Hope for “beta” males?

Musette is frequently puzzled by the Game-players who insist that women today strongly prefer highly aggressive, as well as socially dominant, alpha males. This may be generational. In her own youth, domimant males were widely popular among girls and women only if they reined in their aggressive or boastful tendencies. They had to be drolly funny and “laid-back” (to use 1970s jargon). “Trying too hard” was a dismissive insult from women back then. But perhaps it still is today.

The following discussion of the mating strategies of rhesus monkeys is from an article in the Atlantic about “neurotic” and “bullying” sub-types of human beings, and the reason for the survival of the genes for these characteristics. What’s of interest to me in the passage below is that it seems to support my observation that mere aggression is not a form of Game and cannot by itself guarantee a male’s sexual success. Those males with “beta” characteristics, who knew how to get along with both their subordinates and superiors, were far more likely to be successful in the mating game, at least among rhesus monkeys…The article’s main point was that genes for qualities like neurosis or aggression can and do have their value, if that value is carefully nurtured by the right kind of upbringing, so it didn’t sound a death knell for either characteristic, but still, the point about agreeability as a useful male quality made an impression on me. Of course, I can’t judge whether the article was scientifically sound; I’ll wait to see what my readers have to say about it.

A maturing female will stay with this group all her life. A male, however, will leave—often under pressure from the females as he gets rowdier and rougher—when he’s 4 or 5, or roughly the equivalent of a 16-to-20-year-old person. At first he’ll join an all-male gang that lives more or less separately. After a few months to a year, he’ll leave the gang and try to charm, push, or sidle his way into a new family or troop. If he succeeds, he becomes one of several adult males to serve as mate, companion, and muscle for the several females. But only about half the males make it that far. Their transition period exposes them to attacks from other young males, attacks from rival gangs, attacks from new troop members if they play their cards wrong, and predation during any time they lack a gang’s or troop’s protection. Many die in the transition.

Very early in his work, Suomi identified two types of monkeys that had trouble managing these relations. One type, which Suomi calls a “depressed” or “neurotic” monkey, accounted for about 20 percent of each generation. These monkeys are slow to leave their mothers’ sides when young. As adults they remain tentative, withdrawn, and anxious. They form fewer bonds and alliances than other monkeys do.

The other type, generally male, is what Suomi calls a “bully”: an unusually and indiscriminately aggressive monkey. These monkeys accounted for 5 to 10 percent of each generation. “Rhesus monkeys are fairly aggressive in general, even when young,” Suomi says, “and their play involves a lot of rough-and-tumble. But usually no one gets hurt—except with these guys. They do stupid things most other monkeys know not to. They repeatedly confront dominant monkeys. They get between moms and their kids. They don’t know how to calibrate their aggression, and they don’t know how to read signs they should back off. Their conflicts tend to always escalate.” These bullies also score poorly in tests of monkey self-control. For instance, in a “cocktail hour” test that Suomi sometimes uses, monkeys get unrestricted access to a neutral-tasting alcoholic drink for an hour. Most monkeys have three or four drinks and then stop. The bullies, Suomi says, “drink until they drop.”  [my emphasis]

The neurotics and the bullies meet quite different fates. The neurotics mature late but do okay. The females become jumpy mothers, but how their children turn out depends on the environment in which the mothers raise them. If it’s secure, they become more or less normal; if it’s insecure, they become jumpy too. The males, meanwhile, stay within their mothers’ family circles an unusually long time—up to eight years. They’re allowed to do so because they don’t make trouble. And their longer stay lets them acquire enough social savvy and diplomatic deference so that when they leave, they usually work their way into new troops more successfully than do males who break away younger. They don’t get to mate as prolifically as more confident, more assertive males do; they seldom rise high in their new troops; and their low status can put them at risk in conflicts. But they’re less likely to die trying to get in the door. They usually survive and pass on their genes.

The bullies fare much worse. Even as babies and youths, they seldom make friends. And by the time they’re 2 or 3, their extreme aggression leads the troop’s females to simply run them out, by group force if necessary. Then the male gangs reject them, as do other troops. Isolated, most of them die before reaching adulthood. Few mate.

Here’s another article, this time about the bad-boy novelist James Ellroy, which depicts some of the struggles that an aggressive male may endure in establishing himself in the world (n.b. some foul language):

Some illuminating pre-interview James Ellroy research shows: “America’s greatest living crime writer” (some would root for Elmore Leonard) feigning joyful masturbation for the benefit of the Playboy Channel outside the house where a girl he used to spy on as a teenager once lived; Ellroy growling at the presenter of a radio show, “No, I’m not mellow. I floss with barbed wire and gargle with the Aids virus”; Ellroy showing off about the size of his “donkey dick”; Ellroy telling the whole world that, artistically speaking, he is rivalled only by Beethoven.

[snip]

Helen Knode, his second wife and best friend, nicknamed him “a zoo animal”, while they were still together. When the marriage broke down, she told him: “You drove around Carmel in shit-stained trousers. My parents heard you jacking off upstairs. You peeped women while you walked Dudley [the dog].”

I assumed he was going to be a handful.

But in the plush Langham Hilton, Ellroy appeared tall, slightly hunch-shouldered, dapper, bald, energetic and bespectacled. I later watched him being interviewed by the cultural commentator Mark Lawson and expect that he would have behaved very differently had I been a man. Lawson, all British tea-parlour politeness, soldiered on in small-talk mode, unable to cope with Ellroy’s habit of, I think unconsciously, baring his teeth in an appearance of light menace and batting away questions with one word answers, usually “No”.

[snip]

What about the tenuously reformed pervert. Is that still him?

“I’m a son of a woman who was raped and murdered. It’s core-deep with me. It’s suffused with discernment and I grew up in an era of privation and so sex wasn’t available and the era of privation, fuelled by my unhygienic state and lack of social skills, induced a great gratitude for me when I finally grew up and changed my life a little bit. And it fuels me still. I’ve never lost a teenage boy’s awe pertaining to sexuality. It’s the old joke, ‘I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he’s working on now’. It says it all. It Says It All. I live there.”

The article makes it clear that Ellroy’s combination of aggression and vulnerability is attractive to women; it’s equally clear that the one quality without the other would have rendered him helpless, or landed him in jail (again; he’s already been once). It shows that the path of the highly aggressive dominant male is not a one-way road to sexual success.

A Pre-Christmas Exorcism

(Re-posted)
Readers, if you like English folklore, history, and an element of the uncanny, you could do worse than read Hobberdy Dick (1955), by K.M. Briggs, who is a well-known English folklorist and scholar. A hob is a kind of friendly (to humans) house-sprite. I don’t know whether Briggs is still alive. Her book is, I suspect, one of the many sources that Rowling pillaged, er, drew upon, for her Harry Potter series. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 5, recounting how a ghost was driven out of a servant’s bedroom:

This ae night, this ae night,
Every night and all.
Fire and sleet and candlelight,
And Christ receive thy saule.

But if the days were happier for Anne, and for Hobberdy Dick too, the nights grew harder for both of them. It was getting near to Christmas, and until the twelve days of peace came, the forces of Winter grew stronger; ghosts and bogles pressed about the earth, and as the nights lengthened the lucifugi rose from their dark caverns and thronged about human ways. Dick found it increasingly hard to stand by his post in the attic; and evil dreams forced themselves even into Anne’s over-wearied sleep. At last, one night, they woke her, and she sat up in bed with a beating heart, aware of a wicked thing in the room. There seemed a faint light at the end of the bed; more she could not see, but the room was icily cold, and cruelty and remorse and pain pressed on her like a weight, so that she could not move. She tried to say her prayers, but her tongue refused its utterance. Dick, who could see the whole show and fancied that she saw as much, was in pain for her as well as himself, but powerless. If this Christian human had no words of power from where could he gather them?

…He must fetch reinforcements, but where could he go? He thought of the Taynton Lob and old Grim of Stow Churchyard, but after their defeat last May he had little confidence in them…What fools mortals were! They had not so much as a spayed bitch in a house with two ghosts in it. That at least would be some protection against spirits. What about human help? George Batchford was a sensible man and might know what to do, but nothing would induce him to set foot in the haunted attic at midnight. The old lady was the person. No evil spirit could stand against her.

He slipped aside from the pressure of the chill, foul air, and scrambled under the door. It was but a second before he was in Mrs Dimbleby’s room, and by good fortune she was asleep. ‘Come,’ he said, too low to wake her, ‘you’re needed above stairs.’…[S]he followed him steadily up the attic stairs, still in the light sleep of old age. She opened the door of the west attic, and Dick stood aside for her to go in, afraid of what he might see.

The Ur light was still in the room, but it lit nothing but itself. It was a moonless night, and Dick needed his night-piercing eyes to see Anne, then a little from the bed, pressed against the wall with her hand to her throat. Mrs Dimbleby’s eyes were shut, but apparently she saw the ghost as well as Dick did himself. She stood for a moment turned towards it, and then said in a voice even lower than usual, ‘You poor, wicked thing, come out of the shadow of that poor child, and let it join his soul. What good does it do you to chew over and over again the evil things you did? You’ll be none the better of it. Come out, and go to the place that is best for you, through the love of God.’

The ghost is that of an angry and evil woman who once lived in the house, but she assumes the appearance of a dead child whom she had tormented while both were still alive. That’s why Mrs Dimbleby says, “Come out of the shadow of that poor child, and let it join his soul.”

Musette’s semi-annual Christmas carol fest

This is a favourite of Musette’s. She may have posted it two years ago, the last time she had a Christmas carol fest, but wasn’t then able to find a very good or even audible version.

Christmas-haters, beware. I’m going to be doing this often over the next few weeks. Incidentally, I disagree with the redoubtable Camille Paglia (and others) and her ferocious attacks on the sentimentality of Christmas celebrations. I understand hating the excess of Christmas – of food, tinsel, gilt, drink, Santas, family togetherness (sometimes), etc. – but carols have never been part of the unpleasant or annoying side of Christmas for me. (Although operatic tenors emoting over O holy night may be an exception.) I nearly always find that they bring, not a warm and cozy feel, nor a tear-inducing fuzziness, but a touch of the numinous, a sense that the Other World is about to intrude on the present one. I don’t think that this sense necessarily grows out of being a believer. I’ve felt the presence of the numinous at sites or on occasions which were decidedly not Christian: at a shrine outside the Nigerian town of Osogbo, for example; or in Greek or Roman temples.

The Black Dog

The dark days of November, the long nights, and a bout of the flu, have all led Musette to an encounter with the Black Dog, which is part of the reason for her long silence. The Dog never quite goes away. Much of the time, however, he lies silently asleep in a corner and awakens only momentarily to prick up his ears, growl, and fall asleep again. But lately the Black Dog is awake, and moving restlessly, and at times his jaws are gripped firmly around her ankle. That’s not too bad; it’s not until he sits on her chest that his presence really becomes a nuisance. But the effort to fight him off takes up much mental energy.

Edna St Vincent Millay, though not a great poet, had the lyrical gift. And she knew a thing or two about the Black Dog. Here are a few lines from her poem, Renascence, that will strike a familiar chord to those who have met the Black Dog*, or have one of their own.

The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ’most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.

*A certain friend should know that I am NOT speaking of Mimi, who is the nicest Black Dog you could ever hope to meet.

Grief. Ghosts. Memories.

It seems nearly universal among people of the northern hemisphere to remember and mourn the dead in late October or early November. Although Musette is not much attracted by Wicca, she has a kind of vestigial attachment to paganism in its original, not-for-New-Age consumption form, and she cannot help but feel that the Other World – not the world of fantasy and glamour but the world of the dead – is very near at this time of year. Perhaps it’s all those dead leaves rustling that sound like voices on the wind. Perhaps it’s the short days, with their pale, watery sunlight, and the long nights that encroach a little more into the daylight hours with every day that passes.

At any rate, it was with a sense of this nearness that Musette went the other day with her fiance to visit her mother’s grave. We bought a bouquet of roses in the Byward Market, and took a cab to the Notre Dame cemetery, where my mother was buried in January 2005. But it had been several years, too many years, since my last visit there, and I had only the vaguest idea of where the grave was. Then, it had been June or July, the leaves on the trees concealing the layout of the place. Now it was November, sunny and warm to be sure, but the bare trees and stark tombstones looked so different this time that I barely recognised the place.

It was a Sunday and the office was closed, and the map at the gates was of little use. So we wandered for a while, roses in hand, as I tried to remember where the grave was. Somehow it seemed very important to find it, an insult if I could not. We decided to do a kind of quick run-through of the gravestones in the most likely areas, the ones that looked familiar to me, and we inadvertently got separated for perhaps an hour. That hour was a strange experience: I had a sense that I was entirely alone, that the busy world outside the cemetery, and everything that had happened to me since my mother’s death, were not quite real, figments of my imagination. All that existed was this place, this city of the dead, waiting for the last trump.  The silent majority, as Chesterton once referred to them. The setting sun slanting through the trees magnified the eerie feeling of the moment, half-blinding me. I was bemused. Twice I thought I saw my boy moving among the graves, and each time I turned to look more closely it was only a shadow moving in the wind.

At last my best-beloved reappeared in the distance at the end of a path lined with elm trees, calling my name. He was still carrying the roses for my mother. I started to walk towards him, then began to run, absurdly relieved to see him again. We embraced tightly. “You didn’t find her, then”, I said. “No, I didn’t, but don’t worry about it. We tried. And we can come back another day.” So we let it go, and left the City of the Dead to rejoin the land of the living on busy Saint Laurent Boulevard.

The poem that follows, by Robert Frost, has nothing in particular to do with death or mourning, but it does capture something of the strange, uneasy feeling of this time of year.

THE RUNAWAY

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted to us. And then we saw him bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray,
Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes.
The little fellow’s afraid of the falling snow.
He never saw it before. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
He wouldn’t believe when his mother told him, ‘Sakes,
It’s only weather.’ He thought she didn’t know!
So this is something he has to bear alone
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
He mounts the wall again with whited eyes
Dilated nostrils, and tail held straight up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When all other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.” 

Zowie. Hot news for Catholics.

Damian Thompson in his Daily Telegraph blog makes the following announcement  (via Seraphic Goes to Scotland):

Pope Benedict XVI has created an entirely new Church structure for disaffected Anglicans that will allow them to worship together – using elements of Anglican liturgy – under the pastoral supervision of their own specially appointed bishop or senior priest.

The Pope is now offering Anglicans worldwide “corporate reunion” on terms that will delight Anglo-Catholics. In theory, they can have their own married priests, parishes and bishops – and they will be free of liturgical interference by liberal Catholic bishops who are unsympathetic to their conservative stance.

There is even the possibility that married Anglican laymen could be accepted for ordination on a case-by-case basis – a remarkable concession.

The comments on the post are grumpy but interesting. Musette would like to ask Vladimir or Baduin to comment on the accuracy of the bit about the Didache. She wishes she knew more early Church history but there are so many frauds and charlatans in the business that she does not know where to turn for information. The discussion in the Catholic Encyclopedia doesn’t appear to touch upon the issues raised by the Telegraph commentator, though they may have been addressed long ago.

Some thoughts on female submissiveness

Today is a day in which the wild west wind that is the breath of autumn’s being is blowing with such energy and lustiness that it is invigorating to the hitherto tired and ennervated Musette, who is still waiting for Clio to reappear and inspire her with the desire to write about something or someone other than herself and her True Love.

This form of absorption in the particulars of one’s own life is said to be characteristically feminine, a view that Musette has always rejected in the past with some heat. She is not certain that she is prepared to accept it now, but it is clear that she must reconsider her position, and will perhaps make greater allowances in future when she encounters this kind of behaviour among her friends.

Recently, Musette has been following with interest the rise of a new blog called Girlgame. Its co-authors are five young women who want to discuss the ideas of “Game” as promoted by the “PUA community”. (PUA= pickup-artist.) All have found for one reason or another that feminism as they grew up with it has been at the very least an inadequate tool for the understanding of relations between men and women. That is the perspective from which their blog is written.

It is not exactly news that some women find much in feminist thought and activism annoying or burdensome. Women’s magazines and the lifestyle sections of our newspapers have for some years now been filled with accounts of young women who gave up careers to be full-time housewives and mothers, while op-ed writers pontificate about young women’s betrayal of the legacy of feminism, or else, taking another tack, insist that feminism never had any quarrel with some women’s decision to work as mothers and housewives rather than at paid careers. “It was all about choices“, they insist.

But all of the co-authors of Girlgame are career women in some sense, or else students. At least one is training in a very demanding profession. Only one appears to be religious in the orthodox sense . None of them is a stay-at-home mother trying to defend her chosen way of life; none of them is married. In their accomplishments, they are the kind of women to whom feminists would probably point with pride as a mark of the achievements of feminism. And yet there they are, rejecting much (not all) that has characterized feminist thought about the sexes since the 1970s.

Nor are all these young women white. Several are in fact of Indian descent (dot not feather, as current internet usage would put it). None of them is African-American – but by coincidence there is another, earlier but still newish blog with a similar title – Gameforgirls – one of whose co-writers is indeed African-American. It is sterner than Girlgame, and a little less polite in tone, but it covers much the same territory, and it, too, is impatient with most of what feminism has to say about male-female relations. The principal author, who goes variously by the names of Mamasan and Kthulah, has a post up about how recognise a good man that might have been written by my mother or grandmothers.

Musette first encountered most of these women at Roissy’s blog, and indeed it appears that it was reading Roissy that inspired most of them to begin blogging. Many of them were popular there, but Kthulah/Mamasan, for reasons that Musette has never quite understood, was given a very rough time by the Posse, which was odd because she was not hostile to the fundamental tenets of Game theory, though often critical of the way it was applied by some men, including Roissy. Perhaps the problem was that she never tried to ingratiate herself with them. Or perhaps it was that she fought to challenge the racial stereotypes in which they so often indulged.

In any case, Musette must confess that she finds Mamasan’s point of view, as expressed in her blog, in many ways more appealing than the views of the sparky younger women on Girlgame, and this in spite of the fact that Mamasan is in certain respects a sexual radical, while Musette of course is not. The Girlgame women have not yet been tempered by hard experience, and Mamasan has.

Lack of tempering? Well, for an example of what Musette means, readers might check out a recent post on the Girlgame blog written by the charming and intelligent Aoefe. In it, she argues that women are in general (she does allow for exceptions), submissive by nature, and in order to flourish, they need a dominant man to lead them. This is a view that always gives Musette pause and fills her with a variety of conflicting thoughts and feelings.

Now, Aoefe is a young woman trying to grope her way towards a greater understanding of men and women, and trying to determine what she ought to keep, and what to discard, of the ideas and shibboleths of liberal feminism, but Musette does not think that in this case she is moving in the right direction. Must the fact that women do, in general, prefer men who are socially and sexually “dominant”, have as its obverse the implicit assumption that women are in general “submissive” and looking to be led by men? Musette disagrees quite sharply with these views. She suspects that Aoefe has either a) over-generalized from her own particular nature, or b) been misled by the language of the sexual subculture of “dom/sub” relationships, though she explicitly denies this.

Musette’s own view of these matters is difficult to articulate, in part because the concept of feminine submission awakens such a maelstrom of negative feelings in her. She does not think that women are in general submissive, though she agrees that women do prefer socially and sexually dominant men (like Aoefe on the other side of the issue, she allows for exceptions in both cases). This preference, she believes, does not in itself indicate a wish to submit to male authority. Rather, she thinks that it is a sign of women’s wish to find an equal partner in life and in the bedroom. This apparent paradox is not, properly understood, a paradox at all.

One of the basic problems with the institution of marriage is that it is easy, all too easy, for men and women to fall into a mother-son relationship to each other. The reasons for this may have to do with the fact that for both sexes, the mother-child relationship is nearly always (except in extraordinary circumstances) their first experience of loving and being loved. That is what it means to be a mammal: mother is our first love-object. Once courtship is over and their lives together have begun in earnest, and especially once a couple has children, the mother-son template is so easy and natural to both sexes that it may require conscious effort to avoid it. Some men accept it with resignation; others fight against it and behave like rebellious teenage sons. Neither approach is desirable in marriage: mother-son overtones in marriage effectively kill desire, and leave too much responsibility on a woman’s shoulders. That is why a wise woman either chooses a strong, dominant man (and even they have been known to fold under pressure), or does her best, by a process of subtle encouragement, to teach her man how to become dominant without becoming submissive herself.

Submission cannot encourage a man to become or to remain dominant. In fact, a man who looks explicitly for a submissive woman is quite likely, though not necessarily, to have a fragile sense of masculinity, to need not mere respect, but the continual “stroking” of his ego, to remain strong. Writing of St Paul’s notorious comment that wives should submit to their husbands, one very orthodox Catholic blogger I know of has written that this may be a woman’s duty, but that she regards it as a purely private duty of conscience against which a woman should make her decisions, and that any man who goes so far as explicitly to demand obedience from a woman, or worse yet compel it from her either by physical force or by making decisions that affect them both without consulting her, is not to be trusted.

Musette stresses that she does not think that women should be disrespectful, rude, bullying, or unkind to their men. Nor does she think that the only equal relationships between men and women are those in which they parcel out the housework and childcare according to a strict schedule, or both work outside the home, nor any of the other forms of crude egalitarianism that some feminists support. She is saying that husbands and wives both need to take their spouses into consideration, and each respecting the sexual differences – whether anatomical or emotional – that make us men and women.

Below readers will find a few paragraphs from a story, a sort of fairy-tale, that was a childhood favourite of Musette’s. It is about female pride (and male pride), and indeed its title is “Proud Rosalind and the Hart Royale”.

After a little Harding began to speak. “Are you satisfied, Rusty Knight,” said he, “with what you have done in Proud Rosalind’s honor?”

The Rusty Knight did not answer.

“Did ever lady have a sorrier champion?” Harding laughed roughly. “She would have beggared herself to get you a sword. And she got you a sword the like of which no knight ever had before. And how have you used it? All through a summer you have brought laughter upon her. She would have beggared herself again to get you a bow that only a god was worthy to draw. And how have you drawn it? For a month you have drawn it to men’s scorn of her and of you. You have cried her praises only to forfeit them. You have vaunted her beauty and never crowned it. And what have you got for it?” The Rusty Knight was as dumb as the dead. Harding stepped closer. “Shall I tell you, Rusty Knight, what you have got for it? Last Midsummer Eve by the Wishing-Well the Proud Rosalind forswore love if heaven would send her a man to strike a blow in her name for her fathers’ sake. She did not say what sort of man or what sort of blow. She asked in her simplicity only that a blow should be struck. And like a woman she was ready to find it enough, and in gratitude repay it with that which could only in honor be exchanged for what honored her. Yet I myself heard her swear to hold herself bound to the sorry champion who should strike for her in the tourney. And you struck and fell. Did you tell her you fell when you came to her, crownless? And how did she crown you for your fall, Rusty Knight?”

The Knight sprang to his feet and stood quivering.

“That moves you,” said Harding, “but I will move you more. The Proud Rosalind is not your woman. She is mine. She was mine from the moment her eyes fell. She was only a child then, but I knew she was mine as surely as I knew this hart was mine and no other’s, when first I saw it as a calf drink at its pool. But I was patient and waited till he, my calf, should become a king, and she, my heifer, a queen. And I am her man because I am of king’s stock in my own land, and she of king’s stock in hers. And I am her man because for a year I have kept her, without her knowledge, with the pence I earned by my sweat, that were earned for a different purpose. And I am her man because the hart you have defended so ill, and hampered for a month, was saved to-day by my arrows, not yours. It was my arrows slew the hounds from the top of the cliff. It was my arrows split the bows of the seven knights. And it is my arrow now that will kill the White Hart that in all men’s sight I may give her the antlers to-morrow, and hear my Proud Rosalind called queen among women.”

And as he spoke Harding drew back suddenly, and fitted a shaft to his string as though he would shoot the hart where it lay.

But the Rusty Knight sprang forward and caught his hands crying, “Not my Hart! you shall not shoot my Hart!” And he tore off his casque, and the great tawny mantle of Rosalind’s hair fell over her rags, and her face was on fire and her bosom heaving; and she sank down murmuring, “I beg you to spare my Hart.”

But Harding, uttering a great laugh of pride and joy, caught her up before she could kneel, saying, “Not even to me, my Proud Rosalind!” And without even kissing her lips, he put her from him and knelt before her, and kissed her feet.

Readers are asked to note that Harding was not being submissive here, but joyfully acknowledging that he had found a woman worthy of him. Those who wish to read more can find the story (it is part of a collection called Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard) here.

The Catholic Church and the modern world

From a discussion in the comments thread of Musette’s “Late marriage” post, between reader Vladimir and Clio, who seems to have crept back for a visit without announcing herself:

aliasclio:

As for John Paul II, I don’t think that most people, esp. most North Americans, are yet able to see how revolutionary his leadership really was. Because he was a “conservative” regarding sexual matters, they cannot see that his concessions to liberalism in other areas, including immigration, represented an enormous change in the Church’s attitudes to the modern world. One example: in the 19th century the Church was instructing Italian Catholics not to participate in any way in democratic elections or face excommunication, and that isn’t really that long ago. Vladimir appears to know more of the modern (post 18th century) Church than I do; perhaps he could step in to comment?

Vladimir:

Thanks for the invitation to comment; it’s an honor coming from an author such as yourself.

The 19th century Church was in a specific situation because the unification of Italy in the 1860s included, among other things, violent annexation of the Papal States. In the period of 1861-1929, the papacy refused to recognize the authority of the newly unified Italian state, in my opinion rightfully. The Papal States had ruled Rome for more than a thousand years, with only occasional brief interruptions, not as some aberrant theocratic phenomenon. (In fact, the whole idea of unified Italy is a product of 19th century romantic nationalism. Before that, Italy was a patchwork of smaller states and peoples with very different local customs and languages, and many of these states and local identities had many centuries of tradition and legitimacy behind them. Much of the trouble that Italian governments have had with Cosa Nostra and other mafias stems from the fact that in many places, the local populations never really accepted them as their true legitimate sovereign, relying on their informal traditional networks of authority instead.)

As for the modern Catholic concessions to liberalism, in an important way it has been a reprise of the same story that’s been repeated many times through history, only this time with a different response from the Church authorities. There have always been movements with the Church that attacked the Church hierarchy and doctrine from a radicalized and self-righteous standpoint, some of them with significant success, like e.g. the 16th century Protestant Reformers. Yet, the Church had always met such challenges heads-on, not budging an inch in any significant matters of doctrine, and even if they resulted in crushing defeats leading to a great shrinking of Church’s extent and influence, at least the doctrine remained pure and uncompromising. The last such occasion was the 19th century Modernist movement, which was dealt a crushing blow by Pope St. Pius X a century ago.

The revived post-WW2 modernist tendencies in the Church have been merely one more such episode of radicalized self-righteous rebellion. Unfortunately, this time the response was far more lenient and, even more catastrophically, these tendencies have been allowed to influence the Church doctrine and ritual. Even when it comes to the greatest abominations that have been rightfully condemned by the recent popes in unambiguous terms, such as e.g. the “liberation theology” or the “pro-choice Catholics,” many of their proponents have been tolerated in practice and allowed to speak while maintaining their prominent positions within the Church. In my opinion, the most disastrous consequence of these trends has been the near-complete destruction of Catholic spiritual art and architecture and the sad degradation of the beauty and dignity of the Mass. (With sadly few honorable exceptions.) Alexander Borgia might have been one of the most depraved men who ever lived, but even he could never have even dreamed of wreaking such destruction during his papacy. It should be noted that while sedevacantists and others who claim that the Second Vatican Council was heretical are in an obviously absurd position, it is true that the wording of many documents of the Council was unfortunate in that it permitted extremely liberal readings without too much of a stretch.

But what’s the reason for all this? Why did the Church always fight resolutely against such trends in the past, only to succumb to them to a large degree this time? There are, I believe, several reasons.

The first one is the seductive allure of the Anglo-Saxon liberalism. The Anglosphere has been at the undisputed forefront of Western civilization for almost a century now, and especially after WW2. Thus, it’s nearly impossible for any intellectual, Catholic or not, to avoid the temptation to succumb to its intellectual trends, rather than to stick to traditionalism and be branded a troglodyte by the fashionable opinion. So, we’ve ended up in a situation where the Church leaders, all the way up to the Pope, are bending over backwards to be as PC as possible on all questions except those few ones where it would mean out-and-out heresy or apostasy. Thus, they’ll hold the line when it comes to, say, abortion, gay marriage, or woman priests, but they’ll frenetically try to make up for it on all issues that the Church has traditionally considered as a matter of free personal opinion and a free choice of the secular authorities, such as e.g. mass immigration, death penalty, or the policies and attitudes towards Islam. Of course, like all appeasement, it only feeds the beast and creates further pressure to abandon the traditional doctrine on all other matters where it might conflict with the PC worldview.

The second one is the frog-boiling principle. The modern PC liberalism has acquired its present extreme characteristics only slowly and gradually. There was no single point at which mainstream politicians and public intellectuals started advocating things grossly incompatible with the Catholic faith, which the priests and bishops could then recognize as the time for a decisive break with them. (Like, for example, the Church in Eastern Europe suddenly found itself under an openly hostile regime in 1945.) Rather, the priests and bishops have stuck to their prominent social roles, even if this required tolerating (and endorsing by silence) more and more grossly heretical and sinful views among the social elite whose part they wanted to remain. Thus, we have slowly drifted towards a situation where Catholic bishops cavort with pro-abortionist politicians without daring to mutter a single word against their views, and a priest gets arrested for protesting against abortion on the campus of a supposedly Catholic university, lest the reverend fathers running it might be deemed uncouth by their social peers. On a more mundane level, the same prideful lust for social prestige leads to the disgusting modern church architecture and art that will win praise by the modern art establishment, even if it’s at the same spiritual and aesthetic level as an abandoned warehouse. (How anyone can have any respect in the first place for this bunch of obnoxious poseurs and charlatans and their nauseating output is beyond me, but that’s a topic for some other discussion.)

The third one is that many Catholic hierarchs, theologians, and other intellectuals have committed the same ignorant errors that have pushed the Mainline Protestant churches into de facto dechristianization. By this I mean the naive conflation between the traditional Christian virtues of charity, mercy, justice, and love of neighbor and the modern PC/Universalist sugary liberalism, and the similarly naive conflation between traditionalism and fascism/Nazism. Thus, many of them actually believe that even the most abominable and extreme left is preferable to even moderate traditionalism. These days, among liberal Catholics, one will certainly draw much more controversy by being a fan of the Tridentine Mass than the Clown Mass, and one will be considered far more evil for giving un-PC comments about issues such as multiculturalism than for outright heresy and apostasy aimed at making one’s views more PC. For various reasons, some of them discussed above, the present power of such currents of thought among Catholics, both laymen and clergy, is at a historically unprecedented level, as well as the favorability of the surrounding environment for their growth.

There is much more to be said about this topic, easily enough to fill a whole book, but these would be some of my preliminary thoughts on the matter.

Late marriage

This is a more personal story than is usual for this blog. Those who are embarrassed or bored by such material can skip it, if they like. Musette promises the rest of you that there’s nothing actually salacious here, and that she has kept the gritty details of her folly to herself.

When Musette was six years old, she received a Barbie wedding-dress as a Christmas present from a friend, and for a few weeks she thought she had died and gone to heaven. Like most little girls, she was delighted by, even in awe of, the glamour of the Bride in her white dress and veil. The first wedding she ever attended in real life took place perhaps a few months later; the bride and groom were friends of her parents. She was bitterly disappointed to find that the bride, though not Indian, was wearing a blue and white sari rather than a Swan-Lake style wedding dress with full tulle skirts. (We lived in New Delhi at the time and saris, far from being exotic, were an everyday fact of life. )

That feeling for the glamour of the bride and the wedding ceremony is still said to push girls to idealize and romanticize marriage. Some feminists insist that it encourages many of them to marry too young (surely not so much any more); or too soon during the courtship phase; or too often; or too thoughtlessly. Perhaps. Musette, however, who was an odd child in some ways, did not find herself over-eager to get married once she had reached an age when such a thing was possible. Her mother had always told her that she would not make a good housewife, and she suspected this was true, although of course, by that time, it was becoming common for women to be married and mothers but also to have a career. Musette saw these new women and how busy they always were, and how chaotic their households often seemed. She wondered what it would be like to grow up in one of them, and was not inspired by the idea.

In fact I often wondered (to switch voices) about having children in general. It frightened me, not because I disliked children or didn’t want to be bothered by them, but because I feared I wouldn’t be a good mother. In young adulthood I was the victim of short, but frequent and intense bouts of depression. I could never be certain where my moods would take me from one hour to the next. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the vast array of anti-depressants now available scarcely existed, and those that did were tricky to use and infrequently prescribed unless you were literally suicidal. Meanwhile, one of the things I used then to lift my spirits was dressing up, especially dressing up to go to parties, where I could usually count on getting a little infusion of gaiety (in the, er, old sense), and vitality, as I talked to new people and flirted a little. But married mothers, I understood, didn’t dress up or get out much, except to work, and they weren’t supposed to flirt. How would I cope with the sense of confinement that inevitably comes to young couples with babies? What if I visited my mood swings on my children? I wondered. What if I was one of those needy and possessive mothers who drive their children to distraction? I had terrible bouts of guilt over my non-existent children and what I might do to them.

It wasn’t just having children that I feared, though. It was marriage itself. I was convinced that marriage was death to any feelings of romance and passion between husband and wife, and replacing marriage with “living together” didn’t seem to help much with the problem. Older women, including my mother and aunts, assured me that it was true but that it didn’t matter, that a new kind of love came along to replace the old feelings of being In Love. This didn’t reassure me. I had the teenage romantic’s belief that being In Love was the greatest state in life, and besides, like parties, that sort of love was a terrific cure for depression, a feeling that could suddenly flood a grey world with brilliant colours, warm a cold heart, and infuse life with meaning and purpose. What would I do if I lost that capacity? Or worse yet, if I lost it for my husband but retained it for other men? As with my imaginary children, I had guilt-ridden visions of myself as an unfaithful wife (emotionally, at least), a modern Emma Bovary dreaming of a less drab existence.

Astute readers will see that I had a great deal of growing up to do before I was fit for marriage, and that perhaps my first need was to cultivate my sense of humour.

All the same, by the time I was 25 or so, I thought I might be able to manage it. I did want children and, thanks to my reading of much-maligned women’s magazines like Glamour, I knew that it was easier to have them in one’s 20s and that fertility drops sharply after age 35. I didn’t want to be alone all my life. Looking at my friends in their “long-term relationships” (I didn’t have any married friends until I was in my 30s – a sign of the times?), it seemed to me that In Love didn’t die quite as quickly and completely as I had once believed. Anyway, if it did, I thought I would be able to cope. My moods were more stable than they had once been, and anyway I had learned how to control them to some degree.

But then tragedy struck my family. My brother G., six years younger than I and still only a teenager, had been showing signs of distress for a year or two. In the summer of 1986, his symptoms became acute, and a doctor suggested that it was probably schizophrenia. A short time later he suffered a complete breakdown and had to be hospitalized for a few weeks.

Although none of us suffered anything much compared to G. himself, we were, of course, stricken with a terrible grief. In my own case, my carefully cultivated optimism and emotional stability vanished. I found myself suddenly as eager to fall In Love as I had been as an adolescent, but with an added sense of urgency or desperation for commitment that had never been there before.

This is not a good state of mind in which to date. I won’t say much about my misadventures over the next few years, except that, although I always chose men who were presentable, attractive to look at, and seemingly stable, were also often deeply disturbed under their appearance of normality. I was drawn to chaos and to staring into the Abyss, and as with Nietzsche, the Abyss began to stare back at me. In my own unhappiness I ended up driving away such love as I might have found. I’m not sorry about it, in retrospect, because I doubt that I would have been happy with any of the men I dated in my dark years, but at the time my repeated failures only added to my distress.

Going back to graduate school in my early 30s was my salvation. It gave an outlet to my passions: instead of falling In Love with a man, I was In Love with history. I gave it all the furious, intense devotion I had tried and failed to invest in a man. I thought that I had at last found my place in the world, and my purpose: I was a scholar. I would be a celibate scholar, too, if I had to be. I didn’t think I would mind. Though I continued to date, it was light-heartedly, without the passion of previous years,  and with a determination to avoid emotional chaos.

For a long time, this approach was successful. Although it didn’t exactly lead me to a lasting love, I didn’t really care. I was happy. I still suffered from bouts of depression, but if they threatened to become severe, I could turn to Prozac or Paxil or Welbutrin or any of the new anti-depressants that seemed to have been invented for people like me. With their help, if necessary, I looked forward to a long career as a professor of history at some university. I refused, however, to stay on them for more than a few months at a time. I didn’t like the emotional numbness of Prozac, or the sleeplessness induced by Paxil.

When my parents returned from what was to be their last posting, I found that my mother was deeply distressed over the prospect of having to care for my brother without help. Abroad, she had housekeepers and could go out freely when she needed or wanted to do so. In Canada, this would be much harder to manage. As I watched her and sympathized, it began to dawn on me that I wouldn’t be able to leave Ottawa to pursue my university career, which was tantamount to accepting that I wouldn’t be able to pursue it at all. Academic careers require you to pick up courses as a sessional lecturer wherever you can, travelling  from one school to another, week in and week out, and, if lucky, acquiring a reputation for good teaching, all the while publishing papers and attending conferences. This is what leads to full-time jobs and, perhaps, tenure. But I couldn’t do this and continue to provide my mother with company and emotional support. 

Although I finished my dissertation, and got my doctorate, I gave up my dreams of Academe, and got a job in a related but non-academic field. I was by now nearing the age of 40, supposedly a time when women cease being attractive to men, or so I had always thought.  All the same, I was pursued – almost stalked – by a charming but sociopathic (I don’t call him that lightly) colleague, in whom I invested all the emotions that I had for so long safely ploughed into my scholarly work. I’m saving that story for my fiction, so I won’t tell it here, though I will say that I think he lived to regret it. I was his victim for a time, but I don’t believe he ever tried anything of the kind again. It’s the one satisfaction I can take from the episode, which cost me several years of the most severe depression I ever experienced, not through heartbreak, but through furious rage at myself and at him.

The experience purged Musette once and for all of false romanticism, of flirting with the Abyss. When she met the man who is to be her husband, some years later, she discovered that he, too, had once been drawn to the Abyss, but had learned that the Glamour of Evil – so well-represented in her own life by her sociopathic colleague – quickly faded to dullness and despair. When together, they talk, laugh, and tell each other stories. He teases her incessantly, and she returns as good as she gets. They attend Mass. They have learned how to love.

Perseverance…sigh

As temperance and its annexed virtues remove from the will hindrances to rational good arising from sensuous pleasure, so fortitude removes from the will those obstacles arising from the difficulties of doing what reason requires. Hence fortitude, which implies a certain moral strength and courage, is the virtue by which one meets and sustains dangers and difficulties, even death itself, and in never through fear of these deterred from the pursuit of good which reason dictates. (See FORTITUDE.) The virtues annexed to fortitude are: …

….Perseverance, the virtue which disposes to continuance in the accomplishment of good works in spite of the difficulties attendant upon them. As a moral virtue it is not to be taken precisely for what is designated as final perseverance, that special gift of the predestined by which one is found in the state of grace at the moment of death. It is used here to designate that virtue which disposes one to continuance in any virtuous work whatsoever.  — Catholic Encyclopedia

A few days ago, I left a comment at the 2Blowhards’ website on the subject of the difficulty of perseverance. Because this is an issue that much occupies Musette’s mind at the moment, as she struggles with certain intractable bad habits, she has decided to re-post the comment here in an edited format:

Why do some people succeed in some great effort of self-reform, and then give it up? Why do others not appear to try at all?

I think the answer may be the same in both cases, and that it’s something to do with the psychology of perseverance in human beings. It’s one thing to see reason, like the perception that one is after all too fat, or ill-tempered, or drinks too much; undergo a conversion to better eating, or giving up alcohol; and reform your life. It’s another thing to know that you’ve done it all already, and failed. It may be worse yet to know that you’ve done it all already, succeeded, and then relapsed into your former ways.

I suspect that the people one sees who appear never to have tried, or never to have succeeded at, reforming their lives, have in fact done so many times over, something we can’t really know unless we’re on intimate terms with them. They are worn out by the cycle of desperation, renewal, and relapse. As John Cleese groans at a pivotal moment in the movie Clockwise, “It isn’t the despair that crushes you. It’s the HOPE!”

Resignation to one’s bad habits or vices may hurt less, in the immediate moment, than hope and the renewal of effort. Perhaps there’s something in evolutionary pscyhology to explain this, and perhaps it is, after all, the consequence of the Fall.

Perseverance is one of the “moral virtues”. There are also “intellectual virtues” and “theological virtues”, the last of which comprise faith, hope and charity: “these three”, as Paul says in one of his most famous passages. It may be that in order to overcome any really disordered desire, like that of the serious alcoholic, it’s necessary to call upon not merely the natural virtues (that is, the intellectual and moral ones), but upon the three supernatural virtues, the theological ones. Most of the most serious alcoholic and drug addicts do not manage to break free of their addiction without calling upon these. That’s why the most successful treatment programs for such people tend to involve a great deal of God talk, sometimes to the discomfiture of the people who turn to them in desperation.