https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/
Monster Seeks Minder
This essay starts someplace and goes somewhere else. The hyperlinked Paris Review essay may explain what I know I need to do, and am getting to, likely too late …but the conflation of being a sexual predator where it starts, as a man a monstrous man to make art, whereas all a woman gas has to do is leave her children… is a leap not worth making. It lacks equality. The range of human behaviour, often past all previous imagining (mass shootings, mosque bombings say) includes the dark side…”just wanna fuck n fight,” as The Kills paraphrase Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.
What seems to be missing now I think on it, is the possibility writers and artists may sublimate their darkest thoughts and desires to make profound art and literature, with whatever their imagination, thinking and writing give them. It’s not just writers and artists of course, we can all write for our lives[1].
One of my first short stories in university was about a conceptual artist advertising for a willing subject who agrees to be brutally beaten to death with a lead pipe and then have his various parts lacquered into place, on canvass. The process is captured by a stationary video camera. Then the finished piece including video and body painting is “exhibited.”… No matter how much I might want to beat someone to a pulp, I am 100% more likely to write imaginatively about it, than actually do it.
So Manhattan ok, screwing a high school girl as a moral question, in a great movie. Screwing your adopted high-school-aged daughter at home, not ok. The distinction between representing and doing is essential.
back to the essay….
Noticing the pram in the hallway in the essay, made me recall the time mother left me in the hallway, in front of an open doorway to the basement while she washed her new Studebaker, while I rocked the pram and flew into brick wall face first. So I’m told, I was only six months old. Then, when I was three, she locked the door against me…etc… to study for her B.Ed . So I was told. Those stories became poems in boy (Hagios 2012). So I make the connection to her selfishness first. Yeah, I think she was a feminist without much information or guidance except knowing she had every right to be equal to a man, and as such able to make her own decisions. (Susann with two ns will catch this up.)
My father who shut his door to brood, think, read the Bible and prepare sermons also offended little boy me, and what selfishness I’ve chosen in my life is closing the door, as the essayist does, to write. My sister said she looked after me because “Mom and Dad were doing God’s work, somewhere else.” Selfish for God.
Another irony, I was at my selfish worst writing boy, locked in my room writing and drinking and writing. My 2nd ex-wife had done a runner, my third about to be wife was in Toronto doing her Ph.D course work in Toronto in 12 months. A pattern here, made worse because I was neglecting my daughter who was busting her brain to do well in a Kelvin IB program, it was self-defense and a shout-out to me who had his hearing aids out and the door closed. The boys were older, and that’s another story.
I never found out whether the woman I first married was selfish. Well, because I was selfishly getting drunk, you know like writers do. Same in my second relationship. Now I’m realizing learning to cook for women was probably a mistake, because once you are good at something you can unselfishly share in a family it can take you away from your selfish writer self. A chronic depressive, I never ever expected a woman to do much of anything for me but sleep in the same bed without fail, though I have had some definite advantages over the years and more recently married to a full-time professor, including an appreciation for good design she could afford, with good conversation and companionship not the least, though learning how to poach an egg is also right up there.
Now I poach my own eggs, as the third marriage winds up, and I’m left to look after myself. Despite disability it’s not that hard, nor would looking after someone else. Much harder is finding someone to look after me, something I never expected since my first hip surgery in 1969, though I did learn a lot from my brother and sister. Few women will look at me without thinking I’m going to be a lot of work. I’m physically becoming monstrous, need lots of meds and rest, and would love someone to clean up after me. How stupid is that. It’s 2017!
Now how do I find a woman ready to lick my stamps, like Vladimir’s Vera, and clarify my communications and maintain a steady flow of poems whatever to magazines. Minimize the number of my appointments and make sure I get to the ones I need to keep. Plus keep house, sleep with me, read books and enjoy conversation, and cook at least tolerably well.
Wanted, I’ll say in my online dating profile…Monster, rarely travels, goes out only for food or doctors, constantly plays music at home; seeks minder, gatekeeper, conversationalist, and companion to provide peace and the eats so I can write…and finish another damn story!
[1] Ted Dyck, founder of the WFYL mental health movement in Saskatchewan.