Femicide

A men’s court called the “Holy Inquisition” required only a few hundred years to kill upwards of five million women. Today we have the drip-drip of “Me too.” If the survival of the species depends on a healthy masculinity, we are in trouble.

Male glamour

Only a few are glamorous. Glamour is innate, an endowment, as every charism is. Men who strive to be glamorous are merely affected. Orchids don’t try to be glamorous; they just are.

Glamour is derived from grammar. Before the masses knew how to read, Latin was glamorous. It was a secret knowledge; only the priests knew it. Now everyone knows how to read. So the churches are closed and falling down. Stained glass windows have had their day. Glamour has moved on.

Miles Davis was glamorous. You could not take your eyes off him. His glamour cast a spell. His Bitches Brew was glamour’s answer to doo-wop.

Davis liked his ladies and his heroin. Glamour is careless, even reckless, but it is also connected. It arrives on the scene like an unshelled secret. “Don’t play what’s there,” Davis said. “Play what’s not there.” Improvise. Play what you don’t know.

Glamour’s first rule: To be who you are, you have to be like nobody else.

The joy of nothing

Freedom is freedom from something. It is a subtraction. The less of us there is, the freer we are. As men, our goal is to become nobody in particular.

Freedom cuts across the cultural grain. In the West, solutions are typically proposed in terms of more, not less.

“Be nothing. Know nothing. Have nothing. This is the only happiness worth having.”

Statements like this stun the mind. We are like the bird that flies into a window.

Masculinity

The purple robe and the jewelled ring signify masculinity. Masculinity is the awareness of oneself as a surplus. Awareness is consciousness. The conscious male is expansive. Life flows out from him. The unconscious male is parsimonious. He has his taps turned off.

Stoic code

Do not want anything. Do not avoid anything.