ATTENDING THE RECIPROCAL BECOMING

 

There is a peculiar emotional and psychological violence hidden inside our ideas of completion. We praise the finished sculpture and forget the blows of the chisel, admire the cathedral while concealing its scaffolding, place the crown upon the king and behave as though there had never been a trembling boy beneath it—or hands which, knowing the trembling becoming, aspire to its manipulation. We have become so accustomed to presenting ourselves to one another as accomplished things that we rarely consider what intimacy might mean before accomplishment. Much of what is most alive in us exists precisely because it has not yet become anything we can name. Perhaps one of the great injuries of patriarchy was never merely that men accumulated power, but that we constructed a civilization in which authority required the appearance of completion. The father was supposed to know, the king to be certain, the priest to possess the answer, the husband to provide, the warrior not to tremble.  I know that, in my ignorance, I found myself not only incapable of “arriving” but, worse, I projected rage and anger on the expectant one. The wounded man disappeared until he could return healed. Somewhere inside that architecture an extraordinarily consequential proposition took root: I must finish becoming before I can permit myself to be fully seen.

Nature seems remarkably uninterested in this proposition. Consider the stag. His antlers do not arrive as bone. Before the magnificent hardened crown there is velvet: warm, vascular, innervated tissue so exquisitely alive that the forest itself seems capable of entering him through it. Rain touches him. Ferns brush against him. Wind moves across him. A branch can make him recoil. The crown that will eventually become an emblem of masculine strength begins not as armor but as sensitivity. Only after this season of extraordinary receptivity does the blood withdraw, the velvet fall and the antler become bone. Strength, seen this way, is not what remains after tenderness has been conquered. Strength is the shape tenderness takes after it has felt everything. The tragedy is not that the stag once had velvet. The tragedy is convincing him that velvet is embarrassing evidence of incompletion and that no one should see him until the bone appears.

I have been pondering this beside an ancient garden. Mary Magdalene arrives at a tomb carrying the grief of what has already been lost and encounters a man she does not recognize. She mistakes him for the gardener. Then he says her name. Recognition happens in a word. She turns toward him and almost immediately comes the strange interruption: Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. For two thousand years we have been trained to continue reading. Resurrection is underway, ascension awaits, prophecy has been fulfilled, theology has somewhere to go and the story must move toward its appointed conclusion. But what happens if Isaiah is present but not exhaustive, prophecy is a vector but not the boundary, ascension is admissible without extinguishing every other possibility, and for one moment we simply stay in the garden? Jesus has survived betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, torture and death. A woman capable of recognizing him stands before him, and still there is somewhere else he says he must go before the journey is complete. An unbounded field does not grant the known future authority over this present. At that instant there is Father, certainly, but there is also woman, body, garden, touch, separation, resurrection, incompletion, desire, recognition and whatever history has been carried into that moment from cultures and stories far older than either person standing there. Perhaps the question hidden in the garden is not whether Jesus should have stayed or ascended, but whether unfinishedness and intimacy could ever have occupied the same moment without either one threatening the other.

And over two thousand years of Egypt and its beliefs are already inside the field. Matthew deliberately places the infant Jesus in Egypt and, upon his return, invokes Hosea: Out of Egypt I called my son. Hosea had spoken retrospectively of Israel—“When Israel was a child, I loved him”—yet Matthew allows the older text to become generative again without annihilating its first meaning. Egypt becomes simultaneously geography, memory, exodus, refuge, danger, formation and christological image. The canonical writer himself permits an older event to remain fully itself while generating meaning in another temporal location. Egypt, moreover, was not an archaeological civilization buried beneath two thousand years of sand for Jesus, Mary or the writers who remembered them. Egyptian religion was alive. Isis and Sarapis had traveled through the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean, including into Samaria. Galilee, Samaria, Judea and Alexandria were not one culture, but neither were they hermetically sealed worlds. People, goods, armies, languages, stories, images and religious practices moved among them. We cannot establish that Jesus or Mary Magdalene was initiated into an Egyptian mystery tradition, nor need we. But the opposite assertion—that the Osirian grammar of death, feminine attendance, restoration and renewed life must have been culturally inaccessible to them—requires an isolation the historical Mediterranean does not give us.

The Gospels make that isolation still harder to maintain because feminine attendance upon Jesus's death begins before the tomb. A woman approaches him carrying extraordinarily costly aromatic substance and pours it upon his body. Those around him object. Jesus does not. In Mark he interprets her act explicitly as anointing his body beforehand for burial and then makes the extraordinary declaration that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done is to be told in memory of her. The textual gesture is remarkable: Jesus fastens the memory of the woman attending his body to the worldwide proclamation of the only Gospel Jesus identifies explicitly as “This Gospel”. Yet Christianity became remarkably capable of proclaiming betrayal, cross, blood, tomb and resurrection while treating her act as beautiful prelude rather than something Jesus explicitly attached to proclamation itself. Perhaps the field began collapsing very early: the masculine trajectory became the story while feminine attendance became an annotation to it.

I do not need to call this woman Isis or Jesus Osiris. I do not need derivation when cultural proximity is already interesting enough. The architecture can simply remain visible: feminine attendance upon the masculine body, precious aromatic substance, anticipated death, burial, mourning, the missing body, restoration, recognition and the possibility of touch. More than two millennia before the garden, Egypt had already told one of humanity's great stories around resonant elements. Osiris is broken. Isis searches, mourns and gathers what has been scattered, restoring generativity so that Horus can be conceived. John then gives us an image whose unexplained precision deserves attention: Mary Magdalene bends toward the empty tomb and sees two figures positioned where Jesus's body had been, one at the head and one at the feet. Modern scholarship has observed that a reader familiar with Isiac iconography could have recognized a visual resonance with Isis and Nephthys flanking Osiris. That does not prove John's intention. It does something more useful for an unbounded inquiry: it establishes admissibility. The image existed. The cultural grammar existed. The field contained it. John does not explain the geometry away, and neither need we.

The temporal geometry is therefore fascinating. More than two thousand years before the garden, the wounded masculine encounters a feminine presence who participates in his reconstruction. At the garden, the feminine encounters the masculine returned from death, recognizes him when he speaks her name and approaches him, yet he identifies himself as still unfinished: he has not ascended to the Father. In one trajectory the feminine participates in restoring the wounded masculine; in another the restored masculine continues toward the Father. An unbounded field need not choose between them before asking what neither trajectory exhausts: What if she does not have to reconstruct him, and he does not have to leave her in order to become?

There is an ancient seduction hidden inside both possibilities. The wounded masculine can become dependent upon the one who recognizes what is missing in him, while the empathic feminine can become responsible for completing what she perceives as lacking, immature or undeveloped. She feels the wound and sees the possibility, perhaps even recognizing a form trying to emerge before the man can describe it himself. Because she loves what she sees, perception quietly becomes responsibility. If she sees the missing piece, why would she not offer it? If she can imagine the completed crown, why would she not help fashion it? Compassion slips almost imperceptibly into authorship, and the man can receive a finished image of himself from the very person whose recognition he most treasures without either noticing what has been bypassed: he never experienced growing it.

And here the golden phallus deserves considerably more tenderness, because the gift is astonishingly ancient. In the Osirian cycle Isis gathers the murdered and dismembered Osiris and restores his generative capacity (his missing penis)' so that conception becomes possible. The surviving traditions vary in their physical details, but the generative architecture is enough: from restored Osirian potency and the attending agency of Isis comes Horus, not merely another divine child but an embodiment of kingship, protection and sky, later carrying solar, protective and healing dimensions as well. The living Pharaoh could be identified with Horus while the dead king was associated with Osiris. Restored masculine generativity therefore does more than overcome death; it produces the divine grammar through which kingship continues. The golden phallus is not an absurd shortcut to masculinity. Within this ancient architecture it is a gift of extraordinary devotion: the empathic feminine sees what has been severed, restores generativity and participates in bringing forth the king.

Perhaps patriarchy’s indictment deserves this much generosity from us. Its mythic birth need not be imagined merely as men seizing power from women. One of humanity's oldest symbolic architectures permits a subtler contemplation: the loving feminine participates in reconstructing the generative masculine from whom kingship will descend. Isis is not defeated when Horus becomes king; she is indispensable to his becoming. Patriarchy, viewed through that image, can contain within its origin a profound cooperation between feminine generativity and masculine sovereignty. The tragedy comes when the king forgets the Goddess’ empathic love, when bone forgets velvet, when the finished crown behaves as though nothing tender participated in its becoming. The trajectory need not therefore be condemned to be completed. Isis gathered. Osiris generated. Horus arose. Kingship organized civilizations capable of order and protection, inheritance and beauty, hierarchy and violence. Humanity has inhabited that trajectory for millennia. An unbounded field can honor what it generated without concluding that generativity itself has been exhausted.

Seen this way, refusing the golden phallus becomes something entirely different from rejecting the Goddess, masculine potency or the king. It becomes an interruption of an ancient generative agreement precisely because that agreement has already magnificently expressed itself. Thank you for seeing the king in me. Thank you for knowing what can arise from restored masculine potency. Thank you for the inheritance that carried civilization this far. But do not manufacture the organ from which my next becoming must be born. Do not complete me so that I can become sovereign. Let me remain vascular. Let me remain unfinished.  Let me decompose in the Nile’s flood so that the Blue Lotus can emerge in its season. Let me discover what grows when neither of us already knows what masculine potency is supposed to produce. And perhaps the most remarkable response imaginable is simply: Great. We'll watch and wait.

But if all development now belongs to the masculine while a completed Goddess waits benevolently for him, nothing fundamental has changed. Father has become Goddess, authority has become empathy, and completion remains on the throne. Her answer must therefore be allowed to change her too. Isis knows how to reconstruct Osiris; the Goddess knows how to bring forth Horus; the empath knows how to perceive latent possibility and help make it actual. But what happens to the feminine when love no longer requires her to perform the ancient miracle? What happens when she can see the king and refrain from manufacturing the conditions that guarantee his arrival? Then watching becomes her velvet. She discovers who she becomes when seeing does not require shaping, while he discovers who he becomes when being seen does not require performing. Neither occupies the completed position from which the other's becoming can be directed.

And even waiting now reveals an error. Waiting contains an anticipated outcome, and an anticipated outcome quietly bounds the field. We wait for a train because the track and destination already exist. We wait for harvest because we know what was planted. We wait through the night for the sun to rise. In each case we smuggle a “known outcome” into waiting, certain not merely that something will arrive but that we will recognize completion when it does. The anticipation then begins exerting influence backward upon the becoming itself. If she is waiting for Horus, however lovingly, Horus already occupies the future. If he is waiting to become the king she sees in him, the golden phallus has merely become invisible; its completed form still organizes the field. Even Great, we'll watch and wait can therefore be allowed its own becoming. She can cease manufacturing the golden phallus and still discover that she must relinquish the anticipated image of whatever she thought would grow in its place.

Attending is different. Attending does not await fulfillment of an anticipated form. It means becoming exquisitely present to something whose eventual form cannot yet be known. A gardener attends a living thing without pulling on its stem to accelerate its growth, although even that metaphor eventually fails because the gardener usually knows what was planted. A musician attends silence without deciding what note must emerge from it. Reciprocal becoming asks something more radical: presence without possession even of the expected fruit. Lovers might similarly attend one another without converting uncertainty into emergency or possibility into prophecy. Space need not mean abandonment. Proximity need not mean possession. Desire can remain alive without requiring immediate consummation. Silence can contain extraordinary intimacy when neither person uses it to disappear. The difference between waiting and attending is therefore not patience. It is whether an anticipated future has been granted authority over what is still becoming.

Now gold and velvet reveal their full contrast. Graven gold is finished before it is offered; velvet is alive because it is unfinished. Graven gold does not bleed; velvet is vascular. Graven gold preserves the form its maker gives it, while velvet grows into a form neither the stag nor the one attending him can completely specify beforehand. Graven gold is not evil—its incorruptibility helped make it an ancient symbol of divinity—but precisely because it does not bleed, decay or grow, it cannot teach the lesson velvet teaches. Velvet permits potency itself to undergo becoming. Perhaps this is what inherited masculinity forgot when it learned to admire the antler and conceal the season that produced it. The man learned to return only when the crown had hardened: when he had the answer, the money, the erection, the accomplishment, the certainty, the healing or the spiritual insight. In a thousand forms he learned to say, Do not touch me yet. I have somewhere else I must go before I am ready to be met. Beneath it lies the proposition with which we began: I must be finished before I can be loved. Beside it lies the empathic feminine inheritance: If I can see what you are becoming, love requires me to help you become it.

Reciprocal becoming releases both without condemning either. He can be witnessed without performing completion, and she can witness without engineering it. Because witnessing is not passive, neither emerges unchanged. Her attending his becoming becomes part of her becoming; his allowing himself to be attended becomes part of his. Neither can say I did this alone, and neither can say I made you. Something more interesting becomes possible: I became myself while you were becoming yourself, and our attending changed what each becoming could become. This is not impotence against potency, softness against strength, feminine wisdom against masculine sovereignty or matriarchy against patriarchy. It is the difference between receiving the completed symbol of what we already know how to become and remaining alive long enough to discover what can emerge when the field no longer requires us to reproduce it.

The question at the fulcrum is therefore not what should replace Horus, because the moment we answer it we cease attending and begin waiting. We name an anticipated outcome, allow it to exert influence backward upon the present, and organize becoming around its arrival. The next king, the perfected man, the liberated woman, Sacred Union, matriarchy, even “the end of patriarchy” itself can become another golden phallus if its imagined completion is allowed to determine what must emerge. Horus need not be killed, the Father dethroned, Isaiah silenced or Isis accused of some primordial mistake. That merely preserves the old architecture while changing its destination. An unbounded field does not need to destroy a completed trajectory in order to cease treating it as compulsory. It requires sufficient freedom from anticipated outcome for a genuinely generative trajectory to arise. The masculine does not know what his potency must produce. The feminine does not know what her attending must produce. They are not waiting to discover whether the future they imagined will arrive; they are attending something for which neither possesses a finished image. Neither ignorance is deficiency. It is the condition under which something genuinely NEW can occur. Perhaps patriarchy begins to end not when the king is overthrown, but when neither the God nor the Goddess requires that the next child be a king.

Androcles and the lion reveal the same fulcrum in miniature. We ordinarily locate the miracle in removing the thorn, as though relationship begins when one creature successfully relieves another's suffering. But relationship begins earlier, when the wounded creature permits another close enough to see where it hurts. There is an interval in which the thorn remains, the stranger remains and neither knows what the encounter will produce. We hurry through it because extraction gives us the satisfying causality of wound, intervention, healing and gratitude. But the generative possibility may exist before causality becomes so neat: the lion can be met while still wounded, and the witness can remain without yet knowing what to do. The unfinished becomes inhabitable in the presence of another.

Perhaps this is the interval worth recovering in the garden. Mary need not become an omniscient initiatrix who understands what Jesus fails to understand, just as Jesus need not become a completed masculine instructing an incomplete feminine. They can remain two beings at an extraordinary boundary condition, each carrying histories larger than themselves and each capable of affecting what becomes possible for the other. His orientation toward the Father can remain genuine without becoming the only imaginable trajectory; her movement toward him can remain genuine without becoming a demand for possession. The field can contain Egypt and Israel, Isis and Osiris, Horus and kingship, Hosea and Isaiah, Father and woman, prophecy and emergence, resurrection and incompletion, separation and touch, without demanding that any dimension erase the others. Unfettered perspective does not flatten distinctions. It permits distinctions to remain fully themselves without requiring one to extinguish the others.

This is why Egypt matters without needing to prove anything about Egypt. The anointing matters without requiring the woman to become Isis; Jesus binding her deed to proclamation of the Gospel matters without requiring a secret doctrine; John's unexplained tomb geometry matters without requiring an Egyptian key to the “real” Christianity. The cultural proximity makes resonance plausible, John's silence leaves it unresolved, and the unresolved is not a defect when becoming itself is the object of contemplation. Isaiah can remain inside the field without becoming its perimeter. Hosea can speak first of Israel and later be heard through Jesus. The Father can remain a direction without becoming the circumference. The point is not to replace one authorized trajectory with another, but to return to the instant before possibilities collapsed into history and notice how much remained alive there: an unfinished man, an unfinished woman, intimacy without certainty, proximity without completed meaning, and a future not yet reduced to the explanation later generations would give it.

Perhaps Sacred Union was never the eventual meeting of two perfected opposites. Perhaps union is the capacity to remain near another's emergence without possessing its destination while allowing their emergence to alter our own. I do not need you finished before I can love you, nor do I need to finish you for my love to matter. I do not have to disappear while I become, and you do not have to suspend your becoming while you attend mine. This may be the interior event any meaningful end of patriarchy requires, because transferring authority from a completed masculine archetype to a completed feminine one leaves the deeper architecture untouched. Someone still knows while someone else becomes. Someone still possesses the finished image. A genuinely different field emerges when neither possesses the completed form of the other and neither experiences that uncertainty as failure. Completion itself loses sovereignty.

The forest has always understood this without doctrine. Velvet becomes bone, bone eventually falls, and the crown that once appeared to announce completion returns to the earth from which its minerals came. Another season begins without interpreting the previous season as failure. Becoming was never the embarrassing corridor between incomplete and complete; it was the living condition itself. Those who love us most may therefore be neither the people waiting at the destination to congratulate us on arriving nor those who drag us toward the form they already see, but those willing to remain sufficiently near our unfinishedness that their presence becomes part of the environment in which we grow, while allowing that same proximity to expose whatever remains unfinished within themselves.

Then the ancient garden does not need a different ending. It needs our willingness to inhabit the moment before the ending became inevitable in our imagination. Egypt is behind them, but Egypt is not merely behind them. Israel is within them. Isaiah speaks without owning the field. Hosea remembers one son while Matthew discovers another. Horus can remain king without requiring every future child to inherit his throne. The Father remains a direction without becoming the circumference. The woman remains close enough to touch without touch becoming the only measure of union. The man remains unfinished without unfinishedness requiring disappearance. At that boundary condition, perhaps the most generative thing either can offer the other is neither completion nor departure nor even waiting, but attendance: the courage to remain present while the form is still alive enough to surprise them both. The stag does not apologize for the blood inside the velvet, and the one beside him does not mistake seeing the crown emerge for permission to determine its shape. Each becomes because the other is there, and each remains free because being there does not confer authorship.

The moss drinks the rain beneath them. The fern opens without knowing what its final leaf will look like. Somewhere a crown is still warm with blood, and somewhere beside it another living being is discovering what love becomes when it no longer needs to know the ending. After thousands of years in which Gods and Goddesses alike seemed to know the identity of the child before the story had even begun, perhaps there is something sacred in allowing conception itself to precede the name. The end of patriarchy need not be the death of the king. It may be the tender moment in which we can honor the king who was, release the Goddess from having to manufacture—or even anticipate—the king who comes next, release the man from having to become him, and allow both to encounter the exquisite uncertainty of a generativity whose outcome neither possesses.

Perhaps that is all the NEW ever needed from us: not another finished answer, not another throne and not another prophecy promoted from trajectory to perimeter, but the courage to remain inside an unbounded field long enough to be witnessed in our unfinished becoming, and to discover that attending another's becoming is itself one of the ways we become.

The velvet does not tell us what comes next. That is why it is still alive.