Father’s Day
Sunday morning, and it is Father’s Day. I feel puzzlement each year when Father’s Day arrives. What a mother does is something that is easy to feel. Is that Illusion? I am no female. And if I were, would I be up to giving birth? Is everything simply one more delusion, another fantastic and flawed insight to be added to the pile left strewn behind me?
How much can one learn from books? If knowledge is nothing other than the ability of the body to execute actions with absolute economy of effort, to precise affect, — then only what we learn-by-doing matters. Everything else is hearsay. Just another attempt to imagine that I “know.” Knowing is to practice, to achieve by trial and error what amounts to what we mean by “art.” To throw oneself over and over, at the hard-edged real, until one becomes master, then makes/finds a niche, a toehold.
Then what do I know?
None of this has to do with money, that medium of exchange, in this society, what America now features, regards as the prime virtue. The prime virtue is that which by consensus we deem supreme, the apex value. Money as virtue, the idea strikes me as obscene on the face, a demeaning, slavery-to-legal tender. And we thought that slavery was outlawed in the course of the Civil War! Obviously now slavery by other means than a physical chain is the rule. Slavery is the enforceable extraction of life-force from another who is unable to resist, to prevent the theft. When there is no alternative. No outside to the game. Theft has many alternative descriptions: extortion, insider trading, tariffs, war, legal requirement, deception… So many ways to say: pay up sucker! Taking without giving.
My thoughts careen into an overgrown path littered by waste.
It is Father’s Day. I wager that there is still time left to practice fatherhood. What can I do, what work remains for us?
Enough smoke tinged self-talk. But something is burning.
Can you smell it?
