This article originally appeared on CHRISTOS - A Center for Men 

Everything You Know is Wrong

 © 2000

All souls are naked.
It is the body that is its first, and longest lasting suit of clothes.
When we are young we are proud of our primal finery but somewhere along the way fashion sets in and suddenly our first clothes seem too shabby to be seen.
But there comes a point when the soul can bear the burden of fashion no longer and some of us go naked once more.
Not all mind you, psychiatrists' offices are filled with those who do not listen to their soul and strip away the fashions to dance naked in the sun or moonlight.

If you're old enough to remember Firesign Theater's famous sketch, then, like me, you've probably spent more than one sleepless night wondering "what the hell happened?" I remember one evening, back in the 1970's, when the network news came on filled with doom and gloom about runaway inflation, yadda yadda yadda. That night I lay abed all night and worried about it, wondering how my income would ever keep pace, why my marriage wasn't working, why disco was moving to the top of the charts, and why the orbital mind control lasers seemed to be completely bollixed up. I didn't watch the network news again until the U.S. won the Olympic hockey match against the USSR (remember the Soviet Union-they used to be the bad guys.)

A few years later, during the great boom times of the 1980's, I was talking with a friend one beery Saturday afternoon. He was viewing with alarm and deploring the rising trend (I don't remember exactly why-but that was Carl's usual approach to dealing with the new or unknown) and I interrupted and said, "Carl-what if the reason everything is screwed up is because the rules don't fit. What if we've been running a '57 Plymouth on unleaded all this time?" Carl's reaction was to groan "O tempora, O mores" and like Cicero launch into a lengthy oration calling for a return to those traditional values that, if only those pure of heart and strong of will would adopt them, would ensure a return to the golden age and everything would be jake. Since there was no stopping my friend when he had a head of steam up, I shrugged and let him speak. But I had sown the seeds of discord in my own mind.

Shortly after my bull-session with Carl, I realized I was onto something. I began trying to identify the moment when the rules finally broke down. I bounced several important events in recent history around in my mind: the Kennedy sssassination, the McCarthy hearings, the Chicago riots and the Kent State shootings. All of these events seemed charged with change and certainly things were very different after them than before. Finally, I settled upon July 16, 1945-the date of the first atomic bomb test at Trinity Site, New Mexico. There was something telling and true about the reaction of one of the Los Alamos scientists immediately after the blast, "we're all sons of bitches now."

As I thought and read more, I found that philosophers had hit upon much the same notion. Michel Foucault and others were exploring what came to be called "the post-modern era." In a nutshell they were arguing that the linear thinking of the past had been replaced by a new, non-linear approach that is best realized today on the internet. My own thinking was that we had, somehow, severed our links with the past, particularly the Classical past, and so had cut ourselves off from other human experience. And it all seemed to fit together nicely. By cutting ourselves off from this continuity of experience, we had put ourselves in the position of reinventing the wheel every time. It was impossible to learn from experience because we had challenged the validity of experience itself. Only the direct experience was true to our new, non-linear minds. History, as Henry Ford observed, was bunk.

But if this was true, why then was Cicero viewing with alarm and deploring the rising trend two thousand years ago? Why was he, like my friend Carl, calling for a return to "traditional" values that would restore an even earlier Golden Age? These questions troubled me because to answer them I had to acknowledge that everything I knew was wrong.

When I began seeing Larry about two years ago, we struggled for a time to find a common language with which we could communicate and happily hit upon myth. I was muddling rather blindly through my mid-life transition, screaming with pain that I didn't know or want to acknowledge I felt, thrashing about in the puddle of my soul, convinced I was drowning. So I plunged into various mythic cycles looking for situations analogous to mine-I didn't really find them, but my spiritual nature, which had been banked for some time against increasingly harsh winds of the psyche, managed to come fully alive. Suddenly, the world of myth, which had been an exercise in communication for me, leaped up, ablaze with life and immediate meaning. Now when I read the Rig Veda or Al Q'uran or the Bible, when I read Homer or the Edda of Snorri, I felt the veneer of my civilization peeled off, my heart and soul talked with the story tellers and my ears, now unstopped, listened to all these voices, crying out "O tempora, O mores" century after century, generation after generation, the same stories, but each unique with each retelling, as familiar as my shoes, as different as performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by the Chicago Symphony and the Pawtuxet Middle School Marching band.

And I heard something else, overtones if you will, resonating in the background. I heard older voices singing between the lines of the myths, telling older stories and older stories still. The stories of the myths began to realign themselves, their meanings suddenly fresh and clear, as alive and true today as when they were first told. I felt the anguish of lonely people in isolated villages, struggling for survival, trying with their stories to make sense of a world gone mad. I knew that Cicero and my friend Carl were only adding their voices to a chorus that has been singing for the last nine or ten thousand years "Everything you know is wrong!"

I am beginning to approach these old stories systematically, working to strip away the layers of paint and wallpaper generation upon generation have slapped over them, trying to sit around that first fire the first time the stories were told. I will share my experiences with you as I go, and when you hear the stories, don't sit on them and nod sagely-pass them on. And if these myths don't resonate with you, don't lose heart-we're writing new ones as fast as we can.

© 2001

MENSIGHT

MENSIGHT About Archive Links Advertise Library TMC Home SPONSOR Syndicated careers columnist Dr. Marty Nemko offers open public access to his archive of career advise: How Do I Become  a Sponsor? This article and poem originally appeared on Larry Pesavento's CHRISTOS MEN'S CENTER web-site.