Osterhase

The day after Easter: family, gospels,neo-liberal ideology, speech explosion, n+1, errata.

My niece’s verbal ability has exploded in recent months. In december, she had a handful of words, and one (‘up’) stood in for many, many meanings. Four months later, she knows hundreds of words, and is making sentences. The linguist in me is especially impressed by her phrase: “I do myself!” One would assume “I do” is all the child would need to say at first, but she already picked up on the unnecessary but emphatic phrasing or reflexive pronouns… or, she has some quick emotional and communicative understanding of it at least. Apparently asserting her selfness is a powerful enough feeling that she is tuned in to appropriate the most sophisticated language forms to express it. Cool.

At the Hamilton Sculpture Garden, I say a sculpture which through into relief, so to speak, an aspect of the aesthetic I’m interested in: relationships between characters (characters? desires? aspects? Something not as formalistic as pure forms, but not as specific as psychological people. Whatever the psychic building blocks are is what I mean). It was some kind of animal scene with fantastic trees and animals, and it immediately put the viewer in the state of relating the objects - it makes the viewer synthesize elements. 

This makes sense to me - in ways that portraits and paintings depend mostly on sensually and textural and pure experiences, I am most excited by what I might call Psychic Content. Stories necessarily have relations between things: Characters, Desires, points of view.

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Thinking about art and patters: thinking of ornate patterns, stories, and music. All can have a similar function: creating a space that is beautiful and rhythmic within which some painful aspect of life of is shown. A safe and aesthetic space for terror, for grief. The pattern itself, the composition, the ornamental frame, the rhythm and melody - these are what’s real. Pain and joy are just leaves on the vine which greater than any single growth.

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Read an essay by Jebediah Purdy in N+1, The Accidental Neo-Liberal. A good essay… ash, I left my notes at home.

It does make me reconsider my 'realist’ stances. It also embodies a certain political interpretation of my Orphan Prince story, the radical Aneia being bound and sentenced to death by the maternal and considerate and realistic sphinx.

His main idea is this: We (um… I suppose we is some kind of leftist but not radical america) largely that we have accepted the notion that we have reached the ‘end of history’. Democracy with free markets is where it’s at, with just a little more fine tuning. What we don’t believe is a radical change in any direction. What we don’t believe - is the possibility of a big change.

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A line I came upon in both some anarchist literature and in the Jebediah Purdy essay concerns that there should be a shift from analyzing psychological problems to analyzing structuring problems. That is, if a given societal structure effects people in a certain way, fixing one person is hardly beneficial; the structure must be changed.

This reminded me of a question put to me by a radical group I once joined. They had asked me: “What radicalized you?” Most of the people in this group queer, and I was the whitest slice of bread in that bunch. But my honest answer I didn’t say… In the way that certain ‘subjective’ problems of first world angst don’t seem valid in relation to the oppression of the minorities. My unspoken answer (I forget what I actually mumbled) was the way I felt consumer capitalism and societal structure effected my family. Certain members seemed cut off from society, wholly dependent on the nuclear family, necessarily disappointed, and found solace in the hungry ghost game of shopping. Shopping itself became to me sad expression of misdirected and confused desire for life. I felt, and feel, should crushed and misshapen through our culture.

Even watching the joy which is my two-year-old niece - there is something about the structure of two parents raising a child, segregated from a larger community, which seems like a misuse of certain energies, and limiting of our greater affections. Why should older adults have to wait so long for little ones to take pleasure in? Why should their affection be limited to a few? Why not live among non-related ‘uncles’, ‘aunts’, ‘grammies’, ‘pappies’? Why so much depending a single child, a few children? I think a parent, I think a grandparent could love and co-raise a greater number of children.

I think of this another way, too, in terms of emotional investment. Watching my parents undergo the loss of my sister - was dark and brutal. Now, my goal is too make the the pain of loss less, but how to diffuse it through other joys of life, other continuations of life. Our family was lucky in terms of this, in that, 3 months before the death of my sister, my brother and his wife had a baby girl, Ava Isabella. To try and imagine that terrible fall without the babe is painful. At the wake, I remember one scene: Us, the family, lined up, receiving people, and my mother breaking down in tears, and Suz presenting to my mother, in the midst of her sobbing, little Ava. My mother - through her tears - smiled, and her sobs slowed down, and she took up her granddaughter in her arms and cooed.

I suppose my point is this - the life cycle is a thing we are largely removed from in our culture, and what experiences we have are more intense and disarming for all their rarity. More relationships means more encounters with disease, death, birth, and joy.

The last category of thinking here is, of course, one I feel very much: the responsibility of the child to the family. I feel this love, this bound, and, yes, this dependence. I want to be both loved and more free. The intensity of desire to gain and maintain the approval of one’s parent’s is profound.