A Plea for Eros

soldiers on stretchers. The tag is yellow. This transfer of the name of the illness onto the tag is, I’m sure, ludicrous, but my brain is obviously in the business of bald simplification, and that’s how I see it. This scene takes place in color. I have certainly borrowed its details from war movies and from what I have seen of Asia, not where my father found himself but farther north, in Thailand and China.
    Why I imagine myself inside my father’s body in this story and not inside my mothers body when she was jailed is not, I think, accidental. It corresponds to the distinct levels of consciousness in each story—that is, in order to understand what happened to my mother, it is enough to move myself into that jail and see her there. In order to understand what happened to my father, I must imagine waking in a fever and making out the letters that spell imminent death. I rechecked this story with my father, and he says there was no yellow fever in the Philippines then and he really doesn’t know who made the diagnosis. In reality, he, not the tag, was yellow. He suffered from severe jaundice, a result of having both malaria and hepatitis. Because my father has never shared the other stories, the horrors of combat itself, this experience became for me the quintessential moment of war, a tale of looking at one’s own death. It can be argued that accuracy isn’t always crucial to understanding. I have never been in jail and I have never been a soldier, but I imagined these events and places to the extent that it is possible for me, and that imagining has brought me closer to my parents.
    After the war, my father finished St. Olaf College on the GI Bill, with a lot of other vets who are now legend in the history of the school. A college started by Norwegian immigrants and affiliated with the American Lutheran Church, St. Olaf attracts the mostly well-behaved offspring of white middle-class midwesterners, many of them with Norwegian roots. It is not a wild place. Dancing was forbidden until the 1950s. I went to college there, had some wonderful teachers, but the students were by and large a sleepy, complacent lot, more conservative than their professors and easily “managed” by them. My father and his veteran cohorts were not. He tells a story about a man I knew as somebody’s highly respectable “dad” literally swinging from the rafters in one of the dormitories. I see him flying above a crowd of heads with a bottle of whiskey. The bottle, however, may well be my embellishment. Four years at war had turned them into men, as the saying goes, and they took the place by storm, not only with their poker games and Tarzan antics but with their intellectual hunger. All this is true, and yet it has taken on the quality of fiction. I read the stories I’ve been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.
    The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy. My father took the place he knew best and transfigured it, but he has never left it behind. He received his Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His dissertation, which became a book and was awarded the McKnight Prize for literature, is a biography of Rasmus Bjorn Andersen—an influential figure in the Norwegian American immigrant community. The book is not only the biography of a man but the story of a time and place. My father has used his gifts to understand and preserve “home,” not in the narrow sense of that single house with those particular people but in its larger sense of subculture. I think it is fair to argue that his “place”— the world of his childhood, the world I glimpsed in the old people I knew as a child—is now paper. My father has been the secretary of the Norwegian American Historical Association for over thirty years. The association publishes books about immigrant history, but it is also an archive. Over the years, my father has devoted countless hours to organizing what was once unsorted mountains of paper in innumerable boxes and is now an annotated archive of letters, newspapers, diaries, journals, and more. These are facts. What is more interesting is his will to do it, his tireless