Blindfold on a Tightrope: Men's Myths & Men's Mysteries

CHAPTER ONE

You Must Learn to Like Your Penis

Where a Man needs to go there are no paths. Therefore this cannot be a guidebook or a map. A Mystery cannot be written down, or even told in words. It happens inside you, your response to the great dark empty spaces of the caves where the light of the fire does not reach.

In Women’s Mysteries there are guidebooks, there are maps, carefully devised to prepare the initiate for the journey. Women explain the journey to one another very carefully before embarking upon it. They secure the circle and guard against every untoward occurrence, helping each other at every step of the way. I believe these things to be good and proper in the conduct of Women’s Mysteries; yet even with so much preparation, the journey is a different thing from the description of the journey. The map is not the land itself.—Else why go to the trouble of the physical experience? Why not just read about it?

A Mystery cannot be written down, or even told in words. It must be walked through, observed for each Self. For each person the Mystery is different, like each person’s response to a work of Art. A woman can say to a woman: You will see the Mona Lisa. She will be seated, and she will have a smile. That will not prepare her for the actual experience of that smile upon the soul. A man can say to a man: You will see the Discus Thrower. He will be bent over, his arm held back, just so . . . That will not prepare him for the response of his own muscles to that tension, that imminence of motion.

Why then do you hold this book before you?

Because you are seeking, and though there cannot be any maps or guidebooks, there can be stories told of what happened away from the campfire. There can be fictions that lift you out of your Self and give you some intimation of the Mystery. That is how fiction works: reality distorted into truth. A romance novel is not a romance, but it gives one some idea of what the thing might be like. An adventure novel is not an adventure, but it shows what someone’s adventure might have been like.

Therefore, I ask you to let me entice you. I ask you to let me lead you in meditations that will give you glimpses, illuminations, flashes of light that in your mind’s eye may make pictures which in turn will lead you to set your feet upon dusky grasslands for which there are no maps. Let me cajole you to the edges of the precipice, while still you sit safely in that chair. And if I tempt you with these visions, perhaps you will open the door and walk out one day, not into daylight but into night, leaving behind the safety that the women have made, in the hope that you can bring back some treasure, some trinket: the leg of a mammoth, chunks of emerald crystal, the first ever stallion to be ridden, the tale of a wondrous land beyond the darkness and the mists and the howling of the sabertooth tiger.

And if, when you have read this all, there safe in your chair; if, when you have done all the strange things I will ask of you as you sit, alone, safe in your home; and if, when you have glimpsed what may wait outside the firelight: if then these things hold no attraction for you: well, so be it. In a land where there are no paths there is nothing to compel you to journey the same way I have, nor anything, indeed, to compel you to journey at all. You may remain secure inside the fire circle and never dare. Or you may find other darings I have not imagined, maybe even inside the circle of light the campfire makes. Did Homer not adventure more than most, beside the table and in blindness?

Just for now, humor me. Indulge my suggestions and give them some thought, as you might any other book on any other subject.

But why this apologia? Why this perambulatory style? Why this introduction, when, if you were not interested in this subject you would not have picked up the book?

Why would I strip you naked, paint your body with clay and herbs, and send you alone into an uncharted swamp, as I have done with many men? Why would I lead you up mountains in the cold of winter with no destination in mind? Why would I tell you to learn a game or a sport in which you have no interest, and from a totally alien point of view?

Because things you understand do not produce the response of Mystery, that is why. Here on the page I must find a means of unbalancing you in order to convey any of what I could readily do if you were walking beside me in the darkness. That is why this book is not organized like other books, not put together the way other books are put together. I am being deliberately unfamiliar, going against the structures and the forms which normally carry so much information, trying my best to throw things at you the way a pitcher throws a baseball at a batter.—I want you to swing at the ball I am throwing, but I also want you to miss. I must elicit reaction, not consideration, as my primary goal.

We are not here, possible brother, to shed light. We are here to explore the dark. We are here to become in connection with the deepest parts of ourselves, to reach below psyche for spirit, to touch the parts that make us separate beings, and just above that, the parts that make us uniquely male or female, depending.

(I realize that women will also be reading this book, just as men read books about Women’s Mysteries. It is my hope that understanding will result. It is always my intention that understanding will result, between all the different aspects of living being. I also realize that there will be things which will be offensive, both to women and to men. Differentiation into multiple selves guarantees diverse viewpoints, which I tend to view as mostly positive.)

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It is curious that I began this work at the request of women. Women who had fought hard for their own spirituality, just as they had fought for legal equality, financial equality, and social equality. They had come to discover, in discovering their Womanhood, that equality was, in certain areas, overbalancing. They had wrested rites of passage from the mists for themselves, but in so doing they noticed that the same rites were all but vanished for their male counterparts. They suggested that I go looking for the male equivalents to the work they were doing with femaleness, and the search led me, as in retrospect it plainly must, to areas not only equivalent but also areas totally unthought and decidedly different.

Tell me, what is the social and spiritual equivalent of the onset of menstruation, in the male? If the girl is welcomed into the tribe of Women when she exhibits physical evidence of the ability to achieve pregnancy, where is the equivalent ceremony of welcoming a boy into the tribe of Men when he exhibits physical evidence of being able to achieve pregnancy? (Why do we place so much weight, in language and custom, upon the female’s part in pregnancy: not, mind you, the nine months of labor, but just the act of becoming pregnant. And why are there any negative connotations to the reality? Please think of at least three new answers to these questions which you have never thought of before. It does not matter if they are realistic answers, it only matters that you think about the issues in new terms, right here and now.—Did you think I was joking when I said I would want you to do things as you read this book?)

Is not the boy’s social consciousness as important as the girl’s? Should he not be held in as much esteem, and required to be as much a member of the tribe as she?

Some readers may read the above in the light of political feminism. But I am not a feminist, though I support many feminist goals. If it has been read so, then please, man or woman, go back and read it with fresh eyes. Think about what I have said without the background of political agendas. Then think about it without the background of tradition, or historical precedent.

I am working toward a change in your consciousness. It is my hope that by the time you have stumbled around in the darkness long enough you will note that we do not live in a Patriarchy any more than we live in a Matriarchy. That each cherished position of our culture, here at the end of the Twentieth Century, is only a soap box. The soap box has been put there in the dark for the purpose of tripping you, making you stumble, barking your shins, making you curse whatever is at hand, and otherwise distracting you from that misappropriation of Mystery which our culture has made.

You are not supposed to notice that there are strings attached to your wrists and ankles. I want to show you how to cut the strings (if you want to cut them), and more, to take off the masks and try on others, or even, if you wish, to change your costume, thus changing your character. It almost smacks of transpersonal analysis, but it isn’t that. It’s more like ritual drama.

So let us begin, as one begins with a play, with the actors.

We have begun to see The Play About Women. They emerge around us with strengths and beauties that are different from the images painted upon them in the past. We watch them daily discover themselves anew, trying on new costumes, new characters, emblazoning themselves with the visage of the Great Goddess and sometimes even emerging to be Her priestess. That play unfolds, and to men who like women (and I do mean like, not merely lust after with tolerance) it is a wonder to behold.

Now let us turn to the Play About Men.

Now let us discover where are the men to fill the role of the Great God.

For I wish to make one thing very clear here, at the outset: There are no wimp Goddesses! How then should She who sings the music beyond the Moon be called upon to accept a Consort who is less than Herself?

Lesson One

You Must Learn to Like Your Penis

Our culture, our megaculture, is fraught with obscenity. There is virtually nothing that can be done that will not strike someone as obscene. Yet what is this obscenity? What is this thing that sends legislators hurrying to the forums to make new laws? And why is it so hard to define? So difficult to pin down, if it is so important?

In Kurt Vonnegut’s book God Bless You Mr. Rosewater there is a legislator who has achieved fame and power by defining obscenity very simply. To him (and because of him) obscenity is the depiction of body hair. Smooth bodies, to him, are not obscene. Pubic hair is.

I am sure that both you and I know people for whom the opposite is true. For whom pubic hair means nothing, but smooth skin where pubic hair might otherwise be is titillating. Let me therefore suggest that our culture’s definitions of obscenity are in themselves obscene, for the very definitions offered are based on individual response: i.e., if it doesn’t excite you it is not obscene. If it excites you in a manner of which you disapprove, then it is. I would submit that this is absolute, and further, I would submit that all those people who stand around being shocked are hypocrites. What they are recognizing in the material before them, whether film, play, picture or book, is their own response. They are not being shocked by what is before them, but by what they are feeling. And the revulsion they so richly display is only another example of hormones being pumped into a physical system at odds with the intellect inhabiting it.

In the 60s, in the early days of topless dancing in San Francisco, there was a beautiful Algerian dancer named Yvonne D’Ange. Someone once quipped that she represented two of the seven natural wonders of the world. She also went further in her ecdisiasty than the other dancers in Northbeach and the result was a raid by the police. (Why is it there is never enough money to defend women from rape and assault, but always enough to raid strip joints?)

As the police came on, armed to the teeth against the terrors of this diminutive dancer, she leaped upon a table, spread her legs, and announced to everyone assembled: My pussy is not obscene. No part of my body is obscene. God made all of me!

I site this story as a example of women’s liberation. Looking back from so much later it is perhaps hard for many to realize that women’s bodies, and particularly their genitalia, were, in those days, considered a priori, as obscene. Even ‘girlie’ magazines did not go so far as to actually depict the vagina. Even written material, hard core pornography, was delicate in its attempts to give description, resorting in the final effort to emotionally loaded pejoratives. Pejoratives, mind you, for there were no positively loaded words available. One still encounters the occasional throwback who longs for the ‘good old days,’ when ‘air was clean but sex was dirty.’

Now let us change the stage set. Now let us move into a theater in which it is men who dance on the stage. Such things did not exist in the 60s, except in the rare instances extant in the Gay subculture. Today there are places where men dance naked for the enjoyment of the audience, most often clubs that are open to women only. (And I would submit that such clubs are just as important meeting places for women executives cutting deals as are those men’s clubs which the women have outlawed as sexist and unfair.) I say naked, but I am forced to mean semi-naked, for that all-important distinction of male anatomy, the penis, is still regarded in our culture as a priori obscene. Most particularly is it regarded as obscene when in a sexually aroused state.

We have not yet had the part of the Play of Men when the dancer stands upon the table and says to the cops: My hard-on is not obscene. No part of my body is obscene. God made all of me.

Now let us stand back from the scene, and also stand back from this book. Let us listen to the minds saying, well, no, an erection is not the same thing as a vagina. An erection is aggressive, not passive like a vagina. If it were only a limp penis it would be a different matter. A vagina is not threatening. To which I reply: Double Bullshit! Young men and young women never look into the eyes of their early lovers. They are too intent on the stuff between their legs, and what the world has taught them about what they are supposed to feel and do. When they get older they are set in their ways, and may still never see the insecurity, the fear, the threat of the sex opposite.—And don’t tell me that what I say is untrue. Men, take off your macho for a minute: there is no one here to look, you are safe. Women, take off your calculation and defense, there is no one here to assault you, you are safe. After all, this is only a book. When you finish with it you can toss it away.

But why should an erection be obscene? Why any more than a vagina?

The answers to these questions are the reasons why you are reading a book about Male Mysteries. They are the reasons there are kid gangs killing each other in the streets of New York and Los Angeles, teenagers and older youths (up to the age of 80) dying of drug overdoses, why the family unit has become a legend rather than a support group.

And no, I don’t propose to give you the answers to these problems and tell you how to solve all of society’s ills. One cannot give anybody answers, only palliatives. One can only ask questions which, with luck, will cause dissatisfaction, then response, then a seeking for answers from the unique perspective of the individual.

Always remember that my answer may not be your answer. Mysteries come out of you, not out of me. I only set the stage. You respond to the play.

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Now, before we go any further, let’s try coming to grips with that basic reality between your legs. Not in a complex way, not in a spiritual way (yes, later we will discuss Your Dick As a Source of Divine Spirit), but in a simple considerate way. If you are a woman reading this book, the next part will seem a little distant, but don’t let that stop you from reading it.

My male friend, I here assign you an exercise: read the rest of this chapter with an erection.

I don’t care how you achieve it, I don’t care what kind of fantasy or equipage you may require, the purpose of the exercise is not to produce an orgasm but only to familiarize yourself with a part of your anatomy you perhaps think you know, but which I am willing to suggest you probably don’t. If you want to move into the realm of the spirit you have to know your way around the temple, and it is an old mystical adage that the body is the temple of the spirit. Further, if you want to know that part of your spirit that differentiates as male, you have to know that part of your body which is emblematic of maleness, namely your erection: as opposed to the limp penis.

This exercise will require two things of you which are a part of your innate nature, and which, if you are over seventeen, you may have forgotten. One is the independence of the God Phallus. He appears just as well while you are reading a math book as when you are out with your partner of choice of the moment. The other is your ability to exist as a separate being from the presence of Phallus, a thing which our culture invests enormous amounts of energy in convincing us to forget. You can think of something besides sex, and it is neither wrong nor unmasculine to do so.

Safe, behind a closed door, with no one to observe, I here empower you to admit to yourself that there are other things as interesting as sex, and that you can think of them, even while your cock is hard.

So, now, get it up!

(And to the women reading this book: You also may wish to provide yourself some sexual arousal while reading the rest of this chapter. I do not know what the result of this will be, possibly the acquisition of some new Mystery. I do not know what the interior reality of a woman is like, and I have never read a book or talked to anybody who could help me understand that. The closest I have come is to understanding some of the social experience, and that through the paradigm of science fiction, where excellent writers like Octavia Butler are able to say more than any number of social tracts ever communicate.)

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Now it is time for a meditative exercise.

Feel (I don’t mean grab or pump) your erection. Think what it feels like, experience it not as a condition on the way to something later but as a state, as a presence. Not an incomplete thing, not a part of the sex act, but as a thing in and of itself.

If you have not been able to achieve erection, and maintain it while reading this text, that’s okay. Use your memory. You have, after all, been living in a world that has told you since day one that you’re not supposed to have a hard on. You have had one anyway, somewhere along the way, so link in to the memory and use that. Human beings are wonderful creatures and they can almost always find a way around difficulties, when their culture has not convinced them that they can’t.

Now, while conscious of that firm, hard, filled physical feeling, try and remember a spiritual experience. It might be First Communion, if you are Catholic. It might be Giving your Soul to Jesus if you are a Fundamentalist. What might it be if you are Jewish? (I mean that question: give me an answer, a real answer.) If you are Buddhist, Moslem, Pagan? It might be the First Sight of the Mountains, or the Ocean, or the Majesty of a Storm. In the Old Testament we see that angels