Meet The Parents
Last night I went to see The Eels. Eels are actually Mark Everett and a rotating cast of other musicians depending on how Mark (also known as E) wants to present his music on any given tour. They’ve been a rock band with a turntablist, an “orchestra” with a full horn section, a string quartet, a four piece rock band and a 3 piece punk band in prior incarnations. This tour, Eels are a duo consisting of E and “The Chet”, who is a “multi-instrumentalist” as they like to say. Between the two of them there’s guitar, drums, saw, and a few different keyboard instruments. E’s songs are happy little ditties about mental illness, suicide, serial killers, freaks and birds. So you can see how he has universal appeal and are as surprised as I am that he’s only had one big radio hit in the US and that was 12 years ago. How was the show? Fantastic, of course. But this isn’t a concert review post, no sir. Because there’s another part to E’s story that is not on your average “Rock Star” resume.
E’s father, Hugh Everett was a physicist who developed the “Many Worlds” theory in part as an explanation of the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, click the links and check it out if you’re interested. Though there was limited interest in the theory when it was proposed 50 years ago, interest has risen over the last few decades to the point that Mark Everett decided to make a documentary film investigating his father’s life. That film was the “opening act” of last night’s show, and it was a fascinating, moving film that got me thinking about something: do children ever get to really know what their parents are like as people as opposed to parents? I’m inclined to think that the answer is almost always “no”. There’s so much emotional baggage between any parent and child that there’s almost no way that they can interact the way individuals would normally interact. That’s an unfortunate element of the way humans are built, because who among us wouldn’t want to know what their parents were like, I mean really like in the real world. It’s a hard thing to pin down because if your parents are dead as mine are it’s doubtful that anyone that knew them would tell you the truth, or at least their version of the truth. Speaking ill of the dead is a bit of a taboo in our society
It’s probably just as hard to pin down if your parents are alive unless you’re either able to really detach yourself from the baggage and just observe them, or if you happen to have parents that are somehow noteworthy enough that public records exist of their achievements. If you’re old enough to have friends with kids old enough to understand, shall we say, certain things are you gonna tell them the unvarnished truth about their folks? Probably not, right? Think about some of the things you did with people who are now “responsible grown-ups”. Now consider the fact that your generation isn’t the first to engage in less-than-wholesome activities and you’ll realize that your parents’ lives may have been a lot more interesting than you thought they were. At least until you showed up, that is.
Why does all this matter? I think (and realize I could just be projecting here) that as we get older it becomes more and more important for us to understand our parents as people as a way of understanding how we got to be who we are. I think most, if not all of someone’s personality traits and preferences are developed as a reaction to the person that raised them. There may be a genetic component (and there obviously is for pathological issues like depression), but I think we develop many of our attitudes and tastes by either copying our parents exactly or by going 180 degrees the other way. There just doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.
I’m vaguely jealous of the opportunity that E had to explore his dad’s life. I’m touched by how his feelings changed about the guy after he learned of his dad’s struggles. We should all be so lucky as to have that kind of chance to figure out the people who made us. Ask yourself: How well did you (or do you) really know your parents? And how well do you know yourself?
E’s father, Hugh Everett was a physicist who developed the “Many Worlds” theory in part as an explanation of the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, click the links and check it out if you’re interested. Though there was limited interest in the theory when it was proposed 50 years ago, interest has risen over the last few decades to the point that Mark Everett decided to make a documentary film investigating his father’s life. That film was the “opening act” of last night’s show, and it was a fascinating, moving film that got me thinking about something: do children ever get to really know what their parents are like as people as opposed to parents? I’m inclined to think that the answer is almost always “no”. There’s so much emotional baggage between any parent and child that there’s almost no way that they can interact the way individuals would normally interact. That’s an unfortunate element of the way humans are built, because who among us wouldn’t want to know what their parents were like, I mean really like in the real world. It’s a hard thing to pin down because if your parents are dead as mine are it’s doubtful that anyone that knew them would tell you the truth, or at least their version of the truth. Speaking ill of the dead is a bit of a taboo in our society
It’s probably just as hard to pin down if your parents are alive unless you’re either able to really detach yourself from the baggage and just observe them, or if you happen to have parents that are somehow noteworthy enough that public records exist of their achievements. If you’re old enough to have friends with kids old enough to understand, shall we say, certain things are you gonna tell them the unvarnished truth about their folks? Probably not, right? Think about some of the things you did with people who are now “responsible grown-ups”. Now consider the fact that your generation isn’t the first to engage in less-than-wholesome activities and you’ll realize that your parents’ lives may have been a lot more interesting than you thought they were. At least until you showed up, that is.
Why does all this matter? I think (and realize I could just be projecting here) that as we get older it becomes more and more important for us to understand our parents as people as a way of understanding how we got to be who we are. I think most, if not all of someone’s personality traits and preferences are developed as a reaction to the person that raised them. There may be a genetic component (and there obviously is for pathological issues like depression), but I think we develop many of our attitudes and tastes by either copying our parents exactly or by going 180 degrees the other way. There just doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.
I’m vaguely jealous of the opportunity that E had to explore his dad’s life. I’m touched by how his feelings changed about the guy after he learned of his dad’s struggles. We should all be so lucky as to have that kind of chance to figure out the people who made us. Ask yourself: How well did you (or do you) really know your parents? And how well do you know yourself?
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