Daddy

Let me tell you something about Daddy. He was very handsome, a lady killer who buried two partners while he lived in his own isolation. You could not reach him except by telephone; he was inviolate, the chief citizen in his own word filled world. Daddy didn’t like to share. He had a room in his mother’s house, but he preferred his children visit him in a cinema, a restaurant, any place that helped him preserve the sanctity of his own skin and fears. On the rare occasion that one visited him in his room, one saw it was stacked high with newspapers. He read newspapers obsessively; the facts helped feed his nihilism and terrors. It occurs to me now that Daddy’s fright–he was only alive to disaster–was, in the end, about his own body, that is, tabloid words reflected his out of control skin–he had eczema on his hands, his elbows; I now have eczema on my hands and elbows–and his Tourettes, which no one ever talked about, even as he talked and talked. He repeated words and phrases, and touched objects–lamp posts, trees–as he passed them, sometimes over and over again. What kind of man was this? His masculinity was at war with itself. I saw him realizing that. And I saw him wondering this: Was he a man, or a series of sick thoughts in a sick skin? Or did I wonder all that? As a child I was already a writer–an occupation where you imagine closeness between characters, or yourself and others, but you can only achieve this by being alone. Like father, like son. As a child, as a teenager, the experience of visiting with my father was exhausting because he could not separate his harmed skin and out of control trying to be controlled self from your gender; your illness was his illness and then because he was frustrated by the limits of his mind and body–this included his race–he either exploded when you said something or pretended you hadn’t said something. That was all I knew about fathering, or, more accurately, what I knew about being a son, and for a long time, until I began to see other experiences: one young man I know filling up with a joy so complete when he showed me his baby’s son beautiful face, and curly hair, that he could barely speak, and then there were other fathers who understood their sons as being different than themselves. It has taken this long for me to understand that love doesn’t have to be exhausting, a job, played out in a restaurant or a cinema. There’s pleasure to be had in mentoring, and love for no reason at all. Let me tell you something about Matthew Barney and what I learned about Daddy tonight as I looked at Barney’s game changing show at the Morgan library. It’s called “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney,” and it’s a profoundly good exhibition for a number of reasons, including this: it’s an unequivocally interesting show. If I had to say it was “about” anything, it would be a kind of exhausted masculinity, or masculinity that has run up against the brick wall of itself, leaving, in one room, dismantled weights, scrawled messages and graphs–science as male, logic as the game of men–and in the main rooms, display cases filled with drawings, sketchbooks, postcards and other ephemera relating to the late Norman Mailer, whose practically unreadable–but I’ve read it–1987 novel, “Ancient Evenings,” is the source for Barney’s still-being-worked-on opera pieces and films that proceed under the title, “River of Fundament.” In the first case, before entering the show in the main room proper, there’s Diane Arbus’ portrait of the novelist (Mailer: “Giving Diane Arbus is like giving a kid a hand grenade.” Power recognizes power) and, with it, postcards referring to the book, and, moving on, Barney’s small drawings of Mailer’s head, which, in other cases, becomes a satyr head, the satyr being a creature Barney bought to life in his famous “Creamester” film series (1994-2002) where masculinity becomes something else entirely. The body, male or female, what to do about it as the balls drop, and the flesh becomes hard or soft, and the ass becomes a neutral, “genderless,” place of pleasure or power–the ass as object of desire, and controlling object: how long can you hold your shit? This finger? This tongue?–and then there’s the mind and desire as a glob of Vaseline inviting all extremities in but not out, certainly not unchanged, look at how sticky they are, now, and how they glisten, like succubi in the terrible garden of one’s imagination. Also in the cases: paperback novels drawn on, magazine covers drawn on, postcards, “reference” material showing football players, or Houdini, another shape shifter who used to hang from his ass, and then Mailer again and what have you: books as drawings, men as drawings, lives as drawings. If I could draw Daddy for you now, what would he look like? Something composed of many lines and bumps on the skin, a Vaselined tic moving toward and moving away from his own progeny whose collective genderless ass he sometimes beat with a belt in a bid to discipline them and let his presence be known, after which he would talk, talk, talk, on the telephone waiting for someone’s forgiveness, all the while living like a mixed metaphor, like an electric jellyfish, sucking and feeding and sucking oxygen out of its own blue ocean, struggling to survive.