My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

in which it can be read. Like many other gay people, I grew up with a heightened sensitivity to the strate-gic need for silence, for keeping my own counsel. As a child I experienced strong feelings of difference that were not specifically linked to longings for other boys or men, but they did contribute to a rich inner life. This link only came in early adolescence when questions of voice first became erotically charged. Then, I lived in a space defined by the tension between revealing enough to attract another and concealing enough so as not to be discovered by those who might do me harm.

As an adolescent, I learned that our silences, like our words, await the interpretation of varied reading and listening audiences. I also learned that it is often better to remain silent than to use language belying our experience. The tomes that I covertly perused in libraries and bookstores during the 1950s employed a pseudoscientific language that seemed to have no relationship to the feelings and emotions that pulsed through my body.

Today, even though I can choose to refer to myself as homosexual, gay, or queer, I am still painfully aware of the constraints that labels place upon us and stymied by the gap between experience and articulation. These reservations about language do not constitute a ratio-nale for silence. Rather, they underline an existential reality—much of human experience is unspeakable, even unimaginable. Nor are we automatically accessible to each other but must continually engage in a struggle for mutual understanding.

As an early childhood teacher in the 1960s and ’70s, I was used to busy classrooms filled with the sounds of young children at work.

Neither silence nor stillness seemed developmentally appropriate.

Charged with the task of encouraging children to verbalize their thoughts and feelings, I did not consider that the acquisition of language is a mixed blessing. Along with the parents, I welcomed the children’s use of words as an unalloyed indication of development and integration into the social world. But language also imposes order and control, culture and constraint. We seldom think about what is lost.

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In The Beast in the Nursery Adam Phillips reminds us that linguistic competency is achieved through distancing from the preverbal self and at the cost of the rich, if chaotic, emotional life of the preschool child. Language can inhibit the new and unrehearsed, the raw and embodied expressions of ideas. While failed attempts at communication remind adults of what it is like not to talk, most often words bring safety and containment. As a teacher I thought less about how to sustain fluency between the children’s spoken and unspoken lives, their words and the experiences in which they are grounded, than about how to improve verbal facility.

Later, as a newly minted assistant professor, my life was haunted by pedagogical silences gone awry. Day after terrified day, I heard my freshly disciplined, carefully chosen, graduate school words sound-lessly swallowed by cavernous lecture halls. I looked out from the podium, so clearly designed for other, wiser, more charismatic instruc-tors, to see students casually leafing through books, surreptitiously passing notes to classmates, and staring distractedly at the window.

My attempts to generate discussions ended in sluggish question-and-answer exchanges that only confirmed my inability to fill the classroom void with the lively noise of engaged learners. No words were ever as painful as the silences permeating those first years of teaching.

Lacking the sanctuary of a seminar for new faculty or sympathetic colleagues to share my discomfort with, I inevitably read silence as failure. This sense of failure was all the more embarrassing because the subject of my classes was education itself. In retrospect, I understand the unrealistic images against which I measured myself, the alternative strategies that might have challenged apathetic undergraduates, and my own unwillingness to speak about the things that really mattered to me.

In those early days of teaching, I granted my unsuspecting students far too much power over my life in academia. Hurt and resentful because of their lack of interest, I failed to recognize that student silences are as likely to reflect their fears of the material as our communicative abilities. With time I became more conversant with these 112 n jonathan g. silin

fears and the defensive mechanisms through which students try to keep them under control.

A turning point in my appreciation of silence occurred when I began to speak in class about being gay and how this affected my perspective on the state of American education. Coming out shifted some of my discomfort about teaching onto the students. The situation became less problematic for me, more disquieting for them. They began to question their prior assumptions about who can speak and who remains silent, about what teachers and students should know of each other’s lives.

In the classroom our conversations became richer as I left behind the pose of objectivity. At the same time, I also began to welcome silences rather than to fear them. Here were opportunities to reflect on troubling questions, acknowledge unresolved issues, and experience unsettling emotions. Not wanting to foreclose these sometimes confusing, often provocative moments, I gave up the press to cover material in favor of the commitment to build a community of learners.

Challenging the authority of the word to order and organize our time in class, I began to wonder about the way that communication occurs in and through silence, a process that was confirmed for me during my father’s many illnesses.

Now there are often days when I arrive in my father’s hospital or nursing home room with the New York Times in hand and it seems as if no words will be exchanged. With a brief nod for a greeting, he immediately points to the eagerly awaited reading matter. Then he proceeds to extract the business section, fold it into slender quarters—a skill that I admired as a young child and still have