Painful Things

Without guilt
What is a man? An animal, isn't he?
A wolf forgiven at his meat,
A beetle innocent in his copulation.
- Archibald MacLeish

I was in the desert when word reached me. My agent on the ground back home reported that he had figured out why I had not been able to make contact with her: she was not there. Seems she had moved in with a man in Baltimore. Ironically, her letter reached me only days later. I still have it, somewhere.

To jump to the middle of the story--it turns out I am understanding and grateful, yea thankful for her actions; indeed, I have a vested interest in the success of her marriage (yes, she married the man from Baltimore): her claims of ineffable (literally--she could articulate no reason) love could only make sense in that context, through the success of that pairing. Under those conditions, I can understand her motivations, if not her actions. And, of course, those events set me up for the my own eventual satisfaction and success.

I may develop this story over time, in a single post, adding and subtracting parts as I see fit. But given the point of this blog--to figure out what it means to be a man--I will post for my reader(s) the initial, base, male response.

Upon returning to the States (and I will save the intervening time and activities for another day), my first action was to break into her apartment (if you can call it that, given that I had a key and was paying the rent; but it felt like breaking in). My main fears, as a man, had to do with sex and money (I was rather unreceptive, at that time, to the idea of, for lack of a better term, true love). This man either was a better lover than I (but, of course, prior to commission, how could one know?) or clearly he must have had more measure (measure, in this case, could mean money, connections, power, worldly goods, whatever it is that men accumulate in their attempts to attract women; you know, crow-like "sparklies.")

Sex. Money. What is a man? Strangely, if the answer has to do with sex and money, I am okay with that. [I read somewhere that most mathematicians develop their best ideas before age thirty, then spend the rest of their careers defending those ideas; in related research, it seems that mathematicians, male ones anyway, are struggling for the same thing as most men: feminine attentions. We just want to be wanted, need to be needed, that sort of thing. Oo-rah.]

That is about as much recollection as I can stand at this time. We'll see how this pans out. I will, however, jump to the current time and state that my daughters and sons could do worse than to emulate the academic and professional achievements and passions of she to whom I was first betrothed (an unripe liaison, since annulled). I seek not "closure" here (a term, and a goal, that annoys me, "closure," as if anything is ever, ever "closed."); fact is, I do not know exactly what I seek (heck, I am still near emotional ignorance of my father's passing).

More later. Maybe.