in the shadow of unknowing

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More and more I find us turning to old men to make sense of the world, hear them beseeching us to just act right behind their measured tones, behind their opining, behind their fitting this world into the one they thought they lived in. It makes me want to explode tree stumps, send splinters ripping through the fog. Men have found how to do things behind the fog of your agreement on what is so. Old journalists. Old CIA agents. Old historians. Old economists. Old hippies. Articulating the fog of dated consensus, pleading it to the asking fog of befuddlement.

I can hear my father telling me he no longer wanted to talk about the world, explaining that things make him cry now, that he doesn't feel competent to deal with it anymore. That was before he lost competence with space/time and with words themselves. I know he's in there, knowing just fine, but not able to put these things into workable sequences much.

One of the last times I had a conversation with him, he was telling me about hearing music and voices that he knew weren't in the house, that he'd figured out they were the neighbors and the sound was being picked up by the heat exchanger outside and carrying in through the vents.

Or, I told him, that perhaps tiny parts of his brain were dying from mini-strokes and that was leaving him in a different mental frame from the old one, not a lesser one, but a greater one, and when you're there you do hear music and voices, that sounds that used to be the refrigerator kicking in or a distant lawnmower suddenly sound like symphonies, a sharp rap like someone shouting your name....

I can't describe the look of identification, of relief, on his face.

It makes me cry to think about it.

I keep reminding Mom that he's still in there, that she shouldn't treat him as though he's dotty, because in truth he's less dotty now than most people. I feel such a failure not to be able to be with him more. My mother, for all her surpassing qualities, isn't very insightful about this sort of thing....