And that night, a cold December in 1989, my father was not in the family room, his usual evening haunt. The outside’s ink had painted the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the scattered stars of neighbor’s lights glittered in the distance. Home from college, I was surprised to find myself alone in the house. Inside, at last, the family room was entirely mine, which meant the stereo was mine, and I, a denizen of this domestic Lilliput, was seeking a song.  

^^^ 

As a child, I was fascinated by volcanoes. I recall seeing, on our boxy television, the Mauna Ulu erupt in Hawai’i. Towers of orange-red flame leaping from the mouth, lava falls higher than Niagara, creating lava flows thousands of feet away, ejecting torrents of rock and smoke. I was in awe. You could be burned alive in that river of fire.  

^^^

When I was young, I craned my neck up to see my father. I looked up to him. Or rather, also, I waited, watching in his shadow.  

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They would erupt, suddenly, my father’s gloomy moods, his occasional but always surprising lashings-out at family members. They would freeze me in my tracks—or, rather, cast me in ash.  

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My father had bought the stereo system in Hong Kong while on leave from Vietnam, and it had blown its way through various apartments and houses in California before it landed in our sleepy bedroom suburb of Chicago. Despite its analogue hulk, a vestige of the war, its massive wooden speakers could blow our eardrums bloody.  

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Once, as a child in San Diego, I saw a neighbor’s front yard covered with black volcanic rocks instead of grass. Holding one of the rocks in my hand, with its hard yet airy lightness, its sharp edges, I kept telling myself, I’m holding lava, I’m holding lava.  

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When he’d perform a feat of strength around the house, my father would push out his massive chest, saying, “Quinbus Flestrin! Man Mountain!” I had no idea who this Quinbus guy was, but I knew he was big and tough and I was soft, my muscles lean until my later teens.  

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Once, as a kid, I was having trouble with Caleb, the neighbor boy. He wouldn’t share. When my father heard, he was furious. He told me, “Let him have it!” 

The next time I saw the boy, I said, “Caleb, do you want to have it?”  

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It was a game we played in the family room, my sister and brother and I. The floor was lava. We had to hop from sofa to pillow to chair, an archipelago of safe spaces, to stay off the floor. We didn’t want to get burned alive.  

^^^

For at least a decade, in the family room, my father would chomp on—and sometimes smoke—one of his collection of wooden pipes, while watching the news. The sweet smoke of his pipe would colonize my nostrils, sending me into sneezing fits and out of the room.  

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That year in college, in a survey of English literature, I read Gulliver’s Travels, and a mystery was solved. While on a voyage by sea, Gulliver is caught in a storm. Shipwrecked, he winds up on an island, and falls asleep, only to awaken tied to the ground, surrounded by little people.  

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Whenever he was in the house, to me he was titan-sized, crowded out a room with his presence. Never mind that by this time I was his height, or taller. But with his barrel chest and booming voice—and more than that, his voluble presence and emotional friability, I always felt like a little child around him.  

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Quinbus Flestrin, it turns out, is the name the Lilliputians give to Gulliver. It literally means “man mountain.” Gulliver is a giant compared with the little people of Lilliput. The people of Lilliput are not merely small, they’re also small minded. When they ask him to destroy and enslave their enemy, the Blesfescu, he refuses, much to their dismay.  

^^^

I turned the stereo dial just past 93, to WXRT (officially 93.1, the stereo dial was analogue), the radio station known for new, cool rock and roll, stuff that was almost-edgy but not really, like Steely Dan or Toad the Wet Sprocket, so all the more shocking that, in a fit of mad genius on an evening show that must have been a programming error, Hüsker Dü’s version of “Eight Miles High” began to play.   

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While crossing the Alps in 1693, the English writer John Dennis had an experience that caused him to change his mind about the nature of nature. At first, in the early winding ascent of Mount Aiguebellette, Dennis found the going “easie.” But halfway up, things changed. 

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Was it even music? It was as if “Highway to Hell” had been played at twice or three times the speed, a similar riff-guitar intro but one that immediately begins to careen, and the growl of a singer—was it even singing?—enters.   

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Dennis: “the unusual heighth in which we found our selves, the impending Rock that hung over us, the dreadful Depth of the Precipice, and the Torrent that roar’d at the bottom, gave us such a view as was altogether new and amazing. On the other side of that Torrent, was a Mountain that equall’d ours, about the distance of thirty Yards from us. Its craggy Clifts, which we half discern’d, thro the misty gloom of the Clouds that surrounded them, sometimes gave us a horrid Prospect. And sometimes its face appear’d Smooth and Beautiful as the most even and fruitful Vallies. So different from themselves were the different parts of it: In the very same place Nature was seen Severe and Wanton. In the mean time we walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d. The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz. a delightful Horror, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.” 

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Before my father the man-mountain, I bowed, kept my emotions inside, and tried to fit into the family story of immigrant achievement and gain his approval. Once, I shared my high school report card to my father, puffing his pipe while reclined in his family room easy chair. I had six As and one A-.  

“What’s this A-?” he said.  

I felt a burning shame rise up in me, but no words.  

^^^

Dreadful. Precipice. Torrent. Roar’d. New. Amazing. Craggy Cliffs. Misty Gloom. Horrid Prospect. Severe. Wanton. Destruction. Horror. A Terrible Joy. This is the language of sublime experience, where the great heights and inhuman scale of mountain peaks cause terror. Death is a stumble away. And that admixture of feeling, the “delightful horror” and “terrible joy” cause an infinite pleasure and a trembling.  

^^^

Adrienne Rich: “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure in concealment—that explodes in poetry.”  

Rich herself, accused of being angry, of being shrill, was angry about being called angry. She was at home in her anger, a Vesuvius at home, as she called her progenitor, Emily Dickinson.   

Still, too often, poetry’s explosions are like video of volcanoes erupting, erupting but without sound.  

^^^

Even in sports—like during soccer, for instance, where I played defense, conservatively hanging back and taking few risks that might endanger the team, I remember hearing him yelling from the sidelines, “Attack the ball!” he called out. “Why are you hanging back?!” 

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But I was myself, often (too much) in my head, afraid to do something (anything?) that might cost the whole team, thinking before acting.  

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According to one origin story, the Byrds’ original version of “Eight Miles High” initially was called “Six Miles High,” a reference to traveling by jet, but Roger McGuinn changed it to “eight,” like the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week”—something outside of the possible. Even sublime. Of course, the Byrds were also experimenting with LSD, and the “high” was doing double duty. Sublimity, after all, is not just “out there,” it’s the meeting of exterior might and interior quailing.  

^^^

“Eight Miles High” had been inspired by John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass, itself being inspired by the ragas of Ravi Shankar. Inside every great song is another great song; like Russian dolls, we crack them open, only to discover that they contain another beauty—and therefore, whole worlds—within them, and another, and another.  

^^^

His father, like me and my father before me, was named Philip. Born in Lebanon, he’d fled with his family as a baby in exile to Mexico. His father was murdered by bandits in their family store in 1923, before the family fled again to the United States.  

He was a hard man, known to thrash his children if they angered him or broke his strict rules.  

Or was he a soft man upon whom life dealt blow after blow?  

Was he an angry Arab patriarch, or was he a brown man in a white world, simply trying to protect his children from the judgment and hate of others?  

^^^

My fear of my father was not just fear, exactly.  

Or rather, it grew, like a volcano’s beehive spatter chimney, spires of spatters on the surface of a lava fill, a monstrous ashen shell around my anger and pain, a suffering body, a flesh that kept growing even though the shell did not. Like a human kettle with the spout stoppered shut, my slow boil had nowhere to go.   

^^^

What is a volcano but an eruption onto the earth of what has always been burning in its heart?  

^^^

Just the other day, I was preparing to send my father’s letter tapes that he recorded during his time in Vietnam. He recorded them on three-inch tape reels and mailed them to his family in Brooklyn. As I opened one of the boxes, dated February 1, 1968, a sliver of a postcard tumbled out. It read: “Dear Mom and Dad, fighting is over in Saigon. Everything is quieted down. All’s ok with me. Love, Phil.” He’d somehow survived the Tet Offensive—one of the turning points of the war. The postcard says everything and nothing. He had no language to describe the indescribable.  

^^^

I wonder, now: was I also a terror, a terror to my father? First born, less than a year into married life, two years after the war—could I have been the too-much-too-soon abyss whose tidal hungers and stormy cries threatened to capsize the delicate craft of a new life? 

^^^

There are moments when the world terrifies me. When its sheer massive otherness—whether on a mountain or braving hard seas—that I feel my utter smallness. Looking over the edge of a cliff on Inis Mor in the west of Ireland, my whole body seizes with terror, becomes a bell ringing with a sound only I can hear, but drowns out every thought. I become a child. But rather than being only frightened, something else grows in me. A feeling of awe.  

^^^

In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke delineates the difference between classical ideas of beauty and sublimity. If Greek notions of beauty involved reason, proportionality, and light, inducing feelings of pleasure, then the sublime was almost its shadow-opposite—a realm of experience ruled by the irrational, disproportionate, and darkness, horror, and awe. Sublimity threatens to destroy us. We may find those moments of encounter with radical otherness to be traumatic in the extreme. Perhaps war, torture, and other forms of abuse are forms of radical otherness imposing themselves on us in ways that overwhelm the mind and body, violating the boundaries of flesh and spirit?  

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This is not an essay about a bad dad. No, my father loved me, loved me with a tenderness that was both fierce and close. It was the kind of love I wanted to give to my own children.  

Perhaps too close? But like a caress of the neck when I was in the passenger seat and he was driving, I often felt captive to it. A chain I wanted to throw off.  

It’s safer to say I did not know what boundaries were. That he was not predictable. He could explode— 

I would place my hand to remove his hand, in that teenagerly way, to say that my body was my body.  

But was it?  

^^^

Do you remember, I ask my mom while writing this essay, that as a child I was fascinated with volcanoes?  

Well, you lived with one, she replied.  

^^^

Burke notes that a little bit of distance makes the difference: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.” A volcano erupts on television, and it’s almost beautiful. Those who run from its smoke and fire feel otherwise.  

Where our brains break, and language fails, in the crags and crevices of experience, something echoes. That breathing room between the us that we know and the overwhelming that we do not yet know and cannot perceive the ends of.  

This is the opening of art.  

^^^

I’ve been trying to write about Hüsker’s version of “Eight Miles High” ever since I heard it. These lines, from my college poetry thesis, written over thirty years ago, try to capture it: