Tracing the threads

This morning, I come to find out that Alex’s brain works exactly the same way mine does with respect to right and left. If someone says “go right”, we have to consciously think for a second: “which way is that? OK, I write with my right hand, and that’s this one [shakes hand in air], so this way is right…” But if we’re driving, and someone says “turn right”, we know which way that is instantly, because we know it’s “the shorter turn”. Vice versa with left, of course.

But she doesn’t do the same thing that I do with tying my shoes – making two rabbit-ear loops with the laces, and wrapping one under the other to tie the knot. Most people, including Alex, do whatever loopy thing they do to make it come out the same way… I have a kind of combination of mental block and superstition which makes me hold on to my primitive technique, as if I am holding out against some kind of betrayal, however trivial.

I am constantly checking this kind of thing – trying to see who my daughter is, and what subtly connects us, and in what ways she has become her own unique person. And observing myself and the threads of my personality and my style, and the underlying ways of being from which these personal elements emerge.

I often feel my brain working “as a Radetsky” – there are imperceptible little signs and patterns which are distinctly and recognizably Radetsky, and even more specifically, like the way my father thinks, although growing up I can really remember almost no interaction with him, and certainly no “influence”. I have even come to believe that there must be some genetic mechanism for these enormously specific traits to be transmitted, perhaps emerging from some underlying qualities in a kind of fractal surprise. I would expect, for example, to find that my odd way of conducting music with rhythmic waves of my hands and strumming of my fingers came down to me from some ancient Radetsky – it just seems to me to go along with those qualities of thought that I discern somehow flowing through my mental make-up.

For example, I have a quick temper, going from happy smiling to scowling and raising my voice in an instant, and then back just as quickly… Oddly, I do not perceive this shift as much of a mood change at all – it feels to me like I am simply letting my feelings through, without anger or bitterness. But I remember very distinctly finding this to be a selfish and emotionally disconnected and disconcerting quality in my own father, and I am aware that my daughter sees it the same way in me. My father and I also share a deep mathematical intuition, and a kind of false sensuality… a genuine love of the physical and carnal, undermined and made false by the dominance of our ascetic and mystical side.

Last time I spent much time with my father, several years ago, I was overwhelmed by a sense of how alike we thought, at our core, as if we were clones raised in different times and places, with a different “covering” that made many of the superficial and specific elements of our thinking different, but which could not undo our fundamental sameness. I felt as if I was tracing the same contours of thought with him, inside his mind, in ways that our words could never capture, but only reflect. I felt as if I looked into his old eyes, and saw my own mind looking back out at me, from the vantage of his age and experiences, looking at myself as my son.

At the same time, I feel the softer and sweeter strains of my mother’s family coursing through my soul as well. The quality I share with my mother is hard to name… it’s the quality that loves the Alice in Wonderland stories, responding to their vulnerability and hunger for innocence, their laughing curiosity and childlike impertinence. It’s the insistence on pointing out that “the emperor has no clothes”; the incredibly stubborn insistence on remaining true to oneself; the inability to be happy except when being honest with oneself. It's the "loneliness of the long distance runner". It’s the Orwellian view of politics, not as an exercise in mastery of deep theory, which is the Radetsky strain, but as an attempt at goodness while admitting one’s fundamental weakness. These twin influences even shape my face – one minute, the man in the mirror is my father's skinny, pale, fearful, too-smart brother; the next, he has the bright eyes, wavy hair, and boniness of my mother.

And underneath those qualities, like old black and white photos hidden in a drawer, I feel the bitter and disappointed Renaissance-man intelligence and the stubborn integrity of my grandfather, and the long-suffering, loving gentleness and musicality of my grandmother, simultaneously unimpressed and pleased by my intelligence. If I could choose anyone in the world to go back in time and spend time with, it would probably be my grandmother… I would go back to her childhood, and see her in her poverty and unhappiness, see her parents and brothers and sisters I never knew, see the laughter and hope in her young eyes, and dance and flirt with her. I would sit next to her at the soda counter where she met my grandfather, and try to charm her, competing for her attention with my hard-eyed grandfather, laughing at the twinkle in her eyes, holding her soft hands, before fading away to let her fate flow on.

Once, when I was at Berkeley, I had what people would call a mystical experience, although really it was just a very slightly heightened version of the way I think and feel all the time. I was at the crest of Ridge Road, next to the Graduate Student Union, with the Dominican School on my right, looking out across the bay toward the city and the coming sunset. And I had a sudden, deep sensation that I was in a gathering of like-minded souls from across all time and space. A place where time and space lost their usual meaning, where one could go simply by recognizing its existence. I knew as surely as I knew my own existence that others had recognized this state of being as well, and across time touched one another, and validated some eternal connection between us, and some deeper substrate of reality. I knew that I could be there anytime, that I belonged there, and that the reality of this place would comfort and sustain me forever.

This is, of course, simply the way I am. It is a kind of sensitivity to what is outside my own skin that defines how I see the universe, and my values. I do not choose it or believe it or advocate it any more than my dog chooses her perspectives; it’s just me.