Publishing, Family, and Afterthoughts On My Break from Tradition

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.

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.

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[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.