Absence, patience.

I think of Dickens, and the awful, distant and neglectful father he was, despite being able to communicate the beauty and value of family and its critical importance to the flourishing child. I wonder if there’s always a cost when it comes to art and creativity; if there’s always a compromise and the people you love have to pay the price, again and again. I think of Charlie Parker and his long suffering wife, her patience, her martyrdom. I think of Chesterton’s wife, and how loving and patient she must have been, addled as he could be despite, or perhaps because, of his genius. 

It must be a zero sum game, mustn’t it, when one devotes hours of oneself to a craft, or a discipline, or an obsession that isn’t your marriage, or isn’t your family? Of course it gives you something, you imagine, you hope, that you can bring back with you. A bag of oranges slung over your shoulder as you return, not from the war, but the battle that comes after it. You have to believe it don’t you - or you’d never leave for the fray, and or even more obscenely, consider never coming back at all. Greetings from Tim Buckley is a film that almost romanticises the absent, musical father as much as it honestly accepts the damage wrought by his neglect. 

Perhaps the balance it strikes, elegantly, is the fact that one can love so much, and still be so distant, so cruel in their seeming indifference - a fact that we all come to learn eventually, in the endless iterations of the same love and loss that haunts us all, in time.