#20 Men agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (knight-errant/warrior #b)
Warrior archetype is the archetype of destruction, yet
in full expression “only destroys to make room for something new and fresh and
more alive.”
His is an act of creative destruction—he doesn’t tear things down simply for the pleasure of doing so. (from artofmanliness.com)
His is an act of creative destruction—he doesn’t tear things down simply for the pleasure of doing so. (from artofmanliness.com)
Knight-errant has broken away from the world of his
origin, in order to go off on his own to right wrongs or to test and assert his
own chivalric ideals. He is motivated by idealism and goals that are often
illusory. (Wikipedia)
While I concur with Frankl that humans are not driven
by archetypes, nevertheless, these metaphors are relevant in helping to parse
patterns of behaviour, even if those patterns are not “visible” or even
conscious at the time they are being deployed. There is also considerable seeding
of life patterns that takes place, both consciously and unconsciously/inadvertently,
in one’s family of origin, and the length of the respective shadows of various
parenting modelling patterns varies on the virulence/hope engendered by parental
attitudes and behaviour, and how we perceive them as children, adolescents and
young adults. That is the long way of saying that our biographic history plays
a significant part in how we live our lives.
From a very early age, I was made aware of a profound
contrast between the person of my mother and the person of my father. A retail
manager, responsible for supervising a staff of some dozen, higher in summer
when tourists infused the local economy, lower in winter when local business
relied on a shrunken market, my father exuded a kind of equanimity, good humour
and dependability both at home and in the workplace. On the other hand, my
mother the nurse, exuded bursts of high energy and intense anger, bitterness
and harmful judgement of others that would never have found a place in my
father’s consciousness. Superficially, and stereotypically, my father’s image
was of sensitivity, compassion, integrity and dependability. On the other hand,
mother’s was of turbulent, industrious and judgemental tempermentality.
Trying to find a path between my family’s Scylla and
Charybdis,* I found nooks and crannies of difference, very early, between each
of them and me. On one hand, I was somewhat overwhelmed by the prodigious
whirlwind of baking, sewing, gardening, talking and cleaning that stemmed from
each of my mother’s days. On the other, I warmed to time with my dad, joined in
his love of sports, especially Saturday night hockey on the radio with Foster
Hewitt, and respected the way those who worked for him spoke of him.
Conversely, I thought that my mother’s perfectionistic pursuit of cleanliness
had to have come from the operating rooms in hospitals where she trained and
later worked, believing the two sites were not valid comparisons. Similarly, as
far as my father’s reliability, dependability and persistently rising sales
curve was concerned, I deeply believed that his income, without profit-sharing,
company shares, incentives and enhanced responsibility could and should have
been amended, if only through his more assertive and confident self-advocacy in
annual negotiations with the company owners. I also intuited that at least a
portion of “her” anger and disappointment resulted from his passive/aggressive
tendency; and his self-effacement could well have emerged in part from his
close and turbulent association with “her” overpowering, even frightening
threats, withdrawals and emotional storms. Certainly, I believed then in my
adolescence, and continue to hold all of these years later, that my father
failed, by omission, to take reasonable steps to negotiate a more significant
status for his contribution to the success of the hardware store in such
potential instruments as profit-sharing, shares, incentives and even potential
partial ownership.
Memory fails to generate precisely the first time I
objected to something ‘she’ said or did. I do recall protesting her engaging in
smoking DuMaurier cigarettes (I recall the red package!) and my protest, “I
wish you would not smoke!” to which she replied, “If God did not want us to
smoke, He would not have created tobacco!” My incredulity gagged any response;
only later did I deeply regret not have countered her flawed argument, that ‘God
also created’ poison ivy, for example, and that was not ‘good’ for anyone.
At about the same time, I recall an incident which, on
reflection, conjures images of the early incubation of that
knight-errant/warrior. In grade nine, I had received a poor grade of 63 in the
Christmas exam in history, a mark I knew would cause repercussions of anger,
disappointment and punishment from ‘her’. Also, coming from Toronto to visit
over the holiday, my father’s sisters, my aunts, were a welcome interlude of
kindness, generosity and likely calm in a season that was frequently, if not
normally, turbulent as a direct consequence of what could only have been a
combination of fatigue and tension given the complexity and extent of the
preparations mother undertook alone. Putting the convergence of the holiday,
the upcoming hope implicit in the visit and the predictable explosion should
that “63” be announced prior to the day, I decided to withhold disclosure until
after the aunts had departed. On the day of the discovery both of the mark and
the withholding, my mother’s anger boiled over. I had received a new Spalding nine
iron as a Christmas gift of which I was in ordinately proud and happy.
Immediately upon learning the fullness of my “failure” and “withholding,” she
picked up the golf club, bent and then broke it over her knee and pitched it
down the cellar stairs.
Of course, I was heart-broken, angry, disappointed,
and probably instantly vowed revenge. Privately in my room, I penned a letter
to those Toronto nurse-aunts, detailing this story, my disgust at the kind of family
and treatment I was experiencing and wondering, in ink, what I should/could do.
Of course, I informed neither parent of my action in both writing and mailing
the missive. And also naturally, the moment ‘she’ found out about my “betrayal”
of her, especially to these two women with whom she was in a private and
personal competition, she exploded again, this time in physical, emotional
judgement of my “deceitfulness”. As whistle-blower on the woman known as
mother, I had ventured into the fraught territory of disclosing a family secret.
At no time then, or at any time for the ensuing half-century did ‘she’ ever
acknowledge her ‘part’ in the drama, nor did she ever offer an apology. Decades
later, those aunts resurrected that letter, returned it to me with the comment
that they were resistant to taking action by invoking the family services
agency, fearing both the direct impact on me and the indirect impact on them of
my mother’s potential reaction. Clearly, whistle-blowers take considerable
risk, even if and when their cause is both honourable and just.
I have already noted, earlier, the story of my knight-errant/warrior
departure from the church, provoked by the bigoted homily from the Balleymena
bigot. It also had serious and potentially professionally sabotaging
repercussions. (see #19 in this series).
During a one-year stint at the first school in which I
was hired following the move from my home town, I participated in a teaching
model that involved three English teachers, each of whom were assigned to one
class of grade thirteen students. Weekly, in what was then an innovative “Large
Group Instruction Room” (the LGI), one of the three instructors lead the three
classes in what was advertised as an introduction to large classes in university
and college, where many of those students would study in their next school
year. The topics selected followed closely the outlined curriculum, although occasionally,
a slight variance, a kind of spontaneity, was permitted and even encouraged.
One such variance came my way when I was given the opportunity to surprise both
faculty and students. I chose the theme of “isolation” and alienation, and brought
three pieces of literature into the discussion: Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of
Silence, W.H. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen, and T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. I
mention it because I fully appreciated the students’ engagement throughout the
class, and the deep mark the class has left in my more happy teaching-moment
film in my mind.
It was in another of these LGI sessions that the Head of
the department was proceeding with his prepared notes, already three-quarters
of the way through the process. These classes were two periods in length,
requiring student concentration for extended time periods. At this moment, the
principal of the school walked into the classroom. Instantly, not only did the
teacher welcome the principal to the session, a completely appropriate gesture
both for his professional reputation and for the sake of letting the students
know of the presence of the authority figure. It was what happened next that
triggered my anger, and my knight-errant/warrior. This “head” was overtly and unabashedly
ambitious, intent upon impressing the power structure that prevails in small
town education establishments in the hope of his own future “success” in
attaining additional status, responsibility and income. His return to the
opening of the class, and then proceeding to “bring the principal up to speed”
by outlining the totality of his then hour-long presentation, and thereby
subjecting those ninety-plus students to the boredom and the insult of having
to listen to the whole lesson a second time, for his personal ambition’s needs, completely
unnerved me. I stormed out of the room, and burst into the office of the
assistant head, decrying the obsequiousness of the ‘head’ and vowing,
privately, to take the first opportunity to transfer to another school that
came my way.
Easily bored, and knowing I needed conversation,
discussion, debate and the pursuit of ideas, both inside the classroom and outside
among neighbours, colleagues and friends, I perceived a dryness in the absence
of a social life in our then family. Having attempted to introduce such people
and concepts as Rotary exchange students into the family, in a belief that people
from other countries could and would enhance the experience of teen and pre-teen
daughters, and failed dismally, and having also failed when proposing dinner
invitations to friends, I recall uttering words to this effect: I cannot exist
with only sixteen-year-olds in my life; I need the association of adults, and am
therefore going to work in the Man’s World on evenings and weekends. Another
act of rebellion, another expression of the knight-errant/warrior, I was
proposing a solution to what I perceived as a personal need/scarcity, without,
at least as I considered it, risking the continuation of the marriage.
As a unilingual English speaking sales clerk, I
ventured, periodically, into conversing in French with the occasional customer
whose first language was French, in a store in which no other worker
could/would take the risk. I have often joked to now fully bilingual daughters,
(the beneficiaries of French Immersion classes from grade six onward, two of
them having completed French undergraduate degrees also, a third who practices
her second language in a secondary classroom of her own) that I once “sold
suits in French” in their youth. Their embarrassment and modest ridicule at the
disparity of my French accent, compared with their proficiency, evokes memories
of that risk-taking that seemed only normal in the doing .
The invitation to pinch-hit for a colleague about to
take a sabbatical from his teaching post and his part-time television
interviewer/reporter work came while I was engaged in the haberdashery
business. A lunch interview complete with an offer of $5 per interview and $10
per meeting ushered me into the television station, as a free-lance, obviously untrained,
and “green” reporter/interviewer. That began a dozen-plus-year adventure into
municipal politics, the occasional interview with provincial and national political
figures, a newspaper column and several years’ writing and recording radio
editorials for airing in four stations. The ‘water-mitty’ character inside my
imagination had already found expression when I entered basketball coaching in
my first year of teaching at Appleby College. Again untrained, without a single
course in Phys Ed., with only a single year’s experience as a high-school
player, I accepted the challenge of coaching the junior varsity team, where
expectations of both coach and team were quite limited.
Naturally, writing critiques of local municipal
leaders’ decisions, or their failed opportunities, plus interviews with, for
example a federal politician whose government faced protests from Alberta about
the existence of French language on the Cornflakes’ boxes (Canadian history
keeps repeating itself, without abatement of racism,
perceived victimhood, and perpetual perceived injustice, no matter how valid!),
or protesting the building of a retail shopping centre on the bypass, as
opposed to the downtown core, focused the development of a clarity, and a
muscle of political empowerment that I could not and would not have found if I
had been elected to some office. Specifically, in the middle of the public
debate over the proposed shopping centre, when I was loudly vocal in my
opposition to that bypass project, the radio station manager “took me for a
walk” our behind the building. It was a May afternoon, and I recall it as if it
were yesterday. “You have to be taken off the air immediately. The company is
about the lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue, if you
continue. The person representing the Northgate Square project has threatened
to withdraw all advertising if you are not silenced.” Of course, my personal
circumstance and this threat were never disclosed publicly. The public likely
could figure it out, anyway, given my obvious disappearance from the local
airwaves.
The referral of my name as a “news source”,
unbeknownst to me, and certainly without my consent, to the producers of W5 at
CTV by a downtown businessman, following the construction of the shopping mall,
in order to pursue what was then considered by some to be “illicit” money in
their project, resulted in an interview with one of the hosts and his producer in
the Windsor Arms dining room in Toronto. I invited the then deputy mayor, a
local criminal lawyer, to accompany me to the luncheon and departed after brief
introductions. The story never aired, we were told, because network lawyers
considered it too “hot” for airing.
Similarly, and still with local politics, I had to
testify in a local courtroom, in a trial in which the elected mayor was being
tried for election abuse. I had been offered a permanent position as Public Relations
Officer in a joint proposal between the local hydro, the local school board and
the city, the whole idea merely a figment of the then mayor’s imagination, as a
bribe if I would commit to write all of his campaign material. No such position
existed, nor was such a position even in discussion. No one had even before, or
since, spoken of such a proposal. Nevertheless, a clear quid pro quo it was and
remains. Unfortunately, the lawyers acting on behalf of the claimants against
the defendant mayor never rehearsed any interaction I had had with the defendant
and so, they never asked me the pertinent questions about that interaction.
Whether it would have been cogent to their case, is mute today. My brief appearance
as a witness, however, seemed so benign and insignificant that even the defence
attorney refused to question me.
To be continued…
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