Atonement... or at least an effort towards
Oct. 8th, 2011 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonTonight is Yom Kippur, and though I’m not Jewish, I cannot help but find my reflections cast across this Day of Atonement. I’m fascinated by this idea of God as an omnipotent, yet somehow still struggling, author. One inscribing furiously in his notebook of life, rough drafts of blessings and tragedies for all the hapless characters trapped within the pages of his self-published Novel of Life. Until, on Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new year, he begins to ‘seal’ the narrative. Tweaking, adjusting and polishing up certain plot lines as he sees fit for the final edit. But prior to that judgment, during the Days of Awe, the characters are somehow allowed to petition the author for a chance at, if not a happy ending, then perhaps at least a happier one.
Which is odd, because I can’t help but ask what secret sin Tom Sawyer might whisper to Mark Twain for forgiveness? What argument would Sherlock Holmes plead with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for another few books worth of life? What grand soliloquy might Juliet petition the Bard with if she could but sense his pen dipped in blood as it wrote out her love’s fate across the world’s page?
But during these last few Days of Awe I’ve found myself oddly doing just that. Seeking atonement with a father, my own, as he laid helplessly at my feet at times, or sat slumped in his wheeled throne, or even smiled benovolently down upon me from the gilded heaven whose heights sit erected across the scaffolding by childhood memories of distant times together... all as the day of the surgery that would decide his fate ticked closer.
And now..., now my father lays sleeping, or at least trying to, a few blocks away up at the hospital. He’s looking good, better than I did after my hernia operation, and fully conscious. Shell-shocked, weeping still, but with gratitude instead of fear. The surgical procedure that saved his life was performed for the first time in this country yesterday. Just hours before it was used on my father. If this tumor had reached the same point it was at before the excision, as scant a distance back as last year, if his job back in Orlando hadn’t had fired him in 2009 and put him in a city with one of the finest oncology departments in the world, I most likely wouldn’t have a father right now.
So, I’m sitting here, writing this, my own clumsy little Blog of Life, whose only character is the author and who is not excused from his judgment. But I’m writing this because for the first time in months I feel as if the weight of a great dread has been lifted from the core of my being and I want to be able to remember how it felt later on. How the world seems suddenly much bigger and the souls who inhabit it, myself included, seem to have grown along with it. How I find myself able to concentrate all of a sudden, to wrap my attention around people without being snatched back into black thoughts of my father’s impending doom. How I feel as if not only has he been given a second chance, by agency of probability or fate I leave up to you, but for whatever reason that I have as well. Because, I no longer want to live my life without self-respect and I need a place to come back to, because I might forget that.
I don’t know if Neitzche’s right and God is dead. I don’t know if Roland Barthes is right when he says the same of the author. But I do know, that this author at least, is also his own character and I will write the chapters leading to my happy ending, starting with the words on this page and not stop until their inscribed across the words of thought that spell out our actions.
And if I can’t write a happy ending… then fuck it a happier one will do.
Which is odd, because I can’t help but ask what secret sin Tom Sawyer might whisper to Mark Twain for forgiveness? What argument would Sherlock Holmes plead with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for another few books worth of life? What grand soliloquy might Juliet petition the Bard with if she could but sense his pen dipped in blood as it wrote out her love’s fate across the world’s page?
But during these last few Days of Awe I’ve found myself oddly doing just that. Seeking atonement with a father, my own, as he laid helplessly at my feet at times, or sat slumped in his wheeled throne, or even smiled benovolently down upon me from the gilded heaven whose heights sit erected across the scaffolding by childhood memories of distant times together... all as the day of the surgery that would decide his fate ticked closer.
And now..., now my father lays sleeping, or at least trying to, a few blocks away up at the hospital. He’s looking good, better than I did after my hernia operation, and fully conscious. Shell-shocked, weeping still, but with gratitude instead of fear. The surgical procedure that saved his life was performed for the first time in this country yesterday. Just hours before it was used on my father. If this tumor had reached the same point it was at before the excision, as scant a distance back as last year, if his job back in Orlando hadn’t had fired him in 2009 and put him in a city with one of the finest oncology departments in the world, I most likely wouldn’t have a father right now.
So, I’m sitting here, writing this, my own clumsy little Blog of Life, whose only character is the author and who is not excused from his judgment. But I’m writing this because for the first time in months I feel as if the weight of a great dread has been lifted from the core of my being and I want to be able to remember how it felt later on. How the world seems suddenly much bigger and the souls who inhabit it, myself included, seem to have grown along with it. How I find myself able to concentrate all of a sudden, to wrap my attention around people without being snatched back into black thoughts of my father’s impending doom. How I feel as if not only has he been given a second chance, by agency of probability or fate I leave up to you, but for whatever reason that I have as well. Because, I no longer want to live my life without self-respect and I need a place to come back to, because I might forget that.
I don’t know if Neitzche’s right and God is dead. I don’t know if Roland Barthes is right when he says the same of the author. But I do know, that this author at least, is also his own character and I will write the chapters leading to my happy ending, starting with the words on this page and not stop until their inscribed across the words of thought that spell out our actions.
And if I can’t write a happy ending… then fuck it a happier one will do.