Sixth post at Ana Verse, Friday, January 20, 2006, 02:13:00 CST
For about four years, between 1987 when I wrote a 120-page novella, and 1991, when I wrote a 300-page literary opus that dealt in God, Hamlet, Oedipus, and a shielded version of my love life and that clinged to my deepest desire to love and respect humanity, I suspected that I might have been molested as a child by my father. The suspicion was fearsome at first; nonetheless, I quickly accepted it as an excusable aspect of family life. I was much more ferocious on the subject of adult male violence against women who were too trusting of them. After I was attacked in my apartment, I asked my father, in near hysteria, whether he had done such a thing. "No," he said emphatically, an answer I have upheld to this day. I was too beside myself to tell him about the recent attack, out of a different sort of worry or fear. My father was a good but not a rich man, a microbiologist not a doctor, a churchgoer not a Jew or an atheist, a WWII army veteran who stayed in the US while his cousin was shot down over France. We were living in holocaustal times, just following the first US attack on Iraq. That nervous, yet important exchange, not the best and fortunately not the last in what had been a dear father-daughter interest, was not on record.
Six months later, when two fellow graduate students took me to a psychiatric "hospital" in west Houston, no one mentioned false or blocked memory theory, but I was drugged. The woman graduate student was a Republican from southern California and told me it was CIA. I had worried intently that the graduate students at the school I attended were document thieves and village copiers, and to some extent, I know that they were kids; a few of them were wonder kids.
I realized, but not in time to save my own or his life by thought or deed, that the block or difficulty was my own in living in our times. No one I knew deserved my love or trust, except my touchingly humble father and a very small and unrelated group of good souls I had had the positive fortune to know. Instead, I had trusted too many for too little reason. I had given too much ear, when less ought to have been required. I had withheld my dislike too often. I had learned to be a minor to every major whiner around. Life might have kept its curve had I cultivated my heart and not only my mind.
For about four years, between 1987 when I wrote a 120-page novella, and 1991, when I wrote a 300-page literary opus that dealt in God, Hamlet, Oedipus, and a shielded version of my love life and that clinged to my deepest desire to love and respect humanity, I suspected that I might have been molested as a child by my father. The suspicion was fearsome at first; nonetheless, I quickly accepted it as an excusable aspect of family life. I was much more ferocious on the subject of adult male violence against women who were too trusting of them. After I was attacked in my apartment, I asked my father, in near hysteria, whether he had done such a thing. "No," he said emphatically, an answer I have upheld to this day. I was too beside myself to tell him about the recent attack, out of a different sort of worry or fear. My father was a good but not a rich man, a microbiologist not a doctor, a churchgoer not a Jew or an atheist, a WWII army veteran who stayed in the US while his cousin was shot down over France. We were living in holocaustal times, just following the first US attack on Iraq. That nervous, yet important exchange, not the best and fortunately not the last in what had been a dear father-daughter interest, was not on record.
Six months later, when two fellow graduate students took me to a psychiatric "hospital" in west Houston, no one mentioned false or blocked memory theory, but I was drugged. The woman graduate student was a Republican from southern California and told me it was CIA. I had worried intently that the graduate students at the school I attended were document thieves and village copiers, and to some extent, I know that they were kids; a few of them were wonder kids.
I realized, but not in time to save my own or his life by thought or deed, that the block or difficulty was my own in living in our times. No one I knew deserved my love or trust, except my touchingly humble father and a very small and unrelated group of good souls I had had the positive fortune to know. Instead, I had trusted too many for too little reason. I had given too much ear, when less ought to have been required. I had withheld my dislike too often. I had learned to be a minor to every major whiner around. Life might have kept its curve had I cultivated my heart and not only my mind.
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