Dara Barnat: FATHER AND DAUGHTER’S POEM

By Irina AIRINEI VASILE

PRAYER I DO NOT KNOW

No god is here, just me,/alone. I close/my eyes and try/to remember your face,/its light, your/fingers, their light/touch, your laugh,/the lightness. I recite a prayer/that is my own:/May we live/a thousand years together/in another life.

In THE POETRY OF THE FATHER AND THE DAUGHTER, the image of the father appears in the hospital room where the daughter returns again and again to her father, caressing him with the soft wings of dreams. A father lost in the evanescence of memory. Discouraged by his irascible character, the caregivers don‘t help him and leave him one after another.

The chief complaint:/the patient hit another/resident very hard in the face.” (…)/On the day of admission,/the patient assaulted another/resident in the room.

In parallel with this dull, automatically functioning world, the poet’s litany is an intensely emotional look at the world through the eyes of her father, who is struggling with dementia, a dramatic illustration of the physical losses that occur alongside the mental ones. The father’s memories are notes from lyrical pearls strung together in an affective, personal chronology:

This doctor/doesn’t know the patient/sat in a rocking chair/with his month-old daughter/on his lap.

The immanent world gradually disintegrates. Everything is blurred around him, a confused melange in which places mix with each other and loved ones with strangers. In the twilight of his existence, his bewilderment locks him more and more into an irreversible loneliness. Paradoxically, only his daughter-poet shares his tragic hypostasis.

If I could have,/I’d have sat with him, read Whitman,/Dickinson, Frost./Mood was mildly/depressed. Gait was steady./Insight and judgment were/fair. I’d have asked him/a question. What would he/have answered?

The father’s incompatibility with his own family appeared when all the usual channels of communication were blocked following the impact with the „highly unlikely” phenomenon: illness, alienation, psychic and finally, physical disappearance, the exit from the „predictable”, „planned” world.

Our inability to even try to understand isolated cases is present at the level of imagology, the difficulty does not consist in saying what, how, where this parallel world of the father is, nor in expressing the characteristics, the realities of this world, but in the ontological valorization of such a non-common space. The presence of another realm than the one here (the physical-geographical, visible/palpable/definable one), most often located in the immediate reality of this realm, through specific ontological determinations, but also through the significant constant presence of the world beyond within the world here, makes any definition and classification of these realms outside of its symbology (almost) impossible.

WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman walks with me/down the street, opens/doors for me, whispers/in my ear, You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you./Whitman, how good it feels,/the love of poets and/fathers after they’re gone. Illness/outran my father’s/mind, so he could not open/doors for me./Whitman grieves with me,/The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with measureless love./But did he, Walt, did your father hold/you in his arms? We decide nothing/is more desirable/than love from the dead.

A melody of uncertainty. The daughter’s memory searches for the trace of her father in the parallel world, in the second plane completely closed to the world in which he gravitates and which is not understood by his family, neighbors, acquaintances, and then by the medical staff of the sanatorium-hospital where he is admitted. The poet observes that the world of the „alienated” father rejects the path of the „normal world”; the father follows the moral vertical of his revelations.

The father symbolizes a contradictory truth: his world is dominated by the unpredictable, the unknown, and the improbable. Hence the tragedy of the father’s existence in the singular horizon of the second plane of the world that no one wants and that no one stops to understand. Only the daughter-poet follows him in this second plane of the world.

The medical data become meaningless; the father’s emotional experience, his narrative „error” become important and this is the daughter’s revelation. His world is the true „human condition”.

1. Riverside County Regional Medical Center, February 17, 2000/Clinic Note:

A 56-year-old-male with psychiatric/features. The doctors/don’t write that he was a father/of a son, Jeremy,/and a daughter, Dara. Psychiatry wants/dementia work up./Patient refuses to answer any questions,/stating “information/is in the chart” and nothing/more. Before my father/was a patient, he was a psychologist,/who tried to heal people./He could not heal himself.

In Dara’s poetry, the father looks towards the truth of his world, a latent nadir contemplated with majestic lucidity. The dialectic of Dara’s poetry, the balance between the „normal” world and the father’s alienated universe expresses the dramatic meaning of the poem – its senility, enlightenment, misunderstanding. The obtuseness of the „specialists” therapists with their medical procedures through which the man cuts the spiral between the outer and inner worlds, with apparent serenity, in reality very painful, appears even more dramatic. Dara’s poetry reconfigures a multiple reality, in a puzzle that combines what Montaigne called „l’humaine condition”. The moral vertical of the father who lives his renewal stage with nobility – projects a beam of strong, intensely emotional light onto the „normal” world with affective deficit. The „alienated” world is moral and chosen in feelings, the father shining through his kindness, generosity and spiritual wealth from Dara’s first memories to his present of suffering. He has not changed, embodying the humanity in man as the essence and meaning of Creation.

WHAT HOLDS

The dam I built against history/held as long as any/man-made thing:/long enough to believe/it could not be torn down./But fractures formed/that grew wide enough for history/to pour through/in a surge too fast to run from, filled/with debris.

What choice was there, but to grab/what I could, hope/to be saved?