Who's Your Daddy Part Two


 


Especially as I get older, Father's Day, as my father is dead and I have no children, can be surprisingly difficult. It's more difficult with this year, with my friend Tom Artis in his grave, leaving two young children in hard circumstances. I'm still at the state when it doesn't take much to think of Tom and, while I don't spontaneously burst into tears as I did after my father died, it's no fun.

But big deal. Things are tough all over, and I can no longer use feeling bad as an excuse for not doing my homework. So it follows herewith.

I remember reading August Strindberg's The Father , and being astonished at how much a raw howl of pain it was. The father screams out "How can I know? How can I know?" and makes the point that at a word from a woman, a father can simply cease to be--that his whole status, social definition, self-definition, can snap the thread and fall into the abyss.
Fatherhood is a real thing, but it's reality is based on a microscopic doubly twisted thread, surrounded by hope, fear, and conjecture, while motherhood is huge and miraculous--maybe mankind's first reality and its first transcendence at the same time. While motherhood has immense biological aspects, fatherhood is almost completely social.
It is al the more overheated for that. The chain from father to son, part of the desperate male chain, cheating death and God at the same time is, in your bed in the dark with no one to fool but yourself, contingent, doubtful, and chancy. Instead of cheating death without the cheap trick of heaven, you (honestly) hover between the past ant the future, borne up by neither fatherhood nor sonhood, sadly and puzzlingly only whoever it is that you are.
And all the while mother and child actually are the struts and spars of human history.
The Romans, those supreme non-huffers of dreams, did not worry about 'blood': Heirs to houses like Augustus's were built by adoption. A dynasty was a social and political organization, no more romantic than tax rolls. A Roman House was built not on mythical blood, but on Will. It's devoid of comfort--but when were Romans interested in comfort?

So down from Empire to Father's Day, from sacrifices to the Vestals to collect phone calls. Even though middle class America worries less about inheritance and more about love and character, being a father is still the way men semi-consciously seek to cheat both death and God. We earnestly set forth that the social things that a father gives a child and a child a father are every bit as important as the overwhelming physical Great Work that is Woman's. It's absurd on the face of it: fatherhood is basically a Title IX affirmative action for motherhood. That's not to say that that's not true: depending on what the fate and purpose of the universe is, and what God and Meaning is, if anything. the social things (which after all include Love and Courage and so much more) may be just as big a thing as the Big Typewriter abandoned on the beach we clamber around in.

It's just that we want so very much for that to be so that is the biggest argument against it.

Fathers in America tend to be cartoon characters--but that's not because we're screwing up. Rather that the Father has always been a fragile thing, shifting as social structures shift--A product, I am arguing, rather than a source of the structures. Terribly terribly important, as my own heart and mind testify--but maybe as unreal as love or beauty.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. Collect from Reality.

Will you accept the charges?

Posted: Monday - June 18, 2007 at 11:17 PM        

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