Enlightened Librarian: In memoriam: Bryan Crawley, 1921-2006

In memoriam: Bryan Crawley, 1921-2006 · Feb 6, 11:23 PM

At some point I realized I had inherited my father’s laugh. His laugh was this convulsive bark – Ha HA! Or HA ha ha! – that came from the bottom of his diaphragm. And that led me to understand how my dad lived such an intense life in his own body. I believe that he knew what he knew not necessarily by thinking about it, but by absorbing knowledge through his bones. This surprised me, because I know the two of us shared a very British reticence about bodily matters; one’s body is there to be endured, and made, hopefully, not to smell too bad or to be too obvious to anyone else. Then I realized, too, and I think my father and I shared this as well, that you can go through life with an almost complete disconnection between what you communicate about yourself on the surface of your own skin, and what’s really going on in that aquarium, or volcano, that you carry around inside.

Two things suggested to me how I think my father might have approached the world. When he played jazz on one of his saxophones or clarinet, he had such an instinctive sense of swing that there’s no way he could have learned that from a method book without having the information in his blood. I know he got that talent partly from being able to listen to music with rapt attention, sitting in a swinging chair wearing headphones and leaning forward into the notes. He also demonstrated a sense of swing in more than just how he played: there was a relaxed easiness in his stride, and I can’t remember anytime as a child when he didn’t arrive for lunch or tea from his basement office by bounding up the stairs. In his body, my father lived inside of jazz time, which is elastic like a living thing. He knew this without thinking.

And the second thing he knew instinctively was how to take a paintbrush full of colour, draw it in a wash across wet paper and hold a steady line. My dad was a watercolourist, which means a tightrope act between beauty and ruin, because each stroke and misstep can’t be covered or erased. My dad knew that painter’s way of non-thinking that leads you from shape to shape and tone to tone to insinuate details and depth of field. That takes a special way of projecting yourself forward through time into the unknown: you have to see an invisible image on the white paper and help it appear. I can’t help thinking of my father’s painting as a very gentle, but serious, wrestling match – one man’s body – his dexterity and all his skill and the images in his head – doing a kind of gentlemanly battle with Windsor & Newton pigments and an Arches block.

Once more, laughing from the gut.

So it seemed, on one hand, especially tragic that one who depended so much on his steady hand should get Parkinson’s disease. And yet, perhaps this was where all that bodily intensity eventually had to go: to shake itself loose of the frame. The disease caused him many hallucinations, so that a shadow might hold the mass and weight of a sleeping cat, and a fold in his blanket could have contained indescribable hidden treasure. But the disease heightened for me the sense that my father was always at home in the world, and even at home in his own restless body. He was always reaching for things and trying to confirm what he saw: at Christmas we sat and he described the fascinating dove-tailed shapes in a cabinet that held an aquarium in the sunroom of Riverview Health Centre, where he stayed. Of course, he also got tired and frustrated – especially when it was difficult to understand what he was trying to say. He would start a sentence, then find himself facing a string of anonymous words like a line of parked cars – thinking he had arrived at the right one, he would be bewildered to find it locked, and himself without a key.

The thing that I cherish, though, is that, underneath it all, my father remained himself. My dad was utterly, and permanently, invested in the world. He would have taken it all in if he could. I thank God that my mom was with him when he died; from how she describes it, his last breath may have been the deepest of his entire life.

And then he was free to go.

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