Not/knot father: Alzheimer's, nonfiction and writing the father

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?