I have embarked on a personal journey, one fraught with peril, but one with rewarding moments of insight into my own character. I grew up with out a father, and I have never known if I wanted to find him. I remain, like Smullyan’s Gödel, Forever Undecided.

“Like most men who grew up without a father I collect father-figures.”

I have a scarecrow father; a patch-work dad stitched together from films and books, mother’s lovers, and family friends. It includes a dizzying array of professions, and professes to be a bewildering gender-confused, multi-racial, class-less, uncouth, highly educated, myriad of nationalities, sometimes younger than myself.

What did you expect?

Fatherlessness is complexity and comfort in the mystery.

I have snippets of my grandfather, Oscar Wilde, Garrison Keillor, Samuel Beckett, Robert Houdin, Emma Goldman, Jeremy Carter, Lawrence Fishburne, Gordon Bruce, Dustin Hoffman, Roy Walton, David Mamet, Stevie Wonder, Mark Twain, Charlie 2na, Dorothy Parker, Howard Zinn, Italo Calvino, Hardy and Littlewood, Whoopi Goldberg, Brian Blessed, Umberto Eco, Bernardo Bertolucci, Herman Hesse, John Irving, Nina Simone, my mother, and of course the moments I took care of myself.

Imagine. Every time I buy a pocket knife, which is something I imagine a father should do for a son, I am accompanied by an invisible person. It is made of scraps of paper, bits of old film stock, sound-bites, sweaters, socks, pipes, euphemisms, aphorisms, speeches and drunken memories. It must be difficult to exist like that, and I am attempting to let him go.

“His will never became my law.”

This is a quote from Nietzsche. I can’t remember where it is from, but it touched me one day. It reminded me I was free to build my own opinions of the world and come to my own conclusions because I had no towering masculinity on the hill behind me. There was no castle (not even Kafka’s) in the wilderness of my youth. No idealogical limits, nothing undiscussable. That produces a certain kind of person, someone of my kind.

And so the quest.

I am watching all the films of fatherlessness I can find. Last night the selection was Central Station, about a Brazilian boy on a quest to find his father. His sidekick is an old ex-teacher, a little world-weary, and a little lost. She finds her way again by accompanying him on his journey, and he finds…well, I guess I better leave it at that.

There are others too, and that comforts me.

them again, originally uploaded by lardus.