults, young people and whole families; but by early the following morning the pavements had been cleared and you wouldn’t believe any event had happened at all. It was down to him that such disparate groups of people were able to overlook their differences for long enough even to contemplate such a gathering. But something was said. It has never been established exactly what it was, but that it was deeply troubling to him is beyond question. Once again, judgement is suspended. We see him, we hear him still. Piles of legal documents were emblazoned with his name. He railed against the cultural establishment. There were many who viewed him as a supremely good man; a hero possibly; possibly a saint. He won a place on American television thanks to his bizarre stunts. He was the chief dolphin trainer on the US television series Flipper. That was a joke. It was his dream to make the sea and the forests ours once more. How can that be wrong? There was a real incident when he opened fire on the customers of his bank. Each night, he returned home drunk. He always hated those blue dogs. People recall his many acts of kindness, sometimes with tears welling up in their eyes. He was a peripheral player on the international stage. He had been brought up with little experience of change; he liked to repeat that everyone must accept their destiny. We used to listen to him on the radio. He showed us all a picture on his BlackBerry of a man exposing himself, with the comment: “What do you think of this?” Glinty-eyed as ever, he dreamt dreams of baroque splendour but didn’t mean any of it. As though we were china dolls, all of our arms were raised stiffly in greeting to him. The narrow path he followed led him into the valley of the unknown. What made it beautiful was his timing. But he never liked the expression “numinal”. Pale, the sweat beads standing out on his temples, he would smile at us and attempt to speak. Something wrong there. His proximate destination was never, in fact, to arrive, or be arrived at. He thought nothing of making a pot au feu from the offal of his steer. There was a graceful glow on his limbs even when he was doing such things. He wanted to be the man who set broad standards and found the money. Old dreams kept recurring; he would “murmur them in the mud”. He was a keen trumpet and flugelhorn player. He was widely loved, especially by the common people. But why? Rumours of his condition provided inspiration for a notorious and morale-boosting song on the subject that was popular with soldiers. That was his cue. Fervour gripped him. At what point did he enter the domain of mythology? There has long been a division of opinion on this. Now he was even more interested in success than most Americans, because somehow, for all his genius, despite having built the largest factory in the world, he had spent much of his life being mocked as a failure. For a time, he lived in the grounds of Berlin Zoo. He called on us all to follow his lead and reject the old discredited regime. It was great fun. By then, he had lost control of his bowels. This anomaly has since been rectified. Details of the surgical procedures are not available. He used to suffer from bipolar disease and had periods of melancholia, but he was happy with that; it was the upbeat periods that really frightened him. This distinction is unimportant now. A mane of snow-white hair and a pair of glittering spectacles; these were his signifiers. What would his parents have made of it all? Each night, he would go through the photograph albums, meticulously discarding all those pictures in which the subjects were not smiling. I think I can almost see him, with almost complete clarity now, slumped, half asleep, over a pile of lobster and mussel shells. His work served to cast doubt on the value of the “self” and the “inner life”. He used to say “Everybody dies – it’s not hard.” At dusk, he wandered through the deserted building; some people said afterwards that they had heard him crying out in rage once or twice, but this may have been a later embellishment. Among his “special friends” were Audrey, Mirabelle, Lateefa, Chou-Chou, Josephine, Ana María, Marta, Carlyle, Perdita, Fatima, Lauren, Frou-Frou, Russell, LaToya, Hannah, Jayne Marie, and many others whose names are now lost. His connection to poetry was profound; you could almost call it mystical. Even sunbeams were heavy in those days. Soon after his demise, the field was left to a fresh wave of admirers. “Kenneth,” called the disembodied voice, and repeated this once or twice; but that was not his name. No, we are not up to that point yet. He deliberately deceived his doctors and family about his mental state over a period of many years, during which he subjected our mother to heavy irony, disparaging remarks, cold silences and other forms of mental cruelty, and for this I find it hard to forgive him even now. We were domesticated pets at ground level in his presence. He pilfered obsessively. It didn’t help that he was undermining his own authority by indulging in sensual gratification on a grand scale. At that time, he appeared even more handsome than before, wearing a smile with an irresistible complicity in it. Autumn was his favourite season, as he said many times. He used his appearance to criticise Islam. He did not have any political views other than a hatred for certain groups of people. It was said of him that he “looked hard for things to think about”; but was it thought that ensued? According to him, we could never get anything right. He returned to performing zoological experiments. Wearing a caveman mask, he killed a marauding crow. On later returning to the same crow territory, he was dive-bombed; but when he changed to a Dick Cheney mask nothing happened. Nobody expected this result. Among his friends there was some perplexity at the way his speeches were reported. In this, nothing would ever change. I remember him gazing out of the window at the fine rain that was dropping through sunlight in the garden, and being unable to fathom what was going through his mind. His nails yellowed, with ragged but blunt edges. The scent of virgin tobacco; the strike of a match; a fug of sweat in an airless room. Blood streamed from his nose and clotted in his beard. We gathered nettles for him. We never had any reason to fear him. He always had a mournful look. The alcoholic father in the novel was not a portrait of him but of “the man he nearly was”. Blood from his rectum was caked thickly on the trousers of his uniform. A faint smell of dead cat pervaded his study. Slowly, he regained control of his pelvis. Two steps forward, then two steps back, always the same, over and over again, he would pace incessantly throughout the proceedings. Angrily, he hunted for the remote control so as to rewind each scene (which signified undoing the action). These were signs of a compulsion and anxiety to get things right. Because he could not be humble. So concerned in his earlier career with tearing down the social order, he later appeared to be weighing the positive value of civilisation. He possessed intimidating charisma and perilous charm. It is very difficult to establish at exactly what point he underwent surgery. If ever you feel fear, self-pity or failure in your life, then surely you must think of him again. I have an etiolated memory of him, sitting at the dining room table, drawing a picture for me on a piece of paper of a plate with three fishes on it – one for himself, one for our mother, and one, he explained, for me – while all the time my sister was being born in the next room. There is attention to, and mastery of, historical detail in his own accounts, but never at the cost of losing the thread or failing to draw out the general significance of the detail. As children we would be given boiled milk to drink, but we didn’t want to. And so he would tell us stories, and then he would pause and say “Drink your milk”, and we did, so that he would resume the story. He was a collector of clothes that people had thrown away. He was accused of an extraordinary litany of racist and sexist behaviour by a former employee who claimed discrimination over her sacking. His own mouth was opened by those events; to those whose mouths were empty before being closed, his language itself was a tongue from beyond. It was that melisma of madness that he had. But this was not his voice. That’s what they said. The point is that it’s impossible to tell. It was claimed he stopped breathing deliberately. You can say that he was a failure. But when all seemed lost, he was the man who saved us. While our mother was twisting the silk scarf in her hands, not knowing what to do, he gazed abstractedly at her; then, after she had draped it on the stand, he came forward and guided her gently into the shadows. During an extraordinary three minutes in which the world became slow and indistinct, he seemed to hover as much as speak, his voice fluttering in and out of his throat. We couldn’t believe this. After that, his heart was broken. He was drowned. And this he took from her, and wouldn’t give back. I never really wanted to mix this all up, but it seemed appropriate at one time. He did not expect to be a free man soon. At the end of his days he was too thin to work. “His karma caught up with his dogma,” quipped a bystander. His eyesight, by then, had gone. I could see by the way he was sitting, very stiff, with his hands clasped tightly together in his lap, that he was in his worst state of nerves. He lay down on his pillow and cried himself to sleep. Sometimes our mother had to get him out of bed and put his shoes and socks on for him. Friends and family said this would soon pass. But it did not. He would spend the day reading, watching TV and entertaining grandchildren and visitors. When the fancy took him he wrote a newspaper column. He was beginning to weigh us down, his mass seeming to increase with every second. His boots, his shirt, the slope of his nose, the great lobes of his ears. We wondered if he was truly a prisoner. His mass was his fundamental property, the numerical measure of his inertia. Definitions such as this often seem circular because his was such a fundamental quality that he is hard to define in terms of something or someone else. At the last, he welcomed the dark; spoke to a man on a horse from China. Towards the end, he did his business in his pants while watching television. Who cares? He is part of our cultural heritage, and effectively public property. But we could not bear the weight of him any longer. We were crushed in body and in spirit. Apathy claimed him. He was ill-defined by then; you could say he was dead. In his fantasy, hundreds of cockroaches massed in the corners of the room, preparing to crawl onto his feet and legs and over his hands. But gravity had undone him, and his massive head, weighing many kilos, rolled easily through the city streets. After that, his eardrums burst, and it was all over. We struggled to breathe the air he displaced. Those were the days before “reality” intervened. He ceased to be at the exact same minute as eighteen thousand other inhabitants of the planet. He left the kingdom of the living in total silence, packed into a container. Our children believe that he’s in heaven now, watching us all. Most people would like this to be true. Visitors still turn up at his house every day. The property, which was supposed to serve as a literary sanctuary where he could find peace to write, was later expanded to include six hectares of land when he expropriated local farms and homes. Who was he? He was always a defender of Western civilisation. One day, he will return, and save us. But it’s hard to even remember him now.

Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo

November, 2010

Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards' books include the poetry collections Good Science (Roof Books, 1992), eight + six (Reality Street, 2003), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (Shearsman Books, 2006), Bird Migration in the 21st Century (Spectacular Diseases, 2006), Songbook (Shearsman Books, 2009), the novel Futures (Reality Street, 1998) and the prose work Nostalgia for Unknown Cities (Reality Street, 2007). "A Memoir of Our Father" is part of a book of short narratives, Down With Beauty, which is in progress. He has been editor/publisher of the small press Reality Street since 1993.