The Phony Grail of Masculine Identity

In my own life, and in the lives of men I talk to, I encounter again and again how powerfully we desire a natural solidarity with other men. We want to find our tribe. We want to find them because we experience ourselves as being somehow in exile from a core identity. We long for home, for refuge, or whatever other metaphor expresses what we feel we lost, or were shut out from, or never had. Often, it started with a sense that our fathers weren't there for us in the ways we needed them to be. Or that we were excluded somehow from the ordinary world of other boys. 

For many of us, it's hard-wired that as men-loving men we paradoxically desire what we already are. Some of us experience this as a foundational condition of our erotic (and spiritual) worlds. (Daniel Mendelsohn writes eloquently of this paradox in The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity.)

Then comes the seduction. We want to resolve the confusion over what it is we're seeking. We want to know that what we're looking for is really out there. That it has substance, solidity, a stable core that we can seek and maybe will eventually find. We get taken in by facile language about "archetypes" and core mythic structures. 

We transfer our desire for the concrete experience of community with other men onto an imaginary realm of How It Really Is--some Core Truth about what it is to be male, to be masculine, to be a man, to be among men. And then we focus our efforts on getting more deeply in touch with that Truth, as though attaining it will finally answer the longings of our hearts.

But will it? Really?

Consider the Seven of Cups: 

In this Tarot card, we see a male figure from behind, in silhouette, and thus devoid of distinguishing individual characteristics. He's confronted (as are we along with him) not with one Holy Grail as the goal of his quest, but with seven grails filled with the tokens of a whole range of possible outcomes: a perfect relationship, stability, wealth, success, a poisonous basilisk, a serpent that might represent danger but might also represent wisdom--and a glowing velied figure with hands extended.

OK, the smart money is on that last cup. The one that doesn't entirely and unambiguously reveal its contents. The one that leaves room for uncertainty. 

In any case, if the silhouetted figure is paralyzed, he's paralyzed by his own agonized compulsion to get it right. To nail it down. 

If we're uncertain about "authentic" masculine identity, it's because masculine identity is not one stable thing. Supposing that it is can easily lead us into restrictive dead ends--some of them exclusionary, some of them misogynistic, some of them simply self-punishing and counterproductive. We don't need to go off to get in touch with our inner King, our inner Warrior, our inner Whatever. We just need to hang with each other in the here and now, as we are, as butch or as nelly, as macho or as gender-fluid, as we may be. 

At some point, we need to affirm that we are already what we long to be. That we are already the older and wiser men we always wanted to meet.