Dirty Work

"Keith Thompson, in one of his essays, described himself at twenty as a typical young man "initiated" by women. His parents divorced when Keith was about twelve, and he lived with his mother while his father moved into an apartment nearby.

Throughout high school Keith was closer to women than to other men, and that situation continued into college years, when his main friends were feminists whom he described as marvellous, knowledgeable, and generous, and from whom he learned an enormous amount. He then took a job in Ohio state politics, working with women and alert to the concerns of women.

About that time he had a dream. He and a clan of she-wolves were running in the forest. Wolves suggested to him primarily independence and vigour. The clan of wolves moved fast through the forest, in formation, and eventually they all arrived at a riverbank. Each she-wolf looked into the water and saw her own face there. But when Keith looked into the water, he saw no face at all".

In all its requisite partiality, I found a deep resonance with this passage from Robert Bly's Iron John and a few recent stations on my journey, when I was reading it last weekend. He was discussing the absence of old man initiators in contemporary Western society, and the documented effects this has had on the acceptance, ownership and growth of a healthy masculine in young men.

I've felt such absence of support, and therefore a tiring defiance, around this in my life. My Father was a hard-working and loyal wage slave for thirty-five stiff-lipped years. He didn't have the nurturing, social evolution, financial backing, economic climate, access to diverse educational outlets, travel opportunities, and freedom I've been gifted, to know how to claim his golden ball from the Wild Man's cage. My Grandad had also fought that long, lonely battle, alongside the Gentleman's error of play-acting civility and denying the fire in his belly. That left me at the mercy of the well-intentioned, but fatally-flawed maternal therapy culture of the 1970-80's, and its enemy #1: Wild Men's wisdom.

"When women, even women with the best intentions, bring up a boy alone, he may in some way have no male face, or he may have no face at all. The old men initiators, by contrast, conveyed to boys some assurance that is invisible and nonverbal; it helped the boys to see their genuine face or being".

It's been an interesting battle. I've claimed my face, but with a very hard fought theft of the key from under my Mother's pillow. In that defiance, I had to battle many destructive forces on my ego and relationships, which were in addition to the road of trials that the standard birther of wild wisdom faces. I've looked for mentors in the wrong places, I've wound up desperate and listening to false prophets, and I've gone it alone to the edge of annihilation… and I've done it without trust or care. It's been a powerful journey of challenge, but I often wonder whether the battle needed to be as difficult as karma had decided.

Like suffering a simultaneous existential crisis and ego-dissociation/borderline regression without any therapy in the third world for half a year. Like spending $200,000 of savings on trying to mend old wounds and serve the highest ethic I could, and coming out with jack shit beyond knowing I've stayed true to my (longing) centre. Like having a broken jaw, dismantled back muscle structure, inverted spinal problems, and pinched nerves, and continuing to work to pay for my life against all alarm bells and warning signals to pack it in. Like doing fucking furniture removal work with a broken shoulder when I'm a practicing solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW! It's a question I can't seem to answer rationally… it was crazy… but it mended the alienation. I needed to run with my wolves.

"There's no sense in idealising pre-industrial culture, yet we know that today many fathers now work thirty or fifty miles from the house, and by the time they return at night the children are often in bed, and they themselves are too tired to do active fathering.

The industrial revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, pulled father away from their sons and, moreover, placed the sons in compulsory schools where the teachers are mostly women. D.H. Lawrence described what this was like in his essay "Men Must Work And Women As Well". His generation in the coal-mining areas of Britain felt the full force of that change, and the new attitude centred on one idea: that physical labour was bad.

Lawrence recalls his father, who had never heard this theory, worked daily in the mines, enjoyed the camaraderie with the other men, came home in good spirits, and took his bath in the kitchen. But around that time the new schoolteachers arrived from London to teach Lawrence ands his classmates that physical labour is low and unworthy and that men and women hold strive to move upward to a more "spiritual" level – higher work, mental work. The children of his generation deduced that their fathers has been doing something wrong all along, that men's physical work is wrong and that those sensitive mothers who prefer white curtains and an elevated life are right and always have been.

During Lawrence's teenage years, which he described in Sons and Lovers, he clearly believed the new teachers. He wanted the "higher" life and took his mother's side. It wasn't until two years before he died, already ill with tuberculosis in Italy, that Lawrence began to notice the vitality of the Italian workingmen, and to feel a deep longing for his own father. He realise then that his mother's ascensionism had been wrong for him, and had encouraged him to separate from his father and from his body in an unfruitful way."

It's been terribly hard – perversely so – and yet, there's always been the wild man inside who holds the wisdom and knew what needed to be done. My karmic pit was trans-generational, and there's nobody to blame (I still think we should all Fuck the Man for certain, even if I now know there is no Man). I was gifted the circumstances to develop the power of foresight, of the longview, and the strength in many facets of my being to be able to do the deep work of healing my ancestors didn't have the conditions to face. As acutely painful as that has been.

Where to from here? Physical work, mental work, spiritual work. Isn't it obvious?

It was a fine synchronicity to receive an email from Trevor Grey this evening calling Men who've been through his Trusting the Masculine to farewell our "initiation ground" at Thump Boxing on June 18. See you there.