My Patriarch: An essay on My Father
The father-son relationship is perhaps the most strongly established in history and literature, and for that reason it is also the most overlooked and under-appreciated. It is for this reason that I wish to take the archetypical father-son relationship and reduce it from the abstraction of religion and history, and exploit it in terms of culture and personality. Only in its reduction will the empty and unfulfilling abstractions lose their grandiose stature and unravel the true essence of the relationship: a love bred from hope.
It is easy to see, from the dawn of time, that the patriarchal relationship has also been held with great esteem, perhaps even the most. From time immemorial, there must have been something operative in the father-son relationship that allowed itself to manifest into supreme authoritarianism. Fathers have always had supreme authority. However, we cannot think that authority came into existence with the emergence of Homo sapiens. I think that authority itself was a later invention quite apart from the social interaction of our ancestors, and for this I like to think back on the words of Nietzsche who thought that authority emerged with the contract, and it is from this innovation (or rather degradation of live-affirming human interactions) that humans truly become time-conscious animals. Therefore, I think it is evident that there is another origin for the emergence of authority as exhibited through the father-son relationship: love and hope.
Perhaps by looking to flee from the abstractions of the father-son relationship I have already found myself in the most abstract notions that humans can actively engage with; those terms such as love and hope which already operate on a level beyond pure sense-perception. However let me adopt a concept from the theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, that of the immediacy of feeling which precedes conceptual thought. Love and hope are abstract notions, but is it that absurd to think that these abstractions can lead to a primal ground filled with what the signifiers love and hope have as there essence? In other words, just because love and hope are abstract concepts does not been that they are falsely derived from nothingness. They must necessarily stem from a movement in physiology that existed from the emergence of consciousness and which have lost their immediacy. One must never forget that love is a perception that arises in the immediacy of self-consciousness, before the content of our consciousness is incorporated and digested by the faculties of the mind. This is the same with the father-son relationship; today it is an empty conceptualization that has lost all immediacy, and therefore, any relevancy to the human condition.
Now I wish to recover that immediacy, or rather I wish to open myself up to it through active reflection. Here I shall step into those cold waters of artistic distance and relate knowledge of the only father-son relationship that I have any intimate knowledge of, the one with my father Jesus Munoz. I am of the persuasion that anything relevant must be personal, and that you can try out as many perspectives as you like as if they were socks, but with personal experience comes an over-powering sense of passion. Here now I shall relate, auto-biographically, the relationship with my father, and hopefully from it I can gain some clarity into the man that I am, and the man that I will inevitably become.
Growing up in a small family you learn a few things. You learn that you should never upset two older sisters when you have no cousins or aunts or uncles to run to, and you also learn that family is really all you have. These are the people who will always love and care about you and look out for you no matter how many times you screw up. They are the people who best cope with and forgive your mistakes, because they have an intimate association with the cause of those mistakes: your self.
My father was born Jesus (none) Munoz. He was born in the western state of Arizona into large Mexican family that is characteristic of an era in which socio-economic status forced many parents to have more children so that they would not suffer from lack of productivity on the fields. From birth, my father was thrust into a small community four times the size of my own immediate family. He had older brothers and sisters who cared for him and who served the role of mother while his parents worked in the blistering heat. I like to picture my father sitting on his front porch and looking at the dust settle as his father plowed through the field. I like to think of my father playing with the dust in his mind and watching the delicate dance of wind and barren nature coming to terms with each other in spectacular motion.
I picture my father as that wind, constantly battling against a barren nature; a barren nature that takes the shape of small expectations and unavoidable failure. However, like all winds, my father soon came to the realization that trying to overcome nature is as futile as trying to not be a wind; subtle winds soon learn that there is strength in incorporation. To incorporate means to take into yourself something that is foreign, something that is not right. I think the fact that my father saw the expectations set before him as something foreign is indicative of a nature attune to a more divine frequency.
I can’t imagine that my father had too much encouragement in his scholastic endeavors, and I am ashamed that I know so little about the man who raised me. Perhaps we were so caught up in the creation of new experiences that we forgot, and still forget, the importance of actively reflecting on old ones. I sometimes imagine my father sitting quietly in a corner of my grandmother’s old house; reading and escaping the loud racquet coming from the room next door. There were babies crying, records playing, sisters screaming, and a little boy with big ears and big dreams coming into himself in some forgotten corner. Like that corner, perhaps my father was reading to forget himself, to forget that barren nature that also confronted him.
My father, I believe, did relatively well in school, and was able to receive a scholarship to Brigham Young University after converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. This was the most definitive moment in his life. A moment marked by spiritual and intellectual growth that satiated his desire to carry with him gusts of wind that would propel him to new horizons. Some people find joyful content in science, others in philosophy, but one can only find divine content in the beautiful confines of spirituality.
I do not know what sort of relationship my father had with his father, but I am confident to assume that it was marked by a distance that is necessitated by having a small army for a family. I also think that my father’s relationship with me was one that always ran parallel with my father’s relationship with God. By giving himself fully into Mormon scripture and teaching, he incorporated many teachings into his character, and I think it is safe to say that one of them was the archetypical father-son relationship that occurs throughout the canon. We have Elohim-Jesus, Lehi-Moroni, among others.
I admire my father for his faith and for his strength. I mostly admire his ability to do what I have been unable to do: to give himself fully into his faith. When I reflect back on my childhood I imagine myself as a young prophet born into this body of flesh and bones, and I picture my father as a heavenly father who is always there to support me, to give mr advice and correct me when I am wrong. When my father punished me for my wrong-doings, I picture God punishing the Jews, not out of contempt or hate, but rather out of a divine love which speaks many tongues. Love can be expressed in more than one language. In a hug and a kiss, in a concerned talk or a grounding, all things utter love when they derive from a father’s commitment. A commitment to give your son everything you have. This perhaps is the most enticing doctrine of Mormon beliefs for me, and it has always made me question my own purpose and that of my relations to others.
This doctrine is central to Mormon teachings: we are all constantly seeking to become like our savior, i.e. we are all striving to become more and more like the blessed son of God. We wish to inherit his kingdom and his grace, and we want nothing more than to become coeternal with his awesome power. I also think that this doctrine greatly influenced my father. Surely during his mission he must have came the realization that he had a purpose higher than the world could dictate. He had a loving heavenly father who wanted nothing more than for him to succeed. He had a father who scarified himself, quite literally through the incarnation, so that he could have a chance at a better life. I know that my father modeled his relationship with me after his relationship with God because this is exactly how I feel.
I know that through every trying time my father has always been there for me. Like his heavenly father, my father has tried his best teach me the valuable lesson of self-sufficiency. God does not act for us, and that is why, or rather because, we have free agency. I always noticed something that my father had that my mother did not. It is not a personal defect on either of their parts, but perhaps it is indicative of my father’s adherence to the scriptures. My father’s actions and words always contained within them an air of distance while my mother, on the other hand, was more active in her parental engagement. This element of distance, I believe, was one that my father adopted from his faith. God always acts with the proper distance which allows for the fulfillment of free agency. I always felt like my relationship with my father was much like this. He never imposed himself on me, nor did he impose his own beliefs. Rather, he merely presented me and introduced me to them, giving me free reign over my actions and the formation of my thoughts. I thank him for this, eternally.
My father’s story is one marked by distance and self-sufficiency, and I only wish that I knew more about him. I want to know what his hopes and dreams were, and what they still are. My only hope is that his son was one of those hopes and dreams, and I truly wish that every day I bring his dreams to fulfillment. Maybe I am a hope made flesh, maybe I am an ever-occurring realization of one of his fondest dreams.
If I wished to communicate anything to him it would be this: father I do not know the extent of your hopes and dreams, but rest assured that every day that I breathe in the air of life I am reassured and aware that you are one of my hopes made tangible. You are a man of flesh and blood, who I place all my faith in, i.e. you give me hope. Hope that I can overcome the barren nature that I am constantly struggling with, and hope that I can make others happy. I hope it is not an affront to your ego looking back on life that perhaps there were things you did not do. Maybe you had hopes to be a popular writer or artist, maybe a professional basketball player, but rest assured if life has taught me anything it is this: we must create our own meaning in life. George Elliot had this paradoxical notion of the home epic, and I think this is befitting the message I am trying to get across. Home epic is paradoxical because an epic usually describes a narrative journey across many lands with many struggles. I think of the home epic when I think of you: you are beyond the concern of whether or not history will swallow you up and forget you, because you have realized that you will always live on in what you leave behind. Well what you left behind is an extraordinary gift: a beautiful life story, and a wonderful assortment of teaching of lessons that I cannot forget. You will live on through my children and my lessons. No matter how hard I try I will always be confined to your distant shape. I only hope that you know this, I am not trying to escape from your shape, rather I hope to come into it with my own degree of artful autonomy. I shall always be your son, and you my father, and I only hope that you feel satisfied knowing that I truly do think that our relationship is one of epic proportions which will always define my interactions with other people and my children.
AMO ERGO SUM (I love, therefore I am)
~JAM~
