It May be True...

It may be true that a son is responsible for his own finances after a certain age, though let us not forget that it was the father who insisted that those finances be shared in this fashion. A deeper question seems to be that of greed. The son may sit upon the wealth of subscriptions he does not use, and this may be likened to a dragon hoarding. Be that as it may, the suggestion is raised that, were this hoard put to the son’s private use, the expenditure would be rational and hence legitimate, as a result pardoned by the Father. This, at least in part, implies that the son is ENTITLED to the use of the subscriptions, not by his own estimation so much as by his Father’s implication, and, since possession of the subscription is a prerequisite for its use, it follows inductively that the son deserves the subscription. Neither is it irrelevant to point out that the subscription itself was bought with the fruits of the son’s own labours, to be used towards the purposes of furthering those enterprises, and it was kept in the hope of someday finding more noble enterprises in undertaking, about which the Father’s approval means little, for they may very well surpass the Father’s scope and station. Furthermore, the “legitimacy and sensibility” of the expenditure is not entirely absurd and demoralizing, since we all know to whom the money goes: the Gymnasium, the Book Retailer, and, as the result of the missed deadline, the Bank. Any one of these institutions may be considered unworthy of payment, but in that sense they might be deemed to be the ones guilty of greed, in which case the son is not the rightful target for the father’s indignation, and the father’s choice to take his anger out on his own son amounts to nothing more than the impotence of a man who lacks the courage or the strength to confront the true adversaries. In saying this, however, I do not mean to hold my own father to the Herculean task of challenging these institutions, whose bureaucracy and reach render them practically unimpeachable. In order to contend with the TRUE evil, one has no further to look than within one’s own heart. The son may deem himself to be pure of Heart, and he does not do this vaingloriously. Ancient Egyptian Funeral Myths recount the trials of the Soul of the Deceased, who has then to swear before the Gods and Goddesses that he or she was innocent. I knew my innocence, with that same zeal; I simply lacked the tongue to prove it. Yet if the Father were to examine his OWN Heart, he might find that the same greed which he projects upon his son, which is also manifest impersonally in the institutions of these large corporations, in fact lives on within himself. Rather than rejoicing that his son has earned this subscription, though Life no longer affords the frequent payment of the expense, to say nothing of the fact that the son has abstained from its corollary indulgence, for his path has led him to more cerebral pursuits, the Father rages at the loss of money to which he himself felt entitled as the sole regulator and monetary manager. Yet clearly the son had not planned this to be the case either when he had purchased those subscriptions to the Gymnasium and the Bookstore; he simply felt he needed them to do his job(s). The power shifted, but the son remained pure of intent, and having learned from work to shirk harassment, he is not easily rattled and coerced into undoing the purchases he made in good faith in better financial straits. His is not the pursuit of “self-fulfillment” in place of “self-preservation”; it is simply a journey of “self-discovery” which is more important than “self-sacrifice” at this time, for the son remains, as a rule, less obligated to serve others than the man who voluntarily gave up part of his own autonomy to become a Father. To profess the virtues of the lone wanderer but to deplore it within one’s own children symptomizes a narcissistic reading of literature wherein only the reader can be the hero, and not other readers who accompany him. While it may appear just as self-centered to profess my own heroism now, what prompts it, truly, is fascination with heroism as such, as well as an attempt to recover from the heroic battle wounds of traumatic family dysfunction by appeal to the purity of one’s deeper and more enduring Soul, within which the hero always has found Solace even in the Darkest of Places.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]