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?
2 thoughts on “Father’s Day”
Rome in flames, I believe, or at least the smoke-filled metaphor of a culture in decline.
Others see us ascending towards an apex of grandeur through the efforts of a man-child who believes in bullying opponents and flexing his flab to make a statement. The reactions of the non-gullible are, as always, to shake our collective heads in disbelief that anyone could possibly buy into this madness, yet millions do. Ah, justification! The blinders that allow for anything to be possible, regardless of the outcome.
As for fatherhood, I’ve only been a pseudo dad to various pets. I know that it is something I have missed out on. Too late now. No Mulligans for us critters.
So much does revolve around fatherhood. I regret at the time, I had not yet learned much that I would have leveraged to be a better dad to our three children. We are who we are. Our behavior is a disclosure of our view of everything. True, there are no mulligans. I take some comfort that our three have indicated forgiveness towards me, those years when I was “missing in action.”
The imperious leader now ensconced in the White House was abused as a child. He has become an abuser, has gathered about himself a gang of advisers, cabinet heads who are simpatico with verbal and institutional violence as a hallmark of reality. Thus we all are being dragged into hell on account of an inter-generational failure at fatherhood.