| Here is a transcript of the show. The transcript was provided
by the television show and typed in by a friend of mine.
I advise printing out this reply if you want to read it.
It is VERY long (about 20 pages).
A GATHERING OF MEN
With Bill Moyers
and Robert Bly
Copyright (C) 1990 by Public Affairs Television. Copied without
permission.
ROBERT BLY, Poet: [at gathering] We are leaving our time now. We
are leaving our time now. There are places where time moves
more slowly than here. We all know all four directions, east,
west, north, south. And we are also under the fifth direction,
the vertical one, which is in us today, here.
Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen. And they lived
in a castle. And near the castle there was a forest. You know
there's always a forest near the castle. And this forest was
like other forests, with one exception: when anyone went into
it, he didn't come back. Five hunters went out and they didn't
come back. Ten hunters were sent after them, and they didn't
come back. Then twenty hunters went out, they did not come
back. And then thirty hunters were sent after them, and they
did not come back.
And pretty soon, no one went to that part of the forest anymore.
Only occasionally a hawk or an eagle flew over it. That
identifies this as a male story, the hawk and the eagle are male
birds. That was the situation, and that's the way it lasted for
many years.
Finally, one day a young man came, and he said, "Anything
dangerous to do around here?" And the king said, "Yes, there is,
but I don't recommend it, because the return rate is not good."
And the young man said, "That's the sort of thing I like, I think
I'll go."
So he went, taking only his dog with him. Maybe the fact that
he didn't go in a group was a part of it. He took only his dog
with him, and he walked into the forest and he walked all the way
into the forest and all of a sudden, a hand came up out of the
pond and pulled the dog down. And he didn't get hysterical. He
just said, "This must be the place."
BILL MOYERS: I'm Bill Moyers. The title of this program is "A
Gathering of Men," but women are invited, too. What we are
exploring is the confusion many men feel today about their roles
in society and their inner lives as well. Women have a stake in
how men address these issues, of course, just as men have been
affected over the years by the feminist movement.
It's not accurate to describe what's happening as a men's
movement, as such, but gatherings like this one is Austin,
Texas, are taking place more and more frequently, and they're
drawing larger and larger numbers of men. What summons these
men, in my experience, is not a desire to separate again from
women, or to move back to that destructive, aggressive and
dominating masculine personality of more chauvinistic days.
To the contrary. Men are drawn to these retreats by a sense of
loss, a loss of familiar myths and road maps, but also by a
sense of hope. There is something optimistic about the very
willingness of men to learn from one another through sharing
their confusion over the problems of life.
For many of these men there is also the chance to share in the
hard won wisdom of Robert Bly.
[voice-over] Robert Bly is arguably the most influential
American poet living today, whether writing about _Silence in
the Snowy Fields_ or _The Light Around the Body_, about the war
in Vietnam or the archaeology of private memory, he confers upon
even the simplest words a weight and consequence of new things.
Born on the Minnesota prairie of Norwegian Lutheran stock, Bly
first attended a one-room school, the University of Iowa and
Harvard. But the experience of his own life and the poems,
myths and fairy tales of the world have been his most constant
teachers. His own poems are woven from the realities of pain
and hope, tribulation and joy. He won the National Book Award
for poetry in 1968, and has since published a growing collection
of poems and translations that express what one critic calls, "a
deep marriage between the inner and outer worlds in one man's
life."
His clear, strong images of masculine consciousness and the
honesty of his own autobiography have made Robert Bly a father
figure at gatherings of men all over the country. He's now
writing a book on masculinity, and one of its themes is the
grief and loss men often feel, but seldom acknowledge.
BLY: [at gathering] I'll begin with a poem by Antonio Machado,
the Spanish poet. There's a lot of pain and grief around men
these days, and he touches on it here.
The wind one brilliant day called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
The wind said, "In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."
[Machado said,] "I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead..."
The wind said, "Then, I'll take
the withered petals, and the yellow leaves,"
and the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself,
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted
to you?"
Good poem, hmm? I think this feeling is the garden being blown
apart doesn't happen much to you until you're 35 or so. The
models we were given as men in high school, well, what were they
-- Eisenhower, John Wayne? -- they only last till you're maybe
32 or 33. And then you notice that something's gone wrong in
your business, in your private life, in your relationships;
these things don't last. And so around 35, you have to find
another image for what a man is, or what your man is. I that
clear, that idea?
So it takes a little bit of courage to come here. There's lots
of men who feel this, and then they won't act on it. Or those
in their 20s say: "I'm doing fine, Jack, I'm fine. It's true
that 14 women have left me, and two beat me up, but I'm doing
fine. It's true I'm bleeding from all my pores, but I'm fine."
MOYERS: Why "A Gathering of Men?" I mean, that's really rare,
isn't it, to have a workshop for men only?
BLY: Maybe 20 years ago it would have been rare, but lately the
men in various parts of the country have begun to gather. I
think that it isn't -- it isn't a reaction to the women's
movement, really. I think the grief that leads to the men's
movement began maybe 140 years ago, when the Industrial
Revolution began, which sends the father out of the house to
work.
MOYERS: What impact did that have?
BLY: Well, we receive something from our father by standing
close to him.
MOYERS: Physically.
BLY: When we stand physically close to our father, something --
something moves over that can't be described in material terms,
that gives the son a certain confidence, an awareness, a
knowledge of what it is to be male, what a man is. And in the
ancient times you were always with your father, he taught you
how to do things, he taught you how to farm, he taught you
whatever it is that he did. You learned from him. But you had
his sense of being -- of receiving a food from him.
MOYERS: Food.
BLY: A food. From your father's body. Now. when the father
went out of the house in the Industrial Revolution, that food
ended, and I think the average American father now spends ten
minutes a day with a son -- I think that's what _The Minneapolis
Tribune_ had -- and half of that time is spent in, "Clean up
your room!" You know, that's a favorite phrase of mine, I know
it well.
So the Industrial Revolution did not harm the mother and
daughter relationship as much as it did the father and son,
because the mother and daughter still stand close to each other
and have stood close to each other. Maybe that'll change now
when the mother is being sent out to work also, but the
daughters then receive some knowledge of what it is to be a
woman, or if you prefer to call it the women's -- the female
mode of feeling. They receive knowledge of the female mode of
feeling. And the mother gets that from her grandmother, who go
it from her great-grandmother, who gets it from her
great-grandmother, it goes all the way down.
After the Industrial Revolution, the male does not receive any
knowledge from his father of what the male mode of feeling is,
and the old male initiators that used to work are not working
anymore.
MOYERS: What do you mean, male initiators?
BLY: Well, the -- you know, the traditional times, you were not
initiated by your father, because there's too much tension
between you and your father. You are initiated by older,
unrelated males, is the word that's used, older unrelated men.
They may be friends of your father. They could even be uncles
or grandfathers. But they are the ones who used to do it. Then
they disappear. Then it fall on the father to do. Then the
father is off at the office. You see the picture?
MOYERS: Yeah. In fact, in some of the traditional cultures, a
night arrives, and a group of men show up at a boy's house, and
they take him away from the home and they don't bring him back,
then, for several days. And then when he comes back, he has
ashes on his face.
BLY: Yeah. In New Guinea, where they still do it today, the
men come in with spears to get the boys. The boys know nothing
about the men's world. They live with their mother completely.
They say, you know, "Mama, Mama, save us from these men that are
coming here." Now, all over New Guinea, the women accept and
the men accept one thing. A boy cannot be made into a man
without the active intervention of the older men.
Now, when they all accept that, then the women's job is to be
participants in this drama. So the men come and take the boys
away, and the boys are saying "Save me, Mommy," you know. Then
they go across, and the men have built a tent -- on this island
they have built a house for the boys' initiation hut. Then they
take them across the bridge, and three of four of the women,
whose boys these are, get their spears and meet them on the
bridge. And the old men have their spears. And the boys are
saying, "Save me, Mama, save me, these are horrible men, they're
taking me away," you know, and they fight and everything. And
then the women are driven back. Then the women all go back and
have coffee and say, "How'd I do? How'd I look?"
So that wonderful participation in it, the women are not doing
the initiating, they're participating, and then, as you said,
then he'll stay with the men for a year, maybe. Then they will
explain to him something has to die to be born, and what will
have to die is the boy. This is what isn't happening to the men
in this culture.
BLY: [at gathering] I was giving a reading in Minnesota, in my
little town, this year, and I gave "Rapunzel," and the cutting
off of the golden hair of Rapunzel, and I said to the audience,
"How many of you -- do you remember when you had your golden
hair cut off?" And then later a young man came up to me at the
party afterward, and he said: "I didn't dare say anything at
that time, but this is what happened to me. I was about 15, and
my parents wanted my long hair off. And I refused to cut it
off. One day they got me and they tied me down, and they cut it
off. I started to beat the ground, and I was weeping and
hitting the floor. And while I had stopped hitting the floor
and was still weeping, my grandfather walked in, and he saw
immediately what had happened." I said, "what did your
grandfather do?" They lived in Long Island. He took the boy
out to the ocean and he said to the boy, "You see this ocean?
Now, this is for you. This ocean is going to be here whether
you have long hair or short hair."
That -- only the grandfather could say that. And then that man
said to me, "You know, he was right?" He said: "I went away,
six years later I cam back, I looked at the ocean, wham! It was
incredible, like my grandfather had given it to me."
I said, "Unbelievable, unbelievable." That's the kind of thing
that older men do, that your father can't do.
BLY: My father was an alcoholic, and he didn't teach me much
about the male mode of feeling. But he taught me something.
But many men have no father at all, or the father left when they
were two, or the father doesn't say anything, or the father
doesn't talk well about feelings -- natural, it seems to be
natural in the American male, it comes from the frontier,
apparently.
So then, how does he learn the male mode of feeling? He
doesn't. And in the '60s, it came to a crisis, I think.
MOYERS: Vietnam?
BLY: Yes. You know, in the Vietnam war, it was as if many of
the women offered to initiate the young men. The young men
hadn't been helped by their fathers, and they really were
betrayed by the older men in the time of Vietnam. And so the
women would offer to initiate them, in wonderful things like
respect for the earth, respect for life, respect for feeling and
so on. That wasn't wrong at all, it was just that no one has
helped them with the male mode of feeling.
MOYERS: What's the chief difference, as you see it, between
male feeling and female feeling?
BLY: A strong part of the women's mode of feeling has to do
with pain. Moving towards pain and help removing it, and also
the pain of being devalued. I mean, women's values have been
rejected in this culture for 2,000 years or more, and women feel
a strong pain in this devaluation. Men don't feel devalued
quite that much. With the men it's more an area of grief, as
opposed to pain. And --
MOYERS: You keep using that word, brief, in regard to men.
BLY: --yeah. You see, in my own case, I began as a poet,
writing poetry, and poetry deals with feeling, but I felt that
until -- I felt that grief is a door to male feeling. Until I
had really tried to go into some of the grief around my father,
I didn't feel that I had access to the feeling.
MOYERS: Tell me about that.
BLY: Well, you know, as men we're taught not to -- not to feel
pain and grief, as children. I remember seeing one of my boys,
he was maybe about nine. He was hit in a basketball -- maybe
hit by the ball, and I saw him turn around and bend down and get
control of his pain and his grief before he stood up again.
That same boy would be so wonderful in being open to wounds and
crying and so on when he was very small. But, you know, the
culture had said to him, "You cannot give way to that, you must
turn around and when you must turn around, you must have a face
without pain or grief in it," right?
So therefore, as a son of an alcoholic, I received that. I
mean, when you're in an alcoholic family, you're hired to be
cheerful. That's one of your jobs. You're appointed that way.
One is hired to be a trickster, another -- I was hired to be
cheerful,, so that when anyone asked me about the family, I'd
have to lie in a cheerful way and say, "Oh, it wonderful, yes,
indeed, we have sheep, you know, and we have chickens, and
everything's wonderful."
Well, then if you can deny something so fundamental as the deep
grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. So then how
can you write poetry, then, if you're involved in that much
denial? So the word denial was very helpful to me.
MOYERS: Did you resent your father? Did you feel --
BLY: No, I think that what happened was that as far as the
grief goes, being appointed to be the cheerful one in the
family, I would tend to follow a movement upward like this, hmm?
More and more achievement, more and more and so on, hmm? That's
what you'd do. And finally you'd redeem the family's name by
doing this.
Well, I got to be about 46 or so, and then I realized how
unsteady I was, and how my own poems didn't have -- well, I
didn't even mention my father in my poems until I was 46. Not
once. So I'd look at my poems -- they're good poems -- but
there's something missing in there. And then I began to realize
that in the ancient times, the movement for the man was
downward, a descent into grief. Before you're really a man that
descent has to take place. It's referred to in the fairy tales
as the time of ashes and the time of descent.
So I wrote a poem at that time, and it's the first poem -- I
must have been 46 or 47, it is the first poem I had written in
which there was some sort of grief. I'll read it to you. Want
to hear it?
MOYERS: Mmm-hmm.
BLY: It's called _Snowbanks North of the House_. Maybe you know
the poem. Snowbanks-- snow comes down from Alaska, you know,
and then stops suddenly. And I'd notice that little place
there where something stops and doesn't go further. So I wrote
this line--
Those great sweeps of snow that sop suddenly, six feet
from the house...
I left it in the drawer for two or three months, to see what
would happen, and finally the rest of the poem came.
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet
from the house...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin, and makes no more
bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party
and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer--
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing
and are safe.
And the father grieves for his son,
[This is Lincoln]
And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave
the room where the coffin stands.
he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone
And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens, alone.
And the toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust...
The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the
hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and
did not climb the hill.
MOYERS: What did that do for you?
BLY: Well, to me it was the first time that I had felt my words
being involved not in the new age of sense, not in higher
consciousness, but a movement down, when you break off the arc
and you move down, and you go down towards your own. In that
case, it had to do with the possibility that my life is not
going to be a series of triumphs, that what is asked of me is
not to ascend, but to descend.
MOYERS: But how about in relation--
BLY: That meant-- that meant I had to start paying attention to
my father.
MOYERS: Here.
BLY: There. In other words--
MOYERS: But he as here. You didn't have him out there.
BLY: --he was out there, too. In other words, how shall I say
it, often times my father -- my mother and father were living on
a farm a mile from where I was. I would go over and see them.
My father had lost part of one lung and he would be lying in the
bed, in the -- next to the living room. I would go and sit and
talk with my mother for an hour, because I was probably in the
conspiracy with her early on. And if I remembered it, I'd say
goodbye to my father before I left.
Now, my father's lying out there. How do you think he feels
about my talking with my mother for an hour? What can he do?
He thinks, "Well, that nice, they have a good relationship."
But how about him? So therefore, I realized that I had been in
a conspiracy with my mother to push my father out since I was
two or three years old. And I decided at this same time I wrote
that poem, it's time for this to end. I don't want to be in
this conspiracy anymore.
So what I did was, I would go in and sit down with my father.
And my mother would wait for me to come into the living room.
And I didn't. I'd sit down next to him. He's not a great
conversationalist, but we'd talk a little bit. And eventually
my mother would have to come in and sit down on the bed. And
then we all knew that some change had taken place.
MOYERS: It seems to me that you and your mother hadn't pushed
your father out. Your father had removed himself, like so many
fathers do, either through alcoholism or through work or through
obsession with the world, through ambition.
BLY: It's possible.
BLY: [at gathering] When your father is away during the day and
during the year, when he only comes home at five o'clock, you
only get his temperament. What you used to get was his teaching
and his temperament. The teaching would help you. You know how
sweet it is when someone say, "Well, the way you make it is, you
put your board, nail over here, you put your board over here,
and you do that," and those teachings are sweet.
Even mean men are often sweet when they're teaching. And then
we have that gratitude when someone has taught us something,
that's so wonderful. We used to receive that from our fathers.
Now he goes to work, and all we get is his temperament when he
gets home at five, and he's tired. And what's more, at work he
has been humiliated by older men and other men, bosses. He's
been in competition with other men. He has-- he has-- he knows
that his work-- he's not going to be able to see the end of his
work. It's not like making a chest of drawers. He knows that
his company is probably polluting Alaska. How do you think he
feels when he gets home? And that's all you're going to get.
And I want to remind you that the same thing is true of women,
that many people that we call angry feminists are women who have
only experienced the temperament of their fathers. They have
never experienced the teaching. And their attacks on the
patriarchy are really a turned attack on the fact that they
don't believe that there is any older male that has anything but
this irritable temperament. Is that clear, what I'm saying? So
that has to be understood, too. The women only get the
temperament of the father, and it's usually irritable and angry.
One thing I have to say to the men is that, your father is
convinced that he is an inadequate human being. Women have been
telling him that for 30 to 40 years.
He doesn't know how to talk, he can't express himself, he
doesn't know what his feelings are. People hear what they hear.
Your father feels that he's okay when he's with a hammer, but in
every other way he's inadequate.
So you call up your home and you get your father, and he says,
"Oh, John, this is just your father, here's you mother." And I
was saying there are only two kinds of men. One kind of man is
willing to go along with that, and the other kind of man says,
"Wait a minute, I didn't call here to talk to my mother, I want
to talk to you." "No, no, here's your mother." "No, no, that
isn't it, I want to talk with you." "What about? You want to
borrow money?" "No, that's not it." Huh?
The other day I was in Atcheson, Kansas, and I met a wonderful
man there who was an economics teacher. And there's a tiny
little Catholic school in Atcheson, and this man came up to me,
we started talking. His father was a car mechanic who worked
very hard and knew beautifully the engines, just knew what was
wrong and so on. The father got ill, eventually go his-- got
the one leg cut off. He was lying in bed, trying to deal with
the phantom pain. Rick calls him up on the phone, say "How are
you doing, Dad?" Dad say, "What do you want?" Rick says, "I
want to say something to you. I want to tell you how much I
appreciated everything you did, how much I appreciated all the
work that you had to do in order to send me to college. I'm a
college teacher now, and I want to tell you how much I
appreciate that, and how much I love you." And the father said,
"You been drinking?"
I thought that was wonderful. I said, "You just lived through
the history of the last 80 years." The father can't imagine,
that right. Right? There's only two points. Because men don't
talk about feelings. So if you're talking about feelings,
probably you must be drunk. And you've got to get over that.
You've just got to say, "No, I have not been drinking, I'm not
on dope, and I love you. You get it?"
BLY: I'll read you a poem. It is the first poem I did at all
connected with my father. In fact, it is the first one in which
I used the word father. I isn't my father, but it's a poem
called Finding the Father.
My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing--
This body offers to carry us for nothing --as
the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails
with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting
small crabs that flow around the sides.
Someone knocks on the door.
Someone knocks on the door. We do not have time to
dress. he wants us to go with him through the blowing
rainy streets, to the dark house.
We will go there, the body says, and there find the
father whom we have never met, who wandered out in a
snowstorm the night we were born, and who then lost his
memory, and has lived since longing for his child. Whom
he saw only once... while he worked as a shoemaker, as
a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who
painted at night.
When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits
there, behind the door... the eyebrows so heavy, the fore-
head so light... lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.
MOYERS: Looking for father?
BLY: Finding the Father, it's called.
MOYERS: Did you find your father?
BLY: To some extent, I did. He died only a few months ago, but
one of the things that did happen is this. It was-- I was
living in Moose Lake, about five hours away. I get a call. My
mother and father are both in the old people's home, in
Madison, Minnesota. I get a call saying my father was in the
hospital with pneumonia. So I drove down especially to see him,
and some change had taken place in me, so that when I walked in
the room, he was alone there, and for the first time, I picked
up a book, my book that I write in, and I wrote a poem in his
presence.
I had written so many poems in the presence of trees like these,
so many poems in the presence of women, never a single line in
the presence of my father. So this is the poem I wrote. It's
called, Sitting. No, it's called My Father at 85.
His large ears hear
everything.
A hermit wakes
and sleeps
in a hut underneath
his gaunt cheeks.
His eyes, blue,
alert, dis-
appointed and suspicious
complain
I do not bring him
The same sort of jokes
the nurses do.
(Hmmm? When the nurse come in. He's right.)
He is a small bird
waiting to be fed,
mostly beak,
an eagle or a vulture
or the Paraoh's servant
just before death.
My arm on the bedrail
rests there,
relaxed, with new love.
All I know of the Troubadours
I bring
to this bed.
I do not want
or need
to be shamed
by him
any longer.
The general of shame
has discharged him
(He's probably Lou Gehrig.)
and left him in this small provincial
Egyptian town.
If I do not wish
to shame him, then
why not love him?
His long hands,
large, veined, capable,
can still retain
hold of what he wanted.
But is that what he desired?
Some powerful
river of desire
goes on flowing
through him.
He never phrased
What he desired.
and I am
his son.
MOYERS: "He never phrased" -- your father never phrased --
BLY: He never put into language what he desired. In the United
States, we put into language what we want. We want another
television set, we want a VCR, we want a refrigerator, we want a
good 3.2 beer. We want to have a cowboy hat and have some girl
come along and touch it. That's what we want. But in
television, we never talk about what we desire. What you desire
is something you're never going to get, so that gives it a
little fragrance.
MOYERS: Wait, what do you mean by that? We're going to desire
something that you're not going to get?
BLY: Well, someone says, "I want to be as great a poet as
Shakespeare." You never -- I desire to be as great a poet; it's
not going to happen. But it's sweet, the desiring. In the 13th
and 14th century, they did desire. They desired God, they
desired to have God as a lover, for example, with the Provencal
poets. And all of those, and the Sufis, the Moslems, at the
same time. You know that Moslem poem, a Ruhmi poem. "I want to
kiss you." Answer: "The price of kissing is your life." "Now
my loving is running towards my life, shouting, 'What a bargain!
Let's take it!' " That's a poem of desire, isn't it? It's a
poem of -- it is not a wanting.
So if our parents could have phrased what they desired, our
lives would have been different.
MOYERS: Why do fathers have such a hard time talking to sons
about desire, about what they really seek?
BLY: I don't think the mothers phrase what they desire, either.
MOYERS: Yes, but --
BLY: The grownups don't phrase what they desire.
MOYERS: --why?
BLY: Well --
MOYERS: Do they know? Do we know?
BLY: --I think-- I think they brood about it a lot. You know,
my father spent many hours -- I saw him lying in bed, brooding.
And he was brooding about something. And I think it was on what
he had desired to do. He had to go onto the farm because his
own father had a heart attack. He himself read a tremendous
amount. One of his favorite people was the Prince of Wales. He
read everything about the Prince of Wales. Now it must be, you
see, that the Prince of Wales abdicated -- and I think my father
felt that he had abdicated from what he desired in order to
raise his family, and so on. I think so. That must be one of
the connections.
MOYERS: But that's--
BLY: So therefore, it was painful for him to talk about what he
desired. Everyone comes into the world with a certain way he
want to be fathered. And every father comes into the world with
a certain way that he wants to father. What if they don't mix?
What then?
BLY: [at gathering] That's the way for most of it, isn't it?
We wanted to be fathered in a certain way, and our father
didn't do it, so we complain. But it's better to go to the
father and say, "How did you want to father?" Then he says,
"Well, the problem is that I wanted a violinist son," you know,
or, "I wanted an athlete son, I really did."
I remember, my daughters came first, and it was three or four or
five years before I had the sons. And my daughters still say to
me, "Robert, you-- Dad," they say "you remember how you used to
buy all those little green tractors for us" I'd go to the store
and by there -- I loved these little John Deere tractors, you
know. And they knew that I was trying to father a son. And
they were charmed, but it was very weird.
So therefor, you talk about-- you ask your father how he wanted
to father. And then you tell him how you wanted to be fathered.
You know, what I wanted was this, and I wanted this, and -- it
takes a lot of work to go down to what you want and still --
because what you wanted, you still want. And it's good, then,
if you're with a woman, to say to her: "Look, this is the way I
wanted to be fathered by my father, and I want you to write this
down, because I'm going to ask you to do it, and you'd better
not do it. Don't do it. Write it down, will you?"
And then when I try to ask for you, they say, "Wait a minute,
that's one of the ways you want wanted to be fathered, I'm not a
father." "Oh, I missed that." And then be sure to ask your
wife or your girlfriend how did you want to be fathered. Ooh,
ow. And if she's able to lay that down, then you check off
number one, you got angry about that last week, number two, that
was the time we went down to California, number -- she will want
to get from you the fathering she didn't get from her father.
And you're the only one that can move into that, and help with
that, and try to get it clear. And then you have to say to her
over and over again, "I'm not your father, and I wish I were,
but I'm not, and I can't give you that."
And Alice Miller says a wonderful thing. She says: "When you
were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you
will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning."
Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame. Mourning. And she
says another thing. So wonderful. She says, "You know, when you
came into the world, you brought this fantastic thing with you,
coming from centuries and eons and you brought this amazing
energy in from animal life, reptile life, other planets and
everything. And this incredible energy you brought in, and your
parents didn't want it, they wanted a nice boy. They wanted a
nice girl."
You couldn't believe it. That's your first rejection. It's
preverbal. That's why encounter groups won't get to that.
That's your first rejection, and it's profound. They didn't
want the energy you brought. They wanted a nice boy or a nice
girl.
So when you're small, you realize you can't fight against that
stuff you parents-- want a nice-- so you make up a kind of false
personality. T.S. Eliot wrote about that, The Love Song of J
Alfred Prufrock. You invent a false personality, and you
survive.
And then Alice Millers says, "Now, please, you've got to forgive
yourself for that because you did it to survive, and you did the
right thing. You did the right thing." And the proof of it is
that you're alive right now.
MOYERS: Why do you think there's so much confusion today over
what men are?
BLY: Well, you know, you can -- why don't I put it in terms of
high school? What wee we given as models in high school? John
Wayne? A horse? The models we were given for what a man was in
high school don't last past the age of 32 or so. Around 35, men
begin to realize that the images they were given of what a man
is don't work. They don't work in their job, they don't work in
their relationship, they don't work in the marriage, they don't
work.
MOYERS: So what happens when these high school images fade?
BLY: Well, I think that there's a deep sense of failure, and a
sense that you're inadequate. I think that the absence of the
father standing next to the son and giving-- I don't know what
you'd call-- cellular significance, cellular confidence that we
talked of earlier, when that's gone, then you judge yourself a
great deal more. And when it seems to you you're failing in
your relationship, what was it that Maggie Scarf said, that the
typical relationship in the United States involves the woman
chasing the man to try to get him to talk more, and the man
fleeing? But she doesn't chase him fast enough to really catch
him, and he doesn't run away fast enough to really get away.
That's the game that's played.
But then, you see, the man can't turn and face her, in a way,
because without a clear sense of what it is to be a man, he
cannot turn and say, "Wait a minute, I know what I want in a
relationship, it isn't exactly what you want, let me tell you
what it is." And so he feels-- and since the woman knows what
she wants in a relationship, he again feels inadequate. So I
would say that the primary experience of the American man now is
the experience of being inadequate in your work, you can't
achieve what you want to. You feel inadequate as a man because
you don't feel that you have any close male friends, and you
don't know why. You feel inadequate as a husband because your
wife is always saying that you don't talk about your feelings
enough. And you don't know what your feeling are.
And I say to women-- you know, men are not hiding their feelings
from you. When they look down in, they don't see anything down
there. And I know that. It's a feeling of numbness that comes
early on in life, as a man.
MOYERS: Do you remember when you first began to get in contact
with your feelings? As a man?
BLY: It was because I had decided in college that I was going
to write poetry the rest of my life, which was a very rash
decision for a Lutheran. Anyway-- and so, I found that-- my
first book was called Silence in the Snowy Fields. And around
my body which is in touch with the trees and the wind and the
air and the pine trees. And like Thoreau, my feelings didn't go
from here in, they went from here out. And it's like a
beautiful surrounding to your body that puts you in touch with
everything else that's alive. And I typically wrote my poems by
sitting down under a tree for two hours, and then it was as if
the tree said something.
But then I was 36 published that. I still wasn't in touch with
my feeling. So I think it was about 46, around that time I was
telling you in that poem. That's why I say grief is the door to
feeling. Even being out in nature is not the door to feeling.
Excitement, I thought, was the door to feeling. It isn't.
That's why rock music doesn't always work in helping opening
people to feeling. Excitement is not it.
With men, grief-- there's some quality of grief. And men don't
know what they're grieving about. It's as if the grief is
impersonal with men. It's always present. You don't know if
it's about the absence from their father or it may be about all
of the animals that we were in touch with all the millions of
years we were hunters, and all the animals that died. It may be
a grief that's in nature itself. You remember the Latin term,
Lacrimae Rerum," the tears of things?
Men have lived for centuries out there, and they feel that
terrific grief of nature and the out of doors and pine tries.
There are certain-- there are certain little groves in England,
if you walk there, you'll burst in tears, because there is grief
in nature.
MOYERS: Look, I have grief, but I don't write poems. What do I
do about it?
BLY: I don't know that you have to do something with it, but I
think it's a choice at any second. You know, in a conversation
there are little turns, you can turn up or down. Someone says,
you know, "My -- I lost my brother five years ago." At that
point, you know, you can say, "Well, we all lose our brothers,"
or you can touch a hand, or you can go into the part of you
that's lost a brother. You can follow the grief downward in
this way, or you can upward in the American way. You can always
tell an American on the streets of Europe, because he's smiling.
So it's really important for us. I mean, we hired three
presidents in a row who promised us that we would not go into
the grief about the Vietnam war. Carter and Reagan and then
Bush-- Ford; four of them in a row. And if Lincoln had been
alive, do you know how he would have gone into that grief? He
would have gotten everybody-- you know, five years after the
Vietnam war, and he would have said, "We've killed so many
people, and these veterans are here, we have destroyed them --
ahh, let's all weep Aaah, Aaah, Aaah." That's what Lincoln
would have done. he would have encouraged America to grieve
over the losses in the Vietnam war.
We still haven't grieved over that. Only the veterans are
grieving. This is not right.
MOYERS: How does a whole people grieve?
BLY: Well, we don't do it by hiring people like Reagan, who--
you know, Reagan's father was an alcoholic, and when I look at
Reagan, I know he has not gone through the grief of that. So
he's in denial. When you're in denial over your own father, you
can deny the budget deficit easily. That's not a problem. He
is the first president we've ever had who has spent the whole
presidency in denial, and the result is we've got all the
homeless sleeping on the vents, we've got what - a $3 trillion
deficit. That's what it's like when you decide not to-- when
you decide not to take that turn down. You decide not to go and
face you father and to that work. Then you get Reagan.
And so it's a very serious thing, because we knew all of that
when we hired him, in some way. And if we are so co-dependent
as a nation that we'll hire this man who didn't go through the
"adult children of alcoholic work," or whatever that is, that
doesn't speak well for our future.
MOYERS: This is territory I'm not very competent to enter, but
America never really has come to terms with the shadow of its
past.
BLY: that's right.
MOYERS: The Indians, the blacks.
BLY: We didn't mourn over the death of the Indians, and we
didn't mourn -- I think, you know, Lincoln and Whitman, Lincoln
felt that mourning in Whitman, or Whitman in Lincoln. And they
did moderately well in mourning the Civil War. But after that,
it's been a process of not mourning, you know. Alexander
Mitschlich in Germany has written a boot called The Inability to
Mourn, about the Germans, after the Second World War. Now,
we're in that same situation. We have an inability to mourn.
So again, you see, how can we have men or women if we can't go
into grief at all?
BLY: [at gathering] There's one great book on the men's
question, the only one I know that's really great. It's by a
German analyst, Alexander Mitschlich, M-I-T-S-C-H-L-I-C-H, just
put all the s's and ch's you can get into it, that'll do it. He
doesn't fool around. He doesn't say we have a society that has
a weak father, we have a society that has an absent father. He
says we've got a society without the father, period.
So I'll give you two ideas out of his book. The first one
really amazed me. I read this about 15 years ago, and it
astounded me. This is what he said: "If you are not with your
father at all times of the day, and at all times of the year, a
hole will appear in the son's psyche. And that hole does not
fill with little Bambis, and Walt Disney movies. It fills with
demons." That hole in the son's psyche fills with demons, and
those are demons of distrust of older men.
Like when I was a younger poet, my father was alcoholic, as I
said, so therefore there was that hole in me there, and the
times he was with the bottle. Is that clear? And it's very
interesting. I started a literary magazine. The first thing I
did was attack all the older male poets. I noticed I left the
older women alone, but the older male -- zoom, I went for them,
and I got my bow and arrow out, and when arrow went right
through their bodies it felt really good, boy. Choom.
And it wasn't until 10 years later, I looked at it and said,
"God, that is weird." And it caused them pain. I didn't give a
damn. Caused them a lot of pain. So you've got to look in your
own soul and see what effect these demons have had on you. And
if you do not have the trust of the older men, then you'll tend
to go to women and get all -- get whatever you want from women.
And that doesn't work too well, because there are certain things
that women cannot give. Do you understand me, what I'm saying?
They try, they really do, but there are certain kinds of
assurances that we can only get from older men, that you cannot
get from women. Then we blame the women for not giving us, they
feel guilty, etc. etc. etc.
You cannot kill demons. It's an old tradition. For example,
Marie Louise van Franz says that every woman now, after the
patriarchy, has a small figure on her left shoulder, about an
inch and a half tall, who says to her: "You know something,
you're nothing. You're absolutely nothing. You're totally
worthless. You'll never make works of art. You know why?
Because you're a woman, and all women are nothing."
And she describes this little figure as a demon. And I heard a
bunch of women say to her one day, "Ms van Franz, can you kill
this little demon?" She said, "No, no, you can't kill them; all
you can do is educate them."
BLY: To be a man means that you need to develop the warrior,
which means that you are not always obeying the body. Robert
Moore of Chicago, who is doing wonderful work on the warrior and
the king, I heard a tape of his and he said, "All of you who in
graduate school, if you don't have the warrior, you're going to
be in trouble, because you have to do a lot of unpleasant things
in graduate school." And he said, "I'm writing a book; if I
don't have the warrior, I'm not going to finish this book."
MOYERS: The warrior enable us to--
BLY: To go-- when the body says, "let's quit and get some
Haagen-Dazs," the warrior says, "No, no, no, no." And your
body's okay when you're getting a massage, right? "For now,
we're going to do the task, and we're going to continue."
Joe Campbell had a great warrior. In his 20s he read nine hours
every day. That's the warrior that enables him to do that. So
the warrior in men is not always the one that's out there
killing people. That's not it. It's the one who is able to
pursue a task until it's finished. And the warrior usually has
a cause transcendent to himself.
MOYERS: Transcendent to himself? Which means, "I will do it
even if I can't explain it to other people."
BLY: Yes. "I'm not doing it for my good, I'm not doing it for
selfish reasons. I'm doing this for a cause that I believe in."
The traditional way it's said is that the warrior works for the
king, and the king is the one that's connected to the sun, and
to the spirit and to God. So that when the warrior, as in our
culture, has no king, like Ollie North, then he gets in trouble.
You know, the Japanese tell the story about the -- it was a
little pond, and the leader of this pond, I don't know,
disappeared. So they hired the heron to be the king. And the
heron ate up everyone in the pond. Because he was a warrior, he
wasn't a king. The warrior will eat up everyone in the pond if
he doesn't have a transcendent cause.
So about the Americans, the Americans are very weak in the
warrior now, the American men. The Japanese men were strong in
the warrior during the Second World War, and they somehow
transferred that into their briefcases and into their VCRs. And
so we don't have warriors to stand up against them, even in the
business world.
Robert Moore, again on the warrior, has said wonderful things,
like, "The only warriors we have in the United States are the
negative versions of it, the shadow versions, who are the
druglords." They're the ones. We need warriors in the city who
are able to stand against the druglords. But instead of that,
we have only negative warriors.
MOYERS: But when you use the word "warrior," most of the people
watching and listening are going to say, "Oh, he means the
slayer, the combatter,"
BLY: No, the warrior, in general terms, is not sent out there
in order to harm of damage others. The warrior is a defender of
the boundaries.
When you live in a dysfunctional family, then people in the
family cross your boundaries all the time. They will open the
door, they will say things, their mood is the strongest in the
house, your moods mean nothing. You understand what I'm talking
about?
MOYERS: Right. Okay.
BLY: And when you're three and four years old in relation to
grownups, you have no boundaries. They simply do what they
want. And the sexual abuse means-- really means, you know, that
didn't happen to me in a strong way, but it means you open the
door and go in. There's no way you can -- you have no
boundaries. So that the adult man and the adult woman needs to
have a warrior so that they can hold the boundaries.
So that one way that I see it now is, when we're three and four
years old, the doorknob's on the outside of the door. Now, I
have to understand I'm not three to four years old now, I'm a
grown person. And if I want to get the doorknob on the inside
of the door, I will. If I do not wish to be shamed. That's my
choice. But the hardest thing is to realize you're not four
years old.
So therefore, with my father, I do not want or need to be shamed
by him any longer. Well, that means that there has been some
movement to get the doorknob on the inside of the door. That's
the negative warrior. That's the one that's without the king.
But each of us needs our warrior desperately.
Women have a very fierce warrior in them, you know. They have a
very fierce warrior. And I would say that the women, in the
last 20 years, have a much greater sense of their own boundaries
than the men do.
So, you know, I have felt that the men have suffered a great
deal in losing the wild man, which is a certain form of
spontaneity connected with the wilderness itself. And they've
suffered a great deal since the Second World War in losing the
warrior. It's very strange how this works.
We gave up the king, that is, we founded our country with
getting rid of the king. And you know, the king is weak in
American men also; how can it be otherwise?
MOYERS: The king being--
BLY: The king-- the part of the man that determines what he is
going to do now. What my course is going to be.
MOYERS: The king can decide that for himself. That's the whole
image--
BLY: This is the inner king, the one who's down there, who
decides. And when he comes in-- "Follow your bliss," is what
Joe Campbell said. That means that the king decides that. You
don't join IBM and then do what your boss want you to do. That
means there's only one king in the whole thing, and that's the
boss, and everybody else is a non-king.
MOYERS: It's the way the world works.
BLY: Yeah, it's the way it works. That's the way it destroys
inner kings in all of the men and in most of the women. So the
king, then, is that part of you that can decide. And I mean
it's very private, too, because there are various kinds of
kings.
When I am with a group of over 200 people, my king is fairly
strong. I'll decide what I want to happen that day. When I'm
with three or four people, my king is moderately strong, but
they can still drag me off to a movie I don't want to go to.
When I'm with one person, my king is rather weak. And I think
that's because of all those crossing of boundaries and so on
when I was a child. So that if I go in, for example, with my
wife into a store, and there's two sweaters, one is green and
the other is a blue, I can't decide. An I say to her, "What do
you think?" She says, "Oh, the blue is beautiful." Immediately
the green fades into some hideous color. You understand me?
MOYERS: I do, but I'm troubled by the analogy, because we can't
go back to being an aboriginal society. We can't become a
traditional society again. We cannot restore those images that
were transferred to the boy through the initiation. Can we?
BLY: No. But we have a much stronger, resilient man once he
goes through the process. They'd produce a rather brittle one,
I think. It's for a purpose, you know, to protect them from the
neighboring times. But-- so, we're not saying that all of that
is good. What I'm saying is that we can't go on any longer
without trying to do initiation consciously. We can't go on any
longer without trying to be conscious of that which affects us.
Because each generation, the men are farther and farther
separated from the grandfathers and from the kings and from the
inner warriors, and so they're weaker in some way in every
generation.
MOYERS: Who is telling us today that we are men? Who is in
charge of the initiation?
BLY: One of the things it said, if you do not do the initiation
consciously, you will do it unconsciously, 'cause it'll take
place.
MOYERS: Aren't we initiated as men by the sergeant in the army,
by the--
BLY: No! No, no, no.
MOYERS: --corporate executive we take our first jobs from, by
the professor at the university?
BLY: To some extent. But the sergeant is not the equal of the
old male initiators, because he's not interested in your soul.
MOYERS: In your soul?
BLY: In your soul. He's interested in your not dying, or he's
interested in your physical health, or he's interested in your
obedience. But the old male initiators we're talking about --
King Arthur would be one -- is interested in the soul of the
young man. That's what the young men are missing, that there
aren't any older men who are interested in their souls.
MOYERS: And you mentioned King Arthur. He was a mentor to the
knights, he was the one who stood at the gate.
BLY: Yes. You could say that a beautiful thing -- see, one of
the ways to think about a male initiation, it goes in this way,
possibly. The first stage is bonding with the mother, and
separation from the mother. We do the bonding with the mother
pretty well in this country. We don't do the separation well at
all. There's no ritual for it.
Secondly, bonding with the father and separation from the
father. Now, we don't do the bonding with the father well.
What did Jeffery Gore say in The Americans? He said, "In order
to become an American, it's necessary, first of all, to reject
your father." That's about all that is necessary. You don't
even attack him, as in Freud; you just regard him as ridiculous,
as in all those movies that we're seeing, and all the filmstrips
and all the situation comedies in which the men are -- the
fathers are completely ridiculous. You know those?
MOYERS: Sure.
BLY: All over television. The father is a fool and the woman
is a wonderful person and knows everything, and the father --
the man is in bad shape, you know, and he -- the woman says,
"You should have Comtrex." And he says, "What is Comtrex?" She
tells him what it is. You mean the man doesn't know what
Comtrex is? So there is this feeling in which, all over the
situation comedy, the young males writing that are rejecting
their fathers over again in order to become real Americans.
Okay. So the second thing is bonding with the father and
separation from the father. In a culture in which you reject
the father automatically, as in America, oftentimes you don't
become bonded with your father until you're 40 or 46. That's
what I told you in my story.
MOYERS: Well, how do you bond with a father who's absent all
the time, who goes off to the office eight, 10, 12, 15, 30 miles
away?
BLY: Sometimes you have to wait until he's 63 and he's home.
It's not easy. The men that I know say they're 50 years old,
they're 45 years old. The call up their father and he's saying,
"Here's your mother," and they say, "Wait a minute," you know,
"I'm going to take you down to New Mexico, we're going to go
down to New Mexico for five days." "No, I don't want to."
"Yes, you're going to go, I'm going to pay for it and we're
going to go." Well, that's a bonding that sometimes takes place
with their father there. The son has to do it. The son has
to make the motion.
MOYERS: That's the stage of bonding, that's a part of it.
BLY: Bonding with the father. And after that you still have to
do the separation. Then the third stage is called the
appearance of the male mother.
MOYERS: The male mother?
BLY: The male mother. That is a man who does nurturing in a
similar way as a woman, only he's not a woman. King Arthur
acted that way for those young men.
MOYERS: What doe he do?
BLY: Cuts his arm and gives them the blood. He nourishes them
and nourishes their souls. So this is like -- Pablo Casals was
a wonderful male mother.
MOYERS: Yes.
BLY: Every jazz musician -- every black jazz musician in this
century has had a great male mother. 'Round Midnight was about
that. You remember, the first scene of 'Round Midnight, he
walks into a hotel room in Paris, and you don't know what's
going on. And the black musician stands there a long time. And
finally someone says, "Is this where he died?" And he says,
"Well, I guess so, but these rooms all look so much alike,"
That was the room where his male mother, his mentor, his male
mentor had died.
MOYERS: Well, you're talking about a mentor, you're just
using--
BLY: We're talking about a mentor.
MOYERS: You're just using the phrase mother as a metaphor.
BLY: Male mother. I'm using it -- I mean a mentor. And so
King Arthur was a mentor to those young men, and when the male
mother or the mentor comes along and helps the young male to
separate from his mother and from his father, because he has a
man who is not his father who is acting to him both as a mother
and a father. That's the third stage.
MOYERS: Wordsworth has this wonderful poem in which he talks
about the old man who sat under the tree.
BLY: You found that, too?
MOYERS: Yes, he-- the old man sits under the tree, and he says,
"He picked me out from all the rosy boys and I became a comrade
for life."
BLY: I couldn't believe that passage when I read it. And he
was in grammar school, and an old man there at the edge of town
would talk with him every day. And Wordsworth, at the end, say,
"I think he had the greatest mind in England." Do you remember
that? Because he had given that boy so much. So that's a
perfect example. That's how you produce a Wordsworth.
MOYERS: Where do we get our mentors today?
BLY: I tell the men, you know, you have to look for it. Your
father came to you, you didn't have to look for your father, but
you have to look for your mentor. If you want a mentor, you
have to go look for him. That means that usually he's in your
field, but not always. If you're an architect, you go and look
for a male mentor.
You know, I met Szent-Gyorgyi, I stopped to see Szent-Gyorgyi one
day, the one who invented vitamin C, got three Nobel prizes.
And I said to him -- he was living alone in Woodstock, and he
told me various things, and he said: "When I got out of graduate
school, I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. I would have
walked 150 miles to work with this man, and I did. I worked
with him, I loved him." And he said, "I've been her 30 years.
Not a single American man has ever come and wanted to work with
me." I said, "Well, maybe they're not interested in ideas."
"They're not interested in ideas!" he said. "You know what
they're interested in? Retirement plans!" He was a wonderful
old man.
But he was waiting to be a mentor, a male mother, to young
American scientists, and they didn't know the tradition and they
didn't go to him.
MOYERS: But in these traditional cultures, when these older men
played this role for young men, what were the older men? What
were the male mothers doing for the boys?
BLY: When the male mother is there, and the mentor is there,
one thing he does is bless the young men. And it's so strange,
that men need blessing from older men. Robert Moore, I heard
him say in a tape, "If you're a young man, and you're not being
admired by an older man, you're being hurt." I like that a
great deal.
So that many women bless young men, but the man still needs a
blessing from an older man. You know, I heard Robert Moore say
it to a group of men: "How many of you have admired a younger
man in the last two weeks, and told him so?" Silence. "How
many of you were admired by older men when you were young?"
Silence. Then he said that sentence, "If you are a young man
and you're not being admired by an older man, you're being
hurt."
BLY: [at gathering] Robert Moore, from Chicago, is a wonderful
man. He's beginning to do work with men. He's got about 11
degrees. And I heard him the other day. And one of the things
he said, "Men do not learn except in ritual space." I was
astounded at the idea. "Men do not learn except in ritual
space." And he said, "I know from talking to the men who have
been there that you set up a ritual space." How-- you don't know
how you do it, but it's done. And partly it's done because no
women are there, partly it's done because it's in the woods,
partly it's done because older men are there.
Now we take all the older men we have, over 60, we put them all
in the front row. You can imagine how that helps with ritual
space. These men that I used to ask to sit in the front here,
they had never been honored as an older man in their whole life.
They couldn't believe it.
1st MAN AT GATHERING: Can we do that now?
BLY: Should we do it? Let's do it. All the men over 55, would
you come up here and sit down in the front row? [applause] Will
you come down? Come on over here.
I told Bill a story last night -- that we did one up in upstate
New York in July last year, at the old Shaker colony. It was
very interesting. We were up in the old hill where the Shakers
used to have their stuff. We had about 85 men, and they had a
big tent up there, it was a big tent.
So we were in this tent for six days. About the fourth day, we
started to go into fathers, and so on. And the young men were
very good, and they started to be very open and talk a lot, and
pretty soon the younger men were weeping and with their fathers.
And a lot of weeping went on in the fourth and the fifth day.
On the sixth day, which was the last morning, we had the old men
here in the front. And there was a wonderful man who was --
Heinz was his name, Heinz. And he was 75. And he was in the
heron clan. We had herons. And we had a -- we usually get a
samba going, and everybody dances for five or six hours. And the
heron clan were brought in at one point to dance. And they
don't know how to dance.
Suddenly, Heinz stopped the whole thing and Heinz started to do
the heron dance. You know, it took him five minutes. All the
young men broke off immediately, and went behind Heinz, and they
did the heron dance. So beautiful. He knew how to do the heron
dance. And he did that gorgeously. And suddenly, all the young
men were following him. He was doing the heron dance that
night.
The next morning, we were sitting here, and all of a sudden
Heinz had-- his wife had died three months before, and he hadn't
wept for her. Because, you know, people don't weep much at
funerals. And he had been given permission by the younger men
to weep. And suddenly he started to weep, and he walked up --
and another man was over here, 78, whose wife had died three
years before, and he hadn't wept for her, either. And he got up
and went over, and those two old men started to hold each other
and weep, and they wept for 20 minutes. And the young men just
sat there, and we did a little chant while these two old men
wept. That's ritual space, isn't it?
MOYERS: You talk about the old men giving the young men "Zeus
energy."
BLY: Ah-hah.
MOYERS: What do you mean, "Zeus energy?"
BLY: Well, the way that the king is described in Greek
mythology is through the image of Zeus. And Zeus energy is
authority that the male, that the man takes for the sake of the
community. The American Indians in upstate New York, for
example, had a strong chieftainship. The chief was chosen by
women, but once the chief was chosen, he had to agree to give up
all property. He had nothing that was his. And the authority
that he had was for the sake of the community.
Now, that's -- we don't have Zeus energy in the corporations,
because they take authority for the sake of their corporation,
they take power for the sake of their corporation. Exxon takes
power for the sake of the corporation, not for the sake of the
environment.
MOYERS: Where did you get your Zeus energy?
BLY: I don't know if I have any Zeus energy. It could be I just
have a big mouth, you know. That's always a possibility.
MOYERS: No, I happen to know that there are a lot of young
writers and artists and students who look to you as a mentor.
BLY: Men didn't trust me until I was maybe 45 or 50. And I
don't know what that was I noticed it. They were right. So
that--
MOYERS: They were right not to trust you?
BLY: -- whether it was-- they were right not to trust me,
that's right.
MOYERS: Why?
BLY: If I don't have a connection with my father, where's my
grounding? If I don't have a connection with grief, where's my
grounding? So somewhere along the line, because of various
disasters in my life, I must have gotten in touch with some sort
of grief, and then I've done a lot of work to try to maintain my
connection with my father and deepen that. And--
MOYERS: But you--
BLY: -- I thing that's something there, I don't know what it is
yet.
MOYERS: --Robert, how can a 46-year-old man bond with his
father after those long years of estrangement?
BLY: I wrote a poem on that subject, and it said:
There must have been
a fire, that nearly
blew out, or a large
soul inadequately
feathered, who became
cold and angered.
Some four-year-old boy
in you, chilled by
your mother, misprized
by your father, said,
"I will defy, I will win
anyway, I will
show them."
When Alice's (that's my mother) well-off sister
Offered to take your two
boys during the Depression,
you said it again.
Now you speak the defiant
words to death.
This four-year-old
old man in you does
as he likes: he likes
to say alive.
Through him you
get revenge,
persist, endure,
overlive, overwhelm,
get on top.
You gave me
this, and I do
not refuse it.
It is
in me.
So that I realized, then that my father gave me this, "I will
defy, I will win anyway," and that's a gift. It's not the gift
I wanted. My father -- my other father was Yeats. He was my
male mother. He wasn't alive, but your mentor doesn't have to
be alive. Does that make sense to you?
MOYERS: What does a male mother do that the father doesn't do?
BLY: The father cannot do initiation well with the son because
there's too much tension. They're both interested in the same
woman. That's a problem. [laughter] And when men recognize that
their father-- when the initiators are gone, then there's no one
to welcome the young men into the male world. And all young men
are angry about that.
When you're looking at a gang, you're looking at young males who
have no older men to welcome them into the male world. They're
trying desperately to do it themselves. They're trying to teach
each other what courage is, how much pain you should endure,
what a cause it. They're trying to do it; it doesn't work,
because young males cannot initiate each other. But they're
angry at the absence of the older males who are not doing that.
Well, when this group of old male initiators disappears, then
everything falls on the father. The father's supposed to do
everything. And when the young men that I talk to realize that
their father could not have done that, then they begin thinking
of the things their father did to try to initiate them.
Oftentimes they are touched, they weep when they think of the
possibilities.
MOYERS: So when the older men--
BLY: Our father was only intended to keep us through the age of
35 and make sure we didn't get eaten by ants and stuff like
that. He was never intended to initiate us.
MOYERS: And when the father is gone, as happens so often in
America today, often it's just a single mother who is left to do
it all, the initiation and--
BLY: That's right, and women try very hard with that. And I
remember, I said at the thing in Evanston, I said: "You know, a
woman can bring the boy from the fetus to be a boy, but she
cannot move him from a boy to being a man. Only other men can
do that." And some of the women got angry, and another woman
said, "I think he's right, because when my boy was in high
school, I knew that he needed something harder than I could give
him, and if I did that, I'd lose my own femininity."
So it's just to say that women try very hard with this, and it's
hopeless. They cannot really guide a boy all the way to being a
man. That's a job for the men to do. And if a woman is in that
situation, then she should recognize that, and try to find some
older man that she trusts, and ask him to hold the boy in his
heart. It isn't necessary that he take the boy to the zoo every
other day, but many young men do not know a single older man who
encourages them, or holds them in their heart.
So to some of the men who come to my things, I say: "This next
year, you're not going to pay me with money. What I'd like you
to do is to go out and find a young man who doesn't have any
father in the house. I'd like you to hold that boy in your
heart. Which means that you may write him once a month, you
may take him somewhere once a month. He knows that he has a
heart-link through you with the male world."
And that's a responsibility that the men have got to take in
this country. They've got to take more responsibility for the
younger men, for encouraging the younger men, admiring the
younger men and holding the younger men in their hearts.
MOYERS: How do we get in touch with the male mother that's in
us? How do I find in me the male mother that serves another
young man?
BLY: I would think that, first of all, one would consciously
reject the idea that all men are in competition. In business,
that is the primary assumption, and in fact, it happens, so that
there are very few genuine male mothers in business. There have
been exceptions, of course, but-- I would say that first of all,
I never realized that younger men needed anything I had to give
them.
MOYERS: Except a job.
BLY: Yeah, that kind of -- I didn't realize that they are
hungry and thirsty for a simple connection to an older man
that's not shaming. What are the older men saying? "Clean up
your room!" Right? "You did this wrong, you have to stay after
school!" "You're foolish, stupid!" And then they go to women
for comfort.
But what if they could go to older men for comfort? Then the
women wouldn't be so burdened with all these aspirins and stuff.
I think it'd be a great relief to women, when the men could go
to other men for comfort. So I have to realize that by being an
older man, I have some substance that's helpful to younger men,
and then I also have to realize that I can perform something for
them without intending to, by being consciously aware that they
need to step from the father to an older man to God.
And I'm not a guru, because I'm not going to -- I'm not that.
People say to me, you know, "Will you -- can I be -- will you be
my father?" I say, "If it doesn't cost me anything." You know,
I'll think about it. But it isn't anything I do, that I -- you
understand me.
MOYERS: Yes.
BLY: That you just have to agree that that's an important
thing, as is supporting your family, or loving your wife or
protecting the earth. A fourth important thing you can do is to
be open to the younger men, and recognize that they can use a
blessing from you.
And the way it's done in a place like Russia, where the toast is
so fantastic, the toasts, and when they do toasts at the dinner
table, they all toast the younger men. Now, the idea is that
they have to see that younger man clearly. No lying, no
flattery. They have to be able to see there. And then, at the
same time, do some praise, there. So--
MOYERS: Do some praise?
BLY: --do some praise. Blessing is a form of praise. Remember
what Robert Moore said? "How many young men have you admired in
the last two weeks, and told them so?
MOYERS: [at gathering] Are you confused about what it is to be
a man today, of what the society expects of you as a man?
2nd MAN AT GATHERING: Well, I've gotten a whole lot of
contradictory signals in my life, Bill, and I'm-- you know, it's
to be Superman and Superwoman, to be the best parent, to be the
best child, to be the best person, to be everything to everybody
and then it still never seems to be good enough.
3rd MAN AT GATHERING: I feel safer talking with men than I do
with women, in kind of in this vein, that I can tell you what I
think about you, and if it hurts you, somehow that doesn't -- it
doesn't affect me. But if you're a woman and I told you
something that hurt you, then somehow I'd be responsible for
hurting you. But if you're male, take it, you know.
4th MAN AT GATHERING: We're all so afraid of women. And I
don't know why that is. That's an interesting discovery to make
after so many relationships. And right now I do feel a little
safer with men, and I don't have an explanation for that.
5th MAN AT GATHERING: As males, you grow up with your emotional
experience centered on women. And-- yeah, that's right, and all
the political and economic and military power in the world
doesn't erase that dependency. And so one feels hamstrung
sometimes in the presence of this kind of womanly power.
3rd MAN: And we deal with that at home, we deal with females at
home, but we don't ever have other males, with the exception of
our sons, we don't ever have other males that we can talk that
about. But I can talk to my wife about the female point of
view, and that. But very seldom do I get together with guys and
talk about it.
6th MAN AT GATHERING: I realize that I desperately want to heal
my relationship with my father, and it's very difficult for me,
and I see a lot of issues in my life that I become frustrated
with, with myself, and I blame myself a lot. And now I realize
my dad is-- as strong as my feelings are for and against him,
still very important to me. And I do much better with that when
I realize that there are other men that also have that as an
important issue in their lives.
7th MAN AT GATHERING: For some of us, the problem is all the
more poignant; our fathers have died. How do we resolve that?
And I can feel it in my voice, my voice is changing now as I try
to express it.
MOYERS: Why do you think your voice is changing?
7th MAN: Because of the emotion. I mean-- thank you.
MOYERS: What do you need to heal with your father?
7th MAN: I'm not sure where it is. Tried to show love and was
rejected, and tried to seek advice and it was a putdown.
2nd MAN: Well, one of the reasons I came was because there
seems to me to be, for years, and incredible lack of strong men,
clear men, powerful men in this world. And Robert Bly is one of
those men of power.
8th MAN AT GATHERING: Amen.
2nd MAN: And I really-- I always grew up believing that nature
abhorred a vacuum, and what I see is that we've gotten so close
to a complete vacuum of powerful male men in this world, male
models of clarity, initiated men, that we are trying to
rediscover fire. And that is the quest.
MOYERS: [not at gathering] Are you aware that some people say
this is a throwback, a regression to the segregation of the
past, to the time when men had their own private clubs and could
talk about things without worrying about anybody catching on to
their secrets, tat this is a throwback?
BLY: I don't think it's that way at all. Women learn that they
will say certain things when men are not present. Women will
talk about certain things when men are not present. And that's
surely true of men, because the sexes can shame each other so
easily. So for the men getting near their grief, it's really
important that it be done in the presence of men.
MOYERS: Are you--
BLY: So it isn't an attempt to exclude women in that sense at
all.
MOYERS: --you think that men have a harder time with
relationship than women?
BLY: I think that men cannot mix words with feelings as well as
women. And this has been known for a long time. But sometimes
the fury of the male happens because the woman is able to go
ahead of him, go ahead of him, finishes his sentences for him,
goes on ahead. And he cannot do it. The mix isn't there. It
takes him a long time to learn how to do that, 40 or 50 years.
The woman can often do it at 14. And some of the rage of men
has to do with that. So it's important for men to be together
in expressing their feelings at their own pace, which is slower
than women's pace. At their own pace, and then eventually they
come down into grief and they come down into some other place.
And the amount of feeling on the fourth day of a men's group
alone is unbelievable, fantastic to someone who hasn't been
there, that the -- they will show more feeling and amaze
themselves with the depth of their feelings. And many times
they wouldn't have shown that to a woman. Later they can do so.
MOYERS: What does all of this have to do with poetry?
BLY: Well, you know there are two kinds of men's groups. In
one kind of men's groups you use psychological jargon, which is
okay, but those men's groups usually end up complaining about
their wives for three months, and then it stops. The other kind
of men's groups in which they use mythology and fairy stories--
the fairy stories were in this territory long before us, and
when you go into the male area through the fairy story, you find
that many men have had this suffering long before you.
So therefore mythology, I have found, to be wonderful in
teaching, in teaching -- in trying to teach. To use story and
mythology.
MOYERS: Fairy tale in particular?
BLY: Yeah.
MOYERS: Why?
BLY: Well, they're not connected to any one god. You see, a
fairy tale and a myth are alike, but the difference is that the
name of the god is not mentioned in the fairy story. So
therefore it's a social form, and can be told with jokes or in
any way, but it still contains all the energies and the genius.
So, as for poetry, Gary Snyder said a wonderful thing. "The
function of the poet is to fine out what part of the mythology
is useful in his lifetime." Milton did that. He made the wrong
choice, in my opinion, but that's what he did. So therefore the
old connection to the poet with mythology is centuries and
centuries old. The poet is not connected primarily only to the
lyric poem or the poem of feeling, but he is someone who filters
the available mythology.
And people have praised me for what I have done with the men;
it's nothing but finding a couple of fairy stories that are
useful. That's all it amounts to.
BLY: [at gathering]
After a long walk in the woods clearcut for lumber,
lit up by a few young pines,
I turn home,
drawn to water, A coffinlike band
softens half the lake,
draws the shadow
down from westward hills.
It is a massive
masculine shadow,
fifty males sitting together
in hall or crowded room
lifted something indistinct
up into the resonating night.
The woman stays in the kitchen, and does not want
to waste fuel by lighting a lamp.
as she waits for the drunk husband to come home.
Then she serves him
food in silence.
What does the son do?
He turns away,
loses courage,
goes outdoors to feed with wild
things, lives among dens
and huts, eats distance and silence;
he grows long wings, enters the spiral, ascends.
How far he is from working men when he is done!
From all men! The males singing
chant far out
on the water grounded in downward shadow.
He cannot go there because
he has not grieved
as humans grieve. If someone's
head was cut
off, whose was it?
The father's? Or the mother's? Or his?
The dark comes down slowly, the way
snow falls, or herds pass a cave mouth
I look up at the other shore; it is night.
MOYERS: [voice-over] From Austin, Texas, this has been "A
Gathering of Men," with Robert Bly. I'm Bill Moyers.
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