Male Fears #3 - The Cuckold: Darkest Heart of Human Failure

One of a guy's greatest fear, at least the way I see it from my own masculine mind and experiences and reflections, is the fear of his girlfriend or wife being with another man sexually, allowing another man to touch her in her most private places, invading and volating not just herown physical being but the bond of trust and faith that had once bound the two together. True, you could argue that this fear might relate to a man whose girlfriend or wife is not sexually unfaithful, but is emotionally unfaithful, but that is a little harder to define, or even prove, whereas physical fidelity is provable, and creates much more of an impact on the male psyche. (Not to say women don't feel as devastated, but I'm only concerned with the male mind here.)

One of the main fears a man has about being a cuckold is based on the fact that the entire notion of faithfulness is based upon physical fidelity, the promise of one lover to another that they will only let the other touch their body for reasons of passion and carnal pleasures. Two people who committ to each other promise their physical beings to one another, to be touchd and pleasured and held and kissed and felt only by themselves. When you think about it, it almost seems rediculous, absurd, artifical, socially constructed or invented, unnatural, that another person would have this right over our own body, that another person could lay claim to our physicalbeing and demand that this body is not to be toched by another person on this planet, and only he or she can touch it. From where else in nature other than the human mind or human social/cultural system would such a restriction originate?

Something weird happens to a man who is insecure and fears the worstof all possible fears, his girlfriend, his woman, sleeping with another man, giving up her body to a stranger or even a recent lover or previous boyfriend, allowing her most privateness to be opened and revealed and touched and made to make her feel pleasure, her giving it upand giving herself over, her entire body, to another. On some dark deep level he fears as if his whole self is being destroyed, as if his whole meaning was based upon his abilty to wina woman and hold her with him, satisfy her enough on alllevels so she would not need another man. For her to be wth another man means he has failed, he is weak, he has failed.

The Curse of Memory

So many things you look for in life, or want, or desire, seems to be not some immediate thing or future goal but rather a recapturing, refocusing, resuscitation of a memory. You had an experience, and by nature of being a young, these experiences seem in retrospect electric, powerful, immense, dramatic, extra proportional, large. Back then you were still not quite awake yet, your consciousness was still in the process of awakening from the sleep of childhood - indeed, much of life is an awakening of our consciousness, finding out who we are, wondering what it means to be alive and exist as a being in the world. Because we are not quite awake when we experience things, we can't quite remember what exactly it was that happened to us, as if this remembered life of ours happened to a stranger, appearing as an almost recognizable actor moving about in random images of some helter skelter movie playing in our heads. In retrospect, these experiences seem magical, special, better than what we are experiencing now, the bland mundane day to day routine and habitual of our lives today.

This is what the Romantics were about, dealing with the magical memory of the past, the personal past, in contradistinction to what had previously been taken care of with religion, the Christian religion, where our past as a spiritual species was all divinely documented and clarified in the myths of Genesis. God as son of man, Man as child of God, sinful, but with good behavior promised a place in heaven and deliverance from evil and material, corporeal suffering. But once Enlightenment rationalism, science, and philosophy popped our mythic consciousness and woke us up, there was indeed a vacuum fore those unable to trust and perceive with the ancient mythic mind - this was a monumental rupture (i.e., Modernism, with origins in the Renaissance) of the very fabric of our organ of consciousness, the way we understood nature, God, man, and all of reality, really. What replaced God was a set of rational, mechanical laws and rules that basically placed man as merely a cog in a great big unthinking machine, which God may or may not have created and set in to place, but then walked away from to let it runs its course.

So the Romantics, thoroughly bowled over by the knockout punch delivered by the rationalistic Enlightenment religion busters, started to seek the god like in nature, in the child, the innocent glory of a child and his pleasures, this haunting little image of us as a child that follows us around as adults and reminds us of a glorious, golden age, this little child the father to our man in that all he experienced as a child formed who we are and now that we are no longer the child, we still yet remember how joyful he was, how unconscious and without care, without thought and doubt, perfectly unworried in his feelings, unaware of impending death and the dissolution of his own body, of mortality. The Romantic poem was a revival, a reconjurance of this image of this us-child, the feelings and emotions that were so powerful then and still have the power to affect us today as an adult. The image of us as a youth and the remembered glory and dream of the visionary gleam we once had in our eyes not only pollutes our minds with impossible and love-sick yearnings and desires for a past that is completely gone from the world, at its worst acts like a movie projector, like a shadow on the wall, this image our ourselves and the magic surrounding those memories adds a glow and image to everything we see, all the people we know and the goals we try to reach, all colored by the glowing image of the child within us, distorting the color of reality, reshaping our worlds, as we try to make our adult lives live up to the person myths of our own rosy beginnings.

Wordworth's take, oratorically busting out his vision, :

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Coleridge break it down for us, slightly more mystical and lyrical:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Caucasian Trash Rememberance # 44 - James, Dirt, the Desert Bus Stop

Growing up in Apple Valley, California meant riding the bus to school, for a long time. For whatever reason, where we lived was right within the border of Apple Valley school district lines, one block away from Victorville school district lines (a neighboring, rival town), so our family had to go to Apple Valley Schools. Neither school was that far away, but because we had to pick up some kids way far out in the boondocks, the entire bus ride to school and home each way was over an hour long. Even as a small kid, it was a long ride in the desert, a desert with not much to look at other than a very large and wide open landscape. A lot of time to do nothing but look at the long dirt fields and open skies and think.

People often ask me where I am originally from, and I say "the desert, Southern California." And when they ask what town or city, I say Apple Valley. Invariably they will say: "Apples? In the Desert? HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW." They always think that's very funny.

So many of my memories from 6th grade (when we first moved to the desert) onwards are about walking down in the bright desert morning to the bus stop. I quickly made a friend named James, who lived across the street from us. His parents for some reason called him "Toby," which was also the name of our Irish Setter dog. I always felt a little awkward about that. James was a nice guy - quiet, shy, adopted. Chinese, I think, though I never asked him. Even in the 6th grade, he had the beginnings of a very thin but noticable pencil moustache. His parents were old white people, senior citizens. To this day I have no idea where he came from or what his origins were. He wasn't much for words. We sort of became pals, by default.

We never really became deep close friends; just the kind of friends who hung out because we rode the same bus and lived across the street from each other. I think I went into his house once in the 6 years I knew him, but as little 6th grade desert dudes we would walk around the large desert fields together and break beer bottles, run from wild dogs, throw rocks at jack rabbits, build little dirt caves and make candles. We had discovered a small ditch in the field by our houses, put plywood and over the top, then brush to hide it, and we'd hide out there in the summer and dig holes in the ground to melt candles into them in order to make weird shaped desert dirt candles. I think I gave one of them to my mom once, and she being the great mom that she was, pretended to be very pleased with my misshapen dirt gift and put it in her bedroom, on the window sill that looked out over the old cactus path outside my parents' window. "It's very nice, Pat. Thank you."

I only remember small things about James, about meeting at the bus stop each day for school. I cannot to this day recall anything I said to him, or anything we really had in common. He was quiet, solitary, introverted, not a popular guy. Had big glasses. Not the most fashionable clothes. Eventually in High School became he blended into the stoners and heavy metal crowd. He started smoked pot and had a dazed look on his face, and made him even quiter. Sometimes as we got in high school, he'd smoke before the bus came. He never warmed up to punk rock, as I did. I tried to enlighten him to the Sex Pistols, but back then to like such a band was heretical to a head banger. I could tell he did not like them.

When we rode to school on the bus, as soon as we got on the bus he would sit neare the front, where the quiet and nerdier kids sat, safer and closer to the bus driver. All the cooler kids and tougher kids sat in the back, to be rowdy and wild and talk and laugh. I sat in the back, being more of a popular kid. I used to watch James sometimes as he sat by himself, and he'd sit and stare out the window, looking down, sort of sad,watching the desert dirt ground pass by.

One morning, in 6th grade we all had to bring a present to school for a gift exchange for Christmas. I forgot to bring something, and so James and I improvised a terrible gift out of an emtpy Coke bottle filled with dirtand rocks. James ran back to his house to got some wrapping, and when we got to class, I quickly put the dirt gift under the tree. I remember the kid who got it crying and then the teacher, Mr Mandolini (who had huge black eyebrows eternally encrusted with chalky white dandruff) lecturing the class on what a mean thing this was and how it's a bad thing to hurt people's feeling and that no good would ever come out of such actions. For shame, he said, For shame. James and I did our best not to look at each other during the public shaming addressed to the whole class, but secretly meant for us.

Another day, when our bus stop had changed when we went to high school, there was a stop sign right by the stop. James and I got bored, so we picked up a bunch of rocks and started chucking them into the stop sign at close range. BAMMM!! BAMMM!! BAMMMM! A lady came out of her house in her bathrobe and a cup of coffee, glaring, and said, "What the FUCK are you doing????" We dropped the rocks in our hands, and silently turned around. We were not very brave vandals.

One of my last memories of James was when we had a party at our house. We had started playing guitars and jamming with various musicians, when parties and girls were just starting to become big in my life. Within hours of my parents leaving for the weekend, we had rolled a chilled keg into the garage and set up our band in the living room, and the party was in full swing. Girls everywhere. Friends slamming beers. Me and my brother and our usical crew jamming loud music. The house was packed. I noticed James show up and saw that he had a special beer mug. I smiled at him and said "right on, dude." I knew he was shy and wondered if he would mingle with the girls. From time to time I would see him, standing alone with his special beer mug, observing the groups of people laughing, the crowd at the kitchen table playing quarters, couples making out, burly older dudes doing beer bongs,people shooting tequila. More and more I would notice him near the keg. As the night wore on and we became more and more drunk and blurry, people had been telling me, "Pat your friend is passed out on the front lawn." I hadn't really paid attention to it much, because someone else had told me, "Pat, your friend is passed out in the bathtub." How could I expect to be responsible for all the passed out people? Were these the same person? Two different friends? I had lots of friends.

Later around 4:00 a.m., I remember going on the front lawn and seeing James there, all rolled up and dirty and grassy, twisted up and mumbling in a small dusty heap. His special beer glass was a few feet away, as were his glasses. Both were caked with dirt, as were his clothes, apparently from spilt beer and his own vomit. I picked up his mug and glasses and went to him. I tapped him and we looked at each other. I handed him his glasses and asked him if he was OK. He said yes, and then got up, I handed him his special beer mug and he walked across the street in the night to his house. That's my last memory of James.