Closing the gap Between Perception and Reality

To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.

This Elizabeth Bibesco line is true--we are performers in others' lives. This need not be a bad thing, though. We don't always know how others perceive us. We don't know to what part of their story and their experience they are attaching us. It's a sinister enterprise when we're cast in a role that allows the producer of the drama to exploit us for some personal gain, and that does happen. The point is, though, that we can't know to, or know how to, measure the distance between perception and reality.

The quote, the comment, and the ensuing thought process brought my mind to Frank McCourt's 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes. It is the story of an Irishman growing up in dire poverty in Limerick Ireland, in the 1930s under the direction of a mother named Angela who can't provide and a father named Malachy who either doesn't or won't provide.

Malachy is a drunk, a chancer, a philanderer, and a wanderer who torments young Frank with his potential as a good dad. When Malachy shows up, he tells magnificent stories of Ireland's past, promises a bright future for the family, drinks the family out if its meagre resources, and disappears indefinitely.

McCourt draws the reader into the intense pain and anxiety the father creates in his son. Malachy is an awful father, an awful man; nevertheless, his role in Frank's life is essential. He is at once the story and the need to tell the story, and the problem to solve that can't--won't--ever be solved because first and last Malachy is a complicated, broken human being.

He is the muse. Malachy can't imagine the role he plays in his son's life.

Through his memoir, the son transcends the grief the father inflicts on the family and makes of that grief a work of art. Perhaps this is our fascination with memoir--that within the ordinary--the filthy lanes of Limerick, the abuse of an irresponsible parent--can be discovered something of extraordinary beauty.

McCourt doesn't cast his father as a good guy, as a hero. Instead, he lifts him up for who he is; in this way, Malachy becomes our teacher, too. Through him we glimpse the pain one man's brokenness can cause a family.

Through him we see the power of language--expressed thought and feeling--to remake him into something we don't want to forget because he has too much to offer. McCourt explores the distance between perception and reality and closes the gap in some ways--ways that annoyed some of his Limerick readers and relieved others. So it goes with the truth. I wonder if ol' Malachy would see himself in any of this.