Part Four: Every Mother's Son
Foreword
There is a curious story among Plato's dialogues. Aristophanes at the Symposium. Basically, a bunch of the who's-who of Athens are enjoying their wealth by eating and drinking too much, when the talk turns to the topic of love – that is, of Eros, the god thereof. Now, why anyone – particularly Plato's female audience – because he most certainly entertained an audience of women, much to the chagrin of his peers – wanted to hear what a bunch of men thought about Love, I don't know and can't speculate.
And, it's curious. I feel like I haven't thought about this particular story since the first time I heart it. The same moment I dismissed it without any further consideration. Like, I am coming – and have arrived, of course, since – to realize that I did with so much of what I was taught as a boy. But, of course, that isn't true – because I'm going to tell it to Peitho. But, now— Maybe that's why I'm thinking about it now. That, and I have begun seeing it everywhere I look. But less about that and more about—
Maybe I haven't said this yet. Maybe I should have opened with it. Maybe I should open every episode with it.
I have not seriously touched these topics in.... But, see, even the dust of but twenty years is enough to make a man forget what he once knew well. And it's been much longer than twenty years.
I'm forestalling.
The thing I was born to do, created, crafted, to do, I have failed. Perhaps I have concealed this truth from you to suspend your disappointment, or to spare myself admitting it. But—
I failed. Say it how it is.
Not at everything, no. And, as they say – fail, fail again – fail it til you nail it. As my father might have said, you get back on that horse til it bucks you to bucking death. He didn't. We didn't have horses. Could you imagine him making a four-year old boy climb on a bucking sheep?
Bucking adorable.
But that's besides the point. Maybe I am still trying to process what had just happened – with Adalbert. Maybe that's why— But I know that. Now. I didn't, then – not really. Then—
I made my way from the inn to the church, the Santa Maria Foris Portam, at a sort of stagger. A plodding walk that gave me adequate time to think. About nothing.
V doesn't believe me, that I felt nothing. Our forward progress is stopped nearly two weeks because he tells me that I couldn't have thought and felt nothing. He says that every time I have told him it was “nothing” it was always something, so what am I hiding. And of course he's right. I couldn't have left that conversation with Adalbert and then walked right to Peitho feeling nothing. Nothing is ever nothing, everything is always something. And he's right – you're right. Right, that is, to think that.
But sort of a story is it to tell that I watched my feet on the cobblestones, careful not to step on any cracks? That I counted them, the steps, the cobblestones – then I counted my breaths – then the number of carts I saw – then the number of buildings – then my breaths again. I kept my mind busy. With anything but diagnostic scans and ponderations about the future. I just walked.
In simple, modern terms, I am in shock.
Grief, its process, denial....
Allow me – a moment, if you will. These are my memoirs, and this is my work, but – forgive me this. Perhaps, as I have said, I should have done this sooner. But—
I am an old man.
This voice – these mediums I am forced to work in— These are young things, new things – familiar things. They create an illusion, they distance us from the Truth. But the truth of the thing is that I am an old man – an incredibly old man. And I feel it. Maybe not in my bones, in the aches and the pains of the body – but I do in the longing to be done with this world, with whatever is my work in it, and most especially in my mind. In the differences between my mind and yours.
Peitho—
Why did I start with Peitho? You know, I've been thinking about it for a while.
Nobody likes a prologue. So why did I start with mine? That you would think you already know me if I started in any other Age of my life is the easy answer. And it is right. No doubt you think you do, now. That the representations and recreations and rip-offs of me you think you know are true. They are accurate.
But that question, why – it is pivotal to this whole thing – to this whole story, this whole endeavor.
We understand the metaphor that things happen in cycles. The cylces of the sun and moon and planets and stars, of coffee makers, of cars. We think we can recognize the cycles of history. But the cycles of our lives? Have you notice the cycles of your life? Of your mind? The very cycles of your mentation? But what of the reality?
And what does it mean to understand the cycles of things in their reality?
I have walked the face of this Earth for 1145 years, give or take a few months. I existed a year or so prior to that. It's taken me this time to confront these questions, let alone to answer them. Bully and brava to you who are here seeking answers of your own – whether you know it or not.
Peitho was not a calendar event.
Peitho was the comet that killed the dinosaurs – that kicked off the Younger Dryas. While she hasn't impacted, yet, in my telling, she has many times, in her way, cycled through my life. She was the first of many firsts which would become regular cycles of my life. (Maybe I should have started with this. Oh well, no stopping now.)
There is an expectation placed upon the Private Detective as archetype – on all archetypes, but work with me, here. I have a broader – a deeper and, uh, how's the song go? How deep is your love? No. Anyway—
This modern world.... Your relationship with archetypes is an unhealthy one. I think that's the way to say to this – to segue into what I want to talk about. Archetypes to you feel like stereotypes; and you're terrified of those. Terrified of, not terrorized by. You don't understand what a stereotype is, or what it means – you just know it can be bad. So you avoid it altogether, dutifully maintaining a state of ignorance – and, thus, fear – of them. Stereotype. The word kind of has no meaning anymore.
It used to be a printing method. Then academic Psychology got a hold of it and popularized it – meaning it gave it a narrow, specific definition, which then lost all meaning when it was introduced to the public and absorbed into the greater lexicon. As any ten people what a stereotype is, and you'll get ten different ponderous, strained and wincing answers. This is – sort of – the process of language.
It most definitely is the way of stories. As above, so below, as Peitho would no doubt point out. And, maybe, as I honor her memory. To lose all meaning is, it seems to me, the natural fate of all stories with any sort of unorthodox or occult Meaning – that is, any story coded toward any measure of self-liberation. And, let it be stated clear here if nowhere previous: this is not by no means coded toward a measure of self-liberation.
Self-liberation is the primary and sole mission of this endeavor.
Get the the Hell out of here.
Anyway—
As with all things, from the Source to now, there has also been an erosion of what it means to be a Man – what it means to be a Woman, for that matter. But who am I to tell you what it is to be a woman?
I'm not here to tell you that you're wrong to play so fast and loose with identity, Modernity. You are. But being wrong for the right reasons has a kind of feel to it, doesn't it? A good kind of feel. A feel that's sort of... self-right-eous.
A feeling I know well.
It was not so obvious in the year of our Lord nine and hundred that the self-conception of the pain-invulnerable man who is a pillar if not a megalith is not exactly healthy. The image of the hunter, the scout, the soldier, the crusader dragging himself home from a faraway land to die in the arms of his wife, mother, and/or sisters is as old a masculine ideal as – well – males with cause and women to drag themselves home from and to. At least as old as Ötzi the Iceman – you know, the “caveman” they found in the Alps, very likely murdered, fallen, having dragged himself from wherever he was shot to where he died – so some five-thousand years.
And y'all are older than that by more than two orders of magnitude. Just imagine the possibilities for violent, horrific, agonizing maiming – and death, alone, without anyone to send you to the other side or know that you've gone. Then ask yourself why you'd leave at all.
Is it so unnatural for a man to feel like he has to be strong – especially for the women in his life? What is unnatural for a male is sticking around at all. Children, women – they make you vulnerable. How many movies and books and comics, et al – how many stories have you heard of the man whose family are leveraged against him to hurt him or to force him to do something he doesn't want to do? Love— I heard in a song, once – if you've got no one, no one can hurt you.
Women do this work.
I am not forgetting you, Ladies. If I can overshare, this whole thing is sort of a prayer, my own sort of desperate bid for forgiveness from an archetype – a goddess – of my own. You all are just invited along for the ride.
Men have come to jealously guard this work, this archetype – the sufferer, the laborer, the shoulder on whom his family are boosted – for very very good reasons. None least of which that men are and have always been expendable.
That is the reality of the human male, whether they choose to admit it or not.
No human is irreplaceable.
I'm sorry – there are too many of you, and there will be too many more for your uniqueness to equate to value.
But males are uniquely incapable of the more necessary characteristic of all: Creation – literally the magick of bearing new life. And because of that, men have learned to hate their mothers, their sisters, their goddesses.
For good reason.
In the world of my youth – not really all that different from today's modern, technological world – any sign of weakness, or mental or physical injury, was an invitation for a dagger in your back. Man or woman. But literally, if you were a man. Politics could be much less subtle, then. Did it make me paranoid that I didn't trust the Institution? Was I thinking about it? No.
In other words, you get good at pretending you aren't losing your mind – even as your already-tenuous grasp on reality and your place in it has long-since fled your fingers and you're, as the song says, free.
Free falling.
The Ego, by any name, is not merely the collection of philosophical observations which have been made of it – and by it. I don't have time – V says that if I want to talk about this stuff we should do a companion project that's just the philosophical, et al, underpinnings. Maybe he just doesn't know what constitutes important to the narrative. But, he insists, I'm supposed to be telling a story that's about something. Nothing is about anything. Everything is—
I am frustrated by the narrowness of this scope. I feel as though I am attempting to push a potato through a drinking straw. Get as clever as you like, but it ain't easy and is a lot of back-pressure in my skull. If this is about anything—
Sigh.
If what I want to tell you now, with this rambling piece I am recording – and with the scene that will follow....
I watch you young people. I am still in the world, still a part of it, and for the last five years – since V began to push me toward this end in earnest— I have observed you. Not individually, Listeners – I'm not Santa Claus – or Jesus. I mean I have done as I have described of my youth, as you have witnessed: I've sat among you in malls, in restaurants – alone, unobserved. Maybe you thought I was weird. Whatever the case, I've listened to you talk about your relationships. About Eros – not so much love as Love – the concept, if not the god.
You make much of “health”. That is “healthy” relationships, “healthy” environments, “healthy” minds. You're quick to notice when a behavior is abusive in another – and always faster to defend your own family-environment-learned abusive behaviors. Am I calling you hypocrites? Of course not. I've already told you – your ignorance is not your fault.
Perhaps this is what Peitho was trying to teach me. Is it possible that old dogs can learn new tricks? Perhaps this is why I want so desperately to make good on her memory – not my memory of her, but her as she was. We are all made the way we are. So much of our development is out of our control. The psychologist will tell you that your personality gels within you by three years old. By the time you are able to express yourself, you are the you that you are going to be, with all the so-called inborn skills that you are ever going to possess.
This is... intimidating.
What does it say of me that by six I was not only already equipped but able to leave the nest and enter the world? Nothing Good, I feel.
If Peitho taught me anything— Well.... When I see my life through the interpretive lens of pop-social media psychology, I can't imagine anyone is thrilled by what they see. This relationship has gaslighting and abuse all over it. All of my relationships do. But someone once told me – love is shared trauma.
Does that mean that I was falling in love with Peitho?
Many are the games which have tried to somehow gauge mental health – like using a meter to determine sanity. None seem to have done so particularly well – but the metaphor is apt – games are representations of life.
The Ego is more than just one's Self, sense and esteem thereof. It is also one's view and assumptions about the world – and other people. The Ego is very much like the body in that it can be injured, scarred, and killed.
I cannot say whether, as I stood outside the church named Santa Maria, my Ego had died.
Unlike the body, there can be no forensics to determine the exact time and cause of Ego Death. But I can say that if my ego were a soldier in a combat hospital... all they'd be doing for me is trying to ease the pain. There's nothing left to do but wait and make arrangements for what's next.
It's not enough to say that my world had been tossed like a small child for the coins in his pockets, even turned, like a victim of a slow-drawn disembowelment, inside out. Everything I thought I knew and believed in was... what? Destroyed? That's appropriately melodramatic, isn't it?
But, no. Not destroyed.
Worse.
Called into question.
I'd been given reason to doubt – to seek answers I could not find on my own.
Good reason.
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