#384

Here we are, the final post of Factually Masculine 2024. Haven't thought about it too hard, but pretty sure I've done an amazing job. That's what being a man is all about, sweetheart.

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What then, by my lights, is this thing we call man, this measuring-stick by which we mark the lives of those before and who we are? What does it mean, if I call myself a man?

Man is that which stands with and apart from others that are called men. Man is that flesh of the thinking ape which knows it is not as fundamental as that which it is not, and fundamental to what is. Man is mother and child and that which cannot be mother or child. Man is alone in his flesh. Man is part of a great whole, flesh of one flesh. 

Paradox. That's all any of us are. To cleave to one side is to live in a dissonance, however servicable.

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Man is the exploration of what man is in the positive--aspiration--and the negative--denial. It is the definition of two lies which contend in the service of a truth which cannot be apprehended. 

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It's not like you or anybody else knows any better. The hero has infinite faces, infinite quests, infinite genders, infinite alternatives, infinite flaws, and each only the perspective which being-in-the-world as a subjective phenomenon grants the being which calls itself something in the language it has learned, imitating what was there to imitate.

If you want to know what kind of man you are, you have to understand that only you can decide what that means. You will have to deal with what you find and what the world makes of what your findings lead you to express.

Man is the universe perceiving itself through something. A membrane, a tissue, an accretion, a reflection, a refraction, a shadow. 

Just a dream.

--JL