THE CHIEF PETTY OFFICER
Sometimes, when I had work to do in Cape Town, I would arrange to stay over and visit my mother in Onrust. Errol would come to fetch me from the airport where I dropped the hired car, and drive me through in the old Chevair which is now only three years short of the 30 years that qualifies it as ‘vintage’. That was before I had had the engine reconditioned, and there were times along the coast road, or over Sir Lowry’s pass, when we thought we might not make it, but we did.
Errol would chat, frequently on his strong belief that all young men should undergo military training to learn discipline. Of course, in the sixties, military training was the initiation process for white males when you became ‘a man at 16’, (as a British army recruitment poster liked to put it), and as Errol fervently believed.
It is not the discipline or the ‘machismo’ of the army that makes a boy a man. There seem to be moments of decision in our lives, and when we are able to make those decisions we move from childhood into adulthood. Sometimes adulthood is forced on us before we are ready, such as orphans who have to take adult responsibility for raising the younger members of the family before they have had the full support they need to reach their own maturity. The mould is cast before the sculpture is complete. When it happens timeously, we move from being the receptive child to the interactive adult, and certainly manhood is linked to the male becoming an adult. A military environment can be the catalyst to precipitate the onset of manhood because it provides situations that demand decisions. Where there is danger, our confrontation with death can set the mould. Where there is action, we learn to make decisions quickly and to act with resolve.
Timing is important. There is a risk of the boy being too eager to don the armour of manhood and, like the orphan, being forced into the role before completing the process. Manhood should be the start of a continuing process, not just the end of boyhood. There is a danger that insecurity will produce inflexibility to create the appearance of certainty. When the change occurs too abruptly, when the boy adopts the behaviour without attaining the personal insight, you have the Stunted Male that is the stereotype of manhood, the machismo without the man. The paradox of adulthood is to cross the threshold without closing the door behind us. The child we were, remains, and the adult we become must continue to grow. To be an adult, man or woman, means that we have reached a state where we continuously turn our experience into insight, and increase our capacity as we age. We start in youth with a high level of energy and little experience. If we live our lives well, as our energy depletes, our wisdom increases and we are able to accomplish more with less energy.
Carl Rogers famously wrote a book called, ‘On becoming a person’. I wonder how ‘On becoming a man’ would be very different. If the person you are is a man or a woman, when you become a person, you become the man or the woman that you were born to be.
And yet there is a difference. While each of us is unique, we share a common humanity. And within that humanity, we have one sex or the other. To be human is to be different from all other animals. To be a man is to be different from being a woman.
It may be that, as a man, or as a woman, we play different roles in this life. It may be, but it is not the role we play that defines our sex. Neither do the roles we play determine the person that we are. One person may play many roles. Sometimes the role takes us over completely. George Orwell described in, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, an experience he had as a Civil Servant in India. The villagers claimed that an elephant was threatening the village and he, as the British Representative, had to come and shoot it. When he arrived at the scene, he realised that the beast was in no way a threat to the village. But the entire population was gathered to witness the British Empire in action. There was an expectation of his role. Not to shoot the elephant became impossible. He had to fulfil his role. And yet, I feel, he lost a part of himself in doing so.
To know what it is to be a man, and this I can only say from one point of view, you have to be the man. Exactly as, to know yourself, you have to be yourself. Once you are a man, you can, through mindfulness, become more aware of what it means to be a man, and develop your ability to relate as a man, to other men and to women. These are things you learn, or fail to learn, as you do with all the other developmental opportunities that your life places in your path. But how to become a man in the first place, is the difficulty, as it is to become a person. You have to defend yourself against the roles, against the ideas of others, against their own agendas and their own ignorance.
It is in fact, the way of Tao. You do not decide from the mind what it is you would like to become. The becoming unfolds itself. The decision comes in choosing to recognise what is unfolding. Just as an infant will learn to walk and to talk if the world does not do too much damage to it, so will you become a man, (if the world does not do too much damage to you). The way to teach a child to talk, is to listen, to pay the child attention, to be mindful and to show that you hear what is said. The way to make a boy into a man, is to listen, to pay the boy attention, and to show that you recognise the man in him.
Nothing can be spoiled by paying attention. Pretending to pay attention can do harm. Not paying attention, does harm. But holding your attention effects change. Holding your attention means being still. When the mind is still, and not chattering, then life moves forward. When there is chattering, life is on pause.
Errol had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy at Simonstown, and had specific responsibility for training the raw recruits, so he spoke from experience. I think he dealt with the permanent force recruits, and not the white males whose wealthy parents had managed to get them into the Navy rather than risk being sent to the Border. Errol definitely felt a paternal responsibility towards his charges. He was the Older Man Robert Bly describes in ‘Iron John’, who leads the boy into manhood. It was a role he practised consciously, and from his description it seemed to be effective. It may well be that those particular recruits came to the Navy in the first place because they did not have an Older Man in their environment. The Navy itself was their Older Man. When you find an Older Man, and recognise each other, you feel respect and love, both for yourself and for him. The passing of time of itself, does not make you an Older Man as it makes the Chevair into a Vintage Car. It is something you have to do. In our society, there is frequently a shortage of Older Men.
And yet Errol’s own story is a little different. In retrospect, I would have asked some more questions to see how it all pieced together, but I was not paying full attention, allowing the stories to wash over me as I enjoyed the view of the fynbos and said good bye to the mountains I loved when he drove me back to the airport at the end of my stay. The stories gained a familiarity over time, and seemed to elide into one another.
There was something I did hear. Errol told me he had been an alcoholic, and I asked him how he had freed himself from the drug. Somehow, all must not have been well on the quarterdeck. He had left the navy, perhaps because of alcohol, he did not say, but he was in the habit of regular heavy drinking, and he still wore ‘his coat of navy blue’.
One morning, waking up in the cells, having been arrested the night before by the Sergeant who was also a good friend of his, he was paraded before the Superintendent of the police station. This man, noticing, Errol told me, that he wore the remnants of a Navy Uniform, told Errol that he was too good for the way he was living. He said that a man who could reach the level of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy could do better for himself than drink himself to death, and gave him a thorough ‘pep’ talk, of the kind that most people would consider a waste of good words. How could anything anyone said, change an alcoholic?
Well, Errol heard him out, and was then discharged, and he and his buddy, the Sergeant who was now off-duty, went round to the off-sales to get a flagon of wine. They went up to Errol’s first floor flat which he shared with his wife, who worked as a nurse, and they were about to set down and have a drink together. Then Errol got to thinking. He was amazed that so important a person as the Superintendent of the Simonstown Police Station should take the trouble to call him in and talk to him personally. He figured that if that person could take the trouble to show that much interest in him, and recognise what he had achieved in the past, then he must be worth something. At that very moment, he made a decision, grabbed the flagon of wine, and threw it out the window.
Gilbert Ryle wrote a book called ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, in which he argued about free-will, and especially called into question our ability to make a decision. He believed, and not without some merit, that what we perceive as decisions have already been made, (I never did find out where he thought they were made. In those days, philosophers, amongst whom he was numbered, would not mix with psychologists. The academic disciplines were more in competition for tenure than co-operation for truth. He would not consider such a notion as the unconscious, but I think that is what he meant). He ridiculed the idea of actually making a decision and asked, ‘when did I make this decision, before breakfast, or after breakfast?’ I longed to write back to him and say, ‘I made it before breakfast’. He forgot that a question is not a statement and that he had proved nothing.
Errol made his moment of decision quite clear by his action of throwing out the flagon from the first story window. I think that the window must have been open at the time, though it could just as easily not have been, and I like to believe that it landed safely. He followed it with another action. He phoned his wife at the hospital and told her of his decision. She believed him. She believed him to such an extent that she spoke to one of the doctors on her ward who dealt with such things, and he agreed to see Errol right away, and to prescribe some medication and therapy to help him get through it. So the Superintendent had put something in motion which rippled through his life and was picked up by his wife and by the doctor, all of whom supported him when he needed it. It would make sense to say that his stars were positively aligned. Sometimes there is just a break in the negative energy with which we surround ourselves, and the positive energy, when everything is correctly aligned, just comes through.
EM Forster, in ‘Passage to India’, describes a young army officer riding in the carriage of a train with a fellow officer. He asks his friend what he would do if he found that he had Indian blood in him. The British Officer, young and unthinking, replied majestically, ‘But, my dear fellow, I would simply shoot myself. What else could one do?’ His friend thanked him, and they went on to chat of other things to the end of their journey. Later, the British Officer heard that his friend had gone from the station and shot himself. He had Indian blood. He was devastated. He did not know the power of ‘vash’, the power of words, and the need to be mindful at all times. As the posters on the walls used to warn people in the First World War, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.
In Errol’s case, it was careful talk that saved a life. What did prompt the Superintendent of that police station to take that trouble on that day, when so many damaged people pass through his cells so regularly, and he knows how seldom anything he says will be heard? We are not responsible for how people receive our good acts, we are only responsible for doing them well. We have to guard against the excuse of futility. In this case, the futile gesture did not fall on stony ground, but fertile soil. The momentary spark was able to ignite the tinder.1 Errol was able to form his resolve, strangely, to live up to someone else’s expectations of him! Yet it remained his resolve, and I suspect that his act of decision was also his initiation into manhood.
Note 1. A tinder box was a box containing dry flammable matter, and a flint and steel, used before matches were invented, to ignite the tinder by striking the steel with the flint.
© John Mitchell 07 08 08
Sometimes, when I had work to do in Cape Town, I would arrange to stay over and visit my mother in Onrust. Errol would come to fetch me from the airport where I dropped the hired car, and drive me through in the old Chevair which is now only three years short of the 30 years that qualifies it as ‘vintage’. That was before I had had the engine reconditioned, and there were times along the coast road, or over Sir Lowry’s pass, when we thought we might not make it, but we did.
Errol would chat, frequently on his strong belief that all young men should undergo military training to learn discipline. Of course, in the sixties, military training was the initiation process for white males when you became ‘a man at 16’, (as a British army recruitment poster liked to put it), and as Errol fervently believed.
It is not the discipline or the ‘machismo’ of the army that makes a boy a man. There seem to be moments of decision in our lives, and when we are able to make those decisions we move from childhood into adulthood. Sometimes adulthood is forced on us before we are ready, such as orphans who have to take adult responsibility for raising the younger members of the family before they have had the full support they need to reach their own maturity. The mould is cast before the sculpture is complete. When it happens timeously, we move from being the receptive child to the interactive adult, and certainly manhood is linked to the male becoming an adult. A military environment can be the catalyst to precipitate the onset of manhood because it provides situations that demand decisions. Where there is danger, our confrontation with death can set the mould. Where there is action, we learn to make decisions quickly and to act with resolve.
Timing is important. There is a risk of the boy being too eager to don the armour of manhood and, like the orphan, being forced into the role before completing the process. Manhood should be the start of a continuing process, not just the end of boyhood. There is a danger that insecurity will produce inflexibility to create the appearance of certainty. When the change occurs too abruptly, when the boy adopts the behaviour without attaining the personal insight, you have the Stunted Male that is the stereotype of manhood, the machismo without the man. The paradox of adulthood is to cross the threshold without closing the door behind us. The child we were, remains, and the adult we become must continue to grow. To be an adult, man or woman, means that we have reached a state where we continuously turn our experience into insight, and increase our capacity as we age. We start in youth with a high level of energy and little experience. If we live our lives well, as our energy depletes, our wisdom increases and we are able to accomplish more with less energy.
Carl Rogers famously wrote a book called, ‘On becoming a person’. I wonder how ‘On becoming a man’ would be very different. If the person you are is a man or a woman, when you become a person, you become the man or the woman that you were born to be.
And yet there is a difference. While each of us is unique, we share a common humanity. And within that humanity, we have one sex or the other. To be human is to be different from all other animals. To be a man is to be different from being a woman.
It may be that, as a man, or as a woman, we play different roles in this life. It may be, but it is not the role we play that defines our sex. Neither do the roles we play determine the person that we are. One person may play many roles. Sometimes the role takes us over completely. George Orwell described in, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, an experience he had as a Civil Servant in India. The villagers claimed that an elephant was threatening the village and he, as the British Representative, had to come and shoot it. When he arrived at the scene, he realised that the beast was in no way a threat to the village. But the entire population was gathered to witness the British Empire in action. There was an expectation of his role. Not to shoot the elephant became impossible. He had to fulfil his role. And yet, I feel, he lost a part of himself in doing so.
To know what it is to be a man, and this I can only say from one point of view, you have to be the man. Exactly as, to know yourself, you have to be yourself. Once you are a man, you can, through mindfulness, become more aware of what it means to be a man, and develop your ability to relate as a man, to other men and to women. These are things you learn, or fail to learn, as you do with all the other developmental opportunities that your life places in your path. But how to become a man in the first place, is the difficulty, as it is to become a person. You have to defend yourself against the roles, against the ideas of others, against their own agendas and their own ignorance.
It is in fact, the way of Tao. You do not decide from the mind what it is you would like to become. The becoming unfolds itself. The decision comes in choosing to recognise what is unfolding. Just as an infant will learn to walk and to talk if the world does not do too much damage to it, so will you become a man, (if the world does not do too much damage to you). The way to teach a child to talk, is to listen, to pay the child attention, to be mindful and to show that you hear what is said. The way to make a boy into a man, is to listen, to pay the boy attention, and to show that you recognise the man in him.
Nothing can be spoiled by paying attention. Pretending to pay attention can do harm. Not paying attention, does harm. But holding your attention effects change. Holding your attention means being still. When the mind is still, and not chattering, then life moves forward. When there is chattering, life is on pause.
Errol had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy at Simonstown, and had specific responsibility for training the raw recruits, so he spoke from experience. I think he dealt with the permanent force recruits, and not the white males whose wealthy parents had managed to get them into the Navy rather than risk being sent to the Border. Errol definitely felt a paternal responsibility towards his charges. He was the Older Man Robert Bly describes in ‘Iron John’, who leads the boy into manhood. It was a role he practised consciously, and from his description it seemed to be effective. It may well be that those particular recruits came to the Navy in the first place because they did not have an Older Man in their environment. The Navy itself was their Older Man. When you find an Older Man, and recognise each other, you feel respect and love, both for yourself and for him. The passing of time of itself, does not make you an Older Man as it makes the Chevair into a Vintage Car. It is something you have to do. In our society, there is frequently a shortage of Older Men.
And yet Errol’s own story is a little different. In retrospect, I would have asked some more questions to see how it all pieced together, but I was not paying full attention, allowing the stories to wash over me as I enjoyed the view of the fynbos and said good bye to the mountains I loved when he drove me back to the airport at the end of my stay. The stories gained a familiarity over time, and seemed to elide into one another.
There was something I did hear. Errol told me he had been an alcoholic, and I asked him how he had freed himself from the drug. Somehow, all must not have been well on the quarterdeck. He had left the navy, perhaps because of alcohol, he did not say, but he was in the habit of regular heavy drinking, and he still wore ‘his coat of navy blue’.
One morning, waking up in the cells, having been arrested the night before by the Sergeant who was also a good friend of his, he was paraded before the Superintendent of the police station. This man, noticing, Errol told me, that he wore the remnants of a Navy Uniform, told Errol that he was too good for the way he was living. He said that a man who could reach the level of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy could do better for himself than drink himself to death, and gave him a thorough ‘pep’ talk, of the kind that most people would consider a waste of good words. How could anything anyone said, change an alcoholic?
Well, Errol heard him out, and was then discharged, and he and his buddy, the Sergeant who was now off-duty, went round to the off-sales to get a flagon of wine. They went up to Errol’s first floor flat which he shared with his wife, who worked as a nurse, and they were about to set down and have a drink together. Then Errol got to thinking. He was amazed that so important a person as the Superintendent of the Simonstown Police Station should take the trouble to call him in and talk to him personally. He figured that if that person could take the trouble to show that much interest in him, and recognise what he had achieved in the past, then he must be worth something. At that very moment, he made a decision, grabbed the flagon of wine, and threw it out the window.
Gilbert Ryle wrote a book called ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, in which he argued about free-will, and especially called into question our ability to make a decision. He believed, and not without some merit, that what we perceive as decisions have already been made, (I never did find out where he thought they were made. In those days, philosophers, amongst whom he was numbered, would not mix with psychologists. The academic disciplines were more in competition for tenure than co-operation for truth. He would not consider such a notion as the unconscious, but I think that is what he meant). He ridiculed the idea of actually making a decision and asked, ‘when did I make this decision, before breakfast, or after breakfast?’ I longed to write back to him and say, ‘I made it before breakfast’. He forgot that a question is not a statement and that he had proved nothing.
Errol made his moment of decision quite clear by his action of throwing out the flagon from the first story window. I think that the window must have been open at the time, though it could just as easily not have been, and I like to believe that it landed safely. He followed it with another action. He phoned his wife at the hospital and told her of his decision. She believed him. She believed him to such an extent that she spoke to one of the doctors on her ward who dealt with such things, and he agreed to see Errol right away, and to prescribe some medication and therapy to help him get through it. So the Superintendent had put something in motion which rippled through his life and was picked up by his wife and by the doctor, all of whom supported him when he needed it. It would make sense to say that his stars were positively aligned. Sometimes there is just a break in the negative energy with which we surround ourselves, and the positive energy, when everything is correctly aligned, just comes through.
EM Forster, in ‘Passage to India’, describes a young army officer riding in the carriage of a train with a fellow officer. He asks his friend what he would do if he found that he had Indian blood in him. The British Officer, young and unthinking, replied majestically, ‘But, my dear fellow, I would simply shoot myself. What else could one do?’ His friend thanked him, and they went on to chat of other things to the end of their journey. Later, the British Officer heard that his friend had gone from the station and shot himself. He had Indian blood. He was devastated. He did not know the power of ‘vash’, the power of words, and the need to be mindful at all times. As the posters on the walls used to warn people in the First World War, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.
In Errol’s case, it was careful talk that saved a life. What did prompt the Superintendent of that police station to take that trouble on that day, when so many damaged people pass through his cells so regularly, and he knows how seldom anything he says will be heard? We are not responsible for how people receive our good acts, we are only responsible for doing them well. We have to guard against the excuse of futility. In this case, the futile gesture did not fall on stony ground, but fertile soil. The momentary spark was able to ignite the tinder.1 Errol was able to form his resolve, strangely, to live up to someone else’s expectations of him! Yet it remained his resolve, and I suspect that his act of decision was also his initiation into manhood.
Note 1. A tinder box was a box containing dry flammable matter, and a flint and steel, used before matches were invented, to ignite the tinder by striking the steel with the flint.
© John Mitchell 07 08 08
No comments:
Post a Comment