How to be in the world is question

Nov. 7, 2002

Dear Julie,

How to be in the world is the question all of us work out for ourselves. Parents do much of the teaching but they have agendas. Most of us will still be figuring out parent-child issues in our graves.

Mentors are different from parents. They usually have no vested interest. Often the teaching occurs unconsciously when another's way-of-being in the world is absorbed. The realization of the effect they had on you only occurs much later.

Bob Hamblin is an English professor at the local university. Ray Owen was the sports editor when I first went to work for the newspaper. Neither knows the effect they had on me.

Hamblin is a Southerner whose drawling pronunciation of "Tintern Abbey" made Wordsworth more appealing and whose fire for literature was almost contagious.

I didn't know anyone who loved words so much, especially the beauty of William Faulkner's.

Hamblin had his students keep a journal in one class. I remember his reaction to something I wrote about the Vietnam War. He liked that I had written about it in a personal way.

Owen was a prototypical newshound. Cigarette perpetually drooping from a corner of his lip, foot slung over the edge of the typewriter stand, he pounded the keys long into many nights. Writing was a creative mystery to me. He showed it's also making the fingers dance on the keys because there's a deadline to meet, a living to be made and stories to be told.

Ray Owen had decades of staying power interrupted only when he recently became ill. Now he is battling like a man.

Robert Bly and Sam Keen and a few others have unearthed a taboo subject -- masculinity -- during the past few decades. There was a time when Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem made it embarrassing to be male. I knew that much feminists were saying was true and their anger was justified. But they didn't have any answers about why men are how we are, so often silent in the presence of their wives, bored by their work and excessively passive or driven. Bly and Keen do.

In a new book "Wild at Heart," John Eldredge says most men are emotionally wounded.

At the beginning of the teens when the son must separate himself from his mother, he looks to men to begin to understand manhood. "Masculinity is bestowed," Eldredge says. "A boy learns who he is and what he's got from a man or a company of men. He cannot learn it any other place. He cannot learn it from other boys, and he cannot learn it from the world of women."

So few fathers have examined their own emotions that they are unaware they are passing the wound on, he maintains.

Some boys are like Austin Powers. Their mojo has been stolen. They have to fight to get it back.

Driving south last month, DC and I detoured to Oxford, Miss., to see Rowan Oak, the home where Faulkner did much of his writing. Hamblin had pronounced the two words as if they were one and as if they represented hallowed ground.

On the way home we detoured to Vicksburg, Miss, home of a different kind of hallowedness earned battle. Somehow the two places seemed connected, opposite poles in this man's world.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.