Small Favors of Mourning - Journeys Through the Dark Night - "Fear was my father. Father fear."

Many years,
much is forgiven
or lost in cloud,

I've no idea still what
the inside of my father's
bomber

looks like, how
it smells laden
with fear

perhaps passed
off as gun powder, fuel,
flak flame

and smoke so
black and deep in the
pores

it stinks a lifetime.

Yours. Also mine by blood.

Still, your son
is proud though fear is
the meal

you often fed
dutifully eaten with sliced
bread so

white white
light in the shaking
hand,

dread was
the tarnished knife and fork,
simple

instruments to
quell the terror in you
served up to sons,

at least one
of them.

I know now your fear
made mine, yet, many
years in the making, this:

Dessert is a son's pardon.

<><><>

Betsy: "Warren, your father could not do anything to stop his violence and unrestrained compulsions, the storm is archetypal, is bigger than personality, is larger and more powerful than he is, than his ego...if you can begin to get this, to comprehend it, that he was and is gripped by a transpersonal force beyond his capacity to control and curtail then you can and will heal the father wound, yourself, and perhaps even your father in some deep way while he's wasting away with altzheimers, and this hurricane is that mythic one of Falcons who came west from Spain, the Canaries, entered the Gulf of Mexico like a hurricane, and settled in Louisiana, if you can heal this enough in you then you begin to depotentiate it, make it smaller, and also literally redeem your ancestors." - excerpted from below about how I healed my father wound.

Here's Dad, the brown-eyed handsome man, charming what, and his 3 youngest sons, and two of his nephews (the two on the photo right)..I am on dad's immediate right (I remember my loving that shirt I'm wearing), dad's holding Leonard, my youngest brother, and brother Richard, missing some front teeth, is to the (photo) left of dad. 

We're on my grandfather's front porch, my dad's dad, Simon Felix Falcon, middle name Felix is that of the ship captain who sailed the first immigrant Falcon brothers from the Canary Islands to New Orleans in the early 1800's when Louisiana was owned by Spain and called New Iberia (New Spain). Grandpa's house was formerly a popular dance hall before he purchased it for his bride and the soon to be ample brood of mostly boys, jeez, how many, what, 12 of them (with several stillborn or dead soon after birth and therefore uncounted), only 2 girls amongst the very hornery boys but one would not mess with those girls as they were fierce, had to be what with all the brat-boy energy running amok...Oraline, the brood-mother, my grandmother, whom I never knew because she burned to death before I was born by catching her long skirts on fire while trying to warm her rear end in the cold uninsulated cajun-style house (some suspect it was a suicide since she had been very depressed), she was a heavy handed force along with Simon, keeping the wild herd mostly on track, at least when said herd or some of them were in plain sight. 

I was terrified of those uncles, loud, mean, violent, prone to just thwack (cajun kids were for thwacking) a kid just for the hell and power-over of it. I learned to keep wide berth of them. Then though, there was the herd of cousins (Catholic families = brats a-plenty) some (too many - more than a handful doing time in prisons) who were just as hornery, mean, cruel and violent as their fathers. I tried to keep wide berth of most of them too. Something dark there is in those swamps, those old world customs which (my family of) immigrants brung with them (some with their slaves), mostly uneducated though methinks the two Falcon brothers who bore their seed and brood to the New World and New Iberia were plenty educated. But that apparently didn't matter much back then. Even some poor immigrants managed to own a slave or two. None too proud I am of this history. Ugh. 

We moved to South Carolina when I was in the second grade and it was a relief to be shod of daily/weekly "family" time with that scary bunch. South Carolina was another kind of darkness. But that's for another photo and some other time to tell. But I can declare here that my salvation there was the deep woods, those sighing pines, the large oaks and poplars, the sycamores and the holly with their fierce bright berries red red, and the foxes, the crows, the cardinals (!!!), scores of them bright as holly berries guarded by sharp pricks on light green shiny leaves, the rabbits, their stillness in the dew wet front field at dawn with layered fog low over the hay and garden, the bee hives already at work where nearby so still the wild and shagged hare proudly crouched (rutting time), I crept silently down the drive so as not to disturb his meditaion, the fishing lake down the hill, catfish as large as (I shit you not) a bathtub, and so many good though lonely nights on a spread blanket beneath the stars with my star maps, books on astronomy and constellations, and my emergency flashlight signalling into the night sky for what seemed hours, years, SOS SOS SOS.

Now, looking back, I did have solid signs, no, hints, big solid magical hints of some help that fueled my unthought hope-enough that there was some vague sense in the madness, an early Fall morning alone at the foot of the drive waiting for the school bus, the rust colored lake, Carolina red clay its banks and its hue, wearing steam brightly lit by the just dawning sun, I notice about 10 yards from me, as the light gathers, something nearby in the middle of the road, something alive and animal, and feathered. Blinking to make sure my eyes are seeing what they are seeing, and the animal blinking widely/slowly back at me, an owl! We gaze at each other for awhile. I gather courage (fueled by curiosity) to approach it fully expecting it to take fright and fly away. But it does not move. I get closer and it does not fly away. It's head turns up toward me, keep me in its gaze. I back away, find a broomstick-sized stick, and again approach the miracle in front of me. I lower it to the pavement and, again dumbstruck, the owl lightly steps onto it. This is too easy, too good to be happening. I carry (not sure I breathed for at least 5 minutes) my miracle up the drive, behind the house to the barn, open the heavy door and place the stick and owl in the trailer dad used to haul things in, and taking a last look at the owl that keeps me in its long gaze, I slowly close the door then run screaming excitedly through the back door of the house where my mother is distractedly drinking coffee while standing at the kitchen sink (this stance at the sink was a "thing" for her, I never understood what she was doing there looking out the small window over the driveway, the septic tank, into the always shadowed woods). I tell her what has just occurred, she's only slightly interested. "You can't keep a wild animal," she says after a sip of coffee, and my silent retort is, "then why do you goddamn keep dad around?" 

Back from school up the drive I run bypassing the house, straight to the barn where I stand for a moment catching my breath and hoping I will find my treasure and it is really real and not some wild hallucination too good to be true. I slowly heave the heavy door open wide. Late afternoon light, pretty dark inside. In the trailer where I had left it is the stick. Only the stick. On no! please! please be real. My eyes adjust to the dark interior and then, sigh of relief and joy, there it is, the owl's perched on a top shelf where dad keep his tools. It gazes at me. Awe. I gaze back. I say in a whisper, "Hello." Happy. Mystified. Enthralled. Here's a visitor just for me perhaps somewhat like an alien, a UFO, certainly out of my blue morning at the bottom of a hill, in the middle of a road, beside a lake eerie with its own steam cloud rising high brightly glowing with new sunlight - fright, joy, wonder. Just for me. Then. A silent flight in slow motion from the shelf, over the trailor and just over my right shoulder, it glides toward the woods but lands on a low limb of a dogwood my dad had planted, owl looks back at me, its body facing the woods, its face/head facing me. A long communion, joy rushing through me, my bones electric. According to some inner timing all its own, not human timing, never, I want it to be never, it just elevates/floats (it seems) up through the trees, circles a few times over the barn and me and then is gone. My own private UFO of sorts, in retrospect. 

It was enough for me. Had to be. And it was grace sufficient unto the 12 year old or so boy who would eventually forget the entire incident until a dream during my analysis jarred the memory vividly awake and, not too often in those early analysis years, I wept for joy. A kind of soul retrieval long before I'd heard of such. I began to tentatively "believe" and this a few years before this dream recalled just below. 

Alas, owless, still living forlorn on the Carolina hill, the space ship never come to my rescue though I did have a dream of it years later in NYC while in Jungian analysis going through requisite anamnesis (not to be confused, as I once did, with amniosentesis though I could have used a numbing shot at times while in analytical recall trying in angst to give re-birth, even perhaps first psychological birth to myself as a human, not just the scream which survives the electrocution that I felt myself to be so early on in consciousness - I borrow this image Mike Eigen, psychoanalyst/writer extraordinaraire - while revisiting all this childhood/adolescence stuff there was this one apocryphal heartbreaking dream in which I was back home alone in the family house still on the never changing hill, Sorrow Hill, though dad called the place Cardinal Cove for all the cardinals in the woods all around. South Carolina 1960s days/years of sore and yore when in the daytime, this night dream, of a bright light and whooshing roar surrounds both me and the house inside and out. I just know it is THEM finally come to fetch me at long last! I am frozen with excitement/fright, the moment of rescue/salvation come at last, I cannot move when I so want to, to run out the front door arms raised me screaming, All praise to stars and ships! Get me the hell outta here!!!! but I cannot budge at all (I'm in the kitchen, I just now remember, at the sink like my mom, peanut butter sandwich in hand, a glass of milk freshly poured on the countertop), then, alas, at some point the light fades, another whoosh very loud then growing fainter then, soon after, a torrential downpour with thunder and lightning, rain that will not stop, I cower on the kitchen tiles. I have been left forever behind. No mulligans. No second chances. I awaken as the dream storm seems to invade the actual room I'm in. It's the din of West 142nd Street, the neighborhood revved and roaring. The world wags on.

Dear Betsy, analyst, after I share this dream, says to me, I remember tears in HER eyes which scares me, moves me, future paces me, 

"Warren, the storm is all the emotions you could not afford to feel in your family, now they are finally able to surface, to be felt and released, the dream tells me and you that you are ready for this part of the work, the solutio, the water phase, the dissolving of old, tired, worn out defenses which must go so that you may feel it all and in feeling heal and thus regain your more authentic self...this is an arrival of the work you are doing and now this storm, hard as it is, is actually a good thing...you see, an unfelt-but-present in the body/unconscious storm keeps one trapped in the past-as-present, and also trapped in who you know yourself to be which is mostly adaptation, an adapted self you had to grow around the trauma and deficit of your early years... 

"...You may not understand this now but thank god the UFO didn't take you away. I would have been very worried had it done so...The UFO represents wholeness that has been in safe-keeping in the depth of the unconscious, your conscious wholeness is also actually nascent within the very feelings of abandonment and forsakeness, it can rightly be called abjection [a new word for me], now you may more consciously experience those feelings no longer alone, a part of you may begin to bear witness and stay present with that weeping boy...and me too, I'm here to bear witness with and for you, to hold and keep you in that both easy, and by that I mean that the feelings are like river rapids flowing wild in your emotional body, and hard, meaning that such feelings are very difficult to bear in the overwhelming currents of release in the necessary dissolving of defenses that kept your emotions frozen now but now, now they are melting into surrender and shudder like an unshuttered and unfiltered typhoon."

Some weeks pass, difficult days of tsunami-filled night dreams and accompanying waking dreams of emotional storms, sobs, gut-convulsing cries, and shaking literally leaving me exhausted physically and emotionally. I call in sick at work often, would drive my van into mountains. I hiked, napped on rocks, listened to cascading streams and falls and at times soaked in or beneath them letting the chill currents flow through me. I haunted the comidas restaurant between West 139th and 140th (alas no longer there) to wash in odors and flavors of grease, pork, yellow rice, black and red beans, platanos, fried yucca, cafe con leches sixty cents a cup, the music loud full of heat and passion, humor and hips, the owners calling me Jack because they thought at first that I was Jack Nicolson (I kinda sorta looked like a thin Jack from the long jogs so...). The marvelous hold in El Flor de Mayo provided relief to the the grief work unleashed in me. 

Some few months after my "salvation abandoning me" dream, I shared a dream with Betsy where my father was a massive hurricane, I could see it/him from above covering the entire Gulf of Mexico and bearing down upon southern Louisiana just about to make landfall at New Orleans, I could see that there was an infant with my father's face curled around the storm's eye which turned very slowly. End of dream.

Betsy says upon hearing the dream, 

"Warren, your father could not do anything to stop his violence and unrestrained compulsions, the storm is archetypal, is bigger than personality, is larger and more powerful than he, his ego...if you can begin to get this, to comprehend it, that he was and is gripped by a transpersonal force beyond his capacity to control and curtail it then you can and will heal the father wound, and yourself, and perhaps even your father in some deep way while he's wasting away with altzheimers." Betsy is thoughtful for awhile, then says, "This...this force, this hurricane is also that mythic one of Falcons, generations of them before those who came west from Spain, and the Canaries, entered the Gulf of Mexico like a hurricane, and settled in Louisiana...this is important for you to begin to understand into integration, that as you can heal this massive ancestral inheritance enough in you then you begin to depotentiate it, make it smaller, and to literally redeem those ancestors...

"Warren, as you emote the storm with witness, and learn to comfort that young boy by showing up, by being present to your and your ancestral grief, then it is no longer sealed into the muscles and cells of your and in the collective family body. There is much meaning and correctness in all this now emerging consciously in you, that felt storm of grief and rage developed ages before you or your father ever came to be...Warren, this is when wholeness really arrives, through the felt and witnessed strom, believe it or not. At some time the eye of it becomes pure sky and the storm is no more. Well, there are always storms but the storms are then smaller and more doable. And the Earth can hold storms of all sizes so there's a helpful thing to know and you can go to HER, the Good Mother Earth who knows the sense of storms, and she can help you hold their tumult and overpowering forces. You see, storms are HER children too. Perhaps you are, you were, born of Her and Her children of storm and you are indeed one of Her much-loved and accepted storm children, you're her storm child and that makes your suffering all the more poignent and beautiful..." 

Moved. Shaken. My body undergoes palpable sensations never felt before, something deep in my gut burns, expands, radiates out from me, both energy and pain course through my limbs, my eyes are clear fire seeing with such clarity that I know I had never really seen colors before this moment. 

I believed and didn't believe Betsy but I knew intuitively, and I felt my body's knowing, a "knowing," that Christopher Bollas, psychoanalyst/writer, aptly calls "the unthought known". Now that which was unthought is turned into conscious cognitive thought and recognition, is affect born witness to and also born as weight and wait and is consciously suffered; Betsy shares that the word "suffer" in its root meaning means "to carry" "to bear" "to undergo" also "under carriage". In this and all her wise words, Betsy, dear Betsy, was spot on and welcomed my own Lear storm, she could contain it AND me, a child of the Great Mother of all storms. I had come to trust her much and she was correct again for as much as I resisted (and how could I not try, it being too too much for a man-child to bear?!) these inevitable and long overdue emotional storms they did come upon me, from where? from inside? from outside? hard to tell but in full bore they arrived and sometimes I literally held on to the walls of the big city for support, out of the blue a storm would suddenly mug me and I had to undergo it, suffer and surf it best as I could. Scary, yes. Embarrassing, much (and the kindness of strangers proved itself over and over, again and again). And the city walls did still stand tall, not fall, as eventually, gradually would I, stand, this it, not fall, but straighten up tall enough, not grand, gum on my shoe, a sharp dream in my dream's eye making me cry but not out of cruelty or having an indulgent wallow in Victimland, Same Old Iberia. 

"Take a stand," Betsy in time would often enough say. "Stand up." But before the unsought torrents came and I was just sharing the storm as father/father as storm dream, I could only feel that abandonment-trance. 

I remember Betsy once saying, "Warren, family is a trance". 

Soundtrack 1981, my UFO gone away forever, "Last Chance Texaco", Rickie Lee Jones, though her song is about an abandoning lover, a love stalling as does a car, traffic buzzing indifferently by as she turns into cries echoing the sound of indifferent cars roar pass...but it still works for me, this song, as my long sought and hoped for salvation via rescuing space ship had me forever fled, and my last chance for transcendence teased me once then veered up and away, had come and gone. Hers, Rickie's, was my song, the emotions thereof, and tears. 

High school/early college before Rickie, "Wooden Ships" Crosby Stills & Nash, then the Jefferson Airplane version, my life theme song late teens/early to mid-20s then the Starship album, "Blows Against the Empire" soundtracked me through college, the dropping out my last semester till graduation, till my eventual mandatory departing the South, me literally pulling my van over along the interstate in order to dust the odious Southern dirt, symbolic and real, with a whiskbroom off my feet when I finally happily crossed the Mason-Fucking-Dixon line into the good (to me then, better/gooder) North.

Barefoot, back in the car, out the window I flip a comic, perhaps owl-sized, bird all the way to and from Good Riddence and Kiss My As from here to eternity. I am OUT, Yankee grass was greener to me and proved to be true, projections notwithstanding.

I made it into NYC ecstatic, overwhelmed, grateful where eventually other songs would serve the New Land/New World I entered - Cockney Rebel's "The Best Years of Our Lives" though I was no cockney gangster but the forlorn voice, the defiant cries of Ian Drury, the song's rough and tumble tale, the Birmingham Brit audience singing along in clearly cockney accents on the live album, served as a kind of homing device for what was still in my shadow, anger, rage, passion, sensuality, my ecstasy in intellectual thinking and ongoing learning, POETRY, and my resisted but acknowledged need to belong to some kind of human community of shared alienation. I wound up in Harlem, West 142nd Street pre-gentrification, there I could be a "stranger on this earth" and there begin to bear the burden storm of my father, myself, ancestral weal and woeing.

In my almost old age I'm still lookng to move abroad. Dark Side of the Moon will do as symbolic place and soundtrack. My once and future plans to shine on, a crazy diamond sending SOSs no more but wet kisses sail back home from afar, my home perhaps an owl wing, a home which is/are people, some good few but unexpected beloveds, I shall bray, "How I wish, how I wish you were here..." My once was secret longing to have a place, MY place, here on the earth come home to me at last as tissue and fabric of my very being, Earth my Mother and Lover, storm child holding storm in the palm of my hand, so near to hand a blessing, a pen storm breaking free of the page, overspilling, seeking boundary and place while displacing and remaking both...

...and a poem by Li-young Lee beginning with 

Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment. 

Selah.