In spite of the jumpy form, the disclaimer, the historical bit, the sudden freewrite, I love how you paint a portrait in so few words. A complex figure that stays complex throughout the text. Family is hard to describe, hard to understand, because you are part in what it is yourself - but your knack for short form really takes me to a place where I have the feeling I sense the truth somewhere just behind the words.
I'll have to go back and see the other instalments... first the math lesson with my daughter though.
Thank you for reading so closely and commenting so lavishly! I worried about the jumpy form, but eventually decided that, if my memories are 'hazy,' perhaps because I don't like to stay with them for very long, it was accurate for the post to be hazy/jumpy too.
My father was complex, yes. I don't see how any human could not be complex back then, or now, given all the false messages we are regularly inundated with.
Speaking of math, you've reminded me that he loved the quadratic formula, and was proud he could recite it flawlessly right to nearly his death. So you have fun with that math. I loved the stuff, the only thing I could be 100% sure of the answers to.
Yes, memory is filtered through the notions of the Now, contaminated in most cases. I seek simplicity now, and love. Why bother with anything short of those?
In my experience people use most of the braincells they have reserved for historical analysis on family. Maybe it is the reason the family saga is so popular a literary genre. Both being moulded and mould, form and being formed makes it a shit show, but somehow we have to return to it.
I have a large family and have poured out so much knowledge, sorrow, responsibility and joy that I feel soaked every time I think about it. In the end, it's all just love, but in the wild and destructive sense as much as in a calm and useful way (with the odd psychopath or two thrown in, mind!).
I wonder if this isn't something we've been taught to do, so that we are less likely to put two and two together about what's going on in the supposed real world. Psychotherapy sure has us dwelling on family matters, as if not much is more important. I credit psychotherapy, in large part, with the sad state of the world today. It's made many of us into the psychos it purported to prevent.
We could go back to indigenous ways (are we the indigenous now?) and tell stories about our ancestors to the children every night, so they can better see outside of themselves.
Maybe it is, but who taught us. Family is the people who were around us for most of your early life, the ones in whose company we learned all the basic necessary things. Putting two and two together - realise things - cognition in a word, is always mixed up in our memories our stories, and there they are: the family.
I see it as something that is just as unescapable as the period of history you live in.
Psychotherapy is a strange monster, I agree on that. It masquerade as science, but it suffers from the same blind spots as religion. It creates powerful and dogmatic stories instead of uncovering the unknown. And then there's art story telling etc. It is only a fraction better, but at least it sometimes touch on truth and there's freedom in it. Psychotherapy always gave me the chills with its overly certain explanations.