I’m putting more words to paper these days on the book I’m writing about growing up in the dominion of the Heavenly Father, the Christian God, and my actual Earth Father. In reflections on religion, critiques of oppressive rule are essential mirrors back to humanity – of which I am a part – which invented its own governance and subjugation (by the Heavenly Father, or by churches and governments erected in his name). Therefore, the time I spend in the essays railing against God is mental leak from the ideological battle inside myself between warring forces of deference to the ultimate power of love, and freedom I crave from the violence implied by that power (love-power). But critiques of my Earth Father’s oppression are different. He is a person I know, and moreover a person who I love. How do I unite these two domains?
Well, I was reading Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” struck me weirdly prescient both of my own relationship to my father and of modern leftist circles. If you’re interested to read it, this link takes you to my annotated scan.
The early iterations of my essays are brutal in their honesty. There is some graphic description I wrote related to beatings I took, bruises, flesh wounds, kneeling, screaming, and these have been redacted and unredacted cyclicly. I’m not uncomfortable about the vulnerability of revealing these scenes, but instead I’m unsure about describing a man through his most violent actions. It’s de-humanizing. Imagining (writing, recalling, describing) your flesh father as his worst act is the unconsented apotheosis which strips him of humanity and raises (or lowers, in any case, removes) him from the level of my life on Earth. And since these violations happened in my childhood, imagining the present father to be nothing more than a continuation of the old father further mythologizes him, since my memories of my father (like all memories), are only loosely based in reality. Any description of his cruelty feels lurid and sensational, not just for the obscenity of his violence, but for the parable implied.
In my adult life, I try to accept the truth laced through the perceptions of a child because I truly think that the only way to stay progressive is to humble yourself before young people and to accept that their reality might be more useful than yours. However, I don’t know how much to weigh the perception of the child who was my old self. When I was younger, I hated my dad. I feared him more than God. What did she, the child, know about the humanity of gods or men? What gift was she who withered in panic, prepared to offer to the greater, kinder, gentler world she had dreamed about?
She had something useful, which was the acute desire for a loving existence. But it was laced through with the darkness, indignity, and righteous anger of a lamb oppressed. She, as James Baldwin put it, accepted the theology that denied her life, and in a very real sense, battled for her humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed her at birth. There was a period of years when I thought the only way to be free was to die, and having been stripped of my own beauty, my own power, dread, freedom and fullfillment, I didn’t even think dying would be any act of transcendence. As far as I was concerned, I was already dead, and simply had been trapped on Earth. I can’t trust my memory to imagine my father correctly, because I was never a child. I was a flesh and blood ghost.
The leftist urge (of which I am also guilty) to immediately turn against any body suspected of moral infraction is the same sentimental panic of which Baldwin accuses Harriet Beacher Stowe, and though we feel that we are protected in the aegis of “moral high ground”, the ledge of that ground is inevitably unstable as sandstone, and self-consuming. Not in the way of the Ouroboros, but in the way of a fire whose life is always, always finite. As Baldwin observes, it is the exact same witch-panic driven by some belief in a complete system of rights, wrongs, punishment, rewards, and singular, pure “truths” that invented the Christian God in the first place. These kinds of leftists are usually atheists or agnostics, and I wonder if that is why they keep inventing religion. They don’t notice how close they are getting to holy war. The total irony escapes them.
In November, I went to a tech-specific labor organizing conference, and listened to a panel there about reform caucuses, which are smaller parties inside large unions which seek to reform the larger union by democratic ascendance and majority power. Hilariously, and unsurprisingly, some large and established unions have re-invented all the same faults as the systems of power they fight against. Nepotism: the union lead position for one of the unions represnted at that panel had been passed through generations of a single family like a kingdom. Wealth inequality: the union leaders and officers were making six or seven figures while most union members are volunteers, or not paid at all. Standing inertia: the union whose behemoth bureaucracy now itself suspects and quells revolution, and resists change.
One of the reform caucases was a teacher’s caucus in the teacher’s union which represented public school teachers. (I don’t remember now if it was actually a local chapter for NYS or NYC, but anyway) one controversial opinion of the caucus related to procedures and protections for school teachers in the incidence of ICE officers in the classroom. What do you do if a federal officer comes to take a child in your class? The greater union represented diverse politics, and wouldn’t take a stand in this matter in the spirit of representing all its paying constituents – some unions have active membership fees.
The system of labor exploitation begets the union, whose corruption itself begets the reform caucus, and as the little-guy-fighting-the-establishment ribbon sash gets passed from hand to hand, we lose track of whose righteous God is the best righteous God. The entire fractal of splitting veins, meanwhile is still contained in the single leaf of capitalism, and more largely, not just capitalism (the market system we’ve chosen to try this century), but all human systems of scale.
So, what am I trying to say? What am I trying to say in my protest novel? I don’t redact the beatings because I pity my father’s de-humanization; I’m worried that some part of me believes he deserves it. A father is a kind of destiny, and as I write this damn book, I am tight-rope crawling between avoidance and fulfillment of that destiny. Descendant from the Greeks, our literary tradition can tell you where this ends.
Baldwin writes “our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult – that is, accept it.” My father and his violence are not something to be overcome nor hated nor battled nor dethroned nor mythologized. My father is a person. I’m made of him in the realest most physical sense, and he is no less made of me. My insistence on any categorization such as “father/daughter”, “creator/creation”, “oppressor/victim”, “right/wrong” is a denial of the truth which might for some time be useful to me as a way of survival, but now I’m 24. I’m trying to love him, which is to say I’m trying to love myself. Leftists, we can’t afford to keep excising each other like cancerous moles. There is no tenable socialist revolution which does not imply all the same violence we are escaping. There is a place for anger in reform, but when the anger calls for blood, it is blood within our blood, and dread within our selves. Everything we hate came from within our selves. Even our fathers. Even our kings. Even our religions and markets and slaveries and wars.
Given all this, how will we ever move forward with reform? I ruled out suicide and patricide (chiral ends), long ago, but what now to do with the remaining pieces of my necessarily bifurcated human heart? I believe that reform has a reproductive relationship to forgiveness. Both birth the other, which form and birth back on itself. Back and forth, the ball bouncing against walls of a match no one can call. Both are faces of our own dread, which we accept in shifting mirrors. We need not mourn our timeless struggle. When does it ever end? Forgiveness is the dry flattening of past lives into tight green blossoms which dare to bloom year after year, in the same exact soil.