Force, Shaping Stone

Carved in Stone

Maybe I'm obsessed with an authentic self because I glimpsed my father's as he was absorbed into something false...

My father studied geology at Stanford.  I learned that after he died.  As information goes, it's unremarkable.  As insight, however, it's gold.  

What was meant as a passing comment turned into the one that exposed the only detail about my father that made sense to me upon hearing it.  The rocks that interested him became the symbol that explained him more succinctly than any other thing he did, or became. 

When I learned he started his adult life collecting stones it was met by an existential sigh. It solidified what was tragic about him. 

My father had himself in his arms just before he let himself get away.  

 He gave away the enduring quality of stone for numbers that never added up to anything.

 I'm sure he did it because it was considered a practical, and responsible choice, and for most people that's probably true.  For Joe Mack it was Hari-Kari.  At least for the soul.  Consider the following observations and facts that detailed my father's life with numbers: 

1. He spent his entire professional life as a Certified Public Accountant.  At first, with big corporations, and finally, on his own.
2. He kept his work and personal life estranged from each other.  There was no crossover, no blending of the two.  No friends from work came to dinner, or pool parties.  He never spoke of people, or experiences, at his job.
3. There isn't a single occasion, not one, that I can recall where joy was associated with how he made his living. Not an anecdote, or a witness.  No references, or allusions. No event, ever, that he shared about something that happened while working.
4. He was happiest fishing in Tahoe, or coaching Little League.
5. By the end of his life he lost the properties he'd acquired in Santa Cruz and Tahoe, his family, and his business.  He'd been arrested for at least 7 DUI's, and spent a year in jail.
6. He died alone, in his car, after missing the turn to our driveway, and hitting a tree in a small ravine.  He was found by a jogger, dead, with a punctured spleen.  I think he was fifty-four.

Sadly, I think my father chose the CPA path hoping it would present him to the outside world as someone he didn't know how to be on the inside.  And of course, it didn't.  Based on the few things I know that brought him joy, rocks were the better bet.  His instinct knew it.  When he abandoned them, he abandoned himself.  If you've ever done that you know you're left with two choices:

• You either walk away from everything you've built, and the identity founded upon it, and reclaim it.
• Or you consume yourself in anger.

I believe my father, the real Joe Mack, was devoured by the guilt, shame and resentment of having turned his back on his life 

Shards of Self

My father died before organizing his fragments into a balanced whole.  He didn't know the calm of repose that reflects a balanced individual.  The mind is separate from the self each of us endeavors to construct.

  Where we are handicapped by self-consciousness in the choice between rocks or numbers, the mind is not.  It will take whatever we give it and strive to create something coherent.  It expects us to arrive in shards, and is programmed to implement alchemy on what we deliver.  Unless it's swathed in anger.  If the pieces we've collected as the components of self are soaked in rage there's nothing the mind can do but watch them boil.

If you doubt the mind's independence ask yourself who's in charge when you sleepwalk.  Or ask yourself who chose to forget the painful details of an accident by insuring you can't recall them with a quick 'going into shock'.  The question of an authentic self is the same question that pry's at the nature of the unconscious mind.  


If you still doubt it, think on these facts:

• Fetuses in the womb have been recorded having REM sleep.  That's dream sleep, with images.  Where are the images coming from prior to sight?
• A person living 90 years will spend 30 of those years in sleep.  It's known that in some stages of sleep the mind is more active than it is during wakefulness.  What are those 30 years allocated for, and what is the mind visiting?

The mind assists our efforts to become individuals by integrating the shards we collect into something whole.   My father tried to force an integrated self on his own.  He wanted it, but didn't have the patience, or self-acceptance required to coax it.  His personal issues were, in a way, compounded by the limitations of his times.  Men of his generation didn't ask for help, or take the unbeaten path.  They didn't stay home to raise three sons.  They were prisoners to the limitations of the developing stereotype of the American male.

My father was in conflict with himself until the day he died.  He never made it back to his rocks, to himself.   

He got gypped. 

Integration

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers believed the function of this stage (integration of shards into a whole self) was to bring together the four dimensions of an individual-  the sociohistorical, the embodied, the engaging, and the spiritual.   

He believed the four dimensions are inseparable, and coexist as a single entity.   The objective of this stage is congruence.   It's difficult, if not impossible, to see yourself as whole without it.  My father, for some reason, was adamant about keeping his parts, apart, in the same way he'd detached from his family.

So,

• Dad the Little League coach, and Dad the summer pool party host, didn't fraternize with Dad of tiny numbers in perfect columns.  
• The Dad who woke me at 5 A.M. (already clean-shaven, hot chocolate and donuts waiting in the car) so I could catch the first rainbow trout of the day, and watch the sun rise from a private boulder on the edge of Lake Tahoe, ignored the Dad who endured the monotony of itemized tax returns to pay for it all.
• Joe Mack, geologist, who entered Stanford with a love of rocks never forgave Joe Mack, CPA, who preferred a cubicle stocked with graph paper, and number two pencils.  

I wasn't aware of the two sides when I was a child.  
I became aware of them as a man with his

own internal conflicts.  The only one I saw as a child was the one with joy in him.  The one who fished.  The one who played games with kids like he was one.  The one with an uproarious laugh. The one who filled his pockets with flat stones, and then skipped them, one by one, across the lake.

The coup by the non-integrated persona  was so gradual, and stealthy, I'm not sure when it began. When it ended was obvious because my father disappeared.  He stopped laughing.  He didn't play games anymore.  He stopped caring, really.  About anything.  His soul dried up and he stopped. 

 The man he'd kept hidden, and isolated, the man he wore at work, rebelled against the imposed seclusion from all that was vivacious, and favored.  When that man located the trunk they were kept in, he destroyed them.  That side of my father wasn't tempered by anything benevolent, so he couldn't reside in it.  Without integration that part of him was inept at living life.  Nothing kind or decent stood a chance when confronted by it.  He destroyed everything he sought, and deserved.

Pebbles in My Pocket

I've taken note of that as an adult.  Where my father subscribed to the American myth of practicality, sensibility, and security, I've remained leery of it.  I place what I love first, and tend to what remains after immersing myself in the other.  Needless to say, this hasn't always been a winning formula.  But I'm embedded in what I care for in the same way the force that shapes stone is embedded in it.

Geology is the science that deals with the earth's physical structure and substance, its history, and processes that act on it.   If someone had applied those principles to an assessment of my father he may have stood a chance.   

The processes acting upon him were the same ones that act upon all of us,  but they owned him. They convinced him to doubt what he loved.  They convinced him that to matter it's best if you don't care.   

When practicality failed to live up to it's promise, it was too late.   He had already relinquished what he loved most about himself, and he understood how difficult it would be to reclaim it.  A fissure appeared, and he split.   He became completely divided. He'd let himself down, and that was harder to take than wasting away.   

Stone Stories

Sometimes, when you learn what feeds and motivates  your enemy's anger, 

you cease to see him as one.  

And, you notice yourself in him, 

just as the tragedy of your life envelopes you

in an avalanche of suffering.

If I over think things, there's a reason.  

If I court suffering there's a purpose. 

I can be my father, and lead my sons to a similar end, 

or I can honor his course with analysis, and try to avoid it.  

I may not be successful at manifesting what's within me, 

but when I die it will be with stones in my pockets,

 and words on my tongue.  

My sons will know who I was,

and they'll understand how much I loved my journey.

                                                 What authentic looks like.