Wound
The healing process
Young men will always be angry. It’s in their bones. Like Salinger and Hemingway, Kafka and Kerouac. All boys go through the process of learning their strength and what to do with it. It is a man’s job to show them. In the shadow of towering legacies gone before, there’s a voice pressing the lungs of all young men that says prove it.
They go to war to prove it. To university to prove it. To fishing vessels to prove it. They go to the gun and savanna and prairie and mountains and sword to prove it. They go to women and business and money and land to prove it. The ineffable depth of the wound. Great trenches in great oceans.
There are two essential wounds that stay with men. The first is dealt by the father: you are not good enough. The second by the mother: you are not lovable. Gregor Samsa. Ignored by his father. Suffocated beneath his mother’s obligatory love. Kept in a shoe-box bedroom where bugs belong. Despised by the people who made him.
The proof becomes a contradiction in physics. Where universes operated by opposing physical laws collide. What a man needs versus what’s physically possible. A rock sailing the black curtains of vacuumed cosmos becomes an asteroid because therapists say so. Now. Diagnosed.
Don’t young men go through a phase where they think strength is: controlling everything…
