Book notes: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
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Book notes: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Fr. Greg Lockwood is an unusual Catholic priest: he wanders about the house naked save for underpants, plays cacophonous guitar in his bedroom at ridiculous volumes and — most unusual of all — he has a daughter.
When Patricia Lockwood and her husband Jason are forced to move back to the family home, Patricia finds herself having to confront the comic anxieties of the past and the future.
It’s a book of faith, a thing that’s impossible to understand: that surging conviction about the invisible and ineffable.
🎨 Impressions
This book is hilarious. Lockwood made a name for herself as a poet, but also as a witty tweeter:
The poem for which she first became known was Rape Joke, a brutally serious poem at odds with the hilarity of the the tweets. The book welds both modes together; the first half is dizzyingly comic (mostly), but she’s a hell of a writer, able to twist language in beautifully sad shapes as the memoir progresses.
How I Discovered It
I’d come across ‘Rape Joke’ a while back, and I then didn’t read anything else of Lockwood’s again. She caught my attention when I read a favourable review of her debut novel, Nobody is Talking About This; it was then I saw that she’d also written Priestdaddy.
As a guilty (very) lapsed Catholic, I’m attracted to anything about Catholics. I have a weird fascination with priests in particular, partly because (I think) until I committed faith seppuku that was the path I was going to take. So there’s an element of ‘road not taken’ about the priesthood, but I’m also fascinated by priests in a contemporary context. They are products of a different era; there’s an impossibility to them, as though they should not be able to exist in the modern secular world and should instead waft heavenward having metamorphosed into incense smoke. But they do exist, and so does my past self. Louis MacNeice (I believe) once said that Irish poets are ‘heretical believers’, and I think that sums up my faith: I don’t believe, and yet on some level there’s a vein that pulses within me that will be forever Catholic.
Who Should Read It?
You don’t need to be a lapsed Catholic to read this, though. It’s about family, and what they pass onto us and don’t pass onto us. If you’ve got a family, this book is for you.
☘️ Impact
It has made me take a good look at my own prose stylistics. I tend to write big, serious sentences; Lockwood’s writing dares me to be funny.
It’s also inspired me to carry a notebook to record my thoughts. Lockwood mentions throughout the narrative that she does this: she is always observing. Without observation, there is no writing.
It has made me appreciate my past more; I am less afraid of it now.
✍️ Top 3 highlights
“What did those people teach you?” he asked me one night, mystified. “What exactly do Catholics believe?” I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.” Jason was aghast. “Thorns?” he whispered. “But that’s the most dangerous part of the rose.”
I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.
📒 All highlights
My mother was the last in a staggering line of them—the second of six children, raised up in a neighborhood that had a St. Something-or-Other on every corner, a handful of beads in her cardigan pocket. When it came to the athleticism of religion she was a natural. She didn’t have to think about it; her body thought for her. She crossed herself and folded her hands because those were the movements her body liked best, the way a hurdler’s likes best to leap. (Location 213)
Why he chose Lutheranism I cannot say, but I suspect he was attracted to the glamour of its founder: a snout-faced man who spewed insults from every orifice and believed he had the power to fart away the devil. (Location 238)
I also recall consuming an enormous quantity and variety of mayonnaise salads, which Lutherans loved and excelled at making. If Jesus himself appeared in their midst and said, “Eat my body,” they would first slather mayonnaise all over him. (Location 255)
The story of any courtship is one of ephemera, dead vehicles, outdated technology. (Location 353)
Catholicism, he saw at once, had more kings than he could ever keep track of. “What did those people teach you?” he asked me one night, mystified. “What exactly do Catholics believe?” I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.” Jason was aghast. “Thorns?” he whispered. “But that’s the most dangerous part of the rose.” (Location 377)
Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”—a poem about the landscape licking up to a portal, in love. Were we crazy? We were nineteen. (Location 396)
St. Bonaventure was said to have continued his memoirs even after his own death. The only surviving relics of him are the arm and hand he wrote with. That seems exactly like God, doesn’t it, to kill a man and then make his hand keep writing his books. (Location 607)
Empedocles wrote that the eye was fire set in a lantern, which poured out to illuminate mountains and forests and the face of the beloved. Other Greek philosophers believed sight was water. Either way, it was an element, capable of flaming or flooding if it was let loose from its delicate pen, of sending mountains and forests and the face of the beloved up in smoke, or else surging them away till they were gone. (Location 639)
“Tweeting is an art form,” I told her. “Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” “It’s not art if it’s evil,” she said. “It’s only art if it’s evil, Mom.” (Location 665)
Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it. (Location 875)
“I hate all modern art, because it’s mad at God,” he likes to say. Most Catholics have never recovered from that painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung all over it. They are under the assumption there are entire museums in New York dedicated to anti-Catholic shit paintings, where all varieties of zoo scat are flung at pictures of the innocent Virgin. (Location 887)
This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go. (Location 912)
The seminarian is a crotchety young Italian man with a disapproving nose, a black boyish haircut, and eyes the precise shape of watermelon seeds. He was born, like many seminarians, at the age of sixty-five, with a pipe in his mouth and a glass of port in his hand. He is tall, but he hunches slightly under the weight of tradition, and whenever he emerges from the dark rectory into the sunshine, he blinks like an over-educated cave creature who is in the process of evolving away several of his most frivolous body parts. (Location 1028)
“Listen. Listen to me,” we can hear her say. “When Superman first came out, there was a whole era where the kids thought they could fly, and they would get up on their roofs and jump, often to their death. Is that something you want to happen?” (Location 1047)
There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld. (Location 1168)
The more people believe in a religion, the more they trust smudgy, paranoid newsletters printed off in a church basement by a woman named Debbie. (Location 1178)
Renata Adler wrote: “ ‘He has suffered enough’ meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too.” To the best of my knowledge, no bishop or archbishop my father ever served under was innocent of participating in cover-ups, shuffling papers, hushing up victims, sending offenders away for rest and rehabilitation. When I looked up Bishop Finn, I held my breath until I came to the sentence that laid it bare. I held my breath because I knew it would come. (Location 1462)
All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape. You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine—it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other? (Location 1483)
A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words. (Location 1541)
The scenery blurs by in a great green flash of coherence, the power lines swoop by in their continuous ink, all as if to demonstrate what I’m talking about. (Location 1771)
At last I stood at the top. It was a little stage and a little spotlight. Time slowed down, and stretched, and exposed every part of itself to the sun. The high dive meant leaping off the edge of a moment and trusting the next one would catch you. The plunge down, like all plunges down, was a short segment of infinity. Your heart flew up out of the top of your head and the red silk of it caught and billowed out and you hung from it for a second in the middle of the sky. (Location 2086)
Here’s another one: “Open up the barn door in the back of your head.” This is what I’m talking about! It meant nothing but you knew exactly what it meant, same as poetry. (Location 2674)
My redheaded teacher taught us about the great composers. Here is what I remember: Bach was a scrolled mahogany computer wearing a little wig. Mozart just farted all the time. Beethoven was deaf and had thunder for hair. Wagner was a Nazi and he had hooves instead of feet. Stravinsky bore the mark of the beast on his forehead. Aaron Copland was cut up for steaks by the National Beef Council and Tchaikovsky was a marzipan baby. John Cage had sex with a piano for five minutes in the middle of the stage at Carnegie Hall and at the end all of New York applauded. (Location 2676)
More intriguingly, she told us the story of a man who painted a musical staff on an aquarium and put a goldfish in the aquarium and then sat in front of it with a flute and played whatever note the goldfish swam. “Oh great,” I thought. “We’re all goldfish, and some dick with a flute is playing every move we make.” (Location 2680)
Though I’ve noticed teachers often don’t like the students who always have the right answers—don’t want them to raise their hands, don’t want them to call out. As we practiced, I watched the line that went singing between her and my redheaded teacher, that tense and tacit agreement that Truenessia would not use her full power. (Location 2697)
I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. (Location 2726)
The great singers were also the great interpreters. She had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject. (Location 2729)
I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain. (Location 2730)
“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet. (Location 2813)
Everything signified. Everything I looked at was designed for my eyes. The fabric of existence was cut to fit me; all ceilings were as tall as I was high; each book in the library fell open and let the word “rapture” leap toward me. The greatest gift of rapture was that it existed independent of the intellect; I needed no education to feel it. It was a capability, and born in the body when I was born—a reflex that sprang back gold against the hammer. We held hands and closed our eyes and felt our bones glow, and when there was pain, we offered it up. (Location 3484)
This is what it is to write about people who are alive and then, sometimes, people who are dead. To say that his eyes were clear as agates, that his voice was a gravelly baritone, to surround him with the right adjectives and set him into the story—all this is an attempt to fit him in the glass box of a good sentence so everyone can see what he means. But it won’t work, the words can’t hold him, and I am glad. (Location 3755)
The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here. (Location 3758)
I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night. (Location 3871)
Wanting to publish more book notes, I’m trying to keep things simple by using a template. This isn’t as detailed as I’d like, but I won’t publish anything otherwise.