When we were both in our forties, my sister asked me, "Don't you think that the way Dad treated us made us smarter?" I replied, sounding a lot like my father, "No. I think we were smart already. I think that the way Dad treated us made us crazy."
"Crazy" is too strong a word, and it's not fair to blame it all on my "old man," but somewhere along the line I picked up a hyper-attentiveness, a fear of overlooking something. It never brought anything more than some mild ridicule, but you didn't want to be foolish in front of Dad. Fellini, my cat, has the same nervous attitude, but he balances his alertness with a profound ability to relax.
Dad was a street philosopher, marching to his own drumbeat, always giving things a spin, looking at them from another angle. Cryptic and concise, at its best his communication was a Zen koan, breaking the paradigm, challenging the assumptions behind your way of thinking. I'm still deriving benefit, unpacking the things he said.
Fellini *
Dad made us think, left us wondering. He often said the opposite of what he meant. His "sure," hardly ever meant yes. It meant, "Why are you asking me such a thing?" Answering a question with a question is the Socratic method. It's also very Jewish.
When I was 16, he thought I was too young to go off, as I wanted to, with my 18-year-old girlfriend for a long weekend in Vermont. Yielding to my persistent entreaties, he said, "How can I tell you what to do? Go make your own mistakes."
Dad taught us to think outside of the box. Taken to extremes, outside the box can be a lonely, even a crazy place to be. But at least there is a victory in being able to pick your own poison.
Twenty-seven years ago, seven years before he died, a stroke robbed my father of a lot of his capacities. Now, white-haired myself, I miss him in a different way.
On his birthday, ten days ago, the death of a cousin found me reminiscing with my daughter about all he did for our Cuban cousins, bringing that brach of the family north and helping them settle after Castro took power.
Havana *
With all of that I conjured him up in a dream five days ago. But let me give you a bit of context, as briefly as possible:
The universe, especially this living world, is infinitely and infinitesimally complex. It is mathematically "impossible," that everything, cosmology and biology, works together as it does by accident, without following some plan. To account for this miraculous harmony, scientific Idealists (some with Nobel prizes) posit a Universal Mind guiding our world of space, time and matter.
Our individual consciousness, these Idealists suppose, is a disassociated part of that Cosmic Intelligence. Filtering experience through our body, limited by space-time, we forget our higher, true being.
To me all this sounds a lot like the old-fashioned concepts of "God" and "soul," but back to my dream:
I dreamed that I was with my father and mother in a house that was ours. I was in the living room. Mom was in the kitchen. Dad was in his bedroom. The three rooms were connected by a very short hallway. I went from the living room to Dad's bedroom. On the way I passed the kitchen where Mom was puttering around. Dad was sitting on the bed, his back against the headboard. He was listening to Yiddish music on a laptop. Dad said to me, "Be nicer to the help." [End of dream]
I woke and took care of my immediate needs. Doing so I noticed that a patch of my skin was itchy. I went back to the bedside table, where I keep a small bottle of olive oil, which I apply to my dry patches of skin every evening before bed.
Because I was trying to transfer the oil to the outer edge of my palm, the better to apply it to the hard-to-reach itchy spot, and because I wasn't yet thinking straight, I managed to spill a fair amount of oil on the floor.
That's the exact type of foolish action for which Dad would ridicule us, a ridicule I internalized as a boy. And in answer to my sister's question, yes, such an internalized voice, such a vigilance, does make foolish mistakes less likely. But it can be overdone.
And I overdo it. I still beat myself up for such trivial mistakes. Lacking actual errors, I invent silly reasons to castigate myself, regularly, daily.
As it was, still in my calm, morning consciousness, still elated by seeing my father in the dream, I only wondered about the juxtaposition, the contrast of my happiness and my disappointment in spilling the oil.
Then I set about cleaning it up.
I knelt down beside the bed, in front of the spill, using a pair of sandals as knee-pads. In that religious posture, before setting to work with a small pail of hot, soapy water and a wash rag, I thought, "Why let the oil go to waste?" The cleaning lady had visited the day before. The floor was clean.
There, down on my knees, I began retrieving the spilt oil with my hand and applying it to my nearly naked body. And in that position, applying that unction, the meaning of my father's message in the dream, characteristically cryptic, came to me.
We are "the help." Our physical existence is in service of our higher being. Our earthly, space-time experience is a vehicle, the servant of our greater, universal self.
"The help," our smaller, human mind does not understand. It worries. It suffers from the "mistakes" it makes. But from the perspective of our integrated cosmic consciousness (often a very unhuman perspective) there are no mistakes, everything is right, necessary.
I spill the oil. "The help," my earth-bound consciousness, laments. I kneel and anoint myself with the spilled oil. Something very soulful occurs. "Be nicer to the help," the part that gets it "wrong," that does see or understand the bigger picture.
I'm not sure what happens when we die, how it will all look when we are completely out of the space-time box. The scientific Idealists imagine a reunification with the Cosmic Mind, without the loss of individual agency. To me this modern, scientific point of view sounds a lot like what we once called heaven.
I think I got a preview of that better world the other morning, a little glimpse: Mom was in the kitchen. Dad was in his bedroom. I was on my knees, anointing myself.
*
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