Family As Crucible

Rick Moody's ''Black Veil'' is a nonfiction attempt to show how family fictions are a veil shrouding who you are, he said. In order to survive, ''You have to recast yourself apart and outside from the family lineage.''

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records on ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
Writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

Writing -- Howard Nemerov

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. -Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945)

Disclaimer: All names of persons are purely fictional and bear no relation to actual persons living, dead or in between.

Predestined fate is a phenomenon worthy of some thought, though I like the term rumination better. Rumination implies an imaginative chewing of the cud. Fate seems to be intimately intertwined with one's temperament, but I have nothing definitive to offer. Hesse said it much better than I could ever attempt to in Demian.  Somehow, I know that I won't get to the heart of this or any other matter in life. As Jung said, the big problems in life are never solved, they are continually tumbled like stones trying to become round in time out of time. But I can try to riff on it, like a head arrangement combining words with music. I wanted to include audio clips embedded here, but I think that I will follow this up with a sound track. That, however, might be over the top. Music says it all for me and expresses what I try to clumsily describe. (When one embeds an audio clip, you have to be careful of the HTML, at least in typepad software. If it's malformed or overly complex the whole post is rendered in HTML. You can salvage it by cutting and pasting to a new post, but I would rather avoid that on a lengthy post like this. Typepad is working on this glich. Stay tuned.)

The recent events in my tight knit family have given me pause to wonder about fate, candor and friendship within a family. Like I have said before, my mother was part of the integral glue that kept my extended family together. She spent a lot of time at my grandmother's matriarchal home. She was a devoted daughter to her mother, wife to my father and a kind and caring mother to me. My father, a photographer by trade, accepted his fate and preferred to tinker in the attic, listen to music or read. He was a model railroad and model plane afficionado. He was good at both. He also read Maupassant, Balzac and Poe. He handed the appreciation of the arts to me. He never pushed it on me. For this I remember him in every song I hear and every memorable prose line I read. I too spent a lot of time at my grandmother's since my parents both worked. Much of my impressionable youngster time was spent at the home of the matriarch. Westerly, RI gets some monster thunderstorms. It must be the proximity to the sea. My grandmother was terrified to death by them. She would start praying and wailing once a storm had begun to unleash its fury. My cousin Margaret and I would be huddled in the basement with our Nana who reassuredly tore out her hair while Jove bowled. The all purpose basement was where my Nana used to raise newly hatched eggs and strangle chickens at a huge sink that had steps leading up to it. It was sort of an altar of food preparation. Little people looked up at it. She would sometimes splatter blood over me as she strangled young chickens that tasted like chicken should when cooked. She would also wash fresh vegetables and fruit from her vast garden in this great sink of bounty. The room had a gas stove and a cast iron wood fired stove. Here is where I learned the mortal fear of Jove and his bolts of fire. In contrast, here is where I learned the community of preparing and enjoying food. This thunder terror instilled a primordial Fear that has never left me totally. I believe it is preferable and more human to have some fear of lightning than being a fearless dead seersucker-clad golfer on the 13th green. Nana had a very good sense of humor. She loved to laugh and it was infectious. She was sly and there were the whispers of old-country Calabrian witchcraft swirling around her memory after she died in 1980. I would exasperate her and her anger would thankfully turn to laughter, mostly. She could also be very generous and tender. So, in a way I was one of the first cousins of my generation to experience her fear, wrath, generosity, warmth and drama first hand. One of my grandmother's favorite phrases was "io il tortuneo il cuolo". Rough translation: "I'll twist/break your ass." She used it both angrily and jokingly. You would not want to be around Nana when she was on the war path. Matriachally formidable is all I can say. Mannaggia, sporco and furbo are other expressions she used frequently. Always with the hands in concert. I think she would have stirred the familial pot a little differently than I did. She would have been much more brutally direct. With. Her. Hands. Maybe the pot needed some stirring. I know that my grandmother would have begun to stir it up much sooner than I did. She would have started about 24 years ago, post-Orwell's infamous date. In many ways, things had already begun to fester and rot before that time. If you don't stir a pot, things can burn, become stagnant. Events and feelings have led me to see familial ties that attempt to bind without love are only that; bonds and shackles with obligation and guilt tacked on. Much like the Catholic Church. That the family is a micro-reflection of this doctrine is no accident. Take a gander at what has happened to the Church recently. Do you think that there is a connection?

Recently, a formerly close cousin and near brother to me, remarked that I had stirred up the proverbial family pot due to my verbal attacks on various members of his/our family. My derogatory remarks were made in person, on the telephone and via the Internets. Damn those Internets. It was those world wide web tabloid-like exposes that still gall him and those related to him. Words on a screen. All of which were true. All of which did not include the mention of other more incriminating deeds, not words, from the past. Afterall, I did use some discretion. I never claimed to be totally heartless and ruthless, but I am working on it. Embarrassing and horrible to read and realize that anyone anywhere could read it too. He aired the family laundry on the Internets! No! Look for yourself. He did. That no good under achiever who never lived up to his potential. Maybe I was suffering from hidden talents or suffered from anosognosia, or lack of insight about one’s own delusions, psychosis and other symptoms. As if anyone knows what the hell their potential or anyone else's is to begin with. That gave me more than a chuckle. And there is the memorably brilliant: "The Irish have no culture" uttered in front of my spouse who is 84.7% Irish. I guess they never got around to the Celtic monastic tradition or The Book of Kells at that Catholic college, for Christ's sake. It is only the preservation of Christianity as we know it. Nothing to get frothed up over.

The Internets, for all its uses and abuses, is a potently cogent way to transmit information. Its impact can only be dimly sensed by us techie-impaired morons. The geeks knew long ago. Gutenberg has probably shit his celestial seersucker pants billions of times by now. Look at the You Tube explosion and Cory Doctorow's explanation of digital copies and the need to think like a dandelion rather than a mammal. Image vs reality reflected/refracted through memory and fantasy amplified infinitely by the Internets. Massively transformative. Fellini is right on in this territory. Imagine his weblog and if he had had digital editing for his films! He intuited and made art of the prima materia that was presented to him. He was open to it all. That's what artists do. I am no artist, but I am inspired by their imaginative vision and filigreed touch of the divine.

I know that I don't know anything. It was ignorant self importance that misled in my quest for authenticity. It was not any premeditated intentional acts that I thought about or considered. It happened and was offered to me. Maybe it was fate that I had to submit to, like an unknown territory of my temperament that kept lapping up against me from my blindspotted sty(e). Given how close I was to many members of my family, I find it somewhat fatefully weird that I have become estranged from all but a few of them. Some of the alienation surely comes willfully from or through me. Some of it issues from other people and events. Over the past 30 some years, I witnessed relationships deteriorating and crumbling. False loyalties based on spurious motives. A dessicated charade assumed the place of relationships once filled with feelings of heartfelt warmth. Assumed moral superiority and absolute judgement of others; another arrow in the side of an afflicted family. Acquisition became the hallmark of one's character and worth. Nothing new here. La Famiglia has been under assault for decades. Look at some of the factors eating away at its underpinnings. They are too numerous to mention. You don't have to look very far. One of the first things is that almighty dollar. In many cases it is money that precipitates estrangement. However, that's too simple in this case and many other families. I believe that it is the lack of love and feeling that is the root cause. $Money$ is just the ostensible excuse. For the love of money. Filthy lucre in a filthy beautiful world.

I don't hate anyone, but I do dislike some of my family and certain inlaws very much. It is very difficult to live in joy among the spiteful without hatred though. Through it all, I remember those persons in my family who taught me well and helped me to get along in this world. However, it is those humans and animals alike who have touched my feelings and who will always mean the most to me.

Sicilian Proverbs:

Amuri e signuria nun vonnu cumpagnia.
Eng. Love and arrogance don't go together.

Cu' è nimicu di li cani, è nimicu di li cristiani.
Eng. If you don't like dogs, you don't like people.

Si vô' passari vita cuntenti, statti luntanu di li tò parenti.
Eng. If you want to have a happy life, stay far away from your relatives.

'Ntr'amici e 'ntra parenti 'n'accattari e 'un vìnniri nenti.
Eng. Among friends and relatives don't buy or sell anything.