"Turning out just like my father"







"The river in search of the sea,
A child in search of the parent,
The human search of the alien,
The man in search of the god"

Mark Oliver Evertt,better known as 'E',the lead singer of the EEL,was featured in a documentary produced by the BBC.Mark is the lead singer of the EELS.The EELS is an American pop band and Mark is know for his distinct style of singing and for the lyrics with deep sense of love,loss and pain ,which he himself writes.The BBC documentary, "Parallel worlds and parallel lives",shows him travelling across America,meeting his father's ex-collegues and young scientists who were inspired by and continue to study his fathers's work in the field of quantum physics.

His father was the American physicist,Hugh Evert,who had proposed the 'Many worlds interpretation theory'.This theory states that all alternative histories and futures co-exist in what it calls parallel universes.Hugh Evert,as a young researcher, was greatly discouraged by the ridicule from the quantum physics community which included Neils Bohr.Dejected,he moved away from classical research and started his own commercial venture which turned quite successful.But according to Mark,his father was broken deep inside by the rejection ,though all his life he continued to believed in his theory.

Though the documentary was primarily about his father's theory,to Mark,being part of it was a means to understand his father.Mark,as it becomes evident from the documentary, felt estranged from his father and it seemed his thoughts and actions were quite contrary to his father's desires. Describing the moments of him discovering his fathers deady body,he says "It was weird touching him,this was the first time we had a physical contact that I could remember".

He was 18 at the time of his father's death.His mother, later died of cancer and his sister Elizebth ,comitted suicide after years of schizophrenia. Many years after his father's death and losing his mother and sister,Evert set off on a journey to understand his father and to understand why his father was, the way he was.
In this journey, he understood the hurt-29-year-old young physicist that his father remained ,inside of his head,all his life.He realized that he himself has grown to be more like his father.He now knew what had been going on in his father's head and what he did was the best he could have done in those circumstances.

The journey of the creation towards the creator is nature.The rivers flowing towards the ocean is often interpreted as its search for its origin.Human being has been in search for the alien life which he believes could be his creator.There are theories that state that the human life is indeed a scientific experiment of some distant aliens.To know its creator,to know the intent of its creation and to understand the relation between itself and the creator seems to be the whole purpose of the journey.

The search,it seemed to had ended for Mark .
He said in an interveiw," I realized that I had been feeling that same thing he must have been feeling all those years when he couldn't be bothered because he always had some crazy ideas he was trying to sort out in his head. You're just about to crack the code and the kid wants to play baseball. I get it now. We're both "idea men" and anything outside of these ideas is a distraction. I had been angry at him all these years but, now that I saw so much of him in myself, it became easy to identify with him. I let him off the hook. And life immediately got better. My parents didn't have a clue how to raise children, it's true. But I can see that, given what they were given, they gave it their best shot. "Source

Man's search for meaning ends at the source.Every human trying to understand his parents is indeed trying to understand his himself.He may start hating or adoring the creator but eventually his liberation would be in knowing the true creator and realizing that he is made from the same mold and that it was all alright and natural.

Mark rendered,
I'm turning out just like my father
Though I swore I never would
Now I can say that I have love for him
I never really understood
What it must have been like for him
Living inside his head  
Source



Comments

  1. Another brilliant article man!

    You hit the nail on the head there.

    Love!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brilliant krishna, I never knew that you write so well. This is a news to me. I definitely want to read all your blogs. it's just amazing.

      Delete

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