My art in terms of my dad.

My father came to visit yesterday. I feel that if I were more like most people, this would be a fairly mundane bit of trivia.  In my case though, it's kind of a big deal.  I saw him last summer up in Maine for the first time in maybe 5 years, and yesterday is the first time he's come to visit me in 6 or 7 years.  These two visits are the only memory my son Jarvis has of his grandfather.  And the man may not be entirely sane.

A few years before my father met my mother he was dating this woman who had some kids.  They broke up and apparently he was pretty much stalking her after that.  I've heard a few different versions of this story over the years from various people, but from what I can gather, one day he got all drunk and convinced a friend of his to drive him to this woman's house where she promptly threw him out.  His friend got him back into the car to take him home, and at some point, my father started ranting about having to go back to her, opened up the car door, and jumped out of a vehicle driving on the highway.  He broke his skull and was laid up in the hospital for quite some time.

About 7 years later, he developed a seizure disorder which the doctors attributed to the head trauma.  I was a baby at the time.  Originally, they put him on Phenobarbital to control the seizures, but then they started coming back around the time I was 4 or 5 years old.  They were pretty bad.  I remember a couple of times when I saw him having a grand mal seizure being scared out of my mind convinced he was about to die.  Up until that time, my dad was awesome.  We played all the time.  He taught me how to build and operate an electromagnet.  Tinkertoys.  Whittling. Nature walks and camping. 

But when the seizures came back, his doctors started him on Dilantin, in addition to the Phenobarbital.  According to my mother, this is when the real decline in his mental health began.  It's hard to describe what it was like living with him.  His whole life was some kind of Native American delusion.  He called himself Medicine Hawk (even today, most people know him as Hawk), and styled himself a Wampanoag medicine man.

I was raised by him to be Niantaquut, which was a religion he told me was an ancient tradition- the worship of Nianta, the Earth Mother- but which as I've realized after much research later in life he just made up.  He spoke with spirits, wouldn't allow me to use colouring books, draw skulls, or hammer nails into trees. He said the Wolf was my totem spirit, because even then he could see I craved both solitude and the comfort of a pack. He became a leader in my Boy Scout troop when he learned they were going to begin teaching us how to shoot rifles because he'd "be damned" if anyone else was going to teach me how to handle a firearm.  Being ex-military, he stepped in as our riflery instructor.  At home, he was teaching me how to throw knives and tomahawks.  I built my first wig-wam when I was about 8 or 9 years old, but he'd get so mad if you called it a wig-wam.  "That's a white man's word," he'd say (my father is white), "it's called a we-tu."

Like in most father-son relationships (according to what I can figure out from television), my father was endlessly disappointed in me and I was endlessly trying to gain his approval.  The thing is, when I wasn't with him, I was out in the rest of the world where I learned pretty early I had to keep his "teachings" to myself or risk a fistfight.  I once beat up a kid because his father had moved to town, bought up a bunch of land, ripped the trees out and put in houses.  Not because I was avenging the trees, but because at 7 years old, we got into an argument about whether or not it was possible for anyone to "own" land.  On the other hand, when I was with him, I had to embody the philosophies he was teaching me. I had to compartmentalize everything to make life bearable.  For years (until I was maybe 7 or 8?), he and my mother kept me in a cage (two cages, to be precise- one in the backyard and another in sign shop).  I didn't know at the time that this was abnormal, but still I knew I had to keep this from other people.  I knew they wouldn't understand.  It wasn't all the time, just when they were busy and needed to keep me out of trouble. By the time I was 13, he was bat-shit insane and the balancing act was getting damn near impossible for me to maintain. 

My grandfather, Wentworth Burrell, started the a sign shop which was on the same property as the house I grew up in. My father took the business over when Grampa Burrell came down with the cancer which eventually killed him.   For over 50 years, all woodwork was done in the front building by the street, and the sign painting was done in what we called "the barn," even though it had never been used as a barn, out back.  This was to make sure sawdust never got into wet paint and that paint splatter never got on unprimed wood. As my father slipped further into his delusions he became much more insular and started moving all the woodworking equipment into the barn.  He constructed an elaborate plastic tent in there which he could retract up into the ceiling using a system of ropes and pulleys so he could keep the wood and paint separate, but this was just a symptom of his drawing himself away from the world.  It allowed him to never have to leave the barn.

I remember around this time he got a squirrel infestation in the barn, so he replaced the ceiling in there with industrial width aluminum foil.  This allowed him to follow their footsteps as they walked around under the floor of the upstairs part of the barn.  This in turn allowed him to use a blowgun and poison-tipped darts to take out the vermin.  He would also sit upstairs in the barn with his compound bow and shoot woodchucks that were invading the garden.

The summer I turned 13, I was away at summer camp when he finally snapped.  He chose a day that mom was at work and my little brother was at a friend's house or something, packed up his pickup truck and disappeared.  When I came home from camp, no one knew where he was.  It was hellish in some ways not knowing what had happened, but in other ways, honestly, it was a huge relief.  I couldn't explain to people what had happened, but on the other hand, I didn't have to deal with the craziness either.

Eventually, we got word back from him.  He was living up in New Hampshire, working as a home health aide for an old hippy named John who had MS.  I visited him for a couple for weeks during the first couple of summers.  He was still crazy.  If anything, he was getting worse. When John died, my father started moving from place to place in the area, alienating people everywhere he went, from all reports, until he finally decided to live his dream and go live in the woods.

Contact was rare during this period, and I certainly never visited him during this time.  He married this cross-eyed woman named Betsy and they built themselves a we-tu in the woods someplace.  Apparently she had some kids that lived with them there.  I can't imagine how horrible that was for them.

There was a very specific moment when I pulled the plug on trying to get him to be "normal," stopped caring about garnering his approval and pretty much cut off all contact for a few years.  During this living-in-the-woods period, his mother died.  He came back down to East Bridgewater for Gramma's funeral and went just a little too far for me to handle.

Standing over his mother's casket after it had been lowered into the ground at the end of the ceremony, in that single silent moment before the people at a funeral start forming little groups and talking among themselves, when all eyes were still on the hole in the ground and therefore on my father standing right there, he starting looking my cousin Jessica (his sister's daughter) up and down leeringly and told her (for some reason in a bad Irish accent) she was a fine looking lass and it was too bad they were family. I walked off immediately rather than further ruin Gramma's funeral with a the righteous outburst I felt he deserved but would not understand, and I didn't speak to him for years after that. 

The last couple of years have been very different though.  He seems to have his medications straightened out.  He says he's not having seizures anymore.  He's living on disability and his army benefits.  He has an apartment in Maine and can actually hold up his end of a conversation.  He works with wood in his apartment and keeps a large garden nearby which I saw this past summer and which at the current rate of expansion might be more accurately termed a small farm in a couple of years.  He's given the best apologies of which I think he's capable for what he's done over the years. 

I started speaking with him on the phone about 2 years ago on a fairly regular basis as he became more lucid and seemed to be actively trying to piece together some sort of life.  I was living with Meghan by then and both her parents are dead, which made me think a lot about not wanting to lose what opportunity I had left to salvage something of at least a knowledge of, if not a relationship with, my father. I wanted Jarvis to have Hawk in his life.  As crazy as he can still seem now, obsessed with his agriculture and his "native heritage," making terrible puns constantly and paradoxically being in love with both his pacifistic spirituality and his guns, there are a lot of things he can teach the boy that I no longer can. Things like fishing, wood carving, the identification and care of edible plants, and throwing tomahawks.  These are things I loved as a kid and which Jarvis seems to love now (based on our visit up-country last summer), but things which I blocked out pretty effectively after Dad left and wouldn't trust myself to properly teach the boy.

When I broke my skull two months ago, my father, being the way he is, saw it I think as a sign of the synchronicity between his life and mine.  He's always told me it was there, and I've always tried to escape it.  I spent years fearing I'd become just like him.  After the accident it was almost like he was sort of happy that we had this shared experience now.  In the same way that after Jarvis was born he had to come down-country to make his presence known, the occasion of my skull-breaking was momentous enough to warrant a visit.

My father, despite (or because of) all his many faults, is one of the most amazingly talented artists I've ever known.  He's also for that reason probably the single largest influence on my having become an artist in the first place, but at the same time embodies for me the artistic establishment against which I've always revolted in my own work.  As a kid, he'd look over my shoulder while I was working on something and say "don't do X because then Y will happen," but all I ever heard was "if X, then Y."  I've brought that attitude into every artistic endeavor ever since.

I used to do makeup and acting years ago, before Gramma died, at a haunted house.  One night Dad came to see what that was all about.  I was wearing a full cranial goblin prosthetic I rebuilt from scratch every night and stilts that made me 8 feet tall and ran around outside making teenage girls cry and little kids pee their pants.  At the end of the night I asked him what he thought and he said "well, it's a start," which is very much a quintessentially Hawk way of saying "are you sure you're not wasting your time?"

The point in time at which I cut off all contact after Gramma's funeral was still a few years down the line, but it was at this point that I stopped sharing my art with my father.  He was all about scale and perspective and realism.  He was all about planning and forethought and painstaking attention to age-old tried and true techniques.  If before I had just been ignoring his instructions, now I actively rebelled against them, although I can't say this was all necessarily conscious at the time.  Free of his critical and irrelevant gaze, I was able to hone my own personal style in relative peace.

So yesterday he came over to visit, see how I was recovering, and share some of his canned bounty from last year's garden.  I've got the apartment absolutely covered in the work I've done since Meghan and I moved in here so while I wasn't about to ask him for an opinion, I was fairly certain I'd get one.

My, how things have changed.  He was frank on the matter and said simply that he doesn't understand the work.  Non-representational art is totally foreign to him and he doesn't "get" it.  But he was immensely interested in and impressed with my process, techniques, tools and materials.  Like to him it was magic or science fiction or something. It felt like nothing short of victory for me, because I knew in Hawkworld, I had just ascended to the position of Teacher.  Which means I both have and yet no longer require his approval.

One of the medications the doctors have had me on since the accident is called Keppra. They said it's now standard practice to administer Keppra to people for a month or so after a head trauma to keep the patient from eventually developing a seizure disorder. Keppra didn't exist when my father broke his skull.

Perhaps this all simply shows ours paths have diverged enough that we can now start to come together again.  He wasn't there for me during those years when I probably most needed a father.  Even if he had been, that would likely have been even worse. I thought for a long time that the man he was when I was small had been lost forever, but perhaps there's a chance he can be a proper grandfather for Jarvis and make up for for all the pain he caused to family he didn't even have yet when he jumped out of that fucking car.