Not Unlike Some Notes On Men

Not Unlike Some Notes on Men                  

In the end my mother and her sisters said they wanted nothing to do with my grandfather. I never thought--and should say never think--that’s true, because what they wanted more than anything was whom he owned, and whom they said "was a better wife than mother": my grandmother.

In the end, after all the stories and protests against him, it wasn’t surprising or unbearable to hear that he had died. Finding out in the airport my first response was to myself, “of course I would find out it in an airport, how cliché of my life.” I told only one person at the time, simply because he was standing next to me at the baggage claim and because I had bought a CD by Seth Price from him earlier in the week, feeling that was enough to say something. He said something along the lines of, “Oh, sorry to hear that.” That was enough to hear, and put an end to any care I might require.

He died alone, though. My mother curses the preacher who didn’t let anyone know earlier in the day about his condition. My grandmother is still appreciative of him.

My own father—who could always supply stories and metaphor at a whim—explained it as being the same as an old, dying lion, who lashed out and distanced himself from the lionesses and his cubs, settling into a self-constructed misery that was made unbridgeable by anyone due to his youthful, patriarchal pride of being able to provide and therefore control. In the midst of not understanding why we couldn’t talk about my grandparents or visit them on the way back from our family Christmas in Dallas that was something I could understand.

The few thoughts I have of my grandfather are none of pride or control. Instead, I most remember his vintage shirts and heavy smell of Stetson, particularly when he would stay with us and in the mornings, after he shaved, would take my face and cheek in his hand and rub it against his own face, the stubble pricking my skin and releasing some pain that was then turned into laughter and euphoria. The other is my mother recounting his fear of dying before he was 33, because some fortuneteller of his youth had said he would not live past the age. At the time, the ideas of this superstitious, cautious man seemed to contrast too greatly with the joyous, playful bear of my youth to give that being any real credence: because he was my grandfather and because he had lived and raised four daughters to be respectable women he could not be this wary, uncertain being capable of losing everything due to his own prideful actions.

Recently, I have been thinking to my grandfather and white men more, especially to my own father and uncles. On a recent trip to New York, the annual trip my mom takes to come see me, after speaking with my father on the phone I mentioned to her that he never says “I love you,” at the end of his calls. It’s understood that he doesn’t need to, and nor should I feel entitled to such a remark as that is what ‘unconditional’ should literally mean, but it is endemic to a certain age of men that compassion, empathy, and outward displays of intimacy or love are profoundly lacking. I know these men are capable of love, or at least their understanding of love which is conveyed in a focus of the eye that is less seen today—it being an almost fearful admiration--but this depraved intimacy is a cooling remnant attributed to men since James Monroe’s Isolationism or fear of compassion still cooling from McCarthyism. Like any glowing stone, its dying embers still have power to ignite dry timber.

In the same time as vanilla ISIS is commandeering a B-level federal reserve gift shop, Pornhub announces that the search result of 2015 which enjoyed the highest percentile of increase since 2014, by more than a 1000% increase, is “Giantess.”

At the same time as I listen to Alain Badiou speak on tragedy and terror á la the November 13 Paris attacks, I recall that some men fetishize giant women crushing their testicles or eating them alive (the word “vorarephilia” has for a long time circled close to my heart). He ends his talk by referring to a new “era of the mother.” This is the only thing which interests me in the entire hour and a half of talking preceding, much of it given way to his hyperbolic French being. The same French being which pervades all of French theory since the 60s, the same French being which Susan Howe once said in the 90s, “always seems to know everything.”

I would wonder if she would still agree, as it is the seeming that, from a distance, allows both my grandfather and the French philosophers to construct beings that would put them at odds with anything that doesn’t coalesce with what they want you to know. More, I would imagine the inability of these men to live without lashing out if they did not have daughters or neophytes to provide to and in turn be consumed by.

Susan Howe introduced me to Jonathan Edwards, the fiery, impassioned preacher, poet, and early American philosophe from New England, who was the only male amongst “ten usually tall sisters their minister father referred to as his ‘sixty feet of daughters.’” I imagine that would account as being a giantess, but more I could imagine the triumph a male might feel at being surrounded by numerous wives or a number of virgins in his afterlife.

Rebecca Solnit cautions to the rampant use of the word “terrorism,” specifically referencing its use to the Oregon militia. I do not feel terror from these men, understandably being “one” of them, myself, even if many have quoted the literal definition from the dictionary—just as I do not feel terror from ISIS or refugees, understandably being “one” of them who do. What I feel is pity, though there is surely no just reason to pity these men. I pity them like I pity those who have been subject to them, each of them unable to break free from the positions of their past. However, where the split is evident is in the seems: to those who were subject it was their position of helplessness and fear. To these men, their positions were only ever what they seemed.

French art is in a sad state of being. The French government spends more on conserving its past than allowing for new artists and art to work itself into becoming. This was succinctly the essay I wrote for my final project to graduate with a French minor and complete undergrad. It is still not something I know to be true, as much as it was something that seemed to be true. In a binary mode of thinking, this one being the classic tale of old and new, there is, what would seems to always be, a dominant.

This is not entirely true.

In the New Museum’s most recent triennial there was no bigger success than trans-ness. It’s biggest uncritiqued and unwritten problem, though, was its allowance towards a path of transnormativity. The most interesting issue for news and media these days is the seeming appearances between male and female, is she male or is he female. They must decide and debate in normalized terms that easily stitch together a narrative they can most readily adapt and exploit. Instead, what is not talked about is the being of complete dissociation and transitivity of identity. For them, this is impossible to make into narrative at the moment.

What is most peculiar about binary thought, primarily the binary which jumps into mind most immediately these days, is the existence of being between 0 and 1. We understand these to make code, and for something to then produce from that code. What we less understand is what is produced between them, something that is not a half of something or a collaboration of terms, but a whole being that is neither/and. In effect, it is 0 and 1 and 3.

When I was young I would play number games with myself whereby I could reach and total any number I picked by any other given numbers. For example: I want to reach the number 589, and I want to find it using only the numbers 3 and 1. By adding 3 and 1 there would be the number 4, which is right next to 5. So, 5 is taken care of. Now, that 4 exists we subtract the original 3 and 1 to equal 2, and times it by 4. Voilà 8. Now there is 5 and 8. Now that we have 4, 3 and 2, by adding 3 and 2 there is 5, which added to 4 is 9. Complete: 589.

Later in elementary school I believed it to be completely ridiculous and a waste of time, but on a recent metro north train ride, thinking and smiling a bit to the numbers, they each made sense as always existing inside one another or in immediate approximation of the other.

A father is made up of only one man, but a mother is made up of multiple women.