Without family

An ode to orphans of domesticity

We begin with our bloodline. Born to mother and father as daughter or son, landing earthside framed by a scaffolding of familial flesh and bone. But blood can be burnt by those whose destinies are formed not in the shape of domesticity. Behind open doors, we conspire a necessary abandonment of the roles the world would have us play—daughter or son to mother and father—in pursuit of a heretical future that is forged once liberated from our bloodline, in honour not of kin, but of soul.

From the concrete cradle of city streets, the wanderers—unsupervised by the patriarch—etch paths of most resistance. In defiance of the demurity expected by broken democracies that feign interest in the protection of family. When you grow up, the unspoken rules regulate, you will settle down. Build a home according to our blueprint, they tell you, and your life will be better.

But the blueprints are burnt by those whose purposes are painted in colours different from the State-sanctioned palette. ‘Hence it is evident that a city is a natural production, and that man is naturally a political animal,’ Aristotle once wrote. ‘And that whosoever is naturally and not accidentally unfit for society, must be either inferior or superior to man: thus the man in Homer, who is reviled for being ‘without society, without law, without family.’

To those who have shed the iron feathers of societal expectations to soar unimpeded by the anchors of ancestry, a similar vilification may sometimes still apply. But the silent scorn of disapproval need not dampen the spirits of humans who have departed the homes they have inherited in pursuit of the spiritual structures where the heart truly is.

‘In certain families the face of beauty is darkened,’ Italian-American writer Emanuel Carnevali mused in a poem once. ‘A rag dirty with a thousand ways of dirt covers up beauty’s face.’ But from eclipsed environments such as these, seekers are so often born. Fated to unveil the silhouettes of the sublime in the company of the self alongside (sometimes, but never always) soul-made kin.

‘Such a one must naturally be of a quarrelsome disposition, and as solitary as the birds,’ Aristotle once wrote of the humans who he observed to be naturally and not accidentally unfit for society. But this is only one way to be, as Homer was: without society, without law, without family. We all begin with our bloodline, and though such bloodlines may be burnt, they are never forgotten. From the ashes of ancestry we rise not bathed of who we’ve been but bolstered for who we will become. With wings of Malachite feathers, made to fly free of reins tanned by toxic persuasions.

‘But there are families where the head is like a great oak tree,’ Carnevali goes on. ‘Those families grow beneath the sun like a group of buttercups. And they are beautiful in the eyes of God, and they are beautiful in the eyes of men.’ Having landed earthside framed by a scaffolding of familial flesh and bone, we too may metamorphose beneath the sun, the moon, and all the stars. Like a group of flowers we are yet to discover—a species they can never classify.

fin.

You can read more of Kathryn’s prose here.

This meditation was first published in OVERDUE magazine