Prosody
Christophe Brunski
At least one Sunday out of every three successive weekends my father would spend the entire day fixing any one of the three Peugeots owned by our family. The cars seemed almost to be waiting in line, spread along the length of the driveway in a tri-colored ray of automotive despair, ready to submit to tools and techniques that would procure a repair that was, in the end, the product of wasted hours, since the duration of the repair’s effect was by far dwarfed by the stretch of time spent in its process.
This unfair ratio, effort to effect, is so common. But perhaps this was, in itself, the magnet that drew my father and me so often to the brinks of mechanical frenzy. From the edge of one cliff to another this thin yarn of a common mission was hurled across the depths of silence which separated my father and me yet proved that we were built of common tissue. (Shared sweatshirts or not, the polarities at which my father and I stood were endless, and forever ornamented these scenes with a subtle, ironic complexity.) These sessions spanned the seasons, connecting the days when the driveway would scorch your hand to the touch and the days when relentless winter cold threatened to lock wrenches, bolts, or other various vehicular components in closed fingers until springtime arrived.
And what remained constant, constant, constant was the unrelenting steel fist clutching with insurmountable strength any real words we could have spoken, choking them like death-bound doves, and letting them fade before they ever arose. Sadly, our characters were based on an aversion to communication. Thus my father lost himself in the task at hand, and I just lost myself. For as often as my father, on his back, would slide himself underneath the sickly automobile, I would picture myself as an altogether formless entity, floating high above the entire scene and gazing down onto a gem of tragicomedy. Maybe my laughter was the wind and my crying was the sunlight. In the drama that I watched a mute character, seated like the Buddha alongside the locus of repair, nodded insolently to obscene remarks and blankly handed tools into a rectangular shadow whose shape moved from one side of the car to the other as the day walked obstinately onwards to its own demise.
This silence became a vase to be shattered only by derision or mockery: every opportunity was taken by my father to damn the French for the Peugeot. This man, a product of hand-worked American soil and cultured through an early marriage, would say to his son, who was a future ex-patriot, “If you ever make it to France, I want you to kill the bastards who designed these fucking cars!” At the moment of such assaults, everything accented with the Language of Love became the object of merciless perdition. “These people better be good at something,” said my father, throwing to me a glance I did not return, “Because they suck at engineering.” The words in my father’s phrases so often stepped apart from one another to allow room for profane neighbors. My father, it seems, had never read Flaubert, had never been graced by Rimbaud. (Incidentally- shall it be mentioned? -a friend of mine once dubbed our Peugeot station wagon as La Voiture Ivre.)
Once I asked him, “If these are such miserable cars, why do we own three of them?”
My father made a choking, repulsed sound: From some hidden point in the engine, a disconnected hose had begun dripping a viscous fluid, and a globule had spattered to his forehead. He mopped it off with a dirty rag. “Why don’t you just hand me that 30 mm socket, all right?”
The entire history of these hours passed by we two, this mal-aligned apprenticeship centered around faulty masterpieces, is sewn with the scarcity of our conversation. In the middle of silence framed only by extraneous noises- the clatter of wrenches, children playing in the street, a plane flying overhead -I recollected earlier scenes from this compendium of moments which, through incessant repetition, has led us up to the present.
Once, when I was very young indeed, my father had given me a bolt to hold on to while he grappled with some other demon in the engine. I clutched it so tightly that I must have squeezed it out of existence; for when I opened my hands again, or, rather, when I became aware that my hands had already opened, there was no bolt. I explored the ground around me. Had it secretly crept into the grass? Had my father already taken it back with his own, invisible hands? No, and when at length he asked me for it and I declared it lost, he stood there with a look of dismay and near-puzzlement, like a surgeon unable to account for the absence of an organ on which he had just been operating. And as though this all were transpiring in the era before the splitting of the atom, I was left bereft of any understanding as to how such a small constituent could play such an important role to any end-effect.
Those were days in which I should have foreseen that mundane mishaps would have to be taken symbolically if they were to be understood at all; when things can’t be discussed, they must be interpreted. Nonetheless, trying to understand exactly how my attitude was derivative of my father’s- how I was derivative of my father -instills in me the uncertainty of purpose one feels when measuring lines of poetry.
Effort to effect.
Is poetry so greatly enhanced by the recitation of Greek numerical prefixes? Come, now. I recall school days, the voices of classmates chanting in unison, ‘iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter’ followed by a rhythmically demonstrative series of ‘duh’ sounds; these voices were blurred and glassy to my ears, as I was already far too drunk by the music of words to understand or care about the measurements of intoxication.
Is the distance of time made less turbulent by the subdivision of years and hours? And does conflict loosen its reign simply through being handed down to us from the fathers we modernize through the continuation of our own distinct lives? Time does and undoes its own process; and distance and proximity are caught for a moment, guilty of holding hands.
So it is that when I think or write about my father I have the inclination to dub the word with a capital “F” in order to demonstrate distance and to escape the task of recognizing the interpersonal link I can neither define nor deny.
There is plastic toolbox in which my father stores the plethora of minuscule Peugeot parts, replacements or spares- the knee-deep tide of seemingly superfluous details that is the by-product of the conflation of electronics and automobiles. One evening as he was sealing shut one of the plastic zipper-bags which contained these trifles, he paused before he threw it back into the box. In his palm he bounced the bag, (in which lay six centimeters of rubber hose imprinted with the Peugeot Lion), considering it, and said, “You know, a lot has changed since I was your age.”
Had I said nothing, he would have said nothing, so in loco nihil I asked him, “How?”
He opened the lid of the toolbox and tossed the little bag in among twenty-odd others. “When I was your age, helping my father fix cars, all these little parts and pieces came in metal canisters.”
It was astounding to me that the same observation could be used to prove two completely contrary ideas- his, and my own, which for once I made heard as I said, “What? What you mean, then, is that nothing has changed!”
