Ill. THE FILICIDAL PRESENT

7. WOMEN AND MEN

There is a reality here whose form, quality, and values are such that one seeks to avoid it if at all possible. Our alacrity in avoiding it is very much a part of the history humanity has written of itself. Even when we brush up against it as we have done here, we still want to look the other way, still want to embrace the old, comfortable idealisms.

Filicide is only another name for barbarism. Or perhaps: a grotesquely civilized kind of barbarism. Shelley--one always gets back to her--seems to have said, if not everything, at least a great deal more than we wanted to hear. The self-hatred which came gurgling briefly to the surface when Frankenstein disposed of the body of his still-born daughter is a powerful clue to what is still hidden.

The perverted homoeroticism of the violently enforced masculine exclusivity of the entire civilization makes a mockery of the best we have done and accomplished. Behind the glorious friezes of Greece, the splendid moral temples of Israel, the monumental architecture of Egypt, the serpentine mysteries of the Orient, the managerial mastery of Rome, the beauty of Catholic ritual, the flowering of Renaissance creativity, and our own modern polymath exploration of intellectual creativity--behind that rich facade of civilized progress lies the personal and social dynamic of filicide. In this civilization the public face of filicide is patriarchal. We have killed our sons to keep the parade going. It is a show whose details and sweep we know well. Even now we would say: Yes, we have done that to ourselves to create--however bloodily and slowly--a better world for everyone. But what do we see if we look behind the facade of patriarchal history?

For one thing, we see a small but highly visible group of males--heretics, deviants, outsiders--who for one reason or another chose not to participate directly in the deadly pursuit of ever greater filicidal control. One of the gaps in our almost perfect filicidal armor consists in the fact that at the same time that we were creating a planetary civilization based on the goal of total control, we, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not, left sufficient growing room for some of our male number to explore various heretical, nonfilicidal lives. We have usually dealt harshly with such men when their activities became public knowledge and formed a threat to the ongoing larger system of filicidal values. But those male renegades have existed in each generation, and still exist today. Men willing to pay the price have had a certain freedom open to them.

If we look behind the same historical facade for female renegades, we find almost nothing. Here and there we see a woman rising by means of almost incredible abilities above the orthodox female role to explore for a time her human potential outside that role. Otherwise the record is bare. The ancient thoroughness of filicidal sexism makes a mockery of the best of the lives of men.

What we have created is a barbarian civilization, in which generation after generation of masculine masters brutally competed with each other to be king of the mountain and brutally raised generation after generation of sons in the same stultifying pattern, while at the same time we confined all women to one role, that of caretaker-mother. It is barbaric slavery of an order and a magnitude so great it is beyond comprehension. Open a history of Western art, of Western science, religion or whatever, and consider what you find there: an inverted world of pervertedly asexual homoeroticism. Having. excluded women from our lives except as doting, obedient, helpmeet slaves, we march through the pages of history masturbating in front of each other, saying in effect: Look at this tool! Look what I can do! And we stand around applauding, urging each other on, to see who can come the farthest, the longest, and the most.

In the past century and a half women have begun to speak of their oppression and to act to free themselves. As long as the documentation of our patriarchal oppression has come from women and has concerned what we have done to women, we could, in our best paternal way, nod sagely and set right the obvious wrongs. Everybody is in favor of equal pay for equal work. We can even feel self-righteous about our efforts to right certain obvious wrongs because in our divinely ordained onanistic glory we can easily understand how other humans might want very much to be equal to us. That self-serving masculine response to the insights of feminism is based on a very limited perception of those insights.

The theory of filicide makes it possible to see the hollowness and the often lethal reality of both sex roles. The theory undercuts the last possible defense of historical masculinity by revealing that at the same time that we were committing gynocide, we were also committing filicide, which is to say homicide, which is to say suicide.

Georgia O'Keefe, Calla Lilies.

The heart of the feminist movement is based on a questioning of the most basic values of the civilization. The theory of filicide offers a framework in which women are no longer defined in terms of their oppression by men, and in which men are no longer defined in terms of their oppression of women. The feminist framework already gives women a largely adequate framework within which to examine and alter their lives in any number of healthy ways. The theory of filicide--at the same time that it speaks directly to women--offers men a similar framework within which to begin questioning the values we use to create our own human lives. What we see in Western myth is a profound, continuing, and intensifying alienation of men from themselves, from women, and from the organic world of natural process and growth. Our basic mental attitude--control--and our basic emotional stance--repression--are both founded on an alienation from our male bodies, our male minds, and our human souls. The alienation reaches its most extreme development in heterosexual men, who will--when their fear has begun to subside-have a great deal to learn from homosexual men.

Toughness is the central criterion of manhood, as we have lived that role historically. We kept telling the story in different ways, finding all sorts of mythic and religious justifications for our destructive behavior. Whoever or whatever Jesus was, we killed him twice over. Once on the cross and then soon afterwards by making him into an image of our own filicidal selves. Whatever his message may have been it was poisoned by the vicious Pauline interpretation which, along with the confused and contradictory accounts of the gospel writers, provided perfect justification for the countless murders and wars we have since carried out in the name of the Son of God.

What we did in Jesus' name we did as functionaries and members of "his" church. We were thus provided with a certain anonymity and avoidance of individual responsibility similar to the stronger sense of mythic reality one perceives in the records of Greek and Jewish experience. In Hamlet we found the first sketch of the individual, secularized male soul wrestling with the chains of filicidal tyranny as they extend from beyond the grave. In Frankenstein the problem was at last outlined free of institutional connections and rationalizations. There we saw father meet son in a duel to the death. 2001 displayed the reduction of filicidal man to machine. And in Myra Breckinridge we saw how the four-character absurdist drama known as the nuclear family exists and operates within each person.

The theory of filicide makes clear the fact that all those portraits of seemingly diverse men through the ages are portraits of the same person--the son striving to be the father striving to be the son striving to be the father, etc. Neither the pettiness nor the naivity of our masculine humanity can any longer serve as a justification or excuse for our massive and ancient barbarism. Here, we arrive back at the painting with which we began. The "great martyrdom" to which Lovis Corinth refers is that of historical masculinity, historical man, all of us, famous or not, mythic or not. We are martyrs to ourselves and the mutilated bodies and souls of the women and children are nowhere to be seen.

Crucifixion: because it is the most effective public splaying and displaying of the body masculine. A protracted and painful public death worthy of the self-hatred which produces such a bloody act.

Crucifixion: because it is near-perfect humiliation. The king is reduced to total and highly visible impotence.

Crucifixion: because it is the most dramatic and prolonged of executions. A theatrical externalization of the reality of filicide, a prolongation of life under terrible conditions, a life which is no life which is centered on death.