The sea vs storm myth contains narrativized national histories, gender studies, cultural dynamics, religious histories, psychoanalysis, climate studies, the metaphysics and ontology of complexity. It is a multifaceted hermeneutic—a many-sided lens. I want to say a little bit on the gender studies aspect of it and transition that into the challenge of modern civilization left unresolved in it.

In the ancient Proto-Indo-European words for mother and father, “mater” and “pater,” passed on to many languages from India to Spain, we see an old duality preserved. Mother and matter are connected, just as are father and pattern. Maternal is close to material, paternal is close to symbolic/conceptual. With these come their purposive end-points, their teleological trajectories: the woman culminates in immanence, the man culminates in transcendence. The woman is present, the man is future and past. The woman is right-brained, the man is left-brained. These are traditional gender roles, and have biological reality. They are not comprehensive gender roles, and only become evil when they are treated normatively, as appearances that determine how people ought to behave. This triggers shame and adverse reaction, fractioning of healthy processes. People spend time searching for a better gender identity because they have not experienced a pre-rational wholeness. People impose unhealthy gender identities because they have not experienced a pre-rational wholeness. Being precedes interpretation. Existence precedes essence, plain and simple.

A word on the method of gender studies. I do not believe that every woman is clearcut into this category, nor do I believe that every man is clearcut into this category. The categories are statistical. The average man and the average woman display these traits, but these traits appear relative to one another, not in isolation. The range of what it means to be a man or woman is much broader than the difference between the genders, and there is much overlap. We are talking about statistical differences that are contingent on biological and cultural complexity. It is counterproductive to focus on minutia of language (e.g., the symbolic importance of whether I write he or she vs. she or he, as if putting a feminine pronoun first were giving women power while putting a male pronoun first is authoritarian… please, if you’re looking for salvation from such tiny things, you are missing the point). It is currently very popular to focus on sexual divergence. I am interested in classical reality. I find that hard dualisms are problematic to begin with, but I affirm soft dualities because they are reflective of reality. Male and female have existed for hundreds of millions of years. We should not so swiftly disregard that. It requires no appeal to religious tradition, simple biology affirms the primary sexes. But nature also shows us that many organisms are hermaphroditic or asexual. Sexuality has a function, and we should try to embrace and understand sexuality in light of what it actually is, not so much what people think it is. It is very tempting to get distracted by argumentative bickering between social groups, to fall into tribalism. I find that many contemporary feminists are actually quite sexist. Sexism can be avoided by trying to see human beings for what they are, not for the gender primarily. Gender identity is less important than human identity. Moreover, the primary sexes are being rejected rashly. It is okay to look at sexual diversity, but it is unwise to hate any duality that is a product of nature. Trauma from unhealthy cultural patterns cannot be healed until we slow down and relax the dualistic battling. Gender is not necessarily dualistic, but nature has provided us with two primary sexes, and these are important to examine first, and then to explore the meaning of alternatives. I do not have much interest in holidays or festivals about human socialization. I would be more interested in celebrating the changing seasons than in the actitivies of social tides. I do not believe in oppressing people, and when I have a choice, I try very hard to treat people well. I am not reducible to a white priviledge male. I am a human being, first and foremost. See me for my demographics, and you harboring the same prejudice that has hurt so many people groups to begin with. Universal, fundamental human respect is warranted regardless of class or creed. Leave me alone for the color of my skin or the actions of the people I happen to descend from. I am an individual. I do not believe in generational responsibility. No one can atone for any wrongdoing, ever, in any case. The Nazis tried to punish the Jews for their economic problems—an extreme example that makes the point. All that can be done is to try to learn and do good. We must allow the waves of life to pass through, and to learn and respond to what is in front of us. Forgiveness does not mean being okay with something that happened. Maybe forgiveness means acknowleding what is given to you for what it is, the quality of seeing “for it is given,” or “having given for someone.” Pain and suffering are real, but they cannot be projected onto anyone adequately. We can never find a body adequate to our symbolic understanding of the world. No one can bear our pain for us. Life itself weaves our sorrows into something new. (I am putting Christianity in bare, secular terms. Buddhism and many other wisdom traditions would agree.) Until we as a society step back from our politicization of social problems into the wisdom traditions, we will make no lasting advances on social problems. There is no transformation within the powers that be. Metamorphosis requires metamorphic means, i.e., something that isn’t box vs. box. I digress.

A man has transcendence, a woman has immanence. Women tend to be centered around ideals of immanence, men tend to be centered around ideals transcendence. Immanence is a fullness of materality, of being. Transcendence is a fullness of attainment, of performing. Women tend to desire to feel real, men tend to desire to feel excellent. But cloaked beneath these apparently feminine and masculine tendencies are the desires of the opposite gender. Women want to feel good enough, to be accepted. Men want to feel touched, to feel seen. The desires loop and cycle in layers of masculinity and femininity. Under transcendence is immanence waiting to be realized. Under immanence is transcendence waiting to be realized. The man stops achieving and accepts himself. The woman stops reacting and determines herself. Really, these are all human desires, but they tend to play into roles of action and reaction, giving and receiving. This is reflected in sexuality. Women tend to have more diffuse, divergent orgasm/libido, men tend to have more focused, convergent orgasm/libido. Female sexuality reflects the body, whereas male sexuality reflects goal-orientation. Again, male and female have both aspects, but the statistical tendency of the duality is naturally somewhat toward one or the other. The duality of male/female is descriptive, not definitive. Rationalization is touched with a masculine hue just as being is touched with femininity, not unwisely, but also not exclusively. All duality is descriptive, not definitive. Curiously, this statement about duality itself is a resolution to the gender duality. Feminism wants to fragment and diverge the gender categories. Masculinism wants to reinforce and stabilize the gender categories. The pattern repeats itself. To say that duality is descriptive rather than definitive escapes (transcends) and fulfills (immanates) sexism and all human dualisms. I am offering a hermaphroditic, creative answer to the problem. We could say that there are “cosmic gender roles” which are not specific to sexual reproduction but are broader than that, pertaining to roles in feedback processes of any kind. This is a spin on sexuality and gender studies I have not yet seen, and is typically how I understand gender.

In the storm vs. sea myth of the Enuma Elish, we see a watery feminine sea being at first open, then suppressive, then conquered. I have experienced this personally. The salty repression of female neuroticism over-against the male spirit is real, just as is the purist inflation of male desire over-against the female spirit is real. The myth preserves the double-handedness of gender iniquity, and how it pans out into cultural diversity/homogeneity, and records how it was the male dominance hierarchy that established itself over Babylon. And now we are left with the residual effects of civilization cycles, in which it is always the masculine-tinged organizing force that generates new society. To attack a patriarchy while investing in bureaucracy and addition of many laws is self-contradicting. Trying to box people in with law to free them from male-dominated power systems is actually quite repressive, don’t you think? It doesn’t matter who is doing the domination, male or female or whatever, domination is domination. Human beings flourish in the mystic indeterminacy, in which conceptualizations are emanations from the wellspring of being itself. How will civilization try to recompense with a flawed, narrowly dualistic relationship to natural complexity? This is the grand story of today’s era. There is a spider in the funnel web, and we must go to find it.


June 26, 2023
Gorda