Normalcy

Sorry for the long break over Memorial Day Weekend, but that really hasn't been what's put me off posting for the last 2 weeks.

The fact is that I'm up against intractable problems here, and doing so from two distinctly different directions. On one side, there are the posts that draw upon my personal pain. They portray the challenges that come with dealing with loss, the anatomy of one psyche coping against the void. On another side, there are the posts that try to abstract from that personal realm into something that might apply beyond me. Something that might strike a chord somewhere in the world.

Neither approach resolves, and my failures here make me feel... diminished. Robert Frost once wrote of "what to make of a diminished thing." And in my own poetry I tried to capture that at times, but not tonight. Tonight, let the thing remain diminished -- because the world is big, and we are small.

Instead let me talk for a little bit about how I come to terms with being a diminished thing -- I don't mean this in a self-derogatory sense. It is our mortal fate, and as such it comes about naturally that we must ask: what is the value of this life? Of my life? Against cosmic timescales and black holes and the births of galaxies?

Several people have spoken to me of feeling my father's presence. I myself have on a few occasions felt his presence very strongly, and yet I know he is not there in any supernatural sense. So how do I account for this?

Beyond the genetic inheritance I carry within me, my father is deeply imprinted in the fabric of my mind. It gathers up the layer upon layer of two dimensional information and three-dimensional memories, and now that he is gone, that information churns and fabricates and constructs him there. And when the mind is freed of the constraints bound to "Dad is gone" -- it re-constitutes him here for me. Just as your minds re-constitute him to varying degrees.

The significance of this, I think, is that it returns us to the fabric of humanity and our impact upon it. The warp and woof of my father continues long after the thread is cut. The community that accrued to him is a fabric that persists and carries forward. The chapter of any individual life is short, but the book is long. And the book requires those chapters, every one of them. The chapters accumulate and influence the narrative going forward. It establishes "normalcy" and creates "inertias" that can never entirely be countermanded or erased.

Now as to why the narrative of Humanity might have any significance... that's a question for a different day.