Chapter 3: The Problem of Mothers

I am absolutely not going to talk about Mother God. Well, okay, just a little bit. Father Evans (the priest who thought while I prayed) told me to think about God’s love as a mother’s love, not as a father’s love. Unconditional. We fathers love best when our progeny, like the Wizard of Oz, “ . . . perform feats of stratospheric skill never before attempted by civilized man.” Mothers just love. I try to explore my feminine side here, but I just can’t really get it.

Western religion has missed many a boat, but it is in the feminine divine that it really missed out. The passing (and extremely cultish) nod to Mary, crude though it was, at least hints that we are not completely bereft of a sense of mystery. Human reproduction is the best example of this mystery. I’m nervous now, however, since I’m about to talk about sex.

And why should a fifty-two year old man be afraid to discuss sex? Because he was raised by the last Victorian. My grandmother died of tuberculosis when my mother was nine. Mama was reared by her grandmother who actually lived during the reign of Victoria. In examining old photographs I suspect that Henrietta Troupe Dames, my great grandmother, was Victoria. Did you know that Victorians covered the legs of chairs and tables so as not to excite prurient interest? They didn’t even call them “legs”. They were “limbs”. My cultural milieu, therefore, is off by an entire generation! To say that I was conflicted during the infamous “summer of love” in 1967 and the following years is a perfect example of understatement.

Our father tried his best to teach us about the mechanics of sexual reproduction. After a trip to the animal husbandry building at the University of Kentucky to view a bull servicing a cow (Holstein), I was convinced that urine soaked through the cow’s spine and a calf was conceived. He later showed us a flip-chart book that explained (among other things) puberty and wet dreams. Incongruously, it had a picture of a family going to church on the cover. Inside, the pictures were black-and-white line drawings. One that is still with me is a drawing of sperm under a microscope’s field of view. They looked like tadpoles. Dad told us that nocturnal emissions often accompanied “bad dreams”. By this, of course, he meant erotic dreams. I thought bad dreams were nightmares. For years I was afraid of peeing tadpoles in my bed while having “bad dreams”.

Here, for the first time, I will confess publicly that I never did have a nocturnal emission. The reason is obvious: I was terrified of waking up in a pool of tadpoles. My good friend Joseph Thompson claimed I didn’t have them because I wore jockies instead of boxers and rode my bicycle everywhere, but I knew otherwise.

Once as a thirteen-year old on a visit to Mexico City, I had a sore place on my penis. Dad gave me some ointment, but asked if I had been doing anything bad. Bad? I privately recounted my sins, prayed for forgiveness, and the sore disappeared. This cause and effect confused me for years. What would happen to my penis if I did anything really bad? At the least I have been a very good citizen.

We never used euphemisms for body parts or functions. For all the Victoriana present in our family, we were an enlightened home. “That’s nothing I’ve never seen before,” my mother, a nurse, would say if one of us displayed immodesty.

When I finally did grasp the mechanics of human copulation I couldn’t believe it. In truth, I still don’t. Even bathing in the afterglow of sexual congress, I don’t believe what just happened. I do not believe that my parents ever copulated either.

On the other hand, once in a while Mama would be particularly ebullient, dancing and singing around the house, and murmuring things like, “Oh, your father was such a young man last night,” much to my horror.

These rare insights into eros did nothing to diminish the powerful, the overwhelmingly powerful notion of love in my family. Mama loved Daddy; Daddy loved Mama. They loved us; we loved them and each other. We loved each other because we were taught to love each other. It was a maxim that children had to be taught to love each other. We were. “Go give your sister a kiss.” “Hug your brother.” “Take care of your sister.” These commands echo in our heads even today.

The love that we learned to have for each other is mother’s love. It is unconditional. It is creative. It is everything. When we come face to face with the beauty of creation, not tangentially but really face to face, the moment is sublime. It may bring tears. It is often unique. It may be, for example, unique to me that the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony makes my tears flow every time I hear it. It’s why real poetry provokes the same response.

So the conclusion to this syllogism must be as follows: mothers are to blame for art. If they wouldn’t love us, and teach us to love, we could all just go make some money.