Postwar Supermen and Cultural Kryptonite

The people I grew up with are the last of the baby boomers. Most of my oldest friends are sons of immigrants. That makes us prime examples of the American Dream. The quest for freedom, economic and political, was our Pablum. Our object lessons consisted of the mythologies of the old countries. Our characters were forged through the intensity of the cold war while being nourished off the post war glut of commercial goods. Our childhood was good, our parents succeeded through us. We are invincible.

Half a century later, we still grasp those early ideals as a lifeline of reassurance. The difference is the change in today’s sociopolitical landscape. Our parents’ feared nationalistic golems are long dead, the soviet menace has been defanged and our economy is reeling like a punch drunk boxer facing Tyson. Still, as a generation, we cannot be dominated. We saw the end of polio, whooping cough and tuberculosis. Medicine fixed all ills, chemistry made us indifferent to the rest. We drove the best vehicles, travelled with impunity to the farthest reaches of our imaginations, saw new worlds and experienced the unknown.

Today begins the end of our era. Fatalistic as this may sound, we are a shrinking demographic. Our parents are setting before us beyond the horizon while friends are contracting illnesses that should not have the temerity to even come nearby. Our invincibility is starting to show fractures along the edges. Injuries linger and aches morph into symptoms as the heart looks for new avenues to explore. My friends are succumbing to outrageous slings and arrows on all sides impelling me to reassess my physicality in an effort to stave of the inevitable. Our band of immigrant sons (and daughters) is condensing into a refined essence. A purified idealism that we attempt to pass on to our progeny and this is an expression of our faith.

Our common religion is based on tenets arrived at through our family experiences. We hold to these beliefs as a security blanket that we in turn pass on to our next generation. The faith derived from our experiences give us hope. We may show our mortality now, but we do not acknowledge that part of our humanity. Our conviction in the science behind us helps us to face the unexpected. Our devotion to those who made the great leap to bring us here causes us to continue the immigratory process. We endure because know it is possible to do so. We also impart this to our children because we know commitment to our experiences provides an indomitable confidence that can protect all who believe in it. I am a believer. I drink this Kool Aid of 50’s propaganda because I have experienced its successes. I believe it enough to endeavor to bring up a second generation in the face of a diminished national luster. I do it because my parents did more than this long ago. I do it because my friends do the same. We have faith in ourselves.

Losing a parent is a difficult event to accept. Losing a second family member adds insult to injury and adds more salt to the wound. My cousin was the only relative outside my parents to successfully immigrate here. He was an adult with one marriage and two children behind him when he arrived. After trying to gain an exit visa for over twenty years, he was able to escape the economic doldrums of his mother country. A new setting with unscripted possibilities faced my cousin. At the end, he found a new love, added to his family and created a bridge between different cultures for all his local relatives.

What does this mean for me? It comes down to trying to understand an emotionally draining malaise that sucks any will to create faster than a double black hole. A personal inertia has taken hold and there is no manual or textbook to help guide me. There is also a pain that can split me in half and continue down past my toes as it tries to reopen the San Andreas Fault Line. Every bad moment in my sad history file comes to the forefront in sharpest focus. What ifs and if onlys fill my trains of thought.

My cousin was only a concept when I was growing up. My parents, brother and I were the only family outside the home country. My cultural background did not match my friends and classmates as a child. An ethnic island misunderstood and ignored. Stories kept the image of my distant family alive in my mind. A trip to the old country when I was two was just another page in our family mythology. It was just us and then everybody else. After high school came the trip that set me on my self awareness phase of life. I met the family and they became real and visceral. They accepted and reassured me. I identified with them though I do not know the extent of their reciprocation. I met my cousin once more and grew to know him on that trip. I realized the depth and sophistication of my culture through him. I experienced the support that only an extended family can provide through him. He showed me a side of the home country not found in travel guides and expressed an impressively broad store of knowledge. I viewed him as an intellectual equal, one of the few I would admit since I was such a smug self satisfied smartass at that time. I learned so much in the three months I spent with him that I was challenged to add anything significant to his scholarly gems for years.

My cousin finally arrives here and begins to reinvent himself and accomplish new things. I spent much time with him at first, but my life quickly took precedence as I struggled with school and stumbled into a career. A family came next for me and now my concentration was even more narrowly focused. All this effort came at a cost to our relationship. The next thing I now, my cousin has a career, then a new wife and son bringing with it another cultural addition to our immigrant family. My cousin’s role had shifted from relative to friend and teacher, then to extended family member and cultural bridge. My personal career and family arcs took me out of the inner circle of our nuclear family and sadly removed me, all too often, with regular interaction with him.

Now he has passed and with him ends my mother’s direct lineage in North America. I am racked with remorse over my lack of familial interaction and obligations. Regret dominates my thoughts. This compounds the pangs caused by the loss of my mother. Idleness overwhelms any inclination to actually accomplish anything. My only answer to this feeling tonight was to drive. Ever my favorite means of avoiding responsibilities, I could drive for hours and days on end. Since learning to drive at the age of eleven, this has remained the one consistent thing I can do. I would drive in high school, leaving campus during the period before lunch and returning at the end of the school day. With classmates or alone, it did not matter. With gasoline at fifty cents a gallon and a never ending supply thanks to my father, I learned all the major roads in and out of Los Angeles County. So, tonight after the reception for my cousin’s memorial I drove. Without anyone to share this evening of mourning I took to the streets to try and remember past events and sites. My memory failed me in the most perfect manner. Houses no longer recognizable, streets long changed and a greater number of fellow drivers stymied any attempt to wax nostalgic. Still, I think best when driving alone. I came to realize the effects of many forces and stresses working upon my emotions. I realized my need for contact, an attraction to beauty and the need for mental stimulation that has occupied my attention for the last month. These interests echo the conversations with my cousin as he was also a cryptic soul. The similarities of natures are obvious, the success in our abilities to achieve personal satisfaction, not so much.

Loss leads to reflection. This reflection can include different responses but these too, are dependent upon one’s emotional state. Work through it, I tell myself. But I am torn between seeking personal dreams or continuing on the path I have forged many years ago. I have not been able to resolve any of my dilemmas, neither does there appear to be any available resource that can lay out the best possible scenarios. I miss my mother. I miss my cousin. I have no answers for the empty set stuck within my parenthetical heart. All I can do is warm up my ice with another hit of Jack. Perhaps the new week will present options.

A Long Walk Overdue

I finally hit the trail behind my house this afternoon. It’s something I should do regularly because it’s good exercise, convenient and relatively isolated. Life tends to crowd personal time into a corner. I’m guilty of allowing this to happen, subsequently there is a price to pay for this practiced inactivity. I started off during the last waves of the afternoon heat planning to climb up for an hour before turning back. I wore my woven slouch hat and brought the camera along knowing that would cause me to stop periodically and hopefully keep from overheating. I realized after fifteen minutes that I wasn’t gasping for breath, sucking in flies as my heart raced. I was actually feeling pretty good and averaged a fair pace. These realizations lead to another concerning my eating habits and physical activity over the last two weeks. This is where the trip shifted from an early evening health walk to a voyage of contemplation.

I was completely alone on the trail, probably because of the heat, giving me a perfect opportunity to think about my state of mind without interruption. The last two weeks were epiphanic with the assistance of a good friend helping me to shake out emotional cobwebs and rid myself of a pervasive lethargy. This period began with a cleansing that was both actual and mental. Clearing out the accumulation of the last nine months lifted an unimaginable burden and assisted me to transition emotional residue.

This realization then connected with the fact that I have, for some unknown reason, started to reread Lacan and his structuralist concepts. Piecemeal as my reading is, it struck a harmonious chord in how I experience a good artist friend’s work and the way the incomplete image carries just enough detail to suggest but not too much that it closes the experience in a finite sense. Lacan’s notions of “the lack” and its relation to desire pierced me, leaving a visceral pang sending me back to the books to look for more definition.

Hopes and wishes had occupied me for the last nine months, or so I believed. Reviewing my philosophy notes reminded me of the concept of desire. Desire explains the feeling that’s been filling me since May. A desire to accomplish and complete. To attempt and compete. This feeling comes from a lack. This is not an appetite for satisfaction but it does involve affections. I begin to wonder if these unspoken desires can become a driving force, pushing me to realization.

This trail of thought also referenced the “other” as a self-not self. Looking inward but not seeing myself. I’ve rarely been able to apply this type of thought to myself. With that thought I was hit by an understanding of the French philosophers idea of “self as other”. By not applying theory to any personal experiences I have been looking outside of my “self”. If only I could have pondered this way when I was in school…

The trip back down the mountain was all too quick. I was repeating the concepts I had thought of knowing I would forget most of them by the time I got home. I did forget most of it, but the germ of understanding was still there. The past two weeks have been an opportunity to see things new and reorganize. These provide comforts badly needed that mend the soul. It was an opportunity to recharge the batteries. Next week promises to bring the return of stability on a new footing.

A trip to the California Plaza yielded a visceral explosion of the senses that I had not experienced for far too long. A dear friend’s suggestion prompted me to leave my studio cocoon and make the drive to the our city center. Seun Kuti (son of Fela Kuti) leading his father’s band, Egypt 80, courtesy of KCRW and a couple of other sponsors. I have been to performances at this venue before, but these were always staid presentations. The throng of fans raised a significant murmur as they awaited the performance. The music delivered on its promise and the audience responded exuberantly.

A concert can be fun on its own, but tonight’s event was made exquisitely perfect because of the friend who invited me and the others found at the venue. The night was filled with heady discussion of art, social behaviors, creativity, processes and aspirations. Personal accounts added poignancy and strengthened long held bonds. All this transpired with a feverish soundtrack backing the scene. Connections are reinforced by revealing desires and this helps to expunge negative or destructive motives. Creative batteries were charged in my case, especially with the one on one interface of talented artists. A personal need to constantly make new and challenging art is a desire to seek out a catharsis.

The evening continued after the concert at the posh loft of a past student of mine in an historic downtown building. This person received her degree from Occidental College with honors in art but did her printing at Pasadena City College. Her graduate portfolio was exquisitely done and truly gave me a boost. The evening ended with the closest of friends and intimate discussions of the essence of our existence and creative possibilities.

I sadly had to go home eventually, although without an ounce of sleep in me. Once home, it was straight to the darkened studio to shuffle papers and prepare materials. I am now sitting in a cloud of fixative trying to finish a poor write up of a uniquely memorable evening. The sun is barely up and I fear today will pale against last nights experiences.

Piruca en el Norte

In 1958, Ignacia Mercedes Zarate flew from Buenos Aires to begin a new stage of her life. The trip took over one and a half days, hop scotching innumerable cities and towns northward to the United States. Arriving in New York, where many an American family can trace their roots, her new voyage would take her westward across a different continent.

Mercedes has been a wife, a mother, a homemaker, a wage earner, and a grandmother after thousands of miles and fifty three years had passed. Along the way there have been happy times and sad, friendships made and lost, but always every challenge was faced, every opportunity exploited. She was the matriarch of our family and even as she passes from our world, this is only another stage in her voyage. Through our sadness we feel gratitude to have shared our lives with her. The sadness will pass eventually, the love she inspired and that we continue to experience will endure. Her strength of character fills us, even now. We will love and keep her in our hearts forever.