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Feb. 4, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:09
630 Farewell, Father
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Hi everybody, it's Estefan Mulledy from Freedom Aid Radio.
I thought we might take a break from theology, politics, and economics to have a swing through a poem to have a look at how poems are constructed, what works, what's going on in poetry.
I have, humbly or not, chosen a poem that I myself have written, which starts, Twinkle, twinkle, little no.
So, this is a poem that I wrote about ten years ago for a friend of mine whose father died.
He was a man who built houses.
And this was read at his funeral, and was moving to people, so I thought I'd share it.
I'm certainly not making any claims to be a great poet, but I think it's interesting to be able to have a look at how poems work and don't work, and to have a look at some of the complexities of really a very challenging art form.
So, this poem is called Farewell, Father.
The sky, without my father, is too bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
The voice of my thunder god has faded to ashen echoes and memories of high twirling.
As a child I climbed his back, pulled his hair, explored his ears.
Now I have outclimbed his falling mountain.
The white of spirit and the black of flesh have softened to grey.
He and I have become dominoes at his passing.
This larger pattern of falling may be pleasing to nature, but his fall...
His slow fade of releasing light, for that I reserve the right to rail.
At the first commandment carved on the womb, who we love we will watch die.
Who love us will watch us die.
My loss is as deep as my love.
And the agony of this endless ending is a hard price to pay for such tenderness.
There is a cycle of life.
Perhaps our flesh may be born again.
Our hair, eyes, stories, watches even passed on.
We are circular winds of starlight, a larger pattern of falling pieces.
But so little of what matters to us is bound in mere matter.
We are deep layers of meaning.
Our bodies are like prehistoric insects.
Our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
At death, The lake, the amber, the deepest lacquer of our visible souls, dries, vanishes, ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal.
And the body, the least important footnote of our histories, that is recycled.
And the earth, which could wake and wonder at our memories, dumbly accepts our shells and calls itself content.
Now we know, really know, of this loss.
Tell me, why do we love?
There's a kind of immortality in detachment, never feeling a death before our own.
It could remain a surprise, an accident, a careening bus with a black cloak at the wheel.
Or knowing the wild grief of this falling, Would our love twist with terror at the impending loss?
Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
Life needs a balance.
No death would be no planning, no growth.
Death too close would be no discipline, no sacrifice for who does taxes in darkened hospitals.
To live right, we must remember death at a distance.
In the face of death, neither a monk nor a wanton bee.
Death is the sibling of life.
Not stalking, but approaching.
The seasons lie to us.
It's understandable. As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
New, squalling, we imagine no ladder but a wheel.
Life runs the generation's roll around, and we feel like great-grandparents sprung new-bundled from an unwintered twig.
The seasons lie to us.
The seasons return because they do not live.
There is no spring for our individual winters.
As snow falls on our heads, so we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
So much is lost.
I'm going to go to the next one.
Of course I remember you, but only as I saw you, as the beach knows the footprints, but not the foot, the surf, but not the ocean.
A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
I can keep only impressions, not essentials.
When my father fell, His past fell.
A burning map of where and what he had built, the constructed children of his calloused fingers, as important perhaps of those of his loins, his houses stand, though the hand has fallen.
I have lost not the memory of my father, but my father's memory.
This thousand-story library, this infinite vein of nightly mining, how little remains.
What his second night with my mother was like, the dark flash of a bee that flew into his eye, the transparent whirlpool of a reddened sunrise, the groaning bones of his most exhausted day.
The last time he whispered a secret, did he know it?
Did he bid farewell to secrets?
This, all this, can never be known.
Yeah.
In the endless harvest of renewal, each stalk, each soul is an ecosystem, a world, a universe, blindly wiped.
For this, let us mourn what we have lost.
But also now that no father stands between us and our ending.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
Grief is deep glass.
A window to what we have lost.
A mirror of what we shall lose.
And, when we fall, what others will lose in us.
Sorry, missing a page there.
So let's just have a brief skim through this, and I can at least talk to you a little bit, if you're interested in the construction of poetry, what is going on, what I think works and doesn't work within the poem.
There's a number of metaphors that are rolling through this poem that I think are sort of interesting, or a number of sort of mental images.
The sky without my father is too bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
This is a fairly common...
It's a bit of a truism. It's a bit of a cliché, though I tried to describe it or evoke it in a non-traditional way.
The idea is that our parents are sort of buffers to our own death, right?
So as long as our parents are still alive, in a sense, we don't have a direct view of the black tunnel and the sort of wet hole in the ground and the worms that awaits us all.
So... There's a feeling that what I'm trying to evoke is that the Father here is a cloud that blocks the glare.
So it's a bit different.
It's like heaven, it's like a light, it's like that, rather than just the darkness.
But the sky without my Father is too bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
Now that my Father is gone, I can see directly into my own demise.
The voice of my thunder god has faded to ashen echoes and memories of high twirling.
So what we've gone from here is the present where the father has died and now the end of life for the son is far more visible and unsettlingly so.
There's a memory that goes back to the very beginning of things.
And so I'm still continuing with the idea that skyward is the end of things, is the death.
And so we're going back to very early childhood here.
As a child, I climbed his back, pulled his ears, explored...
I pulled his hair, explored his ears.
So the idea that you climb your father is the idea that as a son, you grow and you climb up your father.
The child is the father of the man.
It's worth what's set. But...
It's sort of like in a cartoon, right?
You climb the ladder, and then the ladder disappears, and you sort of kind of keep climbing.
The idea is that you can out-climb a mountain that falls away.
So you mount, in a sense, up through masculinity, up through life, on the back of your father, but then your father dies and sort of falls away, and you continue to climb.
So it says here, I have out-climbed his falling mountain.
The white of spirit and black of flesh have softened to gray.
And that ties into the absence or the void that occurs when somebody dies, right?
All of their memories, all of their history, all of their favorite songs, their favorite books, all the little details that probably only they themselves know I don't believe in an afterlife, of course. So they completely and totally vanish.
So the white spirit and the black of flesh have softened to grey.
They have sort of, to me it's like going from credits in a movie, the black and white, to just that grey static that you can see on a screen when there's no signal on a TV. He and I have become dominoes at his passing.
So I worked with black and white and grey here.
I think the grey doesn't successfully transition to dominoes, but I couldn't think of a better way of doing it.
Dominoes, of course, is the idea that you have a father who has a son, the father falls, the son falls, like it's this endless sort of continuous thing that occurs through life and death and birth.
So, when your father dies, you're next, right?
I mean, this is the generational thing.
When your father dies, you've got this glare of your own ending that he's no longer shielding you from, and you've become a domino, right?
You're now next. So the larger pattern of falling, this is continuing the domino metaphor, may be pleasing to nature.
And of course it is, right?
I mean, there's no such thing as evolution without death, because you need a renewal of the genetic material in order to continue to evolve, right?
So it is pleasing to nature in a sort of abstract way that people...
That people live and die.
Of course, as Galileo once said, we should not really rationally object to death, because without death, we would not need to be born.
If there was just one generation that never died, the elves or something, then we would never need to be born.
So, the fact that people die, the fact that we're going to die, is exactly what we're here to begin with, right?
This sort of renewal of nature.
So, this is going from the abstract, yes, yes, we all have to live and die, that's fine for nature, but for this son, his own father's fall, his slow fade of releasing light, and again, that's kind of nice, because for me, it goes back to the sky without my father is too bright,
that the father is releasing light as he dies, and the light is the light of knowledge, of your own mortality, and of, in a sense, the personal injustice that Though the natural justice or appropriateness of life continuing when people die, new people get born, and so on.
And... So, in the grand sense, yes, death is natural, but in the personal sense, it's horrible.
It's unpleasant to watch.
And the first commandment that's carved on the womb, who we love we will watch die.
Who loves us will watch us die.
That there is a personal attachment that is completely outside and beyond mere DNA, the mere renewal of nature.
That is painful.
My loss is as deep as my love.
And the agony of this endless ending is a hard price to pay for such tenderness, the poem goes on.
Of course, if you don't love people, then you don't lose people.
And there is a kind of immortality, as I talk about later in that, that you don't become attached to people, and therefore you never go through the agony of watching them die.
There's a tendency, this is also made in the movie, the point is made in the movie Shadowlands, with Anthony Hopkins, that when you become attached and passionate about people, you do end up with this problem where they're going to die, and you're going to have to watch that, or you're going to die, and they're going to have to watch that, so...
It is a hard price to pay.
I mean, the tenderness, the joy now is the pain later, right?
Now, there is a cycle of life, perhaps.
The poem goes on. Our flesh may be born again.
That's true, right? I mean, all of the matter that we have, that we are composed of, will sit in the ground.
Somebody will eat of a fruit that was grown on the grave, and the matter gets recycled.
Our flesh may be born again.
The matter that we have may be born again.
Our hair, eyes, stories, watches even, are passed on.
But what is passed on? The genetic material for our hair or not so much?
The eye color? Our stories can be passed on, right?
So as we tell stories, people will write them down.
They can be passed on. Even our base possessions, like watches, they can be passed on.
We are circular winds of starlight, and what that means, of course, is that all of the matter that composes us was at one point in a star, you know, maybe blew up, maybe went out into space, coalesces in the solar system, so it's very cyclical from that standpoint, right?
The matter which animates us came from some distant star, we'll go back to the ground, so it's just passing through us, right?
We're just a vehicle for matter in that sense.
A larger pattern of falling pieces, but so little of what matters to us is found in mere matter.
We are deep layers of meaning.
So human beings have meaning and passion and invest strongly in their memories and in our attachments and so on.
Our bodies are like prehistoric insects.
Our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
And what I sort of try to mean by that is that, you know, when you look at the head of somebody who's not very smart or the head of Einstein, they're kind of like the same size.
But the personalities, the souls, the spirits, the depth, whatever, is very, very different.
So the idea that the soul, which is, I'm not a religious man, but just to use that for the sum total of consciousness, passions, instincts, and so on, emotions, that our bodies are relatively tiny compared to our minds, not the physical brain, but the consciousness, right?
So, if you watch Jurassic Park, there's that little mosquito that's in a huge kind of amber drop, right?
It's a sack that hardened up some prehistoric tree.
So, so much of what matters to us, what is important to us, what is unique to us, so little of it is bound in our mere matter.
Of course, it all is material at the base, but I'm just talking about the mind or consciousness.
So, when the poem says our bodies are like prehistoric insects, our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
There's the physical, which is the body, but then there's the meaning and the history and the consciousness, which has the same relationship to the tiny little mosquito that's bound in a huge wad of amber.
That's the same relationship that our mind or our history has to our physical bodies.
At death, the lake, the amber, the deepest lacquer of our visible souls, dries, vanishes, ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal, which again is, you must die so that others can be born, and it's this sort of rotating cycle of renewal from a mere genetic or physiological standpoint.
But the meaning in a human being dies much more fundamentally than the body.
The body is atoms which get recycled, but the memories, the history, the passions, everything that goes on that is within the consciousness of the human being, every memory of every dream you've ever had, and so on, that really vanishes in a much more fundamental way than the mere atoms of your body.
So your body is recycled, and the The earth which could wake and wonder at our memories dumbly accepts our shells, our bodies, and calls itself content.
So the meaning within our life completely vanishes when we die, but our bodies remain, which get recycled.
And of course then, as I mentioned before, there's a stanza which talks about, now that we really understand this loss, why do we love?
And in a sense... It's kind of like a kindness that we don't know how much it's painful to watch somebody die until we watch them die.
That love has within it the tragedy of watching somebody die that you love, or vice versa, them watching you die.
So now that you really know, in a sense, this son loved his father so much that watching him die was agony.
But now he's saying, why do we love?
But of course, partly why he loved was he didn't know the loss that was coming up.
And so I say, never feeling a death before our own, it could remain a surprise, an accident, if you don't get attached to anyone.
A careening bus with a black cloak at the wheel just, wham, hitting you out of nowhere.
So, when I say, knowing the wild grief of this falling, what are love, twist with the terror of impending loss, right?
This is sort of a, when, if you really get how painful it is to watch someone die, would you withhold your heart from loving them, knowing that it was going to come?
Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
Would we try and hang on to people in a desperately clingy way, or would we reject them because we know the pain of losing them?
So, that sort of talks about that.
And then the solution, right, so that's the problem, right?
If we know that people are going to die, how is it possible to love them with all our hearts?
The solution, at least, that the poem talks about is life needs a balance, right?
If you don't even think about death in any way, shape, or form, if you imagined that you were immortal, you wouldn't have any discipline, you wouldn't make any sacrifices, it would just be later, later, later.
But if you obsess about death or if you think about death constantly...
Sorry, I made that mistake.
No death would be no planning, no growth.
Why would you go to school?
You do it later. There would be procrastination.
But if you really obsess about death, then there's no discipline, no sacrifice.
As I say, for who does taxes in darkened hospitals?
So at night when you're in your deathbed in a hospital, you're not sitting there going, gee, I'd really better get my taxes done.
I'm not saying taxes are good, but that's sort of the metaphor, that there's no discipline.
If you're always thinking about death, then in a sense you don't plan for growth.
And if you never think about death, then you never do that either.
So I say, to live right, we must remember death, but at a distance.
So we must remember that we're going to die, but not, you know, right up in your face, why get out of bed, because I'm going to remember it, so that you get things done, but not have it so close in your face that you've paralyzed, right?
We must remember death at a distance.
Neither embrace it nor evict it.
In the face of death, neither a monk, which is the rejection of sensual pleasures, of earthly attachments, and so on, Nor a wanton bee, right?
So don't be a slut and don't be a monk, right?
So don't slavishly say, well, I'm going to die, so I'm going to go out and just grab every pleasure with no discipline.
But at the same time, don't say, well, I'm going to withdraw myself from human attachments and live a life of pure intellect or whatever, because we're going to die, so why bother getting attached to someone if they're just going to die on you?
Death is the sibling of life.
It's a brother, right? It's not life itself.
It's not a distant relation.
It is the sibling of life.
It's not stalking you, right?
It's not hunting you down, but it is inevitably approaching, as we all know that we're going to die.
And now I bring another metaphor in based on this sort of renewal cycle.
The seasons lie to us, right?
Because the trouble with the seasons, and I remember this very much when I was a kid, you think, okay, well, winter is death, spring is youth, summer is middle age, fall is, autumn is old age, and then there's death again.
But the seasons come back to life, right?
So, in the arc, it's a circle, right?
The seasons go and come back to life.
Human beings, not so much, right?
Our December the 31st, our death day, is not followed by January the 1st of renewal.
So, as I say, the seasons lie to us.
As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations, because they are rungs, right?
They go past, as life sort of steps up through the rungs of generations, it doesn't go back.
There's no circularity. A ladder is a straight line.
We gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
New, squalling, that's us as babies or very young children, we imagine no ladder but a wheel.
We don't think it's a straight line that we fall off and never come back.
We think, like the seasons, that it's a cycle.
Life runs, the generations roll around, and we feel like great-grandparents sprung new-bundled from an unwintered twig.
And that's a complicated metaphor, but it's sort of the idea of the Buddhist renewal.
I don't believe in it, but it's something that I remember thinking of as a child.
That if it's a cycle, then great-grandparents come back to life in a sort of reincarnation way.
They come back to life as babies, right?
So we feel like great-grandparents sprung new bundles from an unwintered twig, a twig that has gone past winter back into spring and now is giving birth again.
And that's a lie, right?
That's what we believe. So I say again, the seasons lie to us.
The seasons return because they do not live.
Winter and spring and summer, they're not alive.
They're just states of nature.
There is no spring to our individual winters.
So when we die December 31st, or whatever winter solstice is December 22nd, we don't come back to life.
As snow falls on our head, right, so as we get white hairs, so we fall from life, right?
So snow's falling on our head, we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
I'm entombed in ice forever.
We don't come back to life.
I mean, seeds can sit in ice and then we, I think, can sit in ice and then come back to life.
We're not that way. We fall from life, we don't get to come back, right?
So that's what that talks about.
And I kind of like the snow falling on our head, us falling from life, snow turning into ice, right?
I kind of like the sort of snowy-haired thing turning into ice.
I thought that was good. And then the son comes back from the sort of abstract thoughts and says, so much is lost.
And here he's back talking about his father's memories.
He said, of course I remember you, but only as I saw you, as the beach knows the footprints, but not the foot, the surf, but not the ocean.
So when somebody speaks to us, all we get is that person's Conversation with us.
We see them exterior.
We hear them. We remember things.
But we don't get to experience that other person directly.
There's no jumping out of our heads into somebody else's head.
So he says, well, of course I remember you, but only as I saw you.
Your existence, now that you're dead, my father, is absolutely wiped.
I remember you, but just as a beach knows the footprints, but not the foot.
Just the impression that somebody has on us, that's all we retain of them, not the person themselves.
Sort of a bit Kantian, but you won't get the idea.
The beach knows the surf, the pounding of the waves, but not the ocean, not the whole thing.
So the metaphor is that when somebody speaks to us and we hear them or we see them or whatever, they are having an impact on us, but we're not getting all the depth that's in the other person.
It's going through this constraint of communication.
So just as a beach only knows the overlap of the ocean in terms of the surf, there's a whole distant ocean out there that the beach doesn't know about.
A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
I can keep only impressions, not essentials.
I can only remember people as they showed up in my life.
And what they chose to tell me or chose not to tell me, and to some degree how I chose or automatically interpreted those things, I can only keep the impressions of people, not their essentials.
That is lost when they don't.
And so he goes on to say, when my father fell, his past fell.
A burning map of where and what he had built.
So a burning map is obviously, a map is everything that this guy had done, his own mental map of his life, his history, and so on.
Burning is because he's dying, right?
He's dying, so it's all burning up, never to be recovered.
His houses stand, though the hand has fallen.
He says, I have lost not the memory of my father, which I remember, but my father's memory.
Everything that my father did.
Everything that he remembered, that he didn't tell me, or that I may have misinterpreted, or something like that.
I have lost not the memory of my father, but my father's memory.
This thousand-story library, and it's a cheap but I think good, in fact, a story being a library that has a thousand stories in terms of height, but of course, you know, stories in the second way.
This infinite vein of nightly mining, how little remains.
Infinite vein of nightly mining is dreams, right?
All of the dreams that his father had, everything that was never communicated to anyone else, is all completely gone.
Sorry, let me just take a brief pause.
Sorry about that. So, this infinite vein of nightly mining, how little remains.
And then there's a few examples of, you know, what was his second night with his mother, my father?
What was his second night with my mother like?
The dark flash of a bee that flew into his eye, which he would remember nobody.
Maybe he never told anyone he was out on a walk.
All of that's completely gone.
It happened. It was in his mind.
Now his mind is gone. And it's all lost.
The groaning bones of his most exhausted day.
What did that feel like? All lost when somebody dies.
The last time he whispered a secret, did he know it?
Did he bid farewell to secrets?
That's a bit of a thief moment for me from the Stone Diaries, I think it is.
All this can never be known.
In the endless harvest of renewal...
So this is the idea that nature harvests life, just cuts down the stalks so that it can plant new ones.
So this is a fairly standard metaphor for the renewal of death and life.
In the endless harvest of renewal, each stalk...
So each stalk of wheat or whatever it is...
Each soul... It's an ecosystem, a world, a universe, blindly wiped, right?
So it's like, well, we need to renew the species, so death is part of life, nature wipes us out, so that new people can be created, but it's blindly wiped out, and what is lost is not the physical body, because that is renewed, but the soul, the spirit, the memories, all of the history is blindly wiped.
For this, let us mourn what we have lost, which is the Father's consciousness and memories himself.
Not just the impressions that he left upon me or you, but our Father's actual lives and histories.
That's what has been lost.
But also now that no Father stands between us and our ending.
So this is right back on.
I sort of do this bookmark thing in poems, or this bookend thing in poems, where you use the same metaphors at the end that you do in the beginning.
So in the beginning, we had the sky without...
My father is too bright. There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
So we mourn what we have lost, but we also mourn for ourselves.
No father stands between us and our ending.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
So we talked about how the father dies, and then the son is next.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
So we're now one of the dominoes who's falling.
So you... Assume that most people lose their father when they themselves are in middle age, so now you sort of look forward, and there's no cushion of a generation ahead of you to soften this hole that you're going to fall into, or this guy that you're going to fall up to, as the metaphor is put at the beginning.
And then at the end, the poem says, let us mourn, right, for the loss of our father's memories, and also the fact that we know, we're now staring our own mortality in the face.
It says, grief is deep glass.
Now, glass, of course, is a wonderful substance for poetry because it lets you see through into the world, but it also reflects, or if you treat it with whatever, you turn it into a mirror.
So glass is very, very important.
Glass is also something very interesting because it's a metaphor for consciousness, right?
So we live in a brain, we have eyes, which are sort of like glass, and we then see into the world, or rather the world, in a sense, comes to us.
It's the view beyond the glass that's important.
So when I say grief is deep glass, it means that our consciousness is between us and reality.
And it's not a bad thing.
It doesn't mean that we're subjective or anything like that.
But it is a natural factor of life.
So grief is deep glass.
And it says, a window to what we have lost.
A mirror of what we shall lose.
So when we watch someone die...
Grief lets us see deeply into their death, which is that we've lost everything that's specific and individual to them, and their essence is gone, only our memories of them retain, which is about a tiny percentage of their entire existence.
So grief lets us see deeply.
When we watch somebody die, we get to see deeply into that loss.
And window, deep glass, a deep glass window, like a porthole or something much thicker, miles thick maybe, And this also goes back to the endless ice of history, right?
So ice is like glass.
So there's a couple of things that kind of work together here, I think.
So grief is a window to what we have lost, a mirror of what we shall lose, right?
So... The poem is really working at two levels.
It's looking out to say, well, this person has died, and I now get everything that's been lost.
So I'm seeing out into the world, but I'm also seeing my own ending, my own death, now that my father doesn't shield me from mortality or this.
I think Dustin Hoffman said, when you're 60, it's different, right?
When you're 40, you say, well, I could double my age and still be alive.
And they said, when I'm 60, I can't double my age and still be alive.
So it's a different sort of mindset.
So grief is deep glass, both a window into what we've lost and a mirror into what we shall lose.
And then the last part of the poem brings in something new, which I think is why, for me at least, it resolves nicely.
You can let me know what you think. So, this is part of the empathy that is involved in watching somebody die and learning about your own mortality.
So you look into the loss of somebody else that inevitably gives you the mirror of what you're going to lose when you die.
But then you actually get to go outside of your consciousness and really project yourself imaginatively and empathetically into the minds of others.
So that once you get what you have lost, what you get, what you're going to lose personally when you die, you then also get what other people are going to lose when you die.
So the last stanza is grief is deep glass, a window into what we have lost, a mirror of what we shall lose, And when we fall, what others will lose in us.
And that, of course, is also why we write poems, so that a little bit less gets lost when we die.
So I hope that this is helpful, and let me know if this is of interest to you.
I certainly would like to do more of this with my own poems, of course, and the poems of others, better poets.
So do let me know what you think.
Thank you so much for watching and listening.
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