BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILD

      ilya bolotowsky, tondo

This crazy deal with my mother enforcing fear takes me back to childhood home where the house was ruled by fear. And almighty guilt. I had not thought much about the gulf between myself and my mother spiritually. I know it is a deep and wide chasm, but never think about it. From out of the blue, it turned out she's more concerned that I believe in Satan like she does than believe in Jesus like she does. I knew she had a close relationship with Satan, because she speaks his name so frequently, considerably more than she uses the name of Jesus. Jesus is inert and Satan is active. It's like John Milton, whose Satan was far more interesting than God. The God and Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost is my mother's cosmology. After leaving that cosmology in my past, I despised Milton's Paradise Lost in college, where God is the same as dead, giving credence to Nietzsche. It is that vision of God Nietzsche was saying was dead. Milton's vision of the devil is a cool guy with a life. The Miltonic vision of the light and the dark is the same as I grew up being taught to believe, God with long white hair and beard, the white-robed patriarch judge slamming down the gavel, saying: Guilty! Go directly to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.


No wonder she believes so much in fear with such a cosmology. I could not live with a God like that. My vision of God is more like a baby than an ancient patriarch. A fun baby with clear eyes devoid of judgment, eyes that love shines through. Efforts to control others in the name of God are the very most heinous forms of control. I was never able to go with a God about judgment and fear. That doesn't compute with "God is love." Doesn't compute at all. I didn't realize how important fear is to my mother. It answers a great many questions of why living was so difficult in their house. I was kept in a constant state of fear by daddy directed by mommy. Church five times a week. God the judge said everything about me was wrong. Then, secretly with myself, I'd say "God is love," like what a mystery that is. Love doesn't hit. Love doesn't berate. Love doesn't control with fear. Nothing connected for me. Scripture said one thing, Baptist dogma said something quite different. None of the adults saw any inconsistencies. I was in the wrong place. That's why everything about me was wrong.


In the Seventh grade, in a Health class, the teacher, a coach, was talking about hitting children, 1954. He asked how many in the class were hit once a month. About half raised their hands. Once a week, just a few. Once a day? I was the only one. Until that day, I thought it was normal to be hit and berated every day. Even today, I can feel what I felt then at the surprise that I was the only one in the class hit every day. It didn't seem normal half the people in the class were never hit. And the ones that were hit, they only got it once a month with a couple of once-a-week exceptions. I was also the shyest kid in school, far and away. My mind was twisted up in a knot, my emotional self a complete wreck. It was another time I longed for notice. Like, Help! And none was forthcoming. In kindergarten, early in the school year the school nurse examined all the kids with the teacher. When it was my turn, the nurse told the teacher "He chews his fingernails. It's a sign of trouble at home." Little 5 yr old was crying inside, begging to please help me get away from the insane monster at home. But no help came. Observation only. I didn't know yet, but was learning parents are always right and kids always wrong.


Inside myself, I knew better, but the world all around believed adults knew what they were talking about and kids did not. It's still that way. Only difference is, I don't fall for it. Having lived among adults as one of them for half a century, I have learned that it's the other way around: adults do not know what they're talking about. Kids get shut down because they're little and have no recourse. That was the part I hated about childhood, that I had no backup, no one to take my side. It was the very same as locked in prison. I couldn't escape (run away) because a kid out of school during the day is truant, suspect, arrested and returned to parents. No regard for the kid whatsoever, a criminal skipping school and making parents worry. Throw the kid back into the cauldron of hell he ran from. It's the same as shackled, except the chains are invisible. It looks like the Ozzie and Harriet Show on the outside, while on the inside lurks a hell for the kid that nobody else can see, except the school nurse.


A black and white photograph comes to mind. Kid sitting on long-legged stool getting picture taken. Big smile like a kid is supposed to do. Looks relaxed. Upon closer inspection, both legs are wrapped around the stool's legs like vines. They were the only foundation the kid had. Daddy looking at him through the camera, kid screaming inside, paralyzed by waiting for daddy to click the button. I hated for that expletive to even see me, let alone look at me. Curiously, the kid's head is in the center of the photograph like in a scope. Looks like there were murderous thoughts running both ways in the taking of that photograph. The big rooster and the little rooster. The little rooster found that murderous thoughts didn't work on the giving or receiving ends. Nothing to do but wait for time. Paying dues. Getting so twisted up inside from living in the church wing of the insane asylum, there was nothing to do but cry myself to sleep at night over the apparent accident of birth to strangers. It taught me not to gamble, because I draw a losing hand.


I made my final payment on dues for being born the day discharged from the navy. I love it, discharged. Like guns discharge bullets. In my heart I left the navy fast as a bullet when time was up. First thing to do in my life under my own power was to get an education. The 2 years in navy I used learning how to read, preparing myself for an education experience. In college, I never intended to use the degree as credentials for a career. I wanted nothing to do with that insane world. After education, I went to the mountains for healing. In the mountains I learned it was not so much their world that was insane, but that daddy, himself, was so self-centered as to be a mental health issue that was never addressed, just got worse with the idea of authority, somebody who outside the house had none. Mother hanging on the best she could with her own mental health issues, like something in her own childhood that hadn't oughta happen to little girls. Daddy was a hay-wire gene that runs through the Worthingtons and pops up once per generation. My youngest sister has it.


Looking at the years of mental health issues lashing in all directions at all times, living the emotional and mental response to it, even unto today, and to see that it was all genetics, gives it a whole new perspective. Genes. In the education years I learned it was the craziest member of a household who ruled. And there's mommy trying to hold it together with the Ozzie and Harriet look. George Carlin said, Women are crazy and men are stupid. Women are crazy because men are stupid. There it is, encapsulated like a message in a fortune cookie, the meaning of life. Maybe it's time we start educating boys. It's no wonder that war is the constant activity of humanity. Men are stupid. Who are the devotees of Limbaugh mind? Largely not women and children. Mommy trying with all her denial to make their world the way it's supposed to be, against all odds. Trying to do what's right by husband, by kids, by church, by mother-in-law, wanting so much to do right it evolves into need for control, using an idea of God for control, pushing away the ones she wants closest, for their own good.


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RIGHTS

andre derain, the trees, 1906

Just now finished seeing a video of George Carlin on YouTube professing we have no rights. He told it  well. He had to throw in some vulgar language to distinguish that he was not preaching, anyway not religion preaching. He was political preaching. He talked about illusion, breaking down what God-given-rights means. He noted that this country has 10, Britain has 13, Germany has twenty-some. Then he notes most countries recognize no rights. His lesson for the day was that our government does not care about us individually. Does not care at all. Totally true. Maybe it's a surprise to somebody, but all you need to do is think about it half a minute and there it is. And, once you see it, it changes nothing. It's just another way to see something we tend never to think about, which is what he's really after. He went into an examination of swearing on the Bible in court. Like would it take if the Bible were upside down? If he held his left hand up instead of his right, would God object? He breaks it down and looks at it like examining a tradition that has lost it's reason for being, but continues because it's tradition. It's what we do.


In my own life, I've taken the Bill of Rights for granted. Who ever thinks about it? People in law school think about it. Judges think about it. The rest of us could not list our Bill of Rights if asked to name two. It's like Carlin said, he, himself, feels like he has all rights. And we do too. How that works out is consequences of actions, everything comes back. Step on somebody else's rights and yours will be stepped on in turn. I've an idea the Bill of Rights was written and adopted to save us the conflict of learning over and over what other people's rights are and the limits to one's own. Sometimes I get the feeling that the people who make the most noise about freedom want it for themselves, but not for other people. Since the beginnings of women's liberation unto today, black men, as a rule, don't believe women should have certain rights. But black men want liberation for themselves. I've never understood that. It surely has to do with culture, and I know next to nothing of black culture. I can never know black culture, because I don't have the experience. My culture is the privileged race that rarely thinks outside its own box, just like socially it is only looking up the ladder, not down the ladder.


Where the ladder is concerned, my own take on it is to stay away from the ladder. I've avoided work that is structured hierarchically. I've stayed out of social climbing altogether, since childhood where it starts. I will not work in corporate hierarchical structure like in the military. There, you address the rank, not the man. That's bullshit. It makes for good organization, but there are enough people willing to live like that, who want to, they don't need me. Also, in a hierarchical organization, military or corporate, one's rights are restricted. One signs off one's rights endorsing the first paycheck. I've never been interested in working for an employer that tells me how to live my life. Like when I stepped into the art world and became subject to all the s'posed-to mind. I said to myself, I'd rather have a job painting houses, the houses themselves. One individual who was beginning to sell some of my paintings started telling me how and what to paint. I was to paint little nigger kids playing around a schoolhouse, folk art, that's what people want. That was the end of me and her. It wasn't even the racism, but the stupid that got to me. The racism was understood.


I found that everyplace I connected with for selling paintings believed it was their Right to tell me I should paint some way other than what I'm doing. They have the right to say it, and I have the right to pay them no mind. I pulled out of the art-market world, because I'm not interested in my name in lights, not interested in fame or fortune, or climbing the hierarchical ladder in the art world. I'm no big deal as a painter. I make pictures that some people like and some people don't like. I'm ok either way. I'm satisfied that I'm doing what I like doing, what I want to do. I'm not looking to be cutting edge avant-garde, nor am I interested in imitating a certain style that is called mainstream at the moment. Accused of not painting mainstream, I always answer that when a manner of painting is mainstream, it's over. I'm not looking for a place in art history. It suits me better for my paintings to be in the homes of my friends than homes of people I don't know and don't even know who owns the paintings. I don't want my paintings so expensive only the upper-middle-class can afford them, or corporations for offices and lobbies. I want my friends to have them, people I know, people who live in my world. Like I don't like to leave the county, I don't like to sell a painting outside the county. I do, but that's just a rule of thumb preference, not a commandment.


We give up a lot of rights when we pursue money and position. I learned so early on about giving up rights pursuing money and influence, that I never developed an interest in money. I'd rather have a working class job where I can be who I am and not be expected to adjust my thinking to what is acceptable. The way I think is largely not acceptable. I see it in the coffee shop every time I go in there. I refuse to talk political correctness speak, thus get frowned at quite a lot for unacceptable speech. I don't go to church for the same reasons I go to the coffee shop less and less. I'm not submitting to expectation that I think and believe certain ways. I won't do that. I am not dehumanizing myself voluntarily for money. My own humanity is more valuable to me than a big house full of expensive things in the best part of town. I don't want to get so high up that I look down on the lowest people. The people who believe themselves at or near the top of the ladder despise it in me that I don't honor the ladder. I don't shit and grovel when they're around. They hate me to the degree they need to believe themselves high up. None of it has anything to do with me. So I pay it no mind.


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