AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
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by a PR team with a list of names from which mine was absent. I wasn’t sure if I hated them or wished I was one of them. Probably both.
Ultimately, staying away that summer was a means of avoiding living under the same roof as my father in his castrated state. A state like that of King Lear turfed out of his castle, confined to the outbuildings with the animals. It would have meant seeing his reality first hand. I use the word ‘castrated’ deliberately. Though the MS would sure enough disable his sexual functioning along with everything else, it was more that the symbolic male energy that should have flowed from father to son, from him to me, had been interrupted. The oil pipeline, the artery of resources, had been blown up by terrorists. Just as I was making my transition from adolescence to the big wide world, and needing male fuel to boost me on, the engine cut out.
More usually the reverse applies: paternal potency induces filial feebleness. There are billionaire fathers with wastrel sons, and celebrity fathers whose male progeny live in their shadow. In those cases, it is an excess rather than an insufficiency of fatherly strength that causes the son to weaken. For me, it was the other way round. And it was as much about timing as anything else. At the point of leaving home I needed a full tank. I had expected my father to fill it up as a parting gift. I got only a few miles down the road before the engine sputtered and died. Why had my father stopped earning money to support me? Why couldn’t he have an influential job for me to boast about? Why did he have to crumple into his own despair rather than steer me with gubernatorial ease towards a sure destiny? I felt angry with him, disappointed, cheated.
To tell the awkward truth, I felt it would have been better if he had died. To me he was like a bloodied bull staggering around the bullring, dazed and confused, the picos sticking out from his neck to make a grotesque ruff. A part of me was praying for the matador to put him out of his misery. At least then I would have the opportunity to mourn. In the terms of Sigmund Freud, I would have been able to ‘incorporate’ him properly. Instead, he was cast into a limbo between life and death. That made it impossible for me as his son to abstract the remaining heat from his corpse, like an electricity thief, and plug it into my own circuit of veins. For Freud, this is one of the chief causes of depression, or what he calls ‘melancholia’. Instead of being able to grieve fully for somebody by incorporating them into our memories, we are impeded. They remain only half taken in, and that induces a terrible sadness.
But Freud is talking about people who actually die. He is describing a failure of mourning on the part of those who survive them. My dad did not actually die. Rather, he lived a half life, as if he’d been exposed to radiation. He would stir only to do sums on blotting paper, working out how to eke out his savings, now that no more income was coming in. This half life, half death on his part was the cause of my half mourning. I’ve effectively remained in this state of half mourning ever since that rupturing of the masculine tract. I think it lies behind the dejection I experienced at Oxford. Freud refers to primitive societies in which the dead king is literally eaten, ingested, as a way of tapping his energy. Not eating leaves you weak. We grow in strength when we consume dead meat. We need the body of the past to sustain us for the future.fn1
The implication is that when you fully incorporate the dead, you won’t be haunted by them. They will be satisfactorily swallowed, and you can get on with your business, just as if you’d had a restorative meal. Haunting is less a spectral visitation, in other words, than a failure of mourning. It’s not that the dead return, but that the living haven’t digested them properly. The living thus keep burping up the dead like a gas which takes human shape, its hologram shimmering before their eyes. And because, with the onset of his two irreversible conditions, MS and unemployment, my father entered a zone that was also neither dead nor alive, it turned him into a kind of ghost that haunted me. It was his ghostly half-presence that spooked me, and I couldn’t face living in the little house with it for a whole summer.
But nor could I fight with him. Young adult sons need not only to draw from the male strength of the father, but also to do battle with it. There has to be some alpha wrangle that lets the son believe he has thrown the father over. It’s an Oedipal crisis that tightens the relationship between father and son like a screw until the wood splits, and the parts can become individual again. With a damaged father, one mother, two sisters and no brother, I lacked a male adversary to define myself against. My father had become a ghostly gas (the two words are related), and I could punch right through it.
The word ‘Oedipal’, of course, refers to the Oedipus complex as elaborated by Freud. The original version by Sophocles sees Oedipus unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother. Freud recasts the Greek original in psychological terms in order to reveal a general tendency among boys to attack their fathers while idealising their mothers. He says that it is an important phase for a boy to go through. As in, go through and come out the other side. In my attempt here at a Freudian self-analysis, I’m saying that I never quite went through it, or that I might still be stuck in an unresolved version thereof. I couldn’t attack my father because he couldn’t fight back.
And if I couldn’t elbow my way beyond that aggressive phase with my father, does it imply that I remained in a state whereby I idealised my mother in Oedipal fashion? As I pointed out in the Foreword, this book contains disproportionately more material about my father than about my mother. I would answer that writing less about my mother does indeed contain a residual motive to idealise, but in the following sense. Just as my teenage self was squaring up to fight him, I saw that my father was already on the canvas, knocked out by life. With one parent down, and still down to this day – as I write Colin lies in his hospital bed ten miles away – how could I possibly risk damaging the other parent too? Would analysing my mother in the way that I have analysed my father undermine the consolation that I derive from having at least one parent not sitting on death row? Even if any illusions that I hold about my mother serve merely to compensate for the disillusion with my father, that is fine by me. My silence about my mother keeps those illusions about her alive. Those illusions, if they exist, serve a purpose.
Whether or not my self-analysis is valid, it was because of that father–son dynamic that I didn’t go home that first Oxford summer. The following year, 1986, I took up the summer job at the call centre and met Simone. Having dropped out of college, I started wondering what I would do with my life.
Sex: more recreation than reproduction
When Freud writes about incorporating those who have passed away, it fits, perhaps surprisingly, with his earlier theory of sexuality. Whether mourning the dead or reaching out to the living, we are bringing the other towards us, overcoming distance, making relationship. Underlying both is an instinct in us to bond with others and get close to them. It is this instinct which for Freud is ‘erotic’, though in the very broadest sense. He’s not talking about sex narrowly defined, but about the wider need in us to discharge our energy. Given that the energy has to go somewhere, our erotic instincts provide a positive channel.
Not that sex is absent from the picture. Our erotic instincts do also take the form of wanting sex with others, that is bringing them into physical intimacy with us. These erotic instincts have an interest not just in the short-term pleasure of the moment, however, but also in the long-term furthering of the species. Sex goes together with life.
Maybe that is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet the obvious is recalled more seldom than it might be. Thanks both to the availability of contraception and to a growing acceptance of homosexuality, we make the connection between sex and life less automatically than once we did. Whatever the morals of it, there just is an awful lot of sex that doesn’t result in babies being born. That makes sex overall more about recreation than reproduction, as shown in the following diagram. (In the diagram, the size of the circles is a crude indicator of the amount of different kinds of sex that we have.) And whilst the dominance of recreational sex can dull our appreciation of the link between sex and life, our appreciating it less doesn’t stop that link from holding.
So how much of the life force is present when we hold erotic feelings for another person? How far is our sexual desire controlled by an unconscious instinct