617. The well (VIII)
You know, you do seem to have an attitude problem as regards women—all you seem to talk about is how they are perennial liars who want to be raped and murdered and have their hair pulled; it all seems rather reductionist, as they say in the academic biz. We acknowledge you have a point about the rape and murder, but what about all these elderly couples we see who potter around garden centres absorbed in various pot plants? Sorry if that vision is a bit too “bourgeois” for you, but it is as real as the rape and murder (even if the latter is much more, as they say, esoteric); perhaps they are merely retired from “all that”, left to contemplate their begonias.
Yes, of course there is more to it than that—much more than that, the dynamic between the sexes is more than an acute case of the Ted Bundys; although we have to admit that in some ways it is not much more than that (you can remove your hand from my throat now…please). So, for example, after a breakup that cracked me open—sensitive soul that I am—I confided to some old friend who was a girl from school in a dark London basement bar…it was the stage where you enter a bar and confide to anyone after a drink or two, but in this case I knew the girl—it was not the case that I confided to the nearest bar patron.
After I had related my story, she interjected and to my surprise asked about a boy she had gone out with at school—this was a good ten years before; he was her first boyfriend in fact, her first love you might say. Since I was in shock-drunk mode, I was honest—since I had sensed what he thought about her—so I said: “Oh, he’s totally in love with you still.” And that was true.
Now, the interpretation given by the evo-psyches, the PUAs, would be that the girl slept around in her twenties with as many alphas as possible and then, with her thirties on the approach and eggs thinner on the ground by the day, was pinged by the safe option to find a stable beta—an amiable beta-provider, not a volatile alpha who would never settle with her. So she chose this moment to put the feelers out, to complete a circle round to puppy-doggish puppy-love…he seemed like a sweet guy…
Yet I always felt these two should be together, it seemed intuitively correct to me—first love is the only love, perhaps. There was a certain symmetry and perfection to their relationship and I am sure if you saw them together you would see it too; and the girl’s interjection seemed to me more to be like some force that impelled them together. There was a rightness to these two, a Platonic correctness. Similarly, I have met a woman in an innocuous situation and had a certain sensation with her—a subtle sensation—and then, two years later, ended up in bed with her; it is as if a force impelled us together quite independent from conscious will.
The evopsyche approach is cold, yet it is not truly scientific; it makes inferences from animals, from alpha males, and applies those inferences to humans—and that is scientific. Yet, so far as I know, these ideas about “beta providers” and “alphas” have never been subject to real experiment. To me, it is an incomplete theory—it is the underworld, the Luciferian world of masculine techno-scientific manipulation; and yet the underworld, admittedly disprivileged, must be balanced with the overworld. Evopsyche drags everything down to matter, down to the lower depths—whereas I know there are higher forces that draw people together for a purpose, mainly to produce a certain child. There are people who are meant to be together—yet modernity has murdered the sensibility and the call; even though my friends reach still…