Entering the Forbidden Room: Opening
the Door
to the Secret World of the Father
by
Joe Carmichael
© 2005
“The patriarchy is a complicated
structure.” Robert Bly
Modern psychology relates most everything to the
mother. Perhaps this is because both Freud and Jung were so
maternally focused. Fathers, at least in the traditional, or
non-postmodern view, have been away at the office while a female,
the mother, provides the care. Perhaps we should take a moment to
reexamine the patriarch’s house and see what happens when the son’s
yearning for a father image is replaced by empty rooms which he
fills with media images, mythological creations, and an imagined
life of the father.
I first took a hard look at this when my father died
at age 87. He had been dead for three days. My three sisters and I
gathered for a service at the funeral home, and then took his ashes
away in two containers. First we drove to the shore of Lake Ontario,
where we cast off the majority of the remains in a biodegradable
disk. It careened a little way off shore, filled with water on this
cold and windy October day, and sank to the bottom. My sisters
didn’t want to let it go. They were troubled by how close to shore
it still was, that the ashes were not dissolving and floating away,
that the container was not degrading quickly enough. They wanted to
search for a stick, or wade out into the surf to push the remains
out further in the tide. Finally, convinced that there was nothing
more to be done, they relented. We went to our final stop with a
smaller, pewter jar that contained the last, small physical remnant
of my father.
We drove to the cemetery where our mother was buried.
She had died twenty-one years earlier, a cancer victim. She was
eighteen when she married my father. It was World War II; he was a
pilot waiting to ship out to the war in the Pacific. As the story
goes, they knew each other for only two weeks before they married.
Times were different then. He abused her for much of their marriage.
It was a long and complicated life together that encompassed five
children, two separations, a divorce and reconciliation, a nine-year
battle with cancer, the burial of their first-born son after a
horrendous late-night car crash that killed three teenagers, and a
host of other joys and tragedies. Every family has a story to tell.
In the end, they were together again and, as my father had wished,
we sprinkled a bit of his ashes over her grave, laid down some
flowers, and returned to our lives.
My father was unique and different, but like many men
of his generation and the present one, he lived in a dwelling that
was as mysterious and empty as it was known and familiar. Most
American fathers, as did mine, think that their life is different
than that of their children. They assume that they have come from
some far different place—perhaps it is even physically different,
say, they are immigrants, or grew up during the Great Depression, as
my father did. “They just don’t understand what it was like,” they
say to themselves, and perhaps out loud once in a while. The son
then grows up with a vacancy sign hung over the father’s room,
because they know their father believes his experience will never be
understood. The father sees his sons as ignorant, spoiled, and not
appreciative of his sacrifice, whatever it may be. This is a
characteristic of my father’s generation, but also the present one,
and the ones that came before.
The son wakes up each morning as his
father is leaving for work in the office or factory. When his father
leaves the house, he hangs the vacancy sign up on his door and shuts
his room up tight. His mother sends him a troubled glance as the
father leaves and the son is left wondering what it is about the
father that cannot be explained. What is the mystery? becomes
the undying question of the boy’s youth.
When the father returns home at the end
of the day, he is tired from work and from not being treated with
the respect he feels he deserves. He has been grinding gears on a
lathe, or adding rows of figures, or, like Willy Wanka’s father,
screwing the tops onto toothpaste tubes all day. Maybe he is even
doing a task that is more white-collar, like legal work, or
dentistry. Still, he becomes bitter, because he is working for a
paycheck, trying to earn a living to care for his family, yet the
house where he spends his energy is an office, or an assembly line,
or a fire station, or the operator’s compartment of a back hoe. He
leaves his commitment there and can bring little home except
disappointment. His work is an abstraction to his son, unlike the
agrarian world of the farmers of long-ago. Meanwhile, the son is
left to fill his father’s room with mythology, imagined kings, and
the pieces of the propaganda puzzle his father has left on the
floor. The son can not simply step off the back porch and watch his
father do his work. He must imagine this life his father leads and
spends the majority of his energy on.
The Propaganda Shop
Sometimes, in place of the vacancy sign
the father hangs on his door as he leaves the house, he may leave a
sign that says: Propaganda Shop: Come In! The son has the pieces of
a puzzle to work with. The father tells the son things about his
work life. Usually, they are exaggerations meant to show the son
that he is a hero—the type of hero definition the son has learned
from television, children’s stories, and video games. The father
sees his son watching the television, and sees the shows himself. He
sees that the boy has come to know male heroes as static,
one-dimensional men; Christ figures that save the baby from the
burning building just in the knick of time, solve the brutal crime
spree that has been terrorizing the town, or win the big game with a
walk-off home run in the ninth inning. Let’s face it: children are
shown a certain image of men, over and over and over again. Men are
warriors. Men are heroes. Men are rich, intelligent business people.
Men are superstar athletes. This stereotype has changed very little
in the last one hundred years. Just look at the soldiers spread
across the evening news, or Donald Trump’s latest “reality show.”
My father was a factory worker, or at
least he worked in a factory. He was a commercial artist who
designed lapel pins, hood ornaments, and class rings that the
factory where he spent his energy then manufactured. He hated his
work and the people he worked with. He considered himself an artist
whose talents were not appreciated, and consequently wasted, working
near an assembly line. From his drawing table he heard the droning
chung, chung, chung of the assembly line throughout the day.
Like many American men, he saw his work as a necessary evil. Like
many American men, he only told his son enough about it so that I
would have the pieces of the propaganda puzzle to play with and
combine with my television heroes, mythological figures, and
imagination to assemble together in his absence.
Perhaps, on occasion, the boy will go to
the father’s place of work. Perhaps it is “bring your kid to work
day.” In my case, my father’s factory was located dramatically close
to the minor league baseball stadium in our town. When we would go
to games, my father would park the car behind the factory and we
would walk down the street to the stadium. He would pull in behind
the giant smelter smokestack and say, “That’s what they use to melt
the gold and silver. It can get up to ten thousand degrees. Then
they pour the liquid gold into molds. If a man gets one drop of that
on him—one tiny drop! —it will burn clean through his flesh and bone
and come out the other side. I’ve seen it.”
I would take these stories with me to the
ball game and, when I got home, I would pile them inside the
propaganda shop that was growing larger and larger in my house.
Sometimes, on the weekends, I would ask my father about his war
experiences and he would tell a short tale to dramatize his
experiences there. “I once saw a man get his head cut clean off by
an airplane propeller,” he would say. “He was a mechanic, and he
left his wrench by the engine while the plane was starting up. He
turned around to look and, wham!” I would take these stories with
me back to the propaganda shop as well.
At some point the son stops playing in
the propaganda shop and starts working there. He matures to a point
where he can--he must--start imagining his own life as an adult man.
He has the propaganda puzzle pieces to work with and he has the
shards of his father’s broken life in that room, too. After all, his
father had certain dreams that were never realized.
My father had dreams of fighting the
Japanese in the Pacific. As the story went, he received his order to
ship out as a flight engineer in 1945. His next order of business
was to propose to the teenage soda clerk he had been dating while
stationed in Texas. After all, being a combat pilot over the Pacific
was lonely as hell and did not carry with it a very good chance of
returning alive. My future mother accepted, was nearly disowned by
her family for her rashness, and some sort of quickie ceremony took
place, of which no photographs were taken. The young lovers had a
few days together at the base hotel, and then news bulletins came
over the radio declaring an end to the battle in the Pacific. Or at
least I imagine it to have been something like that. My parents
never really talked about it.
On such a dime can a life turn. We all
know people with such stories, or have experienced such dramatic
changes ourselves. One day, my father was about to either become a
war hero, or die in combat; the next, he was an unemployed veteran
with a pregnant, teenage wife and a pile full of youthful dreams
that had to be tossed somewhere for safekeeping. He put them in the
propaganda shop. Where else could they go?
So, as a boy, I had the crushed dreams
and disappointments of a combat pilot, the frustrations of an
unrecognized artist forced to be a tired factory worker, and popular
culture images to play with. My instincts told me to redeem the
father that was lost to these forces. Like many boys do, I set about
the task of rescuing my father.
The Father Mythology
By this time the child has developed a
sense that he has lost his father. He has seen enough of the world
to know that the father mythology is an incomplete, if not wholly
false, construct. His instinct to redeem his father is overwhelming.
He must construct a father image, and go beyond to construct an
image of the man he himself wishes to become. The son begins by
accepting, to some degree, the diminished idea of the father. He
knows that some of his patriarch’s life has been left at the
factory, some has been tossed on the tarmac at the air base; there
isn’t much left. He takes what little he can scrape up and brings it
into the propaganda shop and starts to arrange the pieces. But every
time he starts to construct something resembling a whole, he finds
he is missing pieces. It is a puzzle that has been hanging around
the house too long and is now missing far too many pieces to
successfully assemble. What can he do? He has no choice but to
fashion the missing puzzle pieces from available materials.
Popular culture tosses images to male
children at an alarming rate and with the shocking poignancy only
adolescents can understand. It has always been this way. Ronald
Reagan and, before him, Jack Kennedy, were two examples. Both were
wealthy, powerful, good-looking and popular. Reagan did not threaten
men; men could appreciate his high morals and hold this out to their
own families, even if they themselves were not up to the standard.
Moreover, Reagan was willing to stand up to the Soviets, look them
in the eye, and have a full-blown blinking contest on national
television.
Like Reagan, Jack Kennedy led. He was a
war hero, but threatened American fathers with his good looks and
the delicate beauty of his family. His murder, however, placed him
in position for hero status. We had astronauts at this time,
businessmen like Ross Perot and T. Boone Pickens, Dan Rather and
Walter Cronkite. Politics was a stronger force then than it is
today.
So we took a little dab of Reagan, a
smidgen of Kennedy, and a pinch of some of the others who appeared
on the cover of Time Magazine and took them into our propaganda
shop. But we were still woefully deficient. We needed to bring out
the big guns: television, music and sports. The pop culture
triumvirate has never been short of role models for young, male
children to draw from. During the 1980’s and 1990’s (and today) we
had the Michael Jordans, Derek Jeters, Kurt Cobains, and Brad Pitts
of the world to help fill in the gap. We brought them into the
propaganda room. And let us not forget the stories of Zeus and
Apollo, King Arthur and Caesar, and the other mythological gods and
kings we learned about in high school.
Having an absent father, a father who
carries around with him a staggering disappointment, a codependent
father, a substance abusing father, a workaholic father, these all
create an injury in the son. The son takes with him those wounds
and, at a certain age, often in the young teens, goes into the
propaganda room with all of the puzzle pieces laying scattered on
the floor and the popular culture heroes looming in the corners; he
tries to put the puzzle together. His work is frustrating, mind
numbing, and impossible. He follows a formula that looks something
like this:
The mythological father (politics, pop-culture,
mythology)
+
The imagined life of the father
=
The imagined life of the son
When he comes out of the propaganda room,
usually in high school, the son thinks that he has determined who he
is and what he is going to be. Really, he has just stumbled out of
the jungle, malnourished, confused, sleep-deprived and sickly. He is
lucky he has survived at all. What he doesn’t realize at this
juncture is that in contrast to having all the answers, he is more
confused than ever, and his own identity is never further away.
The Weak and Strong Father
While the son is undertaking all of this
lonely work in the propaganda shop, the father is still around,
trying harder than ever to control the situation. The son’s
adolescence brings with it an inevitable sense of discord and chaos.
The father starts churning the propaganda gears. But by now the son
has, at least in his mind, completed the work of assembling the
puzzle. He isn’t quite as open to the propaganda anymore.
My father sought order in his life
through screaming, yelling, and psychological violence against his
family. He had no control at the factory, but at home, he tried to
control the people around him by force, yelling, and abuse. When he
was calm, my father was filled with Teutonic thoroughness. He would
sit at his desk for hours with a drafting pencil and ruler and
create ledgers with hundreds of lines on which he recorded household
expenses, car maintenance schedules, even lists of family birthdays.
At his office, he might have sat under a magnifying glass for days,
engraving a metal plate by hand with the corporate logo of some
Midwest farmer’s association. His ability to concentrate and make
order from chaos was incredible. But his pursuant fits and tantrums
were legendary. His rages were otherworldly, sometimes lasting days
on end when he would not sleep, only resting periodically in his
room, and then emerging to scream again for hours. He was a sick
man, we knew. But since being committed to a veteran’s hospital
after a particularly violent episode involving a gun and a coworker
many years before, he had refused to see any doctor or therapist. He
stayed off any potentially helpful medications, saved his fury for
the home, and managed to hold this new job in this new town for over
twenty years.
In contrast, weak fathers control their
family through silent disappointment. They may build up expectations
to an unachievable level, then dole out measured dissatisfaction to
bring about the desired impact. Sometimes only a small facial
gesture is needed. Other times, they may ignore the family or not
speak to them for days. By the time adolescence arrives in the son,
the father has lost the one thing that has stabilized his own
identity: Control of the son. Fathers typically experience a crisis
at this time in their life. The door is open to a nervous breakdown,
a midlife crisis, alcohol abuse, and so on. Whatever name we apply,
this period in a man’s life is fraught with inevitable frustration
and fear. The propaganda shop is now closed for business, and two
people’s identities are at risk: The father and the son.
The presence of the propaganda shop and
the absence of the father because of his economic obligations have
changed the entire dimension of patriarchal identity—from both
points of view, the father’s and the son’s. To borrow David Brower’s
evolution metaphor, if the history of patriarchal relationships were
a twelve-hour day, the changes we have seen, mainly because of
industrialization—the most dramatic changes imaginable—have all
taken place within the span of a few seconds of that day. Today, men
are away from their sons the majority of their time because of work.
The training and initiation of sons, therefore, no longer exists.
Instead, the son is left with the dangerous remnants of male
identity—the imagined life of the father, pop culture, mythological
kings—and no instruction booklet to help him assemble the pieces.
The propaganda shop opens its doors wide for male children, invites
them in, but there is no guide, no ticket taker, no one to tell them
what to do with the tremendous energy in that room. Without a guide
and with such danger all around, it is no wonder so many males
arrive at crisis.
Joe
Carmichiel © 2005
