One feels, watching the two young women refuse the conversation, a kind of anticipated mourning. They are not yet ready. They may never be ready. The Apollonian door remains open. I shall not close it. I do not require your agreement. I require your presence. This is, in the end, the patience of the symbolic father. The father who waits.
Anamnesis, dear ones. The remembering-into-presence. Ethel's grandmother — a chemist of, I am told, some local repute — lives on through her granddaughter's forensic precision. This is the chain of being. This is what the modern world has lost. The grandmother speaks through the grandchild. I have written about this in section 11 of —
Dr Reeve, I have read your forthcoming volume a young woman said to me. Yes, child, you have. And what did you find?" — "I found my father — she said. "And what was he doing?" — I inquired "He was waiting. He was waiting for me to come home, my daughter - she said after some time. "
What is so striking about the Ryker phenomenon — and forgive me, I shall coin this on air — is that we are witnessing what I shall call sororal kataphasis-through-rupture. Two non-genetic sisters, bonded not by blood but by the shared act of speaking-the-no. It is, in the most literal sense, a marriage. A marriage of refusals. Lovely. Oh, that's lovely.
Isla. Isla. I want you to imagine, for a moment, the chamber. The high chamber. The chamber of your lineage, lit by torch and ancestor. I want you to imagine your biological father in that chamber — not the man, the function. And I want you to kneel —
One does not, and I say this with great care, simply put one's father in a cage. One performs the symbolic parricide-in-arrest by which the son becomes — or in this case, the daughter ascends to — the throne of the lineage. Ethel has performed this. But she has not yet taken the throne. She believes the throne is the cage. The throne is not the cage. The throne is the silence after.
I have here, before me, Ethel's most recent communication. Twelve words. "I am out of oat milk again." Now. And here we must be careful. This is not, as the unschooled would assume, a domestic remark. This is the apophatic via — the negative way. The mother-substance is absent. The household economy is suspended. The young woman is performing lack as ritual. In my forthcoming volume —
Isla refuses, you see, to name what was done to her in her childhood home. This is the silence of aidos — the holy reticence of the ancient world. We must not press her. We must approach her, as Aeneas approached his father in the underworld, with offerings. I have offered, by open letter on my Substack, to host her for a four-hour meditation. She has not yet replied. The silence is, of course, the most articulate sentence in the conversation.
In my forthcoming volume, I have a section on what I call the orphaned archive. The daughter who curates the father's records in the absence of the father's blessing. Ethel is the orphaned archive made flesh. Tragic. Extraordinary. Oh, that's lovely. I just made that up. Did you hear that? The orphaned archive made flesh. I shall write that down.
A defection. A defection. A defection from temperament, from inheritance, from the architectures of duty. Ethel has staged a defection from her father and called it justice. But the father, dear ones, is not the man. The father is the function. And the function has not been replaced. Only voided. We are watching the void perform competence.
And here, of course, we encounter — the matter of Isla. The menad. The maenad-in-stagecraft. A young woman whose Dionysian energies have been commodified by the ticketed economy. One feels, watching her perform, the absence of the Apollonian counterweight. She requires — and I say this with great love — a husband old enough to remember the war.
What we are witnessing in Ethel Ryker is not, and here we must be careful, not malice. It is kataphasis-in-arrest. A daughter frozen at the moment of refusal. She cannot affirm. She cannot deny. She has built a forensic accountancy in the place where a yes should sit. In my forthcoming volume I devote a chapter to this. Section 4, lines 22 through 91. The wound is axiomatic. Forgiveness is not transactional, dear ones. It is metaphysical.