A Salamander's Tale

by Paul Steinberg

  Yes, doesn’t existence lay too much on us?

  It lays too much on us, to the point that we can only contemplate this existence, these illnesses and healings, our time and our death, through myths and folklore and imaginary gods interacting with real people. Aye, Aesculapius—the wounded healer—coming out of a real womb of a real woman but fathered by a god Apollo. And his three daughters, Iaso, Panacea, and Hygeia—all mythic figures in the folklore of healing, all coming from a father who was snatched from death and propelled into life.

  And then there is Teiresias, the archetypal sage in Greek folklore. Where does his wisdom come from? Walking in the forest one day, he inadvertently or deliberately steps on two copulating snakes and hits them with his stick. As punishment he is transformed into a woman. For seven years he walks around as a woman until he happens upon two mating snakes again and is turned back into a man. As a man he becomes the wisest person in Greece, the blind seer, the soothsaying shaman, the prophet who knows both the masculine and the feminine.

  No point in looking at myths. Let’s look at the reality of time and death: when cut by a surgeon’s knife, we bleed; when radiated we burn; when faced with loss we shed real tears; when chemically castrated we see our testicles shrink and our penises wilt.

  There must be some wisdom—real, not mythic—that comes out of that experience.

  CHAPTER 18

  Following the Religion of Love

  “I follow the religion of Love, whichever way His camels take me.”

  —Sufi Muslim Sacred Saying

  “We will be held to account for the joys not taken.”

  —The Talmud

  It was time for me to dehypnotize myself. My hypnotic trances and my suggestibility in the face of prostate cancer allowed me to focus on my survival. A death sentence along with a hypnotic trance can concentrate the mind as no other experience can.

  Sometimes we need a blow to the head, a blow to the prostate, to shake us out of cherished and strongly held beliefs—not unlike a television that needs a blow to its top to get a clearer picture, to pull it out of the fuzz and static. This blow leads to a remarkable regeneration, but not the kind of regeneration we might see in the salamander.

  It is time for all of us to dehypnotize ourselves, to remove ourselves from the trances and suggestibilities of childhood. Without our realizing it, we can spend much of our adult life figuring out how to dehypnotize ourselves, to shed some of the wrong-headed beliefs that have been engrained in us in childhood, to begin to question the beliefs of our elders when those beliefs do not conform to reality, to scientific investigation, to natural experiments occurring around us. We have no choice but to believe the propaganda we grow up with—to take in and absorb and hold onto the beliefs instilled in us as children. These ideas get locked in. Rituals and traditions and celebrations reinforce these ideas, and we pass them on to future generations without questioning their validity.

  Why is anyone telling us whom we can love, whom we are sympatico with, what gender we can connect with, what sexual orientation we have to follow? What authority gives anyone the right to stop any person on the planet from following the religion of Love, from going in whatever direction Love’s camels take us.

  Only when we look outside of ourselves and see other cultures, other views of love and sexuality, can we see the craziness of these other worldviews and by extension the craziness of our own worldview. Only when we have inquisitive anthropologists traveling to remote isolated communities—studying these communities just in the nick of time before the communities’ belief systems get warped by contact with the modern world—can we see the enormous variety of worldviews adaptive for each community’s special circumstances.

  Love can make or break us. The meat and potatoes of any psychiatric or mental health practice is a failed love. Anton Chekhov, a practicing physician, would not be known today except for his plays and short stories about romantic disillusionment. At the same time, love can be our salvation, can save us from ourselves, can save us from our own distortions, can help us cope with the terrors of the world—the cancers, the viruses, the violence, the fluky horrors.

  We now know that people can handle the stress and pain of an electric shock more effectively when someone is holding their hand. The handling of this electric shock increases when the hand belongs to his or her partner. Neural activity in the amygdala and other areas of the brain associated with stress diminishes markedly.

  When administered blisters, people recovered twenty-four hours earlier when talking with their loving partners about topics chosen to elicit supportive responses. When asked to discuss topics that provoked tension and conflict, the blisters took an extra day to heal.

  Denying someone the opportunity to love, to fall in love, to sustain a love, to have a partner of either gender is like denying a man or woman food and water.

  Thank the gods for the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt who, with a psychiatrist Robert Stoller—a professor at UCLA who died in a car accident in 1991—studied the Sambia people in a remote part of Papua New Guinea in the early 1970s, just before they were exposed to a more modern Indonesian world at the end of the decade. Their work, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in April of 1985, just after my initial experience with prostate cancer, caught my eye. At the time, psychiatry looked at the actual whole person, not just his or her neurophysiology, but also the personal and family and cultural background—not just medication-pushing that has evolved in an era of managed care, an era in which psychiatrists have priced themselves out of the talk-therapy market.

  Paradoxes abound. What makes us masculine or feminine, or super-heterosexual in the case of Sambia men and women, may have nothing to do with what Westerners conventionally consider heterosexual or homosexual, masculine or feminine. What matters is what we ascribe to our rituals or traditions, what these rituals and traditions mean to us, what message we imbue these rituals with. In a small isolated world, the entire culture buys into these beliefs and meanings, and what they ascribe and attribute to these rituals.

  Once upon a time, after the heavens and earth were made, there lived a tribe of some twenty-three hundred people called the Sambia. From 1974 through 1976, when they were first studied, and then any time before 1979 when their culture began to change rapidly with the effects of modernization, they lived in a region of constant war, treacherous terrain, horrid weather, severe protein deficiency—a few possum and birds, an occasional eel to eat as sources of animal protein—periodic famine and starvation, and no medical care beyond shamans. One can hardly imagine a harsher environment for humans.

  With their acceptance of the need to kill members of other tribes or be killed themselves, with their harsh circumstances creating a short lifespan, they realized perhaps thousands of years ago that they needed a great deal of luck and a great deal of feral masculinity in the men and a fierce and steady heterosexual impulse in their men and women in order to procreate and survive.

  As in most cultures, close and nurturing bonds developed between mothers and their young sons in the Sambian world. Husbands and wives were forbidden to have intercourse in the first two years of their infants’ lives. These wives became devoted mothers, and they focused much of their energies on their offspring while their husbands were far afield as warriors and hunters. When the sons reached the age of seven to ten, everything changed. The fathers took over the rearing of their sons. The sons were taken from their mothers and sisters; they were spirited out into the forest where their crucial secret rites of creating manhood began. At this same time, female members of the tribe were severely taboo to the male initiates, not only as erotic objects but in any other form as well.

  What are these rites of passage? What is the inner life of these young boys imbued with? Let Stoller and Herdt tell this part of the story, given that the rites and the meaning of these rites are inconceivable to us Westerners.

  At the height of the first-stage initiation, he (the young boy) is told the secr
et of Sambia maleness: One remains only the shell of a male unless he drinks as much semen as possible. He then must suck postpubertal boys’ penises often, ingesting as much semen as possible during these years, for semen alone produces maleness and manliness. Because the Sambia do not believe males naturally produce semen (femaleness is the natural state), its only source (except—more or less—the milky sap or nuts of certain trees) is by taking it from other males who, in their turn, had taken it from earlier cohorts of bachelors.

  The second phase began with a later initiation at around the time of puberty. The boy now has become the person sucked. From this point on, a bachelor must not fellate or suck other males. Forbidden, verboten. As Stoller and Herdt pointed out, “It (fellating other males) is taboo, for one would then be stealing semen needed by the younger boys, but, in addition, neither youths nor men report impulses to suck penises.” The erotic pleasure was in being sucked; and, according to Sambian tradition, the adolescent male “nervously recognizes” that his precious semen is being depleted, that in losing semen he is losing his masculinity. He is being made less manly through this sexual release, and he believes he is gradually inching toward the femaleness from which he originally emerged.

  Again, femaleness was the default position for Sambia men and women. And in his postpuberty years in adolescence, the teenage boy believed that his femaleness had come to the forefront.

  For years, until he married in his late teens or early twenties, the young man was constantly having his penis sucked by the younger boys who were seven to ten years old. Until the approach of marriage and all its attendant rituals, females were taboo for these adolescents and young adults. No glances at women, no touching of the objects women use, no contact with their bodies and their secretions and their touch.

  An orthodox Muslim or an orthodox Jew might not be able to create as rigid a separation of the sexes as the Sambia were able to create.

  But, once the taboo of contact with women was lifted with marriage, heterosexual lust was suddenly unleashed. Heterosexuality, in fact, was the only accepted and acceptable behavior. These young men, when married, entered into intimacy with their young wives by starting with fellatio—no surprise there. Eventually the couple moved toward vaginal intercourse and full genital sexuality. Although “memories of erotically exciting fellatio” persisted for these young men, homosexuality was not an acceptable route to channel one’s sexuality. Fetishism, transvestism, sadism, masochism, and anal intercourse were unknown phenomena among the Sambia—and there were no words or categories to describe these sexual activities in the Sambian language.

  Despite the sexual rituals of boyhood and adolescence, homosexuality was highly negatively sanctioned. A man who persistently indulged in erotic activity with young boys would risk being called “rubbish man.”

  Again, Stoller and Herdt:

  . . . the youths, when marriage approaches, start to create, without deprogramming, powerfully erotic heterosexual daydreams. And they will desire women the rest of their lives, without ever forgetting the homoerotic joys. In fact, by becoming initiators and teaching about . . . fellatio to sons and other new initiates in later years, these men are reminded and have reinforced for them the positive value of semen and homoerotic activities . . . (Nevertheless) they love their lust for women.

  Only one aberrant case of genuine homosexuality among the Sambia was discovered by the two American researchers. This one man, whom Stoller and Herdt called “K.”—Kafka could not have made up these sexual rites and rare deviances—had four failed marriages and almost never had any form of erotic experience with women, wives, or others. Unlike any of the other Sambia men, he was uninterested in being a warrior or hunter. His career track was that of gardening, a pursuit that his mother followed as well as many women and older men.

  K.’s personal history was quite aberrant for Sambian society. His mother had had a sexual affair with a married man from a neighboring hamlet. This man ultimately rejected the mother of K. and disavowed any parental responsibility for his biological son—a highly unusual occurrence in Sambian society where male offspring were particularly desirable. Indeed there was no word in the Sambian language for a fatherless child or “bastard.” This man could have taken K.’s mother as a second wife, but he refused to do so. Instead, K.’s mother became an “immoral” outcast in the Sambian world. She was condemned and beaten by her brothers as well as by others in the community. She retreated with her son to a pig herding farm “well-removed from the hamlet,” in stark isolation.

  K. had no male adult figures with whom to identify. With his morally offensive birth in this Sambian culture, humiliation and banishment and bastardization dominated his childhood. He grew up without a father and did not even have the benefit of his mother’s brothers. He identified only with his mother and another woman with whom they lived. He was unable to establish any kind of extended partnership or intimacy with anyone, male or female.

  As Stoller and Herdt wrote:

  Above all else, the one act that makes no sense to the Sambia is that he (K.)—an adult—sucks boys’ penises. There is no category for that. It is outside their culture and comprehension. To us (Westerners) it is a primal urge of his, a homosexual commitment based on the disasters of his childhood. He would be a homosexual anywhere, independent of the culture’s erotic customs.

  Me and the Sambia. The Sambian boys started out in the default feminine mode, according to the beliefs of their culture. Then by sucking teenagers’ penises from age seven to ten and by swallowing as much semen as possible, they moved into a more masculine mode, only then to return to the feminine by having their penises sucked during adolescence and young adulthood—sucked by young boys no less. Then they moved into the masculine mode again when they got married and were able to indulge in heterosexual love and affection. And they were not just run-of-the-mill heterosexuals: they were super-heterosexuals—master hunters and master warriors and master lovers and master procreators.

  Me and the Sambia: No, I had gained no mastery; I was anything but a master hunter and warrior and lover and procreator. But, not unlike the Sambia, I have moved back and forth between the masculine and the feminine, in similar directions but in different time frames. Ten times going from the masculine to the feminine and then back to the masculine in my adolescent and adult years.

  Yet, unlike the Sambia, I did not have a cultural explanation and rationale for my going back and forth between the masculine and the feminine. My rationale was singular, that of managing a disease ready to kill me. Perhaps sucking teenagers’ penises and swallowing as much semen as possible during my boyhood years could have allowed me to become a real man, a man resistant to prostate cancer, a man resistant to any need to go through temporary castrations, a man ready to handle the harsh environment of prostate cancer.

  Are the paradoxes of life even thinkable? Who would have thunk that homoerotic customs in young boys would allow them, especially when indoctrinated with a specific meaning to these customs, to become “super-manly” in their adult years?

  What kind of indoctrination have we been fed here in the West? “Just say no”—to sex, not just to drugs.

  At least the Sambia had a set of rituals and customs for sexual initiation, even if this set of customs was outrageous by Western standards. Sexual initiation here in the West is haphazard at best. We teach our kids how to eat, how to sleep, how to read, how to pray, how to play basketball, how to maintain a household. Sex? Verboten, forbidden, especially during the childhood years. Conversations may begin in our early teenage years after we reach puberty, at best. But no rites, no rituals, no customs established when we are seven years old, when we are most hypnotizable.

  Imagine our teaching our young boys diligently about sex instead of, say, religion—diligently speaking of sex when they sittest in the house, when they walkest by the way, when they liest down, and when they risest up. Imagine our male elders taking young boys and teenagers out into the local forest and teaching
them how to be men, how to treat and respect women, how to treat and respect gay and straight people equally. Imagine teaching our boys and teenagers that in some cultures homoerotic rituals may lead to super-manliness and super-heterosexuality and super-procreation and—who knows?—in some cultures heteroerotic rituals could lead to nonmanliness and nonheterosexuality and nonprocreation.

  At least we would be addressing sex and sexuality—and addressing it head-on as the Sambia do. None of this birds and the bees stuff, these euphemisms. We would be integrating our sexual selves into our larger lives—integrating them with playing and eating and writing and drawing and reading and singing and praying and driving and walking. Sex would not be a hushed thing, to be dealt with only at a later date, otherwise secret and mysterious—to be joked about because we really cannot talk about it in any sensible and noncontroversial way.

  Here is the wily wisdom of the Sambia: They figured out a way to ritualize ejaculation and orgasm in adolescence. It would have been counterproductive to have adult men suck the teenagers’ penises. That kind of ritual would have simply sanctioned and sanctified homosexuality, an accomplishment that would have thwarted the community’s need for profuse procreation.

  It would have been counterproductive to have teenage girls suck the boys’ penises. Both the boys and girls were just getting acclimated to some major changes in their bodies, adjusting to metamorphosing from a quiescent pupal caterpillar stage, from a chrysalis to a vibrant butterfly stage. Acclimation takes time—no need to add additional excitation and confusion. And the exotic leads to the erotic: The separation of the boys from the mothers and daughters made the boys yearn for the opposite sex. Too much familiarity may lead to contempt.