Letting It Go Away

My father sat at the back of the college classroom.  He watched the professor at the front of the classroom.  The students were watching the professor, too, while he interpreted a poem called The Cancer Cells, which is a poem my father had written. Dad was prominent as a poet during the middle fifty years of the 20^th century.  On that day, Dad was a visitor at this college, brought to the college to read his verse and to participate in classes as an established poet. 

            The professor concluded his interpretation.  The Cancer Cells, the professor had opined, is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  Then he called on Dad.

            Dad stood.  “Well,” he said, “I wrote The Cancer Cells.  I have to say that it has nothing whatever to do with the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  What the poem has to do with is what it says in the poem.  I saw vivid color photographs of cancer cells, in large scale in a magazine.  The images were intensely beautiful.  However, the images are also death.  It’s the contrast between their beauty and their power to cause death that moved me to write the poem. And it’s the aloof observation of the poem’s last line that makes it a good one.”

            Dad reported to me that the professor watched Dad for a moment after Dad stopped talking, and then the professor said to the class, “Well, notwithstanding what was just said, the poem is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe, and now if you will please turn to page 182….”

            Dad was not called upon to speak during the remainder of that class. 

            “Dikkon,” Dad said to me later while he mused on this event, “the truth is that once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

            I recall this conversation as I work now to draw attention to the approaching publication of my memoir—in June—a memoir that explores my relationship with my poet father and how his and my relationship affected my allegiance to our ultimate Father. 

            I am working in the background now.  Others are working in the foreground.  My literary agent—formerly prominent in the foreground—has moved into the background, for now.  My conceptual editor at the publishing house—she who acquired the book, and who then worked diligently to shape it so that it is readable—she has merged into the background, though her role still is to oversee. My cover has been designed by a genius—who has captured the atmosphere of this memoir both by color selection and by selection of images. My line editor—she who evaluates grammatical adventures of mine, checks my facts, and questions me closely when my sentences are obscure—my line editor is in the foreground as we finish our work together.  Stepping more prominently into the foreground, now, are the publisher’s marketing director and my publicist. Copyeditors will come next and, I am sure, other professionals of whom I am not yet aware.

            “Dikkon, once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.” 

            This is true not only of those of us who write stuff and who desire other people to read it.   

            For example, my wife Channa and I have four children.  They run is age from thirty-six down to twenty-seven.  Over the years, we “published” them to the world, and now they do not belong to us anymore, as they did belong to us once when we were still “writing” them.  Even our son Sam, who has Down syndrome and lives at home, at age thirty, has been “published.”  It’s just that, as a “book,” Sam rests on our bookshelves at home between his excursions into the world to interact with his employers and colleagues at the convenience store where he works, with his fellow painters and other artists at the artists’ collective where he paints, and with his fellow athletes challenging themselves in Special Olympics swimming, skiing, basketball, and track-and-field.     

            My book today is immeasurably more mature than it was when I thought I had finished it.  Before, when the book just had me in its life, figuratively I could take it to bed with me as I took our children to bed with me.  My book was little then, and, like my children then, it didn’t question my judgment.  I could enjoy cuddling it then—I could enjoy that deep, trusting, boneless slumber of its warm little body on my chest.  Now my book is all grown up and it has other people whose judgment it has learned to trust.  It needs to make a living on its own.  It doesn’t really need to listen to me anymore.    

            Dad needed to learn to be content when he discovered that The Cancer Cells is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  He didn’t particularly like that the poem was about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  But he needed to be content with that. 

Fortunately, my father was a literary philosopher as well as he was a father philosopher. As his son, I made decisions he didn’t particularly like. But, regarding The Cancer Cells and me too, he would puff a few puffs on his pipe, smile at me, pat me on the shoulder—a taller shoulder now than it had been when I was a boy—and he’d say, “Well, I still love you anyway.”  

 

Copyright - Dikkon Eberhart - 2015