Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

It is not that I presumed the girls’ water we used as his infant formula would counteract these predictable, unsatisfactory instincts (protect the head, breathe, eat, grab warm bodies, and nuzzle their flesh). For all of its power, girls’ water cannot prevent basic animal responses to threats or hunger, however boring these predicaments have proved to be. As you may have noted from your observation tower, I have stood outside under the flood of evening birds, who circle the emotion furnace and feed on the behavior smoke, and I have consumed great amounts of water, with the hope of generating an ideal learning fluid for the boy, which would save him from the terrible guesswork of life among people. He drinks it and he smiles, but nothing is learned; he swallows no instructions. Ben still sits at the window and sings his warble, runs after the birds with his little arms waving as though he controls them with string. I am trying to discourage his sense that he can influence the life around him, that he is responsible for something that is already occurring. Part of my approach here is the institution of a Powerlessness Emphasis Program. For about an hour each day that Ben is charged to me, I take him around the house and point out things he was not responsible for, mostly tables, chairs, beds, walls, other people. I have lately also been scheduling a stop at the mirror by the bathroom, allowing Ben to discover how unremarkable his features are, to educate him on the basic disappointments of the face. When the light is right, I drop his pants and we consider how crushed and matted his hips appear, how his penis looks like an entire person smushed into a wrinkle, his buttocks like the flattened head of a seal.

My problem: Parenthood should not feel like charity. Ben is proving special in the wrong way. My soft spot for cretins is bone-hard.

I am nevertheless disappointed to see Ben’s contract with poor performance so quickly fulfilled, his apparently easy assimilation to other people and their average theater of disappointments, despite our best efforts to originalize him.

My concern: by publicizing his “insecurity” (your words), Ben boasts of a future failure and creates a zone of foreshadowing around his head, indicating his Kill Spot, akin to wearing a bull’s-eye. I read the papers enough to know that failure is the trend for young people today, but it does not compel me, and I’ll be curious to watch its enticements fade as success and survival regain prominence as the coveted actions for persons, and others, of our time. A sort of glory is lately attached to coming up short, then articulating the inadequacy, soliciting blame with the same fervor our generation sought to deny it, as though verbal eloquence can overwhelm incompetence. But I say let the other American children fail and brag of failure, whether through song or verse, even exaggerating the various ways they have become terribly weak people of the Current Moment, a regime where the word “person” now equals “loss,” where to breathe is to inhale remorse. Error is a dead end. Modesty is the most arrogant stance of all. Our boy will continue to operate in secret, beyond the behavior fads, and his debut will revise what has heretofore been thought possible in the scope of actions that a person can produce. I believe this.

Do I care how arrogant this sounds? I do not. Am I worried that my ambitions for him are not his ambitions for himself? I am not. Left to his own devices, Ben would have no devices. Left alone, he would be alone. The history of behavior has borne this out. No more equivocating. My role is to optimize him, to medicate his trajectory, to fuel the launch. “To mother:” a verb suggesting special, strategic assistance, a tactic of person making. Mothering is the science of waking up. Bestowing behaviors on others. Mothering.

So how will he do it? At the least, Ben should be outfitted with a decoy weakness, an area some distance from his head, that he nurses with care. This is an old-fashioned idea, but one that we have apparently overlooked in all of our quests for newness. I am not suggesting a garden — civilization should quit its relentless tilling of the earth before it digs its way to hell; it is presumptuous the way people attempt to enhance or alter vegetal life, while in the end they only interfere with something they don’t understand (fatherhood, according to my father, is to modulate interference, to ration intervention, like management with a whip). Instead, why not a living creature who can die before Ben does, to give Ben a sample of recoverable loss, just to widen his arc of grief before his emotions are finally cleansed? But who or what should this living creature be? Who or what? Who or what? Do any candidates come to mind that we can sacrifice to Ben’s advancement? A loved one? A formerly loved one? A despised one who thinks he’s a loved one? Think! Presuming your own selfishness still obtains (which isn’t even a presumption, but a rational prediction based on all of your past behavior), and you refuse to completely and finally donate your own person for this project, we might consider accessorizing Ben with a dog or a child, a side-car diversion to give his potential attackers real blood to shed and to let Ben fail at something grave — the upkeep of another life — without dying himself, though we should be careful not to fetishize his survival above more spectacular behavioral gains. Let’s not presume that he needs to live to be considered a successful young man. Survival for its own sake can tend to feel so obvious, so plainly desperate.

A short diagnosis of Ben’s condition: Afraid of One’s Own Motion, Afraid of Hands, Scared to Breathe, Walking Fear, Repulsion Toward Food, Fear of Clouds, Water Phobia, Nauseated by Sound, Allergic to Objects, Allergic to People, Allergic to Oneself. I presume parents, if anyone, should cure these fears and aversions. Parents should intervene at a stage such as this one and impart a survival tactic, a motion reduction, an anxiety channel to siphon off the distracting behavior. Certain specific parents, in fact, should consider the ultimate sacrifice to their son, a boy who might finally require the loss of a parent in order to be healed (I’ll spell it out: Ben requires a disappeared father, a dead father, a father harmed and brought to his knees, an embarrassed or humiliated father, a father attacked, a father lost at sea, a father with no money, a depraved father, a shot-in-the-head father, a gut-shot father at night, a father fallen from a tree, winded, a confused and possibly blind father, groping down the hallway in his nightshirt, entering the wrong room, weeping, a father who must be fed, a deaf father, whose lips curve around other people’s words but never discern them, a father who one day doesn’t wake up, who stiffens there in bed, finished). A successful young boy might require one of these events to mark him as a more authentic young man, a man with experience, a man with knowledge, a man who has suffered. If you cared at all for his progress in the world, you would help Ben with this deficiency; you would not even blink before volunteering. You would be loading your gun at this very moment. You would be swallowing all of the wrong pills and dragging your fatally poisoned body out into the field, where Ben could watch you fail this world forever, and never forget your death. A father having a seizure. A father expiring in the grasses outside his own home. How proud we would all be if you could do this for him! What an amazing gift! How noble, to exit your hard life and infuse our young man with such an important, defining loss! How many young men actually get to watch their fathers die? An intelligent man would overcome his self-serving blind spot on this topic. What exactly are you “living” for if not to accelerate your son’s stalled launch, to jettison your sorry boy back onto the frontier of the all-new behavior? Let him live through grief! An intelligent man would do this.