Today I learnt
of …
Today I learnt of a man
I never met. The facts and fictions of his life escape me, but the irrevocable
fact of his death, and his connection to me, gives it meaning that I cannot
escape. How can what I do not know, and never did know, affect me so deeply?
Indeed, how is it a real loss to me? This unknown fragment, light as a feather
in the air, but heavy as a boulder on my heart? Perhaps I cannot know, perhaps
I cannot …
Apparently his death
brought him back into lives that he had long departed from; perhaps like myself
he had retreated too far to come back into their lives, and make himself a part
of their bodies once again. His heart and lungs gave way to his addiction, and
he slipped out of the world, his history unknown to those who knew him then. He
had become a fragment, lost in decades of dissolution, slowly becoming one with
the sea of noise that he had drifted into when his heart had broken.
Till today, I had never
heard of him. But my mother insists I knew of him, her brother. The truth is I
have no memory of him at all. And somehow I feel guilty, a guilt for the
nothingness that remains where more appropriate emotions should be. I am cut
off, adrift from the world of interactions that enforce memory through
regularity, frequency; of the things that make a signal amidst the noise.
He died institutionalised. It could not have been a happy death, but how are we to know? Apparently he had attended university once, even graduated with distinction, but I am unsure how much of this is real, and how much is fiction. It has all blended, as it has before, and become a myth, a story worth telling. A story perhaps better than his life was at its end, expiring in a stark, dry interior border town, where nothing much resides, and everything passes through, like tumbleweed; searching for anywhere but here, little pieces scattering along the journey.
There is a silence in these places, these in-between spaces. Perhaps that was what he craved there, a place where the noise ceased, and there was a sense of peace, even if contrived; a product of a solitude rarely present in urban life. A silence where in some moments, only the earth and the sky could be heard, as though they hummed in and of their own constitution, a resonant body of sorts that made up something that exists without us, and despite us. Something that reaches into eternity.
One of the generation of ’76, he fought the police at the barricades, apparently. So many claim to have, of that generation. An old wives tale told by prisoners we often hear, but how much of it is myth, and how much is true? We will perhaps never know, because this history has been put asunder, for a greater purpose, a greater myth, one that has begun to fail us, but at which we grasp with conviction, as though the loose sand we clutch at can rescue us from its quickening when it floods from below, and turns to a watery grave.
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