Iron on Iron

As iron sharp­ens iron, so one man sharp­ens another.
Proverbs

Today I met a man for cof­fee, a man I had never met, to talk about writ­ing, and you know, make friends or some­thing. As I drove to the meet I won­dered about the but­ter­flies I had. What should be hard about this? I want to write, and I respect this writer a lot and he seems like a nice enough fel­low in the exchanges on email, etc. But the but­ter­flies are flit­ting, and I think it goes back a long way, beyond me and him by far.

Men are trained to be wary of another man. Maybe it is in the genes too. The long bathing of our code in testos­terone has trained us to sleep with an eye open, to hone our skills, be ready to fight – and be ready to kill. This is a unique part of the grain of being a man. There is PTSD, (post trau­matic stress dis­or­der), but this is more like Pre-TSD – it is already there, the vig­i­lance, the hair trig­ger. Women are not indoc­tri­nated this way. You may say that women can be extremely dan­ger­ous to one another, way beyond catty. True, but my expe­ri­ence of being a man is that men are born with a bent toward and then pre­pared for a life of bat­tle with each other. It is in us to kill one another, and the closer we are to one another, the greater the risk. Genetic close­ness makes for the great­est risk. Men make a big deal about the vital impor­tance of the team, the pla­toon, etc. It is a way to counter our ten­dency to make war with who­ever is nearby. It com­pen­sates if I can clearly remind myself that we are on the same side and so I should keep my sword in its scabbard.

The first mur­der we read about in the Bible is a brother killing a brother. Jeal­ousy is the usual rea­son given, but I think it was shame. Cain could not tol­er­ate his belief that Abel had shamed him, made him look bad. God appar­ently did not like the fruit that Cain brought for a sac­ri­fice and let him know it and although god makes no mis­takes, maybe he also told Cain in front of Abel. The last straw? The book doesn’t say, but I think it could have been the only straw and it would have been enough. This story is not an acci­dent. From as far back as we go, the threat is there. Read East of Eden for the mod­ern look at this dark side of manhood.

So I meet my new friend, we share a table, we get through the ini­tial blows of hel­los and no one is dead yet. We find a com­mon ground in the words, the writ­ing. Maybe I find the courage some­day to tell him about the harder parts of my per­son­al­ity or the strug­gles I have with impend­ing father­hood, or the fight Rose and I had, or my fear of the past…and the future. For now, I am, in a deep and arche­typal way, thank­ful that we remained civil in spite of our genetic and cul­tural her­itage. Maybe too, I am proud of myself (and him, although he needs none of my pride) for reach­ing across the usual silence we men main­tain in each other’s pres­ence, hold­ing out our hands, and say­ing, ”Hello.”