1. Prelude

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.

             William Wordsworth, The Prelude ^[i]

A dose of shame can sometimes soften the defended Heart, make our weaknesses and unavoidable, remind us of our humanity. But it appeared that was not something anyone in my childhood understood. Perhaps that explains why getting beneath the surface, beyond what is apparent, has become my life-long quest. Though I didn’t always understand what drove this, my Heart knew I was seeking healing from the depths. And the child, the artist, the lover and visionary within desperately needed the veil to drop so I could recognize what is True and Beautiful.

What I Learned from My Father

My father was better at manipulating the world than understanding it.

He told me to work hard. What did that look like in real life? It looked like digging a hole large enough for an inground swimming pool. This is not a metaphor. My father wouldn’t have understood metaphor; and he never really explained why he was driven to do this hard work of putting in a pool in the backyard. I was in elementary school, and still a soldier in his army, conscripted into his fantasy that floating in chlorinated water would bring him happiness. We spent an entire summer shoveling. At a certain depth, the hole filled up with ground water. Thick oozy slop weighed down each scoop and throw.

He got pissed off because my throws were not on point. There’s a way to use a shovel. You should know that!

Of course, there were backhoes, but hard work never killed anybody. Late in that summer of 1965, just as school was about to start again, he broke down and rented a sump pump and backhoe. He always used that phrase, breaking down, meaning giving up reluctantly, doing something that you just never want to do or admit to having done. I don’t know if it was common for people of his Greatest Generation to speak in such terms, passing along “knowledge” in repetitive phrases. Much later, I learned from Robert Bly that unless your father has done his own work, then he can only teach you his temperament, not his wisdom.

More recently, I learned from Dr. Lain Mc Gilchrist, that my father’s expressions are a sign of a left hemisphere dominance. Left is the division of the brain that’s better as the “emissary” not the “master.” It specializes in cliched and paranoid references. This part of us is “almost a tool” to pin down fragments rather than utilizing the power of language to convey “a spark of the heart.” Even without ever knowing this science, as a boy it didn’t take me long to realize, breaking down to the fact, that my father’s words were shallow and ill-informed.

I had stopped idealizing him much earlier than that summer we dug a hole in the ground. I stopped when I kept getting hurt, certainly by the restraints and also by his belt (more about that later). But it was not because of the physical pain (well it was that too) but because he was so dismissive or outright angry about my pleadings for mercy. If you think I’m being unfair, I assure you I’ve tried not to hold on to these things. My mother taught me that. You can’t hold on to stuff because it’ll drive you crazy. She practiced what she preached. She never held on to anything, including herself.

Constructive Criticism

But to give credit where credit was due, another one of my mother’s favorite phrases, my father did show me how to keep my head down. If you didn’t, then you were sure to get pummeled sooner or later.  Getting pummeled. I recall a visceral memory. Stepping off the school bus in seventh grade, surrounded by a group of older boys. Ricky wanted to fight me, they said. Of course, men fight when they are challenged. Don’t show weakness. Man up.

Ricky was learning boxing, and he must have thought I was a somewhat large and soft object to practice on. I barely knew this kid until he left my face all bruised and swollen. I didn’t even try to punch back.

You need to keep your head down. You look like a punching bag, my father said. He next described some unlikely physical move I was supposed to use in a fight, to throw off the opponent. A wrestling move. Like using a shovel, this was something I should know!

When he learned that Ricky was physically smaller than me, he lost interest. I was a lost cause.

And More Advice

You need to get a good job with a salary that will allow you to buy a house, not just any house, but the place of your dreams.

Some houses, of course, are deal breakers because the countertops aren’t granite. If there’s carpet in the living room, then you can’t live with that. It needs to have some resale value and location, location, location. A million-dollar view.

Of course, if you’re handy like my father, then you can fix or renovate anything, probably with tools that you find around your house already. You don’t want to break down and go buy something new, especially if you’re just going to remove a couple walls for an open concept. Hard work never hurt anybody. Sweat makes the man.

After the house of your dreams, you need a boat, a fishing boat, or a speed boat. With a lake house, or something on the beach, so close to the ocean that the tides carry the surf right up to the deck where you sip on your beers. In the driveway you’re going to need a large truck, like a Ford 150, with a cab big enough to entertain guests.

You’ve probably heard all of this or something similar: if you work hard, you get things you want, then you can go on trips, like real vacations. That’s why you put up with demeaning and soul-flattening stuff at work because management is always out to get us.

Organizations screw everyone over.

Workplaces are all like that.

The union isn’t much better with all its ridiculous rules.

Everybody is in it for themselves—end of story.

My father again, of course. At one point, he was a union buster, while his father (my grandfather whom I never met) was up there in the union in Providence Rhode Island. Up there as a boss was a location you wanted to get to, but my father didn’t trust that place nor the people in it.

I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn from all that.

Maybe you’ve not been contaminated by parental temperaments, perhaps parental phrases are not quite so intrusive in your mind. But there’s one thing we probably have in common. You have Work to do, and so have I, and likely (of course, I’m just guessing), your father didn’t inform you—maybe no one, not one man or one woman in your life has shown you—how to do the Work. Even how to recognize what work you need to do to feel less crazy. But we all need to do it, dig into the dramas that have been chiseled into our bones. You might get pummeled, but we can’t afford to keep our heads down.

Footnotes

Prelude: Prepping for Heart-drama

[i] Wordsworth, “Book I, Childhood and School Time,” The Prelude, (Oxford University Press, London 1970) lines 301-302.

[ii] Attributed to Robert Bly. “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive his temperament, not his teaching.”

[iii] Lain Mc Gilchrist, The Master and Its Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, (Yale University Press 2009), 51.