I bet you're saying to yourself that Daddy really takes a long time between these posts. But that's cause daddy is a slacker and stuck in his own pathetic little rut of depression. You see, mom and I are living in St. Louis and I'm not working and we don't have access to our cash, despite having alot of it at this moment (Don't worry, it will probably be all gone by the time you get around. We recent sold the house where you were conceived and that's the cash we have now. But that's going to go into a new home for you because having to live in an apartment sucks ass...that's Daddy more direct and less circumspect than perhaps he should be. BUt that's part of what it means to be true to yourself, I think). I should be doing work; Lord knows I have alot of it to do what with finishing the dissertation and all. BUt Daddy is sad and isolated cause he can't really go anywhere and do anything except look and that seems even sadder. In any event, he doesn't really know anybody in this area and he misses his friends very much.
To build on what I said in my previous post, love is about making that connection with someone else that gives you a glimpse of truth, which is really a revelation, in a very fundamental way, of the fact that we are fundamentally connected to one another. Being human means being with humans, exaltedly naked, bare soft flesh against the hard cold edges of world and other. Awww, what the hell! I've suddenly lost my desire to continue on here.
All I really should say is that the best comfort you can take in the endeavor with the Other, with the other, with love and all the shit of life, is to be found in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" especially in the epic account of the self that is "Song of Myself" (any true account of the self, because it must recognize (as any thing which purports to be a full account, a totality to put it formally) that which it is not, which is to say its negation in the Other, will always be epic in nature). The best summation of all that I was talking about before, and the greatest comfort one can find, is to be found in that whole poem but most especially in stanza 6. It's all about the connection of life and death to one another; ultimately, the thing we must all confront, is that the Other for all of us is death. That's why, even were we to live utterly and all apart from everyone else, there would still be that relation of Self and Other that defines who we are even to ourself. Because we all face that dilemma, be kind to your fellow human. Treat them with respect, sympathy and kindness no matter who they are and what they do, which doesn't mean that you can't be angry, loud, aggressive and all those other things that smaller intellects think of as inherently negative. Remember, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. In that respect, anger can be understood (sometimes..we'll get into the qualifications of that later) as an act of love. It sounds strange I know. But really give it some thought and I think you'll see what I'm talking about.
Anyway, Whitman is a comfort. Read Stanza six at my funeral will you?
OK, I probably should be doing something more productive with my time...not that writing these words for my child in the future isn't productive. But understand little gleam that Daddy is under the gun to do ALOT of stuff right now to bring one phase of his life, that that was before you, to a close before the next, which is you, opens. That way Daddy can bring all his considerable attention to bear on helping you to grow up and be the best you can be, because he wants that very, very much.
Awright, before I start sobbing quietly and/or drooling on myself (distinct possibilities for me at any point in my life) let me explain what I intend here. What I would like to do is have these entries form a sort of running commentary/interrogation of what I consider to be the proper moral and ethical ways by which to organize one's life. As such, they will be necessarily messy and subjective, full of all sorts of tortured and convoluted logic, to say nothing of gapping holes in what ever argument they happen to be making/attacking/pretending to posture as.
I say all this by way of introducing what is the first and perhaps most important of these, which is that you should always, ALWAYS, make up your own mind. Dad's a human being, which means he is a messy and slobbering beast as all human beings are (you might detect some of Daddy's misanthropic tendencies here...we'll talk about that another time). Being messy and slobbering beasts, that means Daddy, like the rest of the human race, is prone to error, occasionally. So you can't always trust that why I do what I do and say is so for the right reasons. So ask questions. Demand answers. Don't be satisfied with any that come to easily or that appear to neatly fit in with what you expect especially when they come from other people. I suppose this says, really, that your approach to life should be one of thoroughgoing skepticism. And that's an important observation to make because it means that you should include yourself under the reach of those things that you question. So lemme rephrase this:
BE SKEPTICAL OF EVERYONE, BUT MOST OF ALL OF YOURSELF.
No one can do the damage to you that you can do to yourself; believe me, it's a lesson that I've learned on more than one occasion. I've found that those times when I really hurt myself are most often also the times when I thought I knew exactly what I was doing/thinking/feeling/believing/etc. And the fact of the matter is that I didn't. Why? Well, I suppose it is easier to lie to yourself than it is to anyone. But I suppose that it is also that we spend so much time with ourselves (and this isn't true of everyone. For good or ill, Daddy is an intellectual and so lives in his head. Consciousness is being for Daddy, which i why he thinks he can write these things so as to make a difference in your life. That's because Daddy wants you to be an intellectual too. But that's another discussion...maybe I'll make up a category for that.) that we forget about the world outside of us. It is bound to time and we, because we live in the world, are likewise bound. But because we never see ourselves from the outside, we forget that. Further, there is a depth inside of us that we experience directly; that's what it means to be with ourselves. Because we don't always see the world around us and that we are in as something separate from us, we tend to elide our internal depth with external appearance. The world seems to have a depth and motivation that makes it three dimensional. We think we know more than what we see, that there is more than what we see. And that is true. But that reality is ever closed off to us because it is the realm of the other, of that which is inextricably other, Big 'O' Other. It is utterly and absolutely other and so by definition nothing we can ever know directly. Remember, consciousness is being for Daddy.
Now, this is not to say that we can never know anything about it or that we are all trapped in our own little worlds. What ever else it may seem to be, Daddy's injunction to you to be skeptical of everyone but most especially yourself is not meant to be in any way advocating any kind of solipsism. Rather, the point is that knowing anything about that which is radically other is a difficult process fraught with peril. One must recognize that one is fundamentally bound to something that one is not and never can be. One is caught up in a relationship with the other, a relationship that any understanding of must involve a radical departure from one's self. And you can't leave yourself behind if if you take yourself, or the world, at face value. Never. You have to be hard on the world and yourself if you ever wish to catch a glimpse of the truth. And when you do it will be like nothing else you've ever known. I know that when I meet your mother I had one of those moments. I think that perhaps that is what love is, the experience of truth revealed when one gives oneself up completely to the Other and so binds themselves to them...
Ok, I'm starting to get a bit misty so it's time to put this down for awhile.
Should I play a little Mozart or Bach to the baby? I'm kind of wondering how the little tyke, crammed into the safe confines o' the wife's uterus, would take to the gentle strains of Glenn Gould's take on Mozart's Piano Sonatas. Or better yet, I could get them ready to be angry at the world by blasting some hardcore in there...a little Minor Threat (it's just a kid after all, so we'll stick to the straight edge until he/she/it's out. Then it's straight to the DK's and pre-Rollins Black Flag). I mean geez, don't ya have ta wonder? If Army PsyOps blast heavy metal music at the Vatican Embassy in Panama 24/7 to make Noriega unhappy then what effect can music have on a developing fetus? Maybe I can teach 'em language while their in there, give 'em an affinity for poetry with a little Ginsberg. Or perhaps Kerouac & Steve Allen? What about playing jazz, the blood & soul of music the very epitome of the creative mind in action? A little Bird or Miles, perhaps some Ellington for the big band expansiveness and Coltrane for the vision of the eternal and inevitable supreme love beneath it all. I'd probably get thrown in jail...
We're at that point when what's known as the Quickening (I can't help but think of that word in ominous tones. I keep thinking of the character of Frau Blucher in "Young Frankenstein"; every time someone spoke her name lightening would flash and there would be, distantly, the sound of horses whinnying) which is when the baby starts to move in the womb. Trouble is that the kid hasn't moved yet, which I am told, by much nervous research, is completely normal. But of course that doesn't matter one jot to me. I'm still worried sick...or maybe I'm just anxious for the kid to provide further evidence of his/her/its existence, as if I was in (still) some strange state of disbelief. It's not that I don't want a child but rather the thought that I have been blessed with one that strikes me as so awesome. I've never felt worthy of my wife's love and I surely don't feel worthy of this. Will I be equal to the task?
God, that's a terrible way to put it! It makes it sound like having a child is like painting a room or fixing a light. It's not something you accomplish like climbing a mountain or an end you can ever achieve; you are instilling a being into time with no other telos than to survive. And even that can not adequately describe it. I suppose it is a new awareness on my part, though I think it has always been a part of my mindset, to the infinite possibilities of life. But it is also a newly profound sense of responsibility to and for those possibilities, maybe a new sense of the Other, which of course leads me to ask myself if I really have been just a selfish bastard all my life. I know what my wife would say...
But seriously, you have to have a sense of self, a strong sense in this day and age I would argue, in having any sort of relationship with any sort of other. With out any sense of boundary, there is no other possible, no? See, this is what happens if I read Derrida too early in the day...