The hardest part is knowing I’ll survive

Listen!

My younger son didn’t want to come to the phone when I was in California, and he said as a little guy, “I ain’t got no words for Daddy”. He wasn’t angry, he just didn’t know what a phone was for if you had nothin’ to say. Like the kid whose father calls her from near the Moon in Kubrick’s 2001.

I’d read that Robert F Kennedy on the campaign trail would call his kids from his hotel room, and tell ‘em stories. And so that is what I did.

Maudlin? Moi? I don’t think so because whatever else is the case (der Fall), my situation is no drill. It’s real.

“You’re not my father”

The nice thing about email is that when your grown child says “you’re not my father”, you can sit back, hit up with a Nicorette and a Red Bull, take a deep breath, and not react in a maudlin-violent way like Willy Loman.

Edward G. Nilges, “Death Messages Spoil Cheering War News”, assemblage of original drawings, photographs and newspaper article, 2005.

The assemblage is cut off on the right in the single-post view because I suck at WordPress image management. To see the entire drawing-assemblage, click it or click above on “Spinoza’s Blog” to see the multi-post view.

Instead, calm reflection reveals that his Mother was a piece of virtue, you had sex with his Mom about nine months before he was born, you could see his little hand on his Mom’s belly exploring the limits of the womb, and when he was born, he not only looked like you he acted like you.

For example, the son in question was getting his rations at only three months, and while his Mom was burping him, she tried to elicit a burp, saying, “where dat burp?” Whereupon my number one earthly branch said, “erp”, naming the thing in a remarkably sophisticated fashion as a joke. Truly, the apple did not fall far from the tree, for when I was at uni, working in the college bookstore, I liked, in the general climate of the times, to synthesize loud burps as a sort of rude and political gesture in the general direction of the draft, the war, and, of course, reactionary Fascistic business administration majors.

But today I must confess a certain helplessness as regards Yi Number One Son who needs to take responsibility for his behavior. I cannot refer him to a theological ground for doing the right, and he has tried to do right. But males are discounted, it appears to me, in some sort of toxic smog, back in the USA, of post and pseudo feminism which in Weininger’s sense still defines itself against phallic ideals which ordinary males cannot meet.

His Mom treated me to a lecture when we were going together back in the 1970s to the effect that I should never, ever, say that a woman who dresses flash is asking for unwanted male attention, and I participated in the Hong Kong slutwalk to support this last December.

But women do dress flash to get wanted male attention, even as I bathe to get wanted female attention. But it’s a broadcast signal. So, maybe I might not want a fat girl’s attention. Likewise, women don’t want the attention of a man who doesn’t make as much money as they do. They have a Mister Right template in mind, same as I have a Ms Right template in mind.

We need a society in which women can dress as they choose because it’s safer for them, and if it’s safer for them, it’s safer for men and children. What we’ve got are women and men in their twenties and thirties who, unlike me in the 1980s, cannot get decent jobs and act out in an increasingly brutal struggle. One in Chicago of rules that are unstated because they are unstateable: essentially the rejection of the small p Phallus in favor, not of freedom, but of a big-P Lacanian phallus that represents a lost America in which Father knew best.

But I have to be careful about this. Recent developments show that I am having a long-distance effect because unlike many divorced fathers I stayed concerned. I just don’t know if it’s any good. My signal is going into a deep matriarchy created by the Peter Pan syndrome of a lot of guys in the 1980s, myself included. I took, for the most part, a financial responsibility, and not day to day physical responsibility.

A funny guy in one of my recovery groups said it best, “Ed, quit complaining. My kid erases my hard disk every month with some new download. His Mom makes me raise him. Whereas you don’t have a teenager drinking your Red Bull, sitting in your chair, and erasing your hard drive.”

Basically, all I can conclude is that while I support Lysistrata, I do not support Elektra. There is, as Olaf the draft dodger said in ee cummings poem “i sing of olaf glad and big”, there is some shit I will not eat. Too many feminist Moms disempower their sons by sending conflicting messages.

I’ve tried, god knows I’ve tried, like Robert Crumb’s whiteman. Sure wish I’d had my wish in 1981. I wanted to drag the whole lot to Paris. But I was never taken seriously because I did not take myself seriously. I was the “mascot” of the classic dysfunctional family, self-destructive so as not to disrupt things, retreating to the Evanston library when things got too tough. I may have failed, big time, as a father as a result.

All I can do at this point is send out carefully written messages from the distant planet on which I live.

Peter’s Crazy Aunt: inking the line drawing. With a note to fathers.

Edward G. Nilges, “Line drawing on canvas for Peter’s Crazy Flibbertigibbet Knucklehead Aunt Dances on the Strand to the Music of Bach, and Clifton Chenier (The King of the Bayou)”, acrylic on canvas, 60*80 cm, 21 Dec 2011

Follow the lines carefully and feel the muscle and bone. Since she’s young, there’s a concavity under her arm save on the left where the triceps is pulling the forearm up. If I extend my arm as she does on the right the triceps is not involved. The deltoid muscle (I think that is its name) above the biceps is not a plain curve, rather, one that strives toward a triangle ever so subtly. I draw on running and dance to think about this stuff.

Her “over the shoulder boulder holder” or bikini top shall be dark in tone and not express much chiaroscuro. It’s going to be tough to express that the shorts are denim. But the folds, and loose threads, work. Yes, they express vaginal thoughts. Boo hoo. Just because she’s dancing and it’s hot doesn’t mean she wishes to do anything more than dance. If I can run to the store shirtless and attract nothing more than hostile or interested stares, very rarely, women should also be free to mosey around comfortably as we said in the Hong Kong Slutwalk.

A friend said her waist is still too narrow, but I need it to twist in such a manner that from the angle of view it is narrow indeed. The violence has to mediate the calm delight of her face, and the peaceful geometry of her legs.

She is not en pointe, instead caught leaping. There’s an insistent dropped vertical line from the shorts to the toe but very delicate chiaroscuro of the knee interrupts slightly.

This is not intended for laddie magazines. Instead, I am quite serious about it. The dance is what makes us human even at the end of time, dammit. It expresses joy and sorrow. Your real artist doesn’t represent an Idea because he’s a lecher who wants to objectify females, even if he IS a lecher who wants to objectify females, he does so because God created woman as release 2.0 and rectified the design flaws in men (baldness, love handles, anger management, etc.), and the female figure, in Western art, has always represented ideas and the transcendental.

Sure, Felibien asked Poussin to put a lot of pretty girls in Poussin’s Rebecca at the Well. But Creation Theology teaches us that “God so loved the world”. It’s the fundamentalists that hate it.

In a dysfunctional family such as my family of origin or the situation in which I find myself now, speaking of love is an insult, and I realized with amazement…this is like the situation in Fundamentalism, where the pious actually prevent you from talking of God lest you, an ordinary slob, make some doctrinal error, step on someone’s toes, or open an old wound.

A friend who’s done business in Cairo says it drives him crazy: the cab drivers, stuck in traffic, who put spoken, not sung, recitations of the Koran on their tape deck. For some Islamists believe it is blasphemy to get enjoyment from singing the Koran. There are horrible YouTube videos of a woman transformed into a dog (which the police need to investigate) because she “did something” to the Koran, and my own Catholicism is not free of such brutality.

Shakespeare stopped making references to religion after the Puritans increased their power after King James’ accession and his late Romances take place in a pre-Christian world.

Likewise to express love is an insult in a dysfunctional family, and I really got my tit in a wringer yesterday over that one, which makes it painful to go on.

But one of the most beautiful things my recovery plan teaches me is pure Duty, not doing that which thou lusts to do, not today. Stopping short, keeping your paws off the nuclear option. Speaking to yourself in the manner of Jenny Holzer (PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT), complete, gnomic sentences, commands, surrounded, as in the Wanderer, with serpent shapes. Abraham and Isaac.

I will hold off on any moves until I meet with my therapist and continue with this work and my other constructive projects. I might even have some sort of film deal. I must use my time constructively.

“We must bear all. O hard condition”

Shakespeare, Henry V

“Muss ess sein? Ess muss sein!”

Beethoven: Listen!

A Note to Fathers, and Prospective Fathers Who Are Artists

Fathers! Stay with your wives and children. It’s a lie you can co-parent. Instead, your wife will be overburdened with their care and YOU will pay the big bucks. As the kids grow older you will grow apart and you’ll be an embarrassment to them. A joke.

Here are some things you can say NOW to save your marriage.

“Yes, dear, of course.”
“I have jumper cables and know how to use them.”
“Let me fix dinner. The kids like rice, beans and octopus with hot sauce.”
“I love Pride and Prejudice.”

Here’s what not to say.

“Aw hon.”
“I need space [no, you don't.]“
“I was drunk. I met her inna yard.”
“I love Flashman.”

Because of the systematic and world-wide oppression of women, I regard actually marrying one as equivalent to joining the Marines or the 101st Airborne division: a full time job. You’re an artist? Forget it. Don’t get married. Ever. Because she’s oppressed and prone to clinical depression, we don’t need YOUR vaporings, can you dig it. And check it out: the Marines and Airborne let you go after a couple of years with a fat pension assuming you don’t get killed.

But YOUR reward is…you get to grow old with her. And married guys get killed or wounded slightly less than Marines or Airborne in the course of their duties.

Hoo ha!