Art is, in some ways, the landscape of our lives. Posted signs around hunting season – it is underway here in the country – are a part of the landscape, so ugly and ordinary it is easy to not even see them. But there is a beauty to these postings, and to the old posts they are stapled to. The art of rural life.
Pamela Rickenbach’s husband Paul, one of my closest friends, killed himself earlier this year, and his wife and our friend Pamela is grappling with the grief and shock of it.
She wrote about it poignantly this morning on her new blog, yacu-corolina.org, already a powerful outlet for her spiritual and mystical writings about the horses, and her remarkable life. The piece was called “No More Paul…In This World and All It’s Things.”
Pamela has moved Paul’s things out of their bedroom and into a separate room, and it has driven home for her the realization that he is gone. Paul was very much a man, in so many ways. He was a fire chief, a first responder for much of his life, he was a big and imposing man, a rescuer of people and a leader of people. He was one of those men who rush into burning buildings and plunge into icy waters to save the lives of strangers.
But I have to come to believe that being a man may have cost him his life, prematurely and tragically. His is in part the sad story of maleness – the sense of responsibility, the crushing weight of machismo, the inability to open up and ask for help. Even though he was surrounded by people who loved him and who would have rushed to respond to him, he could not seem to see himself as being on the other end of rescue.
I thought of Paul as a kind of Lord Nelson, the Captain of the Fleet, a brave and imposing figure. But that was only part of his story, the visible part. The other part was the rarely considered story of men, lost in the clamor of others for liberation and freedom; their inability to be truthful, even to their friends, their refusal to cry out for help, their stoicism about pain and suffering. Men have always been too strong to be weak, and in so doing, have been too weak to get strong.
In the end Paul surrendered to life and was overwhelmed by it. It was just too much for him. His wonderful wife will never be overwhelmed, I believe, she will never stop fighting for her place in the world, for her own life and her beloved horses. I am not judging Paul, not for me to do. But I have come to understand that women are so much stronger than men in so many ways, despite all of the persecutions and oppression they have suffered. I think the world is catching up with this reality.
Paul was easy in the role of the First Responder, he was The Chief. That is a burden in it’s own way, I imagine, like being a Superhero. Who can live with those expectations?
I am guessing it was impossible for him to come to terms with the other side of being a man, the hidden side, the frightened and bewildered side. That’s where we connected, because that is the realm of the man in which I have long lived. Nobody would ever confuse me with Lord Nelson or The Chief.
We men usually struggle long and hard to figure out who we are and wish to be, we have no movement. Even the people who live with us do not often like us very much. I often cringe when women talk about their husbands, how oblivious they are and remote, send them off to the living room to watch TV while their friends talk about their lives. We do a lot of harm in the world, unless we take responsibility for it, we can never be whole.
It is ironic that Pamela and I now have as close a friendship as Paul and I did. Perhaps because she can speak so openly and honestly about her life and her emotions, something I am learning to do, something I look for in friends. Like me, she is not afraid to be weak and vulnerable sometimes. It makes her strong.
Paul could never really do it although I think he wanted to.
In my lifetime, one of the great stories in America, my country, has been the idea of liberation and freedom. We are a nation founded on the idea of freedom, yet freedom, like wisdom, doesn’t come with declarations or marches, it seems a grinding, never-ending, difficult and exhilarating journey. It seems there is no end to the process of being free, just ask women, gays, African-Americans, trans people. You can also ask men. Many of us are oppressors, but we are all, after all, human beings.
Talk of freedom is like talk of religion. People like to exploit it but they quite often do not seem to really grasp what it means to be free. One of the things it means is that everyone needs to be free, or no one is. This week, and perhaps because of Paul, I am thinking of men. We are not on anyone’s agenda, mostly because everyone thinks we have no need of one.
There is little sympathy for men. Men can be violent and hateful and are, in so many ways, destroying the world. I talked to a New York city psychologist about the rage in the animal rights movement, and she said it is because so many people have suffered at the hands of men, it is easy to project these suffering onto animals.
But I do feel sympathy for men. We are who we have been taught to be, what we have grown up seeing all around us.
Without men, there would be no climate change, no wars, less violence, empty prisons, safe streets. The male notion of conflict, corporatism, greed, conquest and domination is destroying our political system and very clearly, is destroying the world. I believe the only hope for the salvation of our children is for women to take over. I have faith this is beginning to happen. The angry old men of the world are on the run, their time is up, just watch them railing and posturing every night on screens. The whole world seems sick of them.
It is not a popular position, but I feel sorry for them, I feel empathy for them. I am, after all, one of them, although I’ve never been very good at being a man. Many men have surrendered their lives to the burdens of being male.
Men are never included in the liberation movement, even though they may, in so many ways, be the least free and liberated beings among us. I have always struggled with men, and I have listened for years as women talk about the obliviousness, remoteness, disconnection and narcissism of their husbands and lovers.
What does it mean to be a man today? What did Paul think it meant to be a man, apart from saving so many lives and showing so much bravery? He couldn’t get across the bridge.
Frank Pittman, the scholar who spend his life studying men, (Man Enough:Fathers, Sons, And The Search For Masculinity), says a man learns masculinity primarily from his father. But entire generations of boys grow up without caring fathers or male mentors or role models to emulate. They are left, as I was, to guess what it means to be a man, what “men” are really like. They rely on cultural icons – comic books, websites, TV shows, video games, movies, athletic super-stars, warriors.
They turn to fantasy for their idea of maleness. They become, says Pittman, politicians, philanderers, soldiers, controllers and competitors – constantly compensating for their loss of a genuine role model, yet unprepared for the softer and more intuitive side of life, for families and relationships.
Last year, Paul joined me and my friend Scott Carrino in forming the Fabulous Old Men’s Club, the latest in a life-long and spectacularly unsuccessful effort on my part to find a group of men i can meet with and talk to openly and honestly about life, to figure out together what it really means to be a man. The criterion for joining were simple: you had to want to be a better man.
Before we left the farm for Pompanuck that night, one of the last times I would see Paul, he told me he looked forward to doing many great things with me. I liked that. I thought of Paul as a loving man, he had a big and sensitive heart.
For me, the true male heroes are the ones who support, protect, encourage, love and nurture, not the ones who attack and conquer. That’s what it really means to be a man. That’s what a real man does.
Paul and Scott feel very much the same way about being a man, we all wanted to do better than many men do and have done. We talked about supporting our wives and children, about building a gentler and safer world. Paul talked a lot about the male hierarchy and how it needed to be broken down. Sounded right to me.
We had one great meeting in the Sugar House at Pompanuck Farm, buoyed by a roaring fire and some hot toddies. Within a few months, Paul was gone, Scott was overwhelmed with work and crises as he set up his new business, the Round House Cafe. We never meet again. We will not do any of those great things on the horizon.
And so it goes, yesterday I called Scott and I said we ought to have lunch. “What for?,” he asked, suspiciously, as if there might be some trouble. “Because that what friends do,” I said. Scott came over with some loaves of bread for the donkeys and a sandwich for me. We stood with the donkeys for awhile, and then sat in the house and talked easily, and comfortably for awhile.
It felt good to both of us, it was sweet, I think. It was something we keep saying we need to do regularly, but what we rarely do because we are too busy. The curse of being male, says Pittman, we are all burdened with obligation. I will tell you the truth – it will never happen, we will never get together regularly, we have been talking about it for three years, we are men, everything else in the world is more pressing, more important.
Still, the feeling is real. We love each other. We will be there for each other. A step.
Pamela wrote this morning that she realized last night that Paul was gone, his things are no longer in the room.
But I felt Paul was here on the farm yesterday, sitting here with me and Scott, the survivors of the Fabulous Old Men’s Club.I think when people die, a part of them lives on in everyone around them, everyone close to them.
I look forward to the great things we are going to do, Paul kept saying, raising an eyebrow as he often did when he was intrigued about something.
Perhaps he was bemused by the sweater I was wearing.
It was his, Pamela gave it to me last month. We dwell in the confusing, incomplete and often lonely world of men. We have so many great things ahead of us.
Paul’s life mattered.
