A Quarter of a Century ago / Twenty-one days with my Father – 2026

Tears are an internal mode of the moment. Only a sort of permission by the touched one, or a certain point of needing a release, or of wanting to sense, or express weakness, or fragility, or fragile strength, will water the eyes to the point that tears reach the cheeks, perhaps the jaws.

Tears need not flow. The verge of the lids may well contain them. Even then, tearing occurs. Deep sensation, often on the surface of being, and far beyond being flesh.

It consists initially of a thin layer vibrating within the thin skin, neither outside, nor in the blood stream. Thinly, so gentle, yet so sensationally spirited that the living ones surrounding the touched one are likely to become aware of the state, even if the tears abstain from flowing.

As well as it was for you, this sensation manifests itself in me very often. I say often. No frequency value in numbers. Just often: during memory pop-ups, a realization while walking along a sidewalk, an event before my eyes, involving two, three, or just one individual interacting in such a way that I am moved to the joy of tears.

At times, listening to a symphony, and then listening to the same one but as so differently interpreted by a different conductor, listening alone with myself in some chamber, or alone with another hundred souls about me. At the cinema theatre, in the concert hall, at the opera house, in the New York subway system, I have been on the verge of, or in the stormy state of crying.

Deep analytical, poetic displays of being soul and flesh, like Ingmar Bergman did it through “Persona”, “Autumn Sonata”, and “Scenes of a Marriage”, David Lynch with his “Elephant Man”, or the Japanese soul as expressed for the screen by Takeshi Kitano in his “Dolls”. I have cried, often.

After all these cries, between 1958 and 2001, on that March 11th, on which I contemplated you inhale last, my eyes were dry. They were focused, attentive, as my whole body and the totality of the soul demanded it. All I was able to be was an observer. For the very first time I was witness to a state I had written about a dozen years earlier:

I wish to be when I die 
I wish to see the whole process 

If dying is a loss
I wish to see 
how much to lose I have
how much to lose I am 

If dying is a gain,
I shall write again

(1989)

Hours later, your corpse was carried out of the house in a bag. I had no tears, still, for I was about to faint.

The solemnity of life, the solemnity of a corpse — in a bag.

What is a quarter of a century in your current state?

I wonder

Had I Served You Coffee — in process, content, notes