Not/Knot Father: Alzheimer's, Nonfiction and Writing the Father

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer's disease or AD is characterised by neurofibrillary knots, or tangles, and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Nerve cells waste away and wither and eventually decay and die. AD is a state of atrophy, degeneration, and negation. It is about not thinking right, about not being able to think straight, and not being able to remember. In Heidegger's terms we could think of this as unthinking—or unthought: nots as well as knots. As a site of resistance this essay is highly speculative, an exploration of nonfiction as an experiment with experience, in particular an experiment in writing the father, my father: ‘Visiting Not Dad’. What I am presenting here is a trying out (or essaying) of something … something indistinct, something belonging more to shadows, half-light, the in-betweens, which takes us away from the deductive logic and dogmatism of my father's creationist beliefs opting instead to celebrate empathy and pathos, with a willingness to explore human fallibility, and unsettledness. Through a close-up experience of Alzheimer's disease, and the poetics of jottings and annotations, I ask: is there a possible link between what we know and observe about AD and the necrotising and knotting of the brain, and the search for something indeterminate, poetic, unthought?

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer's
• Heidegger
• memory
• creationism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Francesca Rendle-Short is an academic, essayist and award-winning novelist. Her most recent book is the memoir-cum-novel Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press 2011). She is an associate professor at RMIT University and co-director of the nonfictionLab Research Group and WrICE (Writers Immersion Cultural Exchange). In 2013, she was a writing fellow at the Nonfiction Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Iowa and in 2015 was showcased in the Outstanding Field: Artistic Research Emerging from the Academy at the Victoria College of the Arts. http://www.francescarendleshort.com