Robert Bly

Robert Bly is a well-respected American poet. How did he come to
write a self-help bestseller? Bly had been giving talks on mythology
to supplement his income, and found that the Brothers
Grimm tale "Iron John" hit a nerve with men. His resulting book
about this age-old story helped establish the men's movement, and his
seminars inspired its drum-beating, tree-hugging stereotype.
The modern man
In early seminars, Bly asked men to re-enact a scene from The Odyssey,
in which Odysseus is instructed to lift his sword as he approaches the
symbol of matriarchal energy, Circe. Peace-loving men were unable to
lift the sword, so fixed were they on the idea of not hurting anyone.
These were men who had come of age during the Vietnam war, and
they wanted nothing to do with a manhood that, to feel its aliveness,
required an enemy. In place of the single-mindedness of the 1950s
male, they had receptivity to different viewpoints and agendas.
The world is a much better place for these "soft males"—they are
lovely human beings, Bly admits—but such harmony-minded men are
also distinguished by their unhappiness, caused by passivity. Bly tried to
teach them that flashing a sword didn't necessarily mean that you were
a warmonger, but that you could show "a joyful decisiveness."
Iron John is about taking men back, through myth and legend, to
the source of their masculinity, and finding a middle path between the
greater awareness of the "sensitive new age guy" and the power and
vitality of the warrior.
The story
The Iron John story has been around in one form or another for thousands
of years. In a nutshell: A hunter answers a challenge from the kingto go to a part of the forest from which men don't normally return. The
hunter goes into the forest and his dog is taken by a hand that shoots out
of a lake. Slowly draining the lake with a bucket, he finds at the bottom
a hairy wild man, who is taken back to the town castle and imprisoned.
The king's son is playing with a golden ball when it accidentally rolls
into the cage holding the wild man. At length, the prince does a deal in
which he gets the ball back, but only after he has released the hairy man
in the cage. This deal marks the beginning of the boy's manhood: He is
willing to separate himself from his parents and retrieve his "golden ball"
(that alive feeling of youth) through discovering his masculine energy.
Who or what is a wild man?
Bly makes an important distinction between the wild man and the savage
man. The savage is the type who wrecks the environment, abuses
women, and so on, his inner desperation being pushed out on to the
world as a disregard or hatred of others. The wild man has been prepared
to examine where it is he hurts; because of this he is more like a
Zen priest or a shaman than a savage. The wild man is masculinity's
highest expression, the savage man its lowest.
A civilized man tries to incorporate his wildness into a larger self.
When the prince in the story risks all and goes into the forest with the
wild man, the parents simply think that their boy has been taken by the
devil; in fact it is a profound initiation, an awakening. Bly's message is
that the modern obsession with making childhood a cocoon of light
closes children off to sources of power. Addictions and psychological
disorders mirror society's inability to accommodate the "dark side."
Bly believes that New Age thinking about harmony and higher consciousness
holds a dangerous attraction to naïve men. Mythology beckons
us to enter fully into life, with all its blood and tears; the way we
achieve full realization of ourselves is to focus on "one precious thing"
(an idea, a person, a quest, a question) and the decision to follow it at
any cost is the sign of maturity. When we make a clear choice, the king
inside us awakens and our powers are finally released.
Re-awakening the warrior
Warrior energy, if not honored or channeled, ends up being expressed
as teen gang warfare, wife beating, paedophilia, and feelings of shame.If used rightly, it can become a source of delight to everyone in its
refinement. How else, Bly asks, can we explain the unconscious admiration
for a glorious knight or a man in a starched white uniform and
medals? This image represents the civilization of warrior energy.
The author also calls for the warrior spirit and occasional "fierceness"
to be used in relationships. He quotes psychoanalyst Carl Jung,
who said that American marriages were "the saddest around because
the man reserved all his fighting for the office." At home he was a
pussycat. Fierceness involves protecting what is rightfully yours, and
women want to know what a man's boundaries are.
Coming to ground
A man may spend his twenties and thirties as a sort of "flying boy"; in
his imagination, nothing can hold him down. But for a man to be made
whole, there has to be something that rips him open, a wound that
allows his soul to enter. In many myths, a wild animal gets close
enough to a young man to gore his leg; in the Iron John story, it is a
knight who chases after the prince and stabs him in the leg. As he falls
off his horse, the golden hair he has hidden from everyone underneath
the helmet is revealed. Until then he has seemed two-dimensional.
Appreciation of pain and sorrow, Bly says, is as vital to a man's potentiality
as is having the ability to soar through the air.
A hunger for the masculine
The male initiation ceremonies of all cultures form a deepening, a forced
discovery of the dark side. Women can't initiate men. In many cultures,
a boy is taken from the women who have so far managed his life and
made to live among older men for a while. Modern society has few
structures for initiation, and boys can spend their teenage years prolonging
their freedom, manifested in wild behavior, rudeness to parents (particularly
the mother), and clothing and music that attract attention.
Millions of men have grown up with an environment of feminine
energy—which isn't a problem in itself, but boys also need the masculine.
Men start to think more about their fathers as they get older, and
mythology has much to say about the heaviness of "entering the
father's house," leaving behind the expectation of lightness and comfort
to face grim reality. Bly says that Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance, isan elaborate metaphor for this process of moving from the mother's
side to the father's.
Colors of a life
In Iron John the prince, disguised as a knight, rides a red then a white
then a black horse. These colors have a logical symbolic progression in
relation to a man's life: The "redness" of his emotions and unbridled
sexuality in younger years; the "whiteness" of work and living according
to law; and the "blackness" of maturity in which compassion and
humanity have the chance to flower.
Bly comments that in the later years of his presidency, Lincoln was a
man in black. He had seen it all. No longer ruled by his emotions (red)
or some external set of principles or law (white), he had ceased to
blame and had developed a brilliant, philosophical sense of humor. You
tend to know a man who has begun to move into the black because he
is really trusted. There are no hidden corners, because he has fully
incorporated his shadow.
Final comments
Why has Bly's retelling of a fairy tale appealed to millions of western
men?
The Iron John story has been told around campfires for millennia.
Unfortunately, like an inheritance that lies uncollected, many men do
not know exactly what they have missed, but this book's impact suggests
that many overdue claims for genuine masculinity are now being
made—and women and the rest of society will be better off for it too.
Men who may laugh at a book like this are probably those who
need it most. The most destructive types tend to be those with the least
developed powers of self-examination, and women should welcome any
efforts to revive a forceful, but non-destructive, spirit of masculinity.
What Iron John has done for men, Women Who Run with the Wolves
(Clarissa Pinkola Estés) has achieved for women, and is highly
recommended.
Iron John bears reading twice or more, especially if you are unfamiliar
with mythology. This was Bly's first book of prose, but it includes a
good selection of his excellent poems.