Wednesday, August 02, 2006

In Memoriam: Ronald Shlensky, 1935-2006

Evely Laser Shlensky, my mom, and Ronald Shlensky, my dad


Shards: A Eulogy for My Father, Ronald Shlensky, 1935-2006

Offered at Congregation B'nai B'rith, Santa Barbara, August 1, 2006

Prologue: a memory trace. When I was a toddler, my father used to take me with him to the city garbage dump near Frankfurt, Germany, where we lived not far from the US army base hospital at which he was stationed. We would drive to the dump in his old VW Beetle, an occasional event that brought me great joy. In the winter, deep snow was the backdrop to the detritus of a renascent Germany piled high at the dump. How could my father guess that I would so much love accompanying him to this place of discarded remnants and ruin? My dad somehow knew that I would take pleasure in joining him on an adventure to the scrap heap of quotidian history – that going with him to the outlying spatial and temporal boundaries of civilization would mean the world to me. Perhaps he even intuited that I would carry throughout my life a memory – or was it only the image from an old photograph? – of that other-worldly experience. This was very much in character for my dad: unconventional acts appealed viscerally to him, and he, with his offbeat and tremendously charismatic charm, found life-sustenance in the eccentric and the unexpected. His untimely death on July 28, 2006, in Santa Barbara, California, in an apparent hit-and-run accident in which he was a pedestrian, was a terrible shock. The outrage of his sudden death, and the sense of tragic incompletion that makes his loss so devastating to me and my family, were no less shocking and unexpected than so much else in my dad's seventy-one years of life lived very much on his own iconoclastic terms.

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It is an impossible task to adequately memorialize in words one of the two first presences in my life, my father. That is the nature of memorialization, that is the nature of the father-son bond, and that is the insoluble problem, as we all well know, of words. My father, along with my mother, bequeathed me my first words and the very language I use and cling to like a life preserver in the painful chaos of grief today. One of his fundamental legacies to me is my presumed authority over and through words – an authority constantly undermined by the very nature of the words themselves, as he would understand very well. My father, the tremendously loving and caring man who knew me so well, who helped to make me a man, whose every gesture towards me was an attempt to protect me from harm and to enable my growth and success in the world, knew something of the limits of authority, his own and that of others. He also accepted and believed in the necessity of authority. Between the limits, necessity, and impossibility of authority, my dad staked his precarious ground. Despite the tremendous confidence and agility with which he would sometimes step, he nevertheless indicated to me, in a moment of intimacy, the deep and disquieting way in which he felt orphaned in the world. He had never been satisfied with the minimal guidance he felt he received from his own beloved father, my dear Grandpa Ise. This was a source of tremendous and unresolved angst for my father, who so valued the certainty and security seemingly offered by authority, and yet who spent his life in open rebellion against it.

My father, in his often exasperating pugnaciousness, and in his deep wisdom, did not believe in accidents. An accident, my dad would say, is a puzzle that calls for explanation and analysis. In his life, so in his death. This corresponds exactly with his mixed feelings about power. We are the masters of our own fate, he asserted, and yet he frequently seemed to act, in his own life, as though this first principle were irrelevant. He submitted to a sense of fatalism and even vulnerability at the intersection of mind and body, spirit and word, where the physiological and the psychological contended endlessly for his attention. This was an imbalanced point of rendezvous for him, a place where the chemical and the emotional were ceaselessly thrown off balance, but which, until the very end, held out the potential of final redemption. He so much wanted to believe in the redemptive quality of expertise: in lawyering and doctoring, and in the panoply of authoritative roles he admired, rejected, impersonated, and embodied. And it was this very wishfulness in a sustaining power, and his fear of its fragility or even of its impossibility, that allowed him to experience the most elemental personal vulnerability, and the most profound faith in his own and others’ humanity.

I cannot say whether my father believed in anything at all, whether he had any faith in a power greater than his own primal, albeit increasingly frail, strength, or any trust in an authority beyond himself. This refusal of faith or belief was his first line of defense, for himself, but also his Maginot Line against the depredations of a hostile world threatening, he imagined, to everyone he loved. Yet he sometimes revealed, in an awkward but touching moment, when he would knock on wood or lower his head in prayer, a surreptitious sense of the immense and otherworldly, and the possibility of faith in something he did not name. But I can say – with a tentative authority or agency of my own, inherited surely from him – that he did believe deeply in one thought, one unifying and, to my mind, profoundly redemptive idea. Amidst the shards of a broken world – one in which, like the Kabalistic image of a shattered divine vessel, divine authority was already absent but, in its most benevolent and unknowable form, always possible – my dad believed in something whose presence he could perceive as it bodied forth from behind the veil, or perhaps the mask, of authority. This something in which he did, despite everything, believe, was the power and potential of caring love. Not remote, as authority in the image I know it always seems to be, my father’s caring love was transcendent, brilliant, astonishing, truly oceanic in its comprehensiveness.

More than any other quality – and he had many, including humor, style, perceptiveness, wit, wackiness, wisdom, and the capacity for vulnerability – my dad’s tremendous ability to care for all those around him was his outstanding, shining quality. Those who knew him well – and they were relatively few, for my dad was not especially communally oriented – knew of his incredible capacity for caring. He went to extraordinary lengths to help those around him in need, treating each person as an individual worthy of succor and attention and love. His was an ethic of plenitude when it came to others: he rescued, he supported, he treated, he provided and cared for, and in a thousand other ways he extended great love to any person close to him who might ask. He often did so before being asked, when he felt that someone needed him but could not, or would not, ask.

A final gesture towards me: when the water heater blew out in my new home in Canada last week, he first teased that this was one of the stakes of home ownership, and then he telephoned back to say that it was a good omen for me, and he insisted on paying for the new water heater. A good omen. I know what he meant: I was coming into new authority as the owner of a house, and this was his opportunity, freely offered, to help me with my transition into a new stage of adulthood and responsibility. An omen: another sign of his private faith in the other meanings of the universe. Another opportunity to show care and love for me. In offering to buy the new water heater, he was, it is true, exercising his authority as father, and yet doing so in a way that undid authority as a structure of command and recreated our relationship, yet again, as one of loving care. He was at once exercising authority, and at the same time, he was making authority impossible, or revealing the impossible nature of sovereign authority. In this paradoxical way, he was conveying in words the love he felt for me, his pride in me, as his son, and his desire to continue to father and nurture me. He was also demonstrating his recognition that the greatest love he could give was the unraveling of any assumed legacy of authority or expertise or jurisdiction, in favor of an inheritance he could only imperfectly verbalize: his profound commitment to loving care.

It is impossible for me to express in words how much my dad’s presence will always be with me, and how much I shall always love him.