Continuing Requiem for A Cafe, or, Uses of Patriarchy
Photograph Source: waferboard – CC BY 2.0
All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
–Lauren Oya Olamina, in Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The achievement of individual consciousness…to Jung, civilization’s highest achievement, the hope of our future. But the tree grows only from deep roots….I will find [true myth] only in myself; in that core of individuality lying in the heart of the common darkness. Only the individual can get up and go to the window, and draw back the curtains, and look into the dark.
–Ursula K. LeGuin, Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction
We have art not to die from the truth.
–Friedrich Nietzsche
Dreams are great peace-makers, perhaps the greatest peace-makers, which is why we must have more of them, as John Lennon urged in the song Imagine. Belief in something unseen or not yet – is the key ingredient; no scoffers need apply. This statement doesn’t hold, however if the dream is secondhand. If the dream you follow did not come to you personally, if it didn’t change you, (i.e., “initiate and guide action,” as Lauren Olamina writes) it can be used for the opposite – for building divisiveness, upholding status quo inequality. And, importantly, to be powerful enough for peace-making, the dream must have trial or crisis for its prequel. That is, to the extent we delude ourselves we’ve personally escaped pain and suffering, the Big Dream of Peace is hard to come by. Thanks to progress, having escaped so many of nature’s constraints, relying much too heavily on our left brains, and denial, we have to go through something to get back to that terrain where miracles happen.
Examples of the Dream being used for its opposite abound. Not just by Trump waving a bible, but for instance, it is common in churches, all professing Jesus’s dream of the brotherhood of man, transmitted via scripture and liturgy, to squabble over many matters large and trivial, the threat always in the air of cutting pledges or switching congregational allegiance. And there’s the damning history of segregated churches, or the schisms in denominations over homosexuality. As Walt Whitman pointed out long ago, secondhand truth doesn’t work; Big Dreams must be personally tested – slower going, but better – purer – results. Big Dreams are fed to us via persons who feed themselves the inspiration of art.
The dream Orin and I followed, of starting a small coffeeshop business, would not have occurred to either Orin or me singly; we made use of our marriage, and possibly our shared paternal legacy as children of artist fathers, to create something Big at mid-life. Many creative partnerships do not demand the ball and chain of marriage. But still, most people marry, and we’re not all gifted in the way to be Rodgers and Hammerstein or Strayhorn and Ellington. Outlandishly, I hold out for a different interpretation of “be fruitful and multiply.” Might it be the larger point of marriage that it is a portal, its oppositions meant to push to depth, to need for a different, higher and more inclusive dependence for their resolution – the extending of the imaginative roots necessar
We prepared for it by years of inner work, of reading books by Carl Jung, of Orin’s work in the mythopoetic men’s movement, of steeping ourselves in the Romantics, in myth and fairytale. Thus my experience of the unitive Dream (chronicled by me many times before) and belief in its reality became the basis for our shared belief, Orin trusting me as “the shaman.” As we conceived our Cafe business, it included our belief the Cafe was made of, dependent upon, our very (and considerable, often inflammatory) differences. We thought of them archetypally, as masculine and feminine realities, necessary complements. In joining our different temperaments to establish our Cafe, it seemed we had triumphed over inequality, both sets of attributes essential to the whole. Without Orin’s being a “quick study,” his orientation to action, to a kind of egocentric boldness and charisma, his precocious adolescence that had had him exploring music and drugs at an early age, the hip and charming Cafe would not have existed. And I was its shaman. I’d had an experience that made me believe in dreams.
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Although many people since its sale let us know they feel the loss of the Cafe profoundly, probably only Orin and I experience it as fully a tragedy, something from which we – individually and as a couple – can easily imagine not recovering. Its loss has stripped us of the safety the Cafe gave to our souls; so that a different assurance must be found. Both of us struggle with early trauma and compulsive behaviors that have gained strength since the Cafe’s loss, this amidst a deteriorating political, social and economic context. Is there still a dream that unites us? No fanciful question, even given the catastrophe the world is in. And, though the Cafe gave patriarchy a pass, the fact that Orin’s familial roots are in Sicilian patriarchy, how will that work now the Cafe is gone?
Patriarchy had actually left us a “benign” legacy in the fact both our fathers were artists; this made both of us susceptible to taking dream reality more seriously than the average. Whether or not that gets to be a “plus,” was the circumstance each son or daughter had to work out as best she/he could! Our marriage, though freely chosen, could, to a lively mind, be seen as reminiscent of arranged marriages between the children of banana dealers in Orin’s Sicilian great-grandfather’s time, a feeling almost of destiny about it. Orin’s chief charm for me when we met, may have been his having had a real-life patriarchal upbringing, something so unusual in my experience that it was not a deterrence, even given my then strongly feminist ideals. That such overt and unquestioned loyalty and obedience to one’s father still happened, for some reason felt reassuring to me, whose father’s presence was so much less substantial.
Not that I would have been drawn to an obvious brute, if there is such a thing, but it was as if I felt safer in the context defined by the supremely sufficient egoism patriarchy granted to men, such that their decisions could be made cleanly, without the kind of invasive self-doubt that hangs me up still. Even when Orin later revealed to me the abuse, the domestic violence – that had occurred in the home while he was growing up, I fell in line with his mother and siblings, never challenging the tyrant’s rule in his own domain! Never mind my father-in-law Sebastian’s preoccupying identification with the Roman Empire, his paintings of Mussolini and expression of admiration for il Duce, never mind the evidence of something deeply wrong in a family context that had stood helplessly by while an 18-year-old son, certainly bright enough for college, not only fathered a child out of wedlock, but got sent to jail to serve a two year sentence on a bogus, easily dismissible – charge.
A necessary word about Sebastian: he followed his Muse. This is important. Of course he had a screw loose – who does not who follows her? Making art doesn’t make you nice, or even competent. It doesn’t make you stand up against injustice. It makes you cooperative with invisibles, with reality unseen. Unlike my father, who painted from nature, Sebastian’s subjects were mostly cut from magazines and newspapers, so he could paint during his lunch break at work. His style was expressionistic, wildly colorful, paint thickly applied, sometimes he added words in a cartoon-like way. Although I was never sure how I felt about it, I was the exception among his children, all of whom considered him – in a way that was impressive to me – a great, if not the greatest – living painter. Later, after he retired from the job he hated and from which, with 7 children he could not free himself, running a graphics department for the U.S. military at the airbase in Rome, he became much more a nature painter, a good one.
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In preparation for a talk Orin and I are giving January 29 called The Ballad of the Glad Cafe, I’m reading all the messages sent to us since the Cafe’s closing. There’s no doubt the Cafe made people feel good; few attempt to analyzewhat was there about it that made it so. But here it is:
In order to follow the dream, instead of slavishly following the business rule book, we followed it minimally; ours was unabashedly a “Mom and Pop” enterprise, substituting for business “savvy” elements with mythic power (or this is my shamanic take). They added up to a place that exuded hipness and its own kind of warmth. The Cafe fueled bodies and imaginations both. Relying upon imagination, we could move and act not apart from but within the sickness of our society.
It worked until it didn’t. The first major blow to our dream came not with the realization the business was failing financially. It came with the sale, the buyer a young woman who’d worked for us (and taken her inspiration from our Cafe). Following the advice of the bankers, she paid us strictly according to book value of the equipment and furnishings, next-to-nothing for the fact she was purchasing a legend, and would inherit our clientele. No one in his right mind would blame her and we do not, but the minimization of intangible worth hit us where we were most vulnerable. Since that “rude awakening” from the charmed space of the Cafe, and then the actual sale, we’ve dropped down to something that in the dominant heartless context feels more like the naked lunch at the end of the fork.
And at times, the naked lunch, with the two of us rattling around in our too-large old house with too much deferred maintenance, feels a lot like the return of patriarchy and its aggrievements, a rather total defeat. However, I have to insist the shaman wasn’t wrong. What I want to say, maybe defensively, maybe not, is that what imagination is needed for – what art is needed for, that is – is coping with the very fact that “life is what should not have been.” The only other choice is to play it safe, deny the dark and seek to stay in the light, a denial our civilization has experimented with for centuries. Where this has gotten us is the triumph of the worst, whether the progressive freer, better, liberal AI-built future in (that works for those who can afford it and who need not confine themselves or their lusts within any earthbound limits) or the fascist theocracy now closing in on us. I’m with fictional Lauren Oya Olamina on this: if we do not believe in change, the real possibility of it, there will not be any except for the worsening which is already happening.
Having just read Sophie Smith’s excellent piece in the London Review of Books (Sleeping Women 12/26/24)) on the infamous Pelicot rape trial in France, I’m not about to make light of patriarchy! However, even before patriarchy, another chain must be removed; that upon imagination. The world we want to see is not a world that, in its resolve to be more protective toward women, continually makes laws to protect the vulnerable but which keep the abusive, exploitative, system and its assumptions intact. There can be no post-patriarchal world by fiat. Our concept of change (as always, I address people like myself – white, liberal, middle class) has to change. In order for this to happen, the barrier set against imaginations must be removed – a work for individuals in both/all genders – so we no longer are protecting our (egoic) selves against our very souls.
The most potent barrier in place against imaginations is trauma denied. It can be repressed – keeping darker knowledge banished, boundaries well fortified – which can work – for some – in the short term. But even if one is successful, denial makes one a co-conspirator with the worsening, enemies to the seventh generation. In our world in which power is unequally distributed (patriarchy), trauma is not restricted to the victims of natural disasters, war, or blatant brutality and oppression; the effects of childhood trauma are universal, intergenerational, affecting men and women. The wound can be forced out into the open – the best context for this is within mutual commitments to in-place, face-to-face and local relationships, where healing can commence because it has to. The best medicine is art, which personalizes and sacralizes. We need not to continue the abandonment of imaginations but to build communities of dreamers, locally in place. Candidates for such communities are everywhere, they are us.
Our Cafe was a place tasting of Utopia, a safe place for souls because it was a partnership of father and mother, both of us humanly flawed, our all-too-human family on daily display, but also, representing symbolically a universe made of oppositions, room in it for everybody. To make it and keep it we trusted in a dream, larger than ourselves, the reality of many gods, not One. Now, chips down, I keep my faith with that dream by writing – she who’s the writer has more, always, to tell me so I know this is not “end of story!”
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