Abstract
This article addresses concerns of being and becoming between father and son. The article uses performative and autoethnographic approaches to examine the poetics of memory and family construction. The piece centers on disability, fatherhood, and masculinity. The author produces a narrative engagement with his father that imagines a reflexive approach to the poetics of memory. The text spreads across various memories culminating in a recent journey to Sedona, Arizona. The memories and the journey demonstrate the growing distance between father and son and the process of mending such gaps through the recognition of the self in the other.
Prologue
The following text is an unfolding of memory spreading across performance, autoethnography, and narrative. Inna Semetsky (2006) reminds me that memory “is to be constructed in a multidimensional field and . . . is always posited as collective and plural: as a state of any other ‘thing’, it too is a relational entity, that is, a multiplicity” (p. 2). As a whole, the text functions as a dancing memory between my father and I. The pathways are riddled with potholes; the memory sometimes glides across the surface, and yet other times, it trips on itself. The story is a depiction of the waxing and waning of our relationship, the shift and rearrangement of our continuously missed connections.
Our bodies align and misalign in various ways. As long as I have known my father he has rigorously studied martial arts. One day, while practicing Aikido, he miscalculated a flip and landed on his head. The next day he became violently sick, the following six months he spent inside critical care, and the rest of the year he spent in a rehabilitation home. My father has acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). The disease is similar to Multiple Sclerosis. ADEM affects the nervous system through the brain and spinal cord. Multiple sclerosis is typically a degenerative disease; ADEM only strikes once. The impact on my father’s body was irreversible.
The following year after his release, my parents found they could no longer mediate their differences. The dance was no longer in rhythm and neither had the ability to fall back into step. They divorced in 1996, and I moved with my mother from the California coast to the vast planes of Texas. Since 1996, I have seen my father once every year, sometimes once every two years. My brother has not seen him in several years. Although we talk over the phone, mostly about movies, the distance between us is obvious. The following story is an attempt to connect to my father, both bodily and artistically.
Most important, and above all, my father is an artist. Before he became sick he worked for Montgomery Wards as a photographer, but his heart, his time, his being was/is spent creating art.
The memory of my father is never static, even after I reconstruct him on the page. Throughout this process, I question how I position him, particularly in relationship to his disability, but also in relationship to myself. Campbell reminds me that
everyday moral narratives . . . operate with the fixed terms of good and evil. . . . Literature destroys this border between perceiver and perceived. We are no longer placed in a position of ordering judgment but become other through a confrontation with the forces that compose us. (p. 131)
I take comfort in writing my father as a composition of myself. The story begins as a progression or dance through the web of memory, collecting and creating my father in relationship to myself; the second half takes place in Sedona, Arizona, over a week in the summer of 2011. The first half is a deconstruction of our relationship; the second half is a joining together of our puzzle pieces. This is not just a story about my father and his disability; it is a story about the cultivation of a masculine identity. It is a story about the definition of an able body; it is a story about the changing roles between father and son. It is a story about his art, the space between, and the constant and continuous transition of being and becoming.
Collecting the Father/Self
A poetics of memory might investigate the retroactive constitution of beginnings; the foldings, unfoldings and refoldings of images, feelings, narrative fragments. (Brewster, 2005, p. 398)
3814 Clough Ave, Fremont, CA, 1988
My father lives in isolation. He works in a dark room in the back of the house, molding and sculpting various objects, an archeology of self, crafted on the canvas. The empty space between his body and the rest of the family fills the living room with tension and provides compression for familial relations. In order to speak to my father, I traverse the frigid dry hallway, sneaking into the depths of the mountain to find a skinny Van Gogh searching for his ear in the dark. When my father is done he reveals the work to each of us. Each piece of art is a representation of the various selves my father creates. He sells his various selves in art shows or to friends, but mostly he gives himself away.
Flamingo Blvd, Las Vegas, NV, 2004
I find myself modeling my father’s relationship to space. I keep distance between my body and others. I dodge the risked vulnerability lingering in the air during conversations, the pause between words, between bodies, between past reconciliations and the present. The fear of space illuminates the creation of space, fostering a tangible break in connection. The isolation can be as productive in these moments as a fissure of empathic creativity. My father’s art has taught me that vulnerability begins with the self, secured in seclusion.
The night before my grandfather died, my father and I flipped through old photo albums searching for the reduction in space, between ourselves, within our blood, throughout our history. My father pauses on a picture of my grandfather in his military uniform. My father presses his finger onto the picture; “He was such a mean, mean man,” he says. His voice is accusatory and historic, pulling the past to our dinner table.
In the morning, when the call came, the abrupt distance resumed. My grandfather died the following night from heart complications. Later, we would find out that he had passed because of he was combining his heart medication with a recent prescription of Viagra. My grandfather’s body collapsed while trying to perform masculinity.
My father’s body pushes and pulls against masculine norms. I have never known my father to be physical; his body is always in a state of absence. In recent years, he has started to articulate his love for my brother and I.
My grandfather, like his father before him, was not affectionate. The terms of love were withheld, as though to repeat the silence fostered through masculinity. My father’s recent articulation is a rebuke of the patriarchy of his father and his grandfather before him, a masculine ideal thrown off into the setting sun.
Hayward, CA, 1980
Originally, as a child, I was told my name was hyphenated, combined, conjoined with my father’s, that I was Christopher-Michael Chaz Collins. I found my father interconnected to myself through our naming. The name of the father follows the first son and is also present in my father’s name, Michael Howard Collins. However, I have always removed my father from my name and even as I age the name continues to change. A year ago, I found out my name was actually not hyphenated, that the hyphen was something my parents wished for, but the nurse had failed to record. In our naming, my father and I become fractures in the fold, fissures in the hardened ground. The bridge between father and son, one that I had assumed existed my entire life, was lost in the matter of words.
Kaiser Permanente, Hayward, CA, 1994
My father would take photographs.
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My father would frame the body in perfection.
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My father gave the body to consumers.
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In the hospital, what body did he dream about?
What memories freed him from paralysis?
Did he sit up from his chair and kiss the nurses on the lips?
Did he dine with oysters and red wine?
Did he taste the salt of youth in his mouth?
I wonder about the best part of his day.
I want to pause on the top of your thigh.
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The way your dress blows against your skin.
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I want to watch your fingers wrap around bookends.
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I want to see the curl of your lips.
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And I want to stare into eyes that see beyond this diving bell.
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Where did my father venture in his sleep?
Did he get lost with my mother in the Hawaiian surf?
Did he wander in vortexes of Arizona?
Did he meditate in the desert under sparsely wooded pines?
Did he bathe in the ocean
As the waves wrapped around his chest?
My father would take photographs.
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My father would edit out imperfection.
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My father could see beauty in the curvature of an arm.
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I want to know if he saw us?
What he remembers of our voices?
If he knows the feel of our lips upon his salty forehead?
If his mouth stopped him from speaking his mind?
When his lungs filled with fluid
Did waves wash to the shore of his teeth?
Did he grow gills
Or did he choke for air?
Did the sand spell out our names?
Or did he disappear in the surf
Lying still, naked, washing his body out to sea?
Carbondale, IL, 2008
Colebrook (2002), expanding upon Deleuze, reminds me “the supposed real world that would lie behind the flux of becoming is not . . . a stable world of being; there ‘is’ nothing other than the flow of becoming. All ‘beings’ are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life” (p. 125). When I think of my own body, I realize that I cannot know what my father’s body knows. However, there are meeting points, where our dance intersects. Where we are in step with one another, and I have an ontological and epistemological connection to his bodily experience.
I often get migraines, and interesting enough, they are the closest I can come to understanding my father’s body. I know I am on the verge of a migraine when my eyesight begins to vanish. Dark matter produces missing spots in my vision. I try to turn my head, recognizing the gaps in objects ahead of me. I place my hand to the left, shifting it in and out of the growing space. Where does my eyesight go? What else am I seeing? How does the loss of perception open up new realities for understanding my father?
My father’s eyesight vibrates like a shifting pan shaking for gold in the brown of his pupils. His nerve endings don’t migrate as numb fingers fumble around wires that hold fabric, his art, in a line. A line his body lacks as it curls over the cane. I think of his body in the MRI scan, my own body in the MRI scan. How his legs cannot stand and my legs cannot stand. Before the migraine sets in, I often faint, a failure of the body as recognition of what is to come. I have fainted in the recreation center, as the strong masculine body becomes the shaking withered wisp. I have fainted in the hospital as the secure healthy body falters into sickness. I have fainted in the bathroom during a midnight piss, awoken inside the porcelain tub with my head slammed against the wall. I have fainted in the amusement park as my heart bangs off beat. Our bodies are dancing, my father and I.
Again, Colebrooke (2002) reminds me “To see any thing as actual requires the virtual synthesis of time: we see things only by retaining the memory of past perceptions and anticipating and connecting future perceptions” (p. 127). Our bodies are not moral creatures. Our being becoming disabled is a new way of seeing, a possibilizing of the perfunctory, and a doing of the everyday. What do we know? What do our bodies beckon us to understand? I cannot speak for what my father knows; however, I can speak for my own relationship to his body. How I question his body, “Why don’t you run more?” Forgetting his legs cannot carry. “Why don’t you speed up?” Forgetting his feet have difficulty with the follow, “Why don’t you eat better? Why don’t you live somewhere else? Why don’t you stop being such a boy and start becoming more of a father?” Forgetting that his body teaches me how to walk with him, how to walk with others. Forgetting that his body teaches me how to sit with class and divisions in culture. Forgetting that his body teaches me how to perform father Otherly than ordered masculinity. That performing father isn’t playing catch; it’s about creating connection through our bodies, by becoming our bodies, and being with each other.
Sedona, AZ, 2011
Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 262)
I. The mesas of Arizona call my name. For years it has asked for a return, a return of insight, a return of self, and the introspection for the next step of the journey. My father will have a different journey, a journey up the mountain, a journey into the desert, a journey to feel the sand on his face. My father will let the sun run into his skin. His body is extremely sensitive, and the heat aggravates his ADEM. The trip will be a bodily journey, a journey into a vortex to renew the self, a dissolution of self to create something new. I will ask questions, questions I’ve always been afraid to ask, questions that will challenge us both by their articulation of one another. We will walk step in step, my body matching his in the shift of knowledge. A dual recreation of self in the other. We are being and becoming father and son through our shared bodily epistemology as we walk into the sand. I will feel my father between my toes as he remembers himself in my smoker’s lungs. A shared ontology captured in historicity. The location is imperative; Sedona is the last time I remember the collective feeling of family. My father and I are coming again to create family anew. When I was little, the sun rose above the mesa and ripped apart the sky. Light exploded over the sand and sprawled over the city. The slow crawl of darkness retreating to the base of the stone. The history before us, carved into the stone.
My father and I both perform the role of the vehicle. I will transport us through space; the first time my father has seen me drive. He will provide the means of space; we will stay in the same hotel on top of a mesa that we stayed at when I was eleven. In order to act we must both give a part of ourselves. I will be the GPS, guiding the mountain terrain. He will be the food that replenishes our exhausted bodies. We perform a dual need.
II. As we walk through the airport I have to keep reminding myself to check on my father. We arrived several hours early, and I forgot that he was pulling his own luggage because he couldn’t check them yet. The luggage threw his weight off and made it difficult for him to walk. I ignored the problem until its presence became overbearing, and I asked him if I could pull his luggage. Earlier in the week, we stopped at the Sedona post office. My father wanted to send a poster and a blanket home through the mail. As we pull up, I tell him I will wait in the car, but I know that he will have trouble putting the blanket into the tube, writing out the forms, and completing the tasks in the office. I stay in the car, sweating in the Arizona heat. When he finally arrives back at the car, he remarks that the process was difficult because the woman behind the counter refused to help him, just as I had refused. The denial of my father and his body is cupped in my hands as I grip the steering wheel.
III. My father and I are in a huge debate about Sedona’s cultural heritage. The Sinagua Native American Tribe cultivated this land for hundreds of years. Our debate is about the ethics of cultural memory, appropriation, and colonization. My father argues that because we grew up in the United States we have distanced ourselves from our cultural heritage and appropriated the cultural norms of the Native Americans. We have moved from our own Celtic upbringing (for our specific family) and thus we no longer inherently understand the symbols of our past. He draws a picture of a drum.
“What is that?” he asks.
I say, “It is a drum.”
He says, “Ok, what is this?” and he draws a picture of Triquetra Vesica Pisces. It is a circle with three separate vesica pisces moving through it. He has the symbol tattooed on his right thigh.
I say, “I don’t know.”
“There, that proves my point.”
I tell him that even though I know the symbol of the drum, that doesn’t mean I understand the cultural implications of the symbols. Furthermore, the symbol isn’t culturally specific. I tell him that I feel like we often colonize the subject in order to use their symbols for our own purposes.
I have this debate in relationship to writing about my father. In what way am I allowed to use his body, to use his cultural and embodied experience to discuss my own experiences? I question whether I colonize his body as I write, whether I appropriate his disability, his memory, his being.
IV. We shuffle for a few blocks, moving in and out of shops along the walkway. About half way down the first side of the street his legs became tired, and we had to turn back. We had only walked three blocks, and his body had already lost its strength and was depleted. At first I was frustrated, we had a limited time in Sedona, and yet the day was cut short and would have to be repeated again tomorrow. If we doubled our days walking through shops we might miss a vortex, we might miss a massage, or a palm reading.
I remind myself that the process is the journey and not the end point. The locations seen are not as valuable as the process of seeing. Even as we walk through the various stores, the goal isn’t to finish all of the shops or to find something special; rather, it is to be present with my father as we walk through the process.
V. I cannot make the trek myself. We watch vortex hiking videos all afternoon, but my father is concerned that he cannot make the trek with me. I feel as if we are land-locked in an ocean of dirt. I want to walk out in the sun, to lose myself, but I am paralyzed because I feel like I must do it alone.
He talks about moving from southern California to Sedona, but he is afraid to leave his mother behind. They both live in the same senior park in San Bernardino, and he feels responsible for her regardless of what he wants. I question whether I would stay for my own father and take on the responsibility of caring for his body. I wonder whether my parents’ divorce hinged on a similar failed negotiation between burden and care.
VI. My father and I both reside in the constant tension between being and becoming. I sense his reflection in myself. We walk all morning through the cliff dwellings of the Sinagua tribe. Their civilization remained in the red rock of the Coconino forest for almost eight-hundred years and then disappeared.
Our hike into the ruins was casual; the walk back was a lesson between us. My father reached out and took a hold of my shoulder, my hand reached up taking his hand, guiding him down the rocks. His feet maneuvered the hard unstable ground. We walked together, as one instrument gliding along the cliff side into the desert.
In our first trip to Sedona, he guided me. Now, as an adult, I guide him. We are the being and becoming of the ouroborus. My father referred to the experience as a spirit journey, one of the most memorable experiences of his life.
Coda
My father awoke with the Sedona sun pouring through the window and said he had a dream last night. He was dancing ballet on the balls of his feet with a woman he didn’t recognize. She choreographed his movements and then it was his turn to dance, without a cane. After they were done, she took his hand and led him into the desert.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.