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Wisdom Pages > On Being A Man Page 3. Thompson: Underneath most of the issues we've talked about is the father, or the absence of the father. I was moved by a statement you made in News of the Universe, that the love-unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father and son bond. Bly: I think it's important that we not idealise past times, and yet the Industrial Revolution does present a new situation, because as far as we know, in ancient times the boy and his father lived closely with each other, at least in the work world after age twelve. The first thing that happened in the Industrial Revolution was that the boys were pulled away from their fathers and other men, and placed in schools. D H Lawrence described what this was like in his essay "Men Must Work and Women as well'? What happened to his generation, as he describes it, was the appearance of one idea; that physical labour is bad. Lawrence recalls how his father enjoyed working in the mines, enjoyed the camaraderie with the other men, enjoyed coming home and taking his bath in the kitchen. But in Lawrence's lifetime the schoolteachers arrived from London to teach him and his classmates that physical labour is a bad thing, that both boys and girls should strive to move upward 'into more spiritual work - higher work, mental work.' With this is the concept that fathers have been doing something wrong, that men's physical~work is low, that the women are right in preferring white curtains and a sensitive, elegant life. When he wrote Sons and Lovers, Lawrence clearly believed the teachers; he took the side of "higher" life, his mothers side. It was not until two years before he died, when he had tuberculosis in Italy, that he began to notice the vitality of the Italian working men, and to feel a deep longing for his own father. He began to realise it was possible that his mother hadn't been right on this issue. A mental attitude catches like a plague: "Physical work is wrong'? And it follows from that that if father is wrong, if father is crude and unfeeling, then mother is right and I must advance upward, and leave my father behind. Then the separation between fathers and sons is further deepened when those sons go to work in an office, become fathers, and no longer share their work with their sons. The strange thing about this is not only the physical separation, but the fact that the father is not able to explain to the son what he's doing. Lawrence's father could show his son what he did, take him down in the mines, just as my own father, who was a farmer, could take me out on the tractor and show me around. I knew what he was doing all day and all seasons of the year. In the world of offices, this breaks down. With the father only home in the evenings, and women's values so strong in the house, the father loses the son five minutes after birth. It's as if he had amnesia and can't remember who his children are. The father is remote; he's not in the house where we are, he's somewhere else. He might as well be in Australia. And the father is a little ashamed of his work, despite the "prestige" of working in an office. Even if he brings his son there, what can he show him? How he moves papers? Children take things mentally. If you work in an office, how can you explain how what you're doing is important, or how it differs from what other males are doing? The German psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich writes about this situation in a fine book called "Society Without The Father'? His main idea is that if the son does not understand clearly, physically, what his father is doing during the day, a hole will appear in the son's perception of his father, and into the hole will rush demons. That's a law of nature, demons rush in because nature hates a vacuum. The son s mind then fills with suspicion, doubt, and a nagging fear that the father is doing evil things. This issue was dramatised touching in the '60s when rebellious students took over the presidents office at Columbia, looking for evidence of CIA involvem,ent with the university. It was a perfect example of taking the fear that your father is demonic and transferring the fear to some figure in authority. I give the students all the credit they deserve for their bravery, but on a deeper level they weren't just making a protest against the Vietnam war; they were looking for evidence of their fathers demonism. A university, like a father, looks upright and decent on the outside, but underneath, somewhere, you have the feeling that he's doing something evil. And it's an intolerable feeling, that the inner fears should be so incongruous with the appearances. So you go to all the trouble to invade the presidents office to make the outer look like the inner, to find evidence of demonic activity. And then, naturally, given the interlocking relationships between establishments, you, do discover letters from the CIA, and demonic links are found! But the discovery is never really satisfying, because the image of the demons inside wasn't real in the first place. These are mostly imagined fears; they come in because the father is remote, not because the father is wicked. Finding evidence doesn't answer the deep need we spoke to in the first place - the longing for the father, where is my father, doesn't he love me, what is going on? Thompson: Once the father becomes a demonic~figure in the sons eyes, it would seen that the son is prevented from forming a fruitful association with any male energy, even positive male energy. Since the father serves as the son 5 earliest role model for male ways, the son's doubts will likely translate into doubts toward the masculine in general. Bly: It's true: the idea that male energy, when in authority, could be good has come to be considered impossible. Yet the Greeks understood and praised that energy. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate authority, intelligent - physically healthy authority, good will - ,in sum, positive power accepted by the male in the service of the community. The native Americans understood this, too - that this power only becomes positive when exercised for the sake of the community, not for personal aggrandisement. All the great cultures since have lived with images of this energy, except ours. Zeus energy has been disintegrating steadily in America. Popular culture has destroyed it mostly, beginning with the "Maggie and Jiggs" and "Dagwood" comics of the 1920s, in which the male is always foolish. From there the stenotype went into animated cartoons, and now it shows up in TV situation comedies. The young men in Hollywood writing these comedies have a strong and profound hatred for the Zeus image of male energy. They may believe that they are giving the audience what it wants, or simply that they're working to make a buck, whereas in fact what they are actually doing is taking revenge on their fathers, in the most classic way possible. Instead of confronting their father in Kansas, these television writers attack him long distance from Hollywood(This kind of attack is particularly insidious because it's a way of destroying not only all the male energy that the father lives on, but the energy that he has tried to pass on. In the ancient tradition, the male who grows is able to contact the energy coming from older males - and from women as well, but especially male spiritual teachers who transmit positive male energy. Thompson: I find in your translation of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as in your most recent book of poems, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, a willingness to pay honour to the older males who have influenced you - your own father and your spiritual fathers. In fact, in the past few years, you seem to have deliberately focused on men and their masculine experience. What inspired that shift in emphasis away from the feminine? Bly: After a man has done some work on recovering his wet and muddy feminine side, often he still doesn't feel complete. A few years ago I began to feel diminished by my lack of embodiment in the fruitful male, or the "moist male'? I found myself missing contact with the male - or should I say my father? For the first time, I began to think of my father in a different way. I began to think of him not as someone who had deprived me of love or attention or companionship, but as someone who himself had been deprived, by his mother or by the culture. This process is still going on. Every time I see my father I have different and complicated feelings about how much of the deprivation I felt with him came wilfully and how much came against his will - how much he was aware and unaware of. I've begun to see him as a man in a complicated situation. Jung made a very interesting observation; he said that if a male is brought up mainly with the mother, he will take a feminine attitude toward his father. He will see his father through his mother's eyes. Since the mother and the father are in competition for the affection of the son, you're not going to get a straight picture of your father out of your mother. Instead, all the inadequacies of the father are well pointed out. The mother tends to give the tone that civilisation and culture and feeling and relationship are things which the mother and the son and the daughter have together, whereas the father has-is something inadequate, stiff, maybe brutal, unfeeling, obsessed, rationalistic, money-mad, un-compassionate. So, the young male grows up with a wounded image of his father - not necessarily caused by the fathers actions, but based on the mothers viewing of these actions. I know that in my case I made my first connection with feeling through my mother, she gave me my first sense of human community. But the process also involved picking up a negative view of my father and his whole world. It takes a while for a man to overcome this. The absorption of the mother may last ten, fifteen or twenty years, and then, rather naturally, a man turns toward his father. Eventually when the male begins to think it over, the mother's view just doesn't hold up. Another way to put all there is to say that if the son accepts his mothers views of his father, he will look at his own masculinity from a feminine point of view. But eventually, the male must throw off this view and begin to discover for himself what the father is, what masculinity is. Thompson: What can men do to get in touch with their male energy - their instinctive male side? What kind of work is involved? Bly: I think the next step for us is learning to visualise the wild-man. And to help that visualisation, I feel we need to return to the mythologies that today we only teach children. If you go back to ancient mythology, you find that people, in ancient times have already done some work in helping us to visualise the wild-man. I think that we are just coming to the place where we can understand what the ancients were talking about. In the Greek myths, for example, Apollo is visualised as a golden man standing on an enormous accumulation of dark, dangerous energy called Dionysius. The Bhutanese bird men with dogs teeth are another possible visualisation. Another is the Chinese tomb guardian; a figure with enormous power in the music] and the will, and a couple of fangs sticking out of his mouth. In the Hindu tradition this fanged aspect of the Shiva is called the Bhairava; in this Bhairava aspect, Shiva is not a nice boy. There's a hint of this energy with Christ going wild in the temple and whipping everybody. The Celtic tradition gives us Cuchulain - smoke comes out of the top of his head when he gets hot. These are all powerful energies lying in ponds we haven't found yet. All these traditions give us models to help us sense what it would be like for a young male to grow up in a culture in which the divine is associated not only with the Virgin Mary and the blissful Jesus, but with the wild-man covered with hair. We need to tap into these images. These mythological images are strong, almost frightening. Thompson: How would you distinguish them from the strong but destructive male chauvinist personality that we've been trying to get away from? Bly: The male in touch with the wild man has true strength; he's able to show and say what he wants in a way that the '60s - '70s male is not able to do. The approach to his own feminine space that the '80's - '70s male has made is infinitely valuable, and mot to be given up. But as I say in my poem '1A Meditation on Philosophy": "When you shout at them, they don't reply They turn then face toward the crib wall, and die'? However, the ability of a male to shout and be fierce is not the same as treating people like objects, demanding land or empire, expressing aggression - the whole model of the '80's male. getting in touch with the wild-man means religious life in the broadest sense of the phrase. The '50s male was almost wholly secular, so we are not talking in any way of a movement bad. Thompson: How would you envision a movement forward? Bly: Just as women in the '70s needed to develop what is known in the Indian tradition as Kali energy - the ability to really say what they want, to dance with skulls around their neck, to cut relationships when they need to - what males need now is an energy that can face this energy in women, and meet it. They need to make a similar connection in their psyches to their Kali energy - which is just another way to describe the wild-man at the bottom of the pond. If they don't, they won't survive. Thompson: Do you think they can? Bly: I feel very hopeful. Men are suffering right now - young males especially. But now that so many men are getting in touch with their feminine side, we're ready to start seeing the wild-man and to put its powerful, dark energy to use. At this point, many things can happen. End. |
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