MASCULINISM

           I have been reading about the rise of feminism, particularly in the art world but also in the culture at large in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More about that when I’m finished reading. In the meantime, though, I’m reminded how much I regret the absence of a corresponding rise in masculinism.

It’s not even a word! We hear a lot these days about toxic masculinity and it’s not hard to see what that means. A glance around the world, the country, even the neighborhood is enough to remind us what misused, abusive male energy has wrought, and continues to wreak upon our benighted species. Warfare is one deeply horrifying thing. Abuse of the planet through its ruthless exploitation is an even greater imminent peril for us all.

Here “at home”, in our country, the distorted model of masculinity embodied in the grotesque machoism of our former president is embraced by millions of our men. A Supreme Court dominated by the energy of four damaged males and one female trained in submission to men continues to endanger not only the lives of women but even our children and our planet. Young men are permitted to purchase weapons of war—and use them to devastating effect. Heavily armed, too, the police kill with impunity. Money becomes malignant power in the hands of corporate executives. And so on.

            We need a masculinist movement, in which men subject the whole culture of their gender to the kind of critical self-examination that led women to question, then revolt against the status quo. We need to be not more like women, but more like men, and for that we need a new model of manhood. We see those pathetic public figureheads of manhood—Johnson, Putin, Trump--clinging desperately to the last vestiges of power. Those who support and enable them are too often in deep resentment, anger, and fear of disempowerment. They assert themselves with the exercise of violence against those they fear usurping their supremacy.

            Why have we men spurned the path that pioneering women took, this past half century, to validate themselves and their fellow women? Why no “masculinism”? We men have been watching women gain in power with envy, fear, and condemnation, even ridicule. Clearly, we have had no motivation to change our selves. Patriarchy has worked well for us. We have been sitting in the catbird seat for centuries and wish to keep things as they aways were—with us in charge. 

            All of which is not intended to denigrate my fellow men.  Quite the contrary. I love men. And there are many of us who seek to modify the old models without sacrificing what it is to be a man. Indeed, to capitalize on our peculiar strengths. I had the good fortune, many years ago, to fall in with an organization of men that works consciously to “save the world, one man at a time.”  (For those interested and not yet informed, it’s called The ManKind Project). Less active now than I was for many years, I am still grateful for the awakening I received at the hands of other awakened men. Reduced to its simplest formulation, it is the recognition that male power resides not merely, not even primarily in the genitals or physical superiority, but instead where we have been taught to least expect it (and never look for it): in the heart.

            I claim no originality for these thoughts, but am grateful to have been challenged to rethink them in the light of what I have been reading.

 

FATHERS

The past couple of weeks we have been on retreat from our city life in the little cottage in Laguna Beach we bought nearly thirty years ago. How lucky we were! Or as I prefer to say, how smart! Tucked away here in this cosy space between two gardens, front and back, that Ellie has lavished loving attention on, we are a long way from the problems of the world that we witness daily, foolishly (we should shut the damn thing off!) on our television screen. From this perspective, it can seem almost unreal.

Our stay here has been highlighted by family visits. Our daughter Sarah and grandson Luka came down to spend a couple of nights the weekend before the Fourth--they did not stay for the fireworks. It was a lovely visit. Luka still has boundless energy, enough to sap my own, but at ten years old, now, he is learning to manage it much better. He's fun to be with, funny, spirited, and too smart by half. He hones my wits. Sarah still very deeply connected with the friend she has known for five years now--a long-lasting relationship. The two seem like a good match, but have the misfortune to live on different continents. Hard at the best of times, harder still in a time of global pandemic. 

Then yesterday we had a second lovely family visit, this time from Ellie's older sister, Susie, and her niece, Yardena, who drove up from San Diego where they live. We sat down together to enjoy a delicious lunch that Ellie had prepared with much love and labor--cold poached salmon with orzo salad--and chatted genially. After lunch, we got into some deeper family matters, Ellie with Susie, I with Yardena. As she reported later, the two daughters had talked about their father, a man of great wit and charm whom they both adored, but who was also deeply flawed. Like most men of their generation, before women came along to raise the cultural consciousness, he was casually abusive of the women in his life as though by God-given masculine rights. He burdened both his daughters with secrets they should never have known, and proved himself faithless to his second wife of many years--as Ellie discovered only yesterday for the first time—up to the very day he died from an accidental fall.

Yardena and I, meanwhile, got into a different, equally emotional conversation about the effects of separation and divorce on little children. Her father, much like Ellie's, felt free to exercise those same masculine rights. In his case--as, I freely admitted, in my own--this ended up in a split between the parents that necessarily left a deep wound in the psyche of their children. She and her two brothers suffered, as did Ellie and her sister. I told her with great sadness of my own, similar experience and the mark it surely left on the lives of my two sons. 

They say it’s the inherent task of every father to inflict wounds on their children, and of every child to do the work that’s necessary to recover from them. This is the subject of my new book, “Dear Harry,” now in the final stages of production, and I guess it has been true at least since Oedipus. Thanks to Dr. Freud, we understand it better now; and thanks to Dr. Jung we know more about the healing process. But despite the efforts of these two good doctors and countless of their followers over many decades now, I can be quite sure that this generational predicament will persist so long as there’s a human species here on earth.

It was a rich discussion on both sides of the table, anyway, and I’m sure a rewarding one for all of us. Such deep connection makes for deepening relationships and more powerful family ties. All in all, it was, as Susie said as she and Yardena were about to leave, a memorable visit.

 

 

 

WHY?

Why do I do it? Why do I choose to publish things that are so personal and private in this public forum? It’s a question that has come at me from various directions in recent days—and not exclusively on Facebook. It’s a question I sometimes ask myself.

The simple answer is that it’s what I’m given to do. I love that construction, one that I came across for the first time many, many years ago in a poem by Robert Creeley. I have not been able to find it again. Perhaps it was not a poem. Perhaps I simply heard him say it once, in my teaching days, when he came to read to one of my classes, and the words stuck: What I am given to do. Call it a mission. A mission of service. You may think it fanciful, but I believe we all have a reason for our time here on Earth. A purpose. 

It's not because I feel special in some way, especially skilled or gifted, especially wise or knowledgeable or compassionate. Not at all. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’m convinced that I’m common. Ordinary. That there is something in my experience as a human being that I share with every other human being. Not everything, obviously. I am unique in many ways, not least in my physical appearance. But there is a core part of me, I believe, that is shared by other human beings. 

I don’t know what to call it. Call it heart. Call it mind. I think of it as the irreducible core of being human and it lives somewhere in the relationship between self and other, the bridge we all need to cross as best we can in our daily lives. Call it connection. It’s what I have wanted to explore in everything I’ve ever written. Even at those times in my life when I was publishing “art reviews” in national magazines, it was that connection I felt driven to explore. I refused to be a “critic” in the sense of one who can distinguish between good art and bad. The greatest compliment I could receive was something like: “You really got me. You really heard me.”

In the sense that I was writing about connection, then, my “self” was a necessary part of that connection—the other end of the bridge, the receiving end. What I do now is much the same, but—to stick with the analogy—from the giving end of the bridge. I started out as a poet, and I think that this is what poets do. They give out of themselves. They reach in first, then they reach out and touch. It’s what Robert Creeley did, “For Love.” I write in prose but in some strange way the result feels more like poetry. It’s from the heart.

Autotherapy? Am I trying to heal myself by confession? No. I’m trying to communicate some part of my way of looking at the world with words that may resonate with others and touch them in a way that feels, well… right. It’s like when I look at a painting and just say, Yes! With all my heart and mind. No questions. No doubts. Just Yes! With an unapologetic capital and an exclamation mark. So am I trying to make an example of myself, to be the model of humanity? No. I’m just on my mission as a writer, doing what I’m given to do, communicating with my fellow human beings. And in so doing trying to find out more about what it is to be a human being and, just perhaps, become a better one.

 

LEGENDS: A Book Review

Legends of the North Cascades 

By Jonathan Evison

     This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did. Evison is at his best in his evocation of the wild mountain landscapes of the North Cascades in Washington State. The winter winds will chill your bones, you sink into the muddy surface of the meadows in the spring thaw, you hear the rush of streams, the call of birds… Such scenes transport you. All good.

    In the promising first pages of the story, the sudden accidental death of the protagonist’s deeply loved but end-of-her tether wife leaves Dave Cartwright the distraught father of Bella, his little five-year old daughter. A veteran of the Iraq war who suffers from PTSD (never named, but readily diagnosable for anyone paying attention to our recent history) he does everything he can to alienate those around him—and that includes this reader as I suspect many others.

    Angry at the world, rejecting anything that looks like sympathy or a desire to help, dismissive of social norms and the political circumstance alike, he heads off deep into the mountains to lead the life of an isolationist and survivalist. He takes his little girl with him. Bereft of her mother and deprived of the critical understanding of an adult, she adores him, obedient to his slightest whim. Smart, sassy, tough, adaptable, Bella appears at first to thrive amid the rigors of living in the cave he makes their home, while her father fails to address the deprivations he inflicts on her—school, friends, warmth, proper nutrition, home comforts and so on. She develops, instead, a rich fantasy life, and enjoys the benefits of learning from the natural environment.

    So, an interesting situation. Unfortunately, it breeds problems, the chief of which is the main character himself. Quite naturally the reader wants to sympathize with a severely traumatized vet. Dave just keeps making it harder to feel anything but dismay, and soon anger at his childish selfishness and refusal to act on what is clearly in the best interests of the daughter whom he claims to love. In the very last pages of the book, disaster strikes and he needs the intervention of a rescue team, and is forced finally to acknowledge a measure of dependency on his fellow human beings. By this time, though, it feels more like self-service than enlightenment.

    There are other problems. There is a sub-plot, pursued in a series of separate chapters, which takes us back to the earliest days of human existence, a parallel story of survival in dire circumstances in these same mountains. Exiled from her clan, a woman loses the man who is her sole protector and is forced to face every danger in raising her boy-child to manhood. In modern times, Bella’s special senses pick up their proximity despite the centuries that separate them—at one point she turns up a skull which we readers know to be that of the boy’s father—but this other theme of potential interest never culminates in any satisfying connection between the two stories. They just run parallel, and we are supposed to do the working of making that connection.I wanted, too, more compelling action in both stories, more continuing forward movement, more reason to keep the pages turning to find out what happens next.

    Another problem: these ancient people are gifted with thought processes and language that seems inappropriate to their level of development. The mother’s skills of introspection and psychological perception about her son seem wildly out of keeping with her time. The result is many jarring moments when the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is suspended. 

    Last of my nit-picks is Dave’s family. Hard to believe his supposedly sympathetic brother and his wife would be so unfeeling, even cruel, during Bella’s brief respite off the mountain, when she has the chance to return to normal life, school, friendship… pizza! They provide her shelter, but so excessively give preference to their own daughter that Bella feels excluded, rejected, and is only too happy to return with her father to the dangers of the mountain. 

    So… I wanted more from this interesting premise. I wanted, above all, to lend the story my credulity, and I could do so only intermittently. Which is not enough. 

 

 

HARLEM SHUFFLE: A Book Review

I guess I’m just about as white as you can get. I still recall the trepidation I felt in anticipation of my first visit to Harlem, back in the late 1970s, on an art research project. It’s a good thing I had not read Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle” before going there; if I had, I might never have dared set foot in that fabled quarter of New York City… Joking? Not entirely. (I was actually warmly welcomed; never felt a moment of anxiety. My fear was the product of pure prejudice). Whitehead’s, though, is the street Harlem of the late 50s, early 60s, a sprawling, teeming urban underworld of petty criminals, hookers, druggies, con men, stone cold killers—people, in other words, who are all struggling to survive in an urban jungle. They are human beings, all; and remarkably this writer (whose “Underground Railroad” was made into the popular television series of the same title) manages to allow every one them a kind of nobility in their humanity.

Ray Carney, Whitehead’s protagonist, is the nearest thing to a law-abiding citizen. He runs a regular furniture store, but needs to supplement his income with a little fencing of goods of doubtful origin here and there. He has a wife and family to support and like everyone else in the story is constantly on the hustle. It’s what everyone must do to simply get by. This is the social norm of a community sidelined by the dominant white culture to the south; everyone gets creative in their need to escape abject poverty, neglect, injustice, squalor, even hunger. Whitehead introduces us to a cast of criminals great and petty, vicious and simple-minded, cruel and compassionate, powerful and weak. The cops are venal, on the take like everyone else. Their killing of an innocent, unarmed boy sets off a riot. Sound familiar? Even Harlem’s wealthy Negros (the then-current term) have a mutual back-scratching Society that supports them in their effort to maximize their profits. 

It's a social structure based on contingency in which everyone has learned to play their part. Favors given require favors in return, and if not honored require payback or revenge. Carney’s conscience is malleable—but he has one. His great desire is to find a place for his family to live on respectable Riverside Drive, and he’s stubborn, patient, willing to do what it takes to fulfill his dream. Unhappily, this leads him ever deeper into the morass of crime, dragged to ever lower depths by his peripatetic, drug-addled cousin, Freddie, who whines constantly, after each worse disaster, “I didn’t mean to get you into this”; and by his resource of last resort, Pepper, a steely old criminal associate of Carney’s father’s and a man who does not hesitate to kill if he sees the need. 

What keeps the reader’s head above this exceedingly polluted water is the sympathy the author shares with us for all his characters. A handful of them, to be truthful, are just plain evil—and for the most part these are not Black. The white power structure of mid- and lower Manhattan real estate moguls, financiers and lawyers are the inevitable winners in this Gotham City; they are no less venal than their less privileged fellow-citizens to the north, and with less reason to be so. But they thrive with impunity. They don’t get nabbed by the cops and packed off to jail. 

If all this sounds familiar, I’m sure that it’s no accident. Whitehead is as powerful a creator of fiction as he is a social observer, historian and critic. His observation and evocation of detail, not only that of human behavior but of the seething reality of New York City’s streets is acute, spot-on, compelling. One of the deep pleasures of fiction is to be transported into an unfamiliar world and live there for a spell, entranced. Here we are, in Harlem, at a period in history not long after the great Negro cultural resurgence of the Harlem Renaissance, not the only moment in history when riots seem the last, inevitably futile recourse of the socially repressed in their struggle for equality and justice, and Whitehead has us live the experience in all its anguishing realism. His book is a great read. His prose is tough, complex, colorful, enlivened by wry humor at life’s vicissitudes. Reading, I found the realization of the Harlem that my white timidity so fearfully projected, all those years ago—not only its lawlessness and squalor, its inexorable Blackness, but more importantly the innate courage and dignity of human beings struggling to survive, and their memorable, deeply flawed, profoundly moving humanity.

A SOFT SPOT: Two sort-of film reviews

But first, can I share a secret? It’s relevant. This is something I have never told anyone in my life before, not even Ellie, who knows everything about me, because I always found it acutely embarrassing. And here I am, about to say it out loud, in public. It’s a pleasure to be too old for shame, too old for embarrassment.

The back story is from my last days at boarding school when I made friends with a school mate about my own age. I admired him immensely, perhaps because he was everything I felt I was not, but aspired to be: a rule breaker, an intellectual who played Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie loudly in the school corridor for everyone to hear; who drank his coffee black; who boldly smoked cigarettes, and even boasted he smoked reefers; who was cynical and smart and dismissive of everyone else in the school. I did everything I could to be just like him, but always fell short. I had the gray trousers of my school uniform daringly tapered—but they were corduroys, and looked slightly ridiculous. Wanting even to emulate his ultra cool short haircut, I went to the barber and told him what I wanted; he gave me… a “Perry Como”! Totally un-cool!

So here’s the secret. My “friend,” my hero, my nemesis gave me a nickname. In his contempt for my friendship, he dubbed me the Village Idiot. 

So much shame! Such a secret, for so long! And now of course I realize that it only hurt as much as it did because… my friend was right! He was smart enough to recognize that the piece of me I so badly wished to hide was some part of my essence as a person. I know enough now, after more than sixty years, to treasure it instead. That soft spot. The innocence. I was brought up in a country village. The Village Idiot is the embodiment of the innocence, the guilelessness, the sense of wonder at the strangeness of the sophisticated grownup world that remains buried somewhere deep in my heart to this day. In all the clever scheming and hostility and squabbling that surrounds us in the world we have foolishly built for ourselves, I am happy to occasionally be able to find refuge in that familiar, comfortable, innocent place in my soul (okay, you soul-less scoffers, my psychological makeup). 

These thoughts were occasioned by two British movies we watched on two consecutive evenings. That would-be lofty intellectual part of me felt almost guilty enjoying them as much as I did. They were charming—and what’s wrong with charming? Both were set the rural environment in which I grew up, both touched on that simplicity, that innocence I’m trying to describe. The first was “Summerland.” In its opening scene, a crotchety old author is disturbed at her work by a posse of unruly children. She shoos them away, yelling after them to “bugger off.” Next scene, she’s young again. It’s World War II. She is working at the same typewriter and jumping up, irate, to chase off another bunch of mocking kids. She’s a holy terror, an outsider, a thorn in the village flesh; along with the whole rest of this tiny population, these kids are sure she’s a witch.

Then an officious lady from the government shows up at her door, bringing with her a scruffy boy, an evacuee from London’s Blitz, who is assigned to be billeted at her house.

She’s outraged, of course. Hates the idea. Despises children. Behaves horribly to the boy. But then of course slowly comes to love him, and he her. He worms his way into her hidden tenderness, her humanity. And through him rediscovers the wound that has made her so bitter… I’ll not say more. I won’t act the spoiler. Enough to say that the film is totally charming.

And then there was “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.” You may have seen this. It’s an old one. We stumbled across it on Netflix and were happy we did. In this one, the peaceful rustic innocence of one of the Channel Islands that lie between England and France is shattered by the arrival of the Germans at the start of World War II. Their hated, brutal presence lifts the veil of innocence and reveals many dark secrets that lurk beneath the surface of village life. The protagonist of the story, a young woman, a promising writer from London, intrigued by the “society”, arrives on the island to research the book club that proved a refuge from the Nazi storm for a motley group of villagers—and ends up entranced…and of course—this is a movie—enamored.

So yes, there’s an English country bumpkin somewhere deep in my heart. And these days I find myself longing to be back where I grew up. Los Angeles feels noisy, with its constant roar of press and police helicopters above and the unceasing wail of sirens on the streets. Its endless traffic jams. It feels tense, as though always awaiting some imminent disaster. Try watching those movies. You’ll see what I mean. You may even find that you too, like myself, are a bit of an idiot. Which is a good place to be.

SHADOW

    I spent a while the other morning sitting with my shadow.

    It’s a familiar concept. We all have our light side and our dark, our yin and yang, our animus and anima. Our masculine and feminine. Our polar opposites. We like to hide the shadow. It’s not something we’re proud of or want to share with other people. For myself, the part I like to show is the light side, the one who cares deeply about every other human being. The shadow is his opposite, the one who doesn’t give a toss about anyone but himself. The one who’s angry, hostile, selfish, inconsiderate, mean… The un-gentle Englishman.

    As I say, we mostly keep our shadow hidden from view, even—no especially—our own. But he or she does tend to pop out at inconvenient moments, most frequently when need arises to deflect the shadow that some other person is throwing at us, provoking our own to come out to play. Projection is one convenient word for it, a simple mechanism by which we react as though our shadow is not ours, but theirs. I point my finger: see what a nasty guy he is. It’s a neat trick of the mind. 

    I find it salutary to sit and watch the shadow from time to time. No use trying to expunge or exorcise it. Try losing your actual shadow when you’re standing out in the sun. In the human psyche, it’s embedded. Psychotherapy is one way to try to get rid of it, but no matter how well you can “understand” it or trace its origin—in childhood, say—sorry, you’re stuck with it. The best way to live with it, I have to remind myself again and again, is simply to be vigilant, to watch for the shadow when it resurfaces, when I find myself pointing the finger, likely getting angry or defensive, above all making judgments about other people: he’s so petty-minded, she’s so selfish, they’re so greedy. Which is exactly the time, I have to remind myself, to trot out the old mirror one more time and take a good look at what I see there.

    The other strategy is to make friends with that shadow side. You, “hypocrite lecteur,” as the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in one of my favorite lines of all time, “mon semblable, mon frère.” You, reader, hypocrite, my mirror image and my brother. (Hideous translation, as are all translations of poetry. Better a live sparrow, though, than a stuffed eagle, as Edward FitzGerald wrote about his translation of Omar Khayyam…) I try to recognize that my “brother” is only trying to help by inserting himself in the situation and, instead of resisting, thank him and tell him: I don’t need your help right now.

    My shadow came out to play last week. It was an uncomfortable reunion, but good to see him again, shake his hand, and have some fun.