The Dark Period of Peru was coming to an end in 1995 when I first moved there. I took room and board with a Peruvian family and stayed away from bars because I was on single status and didn’t want to make it permanent. For free food and entertainment, then, I frequented Canadian embassy functions which isn’t as lame as it sounds. Well, actually it is, but where else could one get Nanaimo bars? It was at such an event that I met the RCMP officer who was the ambassador’s bodyguard. I thought it was a bit ostentatious for a Canadian to need a bodyguard, but a year later the ambassador was kidnapped in the Japanese embassy event, so I guess there were risks.
Our conversation was, in fact, centered on risk and my police interlocutor assured me that my understanding of risk in Lima was grossly deficient. Out of pity, no doubt, he gave me a two hour class in situational awareness that I have not forgotten. Practice remembering details by picking someone sketchy-looking in a crowd and memorize some feature about them. Cross the street in every block and look at window reflections. Project yourself into a dangerous situation and visualize yourself avoiding and/or dealing with the danger. Develop a “muscle memory” of responses so that the initial panic does not freeze you in place. I still practice his ideas and they have, indeed, been useful on a few occasions in my life.
For some time, I have had what some might consider an unhealthy interest in death. In fact, lacking reasonable Christmas presents, I once gave my kids a gilt-edged essay on the need to spend time considering death to meet it with grace and to learn finally how to live. It is an old stoic idea that was taught by Romans such as Livy in his Histories and Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations,
"If then, whatever the time may be when thou shalt be near to thy departure, neglecting everything else thou shalt respect only thy ruling faculty and the divinity within thee, and if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature – then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee, and thou wilt cease to be a stranger in thy native land, and to wonder at things which happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that."
(One wonders why he wrote in such tortured English.) But that was when I was younger and a lot further from death than I am today. I still agree with Aurelius Augustus but hope it perhaps applies to others rather than me! Sadly, John Donne, in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions calls me to consider not for whom the bell tolls because it will one day surely toll for me.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Mr. Donne wrote from his sickbed late in his life and I thought of his situation during our three year experiment with “stupid things to do during a pandemic”. Like many, I suppose, the unexpected loss of several friends and relatives during this time came as a surprise.
On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V had but a few hours to rally his rain soaked and very sick, rag tag army to meet the flower of the French aristocracy in battle. The French would have the best weapons, both heavy and light, and would outnumber the British by three to one. They were rested and completely fed up with the English chevauchée across the French countryside. Death was almost guaranteed to the 5,000 English villeins. Yes, they had the longbow, but Crecy had been one hundred years ago and wasn’t likely to be repeated.
Shakespeare considered the mental condition of the men of that army and wondered how it was that they overcame the gloom that occupied their thinking. He concluded that it must have been a brilliant speech that Henry might have given.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
I think the entire scene from which this quote comes represents the very best of Shakespeare and have been haunted by “the story that a good man teaches his son”. In this case the story was about a battle, but what could it be for those of us who don’t have any battle stories? Or could it be that life itself is a battle that the good man teaches his son?
Paul the apostle takes pains to point out that children are to obey their parents because the injunction to do so comes with a promise,
“Honour your father and mother so that you may live long in the land.”
Is teaching your son “the story” a necessary antecedent to honouring your father? If you teach your son the story, will he honour you and thus live long in the land? And if so, what is the story to be taught? It becomes important to know.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I were at the unexpected funeral of yet another friend. During the touching slideshow of his successful life as an Irish immigrant, I was reminded that these are what the Irish call the “t’in times” in our friend’s brogue. Times when the shroud which separates life under the sun from the life that is to come “thins” and we fancy that we can see vague outlines of what it might be.
I had a conversation with my friend’s son following the funeral and mentioned to him that, based on my experience, he would be confronted repeatedly with the impulse to, “…remember to tell Dad about this”. I also suggested that he welcome such moments because, again in my experience, they were like the soldering of intergenerational links between me and the “great hall of my fathers”.
One of the great themes of Lord of the Rings is the continuity of lineage from the early days of the rings to the present day of the darkness of Sauron. Swords representing great deeds were passed inter-generationally and one of the great virtues of Gandalf is that he remembered the stories and was willing to tell them. The best scene from the best movie of all time, Saving Private Ryan, is when the elderly Private Ryan visits the headstone of Captain Miller who was sent to save him. Standing from his veneration of this hero, he turns in tears to his family and asks them to assure him that he was worth it.
Isn’t this the universal question that, with some trepidation, every man, and I suppose woman, asks him or herself ?
“Was I worth the time that was invested in me while I had breath under the sun? Or was I just a waste of skin?”
Tolkien was tortured by his experiences in the First World War, and I can only imagine what he thought of the waste of all those shortened lives. How to give them meaning? I have met incarcerated men who were as angst-ridden as Private Ryan and expressed a deep desire to make things right with their kids whom they had embarrassed and abandoned.
What to make of all this? Rather than provoking their children to wrath, is it possible that a primary role of fathers, is to teach them “the story” of their family so that both the family and the parents will be honoured? So that the children will have a blessing as well as a long life? I call this creating the “mythology of your father”. The point is not to lie about the story but to ensure that the story is told.
Agincourt was an ugly affair with more than enough blood. But Henry V, via Shakespeare, thought it a story necessary to tell so that an inter-generational band of brothers would blossom in each child’s heart. Not every father is a good father, but every father is a link, and every child wants to know about the link. I have a grandfather who abandoned his wife and children to have seven more children with goodness knows how many other “wives”. Do I care that such a creep is part of my ancestry? No. I care only that I know who the ne’er-do-well was and that finally the blank in that part of the tree has a name. I believe that the connection across generations is as meaningful as the details of the story.
And I suppose the interesting details of the story are different for daughters than for sons, but the connection is equally important. Being part of an identifiable family that has dimensions in time as well as space is what everyone wants. Every child, when prompted, wants to hear stories about who they were and what they did when they were little. Tell me I was worth it. If we have a story, then we were worth it.
We have lost the discipline of family story telling. We have lost the discipline of family. How is that working out for us? We have prisons full of men who want to hear stories of when they were little so that they know they were worth it. We have a society filling up with people who think maybe they weren’t worth it and so live on Prozac or check out in a blaze of other people’s blood.
This story shall the good man teach his son. It is time we start building the mythology of our own families. Maybe in the telling, because no man is an island, we will start to live up to the virtues of some of the heroes we find in the story.
As you wish…
Mythology of our fathers
“I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren't just for entertainment.
Don't be fooled
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.”
- Leslie Silko - Ceremony