His Locker: Unpacking the Gift

It is the time of pitru paksa, the time of ancestral remembrance. It is also the year anniversary of the start of this blog, Life in Seasons. This has brought me to a lot of reflection over the past week as I move forward in my seasonal work, as I think about heading into another cycle of this life of mine.

It has also been a time of reflection upon the professional side of my life, because I recently signed a contract for my dissertation manuscript to be published into a book. I spent the past few weeks rereading and editing the dissertation, turning in all the material just a few days ago. It was scary.  Revisiting the place where my professional life started was frightening and liberating--in equal measure.  It meant I had to sit in the place where it all started: children of Vietnam Veterans.  It is a knotty and dense place for me. A place where everything meets: personal, professional, past, present, hopes, and dreams. Everything. To revisit it as a person who has grown and become something so new was disarming.  Yet it provided a way for me to see how my hard work has brought me to where I'm at. Here.  Now.  As I write this, I can see why the past week or so has been... challenging.

His Locker

The photograph, "His Locker," is symbolic of a lot of what has been happening over the past week or so.  It is a haunting photograph. My father gave me this photograph quite a few years ago--back when I was in grad school.  I had asked for photos from his time in Vietnam and this one struck me as intriguing, undefined, yet full of meaning.  It was his locker.  His Vietnam locker. Until now I did not know what to do with it.  As I read my manuscript, though, I hit upon a section in which I analyze parts of Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried.  Here is a section of my introduction:

"The Things They Carried focuses on one of the greatest hurdles in the process of remembering: putting traumatic memories to words. The quagmire of a lost past full of contradictory emotions, and the irresolution it carries, can (and often does) leave one paralyzed into silence.  O’Brien counters that silence through his disjointed stories that attempt to make sense of the things he carries. The book opens with a laundry list of things Lieutenant Cross and his men carried on their combat missions.  As we read the list of items, it soon grows apparent that there is a complex mixture of tangibles and intangibles.  With the guns, malaria tablets, and P-38 can openers, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 1990, 21). Thus, while language is necessary to express memories of the past, the stories of the past carry weight that goes beyond words.  Included in the stories O’Brien tells us are the interactions he has with his daughter. Kathleen has more than words to make sense of; she carries the weight of her own memories with her father.  Enmeshed in those memories are the love and turmoil found in their relationship. Language provides a skeleton, but the meaning, the flesh filling out the structure within it, comes from something beyond the words themselves."

For me, this locker carries all of the baggage and emotion that my father brought home with him--and what he brought into my life.  It is part of the gift that he left me. It is the ancestral legacy that I must work through in my own way, in my own time. Another excerpt:

"Walter Benjamin, via Shoshona Felman’s analysis, invites us to ponder the residue of a traumatic history.

What Benjamin attempts, in other words, is to transmit the story that cannot be told and to become himself the storyteller that cannot be one but that is one—the last narrator or the post-narrator. The trauma—or the breakdown of the story and of memory, the fragmentation of remembrance and the rupture of the chain or of the “web of stories”—is itself passed on to the next generation as a testament, a final gift. (2002, 46—my emphases)

The ruptures emerging from the breakdown of articulation is what makes trauma visible; the pieces being the gift handed to the next generation. For children of Vietnam Veterans, piecing together the fragments of remembrance is fraught with uncertainty; yet, it is the process of piecing together that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning in the crevices between what is known and unknown."

That locker holds so many stories, but they are fragments for me to decipher. A suitcase, shirts, canteens, cups, bottles, and numerous unknowns. 

My Altar

I also look at this photograph and think about how my father's aesthetic is similar to my own.  I like photographs that capture meaningful things. Thing that are rich with meaning, yet undefined, chaotic, and full of metaphor.  Things I don't want to forget.  I think of my altar photograph and can't help but think about the ways in which we are both trying to communicate moments full of emotion. His locker (altar) is very different from my altar. But I can see how he might have gone to that locker for retreat, solace, and to get through a difficult time in his life. It was a space full of transformation and growth. He saw value in snapping that photograph.  That moment meant something to him.  And now here I am working through that meaning in my own way.

I'm not sure if the publisher will use my dad's photograph. I hope they do.

This time feels appropriate as a marker of the transition out of one cycle and into the another.  This book work, along with the ancestral work I have been doing during pitru paksa, is the perfect set of sadhanas to close out this cycle--and season.