Me and my dad some time in the late 1980s, when he was around the age I am now
Today is Fathers’ Day in several countries around the world, including the UK. Recently me and dad went to Marseille for the weekend to watch Bruce Springsteen at the Stade Vélodrome. We’ve seen Springsteen together once before, in 2003 in Manchester at Old Trafford - the cricket ground, not the other one. The second encore opened with ‘My City of Ruins’, then bled into ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’.
I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Finally the show ended with one of The Boss’ - and I’m just going to say, the world’s - best ever songs, ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ Springsteen is underrated as a lyricist, in my opinion. Some of his lyrics embed you immediately in a place, an occupation, a time in the life cycle, a relationship. (‘We busted out of class, had to get away from those fools, we learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school’, or ‘well papa, go to bed now, it's getting late, nothing we can say is gonna change anything now.’)
‘Dancing in the Dark’ is one of his songs that expresses a state of being, a condition of feeling. (‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ is another). It’s an existential song. It’s about feeling lost, flat and tired; about not feeling too good about yourself. ‘I was so profoundly uncomfortable in my own skin that I just wanted OUT,’ Springsteen wrote in his memoir of a bout of depression.
We’re talking about a rock song here, obviously, so it resolves itself inside of four minutes. The solution it proposes is to take action. In ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ this instruction manifests itself in the form of escape: ‘just cut it loose... [don’t] let it drag [you] down.’ Form follows content: it’s a bleak song. ‘Dancing in the Dark’ is brighter, more hopeful. (There’s a reason it works so well in the cover version by Hot Chip.) You might not know what you’re doing, it says, you might feel lost and scared, but you just have to try. Life is meaningless; you have to embrace this and live it. ‘You can’t start a fire without a spark… Even if we’re just dancing in the dark.’
I’ve never really written about my dad at much length, though he did feature briefly in something I wrote for the LRB blog nearly a decade ago about his (and my) South African ancestors. Probably the most extensive comment I’ve offered came in a Twitter thread a few years ago that I repurposed as a Fathers’ Day Instagram post last year. Here’s the gist:
I think my dad taught me two very important things. The first was to regard the society you live in with (at minimum) cautious scepticism. This was probably unconscious but was the natural result of his frequent references to ‘The English’ this and ‘The English’ that. Despite being a white, anglophone migrant from a former colony, i.e. the most ‘assimilateable’ type of migrant, he insisted on seeing himself as outside the host society. This was a privilege in many ways, and was something he could have opted out of, should he so choose - he wasn’t seen as an outsider walking down the street - and it wasn’t always a conscious political choice so much as an unconscious defence mechanism against the exile’s feelings of both guilt and resentment. Nonetheless, its effect was to embed in me the idea that sometimes one could and should be an outsider and a critic. The second lesson, which is incomplete, and to which I have not yet really lived up - like my dad’s brief and aborted involvement with the African National Congress before his flight from South Africa in 1978 - is that politics sometimes means the most pressing moral obligation to take action. My dad isn’t perfect, either as a dad or as a person (no one is, certainly not me either) but he had a profound impact upon me in all kinds of mostly good and a small amount of bad ways.
Perhaps at this point I should reassure readers that my dad is alive and well - this isn’t a retrospective. But I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what we share, what I have taken from the relationship, what I wish had been different, and what I will try to do when I’m a father myself - which all being well I should be in a little over two months.
My parents, Kinder Scout, 23 April 2022
Blessed am I