Occasionals I

< The way it never was. An art photo of labor.

Home_____Dad & Freudian Arbeit

Father's hair had receded to the sides with a few strands brushed over the top when one day he retired. For over fifty years he had bent to the daily grind, supporting his family as electrician, a trade he learned on the battleship Connecticut in the first war. He worked until age sixty seven. Each morning he listened to the radio of his Ford as he drove to his job at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in the hills above Berkeley, California. The news was his chief interest. Songs didn't stick to him, a practical man who determined early in life that the labor of his hands and feet, not any penchant for pretty lyrics, would get him through it. One song he did like, though, was Sixteen Tons, a Hit Parade tune and South African ballad popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. "You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt." To my father the lyrics bespoke the dignity of manhood, of providing for others, of strength in the face of grim daily reality, of holding his head high.

Most of the other songs he heard were Tin Pan Alley fluff about Paper Moons and White Sport Coats and Pink Carnations but this song was about hanging tough, about a world that ground people into grit and muscle and left little time to think about romantic nights and gossamer clouds.

Father stuck it out for mother and his family and grew older, trying hard not to get deeper in debt. He and mom scrimped and saved for their retirement.

Sir Edmund Hillary said he climbed mountains because they are there. My dad worked because it is a thing set like the pattern of moon and stars. You do it because it is what a man does.

He had dreams as a youth. Their residue emerged when he spoke of the "big shots" at the Radiation Lab, the scientists and managers who wore suits and ties and walked around talking, which to my father was their task rather than using their hands to oil an electric motor.

Later, I read Freud's discussion of arbeit, work, as a key means to growth and self-mastery in life. I smiled at this as I thought of dad. Freud had a wholly different perspective than his. In Freud's own life, creative imagination and intellectual development were central and for that reason he believed that successful arbeit provides a sense of competence and allows personal maturation. He saw in work, modern professional work, a main hope for people. I thought of father who was proud of having a job but it seemed to wear him down rather than build him up. As a therapist, Freud observed his patients and thought in terms of individual fulfillment for the Viennese affluent rather than of how few paychecks in society could support such occupation.

Dad stuck with the program for his family. He never saw a shrink, nor did it occur to him that he needed one. A therapist might have given him greater insight into his own motivations and complexities and the parents within, who kept him as a child in chains, but he had responsibilities and that was that. He would have not known what to make of Freudian psychiatry, which began a new age and atmosphere. In this privileged air the individual sought to free himself from parental and social expectations, to cast out skeletons in mental closets, to seek self-realization even if it meant forsaking obligations. Freud's discussion of work was interesting but dad's background gave me an awareness that went unmentioned by the doctor. Austrian fathers dug for coal in unsafe mines and Austrian mothers took in wash to pay for their children's breakfast while gentlemen and ladies lay on the doctor's couch to take the talking cure.

Freud's was a rather limited view of work, a view proscribed by the marked division of labor in industrial society and he sat on the comfortable side of the line. Dad showed me that that a job often had more of the sense that Studs Terkel gave it in Working, a collection of tape-recorded narratives from many people, fry cooks to executives: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence--to the spirit as well as to the body. . . . It is above all (or beneath all) about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the great many of us."

That is the common reality of arbeit. Its country has no patriots. Its citizens are worn into compliance and they hope only for the winning lotto number.

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