What are these repeated machinations of a world gone mad and doused in a thousand oils? It is the mechanical clinking of the behavioral timepiece that sooner or later falls into silence—which is always, of course, only for a while. From time to time, whenever I have the opportunity on a Sunday afternoon to watch my father playing on the well-preserved and luxuriant fairways of a golf course, tautened like a drum head from tee to hole and bookended by the shabby suburban borderlands where you can see derelict little houses, unused barbecues, and ashy courtyards punctured here and there by a collapsible umbrella, I often wonder to myself how these fairways manage to attract at once the slowest-moving and the most richly diverse people in the whole city of Los Angeles. (Here, depending on the day of the week, people also contend for the title of the pastiest demographic in Southern California. But it could just be the athletic inclination of the sport.)
Observing many of these golfers whiling away the hours in the afternoon, many of them shriveling with age in their finely washed and belted khakis, I find myself confirmed in a suspicion that has been growing on me like a hidden fungus. And the suspicion naturally comes with some ambivalence.
I have recently come to the conclusion that my father’s temperament, his occasional explosions and frustration created by whatever happens to be the stimulus of a reaction that might or might not be reasonable in consideration of a so-called sports etiquette, are as beyond his control as my own inborn genetic tendencies are beyond mine: thinking about things and then thinking about thinking about things, grappling with my unsprung jack-in-the-box of tension and hesitation that has been to some degree somaticized as a choiceless and inveterate anxiety, and returning again to the trusty coils of thought and the same old passive, internally focused observation.
Like women, of course, or any other gender-based identity promoted or politicized in our modern era for reasons that are only sometimes buttressed by self-awareness and nobility of character, to the outside observer men are as predictable in their behavior as they are inscrutable in their motivations and essential impulses. While anyone can readily observe what is happening from the outside and extrapolate it as a kind of repeating pattern, the causes of that pattern are not so easily identified.
As with many phenomena in existence, the enigma is ultimately the why rather than the what; what is unreachable tends to be preferable to the freely given and readily apparent. This enigma is in part responsible for the vast edifice of art and world literature erected over millennia and undergirded by an examination of a character’s psychological genesis, motivations, and foibles in the context of a story or narrative, sprung like a spigot from the mind of a brilliant creator. We like our mysteries to be described, but never explained.
My relationship, like that of any other male tethered to his father, involves the intimacy of the filial bond, which slightly alters the conditions. I am a son, resigned to the inevitable differences that come with any self-respecting relationship between a father and a son, and I admit that I’m no longer a passive observer of the dynamic. In fact, I never was: the majority of my life has given me an intimate understanding of my father, his strengths and weaknesses, his foibles and failures, his psychological mainsprings and susceptibilities.
Hesitantly and to my belated chagrin, I now have to admit that I’m aware of myself as a principal character in the story—and I find it difficult to decide what kind of story it is. Trivial, fantastical, illusory, boring, essential, amusing…and filled with the unforeseen and unwanted thoughts and feelings that end up gently washed ashore without an indication as to their ports of departure and arrival, vessels without even the slightest signs of life.
Coming to this realization has made it no easier to overcome a nagging resistance to the idea of myself as a character. I can already feel the ominous shadows cast by the implications of this idea, allied to my perverse analytical tendencies as the irrepressible abettors of the worst and best in myself, always at the ready to make things seem more foreboding than they should. On the other hand, I can sometimes be conversely tempted by these ideas and their implications, as though my ankles were being tickled by the gentle sweep of the foam from a tide retreating out to sea.
Is it better to heed the warning signs and remain on shore, or to follow the temptations, untether the mooring, and lose sight of the distant coastline? The only thing that could possibly remain, the only option tenable in my own little interior milieu where the majority of my decisions are made ex cathedra by a kind of manikin with a moustache and a gavel that tends to get used and abused without my having any say in the matter, would be to follow the tide out to sea. So here’s hoping for calmer waters—however far from land.
