Nothing sentimental about it here: the hard, unloving, afraid to stand outside himself part. The ready emotional violence part. The persecuted, unsure, looking for an exit part. The life as industrial sandpaper part.
He even predicted the current state of our society, and I used to think that was the sickness in his soul. Now I think it’s more likely that his own hurt sensitized him to the upwelling archetype, whether he knew it or not. These things take centuries and decades, and then they blow. It’s right here in plain sight, and we still have to get out of bed in the morning as if everything’s okay. Which in a way it is, I guess.
There isn’t anywhere to go, though. That’s what gets me. It’s not like you can take a clipper ship around the Horn and find a whole new world. The last time I felt like I could was maybe ’65-’75, then in the ’80s you could hear them screwing down the giant rusty bolts. So I keep coming back to this, because it seems so obvious when I’m sane, and I need to remember it when I’m not: if both A and B will kill me dead, there must be a C that no one’s told me about.
No related posts.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Your old man – I think that’s who you must be describing – sounds a bit like my old man, and probably like lots of fathers of that era, who contended with difficulties in their own lives grimmer than anything most of their sons have had to face. These guys were generally without self-pity, although full of beefs about the world. I kind of admire that in them, more now than I did then, admittedly. You’ve written about your father some, but I wish you’d write more. We’re both at the age now when the storms of the past are done with and we should be able to think about them clearly, not as either “that silver-haired daddy of mine” or “that tyrranical monster who ruined my life.” As I see it, we their sons have a pretty even calculus of the bad and good in us, just as our fathers did, just packaged differently from theirs, and, of course, packaged differently for each human being in any event. It was ever thus.
Whatever the state of the world, whether as dire as it seems to you or, as I would contend, about as dire as it has always been (“just packaged differently”), the real objective of any sentient human being is to free himself from the “mind-forged manacles” – the conventional wisdom of the day – and think, live, breathe, achieve, love in his own unique way.