The Prophet and the King: A Fable

In a certain beautiful land over the mountains and across the sea lived a wise king who ruled over a great and prosperous kingdom. The king lived in a grand palace that sat atop the eastern hills overlooking his capitol city, and every morning rosy-fingered dawn touched its marble columns before bestowing her gifts on the rest of the land. Within the palace were wonders unimaginable; exotic beasts from the southern provinces, whole rooms full of gold plundered in the northern campaigns, and an entire library filled with all of the wisdom of the eastern sages.

The king lived a happy, peaceful life, rarely needing to leave his palace for any reason. One day, however, the kings ministers came to him with a report.

“O King live forever,” the head minister said, bowing before the throne. “A prophet has come among our people and goes among them, prophesying to the poor and destitute.”

“What,” scoffed the king, “to the poor! What has a prophet to gain by offering his services to such as they?”

The king ordered his litter that he might go out and see such a paradox for himself, and was carried out into the cobblestone streets of his great city. There he saw many things; great mansions and temples, and also the destitution of the poor; cripples and blind men sat at the gates begging for alms.

At last the king saw the prophet, an old man dressed in sackcloth with long, unkempt hair. The king watched as the prophet knelt by an old beggar and whispered something into his ear. The poor man’s face broke into a wide smile as the prophet rose and walked on. Next, the prophet knelt by a blind woman and spoke into her ear. Again, the blind woman’s face broke into a brilliant smile.

“It is always like this,” the king’s minister said to him. “He speaks to those in pain and in times of trouble, and what he says brings them great joy.”

“I see,” the king said. “Invite him to the palace.”

That evening the prophet appeared before the throne of the king and bowed in deference.

“O King live forever,” the prophet said. “How may I serve you?”

“Prophesy to me,” the king said. “You will be well paid for your help.”

“I expect no payment,” the prophet said evenly. “But before I speak, let me say this: I give the same prophecy to any man who asks for it. I will give you the same fortune as I gave to the beggar and the blind woman. Do you still wish to hear it?”

The king remembered the joy on the faces of those the prophet spoke to and nodded, leaning forward eagerly.

“Very well. Hear, then, your prophecy, O King.” The prophet waved to the great palace and all of the king’s earthly belongings and looked at the king. “This, too, shall pass.”

Of Sigils

Mystical symbols have always held a fascination with the human mind, to the extent that they are an integral part of most major world religions. Consider the star and crescent of Islam, the Christian cross, or the eight-spoke wheel of the Buddha, for instance. Voodoo uses “veves”—symbols representing the loa spirits—in its rituals, believing that the placement of a veve beneath a sacrifice links the sacrifice to the loa of the veve.

A number of pagan superstitions have combined in the modern age to form the idea of a sigil—a symbol used to invoke magical power. Medieval magicians believed they could use sigils to summon specific angels or demons, while the Jewish practice of Kaballah uses them for everything from protective spells to representative names for God to the creation of healing amulets.

While the efficacy of sigils in the physical world has yet to be proven, there is another realm in which they have an undisputed power.

That realm is art. The greatest artists in human history, whether literary or visual, have used sigils to shape the thoughts and emotions of their audiences in powerful ways. There are two basic kinds of sigil: imagistic and poetic.

What about music? an observer might ask. Excellent question, and easily answered; music doesn’t need to incorporate sigils, simply because music is itself a sigil. Music shapes the subconscious from within in exactly the same way a powerful artistic sigil does. A combination of the two, in a lyrical composition or musical play, can be staggering in its effect.

Imagistic sigils are those images which are powerful in and of themselves. A red rose is an imagistic sigil, as is a craggy mountain, a thunderstorm, a sword, a skull, or a raven, to name just a few. Combinations of these images—a raven perched on a skull, say, or a red rose growing atop a mountain beneath a sky of lowering thunderheads—have a subconscious effect to all observers, no matter what his or her language and background.

Poetic sigils, on the other hand, are linguistically powerful; the sound of the word is the effective element rather than its meaning. Latin is full of poetic sigils; consider “requiem” and “veritas,” to name just a few. There is a reason so many mottos are converted into Latin; doing so gives them a sigilistic power they lack in common English. Certain combinations of words also have the effect of poetic sigils; “something wicked this way comes” and “these are the times that try men’s souls” are two famous literary examples. Poetic sigils depend heavily on the rhythm and tone of individual syllables; again, note the relationship to music.

Artists have always used sigils to great effect, but they are especially visible in literature. Poe, for example, was a master at the use of dark and ominous sigils throughout his writing—The Raven, for example, makes use of both imagistic sigils (the raven, the doorway) as well as poetic sigils (“quoth the raven: nevermore”) to great effect.

To take a more recent example, Stephen King makes heavy use of imagistic sigils in his Dark Tower series to instill the work with a sense of legend and antiquity it would not otherwise have. The book opens with a lone gunslinger crossing a barren desert; both the figure of the American-style gunslinger and a desolate desert are powerful imagistic sigils. The entire series is about a great black tower built in a field of red roses. Again, both are very powerful imagistic sigils—Tolkein also uses the dark tower sigil in his Lord of the Rings series.

Perhaps the purest use of both imagistic and poetic sigils is in the field of poetry. There have been few masters greater in this regard than the immortal T.S. Eliot; consider the following lines from The Wasteland.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Eliot uses several imagistic sigils to convey a feeling of desolation—the desert, the shadow, the dead tree, and dust—combined with a poetic structure so strong as to be a poetic sigil in and of itself. The result is the almost overpowering—and almost unexplainable—effect of reading Eliot’s work.

The audience comes to an artist to be changed. The indescribable way in which a reader’s subconscious is shaped is a direct effect—like the emotions of one listening to a great symphony—by the powerful magic of artistic sigils.

The Obsolescence of Masculinity, Concluded

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on" …

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

- “If,” by Rudyard Kipling

So. Is it over? Have we been emasculated? Is there any place left in our world for the old ideals of manhood? Is the very term “manhood” obsolete in this age of feminism and political correctness?

It is tempting to think so, for believing it frees us from the responsibility to do anything about it. We can sit back on our sofas and watch the football game or daydream to the theme of Fight Club. We can abandon the pretense and allow ourselves to be used where we are placed—passive sentence structure for terminally passive lives.

If you are nodding your head in resignation, you’ve already lost.

If, instead, a spark inside you lights at the thought of passivity, then perhaps there may be hope yet. The world is still a dark and very dangerous place, though now the darkness lurks further beneath the surface and the dangers are more subtle ones. Our culture’s need for true masculinity is all the more greatly felt simply because masculinity is more rarely seen.

So what is a real man? How is a real man different from the “average guy” and his pack? Simply put, it is a matter of growth. The “average guy” is still a boy; only those who have achieved true masculinity can be classified as “men.”

A boy wishes to be strong. A man strives to become strong through physical discipline and training.

A boy wishes to be smart. A man practices intellectual discipline to broaden his mind.

A boy wishes for someone to depend upon him. A man protects the weak because they are weak, not because he needs their weakness.

A boy hates civilization for keeping him from his manhood. A man takes responsibility for his own actions and his own state and thus is a man.

A boy wants everything he sees, and defines himself by what he owns. A man’s possessions are the result of his own discipline in labor; he needs none of them.

A boy tries to “be tough” and not show his feelings, to the point of being harsh and uncaring. A man shows his feelings, but is emotionally resilient—there will be times when those around him need him to be strong, and in those times he will be immovable.

A boy wants to be tough, and does foolish things to try to prove that he is. A man doesn’t need to prove himself, but also doesn’t need comfort—if something in his life requires intense pain to achieve, he will undergo it without complaint.

A boy wants to be respected; he acts in order to gain that respect and fit in. A man does as his principles and personal desires dictate, without needing the respect of others. Interestingly enough, his lack of need for respect usually generates far more respect than the boy’s actions ever will.

A boy needs many things, and consumes them without appreciating their quality. A man appreciates the qualities and subtleties of many things, but needs none of them.

A boy acts on his whims and on the pressure of his pack; what he does, he does to impress others or to fulfill the needs of the moment. A man acts on his principles, and does not deviate from them.

A boy, upon being informed of a flaw in his character, convinces himself that the accuser is wrong and acts defensively. A man acts upon the criticism. Self-deception is lost with boyhood.

A boy wants to destroy the shackles that hold him back from manhood. A man has the courage to realize that the only thing holding him back is his own apathy.

Maybe it’s time to stop fantasizing about destroying a society that is emasculating us. Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about what “they” are doing to us, period. Maybe it’s time to start doing something ourselves. Get off the couch, turn off the television, and let go of all the things you don’t need.

Civilization is waiting.

The Obsolescence of Masculnity (Part III)

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men
who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering.
Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing
cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy
shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history,
man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No
Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war...
our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been
raised on television to believe that one day we'd
all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But
we won't, and we're slowly learning that fact. And
we're very, very pissed off.

- Fight Club

Modern culture has lost its need for men to be men. Technology and societal infrastructures have shifted the requirements and leveled the playing field; the qualities of manliness that once made a man respected are no longer needed to live a comfortable life.

Even so, while society has eliminated the need for men to be men, the need for men to be respected as men is as strong as ever. It’s not good enough for a man to be “successful” or a “team player” or any of the other things that earn respect in society as a whole. Men need to be respected by other men as men; as tough, independent, and all of the other traits we’ve already discussed. This gets progressively more difficult as men become more and more entrenched in the corporate and modern family lifestyles, often leading to the “midlife crisis” problem so many modern Americans face.

Today’s men are fundamentally unsatisfied in a society that no longer needs them. The feeling that something is missing comes out in our daydreams; our art, our music, and our movies. We fantasize about the destruction of that which makes us obsolete with movies like Fight Club and Falling Down; what (we think) if we could simply break out of the routine and bring it all crashing down?

In Fight Club, infrastructure and consumerism are implicitly linked with emasculation; the main character starts a “fight club” that grows into a violent response to that as part of an attempt to return to masculinity through the collapse of civilization. “In the world I see,” Tyler Durden says, “you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Falling Down’s premise is even more simple; a white-collar government worker going postal in a violent rebellion against white-collar society. Though the movie treats Michael Douglas’ character as a criminal, there is still a strong element of sympathy for him as he guns his way through his oppressively normal life in southern California.

We sit and we watch; we cheer on Project Mayhem as it tears apart a fictional civilization on our television screens as we drink our beer and hang with our pack of friends and, in the end, do nothing of consequence.

Who are we, then? Angry, obsolete members of a society that no longer needs us, shaking our fists in impotent rage even as we are left behind, we modern men bemoan the loss of true manhood even as we do nothing to get it back.

The only question left is whether the real man has any place in today’s society. We’ll try our best to address that issue in our fourth and final installment to this series.

The Obsolescence of Masculinity (Part II)

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. - Aldous Huxley

A long way back in the misty reaches of history, the world was a dark and dangerous place. Humanity was composed of primarily small social groups – tribes of hunter-gatherer societies, villages, and the occasional small city.

In that life, survival was fragile. A wolf in a flock of sheep could snatch away an entire family’s subsistence for a year; a flu could wipe out a village; a raid by a rival tribe could mean the end of a culture.

The lack of infrastructure in societies like that meant a man had to fend for himself. He had to kill his own food, grow his own crops, and build his own shelter. Even when the rudiments of commerce began to emerge, a man still had to be independent enough to produce goods for barter.

Life demanded more than that, though. A man also eventually had a family, and had to be able to provide for their needs as well as protect them from danger. In essence, every man had to prove himself capable of living in a dangerous world. A boy, becoming a man, had to undergo long periods of survival in the wilderness, painful rituals, or any number of other experiences that showed him capable of raising his own family.

Look at the needs every man experiences, as covered in our last article. A primitive society fills every one of those needs. Difficult conditions produced strong, independent, tough men, and simple culture meant nearly every man eventually raised a family who he had to protect and provide for. Simply living this life gave him respect in the eyes of his peers, and culture was small enough that his “pack” was the other men of his tribe and their families. Society itself worked to produce men who were satisfied being men; men who failed in those areas were oddities, and often shunned by their peers.

Now let’s go back to Harold and the plight of modern man.

The modern world is quite a different one from the raw forests and deserts ancient man scraped a living from. Today, we have enough infrastructure in place that Harold doesn’t actually need to be independent. He can live off of welfare, his parents, a working spouse, or even the comfortable routine of a dead-end job. To not be independent is the path of least resistance, and humanity as a whole is – like water in a bed of sand and rocks – prone to take that path.

Harold’s need to protect and provide is met with the modern ideals of individual self-provision. In a world where the spirit and intellect are keys to life rather than physical strength, women are at least as capable as men, and Harold’s need to provide no longer has a natural outlet.

Even power is not necessary. A good job rarely requires much physical strength, and the sort of emotional toughness once needed to be a leader in a difficult world is ignored—if not outright discouraged—by today’s culture.

Modern society’s natural tendency, is no longer to produce real men; where such men exist, they are an aberration. With the rise of civilization, culture’s production of manliness has inverted itself.

The only need that can be met in modern society is the need for respect. Nearly all men need respect, and for most men, the only way to gain respect is to give it to others; this has produced the “pack” phenomena we spoke about in the last article.

This combination of psychological need with a lack of societal fulfillment of those needs has created a new sort of man – the “average guy.”

For the moment, though, we’re out of time. We’ll discuss the Average Guy and his response to the obsolescence of masculinity in our next article. Until then.

The Obsolescence of Masculinity (Part I)

A real man.

Your first thought is something along the lines of “He can’t start an essay with a sentence fragment!” You may be right. However, that’s not the point. Your disgruntled protest was accompanied by something else: an image.

That image was of what your idea of a ‘real man’ is. The lone gunslinger riding into Dodge, the knight in shining armor, the mountain man dressed in buckskin, or maybe even a more subtle figure from literature, like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Whatever the image, it wasn’t of a man sitting in an office working eight hours a day, five days a week, with benefits and a 401k.

As much as we may hate to admit it, modern society has lost its need for ‘real men.’ If no gunslinger rolls in to clean up town, if no knight stands forth to defend a sacred Honor, if no mountain man guides our path, if no Atticus Finch stands up for what’s right in the face of unified opposition, society scarcely takes notice; traffic still courses through the freeways of L.A., politicians still write their laws in Washington, and the stock market tickers on Wall Street glide by unperturbed. Business as usual.

This is the first essay in a four-part series discussing the plight of the modern man, his response to that plight, and a suggestion for his consideration.

To why the modern man – let’s call him Harold – is dissatisfied with his plot in life, we must first understand how he thinks. Easier said, you say, than done.

Harold – though he would ardently deny it if accused directly – is a very needy creature. Four of those needs form a significant portion of his problem with society.

The first thing Harold needs is to feel independent. In modern society, it’s very difficult to be truly independent; it’s too easy to rest on the supporting arms of welfare, parents, working spouses, or even the comfortable routine of a dead-end job. So, Harold resorts to displays. Look at any man living off of a successful wife, and you’re guaranteed to find someone “temporarily unemployed” or “trying to publish some writing” or “continuing an education.”

The second thing Harold needs is to provide for and protect someone else – preferably a female someone else. Sometimes the need for independence trumps this one, resulting in the sort of brash, uncaring modern man commonly referred to as “an asshole.”

Harold is not an asshole. Harold displays the need to protect by making displays of protection and provision towards any female he may be interested in. This may include giving her advice, “fathering” her by asking where she’s going and what she’ll be doing, fixing things for her, or any other number of gestures which may very well annoy the modern woman. If the woman rejects his protection – by fixing things herself, say, or ignoring his advice – Harold feels he has failed in his quest to be a ‘real man.’

The third thing Harold needs is power. Harold is an intellectual; he craves a powerful intellect. Other men may seek physical strength or political prestige, but it all boils down to the same basic desire.

Finally, and perhaps above all, Harold needs acceptance. This need is common to both men and women, but manifests itself in different ways. My crystal ball into the mind of women being temporarily misplaced, I asked Anna Joy for some insight into this distinction – one which she’ll be covering in more detail in a future essay.

For a woman, external appearances are an integral part of acceptance. Harold, on the other hand, may occasionally wish to be better looking, but on the whole doesn’t particularly care how he looks.

A woman often seeks acceptance by fulfilling the role she’s in. If she’s in a corporate position, her acceptance depends on how well she does at her job. If she’s caring for a household, her acceptance depends on her house.

Harold, on the other hand, just needs to be part of a ‘pack.’ He can fail miserably at work and feel fine with himself if he has a pack of other men to fit in with. In some packs, failing at work or school can even be reason for renown – look at the classic frat house mentality at many colleges. In short, Harold doesn’t so much need to be thought well of in general as to be thought well of by his pack. The more Harold fulfills the ideals of his pack, the more renown Harold has in their eyes, and the better he feels about himself in the end.

It’s these psychological needs that cause Harold’s dissatisfaction with the modern world. We’ll discuss the details of that dissatisfaction in our next essay.

Tune in, as they say, next time.

Prologue

Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange
Objects in the Cosmos – novas, quasars, pulsars, black
holes – you are beyond doubt the strangest?
- Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy

The planet Earth can be an exciting, odd, and occasionally terrifying place to spend one’s life. We live our lives one minute to the next, constantly regretting those things we’ve done and fretting over those things we have yet to do. We are never rich enough, smart enough, strong enough, brave enough, capable enough to do the things we want to do; we are always too poor, too stupid, too weak, too cowardly, too incompetent to prevent ourselves from doing those things we do not.

We look at our fellow human beings and, in the occasional flash of clarity, think to ourselves: my God, what a ridiculous species.

It’s all a blur sometimes, a jumble of discordant notes in a symphony that seems to have been written by a lunatic composer too short on sleep, and, quite possibly, suffering from substance abuse. We are an audience caught in a moment of chaos penetrated only occasionally by a few instances of rhythm and harmony; occasional markers pointing a work of such genius that the fringes of our comprehension can only begin to grasp it.

We, the writers of this blog, are only notes. In the essays that will follow, we will address questions of philosophy, psychology, and the human experience; we do this with the full knowledge that, like most humans, we are probably wrong.

Perhaps we might be permitted to spark a thought or two. If nothing else, you might find yourself entertained.