It is sometimes difficult to see things as they really are; faces,
landscapes, cityscapes, a painting by Leonardo or Raphael, a crimson and
magenta sunrise pregnant with the promise of the thunder to come. The images
that we see, the images formed in our all too self-contradictory minds are not just
an accurate, or inaccurate, representation of the vista before us, not merely
the product of the flow of ions across a synaptic gap in the optic lobe; the merry gavotte of electrical
energy as it dances the sublime, yet meandering path to consciousness. No, the
images that we see are a mixture of light and memory, the subtle recombination
of what lies before us and whatever our minds may conjure from the deep pools
of remembrance.
Is that sunset really the colour of fire or merely a
replaying of the evening when the fading sunlight danced across the gentle waves
of an azure, tropical ocean with the seeming texture and hue of molten lava?
Does the Great Hall really have such an oaken, sculptural quality or is it merely
the product of the memory of blinding arc lights and distant shadows only dimly
perceived, save for the applause? Is that face, etched in the consciousness,
really as it appears to be; all traces of age, a life’s natural and inevitable weathering,
smoothed flat by something as simple and as basic as enduring love?
In spite of the beauty which surrounds us at every moment of
our waking lives: a barn owl’s gentle quartering of the fields of gold on
silent wing beats at dusk, ghostly and ethereal; the towering sandstone majesty
of Chartres or the Theatinerkirche, relics of a faith in divine providence long
since vanished; the eerie glow of the Aurora, insubstantial spirits cavorting
in wild abandon on days which never end; Monet’s Japanese garden; these are
seldom enough.
For all such beauty, there is one memory that abides in all
of us; one image, more telling than any artifice of man could magic from marble
or pigment, from stone and steel and glass, more inexpressible that any talisman
which nature can, in her infinite variety, fashion. The first memory of the
faces of your parents as they lean over your cot, eager to catch that first
glimpse of the light which shines behind the eyes, that first glint of the emerging
consciousness that is, and will become, you; the moment when you metamorphose
into a being charged with self awareness, with rudimentary language, with
notions of ‘self’ and ‘other-than-self’, when you finally are able to reach out
not for the breast or the comforter but in full awareness of what you strive
for. When that day arrives, it is the
faces of those closest to you that live on.
As a sometime painter, I have, over the years of my
adulthood, tried to learn, mostly with little success, the art, for surely it
is an art not merely a skill, to see things as they truly are. As such, I look,
long and hard at what is before me, and I try to see beyond the memories. If I
have pencil and paper, I will try to represent as faithfully as my meagre skill
with a brush will allow. In the absence of pencil or brush, I will draw using
only my finger and such air as surrounds me. If all else fails, I will mentally
draw pictures with nothing more than my mind in the manner of musicians without
an instrument to practice on.
This can be a great joy but, conversely, a great burden. For
I no longer remember my father as he was in my childhood; all memory has been
swept away with the image of him during his final hours. The sunken cheeks; the flesh pulled taut
across the bones; the eyes, now a cloudy grey, buried in pits of an alarming shade
of black; the tubes coming from his withered and spent arms; the hands, once so
strong, gripping the coverlet or my hand weakly in mockery of what was once so
assured; the laboured breathing; the raw fear that his very own angel of death
was at hand and hovering just out of reach.
It is rare for parents to pay any attention to what their
children have to say; even in the youngest of parents, they have a good head
start on their children in the race to accumulate knowledge, wisdom and
experience. My last words to my father were: “You are not going to die; you do
not have my permission!”
Needless to say, cantankerous old bastard that he was, he paid
just the same amount of attention at the end as he had done at the beginning.
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