I started lifting weights when I was fourteen because I wanted to be a man. To me, men appeared to be complicated, contradictory creatures, but I really wanted to be one anyway. Still do. The act of manhood appeared, at one moment, reckless, and the next moment, the pillar of contemporary life.
The one consistent seemed to be the physical structure of a man. A man is bigger and stronger than a boy. They were all lifting things, every day, millennium in, millennium out – from stones to dumbbells – not merely to move the thing, but to build something in themselves, a psychic resilience expressed superficially as vein and muscle.
This aesthetic said to people, ‘I’m in charge of my shit.’
My dad got me a barbell and bench for my birthday and together we set it up in the garage. A month later it was covered in sawdust and spirals of turf that looked like big sushi rolls. A month after that, it was petrified in a layer of golf clubs and boogie boards and a black mannequin covered with graffiti.
… and then a month after that, my little brother excavated my tired birthday present and taught himself how to bench press. He got bigger than me overnight, which was terrifying but also greatly proved my theory that lifting weights was essential for that fantastic bound into manhood and that physical size dictated psychic size.
A patriarchy is a place where immature men run the land. Whether it’s obvious to you or not, the human qualities fundamentally in governance right now belong to the uninitiated boy who absorbs his power solely through age, wealth, blood-line, and, of course, his sex. To say the very least, this model stifles the real essence of masculinity.
My younger brother was bigger and stronger than me, and as patriarchal prisoner X these traits are seen as my ‘unique’ capital whether I’ve agreed to them or not. And whether I have something greater to offer or not, the only currency I can cash in at school, home, work, and the rest of the world, is muscle and fuck-off-about-your-feelings-mate.
I’m non-competitive. Startlingly more so in the past few years.
It’s startling because it feels like I’m losing touch with something important. Men like to challenge me to things, to either get a response or validate their own worth. I want to be competitive, but it looks hard. Hard at the time, and hard to deal with when you’re alone.
But these tones of the male psyche can’t be inessential. They must have a significant reason for existing. And you, like myself, might have to learn how to express them in order to truly express yourself.
I’m talking about the Warrior, of which you were once-upon-a-time one.
Why would it be important to be competitive? The obvious is survival. But it’s only obvious because it’s an unexamined idea.
‘Survival of the fittest’ seems to be a misinterpreted Darwinian idea, and the corporate world, a post-modern re-imagining of the savannah, is predicated on this catch phrase. Google it. But is this the only way to live, or even the truest way to live?
The Scientific American, in an article aptly named ‘A Sceptic’s Take on the Public Misunderstanding of Darwin’ says this: “Natural selection (survival of the fittest) simply means that those individuals with variations better suited to their environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted. This outcome is known as ‘differential reproductive success.’ It may be that organisms that are bigger, stronger, faster and brutishly competitive will reproduce more successfully, but it is just as likely that organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well.”
Some of Gregg Braden’s work assesses research done on violent competition in different species. From these 400 studies, taken between 1998 and 2000, the optimal amount of competition was zero. If this is true, co-operation seems to be more integral to the structure of society than competition. Co-operation has led us to this point, a thriving booming network of connected souls. We needed each other on those cracking savannah nights and we’ll need each other come the dawning of the new iPhone.
What does this mean for us? It could mean that ‘competitive nature’ as a tone is the ugly end of something more moral. When we don’t co-operate, we compete. We have to. It is the shadow form, and they exist as poles. We must agree to some sort of code and live some sort of way, whether it’s in our best interest or not.
[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none”]When we don’t co-operate, we compete.[/tweet_box]
Maybe we can co-operate in simulating a competitive environment. That’s a funny idea. The Olympics is a good example. Any sport really, a cultural phenomenon that seems to be very important for whole human development – ‘sport’.
We run into problems, though, when the simulation is mistaken for real life and people kill referees over absent-minded decisions, or even worse when we lie to our kids about the absolute importance of victory and make them feel pathetic when they lose to the neighbours’ kid by a point in an arbitrary configuration of neoprene knee pads, wooden sticks and plastic wrist monitors. I hate you, Dad.
The modern western world seems to have the antidote for our daily face-off for survival.
Agriculture, and then the industrial and technological ages have commodified survival and brought it into abundance. We pick survival of a shelf at Woolworths and shop for shelter at Bunnings with a burnt snag hanging from our bottom lip.
And even though the immediacy of death has been removed, the importance of the mechanism remains integral to the human psyche. At least I think it does. Survival delivers us the potential of our character, makes us something greater and connects us to the finer patterning of cosmic energy, turns us into satiated Warriors.
Woolworths and Bunnings and the pharmaceutical companies have made us feel immortal by removing our foreseeable limitations. We’re addicted to security, no matter how glaringly false this term is. Security. Just a word. We’re clinging to these four syllables with white knuckles. Like Rose on the big door, floating in the Atlantic, the apparition of Leo is our fading connection to spirit, earth, and the archetypal energies.
You have a Warrior wielding a sword inside your guts.
The Warrior is an archetype, of which there are a whole host. An archetype is a map of character traits, a signature on the psyche that governs human behaviour, is latent – existing as potential – or apparent – existing as potentiated.
When we talk about manhood, we’re really referring to an interface of mature masculine archetypes. These maps, blueprints, and signatures are inherited genetically, like any physical trait, and can be expressed or repressed. Having a relationship with the archetypes is as important as having a relationship with your physical body. The more you know about yourself, the more meaning you can bring into your very limited time here.
The Warrior is a mature masculine archetype rewarded to the hero at the culmination of the hero’s journey. The Warrior is a selfless expression of commitment to the transpersonal, the one who fights to the end and dies for the greater good. In a contemporary context, the Warrior could be the Olympian, the single parent, or the gay-rights-activist. When we go to the gym, we exercise this archetype more than any other muscle.
When I finally gave in to the bench press, finally finally finally, I was surrendering to my Warrior.
[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none”]Having a relationship with the archetypes is as important as having a relationship with your physical body.[/tweet_box]
As a male, this archetype is integral to whole psychic development, and left latent can manifest as problematic. We feel inadequate, emasculated, and seek fulfilment in other ways. Violence is a good example, and is something important to exercise in the right context. But we’ve tied the tube on our violence and one night after a few beers it’s going to spring loose and rise like the dragon.
At first the Warrior appears competitive, but it’s their facility to co-operate that makes them so fantastic. They co-operate in the fight for something bigger than themselves, this transpersonal devotion.
The gym could be a modern initiation space for males to bring on the Warrior.
In a male, physical expansion could be important for psychic maturity and a younger brother could be a great dummy to practise what I want to call trans-survival competition: the acknowledgment that the universe is an organic mind and everything is just a big, stupidly intelligent and majestic game.
The gym could be a simulation of a natural event, something hugely fulfilling and integral to your growth. ‘Could’ is a fun word and keeps me from getting into trouble by promising you a psychic lift-off. Let’s aim for something semi-psychic and go from there. Expectation doesn’t work.
Why have I spent so much time moving weight around a warehouse in Fitzroy North without adhering to any practical task other than the project of self? Is it just vanity, or is it something greater than me, the yearning for potential, calling down through the generations of troubled and testifying human beings of which I am one?
Surely I could’ve spent that time helping my old dad with his renovations, payback for my first weight set. But no, there’s way too much to do and not enough time.
