#28 | Patriarchy In A Time With No Father - Stephen Jenkinson (Come of Age)
“The subtleties of [our] dilemmas should survive our attempts to understand them.”
My guest today is Stephen Jenkinson, a culture activist, teacher and author, and principle instructor of The Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy. He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
Stephen’s most recent books are the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), and Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018).
I first encountered Stephen back in 2012, when a friend invited me to a summer teaching that was close to my home in Vancouver. That first morning, he gathered us at first light and told a story about the sun, rising. I was never to be the same again.
That meeting has altered my life completely. That winter, I joined the Orphan Wisdom School on his farm in Ontario, and have returned to many gatherings and teachings over the years. I have also produced numerous short films on Stephen’s work, including The Meaning of Death, the Making of Humans, and Lost Nation Road (2019).
If you’ve listened to this podcast for some time, you know that I usually quote Stephen at least once an episode. And this interview has been a long time coming - largely because I wished to record it in person, and not over Zoom.
I finally had that opportunity last September when I travelled to Ontario on a whirlwind trip to the farm. If you’d like to hear more of that story, I’ve shared an additional recording which is available to my Patreon supporters.
For now, I’m very pleased to share our conversation, where we explore personal and profound territory, including: the lost origins of the mythopoetic men’s movement, the times Stephen met Robert Bly and James Hillman, the deep etymology of the word ‘patriarchy’, and the mythic understanding that a culture needs its fathering, as much as it needs its fathers.
And so, enjoy my conversation with Stephen Jenkinson.
LINKS
Orphan Wisdom - All Stephen’s films, essays, and books
Lost Nation Road - short film by Ian MacKenzie
The Meaning of Death - short film by Ian MacKenzie
The Making of Humans - short film by Ian MacKenzie
JOIN THE MYTHIC MASCULINE NETWORK
SHOW NOTES
You begin in the light
The strange ways of men
My grandmother’s brothers
Kids will seek out some recompense for what's missing at home
An audience with Robert Bly
What happened to the Sixties (they graduated)
Society or the inner life
The violation of James Hillman
Masculinity and Femininity are ways of inquiring
Beowulf and strong female characters
The etymology of patriarchy
The culture needs its fathering, as much as it needs its fathers
We are heirs to our ancestry
Poverty is a legitimate beginning
You are not in charge of your happiness
An old Zen teaching story
Will you die as a father?
The indirect thing is the godly thing
Why does Patrimony come first
The Masculine can’t survive the desecration of the Feminine
Courtship is a case-making proposition
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
IM: [00:03:48] Welcome, Stephen, to the show.
Stephen Jenkinson: Ian, welcome. I welcome your welcome, since we're actually sitting in my hall, but it's great to. I never thought you'd ask.
IM: I would love for you to describe for the listener where we are right now.
Stephen Jenkinson: We're in the all but defunct teaching hall of the all but defunct Orphan Wisdom School. Yeah. It's a hand-hewn, post-and-beam building. No metal to speak of at all in it, except for the tin roof. You're sitting across from the last carving that I did in one of the beams, it's 20...oh no, about 36 feet long that, over three beams. And you can see the writing from here.
Well, the amazing thing for me was, when I was laying it out and then doing it, I never pictured that I'd carve words anywhere here. I never thought about it, but it was never in my mind to do it, but this is a quote from, well, me. Are you allowed to say that? This is me saying this. Yeah, and it came from I think it was Come of Age.
I'd written it and sent it in and the editor sent it back and said, you're missing the attribution for this epithet that's up here. And I wrote back and I said, no, it's not missing an attribution. And then they wrote back and said, well, where'd you get it from? And, I wrote back and I said, I don't know, but as far as I can tell, I come up with it on my own. They wrote back, are you sure? And I wrote back and said, this is the last time you should ask me that.
Yeah. So it says, “You begin in the light. You end in wisdom, if the gods are prevailing. Otherwise, light.” Yeah. So it's a serious business, right? It's a real challenge to the age to imagine that if you prevail in the pursuit after light, you may do be doing so at the expense of gods presence in your enterprise.
I would do without the light, if I was forced to choose, and often I am. But the thing I noticed when I got a part of it up, at each end there's a zoomorphic ensemble, right? Monsters and such. And I realized that I could feel my brain change. Not just change gears, but change it's very understanding of itself and what it was doing when I went from all of the imagery here to reading. It was a stunning interruption. You could say that there was something about reading writing that was highly intolerant of the image. And I really caught a glimpse into the history of literacy as we've talked about it in [The Orphan Wisdom] School.
The only thing that came close to reminding me of this is the very first time I put a fence in one of the fields here on the farm. The fence posts was one thing, but when we heaved up the wire fence and it ran down the length and I saw it up like that, I felt two things at the same time. One of them was, man, we're somehow enclosed, as a relief. Then, oh god, we're somehow enclosed, as if now, mysteriously, the pagan life forces are on the outside and I'm on the inside looking out, so to speak. It's very similar. Amazing.
And so even though nobody's coming around anymore and who knows what'll happen, I still get an opportunity to be bamboozled by ordinary things that I seem to surround myself by.
IM: Well, thanks, Steve.
Stephen Jenkinson: You bet.
IM: Strange days in this moment and these times. I’ve come four hours or so from Toronto for a brief visit here to record this. I think the listeners know, if they'd been listening for a little bit of time, that I've come to study here at the school for quite a few years now. I think 2013 was the actual first class, and it's still hard for me to describe what happens in the school, in some ways, because anything I try doesn't quite do it. And maybe that's why over the years I've crafted these little things, video things, that somewhat throw up the scent of something.
I'm grateful that somehow they seem to have called in a number of others who didn't quite know what they were catching, but somehow it drew them. And over the years, the school has grown quite a bit, or at least the efforts to get in, it seemed, and then now COVID hit and here we are.
So, I'm grateful that we have a moment to wonder about a few things together.
Stephen Jenkinson: I guess neither one of us were doing anything!
IM: That's right. One of the particular topics that I think will, if we could circle it somehow and again, I'm hesitant to even volley a question or two around these things, because [in my] time in the school, so much emphasis is put on the right questions, the well-crafted questions. This podcast came about really to wonder about masculinity, in different ways than maybe it has been wondered about.
Maybe I want to start maybe not going directly at it, but I wonder, first, even me asking that question, if you think back to your earlier days and your childhood and the rest, what [were] the models of masculinity or what were the templates that were presented to you, in the time that you were in, even then?
Stephen Jenkinson: As a child?
IM: Yeah.
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:10:11] This may sound either prehistoric or hard to imagine or both, but I would say by and large, it didn't come up. It never came up. It was simply not a discrete item of interest or inquiry. I remember this about…it's a little early in the interview to mention Leonard Cohen, but here we go.
I read an interview of him, years ago, they asked him after the tutelage of his inner life as a child, imagining it must have been just something stupendous to produce a Leonard Cohen. And I guess he paused, and then he said, actually no one ever inquired after your inner life. They were more interested in the order with which you could assemble your shoes at the front door for easy retrieve on the way out.
And he meant it. He was probably overstating it, as he does, but there's something similar to me, that nobody, I don't remember anyone talking about it, being overly concerned about it, men or women. And I suppose, hormonally speaking, there's a bit of a prompt eventually, one way or another.
But prior to that, the closest I could come is to say that, as a memory…I lived in a home where there was a mother and two sisters, and this was very unusual in those days. Very unusual. It wasn't [an] easy life to live. It never is, I'm not saying it is, but certainly in those days there was a lot of stigma attached to it. And you were treated at school as if there was some deep malaise had penetrated your domestic situation and you were damaged goods.
I can distinctly remember receiving that kind of treatment from the teachers, God bless them, who were trying to figure out how to be, I don’t know, to recompense me somehow for the bereavement. Somewhere in there, I probably became alert to how strange, relatively speaking, the ways of men might've appeared to me. As I remember, because I didn't have a lot of firsthand experience from a fairly early age.
So, rather than any kind of instruction or articulation or inquiry, it was maybe remarkably present by virtue of its absence, a different kind of presence, something that I probably had to wonder about independent of any encouragement or inclination around me.
IM: How did the absence show up then? Maybe it's now looking back, but how did it make itself known to you in its absence?
Stephen Jenkinson: Well, it's kind of easy and self-evident. There's just no man there. And then, I mean, you have dealings with men outside the house, depending on your age. The circumstance could be the corner store or something like this, or maybe a relative. And maybe the relatives, on occasion, were let's say scrambling to compensate a little.
But I guess I had a sense that I was watching the comings and goings of another “tribe” when I saw men in action, you could say. And it wasn't charged with any particular kind of sentiment about it, but there was certainly a sense of (I think that's the best way to say it) this was a tribe and their manner was something else.
And then somewhere in there, and I was lucky enough to write about this in the Come of Age book, we got invited to a family reunion, which was the only one I ever went to. So that says something about the family I was reuniting with, I guess, but I might've been, I don't know, seven, something like this.
I was introduced to these characters that were referred to as my grand uncles. I had no idea what a grand uncle was. Grandfather and mother, but that was it. And they were, in fact, my grandmother's brothers, who had never been mentioned during the entire course of my short but intense life as a seven-year-old.
And they were absolutely wild. I mean, they were, on some level, they were creatures and they were wild and they were unkept and they were Brylcreemed and they were dangerous, for certain. And yet they included me, immediately and immensely. It was like running away to the friggin’ circus, hanging out with these guys for the day.
And they were all nicotined up and the whole drill, and not a healthy lifestyle, no doubt, for all of them. But they were like gypsies. Not that I knew the word, but that's a good analogy. It felt like gypsies, and they were my gypsies and it was staggering and it wasn't only because they were men.
But certainly their way and their manner marked them off as a uncouth, but extremely cool.
IM: What happened then when you hit adolescence and then, maybe who did you look to? Rockstars and the celebrities? Where would the template come, sort of how to behave or how to take direction from in that realm?
Stephen Jenkinson: I think a teacher, probably, at school. He was…it was grade five. So, what does that make me? I don't know, 11, something like this. And he was just a caring guy who loved the work, obviously. And somehow you knew that in a way that didn't shine through with the others.
I suppose anyone you find immensely admirable as a young person, you're very keen, first of all, to gain the regard of. Then second of all, to emulate. Not in terms of wanting to be a teacher or anything like that, but there was just something, deeply…he had some regard for us. You just knew it. When you're on the receiving end of that, you don't really debate it. It's pretty available to you.
I'm not saying though that this obeyed the boundaries of your question. In other words, I'm not sure all of this was true because he was a man, because I will say then, as I say now, I'm not sure that my life does or should properly divide up along those lines, you know? I suppose we'll get to what all that means in due course, but in those days, at that age, I'm not saying “people were people.” I'm certainly not saying that, but you're drawn to people for all kinds of mysterious reasons, and you're not in charge of most of them.
And, of course, kids will seek out some recompense for what's missing at home. Of course they will. And if you find yourself in the presence of kids, you've got to remember that, and even if the family may be intact in a way mine was not, but can have all kinds of other internal fractures and fissures. Kids are remarkable “seismic scientists” when it comes to how the family's doing, right? And they can seek out all kinds of sustenance and nourishment that's not easily available.
We're kind of, up to a certain age, the ultimate sort of psychic or spiritual hunter/gatherers, I think. And then something happens. But until then, we can sort of get by, most of the time. Most of us, and I was one of them.
IM: One of the things I've tried to do in this podcast is to link some of the understanding of what was going on, maybe I'll say the 70s and early 80s around these topics, around masculinity, femininity (I think what was called the second feminist wave, I think at the time, or was it the third? I'm still sorting). But there was some sense that the women were kind of rising up and demanding change and the sort of throw down to the men was, it's like, what are you doing about it?
This is what I've heard from people like Meade and the founder of the ManKind Project, these kinds of masculine responses. And I wonder, for you…I’m tracking that cultural moment…how do you see what happened or what was rising up then, in particular for what the men were being asked or invited into in the face of all that, where were you at that time? Was it present for you or was it sort of at a distance that became apparent later?
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:20:09] This is a question that you can't help but blow your brains out in answering, no matter how you answer it. Why? What do you mean? You sound very suspicious.
Well, I'm alert, okay. So, this question, if the answer is, “[It] wasn't particularly an issue,” just as I said, about a decade prior, then if I’m the listener, I'm going, “A-ha! Not very present, eh? You weren't very present either, apparently.” And down go my sales!
Or I could make something up that wouldn't be overly compelling. I'll tell you, honestly, I don't feel an obligation to have had that be some kind of immense presence and force, in around those times. I don't feel any obligation to the idea, really. I don't think it's a prime indicator of depth of life or willingness to be on the receiving end of life, necessarily.
These things come to you, never as ideas, right? Not until you become idea hounded. But prior to that, they come to you as: your mother has to work out some kind of childcare because she can't make it home from work before you get home from school, kind of thing.
That's how it shakes down. And you remember her trying to make that whole scene work. And you were the only one who had a mother who was doing that and…although now, you see, I'm remembering something.
I'm not a fan of biography or autobiography as the motherload of anything, but I suppose this was always in the mix, this memory. I'm going to tell it gently, because it was her memory, not mine. I remember she told me, but it was this thing that she experienced. So, with great regard for however it went, she told me that when she and my father were disassembling, she went to the local minister of some congregation [inaudible] for some kind of, I don't know what solace or direction or whatever it was.
And I don't remember the word she used, but she did say that the guy came onto her when she did that. And needless to say, we never went to church or anything of the kind. She had a rather dark take on not just things religious, but somehow it probably went in the direction of you're vulnerable and men take advantage. There's no doubt that I was on the receiving end of that instruction and that lament.
That's still in the time prior to what you're talking about. By the time I became vaguely alert as a teenager, strong emphasis on vaguely…The time you're talking about I was actually older than that. By the seventies I was in my twenties.
I can honestly say I don't remember that questions of gender politics, as it was called in the day, had an enormous presence or gravitational pull in how people were with each other. I don't think our relationships had been mapped and charted for us by the gatekeepers of all of that. I think that was probably happening then, but my best memory is that we were not tremendously obliged to act according to a gender-specific contemplative order.
Or, I mean, I don't even know if this sounds odd to you, like you might not be able to imagine that there was such a thing, or you might just think it was my weird little corner, but this seems to me to have come around somewhat later. This was not really a woman's studies time in university. It came a little bit later, to the best of my recollection.
And I don't remember it being particularly caustic as an atmosphere that it occupied. That all seemed to come perhaps five or six or 10 years. In that period is when people began to choose sides and swear allegiances and disavowals and so on.
IM: I think that seems to map with what I've just been looking back on and trying to reflect and learn. A big book that came out in the, I think it was late 80s, was Iron John, of course, by Robert Bly. And James Hillman, I think, had been active for many years by that point. And, of course, Michael Meade was sort of the Jungian…
Stephen Jenkinson: …not as a man's guy…
IM: …Yeah, exactly.
Stephen Jenkinson: That was the thing. He was a Jungian psychologist and a maverick inside that institution (now this is Hillman I'm talking about now). So that was later and basically he got pressed into service by, I think, by Bly regard.
IM: And had you encountered Bly? I mean, I know you've mentioned him, at the school you've read some of the poetry. And I wonder, had you seen him at a conference? Because you offered, I think, some take on his presence or his personality or something that I really appreciated. I wonder again, how did you encounter him? Was it poetry before he even became the “man guy”?
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:26:32] No, not really. It was a very rarefied encounter. I was asked…well, okay, I don't know if you've got time for it, but here we are. You're talking to a storyteller. I can't help it!
I was at a garden party. It might've been the last one I was invited to and in Toronto, and halfway through the event the woman who was sponsoring it came up to me and she said, so, how would you like to be in a movie?
I thought to myself, wow! What a line. And I said, what kind of movie? She said, well, we're not really sure yet. It's a kind of documentary. I said, documentary? How do you be in a documentary if it's not about you or you're involved somehow? She said, well, you'd be playing yourself. So, there's a script? No, there's not really.
Anyway, it was like that. And I say, is there anything I should know by way of preparing for this strange thing? She said, well, you could read this book, Iron John. Okay, why? Well, because the guy who wrote it will be in the film. Oh, okay. I'd never heard of Iron John, but I think this is in the time when it was occupying the citadel on the most popular books lists.
It was two days later, and I had a private counseling practice at the time, and a guy came in and he said to me, I don't mind talking about myself, but I wonder if we could devote one of our meetings to talking about this and he slid a book across to me. I looked down and thought: What's the likelihood of me seeing the words Iron John twice in the same week? I've subsequently recognized that sometimes the fingers of God insert themselves up your nostrils and draw you forward. I think that was one of those times.
So, it was two or three months later, I ended up on a soundstage with maybe 20/25 people. Marion Woodman and Robert Bly, and they walked into the sound stage. We were already there and set up and everything and I can still hear his voice. The first thing he said was, “Ahhhh, humans!” And it wasn't clear that he was excited by that, you know?
Well, that's what he said. And he's a bear of a man. He's a huge viking guy, right? And so, we shot the film and it was an amazing encounter. I don't know if it was a good film, but it was an amazing encounter to be part of it in my, I suppose, late twenties, very early thirties, one of the two.
And he was a force of nature. I mean, everything that came to him, came to him fairly, I would say, including the adversity. He was fierce and harsh and hard and hard-hearted at times. Immensely generous in so many things. He was on the receiving end, as was Marian for women, but he was on the receiving end of a kind of father hunger that really knew no bottom to it, I would say.
And he detonated it and I'm not sure that he encouraged it overly, but he didn't step aside from it. And it became part and parcel of what he did. We subsequently corresponded and I wouldn't say we were ever close, I wouldn't say he would remember me, at all, but we did correspond. He knew that I was working on a book at the time, which became Money and the Soul's Desires.
And he said, if I wanted to look at it. And I said, sure. I found out later that he was very hard on people who were involved in the same work as him. It was just how he was. And he wrote back a very short note, and he just said, you're in over your head! [Laughter] That was his paternal encouragement. Get out while you still can!
Yeah, but I felt very lucky to have met him. He earned everything that came to him, I would say, and worked very, very hard.
One other vignette, and then we can move on. He said to me one time, just in idle conversation, you know what being famous in America is like? I said, no idea. He said, it's Good Morning America calls you in the morning and asks you what you had for breakfast. That's what it really is. And I thought, a little cynical, a little harsh.
Years went by and I was doing an interview. The guy said that he felt nervous talking to me. I said, we can just talk about ordinary things until you get on the other side of that, it’s your show, but if that doesn't help, then just start with something ordinary. Okay, he said, what did you have for breakfast? And I immediately remembered Robert's story. And I thought, wow, this is my 15 minutes, which is long over now, by the way.
IM: Well, thanks, Steve.
Stephen Jenkinson: You bet.
IM: I'm trying to understand a way of seeing what was detonated or sparked, because something clearly caught in the culture at large, at least from me looking back as a younger [person], and I heard stories of hundreds of men gathering in a gymnasium, and all these circles spinning out.
I talked to the co-founder, as I mentioned, of the ManKind Project, which spun out from that time as well. They were trying to cobble together an initiation weekend for men to kind of, I don't know, try to become adults or something. Then at the same time, it seemed to have burned hot and then kind of went underground.
And I know Martin Shaw, when I spoke to him, he called it the wilderness years, kind of, in the 2000s. I'm still just trying to understand a way of seeing what was it that caught fire and then why didn't it “sustain.” What are the ways of looking at it that maybe are now easier to see now, but couldn't maybe be seen then?
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:33:03] Well, I could hazard a guess or two. One of them is you could ask yourself what happened to “the 60s”? And the answer is, well, they didn't last a decade, that's for sure. It's just a couple of years. And the simple truth of the matter is that the 60s graduated, that cohort graduated university and had to cope with in the world setting that didn't complement their immense over-involvement in their own satisfactions.
There was other things too about the 60s, but certainly that was an enormous part of it: the demand that everything be relevant to a 20-year-old, just to choose out one thing. So they graduated and it’s [very] hard to maintain “life on the barricades,” and I don't say that with any cynicism. It genuinely is too hard.
So, by the same token, you could ask what happened to the “men's movement.” There was never such a thing as the men's movement. There might've been all kinds of shards of a broken vessel that nobody had seen intact. I suspect that's what it was.
So why did it happen, when it did, in different places? Well, it didn't happen everywhere. Not everybody was drawn into it. One of the colossal consequences was a campaign of unimaginable shame and humiliation directed at it. Men participated vehemently in that shaming and that humiliation.
So, it wasn't just women who are drawing it down. Ms. magazine hired Robert Bly’s ex-wife to write what amounted to an expose of him at the peak of his… I mean, a lot of stuff was going on, and I can tell you that inside, as what little I saw of it, the men's…the three-ring circus of trying to figure it out was not principally a politicized, socially-engaged proposition.
It seemed to function much more at the level of psyche, psychology was heavily leaned upon, a lot of archetypal talk and things of that kind that I, myself, didn't find overly compelling, but certainly an awful a lot of people did.
And an immense reliance upon catharsis. And this might be the biggest hint of all. When you have a kind of broad-reaching social event, that's not principally about society, it's principally about the inner life, and it seeks after a cathartic event every time it gathers itself, every time it tries to cohere and appear again, it tells you something about an acute absence of some kind of ongoing, resolving, orchestrated public life.
It was basically abandoned, as I remember it, in this men's work that the notion of public, orchestrated-public experience was readily and even eagerly abandoned in favour of the inner life. I think anything that is overly hankering after some kind of resolved, simplified, beatific and baptismal inner life is not going to have staying power because you can't find it in your days, you see, and you eventually have to choose your meaningless working life and then your deeply meaningful weekends in the country with the lads. It's not a decision anybody should have to make. I mean, there's a lot of work involved in trying to find the two of them together.
And maybe that's what's happened since. I'm not really a student of the whole operation, but it didn't have a chance. The white-hot attention that was ladled upon it was its own demise. It couldn't stand the glare of that examination, in much the same way, maybe, that the Rajneesh arrangements can't stand a lot of scrutiny, largely because the scrutiny is not that kind.
Okay. So, I'm not saying something nefarious here. I'm saying there's something in the nature of being exposed to an inquiry, which is allegedly journalistic, but is actually attempting to expose. Who's going to sign up for that kind of treatment ongoingly, when your own understanding of yourself can't bear that for too very long, I don’t think?
IM: You shared one time in the school, if I recall, a story about James Hillman. I think you had either met him or it was nearing the end of his days and there was some thing that you witnessed that felt very (if I recall), it's a demeaning or, but it was part of the culture that, and I wonder if you might just share that.
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:38:33] Sure. Yeah, I told the story without naming [him]. The very first time I ever told it, in a public setting, was in Australia. The guy sitting at the front walked over to me at the end and he said, I'm a psychologist and I'm certain you're talking about James Hillman. I said, well, don't tell anybody, but that is the story. And that is the man.
Yes, I was at the one and only men's gathering in Minnesota that I went to, which was the headquarters, I guess, in some respects, back in those days. Glad to do it, but it was odd. It was a lot of things. It was tribal, not in the best sense that that word could be meant. And there was certainly an orthodoxy of sorts that you had to negotiate your way into, in order to prevail, and a lot of things. A lot of hurt people in there as well.
Anyway, I suspect the book called If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him was written either by American Buddhists or for them or both, because the idea's very compelling to a place that has a marginal or sketchy affiliation with its predecessors, right?
Yeah. So, in that spirit, the organizers of the conference put together a kind of student production of a play, on the spot. I guess they had scripted it up somewhat. The principals knew what they were going to do and so on, and what it was, was a send up. It was really a mockery of the teachers of the conference. And the more in earnest the teacher was, the more subject to scorn and worse he was led in for in this production.
I, if I was…I was actually invited years later to be a teacher at one of these conferences and I politely declined, but had I been subjected to this, I wouldn't have made it to first base with any of these guys, given my earnestness.
But anyway, as it happened, James Hillman was one of the teachers there, and he was in for particular critique given his persona, which was reedy and thin and a bit Ichabod Crane-ish kind of thing because he was a Yankee. And in the midst of this play, somebody snuck up behind him and poured a glass of red wine over his head.
And, I mean, he's a very proper guy. He couldn't roll with that. Now, everybody laughed like crazy, or maybe not everybody. I certainly didn't. I was sitting very close and I could see the look in his eyes. And he was awash in indignation of the deepest remorseless kind. And I felt the violation from where I sat. I mean, he pasted a smile and tried to roll with it, but he couldn't.
And as I told the story, I knew what I should have done then. It would have involved me going against, not just the grain, but the whole operation. What I should've done is walked over to him with a towel and apologized to him in some fashion, not as an enormous display, but to somehow soothe him, I guess. But nobody did. I certainly didn't. I sat there frozen and taken up with the tribal noise.
And the moment passed and I let it pass. I don't say that with any understanding. I really regret it now.
Years and years went by and I was invited to be part of a panel discussion at a Jungian conference in Montreal. At the end of the first day (I think we were on for three days), we're all trooping out into the cold November Montreal night to eat, outside of the bad hotel food. I was trying to get out to my party that was waiting for me by the taxi. I could see them. It was one of those old revolving hotel doors. This old man was shuffling in the compartment just in front of me. Man, he was not moving.
And so, they were actually gesturing me, let's go! And I gestured, what can I do? I got this guy in front of me. Obviously, an old man's quite stooped and everything. Eventually he got out of the way and I made my way to the people. Just as I was about to get in the taxi, I just looked over at him and I recognized him immediately from the side, though I'd only ever seen him once. I'd seen a picture. Of course, you know who it was. He was enjoying some kind of tribute there at the end of a long and illustrious career among his fellow Jungians, those who still could bear him.
He was standing with his small group, waiting for a taxi as well. And the whole memory of that time in Minnesota washed over me, and that indignation and the wine and the whole thing, tawdry, and an extreme and deeply violating of an older generation, as it was.
I knew in that moment what I should've done. I should've gone over, briefly reminded him of the moment, and apologized to him for not having taken care of something. But this is all in a second, this is happening. They basically pulled me into the car because nobody knew this. I didn't.
We finally got to the restaurant and the moment passed, and basically people were introducing themselves around the table because we didn't know each other, really. When it came my turn to introduce myself, I told that story instead. Or maybe it was a proper introduction to who I was and what I was capable of when push came to shove, twice, with the same guy. Within two or three months, he was dead.
So, all I've got is the regret to go with the memory of the man. But I tell that story, not out of any desire to make any particular outfit or movement look bad. But, I will say that what I saw of the self-conscious men's movement, the inclination to have a real go at your seniors was very, very strong, very palpable and powerful and not challenged really at all. Oh, there was the odd talk about elders, but man, you had to survive that outfit and it was not clear that being an elder you were much more than an already out to pasture/no longer dangerous type. That was the title or that's how you got it.
IM: It strikes me, you mentioned your book Money and the Soul's Desires earlier, which I have read, and I remember there was a passage where you spoke about something like the, I don't know if you said this, but the food or the nourishment that can come from younger men just sitting with older men and not hearing about their achievements per se, but just how life had its way with them.
I hear that a little in the story you were sharing about James Hillman, and that it's actually a regret and there's no “happy ending” to it, of triumph, but that there's something in that it offers us some naming a lack of etiquette, naming something to how to proceed differently. I just really appreciate that, to hear that.
In Orphan Wisdom School, the subject of masculine and feminine tends to come up somewhat rarely and never really directly at it. I've actually been really appreciative sometimes when you've followed a trail into all of a sudden it's the topic that's being spoken to. We return, in a way, to some of the main inquiries and in some sense it's almost like catching a little something before it's gone again. And I wonder, what is it about the directly using those labels or approaching from those doorways that seems maybe not that helpful, or it's the way that you've somehow avoided typically? I wonder why? Why are those, maybe so loaded terms that sort of immediately kind of get us off the scent of something that maybe there is something within them, though, that needs to be approached quite differently?
Stephen Jenkinson: Well, the first thing I'd say is, I don't avoid them. I reconnoiter the neighbourhood from time to time, and then decide whether or not that's where we're going to pitch our tent. It's not really avoidance. Okay.
And then the second thing would be that I remain...and you could say, “so what” after this, and I wouldn't blame you…but I remain deeply under-persuaded that masculine and feminine, as personality types or as fundamental aspects of personal identity, are as valuable as they're trotted out to be, as useful as they seem to be employed to be. I don't understand these things fundamentally as identities.
I understand them as functions, in that sense as verbs, not as nouns. Okay. That might sound like a trite distinction to make, but I think by the time you descend into the frank anarchy of personal identity, and then imagine that you're going to employ it as a means of inquiry, there's not a lot of consciousness brought to bear on the fact that the…
Okay, I'll say it differently. I think it's advisable to distinguish between masculinity and femininity as identities, and masculinity and femininity as ways of proceeding, which are not resolutely single-note symphonies that allow for enormous departures from the orthodoxy, and so on, right? That's why I call them verbs, rather than nouns. I think when they atrophy and become a personal identity, there's an enormous amount of intolerance that's basically waiting by the door to gain entry into the arrangement.
Thirdly, if that's where we are in the list now, the [Orphan Wisdom] school is principally an enterprise in disciplined inquiry. It is not committed to indoctrination. So, this is why you have trouble describing it to people as being sort of doctrinally oriented and in a particular direction. It's not ideological, right? It's rather than wondering about masculinity as a discrete subject…which you cannot find naturally occurring in a human life, you can't find it as a discretely occurring event (this was a masculine event, or that's a masculine note he struck or she struck, or what)... I think it's much more compelling and frankly, intellectually honest, to allow the real possibility that masculinity and femininity are ways of inquiring, rather than things to inquire about.
The problem with not making the distinction is that if you inquire after masculinity, in this case, as a discrete topic of inquiry, you're not allowing what it is that's bringing you there, what’s the M.O. that mobilizes you in the direction of masculinity? So, this is how we do it at the school.
Yes. Occasionally it's come up. I can tell you a story. I don't know if you were there. I'm sitting virtually in the place where this moment took place, I think here in the hall. We were studying Beowulf and I thought, and remain convinced, that it was going very well. It's a very compelling business: Is there such a thing as monsters? What happened to them? Is God another monster, and how did this story survive the onslaught against paganism and so on? I mean, it's fantastic, frankly. And to know that we're in the mothership of the language that you and I are speaking in now when you're looking at Beowulf.
Well, in the midst of all of this, on the last evening that we had, which tends to be a bit buoyant because we get the mugs out and we get the mead out. Not to re-enact anything (folks at home) but simply to acknowledge that we've gone this far in the proceedings and we're all still alive. Maybe there's been a monster at the door and maybe he or she or they've been let in. Such is the spirit of inquiry that I'm trying to inculcate.
One of the earliest questions of the evening session, after some topical application of the mead, was something in the order of a woman said that she was missing strong feminine characters in Beowulf. And it was extraordinary what happened in the room when this got said. A lot of people ducked, a lot of people looked the other way. A lot of people wanted out, in the worst way, out of the room, out of that discussion, out of this century. And you could certainly see it, right? And a lot of the people that wanted out or wanted this to be over looked at me and said with their eyes, for the love of God, don't!
You can do one of only a handful of things that are available to you. One is you can argue. You could argue, I don't know why you would, but you could. You could feel cornered and therefore argue. You could placate and say you're right. We'll never look at Beowulf again, or let's have somebody translate it and just superimpose strong feminine characters. Or you could even point out there actually are. And then you could ask the woman, do you remember their names? But that's just got you. I mean, there's no point in winning a moment like that. You lose, everybody loses, right?
I said to her…I pointed out that there were female leads in the story, but I did point her attention to the death in the story, the violent death that predominate in the story. Most people did not meet their end in their dotage. And I said, do you recall how many women were maimed or killed during the course of the story? She allowed that she couldn't remember that there was a one. And I said, did you count how many men died in the course of the story? She admitted that she hadn't. And I said to her, neither one of us are trying to win right now. We're trying to wonder about something. It's one thing, and it's an understandable thing, to want to find yourself in everything you read. But with all due respect, I suggest to you that it's a juvenile expectation to bring to the world to insist on seeing yourself at every favorable turn.
The idea being that if you recognize yourself in the advertising of the culture, you are more present in the culture than if you're not in the advertising. What has it done, do you think, to the people who do see themselves in the advertising? It's that kind of discussion. To her immense credit, ten minutes later, not right away, because I didn't know how that really set and we had to proceed and we did, but ten minutes later, I walked over to where she sat, which is where I'm sitting right now, and extended my hand and she extended hers and I shook her hand and I said, we're okay, at least as far as I'm concerned, we’re okay. And she said, we're okay. And I think everyone felt, not that something had been avoided, but in fact that something hadn't been avoided and for that, there was a blessed kind of relief.
The P.S. in the story is that she never came back.
IM: This reminds me of something you said at one other class, it might've been during the Beowulf, but you said that there was a war on the feminine and that there's often women on the front lines. And again, in certain circles, that would seem outrageous to make the case for, and yet there's something there. You're right that the gender itself doesn't somehow mean that you're for the feminine. That's something that I wonder how to approach, then, if feminine and say masculine are ways of inquiry (I think you said) or...
Stephen Jenkinson: Yeah. Ways of wondering about things.
IM: Yeah. Ways of wondering. And then I wonder then, that leads me to another sort of big, what feels like the fundament of the mayhem in the world today, again, according to certain circles, that the word patriarchy, it comes up a lot. And actually in my podcast, I spend a lot of time, if I ever talk about this, I actually say this is not, I don't just use it at face value, let me say. Oh yeah, that's it. That's the word, that's the worst thing ever. Let's move on, and largely too, because of what I've heard in the school, you've spent time, I think, just wondering about it differently. I've been really grateful for that because I do feel like there's something in the ability to, I don’t know, not hold it up as the easy enemy and not recognize what the consequences [are] when you do that.
Stephen Jenkinson: Very good. Especially the unintended ones, the collateral damage of doing so.
IM: I would love if we could speak to that a little. Etymology is I think one way in which it's been quite helpful.
Stephen Jenkinson: [00:59:11] Well, let's start there. People who are not fans of any language or of speaking, finding it to be a kind of low-grade enterprise, and many a conference I've been to (all as a paid participant, I should point out) where language is continually slayed, frankly, in the name of higher understanding. But for those of us left, who regard the language as something we've actually been entrusted with and not yoked to. And to recognize that our imaginations are actually deeply bound to the language that we're entrusted to, then you want to cultivate the language for all it's worth or for as best as you can.
So, patriarchy. Patros. Not man. Not boy. Father. Hmmm. Is father a subset of men? Arche: the fundament, the kind of hard-to-realize fundament that upholds everything that rests upon it. Foundational. Requiring the ability to stand under, in order to be understood. That's not just a play on words. That's literally what it means. That's why it's archeology and archetype and, you know, architectonics and arch, archaic. All of these refer to some, not the first, but that which is willing to stand under and sustain everything that comes subsequent to it. Put them back together and what do you have? Do you have men? No, but you do have something masculine and it's a function. It's the willingness to engage in a kind of primordial spirit labour called fathering.
It does not require that you have bio children in order to do so. In fact, father doesn't say anything about children, per se. You can obviously father a culture. You can father an idea, just to take two obvious examples. So you realize it's a function. Does it partake exclusively of things masculine? I don't know. I have no obligation to know that. But I would say that it goes without saying that if that's what patriarchy is, we need way more of it than we have, number one.
Number two, women should understand themselves as not excluded from the fathering function, not just by virtue of having been on the receiving end of the fathering function in their own childhoods, but to recognize that the kind of psychic repertoire that is included in the word fathering is not exclusive to men and whatever instinct may be in women to abandon it at all costs is costly. And not only to the patriarchy, but to the women who are leaving it to the men.
You could say many of the same things with matriarchy. The sad truth of the matter is, of course, that the word matriarchy has never, at least in my hearing, ever been used as an inherently slanderous, lamentable term. And I mean never, right?
So I think this helps. I don't say that it soothes the savage beast in any way at all, but it’s very hard to engage in systematic grievance and allow the deep…I'm looking for this DNA (let's call it DNA)…the deep DNA of the word to be available to you. It’s very hard to maintain your grudge and your grievance, nevermind the quick and dirty slander that the word has become.
I mean, I don't think it serves anyone to isolate a particular gender. I don't know how many there are now, but in this case, to isolate fathering men as somehow responsible for the things that are laid at their feet. You could easily say that one of the reasons those things that are laid at their feet are there at all in their lamentable legions, is a consequence of the under-functioning of men in the patriarchal role.
That's why I said earlier, we could use more of it once you realize what it is. But the culture needs its fathering, at least as much as it needs its fathers, you see? So even people who are not in the reproductive game don't get an out clause and say, well, this doesn't apply to me at all. No, functionally, it absolutely applies to you, nevermind godfathering, which may be a whole other podcast. So I'll leave it.
So, I mean, I think maybe that begins some kind of parallel contemplation that doesn't argue with the prevailing grievance-driven propositions, because you can't (or at least I don't think you should) argue with the historical realities that clearly indicate paradigms of wrongdoing and so forth.
It's just not clear to me that there is an achievement to be had in seeing to it that a particular gender or gendered function is asked to bear the deep responsibility and the shame and the guilt that goes with it, of these histories. It's much more complicated than anybody wants it to be.
As soon as it becomes complex, it's not easy to win an argument. And there should be a hint for people of good faith who are willing to proceed in good faith with each other. There should be a hint there. If you can't win an argument as soon as it becomes subtle, maybe you're not supposed to be able to win it. In winning it, you lose. The subtleties of the dilemmas should survive our attempts to understand them. There's an enormous nourishment, I think, to be had there.
IM: I'm thinking in this moment to take a second to occupy what I understand to be the, let's say the perspective of those in that seat, like the seat of patriarchy is the ultimate answer into all of the mayhem. And it seems to sort of revolve around this sense that there's been maybe, using this language of father, a great trespass, almost like the fathers betrayed their role to be, let's say, the protector or more of maybe the more noble aspects of masculinity, something like that.
There seems to be that's where the trespass or the agreements lies in this almost like abdication of the true ennobled father, at least that's my read on it.
And at the same time, I still hear (you're right) there's this subtlety of, well, wait a second. I remember speaking with another Indigenous interview subject where he basically was like, you can't separate them in that way, as well. Like that there was something in, it's almost like what happened to this culture whereby the ability to separate, and then demand that the responsibility or accountability lies on the one gender.
Because when you're in it, it seems very clear. Right. You see, oh men, you see Trump and up there in this tower. And it just seems like so self-evident, when I sit in that perspective. And yet again, the consequence of which is still somehow harder to recognize. That's where I'm still with. I'm sort of caught on this crossroads.
Stephen Jenkinson: [01:08:27] Well, understandably so. I mean, it hasn't been easy for you, because you were born with the complex misfortune of living, I think, your entire aware life in a highly charged, highly polarized time of alleged discussion, where there's not much discussion that actually happens. There's a lot of posturing and there's a lot of trying to score points and so on.
Well, how about this? If you are willing to concede the possibility that father as a function and mother as a function are not principally personal identities and therefore not bound to reproductive anatomy, not bound to whatever serotonin matrix is associated with all of that, but in fact, it's first and foremost, a culturally-endorsed, culturally-derived, culturally-enforced proposition. If you're willing to concede that possibility at least, one of the things you end up with is a consideration that what you're talking about here is not the abdication of responsibility of men. Because you keep, I mean, you got to be careful.
Do you mean men or do you mean fathers? It's not this…you mean boys? To boys who have no notion of fathering to speak of at all, for whom the word patros doesn't ring at all.
So, if it's not these guys, if that's not what patros is, that's not what fathering is, that all the understanding of what it is and what it isn't, what it should be and should not be, is culturally derived, then where are the failings? Where are the abdications? They're at the level of culture. Now I'm not arbitrarily distinguishing personal behaviour from a cultural mandate and a cultural matrix that makes it make sense. But I'm saying you don't invent the repertoire that you draw from, right? You don't. You inherit the repertoire and you selectively go through the aisles of what's available to you, as a man, as a father, as a son, as a boy.
So, in one sense of thinking about it, culture has no face. It's not easy to blame. I myself have routinely said in this very room, what we have instead of a culture in the dominant North American circumstance, I don't know any point to trying to figure out “when it started.” Okay. But there's no question that the generic North American culture is desperately seeking after itself and that's on its good days. And one of the ways it does so, it seems to me now, is that it wants more of its, at the moment, fathers, but these are pendulum issues and sooner or later I suspect mothers will be asked to, or maybe already were and now we're…whatever the momentum is, I don't know…but you abandon your culture at considerable peril to yourself, no matter how derelict and defunct you find it to be, because you can't choose your cultural affiliation. No. And it's something like ancestry.
You've heard me talk about this before. I think you don't get to choose your ancestry. Perhaps in a new age context you do. But for the rest of us, we're heirs to an ancestry. It's not in the bulk food bin of your psychic department store. And I've yet to hear anybody do the psychic math on the consequences of setting aside a deeply disagreeable culture that you were born to and trading it in for a more swarthy sort of café-au-lait complexioned, completely intact, inviolable, mother-friendly/woman-friendly proposition. I mean, there's consequences for you as a living person to do so. Certainly there's consequences for the culture that you're more than willing to leave behind, but could there not be compound consequences that ensue from doing so for those people who entrusted a deeply maligned and malignable culture to you. And if that's even remotely possible, can the consequences not be retroactively present? So present, that that's the layer that we're contending with now. We're living the layer of consequence that ensues from our unwillingness to sign up for the culture work that our distraught culture seeks after from us.
So, it's already two layers of compound fracture, and that's just the living. And if the dead have any consequence or presence in our lives, and you'd be talking to a patriarchy and you be slandering up men, man! You are really racking up the consequences and the casualties, ancestrally speaking. Where does it end, if it doesn't end with the living? How come we still can't make a distinction between understanding consequence and being able to black out the bad guys? How's that not another consequence?
I should say hastily that blacking out the bad guys, I was actually thinking of those highlighter pens for those of who are very sensitive to the word black or the verb to blackout. That's what I meant.
IM: I think that this relates to part of a wider, let's say unseeable goneness, which I think plagues so much of men's work that I see in the culture, is that there's no shared cultural understanding within those that participate in it, typically. I actually spoke to an Indigenous fellow and just mentioned what is his perspective on men's work and sort of the broader cultural retreats and things that are being done. I said, how come there's maybe less or not many Indigenous men that go to these? He's kind of like, well, one they've borrowed a lot of things that perhaps they don't know where they're from, but also we got our own work to do, in amongst our people. Maybe down the road we could talk about mingling. I feel like that's a kind of unseeable thing that when, as it relates to ancestry, as it relates to place, as it relates to the sense of being from somewhere, that in the rush to cobble together a new culture or a new men's movement, that those things don't seem to be part of the conversation.
Stephen Jenkinson: Sorry, which things don't?
IM: Those things of not drawing upon a kind of shared ancestral understanding.
Stephen Jenkinson: Okay. They’re not confessing the poverty at their beginnings.
IM: Exactly. And then, so in that sense, I hear in what you're saying that, that to me, is where to sort of the real, I don't know, goneness or real starting place, let's say, that maybe doesn't run so much on the high octane of the weekend ceremony or anything like that. But it's something that I constantly, sort of by being in the school as well, returning to again and again, and just recognizing the goneness is so gone in so much of this. And that any attempt to stitch together some kind of shared something always feels like it's drawing upon the kind of cotton candy around.
It's hard to even approach, in these circles often, too, right? Because how do you really get someone to recognize that the depth of the goneness before they begin? When you send them to the school, I think! [Laughter]
Stephen Jenkinson: [01:17:24] Oh, I don't know. I wouldn't do that to them. Well, poverty's a very legitimate beginning. Poverty of spirit, poverty of inheritance, poverty of your capacity to hold in good stead, if not in, if not dearly, those that preceded you that more or less look like you, all of these things. You throw these away in the name of a better day, you'll mistake anything but that as a better day, you see. That's not what it is.
So, trying to be happy is a ludicrous life goal. Why? Well, first of all, you're not in charge of your happiness, right? You might have certain criteria you think, when met, inevitably produces happiness for you, but any close examination will clearly reveal that that's not true. Your capacity to be happy is just that. It's a capacity. It's not a failsafe response to stimuli. You've got to be able to be happy for starters, you've got to cultivate the capacity to do it, and you've got to be able to do so in a circumstance that's fundamentally unchanged from when you weren't enjoying the happiness, you see?
What am I saying? Why am I talking about happiness? I'm saying, it's that wanting a kind of spiritual clarity as a goal is a ludicrous goal to set for yourself. It's a consequence of pursuing what I like to call work. It's a by-product of work. Self-esteem is a by-product of honourable work. It comes from other places too, but minus that, you're going to be hard pressed to come up with it.
A sense of self that you can live with is not a consequence of how you feel about yourself. It's a consequence of your engagement with the wider world. So, it seems to me that until these trying-to-make-a-new-movement movements cop to the fact that you know why you're trying to do this again? Because the last guys who tried to do it again crashed and burned.
What have you learned from that? It's not another something. It's an old Zen teaching story: Walk out of the door, go down the street, fall down the hole in the middle of the road. Second day, fall down to the hole in the middle of the road. As you're falling, you're going, Didn't I just do this?
Third day, go down the street, fall down the hole. You say, Ah, this is the hole I meant not to fall down. Fourth day coming, come to the edge of the…I wonder if I'm going to fall down the hole today. Fifth day, go down a different street.
That's a wild learning curve, but it should be recognizable to people who are listening. Not just personal foible stuff, but especially the movement stuff, the stuff where people can get lost in so readily and so gleefully. Where they can set aside their personal sense of futility for the sake of something that seems like it's moving. That's a recipe for resembling a shark, not a human: constant movement to drive the water through the gills. That's shark stuff, man.
There's nothing wrong with defeat, provided you are cultivating a kind of life wherein more and more noble things are defeating you. The increasing nobility of your adversary makes you look good. You still don't win, but your manner of defeat is highly commendable.
I'm not a real movement guy, in case it doesn't show!
IM: [Laughter] You made me think of fatherhood actually, now, in this. I'm thinking of my own son who's just about two, and you're a father as well. Something in that, like you said, the willingness to be defeated and it's almost like I think of fatherhood as the adversary and the willingness to be defeated in fatherhood, as opposed to some kind of perfection game, right?
Which it can often be, certainly as a young father, being like, I gotta get this right, whatever that even means. And I wonder, as you look on fathering now, how do you see it differently? Or how is it different than what you thought? I generally would benefit, I think greatly, just to hear some of how it's been for you.
Stephen Jenkinson: [01:22:42] Oh, that's a complicated question, because you're asking somebody who's 66, who's had 30+ years in…35 or whatever it is…in the trenches of “fathering.” So, you'd reasonably expect that my take on it would change just by virtue of time passing, by virtue of my kids not being kids, chronologically speaking, as they once were. Of them occupying places where disagreement with me was not just symbolic, as it once was. And there's many, many examples of that kind of thing. So, these things should simply track the shifts in your life.
In other words, I would say: if you're a father, one of the big questions you must entertain is whether you are now a father first. Is that the identity? I know I've already been troubled by the word, but is that the identity that (pardon the expression) trumps all the other identities? That's what I mean. Are you a father first?
And then, the cultural engine that drives that, that's subsequent to it. When you die, will you die as a father? What does that conceivably mean? What does a dying father…how does a dying father, father now? Well, that's not abstract, because I was in the death trade for a long time. I can tell you, the question never appeared. Basically, never appeared. So, I'm suggesting here that fathering is down the list of things that constitute you, largely.
And this is survival strategies as much as anything else for you, because that person who's two years old right now, it won't take very long at all until they're 22. And the centrality of your fathering function in your self-assessment is going to suffer irreparable harm as they move out past public school circuitry and into employment circuitry and romantic circuitry and so on. The centrality of your gig, you're going to have to find other work.
So, I sense we're coming to the end of our time here, and I'd like to make sure this gets in: I've been asked by not just men, women as well, in fact, more often young women will ask me whether or not they should have children at all. This is an amazing thing that I've lived long enough to be regarded as something of a sounding post on this matter. Mostly they're deeply uncertain about it, in the direction of probably no. They're, in a way, seeking after me taking that certainty away from them.
And I have to be quite alert to that as to why the question's being asked. As these conversations go along, one of the things that becomes really clear is that they don't want to put into motion another sequence of, not just drastic disappointment for themselves, but kind of world-wearying, larger-scale catastrophe for the world. Not to mention, how can I possibly bring a child into the world [inaudible]?
It falls to me to say, well, first of all, the world doesn't need your kid, your imaginary kid, no matter what any self-improvement guru might say. Could be the next…Enough already! We've already had the one that you're going to point to that this one could be the reincarnation of, and look at us! We don't need two! We don't need any more people.
You're going to have to find another way of mothering or fathering in this world, if you're willing to take that seriously, seriously now. Because your personal preferences, your personal drive or deep longing to have another chance to get it right, called a baby, it's not clear that that should be a right any longer. This is fighting words, I know, but it's abundantly unclear that it should be a right at this point in the proceedings.
But for all of that, let's imagine that your son is actually here with us. Well, we don't have to imagine. Let's acknowledge. So, this question is besides the point now. You didn't ask me about it then. You've been in a roundabout way asking me about it now, which is the safest time to ask about it.
I've had to say to these people sitting there in varying degrees of disarray about the whole matter, Do you know if you already have childhood children in the world, you're going to have to come to realize (sooner rather than later would be my recommendation) that beyond the care and feeding operation, the custodial function in their lives, your status in making for them a bonafide inner life is very minor. Okay? You can't do it. You can screw it up pretty bad, but you can't be the paragon that you've set yourself up to be as a goal.
In other words, the psychic life of your child disqualifies you from deep penetration and participation in that life. On the other hand, your participation in the psychic life of any other child besides your own is granted to you as a condition of your citizenship and your gender, whatever that means.
When it comes to your own kids, your gestures and your moves have to be indirect and elongated and elliptical, and never really satisfying in the old sense of satisfying. In other words, the only real way you can have the kind of consequence you want in the psychic life of your kids is to work on behalf of a better day in this world and hope somewhere in there, some aspect of the better day kicks in just long enough to be kind where your child's inner life is concerned, and their kindness in turn reflects towards the world and so on and so on.
One of the ways you do it is by occupying the father function in the lives of other kids with whom you are not disqualified for participating at that level, because you don't have the same kind of “horse in the race” as you do with your own kid. Like, these kids can fail. It's not the end of the world for you. And the amazing thing is that that degree of separation enables you with them. And if there were a “men's movement” that could get really hip to that understanding, and no doubt there is, I could get behind that. I wouldn't join it. I could get behind it though.
The indirect thing is the godly thing. The direct thing is the cathartic thing. Someday we're going to have to give up on our catharsis addiction or die failing to have done so. I mean, culturally speaking, die failing to have done so.
IM: What comes to me is a kind of village mindedness is pleaded for, is called for, and how much that asks of parents, even to be willing to have, for example, another adult be that to their kid and how volatile that can be with this culture, in particular. Other cultures, they know that utterly…
Stephen Jenkinson: Not so much. The nuclear family makes extra-familial involvement in your kids' lives extremely problematic. That's the most neutral way I can say it.
IM: Well, I got a lot more questions…
Stephen Jenkinson: No doubt!
IM: … and no time left to do them, but how about maybe this. This is a quote that came from one of the teachings that Goodman Tad dug up, as the great note-taker that he is. I remember you saying it and I wonder if this might be a place to just leave us for this conversation. You said, “By desecrating the feminine, the masculine can't survive.” There's something in that which I feel maybe could leave us for our conversation today.
Stephen Jenkinson: [01:32:19] Well, we can leave it like that. Just a nice little Zen-koan-ish kind of disturbance. Or you could say, Could you say any more about that? Which I'm happy to do.
I'm doing a course of talks in the fall. One of them is called “Patrimony, Matrimony, Ceremony.” It's about weddings, sort of, but other things too, as you can tell by the title. But why do I put it in that order? Well, because you're a guy…well, maybe not. Maybe I thought about it, but you thought about it as a guy. Okay. You got me there. It's hard for me not to think as a guy.
But I don't know that that's the prison that you imagined it to be. If I can fully occupy the ground floor of being a guy, I might do alright.
So, we never used the word patrimony. It’s very rarely used. The French use it. The French use it as a word to describe the kind of cultural artifacts that constitute the achievements that they most deeply recognize themselves and their values in.
So, it tends to be quite material. Interesting word, material, from the root word for mother, but that's what patrimony tends to be. I've used the word in this title to suggest that that comes first in the following scenario.
A little bit of imaginative paleontology here. It was touch-and-go for us just to make it to another day. A lot of predation and so on around us. It was very much touch-and-go in the childbirth thing. I'm not sure that when people finally realized that something between sex and procreation were actually linked. But let's imagine there was a time when the causal link wasn't clear and who would women have been then to men?
It's extraordinary to think the thought. And what makes you think those days are over? That's not still there in a fundamental way? But in a way, for a woman to submit herself to the slings and arrows, physically, of childbirth in a highly volatile time (such as the time I'm imagining now), couldn't have been easy and might've taken and probably did take all manner of supplication and ministration, which we now go by the word “courtship.”
You mean, come on baby? Come on, come on, come up? No, that's not courtship. No. Courtship is a case-making proposition, much more like spirit lawyering than trying to get over. And one of the things, the cases, you're making is that you are willing to submit yourself to establishing the circuitry of some kind of material sustenance and making that ongoingly so, such that you, the woman, might consider subjecting yourself to something, some parallel disfigurement that could easily take your life. Somewhere in there, the mystery of who men and women could be to each other was made more mystifying, more mystical, more deeply honourable and honouring, and many other things.
The reason patrimony comes first is if you're not, if you don't make the case of your submission to that scenario, which we would now know by job, doing work that you're not thrilled with, and a host of other things. That's why it comes first and then the matrimony comes second.
That's the amazing thing about it. I've never had anybody, in all the weddings I've done, nobody's ever come up to me and said, Hey, as an inclusive person, I'm really distressed that the man is being invited into the holy state of matrimony, but no woman has ever been invited into the holy state of patrimony, ever, that I've ever heard.
Well, it's a good observation to make and you're not likely to, and here's why: because they're not parallel events. One comes first and enables imagining the second. And with those two imaginings in place, engaged in the world, comes to third: the ceremony. That's how you get there. It's not how you feel about each other. It's your willingness to proceed, understanding you're asking an awful lot of the other person if you're asking them to warrant the safety of your desire to procreate, and you're similarly asking an awful lot of another person to subject themselves to the touch-and-go of reproduction, such that you could have something to have and to hold in this world, that you could for a moment mistake for your own.
IM: Well, thank you, Steve.
Stephen Jenkinson: Your welcome.
IM: I appreciate your time.
Stephen Jenkinson: Surely. Yours too.
