This essay originally appeared in Plainsong. (Box U245 College Heights, Bowling Green, Kentucky 42101) in a special issue on Robert Bly, one of the best and most important poets in America.
These are comments made by Bly at the Great Mother Conference in Ocoee, Tennessee, June 1981. Bly started the Great Mother conferences in 1974 to explore female consciousness, the way of the goddess and the matriarch.
Thanks to the editors of Plainsong, and to Robert Bly, for permission to reprint this.
— Ed.
Object Poems
Every time a painter does a still life on an orange or a flower, he is doing a meditation on his body, that is an object. Rodin taught Rilke to concentrate on objects. Then about eight years later, after this discipline had sunk into him, Rilke understood the difference between writing “from inside” and writing from “out there” — which we could also describe as the difference between writing about my emotions and writing about an object that doesn’t belong to me. When you set yourself to become a servant of an object, the language can then become transparent.
Owen Barfield is an eighty-one-year-old lawyer in London, one of the geniuses, really, living. Linguists have discovered in the last twenty years that every word that we now use to describe an inner state once meant a physical action or physical body. For example, attract once meant “to pull a wagon.” A “spiritual” man is a breathing man. All of those words which describe our mental world were once words describing our body’s world.
Barfield’s book Poetic Diction, emphasizing that, is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read on poetry. He deals throughout with the question: “What is a metaphor?” Barfield says that what is necessary in writing poetry is, first of all, to go back to the history of language, so that you know what the physical root of the word is. This helps to purify your associations, or focus them, so that, when you use attract, we as readers will feel transparently behind it the original body perception. This says of course exactly what much psychology has said in the last twenty years, namely that the important act is to go back to your own body. Ask your body if you like a poem, instead of asking your head if you like it: if it’s bad, the body has already responded: “Ugh!” Of course, you can’t get a Ph.D. on that, but, nevertheless, as all poets know, that is the proper way to respond to a poem if it’s bad.
Ask your body if you like a poem, instead of asking your head if you like it: if it’s bad, the body has already responded: “Ugh!” Of course you can’t get a Ph.D. on that, but, nevertheless. . . . that is the proper way to respond to a poem if it’s bad.
The Need For More Discipline
I meet so many poets and so many musicians who sense that a time has come when more discipline would be helpful. Calvin Harlen, who was here a couple of years ago, teaches painting in New Orleans — he is a brilliant painting teacher. He said that recently, for the first time in many years, his students are asking for classes in figure drawing. There is a feeling that the lack of discipline so characteristic of the sixties does not answer the body’s needs now. One could say, for example, that the sixties destroyed a lot of Apollo energy, which is a luminous, disciplined energy. The sixties also encouraged Dionysus energy and falsified it at the same time. Ten rather neutral years intervened between the sixties and the eighties, and somehow I feel the culture needed the earth of those ten years in order to filter out the misrepresentations of Dionysus, or even of Demeter, that were so widespread in the sixties.
We always said there was something “Dionysian” about rock music, there’s something “Dionysian” about the “Stones.” Actually, from the point of view of the Greeks, their excitement is not Dionysus at all. It’s slob music. Dionysus is quite different. Dionysus has a thread of silence right down the center of his body: other people near him are excited, but he is calm. You can see that in all the sculptures or paintings of Dionysus left from ancient times.
I feel there’s a possibility now in the United States for some genuine kind of Dionysus work. Dionysus is impossible without discipline: and Nietzsche was wrong on that point — I mean wrong to make such a pointed opposition between Apollo and Dionysus. A lot of the material on those gods was not available, and he missed something. There is polarity there, but not contradiction. As a matter of fact, Apollo at Delphi gave six months every year to the performance of Dionysus ritual.
There’s a sense in poetry, too, that poets writing now long for more discipline than they’ve been offered. People are getting sick of simple syntax. Many students want to do more and don’t know how to do it, because we don’t have a master in that. Most of our masters in America have said, “Do less,” at least in language, or have been teachers of spontaneity.
Rilke doesn’t, in any way, make fun of the marvelous things that come to you by accident when you’re in your twenties and early thirties — oh, that’s so marvelous, all that wild, beautiful, intuitive stuff that comes. So he says,
Just as the winged energy of delight carried you over many chasms, early on, now raise the daringly imagined art holding up the astounding bridges. Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing living through and defeat of danger: miracles become miracles in the clear achievement that is earned. To work with things is not hubris. . . .
Understand that? So interesting! A lot of people don’t go on and work with things intensely as artists for fear they’ll be called “elitists.” Rilke says,
To work with this is not hubris when building the association beyond words: denser and denser the pattern becomes — being carried along is not enough.
Gorgeous! Because it’s so sweet as a poet just to be carried along — just to be carried along by what happens. You find a book, and this happens, and you find a tree, and that happens. And he says,
To work with things is not hubris when building the association beyond words. . . .
I think that’s the point we really have come to in poetry, of considering the possibility that poetry is something that takes place on the other side of words.
Take your well-disciplined strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles. Because inside human beings is where God learns.
He doesn’t say that you’re to do this “to help your fellow man.” He doesn’t give off the mood of Whitman. Whitman and Rilke are profound opposites. They don’t hate each other, but they involve profound polarities. Whitman said.
Beginning my studies the first step pleased me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, . . . The first step I say awed and pleased me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wished to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
There’s some kind of American arrogance in that, along with the sweetness. The idea that Walt Whitman at thirty-eight could understand with ease what intelligent people labor for eighty years, over centuries, to understand — well, in a certain way he did! That’s what’s so weird. From Rilke’s point of view, Whitman did understand it at thirty-eight, but what did he understand at forty-eight? How come he kept rewriting the same book? What would have happened had Rodin come up to him when he was about fifty and said, “Listen, Whitman, you understood this when you were thirty-eight. I want you to stop babbling about these long lists of animals and objects and look at one of them.” That’s what Rodin said to Rilke. It changed him.
Then I think Whitman would have gotten back his respect for inner work again. One of the amazing things in Rilke is the deep respect for European culture. Jung has it, too. There’s deep respect: “Philosophers and scholars can’t be all fools.” To read a good biography of Jung is rather depressing, in that one sees clearly the distinction between European and American culture. How can anybody come close to what he did? I understood that Jung is not Jung . . . he’s the city of Basel, Switzerland. When Jung walked as a boy to his high school, he might very well meet Burkhardt on the street, or the author of The Waning of The Middle Ages. Nietzsche lived in Basel. And our problem is, whom did we meet in Kansas City? Whom did Whitman meet in Long Island? It’s easy for Whitman to say, “I understand all philosophy,” because he never met a great scholar. I believe in study — we can approach that way the abundance of European genius. A wonderful thing about Americans is that we are strangely open to the ideas of these geniuses. In Europe, a group like this would already be fighting over definitions of words. In America, the openness is given to us in compensation for having been exiled from the sources of culture.
Moods And Poetry
Harry Martinson believes that a poem is made of moods — not of feelings, not of words. A poem is a mood! Learning to write poetry means learning what a mood is, and then learning to catch a mood when it arrives. Very delicate work, catching a mood. What do you do with a mood?
There are two possibilities: one can live out the mood, be angry for two hours, be irritable for four, be happy for six, or one can take some language and descend to meet the mood. If a mood comes and you do not reach down and bring up some language to meet it, some energy from the conscious mind disappears into the unconscious. Therefore, the person who lives by his moods loses energy constantly. But if a mood comes, and the human being dips down and brings some words up, and mingles the mood with human language, then a little bit of energy from the unconscious passes into the conscious where it will never be lost. So by meeting the mood with language, by writing, a little bit of energy from the unconscious emerges in a human form, and the writer has gained a little bit of energy that he or she will never lose.
Introduction To The Witch
Because of Freud’s and Jung’s work people are understanding certain details in Greek mythology that their parents and grandparents could not understand. Hillman made the remark that the Greeks did not have psychology — they had mythology; and he didn’t mean that the Greeks weren’t psychologists: they were, in fact, superb psychologists, who preferred to put what they understood in the form of a single detail added to a well known story.
Hephaestus, as you may know, did not have a father. Hera gave birth to him when she was angry with Zeus one day. Later, during a quarrel between Hera and Zeus, Hephaestus took the side of his mother, and Zeus got furious, picked him up, and threw him out. Hephaestus fell a long way down and ended with a wounded leg. So the man who is not conceived by his father will have a crippled leg. He isn’t firmly “on the ground” — legs are what touch the ground. And many of us have that wound from the father.
A friend, the psychologist James Scherer, calls attention to a marvelous detail of the story in his essay on “The Drummer.” What is Hephaestus connected with? Technology. Who started technology? Well, it was a man who was not conceived by his father. James Scherer in the same paper notices that Hephaestus had no male friends. Every one of these details is important. Do you know how many people in technology have very few close male friends? How few of us have close male friends?
When I was in Memphis this spring, I spent some time with Gordon Osing, a terrifically intelligent man who teaches in the English Department there. Some of you remember him! He attended the Conference a couple of years ago. He has been thinking about what happens to the males in universities. Gordon said, “Young males enter a university system, which is basically controlled by older males. But the older males often tend to shut out the younger male. They do it in various ways — by not inviting him to a party for two weeks after he comes, by making little remarks about the subject of his thesis: ‘Oh, yes, we’re in a time when even Jack Kerouac is considered a writer’ — all those little remarks. The young male often finds himself not accepted by the old men of the tribe.”
But in the tribal system, that we have all experienced for forty thousand years or more, the young male is taken away from his mother at twelve, and he doesn’t see his mother then for a year and a half. The older males take the boy to their ritual place, and there they welcome the young male into the male world. The older males tell him the old myths, give the secret history of the tribe, teach him male songs and ritual, and, in some tribes, even lead him through a second birth — from a constructed tunnel of branches — a male vagina this time.
But what happens in our culture? The young male tends to be exiled by the older males. So what does he do? He receives comfort from a woman. The woman does her best to give comfort, but in some way the young male doesn’t really need comfort at that point. That should be given by the male. The woman naturally responds with an urge to diminish the pain or to give him support: she sees how wounded he is, and how alone, but that comfort isn’t the right thing. He may get into the habit of having close relationships only with a woman. Gordon says, “Most of the university males that I know do not talk to other males. When they have something personal to say, they go to a woman, and they tell her.” The young male’s sense of rejection and loneliness gets deeper and deeper, and finally his idea is to go back and smash the whole thing! He starts saying nasty things about the head of the English Department. And that tension Gordon is describing — that’s all Hephaestus stuff. That young man will be walking on earth with a crippled leg. Such a young male can get an interest in technology. I’m not attacking technology, which has both good and bad sides, but commenting on how the Greeks included psychology in their mythology. It’s so interesting. Technology, among the Greeks, is described as something created by a man who has been exiled by other men.
We’re coming now into a time when the absence of the caring older male is becoming very visible: it is a painful area in the culture. The caring older male has been absent for fifty or sixty years, but it’s only being noticed now, which means that some change is apparently coming about in this area.
One can live out the mood, be angry for two hours, be irritable for four, be happy for six, or one can take some language and descend to meet the mood.
Let’s turn now to the witch. One slowly realizes that one doesn’t pick and choose among figures: what is said is that the whole mythology is important. Emphasizing Zeus and Hera alone is insufficient. Hephaestus has to come in; and no culture’s mythology is complete without the witch. But we notice that the witch does not play much part in New Testament mythology. That is in stark contrast to the testament around Krishna, where he begins dealing with giants and witches when he is only a few months old. And there are many tales telling of his run-ins with witches, as one side of “the dark.”
What we are calling “the darkness” and “going down into the dark” was represented among the Greeks partly by Pan. Pan had a cloven foot. Pan’s name is Everything, by the way. Everything has a cloven foot. Everything is sexy. Everything chases women through the woods. This whole concept frightened or disgusted the Christian fathers, and they didn’t know what to do with it for a long time. Meanwhile, the contact with the vigorous dark continued outside the Christian ritual. Certain elements in Greek myth and ancient Great-Mother ritual continued throughout Europe in the remembered rituals of “the horned-god religion.” The genius on that is Margaret Murray: and she wrote The Horned God, as well as The Witch Cult in Western Europe. It’s known, for example, that every great cathedral is built over a horned-god altar. Below Chartres, deep in its roots, there was a horned-god altar: and one reason for that is that the early religions had already identified the holy places.
Christianity changed one detail in its mythology around 1000 A.D., and that was to say that Satan, whom they had already identified with the dark stuff, has a cloven foot. That’s all they had to say. It was a great idea. Satan has a cloven foot: and we know that all horned animals have cloven hooves. So if a person found anybody dealing with a goat in the woods, he knew the devil was there. The Moral Majority appeared from the egg. The church began to frighten Europe: and with that detail it found the means to persecute the worshippers and wipe out virtually every remnant of the ancient religion in Europe. It’s called the Inquisition. Margaret Murray mentions that until late medieval times it was not unusual for a bishop in France to be a leader in the other religion as well. No one found this terribly unusual. He might be a bishop in the light and a bishop in the dark, and that would be fine. Everything was going along in its old way. But the Fathers decided to move, and it is interesting how the fire was concentrated on the witch.
Early Christianity failed to include the witch in its mythology and then, centuries later, took the witch concretely, as Joseph Campbell would say, and began to burn physical bodies. Since then we live in a culture in which the witch does not fill her proper or fruitful place in our mythology: and the term is used as a term of abuse — “Ahh, you’re a witch!” But we don’t say, “Ahh, you’re an Apollo!” “Ahh, you’re a Zeus!” No one says that.
What is the witch? The Ulanovs — a man and wife in New York — have been publishing articles recently on the witch, and they have suggested three characteristics of the witch — we don’t mean a person now, but the witch as an energy. First of all, there is something remote in the witch. She lives at the edges of civilized areas. Her hut is at the edge of the village, or in some far distant country, in the wild forest, or far off in Arabia in the center of the desert. Often she possesses that quality of remoteness and living at the edges of something.
The witch also has a tremendous amount of sexuality, but it is somehow twisted. We feel that’s right, too. It isn’t that she’s non-sexual. Her whole sexual area is very powerful, as we feel in Snow White: but it’s somehow been turned into an unfruitful form. One never really hears about the witch’s children or the witch’s love affairs. She mixes her potions and flies off on her broom — Saturday night, she flies off on the broom. She’s riding something, but it isn’t a man — it’s a broom.
The Ulanovs mention a third quality, very important: instead of feeding others, she eats. In mythology, the witch energy, which men also have, is felt as female in tone. One key to a part of the woman’s psyche is the labor of feeding children — psychically, physically, emotionally. And it’s so thin — this difference between feeding and eating! How many women say about a baby, “Oh, he looks good enough to eat! . . . Can I nibble at your toes a little bit? . . . Oh, that’s right, put your little hand in my mouth!” That is close. And all women laugh because they know it’s right there — there’s a thin curtain between feeding and eating. “And why should one put up with all these demands from this little squirt? You never get enough back. At least you could eat him!”
Thinking of these three characteristics helps us to understand how the witch is inside, not outside. When we feel distant, the witch is present.
Perhaps I should tell a small witch story for you. This is one of the stories collected by the Grimm Brothers.
Once upon a time there was a young girl, who often, on the way home from school, passed the house where Frau Trude lived, and she felt drawn to it. “Could I stop in one day and visit Frau Trude?” Her mother said no.
“Why not?”
“You’re not to visit Frau Trude’s house.”
“Oh, I think I’d like her all right. Why shouldn’t I visit her? Why do you tell me not to go to her house?”
Her mother said, “Don’t go . . . to Frau Trude’s house.”
Well, the daughter was one of these smart-ass daughters. So on the way home from school, she said to herself, “What do I care what my mother says? I’m an individual.” So she knocked at the door, and when it opened, she saw a man in black standing at the head of the stairs. Frau Trude invited her in. “Oh, come in, and sit down by the fire.” The girl said, “I felt a little frightened just now. I thought I saw a man in black standing at the head of the stairs.”
“Oh, that was nothing. That was the coal man come to deliver coal. Come and sit down by the fire.”
So she sat down.
“Have any other questions?” The girl said, “No,” and then the witch changed the girl into a log, and put the log on the fire. And the witch said, “Isn’t that a good log? Doesn’t she burn well!!”
That’s the end of the story.
In some stories the Jungians do not get their redemption motif in! Suddenly it’s all over. The witch is connected with transformation, but it may not always be a transformation that you’re crazy about.
Sometimes a tree, if nourished or loved, can turn into a person. Turning a person disguised as a piece of wood into a human is a positive transformation. Turning a girl from a human into a log and then burning her is. . . . I feel there are some women in the country now to whom this is happening. It happens in different ways. Sometimes the witch part of the mother does it alone, or the witch part of the father. I also meet many women who say they want to have nothing more to do with men, and perhaps they go to California and live in a commune, with women only, such as ten women living together studying earth rituals and the mother goddesses.
They assume the mother goddess is totally beneficent, but there’s no evidence for that in mythology. Perhaps they should approach the rituals with a little more fear. A human being can go too far into the patriarchy and be in trouble. But a human being can also start out too blithely on the road toward earth rituals and all that wonderful brown-bread stuff — but at the end of the road there can be Frau Trude.
If we had meetings with the witch energy in our daily mythology, we would all be more balanced. If the mythologists of the New Testament had invited the witch in, then when one went to church on Sunday one would hear: “Once traveling in Galilee Jesus met a witch. And he said to this witch, ‘Why do you live in a remote place?’ And the witch said. . . .”
The Swan
Something new came to me very recently. I’ve been realizing for a while that there’s a lot in the witch, for she belongs to that area of darkness that we tend to shy away from. I have been trying for five or six years to understand “The Six Swans.” I had been planning to teach it here for four to five years, but I can’t teach a story until I understand it, and every year I hesitated. I’ll tell you the first part of the story.
Once upon a time, a certain King was hunting in a great forest, and he chased a wild beast so eagerly that none of his attendants could follow him. When evening drew near he stopped and looked around him, and then he saw that he had lost his way.
He sought a way out but could find none. Then he perceived an aged woman with a head which nodded perpetually, who came towards him, but she was a witch. “Good woman,” said he to her, “can you not show me the way through the forest?”
“Oh yes, Lord King,” she answered, “that I certainly can, but on one condition, and if you do not fulfill that, you will never get out of the forest and will die of hunger in it.”
“What kind of a condition is it?” asked the King.
“I have a daughter,” said the old woman, “who is as beautiful as anyone in the world, and well deserves to be your consort, and if you will make her your Queen, I will show you the way out of the forest.”
In the anguish of his heart the King consented, and the old woman led him to her little hut, where her daughter was sitting by the fire. She received the King as if she had been expecting him, and he saw that she was very beautiful, but still she did not please him, and he could not look at her without secret horror. After he had taken the maiden up on his horse, the old woman showed him the way, and the King reached his royal palace again, where the wedding was celebrated.
The King had already been married once, and had, by his first wife, seven children, six boys and a girl, whom he loved better than anything else in the world. As he now feared that the stepmother might not treat them well, and even do them some injury, he took them to a lonely castle which stood in the midst of a forest. It lay so concealed, and the way was so difficult to find, that he himself would not have found it, if a wise woman had not given him a ball of yarn with wonderful properties. When he threw it down before him, it unrolled itself and showed him the path.
The King, however, went so frequently away to his dear children that the Queen observed his absence: she was curious and wanted to know what he did when he was quite alone in the forest. She gave a great deal of money to his servants, and they betrayed the secret to her, and told her likewise of the ball which alone could point out the way. And now she knew no rest until she had learnt where the King kept the ball of yarn; and then she made little shirts of white silk, and as she had learnt the art of witchcraft from her mother, she sewed a charm inside them. And once, when the King had ridden forth to hunt, she took the little shirts and went into the forest, and the ball showed her the way.
The children, who saw from a distance that someone was approaching, thought that their dear father was coming and, full of joy, ran to meet him. Then she threw one of the little shirts over each of them, and no sooner had the shirts touched their bodies than they were changed into swans, and flew away over the forest.
There are young males floating around the country who are soft, immaterial; they are flying, they are too spiritual. Do you understand me? In Jungian psychology they are called puerí, or “eternal boys” — I call them flying boys.
I myself was a swan up to the age of thirty-five or so. With many males the condition ends around thirty-five. But how does it begin? It happens most often to a younger son, or at least to a son who’s the favorite of his mother. Perhaps — as happens often now — if the mother’s sexual energy is not all being absorbed by her husband, then it’s possible that the mother’s sexual energy or some of it may be attracted by the son. The young male starts to soak it up through the eyes. Soon the mother wants him to do things, to be a hero, to be Parsifal. The important thing is that the mother’s sexual energy turns, and the ten or twelve year old boy feels it coming toward him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s not prepared. That is happening more and more, especially in houses in which there’s no man in the house. Almost all the women who are bringing up young males alone are in great danger of giving the males too much sexual energy. What happens, then, is that the young boy, unable to remain where he is, flies up. Apparently in the psyche the ground, the mother, and the unconscious are related. In fleeing from the mother, he leaves ground. He may go up to ten thousand feet and start cruising there. And he’ll escape from women his own age, as he escaped from his mother.
Suppose you’re a young woman, and a flying boy makes love to you — oftentimes if you’re in a relationship with a young male like that, the moment he makes love to you is, for you, a wonderful grounding thing, because you have both just touched . . . ground! But for him you know what ground is? “Ground is . . . my mother (Oh,God!).” Thum! It may take him a while to get back in the air, but the moment he made love to you is the moment he decided to leave. Soon he’s gone. Sometimes it takes two or three months, but he’s gone. This will happen over and over again, and the woman he left doesn’t know what’s happening. She thought that moment was terrific!
He doesn’t know what’s happening, either. He does not know why he suddenly has this impulse in the psyche — thoom! like this: “Turn!” But he turns. One day recently reading some early poems, I noticed that almost every love poem I wrote in my twenties was written at the moment I left. That’s the exciting time! The male is getting a little of his freedom back again, and it’s all mysterious. I mistook that moment for the love. Creepy stuff! And I was proud of myself for leaving. Did the heroic thing, yes, sir!
The young woman, then, may be left three or four or five times, and she has to learn to take it more impersonally than she would “by nature” . . . and visualizations like this help. Of course she herself may be a flying girl. . . .
I was the favorite of my mother, and I want to emphasize that the flying boy state has a positive side. If a young male is the favorite of his mother, certain creative energy is sparked in him, is fertilized by that heat coming down; and we notice that almost all young artists are flying boys, at least for a while. Joyce understood that. It’s important that creative energy be sparked. That sometimes happens to a girl if she is her father’s favorite daughter, or loved by the father. Oftentimes the creative energy — your father giving heat — will spark the creative impulse in you.
This is the visualization I have had: it helped me understand how the young male got up and floating. The activity of the mother, so to speak, forced him up. And I was happy with that. But some women have said to me, “That’s not . . . something’s wrong here. That doesn’t ring completely right, that the mother, by loving the son, would turn him into a flying boy. There’s something missing.”
Well, I saw it the other day. My mistake was that I assumed that only activity produces transformation, that the mother, by turning sexuality toward the son — that’s an active thing — makes him bounce up and fly around. But Marie Louise von Franz makes this remark, “Sometimes, if a mother is spiritually lazy, that laziness may turn the boy into a swan.” The witch is imagined by us as activity, furious activity, but that might happen only in a culture in which the witch image is in the forefront of the consciousness. That’s not the way it is with us. The witch has dropped down. In our culture it is possible that the witch appears in the form of inactivity.
I think spiritual laziness has something to do with the collective, and we need to distinguish a collective from a community. Communities will allow you to be wild. Indian tribes had their Heyokas. But a collective is more abstract and rigid. A small town is a collective: nobody is supposed to be wild: everyone is supposed to be boring.
Our mothers often have no opinions that are really opposed to the opinions of the collective. At the beginning of the Vietnam War my mother said to me, “Robert, what have you got against the Vietnam War?” And she realized that the people in my small town would be upset — as they did become — if I said what I thought.
My father, in some ways, is more independent of the collective. He did any damned thing that he wanted to — and of course in other senses he was tied to the collective.
To return to laziness, there is a contradiction between a personal religious life and immersion in the collective. We conclude that, if the mother is spiritually lazy, if she does not have a personal religious life, this inactivity itself turns the son into a swan. Did you see the witch take swan-shirts and throw them over the sons? Marie Louise says. “And what is a swan? From this point of view, we can say that the swan is a dehumanized, spiritual being.” The two adjectives are “dehumanized” and “spiritual.” So many boys in Indian ashrams or meditation centers are swans. Can you hear the sound of their wings? Flying through the air, they look gorgeous! Girls love ’em, they’re so out of it, they’re so away from the physical. And the women say, “Well, I want to go up there. Take me up there.”
“Well, come on up, it’s beautiful.”
Later the women notice that there’s a little lacking in the human area somewhere, but still they think: “Wow, a swan! What long necks! I’ve got a swan in my bed.” So swan-love is a temptation. But she finds that swans fly.
Lately I’ve made a distinction between the visible witch and the invisible witch. Certain women have told me that their mothers were very visibly witches: a lot of hostility, shouting, envy. In some ways the visible witch is relatively easy to deal with. The invisible witch is harder to deal with. When the witch appears invisibly in a mother, it takes the form of that spiritual laziness in which the mother has nothing but conventional opinions and no personal religious life. The son, then, is turned into the swan.
The mother is asking the son to live through everything she didn’t, including the spirituality: “Be completely spiritual. I want you to live my whole spiritual life. Become a swan. A human is too dirty and low. Be a swan. Be nothing but spiritual. Go to India!”
She may also say: “I obeyed the collective. Don’t do that. Just forget the collective. Disobey the collective.” I specialized in not stopping for stop signs: “I’m too special to stop for stop signs — much too special.” I usually parked where I wasn’t supposed to. I enjoyed sneaking into concerts if I could, rather than paying. Of course! I’m a special person. A swan is a special person, and he does not obey any rules, sensible or not sensible. When I got to be about forty, I noticed myself stopping for stop signs, and I knew it was an important step for me! My children could hardly believe it. I decided I might be raising my daughters to be swans, and my sons, too, by not stopping for stop signs. Everything the parent does has effect.
There are young males floating around the country who are soft, immaterial; they are flying, they are too spiritual. . . . I call them flying boys.
The swan complex is connected with allowing children to have a very long adolescence. Phillip Aries in Centuries of Childhood mentions that clothes especially designed for children are a very new development. In the middle ages children were dressed as small adults. That’s the way humans have done it for a hundred thousand years; it helps to teach the child that he’s to become grounded, and become an adult. The jean joints tell teenagers that they’re in a special category: “You’re a special person. You don’t have to pay taxes. You can have your own music, stupid as it is. You don’t have to study Mozart — you’re a special person.” And, of course, that’s encouraging them to be swans and never come down. It’s the luxury of a capitalist civilization that maybe half the young males in the country are swans now. Yes, it’s a luxury. Another way to look at it is to say that the whole thing is a sacrifice of young males, a witch sacrifice. The young males are being killed, sacrificed.
It’s important that the mother and father live out their sexual lives, their political lives, their personal religious lives. Here is a poem of Rilke’s on that subject:
Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.
What I’ve added to this poem is a discussion of the mother’s influences, what happens when your mother doesn’t live her personal religious life. That probably happened to them also. You know what he wrote about his mother a little bit later?
My mother lives in a narrow attic room and Christ comes there to wash her every day.
That’s a terrible sense of collectivized Christianity. And he ended up with a real hatred of Christ, which is a great weakness in his work, really. Part of it is because he got turned into a swan by his mother.
Religion And Spiritual Growth
Rudolph Steiner wrote a very interesting book called Christianity as Mystical Fact; and in it he mentions that a major difference between Christianity and the ancient religions is that the ancient religions in general laid out spiritual growth in stages, slowly.
When one went into the mysteries, all work moved in stages. As a mystery the work was connected with Demeter, because Demeter knew the way out. Demeter holds the grain. She knows this world of nature, and you pass through Demeter’s door in order to go out into a wild thing out there. In the mysteries everything apparently went slowly. Ten or fifteen years might pass before you were given a certain knowledge. In the beginning one went underground to water. The descent was immediate. One did not rise, as in Christianity. One went down.
Everything that was taught was secret. If you revealed anything, you could be killed; and in Greek times a number of people were killed, because they discussed the scenes or events that went on at the mystery ceremonies.
Everywhere you go in the ancient world you meet this — not only does growth go in stages, but the discipline of secrecy, mystery, and reserve has to be kept. What is so astonishing to me about Anna Akhmatova as compared, say, with Anne Sexton is that Anna Akhmatova stands for psychic privacy — the privacy of the woman when the baby is inside, some reserve that seems natural in pregnancy. Anna Akhmatova preserves that in her private life. She doesn’t babble everything, as the confessional poets did. (One could say, with great respect for them, that they are people who don’t understand Demeter’s mysteries and, therefore, are too public.)
Two things turn up. Everything moves by stages, and the privacy is very deep and must be kept. And one must not let someone like Whitman, who is a democrat, pull one out of that privacy. He urges revelation, even though, cunningly, he kept certain secrets of his own. (But he told everybody to tell everything.) “Watch what he does, not what he says!”
Steiner then suggests that early Christianity rejected that idea (of spiritual growth in stages) and became committed to the idea of instantaneous conversions. And that’s still going on with Billy Graham. From the point of view of Demeter, the reason that Billy Graham’s conversions do not mean anything is that these “conversions” go against the whole structure of the human psyche as experienced for four hundred thousand years. They happen for a second, like the great line of a poem. How about the rest of the poem? Nine hundred lines left to do!
The Middle Class
There’s a lively article in the recent Missouri Review written by Frederick Turner, who is an editor of The Kenyon Review. He’s English, a bit snotty, a bit lofty, but very intelligent. Turner claims there has been no great poetry written in English since the Second World War. Wham! He sweeps everything off the table. He maintains that our poetry lacks epic qualities, narrative quality, and the intellect; and it ignores the advances in science, and has a very narrow feeling and style range, besides. He’s right that poetry since the Second World War is narrow — the poets continue to carry T.S. Eliot’s grudge against science. I think he’s wrong to say that no great poetry has been written in the last thirty years, but that’s not the point. His article is an article of ideas, and the last point in his article is the one I want to come to.
In the last section of his article, he says roughly this: “All major poetry that we know from the past expresses the values of an entire social class, and not only the poet’s personal values.” To give an example, Parsifal does not embody the private value system of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The poem carries the values of an entire class, and its values included the ideals of knighthood, the power of the lonely quest, love of the transformative power of women, and respect for the teaching and living out of male discipline.
One could say that Chaucer expresses the values of the new city or merchant class he belonged to. He worked, as if on the New Jersey docks, as a sort of customs checker. His class has some tolerance for bribes and con men, may tend to buy their salvation, but on the other hand they value openness, bawdry, subtlety in human relationships, strong women, and matter in general.
At one time a poet might be born into the lower class, and he might then attack the middle class. But his poetry would still carry many values of the class he came from. Patrick Cavanaugh is an example. Perhaps a poet might be born into the middle class who would, then, reject the middle class — to some extent this is true of Yeats, whose adult poetry carries the values of the Anglo-Irish land-owning class: he chooses among the values, but he still admits there are values beyond his personal ones. When one reads Yeats, one becomes aware that he’s carrying two enormous systems of values. One is the system of values he received from Blake, which goes back to Pico della Mirandola and Lully — the so-called occult values. Also, his work carries the values of the Irish land-owning class: among those were love of horses, fondness for women-chasing, love of fame, and then, using his word, folly. They understood folly: it was what the middle class didn’t understand. Yeats once said something like, “No one has ever owned this house/ That did not have a name or fame/ Or out of folly into folly came.” He meant they could easily waste a fortune in impulse. And that was good. It’s one of the values of that class. “Oh, that was Grandpa! He was terrific. We barely saved the house, but still. . . .” Yeats said that happened “Before the merchants breathed on the world with timid breath.”
Since Baudelaire, or, if one prefers, since the surrealists, every poet in the U.S. is an enfant terrible. The poet attacks the values of the middle class — automatically. The first assumption is that poetry — and all art — is incompatible with the values of the middle class. It was my first assumption. The other day I was writing to an old and close friend about this matter, and I noticed that in one of his early poems he criticizes the people in his town, who “put their clothes on chairs at night, and put them on again in the morning.” I began to tease him a little, and I said, “What’s wrong with this? Don’t people in the working class put their clothes on chairs, too, and pick them up again in the morning? Why have you got this great grudge against the middle class? Where’d you get this?” He said, “I got it from you, buddy.”
He’s right, to some extent. I’ve always — or at least since I became a reader — had a great grudge against the middle class, and I passed some of it to friends. Of course, he wanted it, so he took it.
Most poets now, at least most white poets, are born into the middle class. If most white poets are born into the middle class and if all white poets attack the values of the middle class, then what values can their poems carry?
Suppose I am twenty-eight and I sit down to write a poem. What do I say to myself? I remember it well. I say, “I’m alone. Who supports me? I have to make my own values.” I start brushing off the other values. First, I brush off all Billy Graham values. Then I brush off all Ayn Rand values. Then I brush off Rockwell Kent values: then I brush off military school values and business values. After a long while I have a neat, sanitary container or vessel. It contains only my values. Or, to put it alchemically, I plan to cook some values inside my poem. Values will appear out of my language — out of the heating of my language.
But what if the heat isn’t high enough? What if the values one puts in to start the process aren’t strong enough, what then? Then you know what comes out? A workshop poem. You know the kind. One of these poems in which a poet proves he is sensitive. He or she describes the father or grandmother but makes clear that the poet does not have their values.
I’d like to connect this now with the witch, that we’ve been talking of. If the interior, negative female is so strong in the male that it cuts him off from other males, isn’t it possible that she also cuts him off from his own social class? For a male, isn’t an attack on your own social class an attack on your father? Isn’t your father one of the males that the negative, interior woman cuts you off from? I’ve been thinking about this, and I wrote a friend and said, “How come you never praise any of the values of your social class?” He named the suburban street where he was born and said, “There are no values in Elm Street, Robert.” I said, “How can this be? I mean how can a neighborhood have no values? How can a class have no values at all?” Anger must have overwhelmed the ability to make distinctions.
I’m not praising the middle class, but we are returning to the problem of why so many of our poems carry no values except private ones. I think the universities have had a part in this. One could say that the M.F.A. programs de-class a young poet. If he or she is working class, the university says, “You’re not in the working class anymore. You’re in a special class.” If he or she is middle class, it says, “You’re not in the middle class anymore. You are now in a special class.” The university takes away the young poet’s link with his own class and substitutes, instead, a superficial intellectual camaraderie. That is a big loss.
I heard, the other day, Jacobo Timerman interviewed by Bill Moyers. Jacobo Timerman owned a newspaper in Argentina and was picked up by the generals and tortured, partly because he was Jewish and partly because he published in his newspaper the names of those who disappeared. Twenty thousand people have disappeared, Timerman believes, and the response of the generals is silence.
It’s possible that Argentine Nazism is not an isolated incident, but, rather, the 1980’s may amount to a re-run of the 30’s, but on our own continent this time. I think our attitude toward the middle class is going to be crucial in this battle, or, one could say, certain values of the middle class will be crucial.
Timerman mentioned that the generals and the torturers are convinced that there is a Jewish conspiracy, and it involves taking Patagonia: “We know that you Zionists want Patagonia. Why don’t you admit that you are part of the Jewish conspiracy to annex Patagonia?”
“Why would we want Patagonia?”
“Because Israel is a small country — we know that — you want more land, and you want Patagonia.”
Timerman says, “How can you talk with people like this and tell them that you don’t want Patagonia?”
One of these men in Argentina can move from a farmer or laborer class directly to the general class, with no middle class in between. The United States is a little mad, but in it twenty thousand people do not disappear without mention. One of the reasons for that is that we have a powerful middle class, and it believes that things should go through the courts. We’ve been trashing our parents, the middle class, and the structure of society for years, and I have the feeling we’re going to need these things. The writer benefits from the middle class but won’t acknowledge it. The middle class is various, contradictory, made of separate elements, prejudiced, violent, half-dead, but it also has a certain sense off fairness and respect for law, and you see it clearly when you look at Argentina, where the filter isn’t there. The other day my wife said, “Well, if virtually everyone is in the middle class now, then it’s not a middle class . . . it’s not middle to anything.” I think a lot of our trouble in thinking involves the term “middle class.” I thought of a phrase: “domesticated object-owners.” We are all domesticated object-owners, divided into a leftist group, a liberal group, a rightist group, a fundamentalist group, etc. I know I haven’t been fair at all to the complications involved in this matter of values, but we could still ask: “Do domesticated object-owners have any values at all?”
© Copyright 1981 by Plainsong, Inc.
