Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Farewell Father
Aired: 2020-04-11
Duration: 11:15


=== Climbing Back (02:37) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, and hope you're doing well.
[00:00:02]  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.
[00:00:10]  Actually, up until my mid to late 20s, I was in the realm of art, particularly writing, although also acting.
[00:00:17]  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.
[00:00:38]  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.
[00:00:48]  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.
[00:00:58]  And so I wrote this, and it was read at the funeral, and it was very powerful for the people there.
[00:01:05]  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.
[00:01:19]  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...
[00:01:27]  Has the capacity to truly compress human experiences into very compact and powerful statements.
[00:01:36]  I think I did a good job in this.
[00:01:37]  Of course, you can decide for yourself.
[00:01:39]  But this is the power.
[00:01:42]  Farewell, Father.
[00:01:48]  The sky without my father is too bright.
[00:01:58]  There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
[00:02:07]  The voice of my thunder god has faded to ashen echoes and memories of high twirling.
[00:02:22]  As a child, I climbed his back, pulled his hair, explored his ears.
[00:02:29]  Now I have out climbed his falling mountain.

=== Seasons of Detachment (04:47) ===

[00:02:37]  The white of spirit and the black of flesh have softened to grey.
[00:02:42]  He and I have become dominoes.
[00:02:48]  That is passing.
[00:02:54]  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.
[00:03:12]  Who we love, we will watch die.
[00:03:19]  Who love us, Will watch us die.
[00:03:26]  My loss is as deep as my love, and the agony of this endless ending is a hard price to pay for such tenderness.
[00:03:43]  There is a cycle of life, perhaps.
[00:03:51]  Our flesh may be born again.
[00:03:55]  Our hair, eyes, stories, watches even passed on.
[00:03:59]  We are circular winds of starlight, a larger pattern of falling pieces.
[00:04:07]  But so little of what matters to us is bound in mere matter.
[00:04:15]  We are deep layers of meaning.
[00:04:20]  Our bodies are like prehistoric insects.
[00:04:24]  Our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
[00:04:32]  At death, the lake, the amber, the deepest lacquer of our visible souls dries.
[00:04:43]  Vanishes, ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal.
[00:04:46]  And the body, the least important footnote of our histories, that is recycled.
[00:04:52]  And the earth, which could wake and wonder at our memories, dumbly accepts our shells and calls itself content.
[00:05:02]  Now we know.
[00:05:09]  Thank you.
[00:05:10]  Really... Know of this loss.
[00:05:16]  Tell me. Why do we love?
[00:05:23]  There's a kind of immortality in detachment, never feeling a death before our own.
[00:05:30]  It could remain a surprise, an accident, a careening bus with a black cloak at the wheel.
[00:05:36]  Or knowing the wild grief of this falling, would our love twist with the terror of impending loss?
[00:05:43]  Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
[00:05:53]  Life needs a balance.
[00:06:04]  Thank you.
[00:06:06]  No death would be no planning, no growth.
[00:06:09]  Death too close would be no discipline, no sacrifice, for who does taxes in darkened hospitals?
[00:06:17]  To live right, we must remember death at a distance, neither embrace nor evict it.
[00:06:25]  In the face of death, neither a monk nor a wanton be.
[00:06:32]  Death Is the sibling of life.
[00:06:39]  Not stalking, but approaching.
[00:06:42]  The seasons lie to us.
[00:06:52]  Thank you.
[00:06:55]  It is understandable. As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
[00:07:02]  New, squalling, we imagine no ladder but a wheel.
[00:07:06]  Life runs, the generations roll around, and we feel like great-grandparents sprung new-bundled from an unwintered twig.
[00:07:18]  The seasons lie to us.

=== Endless Harvest of Renewal (02:55) ===

[00:07:24]  The seasons return because they do not live.
[00:07:31]  There is no spring to our individual winters.
[00:07:39]  As snow falls on our heads, so we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
[00:07:52]  So much is lost.
[00:08:00]  Thank you.
[00:08:01]  Thank you.
[00:08:02]  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.
[00:08:14]  A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
[00:08:20]  I can keep only impressions, not essentials.
[00:08:32]  When my father fell, his past fell.
[00:08:36]  A burning map of where and what he had built.
[00:08:41]  The constructed children of his calloused fingers as important, perhaps, as those of his loins.
[00:08:47]  His houses stand where the hand has fallen.
[00:08:57]  I have lost Not the memory of my father, but my father's memory.
[00:09:07]  This thousand-story library, this infinite vein of nightly mining.
[00:09:16]  How little remains.
[00:09:22]  What his second night with my mother was like.
[00:09:26]  The dark flash of a bee that flew into his eye.
[00:09:29]  The transparent whirlpool of a reddened sunrise.
[00:09:34]  "'the groaning bones of his most exhausted day.' "'The last time he whispered a secret.' Did he know it?
[00:09:49]  Did he say goodbye?
[00:09:52]  To secrets. This, all this, can never be known.
[00:10:07]  in the endless harvest of renewal.
[00:10:11]  Each stalk, each soul is an ecosystem, a world, a universe, blindly wiped.

=== Dominoes Fall Free (00:55) ===

[00:10:19]  For this, let us mourn what we have lost.
[00:10:33]  Thank you.
[00:10:35]  But also, now, that no father stands between us and our ending.
[00:10:47]  Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
[00:10:52]  Grief is deep glass.
[00:11:02]  Thank you.
[00:11:04]  A window to what we have lost.
[00:11:09]  A mirror of what we shall lose.