HELIOLITH

I’ve been playing with Stumbleupon and came back again to the postsecret weblog that takes postcards sent in anonymously and posts them. They are frequently sad, occaisonally funny, and very frequently incredibly powerful.

Upon seeing this card, I felt tears coming on and had to put my head down for a few moments. In just seconds, my mp3 random list landed on Mystic’s “Fatherless Child” and I was touched by the eerie sensation of the universe folding back upon itself.

I still have my father, and in fact have grown closer to him over the years than we were when I was growing up. Now the father of two children, I myself am more aware than ever of the perplexing role of fatherhood. The word father is such a powerful term, riddled with layers of connotation and personal experience. Another song that often sends me into spirals of contemplation around fatherhood is Saul William’s “Our Father,” which starts out with his own father, a baptist minister giving a sermon on fatherhood, woven to break beats, prayer, poetry and the music of Saul himself. (see endnote*)

No doubt something is broken in our culture around fatherhood. The partriarchal authoritarian model is so fundamentally dysfunctional that it’s difficult for many men to ever discover what it’s like to be strong and nurturing. I think many people don’t really connect the trends of social conservatism & machismo with broken homes and missing fathers, which is odd, because to me it’s so transparent.

It’s ironic I suppose, in that the boys-don’t-cry gender definition (so clearly represented by a warlike, wannabe-cowboy presidential administration) is still so strong culturally, and yet the right constantly spins tales about family values, often under fundamentalist banners that proclaim church and marriage to be the answer to all social woes.

I can’t claim to have discovered the perfect balance, but reflecting on the sadness of the loss of that bond for others, whether from death, absence, or lack of attention, I’m more acutely aware of the value of a positive father relationship with my own father and with my own children.

*endnote:I had the pleasure of seeing Saul when he came and spoke at UCSB a month or so ago, and couldn’t help but see the mystic in him. It’s a funny thing when someone shares their art with the world, and so many strangers can experience these deeply personal revelations and experiences within that art. I think that it’s probably quite common for one to perceive a closer relationship with the artist through their art, and yet the artist, being the giver, has no consciousness of the intimacy of that relationship with so many receivers.