A MAN

With so many insecure and wounded little boys running around the place these days, posing as men, it's refreshing to meet a real one.  We did, last night.  Sadly, he was a man in bereavement, so I must be careful to respect his privacy; more in a moment.  In the meantime, I woke this morning thinking that it would be useful, on this new blog "about men," to reflect a little on what I mean by that.

I tend to assess a man's character based on what I judge to be his integrity.  By "integrity," I mean, in the idiomatic phrase, "having it all together"; and by "it" I mean the four basic qualities that constitute the fullness of the human experience: the intellectual, the physical, the emotional, the spiritual.  To lack any one of them, or to have these qualities in some way out of balance, is to lack the integrity, the "togetherness" I'm talking about.  What those wounded little boys who pose as men most frequently lack is the connection to their emotional lives, and they wreak a whole lot of damage on those they purport to love--and, needless to say, upon the world at large.  Think George W. Bush.  Think Vladimir Putin.  Think other world "leaders"whose damaged egos lead us into wars...

So it was good to be sitting on our balcony last night, as the sun set, and getting to know a man who had just arrived in our lives.  No need, at all, to say more about him than that he was a man bereaved of his partner in life, the man whom he had loved, and with whom he had lived for the past ten years. We listened, rapt, as he told us of his loss with both poise and dignity, and with frequent moments of undisguised emotion.  There was no attempt to disguise, or minimize, his grief and pain.  We listened, too, as he read letters of profound wisdom and consolation from a distant, previously unknown sympathizer--a person whom he discovered to be a woman who had made the decision to live her life as a man.

And I found myself reflecting on all this, this morning, as I woke.  How our manhood has little to do with who we love, or even what we have between our legs.  To be a man belongs to what is within, a sense of self, a inner clarity about who one is and where one belongs in the world.  A man's strength derives not from the macho posturing that is often mistaken for strength, but rather from his security and the vulnerability this allows, from his compassion, his sense of purpose, and his dedication to the service of something greater than himself.

So when I write "about men," this is the kind of man I think about, the standard by which I measure other men.  I know that I'll be writing frequently about those little boys, because they are so many.  But I'll be holding them to the standard of a man such as I have just described.

THE LEAP

BIRDMAN, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance: a Film Review

So much to write about these days, when you start writing about men, as this blog seeks to do!  Apple CEO Tim Cook's courageous act in coming out as a gay man would warrant an entry in itself; and I've been thinking a lot about the Frontline special that I watched, The Rise of Isis.  Then there are three exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that I saw last Friday, two of them provoking further thoughts about men at war.  If all goes well, I'm planning to write about them next week.  And I didn't have time for the exhibit of Samurai armor!  More testosterone to think about...

Today, though, I'm choosing to put down some thoughts about the movie Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) by the Mexican born director Alejandro González Iñárritu.  Along with the rest of the audience at the performance I saw last night, I sat stunned into silence while the end credits ran.  The film was that powerful, that intense.  It had had so much publicity by now that it is almost unnecessary to note that it's about an aging actor, Riggan Thomson (superbly played by Michael Keaton), like Keaton himself a one-time action movie ("Birdman") idol, now struggling to recover something of his earlier success and fame with the production of his own stage adaption of a Raymond Carver story.

At one level, this is a classic (Jungian) hero's journey: descent, ordeal, return.  The descent is triggered by a stage accident that makes way for the hubristic Mike (Edward Norton) to step in as replacement for an injured actor and provoke chaos in the play's preview run.  The clash between the desperately insecure and needy Riggan and the imperious, sneeringly confident Mike is complicated by fellow cast members, wives and women, including Riggan's flirtatious daughter (a great acting job by Emma Stone) who challenge, sometimes mock, the fragile male egos of the lead men.  The ordeal is Riggan's.  Tormented by the voice of his taunting alter ego, the superhero Birdman, he vacillates between his desire for the success and adulation he once knew, and despair and the impulse to self-destruction.  It's a powerful inner battle, and he ages visibly as it progresses.  The director stages it for the most part in the confines of the theater's dingy backstage, where Riggan slugs it out with both his inner voice and--sometimes literally--with his outer nemesis, Mike, in the interminable, ill-lit corridors and claustrophobic dressing rooms.  As a metaphor for the twisted passages and chambers of a tortured mind, the director's use of this location works to unsettling perfection.

In part the struggle is between reality and artifice, between the actor and the roles he plays, between the small stage in the theater and the great stage of the world out-there.  Mike chastises Riggan for being lost in artifice--but he himself is the shell of a man, who exists only as the character he inhabits.  Unable to "get it up" in the context of his real life as a man, he's ready for sex, inappropriately, on stage.  Riggan is agonized by his ambition and his unsatisfied--insatiable--need for recognition, but also guilt-ridden for having sacrificed wife and family (his daughter) on the altar of his actor's ego.  Goaded by Mike, he loses himself in the gap between the real and the imagined--and it is this nightmarish confusion that leads to the startling climax of his ordeal and costs him, possibly, his life.

But this is not purely psychological drama or social realism.  It's the element of Latin magical realism that makes this production more fraught with symbol, more intense, more internal, and more lyrical.  Riggan is gifted, or imagines himself gifted with supernatural powers: he can shift objects with his mind, throw them up against the wall, summon images of events and beings that have no basis in the real world.  In strictly psychological terms, we'd call him schizophrenic.  But he's more than that--he is, in a real sense, a super hero; perhaps, to be more exact, a meta-hero, the exemplar of conflicted human being, caught between raw existence and the hunger for transcendental meaning.  He's exceptional, like all heroes, yet also Everyman--for who, among us, has not in his mature years nursed regrets for what might have been, for what seems now so hard to achieve, if not beyond our reach.  It is to Michael Keaton's great credit that he pulls this off, creating a character who inspires profound compassion.

So about that leap...  At the beginning of the film--and it passed too quickly for me to have remembered the words exactly--there was the suggestion that nothing great will come without that leap that characterizes risk, the staking of everything we have.  And at several moments throughout the film, we see characters literally or metaphorically confronted by that leap.  At the end (don't ask, you must see this for yourself) we find Riggan on the high ledge of a hospital room, looking out into the void, and ready, now, to take the leap.  For him, this is the leap that will free him from everything that has tortured him: his ambition, his failures as a man, a husband, a father, the one-time mega-success that is now beyond his grasp.  And what will make it possible for him to finally take that leap is the realization of the love he longed for and was unable to find because of if "ignorance"--the ignorance of the film's subtitled--that has blinded him to the truth of his own love for others and the love that others, he now understands, have for him.  In his hero's journey, this is the moment of truth, the moment of return, of salvation of a kind.

You may be as initially surprised as I was, as the final credits rolled, to see the name of the well-known Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh included in the list of to whom the film's creators wished to express their gratitude.  On second thoughts, though, the inclusion seems natural and credible.  The central teaching of the Buddha asserts that suffering is inevitable for us human beings, but that there is a path to the release from suffering.  It is this letting-go of pain, in the final scene of the film, that the hero finally achieves.

And the rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.  Which, as noted above, is how we were left, as an audience, as the final credits ran.  In stunned silence.  Birdman will remain in my memory as one of the truly great movies I have been fortunate enough to see.

WOUNDED LEADERS: A Book Review

(I posted this a while ago on The Buddha Diaries.  It also appeared on The Huffington Post.  But it seems appropriate here… PC)

Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion, by Nick Duffell.

First, don’t assume from this book’s subtitle that is irrelevant to us here in America, or to our leadership.  It is of vital relevance, no matter the specificity of his target.  Nick Duffell’s title will have resonance for anyone who has lived through the past couple of decades in America and watched our own wounded

leaders in action--or, more correctly, inaction.  That said--and we'll come back to this--his central argument is that the boarding-school educated governing elite in Britain are themselves unconsciously governed by the lasting wounds incurred by the experience of being sent away from the family at an early age, and placed in a militaristic environment in which they learn to protect themselves from a hostile outer world.  

I can speak to this.  I am what Duffell aptly refers to as a Boarding School Survivor.  As a practicing psychotherapist, he has a long-standing practice designed to bring such people back from their emotional disorientation and isolation.  I could have used his services, long ago, but had to discover my own path through this maze.  I was sent away to school at the age of seven, and by the time I escaped to freedom at the age of eighteen, I had received a remarkable head-oriented education but remained what I often describe as an emotional cripple.  I had learned the costly and dangerous art of evasion and emotional invulnerability.  As a seven- or eight-year old, I could not afford to do anything but suppress the feelings that would open me up to attack from my fellow-boarders: fear, anger, sadness, grief, the terrible pain of being separated from parents who assured me that they loved me—even though it was hard to understand the paradox of being loved and yet exiled from the family, the locus of that love.

The result of my excellent education was that I never grew up.  Rather, it took me another three decades before I realized there was something wrong with living like a turtle in a shell.  Boarding School Survivors, as Duffell describes them, are stunted individuals so caught up in their heads that they remain disconnected from their hearts.  I simplify his profoundly well-informed and subtle arguments, whose bottom line is that Britain’s ruling elite, boarding-school and Oxbridge-educated, are supremely unqualified to lead in our twenty-first century world because they get so intently focused on their distorted, rational vision of national and global issues that they remain impervious (invulnerable) to the bigger picture of human needs.  They are unable to listen, to empathize with others than themselves and their own kind.  They are guided by the certainty of their own sense of rectitude.  To doubt, to question, to have a change of heart is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is the last thing in the world they can allow themselves.  (Duffell’s final chapter, on doubt, is particularly eloquent and on-target.)

I am admittedly unqualified to evaluate the more technical aspects of Duffell’s argument.  To this reader, he seems impressively knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest discoveries of neuroscience and academic psychology.  He draws on a broad understanding of the philosophical development of rationalism and its critics, the countervailing social movements of repression and rebellion, and contextualizes his argument in that historical perspective.  In our contemporary times, his exemplars are primarily the likes of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, England’s current Prime Minister David Cameron, and London Mayor Boris Johnson, whose attitudes and actions are profoundly—and in Duffell’s view—mistakenly reactionary.  As he sees it, they bully and bluster their way past opposition into futile military actions and social programs that enrich the already privileged and wealthy and contribute to the continuing impoverishment of the needy.  No wonder the England he describes is an angry country.

Late in the book, Duffell expands his vision of an entitled elite to include brief reference to American leaders—in particular, of course, George W. Bush, whose blind and reckless pursuit of a delusory obsession rushed us headlong into the war with Iraq.  The disastrous results are with us today, in the form of a Middle East in unending turmoil.  Looking at America today—a nation of people surely as angry as the British—I’d argue that what Duffell calls the Entitlement Illusion is by no means limited to British elitism.  Our leaders must also be counted amongst the wounded.  Our leadership is dominated by the squabbling of little boys who have never grown beyond the need to protect themselves and their own territory from those who do not agree with them.  Our political problems are the same as those Duffell describes in his country: militarism, misguided and prejudicial rationalism, a lack of empathy for the poor and underprivileged, an assumption of rectitude that rejects other views without a hearing, an angry rejection of doubt or reappraisal of previously held views.

Entitlement, I’d argue, is not the exclusive property of the British elite.  I myself believe it’s also, more broadly, a factor of historical male privilege, the patriarchal tradition.  There is a persistent myth in our culture that sees men as rational beings, in control of events, capable, practical, while women are (still, in the eyes of too many of us men) perceived as irrational, guided by emotion rather than reason, and therefore less competent in leadership positions.  Duffell argues passionately for a middle path, one that minimizes neither reason nor emotion, but balances the intelligence quotient with the emotional quotient, the head with the heart, reason with compassion and empathy.  I agree with him, that unless we as a species can find that balance, we are in for dangerous times ahead.  His book is a timely and important reminder of the need to “change our minds” in a fundamental way, and open ourselves to the powerful--and practical--wisdom of the heart.  I sincerely hope that the book will find readers beyond the native country of which he writes.  Its insights are profoundly needed everywhere, throughout the globe.

LOST MAN

An intriguing news item: a middle-aged man attends a Denver Bronco football game. At half-time, he simply disappears--with, apparently, no credit card, little cash, and only the clothes he's wearing.  He has no mobile, and therefore can't be reached by phone.  Police efforts to trace him as a missing person fail to find him. His disappearance attracts national media attention: CNN, Fox News, ESPN all carry the story, but apparently he's not watching television news…

A week goes by before he finally shows up.  A man "fitting his description" is found in a Kmart parking lot, a hundred miles from the site of his disappearance.  Police reported that he was found in good health, "speaking and answering questions intelligibly that were asked of him."  Without any personal means of transportation, he seemingly walked for most the the hundred miles.  His explanation: that he'd gotten bored with the football game and decided to go for a walk.  He was looking for "somewhere warmer" and had been sleeping in "tree'ed areas and bushes" along the way.

Paul Kitterman, Broncos fan

My fantasy?  The man's a delightful dreamer.  I like his generous mustache, and the crow's feet that seem caused more by good humor rather than age.  (Oh, yes, he's only 53.)  I can't blame him for leaving the football game: the last one I saw myself was a total bore.  Now that the NFL is so thoroughly commercialized, there seems to be an interminable wait between every play while the television stations air their ads.  The actual action on the field is pretty minimal and predictable.  So much for football.  It would take an awful lot of self-supplied testosterone to get a kick out of it.

But look at his smile.  Beatific, almost, wouldn't you say? He's happy to have his back to the football field behind him.  What are they doing, anyway?  Measuring the yardage?  Moving the chains?  The men in black seen strolling across the field give a sense of suspended action.  And look at those half-empty stands.  Not a great deal of excitement there, either.

So he left.  Wandered off.  Found more interesting and engaging things in his own head.  A hundred-mile walk!  What a concept!  I imagine him strolling off with his beatific smile through the parking lot and out into the surrounding neighborhood.  He barely notices his fellow pedestrians, let alone the cars.  He's happy when he finally reaches the edge of the suburbs and strides out into the countryside.  He breathes in the air, finally unleashed from the city's grip, feeling better than he has for years.  He's alone.  No one to talk with, no one to talk at him.  No bad news to be subjected to!  No ISIS!  No election politics!  No hatred and contention!  A kind of ecstasy…

If it feels so good, then why go back?  What better than to keep on going, into the dusk, the twilight, soon the night?  What better than to make a bed amongst the fragrant pine needles, perhaps looking up into the starlit sky?  To fall asleep untrammeled by the usual trappings of the civilized life!  To wake, at dawn, to the sound of birds?  Ah, this is living…

I'm probably romanticizing.  Maybe the poor guy had a hell of a week, fighting off the cold and hunger.  He had little enough money, no credit cards, how could he have even stopped at wayside restaurants to eat?  Perhaps he got tired of the dirty clothes and the sore feet.  Still, no sign that he was begging for help when he was "found."  No sign of physical or mental distress.  Was his dream shattered by his discovery?  Was he secretly hoping NEVER to "go home"?

There's no telling, of course.  All I have are the media reports.  He'll probably show up on the Today Show in a few days' time, to be interviewed by Matt Lauer about his wayward ways.  But I hope not.  I hope that he stays silent.  And I hope he never loses that beatific smile.