The Presence of Absence in Hybrid Memoir “Disequilibria” https://ift.tt/8QMrC9m
There is something paradoxical about writing a story about what is missing. How does one draw in a reader when the essence of the story lies in the absence of something? In Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, winner of River Teeth‘s 2021 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, Robert Lunday weaves contemporary, historical, and cultural references together with what is missing — what is not present, nowhere to be found, unaccounted for — and his family’s story, thereby crafting an intriguing narrative despite its roots in negative space.
Disequilibria is a memoir framed around Lunday’s experience of his two missing fathers. His birth father was absent by divorce and then died tragically. A few years later, his stepfather disappeared. Instead of writing a traditional memoir about the void created by his fathers’ absence, Lunday attempts to unravel the unexplainable by exploring the absent, the disappeared, the vanished.
His boyhood, his military family, and his fathers are the unlikely companions of mathematical concepts, those missing-in-action (MIA) during the Vietnam War, and younger versions of himself. The result is, at times, a doctoral dissertation on the concept of “missingness,” and at others, a floundering in the dark, where one is constantly surprised by the interjections of other allusions. In a way, the floundering mirrors what it’s like seeking answers and trying to make sense of the disappeared.
In the first of Lunday’s 40 vignettes (or meditations) on missingness, titled “Finding; Understanding,” he begins by debating when exactly his stepfather became missing: Was it the day he left home, the day the police report was filed, or the day his car was found? It turns out that missingness is hard to define. “Sometimes life veers into something other than death. That third state might resemble a car driving down the road, turning and vanishing from sight. Say one more goodbye to the vacancy itself. I see my mother waving, waiting for time’s loop to close,” Lunday writes.
The human response to the “Missing One,” what Lunday calls whatever it is that has disappeared, is also hard to characterize. Lunday’s mother finds acceptance. His brother finds purpose in the search. “His searching has become a mission, a way of life. As time goes by, the more urgent grows his search.” And Lunday finds purpose in reflecting on what it means to be missing. Lunday concludes that even if the Missing Ones are found, they may never be understood — a hint at the infuriatingly infinite or unsolvable nature of a person’s disappearance.
The first mathematical reference in Disequilibria is the title, referring to both a state of imbalanced variables (disequilibria) and the absence of such variables (missingness), suggesting that the absence is what causes the imbalance. In “Asymptote” Lunday expands on the idea of the missing being an infinite unknown by using the mathematical concept of a straight line that reaches out to but will never meet an adjacent curve. “A curve pulls closer and closer to a line but never reaches it…The asymptote is a distraction from despair, though it might define the outer limits of the search. We’re always at the head of the line, getting closer and closer.”
While mathematical references are scattered throughout the work, literary references to missingness abound. “Wakefields” uses Nathanial Hawthorne’s story, “Wakefield,” as a tool for exploring in depth ideas of anonymity. “Absence is not mere anonymity,” Lunday writes. From the perspective of the one who disappears (Mr. Wakefield), Lunday presents the unsettling consideration that the Missing Ones might not be missing but spying on us as we search for them. He also discusses the adaptations and iterations of Wakefield’s story by different authors. These alternate versions of Mr. Wakefield’s disappearance are a striking parallel to the theories the Lunday family has considered for his stepfather’s mysterious vanishing.
Both of Lunday’s fathers were soldiers in the Vietnam War – an era of American history characterized by enormous loss. In “Old Soldiers Never Die” Lunday explores the concept of losing one’s identity through transformation. “Old soldiers never die because it’s a way of life that disappears before the person. The process of making a warrior, the modern type of warrior, grafts the individual into the machine. Retirement can’t undo that.” Those who have become absent by choice or tragic circumstances are transformed by their missingness – as are those who love them. Their previous lives no longer exist. Throughout Disequilibria, Lunday reflects on the Vietnam War as a useful lens: the war and its aftermath represent a nation’s reckoning with missingness, from soldiers MIA to prisoners-of-war to a generation’s collective loss of faith in their government.
Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness fuses reflection with research, and as such, its subject matter may unsettle, and its format frustrate some readers. As the mystery of Lunday’s stepfather’s disappearance is unsolved, this fascinating yet perplexing journey fails to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. There are no answers when we try to find what is not there. Seeking answers propels us into a loop – as we seek the unfindable, we only achieve a perpetual state of disequilibrium.
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