I’ve said this before and usually have gotten a ton of crap about it, but yes – I think it IS all men. ALL men. Even though there are plenty of guys like me who work daily to end this bullshit against women and kids, the reality is that we are ALL capable of it. The fact that I haven’t or wouldn’t beat up, rape, or murder women and children (or other men) for whatever reasons, doesn’t mean (for any practical purposes) that anyone could ever be certain that I can’t or won’t. Context matters. Women can’t tell, and their biological hard-wiring to build connection and relationship makes them always vulnerable. Plus, a woman has no way to discover the difference between me and a guy who will harm her without her getting too close to react effectively before it’s too late.

If you listen to felons in support groups in prisons they will all admit that it takes at least a year of faking it before they will start hitting a woman with fair confidence they can maintain control and keep her from leaving. This is a prescriptive pattern, not happenstance or a one-off.

And when it comes to sex, most guys are just looking for the relief of a few squirts in the dark, but every woman without exception is literally putting her life at risk with every single occasion of intercourse. If you don’t believe that, just look up the stats for eclampsia and other pregnancy-related causes of death among women. We have profoundly different perspectives on the sexual experience. This also speaks to the old cliche – “Women need a reason to have sex. Men only need a place.” In other words, most women will not be willing to have sex unless they feel safe and affectionate or unless they are driven to it by complex and deeply unmet needs. Most men are willing to have sex simply because it’s Tuesday and they want pizza for supper.

And part of the difficulty for women is they need to choose a mate who is violent enough to provide and protect without being so violent or psychologically damaged that he will turn that violence inward and on to her, on to the family, his tribe, or his community. In this day and age, with so many deeply damaged men who have no idea what it means to be a man, this gets really really tricky and dangerous for women and kids, as well as for other men. This is part of the reason so many women get trapped and badly damaged by their attraction to the “bad boy” stereotype. Women can’t tell the difference between a “good enough” bad guy and an actual bad guy, and too many men are very good liars, or are too damaged to self-manage effectively. Men are competent in self-regulation, distress tolerance, executive function, and interpersonal effectiveness. Boys are not. Men own their responsibilities. Boys do not.

As a species we humans are pack-hunting apex predators and obligate meso-carnivores scoring higher on the carnivore scale than wolves but lower than cats. Look at our prey – we kill and eat everything from bugs to blue whales. We are fat-seeking meat-eaters and massive ecosystem engineers who alter every landscape we inhabit. And while women can certainly be violent, human males are the most lethal apex predator ever to walk this planet. If T-Rex still lived we would have fast food Dino-franchises in every country on the planet, and the ads would swear he tastes like chicken. Until we take steps as a global culture to reckon with that innate violence potential among human males – to own it and take real responsibility for it – nothing else we ever do will come to much beyond our own extinction.

The human male capacity for violence is extraordinary, and the only thing I know capable of taming it in any case is to awaken empathy and build a strong ethical structure in place in the young male before his capacity for violence gets set in concrete during and after puberty. This is tricky, because too much empathy makes a man too weak to kill an animal for food or too weak to defend his family when real violence is required. Too little empathy makes him arrogant, selfish, unkind, and overly brutal to others, especially to those weaker than he is. In the old days, the rest of the men in the tribe would just get together and kill an arrogant, abusive, bully male – take him out into the woods and make him climb the honey tree. It doesn’t quite work like that anymore, at least not in a society of laws.

That behavioral difference – too much or too little empathy – is also the distinction I personally make between a soldier and a warrior. A soldier is compliant, submissive, and obedient, and will follow orders without regard for any moral or ethical stance. A warrior owns his strength and knows his weakness. He lives and acts in service to his tribe. He is morally and ethically responsible for the expression of his power and his capacity for violence. He will provide for and protect his tribe and his family, and he will not permit or tolerate cruelty visited upon the weak. This is how we evolved as a species. Who did men protect women and children from? Other men. Predators.

We humans must learn to integrate that awareness of our capacity for violence so it doesn’t run us as a species. Embrace the shadow. You cannot manage that which is undistinguished – therefore it runs you. As long as we pretend we are harmless and deny the human capacity for violence it will continue to spill over onto everything we touch, including women, children, and all of the natural world. These are our kin – each and every one – from maggots to maples to men of other tribes. These are all our relations.

All our ancestral societies had methods and rituals to channel the predilection for risk-taking, adventure and achievement, and the innate violence of young men so they could learn how to protect and provide before those drives got misdirected and started to hurt the boys themselves or the tribe around them. We have lost that. We need to recreate it. One of the writers I have read about this topic says that men are wired for the three Ps – to Provide, Protect, and Procreate. To that I would add that we need to install self-mastery as an inescapable requirement for all males graduating from boyhood to manhood. If you cannot effectively manage yourself then you have no business managing anything or anyone else.

Another significant point about this which is likely utterly invisible to most men – over a couple decades of work in my emotional intelligence workshops when I have asked the men in the group what they do on a daily basis to protect themselves against sexual assault there is usually dead silence and puzzled looks. Eventually some wise guy in the back of the room will snicker and say he works real hard to not get arrested and sent to prison. All the other guys chuckle and guffaw. The first invisible thing here is that this too is an expression of the reality of male-pattern violence.

When I ask the women in the group that question (I have by now spent a couple days building trust and safety in the room) they get really nervous and after a bit of hesitation share volumes of experiences, many including descriptions and stories of specific sexual assaults that have happened to them personally, many women having had more than one experience. While the women are sharing this the men get very quiet and look completely stunned.

Understand, out of three workshops of about 40 people each (usually 50/50 or close to it) there will be one woman who has NOT had these experiences, and more than a third of the women had these experiences while they were still children, before they passed through puberty. Most of those women never reported the assaults to the authorities. In those cases where the assaults were reported, most of the perpetrators never went to prison or were held accountable.

The men have no idea. Most men don’t get it. It’s not part of their lived experience. The good ones are appalled and outraged and want to help. The guilty ones defend themselves, cast doubt, criticize, attack, invalidate, and deny.

And sad to say, too many men remain utterly blind to the reality. And thus they interpret women’s natural defensive reactions to men as hate. Nope. It’s about trust and safety. Women want us to step up, to do well, and to be the men they need. And… They want us to stop molesting, raping, beating, and murdering them. Feminism is about women having an equal voice, an equal vote (in all things), and being heard. That you don’t get that and that you misinterpret all of it is the perfect demonstration of why it is still so essential.

This is a real thing, it’s everywhere, and it’s inexcusable. And we men need to fix it. Women can support and help of course, but this is real men’s work.

I highly recommend these essays by Rob Henderson, by Jay, and by Jordan Peterson as well, where they talk about some of the same issues with young males, the differences between males and females, and some of the larger social conversations about what it means to be male:

Rob Henderson – Young Male Syndrome
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/understanding-the-young-male-syndrome

The Male-Warrior Hypothesis
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-male-warrior-hypothesis

Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity: The Meaning Behind The Meme
https://www.musclehacking.com/blog/reject-modernity-embrace-masculinity

Comment on the APA Guidelines for the Treatment of Boys and Men
Political Correctness – Beware the Ideologues in Psychologists’ Clothing

“The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution” by Richard Wrangham

Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly

Masculinity – Dr. Roy Casagranda (about 2 hours)

We (in the human domains of knowing) understand a lot about how all this works. We even know how to fix it. We simply lack the political will to make it so.

Carmine Leo
04/02/24
https://www.carmineleo.com/

—

Matsuo Basho 1644-1694

I’ve dabbled in poetry for 60 years, and there are two poetic forms from the Japanese that I love dearly that are closely related and quite different – haiku and senryū. Most people are familiar with haiku – a non-rhyming verse form consisting of three syllabic lines of 5-7-5, and which have a fairly complex set of guiding rules that are several hundred years old.

Senryū (also called human haiku) is the second variation of Japanese verse consisting of three lines of 5-7-5 syllable lines that do not rhyme. Senryū is usually written in the present tense and typically only refers to some aspect of human nature or emotion. (1)

Years ago I participated in a number of poetry workshops with Robert Bly. In a couple of them we got into the topic of haiku, where he maintained that the structure of a haiku requires two images simultaneously connected and separated by a vast, floating, associative leap. (2) The Japanese also require a haiku to contain some kind of seasonal reference as well as something from the natural world that illuminates something in human nature. You can see that in (what I at the time thought was) Bly’s version of Basho’s magnificent poem:

bright October morning
a sudden chill – underfoot
my dead wife’s comb

Bly must have had a serious brain cramp that day (I’ve certainly had plenty like that) because I later discovered that poem was not written by Basho at all but was Bly’s interpretation of a poem written by Taniguchi Buson. Also, the most delicious irony is that it was written when Buson’s wife was still alive, and she outlived him by many years.

The word “sudden” should instead be “piercing” which has many subtle meanings related to death, autumn, the sharpness of the comb teeth and so on. Bly really missed much of the depth in this poem, though I didn’t realize that until years after. The original in Japanese never mentions the month but refers to Autumn through associative leaps inherent in other words in the poem unique to the Japanese language.

Here’s another translation of Buson’s poem I encountered years later:

piercingly cold
stepping on my dead wife’s comb
in the bedroom

and the associated commentary quoted from that page:

“The opening phrase, mini ni shimu (literally, to penetrate the body), is an autumn phrase that suggests the chill and sense of loneliness that sinks into the body with the arrival of the autumn cold and that here also functions as a metaphor of the poet’s feelings following the death of his wife. The poem generates a novelistic scene of the widower, some time after his wife’s funeral, accidentally stepping on a comb in the autumn dark, as he is about to go to bed alone. The standard interpretation is that the snapping of the comb in the bedroom brings back memories of their relationship and has erotic overtones. But this is not about direct or personal experience. The fact is that Buson (1706-83) composed this while his wife was alive. Indeed Buson’s wife Tomo outlived him by 31 years.”

–excerpted from Haruo Shirane’s essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths,” Modern Haiku, 16:1 Winter/Spring 2000″ (3)

The Edo period poet, Basho (1644 – 1694) is credited as being the creator of the haiku form, although Masaoka Shiki is credited with naming these poems as haiku during the late Meiji period, about two hundred years after Basho’s lifetime. (4)

Basho was a master of both renga and “haikai no renga” which was a poetic form practiced by multiple poets – at a moon-viewing party for instance. One would begin with an hokku (5-7-5) and then the next poet in the circle would move the form forward with a 7-7 mora verse, then another would do 5-7-5, and so on throughout the entire evening. Only later did Basho separate out the 5-7-5 hokku segments that were eventually renamed haiku by Shiki. Renga are usually either 36 or 100 verses long, and each verse must connect to the verse immediately before and the verse immediately after, but not necessarily any other verse.

There are many different translations of Basho’s works, (as well as of many other haiku poets) and some of them suck royally because they were written by translators who were not poets but linguists. It’s a very difficult thing to capture the heart of a poem while bringing it across the worldview gaps between languages, especially translating from a deeply subtle, ancient, and sophisticated language such as Japanese.

We see this even when great poets such as when Bly himself attempted to translate the works of someone like Kabir. That was a miserable failure (in my opinion) as Bly lacked the cultural frame of spiritual mysticism from which Kabir himself wrote. Bly’s Kabir book should have been called something like “Robert Bly’s approximate interpretations based on poems by Kabir” as his translations had very little to do with the actual meanings embedded in what Kabir actually wrote. He and I had a huge disagreement about this after I gave him what I considered to be an excellent translation of Kabir’s work. I have similar complaints about Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi. Great Coleman Barks poems. Only kinda Rumi-ish. (and yes I love Barks)

And so many of Basho’s poems have such subtlety that it may not even be possible to translate them at all. All the puns and hidden cultural meanings just vanish from the English translations. Case in point is his “old mill pond” poem with the frog and the sound of water. Pure zen, and pure Japanese.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the simplest way to describe the essence of what a haiku is would be to call it two images separated (and/or connected, depending on your point of view) by a huge floating associative leap. Leaping is the interior connection of two apparently unrelated objects in such a way that the reader gets the connection, moving from the conscious to the unconscious and back up again – the known to the unknown and back – from the outer world to the inner world and back out again, or vice versa.

The associative leaps that most people make in their thinking are usually short and obvious. For example, you think of summer, that leads to green grass, which maybe leads to mowing the grass which leads to being hot and thirsty which leads to lemonade. Short leaps. There are many good poems with short leaps, but usually the best ones have lots of leaps and they are very quick. But if you can make the leaps at the heart of a poem very large, then something inside us quivers in excitement and surprise. If you can make those vast leaps repeatedly and in rapid fire, and they cover the full emotional spectrum then something unspeakably profound happens inside us. (I highly recommend Bly’s marvelous paper on Leaping Poetry. (2) )

A perfect demonstration of associative leaping can be seen beautifully articulated by Antonio Carlos Jobim in his extraordinary song, “The Waters of March” in the first verse and chorus here:

A stick a stone
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of the stump
It’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass,
It is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death,
It’s a trap, it’s a gun.
The oak when it blooms,
A fox in the brush,
The knot in the wood,
The song of the thrush.
The wood of the wind,
A cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump,
It is nothing at all.
It’s the wind blowing free.
It’s the end of a slope.
It’s a beam, it’s a void,
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope.
And the riverbank talks.
Of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain,
It’s the joy in your heart. (5)

Outer world, inner world, outer world, inner world again and again in the blink of an eye. In my view, this is what lives and breathes at the heart of all art. Can you imagine what kind of person you have to be inside yourself to see all that? To say nothing of making it all visible to everyone else all over the world. Astonishing! I am so in awe of that song and that man’s work and consciousness, I can’t even begin to tell you.

—

So in addition to the structure and relationship of images in haiku and senryū, there is the issue of syllabic form. The way Japanese count syllables is called onji (linguists say mora (s) or morae (pl)). (6) Two letter combinations make up all words. For example, the word haiku – in English that’s 2 syllables but in Japanese it’s 3. Ha-ai-ku. In Japanese, a classic haiku is 5-7-5 onji but there are examples of 15, 16 and 18, some even from Basho himself. Many haiku contain a dash. The dash represents the kireji, or the cutting word. This is very difficult to describe in English as there is no analog. Mostly it is a pause, a break in both form and rhythm as well as in the flow of thought. Here’s one of my early morning walking poems as an example where you can see and feel the cut:

small boy spits at me
from a passing yellow bus –
misses

In the modern English language world of haiku writers there exists an enormous ongoing discussion about syllables and lines. I have seen terrific poems with as few as eleven syllables. Here’s one (7) with 10 syllables from the American master, John Wills:

rain in gusts
below the deadhead
troutswirl

and 9 syllables in this senryū from the brilliant Alexis Rotella:

not speaking
our shadows
keep touching

I think any poem that works, that is to say – it has somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 syllables, it leaps, has good images, a seasonal reference, something that reveals human nature through wild nature, and makes you FEEL – that’s a decent poem. But from my own experience, they are devilishly hard to do and though I have written hundreds of the little buggers, I am not certain many of them deserve the name haiku. Maybe a half dozen of mine actually work as haiku, and some are decent senryū. One of them is about the best thing I’ve ever written and I still hesitate to call it haiku. Wanna guess which, and why? 🙂

—

Here are three of mine:

sleepless summer night
through the open window
every distant laugh

—

daughter’s summer tent
mowing her porch
leaving the daisies

—

reflections
on the sea of grass
countless fireflies

**************************

Notes – links:

(1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senry%C5%AB

(2)
https://www.amazon.com/Leaping-Poetry-Idea-Poems-Translations/dp/0822960036/

(3)
http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2014/10/poetic-musings-broken-moonlight-haiku.html

(4)
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-senryu-poems

(5)
Waters of March – Susannah McCorkle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MNknFy2gdQ

(6)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(Japanese_prosody)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)

(7)
The poems of John Wills and Alexis Rotella are published in Cor Ven Den Heuvel’s marvelous book, “The Haiku Anthology” from back in 2000.
https://www.amazon.com/Haiku-Anthology-Third-Cor-Heuvel/dp/0393321185/
—

© 1984 – 2020 Carmine Leo • All Rights Reserved
Carmine Leo & Associates, Inc.

—