The old man and the city

Six years ago, back when I knew even less than I do now, I wrote a piece trying to reflect on the death of the father in contemporary culture.

I did scratch the surface a little bit, but until rather recently I had no idea how profound this theme actually is, and how many threads of our current societal predicament can be connected to it.

Yet even then, I immediately made certain observations. Something which in retrospect stands out to me as particularly important is the sense in which I felt to be violating a cultural taboo in merely probing the dark side of the loss of the father in his various manifestations.

In other words, I was doing something shameful just by asking these questions, as well as in connecting with the realities of male suffering and the suppression of distinctly male modes of experience.

In part, I think this antipathy relates to how the very notions of the essentially male and essentially female have been rejected.

“Although many online criticized what they saw as Delevingne suggesting that receptive anal sex is inherently demeaning, Matatas said she only talks about pegging in a metaphorical sense, to denote the subversion of a gendered power dynamic.” Them.

These are, explicitly or not, regarded as anachronistic constructs, historical remnants of a primitive and evil past where they served as tools of oppression leveraged against those unlucky enough to be endowed with the capacity for childbirth.

The male is by definition the antagonist in this dichotomy, and since its character is regarded as equally arbitrary, the choice to be male is unethical. The choice to manifest masculinity in this narrative framework becomes an act of support for oppression. For injustice. For the limiting of human freedom and perfection.

Hegemonic masculinity is an identity built on what they must not be, to be men: they must not be women, they must not be children, they must not be 'fags.' Only then can they be men.

If you can't be all of those things, there's very little left that you can be, and you lose a lot of yourself.

It is clear to me that, from a young age, cisgender men and everyone assigned to the category 'man' at birth are systematically trained to exercise power and oppression. It is not a biological determinism — it is a socialization process that strips them of a part of themselves, that strips them of inherently human characteristics like love, tenderness and compassion.

The moment men stop being violent between men, then and only then will things change. Men are violent with others to the extent that they are violent with each other and with themselves.

Laura Valentina Cortés Sierra, https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/trans-patriarchy

Yet the rejection of an inalienable essence is violence par excellence. The nullifying of male and female towards a universal yet impersonal "love, tenderness and compassion" is a most radical reductionism that cannot help but undermine genuine situated subjectivity.

This way of approaching the human person, this philosophical anthropology, has complex roots we can't uncover completely in this space. But I think we should dismiss it.

It's a simplistic perspective, a reductionism indirectly anchored in a materialist worldview and a Cartesian cut, and both of these approaches are misleading for various reasons.

But we don't have to get into the details of those to know immediately that there's a non-arbitrary mode of being intrinsic to embodied maleness, and which to the vast majority of us men is neither mutable nor really very malleable.

There's a pattern of embodied male (and female) experience which has a distinguishable form and identity, and which as such permeates who and what we are. That gives shape to the choices we can make, and the modes of being available to us.

What's more, the rejection of the profound meanings inherent in the distinction between the sexes, with a monolithic reductionism as a substitute, devoid of deep, embodied subjectivity, is at the same time to cut off a whole dimension of experience, knowledge and wisdom.

The ways of being and knowing which depend entirely on radical sexedness, on a definite and irrevocable embodied human masculinity and femininity, thus become inaccessible to the culture as a whole.

To bracket them, to render them relative and unstable, namely also deprives us of the foundation in which these modes of human agency can flourish. Rather than rendering them accessible to everyone, the renunciation of the ultimate and irreversible either-or removes the sacrificial aspect of definite sexedness. The price which we have to pay to fully become men and women.

This sacrificial aspect is, I suspect, entirely necessary for the devotion and exclusive surrender to these modes of being without which they cannot be fully assumed nor perfected in the life of the individual, which also banishes their structural effects from the society as a whole.

And blind to our inherent potential to a self-limiting choice of the virtues and sufferings that reside in our definite sexes, we tend to become lesser persons. Creatures of compromise and complacency.

There's a female hardness that's not just appropriated, commodified masculinity.

And there's a nurturing, resilient softness of the male that's qualitatively different from its female counterpart.

These are lost, and all manner of equivalent complexities, first through the binary dichotomy and its simplifying separation, and then through the negation of our essential, embodied sexedness.

The result is that the commodified one-dimensional man and one-dimensional woman become the only available templates from which we may structure our identities and modes of being. And always through the compromises emphasized by a marketplace catering to our insecurities, weaknesses and reluctance to suffer.

What's the result? What sort of society has emerged around us?

Key human traits and forms of agency become dichotomized and simplistically associated with the notion of a socially constructed sex binary, which then, in a sort of double-bind, is rejected as primitive and morally suspect.

The society's approach to the sexes, then, on a certain fundamental level, renders their manifestation shameful unless they appropriate key attributes taken from the other side of the arbitrary sex binary, so as to supposedly balance out the unequal power relations structurally inherent to it.

One obvious result is an appropriated, asinine notion of femininity, marketed as the bearer of intrinsic virtue, yet culpable if it does not reject its implicit subordination through the manifestation of masculine agency.

This is naturally pressed into service for the dominant power structure in myriad ways.

Something like male fierceness is only discursively valued when it's transplanted to, and appropriated by, a female person. Likewise, female nurturing is only acceptable when it's manifest in a male, modulating and tempering his supposedly intrinsic tendencies towards violence and injustice, whereas in females, its willed presence is tantamount to voluntary submission to oppression.

The transgender-phenomenon, in all its complexity, exemplifies the situation to some extent. A virtuous man, as the dominant layers of our societal discourse frames him, must exorcise his internalized patriarchy, and to that end therefore assume the commodified and one-dimensional femininity offered us by the spectacle.

It's somewhat different for women, I think. The same aspect of virtue is present, but probably not as significant.

Yet the narrowed-down masculine is only really welcome when it's a lived mode of being for a female person, so a deeply felt lack of masculine presence in a society which has exorcised it, might very well manifest as a desire to appropriate it. To actually become it.

And some take all of this further than others.

Transgender individuals are to an extent akin to contemporary society's saints and religious radicals. They embody our key virtues in a self-denying and quite extreme sense, with certain superficial similarities to, for instance, the medieval anchorites.

The anchoritic life became widespread during the early and high Middle Ages. Examples of the dwellings of anchorites and anchoresses survive, a large number of which are in England. They tended to be a simple cell (also called anchorhold) built against one of the walls of the local village church.

...

The anchoritic life proved popular in England, where women outnumbered men in the ranks of the anchorites, especially in the 13th century. Written evidence supports the existence of 780 anchorites on 600 sites between 1100 and 1539, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by Henry VIII brought anchoritism in England to an end. However, the lack of a consistent registration system for anchorites suggests there may have been substantially more.

Wikipedia

Through the impoverishment of our gender templates, in the loss of all of this complexity, a whole ecosystem of roles, relations and modes of agency that have always been present in traditional societies, is all but eradicated.

And it's not simply that we are deprived of access to identities or immediate modes of thinking and feeling. It goes much deeper than this. Whole layers of myth, of complex narrative and imaginative modes of reflection, avenues of growth and experience that depend on the lived immersion in the immutable realities of sex, are lost.

These are whole structures of interpersonal agency and collective cultural life that take generations to erect, and which have been with us since time immemorial. Arguably, these are collective cognitive structures whose purpose is to address challenges, weaknessess and injuries encountered by groups and individuals, and to help them grow and flourish together. Since they're ubiquitous in every human culture throughout history, and closely associate with universal patterns of psychology, these are likely crucial for our existential health and our psychic and social integrity.

To be alienated from them is not a trivial matter, and our dominant worldview can do nothing but. There are now wounds we can no longer heal. There are heights of full human adulthood that can no longer be accessed.

We conclude that some young men in the past, presumably those guided by the old men, became more and more like evergreens and less like spring flowers. They did not die when wounded, but took a wound, and survived with a scar. The Odyssey, which remembers all that men and women have learned about the Great Father and the Great Mother during a hundred thousand years, amounts to an announcement that this sort of man is now in the world.

Moreover, the leg wound that the King's men gave has created, according to the fantasy human beings have carried for centuries, a womb inside the male body. No one gets to adulthood without a wound that goes to the core. And the boy in our story does not become King without that wound.

The old tradition says that women have two hearts: one heart in their chest and another heart in their womb. They are double-hearted. The old initiators then make the young man, through the wound given in ritual space, double-hearted. Now the man has the physical heart he has always had, but also a compassionate heart. He has a double heart.

Robert Bly. Iron John.

Yes. The old men of yore. Weaker and less vigorous, perhaps. But scarred and gnarly. Kings and priests who have stared into the abyss and lived to talk about it.

“Gandalf the Grey”, Mara Marcu.

But what is an old man in industrial society? Little but a corpse. Human modes of being that depend on both a holistic interconnectedness as well as a complex mythical consciousness of immutable realities cannot be maintained within a framework of secular reductionism and radical individualism.

We just don't breed old men anymore. We've eroded that capacity. Our young men do not any longer receive an unambiguous initiation into a definite and robust embodied selfhood.

Neither are they guided by an experienced collective to unconditionally face the deep conflicts and contradictions of human existence. The death, darkness and despair that surround us. They are not lovingly given the wound by the hearth, in the bosom of a band of brothers, to prepare them for the terrors on their path ahead.

When these then are inevitably encountered, together with the many other injuries and harms that can beset a human being, the fledgling stands alone and opts for a softer compromise instead of completely confronting his trials and the growth they bring. He becomes a stunted soul.

The soul may become stunted and its development arrested like one dwarfed through some deformity. Or it may take a false direction. Instead of true humility, it may almost unawares develop a sort of refined pride, which scarcely appears at first except in the small details of daily life. For that reason this will remain unknown to a spiritual director living apart from those he directs. This pride will steadily take the form of an amused condescension, and subsequently develop into an acerbity of manner in our relations with our neighbor, permeating the whole life of the day and thus stultifying everything.

Garrigou-Lagrange. Providence.

So there's little to build on. Our young men cannot flourish into seasoned warriors through the passage of time and experience, and often remain in the limbo of an abortive adolescence. The disruptive atmosphere of hyper-mediation and displacing individualism further undermines such quiet reflection and remaining communal resources that can enable certain rare individuals to come to terms with all of this on their own, in spite of an impoverished worldview and generally poisoned discourse.

And for these reasons, there's no social context to reliably form the weathered and accomplished old man, whose balanced and cultivated wisdom, embodying the refined and genuinely male forms of fierceness, ingenuity and nurturing would go a long way to remedy the lack of rootedness and deep critical thinking that characterizes contemporary society.

I say this to speak to many young men who want from the father a repetition of the mother's affection, or a female nurturing they haven't gotten enough of. Whatever the father gives us, it will not be the same kind of closeness that our mother offered. And some men have to be satisfied with a relationship to their father that is not close. In many traditional cultures the men older than the father give and teach nurturing. The old man's power to nurture began with the foundation given by female nurturing, the mother's warmth, love, singing. Later the boy transfers to the earth as teacher; this is the time of the hunt, the cold, the wind, the weather. When the foundation of mother nurturing and earth companionship is in place, then the old men can move in and bring male nurturing and its vision.

Robert Bly. Ibid.

The reason our leaders seem like little more than a bunch of kids is precisely that they have never been consecrated into adulthood.

Their reason is indecisive, scattered and cowardly, lacking both the humility and the fierce and tested decisiveness of the old temple guardians or the grandfathers at the city gates, carried by countless generations before them.

There’s no honesty in them, no notion of sacrifice or unapologetic loyalty with no turning back, whether to a tribe, a flag or an ideal.

They are all nothing but petulant and craven children. Just like most of the rest of us.

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if (so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who, his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father’s fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer’s keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly (over utmost him
so hugely) stood my father’s dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the Pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and (by octobering flame
beckoned) as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he’d laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine, passion willed,
freedom a drug that’s bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit, all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why men breathe—
because my Father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all

E. E. Cummings