The Last Conversation

The day before my father died two years ago we sat in the morning of his last room drinking warm beer talking about the madness of art. How the Chinese mountain poets were not idyllic escapists but transcendents, looking to the mountains with little need of a career in court politics or current affairs. How Thoreau understood this and sought not seclusion but intellectual solitude. We got drunk and dizzy and recited Whitman and Wang Wei, talked of the artists job, of willful disobedience required to hear the music of nature. To be poor if need be, but always honest…

But that wasn’t our last conversation, it’s the fantasy conversation I have with him today, while out running or walking along a river. It’s an intellectual exercise and not something I dwell on. The actual conversation isn’t important because it was laced with the uncomfortable reality of imminent death and dark family humor. There was nothing left unsaid, for he never hid. My father was the most unique human I have ever known. He sought understanding his whole life, was an intellectual and an artist having little patience for emotion, so he chose early in life to not set store by that.

An old close friend of his once told me the best description of my father was a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, “…angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”.

And in that lies the poetry of a life and that is why I do not dwell on the final conversation we had, it’s the previous ten thousand that empowered in me curiosity and a love of art, to not be normal. To explore the world without apology. Maybe Alfred Tennyson is right, “..that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” That’s goddamn right.