EC 513

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…     

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

22 The Father Who Was Not

What bothered me was that Daisy continued to insist that Stud was her cousin, and gave this as the reason they could not marry. A similar assurance that ‘cousin’ was truly a cousin came from Daisy’s mother. It appeared to support the idea that cousin was sleeping with Daisy simply because it would somehow be unnatural not to have someone to sleep with.

Of course, this is not a new idea or one that I had not heard of before. One example is the welcoming mat said to have been extended by the wife of the Inuit eskimo who was out hunting. Village men would then come visit the wife to keep her from getting lonely. If a child came of it, no stigma followed him or her. This all too obvious village incest eventually became a tradition whereby a similar welcome was extended by the hunter to his guests.

But such was not the custom either among the Balts or Slavs—certainly not in our times. Therefore, I could not help wondering if there was some other reason why Daisy’s mother seconded the notion that ‘cousin’ was not for Daisy to marry. Was this because she had called Daisy a ‘whore’ more than once and sleeping with ‘cousin’ absolved her from guilt?

The other question was: if Daisy’s father were alive, would he not say anything if his brother’s or sister’s son lay with his daughter?

When I suggested that Daisy and Stud marry, Daisy initially responded that cousins were forbidden to do so. When I replied that I had heard that there was no such law in Latvia, she fell silent. I decided to wait out the situation. I could not deny the possibility that Daisy believed that her relationship with Stud expressed true and all-transcending love that both had privately sworn they would honor all their living days. Such faith is not uncommon among the young. Moreover, in the backwaters of ‘civilization’ all kinds of strange things happen. I remembered the case of a couple in a nearby village, both of who had a child—a daughter and a son as the case may be—from a previous marriage. All lived in one apartment. The two children married each other when they grew up.

After Stud assured me that he would marry Daisy, then reneged, I became more ruthless in the kinds of thoughts I entertained. I began to think of his behavior as high handed as that of Daisy’s stepfather, who continued to call her a whore when the opportunity presented itself or he was on the defensive.

Then—as sometimes happens—the stars came to my aid.

With communal chaos fostered by post-‘Enlightenment’ institutions integrated in a seemingly irreversible city-scape and virtual environment, and the mind no longer able to distinguish between real reality and virtual reality, I experienced something of an ‘awakening’. Having committed to live among the countryside people, I began to feel some of their despair. In the frequent economic and spiritual dead-ends that the post-Soviet Latvian government led the country into, I was led to seek a better ‘order’.

Seeing that psychologists were of no use as advisors in the real world, but were products of the virtual urban environment with little or no experience in real reality, I turned to astrologers available on the internet. Needless to say, when it came to talk about love and money, most astrologers were enthusiastic on my behalf at least once every month. Silly as this may seem, it helped, because hope of pulling through for another day was more important than advice to reduce stress by meditation. As for pills, well, for people of the countryide, beer has always been a good substitute.

I was paying especial attention to one horoscope site, when I read in one of its forecasts the word ‘renegade’. The astrologer suggested that the stars were telling that a renegade event was about to occur. The dictionary explained ‘renegade’ to be a word that described a traitorous situation.

Who and what in my immediate surround could be so ‘renegade’ as to be traitorous? Nothing came to mind, but the word stayed with me. Some days passed. Then the answer came through the remembrance of an event seemingly forgotten.

I recalled the occasion when Daisy’s friends told me that Daisy’s father had taken his life. When at a later time I asked Daisy about it, she confirmed the story as true.

Like Hal 9000, the computer, who had (as if become human) sung a love song to Daisy, Daisy’s father, too, had expressed love for his daughter by buying her for birthday a winter coat. Then, suddenly, on her birthday, he took his life. What compelled him to do so? Why should he have changed his love to a curse? Was it a coded message for Daisy to decipher later in life?

A gut feeling flashed a series of suggestive questions and answers.

What if the father unexpectedly discovered that Daisy was not his daughter?

What if Daisy’s father by chance discovered that he had married a woman pregnant with a child by another man?

What if Daisy’s father discovered that his ‘Florence Nightingale’ did not offer her breast only to a wounded soldier or one suffering from post-combat stress, but also serviced and petted stressed hospital doctors? What if he had discovered this through the friend who was recovering at the hospital from the wounds incurred in Afghanistan?

What if Daisy’s mother had had abortions before Daisy was born, and Daisy ‘lucked out’ only because a sex starved and war shocked veteran of the Afghan war happened to come along and wanted to marry her, and had, thus, provided the conditions which enabled Daisy’s mother to save her daughter’s life?

My rhetorical questions offered rhetorical answers, and gave renegade explanations for long hidden existential situations that may have robbed Daisy of her mother’s affection for decades.

Though Daisy claimed that her mother had breast fed her, she also insisted that her mother paid little attention to her, and was of little help to her either as a child or now that she had children of her own. Was she in her mother’s eyes no more than a thing that had dropped out of her belly? Had the fact that her mother was forced to consider aborting her become part of a hardened mindset  that now distanced her from her daughter?

Daisy tells that when her mother babysits for her and lets the children go play in the yard, she pays no attention when they drift away with their friends. Why is this? Is it because her mother has a heart condition inspired by vegetative distonia? Or is it an extreme case of distancing because of thingification? Is it like the nausea I sometimes feel in the mornings that keeps me in bed? Is it the ‘hollow men’ that the poet T.S. Eliot wrote about? Or is it Ezra Pound’s “Ione”, who I read “Yan”, and think of as John the Baptist the humiliated herder of elk earning his keep in Livonia?

“Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
          Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
                                        Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk
But seems like a person just gone.”

If it is true that Daisy is not of the man everyone believed to be her father, there must have been some rumor of this. If so, Stud most likely heard them. Did it not flash through his mind that Daisy was not really his cousin as he claimed to believe her to be?

Had it not occurred to Stud that if he kept quiet and made no further inquiries, he could fuck Daisy until Kingdom come? He, too, could contribute to her belief that engaging in sexual intercourse was a sign of love, and ignore the advice of old elephants who through intercourse have tried to bring a dead mate back to life, but know from experience that no such miracle will occur.

Her mother’s indifference could suggest to Daisy that her as if automatic sexual fixation on a younger man (who was still a teen when they first came together) was true love, because hidden in her willful insistence was the echo of an existential fear (brought gratis through the automatic nervous system in dreams and pareidolia inherent in ‘reading’ the stars) that she would never know love, unless she seized and took possession of the first male ‘thing’ that stuck out from the fly of a young man’s pants?

Was Daisy shy of men her own age or older because no father had loved her, cradled her in his arms, and massaged the fishbone of nurturing love into her heart by example only a father, integrated in a given Commons, can provide?

While Daisy’s seeming addiction to irresponsible (?) sex was perhaps the compulsion of an unconscious Will insisting that her love was real, its mundane cause was—more likely—a nurse’s aide’s, her mother’s, no less desperate Will in a hard pressed Soviet world to sustain her life by whatever means for another day.* The animal instinct seemed clear enough. So what if it turns her daughter into a thing so desperate for love and intimacy that she turns these needs into pornography?

*A recent blog at BBC.com tells that 70% of students at Pakistan’s medical schools are young women, while women represent only 30% of doctors in Pakistani society at large. Evidently, the girls attend medical school in hopes they will find themselves a doctor for a husband.

Daisy is not the only example of discarded womanhood in Latvija. There is no shortage of such women and their children in the countryside. While I am reluctant to say that erotic license in the countryside relates to masochism, there is no doubt in my mind that government is the agent of pain, neglect,   incredible suffering, and innumerable manifestations of alcoholism.

A woman I know is said to have drunk a 2 liter bottle of beer before being taken by ambulance to the hospital to deliver her child by cesarean. When back home, she apparently forgot that she had arrived at the hospital drunk, and complained of ill and disrespectful treatment by the doctors. “Winter is icumen in lhude sing goddamm….”

As I live in the midst of these tragedies (of young and old), this may be no less the reason why my Godfather, the First President of Latvija, turns over in his grave.

Be that as it may, Daisy’s response to my request for a taste of mother’s milk was an exhilarating experience. I was well aware that it was eighty years after having had suck at my own mother’s breast. Alas, it was a gift of the Gods that was likely to go without being requited in other ways, but a reminder of how sexual love is for a moment and how the keepers of it’s sorrows are doomed to have shotgun weddings all lifelong.