The tail of the phoenix

This evening using my Microsoft file navigator. Separating items to create collections. This file drop in that folder open on the screen. That file slip into another folder, one also open in display mode. 

One file here, another there.

Drop. Drop. Drop.

Botany “the study of plants”

The sound of liquid dropping reminding me I studied industrial process plants for many years, as did my father, he as a senior sales engineer (a man used to contracts, documents, MS-This and MS-That), and me as a lowly PR operative. 

He’s not regretted by anyone I know.

I spend an hour or so in my Botany house searching TYB files looking for something but I didn’t find it. I found other things. Things related to when I ended up in hospital in 2000 forcing mum and dad into a panicked lockdown until, finally after six weeks and being discharged from the hospital, I began to butter them up. Here’s dad to Australian family member, 3 Mar 2001.

In my last letter to Matt, just before he left hospital and after two happy telephone conversations—“now to Matthew Dean da Silva who was a most beautiful and happy human being. In the last 20 months we have had two phone conversations that have given me great joy. Something good has happened! Your voice was that of a Matthew we have not heard for years. Our language scholar and speaker, clear and distinct, articulate with a well-constructed delivery. What can we say? Congratulations! We hope that the process of your re-entry into the world has started. Recovery from a traumatic experience, and I have had a few, requires time to restore acceptance of the new status. A new and stronger persona emerges after trauma, for those who survive. Eventually you will be discharged, hospitals are like that, and my experience is that it comes as a surprise, and access to the outside world is a reminder that though one may have changed, the world of human values hasn’t. Thus one must adapt to prevent the return of a problem. You should be planning what you will do and also have contingency plans should the ideal opportunity not be available.”

Relieved but still full-scale patronising, falling back on tired tropes of a man not willing – you could if you were charitable say that he was “incapable” of understanding, but that would remove the element of agency he’s due – to understand the human. What human values he refers to – in a combative, cold, and vain world – I can’t guess, unless it’s the same as “family values” politicians always talk about, or “Judeo-Christian values” likewise.

He had none to do him or anyone else good. A user. But then again most corporate types are well trained in the art of manipulation, it allows them to rise to the top. And stay. 

The family tried to help him but he refused it. Here in the same letter talking about a cousin.

[She] also writes that Matt, “needs love because he is a Portuguese boy.” She has never met him. I need love, you need love, men need love and women too. Matt is no boy just starting out, as he will be 39 this year and has not lived with us for over 20 years. As an Australian he has had 100% control over his own affairs since he turned 18. The only thing we have been allowed to do is to give♫♪, whatever!. We have no say and he has, on many occasions when we have been worried about something, said: - “I do not wish to discuss that!” That sounds just like my Papa. On the other hand Yukiko thinks that I am some kind of head of the clan and Matt must do what I say. (i.e. what she tells me to say) What a JOKE! Matt has never deferred to me any more than I deferred to my father, though Sally did until 21 and then left forever. We can but wait and see.

“She has never met him.” Just let’s slow down and go back a minute to what he said at the beginning of this little explosion – to one family member on account of what another family member said to him (he’s surrounded by family members) – scathing, “I need love, you need love, men need love and women too.” Here is dad with his convenient family members busy listening and advising and he says, basically, “Fuck you.” “Matt is no boy just starting out, as he will be 39 this year and has not lived with us for over 20 years,” meaning that whatever problems I had were entirely of my own making and he wasn’t responsible for any of it. 20 years of doing no-good jobs to make men like him rich.

He told me to talk to Centrelink. 

Talk to the Australian Consulate in Tokyo

Here he is to the same family member, I mean the same family member referred to in the last letter quoted from.

[Judy’s brother] Geoff’s wife Christine phoned and gave me an earful on the subject of “Judy should come and get Matt immediately!”. Judy was at the Farmer’s Market buying fruit and veg at the time and I was in bed, unable to move, as I had a Spinal Episode when we were in Los Angeles. Had to get wheelchair assistance at both LAX and HNL as I couldn’t move an eyelash without terrible pain. I have been taking dope and am now using a walking stick, a folding one with which we travel. I am now at about the same level as I was on Matt’s wedding day in 1991 when I left the reception with Stephanie and hobbled back home leaning on a walking stick. Today was the first time I have been outside the building when Judy walked me to the beach before breakfast and plans to do so each day. In short, as I have been saying for the last 50 years, “I’m as good as I will ever be.” The only person who really understands is Judy and it took her about 15 years to work out what was meant following our meeting at a theatre party for Geoff’s 21st Birthday 48 years ago next month. Actually I took her to Lady’s Day at the yacht club about a year earlier after which she wouldn’t go out with me again because she was engaged. Christine doesn’t understand as she is only 56 and doesn’t want a 69 year old husband. Gosh! 56, I was still in my prime at Honeywell in those days. Judy is now taking one Voltarin pill each day and her mobility has improved. Just as well I travel with all that dope.   

“Gave me an earful.” Poor man. Shrill as a fishwife when he doesn’t want to do something. Big contrast to “now to Matthew Dean da Silva who was a most beautiful and happy human being” when things are going his way. This is dad again writing to the family member I started out with.

We can only hope and trust that Matt can put all behind him, get on with his life, be at peace with himself and pleasant to those in whose company he finds himself. It’s been a troubling twenty years for Judy and me as we have never understood his agenda. Nor could we have believed he could sink so low.

“Hope and trust.” “Get on with his life.” “Be at peace with himself.” He means “get on with the life I chose for him” because even though he says “Matt has never deferred to me” in actual fact when I was 16 I telephoned him in his office when I got home from school, having just learned that French and art were to be held on the same day at the same time. 

MY agenda?

I deferred to him

When I needed “You make up your mind” he said “No.”

While mum looked after Peter I was left alone to go back to my family home (I had left it a year before) and wait to be put on a Qantas jet and sent, like a side of prime lamb, back to Australia. Staff gave me three seats and wheeled me onto the plane, just in case I wasn’t able to walk. The funny (?) thing is that while dad really couldn’t walk and had to be wheeled onto a jet at LAX and HNL I was treated at NRT as if I couldn’t walk by an airline considerate of my needs in a way that I hadn’t experienced in nine years.

Or maybe not considerate. Maybe just being safe. Like Yamatake getting the company car to chauffeur me back home the day they sacked me. Back to my family. Like a Dear Guest. Don’t get lost on the way. Off you go, careful of the door on the way out of NRT.

“Poor chap!” 

I am not likely at my age to put anything like this behind me. Rather, these pages are my journey. My Leontograph, the making of the past in a way I can grasp in detail. 

Multifarious?

Dad and his nefarious tendency to blame other people. Am I like him? For example to a different set of family members on 4 Apr 2003.

We should have had more fun at University than we did but we learnt a lot about the local kids and ours during the Cranbrook years. They didn’t go anywhere else from Kindy to Leaving. Maybe they would have been better off with State School. Too late now. They were both delightful boys until about 16, after which our influence withered.

“Too late now.” “Better off with State School” (knock some sense into them). “Kindy to Leaving.” So old-fashioned. But honestly, as if Cranbrook could do anything for me during years I kept attendance. I know for sure my brother had a hell of a time. Hoo boy. I don’t seek places to apportion blame, this simply takes the cake. Part of the patriarchy like my father, Cranbrook tried to break me not make me. Make me fit a mould. 

But I was “romantic”.

Quite impossible

(I’ll get to this.) 

Can you BELIEVE it? “They were both delightful boys until about 16.”

We were CHILDREN for God’s sake! Honestly my patience with the STUPID in this man’s mind just gets worn and worn and worn and worn. It’s like a knife sharpener on my WIT, a constant flow of STUPID the ends of which never seem to be reached, every time I turn a page – or rather every time I open a saved Microsoft file – a big, fat, stinking dollop of STUPID falls on my head and me a pig to roll in it, it’s as if the computer had a pipe connected to a chute near the ceiling. Each time the pig uses its pink snout to open a patriarchal Microsoft file with this sort of CRAP in it one dollop of stinking goo pops out of the pipe, down the chute, and onto my head.

Oink.

3 Jan 1997 to family member not Leontographer: “Matt and family have lived in Yokohama since 1992 and it is quite impossible for me to visit them there.”

Splat.

We do hope that you will come and see us when you return to Sydney and if you do and show any interest in the rest of the da Silva clan we can bore you for hours.

Splat.

9 May 1999 from Honolulu:

Matt is better than we expected but very depressed and seems to blame me for his psoriasis, depression and life’s difficulties!

May 1999 – note, this is before I had the breakdown in fact in May 1999 I was living with my family still – and then, in a 1999 letter from family member whom he’d two years earlier invited to Sydney, this.

That Matt’s management of his internal affairs, however they’re being exacerbated, is up to him. He can & will blame anyone he likes, but it’s only when he’s matured by way of his present process that he’ll cease blaming & be accepting of his own rôle at the heart of the matter. It may serve to let him know, briefly [i.e. not a complete assay of how you felt while he was in HI.] how you feel, even if he presently doesn’t acknowledge you. At least he’ll have to take it on board, if he reads your communication, & he’ll have something clear, to which he’ll attend at some future time.

As if dad would HAVE a heart-to-heart with either of his more-than-16-year-old children. Lord.

A generation later and I’m more convinced than ever who was in the right. It wasn’t the psoriasis, though it was that mum and dad could see because it was VISIBLE. Another manifestation of my distress. “Poor chap” dad groaned like some English uncle in a crime drama mum couldn’t watch because he refused to indulge anything for her sake. Maybe he needed a regime of ‘Father Brown’ and ‘Poirot’ at least on Friday nights with his dear wife sitting on the couch and getting a dose of human values. “Judy was at the Farmer’s Market buying fruit and veg at the time and I was in bed, unable to move,” is sort of the story of their lives for this decade. She doing all the housework and looking after him when he’s sick or disabled. But, no, going to Japan to visit his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren was hard. Better wheeled onto a jet in LAX that in NRT.

The heart of the matter was that I was completely unsuited to the kind of work dad’s planning had dubiously assigned for my benefit. Finding that children aged 16 years and older are somewhat difficult was probably the biggest waking-up my father had ever had apart from breaking his OWN neck aged 16.

You can’t MAKE this stuff up.

FRCHRISSAKES.

Microsoft

Anyway let’s forget for a moment the correspondence files but, rather, turn to files containing poetry. “Put away” sounds depressing, I’d prefer the files released into a world, and perhaps that will occur. Not just now. I mean not in an immediate sense. It won’t happen now (it’s 2.48am; no it’s 3.38am; 4.48am; 5.21am; 6.19am) nor tomorrow (today?). But at some point, yes. 

There are 5000 words in ‘The Yellow Bin’, there are 27 Microsoft files. 

Like a little baby. Micro. Soft. Small and yielding. A little person who listens to you, not a big, pimply 16-year-old who has their OWN IDEAS and speaks them. No wonder dad spent so many hours with his computer typing away assigning blame ludicrously not imagining for one MOMENT that I’d come along one day and turn his efforts the other way.

I’m thorough and particular just like my dead father. Below the files sorted in descending order by the date last edited. Look at them all, ready to go SPLAT on some poor chap’s head.

Most work done in ‘22 and ‘23. The number of files with “2023” as year of last edit disguising a fact: the Word docs were actually made earlier. I am sure of this because I edit things serially over a period of days and weeks. It’s always my routine. 

The date the earliest file was last edited is 8 May ’22. By then I’d started making art. This was also around the time my “functioning alcoholic” (his boast) best friend ghosted me. I’ve been abandoned (please don’t you, reader, abandon me) but I can safely say that in May ’22 I was on my way. Starting as an artist I mean. So that’s, what? 1999 to 2022: 23 years. 1978 to 2022: 46 years. Exactly double and far more than “twenty years” as dad averred. Surely, a poetic theme to be found in both these, maybe more. 

I’ll be sure to include them in my process.

His present process 

Indeed, a lifetime.

But it’s only when he’s matured by way of his present process that he’ll cease blaming & be accepting of his own rôle at the heart of the matter.

Blame. Unlike in ’99, in May ‘22 I wrote poetry because, as my father said – it’s absolutely too late (too early!) to go searching for a precise reference – I’m “romantic”.

Not an academic. 

I tried to find the right piece of correspondence, the one where he spits on writers, but I couldn’t manage. When I do manage I’ll post. 

Is this my process?

Now I have to go through the TYB files that had been unnecessarily stuffed with others in a folder, one I’ve still after the reorg kept to hold other things. My work begun. Like dad I CONSERVE. I also WORK. And I cook for myself, if you can call it cooking.

Be that as it may, all these files in one place unable to breathe was wrong, like me living in an apartment in Yokohama with my family, never having any time to myself apart from when I went jogging. No books, no galleries, no walks around town alone to experience a city I loved, in its multifaceted detail. Typical Japanese father has no more than I had. I don’t know how most cope. Living in Botany in a house is more my style.

I have matured to an age beyond my years or those of the average Japanese “salary man”. What I’ve done – am doing – is Leontograph the world to make it more closely resemble ME. Dad resurfaced after breaking his neck aged 16, and rose like a phoenix to fly in the air. For my part I bent to the surface of the sea taking Icarus with me, and we were dumped on the Fatal Shore by Qantas. Me, a day before the Twin Towers. By then dad was already in Queensland. Our journeys had not yet reached their end. 

The files

How does it feel to hit jackpot. Thousands of letters in digital form, dad must’ve pasted and typed them all into MS-Word files, each with a separate name for easy reference (see image below). Thankful for his obsessive completism, I can imagine day after day:

1. Writing ‘Growing’, his memoir in MS-Word 
2. Writing correspondence on MS-Word
3. Typing received correspondence into MS-Word
4. Making family trees in MS-Excel
5. Looking after finances (MS-Excel/MS-Word)
6. Planning trips and buying tickets
7. Arguing with people over property (see relevant blogpost)
8. Eating and swimming
9. Shopping cleaning cooking laundry

There’s even a special Word file with addresses in it, hundreds of them all maintained and updated as circumstances changed so that he could ALWAYS keep in touch with correspondents, friends, companies, banks, lawyers, accountants etc. 

Eight things to do every day 

Item nine mum’s job alone, apologies for the mistake. But even so, what a busy happily married man he was! Pity about the children! All those files (see screenshot below). All those sheets of A4 given to mum so she could check his terrible spelling. Mum for her part busy being a live-in maid. But they’re PRETENDING to be Mrs Simpson and Sergei Diaghelev on the Cote d’Azur. Yes, dahling we MUST tell John, Eduardo, Celeste, Peter, Joan, Robyn, Trish, Ursula, Geoffrey, James that “You can never be too rich or too thin” – a favourite saying of dad’s when he wanted to go the full-1925. Born a mere half-decade later, dad wouldn’t outgrow a need for reassurance, any demonstration of self-respect a threat to his identity. It was personal. A Depression baby to the end, he kept his financial cards close to his chest.

Honolulu, Maroochydore, Florida, Southern Portugal

Mum joined in enthusiastically. She corrected the proofs of dad’s letters and his memoir which grew to a length of 150 A4 pages, ending its narrative just when I was born in 1962 when the family escaped the hated city of Melbourne which had been the source of such suffering for both of them, but especially for dad. “Words, words, words,” as Shakespeare has Hamlet say. She would have been contributing to the process of writing letters, calling out suggestions across the living-dining-kitchen area of whichever luxurious apartment they were staying in wherever the sun and jet engines had taken them. 

I haven’t gone through all the letters, it’s almost too much for me to bear doing in a systematic manner. I will dip in here and there and pick out passages for inclusion in these blogposts. Reading them I relive the suffering of 2000 and the memories of horrors of a type that many people could not survive return to memory. Then there was 2008. In both of these instances I was saved by the very things that got me into trouble in the first place, my empathy, my obedience, my cowardice. 

They saved me from death. They brought me close to death.

Here’s mum on 6 Sept 1999 – 6 mo before a crisis at the point where I left my family in Yokohama to go and live separately in a run-down apartment I was nevertheless lucky to secure being nothing but a foreigner – here’s mum I say happily playing secretary (she enjoyed dress-ups as a kid) for dad’s benefit, contacting her aunt, Edna Kewish. Note that the says she’s doing the research with her brother, not that she’s doing the research on dad’s order.

I am trying to work with [brother] Geoff on a Kewish family tree, and would love to probe your memories of various relations. I remember that Betty (Elizabeth) Kewish married Heinz Altschul, and went to live in Vienna, and that her sister Patty married an architect, but can’t recall her married name. She may still be around and contactable. I also heard that cousin,(Uncle?) Perce did some Kewish family research in England and the Isle of Man, and someone in the family may have that material stored in an attic someplace. As [spinster aunt] Reba aged I spent my infrequent Melbourne visits with her and gathered some stories, but as I wasn’t so concerned with my project then, didn’t bother to probe further. I think everyone starts this search for family about the age of 60.

Edna (nee Dupont) was the wife of Noel Kewish, a man who was long dead by this time. Mum fattens out her demand by talking about Noel’s beloved photographs (he was talented).

[Husband] Peter and I have been traveling to the northern hemisphere during the Australian winter since 1992. Peter needs to swim, for exercise, daily, and is actually physically allergic to cold, so after [Peter’s mother] Phyllis died in 1996, we sold the house, which we’d really kept for her benefit, and moved to Queensland. After spending a month, in an apartment, at a different location over seven summers, we decided on Maroochydore, which is flat estuary country, has a great heated Shire swimming pool, and a Franklin’s Big Fresh Food supermarket, plus a large Shopping Mall nearby. We sold or disposed of all our worldly goods, except Photographs and some paintings. The photograph of [Edna’s late husband] Noels that Geoff gave us is in an apartment we use in Florida, where we go for the summer hurricane season. It’s a black and white study of two painters and their scaffold against the hull of a ship, a naval vessel. I’d say it was taken at the naval dockyard at Williamstown, during or shortly after the war.  There are wonderful cast shadows. Perhaps you remember if he did a sequence at that time, and I can note the provenance correctly.

I went through the Microsoft file diligently looking for any sign of a correction from Edna or a corroboration, but found nothing. I had always thought that these photos of ships being cleaned had been taken by mum’s aunt Madge Johansen. I actually sent one of the prints to Japan. Feeling particularly aggrieved by mum’s concern about “provenance” (she might’ve thought the photo might be worth something in a financial sense) I assume they were tidying up things and wanted to put another issue to bed along with yet another name in a spreadsheet. Collecting people. People who hadn’t become divorced or been separated from their families. 

I have other photos of Noel’s, hanging in my bedroom, photos I had framed so that they would be preserved. Mum and dad never spent any money to conserve them, so it was up to me to grab the ball and run. She did get family photos framed herself but only after dad died (in 2011). The following shows her peripatetic style, a cast of mind that is probably responsible for her making nothing in the form of painting or drawing, during her life, apart from a few sketches dating from the early years of her marriage. Easily distracted.

Next week I go to [niece] Clare Dean’s wedding to  James Warwick Rourke. In the Green Cathedral, a clearing in a rainforest on Wallis Lake, near Pacific Palms and Bluey’s Beach. It’s between Taree and Newcastle, and if it rains there’s a little church nearby. The safest and most feasible way for me to travel, (Pete couldn’t handle the trip) alone is by 3 buses. From Maroochydore to Brisbane, 2 hrs. Then by McCafferty’s to Newcastle, overnight, 14 hrs. Then by the Great Lakes Bus Co. back up to Bluey’s, where the bus stops outside the door of “Blueys on the Beach”, my hotel, 2.5 hrs. That’s 18.5 hrs and I hope I don’t get travel-sick. We had our 1st and last cruise this year, and I was unexpectedly nauseous most of the trip. Perhaps it’s a latent Kewish gene showing up! I remember Noel was cursed with the problem. Up here they swear by Ginger to calm the symptoms, but this is Ginger Country. Do you still fancy Ginger? I seem to recall you and mum solemnly exchanging decorative jars each Christmas.

Here she starts with the wedding, then goes on to talking about a bus trip she facilely dreads undertaking, because she relishes having an opportunity to talk with someone about it, and ends with the entirely unrelated subject of Buderim ginger! God dad must’ve hated it when mum burbled away happily like this about completely unrelated things. For myself, I particularly like the reminiscence in the final sentence, it gives the entire paragraph a sort of tail that loops back toward the subject of celebration (the para started with a wedding). 

The files

There are about 800,000 words in variously hysterical and light-hearted prose in these Microsoft correspondence files. Sentences that curl and barbs that bury themselves deep in the flesh of my self-esteem. They are full of life. I become a kind of St Sebastian reading the lame boasts of a couple damaged by their short-sighted search for material wealth and nothing but material wealth.

Yes that’s right you read it correctly, 800,000 words (see image below).

Just to underscore the point of how similar I am to my father, I made that graphic in MS-Excel. Open up the Word doc, see the word count, transcribe it into the spreadsheet. Ten minutes’ work. But them? How many cups of coffee, how many comfortable conversations, conversations between a married man and his wife, conversations about people they didn’t care a fig about, but in whose affairs they play-acted an interest. People who didn’t know the first thing about them. There they are in their nice apartment overlooking this beach or that river. Right there, in the living room or, to be more correct, him in the living room and her in the kitchen. And she asks him if he wants another cup of coffee. “Would you like another cup of coffee?” “Why yes, my dear, that would be nice.” And then he goes back to entering a received letter into the MS-Word document, obediently filling up the space in the file, he’s turned into a typing machine, a sort of literary mechanism. Churning out tens, hundreds of thousands of words over the period of about a decade, a decade during which, separately and entirely unassisted by anyone, I crashed.

Loss of a mind

Letter of 6 Sept 1999 to Edna Kewish. You remember, I quoted from it before. Yes, I never met Edna but that’s quite another story. What happened in my world at that time was that things were heating up. Three or four months later I’d have left my family home and the stress of living alone, travelling further (bus/train instead of train only), cooking, cleaning, doing laundry (I bought a washing machine it had to be installed on the balcony outside there was no room for it in the apartment) was too much. This is mum on 4 Feb 2000 from Maroochydore.

You don’t say when Matt moved out; or if he is alone or with a new partner.

She had to blame someone, why not blame the messenger?

We know nothing about “Divorce “or  “Separation” which have seldom occurred in either of our families. 

Ie “Don’t trouble us with your problems”. Note the quotation marks. VERY important.

Peter is an Engineer and I a decorator of sorts, and we have no legal training or knowledge to advise you.

“Don’t trouble us with your problems” (take two, just to hammer home the point).

If you want advice on your legal position, go to the Australian Consulate in Tokyo. You were married under Australian marriage law, and Adelaide is Australian by birth. Your children need to be supported.

Ie “Clean up your own mess”.

I am still very disturbed by Matthew’s appearance and attitude to us last May, it may be that he is ill, and needs help from someone from the same cultural background as himself.  

Ie “We never wanted our son to go to Japan he’s not looked after properly there”. Pathologise where you cannot understand or offer any real solutions.

I felt then it was useless to write, as whatever we said seemed to enrage him. This is why we feel so helpless.

It’s almost incredible to me. This is a woman who greedily consumed crime dramas for years after dad’s moving to a nursing home (in 2009) allowed her to watch crap TV freely. There’s no way he would’ve allowed her to consume such innocent nonsense as ‘Father Brown’. When living near her in Maroochydore from 2009 to 2014 I’d go over to cook our dinner every night and on Friday nights her housekeeper G would come over to keep her company, sit with her and chat about ‘Midsomer Murders’ or ‘Poirot’, and then stay overnight in the spare room. We all got along like a house on fire, me, mum, G and Poirot. Four musketeers!

We have learned that nothing we may say will influence either you [daughter-in-law] or Matthew.

It sounds like the Bitch Mother-in-Law from ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ right? But I think this is dad talking, I can’t be sure. There are indications here and there that mum and dad had fixated on some random statement from my then-wife about moving back to Sydney.

So they could see their grandkids.

But I loved my job.

Until Yamatake fired me

They actually asked me when they did it if I wanted them to change the official internal record to say I left voluntarily. I demurred. Yamatake couldn’t influence me. They thought lying would help me. Dad was a good corporate man, so therefore by definition good at lying. In any case “nothing we may say will influence … you” – I can hear dad insisting on that “may”, calling across the room to make sure she puts it in the letter – a pretty extraordinary thing to say in a case where what’s needed is someone to just LISTEN. Help two struggling young people, half their age, work out how to live. Two children under ten, rent to pay every month, a 9-5 job in a country with a strange language (I never learned to read and write Japanese), and no desire to be part of the patriarchy at all.

Yes they were monstrous and cold. Icy, indeed, betraying an inability to feel real emotion. Finding it in others they felt nothing but revulsion. Here’s dad some months before, in May 1999, writing from their apartment in Honolulu in order to express something like regret to an Australian correspondent, a family member:

How I wish I was Matthew’s lovely Dad instead of whatever he thinks of me.

This inability to feel emotion worked both ways, as you see. Unwilling to acknowledge actual feelings in other people, they craved the ability to feel it themselves. In a glaring absence only sadness held sway. If I wanted to be uncharitable I’d say that it’s more like he’s embarrassed he’s got no news of his son’s devoted adoration to communicate to friends and family. It makes him LOOK BAD. Some months before that, on 3 Oct 1998, in a letter sent to Australia from Florida, to the same family member:

I would never intentionally draw a debate with him. Too many chances that he may say something that he might regret and sadden me. Strange how he looks like my father too.

Sadden.

He should have said I was terrified of his tongue. He wouldn’t be sad, he’d just get short and turn away with a sharp comment to make the point that I should look after my own affairs. He looked after his. He never wanted to hear what I thought even when I was a teenager. Teenagers much too difficult, they answer back, have moods. Troublesome. I even looked like his father. Well what did he think about Joao Luis? Here’s dad to a different family member on 15 Mar 2000 from Maroochydore:

I rarely thought of Melbourne, except in the context of visiting my wacky Papa 

Perhaps he said this because by that date I’d moved out of my family home and he felt some aggrievedness linking his experience of the present with the distant past. Funny though that dad went to Melbourne, picked up his mother, dragged her up to Sydney, in 1962, the year I was born, deliberately took her AWAY from Joao Luis so she could work on what dad called his “favourite charity”, the family business, Miss Phyllis Caldicott’s Home Accessories, corner Petrarch Ave and New South Head Rd. Mum designed the shop and when I was 18 and old enough I went to uni and studied Italian, reading Petrarch in the original. The building with keyhole shaped windows.

What was the key?

The street was named by a prominent Sydney statesman and politician of the 19th century, one of the university’s founders. 

Must be funny in a rich man’s world

The building is still there. Like much else relating to mum and dad’s life, including the fond memories of their children, the business is long gone. Not much remains for that matter apart from a dozen or so MS-Word files and some paintings and drawings that I have taken care to conserve.

What dad thought of me is now sort of irrelevant, but then again that’s not true because if I want to understand who I am I have to nut out a puzzle. To what extent was my otherwise perfectly normal mother turned into a fascist. Was it under dad’s tutelage. Was she forced to adopt his views on the world in order to coexist in the same dwelling with him? I find it difficult to believe that she would simply on her own instigation just come out and baldly say, “Sorry this is too hard”, walk away from her own son.

I didn’t walk away from her when she needed me. What follows is mum when she was being “normal”; I joyously include below a passage from earlier in this blogpost, if you remember.

I remember that Betty (Elizabeth) Kewish married Heinz Altschul, and went to live in Vienna, and that her sister Patty married an architect, but can’t recall her married name. She may still be around and contactable. I also heard that cousin,(Uncle?) Perce did some Kewish family research in England and the Isle of Man, and someone in the family may have that material stored in an attic someplace.

Busy, happy, happily married people.

A dream. THEIR dream. I got into difficulty in a life they had chosen. I didn’t want to go to uni to get a degree, they had insisted. I didn’t want to read Petrarch in the original. This was all their idea: “childhood > school > uni > job > property > marriage > happiness”. In the eyes of BOTH parents. Apart from the fact that they never or rarely saw their grandchildren, the patriarchy had worked for THEM so why wouldn’t it work for EVERYONE? It signally didn’t work for me.

Brought me low.

A new art project

It’s impossible to “let go” until you have fully understood. “You can’t let go until you know.” It’s time to dive deep, and take stock. This is an intergenerational task, not one for faint-hearted time travellers. I am seasoned by despair so I can take the punishment that would repel the less conditioned. What I can’t do is talk with family and friends about this because nowadays they just don’t want to know.

They don’t want to LISTEN.

It’s BORING,

As for me I still want to talk about many things. And I’m not ill, I’m perfectly fine. For a man who lives with a mental illness that’s as good as it gets, crois moi. It’s nevertheless funny because today as I read through old letters dad had saved to his PC – in a folder labelled 2008 – I felt a kind of instinctive jolt as if, years having passed without any knowledge of this correspondence, I had come across something I was meant to find at exactly this point in time. And it’s not just dad. I will go through the letters in their digital form, preserved in zeroes and ones, when I have the inclination to, but in the meantime I can plan a new series of paintings for execution.

Love that word, it’s so sort of “police procedural”, “spy novel” and crisp like an establishing shot above a city just before the next scene in which the detective will come into the operating theatre to talk with the pathologist. In this conversation the pathologist (with access to a computer file, a ZIP file, labelled “Computer 2008”), will be able to tell the detective that not one but two people were involved in the death of the victim. 

The victim being me.

You see? Anyway while I’m faffing around summoning up the shades of Endeavour Morse, I can refer back in time to a Facebook Messenger conversation with an overseas friend – a friend who point-blank refuses to talk to me about my father – and to a comment made by my first gallerist when I was getting ready to leave on the last day of my first solo show. No, I stand corrected by memory. It was on the day I went back to visit her and drop off a painting I’d made to commemorate the show, I’d been so grateful for her support (my father never did anything to further my artistic career, or even say a single word about a painting or drawing I made) that I promptly scrambled up two artworks about showing art. One is on the wall above my desk as I write.

What it looks down on is a man who said to his overseas friend, “I’ve got a new series of paintings planned.” This was back in December, in the lag-time before Christmas, when life sort of slows down so that it almost entirely stops, I’m not sure what mechanism keeps it running but it takes the Jolt of the first Monday two weeks after New Year to get it running smoothly again.

This seems like a digression but bear with me.

So, the gallerist said “Why don’t you make them bigger?” in November, then I said to my friend “I’ve got a new series of paintings planned” in December. It’s now January and it’s at precisely this time that I find the letters in “Computer 2008” ready to be plundered for gain. 

What Poppey creation can come out of this confluence of thangs?

Which reminds me that the man whose name dad chose for his first-born, Jim Donald, was married to a woman commonly known as Pop. I can put that in an artwork, too. Funnily enough in the past couple of days I’ve come across two family members online. I didn’t find them, they found me. One through Ancestry and one through my website.

The website where I posted dad’s memoir. Ha.

I posted it back in 2010 and it’s been rewarding as a honeypot, drawing distant people, both family and strangers (sometimes family ARE strangers, you know what I mean), to my Inbox. Like the emails I answered today and yesterday and the day before. I usually at this point send copies of spreadsheets dad made when he was retired and travelling around the world spending money like a madman pretending to be Coco Chanel. I mention my plans for newspaper clippings saved from the jaws of oblivion by mum and dad’s propensity to CONSERVE everything. 

Except some of my most notable artworks of youth. Paintings now sadly lost.

But while some things were lost other things were retained in the family. I’ll write more about it in future when certain contingencies arise. For the moment I should get back to m y painting project, which is why you’re still reading this far. Well I won’t say another word. I’ll keep it under my hat as the saying goes. I’ll CONSERVE it for future use.

So farewell.