Martin Wooster

A Euology for Gerald Wooster

Dad, your life always seemed to me like an adventure and like all adventurous lives it was inseparable from the telling. For you, ideas however small and at times rather hard to understand, were the adventure. Your life had the character of destiny, a strange force that you seem to give yourself over to when you decide that only a life that has the form of an adventure can truly find love. Is this because as humans we always seem to fail the ideal of love and in the end it is this that prompts us to keep trying. I know you once said you never really understood Beckett but were you not in agreement in his insistence that as humans we necessarily fail and therefore all we can do is fail better. I guess if for you a life of adventure begins in the unconscious, an extremely rickety structure held together by desire, illusion and force, a volatile brew at the best of times, it manifests a literary poetic language and guided by the hope that there is something in our present condition that has its roots in a redeemed future.

Indeed it seemed, even in your moments of greatest doubt, that hope must exist in abundance, perhaps out there somewhere in the far distance of our universe, like dark matter. I guess the problem for the adventurer is how we tap into hope’s most elusive quality, its propensity to float in the spheres of the ideal yet only able to manifest its power because it is also profoundly sensual. Doubtless you also knew that when hope is crushed in the name of highest values: happiness, truth, security, it ceases to function as a unifying factor by which we may reconcile ourselves to the lives we lead. It was with admiration that I looked upon your ability to never stop believing in people, in their future possibilities that must never be separated from the power of life’s metamorphosis sustained by what is most valuable in existence itself, its common connection to animality, the mineral, the vegetal, the stellar.

For a long time philosophy had felt it had to decant the intelligible from the sensible, the mind from the body, and life from the living, everything you found so difficult to comprehend. But through psychoanalysis you found a way to cultivate a strange wisdom within the dominion of affection, of the body, and of sensitive moods. Sometimes it felt more Alice in Wonderland than Darwin’s theory of evolution but you always remained acutely sensitive to changes in atmosphere, to dark moments in time when passion overthrows reason, when what seems to be virtuous is in truth vicious, and the gods themselves are liars. To those strange drives that inhabit the human animal at its core, drives we do not completely control and which lead us invariably back into the shadows. Yet however problematic and vulnerable this fact makes us feel you always maintained that precisely here where our spirituality is torn asunder, where we feel most destitute, that the opening to a sense of a shared ethical world may reappear, just as in the ungroundedness of language, the said can return once again to its saying.

Of course you knew the dangers of our insistence on needing to know, and more worrying still our present mania that continues to insist on the foreclosure of negativity and the other as unknown and unknowable. No doubt it was William Shakespeare, whose company you so intimately kept for all those years that you found, especially in those last romance plays, and in particular ‘The Winter’s Tale’ a sense of the ineffable and its ardent impossible meaning. I remember as a child how you always seemed to want to keep one foot in the natural sciences and delighted in reading to us, your children, those stories of magical animals roaming in the green world and whose powers, imbued with original virtue, miraculously acquire sensual sympathy in the listener.

If ‘The winter’s Tale’ at its heart is preoccupied with time as destroyer and renewer, as though time only seems to renew things because it must renew their truth, then what is it that allows thought to make its first tentative steps beyond the realm of our conceptions and the pain we feel when history obsessively repeats itself, allowing no new beginning. Here I imagine you saying, failure and inconsistency need not be feared, as Simone Weil would say, the mystic philosopher you once told me, more than anyone else, had influenced you so powerfully as a young man, ‘those who refuse confusion are marked by suffering’. What is more important is that we be attentive, for thought harkens to a place beyond personal consciousness, for which the will and its sense of freedom is only useful for servile tasks.

Dad, you knew how to listen, no doubt cultivated in your work as an analyst, the intense pleasure you took from music and the vicissitudes of sound from which you acquired such great sympathy for all that is infinitesimal. As an educator, you sought a creative evolution in which to place thought as a precarious and destabilising agent in fields of history, biography, and time. Greatly supported by the institutions you passed through and your wife Bruin, who never stopped believing in you, yours was an education that lifts a veil rather than shedding light.