Fathers and Sons and Fish
My father is not a fish. I don't believe that he ever will be. But for the past few days it has felt like my father is a fish.
I often implore my students to furnish the interior of their hearts, to decorate their minds, to wallpaper their souls with great literature and poetry. It's a hard thing for many to do. It feels so anti-utilitarian. We are a pragmatic species and reading Yeats and Waugh can seem impractical, an inefficient waste of time.
"Why do it, Mr. Chiarot?" My students often ask.
I don't know. If feels irreverent to even try and justify that which needs no justification. Don't ask me to justify why you ought to squeeze the fat cheeks of your three year old. One ought to read Shakespeare. Period. However, the sheer givenness of the fact that one ought to read King Lear does not preclude the fact that imbibing great literature often does carry with it wonderful practical benefits.
It is amazing how often forgotten books and parts of books will resurface and elide with the present moment. Characters, sentences, stories, and scenes can arrive out of nowhere and like a small fishing vessel on the shores of Dunkirk, they can rescue the troubled mind. They can give words and place to scrambled thoughts. They throw a warm wool blanket over your shiver-sick soul and row you safely home.
I have not read William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying since I was a sophomore in college. Incredibly, that was about 20 years ago. At one point in the novel there is a 5 word chapter. Vardaman Bundren, the youngest child in his family say, "My mother is a fish." That is the entirety of the chapter. I remember my literature professor and now dear friend, Brad McDuffie, teaching me what a "tour de force" was. I pretended I already knew, but as a gentleman I'd let him explain for the benefit of the rest of the class.
That chapter was a tour de force. Vardaman is too young to make sense of the shock, horror, and finality of his mother's death. So he compares the death of the fish he caught to his mother's death. "My mother is a fish." The simple searching for answers, the agony of his definition-less pain, the ache that remained wordless because the little boy lacked the words, that has always stuck with me. At least now I realize that it has always stuck with me. I haven't thought of the novel or that chapter in years; not until recently when it was finalized that my mom and dad were moving back to Tennessee.
My father, the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, is moving and I keep thinking "My father is a fish." My father is alive and well but there is something about that chaotic swirl one feels when everything that was solid starts shifting—the tectonic plates of my life gyrated and out came Faulkner's character who didn't have the words and yet his lack of words loosed my tongue. Vardaman couldn't speak and because of that I can.
11 years ago I became a father. Leah Elizabeth was born. 11 years ago my father moved to New York. He baptized baby Lea-Lea and as my pastor he would go on to baptize Judah, Jo-Jo and Robbie. In Gilead Marilynne Robinson writes about how in baptism "the water heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection." Each baptism, each sermon preached, each communion served, has made an electrical connection of sorts between my family and my father. So has each day and hour of watching my children by my mother. Each bag of junk food (the food I was never allowed to have as a child!) shuttled into my house under the cloak of secrecy has thrown a hook in our bellies leading back to grandma's hands.
When I think of my father it is impossible to calculate how much of my mind he has created. Many people think fondly of their fathers and many think that their fathers are brighter than they are in reality. I am not one of those people. I happen to be right when I say my father is the smartest man I know. (I have met many of your fathers. Sorry. I am right on this one).
My father is the reason I love Bob Dylan. You never really had a choice in my house. Dylan has a great album from 2001 called Love and Theft. Dylan's whole career is based on loving something so much that you steal it, you take from it, you glean in the grassy glen of greatness. My father has a great mind, so consciously or not I have been stealing from it. When T.S. Eliot has a poem precariously situated in the side of his pants, you pickpocket.
In The Odyssey Homer wrote that "few sons are better than their fathers, most are worse." I've never wanted to be better than my father. Maybe subconsciously I have tried to be like him and have developed some of the same ticks, similar mannerisms. I couldn't be better. I am just happy that my father is my father.
My father has been in my life in a direct and personal way for the entirety of the time I have been a father. Once you have had children for a number of years your life before children is nothing more than a dream of a memory. That life existed but is wraith-like. Thinking now of life as a father with my father many states away has caused Faulkner to come swimming up out of the waters of the literary deep. He has helped to give voice to a whirling mind.
Inexplicably, having a story to hang one's heart on provides stillness amidst the turning and turning of the widening gyre. And in that stillness I can hear my father's voice. A voice that has spoken so many beautiful words. A voice that has again and again proclaimed the sure and certain hope of embodied, resurrected life. A voice too smart for me. A voice I didn't always completely understand but just like my sophomore self, acting as if I knew what a tour de force was, I nodded along. But as Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It, "You can love completely without complete understanding."
Justin Chiarot serves as Chair of our Biblical Studies Department at Chapel Field and Pastor of Christ’s Church of the Hudson Valley in Ulster County, NY.
A huge thank you to the generous businesses who sponsored our recent “Golf Outing” fundraiser.
Their support continues to help Chapel Field in our mission of bringing Classical Christian education to Hudson Valley families. We hope you will consider working with these businesses in the future.
