Transmissions

Over the past seven years, during the life or half-life and death of my father (he passed away in June 2004), I inherited a car, a 1907 Mitchell, from my father. Well, this isn’t exactly true; I wasn’t its recipient, as stated in his will, for my father had visions of its being part of an automotive museum with a plaque bearing his name (he was a traditionalist at heart, preferring those more monumental forms of tribute). The museum confessed it would only sell the car to raise funds, which gave me reason to hesitate. How best to align will, testament, desire of the deceased, with the living? How to be the translator of intention and honor the memory of my father through this odd creature of a car? To whom or to what is a daughter faithful? Was I only a host to a will, to his intention? Witness to and inscriber of a word’s material form? Something else, something less biblical, I felt, was being asked of me.

They strangely resembled one another, I began to think: the car was no Rolls; it was a simple twenty-horsepower vehicle that, like my father, was born in Minneapolis in 1919, was from the Midwest and seemed to emblematize a kind of clear-intentioned absence of frills. Both the car, in its lack of any panache that accompanied its ambition, and my father, having been a veteran of The War, betrayed an almost noble humility that I associate with the singularity of their time. Yet the car had, in its current state, a tragic flaw: it was missing its engine. We were clearly dysfunctional. When I was enrolled in grammar school, at the French Lycée, I remember my father stating (when I was six) that he would drive me to school in it as soon as he had the engine repaired. The idea of being driven fifteen miles down the Santa Monica Freeway in a twenty-horsepower-engine car with no doors and windows still haunts me today—but it never happened, nor did my father ever drive me to school. It was a vision. The engine needed repair; it needed parts: so began the saga of the engine.

When I was in junior high school (no longer the Lycée, but an all-girls school on the west side of Los Angeles), the engine left the house to have its envisioned glory restored. Someone came to pick it up. And for the life of him, my father could never remember who that someone was.

In the course of the past twenty-five years, my father had forgotten to whom the work was entrusted, he could not remember the name of the repair person, and had no written trace. Organization was never his forte. There was no paper trail to follow, no witness to its whereabouts. When he began to suffer from dementia following a stroke in May 2000, he could provide one sole clue to the location of the engine (a clue he could not remember previous to his dementia): Sun Valley (California). He still could remember that, and something or someone in him, the person in him who once wanted to repair it, was able to attest to it in the form of those two words. This clue, by now almost a postmemory, came like an oracle, bridging time past with the promise of a future, from a father already no longer fully present, yet present in ways not even imaginable in life. As is the case with many stroke victims, my father changed after his stroke: not only could he remember the Latin names of orchids and the Czech language he had once learned at age eleven when living in Prague, but his own relation to himself and his relations to others had altered. Ipseity, or self-sameness, was clearly not a metaphysical concept, I thought: the cogito was as vulnerable as flesh, inscribed into it, part of its material association, traversing the body to remember itself. Our relation to ourselves is punctuated by the exposure of the body, this gaping hiatus that we are...