September 9, 2011 Well I had a dream, I stood beneath an orange sky –
It’s been almost seven days, and still I’m hovering between the interstices (or intersection) of love and unmitigated loss; then I ask myself if it’s possible to leave without leaving the people I love behind. It’s not chronic wanderlust, no – but a seasonal perpetuation of disembodiment, detachment and then subsequent re-emergence; that I may be able to breathe once in awhile. It’s also been six hours since I’ve sent my parents off, with great regret but also greater relief, knowing that they will never survive the complexities of the city and its people – they belong to the class of the geopolitically dispossessed; where the psyche of the city and all its semiotic relevance evolve faster than it takes for any meaning to acquire substantial value (or at least the ones that truly matter.) As with home, you can feel the inertia of an entire generation falling through the cracks; beneath the ebb and flow of urban regeneration and its systemic transience. Unlike East Croydon where change occurs at a much slower pace, it holds a much greater significance for my father. It was there which I finally met the grandfather I never had.
He and his wife kept one of the most opulent (but meticulous) gardens I’ve ever seen, and it was through him that I learnt about my dad and his idiosyncrasies compared to his other siblings; between a yellow Fiat Spider and a red Lotus Elite (which his elder brother chose), the dish-washing fiasco, bohemian Christmas dinners; my paternal grandfather and his stint at Keyhawk in the 50′s before where he is today and the boxy little offices off Cecil Street in the 1980′s that resembled a river town during the average tropical storm. It was then that he spoke about my father’s late friend, Graham, a kindred soul, who loved motorbikes; quit his job when he had the chance, and rode towards his destiny in the Far East, all over Asia. At the age of 87, he had such a charming soul; and even with the unfortunate reliance on a home-made eucalyptus inhaler, he had the life (and brilliance) of all the people I’ve ever met. We spoke animatedly on football – he holds a season-pass for Aston Villa games and displays an autographed 08/09 jersey in his home office upstairs behind a computer that he never uses/detests, and also photographs of the team between the 60′s all through to the 80′s – of athletics and Mo Farah, and then about my paternal grandmother and her golfing prowess, especially in the dark. At this point, I would have contested against Marvell’s winged chariot; having seemed to have the ability to stop Time altogether, if only for a moment.
My father on the other hand, is a quiet revolutionary, one who revolts in his own way and in Le Guin’s words, beginning with and from the thinking mind. If there was one thing I’ve learnt from him in twenty-three years, it was embracing the synchronicity between knowledge, astute observation and the soul. This was made manifest while we were at the NAM in Sloane Square; I suppose it was there that I realized most of my ideological influences on the various narratives of war were inherited from my father, not Robbespierre, Hobbes or Foucault. My mother, however, was wildly pragmatic, ignoring (and perhaps, wisely so) the obsession of anti-violence with her Archaeology of Knowledge on Flora and Fauna. Needless to say, Kew Gardens and Regent’s Park became her spirit home. Unlike my father, my mother was the hurricane you’d find in Looking for Alaska; heady and stubborn – it was flowers or turgid silence. But it was also this mad excuse of a lady who taught me not only the importance of being earnest but the value of self-sufficiency and perhaps by extension and my own interpretation; the inclination to trust no one. In a way, I deeply admire my parents’ diametrical opposition and it never ceases to amaze me how oddly paired they are. While they share too many differences sometimes, I would like to believe they still love each other like they did thirty years ago; which makes me wonder about too many things in general.
This week has been too surreal, and I miss them already.
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- Posted under Hyperreality, Lucid Dreams
