Giant Steps
Archetypes #7: Fathers & Sons
After a lengthy hiatus, I thought there was another masculine archetype I hadn’t looked at… the original really!
Sky Father looks down at his people, this we know in our bones. Sometimes he's a grizzly grumpy Old Testament kind of thing. Other times he's a vaguely white beard, benevolent Santa Claus type. Or he's an aggressive wizard Allfather type figure that we think about every Wednesday if we're a little bit Norse. There's no getting away from the fact that he's a Father though. The masculine that begat, and all of us have had an imperfect human version, and, if we're in a male body, all of us have a design that is intended to hold the same bits of the reproductive system, even those of us whose reproductive male bits don't quite function as designed, and therefore we all have our own, often ambivalent relationship with the Father archetype.
My own moment of literally and physically becoming a father was pretty awe-some, in both senses. Both times (I have two daughters, whose journeys through childhood and towards their current young womanhood it has been a privilege to witness and support). And for them, after nine months of hearing my voice outside their womb-home, there was I, this differentiated figure in their lives. Mother is the extraordinary origin, the safe space, the ultimate image of the Creator, as Rilke was far from the first to acknowledge. The Father archetype, in some tellings, first represents the first friend: an Other to be interested in. Adventures await. Encouragement to go on adventures, like the warming of Father Sun inviting us to stretch into the day. Taking risks, but with a great sun at our back.
What were the encouraging and authentic conversations your dad never had with you? We live in a culture where conversations between older men and their children are missing, multi-generationally. Long ago I sat in a room where we were first asked about all our issues of being neglected by our parents. Then those of us under 30 were asked to stand up. Then we looked around at this band of youngsters and realized, this was our parents when we were born. Also lost. Is this the doomed cycle of fatherhood? Ever poorer and more diluted iterations of some mythical ur-Father.
Well I'd have to say, no. But it's taken us a few broken generations to even work out what's wrong. Nature gives us plenty of examples of bad fathers: jealous types who overprotect their genetic progeny, or even worse, are so freaked out by the next generation taking their spot that they'd rather kill their own kids than "lose". Lions, who some men love being compared to, are amongst the worst culprits. No wonder some species of dad get taken out by the mothers after copulation.
But there are plenty of better examples to follow. And we recognize them instantly. Emperor penguins, using their own physical and energetic resources to care for their eggs in extraordinarily harsh conditions. A somewhat lonely existence for long stretches; feeding perhaps too much into our one-man-against-the-world narrative. Still, there is the self-sacrifice. In that most common version of the original family tableau, there's the baby, there's the mother surrounding the baby, and there's the father surrounding them both and keeping out the world. It was a lonely shock to the system for which I too was ill-prepared in my naive twenties, never having had conversations with men further down the path about the patience and endurance fatherhood would call on, the usefulness of having a network of support for men out there on the journey. Without it, society suffers, this we know. Lack of older men in the community leads to gangs and trouble; though those older men themselves have to be bringing the patience, the endurance, and the gentle warmth of Father Sun.
There are also beaver fathers who not only encourage their kids to get involved with building, but fix up their immature efforts, when the kids are out of sight, showing an extraordinary sensitivity - praising their work but knowing that it's not quite good enough for adult standards. Practical skills building is a great Father piece. Of course these are things that can be taught, but often there is as much to be learnt by watching what dad does. It’s an interesting dynamic, this son-competing-with-father-he’s-learning-from thing. Many sons, of course, have been happy to replicate down the generations. But others have been determined to outshine the previous generation of crafters. This is how single-string bows become, evolutionary generations later, a Stradivarius or a Stratocaster. That creative rebel spark opens new grooves that dad never thought of. Jazz musicians were aware of taking giant steps thanks to those who came in the previous generation. Jazz is a unique product of the modern media age, where we can see the evolution in real time. Many a new kid on the block began as a Beloved god atop our masculine vehicles; as I felt once, walking down a Roman road upon dad’s shoulders. At the same time, the joke is, of course, that there was nothing wrong with that monochord in the first place. The uhadi playing out in the Boland night told me so many stories that Paganini and Hendrix missed.
This is some of what we blended into the Dads and Kids camps we set up at my kids' primary school. Opportunities to learn some basic carving and fishing and stargazing and bouldering and nature art and slacklining and stuff. And then military-level hot chocolate queues and storytelling round the fire. And men working together smoothly without blistering egos, learning together how to be better at this fatherhood thing, including stepping in for a while as surrogates for those absent ones. One child famously responded to the question "How would a Moms and Kids camp be different?" with the obvious answer: there'd have been a lot more toothbrushing. Here I have to include the disclaimer that I always made sure my children's teeth were brushed, but the deeper point comes up a little in reflecting on my own childhood in a divorced family. Mom dealt with the daily grind; dad was the fun parent for holiday adventures, which is a little unfair of course but a source of fond memories from a different time. And thereby he didn't have to hold the same boundaries, or find ways to deal with me transgressing them.
So like many kids today, I had little sense of my own father in the role of laying down the law, which has often defaulted to mothers in our society. We've become a little too much like elephants, where the matriarchs have to keep those unruly young men at bay, whatever their evolutionary usefulness. And when the moms don't have the resources either, kids go feral, or, these days, disappear down screens. (In my day it was hours of TV, memories from which still invade my brain from time to time, until I found more creative or risky pastimes).
Sons have a different experience of our own shoulders, to those Father shoulders we were borne on before: the weight of expectation there is brought by millennia of patrilineal thinking, however generous and compassionate our personal parentage might have been. Often it's worse now, because mothers' disappointment in adult men gets redirected into hope for the next generation, even when the fathers aren't around to be pressing the generational dharma upon youngsters. Absent fathers might lead us more quickly to the famous Son's line on the cross, about being forsaken. But many Sons today have had more opportunities than their fathers had, particularly when it comes to emotional and communication skills. And we only really learn the truths about men across the generations if we find our ways to tell the stories, across the great chronology of Father Time. If we create spaces and moments that the older men can speak into as much as the younger.
We may find many stories there of resilience. For there's no doubt that we've made it here because our lineage survived while others evaporated. It's strange how the most Viking nation of all, Iceland, handed on female surnames too while the rest of us are just Mac's and other remnants of long-past fathers. Women generally have the option of keeping their father's surname or taking their spouse's father's surname. (Even if their spouse is also a woman!) It's written down, this father thing. Genealogy carries the stories of men, and while women might understandably resent that, it also brings that weight to us of all that came before. Be it as simple as the fact that somewhere in our lineage, a Smith, probably many generations of smiths, were striking iron day after day at a hot furnace. Other later men probably got ripped from their lands and led to short polluted lives by Musk and Gates and Bezos's predecessors. Somehow we made it through, and we have the energetic scars to prove it, which we can only loosen if we remind our ancestral grandfathers how to dance.
There's a great Norwegian folk tale about a traveller searching for the "father of the house" and going through increasingly ancient levels of geriatry until he can finally receive hospitality from a tiny wrinkled old squirt seven generations back. Fathers hanging on forever and living to Abrahamic ages: such a humorous tale helps blow holes in all this patriarchal deference. Meanwhile some sons are left like Charles, expecting all his life some great role that finally lands in his dotage. (A dotage exceeded in age by the current and previous US presidents, lest we forget. There was a time when ancient fathers of the nation were mainly a Chinese communist phenomenon! Somehow these global frauds have conned us all into their webs.)
Frodo isn't exactly Bilbo's son - in fact Tolkien makes much of Bilbo being the classic wayward uncle, that other roguish archetype that too many of today's fathers, we might feel, have dropped into, rolling stone papas cut off from that sense of worthy responsibility that marks wise fatherhood. But Frodo still has to take on the family dharma and karma, returning the ring: paying for the previous generation's sins. We make much of that kind of thing at the moment: fathers who have acted without thought down the seven generations, as the Hopi might urge us to consider. And with seven generations of ancestral fathers not just waiting to bless with a feast when we get it right but watching, supporting, longing perhaps to be called on and spoken to. And no doubt taking the piss out of us too. I'm not one to think that women don't make great comediennes (Miranda is one of our family’s recent-decade favourite sitcoms, and for all John Cleese’s brilliance, Fawlty Towers would have been nothing without Connie Booth): however there's something about male banter that we seem to get from our fathers as just a vital piece of being a man. That's often seen as dismissive, and at its worst it becomes put-down sarcasm that pushes back at the next generation. But at their best, dads' jokes keep bursting bubbles of hubris and arrogance in ways that are playful, silly, creative, enjoyable and essential.
The true father needs, I feel, to be calling on all the rich archetypes I've spoken of in this series: in tune with his wild man, his magician, his lover, his fool, his playful trickster, his warrior, his king. A father caring for the community of life, nurturing and inspiring sons who will do the same. Present, honourable, listening, emotionally aware and compassionate, boundaried, natural, hairy, magical, poetic, practical, problem-solving, reverential, respectful, sensual. Penguins might be able to do all that alone, but human fathers often need good communities of men and women around them to help them step up to the challenge. And sons need encouragement to move in that direction too. There’s something incomplete about a Son on his own. Plenty of Sons never become biological fathers, but they do father nonetheless; they cause stuff at every step, as they career across Her.
Somehow I think of stone skimming as a classic Son activity; identifying the right kind of flattish roundish number that will perhaps fly across the ripples or the waves so impressively as to delight those watching; less content to just leave things be, as part of the landscape alongside the pebbles. The Son wants an audience and audiences want the Son. Be it Christ, Ganesh, Krishna, the Son has that youthful, forgivable zest that captures hearts, truly the Beloved. In the old movies Father God booms his voice out across the skies, but where is He? Not quite the same as showing his martyrdom to the world. Now there’s a Son archetype I’ve had to laugh about in myself: look at me, how I suffer and what I put up with. Sacrificed because the old men of the temple willed it, and because Father loves us all, apparently. Though He was just copying Abraham who got in first. Killing the son for some greater good. Or Agamemnon: the Greek ur-Father who sacrifices his daughter instead to the furious heavens, and as a result gets the fury of the feminine coming right down upon him. Even there, you see, it seems to be thanks to His atrocious actions that we get drama. Greek theatre and modern soaps alike depend on brutish, boundary-crossing daddy figures. Stalin and Mao, Mussolini and Hitler, Fathers of the nation and almighty fuckups in technicolour - stepping in, once Nietzche had told us Father had died.
But Society has been happy to do the same thing and sacrifice its Sons. Those people most likely to be violent and dangerous: males aged 16 to 24. However, those people most likely to be on the receiving end of violence, often unprovoked: also males aged 16 to 24, by a huge margin. Biology has something to answer for here as a model, of course. Busting through puberty, we suddenly discover we have the power to dispense millions of dispensable spermatazoa, seemingly on a whim, without waiting for a time of the month. And this colossal attrition is the supreme masculine biological contribution to the next generation, for the lucky survivor. I remember being that nervous, dispensable age, where I could so easily have been cannon fodder in another time and place. Somehow the solidarity and community men need is shown up here in its full power. No wonder we seek gangs. It means safety, paradoxically. The camaraderie of sons gone to war is all about that. Thrown out of home, the edgy community of bravado, bullshitting men is where we get to, often at the wrong end of a bottle.
The Rebel in me graffitied my neighbourhood with other boys, hung out in half-baked graveyard séances, lifted up caretakers’ cars after breaking into schoolgrounds – all to avoid being scapegoated, outed, pushed beyond the pale of peer group Safety; as much as for the sheer exhilaration of breaking the rules and getting away with it. Yet he’s also not far from magical, this Boy Rebel; his spandex tells the story of quite how sexy it can be to break daddy’s rules. Wise Fathers know Sons need challenges: need to boldly go into the unknown. Initiation happens, one way or the other. Not so easy to build healthy rites of passage into the Unknown, in these global technicolour times, but it is still possible and necessary. Sons need to find the Edge. Those creative Sons of music, to return to that theme, often sought expansion in the taboo. He has flexibility, still, the Son. He’s on a clear trajectory, burning a path, but he can veer off somewhere else if he likes. Released into individuality, exploration, unwittingly entering hell if not guided right. The young sax genius Charlie Parker caused bebop, but also crashed out of the back door of a club on 57th St, and threw up from alcohol poisoning or heroin or something else; the young trombonist Mike Zwerin, freshly arrived downtown, witnessed his hero and considered if he still wanted to emulate him, as he recounted in ‘Close Enough for Jazz’.
I stood and listened to my parents yet sometimes did something different that felt right to my soul. I found a way. Of course, I had enough inner resources from an upbringing rich in spirit, that I could find a way that was exciting rather than just damning. And for that, of course, I have my dad, and many generations of men before him and alongside him, to thank. The most obvious thing the Son has to do, however, is to thank the women too. To recognise that the real reason the Son was sacrificed in that old story was to bring awareness to the daily sacrifices of the Goddess, in human form and under every step we take, as his physical corpse sank down to nourish Her in her cave. Lacking sisters, this necessity of male gratitude was perhaps less obvious to me than it should have been. Though I’ve also seen plenty of mollycoddled boys, favourites in spite of their brilliant sisters. There are so many strands of this intergenerational archetypal journey, it’s difficult to unravel, as the Rebel might want to, to say, what if we got rid of all this? What if the sacrificial, saviour Son is just a story we’ve got to blast off to some other unsuspecting planet? So that sons can rise, aware of the mischievous potent difference they bring, but equally reverential to the majestic Mothers and Daughters everywhere, without losing their unique mystical masculine-juice, and without needing to declare childishly, for far too long, that they have come again.
I think, personally, that it’s all more flamenco than jazz. Hard edges, awakening rhythms, delicious strumming. Bass and tenor alike and the cajon, the licensed rebel drum in a society run by a Papa-Pope that banned drums. Allowing those soaring female vocals to fly, those feminine castanets to ripple. My mother invited a gap-toothed flamenco guitarist into our house to bring a little shaking up to my teenage life. Another iteration of Father; another kind of Son. Awe-some at keeping Time, as the gathering of men from different epochs call another creative truce for the good of the beat.