Pan of the Infinite Realms
To sing in mourning: bittersweet.
Occasionally during these weeks following his passing, I have found myself struck, in contemplation of the father as mythical being, by the image of Pan, rustic God of the wild, goat-horned satyr, famed piper and, by all accounts, general mischief-maker. In spite of Panās status as an outcast from the snowy-peaked heights of Mount Olympusāa figure who categorically refused the pomp and grandeur of Zeusā impetuous broodāthe wild Godās unimposing presence was epic, even if only for its tacit reach. Thereās something of Pan in the attention to proximity: of being aware of the boundaries between self and those in orbit that plays out through this self-distancing, a recurring displacement of the shapeshifter as he moves along the parallax gap between a retreat into ostracism and the act of caring from afar. Pan: everything, anything, and perhaps especially all those things you hadnāt altogether noticed. Frederick, my father, was, to me, the epitome of the unspoken imperative, quite in contrast to the loud souls surrounding those types of men Iād observe who couldnāt keep their words, their habits or their worldviews contained.Ā
Frederick was never loud, in my recollection. There was a song-like cadence to the inflection of his words, even in those rare instances when heād engage his booming voiceāfor there are times when, no matter the family dynamic, the semblances of a fatherās authority is demanded. When he spoke, it would often border on the mumble, such that one was inclined to strain in order to hear the words being said. To the uninitiated, this might have seemed the behaviour of the anxiously unsure: of one whose emotions had gone cold, held back and kept tight under guard. Itās true that Fred was not loud in his emotions or his moods, but he showed his love for family and community through his actions. He was generous in his attention, even if it only ever emerged from the outliers. Heād always ask how you were getting on, always eager to hear what youād been up to, and especially what you thought about the secret whispers of existence or the ways you navigated the various folds of the space-time continuum. His presence, though soft, or at least one that was registered only with a deceptively light touch, became important for those of us who knew the value of having someone to watch over the situation with careful and sympathetic eyes. Someone who made the effort to see you.
Pan was said to be the ugliest God. Well, I think Iāll let that specific part of the constellation skip over into incoherence, unless I wish also to implicate myself and my dear siblings, my fellow autochtha, in this charge of unsightliness. But I can say that there was perhaps some evidence of an aversion to beauty as an ultimate value in Fred, if by ābeautyā we mean the type embodied by magazine spreads or movie screens. And if āaversionā is too strong a term here, perhaps āindifferenceā will do more aptly. In their wedding photos, both Frederick and Veronica (who, among many other things is the mother of his children) look stunning, so itās not as if he couldnāt lean into, or be swayed, by the gravity of the aesthetic. But in his later years, and personally, for me, in his most handsome of forms, Fred would let his face grow wild until his big bushy beard would catch crumbs. Heād eat heartily without regard to the shape of his tummy. Heād sometimes let the cobwebs grow and the ābitsā on the carpet meander at his apartment in Parramatta. When I helped Veronica clean his cottage late ā22, when heād been admitted to Campbelltown hospital with the double threat of a UTI and Covid-19, I marvelled at the community of spiders heād left prospering on his top window by the front door (which was actually his side door, but that's a longer story).
Pan was a much loved piper. I remember how special I felt to be a part of the band at Sadlier at our little church close to our home in Ashcroft and the school I attended. Well to be honest, just between you and me, I wasnāt really part of the band per se, I was really just sitting at the back with the rest of the band, singing along. But Iād go to the rehearsals each week where at least a couple of siblings would be strumming guitars and Fred would play flighty green melodies on his flute. And as far as Fred was concerned, I was part of the band, same as anyone.
In his image, Iām reminded of talk about the fruit freshest from the vine. By which I think I mean to say that even in his advanced age there was something young and carefree to his presence. Being the youngest, I made a particular point of contrast with the oldest member of the family, even if only in our respective ages. I think there was something in me that embodied the audacity and recklessness of youth: the freedom to take the foolās role and the rebel's cause. It may just be my imagination but I always felt that Fred appreciated my sense of mischief, and perhaps encouraged it to a degree, if not outright endorsing. I mean, heād never tell directly if he did. Fred was 38 years old when I was born so I never had the pleasure of knowing him as a younger man. In many of the photos we have of his earlier life I notice how broadly he used to smile. When I look at these photos I imagine in the moments of their taking, heād felt a sense of self-purpose and that he had faith, either in himself or something beyond to which he was connected, and that he held the ideas he brought into the world passionately, close to his heart. As his youngest child I can only smile in the hopes that I can continue this legacy. That we all can.
The man I knew may not have smiled as openly or as vigorouslyāor at least not for those pointing cameras at himābut humour was never far from his grasp, his bag of tricks always ready at hand. His impish joy would shine brightest in those moments when you were the only one to catch his underhanded joke over the busy dinner table, and heād smile just as broadly when you passed the same joke back to him ten minutes later. Even once his health began to slide, over these past few years, he was never despondent, never faithless. He was the type who'd crack jokes to the nurses as he limped, blood trickling down his face, and looking as if heād just barely scraped through a minefield.
Various stories abound regarding Panās ancestry and progeny. Some place him as the son of Hermes, others that he was the foster-brother of Zeus, and thus Hermesā uncle and teacher in music. Other tales have him being older than Zeus, a son of Cronus and Rhea. Itās hard not to think, in this tangle of identity, of those generational traits and recurring faces that are familiar to any who are part of a family tree that takes particular stock of their ancestorsā tales, and holds them close. In this sense, Pan becomes something quite personal, taking on a specific form and imbued with a particular emotional intensity.
Pan, to me, is the spirit of a quiet, smiling face or a particular high-pitched tenor to the questioning voice. Or sometimes heās a mood: a restlessness that borders on nervousness which, in the end, drifts towards the gentle silence that can emerge between careful minds. He's an inclination to pull the brightest light close to the soul in order to reflect, but not close enough to hinder its flight-path. An idea that comes to you as if from nowhere, before realising that even all of those sweet secret moments in which the āselfā reveals its āselfā had been, in part, passed down to you along the river's flow. Pan is everything, the interdimensional Mƶbius loop as well as the tangled mess of phone cords you keep in an old drawer.
In Plutarch, a story related by the historian Philip, tells of Thamus, an Egyptian sailor bound for Rome who had heard a divine voice proclaim that āthe great god Pan is dead!ā In his compendium, The Greek Myths, Robert Graves writes that Pausanias, while touring Greece roughly a century after this declaration was recorded, had āfound Panās shrines, altars, sacred caves, and sacred mountains still much frequented.ā Perhaps itās only in this way that we know the value of the wild: once it has been all-but purged from our hyper-aware state of self consciousness.
Perhaps the death of Pan struck such a chord to those in this time of Thamus because it was more than the story of the death of a God, it was also the death of a way of thinking about āThe Gods,ā which over aeons had shifted, from the rustic ideals of nature as life-giving, passed down through our various oral, aural and psychical transmissions had mutated into the icons of those grandiloquent beings that stood beyond reach as if looking down in judgement from above. If a God could die, it meant that the Gods were like us after all. Let them die to let them live. Let us honour the Gods as being like us, rather than placing them on a pedestal of worship. In this, Pan was perhaps closer to Gaia and Hades than he ever was to the self-assured Zeus. Not transcendentalāin the skyābut of the earth below.
Iām not going to pretend that Frederick had any particular inclination towards the Greek gods, or at least he ever shared it with me if he did. He was more into the druidic mysteries and his runes, the teachings of the elders of the Navaho, and the stories of the carpenter of Nazareth than he was in the usual classical fare of ancient history as conceived in āthe West.ā As such, I should point out that this is in part my picture that I paint over the outline of the father, in the hopes that he wonāt mind too much me placing him there, and in fact might find himself at home with the figure of Pan who I have come to love and respect, two archetypes blending.
For the love of the father, his kindness and his gentleness and all of the ways that he shined in his own way I offer three silent cries to the dead God: Pan of the infinite realms. Long may you return to us, and especially in those moments in which we forget what weāve forgotten.
