I left myself behind

I left but did not know I left myself behind.

Like a lizard after its shedding,

I don't know how to live in new skin.

I press my soft belly to once-familiar stones, asking,

"Why do these not fit me?

How far must I run

To find myself again?"

~Sleyca

Kafka and the doll

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924),who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her. The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures." Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life. During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable. Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin. "It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl. Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home. A year later Kafka died. Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written: "Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

Voice Male Marked Important

I love Mubarak Dahir’s essay “Nobody Likes a Nelly Homo.” As I started reading it, several things hit me at once, not the least of which was “what the heck does nelly mean?” But by the end I was convinced, yet again that I had discovered another ally in this tumultuous sea of society, the one we are all struggling in, just trying to keep our heads above the emotional tides that often threaten to swamp us, treading against the undertow that lurks silent and invisible beneath us, ready and willing to suck us under and do us in.

Apparently, nelly  refers to a very feminine homosexual man, and the term came into popular use by season three of "Arrested Development," where George Senior and Lucille Bluth refer to the seemingly homosexual Tobias as a "nelly." Can be used as either a noun or adjective, but it is almost always pejorative.

And then something beautiful happened: Dahir reveled in the outsider. He said how beautiful it was to watch someone knowingly step over the line and do it with style, with joy, with verve. After spending several paragraphs showing us that pointing and laughing seems to be hard-wired into human DNA as a means to bolster our positions of group inclusion, Dahir holds the gold lame wearing nelly queen in reverence but without the distance that is created with awe.

He finds value outside his own expression and relationship with the world. Ultimately, it is the variety of experience that he comes to value the most, the true diversity of it all. And isn’t that really the measure of our dedication to freedom: our willingness to appreciate and even defend that which offends us, or that we disagree with, but that ultimately causes no harm? Well done, Dahir. And thanks.

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I found many definitions, but my favorite one was at urban dictionary: Nelly Sweet, beautiful girl, very intelligent and creative. Though very stubb[o]urn and often pessimistic. More of a leader th[a]n follower. Often not one of the most popular girls around, but does have a group of friends. You would be very lucky to have a Nelly in your life. W[h]ether a friend or lover. Nelly's often switch back and forth from the dark and light side. They will get evil if pushed to it, but will be an angel if treated right. And often act before thinking.

Green Monkeys, All

“Men’s acceptance of the cultural association of manhood with control makes them complicit in its consequences, including the use of violence. Acceptance need not be conscious or intentional. Individual men need not be violent themselves. Mere silence -- the voice of complicity -- is enough to accomplish the effect and to connect them to the violence that other men do.”

This needs to be said over and over and over again. Rephrase it, repeat it, reprint it, restate it until we all know it in our cells. Because the patriarchy has only one tool, only one punishment for failure: Men won’t like you if you don’t conform. Yep, that’s it. People won’t like you, specifically middle class white men, the standard to whom all beings are held, the measure by which we are all found to fall short. We are willing to beat each other into submission, to kill each other, to cage each other, to hurt each other, to use tools ranging from violence to shame, to avoid being ostracized.

The code begins in the school yard if we didn’t get the message at home: point and laugh at anything different; set the new kid apart and be actively cruel; define your inclusion to the group by standing together against the outsider; show your position of strength by how forcefully you can act in to perpetuate the idea of the norm.

Back in the Seventies, before there were rules governing such experimentation, a bunch of social scientists studying group inclusion and identity behavior had a collective of monkeys in an observation area. One day they decided to take a middling member of the community and dye his fur green, reintroduce him to the collective, and see what sorts of behavior was used to assimilate or address this surface change. The researchers expected actual behaviors by the collective, elements that they could study and from which they could draw conclusions and possibly write papers for the coming decades about skin color and its effect on the collective subconscious.

They certainly were not expecting what they got: The whole group came together as one body to shred the green monkey. Nothing was left of it other than small bits of fur. It was not merely killed; it was annihilated, evaporated, removed, violently and with one explosive, collective act.

In their confusion, these researchers concluded that there was nothing of value to be learned from the experiment.

Instead of dismissing the unexpected results, we should see what is really before us, presented in undeniable context and and written in blood: xenophobia is a survival issue. Love and belonging are the real currency of the group, and no health and wellness program, from gym memberships to soup kitchens, can hope to be effective if these elements are met as well.

---

Allan Johnson, “Fatal Distraction: Manhood, Guns, and Violence,” in Okun, Rob, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p.377, emphasis added.

The Color of Destruction and Power

It must be uniquely difficult to be a Black Man in America. He is not seen as having a family, but as being a threat, a walking, breathing cornucopia of violence, lust and theft. Everything you have, we are told, will be taken away by the Black man if he comes near. He will take burn your home, steal you money and screw your women as he passes by. We are so threatened by adult Black men as a culture that we feel justified in shooting them, caging them, rejecting them.  When a Black man comes into the office, we subconsciously clutch our wallets or purses a little tighter, pull our children a little closer, find a reason to have him leave or to leave ourselves. For those of us in the dominant culture, we might only feel that way once or twice, if ever, but for Black men, they feel it everywhere they go -- it is in the air they breathe, and it smells of mistrust and ostracization.

And Black communities don’t provide much solace. Even at home they are suspect, given the label of ne’re-do-wells, junkies, baby-daddies. The American Black family in the twentieth century and thus far into the twenty-first, has formed around the absence of the Black man, coming into its own as best it could with their adult men behind bars or dead when they weren’t running around with the gangs that would seal their fate.

Is it any wonder that Black men, and the adolescents who look up to them, adopt the cool pose? Stripped of economic and educational opportunities, unable to secure housing for themselves let alone for a family, they are seen as parasites on the women-run Black community. How attractive it must be to take the accusations and condemnations and make them claims, reveling in the destructive power that every Black man carries with him, no matter where he goes, even when he sleeps. I imagine a hurricane reveling in the destructive power and glory of itself, sweeping all before it, laying waste to the little people with their little buildings and crops and schools and cars and laundry on the line as though life is normal, ever, anywhere, as if it ever could be, laughing in pure joy of unleashed power, never apologizing.

When we crafted this hostile narrative of destructive power, we left the Black man only one option for defining himself in relation to society and the world. America in the twenty-first century can do better, but only if we hold our eyes firmly on the truth and acknowledge our role in the violence that continues without much to hold it back, pervades every aspect of civilized interaction, from the manufacturing floor to the classroom to the boardroom, survives us all, generation after generation.

All of us have reparations to make to the Black man, those of us in the dominant culture and those in the Black communities as well. We owe Black men a safe space to release this image, to lay down the tools of destruction and relax out of the cool pose he has adopted for survival. We owe it to each other to change the narrative to one of inclusion, trust and the real possibility of being husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, instead of rapists, thugs, killers, junkies, and thieves.

White Folks Love Morgan Freeman

White folks love Morgan Freeman. He is soft-spoken, melodious, lean, and carries himself gently. One can relax in his presence; he is the antithesis of the angry black man.

But you have to know that, for all that he sees the weight of centuries of Black masculinity on his shoulders, he rages too. He has to have days where he seethes that the roles he takes are encompassed and circumscribed by larger obligations to reshaping the roles that all Black men take, participating in a new way of showing men of color. And then Driving Miss Daisy comes along and we’re right back where we started, feeling comfortable seeing the Black man as a kind and gentle servant.

I want to see Morgan Freeman playing a character where his kindly black servant, possibly as a librarian, is actually a cover for his absolute, no-holds-barred martial arts badassery. I want to see him ripping everyone off, regardless of color, caring only for the green of hundred dollar bills or the pristine icy sparkle of diamonds. Gold is too cliche for this vision. I want to see a flat-out dangerous character who just happens to be a Black man, a man who passes as the easy and gentle neighbor, kindly and helpful, the Ted Bundy of espionage, possibly corporate espionage with lots of technical elements that most white folks don’t understand in the first place but that is usually relegated to the Asian kid, sometimes fetishized as the Asian chick.

I want a society wherein everyone is safe and accepted enough that I’m not culture jamming by casting a Black man as this or a white man as that or an Asian as the other. I want a society that is a true meritocracy, but that has a minimum security guaranteed for all, not because we are weak and pathetic, but because it’s right thing to do, because all people deserve security.

What We Gain With Healthy Masculinity Is What We Need the Most

Michael Kaufman writes that there is “no such thing” as healthy masculinity. I get where he’s coming from; I really do. But there is healthy masculinity, and finding it will go far to giving us, as a society, what we need the most.

What is achieved in men’s resource groups around the country is the idea of a self that matters, of identifying privilege when we carry it with us into a room, of comporting ourselves as beings with responsibility and accountability in equal measure, deserving to be the role-models we have been deemed.

We need a masculinity that is seen as power and voice. In a world focused on force, this is a little mind-crackingly foreign, but hear me out. This voice can be had by anyone, man or woman, and it harkens more to the original greek idea of phallus, that of power as opposed to penis.

When we value power over force and ultimate come to see force as the enemy of power, the agent by which power is destroyed or shattered or given away, we can come to see ourselves as the truly powerful beings that we are. Once we recognize our own power, we can begin to cultivate power in others. This self-awareness of power and its employment in meaningful ways is itself a healthy masculinity, while I see the nurturing of that power in one’s self and in others as deeply feminine, and giving rise to a far healthier femininity than any we have seen lately.

These ideas of masculine and feminine are not rooted in biology but in spirit, and harken to eastern ideas of balance. Perhaps meditation and t’ai chi and yoga every day won’t save the world, but would it be so disastrous to try? What if we taught balance in schools alongside math, that the idea of personal choices and balance was no different than two trains leaving different stations, and possibly that solving the choices problems were more important than the trains one?

---

Michael Kaufman, “Any Gender is a Drag,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 363

The Paladin, The Champion, and the Bro Code

The Bro Code has come a long way from the Code of Chivalry and its progenitor, the Prudhomme. In fact, it seems to be about as diametrically opposed to these earlier codes of behavior as can be, and yet the Bro Code and those who espouse its toxic, often militaristic dogma often harken to a mythopoetic Paladin or Knight for its justification and validity. In fact, I can think of no clearer illustration of how antithetic the modern day manifestation of the ideal is than Paladin Press.

Paladin Press is a book publishing firm founded in 1970 by Peder Lund and Robert K. Brown. The company publishes non-fiction books and videos covering a wide range of specialty topics, including personal and financial freedom, survivalism and preparedness, firearms and shooting, various martial arts and self-defense, military and police tactics, investigation techniques, spying, lockpicking, sabotage, revenge, knives and knife fighting, explosives, and other “action topics” (though the availability of books on topics like improvised explosives has been severely curtailed in recent years).

To read this list, one would think that Rambo is the ultimate Paladin. Yet the definition of a paladin couldn’t be farther from this twentieth-century incarnation. According to Merriam-Webster, paladin was first used in 1592; some synonyms include: “advocate, advocator, apostle, backer, booster, champion, expounder, espouser, friend,  gospeler (or gospeller), herald, hierophant, high priest, exponent, promoter, proponent, protagonist, supporter, true believer, tub-thumper, white knight” and is related to “loyalist, partisan (also partizan), stalwart; adherent, cohort, disciple, follower; interpreter; applauder, cheerleader, encourager, fellow traveler” while a paladin is actively not: “adversary, antagonist, opponent, or enemy, foe, rival; belittler, critic, faultfinder.”

One of my favorite definitions of paladin comes from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Esydamus finds that “Paladins take their adventures seriously, and even a mundane mission is, in the heart of the paladin, a personal test: an opportunity to demonstrate bravery, to learn tactics, and to find ways to do good. Divine power protects these warriors of virtue, warding off harm, protecting from disease, healing, and guarding against fear. The paladin can also direct this power to help others, healing wounds or curing diseases, and also use it to destroy evil. Experienced paladins can smite evil foes and turn away undead. A paladin's Wisdom score should be high. .  . . Many of the paladin's special abilities also benefit from a high Charisma score.” While it would be easy to dismiss this definition as a bit of fantasy fluff, it actually recalls the twelfth century ideal far more accurately than the catalog of Paladin Press would indicate.

The chivalric code is a code of conduct associated with the medieval institution of knighthood which developed between 1170 and 1220. Over time, its meaning in Europe has been refined to emphasise social and moral virtues more generally. The Code of Chivalry, as it stood by the Late Middle Ages, was a moral system which combined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners, all conspiring to establish a notion of honour and nobility.

Léon Gautier, in his La Chevalerie, published for the first time in 1883, bemoaned the "invasion of Breton romans" which replaced the pure military ethos of the crusades with Arthurian fiction and courtly adventures. Gautier tries to give a "popular summary" of what he proposes was the "ancient code of chivalry" of the 11th and 12th centuries derived from the military ethos of the crusades which would evolve into the late medieval notion of chivalry. Gautier's Ten Commandments of chivalry are:

1. Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches and thou shalt observe all its directions.
2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
3. Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
4. Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
5. Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
6. Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.
7. Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
8. Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
9. Thou shalt be generous, and give largesse to everyone.
10. Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

In these “Ten Commandments,” the militaristic religious mandate is clear, but to walk away from this list seeing only the holy war aspects is simplistic, as invalid as seeing the Muslim code of behavior as only the jihad.

According to David Crouch, prior to codified chivalry there was the uncodified code of noble conduct that focused on the preudomme. This uncodified code - referred to as the noble habitus - is a term for the environment of behavioural and material expectations generated by all societies and classes. As a modern idea, it was pioneered by the French philosopher/sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, even though a precedent exists for the concept as far back as the works of Aristotle. Crouch argues that the habitus on which “the superstructure of chivalry” was built and the preudomme was a part, had existed long before 1100, while the codified medieval noble conduct only began between 1170 and 1220.

The pre-chivalric noble habitus as discovered by Mills and Gautier are as follows:

1. Loyalty: It is a practical utility in a warrior nobility. Richard Kaeuper associates loyalty with prowess. The importance of reputation for loyalty in noble conduct is demonstrated in William Marshal biography.
2. Forbearance: knights' self-control towards other warriors and at the courts of their lords was a part of the early noble habitus as shown in the Conventum of Hugh de Lusignan in the 1020s. The nobility of mercy and forbearance was well established by the second half of the 12th century long before there was any code of chivalry.[26]
3. Hardihood: The quality of hardy aligns itself with forbearance and loyalty in being one of the military virtues of the preudomme. According to Philip de Navarra, a mature nobleman should have acquired hardiness as part of his moral virtues. Geoffrey de Charny also stressed on the masculine respectability of hardiness in the light of religious feeling of the contemptus mundi.
4. Largesse or Liberality: generosity was part of a noble quantity. According to Alan of Lille, largesse was not just a simple matter of giving away what he had, but "Largitas in a man caused him to set no store on greed or gifts, and to have nothing but contempt for bribes."
5. The davidic ethic: It is the strongest qualities of preudomme derived by clerics from Biblical tradition. Originally it was a set of expectations of good rulership articulated by the Frankish church which involved the rightful authority based on protection for the weak and helpless (in particular the Church), respect for widows and orphans, and opposition to the cruel and unjust. The core of Davidic ethic is benevolence of the strong toward the weak.
6. Honor: honor was what was achieved by living up to the ideal of the preudomme and pursuing the qualities and behavior listed above.[31] The loss of honor is an humiliation to a man's standing and is worse than death. Bertran de Born said: "For myself I prefer to hold a little piece of land in onor, than to hold a great empire with dishonor.”

Chivalry and especially its predecessor the noble hablis stand in sharp contrast to the cornerstones of masculinity identified by Brannon and David in 1976:

1. No Sissy Stuff: Never do anything that even remotely hints of femininity. “Real” men always steer clear of any behavior or characteristic associated with women.
2. Be a Big Wheel: Masculinity is measured by success, power, and the admiration of others. Consequently, men need wealth, renown, and prestige to be identified as “real” men.
3. Be a Sturdy Oak: Manliness requires rationality, toughness, and self-reliance. A man must remain calm in any situation, show no emotion, and admit no weakness.
4. Give ‘em Hell: Men must exude an aura of daring and aggression, must be willing to take risks and “go for it” even when reason and fear suggest otherwise.

At no point does this modern code of behavior identify compassion and caring to those who are weak or suffering; indeed, it seems to actively espouse a callous view. The details of this masculinity may have changed, updating to incorporate the Cool Pose of the black urban man who has nothing and so has to find a posture to assure us all that he does, indeed, meet all four rules, or the unwritten fifth rule of male social conduct that seems so prevalent in the 90s and beyond: Bros Before Hos, meaning that relationships with women -- no matter how significant -- are of lesser priority than relationships with men -- no matter how casual.

Especially as regards the Davidic ethic, it is difficult to square the Paladin Press’ focus on individual survival and separation from society. If anything, it would seem that a true Paladin Press would include lists of charities and inequalities to address, a guide to good manners and gentleness. I am reminded of the Leo Buscaglia quote, “Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” This is the kind of strength and conduct we should all aspire to, men and women alike. Instead of seeing power and prowess as liberators from social obligation, they should tie us more closely to it.

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http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paladin
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus at http://www.easydamus.com/character.html
Gautier, Léon (1891). Chivalry. translated by Henry Frith.
Crouch, David (2005). The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900–1300. Harlow, UK: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-36981-9.
Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).