Fathers, Sons, and Seizures: Parts 4 and 5 of 5
An essay...
(Note: Parts One and Two of this five-part essay can be found here. Part Three can be found here.)
FOUR: 1997
My real writing gets done when I revise my manuscript, and in the case of a novel, I revise it literally hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. It's the same story over and over, each time with some variation, some change in the nuance, some minor alteration in the breathing, and every time a little bit more of the story.
So, repetition is at the center of my art.
There is a natural tendency toward the dramatic in everyone's stories. A personal anecdote always has dramatic form…literally, a beginning, a middle, and an end. So that, a family story that over the years has taken on emblematic meaning for everyone in the family, that has become the story, has a shape that makes the story memorable. When you hear the cliché, "If I could only write, I could tell you such a story," that person already has done much of the footwork, and doesn't realize it.
For the writer, what the novel itself lacks are the actual people themselves who, in the family anecdote, will have indeed performed the thoughtless action or made the unguarded remark. Maybe Little Rose, the perennially sick baby who died so sadly, or Uncle Eddie's memorable night in the backseat of a convertible, or Grandpa's deathbed admission…in the anecdote, all these actually took place. In my work, as the novel takes shape, the imagined characters and events become like characters and events that have actually taken place in my life. The completed novel is like the final recorded memory of those things. I've given the memory a beginning, a middle, and an end. The difference between the family anecdote and my novel is just that, in the novel, I never had actual facts that I was trying to recount. In the novel, I just made those facts up. I just made those memories up.
Revision is the shaping of that memory. I have to go over it again and again, so that I understand it and can make up the next memory, because memories have to have a shape that makes sense, and a flow.
So, I write and revise, read and re-read, to the point at which any normal person would angrily give up. That much repetition is way too much. But so it is, and every time, the manuscript is new to me. The actions, characters, gatherings of words…all of it…refreshes me. It's as though I'm coming across it for the first time every time, it's all so interesting.
So, I'm compelled to repeat myself when I write.
With all this, I think a lot about my father and my son. Cathleen sat through the many years of complaint I had about my father, and the conversations we had must have seemed boringly repetitious to her. How long should it take for sons to get over the troubles they have with their fathers? Can't there come a time when you simply give up?
These days I think just as much about Brennan, and I'll probably never give that up, since we're still in the middle of the process, and probably will be for many, many years. The revisions are still being made, his and mine.
The difference between Hank's and Brennan' s stories and the ones I tell about those two men, though, is significant, because they are compelled to tell theirs in the same way every time, by forces of illness that are beyond their control. I don't have to do that. They both suffer severe epilepsies, and I do not. I'm in the middle, some kind of conduit for the messages traveling between them. Perhaps, as my friend A. said, my son is my father come back to tell me the truth about myself.
Thomas Moore writes that "if we were to examine our diseases poetically, we might find a wealth of imagery that could speak to the way we live our lives… We could attune our lives and allow ourselves to be corrected by the disease. That is what I mean when I say that without sickness we wouldn't be cured, physically and psychologically."
It's up to me to write for my father and my son what they've been forced to miss, and that is the truth about me.
FIVE: 2021
It has been twenty-four years since I wrote the preceding four sections. Brennan is now forty-nine years old.
We know—barring disaster or some other unforeseen circumstance—what Brennan' s life is and most probably will be. There is no longer the swirl of possibilities that, even though he was so severely afflicted, still remained for him when he was a child and a younger man.
He has held a long succession of jobs at various large companies in California, like Long's Drugs and Yardbirds, in which he's done basic janitorial work, stocking, and carrying bags out to customers' cars. None of these has panned out well because Brennan has great difficulty with authority figures like job coaches and store managers. Even those who are trained to deal with learning-disabled adults and their insecurities have trouble with Brennan, who takes a suggestion—that maybe it would be better to do something this way instead of that way—as a rank insult. Such a suggestion often infuriates him, because he thinks that the person making it regards him as stupid. Naturally he rises up against that because he believes he is smart and knows what to do. So, he becomes very angry and sometimes seems threateningly violent when even the mildest of suggestions are made to him.
He's been fired many times.
The governmental organizations that help us with services made the decision some years ago that unless Brennan underwent a "behavior modification" program—to help him control his anger in these situations—they would no longer fund his support and job training. The trouble was that those in the program recommended to us quickly threw up their arms. They gave up on him, basically, finally not allowing him to do anything except ride around in the vans in which other clients were transported back and forth. In short, the experts trained to help him with his difficulties could not. We took him out of the program, and haven't spoken with them since.
Some years ago he fell down in the street in Walnut Creek, California. Fearful of the oncoming traffic, he got up and ran to the nearest curb. When he got there, he discovered he had separated his left shoulder in the fall. He went to the hospital on his own and got the appropriate treatment, including a sling to wear on his left arm and shoulder. He noticed that he did not have his high school ring, something that is very important to him. So, he went out at about midnight that same evening to find the ring. Arriving at the intersection where he'd fallen, he searched around for it until a Walnut Creek police department squad car arrived. The policemen sent him home, and Brennan waited an hour or two in his apartment before going back to the intersection to search for the ring once more.
The same policemen saw him, and this time told him more forcefully that he was not to be out wandering around in an intersection in the middle of the night. Brennan became afraid and belligerent and, to make a long story short, the Walnut Creek policemen maced him, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and tossed him into the back of the squad car, separated shoulder, sling and all. They apparently began to understand only then that Brennan was learning disabled and physically injured, and they finally took him to a local hospital and left him, alone, in the emergency room there, to get home under his own steam, which he did the next morning.
Our complaints to the police went unheeded. Since no charges were pressed against Brennan, they said, there was no record of the occurrences and therefore nothing on which we could rely to determine the actual sequence of events.
Naturally I thought of Franz Kafka. Or East Germany and the stazi.
Finally, just five years ago, Brennan was on his way to a drug store at ten o’clock at night, near his home in Concord, California. He was on foot and was crossing a street in mid-block. It happened that a police officer saw Brennan in the middle of the street and pulled his patrol car up close. He told Brennan to get back onto the sidewalk. A donnybrook then ensued, and Brennan engaged the policeman in a wrestling match in the middle of the street. The officer had gotten out of his squad car to subdue what he thought was a crazy man shouting obscenities at him. Other police were called, and Brennan spent the next three nights in a prisoner holding cell at the Martinez, California detention facility. Despite complaints and requests from me and his mother Cathleen, from physicians and public health assistance teams, he was not allowed to receive or ingest his anti-convulsant medications. This was a denial that could have killed him, and he’s a lucky man that these helpmates finally prevailed over the court system.
There is an ironic literary reference: the moment in which Prince Myshkin's life is actually saved by his affliction. The main character of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, Myshkin is an innocent in a treacherous world. He is also an epileptic. One night, he is climbing the stairs toward his room when an assailant jumps out at him from the darkness and attempts to kill him. (The assailant is Parfen Rogozhin, a dark- minded, complicated man who is jealous of the prince's seeming emotional success with Nastasya Filipovna.) In the very moment of the attack, Prince Myshkin is overtaken by a violent epileptic seizure that so frightens Rogozhin that he runs away, inflicting very little harm on the prince himself.
I've thought many times about this moment, especially in the context of Thomas Moore's remark, quoted earlier in this essay, that without sickness we cannot be cured. In Prince Myshkin's case, he is actually saved by his sickness. Strict reason would have it, then, that the more chronic or protracted your illness, the more cured or saved you will ultimately be. In my father's case, this speculation leads nowhere because he was killed by his affliction. In Brennan's case, I'm not sure it's appropriate either because his illness remains ever the same, the barrenness of it, the plain sameness of it, year after year. Where's the cure in that for him? What's he being saved from, or for? He still repeats himself. His life has changed little in the past twenty-four years, including his brushes with job-site authority and, to our continuing worry, with the law.
But there is a cure for me in this. Like Prince Myshkin, Brennan is an innocent. He has been given a bad deal all his life, and it causes him problems that cause him to cause problems. Yet the sameness of his days—twenty-four years ago and now—includes a kind of self-regard that allows him to think that he's merely leading his life, and that those who would have him do things differently are simply wrong. He floats. He revisits the things that are important to him frequently and repetitively. He knows he's different from others, but because he has so little understanding of what it's like to be one of those others, the differences are, in fact, unknowable to him. Brennan is always simply Brennan, and despite my worry and my wishes that he be different and that he understand the world, despite my sometime anger at and frustration with him, despite my rage…. Despite all that, Brennan seems to lead a life that is satisfactory to him.
It is, as you can imagine, not satisfactory to me. But I seem to make it through the world with more or less ease. I'm gregarious. I enjoy a good story. I talk well, a conversationalist in a world in which conversation seems to have disappeared. I love to write. I make friends.
In fact, were it not for Brennan, I could have walked through this life without any real problems at all. In other words, I could have led a shallow life in which I did not have to search for anything, dig for anything, or suffer any loss. But when Brennan had that first seizure forty-six years ago, the darkness opened before us. We looked into it and, just to speak for myself, I fell into it.
I went down to the dark, to the room where the seizure's flash ushers in the black. I've been there since that moment, and Brennan has escorted me around. He brings with him a kind of complicated light that allows for my emotional search, for my study of the nooks and interstices of the soul's unhappiness and happiness, for the reasons why it is so important now for me to seek friends, emotional exchange, conversation, and perhaps even the possibilities for writing well.
Unlike others, Brennan' s mother and I have not given up on him, in the sense that we have not abandoned the fact that he is a man who needs true love, deep caring, and real respect. But it is different now from twenty-four years ago. For me, the message is more muddled than it was then. The implacability of circumstance that Brennan represents has obscured the future for me, rather than made it clearer. Is this how it will be forever? Will there be no change until the ultimate change for both of us, the one that comes without fail to everyone?
The memory of my father and my difficulties with him has faded, mostly I think because I no longer hold anything against him, nor (I hope) he against me. I now know well what it really means to be a father many of whose hopes have gelled into a kind of injured pain. For that, I believe my father has watched sympathetically from the beyond as I've dealt with Brennan and learned therefore how to treat him as he simply is, without unwarranted expectations.
It's a darker scenario than what I had hoped for in 1997. But Brennan is now loved on realistic terms and will always be so. Perhaps, as my friend A. told me then, I had missed the truth about myself. Knowing now what that truth really is, it still holds that it was Brennan who brought it to me.
____
“Fathers, Sons, and Seizures”, Copyright ©1997, 2021 by Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
____
(Note: Parts One and Two of this five-part essay can be found here. Part Three can be found here.)
____
Terence Clarke’s new novel, The Moment Before, will be published on September 15, 2021 and available everywhere. Yvette Roman is a noted artist afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that features vivid visions before the arrival of the seizure itself. These visions are models for her work. One day, a large self-portrait of Yvette arrives at her Manhattan gallery, and she has no recollection of having done it. It is her masterwork…but could it be a forgery?
