This essay was written for a preceptorial on Virgil in my third semester at the St. John’s College Graduate Institute and selected by the SJC Prize Committee as the best graduate essay of the year. It isn’t my favorite of the work I’ve done at St. John’s, but given that a group of smart people whom I respect decided that they liked it I am open to the possibility that there’s something worthwhile in it that I—in the position of author—am incapable of seeing. This in mind, I decided to share it here and open it to more general criticism.

At the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid, we find the surviving remnants of Troy floating across the Mediterranean in a mere handful of galleys after suffering defeat at the hands of the allied Achaean army. Waves toss the Trojan ships like a petulant child having a temper tantrum. The goddess Juno, angry about a prophecy foretelling the destruction of her beloved city of Carthage at the hands of the Trojans, petitions Aeolus to loose violent winds upon the already-tattered fleet. He complies. Violent gusts batter the Trojan galleys, breaking several against rocks jutting up from the sea floor. The sea-god Neptune notices what is happening in his domain and rages at the other gods encroaching upon his sovereignty: he dispatches the winds back to their mountain home, rebuking Juno and Aeolus for their impetuousness. The winds calm, the seas still, and the Trojan exiles drift ashore near Carthage. They sprawl out in exhaustion on the beachhead, run an inventory of their remaining equipment and rations, and start fires for their first meal on land since being forced from their home. Aeneas goes on the hunt, killing seven huge bucks: one for each vessel destroyed in Aeolus’ storm. The Trojans—“a remnant left by Greeks, harassed by all disasters known on land and sea, in need of everything”[1]—sorrow at their condition.

However, there is hope. Aeneas, sensing the dejection gnawing at his men, makes a rousing speech: “You have neared the rage of Scylla,” he reminds them, “and her caves’ resounding rocks; and you have known the Cyclops’ crags; call back your courage, send away your grieving fear.”[2] Then he reveals a second prophecy concerning the future of the Trojan people: “Through many crises and calamities we make for Latium, where fates have promised a peaceful settlement. It is decreed that there the realm of Troy will rise again.”[3] Though driven from their homeland, the Trojans are fated for a new home.

A new home is a strange idea. For us modern, 21^st-century Americans, “home” is often merely a euphemism for “where you happen to live”: it is not uncommon to see billboards along highways advertising “New Luxury Estate Homes,” “1 & 2 Bedroom Apartment Homes,” “New Homes For Sale.” But for most of human history, home has been something familiar, old, and beloved—it precedes us, produces us, and remains a permanent part of the background of our lives even if we leave it for somewhere new. “You can take a boy out of the country,” they say—you know the rest of the story. Like Ithaca for Odysseus, home awaits your return, because one belongs to one’s home as much as one’s home belongs to oneself. Which is to say, home is as much a place—a fixed, bounded geographical zone with specific, identifiable qualities and details—as the stories, feelings, things, and—perhaps most importantly—people associated with it. Home is the place where you exist as a midpoint between a succession of generations into the past and a procession of generations into the future. “There’s no place like home” may be a cliché, but the saying is common for good reason: home is a place and no two places are identical. No two homes are alike—maybe not even for the people who share them.

What happens, then, when one’s home disappears? Not mentally, mind you: not as if the place that was once considered “home” is no longer thought of in those terms. What happens when home is destroyed? Where do you go when homecoming is impossible? Unlike many peoples whose names have been wiped off of the map and out of the register of human memory for all time, the Trojans are not simply homeless: they have a great destiny, foretold in prophecy. The destruction of their city provides them an opportunity. They are bound for a new home—not for an already-established, foreign city into which they will assimilate, but for a new place entirely. They will make a new home: Rome, a city fated to blossom into an empire. Aeneas will “establish a way of life and walls for his own people,” Jupiter reveals to Venus. And as for the following generations of Romans, the father of the gods will “give them empire without end.”[4]

This essay will explore home: what it is, how one comes into being, and what happens when home and world become identical.

Troy and Beyond

Troy was one of the richest and most beautiful cities in the world. The beautiful face of Helen was not the only thing that brought the Greeks to Trojan shores: the possibilities of plunder to be won from Priam’s city and well-wrought armor to be stripped from the bodies of dead Trojan soldiers were not overlooked. Even before Helen’s name is mentioned in the Iliad, Apollo’s priest Chryses relays to Agamemnon and Menelaus that “the gods grant who have their homes on Olympos / Priam’s city to be plundered and a fair homecoming thereafter”[5]—treasure was always part of the deal. Aeneas and the Trojans, even, did their best to rescue as much wealth from their city as they can: after landing in Carthage they draw from this collection to thank Dido for her hospitality. All the more horrible, then, to see it burned and pillaged.

But along with some of the city’s riches, the surviving Trojans also escape with the city’s “household gods.” The night after leading the infamous wooden horse inside the city walls, Aeneas is approached in a dream by Hector: the dead warrior reveals the treachery of the Greeks to our sleeping hero, urging him to wake and flee the flames of his burning home and entrusting to him Troy’s “holy things and household gods.” “Take them away as comrades of your fortunes,” he urges, “seek out for them the great walls that at last, once you have crossed the sea, you will establish.”[6] Aeneas wakes, arms himself for battle, and charges into the streets to make vengeance. There he meets Panthus, son of Apollo’s priest, desperately leading his grandson to safety while “in his hand he carries the holy vessels and defeated gods.”[7] But the existence of these peculiar deities is also mentioned in the first stanza of the poem: once he founds Rome, Aeneas will have “carried in his gods to Latium.”[8] And after landing at Carthage, as if to clarify just what “carry” means in this context, Aeneas announces to his disguised mother Venus:

I am pious Aeneas, and I carry in my ships my household gods together with me, rescued from Argive enemies; my fame is known beyond the sky.[9]

 Unfortunately, the poem does not provide any direct description of what these “household gods” are. We learn about them only by way of what happens to them—in their being held, carried, transported across the ocean in the galleys of ships. We learn that Juno is horrified by their fated arrival in Italy. While leaving Troy, Aeneas—hands soiled with Grecian blood—begs his father to carry them. And much later, after landing on Italian shores, we see Aeneas make a tribute to the household gods of his friend and ally Evander.

Every home has its gods, it seems: homes are not just where you and your family live, but also where your gods reside. And unlike the gods of Olympus, the gods of one’s home are fragile, transportable, and require a great deal of care. It is unclear what kind of role they play in the lives of mortals: we do not see any children of household gods, they never take human form, they do not intervene in human affairs. Rather, they are quiet elements of city life that seem to grant a sense of the sacred to affairs both domestic (Panthus and Evander seem to have their own household gods) and political (Aeneas carries the gods of Troy).

When home is the home of your family and your gods, it could never just be a house—which is why none of the places the Trojans stop on their way to Italy could have been their new home. Many of the places are self-evidently unfit for consideration as the location of a new Troy: Thrace is a poisoned place, the site of an ancient crime; Buthrotum is a sad and hollow replica of the once-great Troy, now shot through with sorrow and anguish. Others, however, are less clear. When the Trojans found the city of Pergamum on the island of Crete, it seems a fitting enough locale for long-term habitation—that is, until a plague befalls the island. Aeneas, sleeping in bed one evening, has a vision of his household gods[10] standing over him: they speak to him, reminding him of the promise of Italy, Rome, and the eventual empire over which his descendants will rule. Clearly, the gods are not happy in Crete. Aeneas orders the ships loaded and the sails raised, though a small group of Trojans stay behind. By the time they arrive in the comparatively hospitable Actium, it seems they have internalized the lesson taught at Crete: the Trojans spend a year there without founding a city, experience no hardship beyond the coldness of winter, and raise their sails for Buthrotum.

What ruled out Carthage, however, is initially much more opaque. Though initially met with resistance and suspicion, the Trojans are welcomed with open arms by Dido and the Tyrians. Their fame has been preserved in a series of murals—whether painted or etched is unclear—at a shrine to Juno in the heart of the city, depicting both the heroic deeds and the suffering of Trojan warriors in their battle against the Greek invaders. Carthage has build a monument to Trojan courage. And with the heroes themselves suddenly landed upon the shores of their domain, the Tyrians are happy to offer them a home. “[S]hould you want to settle in this kingdom on equal terms with me,” Dido promises them, “then all the city I am building now is yours. Draw up your ships. I shall allow no difference between the Tyrian and the Trojan.”[11] So why did this offer not last? The simplest answer is that the gods would not allow it. Indeed, when Hermes approaches Aeneas to remind him of the prophecy, “he sees Aeneas founding fortresses and fashioning new houses.”[12] Assimilation seems to be underway. It is only once the god reminds Aeneas of the promise made to his son that the Trojan leader’s mind changes. To remain in Carthage would mean to rob Ascanius of the glory for which he is fated. Carthage would provide a happy home for Aeneas and his people—but it could never allow for the glorification of Aeneas’ true heir.

People in a place with their gods and their families: this is the basic recipe for a home. But if a people cannot simply assimilate with another to have a home, how do they make a new one?

A New Troy

When Jupiter reveals the fate of Aeneas to his mother Venus, the first item in his list of events is that he “shall wage tremendous war in Italy and crush ferocious nations”—only after which he will “establish a way of life and walls for his own people.”[13] Rome will happen, but not without conflict. Prophecy does not imply simplicity or ease. But what is the function of war in the founding of a new home? Is it the whim of the gods? Or might conflict be a necessary part of founding a new home?

The Trojans do not simply invade Italy. When they land at Latium they are initially extended a warm welcome by King Latinus, who just recently received a prophecy that his daughter will be married off to foreigners. “For strangers come as sons-in-law,” the voice of his dead father tells him—and as if to assuage any doubt about who these strangers might be, he recites the fate of the Trojans: “their blood will raise our name above the stars; and their sons’ sons will see all things obedient at their feet, wherever the circling sun looks on both sides of Ocean.”[14] Rome, then, will begin with a wedding—but the wedding is the first source of conflict. Princess Lavinia has been all but promised to Turnus, the handsome and young king of the Rutulians, but Latinus’ prophecy inspires him to break off the engagement. Juno, furious at the prospect of a Trojan marrying into the Latin royal family, sics the Fury Allecto on the Latins: Lavinia’s mother Amata and Turnus are roiled into bloodlust. The Rutulian king begins to muster an army against the Trojans.

Allecto also helps sow the second seed of conflict, by leading Ascanius’ hunting dogs to the beloved stag of Tyrrhus and Sylvia. Ignorant of the stag’s privileged place among the Latins, Ascanius sends an arrow into his gut, killing him. It is a grievous betrayal of custom, but a custom that the Trojans could never have assumed—and which the Latins, being “a race of Saturn, needing no laws and no restraint for righteousness,”[15] would never have told them. Sylvia and Tyrrhus rouse the Latin farmers to battle: wielding whatever sharp implements they can find—“anger makes a weapon”[16]—they march against the Trojan encampments. First blood is drawn: Almo, son of Tyrrhus, is struck by an arrow from an unknown bow. Latinus rebukes Turnus and the Latin mobs and refuses to open the city’s Gates of War—but Juno does it for him, making the war official. War, however, requires alliances—and while the Trojan encampments are under siege, Aeneas sails down the Italian coast making pacts with friendly kings. The most notable of these is Evander, king of the Arcadians, who entrusts his son Pallas to Aeneas’ tutelage. By the time Aeneas returns to assist the Trojan ramparts, he has assembled thirty ships with ten generals from different regions of Italy. It is a motley crew, including gods and mermen, all willing to put their lives on the line for a Trojan victory.

Marriage, the breaking of custom, and alliances: these are the preconditions for the Trojan-Latin war. The marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia, if carried out, would result in the union of two peoples—but beneath the kingship of one: the Trojans. Aeneas and his people would inherit a city, a place to live while raising the walls of Rome, and the Latins will become collaborators in Rome’s greatness. And as Rome is destined to be an empire of law—one that is destined to “teach the ways of peace to those [they] conquer, to spare defeated peoples, [and] tame the proud”[17]—the flimsy, ambiguous rule of custom must be overcome. A civilized people must be able to articulate the rules, especially to guests—a tradition of inexpressible cultural habits is no way to teach the ways of peace to others. Furthermore, the alliances crafted in battle set the terms of who will possibly be victor and who the conquered: not only do the Trojans win if Aeneas leads his army to victory, but so too would (for example) the humble and rustic Arcadians. The winning party will determine the character of the peace that takes shape afterward. The conquered will be subject to the laws and customs of the conquerors.

Or so it seems, but the arrangement arrived at by Jupiter and Juno complicates this outcome. “For the Ausonians [Italians] will keep their homeland’s words and ways,” Jupiter promises his wife:

…their name will stay; the body of the Teucrians will merge with the Latins, and their name will fall away. But I will add their rituals and customs to the Ausonians’, and make them all—and with one language—Latins. You will see a race arise from this that, mingled with the blood of the Ausonians, will be past men, even past gods, in piety; no other nation will pay you such honor.[18]

Jupiter turns this expectation on its head: the conquerors will take the name and language of the conquered. In a set of circumstances unique to the Trojans and Latins—and brought about only through divine authorship—Trojan and Latin customs will exist peaceably alongside one another. Neither will dominate. But again, customs are not laws, and the Latins are a lawless people: one may assume that the laws established by Aeneas will be binding for this whole new race. Which is, of course, a curious and new term. From the union of these two peoples we will get one: no longer understood as members of family groups (Teucrians descended from Teucer, Dardaans descended from Dardanus, and so forth), the people will comprise a unity of plurality—a many that makes one. And this transformation of peoples into a race is a reflection of another transformation that Rome will effect: that of home into world.

World

Before meeting with the Latins after landing on the Italian peninsula, Aeneas visited the Sibyl. A deranged priestess of Apollo, the Sibyl was granted the ability to presage the future by writing the fates on a collection of leaves—which are then frequently scattered by the wind. But Aeneas is not here to hear the future from the Sibyl: rather, he requires her assistance in descending to Hades to visit the soul of his dead father, who will tell him the whole story of Rome. The Sibyl agrees, but Aeneas must first complete a few tasks: so Aeneas picks the golden bough, performs the required sacrifice for Persephone, and the two climb into the bowels of hell.

When they reach Anchises in the Fields of Gladness, he is positively glowing: he stands in the middle of a grassy meadow, telling the story of his bloodline to the souls of his descendants. Aeneas tries to embrace him, but his arms pass through his body like a beam of light through a window. They share tears. Anchises then takes Aeneas on a tour of the blessed part of the underworld, the place where great souls live out their afterlives in joy and gaiety while waiting for the moment of their resurrection—when, a thousand years after death, they will drink from the river of forgetting and return to a bodily form on earth. Then he reveals to him the destiny of Rome: the events that will shape its legacy, the greatness it will win, and the men who will lead it there. “Rome will make her boundaries as broad as earth itself,” Anchises says, “will make her spirit the equal of Olympus, and enclose her seven hills within a single wall, rejoicing in her race of men.”[19] Rome, it seems, will be founded as a great city by great men—but then will become something different. Rome will eventually become the whole world.

If what was said earlier about home has any validity—that home is a place—then this poses a strange problem. Just as home is a place, world is a space. Rather than being defined by boundaries, specificity, and uniqueness, the world is that space which transcends all places and inside of which all place loses its place-ness. A place is defined explicitly in opposition to the world: in full knowledge of the vastness of everything and the infinite array of possibilities, I settle myself in a small corner of existence whose contours become as familiar as the backs of my hands. I always live in a place, though I may have knowledge of the world: I can study astronomy, oceanography, and the histories of distant empires without ever leaving my home. Somehow, however, Rome will collapse these category distinctions: it will be an empire that spans the whole world, while remaining the home of a people in the form of a race. How does a transformation of this kind take place?

It seems to involve two factors: people and history. World-as-home-for-race carries with it a different set of categories than place-as-home-for-people: as seen before, the category “race” transcends of particular family groupings to constitute a higher-order unification of people. The Trojans and Latins will retain their separate customs and rituals, but will become one inasmuch as they are members of the same race—only this arrangement of people is capable of inhabiting a world-sized home. No longer will separate peoples inhabit far-flung cities ruled by hereditary kings: the boundaries of Rome and those of the world will become identical, uniting all people under one banner. The whole world will have an order, then—and he who rules Rome rules it all.

It is no accident that Anchises’ prophecy takes place over the course of many generations. The founding of Rome will not be like the creation of the heavens and earth (or even, perhaps, like the transformation of the Trojan and Latin peoples into a single race): it will not go from being a city to encompassing the entire earth in a single instant. Rather, though its destiny is already written, the transformation must play out in time. Successive generations will make their contributions to this transformation: specific human beings—people like Tullus, Numa, Romulus, Mummius, and Caesar—will be the agents of the change. Fate does not preclude active human participation in its execution. Gods may author what will happen, but humans must effect the execution. And inasmuch as human beings are beings in time, their actions are events in time—and the memory, or story, of these events constitutes history.

At the end of the Aeneid, however, we do not see the founding of Rome. The bleeding body of Turnus does not provide us with a vision of Roman greatness that we expect after reading numerous instances of prophecy: it is hard to see how the merciless, vengeful slaughter of the Rutulian king is a beginning-point for the eventual Roman mission of teaching peace to the conquered, sparing the defeated, and taming the proud. Perhaps the execution of prophecy often plays out like the opening of the poem, where a band of confused refugees float around the Mediterranean, unsure of where they may land. But though we all long for a home, perhaps only a few are called to inhabit their own—and even fewer to see theirs to greatness.

[1] Book I, lines 841-843. All citations refer to Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, published 1961 by Bantam Classics.

[2] I.279-282.

[3] I.284-286.

[4] I.369, 390.

[5] Homer, Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore, I.18-19.

[6] II.400-404.

[7] II.437-438.

[8] I.10.

[9] I.534-537.

[10] This is the only occasion in the Aeneid in which the household gods are personified and take on an active role.

[11] I.805-809. Emphasis mine.

[12] IV.347-348.

[13] I.363-369.

[14] VII.123-127. The ghost of Creüsa, Aeneas’ wife who died at Troy, had told him of this fate before he and the survivors had escaped the burning city: in Hesperia, “days of gladness lie in wait for you: a kingdom and a royal bride” (II.1056-1057).

[15] VII.268-269.

[16] VII.670.

[17] VI.1136-1137.

[18] XII.1107-1117.

[19] VI.1034-1038.

For the past four months I’ve been employed as a teaching intern at a small, very expensive private high school with a curriculum built around classic texts of the Western canon and primary source documents. I work primarily with freshmen, sophomores, and juniors: the first study ancient world from early Sumerian civilization to the rise of Islam, with extensive readings from Greece and Rome in between; the second, European civilization from the Middle Ages to the 20^th Century; the third, American history and letters from the early colonial period through the Founding, up to the immediate post-9/11 era. The curriculum is an ambitious attempt at communicating the important features of Western history and thought (i.e. “The Humanities”) as the gradual development of a coherent whole—with philosophy and literature and events all interpenetrating and shaping one another—rather than sectioning off separate categorical territory and exploring each one independently of the others. The classes are conducted as roundtable discussions, with the concerns and interests of the students often driving the course of the conversation. Sometimes this can get pretty lively, with students engaging with the material in a way that forces them to reflect on their own opinions and presuppositions. But most of the time—especially in the classes of freshmen—the discussions are dominated by kids who bloviate in an attempt hide the fact that they ignored the reading in favor of a summary on Shmoop.

At best, this model of education teaches students that taking stances on phenomena in the present always entails taking some kind of stance on phenomena of the past, and that real, authentic learning requires the active participation of the learner. At worst—though I suppose this is a danger of all attempts at “education” and not limited to this particular school or pedagogical model—the students learn absolutely nothing.

The last few weeks of sophomore year involve a close study of Bolshevism and European fascist movements with readings from Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Spengler (!), and excerpts from a variety of documents from Nazi Germany including speeches by Hitler and Himmler, the text of the Nuremburg Laws, and—in a separate unit on the Nazi death camps—the Wannsee Protocol. This is, of course, important stuff. Probably the most important stuff, when one is considering the situation in which we find ourselves in the 21^st Century. It’s also material that I hardly touched in my own utterly un-elite, provincial, public school education, which involved much attention paid to particular battles of the Second World War but hardly any mention of the Germans’ attempt at obliterating every human being on planet Earth whom they categorized as a “Jew.” Over the last decade or so, however, this period of European insanity has become a major object of study in my life—so upon discovery that the kids were going to be reading the Wannsee conference notes and discussing the implications of the Nazi death camps, I felt I had to observe.

I’m not sure there could have been any way to prepare for the nightmare I witnessed. On one hand, it makes sense that teenagers growing up in our world would be mostly unfazed by the form of the document, full as it is of the kinds of figures, statistics, and bureaucratic euphemisms common to the 20th-century technocratic American style. Though a technocratic dossier like this is something totally novel within the context of their studies, the figures, statistics, and bureaucratic euphemisms that populate it are utterly unremarkable features of the documents of modern public life. It is a mistake to treat what is familiar to you as a trans-historical given, but it is not an intellectual sin. One would think, however, that the marshaling of such a familiar way of writing for the goal of exterminating more than 11 million people would stimulate some kind of reflection on said style—“hold on, why is it that mass murder looks so much like health policy?”—but then you would be revealing yourself to be an optimist. The teacher did a heroic job trying to stimulate such a reflection. But the sheer strength of their commitment to certain presuppositions—namely, that “science” and “good” are synonyms—made such an inquiry fruitless.

But the real horror began only after someone mentioned Mengele and the broader Nazi experimentation program. “Should we dispose of the results of the Dachau hypothermia trials,” someone asked, “just because they were conducted unethically?” I’m not sure I heard a single voice suggest that maybe we should. Another student mentioned several closer-to-home examples of forced or unethical experimentation to press the question: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Albert Klingman’s two decades of dermatology experiments at Holmesburg Prison, the US government infecting Guatemalan mental patients with herpes and gonorrhea in the late 1940s. The group remained unable to consider the possibility that, when it comes to “science,” bad means might imply bad ends. Things got even more macabre when a student suggested that the real problem with Nazi experimentation was that they failed to “scientifically” determine which populations were expendable to society and thus best suited for use as unwilling subjects of experimentation. Their hatred of the Jews was a product of feeling, not science. (Every serious committed Nazi, of course, would disagree). Several students suggested that we use death-row prisoners in medical experiments: this would make them more “useful” because they would be “helping all of mankind.” Eventually the idea arose that consent was important, and that many people would be willing to volunteer for medical experimentation to “help out their fellow man.” At some point my quiet panic made it impossible for me to pay much attention.

There were, thankfully, a few students who expressed gut-instinct responses that all of this discussion was grotesque, and a few more came around at the end. But these few passionate reactions failed to entirely dissipate the technonihilistic atmosphere that hung over the class. One student, quite thankfully, said the thing that needed to be said: “There is no difference between determining who is ‘scientifically expendable’ and what the Nazis did.” But nobody could bring themselves to question the scientific enterprise as such: the Nazis were accused of “pseudo-science,” of being “racists,” in sum, of being wrong. And because science that turns out to be wrong—or that has negative consequences beyond what the norms of polite society allow—cannot be science, science remains unscathed. Science itself cannot be the problem, because it is categorically good.

I know that this is harsh criticism of the opinions of teenagers. But I don’t impute the fault to them: they’re just kids. Nor do I think that the problem can be pinned on ideas or indefinite categories such as “culture” or “society,” though their opinions certainly reflect assumptions they’ve inherited from the intellectual ecosystem they inhabit. The issue, I suspect, is largely structural: their failure to think seriously about serious things is a problem at the heart of the entire schooling-education project. Most of these kids are very intelligent. Almost all of them come from extremely wealthy families. Some combination of these two factors results in a kind of purely abstract, virtual thinking that sees the world from a feigned “objective” perspective a thousand miles up. (Which, hauntingly, is the essence of totalitarian thinking.) From such a height, all things—including fellow human beings—take on the appearance of purely manipulable objects subject to your godlike will. When wealth and parents and school administrators and the technology regime all conspire to protect a person from even the mildest experience of suffering, it’s easy for that person to call for an “objective” or “scientific” investigation into who is most deserving of suffering: their answer, undoubtedly, will never include themselves. They lack skin in the game. And education understood as an activity separated from living only serves to intensify this abstraction of thought: it would be an incredibly rare and special mind that could think its way to empathy or arrive at it with only a stack of books. The rest of us must rely on some kind of experience, something over which we have little or no control, to rearrange our thinking and our disposition toward ourselves, others, and the world.

I wrote this over the course of an hour the day after my father passed away and posted it on Facebook so my friends could understand. Since some people who aren’t connected to me there might be interested in reading it and because Facebook is not the best place for archiving writing, I thought I would give it a more permanent home here (though with redacted names).

Last Tuesday (1/16) I got a call from S., my dad’s partner of 18 years, that my dad was going back into the hospital for his fourth bout with congestive heart failure. He had been in and out of the hospital with some regularity since I was in my early teens, so I’ve gotten used to the occasional hospital stay: last month he tripped and fell on a marble floor and was hospitalized for internal bleeding; a cancerous tumor was removed from his kidney when I was in middle school; his history of heart issues extends far before my birth. This time, however, things looked grim.

My girlfriend B. and I got plane tickets and flew to Albuquerque two days later. We got to the hospital at about 4:30pm Mountain Time. Dad was lying in his hospital bed watching TV, S. dutifully at his side. He was alert and in good spirits but looked—his own words—”like a concentration camp victim”: all skin and bones, hacking and coughing, arms full of tubes and bruised from countless hypodermic injections. He was really happy to see us, but also incredibly drowsy and dulled from all the pain medication and who-knows-what they were pumping into him to make his condition somewhat more tolerable. We talked for an hour or two before he went in for a procedure and we needed dinner, so the three of us—S., B., and I—stole off to the hospital cafeteria while doctors wheeled him off to run a catheter into his heart.

My relationship with my dad has always been very difficult and complicated. My mom left him when I was about 6, but I didn’t learn any specifics of her grievances until I was a teenager: Constant philandering (one of which produced a child that he kept secret until the government garnered his wages), alcoholism (and, I would learn later, a history of heroin abuse), frequent inexplicable rages, and a weird history of getting arrested for contempt of traffic court while pointlessly fighting speeding tickets were a few of the things I found out. Right after my mom took my sister and me to Florida, he moved in this creepy old guy named Jim who had ties to libertarian militiamen in Missouri—and who would break into my dad’s bedroom when we were gone and eat all the food that was being deliberately hidden from him. My sister and I were introduced to a string of girlfriends of wildly varying degrees of pleasantness, many of whom were groupies from his years in a rock-and-roll cover band and with whom he cheated on my mom. I didn’t talk to him from age 13 to 20 on account of a now-legendary argument that happened on a family vacation, in which then-new-girlfriend S. got frustrated with my carsick teenage sister and my dad joined in to say a bunch of weird and hurtful stuff to me and her. (He seemed to reciprocate the disinterest in communication, as the already low volume of calls and letters from him came to a halt.) Dad had also left S. twice over the past 15-or-so years, both times in wild spectacular form involving rescue by my brother and accusations against her of violence, thievery, and general psychological torment. Both times she took him back and cared for him throughout his many stays in the hospital. One time, after hearing him call her his “tormentor,” I asked him why he stayed with her—to which he replied “I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it.” I was prepared for a few days of gritting my teeth through uncomfortable conversations with a lunatic who nevertheless loves my dad while sitting at the beside of my dying father.

What actually happened, however, I could never have prepared for. Over cheap cafeteria cheeseburgers, S.—whose parents both died within the past 6 months—began to open up to me about how less than one week ago, my dad told her that he was leaving her, and that she needed to give him a car, a television, and a set of pans so he could get back to Memphis. Not only that, but she had to be the one to drive him there. He had never paid for a single thing in the course of their nearly 20-year relationship, not even for thoughtful little gifts or offering to pay for dinner. Between hospital visits, he would be mean, petty, and lazy, spending most of his time watching television or telling her to read conspiracy theory books written by crackpots. He had told her that she was “the only one I never cheated on,” then tenderly kissed a woman on the lips in front of her twice in one evening. She told stories of him insulting her with inexplicable cruelty with absolutely no provocation: the most grievous I can remember involves him turning to her on Christmas day and saying, “You know, your life is never going to get any better. You think it is, but it isn’t.” This was just weeks after her father was cremated, and months after her mother.

At first, nothing she said could clear my impassable wall of skepticism. But when it became clear that I had nothing that she could have possibly wanted, that my dad was utterly penniless and had nothing to exploit, and that so many of her stories sounded *exactly* like the kinds of things my mom said about him—and my mom and S. have never spoken—something cracked. Even if many of these stories were embellished or exaggerated, the general narrative was clear: not only was my dad an asshole, he had always been that way—and I had never really plumbed the depths of his cruelty. This made even more sense when she revealed to me that the US Navy—who had dishonorably discharged him from the service at the age of 16—diagnosed him with schizophrenia; that he spent time in a mental institution at a young age, though he always told interlocutors that he worked there (and at other times, that he was so clever that he tricked the workers in various ways); and that he had driven one girlfriend to suicide, a wife to madness and institutionalization, and my mom to pack my sister and me in a van and drive us into a swamp in rural Florida—all just to escape him. Dad had also been violent, S. said: he choked her on three occasions, hit her in the ear so hard that it bled for days, and threw a conspiratorial book about Obama at her so hard that when it struck her elbow it broke something.

We told stories and wept together. She never had the opportunity to talk about this stuff with anyone before. When he planned to leave her the week before, she said, she was thrilled: “Finally,” she said, “I would be free of him. I was going to dump him off in Memphis and be done. He wouldn’t be my problem anymore.” But then his sickness got too bad to ignore, and instead she hustled him to a hospital where they told him he was dying and there was nothing they could do about it.

We talked for four hours. None of us had any idea what to do. We finally steeled our nerves enough to walk back into the room, where my dad was watching Fox News and didn’t seem to notice how long we were gone. We chatted for another two hours or so before B. and I went back to our hotel, S. went back to her dead father’s house, and we all had our respective psychological breakdowns. My urge to assist and comfort my father qua father and the truth of the man himself were ripping me apart. I called my mom and cried for an hour while thanking her and saying that I finally understood.

The next day we decided that the truth of the man aside, we would see this through and help a dying man exit the world as comfortably and peaceably as possible. We would help each other help him. We sat with him as long as we could, held his hands, helped him drink water, and fed him Jello and applesauce. His breathing grew shallower, his nausea more intense. The doctors told him that his kidneys were shutting down and slowly poisoning him. We arranged for him to be transferred to a hospice facility, and as we waited for them to come we talked about his favorite childhood memories (riding his bike around his neighborhood), the people he idolized in his youth (Uncle Francis), how he’d like to be remembered (“I’d say as a good guy but I really screwed that one up, so I’d like to be remembered as someone who played the horn well”), his favorite places (Herald’s Harbor, Maryland; New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee). He wanted to ask about my “vagabond trip”—the several years I spent traveling—and about the farm in southern KY. He asked me whether I enjoyed my childhood. An ambulance team arrived to take him to the hospice center across the street—we met him over there about a half hour later. I sat with him and talked for two more hours before I told him goodbye, that I love him, and that I’m proud to be his son. B. and I boarded a plane and flew back to Maryland. I called him the next day before class at St. John’s, asked him if he was comfortable, told him I loved him and that I’m glad that he has S. nearby. I talked to him the next day on break at my new teaching internship, and though he couldn’t form words I could tell he was happy to hear my voice. He was dead that evening.

Showing compassion and love for my dying father while learning more and more about how horrible he is has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. I am nevertheless glad to have done it. But make no mistake: he was a complicated, deceitful, petty, cruel, bizarre, and deeply flawed man (as well as an immensely talented artist). I am going to be okay. It will take me some time to sort things out, but I’m not alone in this: I have my sister, brother, mom, and a whole cast of other characters who have been witness to—and been hurt by—the man who was my father. All of us are at the beginning of something: now we begin to heal. We are free. And he too is now free from his suffering.

Lately I have been making a little extra money modeling for a drawing class. Four women and one man—all in or past their fifties—make up the class, which is taught by a local portrait artist (who is also my landlord’s sister, hence the job). The sessions take place in a small rural cabin built for precisely this use: the room lacks utilities and is barely heated, but huge glass panes installed on the roof let in beautiful light from the north. I was surprised how difficult it is to sit completely still for twenty-minute intervals, especially early in the morning and while recovering from a cold. Even more surprising was how much I was able to learn about art by allowing strangers to draw me.

I’ve never been able to draw. My mom would disagree with me about this, reminding me that as a kid I enthusiastically produced dozens of the cute, colorful sketch drawings of bugs and cartoon characters and imaginary creatures that kids love to make. And in my early twenties, inspired by the artistic personalities I often found myself surrounded by, I would occasionally scratch little doodles into a journal or in the margins of letters I would mail to friends. But the idea of transforming the contours of reality into images on a page always seemed downright impossible, and the fact that anyone could do it at all struck me as a mystery and a miracle roughly on par with the resurrection of Christ or the invention of language.

So during these sessions, I made an effort to listen. I was fascinated by what I heard. Drawing from life is thrilling because it has nothing to do with imagination: your task is to dutifully record the world of appearances onto a sheet of paper, using only your eyes, hands, and a set of rather rudimentary tools (charcoal, pastels, brushes, chamois, an easel, etc.). You become a kind of conduit, the catalyst by which a moment (or a small, limited collection of moments) is made permanent. Your duty is to closely observe reality—my face, the light falling on it, the point where my face becomes my cheek, the line of my mouth, and so on—to recreate it in static form. And to do this, you must see.

Forgive me this seemingly obvious observation—it’s not as obvious as it might seem. Our sight is regularly clouded by our thought: we try, one could say naturally, to see beyond the merely seen—to capture the essence of what is seen by seeing through the world of appearances. What we think of as sight is, more often than not, a mixture of sight and thought with no clear indication where one ends and the other begins. When we look at a person, we try to gain a sense of their interior dimension—whether that be the content of their emotions at this particular moment, or something deeper and more shrouded such as their soul, personality, or character—by looking for clues on the surface. (This is especially the case when the person in question is a friend or loved one.) A facial expression, a hairstyle choice, the brightness of one’s eyes: all of these things have a double existence, both as a mere appearance and as a clue as to what lies beyond the appearances.

We quite naturally hold the mysterious thing beyond to possess more reality than mere appearances, and we do not typically deal well with subtlety. Ask nearly anyone to draw a picture of a happy woman, for instance, and every image will likely share two qualities: exaggerated feminine features and an exaggerated smile, to ensure that viewers recognize beyond any possible misunderstanding that this is an image of a woman who is happy. It is unlikely, however, that someone so prompted might immediately produce an image of the Mona Lisa, whose wry smile conceals more than it reveals. In creating images, we regularly seek to plainly represent the thing beyond—femininity, happiness—rather than to construct a surface of appearances that subtly hint beyond themselves at what might, with no certainty, exist beneath what is seen.

Drawing from life demands that we remain beholden to reality as it is. If there is a depth beyond this surface—if behind my face there lies a soul, a character—its existence must be somehow revealed in the surface itself. The depth can never be directly represented: it may only be hinted at by subtle clues present in the surface.

In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger declares that “All art is essentially poetry” (“Alle Kunst ist in ihrem Wesen Dichtung”). I no longer believe this to be true. Much of our spoken and written discourse reveals the self directly: we regularly and unproblematically communicate our feelings, intentions, beliefs, memories, and so forth. We can, and often do, speak at length about things that cannot be represented in images: love, God, time, space, etc. The relationship between language and thinking is not identical to the relationship between image and thinking. The relationship between surface and depth in poetry is different from that in drawing. Exactly what that difference is, however, will require more thinking. But against Heidegger, I propose the following: all art is either poetry or drawing. And we have yet to fully understand the relationship between the two.

The poem I wanted to write was several pages long,
consisting of images of life in the modern city
and how our atomized human experiences
evaporate into a dark, miserable cloud
which rains more misery upon our lowered, sullen heads

The poem was written in Serbian
by a character I would like to have scripted:
a tall, brooding old man, silent as the moon,
broken and lonely, in a foreign city
whose residents do not speak at all
but spit forth sounds of trauma and heartbreak

This character would be the protagonist
of the novel I wish I had written:
a novel set in wartime Yugoslavia;
a novel about the depths of bitterness
into which the human heart may sink;
a novel about my degraded, sallow subject,
but mostly about the grinding gears of history
and the mountains of cadavers it produces

The novel would exist in a series, of course,
a five- (or seven-) part cycle,
a collection of hefty, colorless tomes
in which I reveal the secrets of the known universe
in allegorical fables and poignant aphorisms
with famous quotes from notable philosophers
hidden among dialogue between characters;
a cycle of novels which wraps around onto itself
and ends where it began, with no conclusion
and no linearity to speak of
which would baffle experts in hermeneutics
and semiotics
and philology
for decades to come

The poem I did write
consisted of two simple lines
scrawled in fat, black ink
on the wall of my empty bedroom:
“Please put me to sleep
I no longer wish to feel”

(Published in Cavalcade Literary Magazine #3, 2014: www.cavalcadelitmag.com)

This is how it will happen. We will meet sometime mid-day, the sun buried behind layers of low-hanging clouds. A cool breeze will stir the grasses and leaves of unrecognizable trees and whip plastic bags and pieces of litter in amusing little spiraling trajectories. We will be be sitting at a wooden picnic table painted a number of bright colors in no noticeable pattern. To the left (of me – it will be to your right) a sick-looking bush will be planted in a metal garbage can. The dirt will be dry and gray and full of small pebbles and cigarette butts. I will smile and take a number of heavy breaths. This is to show that my brain is processing intense emotions that I am unable to constrain nor express linguistically. I will look at you and smile wordlessly (with one side of my mouth, in that strange way that I do when I am nervous) for five seconds then look wistfully at the words “JUGGALO LOVE” carved into the tabletop. I will say “juggalo love” under my breath in a way that sounds as if I am talking to myself but really I intend for you to hear what I am saying but also to think that I am talking to myself. You will say to me “how was your day.” I will say “it was fine.” This will be a lie. This exchange will be necessary to open up to the beginning phase of conversation where we will discuss arbitrary pleasantries for approximately 6 minutes. We will ask questions we already know the answers to. We will talk about the weather and decide that it is “strange.” We will construct predictions for where our bodies will move to and from in the following hours and possibly days. We will both feel a sense of immanence, the conversation moving toward a particular realm from which we cannot deviate its course. We will think it is becoming “serious.” I will say something that I mean and something that I do not mean. I will intend to be provocative. My voice will get slightly louder. I will gesture with my hands in a way that means “I am thinking hard about this.” I will not be thinking. I will look in many different directions at assorted colorful or moving objects in my vicinity. You will be doing the same but I will not notice since I will feel unable to look at you except for when I am speaking and then only for seconds at a time after which I will look down at my hands wringing compulsively on the table. You will say something to me and I will only hear 7 words out of 10. I will think hard about what I will say to you next and when you are done speaking I will be shocked by the silence and forget both what I was thinking and what you just said. In an effort to continue the conversation I will repeat something I said earlier in different and more complicated words. I will think about sex. I will say something I do not mean. I will say several more things I do not mean. I will think, “it is impossible to say just what I mean.” I will develop a strong desire to read T. S. Eliot or maybe find a way to mention him but will not find a rational way to bring him into the discussion. I will be somewhat frustrated by this and begin to feel tired. I will think “language” and “Wittgenstein.” We will say things back and forth to each other. There will be occasional silences. Some will feel awkward and others will not. The silences will grow longer little bits at a time. This will mean that we are both thinking about other things. Our voices will become gradually softer. I will start to take heavy sighing breaths which will mean that I am thinking about standing up and walking away. I will try to think of a logically sound reason to no longer continue talking. I will fail and make something up. This will be another lie. I will feel empty and lonely. I will think “I am hungry” and “…” I will say some things that mean “goodbye.” I will stand up and walk away. The garbage will settle on the sidewalk. There will be no sunset.