One of the patriarchs of the modern men's movement, poet
wildman Robert Bly is both revered and reviled because of
his commitment to honest communication and a life
passionately lived. He has authored, edited, and translated
numerous books, including the best seller Iron John: a Book
about Men (1992), The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (edited
with James Hillman and Micheal Meade, 1992), and Night and
Sleep (poems of Jelaluddin Rumi, translated with Coleman
Barks, 1981).
ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART: Men and women don't seem able to enjoy
each other, which is a real shame. And there's a big negotiation going on
before the party, like "How are we going to define how we're going to have
fun here?" But nobody is really having any fun.
R0BERT BLY : These are all very deep problems. I think that women and
men are ill suited to each other. That's a fact of human life, because men
have been specialized in one direction and women have been specialized in
another. And if the men were not specialized to kill animals and people, no
one would be around at all. So therefore men did a great deal with other men,
specialized as they were, and women did a great deal with other women,
specialized as they were. And the suffering, or as they would say in the
ancient world, the goddess Necessity made them overlook how ill suited they
were to each other. I know, on the farm, when I was a boy, my grandmother
worked a tremendous amount and the men worked a tremendous amount
and they hardly noticed they were ill suited to each other.
ABE: They didn’t have time.
R0BERT BLY: No, they didn’t have the time. Now you have a completely
different situation in which people don't do that physical work as much,
and men and women are noticing how ill suited they are. Well, unacceptable.
Somebody must be wrong. Some feminists suggest that it's the fault of the
patriarchy. The patriarchy is why men and women are ill suited to each
other. But the more you hear that, the more it's like ex president George
Bush complaining about Congress. The more he complained, the less real it
seemed to be. What I'm saying is that the pin has gone in and both men
and women are asleep. And that's a very different
explanation. You're
talking about waking people up, then. I mean, compulsory education,
among other things, has put the pin in, and that's not arranged only by
men. In the United States the overwhelming number of grade school
teachers are female. So the women are very much involved in the putting in of
the pin, both for girls and boys. The adult men in the United States, not as
much in Scotland or England, have withdrawn or been pushed out of the whole
process of childhood development. For example, I think the greatest mistake in
consciousness in this century is the belief that fathers are not important. And
both men and women have accepted that. The men have accepted it more grudgingly,
but nevertheless, they've basically accepted it, so that when a man gets
divorced, he may simply say, "Well, I'll let her raise the children." As a
matter of fact, in my father's generation, it was thought that the woman would
raise the children and the father would earn the living. But the very fact of
earning the living in the presence of the sons helped pull out the pin.
ABE: What is the result of this
negation of the father?
ROBERT BLY: The disasters that have come about from this simple belief
that fathers are not significant in the raising of the sons or the daughters are
multiplying all over the planet. When you're looking at gangs in the United
States, you know, you're looking at young men who have no older men at all
as models or mentors. Women are terrified of those young men, and justly
so. But I have been attacked over and over again, for example, in Ms.
magazine, where they as much as accused me of starting the Gulf War!
[laughter] Schwartzkopf and Bush and I started the Gulf War. And then
there's the idea, which really surprised me, that men are to have nothing to
do with the raising of boys. When Bly is saying these things about the father in
Iron John, all of that is completely destructive because women are completely
peaceful as human beings, and if they had raised the sons alone, then the sons
would never go to war. The fathers are all Pentagon murderers, and if you let
them have anything to do with the raising of the sons, then there's going to be
more wars. Now, that's an astounding idea when you look at it. Astounding. It's
astonishing to me that the women's movement, which has stood for so much
consciousness raising among women, which has culminated in the United States in
Ms. magazine, and which says a lot of true things, would be willing to publish
something like this, which, if it's followed, if the fathers are continually
sent out of the family, will create more gang murders, more terror for men and
women. For example, in New Guinea they stopped initiation of young men among
many of the tribes, and for the first time there are roving bands of two to
three hundred young men moving around New Guinea. And in Kenya something similar
has happened.
ABE : The women seem to have no
perception of how damaging their behavior is at the point when the young man is
passing from boyhood into manhood. If the young man starts to step away from the
mother and begins to establish independence, it's as if the mother won't
recognize that the son has the right, even, to make that transition.
R0BERT BLY : What can we say about
that? First of all, one has to say that women have been humiliated by the
Catholic Church and by the Supreme Court and by the old economic marriage in
which the man had all the economic power. This humiliation has been going on for
hundreds or thousands of years. And I think all men need to acknowledge that,
and say that it's hard for us to understand how that would drive a woman into
her own consciousness, so that she expects very little from the men around her.
But then, when some of the anger that she couldn't express, for economic reasons
perhaps, or physical fear, begins to be expressed by large groups of women,
tremendous disturbance erupts in those women themselves, and yet they feel it as
a definite movement towards sanity and health. I think that this ability to
express anger and attack the patriarchy or attack men is the proper step to take
in a movement away from centuries of timidity. But then an odd thing happens in
that the ability to see becomes so disturbed. Is it that the woman is so deep
inside her own consciousness that she cannot understand how different the boy is
from her?
A B E : Yes, I see that.
R0BERT BLY: What I see is this
absolute failure of consciousness, so that there is this possibility that many
of the women simply cannot see how different the boy is from them. And that's a
question of vision.
ABE: Any mention at all of any actual
differences between men and women in the presence of the woman or the presence
of the mother is denounced immediately as sexist or untrue or unreal.
R0BERT BLY: So that's a possibility. It's a genuine failure of vision. A second
possibility is that during all of those years when the woman has very little
economic power, but to some extent power to determine how things go in the
house, a counter reaction takes place, so that she doesn't want to lose the
boy, or at least one of the boys. This is not a matter of vision; this is a matter
of power. She doesn't have power over the adult man because he can leave at
any moment. That happened a lot in the sixties turn on, tune in, drop out,
or whatever. But she can have power over the boy, especially the favored
boy. And then you'd have to adjust the whole thing and say that men want
to have power over the area between houses, that is to say, they like empires.
But women like to have power over what is inside the house. The idea that
the female is the only gender without any power impulse is crazy. So what is
happening is not a lack of vision, but its an actual presence of
unacknowledged power, the desire that the life of one of the boys will be
altered according to the way the mother wants him to be altered.
The third explanation is that what we're talking about here is
knowledge. For example, the old initiators used to spend 67% of their time
in Australia in initiating and working with the young men, which means
that there's a tremendous amount of knowledge involved in helping a boy
grow out of the female fetus that he was in the womb, outward, to be a boy,
to be a youth and finally to be a man. Now both the men and the women
have lost that knowledge. So that's a very different explanation. That the
women don't see intuitively how different the boy is that's one; that they
want power over the younger boy in the house that's another; but this
third explanation is that there's been a vast disappearance of extremely
important knowledge. And it's something like what happens in primitive
tribes when you lose the knowledge of which herbs are useful for healing,
when the trees are cut down.
I think it's more the third, that to change a boy, who is actually a female
fetus in the womb as you know, in the beginning all fetuses are female to
change that into a boy takes a fantastic knowledge on the part of the DNA,
all of that fantastic knowledge we can't even imagine. And then for that boy
to change into someone who, as they say, learns to disidentify with the
mother, is very painful for him. He has to learn to give up Eden, which is the
identification with his own mother, and then learn to identify with someone
of a completely opposite gender (as it seems to him), to the father, and then
to continue to go in that direction. Well, vast knowledge is necessary for that
to happen. We are simply ignorant. So, if we agree with the third
explanation, then I think that the women would have to say, "We need some
humility here, in this situation." And the men would have to say to
themselves, "How did we lose this knowledge? Were we too busy making
money so we didn't bother about it? Did we expect the old men to do it?" Do
men gain this knowledge when they get to be about sixty or sixty five? Is
that why the grandfather is so important?
ABE : It seems to me the First World War is the beginning of that. A
European civilization that had been in the making for millennia, and that was
actually beginning to humanize itself in a very interesting way, got wiped
out during the First World War. All kinds of knowledge, for example, simple
things that have now become clichés, got lost. For example, say I'm a suitor
of your daughter, and it's before the First World War, and I say, "Can I have
your daughter's hand in marriage, sir?" Well, the fact that I'm there at all
means that I have a house, I have land, I have means, otherwise I wouldn't
even dare to be there. So when you ask me, as the father of this daughter,
"Are you able to keep my daughter in the manner to which she is
accustomed?" what are you inquiring into? You're inquiring into the quality
of man that I am, my spirit, my being. And everything represented by what
I've just said was wiped away by the First World War.
R0BERT BLY: How was it wiped away?
ABE : The First World War wiped away
a whole generation of human beings; it escalated the industrialization of
Western Europe; it put women in the factories, and yet kept them at a kind of
agrarian state of consciousness at the same time. And it bred a schizophrenia in
Western womanhood that we're still reeling from. It wiped out a whole generation
of men and their connection to their fathers. So you had the first generation of
millions of fatherless males in the West.
R0BERT BLY : It's interesting that
James Hillman mentions that when you used to go and ask for the daughter's hand,
the father might say, "Ah, he's very well spoken." Well, that means that you
were required to have absorbed some of this knowledge of rhetoric and careful
speech and awareness of the sensibilities of others. And that disappeared
completely. Even our politicians are not well spoken anymore. So, I think that's
right. This is like what happens when all the shamans are killed all of a
sudden, and no one knows what the herbs are anymore. That's what happened in the
First World War. I agree with you.
ABE : Okay, here's a bunch of herbs,
we've heard that some of these herbs used to be able to heal something, but we
don't know which ones do what anymore. How do we rediscover this knowledge?
R0BERT BLY : Well, you have to try
the herbs on yourself. That's the only possibility. And I also say that cannot
be done in big groups. It's no use having two hundred people taking the same
herb at the same time. So, I think that the knowledge of how boys can be changed
to men needs to take place in small groups, in relation to the men recovering
their knowledge, which is a different thing than the women recovering what they
used to know, because women used to know a great deal about that. And you can
still feel it in many mothers. I don't know how many women have written to me
and said, "This Iron John was tremendously helpful to me in raising my sons,
because intuitively I knew those things but I had never seen them expressed." So
all of that is still present intuitively in a whole lot of women.
ABE: How are men to know how to go
into the process of rediscovering the lost knowledge of authentic manhood?
ROBERT B: Men need to be together in small groups over a period of two
to five years, where they can talk about what the absence of the herb meant
to them, how a little bit of the herb they took at a certain age helped them.
It's a very slow process. I don't believe in any of these men's groups taking
place without 60 , 70 , or 80 year old men in them. To give myself as an
example, I was my mother's son, and my mother couldn't influence my
father; my mother realized that my father would not change his way of life
for her sake. I think that was the biggest shock of her life. So she chose me. I
would change the course of my life for her, which I did. And in the course of
that it separated me from my father and my brother, but it also pulled me
into the whole world of feeling and poetry and all of those things. So there
were great blessings given at the same time. But, when I was forty five, it
was very clear to me that men didn't trust me. The teaching that I do now I
couldn't do then because the men would not have trusted my words. I was
still talking in the old way, and what I'm trying to say is that, as I got older,
as I got to be 55, 58 I'm 68 now a certain kind of knowledge came into
me about what it is that young men need and how an older man can be
generous to them and can help defend them. I think it's a knowledge like
that of herbs, and it came along as I got older.
ABE : What effect has that more mature knowledge had on your
experience of yourself?
R0BERT BLY: When I began to receive some kind of old man knowledge,
two things happened. First, I had to give up the idea immediately that men
and women are the same. That's step number one. The second thing that I
felt was a tremendous compassion towards younger men that I had always
felt towards younger women. I was chosen, in a way, to hear my mother's
sufferings, which my father would not hear. And so I always had a lot of
compassion for young women and their suffering. But it wasn't until I was
sixty or so that I began to feel the same kind of compassion towards younger
men. And it's obvious that as soon as that happened to me, I became a better
father to my own son. Well, what else are you going to say? I mean, we're
talking about the loss of this knowledge. It seems that when we left Europe
for North America, one of the statements we made was that fathers are not
important. The Fatherland is not important; grandfathers are not important.
I think we said that, first politically and geographically, but then we began
to absorb it all the way through our system.
ABE: And yet, peculiarly, we came to Turtle Island, the place where the
elder, since the last ice age, had been and still is, in the Native communities,
the highest office you can attain, in a certain respect.
R0BERT BLY: Well, we just shot them like we shot anybody else. But I
agree. I heard Gary Snyder talking one day, and he said that among the
Athabascan Indians they feel that the brain is not finished until you're fifty.
So that's why the old men and women talk first, and the younger men keep
their mouths shut. Well, I think that's true. I think the brain really isn't
finished until you're fifty. So I think the women who are thirty five have to
be humble enough to say to themselves, "My brain isn't finished. I really
don't know what to do with these boys. I have an unfinished brain." And
the men have to say that, too. The fathers have to say, "My brain is
unfinished, and that's one reason I can't deal with the woman. It's one
reason why I don't know, how to deal with my sons." I like the tone of the
whole thing, and Native Americans are the ones who know that best.
ABE: On the one hand, you speak of the compassion for the daughter, and
then you reach the compassion for the son. But what I hear you saying is
that the man needs to have a respectful, compassionate regard for the
woman, and at the same time have the capacity to disregard her opinions
about what men and women actually are. Would that be close?
R0BERT BLY: I think so. Not completely disregard the opinion, but to say, "I
don't know much about men, but I know that some of it is stored somewhere
in my cells, maybe not available to me now. But it would be madness for me
to accept the woman's opinions before I have gone to my own cells to find
out what I think." So, I have to listen with honor to what she says, and then
I have to use my own instincts about how I'm going to raise the boys. There's
a lot of loneliness in that. One of the approaches that can be very helpful
when a man is involved with a problem he can't solve, whether it has to do
with a woman his age or a mother or father, or a conflict with a daughter or
son, is to imagine an ancestor behind him, and to step backward into that
hollow tree of the ancestor, and ask, "What do you think?" And wait until
the answer comes. But, we don't do that. We immediately get into the fight
with the woman. Isn't that right? We try to convince her or we try to fight
off her argument. It's too naked. There's no protection. The whole line of
defense of men is gone.
I don't think that regaining the knowledge means demeaning women or
excluding women. I don't think of myself that way at all in the work I do. It
has to do with the reconciliation of men and women. And it has to do with
imaginative work on the part of men, of which this is an example.
Imaginatively imagining one of your ancestors, and before you say another
word, you step back and see what he might have to say about that. These are
all attempts to rebuild something. Isn't that right? Because, at one time, you
could go into the next room and say to your grandfather, "This is where I
am. What do you think?"
Why don't men take this step backward? One, the man is so threatened
by what the woman says that he beats her, and you're into wife beating,
which is horrendous. The second possibility is that he goes forward and says,
"The woman knows better than I do, so I will repeat feminist doctrine, and
that way she will approve of me, and I won't be in this terrible situation."
What I'm saying is that neither of those two make any advance at all for the
man, and certainly not for the woman.
ABE: I once entitled a little piece of writing "Never Trust a Man Who
Claims to Be a Feminist." You know, you hear the feminist line come out of
men, and you know it's bullshit. Men are very sensitive to other men's
bullshit, but they get away with it with women.
R0BERT BLY: What I would like to do is tell you this story about John
Rowan. John Rowan is English, and when I went over to England four or
five years ago, they said, well, the only man we have in the men's movement
is John Rowan. He wrote a book called The Horned God. So John Rowan is a
classical example of the man concerned about men who has taken the
feminist point of view. He believes the man should be a consort to the Great
Mother. I was with John Rowan in a book recently about male spirituality
called The Choirs of Gods that John Matthews edited in England. In that
book Rowan described a ritual exercise that he had worked out. He has a
woman who helps him, and this is the way it goes. He has about fifteen men
and about fifteen women. His partner, the woman, takes the fifteen women,
puts them in a circle, then they hold out their hands towards each other and
they imagine female power and energy, until they get this circle all full of
this energy. Then John takes the men and he goes to another room, and he
tells them, "Now, what you have to do, first of all, is give up the male
attitude towards work." So there's all this talk about workaholism, etc.
Okay, I give up the male attitude towards work. "Now, I want you to give up
the male attitude towards emotions." Okay, emotions are bad, they invade
my body and that's wrong. Okay, I give up the male attitude towards
emotions. So, it goes on like this, and you give up the male attitude towards
love, and then you go on and you give up the male attitude towards spirit. I
think the tenth one is that you give up all male aggression. The eleventh one
is that you give up your testicles. The twelfth one is that you give up your
penis. Now, when they've done this exercise, he brings them back in, they
crawl under the arms of the women [laughter] and feel that the women have
all the power. Here they are with no cock, balls, or anything. [laughter]
Now John Rowan recommends this as an excellent exercise to introduce
men to men's work. How do you like that? Can you imagine a woman taking
women off in a room and saying, "First of all, I want you to give up the
female attitude towards children. Second, I want you to give up the female
attitude towards beauty. Now I want you to give up your breasts, and now I
want you to give up your..." I mean, women would kill that woman. No
woman would say that as a way of introducing women to women's work.
And yet, it's perfectly obvious that the women doing this exercise with John
approved of what he was doing. And John approved of it. Isn't that
amazing? It's been done in England a lot, printed in a book, and the editor
prints it with no footnotes. So I think that's one thing that we're up against.
And if a woman cannot see how destructive that is to everything that would
produce a decent relationship, if she doesn't have vision enough to see that,
then she has to at least ask, "Am I doing that to my son? Am I asking him to
give up his attitude towards his male work?" Wboa! I think woman have to ask
themselves a lot of questions along that line. Don't you think so?
ABE : The thing that emerges all the
time is that women don't want power over men. And I speak from my personal
experience with that. But almost all women can't help trying it. I think that's
their way of finding out and I think it's more instinct than knowledge of
finding out what you're made of. And at the moment that you are clear not in a
violent or hostile way and you say, "Listen, there are some things that you are
just not going to get to do with me,” there's a smile that comes to their face.
It's like a relief, like a weight that you've lifted from their shoulders,
because now they're able to think, "Oh, okay, so you're the boy, I'm the girl.
Great."
ROBERT BLY: I agree with you.
ABE: And yet, it's faith in that that
the men in so many men's groups don't have. They don't understand that...
R0BERT BLY: That they could make any boundaries there.
ABE: Yes.
ROBERT BLY: I like that, because one of the things it's saying is, if the
patriarchy is disintegrating along with the boundaries it created in terms of
male power and I don't think the women have brought that down, the
industrial revolution brought it down but, if that's so, that means that
there's a power vacuum here. And what John Rowan is doing is asking
women to start expanding out farther and farther until they're responsible
with their arms raised for everything on the planet, and they're responsible
for all of these men. Wow! That's damaging to women, to give them no
bounds at all to their expansion. And so I think all feminist men have to ask
themselves, "Am I encouraging women to expand their powers to a point
where it will be extremely destructive to them?"
ABE: What do you think happened in America when the people elected Bill
Clinton? It seems that some kind of shift in the psyche of America took
place. Has there been a shift, and if there has, what is the nature of it?
R0BERT BLY: Well, you know, whenever you look at something you tend to
look at it through whatever you've been thinking about. So, I'm going to
answer partly in terms of the men's movement. In the workshops that
Marion Woodman and I do together, there is something called the "false
tutor," who is in connection with the "stepmother" so it's men and women
together doing it who puts in the pin that puts the boy asleep. That pin
was put in by Reagan and by Bush. A lot of destructive things happen when
you're asleep, and being asleep allowed greed to move. So, what had
happened was a terrible tragedy in the United States, an unbelievable
amount of ground lost during these twelve years of sleep. People finally
understood it, and Ross Perot helped with that. What happened was that the
American people did exactly what happens in the "false tutor" story. They
took a sword and cut off the tutor's head. Everything that Reagan was
teaching and that Bush was teaching ended that night. The head was cut like
that. Then, what happens next? Well, it's very interesting that Clinton made
it clear at the convention that everything he got, he got from his mother, and
from women. He defended women against the stepfather, which is a very
good thing to do, and the women, his mother, Gennifer Flowers, and many
others have given him many gifts. So he understands inclusivity; he
understands something about the greatness of the female view of the world,
to bring people in, unite them, not to split them and all of that.
Then, the more touching thing that happened is that he chose Al Gore,
which was a brilliant move, and when they stood up there together, what we
saw was a man with his first male friend. Now George Bush couldn't do that
with Dan Quayle at all. In fact, he chose an inferior. But Clinton chose an
(psychospiritually) older male, Al Gore, who possessed more of the kind of
male knowledge gotten from his father, and he from his father. The New
York Times, for example, printed an article in which it said that only two
weeks after the convention an amazing amount of change had already taken
place in the United States among the men, because basically it wasn't a fight
between two machos now; it was a fight between Iron John and John Wayne,
and that four years ago at a political convention you would never have seen
men talking about their children who were nearly killed, or their mothers
and alcoholism. But men had made enough changes in four years so that
these men were able to do this.
And later, Gore said that Iron John had been tremendously helpful to
him, especially with his son. So, we were actually watching a change of
consciousness there, from the stagnant one of Bush with those lies and
that dubious connection with the banks, to the human sphere of Bill
Clinton, who has a good root in the mother, and a good tutor in Al Gore
connected more to the father.
