The Wisdom Pages

ON BEING A MAN
Keith Thompson talks with Robert Bly
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Thompson: The golden ball, of course is recurrent in many fairy stories. What does it symbolise in general and what is its significance here?

Bly: The golden ball suggests the unity of personality that we have as children, or a kind of radiance, a sense of unity with the universe. The ball is golden, representing wholeness; like the sun, it gives off a radiant energy from inside. Notice that in this story the boy is eight. We all lose something around the age of eight, whether we are boy or girl, male or female. We lose the golden ball in grade school if not before; high school finishes it. We spend the rest of our lives trying to get the ball back. The first stage of that process, I guess, would be accepting -firmly, definitively - that the ball has been lost. Remember Freud's words? "What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult'?

So who's got the golden ball? In the '80's, males were told that the golden ball was the feminine, in their own feminine side. They found the feminine, and still did not find the golden ball. The step that both Freud and Jung urged of males, and the step that men are beginning to undertake now, is the realisation that you can't look to your own feminine side, because that's not were the ball was lost. You can't go to your wife and ask for the golden ball back: she'd give it if she could, because women are not hostile in this way to men's growth, but she doesn't have it anyway, and besides she has lost her own. And heaven knows you can't ask your mother! After looking for the golden ball in women and not finding it, then looking to his own feminine side, the young male is called upon to consider that the golden ball lies within the magnetic field of the wild man. Now, that s a very hard thing for us to conceive; the possibility that the deep nourishing and spiritually radiant energy lies not in the feminine side, but in the deep masculine. Not the shallow masculine, the macho masculine, the snowmobile masculine, but the deep masculine, the hairy instinctive one who's underwater and who has been there we don't know how long.

Now, The amazing thing about the "Iron John" story is that it doesn't say that the golden ball is being held by some benign Asian guru or by a kind young man named Jesus. There's something connected with getting the golden ball back that is incompatible with niceness. In the story of "The Frog Prince'1 it's the frog, the un-nice one that everyone says, "Ick!" to, who brings the golden ball back. And the frog only turns into a prince when it is thrown against the wall in a fit of what New Age People might call a fit of "negative energy'? New Age thought has taught young men. to kiss frogs. That doesn't always work. You only get your mouth wet. The women 5 movement has helped women to learn to throw the frog against the wall, but men haven't had this kind of movement yet. The kind of energy I'm talking about is not the same as macho, brute strength, which men already know enough about; it's forceful action undertaken not with-out compassion, but with resolve.

Thompson: It sounds as if contacting the wild-man would involve in some sense a movement against the forces of civilisation.

Bly: It's true. When it comes time for a young male to have a conversation with the wild-man, it's not the same as as conversation with his minister or his guru. When a boy talks with the hairy man, he is not getting into a conversation about bliss or mind or spirit, or ''higher consciousness, but about something wet, dark and low - what James Hillman would call "soul'?

And I think that todays males are just about ready to take that step; to go to the cage and ask for the golden ball back. Some are ready to do that. Others haven't got the water out of the pond yet - they haven't left the collective male identity and gone out into the wilderness alone, into the unconscious. You've got to take a bucket, several buckets. You can't wait for a giant to come along and suck out all the water for you: all that magic stuff isn't going to help you. A weekend at Esalen won't do it either! You have to do it bucket by bucket. This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach all did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than many males have right now.

Thompson: And of course it's going to take some persistence and discipline, not only to uncover the deep male, but to get the golden ball back. It seems unlikely that this un-nice wild-man" would just hand it over.

Bly: You're right: what kind of story would it be if the wild man answered: "Well, okay, here's your ball - go have your fun"? Jung said that in any case, if you're asking your psyche for something, don't use yes-or-no questions - the psyche likes to make deals. If part of you, for example is lazy and doesn't want to do any work, a flat out New Year's resolution won't do you any good: it will work better if you say to the lazy part of yourself, "You let me work for an hour, then I'll let you be a slob for an hour - deal?" So in "Iron John;' a deal is made: the wild man agrees to give the ball back if the boy opens the cage.

At first the boy is frightened and runs off. Finally, the third time the wild man offers the same deal, the boy says, "I couldn't open it even if I wanted to, because I don't know where the key is'? The wild man now says something magnificent: he says, "The key is under your mothers pillow'?

Did you get this shot? The key to let the wild man out is lying not in the toolshed, not in the attic, not in the cellar - it's under his mother's pillow! What do you make of that?

Thompson: Would it suggest that the young male has to take back the power that he has given to his mother and get away from the force field of her bed? He must direct his energies away from pleasing Mommy and toward his search for his own instinctive roots.

Bly: That's right, and we see a lot of trouble here these days, particularly among spiritual devotees. A guru may help you skip over your troubled relations with your mother, but one doesn't enter the soul by skipping one's personal history is also history in the larger sense. In the West our way has been to enter the soul by consciously exploring the relationship with the mother - even though it may grieve us to do it, even though it implies the incest issue, even though we can' I seem to make any headway in talking with her.

Thompson: Which would explain why the boy turns away twice in fright before agreeing to get the key from his mothers bed. Some long-time work is involved in making this kind of break.

Bly: Yes. And it surely accounts for the fact that, - in the story, the mother and father are away on the day that the boy finally obeys the wild man. Obviously, you've got to wait until your mother and father have gone away. This represents not being so dependent on the collective, on the approval of the community, on being a nice person, or essentially being dependent on your own mother. Because if you went up to your mother and said, "I want the key so I can let the wild man out;' she'd say, "Oh no you just get a job;' or "Come over here and give mommy a kiss'? There are very few mothers in the world who would release that key from under the pillow, because they are intuitively aware of what would happen next - namely, they would loose their nice boys. The possessiveness that some mothers exercise on sons - not to mention the possessiveness that fathers exercise toward their daughters - cannot be overestimated.

And then we have a lovely scene in which the boy succeeds in opening the cage and setting the wild man free. At this point one could imagine a number of things happening. The wild man could go back to his pond, so that the split happens all over again: by that time the parents come back, the wild man is gone and the boy has replaced the key. He could become a corporate executive, an ordained minister, a professor; he might be a typical twentieth-century male.

But in this case, what happens is that the wild man comes out of the cage and starts toward the forest, and the boy shouts after him, "Don't run away! my parents are going to he very angry when they come back'? And Iron John says, "I guess your right; you'd better come with me'? He hoists the boy on to his shoulders and off they

Thompson: What does this mean, that they take off together?

Bly: There are several possible arrangements in life that a male can make with the wild man. The male can be separated from the wild man in his consciousness by thousands of miles and never see him. Or the male and the wild man can exist together in a civilised place, like a court-yard, with the wild man in a cage, and they can carry on a conversation with one another which can go on for a long time. But apparently the two can never be united in the courtyard: the boy cannot bring the

wild man into his home. When the wild man is freed a little, when the young man feels a little more trust in his instinctive part after going through some discipline, then he can let the wild man out of the cage. And since the wild man can't stay with him in civilisation, he must go off with the wild man.

This is where the break with the parents finally comes. As they go off together, the wild man says, "You'll never see your mother and father again'? The boy has to accept that the collective thing is over. He must leave his parents force field.

Thompson: In the ancient Greek tradition a young man would leave his family to study with an older man the energy of Zeus, Apollo, or Dionysius. We seem to have lost the rite of initiation, and the young males have a great need to be introduced to the male mysteries.

Bly: This is exactly what has been missing in our culture. Among the Hopis and other Native Americans of the South West, a boy is taken away at the age of twelve and led into the kiva (down!): He stays down there for six weeks, and a year and a half passes before he sees his mother. He enters completely into the instinctive male world, which means a sharp break with both parents. You see the fault of the nuclear family isn't so much that it's crazy and full of double binds (that's true in communities to - the human condition); the issue is that the son has a difficult time breaking away from his parents' field of energy, especially the mothers field. Our culture has made no provision for this initiation.

The ancient societies believed that the boy becomes man only through ritual and effort - that he must be into the world of men. It doesn't happen by itself; it doesn't happen just because he eats Wheaties. And only men can do the work of initiation.

Thompson: We tend to picture initiation as a series of tests that the young man goes through, but surely there s more to it.

Bly: We can also imagine initiation as that moment when the older men together welcome the younger males into the male world. One of the best stories I've heard about initiated this kind of welcoming is one which takes place each year among the Kikuyus in Africa. When a young man is about ready to be welcomed in, he is taken away from his mother and brought to a special place the men have set up some distance from the village. He fasts for three days. The third night he finds him self sitting ma circle around the fire with the older males. He is hungry, thirsty, alert and frightened. One of the older males takes a knife and opens a vein in his arm, and lets a little of his blood flow into a gourd or bowl. Each man in the circle opens his arm with the same knife, as the bowl goes around, and lets some blood flow in. When the bowl arrives at the young male, he is invited in tenderness to take nourishment from it.

The boy learns a number of things. He learns that there is a kind of nourishment that comes not from his mother only, but from males. And he learns that the knife can be used for many purposes besides wounding others. Can he have any doubt now that he is welcome in the male world? Once that is done the males can teach him the myths, the stories, the songs that carry the male values: not fighting only only, but spirit values. Once these ''moistening myths" are learned, they lead the young male far beyond his personal father and into the moistness of the swampy fathers who stretch back century after century.

Thompson: If young men today have no access to initiation rites of the past, how are they to make the passage into their instinctive male energy?

Bly: Let me turn the question back to you; as a young male, how are you going to do it?

Thompson: Well I've heard so much of my own path described in your remarks about soft young men. When I was fourteen my parents were divorced, and my brothers and I stayed with our mom. My relationship with my dad had been remote and distant anyway, and now he wasn't even in the house. My mom had the help of a succession of maids over the years to help raise us, particularly a wonderful old country woman who did everything from changing our diapers to teaching us to pray. It came to pass that my best friends were women, including several older, energetic women who introduced me to politics,

literature and feminism. These were platonic friendships on the order of a mentor-student bond. I was particularly influenced by the energy of the Women's movement, partially because I had been raised by strong yet nurturing women and partially my fathers absence suggested to me that men couldn't be trusted. So for almost ten years, through about age twenty four, my life was full of self-confident, experienced women friends and men friends who, like me, placed a premium on vulnerability, and gentleness and sensitivity. From the stand point of the '80's-'70s male, I had it made! Yet a couple of years ago, I began to feel that something was missing.

Bly: What was missing for you?

Thompson: My father. I began to think about my father. He began to appear in my dreams, and when I looked in old family photos, seeing his picture bought up a lot of grief - grief that I didn't know him, that the distance between us seemed so great. As 1 began to let myself feel my loneliness for him, one night I had a powerful dream, a dream I had actually had before and forgotten. In the dream I was carried off into the woods by a pack of she-wolves who fed and nursed and raised me with love and wisdom, and I became one of them. And yet in some unspoken way, I was always slightly, separate, different from the rest of the pack. One day after we had been running through the woods together in beautiful formation and with lightning speed, we came to a river and began to drink. When we put our faces to the water, I could see the reflection of all of them but I couldn't see my own! There was an empty space in the rippling water where I was supposed to be. My immediate response in the dream was panic - was I really there, did I even exist? I knew the dream had to do in some way with the absent male, both within me and with respect to my absent father. I resolved to spend time with him, to see who 'e are in each others lives now that we ve both grown up little.

B1y: So the dream deepened the longing. Have you seen um?

Thompson: Yes. I went back to the Midwest a few months after to see him and my mom, who are both remarried and still live in our hometown. For the first time I spent as much, if not more time with my dad than with my mom. He and I took drives around the county td places we'd spent time during my childhood, seeing old barns and tractors and fields which seemed not to have changed at all. I would tell my mom, "I'm going over to see dad. We're going for a drive and then having dinner together. See you in the morning'? That would never have happened a few years earlier.

Bly: That dream is the whole story. What has happened since?

Thompson: Since reconnecting with my father I've been discovering that I have less need to make my women friends serve as my sole confidants and confessors. I'm turning more to my men friends in these ways, especially those who are working with similar themes in their lives. What's common to our experience is that not having known or connected with our fathers and not having older male mentors, we 've tried to get strength second hand through women who got their strength from the Women's Movement. It's as if many of today's soft young males want these women, who are often older and wiser, to initiate them in some way.

Bly: I think that's true. And the problem is that, from the ancient point of view, women cannot initiate males: it's impossible.

When I was lecturing about the initiation of males, several women in the audience who were raising sons alone told me that they had come up against exactly that problem. They sensed that their sons needed some sort of toughness, or discipline, or hardness - but they found that if they tried to provide it they would start to lose touch with their own femininity. They didn't know what to do. I said that the best thing to do when the boy is twelve is send him to this father. And several of the women just said flatly, "No, men aren't nourishing, they wouldn't take care of them'? I told them that I had experienced tremendous reserves of nourishment that hadn't been called upon until it was time for me to deal with my children. Also, I think a son has a kind of body-longing for the father which must be honoured.

One woman told an interesting story: She was raising a son and two daughters. When the son was fourteen or so, he went off to live with his father, but stayed only a month or two and then came back. She said she knew that, with three women, there was too much feminine energy in the house for him - it was unbalanced, so to speak, but what could she do? One day she said gently, "John, it's time to come to dinner, and he knocked her across the room. She said, "I think it's time to go back to your father'? He said, "you're right'? The boy couldn't bring what he needed into his consciousness, but his body knew it. And his body acted. The mother didn't take it personally either: she understood it was a message. In the U.S. there are so many big muscled high school boys hulking around the kitchen rudely, and I think in a way they're trying to make themselves less attractive to their mothers. Separation from the mother is crucial. I'm not saying that women have been doing the wrong thing, necessarily. I think the problem is more that the men are not really doing their job.

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Index
Being Human
Friendship
Future
Good Morning
Living
Love
Men
New Age
Lord Shiva Presents;
The Art of Cantering
Past
Present
Risk
Sage Advice
Tree Signs
Wisdom
Your Most Sensitive Organ

 

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