Maya: Lifting the Veil, pt 5

That Damn Cat

The Tiger Consumes All in Its Path

You can feel his heart but you know he’s mean.

A few weeks ago, my mother called me with the news my half-brother was dead.

My initial reaction was one of shock; I was not expecting this kind of phone call (no one does), as I was on the road during a business trip to New England. I pulled into the parking lot of a Taco Bell in a disheveled Massachusetts town to have this conversation, eyeing the graffiti and the addicts and the monumentally obese roll into the fast food establishment. (How the hell does Taco Bell keep getting involved?)

My mother asked if I was even sad about this news, as my affect had been flat during the call and I did not immediately come to tears. What I felt instead was a sort of relief, and a sense that I was not surprised about this news. This wasn’t because I was cold. I was, and still am, grieving his death, but the relief I felt was because I thought it meant he was no longer suffering.

And suffering he was.

Since that time, I’d get the usual condolences from people I knew. Out of reflex, people tend to ask “Were you close?” I’m not sure why this has become so popular to the common repertoire of “cliched things you say to someone who is dealing with someone’s death”, but it’s something you hear nonetheless. The answer to it, affirmative or negative does nothing to console the mourning. I, myself, am often at a loss for things to say when someone informs me of a death in their family. I try to avoid trite sayings but it’s difficult to do so. This is most likely because our culture has become so far detached from the inevitability of death, but I’ll save that for another time.

I started writing this series from personal experience for two reasons. One, as I said, is because it’s an indulgent act of journal-keeping and discovery. The other, as I am figuring out, is because I think it needs to be illustrated just how personal the themes of this writing are. John Carter from Postcards From Barsoom has deftly demonstrated this weaving of the personal with the abstract in one of my favorite essays, which I’d highly recommend.

There are plenty of (incredibly good) Substacks and articles out there that provide deep academic insight into the problems of modernity, the feminization of men, the infantilization of adults, the degeneracy of the neo-liberal order, but most of them come from a detached, impersonal view.

Our struggles, however, are very, very, personal.

The Tiger consumes all in its path.

The Tiger, of course, is all the problems of modernity. Evola suggested that the “differentiated man” Ride the Tiger, to borrow an Eastern idiom: If you ride the Tiger, you are at least away from its jaws.

If you do not get ahold of it, it will consume you, your friends, and your family.

This part will be very difficult to write. It will involve pain and embarrassment and shame. It is necessary to embrace this rather than run from it, so the wool may be pulled from the eyes.

The Sharpening of the Claws

My brother and I were not close because we were not raised together in the same household. He was my mother’s first child that she had with her first husband. I was her second child that she had with her second husband. Both of us eventually ended up living with our respective fathers after their respective divorces. This is quite unusual, as the woman was nearly always awarded custody. We only lived with our fathers because my aunt convinced my mother it would be best for us to do so, so she let us go. It was probably the best move she could have made. She was not in a position to care for children.

Alea iacta est

Our futures would be forever set. Maybe not a destiny, but this would have an impact on our lives. The Tiger readied its claws, after feasting on our parent’s marriages. I was two years old when my parents divorced. I don’t remember how old my brother was when his father got divorced, but he was also pretty young.

The Tiger had torn through many marriages during the late 70s and early 80s. Divorce was so en vogue then. This was the natural endpoint of women’s “liberation”: the broken home. Murphy Brown showed that women can be single mothers while still being a “strong, independent girlboss.” Again, an alternate reality that does not comport to reality. Propaganda designed as entertainment.

I ended up living in Arizona after the Tiger called “failed liberal administration” completely destroyed the city of Detroit, weakened its automotive industry and thus the economy of Michigan as a whole. My father, himself the adventurous type, struck west to find prosperity like a pioneer from 1849.

He did it for me. Everything he did was for me. I can never repay him for the sacrifices he had to make to ensure I had a chance. You can imagine how frustrated I was throughout the years seeing “single moms” being lionized as heroes while single fathers were ignored. Depictions of fathers in TV and film had not been flattering. At best they were clueless doofuses. At worst they were abusive monsters. He was not that, not by a long shot.

Alternate realities, again.

Endless Pathologizing

The modern world makes much of psychologizing and pathologizing a person’s life. When I was a kid I could remember endless class activities and sessions meant to push “self-esteem” and end “bullying”. You could see the seeds of the worship of safety and self-affirmation budding there, planted by the hippies and “revolutionaries” of the 60s: The values of the boomer being force-fed to us like sticky, saccharine Dimetapp cough syrup.

Not unlike chugging cough syrup, overdosing on this would lead to madness and delusion.

My father had dated a few women while I was growing up. Some of them better than others. He ended up remarrying when I was about 11 years old, and I had taken this… poorly. I didn’t like the woman. She was a drunk and a scold. Every bit a fairy-tale stepmother in my eyes. I lashed out one day after hearing them through my walls the night before. I took a pocket knife and put some holes in the waterbed.

As you might imagine, they didn’t take this well.

The outcome of this was that I was sent to a shrink. It was my first experience with a psychologist, at 11. He was the typical soft-handed type of intellectual who spoke with that soft, slightly condescending tone that headshrinkers talk with. Not a bad guy, but dedicated to keeping up with the latest in psychological “advancements”. I didn’t know it at the time, but that made him slightly dangerous.

And the origins of my angst were discussed at length. My adolescent confusion about sex, the fear of having attention from my father being directed away from me, and of course, the divorce itself. He was convinced that my angst derived from the fact that my parents divorced and that I desired them to reunite.

Absolutely not. This was a nightmare scenario. My parents hated each other. I insisted that this was not the case, yet he would keep pressing on the issue. He didn’t believe me. I think this is because he didn’t truly get it. The modern academic wouldn’t.

Of course, I didn’t have deep philosophical or political insights when I was 11, but I could definitely feel that something was wrong. Why would I make such a dramatic statement otherwise? For the most part I tucked away thoughts of my childhood and divorce into the back recesses of my mind throughout my adult life. I instinctively refused to use it, as I saw many of my peers do, as an “excuse”. I loathed those that endlessly talked about their “trauma”. It was the mark of someone who loved to relish in the attention of others by talking about their “pain”, to explain away their actions due to it, without responsibility or accountability.

I had already encountered enough people in my personal life that exhibited this, and I rejected it.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

The nature of my upbringing, thankfully bolstered by masculine support from my father, meant I was less susceptible to the feminizing influence that most young boys often have to put up with, either because they were raised by single moms, or because their mother wielded unbalanced power in their parent’s marriage. I saw plenty of both of these types of kids growing up.

Regardless, my brother’s death had reawakened thoughts and feelings about my familial situation growing up. I felt a similar sort of angst and disappointment and resentment that I had when I was 11. Now I believe I know the source of it. It wasn’t my parent’s divorce specifically, but the general nature of how the Tiger eats families. The conditions which meant I did not have a relationship with my brother. The conditions which meant I did not grow up with an appropriate maternal figure (though my very Catholic, traditional and loving grandmother filled this void quite well, thank God.)

No, I was angry at the world, but not in the typical nihilist teenage sense. I was too young to understand that yet, but there was always a deep discomfort with how things were. I didn’t, and still do not, blame my parents for this. They were simply trying to navigate life in a world that told them lies.

And I think if you scratch hard enough at any angry-at-the-world youth you will find this instinctive rejection of the world as it is. The disaffected youth are growing in number at an alarming rate. Just look at the type of media they consume and you will see it. They are ripe for picking by the Tiger, because they are prone to channel their disaffection into endless self-help and pathologizing, escapism through drugs or sex, outright nihilism and “activism” for bullshit goals as a substitute for true purpose. They are at danger because they fail to see the bigger picture. The bigger truth.

Our great war is a spiritual war.

Without acknowledging this, they will be crushed by the fangs.

The Hunted

I didn’t figure this out soon enough, and it nearly destroyed me. In part 1, I mentioned an incident which nearly ruined my marriage. I promised I would return to it, but it was difficult for me to do so because it involved no small part of shame. Normally it’s the kind of thing that “wouldn’t be anyone’s business”, but honestly that’s the type of thinking that leads to unaccountability. It’s a failure to address reality while hiding behind a curtain that sounds respectable: “Hey man, who am I to judge, it’s none of my business”.

No, it’s all of our business.

Like I said, the Tiger is a problem for all of us, and if we want to make people aware of it, we have to let them know how it hunts. How it stalks.

So yes, you see, I have to return to the past.
For the future to be predictable, the past must be intelligible.

Let me tell you the story of a man released from the constraints of military service, used to indulging in vice to rid himself of the nagging feeling of purposelessness that comes with fighting for a lost cause. He’s been told his whole life to seek self-fulfillment. To make himself “happy”. That he’s a special person with special needs that he must take care of. He’s consumed film after film and TV show after TV show about the nature of “true love” and how it’s a picture of bliss. These stories invariably involve a woman who is dissatisfied with her fiancé and then meets her real love. She’s usually a writer for some fashion magazine, her fiancé is some clueless, insensitive jock or corporate bigshot, and the man she leaves him for is a hunky cowboy or small-town guy who’s really a sincere and considerate man.

For men, he’s shown that marriage is a chore and a jail. His wife is a scold and a cold fish. Numerous jokes are made at the toll it takes on his sexual “fulfillment”. Adultery is sold as an inevitability. Monogamy a crumbling myth.

So this guy ends up getting married with these ideas poisoning his brain, and sure enough, the “passion” dies out, as it always does. Day-to-day life ensues, as it always does, and the inevitable friction of two people living their lives together becomes inescapable, as it always does. These are things that every married couple deals with.

So, while at a trade show, he runs in to what could be described as an “old flame” from his past, who is also a friend of his wife. Before he was dating his wife, he would flirt with this woman, and they would hold hands one night before she pulled away because she had a boyfriend. The memory of that lingers. It becomes fantasy, and as much as he tells himself that he’s not going to do anything about this, he knows he secretly wants it to happen.

And he is surprised but also not surprised when the hand-holding returns. It’s exhilarating: the first touch of a lover all over again, like morphine into the veins. It devolves into kissing, and although it stops short of going all the way, the damage has been done.

It was done long before he set eyes on her again. It is because he did not understand what marriage was. It was because he misunderstood what fulfillment is. It was because he was entirely trapped in the web of the maya. The Tiger has pounced on him, and it nearly tore his throat out. It nearly ripped his marriage and her marriage to shreds, while severing the bonds of friendship between the two couples.

Radical Accountability

At this point, you might accuse me of doing the thing I accused others of when talking about accountability. After all, you might think, I wrote that entire section in the third person. A coping mechanism, I’m sure, as it still hurts to acknowledge that I did those things. That I was foolish and careless and selfish.

I previously pointed to COVID and the 2020 Elections and the Summer of Floyd as the point when I really started to doubt the ideological frame that myself and others were living in at the time, but this event, I think, is the true origin of it.

What it meant was the feeling of the entire world collapsing upon you. You find yourself lying in the guest bedroom, unable to sleep, wondering just how it had gotten to that point. You read “modern” articles with titles like “How to Save Your Marriage” along with stuff from “Men Going Their Own Way” about how marriage sucks and you should just get out. Neither of these felt right. There was something else at work, and that required at first a deep, deep dive of introspection and self-study.

This problem would not be solved by letting my destructive impulses finish off the work it started: that would be cowardice. It would mean a betrayal of an oath. It would mean letting go of someone I really, truly cared about and being on my own again.

I couldn’t rationalize why I felt that way, but I knew it and felt it. The cold knife of moral truth held itself to my gut. Being the rationalizing type, I struggled with this, as, at the time, I thought I could rationalize everything. The trap of the maya again.

Such a self-introspection is terrifying. This is about the time I got into Jung, and realized that I did not recognize the man I saw in the mirror. I didn’t understand the conflict between my gut, my heart, and my head. I thought I was in control. I thought I was in the driver’s seat.

I was not. I never was.

You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind

This hurt. Badly. I was a slave to unconscious desire. I thought the adultery was originated in “Love”. It wasn’t. It was wanting to have everything. It was a selfish pursuit of lust and Pride. What was I thinking would happen? That we’d start over with each other? No, that would be trying to grow a garden in nuclear fallout. That feeling I got when with her was no different from a shot of cocaine. A deadly, destructive poison. You snort it not thinking about work the next day because “fuck it, it feels good”.

The pain I felt upon this discovery- that I could be evil- is unlike anything I ever experienced before. Moreover, it meant I had to account for all the bullshit I had done before that was just as fucked up. No, I could not hide from it. I could not rationalize it away. I could not just pathologize and psychologize it. No, I definitely could not defensively blame it on my wife. It’s what I tried to do at first- like a trapped rat clawing at anything to escape the inevitable. That made me feel even worse.

Tyler: Without Pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing

Narrator: I tried not to think of the words “sear” or “flesh”

Tyler: Stop it! This is your pain. This is your burning hand, it’s right here!

Narrator: I’m going to my cave. I’m going to my cave and I’m gonna find my power animal.

Tyler: No! Don’t deal with it the way those dead people do. Come on!

I had to sit there and let the lye eat into my flesh because I deserved it. I could not run from it. This was part of life. This was the hardest lesson to learn, and the most important. I was reaping the wages of sin, and I had to take it. The more you ignore it, the bigger of a mess it makes when it explodes in your face.

This does not sit well with our contemporaries. They would be aghast at such “self-loathing”. They would clutch their pearls at how much anger and disappointment I had manifested in myself. They would tell me to not be so hard on myself.

This is because the Tiger does not want you to learn. It wants you to pretend everything is OK. It does not want you to discover the truth:

That you are a sick person. You are a patient dying of a disease.

But the body is not sick, the soul is. The body may not die, but the spirit will. The disease is sin.

And again, anytime I bring up “sin”, the typical modern reaction is to dismiss this as “just some more Christian proselytizing”. Again, I’m not talking about sin as “something that God will be angry at you for.”

I’m talking about sin as the origin of self-destruction.

Again, like gravity, it will destroy those who ignore it.

So make no mistake, I’m not blaming the modern world for my failures. What I do condemn the modern world for is that it actively tries to hide this truth from you. A condemnation of shame means that no one is to take accountability. This is the most dangerous thing to human beings that I can think of. It’s our friend Pride again, out to destroy us.

The Wages of Sin

This part will be equally hard to write because my brother’s death is recent. It sits fresh in my mind, inescapable. It is also hard to write because what I feel about it is complicated, and I don’t want it to be misconstrued as being cold, or opportunistic, or uncaring.

As I mentioned before, I did not see much of my brother growing up, and even less as an adult. One of my freshest memories of him was at my wedding. Family and friends met up at a local bar the night before the event, and he spotted my parents actually talking to each other.

In a civilized manner.

”Looks like Hell’s about to freeze over”, he said, as we both laughed. He was in on the joke. He knew what we both grew up dealing with. In many ways, he was a mirror of sorts. We were both raised by our fathers, both around the same time in history. We weren’t poor but lived modest lives, with our fathers being working class. In a different set of circumstances I could easily have seen our roles reversing. I could easily see myself in his shoes given the right (or wrong) set of friends, tragedy, relationships with family.

After that moment, I hardly saw him again. I got periodic updates through the years from my mother. He divorced his wife, which he took fairly hard. Later I would learn he’d been arrested for possessing methamphetamines. I’d hear stories about how he’d ask family for money and not give it back. He’d tell stories about how he’d really need it and disappear again for stretches of time.

If you’ve ever dealt with a drug addict you know the deal.

Fuck, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. I don’t want you to think that’s what’s happening here.

I’d try to reach out periodically to talk to him. I’d fail. I guess I didn’t try very hard. After all, I didn’t really grow up with him. I didn’t feel the way most people feel about their siblings, it seemed, and I did sense something wrong about that.

I’d later hear that he’d contracted AIDS.

A few years later (about a month ago), I’d hear that he had been found dead in his apartment. Paraphernalia on the bed, but the cause of death, at this time, unknown to me.

He was sick. Literally sick. His infection, coupled with years of meth use did not do him favors. In a memorial group, a friend posted pictures of them. One at a pumpkin patch. Another at a wax museum. The first thing I noticed was how skinny he was. Skeletal. He clearly was not the slightly chubby guy I remembered from my wedding.

The second was that these photos were not the type of photos that “buddies” take of their friends. They were the type of photos that people in a relationship take. I asked my mom about this and she confessed that yes, he was indeed gay. She didn’t tell me before because she didn’t know how I’d take that news. I told her it wouldn’t keep me from caring about him, of course. He was family, after all. Contrary to what people think, apprehension about homosexuality isn’t about hate. It stems from deep concern and, in what may seem paradoxical to the left, genuine compassion.

I started thinking things that you are not supposed to think about in today’s society. You’re not supposed to judge people. You’re not supposed to imply guilt or accountability. Especially when it involves the death of your family.

What you’re supposed to do, to be a “normal person”, is to grieve with the rest of them, say nice things about them, tell stories about them, and move on.

The grief is definitely there, but I cannot sit here and pretend that I am also not angry. When I say that I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, I mean it. He, like me, and like everyone are not “bad guys”, but he, and me, and everyone else, are susceptible to the maya. We’re all hunted by the tiger.

And while I narrowly escaped its jaws, it consumed my brother whole.

This is impolitic to say. Most people will call probably call me an asshole when I point this out, but the first thing I thought of when I heard of his AIDS diagnosis following his arrest for drug use was everyone’s favorite predator Joe Exotic saying

“Well, you ain’t that straight”

when discussing seducing a man for methamphetamine.

Now, of course I have no insight into whether or not this is the case, but desperate, addicted men do desperate things. Yes, maybe I’m wrong about this and he was “born that way”, but it was something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

The other thing that is anathema for me to say is another inescapable thought:

The wages of sin is death.

This doesn’t fly in our modern, “sympathetic”, “non-judgmental” world, but I’m not dealing in sympathies here. I’m dealing in truth. I have a vested interest in it, and that means facing hard, and incredibly distressing facts.

Am I to pretend that not only his death, but the suffering he endured throughout his life were not the consequences of his actions?

I can only imagine people reading this right now thinking about what a hateful, spiteful, callous person I am to even consider this, but you’re wrong. I don’t hate him. I don’t hate gay people. I don’t hate drug addicts. I love him. I have wept for him. I weep for him now. I wish I had spent more time with him. I am angry, yes, but not at him. I am angry about what killed him.

But I am not naïve. I am not naïve enough to believe that the typical homosexual is what is depicted on Modern Family (alternate reality, again). I have seen enough to know what a large portion of the community is like. It’s why I am so irked by the trite sloganeering of “Love is Love”. This is said by people who do not know what love is. It’s the same kind of mistaken “love” that I discovered was a manifestation of my own selfish pride and lust at my weakest moment. As to the golden calf status of “Pride”? I think I’ve covered that in great detail already.

I know he was promiscuous enough, or careless enough, to have contracted a potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease. I knew he had struggled with substance abuse for years.

You may think of this as uncouth to bring up. Really? If your brother was murdered would it be “uncouth” to want to discover his killer?

I could have stifled these thoughts. I could have ignored it and repeated platitudes about “what a shame” it all is, and “how unfortunate” it was to lose him “so early.”

Fuck that. He was murdered. He was murdered just like every dead junkie with a needle in his arm was murdered. He was murdered like most suicide cases were murdered. He was murdered like every AIDS patient was murdered.

His life was savagely torn apart by this Tiger that we pretend is a Kitten. Millions of lives are savaged by this unassailable cult of hedonism, degeneracy, self-worship, and unaccountability. This honorless, faithless, truthless excuse for what passes as “appropriate moral paradigm” will continue to devour us until we stop playing dead.

Until we stop bullshitting ourselves.

This is personal, and it affects you every bit as much as it affects me.

I pray, fervently and earnestly, that God has the grace to have mercy on my brother’s soul and to let him find peace.

I have the same prayer for all of us.