The Old Days:

The Old Days.

I could not help but to notice, when I got off the phone with Michael, who turns forty-seven I think this year, (next Tuesday to be exact_) that it is not often that people my age have conversations lasting seventeen consecutive minutes by telephone. Given this fact, (and I mean that both in the sense that I have been given it but ALSO that you, READER, have already received it and might be already bored) it is doubtful that most of my peers will read on. That is unfortunate. After all: they are those who need it most.

Whatever the case might have been on my end and as a second thought, I still had felt like I was rushing him, at that very moment (though he’d made and I had qualified immediately the preface that I “hate the phone” or, as I’d put it: “try not to talk too long.”). It is a testament to my seemingly Protestant character that I hesitated to call seventeen minutes (a lucky number) “much”, for I felt guilty for cutting our conversation “short”. I guess I fancy myself a busy man. Yet by the end of it I took this as an opportunity to assuage some of my restlessness and angst, a classic symptom of neurosis and not-having-one’s-feet-upon-the-ground. The guilt had been in fact the very CAUSE for my restlessness, for I am in the frequent habit of suspecting that if I am wasting time then I am sinning.

Against whom am I sinning? Who if not WOMEN?

As Michael rambled on and on I thought of them; they, after all, tend to be on my mind twenty-four/seven, if such thoughts can be quantified in such a fashion.

I thought of Michael’s generation. There is an ease with which the man speaks, though he stumbles. It’s the ease of some one who has learned to stumble gracefully. At some time, that is all that one had to do to get ANY thing done, and there was nothing more one COULD do.

It is not so now.

Now we (if I may) are sheltered by a proliferation of rules. They supplant the influence of our traditions, our encounters, and our experiences. The cell phone is one thing; at times I am ahead of Michael’s time, when cell phone use was prevalent, and yet at other times I’m far behind him, and I’d rather write a letter and have it mailed by some device more primitive and more ingenious than a typewriter.

The Smart Phone is an other. So are online social networks of all sorts.

It is bad enough to have to listen to Michael ramble when we could just talk about it all in person on his birthday. What is truly sad is meeting people. Every girl these days is on her phone or on the clock, and when you meet one through the Net you never know what you will get. (Or if you’ll “get” any thing at all other than a series of emojis and false flattery.)

As Michael rambled I thought about the notorious Wage Gap.

I imagined for a moment the nineteen-nineties as a time when women were more desperate for help because they made less money. Such had been the social narrative, long kept secret by patriarchal proto-Fascists, but then BROUGHT TO LIGHT! By social justice warriors back in 2014.

I thought of the film “The Santa Clause”, and what a prick that lead guy was. I wondered how he lived with himself and WHY. True: I knew why. It was not male self-entitlement. It was a deeper and more passive narcissism, a FEMININE narcissism in fact: the refusal to accommodate an other’s self-entitlement. A passivity alert only to its own self-perpetuation. A parasitic complacency and self-contentment.

How come such characters were so prevalent in the nineties? I mean: men have sex drives. Don’t they have some body to impress??

The feminist myth of the Wage Gap, for which no woman I knew to have been enflamed by it had ever managed to find evidence, was a likely story. But it was TOO likely. It was too simple. Like a lullaby. A fairy tale hardly worthy of being called a Myth in the Grand Sense. This was not the Wisdom that is produced in the Mystical Realm and transmuted into worldly form by Poetry and Literature. This was an URBAN myth, an IDEOLOGICAL legend. Propaganda. Proto-Fascism. Agenda. And most ironically: A SOCIAL NARRATIVE.

The solution is at once more simple and more complicated, for it leaves more of the TRUE, INTRINSIC complications found in Nature to the Imagination of the Individual Subject, uncharted territory to-Be-explored.

In Michael’s time there was not the neurotic need to IMPRESS the other gender. This had been transcended, so people could be blunt. They could be vulgar. They could be POLITICALLY INCORRECT. And somehow only a few came off as total narcissists. And they were made into stock characters in film, television, and other media.

May be this also dawns upon people at Michael’s age. I hope so. But I know better than to hope to excess. I am old enough, and living in such morbid times, as to have learned THAT much.

Getting off of the phone with Michael was like stepping out of a long shower and awakening from a long dream (though I would do well not to fall asleep in the bath, as we all would do well to avoid as well).  I felt LITERARY, as though I were in a novel of some sort or, to be more specific, as though my life made SENSE in relation to the records of the past. And the literature was not the Kafkaesque labyrinth of constant paranoia and bureaucracy, where to raise my head above the mass was to be guilty of elitism and insubordination. NOR was it such INFLATED self-aggrandizement that I lost all humility even as I DEMANDED it of others. (And this is NOT to say that I am not free to demand it of those who have not reciprocated my own consideration.)

I returned to my virtual women, their replicas upon my telephone screen, with a sense of earthbound clarity. The realm of EMOTION was still available to me, but I was free of what a certain religious philosopher and ethicist had called EMOTIVISM, and this freedom felt so BASIC and common-sensical that I remembered all of a sudden why I had so easily and readily absorbed that thinker’s thinking and all so why I’d become enraged by my “peers” who had sneered at me for even MENTIONING the word “emotive”, as though ANY form of criticism of the liberal status quo were blasphemous.

Yes: “liberal status quo”.

To use a contemporary adage:

It’s a thing.

Then I found several more coy, womanly faces looking up at me from the newspaper in the Living Room downstairs. They caught my attention; I observed. These were the faces of three writers who were concerned with “women” as a cause.

It dawned on me.

In Michael’s time “women” were not a cause. Any semblance of women Being-a-cause was but one of a number of semi-neurotic trends that might as well have been a grungy fashion statement.

WOMEN were much MORE back then. They were still Goddesses and Temptresses, Sirens and Angels, and most importantly: they were PEOPLE. And that meant that their value was determined entirely by relationship. To men, they were the Other. Yet they were also close enough to men, at a time when every one was Other to every one else, that one could slide into relation with them with incredible ease, even if, like heroin (a drug named after women as well), the easy slide was excruciatingly hard to slide OUT of.

Michael’s time was a more sophisticated time. Women had fewer rights because they did not NEED them. A right is simply a protection against the Other. Women did not NEED to be protected from men. To be woman was to IMPLY man. One did not have to simply identify “as a woman” as DISTINCT from man. It happened naturally that to BE one was to IMPLY the other, by virtue of relationship, and BY RELATIONSHIP ALONE, untarnished and untouched. It was a time of THOU, not IT relations: PERSONAL connections, not impersonal, Utilitarian ideological demands and self-entitlements.

AND MEN AND WOMEN GOT ALONG.

They did not need to blame the “creeps”; to be a “Creep” was cool, hence Radiohead’s song (which Michael had recommended that we cover, in his phone call). They did not blame the President; ALL politicians were corrupt, so why bother? Improve yourself; THAT was the spirit.

This is why people pretend that sex and gender are distinct. It’s but a mind game.

Ideology has segregated us and taught us what it MEANS to be a woman or a man.

It does not SOLVE the PROBLEM of gender roles. It CREATES it.

It is the very problem that it offers to resolve, threatening the Individual for disagreeing and delivering punishment by making the problem much more severe so that only the “protected” can survive, at great personal expense.

It is ideological extortion.

And the expense is Authenticity: the kind that only comes via Relationship.

Now if you don’t fit the role assigned to you by this society, you have the “option” of changing, but only if you claim that you were “born wrong” – DESPITE the notion that it is a Social Construct!!

My other writings deal more with the issue of Gender. It’s far more than a Social Construct. But my point remains.

Michael’s generation is evidence that progress is a recent invention.

Things are getting worse.

Yet somehow: talking to him I am reminded that they’re also getting better. NOT because of ideology; ideology is the anti-Christ that Jung spoke of.

But rather because some people still adhere, unknowingly (and thereby fittingly) to the Tao – the Way of Mother Nature.

And it is IMPERATIVE that those for whom it’s getting worse wake up and realise this fact.

Dm.A.A.