Father Says Research Articles

Mother and Father

THE GAME IS POOL, sometimes called eight ball. My father and mother play the game each night before going to bed. am there as ob server, too young to account my age. My father likes to break and my mother, who is new to pool, tends to give the old man his head. It is her habit to admire his every gesture, his hesitations, false starts, benign mis chances. Sometimes when he chalks his cue in his unassuming way, she can't help but emit a crow of pleasure at the secret grace of the gesture. Her praise makes him irritable, tends to throw him off his game. I don't know what's wrong with me, he says when he scratches on the What a stupid thing to do. My mother allows that there must have been a distracting noise from outside and offers him the occasion to replay the opening hit. You usually break so beautifully, she adds. I can spend whole days just watching you make the break. Well, you won't have another chance of watching it today, my father says. I take full responsibility for my misplays. My failure is already part of the recorded past. I don't blame you for saying that, my mother says. By the way, have you seen my stick? like, as you know, the little one. My father hands her his cue, which she accepts for an unhappy moment, then returns. This is nicer, but really prefer the one I'm used to. She goes to the back wall and checks out the four remaining cues, dis carding each in turn. One of them must be yours, my father says, chew ing on his impatience. That's all we have. Unconvinced, my mother selects the second smallest of the four remain ing ones, which is visibly warped and has a worn tip. That one's no good, my father says, trying to take it from her. Their struggle produces inertia. You never let me use the one want, my mother says. My father reads the cracks in the ceiling as antidote to that remark. It is my mother's practice to address the first ball she fixes on and then decide in the ensuing moment that it is not for her. At that point she will ask my father if there is a better shot available, something more in keeping with her limited skill.

Some Big Broad

awhile to read a sentence over again it is so much like one of my sen tences. Uses three dots liberally?just like me and Celine ... John Cage suggests that the hard work of the serious artist is equivalent to playing chess. Why do you play chess all the time, I can hear some father say ing. It's time to grow up and go to work. Like somebody might have told Fragonard, Drop that pink paint brush! Or Mozart? Why must you always compose in pink? ... Mozart, your nudes will live after you. Edith Oravez has brought them to life. Drop your pink brush. That's what people tell me. Lafe said, But how does your hero make his money? But Tm on the ground floor of the revolution of the novel. More Juno! Catullus' title. That's all right. Something was going on then. I thought it was over and I was only hanging on, that's what I thought, kicking a dead horse. I should know better. I told myself a long time ago. Keep kicking the dead horse. You never know where you might get to! I told myself! The modern novel a monster. Robbe Grillet has puffed me full of confidence. Yes, yes, Tm an exponent of the nouveau roman ... any school that will have me ... my own influ ence felt around here ... I hope it widens ... a celestial body ... exploding, spiraling nova ... that's me .. .on fire ... yeah yeah yeah! Going for bear, yeah! Into the fray ... and all of that... back to back ... coming going along ... I like it like that... Celine has shown us how ... (from letters to the editor and Renata Is Crying: A Nostalgia for Mona and Those Times)

In Quest of Ms. Mouse

In Quest of Ms. Mouse Helen Kay (bio) The story of the mouse in search of a husband has been told many times in many lands over the last several thousand years. While the mutations of the story provide interesting material for the folklorist, there is particular fascination in tracing the varying social attitudes towards a marriageable woman, as they are represented in the fable. One of the earliest versions is found in a folk tale from Greece, called The Mouse and His Daughter."1 In this telling, the mouse father, proud of his possession, a beautiful daughter, wishes to find her "a worthy suitor . . . but not a mouse . . ." The father can find no one fit for "my little girl" until he approaches the sun, suggesting "I could not give her to anyone else, but someone like you"—that is, the strongest. The sun confesses that he can be hidden by a cloud; the cloud claims that he can be scattered by the wind; the wind asserts that he is not really the strongest either because "he cannot blow a Tower down." As to the Tower, "to cut a long story short," he has digging within his walls a suitable husband for the beautiful mouse daughter—another mouse. The Japanese also claim this tale under two titles: The Beautiful Mouse Girl,2 and The Mouse's Wedding.3 Here both parents worry about a husband for their daughter "Lovely." None of her many suitors pleases them. The father says: "I am going to search for the most powerful being in the world" as a fit husband for Lovely. The father ends up before a blank wall, but within the wall lives a most powerful mouse, and a very obliging Lovely is happy to marry the mouse her father has found for her. In these early versions, the socializing purpose seems subordinate to the wit and dry humor of the animal fable. This balance changes over the centuries, as we may see when the Greek fables ascribed to Aesop (500 B.C.) spread to India, where they became part of the Panchatantra or Five Books, written in Sanskrit about 200 B.C.4 The Five Books are a compilation of moral tales written by a holy man to educate a rajah and his three sons, and among them we find the tale of the marrying mouse. There is an interesting difference between the Indian animal tales and the Greek fables on which they are based. In the Greek animal stories, the animals always act in accordance with what is believed to be their "natural behavior." As G. K. Chesterton defined it: in "Aesop or Babrius or whatever his name, a wolf is always wolfish; a fox always foxy." The Indian fable has a style of its own; here animals "are treated without regard to their special nature, as if merely men masked in animal form."5 In The Mouse Maiden, the heroine is at first a mouse dropped by a falcon into the lap of a childless guru as he meditates on the shore of the Ganges. In time she grows into a beautiful maiden; and when she is twelve years old, of marriageable age, her guru-father begins an unsuccessful search for "the strongest" as a bridegroom. He looks only among the most powerful forces of nature—the sun, the cloud, the wind, and a mountain (which replaces the original wall or tower). All the powerful [End Page 165] elements confess their own weakness and refuse the match. "Only between two persons who are well-matched in means and in blood should there be a marriage or friendship, but not between high or low."6 The caste system of like-to-like is maintained. Within the mountain is a strong, tunnelling mouse, and the maiden begs to be metamorphosed back into a mouse so she can enter his little hole in the mountain and join him in marriage. The stories from The Five Books travelled by various routes into the oral and written traditions of all the countries of the world; and every country in its own way adopted the tale of the marriageable mouse, "The Mouse Maid Made Mouse...

Sense of Injury

Yesterday I killed a tree. Just a little one, to be sure?I didn't think I could kill a big one. I pulled it up by its roots and cut it up with an axe into small pieces which I then dropped down the sewer. I watched it go down. I know, too, a little about the light haired girl who lives a mile down the road. Her name is Jennifer. As the leaves change, every year, I see her in the distance on her mare. But I almost never get close to her. My father says I am blocking the sewer with all that wood. I go fishing, sometimes. The other day I was fishing, killing even the smallest ones?then throwing them back to watch them come to life again?down near the place where the stream falls, where Jennifer sometimes waters her mare. She was swimming, this time. She was alone. She has long hair and it was wet. Then I hooked a big trout and when I looked again she was gone. So I went down there myself and swam, afterwards, leaving my clothes where she had left hers. I hope she was watching, but I don't know that she was. Wouldn't it be something if she did see me? I'll go there again. I hope she will, too. Today I was allowed to slaughter a hog. My father says I'll have to learn how to do it all, eventually, and so I might as well start now. There was a lot of blood and a lot of screaming. If anything has real pain when it's dying, it's a hog.

Specificity in Psychiatric Treatment

Every standup comic has a routine about a man going to a dentist, and the doctor, mistaking him for another patient, extracts the wrong tooth. This usually evokes gales of laughter from the audience, because they can so readily identify with the situation in this day of impersonalization. Unhappily, the "wrong" patient is sometimes seen in psychiatric treatment as well. Consider the man referred to a psychiatrist because of depression, job-adjustment difficulties, and periods of sexual impotence. He is single, 30, in good physical health, and has had individual psychotherapy previously for several years without significant benefit. After interviewing the patient alone, and listening to his story, the therapist decides to see him together with his entire family. The psychiatrist discovers that this man's father is a brutal, denigrating individual, who has always castigated his son. The father says repeatedly, "The only thing wrong with him is that he's lazy."

Breeding Habits of the Greenland Whale

VERY little is known about the breeding habits of the Greenland whale. In the Greenland Sea, according to the log-books of Scoresby Sen., females with calves with them were seldom seen except in spring, west of Spitsbergen, north of latitude 78° or 79°, and in the end of July off the Greenland coast. Young whales, with whalebone 2-3 feet long—the smallest which are seen by themselves—were also seldom seen except in a high latitude west of Spitsbergen in spring. Where they go to in the summer months is not hard to understand: as my father says, “the old females with the younger whales of both sexes bury themselves in the polar ice, north of latitude 80°, after (or before) the end of June, where no ship can follow them; retreating in the autumn southwards as the ice makes in the north” (Scottish Fishery Board; Seventh Annual Report, part 3, p. 366).

Normally Unequal Growth as a Possible Cause of Death

I HAVE found from a good many years' experience that it is frequently difficult to assign any definite cause of death to the lower Vertebrata which die in the Zoological Society's Gardens from time to time. The examination of a large example of the Japanese salamander (Megalobatrachus japonicus), which lived for a good many (nineteen) years here, and measured some three feet in length, has suggested to me a rather curious and truly “natural” cause of death—if my inferences be correct. The animal showed no obvious signs of disease in any organ. Judging from its length it must have been old, for a specimen three feet, long is asserted to have been at least fifty-two years old (vide Gadow, Cambridge Natural History, “Amphibia and Reptiles,” p. 99), Comparing, this specimen with one some twenty inches in length I found that the size of the heart, as of the other organs, was, as might be expected, actually larger, but that all the subdivisions of the heart were of the same proportions in the two animals. But in the course of a dissection of the heart it was plain that the two series of valves, which lie respectively at the anterior and at the posterior end of the pylangium, were so small, relatively speaking, that, when forced backwards by the pressure of blood in the entire conus arteriosus, they would not meet in the middle line. On the other hand, in the smaller salamander the three Valves in question were in the first place situated closer together than in the large animal, being nearly in actual contact, and in the second place their size was so great in relation to the diameter of the pylangium that they would—or, I should father say, could—meet after the systole of the ventricle. The fact is that these valves do not appear to grow pari passu with the general increase in size of the heart and the conus arteriosus. My own observations as to the small size of the valves in the large example are quite in accord with those of Hyrtl (Cryptobranchus japonicus, Vindobonae, 1865), who dissected an animal two arid a half feet in length, and figures the valves, incorrectly as I believe in some particulars, but correctly in representing them to be of small relative size. It might be suggested, therefore, that the imperfection of the circulatory mechanism necessarily caused by the condition of the valves would lead to serious disturbances, and perhaps to death. If so the animal has a term put to its life by the mere fact that, while the heart grows with the increase in bodily size, the semilunar valves of the conus arteriosus do not.