I apologize.

At least part of this is my fault.

I haven’t posted to this blog in a long time, an irresponsibly long time. I wouldn’t be surprised, if I bothered to check, to see that everyone who had ever included me in their blogrolls removed me by now. It’d be fair. Content has been sparse, and frankly, it hasn’t been that good (facebook gifts? wtf?) for a while now.

I’m not going to roll out my litany of excuses and pretend that they’re acceptable reasons to stop even posting occasional blog entries (job, screenplay, awesome girlfriend), except perhaps for the last one:

My father died.

It happened about three weeks ago, now. We still don’t know what happened. As the only child of a divorced man, it came to me to oversee arrangements for his funeral as well as the execution of his estate (as it were - my father was never a tidy man).

I’ve been back in New York a week. In the interim, I lost my job - not because of unfair firing practices but because the television network I was working for (the piteous textbook failed business model AZN Television) stopped broadcasting on April 9th. I applied for a job last week but was informed that I did not get it on Friday. I’ve contacted temp agencies and hope to get back on track soon.

I promise to post more to this blog: it’s important to me to communicate with you, to not shut off my means of communication with the rest of the world. I looked over the full content from the past two years and recognized that for every self-indulgent rant and every pity-party, I produced an equal number of interesting, vital entries that I think contribute to what dialogue there is on film on the internet. And I will continue to do so.

As my first return entry, I’m posting the text of the eulogy I delivered at my father’s funeral on Tuesday, April 15th. It was a traditional Catholic funeral mass, as my father would have wanted, and though my eulogy is by no means traditional or doctrinal, I am assured it was in keeping with my father’s personhood, and I want to share with you a few words about this extraordinary man:

Mark Carlson Bouzard. Born May 16th, 1956 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Graduated with a Bachelor’s of Environmental Design degree in 1977 from Texas A&M University. An artist, a teacher, a student, a friend, a father, a brother, and a son. A man of great faith and great humor.

But these are facts. We all have facts - numbers, statistics, points on a map. The accountant’s truth. They don’t suit my father - he was never a man bound simply to the indifferent world of facts. My father was a man who sought the beauty and wisdom in the living ambiguities and mysteries of the world around him, who was more fascinated by the uncanny provocations of the mind’s eye than by the objects in plain sight.

My father was a sentimental man. He was a nostalgic man. He was very fond of telling me stories about his childhood, his lives in Panama, San Francisco, Japan. He often told me stories about myself as a baby, focusing intently on minute impressions rather than narratives - how he could hold my fragile newborn body in one cupped hand and how he would carry me piggyback to the Montessori school a mile away from our home. He never seemed to live in the present moment, constantly reminiscing on an imagined idealized past, ceaselessly anticipating like Pollyanna the brighter future around the corner. At the time, I suppose these stories - and their unambiguous yearning for an irretrievable and often rose-colored history - bothered me. What - I would think, and sometimes be moved to ask - about now? Why not take stock of what you have rather than unerringly focusing on what’s passed or even more tenuously, what you hope the future holds?

Perhaps this obsession with the future is why my father was so taken with science fiction. Though he read voraciously, devouring great literature and great trash with equal gusto, he was never far away from the sorts of narratively baroque space operas that give most readers headaches. My father was at home inside these intricately sketched universes. At the heart of all great science fiction are the mysteries of faith which my father sought answer to in great measure in his later years - the ever-present binaries of utopia and dystopia, together a reflection of the dualistic Christian eschatology, the metaphysics of the heavens and the possibility, nay, the reality of the hereafter. My father, who fatefully introduced me to my passion for film through a weathered VHS cassette of Godzilla vs. Mothra, recognized the transcendent enigma of the night sky, the extraordinary potential of man’s imagination, and most faithfully the possibility of a utopia in the stars.

But as much as he loved the future, he was even keener on history - reading texts both new and classic, poring through Thucydides and Boorstin, and recalling in immaculate detail the finer points of a given period or movement in art. For anyone given the chance, having my father as a personal tour guide through an art museum was an unforgettable experience, as he could nimbly finesse the subtle meaning of Monet’s brushstrokes equally as well as he could wax rhapsodic on Greco-Roman sculpture. My father’s keen, uncanny understanding of art and history is important in understanding who he was - for him, the preservation of the human record, the ability to trace a line through the Great Conversation of mankind, was one of the highest virtues, and like all artists, he often found himself in moments of doubt, questioning his own contributions to this epochal dialogue.

These problems of memory - the ability of a human being’s actions and personhood to be preserved - seemed to eternally boggle my father - his unpublished manuscript on the life of a fictional French architect named Sale, whose miraculous, hilariously literal buildings were all destroyed before photography had occasion to preserve them reveals as much. It is perhaps glib but inevitable to read this work as an unintentionally revealing roman a clef, a distillation of my father’s anxieties of never having his creative output achieve the recognition it deserves played upon the page. And yet it is a beautiful, giving work: funny, imaginative, kind, with a child’s sense of play - it is not simply a reflection of my father’s basic goodness, but a celebration of his incredible generosity as a creative and emotional being. As with his gorgeous, lysergic batiks, his naive sculpted angels and expressionistic lithography, his life of Sale is essential, soul-bearing art, less an exorcism of pain and more his own unique, effusive expression of his love for the world. If my father at times found himself troubled by life’s complexities, his art was an unambiguously articulate view of who he was, a means of self-therapy and self-expression.

Like my father, I often turn to art as therapy at times of great emotional strife, and lately I’ve been reading and rereading and taking great comfort in an early poem by the American Romantic William Cullen Bryant, his “Thanatopsis” or Meditation Upon Death. In it, Bryant writes,

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre.

So you see? My father in death does not disappear, does not evaporate into some ethereal vacuum. In death, he commutes to the realms of history and memory that he so cherished in life. He is freed from the burdens of facts, the chains of this mortal coil and reemerges as a living part of our collective experience - he continues because we continue to share and look back upon the love, humor, and kindness with which he embraced his fellow man. His legacy falls on us. It’s now our time to take from my father his greatest, wisest lesson - to be sentimental. To be nostalgic. To remember. To embrace the past, to embrace the emotional resonance of our memories, and to unswervingly look to the future, a bright, shining future in which we will all be reunited - in the stars.

To see my father’s obituary, beautifully written by my Uncle Jamie, as well as remembrances from friends, coworkers, and family, follow this link.

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