Silent Feelings

by Rebecca Ruth Gould

A few months before I learned of his death, I wrote a poem in which I reflected on my father’s mysterious disappearance from my life. The poem brought together the best of my childhood memories: developing black and white photographs in our New Orleans basement, being hoisted aloft on my father’s shoulders, hugging him in a backpack created for oversized toddlers like me, attending the violin lessons that he felt were so crucial to my development. The photographs evoked in that poem are of me, a five-year-old ballerina, dancing with my feet pointed upwards, as if the air would lift me up into heaven. For this brief period in my life, I was full of hope. The black and white images that my father created through his black and white photography embed the aura of memory with a permanence that eludes digital photography. I felt like a princess as he lifted me upwards, towards the skies, and I tried to infuse that feeling into the poem.

Mid-way through, the poem takes a dark turn. My memory stalls over my teenage years, when I began questioning my father’s authority, and our relationship changed. I began to blame my father for our family’s financial difficulties, for my mother’s stress at work, and for my adolescent angst. In the poem as in life, my father disappears, “practicing necromancy […] / in some foreign, mystical country.” I will not reproduce the poem here. Even as it expresses one beautiful aspect of our early relationship, the circumstances of its composition fill me with shame.

Why did I write a poem about my father’s disappearance, rather than seek him out, decades after the moments described in the poem had passed?  When I wrote the poem, I was searching for my father through my own words, but an actual dialogue would have been better than an internal monologue. I sought him, but I did not address him, my father who was alive and well in another country. I had his email address. Although we had fallen out of touch, we were not completely disconnected. He emailed me, like clockwork, every year on my birthday, often promising a gift that rarely materialized. I knew how to find him. I longed to understand what was happening in his life, yet I did not take the necessary steps to find out. Looking through my emails now, I see that I relied on my sister to look after my father, to make sure he was ok, and even to keep track of where he was in any given year. Yet another source of my shame.

My father did not live a normal life. But then, who does? And what is normal, anyway? He was born into wealth and privilege. Although he never would have phrased it in this way, I believe he suffered greatly for that apparent serendipity of birth. He was a good person who never figured out what to do with his life. His family was so rich that the idea of working for a living seemed to him to pertain only to those outside the family circle. I don’t know what transpired within his family circle, or how my father’s father—who died when he was thirteen—counselled him. But I do know the result: he grew into manhood and then old age without any sense of vocation.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I struggled to give a straightforward answer to the perpetual question: “What does your father do?” He did not, strictly speaking, do anything, in the sense of work. He sat at home and read books. Sometimes he took notes, that resembled mathematical equations. Sometimes the books were exotic and sophisticated, which I dreamed of being able to understand some day. He devised algebraic equations, and travelled deep into the world of calculus. He played the keyboard, beautifully, with a talent that he didn’t know how to use. He could play an entire song by ear, after having heard it only once. He studied languages. Russian and Arabic were his favourite, and he conversed in Spanish with ease.

I admired his intelligence and intellectual curiosity, but, as I grew older, I could not overlook the fact that the weekdays he passed reading at home had consequences for our family, and specifically for my mother. She had to work overtime to keep a roof over our heads and food in our refrigerator.

My father did many things during his life that was marvellous and beautiful. He invested his mental energy in elaborate ideas that had no commercial use. For most of my childhood, no one paid him to do what he did. And that was why I had no answer to that all-important question posed by my peers, their parents, and my teachers, what does your father do?

Once, while sitting in the driveway after he had picked me up from school, he told me that he didn’t think that everyone should have to work. He had a point: society worships productivity to a fault. Although he probably had not read the story, his patron saint was Melville’s Bartleby, who simply and assuredly insists to his boss, “I prefer not to.” Except, my father didn’t even go to work.

In contemporary society, many jobs are what anarchist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: they serve no social good. I do not judge my father for turning away from such occupations, and for not buying into capitalist lies about production and consumption.

The problem was during my childhood was much simpler than that: one income stream was not enough. My father had every right to his views, and in some ways I agree with him. But we needed to pay rent and cover the bills. And since my father lacked the motivation to work, the labour of raising and providing for myself and my two sisters fell to my mother.

My father’s lack of vocation produced a profound inequality between my mother and father. His lack of a job mattered, not because a job is a sacred thing that everyone should have, but because it created inequality within our family.

I observed this inequality between my mother and father—with my mother working overtime while also raising us, and my father declining such labour, all the while sitting at home—for most of my formative years. It had an overwhelming impact on my childhood, and shaped my views about marriage, gender inequality, and, no doubt at some subconscious level, men.

After I left for college, the situation ended with my mother’s long-awaited decision to divorce him—a decision I had campaigned for since the age of twelve—but my anger persisted long after that. What I didn’t appreciate until my father’s death was the extent to which he lived in poverty himself, after we ceased to be a family unit. He lived in a car for several weeks when he couldn’t afford to rent an apartment. In an era when every child has a smartphone, he never bought one for himself. He died, alone, in a two-star hotel, in the beautiful city of Granada, Spain, just a short walk away from the famous palace and fortress complex known as the Alhambra. He had migrated here with a grand plan to make the Arabic language learnable to everyone.

As we later found out, he had more than enough money to cover his expenses. For someone whose life was dominated by money and its lack, this was an astonishing fact. He could have afforded a more comfortable existence. He simply chose not to spend it. For someone born into privilege, my father was strangely aloof from material luxuries. His mind was elsewhere, wandering with the stars, in the places where on galaxy collides with another. I don’t pity him. I mourn the loss of peculiar, brilliant, and unforgettable mind.

This is not a letter of complaint, or even of lament. It is an attempt to come to terms with my failure to be there for him when it would really have made a difference, and with my refusal to adapt to change. My relationship with my father was fixed by the time I reached thirteen, after having witnessed my mother’s excessive and unjust labors to keep our family together. I was stuck in the past.

People change, whether we like it or not, and my father is no exception. They change in ways that we cannot predict or expect and most of the time do not even perceive. He became humbler, less full of rage, and more accepting when things didn’t go his way. He always retained a strong strand of eccentricity, which endears him to me.

I write this to him, to reckon with my refusal to let go of my anger, with my resistance to forgiveness, until it was too late. Few wrongs are so profound that they are worth holding onto forever, after we have outgrown the shells in which they were encased and shed our skins many times over. My father was not guilty of wrongs that could not be forgiven. So why did I hold onto my anger for so many years, long past the time when my anger had any relevance to the life that I lived? Why did I judge, when I could instead have loved?

Let me tell you a story about a conversation I had with my father, just after I had fallen in love with poetry and decided to become a writer. I was twelve, and it was just before I became the teenage rebel that divided us from each other, in some respects, forever.

He had picked me up from school. We sat in the driveway silently, as we often did, too tired to go inside, enjoying the break in the daily routine. I had a book in my lap, with the cover turned up. It was a collection of poetry by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a cheap paperback Dover edition. My father scrutinized it cautiously.

“Do you think,” he asked me out of the blue, “that poets feel things that other people do not?”

To me, the answer was obvious. “Of course. Poets express their emotions in ways no one else can.”

“But does that mean that they feel more deeply?” he persisted.

I had no answer to that question. I had too little experience of life at that point to know what to say. So I let it hang suspended, silent, in the air.

At that point, my father’s question, like so many words that passed between us, became a wall that separated us. Keen to distinguish myself from him, I made our every conversation serve the end of mutual disassociation. In the aftermath of his death, the question connects us, like a bridge.

I have often returned to my father’s question, whenever I think about poetry and the representation of feeling in language. At first, when I asked myself whether poets feel differently and more deeply from other humans, I sided with the self-interested poet, who is utterly persuaded of the superiority of her perception. She believes that experience is purified by language and that suffering is somehow, even if only in the most mediated of ways, redeemed through poems. I later found support for this faith in the redemptive power of art in Shelley’s famous declaration in his Defence of Poetry (1821) that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Although the quote is attributed to Shelley, it is a close paraphrase of a statement by his father-in-law, anarchist philosopher William Godwin, who described the poet as “the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world” in his dense defence of philosophical anarchy, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners (1793). The very history of this paraphrase—or shall we call it literary plagiarism?—demonstrates my father’s point. Feelings, like ideas, are moulded in language, and often the ones that seem most original are adapted from the words of others.

I deemed myself a poet-in-training when my dad first posed his question. I therefore naturally adopted Shelley’s elevated and self-aggrandizing stance. For the likes of Shelley, and many Romantics before and after him, poets are kings, and akin to gods. They do not answer to human laws—in fact, by virtue of being poets, they are uniquely entitled to violate them—but they know, better than anyone else, what it means to feel. Surely, I insisted, the emotions and inner feelings of the poet are deeper and more profound than that of the ordinary individual. Surely, poets are unique. Even though I did not feel unique at the time, even if I could not express myself like a true Romantic poet, I tried to turn myself into someone like Shelley, who could express himself in unparalleled verse because his feelings penetrated beyond that of ordinary humans. Armed with language, poets like Shelley could endure anything. So I believed. What I didn’t know was that Shelley had simply mastered his father-in-law’s diction.

Shelley may have been a great poet, but he was not a decent human being. He practiced infidelity as though it were his birthright, abandoned his first wife while she was pregnant and drove her to suicide, and neglected the many children he conceived without the slightest forethought or consideration of their fates. His second wife Mary Shelley was lucky: he died within five years of their marriage, leaving her free to mourn her husband in peace. Mary Shelley made the most of her position as Percy Shelley’s widow. She published a definitive edition of his works and preserved his memory for posterity. Yet it is clear that she had a much easier life without him.

While I found consolation in language and cultivated the poet within, I suppressed my father’s side of the argument. It took his death for me to realise that he was right. We have no way to know—and no reason to believe—that poets feel what non-poets do not. All we have are their words, and the best poetry, as an Arabic saying goes, is that which lies the most. Poets express their feelings more eloquently than non-poets, but they also express the feelings of others, feelings that they may never have felt themselves. They do this, paradoxically, in the service of truth.

Good poets are masters of language, and can skilfully shape the medium through which we render life. Their shaping tells us something—but by no means everything—about their experience of life itself. We do not know what goes on inside the hearts of those who prefer to keep their feelings silent any more than we know the true feelings of those who call themselves poets.

My father was not a poet. He was not given to extravagant expressions of emotion, sympathy, or love. Sometimes he was not given to expression at all, although he did love a good conversation, pursued without any agenda other than curiosity itself. I have never seen him cry. But he was a good man, a devoted father, and a decent human being, with a spark of brilliance, a twinkle in his eyes, and a way of posing thought-provoking questions that have wrapped themselves inside and around me, like the diagrams by M. S. Escher that he loved to study. M. S. Escher, who loved the Alhambra, just as my father did. And now he is gone. I loved him. His existence and its sudden cessation are of greater consequence than anyone’s poetry.