Of Hooks and Mirrors

I called this blog the Natalist Diaries because I wanted it to be a sort of field journal of my domestic safari. Home, as my man GK puts it, is “the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.” Truer words were never spoken. This morning the Queen informed me of some very strange goings on indeed.

Apparently, my eldest daughter, Sophia has been having nightmares. She’s always struggled with being fearful at night, but this time her fear is so outrageous (even for her) that I had to comment on it.

Two nights ago, Sophia crawls into our bed apologizing to Amy for the dream she just had (this is a quality of her first-born, “I-have-to-be-perfect-and-never-do-anything-that-might displease-my-parents” constitution).

“Don’t get mad at me,” she whimpers, “but does Olivia have a hook for a hand?” (Olivia is our two-handed third child.)

“No, sweetie, Olivia doesn’t have a hook for hand.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

What elevates this incident from the mundane to the ridiculous is that Sophia kept asking Amy if Olivia had a hook for hand all the next day.

“Mama, are you sure she doesn’t have a hook for a hand?”

“Sophia, she’s standing right there. Look at her HANDS.”

“Okay, Mama, but are you sure?”

This is life with Sophia, our little actress. She’s an amazing kid—smart, funny, kind, beautiful, fashionable—but everything that happens to her is so the drama, all the time.

The funny thing about this hook-for-a-hand farce is that it really isn’t about Olivia, it’s about Sophia. What would she ever do with hook-handed little sister? This is just another of countless examples of her unselfconscious ego-centricism. She’s completely oblivious to her narcissism.

Sometimes she’ll come in at night, worried about kidnappers.

“Mama, are you sure no one’s going to come and steal me through the window?”

“Yes, Sophia. I’m sure.”

I always like to chime in at this point.

“Sophia, why would someone want to steal you? Think about it: why would a bad guy break into your window, which has a locked shutter and a chest of drawers pushed up against it, just to steal the heaviest, most verbal kid in the family? The baby’s in the room next to yours and he’s way more portable than you are and far more likely to forget about Mama and Papi as he grows up poor in a dirty trailer park with desperate, unfashionable, kid-stealing foster parents.”

Silence.

“Mama, are you sure no bad guys are going to take me?”

What amazes me is that as crazy as my kids can be, they always hold a mirror to my own irrationality. It seems each of our kids embodies some of the good and bad traits of Mama and Papi. This makes for a pretty entertaining home life, but it also serves as looking glass for the Queen and me to see our own faults and strengths.

In Sophia, I see so many of my irrational fears and so much of my unwitting selfishness; but, thanks be to God, I also see such a desire for goodness and so much beauty, creativity, and trust.

Something to shoot for...

We watched this at our writer's meeting today. It was really worth the time.

Annamaria Turned 3!

Annamaria's 3rd Birthday

Click on the picture of Annamaria above to see more pix.

Ah, three years old, that magical age. I find it odd that all my children go through what I like to call "a Jurassic Park" phase. Remember the cute little dinosaurs that suddenly eat the fat guy? That's kinda how my kids are when they hit three. It goes away, but Joseph has a few scars from Annamaria that might not...

If you need reminding:

Apparently, Chesterton has met my son...

What can they mean when they say that we must not put militarism into boys? Can we by any possibility get militarism out of boys? You might burn it out with red-hot irons; you might eventually scourge it out as if it were a mediaeval devil; but except you employ the most poignant form of actual persecution, you certainly will not prevent little boys thinking about soldiers, talking about soldiers, and pretending that they are soldiers. You may mortify and macerate this feeling in them if you like, just as you may mortify and macerate their love of comrades, or their love of wandering…

A child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child’s hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence… To put the matter shortly, the boy feels an abysmal difference between conquest and victory. Conquest has the sound of something cold and heavy; the automatic operations of a powerful army. Victory has the sound of something sudden and valiant; victory is like a cry out of a living mouth. The child is excited with victory; he is bored with conquest. The child is not an Imperialist; the child is a Jingo – which is excellent. The child is not a militarist in the heavy, mechanical modern sense; the child is a fighter. Only very old and very wicked people can be militarists in the modern sense. Only very old and very wicked people can be peace-at-any-price men. The child’s instincts are quite clean and chivalrous, though perhaps a little exaggerated.

But really to talk of this small human creature, who never picks up an umbrella without trying to use it as a sword, who will hardly read a book in which there is no fighting, who out of the Bible itself generally remembers the ‘bluggy’ parts, who never walks down the garden without imagining himself to be stuck all over with swords and daggers – to take this human creature and talk about the wickedness of teaching him to be military, seems rather a wild piece of humour. He has already not only the tradition of fighting, but a far manlier and more genial tradition of fighting than our own. No; I am not in favour of the child being taught militarism. I am in favour of the child teaching it.

- The Illustrated London News, 20 October 1906.

Mes Aïeux - Dégénération (English Subtitles)

This song made me sad. Maybe I'll write more about it later. My family is French Canadian way back and this song makes me think of what my great-great grandparents were like. It is supposedly the number one song downloaded in Quebec.

Book Review: The War of Art

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I was reading a book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. In this post, I want to briefly review and reflect on the book, but, just enough to “free the prisoners” of my thoughts on the book; this is not the definitive review/interpretation of the book. I am very interested in hearing what other readers think, so please comment on this post.

The book’s title is obviously a play on the title of Wesley Snipes’s movie, er...Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War and it is a particularly fitting title for a book on writing by a man whose body of work consists mostly of historical war novels set in ancient times. Like Sun Tzu’s book, The War of Art presents very practical, very solid, straightforward advice about its subject; like the Wesley Snipes movie, the appeal wears off rapidly and the last third is barely coherent.

In the first part of the book Pressfield introduces a concept he calls “Resistance”, which is broadly defined as anything that keeps us from our work. Our work, Pressfield says, is what we were meant to do on this planet. Don’t read that wrong. He’s not saying that we’re called to be ants in a hive, he’s saying that each us has a particular job to do, a special vocation. For some, it could be writing; for others it could be painting or starting a business or being a mom. Our work is the thing that we are uniquely suited for and that we must do for our own sake and the sake of the universe. We avoid this work at our peril. Resistance is anything and everything that we put in the way of doing our work. It’s all the excuses, neuroses, diseases, relationships, and rationalizations that we give in to instead of doing what we’re supposed to.

His litany of the many ways Resistance manifests itself was easily the best part of the book. It was, if you’ll forgive the expression, shock and awe. I was had like Bagdad. He named every one of my evasions and left me with nowhere to run. He kicked my ass. And his recommendation for overcoming Resistance is tough love at its finest. Basically, his advice is “Man up, Nancy. Get over yourself and do your work.” So far, so good, but then the book starts to go wonky.

Pressfield is dead on target about what’s wrong with most writers, artists, and people: we are afraid of our own potential greatness so we sabotage ourselves. Everything he says about Resistance rings true, even if the term itself is inexact. What he has to say about muses and the gods (they’re real…kinda), the evolution of man (we are inexorably getting better), and God (a.k.a. the Universe), does not ring true. It rings inconsistent and potlucky. The world view he proposes as response to Resistance is a syncretistic, new-agey mess.

For Pressfield, art comes from resisting Resistance and doing one’s work. The manly advice he gives at the beginning of the book seems to be heavily influenced by his study of ancient Sparta and stoics. That’s fine as far as it goes, but what is glaringly absent (at least from this Catholic’s point of view) is a sense of grace. His notion of cooperating with the muses is profound, but not as profound as Tolkien’s idea of man as sub-creator. His notion of work is noble, but not as noble as Josemaria Escriva’s.

To sum it all up, I recommend this book, especially the first two thirds, but with reservations. For anyone who is used to exact terms and a consistent worldview, this might be a bit tiring—it was for me. But for anyone who needs a good kick in the pants to start writing, working, starting a photography business and getting out of the corporate world, this is a great motivator.

Some Pictures from Pinewood, AZ

Amy and the kids are on vacation in Pinewood/Munds Park, AZ just a few miles outside of Flagstaff. I'm mooching bandwidth from a neighbor to work remotely. So far, we're tired.

Olivia and I went for a picture walk today and snapped photos of anything that caught our fancies. She was really cute about the whole thing, but still has a long way to go...

We picked up Joseph and Sophia from drama camp and Joseph got jealous of Olivia with the camera. He took it upon himself to make things right and relieved his sister of the camera so he could take some pix himself. Both of their work is represented in the slideshow, as is mine.

I like photography. I think I'm pretty good, too, but there's a lot to learn to be great and I don't want to make that investment. If, however, a reader wishes to purchase a wide angle lens for my Canon Digital Rebel that reader would be heartily thanked...

Sophia got a main part in the play. She's Baghera in Jungle Book. Joseph has been cast as an elephant, but he wanted to be a monkey. I told him it wouldn't be acting if he was cast as a monkey

God is good.

Mom My Ride

Here is a funny little video that my wife's friends were passing around for a while. Enjoy!

Do You Know This Man?

His name is Steven Pressfield and he's been kicking my ass for over an hour.

My new friend Mark of the Kindlings turned me on to Pressfield at our last writer's meeting. I got the CD of his book The War of Art at the library and have been listening to him describe all my bad habits as if he knew me. It's a bit spooky.

I'm about a third of the way through the book and it's very good. He writes very directly, in a no-bullshit manner. So far he's spent a lot of time talking about what he calls "Resistance". This is a term he applies to anything that keeps us from doing our work. As far as I can tell, Resistance is roughly equivalent to Freud's thanatos impulse, or Death Wish, that force in our lives that moves us toward death and not life. The life force (Freud calls it eros) pushes us out of the comfortable womb, through pain to life. Thanatos moves against this, seeking pleasure that ultimatley leads to death. You can imagine the deadly effects of trying to be a grown man inside a womb.

Pressfield says that there are a million ways that Resistance can manifest itself--writer's block, illness, addiction, drama--but it must always be combatted by doing one's work, what one was put on the planet to do.

He seems to be headed toward Mother Theresa's "faithfulness, not success" comibined with a heaping helping of Josemaria Escriva's philosophy of work. I'll keep you posted.

The Queen

This is a picture of the beautiful woman responsible for blessing/genetically rescuing the children whose images you see littered throughout this blog. She is the finest woman I know. Most people are mystified by her decision to consort with likes of me (I include myself in that number), but she does, and I'm keeping her.

Chesterton says that limiting yourself to one woman is a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to see one at all. He was thinking of my wife when he wrote that.

He also had this to say about the "drudgery" of motherhood. It applies equally well:

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
--"The Emancipation of Domesticity" from Chesterton's 1910 classic What's Wrong with the World.

The Defense of Christianity

"You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the
binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity
be. . . a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people,
then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that
metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen
to be true - then defending it may mean talking about anything or
everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that
Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is true."

G.K. Chesterton
Daily News December 12, 1903