On being a man

Last night I dreamt that my friend’s partner was going to live in Ireland, in some windblown cottage on the coast where both weather and landscape fashion a person into congruence with what is. I was cross in the dream, annoyed that no-one would tell me who was going, and then envious of his ability to just up and leave. I wanted space and time alone in the wilderness, away from fences and streetlights and small children constantly calling for ‘mum’. If my friend was upset she didn’t show it. He was a nuisance and she was glad to be rid of him. But when I awoke I was reminded of my constant hunger for maleness, for the seeming absence of restriction that maleness implies. There’s something grand contained within the secret of being a man, within the corridors within which men reside.

In another dream I attend a women’s gathering. The women are gathered in a large space adjacent to the grand dormitories where men reside. I leave the women and walk through the arched entrance halls, feeling the pull of those corridors, long and dark, that hold the secrets of men. And then we are all arrested by a man entering, wearing a long black hooded cloak. He is a sorcerer. No one will go near him. No one will challenge him. No one except me. People scoff. They can’t believe that I will fight him. I am a woman after all. But I can and I do, and I succeed in subduing him by chaining two of his three parts to a tree.

I was a child when first I felt the longing to be a man. Not so much to be a man, but to be as tall as a man, as broad as a man — as tall and as broad as my father at least. Instead I got the short-legged, long-torsoed body of my mother and my mother’s mother before her. Small breasts, fleshy thighs and buttocks, a slim enough waist. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind. And yet, as I child I watched my mother fix a bike, lean into the engine of a car, wield a chainsaw, climb a ladder and mend the roof. It wasn’t enough. I wanted to take up space, physically and mentally, to be a person the value of whose existence was undoubted, unquestioned, and all my life I have felt that to be that person means to be a man.

I am dreaming again. I am inspecting a house with the prospect of buying. It seems to be situated on a road that runs through Daylesford, towards Ballan. Its on the down slope of a hill. The hill is to the left, the property to the right. A creek runs down the hill, through the property on the far side of the house. I want to cross the creek to see what’s on the other side, to get a full picture of the place. The creek is full of human debris. A plastic duck, washing machines. There’s a wall damming the flow and I traverse it. In the middle I come head to head with a deer, a stag to be precise. I know him. He is king of the mountain. There is no way for me to manoeuvre around him, so I turn back. But back home, with my husband and mother, I feel ashamed. Ashamed to have come away with an incomplete idea of the place. To have seen only part of a property that we might spend thousands to buy. What if there is something wrong or broken with the land across the creek? What if there earth there is poisoned, or pocked with holes? So I go back.

This time, there are fruits on the other side. Big, round, yellow citrus fully ripe and dripping off the tree. They are rotting on the banks, falling into the water and being washed downstream. I have the taste of them in my mouth and I want the sensation of it on my tongue and so when I go to cross to the other side and am met again by the stag, this time half human, I push past.

I will pause the story here to say there is truth to the theory that says all the characters in the dream are me. And also to say that this is false. The stag man, the king of the mountain is me, in as much as the sovereign in me is wronged when sovereignty is disrespected. And he is also not me. Both things are true simultaneously. By falling prey to ‘what others might think’, and to my own longing to taste the fruit and not have it go to waste, I do not paying attention when the king of the mountain, who is the mountain, who is also the deer and is the man in me, behaves in a way to make me stop and pay heed. I confine myself to a world in which these things — the sacred things, so tightly strung to the material — are able to be ignored, swept aside, and disregarded. And I have also wronged the deer and the mountain and my own masculinity, whose power is bound up in a strange kind of protective devotion to something more than just myself.

The dream becomes quite frightening. The stag man, once wronged is unforgiving. He attempts rape but I escape him. I am running back down the road when he appears again behind me. There is something different about him, he is walking strangely. I slow and stop and when he reaches me I see that things are all wrong in his body. He has been sedated. He can no longer feel. Not anger, not pain, not pride, not loss, not even his own rage.

There is something awful about this dream. And something magical as well. I can feel it in the sedated man, like a knowing that rests in me about how we have become as a species; quite numb. Within that numbness there is the magic of potential, of all those wrongs — trespassing on the sacred, crossing the sacred stream, neglecting to pay homage, neglecting to follow the appropriate protocols, disregarding manners and a sense of mystery, placing a higher value on ownership than on honouring the unseen — and then the wrongs that flow from those wrongs which are a kind of hell broken loose, a rent in the fabric of the universe through which horrible things come — payback, rape, torture, pain: that all of those combined can be subsumed. By which I mean, they can be absorbed into the flow of life within in ways that neutralise their damage across time and space, reality and dream, day and night, masculine and feminine.

The dream ends with me standing side by side with the stag man, now fully human and fully sedated, on a boardwalk over the ocean. Only, there are no supports. We stand suspended, with only the invisible threads of mystery checking our fall. And we are holding each other.

I used to think that there were only two genders. Male and female. And I found myself apologising all the time for myself. For bumping into people in a busy street, or getting in someone’s way on a tram. I existed in a body that didn’t match the way I felt inside. I don’t remember doing this as a child. As a child I was sunk so deep into myself I barely noticed I had a body. And when I did it seemed so entirely congruent with myself that it never occurred to me that there could be an ‘I’ outside of the body, a thinking ‘I’, a dreaming ‘I’, a spirit, a soul. It was all one and the same. I moved in worlds of texture and imagination and touch and feeling and movement and dreaming and story and song that were all entirely congruent, coinciding exactly when superimposed. But not anymore.

There’s a story by Edgar Allen Poe that I read when I was waking up, or splitting off, or getting sick, whichever way you want to see it. Its a story about a man who is no longer a man. He is an eye connected to a brain. A thinking eye. He hates his wife. Her visits are torture to him. We see her only through his eye and his powerlessness to do anything about it except blink. And it begs the question, when are we no longer ourselves? When we are reduced to a brain connected to a single eye? What defines us?

When I was a teenager I developed an eating disorder. The disorder shattered my sense of myself as a whole, undivided being, entirely congruent with everything in my space. I was being split open in order to accommodate patterns of existence that fell outside of the frameworks that I found within. And I tell you it was hell. It was hell because I happened to come of age in a culture in which humans are no longer a part of the natural order of things. Of the patterns that exist within the cosmos and everything in it, that animate it and bring it to life. I came of age in a culture in which humans are dead. Or if not dead, then heavily sedated. And so I became dead like everyone else. And then realised I didn’t want to die.

While I was dead, I wanted a different body or no body at all. A man’s body would have been better. A man’s body in which to disregard all the decorousness of our sex. I wanted to walk shirtless in the street. I wanted to ride a skateboard at top speed, flipping upside down on a half pipe, with no regard for the damage I would sustain if I fell. I wanted to rush at things head-on and come away bruised and battered but still whole. And I felt I needed a man’s body for that. Something with weight and substance and more muscle than flesh.

What if I were two parts of a whole, a walking yin-yang with one dark and one light, balancing and antagonising, generating and absorbing, active and passive, individual and multiplex all at once? Or what if my two parts were self and other and without both I could not be whole? What if I were multiple persons occupying the one body, like a house holding guests at a party, some more familiar than others, some so familiar that they are indistinguishable from the house itself? What if I were not a person at all, but a gateway through which things passed, briefly occupying the space of my body like the particles in a single stretch of river all passing through as they move towards to the sea? Would I be any different than I am now?

As I grew to be a teenager restrictions formed around me. I couldn’t take my shirt off in public. I couldn’t stay out late at night. I wasn’t allowed to learn to hunt. Why? There are real threats to women in my culture. Rape. Violence. The threat of physical harm.

Coming home from Gariwerd / the Grampians with a friend we stopped at a place called Sister Rocks. The man at the backpackers in Brambruck / Halls Gap had said they were the only known women’s site in the vicinity. I can’t describe my feeling when I saw them, a cluster of boulders higher than a house on dry soil amidst sparse gums, not 50 metres from the road, faces layered with paint. Even before spray cans were invented, people carved their names into the rock. They have carried the marks of our people for as many generations as we have been here. White people that is. Europeans. Before that who knows. I couldn’t quite fathom the contrast with the carefully protected and managed wilderness of the mountains from which we had come.

I rather think that those rocks are like the stag man. They have been disrespected and disregarded for so long. But they did not turn on us in retribution. As we walked among them my friend said that she did not feel amiss in reprimanding her daughter for running or climbing on the rocks. In fact, the rocks seemed to ask it of her, demanding a quiescence that nullified the indecency of a graffitied face. And I came away with a new sense of respect and wonder, for those irreparable parts of me that are somehow so completely whole.

What if we are not what we seem? What if this body is actually so much a part of the whole that the idea of it as separate becomes a fallacy, a lie that keeps me from being alive? When I ignored the stag man on the bridge, when I pushed past him as if he were not there, did he start to question his own existence? Did he ask himself, am I truely alive? Do I even exist? And if I do, how come she can so easily, without any sense of repentance or remorse, push past me so? Can’t she see that I am King of the Mountain?

Maybe he became like the eye in Poe’s story. Trapped within the torturous confines of a mind and an eye, without the ability to stretch out past all that is seen and thought into the kingdoms of his own terrain. Into the mountainous kingdoms within which his soul reigns.

And I have to ask, are we all like this? Walking eyes and minds, stripped of ways of knowing within which we are the kings of our domain. Not kings in the modern sense. But in the old way, where a king is wed to the land — earth and human and so much more — birthing ways of belonging and custodianship in succeeding generations so that the sacred is carefully tended in each and every one. When did we stop seeing ourselves as sacred, as part of the dynamic twist of movement that is life?

The sorcerer in my dream had three parts and did not remain fixed in one form. He changed form so often that it was impossible to fight him. Not impossible, but difficult beyond compare. He changed form rapidly, splitting off into multiple parts and coming together again with a speed and agility that was difficult to track. And yet, two of his parts I chained to a tree, so that the third — off wandering somewhere in the outer limits of where sorcerers can move and breathe — roams, unable to change shape. With two parts fixed within the physical confines of time and space, his third part is stuck in the same form for eternity, unable to transform without the other two, which is a kind of hell for him. A kind of excommunication, a separation from the flow of life within.

And I have to wonder, are we all like this? Bound and fettered. Forced into compliance with the physical laws of time and space, of bodies that don’t quite fit, whilst part of us is out wandering? The renegade, the outlaw, the thief?

There is a powerful magic that lives within, that dances to a celestial music completely ignorant of the protocols of this earthly domain. And its terrifying to contemplate…. what if those other two parts were unchained? What kind of relentless destruction would we be able to achieve, in a very short space of time, on this place we call earth?

Its possible, that over the years of their bondage those two parts have grown to love the tree and being rooted so much that they can never leave. Nor would they choose to if given the choice. And yet, if it meant becoming whole again….

If it meant becoming whole again…

Even in my waking self I like the idea of living in a hut on the coast of Ireland on my own. In a place where the winds shape me into congruence with earth and sky and ocean and plant life and birds. Instead I am here, in my body, with other small and big bodies that I am bound to by love. And I find myself sinking back into the careful form of a woman. Into the careful bonds of tending that are less like chains and more like new tendrils, brilliant green, pliable, and yet tenuous. Like the loops of a manna gum bud, springing open to entice the bees. And so I come back to the possibility of inhabiting two forms, consecutively and simultaneously, like a loop that springs open to form a flower, but is still, in its essence a tightly looped bud. So that I am like the sister rocks — painfully painted over with layers of graffiti and yet still, somehow, unblemished.

For a thing appears as it appears, indicating a particular form while at the same time pointing to something deeper, a mystery that keeps unravelling, a story that is yet to end.

My body is not my body. My body is not my body. My body is not the thing it seems to be.

Originally published at https://inthematrix.substack.com on February 17, 2023.