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April 11, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:15
Farewell Father
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, and hope you're doing well.
So for those of you who don't know, I did not start out in the realm of philosophy way back in the day, in my teens and early 20s.
Actually, up until my mid to late 20s, I was in the realm of art, particularly writing, although also acting.
I wrote hundreds of Poems, dozens of plays, and half a dozen novels, and of course I went to theater school, so I really explored a creative side and explored the potentiality of language to try and capture something essential about the challenges of our life and our mortality.
So this was in my Early mid-twenties, a friend of mine's father, who had been the manager of a construction company, built houses his whole life, died rather suddenly.
Now, she was very, very close to her father, and she knew that I wrote, and she asked me to write something that could be read at his funeral.
And so I wrote this, and it was read at the funeral, and it was very powerful for the people there.
I read this on the show many years ago, but I wanted to read the poem and then tell you or give an example of how to break out a poem, how to sort of unpack it and get to the meaning in between the syllables.
So we'll start with the poem, and then I'll come back and we'll go through it and figure this thing out, because, I mean, poetry in particular...
Has the capacity to truly compress human experiences into very compact and powerful statements.
I think I did a good job in this.
Of course, you can decide for yourself.
But this is the power.
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 out climbed his falling mountain.
The white of spirit and the black of flesh have softened to grey.
He and I have become dominoes.
That is 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.
Thank you.
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 the terror of impending loss?
Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
Life needs a balance.
Thank you.
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, neither embrace nor evict it.
In the face of death, neither a monk nor a wanton be.
Death Is the sibling of life.
Not stalking, but approaching.
The seasons lie to us.
Thank you.
It is understandable. As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
New, squalling, we imagine no ladder but a wheel.
Life runs, the generations 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 to our individual winters.
As snow falls on our heads, so we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
So much is lost.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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, as those of his loins.
His houses stand where 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 say goodbye?
To secrets. This, all this, can never be known.
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.
Thank you.
But also, now, that no father stands between us and our ending.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
Grief is deep glass.
Thank you.
A window to what we have lost.
A mirror of what we shall lose.
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