If this is a man

This is a collage of Genesis, Paradise Lost, The Tempest, The Well of Loneliness and, of course, Primo Levi's writing. The object and subject become horribly blurred.

Though I see you everywhere,
I no more know you now than
when I first looked up. You
made me, male and female

in your image: loved my valour,
contemplation, softness, sweet
attractive grace. But I am dust
now, curst who loved you first.

Too maimed to love, this thing
I am is sin against the image
I have dared resemble. You
created, killed, demolished me:

Cain, Caliban, a living corpse
that lies with corpses. No more
in man’s eyes than a thing, my
language lacks the words for

your offence. You made me:
now you need do nothing else.
And me? I’m all potential.
But without performance

I am nothing more.

After so many iterations, I have discovered the story behind this poem.

A parent creates a child. Genetically, that child is no more and no less than its parents. The act of making is theirs alone. In some cases, though not in every case, that act is also one of narcissism: “in my image”. And the child, out of its nature, looks up and loves the face it sees: coincidentally most often its creator.

Making this story Biblical and Edenic, God’s act of creation could be seen as narcissism. Here he was in this great void, creating this and creating that – but with no satisfaction, because light, dark, earth, water, trees and animals don’t answer back, don’t express their love for their creator. So he made man, who mirrored him. And in a further mirroring – so aptly put by Satan in Paradise Lost – God created Eve out of Adam. Adam “for God”, and Eve “for God in Man”.

So far, so egotistical. But Adam and Eve screwed up: they disobeyed their parent and exercised free will. Turning the story back to parenting: early on and in general your child conforms to your will and to the perpetuation of your image. Then the little bugger takes a different tack – that’s what teens are about. You go ape: how can this child throw everything that you’ve done, turn away from the path you’ve dreamt out? That path might not look explicitly like your own image, but it’s formed out of your likes and dislikes about yourself and your own upbringing.

Thought of in this way, it’s not a bad thing: you want the best for the child and have a duty to help it grow up. And you only have your own subjectivity to guide your approach: even in reading others’ advice, you can escape from that subjectivity. At some stage it is healthy for the child to escape from your subjectivity.

So back to the ape: you lose it and say, “That’s it! You can do what you want but you’re getting no more help from me!” Or you could become even more controlling.

The Old Testament is the story of an angry, controlling parent. Perhaps, just perhaps, the New Testament is that parent realising that it has to loosen its grip once and for all. The act of sacrifice is the loosening of control and the affirmation of a parent’s proper place. It’s a pretty crude way of doing it: I don’t intend to be tortured to death as a way of saying to Ellie that perhaps she can have her own way from time to time. But it’s a reassuring twist in the fable: angry Dad letting go but saying he’ll always be there for junior/s. As Matthew’s Gospel says, “And remember, I am with you always, day by day, until the Close of the Age.” It may all be a fairytale, but it tells us about our own nature because it was written by people sharing our own nature.

Back to this poem: it starts out with an act of creation, followed by the love of the created one and the satisfaction of the creator in what he say of his own image in the created. Then there is rejection – and more importantly, the sense of rejection from the created one, a sense of being a maimed version of what should have been. After that, it goes to extremes - in the quotation from Primo Levi. These are the consequences of fucked up creator/created relationships. But they are no more extreme than their Biblical or even contemporary parallels.

The conclusion, for the created, is that the creator’s initial act of creation is enough. Back off now. For the created, there is the possibility of remaining a maimed image, or of drawing a line under that and recognising its own potential. That would be a positive outcome. But, as the poem concludes, if the created doesn’t perform, doesn’t live adventurously, it is potential and nothing else.