02.25.07
Out of Phase
We are, and always will be, out of phase with our parents, just as our children are, and always will be, with ourselves. What does this mean?
It means that we will never fully repay our parents what we owe to them, and we will never endure, in totality, the retribution of our children for our transgressions against their childhoods. There are debts we can never repay, and crimes we can never atone for.
Some may prefer to see glasses half full ( –of air! A cruel trick, I will try to remember that one). To wit: we receive gifts before we can even conceive of gratitude, much less be expected to write thank-you cards. Also we can get away with some egregiously bad behavior, mostly scot-free.
Of course, the two, or is it four, conceptions are mutually implicit, and inextricably linked. This is what I make of it, so far: there is no parity — some may prefer the word “justice”, but I do not — to be found here if one’s view is anything other than abstract — and then here, people may want to use “transcendental”, but that sounds slightly absurd.
The inequity also extends forwards and backwards through the generations, ad infinitum. Like a terrible, guilt-ridden (or glee-filled, your pick) ripple effect through the family tree. But, take a step back, and not even a big step, it’s so insignificant as to sound painfully obvious, but still — take a step back, and see this:
Actually I don’t see it. I sense there is a final balance here, if you step back, and maybe squint a little, unfocus your vision. It probably takes a better person than I to see it. Or is that the point, that, as humans, we find it impossibly hard to see the balance that might otherwise be blindingly obvious? (By see, I really mean, living life in accordance with the principle at hand. Any idiot can say they get something, or write about it, perhaps even blog about it.)
Must remember: glass half full… of air! Fucking brilliant.
zygote said,
February 26, 2007 at 11:36
Maybe the balance is that we know that we will be out of sync with our children, just as our parents are out of sync with us. There is no justice across the generations because the kind of damage that our families cause us is enduring and unforgivable (and weirdly enough, in some instances, probably a necessary part of our upbringing). Yet for the most part we inevitably forgive or at least reconcile because we recognize, just as you say, that we can also never repay our families for what they have given us.
You should watch Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. There is this incredible scene in the movie where Sidney Poiter’s character, John Prentice, is confronting his father about how the older generation that his father represents, has been there both to make possible and also to hold back all the progress and advances that the younger generation hopes for. I mean, the way I sound it is lame, but that movie? Fucking. Incredible. People can’t talk about race and class and generational strife the way they used to. Our discourse today is too fraught with irony and subtlety to achieve the same kind of biting painful clarity.
p.s. A glass half empty view on this whole issue can be found in Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be The Verse.”
alexou said,
February 26, 2007 at 17:52
It kind of reminds me of Stanford’s Asian big-little sib program… my big sib told me that a big reason why they wanted to participate as big sibs is that their big sibs sucked, were useless, etc, and they wanted to improve the program by being better big sibs than the ones they had. But instead, they themselves were typically not great either, wash, rinse and repeat. I saw my one of my big sibs all the time cause he was also a Mendicant, but we didn’t see the other two members of our sib family much at all.
So I actually don’t know that the majority of people forgive our parents out of knowledge that we’ll fuck up with our own kids too — in fact on some level, isn’t that really fatalistic? I’m sure most people feel they won’t make the same mistakes their parents do. Then again more and more I hear people (like Chris) say they see how they are incredibly influenced by their parents, whether they like it or not. Myself, I still feel like I was adopted (in the sense that I see none of my parents characteristics in me, good or bad).
That poem was definitely glass half empty. With like, a hole in the bottom too.