Complexities


On Saturday I didn't have much time, as I haven't lately because I've had to focus on getting my ass to work on the houses. At the San Francisco apartment we are planning a new garden. I spent much of yesterday with my dad at his workshop, making an insulated box for a water holding tank. There are lots of things that step up to take priority over unsalaried writing. I'm going to have to just hold the line against the idea that if you aren't paid for something, it isn't worth doing. There is the alternative thought that if you aren't paid for something, it belongs completely and exclusively to you. That is certainly sobering.

When I began to play music I was a child. Or perhaps I should say that the part that was trying to play music and sing was a child, because it had never been developed. So when it came into the light, it was very unsophisticated. It had the advantage of having a lot of energy, as none had been expended, and the disadvantage a water buffalo has when it doesn't see the lion.

But sometimes things don't work the way you expect them to work, for the simple reason that the smaller cannot see the larger. That is the succinct argument favoring one's having faith in the existence of a higher being. If you have no faith that there is one, you have no faith in your own evolution, and will be tortured and likely destroyed by the negative mother. The negative mother is death, the Old Witch. She is the voice inside each of us which says, "I am going to tell you the truth. It's your fault. Why don't you just die?"

She is a witch after all, and when she strikes it's meant to penetrate the defenses of her sister, Mary, who nurtures the new child and doesn't need to say a word.

The witch demonstrates that a child is not capable of mature work, and since mature work equals work which has risen to the top in a materialistic culture, that means everything is compared to what makes the most money in order to determine its value. It doesn't take much to destroy the joy in creation. Nurturing is a delicate art, and a too heavy hand is like pulling on the little shoots to make them grow faster.

Mary doesn't say anything at all. She looks into the eyes of the child and sees the phases of growth, from infant to the face of an old man or an old woman that shines like a star.

These are the polarities, and at either polarity in a field energy tends to turn into it's opposite, so that too much attention and protection become a coffin, as with Snow White, who was seriously engaged by the Old Witch. The coffin is the mother's unerring support and service.

At the polarity of the Old Witch the death can be the seed from which I grow, as Mr. Burroughs once said. "When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow."

On the way over to dad's my daughter was with me, and I was trying to talk to her. It's not easy anymore. But I know she must notice some of the synchronicity that goes on in these times that seem like conflict between us. She wields a mean sword, just like that chick in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But I am old and crafty. And besides, Linda tells me what I'd better not do. She looks ahead through Mary's eyes. I'm the one who can have more of the Old Witch offering a quick and easy solution to all conflict with those weaker than myself. And who can be more demonstrably weaker and under my control than the infant I loved more than anything that ever existed?

What one does with an infant reflects the pattern of one set of female polarities, those involved in maternal affairs. This same patterning will be engaged with the child in a grown man or woman, and will exert a controlling effect far greater than can be imagined by the immature ego. Without some intervention there is only a mechanical engaging of patterns between those in intimate relationship. The intervention can come in the form of a consciousness of the pattern, because that is impossible until you contain the pattern instead of it's containing you. I suppose when you are sufficiently inclusive you resolve the polarities.




As you can see, there are complexities in these parent child talks.

The complexity I hit when I try to talk about spiritual growth, as in, for example, "If you got up before noon maybe you'd get a job," stimulate a countering response, as for example, "I can work in the evenings." When I try to use logic, which is probably a blunt instrument, and educate her in the ways of the ego and shadow, she stabs me with the only knife at hand. "I don't believe in that psychological shit."

"I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about something you don't have to believe in because you can observe it to be true."

In my mind I hear the cock crow three times. I give Jesus a kiss and the Romans take him away.

After a fruitless parrying of swords around whether or not what I was saying rests on fact or faith, neither of us won because she was right and that pissed me off. She is supposed to understand that knowledge is not always as demonstrable as, for example, pie and ice cream. Sometimes dad wants to pass along what took him a lot of work to own. But what an irresistible power source to just say no and watch him fume.

There is my own father, almost ninety, who is a craftsman, engineer and mechanic. He can fix anything he needs to fix because he puts his mind on it and stays there until it's done. If he has to make himself a part or a tool because he can't get it anywhere else, he makes it. He knows how to do finished carpentry, masonry, or whatever. He can pull a transmission and fix it if he needs to. He tried to teach me these things, but there was a problem.

He had overpowered me with his authority, and thus when I was with him it wasn't fun, in the same way it could be fun with my mother. Now making something with him in the shop is a precious thing.

The relationship with father is the other major (complex) pattern: the father can be a monster, and always is. He may not know this but the child certainly knows it, and knows enough to not talk about it. That is the secret that men keep. They have something in them that is brutally violent when viewed by the object of this brutality. But from their own view they are enforcing discipline, and the lazier the father, the more brutal he is, because he's looking for a quick and easy way to impose good order on the household while not actually practicing self-discipline.

The father also can be, and always is, the sun toward which the young plant grows, and which encourages the flowering of Spiritual connections with the stars, and the mystery contained there. He tends to love his children by making things for them. This allows him to demonstrate in an abstract way the love which he has for his family. The erotic, or sexual, love is the container of energy the child needs for the long voyage toward those stars.

The devouring father is the polarity of the father which allows him to eat his young.

The protecting father is the polarity which takes that share of the eros which is in the relationship with the child, and makes something with it. Some fathers fix the car and some build businesses. But at the instinctual base of the relationship is the drive to protect the nest.

Again, at the extremes, things turn into their opposites. A vice is just a virtue which has been overdone and vice versa. As for example, when this woman was little she was the star pupil in school, and read books all the time. Now she regrets to inform me that she is no longer smart, and thus there are no expectations on her to go to college or even have any ambition toward anything.

It reminds me of a comedy I saw one time when this couple was really focused on the kids not eating fattening stuff, and later on in the movie they are older, and both of them are total blimps.

"Hey, if I had been there I would never have let you do that," I said.

But I was not there. And the idiots at the grammar school made up some sadistic game in which an unwitting victim would be sacrificed. Again, the absence of experience is the mantle given to the sacrifice. In this case, the kid who read the most books got to have lunch with the principal every week or month or something. I can't imagine a more devious ritual in which one child is pointed out as the Christ imagio, ready to process the sins of those who look on with malice and hatred at an overachiever.

But I do have faith that even though I see things, I have to accept a higher power. There is a pattern there which is going to play out. It might be a super smart person who travels under the cloak of a carefree vagabond. It isn't up to me. All I can do is ride along on the trail we're following.

I speed up a little as a subtle warning from the monster that he would enjoy just surging some hormones and adrenalin and intimidating the kid into obedience. It's a family tradition. But just as my own father met his waterloo not with me, but with my little sister, I meet mine here. She is right and she knows it. But she doesn't hesitate to soften the blow by reminding me that though she was smart once, she is no longer.

I turn on the radio and there is a program about faith, and about atheism, and how they are in conflict. It began to express the very ideas we had opened, but found too hot to handle between us. After a few miles we were engaged at a more amiable conversational level, talking about whether or not Stephen Colbert is an atheist. "I'm not sure, but I think I read he's a Roman Catholic."

"Then why is he saying 'Hello pagans and sodomites?'"

"I don't know. Maybe he's not saying it. Maybe his character is saying it, because his entire persona is supposed to be a take off on what it would be like if somebody on the left behaved by Bill O'Reilly. And besides, not everybody who goes to church believes in some god who is male and who lives in the sky." I didn't mention that it depends on your level of maturity. What to a child is the protective aspect of the father is indeed a male who lives in the sky, and he can make life heaven or hell.

"The men who wrote our Declaration of Independence referred to 'Nature's God,' which isn't gendered, and which just means there are higher natural laws that guide us." There were things I didn't think to say, then, but can say now: We have faith we exist in relationship with a higher power because somebody who loves us has seen us in our highest incarnation, an old man or an old woman in whom the stars are shining. There is no longer differentiation between spirit and matter. We have completed the infusion of consciousness into the archetypal form.

Is this atheism? Certainly it would be to somebody whose faith is so obedient to the father that it cannot grow. It has been devoured. This is the brand of conservatism that creates dark ages, full of intellectual repression and religious certainty.

The polarities are always there, and because they turn to their opposites at the extremes, nothing can be denied without allowing it to go unconscious. The devouring father and mother kill children, there's no doubt about that. The world is filled with vacant eyes and careless love.

She puts a cd in the slot and we listen to music.

I consider how she is rejecting what I tell her for the same reason I rejected being like my dad. I began at some point to refuse to do craft work, because I wanted to follow intellectual pursuits. He was so good at it I didn't want to compete with him. I wanted to follow something he didn't know about. And yet there are clues, somewhere in my memory, that when he was young he wanted to write.

The shadow side is always visible. The son grows in the shadow of the father, and at some point in his more mature development sees that only by embracing the father can his eye become single again, as it was when he was born, before the advent of sexual complexities. So why should it surprise me that my daughter grows in the shadow of her mother, and of me? The more emphasis I put on book learning and psychology, the more she will find no energy of discovery there.

The father in me has to resist the negative mother, who will always tell me it is all hopeless and that as a father, I'm as useful as a bottle of whiskey and a stick of dynamite. In those moments there's only one thing to do, and that's say, "Get out of my face, bitch," and put my faith in something I saw in Mary's eyes.

Posted: Mon - August 20, 2007 at 10:40 AM