men’s studies – Fluid Imagination

While looking-for-inspiration/researching-for-an-as-yet-unknown-fiction-project this evening, I came across this sentence:

the title of “Y-chromosomal Adam” is not permanently fixed to a single individual, but can advance over the course of human history as paternal lineages become extinct.
Wikipedia: “Y-chromosomal Adam“

“Paternal lineages become extinct.”

Whoa.

I mean, we’re familiar with bloodline stories (Game of Thrones, Star Wars, early British History, racism), so we’re familiar with the notion of a family being wiped out, but had you ever thought about it in terms of the identity of our “Y-chromosomal Adam” — the father of all our fathers?

Y-chromosomal Adam is a popular name for the scientific concept of the human male line’s most recent common ancestor (Y-MRCA). In order to be considered as Y-chromosomal Adam, you must have “had at least two sons whose unbroken lineages have survived to the present day. If the lineages of all but one of those sons dies out, then the title of Y-chromosomal Adam shifts forward” to your remaining son, who himself must have at least two sons whose unbroken lineages…etc.

I imagine standing at the root of that family tree, being Y-chromosomal Adam, and looking above me into the future, and watching as each of the branches in the crown slowly dies out, the blackness creeping from one side of crown to the other, and closer to the root, a slow black dust whispering away the future. But there, to my right, my sole remaining son’s branch, his crowning descendents still aflower with thin green segments of life, stretching and stretching, growing and growing, living beyond the rot. As the darkness swoops in and overtakes me, I split my trunk asunder and gift the world a new Adam. “Outlive it,” I cry. “Let the rot of it all die with me!”

I came to Y-chromosomal Adam on Wikipedia because I still “surf the web.” It may look objectively similar to scrolling through a feed, but surfing the web is a qualitatively different experience.

Scrolling through a feed provides a kind of opiate effect: it sucks away your energy and time; it leaves you with nothing to show for it; and when you come back to the real world, you feel at least a little bit dirty for having done it.

Surfing the web is different. It’s a more active experience, and it requires skill, attention, and a nimbleness of mind. Like knowing which wave to catch, one must know which ideas to pursue. You also have to be a more adequate judge of your information sources and be willing to track down a primary source to make sure you’re dealing with original information rather than a misinterpretation of that information.

My web surfing experience started because, before I started to write, I wanted to sync my conscious mind to the wordless music being played in my ears. I do the same thing when I’m downhill sking with headphones on, matching my line to the song as best as the mountain will allow. Tonight, syncing my music with my mind meant searching for the meaning of the title of the song being played in my ears: “Thule” (by The Album Leaf).

I already knew that Thule was a mythical northernmost land (think the concept Greenland or Norway as imagined by the Ancient Greeks), but I didn’t know much beyond that, and so from there, I started to surf.

Well, you can probably imagine the line I surfed from “Thule” to “Y-chromosomal Adam.” There were my hairpin cuts along the crest of a powerful crushing wave of Nazi mysticism. There was my lifesaving leap over a forum on 4Chan. There were relaxing, easy glides over populistly-written, science-based blogs, and loops back into and through Wikipedia.

But then I hit that phrase — “Paternal lineages become extinct.” — and I pulled up short.

Cue Keanu.

“Whoa.”

Desire. Humility. Knowledge.

Perspective. Integrity. Truth.

The story of this moment.

Watching *Breaking Bad* and judging Walter White. Watching *Game of Thrones* and judging Jon Snow, Rob Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and all the others. Talking with my wife and judging myself. The question repeating in my head: “What makes a man?”

The connective tissue is my desire to connect them in this moment, the moment when I sit down to write, with the mantra repeating in my head — “What makes a man?,” “What makes a man?,” “What makes a man?” This is coupled with a sub-intellectual urge to find the right music for the mood: a pushed finger and scrolling eyes searching for the right song in a list of always-already right songs — “What makes a man?,” “What makes a man?,” “What makes a man?” — and then I find the words, lined up perfectly in a column of song titles: “Desire. Humility. Knowledge. Perspective. Integrity. Truth.” — the track list of Kamasi Washington’s 2017 EP, *Harmony of Difference.*

That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.

What makes a man?

The answer is performative. Each person is and ought to be free to perform their understanding what makes a man, and each person is and ought to be free to judge the performance of others relative to their already-held ideal of what makes a man.

A man is, then, what a man does and what others think of him for it.

A man is shaped by internal and external pressures. Both are capable of bending or twisting or sometimes even breaking his integrity. This makes a man no different from any other person. Individuals of all stripes are capable of great miracles, great joys, and great horrors, inspired by strange combinations of internal and external pressures that shape their performance of the truth, a performance whose quality can be and ought to be judged in the light of all that is known.

Some stories define a man by the pressures he refuses to relent to and by the conflicts he generates in his refusal to stand down, but in that too, a man is no different from any other person, and no more likely to stand up in the first place. We — all of us — are and ought to be defined (at least in part) by the positions we’re willing to defend and by the passions we ultimately use to defend them.

And so I ask once again, “What makes a man?”

I teach and mentor individuals who identify as trans, as well as to individuals who openly question their gender. I also teach and mentor cis individuals. Many of them are highly invested in the question, “How does one become a man?”

The best answer I can give them is to watch the performance of other men and live out the traits they admire.

The ones I admire make up a harmony of difference.

### Desire
A man desires. Not content with the way things are, he sets his sights on something beyond himself, something different from everything he’s known, something to attract his interest. When he finds it out beyond the horizon of himself, he feels compelled to pursue it.

### Humility
A man stops short. He knows his limits. A man understands that desire and pursuit do not always lead to success, and he accepts man’s natural inability to “have it all.” With humility, he recognizes the appropriate time to give up the hunt, and he understands how to be gracious while doing so.

### Knowledge
A man knows when he has come to the edge of his understanding, and he experiences learning opportunities as they occur. He responds to differences in opinion and differences in beliefs with a curious heart, and when engaging in a debate, he seeks insight, not victory. A man seeks knowledge for one thing and one thing only.

### Perspective
A man stands atop an ivory tower of discoveries and recollections. Each floor added to that tower increases his odds of finding something new on the horizon, something interesting. It also gives a man a broader view on all that is known — the realm of experiences and stories between his tower and the horizon. With both a wider and more detailed perspective, a man can judge the performances of others against a diverse range of possibilities, bringing him closer to the truth of what is and what ought to be.

### Integrity
A man tests the integrity of others, and he responds with integrity to any test put before him. He desires wholeness in others, but allows himself to be fascinated by the fractures. He understands that interesting places twist and bend, and he finds joy in those places, the way one finds joy in the twists and bends of a waterslide.

### Truth
A man enjoys the truth; hard or not, he enjoys it, and he treats it as a sacred thing. Having once experienced it by happy accident, he desires it again and again. But a man stops short, and with humility, he knows when and how to give up the hunt.

What makes a man? His ability to harmonize in a world of difference.