It’s been a little too long since I’ve made the effort to
write to you, you faithful and few who make up my audience. In a way I am tired
of writing, juggling a thesis along with working as a freelance writer from
home wears out one’s fingers. The nitpicky, precise, and complex energies
Heidegger steals from me added to the boring and banal experience of writing ads
is enough to leave one wishing for the balm of a television screen at the end
of the day.
But there is a space in the writing world that neither
Heidegger nor ads can touch, that is, the space called, “whatever the hell I want
to write about.”
I have spent much of my recreational writing energies, the
mental ones anyway, being much less concerned with the blog sphere by itself. Most
of my research and interests lately, not to mention in the years to come, have been and will
be focused on publishing. There is, for example, an incredible amount of data now available concerning the publishing industry which shows, conclusively, that at
least half of book sales are now ebook sales.
Moreover, it is about 100% easier
to publish an ebook than it is to get published by a publisher. I could
literally publish a book by the end of the hour at no cost. The hard part is
the advertising, a piece of work historically left for the publishing
companies. Right now I’m teaching myself advertising: yes, shameless
self-advertising is one of the curses authors must all overcome.
In any event, I intend on publishing via ebook within the
next few years. Perhaps by the end of the year I’ll have at least one text
finished and up for sale.
Something pragmatic happens to a man who decides (at the
shock of many, including myself) to make the conscious choice to fall in love
not only with a woman but with her children. Blogs are fun, but they take up
time which is not in any way lucrative. With filial value sets confronting me
now, though, I know that with a minimal shift of my energies, my writing can be
turned into something lucrative, however minuscule that fiscal gain may be. Worst
case scenario I publish a long, uninteresting blog-like book that no one buys
but my mother.
$2.99 at 70% royalties = $2.093.
$2.99 at 70% royalties = $2.093.
Nice.
Speaking of family, I’m learning that family mental life has
none of the organization of academic life. It’s too chaotic to follow every
possible rabbit trail, too loud and too undulating: the little people change
too much, or have the potential to change so rapidly that any opinion formed in
February is totally obliterated by March. I have noticed within myself, however, the
tendency to apply to each child a certain category or name, and by informing
them of that category, shape them dramatically; that is, by naming them, I confirm
and affirm a set of acts that will become the best description for who they are
for any period of time.
If Parker is smart, it is as much a matter of me telling him
he is smart as it is he is actually biologically gifted. If Connor is sensitive
and caring it is as much Amber and I fawning over his hugs as it is his
neurological structure. If Kalli is completely out of her mind, it is both
because I call her crazy (or more popularly, “monster”) and because she has a bad
habit of running down the street butt naked. Parenthood is certainly
descriptive work, learning who your child is and who they are changing into,
but it is also prescriptive work at the linguistic level, a type of word-choice
binding with the act of adulation, or of admonition, but even more so, with appellation.
It is powerful and horrifying and exciting.
Many times, I think the act is sinful, my own act, I mean,
because it does not pay careful attention to the balance between nature and
nurture. The appellatory act turns out to be an impeding on the individuality
of a child. Parents do this sort of b.s. all the time, not necessarily making
children in their own image, but making them in the image of the image they have
in their imagination. Either type is a gross projection, and the both projections vary in
degrees of grossness. A father who wants his child to play baseball like he did
in elementary school makes the unconscious choice of wanting his son to be happy
how he was happy. If it is wrong, it is forgivable because the man works with
the categories and experiences he has. What makes a person happy is relative in
cases like this. The boy will never learn to be happy as Neil Armstrong was
happy as he walked the moon because the boy will not go to the moon to be moon happy.
There is nothing wrong with presenting familiar modes of
happiness to your children. We all work with what we have. If I could give my
boys the moon I would. I’m afraid I can only offer them basketball and Plato
and poetry. But I know that it is that very limitation, my limitation and
theirs, which will make them like art in my own hands as well as God’s. Both of
us must be careful (God will be better at it) to not infringe on the piece,
only to help it know its boundaries, know what it is and isn’t. The rest will
take care of itself.
That is why I believe that what a parent wants for their
child is a shadow and should always be treated as such. Once you have moved
past the abstract, “I want them to be happy” or “live a good life,” once you move
en concreto, that is, you
have molested their personhood with ghosts and chimeras.
In any event, I’ve tossed myself in en medias res, an action condoned by few in our culture save the
children who need fathers and the widowed and divorced who have suffered more
than anyone should. The disparagement of the act, of me, has good reasons
behind it, I grant. It is true: multiplying the complexities of life only increases
the chances for failure. The statistics are there. And despite what my
objectors think, I am the most conscious of the numbers. (Fortunately for me I have
a body of advocates as well).
But what was I to do? Not fall in love with an incredible
woman (*wink) because she has children? Implicit to that position is the belief
that children are solely a burden. Or maybe I should not fall in love with the
kids because their emotional lives are and will be complicated? Inherent to
that position is the belief that ‘normal’ upbringings don’t present problems of
their own. Even still, I can understand the anti-sentiments, and the belief
that I am making it harder on myself. I can accept that this is a fact. And perhaps
it would have made me a prudent man to back out; but I could never shake
whether it would have been evidence of me being a good man.
Not that I love them because I want or wanted to prove my
goodness to myself or others, but that choosing not to love them for fear of failure
is a shitty reason not to love. Though, ‘choosing’ to love them is an
oversimplification. Choosing to love someone happens in moments, generally when someone
has ticked you off or disappointed you. Conscious efforts must then be made to do
right and good by them in accordance with and proportionate to the infraction.
No, what I chose was to put myself in a position where I knew
I would fall in love with them by
virtue of their being humans; that is, discover them as people and learn to protect,
nurture, and enjoy that discovery pragmatically and at the individual level. More precisely, the choice involved
moving past that generic mode of love into the context of fatherly and
husbandly love. I knew I had to categorize and valorize my love in the terms of
my relationship to each of them. Doing this with friends was old news: I have a
talent for it, you might say. Doing it as a father and lover is a whole other
ball game, but I’m getting the hang of it.
In any event, I get that people fear that which is foreign.
I just think it’s stupid. I also get the fear of hardship. I just think it’s a bad
reason to do anything or not do anything.
And as so many things do these days, it all reminds me of the
mythologies we are brought up in while in Fundamentalist[1] Christianity.
Fear dominates that culture in a way I am only beginning to recognize. New categories and foreign experiences are shunned.
It is a disease
of thought prone to denying the value of anything beyond its own philosophical
parameters. I was given a
Christian, white, male, bourgeoisie, raise my hand during worship, be a
missionary every day, marry a virgin, American, Republican archetype, and told implicitly and
explicitly to strive for it, as if real life has anything to do that image. As
if that archetype and a good man were coterminous.
But I learned some time ago to abandon the mythos and the myths
of that tradition. They have brought me little else besides confusion and
despair. I was taught to believe the historicity of myths. I was taught that the
doctrine of salvation is simple. I was taught that alcohol is an important moral issue. I was taught that there is a spiritual
geography called heaven and hell, gold streets and brimstone. I was taught
about the certainty of God’s existence. I was taught to over-value the sexual
experience. I was taught to under-value the importance humble thinking (ironically,
I was also taught not to think). I was taught to value the comfort of being saved over the beauty of hoping
that there is even such a thing as
being saved. I was taught to balk at novelty. I was taught to neglect counter-intuitions.
I was taught to trust a pastor with minimal training and distrust the church
with a host of geniuses. I was taught that worship meant singing when really it
meant most anything, especially that mode which is most natural to the person.
I was taught to read scripture like a fauna and a fool. I was taught I couldn’t learn anything everlasting
from a tribesman or a Taoist.
I was taught, I was taught, I was taught.
But Anne Rice said something that struck me as correct and
that helped me recognize what lay at the root of my recalcitrance toward my
former tradition. She said, “I hope God loves us as much as we love him.” To many
this appears to be nasty inversion of what conservatives take the doctrine of biblical
love to be. But it’s not actually that. That interpretation would
reflect a sort of prescriptivist view of language which is too simplistic here.
We can’t simply substitute the words “God’s love” tit for tat each time. They
mean different things at different times.
In this context, Rice means that religious people are
surprisingly fervent across the board, and that they trust their particular
tradition to bring them hope: happiness via proper relation to God
or the gods. For me, any Christian theology which does not give an account of
this phenomenon is worse than wrong; it is dangerous and geo-ethno-socio-centric and primitive.
Part of the evolution of theology must involve (and is
already becoming) the growing recognition that we live in a highly populated
world where if, “wide is the gate and many are there that enter it” is true tout court, it is simply too harsh. If,
for example, we cannot extract a universalist Christian God from the
ethnocentric Yahweh found in the O.T. we run into serious problems. When is
ethnic cleansing ever O.K., Philistine or no Philistine? And how could a
universalist God ‘die for the sins of the world’ if he didn’t give a rip about
them a few centuries earlier? Band-aid apologetics to follow from conservative mouths, for sure. But this is an appendage of Christianity, not a scrape of the knee. Band-aids don't count.
Of course, I oversimplify, not to mention that I’m being
painfully unclear and metaphorical. But the liberal approach, it’s concern for spacio-temporal/universal
man, is both more and less comfortable to me. It is less comfortable because
there is so much theory to be theorized and worked out in myself. The recognition
that I recognize very little makes one antsy. And this stands in direct
contradistinction to the conservative tradition out of which I come, a class of
people who hold to any number of dogmas at any given moment.
On the other hand it is more comfortable because it makes a
Muslim a person. It makes Ghandi like me. It forces humanity into our theory;
it forces empathy and sympathy upon us in ways which make the men and women around
us painfully similar.
Fascinatingly, I didn’t learn this type of empathy during
Sunday school. I didn’t learn it in a church or from my family. I learned it
from despair. I learned it in those moments when I didn’t know much of anything other than I didn’t
really want to exist or live anymore. I knew then what it must feel like to
need a religion. I knew myself, too. That I knew I needed it just to walk
around, eat food, sleep. Religion, nay, Christianity became a practical matter in a very
dictionary-definition sense. And I learned most of all the deep pain that comes
from life, and knew I couldn’t stand the thought of another person, any other
person suffering it for any period of time. I crossed the pons assinorum of what old
men’s wrinkled faces and sullen eyes mean, and discovered my compassion for humanity,
all humanity on the other side.
It is the same Evangelical altruism without the narrowness
of method in applying it. It is liberal, you might say, if that word can still be
said to be useful.
[1]
I no longer distinguish Evangelicalism from Fundamentalism, not, at least,
Bible-belt/conservative Evangelicalism. The word is almost useless, but
nonetheless, my point is taken.
