Poet as Hero

Robert Bly, the male poet in America

#2 in the HUNDRED HEROES PROJECT


It’s February 15… President’s Day… and I think of the heroic statesmen our country has produced -- Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Roosevelt (Franklin and Eleanor,) but being by nature a contrarian I decide not to write about a heroic statesman. In fact, my mind goes straight to Plato and the philosopher kings and his arch opinion that the least qualified member of society for public office is the poet. I decide to write about the heroic poet. Welcome to the second essay in the HUNDRED HEROES PROJECT -- Poet as Hero. 

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Eighteen years ago a strange ‘yokeling of Jungians’ (think ‘gaggle of geese’, ‘pride of lions’, ‘exultation of larks’, etc.) gathered on the campus of Notre Dame University to celebrate and roast the brilliant, bad boy of Zurich, James Hillman. The public was invited to serve as congregation to this clergy of practitioner-preachers and I was among the choir of converts. Living into the spirit of Hillman’s own contrarian nature -- his unabashedly gleeful writings on taboo subjects like depression, suicide and masturbation having rocked the genteel society of proper analysts -- the speakers were going way out on their respective intellectual limbs and feeling free to initiate raucous arguments in sessions, in the hallways, in the cafeteria and even on stage. Saturday afternoon, the third day of the conference, had brought the wildest plenary session yet with Wolfgang Giergerich eliciting catcalls and outraged howls from fellow analysts when he insisted that actual bloodletting and animal sacrifice alone could evoke the numinous and that metaphoric rituals were all pathetic nonsense. It was with some relief, therefore, that we returned to the auditorium after supper for a simple evening of music, dance and poetry. 

Robert Bly -- the vested, white-haired, cantankerous Minnesota poet famous for jump-starting the men’s movement with his provocative book, Iron John -- closed the evening with rapturous readings from Sufi poets, Rumi and Kabir. His two “altar boys” strummed and drummed beside him as his perennially plaintive Norwegian voice rang out over the hushed house. Those of us familiar with his translations chimed in like proper Sunday School initiates:

Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t go to the study and start reading –
Take down the stringed instruments!
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground!

We swooned in joy at the absence of intellectual jousting and bathed in the beauty of the language.

At 10:00 PM sharp, a German (this is just a guess) janitor announced from the side door that our time for jollity was over and that he had orders to close up. There was collective protest and Bly tried to whip up a rebellion from the stage. But the organizers, sensing overtime fees and hassles with Notre Dame administrators who, after all, have god and football on their side, persuaded Bly to get off the stage and the houselights came on and most of the audience trudged off to their dorms and illegal stashes of wine and beer for late night gossiping. A small group of us sidled down to the stage door where Bly and his musicians were still bubbling with the energy of mystic poetry like a volcano with lava waiting to erupt. “Let’s take over a building!” shouted Bly. “I’m not ready to stop, are you?” With the adrenalin rush of adolescents on the prowl for a safe place for secretive sexual encounters we plunged into the night armed with the tablas and sitar, pillows and notebooks, checking doors and windows for any possibility. It was, delightfully and ironically, a science lab building with a back door left carelessly ajar that beckoned us into its steeply sloped, kiva-like interior for our continued verbal foreplay. Keeping the lights low to avoid discovery we re-set the stage and Bly took command of the group energy like an ancient shaman of the Eleusian mysteries.

And then the remarkable, heroic thing happened.

I have dwelt upon the sexual energy of the evening, not because it was obvious at the start, but because what followed made it clear that we had spawned something that was now coming forth, and this thing was the best and most pure, truthful and brave thing that can come forth from sex. We saw a man give birth that night, while another man midwifed him.

Bly had exhausted his repertoire of memorized poems and called into the audience for ideas and offerings. Timidly, one young man announced that he had a poem that he had written which he would like to share. The group solidarity made us generous and we called out our consent and encouragement. The young man came forth from the crowd and stood apart to read his poem – about the difficulty of becoming a man in America -- tentatively and awkwardly from the side of the stage. There were murmurings of assent, but the delivery was so mild that it was hard to feel the spirit of the poem. In the polite pause that followed his rendition, Bly suddenly sprang into action. He commanded the young poet to come up on the stage and sit beside him and “do it again!” Blushing with the genuine anguish of the introverted, the gangling, fuzzy-chinned, 20-something poet came with obvious reticence to sit beside Bly on one of the pillows on the stage floor. He read his poem again with even more stumbling and fumbling, and again we applauded and encouraged.

Still unsatisfied, Bly suddenly broke all remaining rules of etiquette -- the ones still standing after breaking-and-entering a building after hours and against orders -- and grabbed the young man around his waist and pulled him, pillow and all, between his own legs, so that he straddled the younger man, the way a mother might place a small child between her legs at the beach while letting him splash his feet in the breaking waves. The young man promptly broke into a sweat and went from pale to red-faced and back again.  “Do it again!” Bly roared. “Say it like you meant it. Say it the way it felt when you first wrote it.” Gasping for breath, the reluctant poet began again. “Do it by heart!” Bly roared and snatched the paper from his clammy hands. The young man stared out into the dim light of the kiva, wild-eyed with desperation, but choked out the poem from memory. It was definitely taking on some shape now. We felt the shift from intellectual poking around to real emotion. It wasn’t “a poem” anymore, it was a body of some sort -- a body of experience, a body of longing, a body of grief, a body of hope.  A hush came over the room. Any pretext of maintaining dignity had drained from the young man and he was visibly trembling and looked nauseated. Bly, more insistent than ever, yet with infinite tenderness, wrapped his arms around the waist of the young man and said again, in his ear, crooning like a nursemaid, “Do it again. Make it come alive. Give birth to it.”

And right there, on the stage of the science lab at Notre Dame University, a man gave birth to a poem. It was every bit as messy, arduous, exhilarating, bloody, horrible, wonderful and ecstatic as any human birthing. We all wailed and groaned in sympathetic travail as the young writer became a poet by virtue of giving birth to a real, living poem in front of all of us. Shaking and sweating and moaning he recited his poem again and again -- in a whisper, in a roar, as a scream, as a song -- with Bly rocking him back and forth with the instinctive wisdom of an old midwife. Through the masculine cervix of the larynx, the poem came forth from the fifth chakra of the throat and entered the world through our ears.

Glancing around the rows of chairs, I discovered I was not the only woman who had grasped the significance of the event. Several other women had wrapped their arms around their midsections in sympathetic memory of this process. My own bodily recollections of three childbirths made my insides writhe and spasm. I “got” that this was the same thing that comes to a woman through nature, but that the rare man must go out and hunt it down, and that -- contrary to Giergerich’s claim -- metaphoric birth, or the birth of metaphor -- is every bit as painful and numinous as the fleshly variety.

At the end of the ordeal, the young poet sank back, weeping, against Bly’s broad chest, and we all heaved our own sighs of relief and joy. There was no applause, we’d long ago passed that stage, but the spontaneous utterances of wonder filled the room with weird sounds -- human birdsong, purring, crooning. Someone threw open the door and turned out the light and let the night flood into the space. Moon and stars and night wind carried our satisfaction out over the unsuspecting grass and concrete and glass and blew it around the spire of the church that championed virgin birth, a church that would have been abashed to learn that such a birth had just taken place in a dim lab, between the lines of university protocol. Behold – unto us a poem is born!

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Now, what makes this scene of Bly’s intervention heroic and not just an act of spontaneous kindness or new-age male bonding? I’d like to delve further into the matter and tell you why I think this event is so critical to our understanding of the wider attributes of heroism and to our American situation in particular.  What Bly did that night was not an unconscious reaction to the presenting situation, but the result of decades of diving into a very murky place in the American collective unconscious. Think of the great symbol of yin/yang:

The feminine has been represented by the dark paisley -- things dark, cool, receptive, interior, emotional, earthly -- with a tiny bright spot of rational “male” energy at its center. The masculine is represented by the white side -- things bright, hot, assertive, extroverted, cerebral and metaphysical -- with a despised spot of feminine darkness lurking at the center. The way I see it, the male poet is the hero who has ventured most deeply into that speck of darkness within the white, shiny, masculine side of the American psyche, seeking the estranged feminine within the collective unconscious. Here, in an early poem, Bly voices the ego position of the young man born into patriarchy:

Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of the ocean, nor the mother of the snake and the fire;
Not to the mother of love,
Nor the mother of conversation, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the solitude of
    death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the
    father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
    zeros;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
    rocks.

(A Busy Man Speaks, by Robert Bly, originally published in Contemporary American Poetry; Penguin Books, 1962)

Robert Bly appears to be one of those conscious human beings who has realized what his life is about even as he’s living it. Early in his career, Bly took on, as part of his mission, the drawing of attention to the great deficit in the American psyche of men blessing boys in order to make them men. In the ancient order of patriarchy, boys become men by killing something (or someone) else, or by sexually taking a female. Girls become women because their bodies make it possible for them to create new children. It takes a rare mind to realize that some boys want to become men by giving birth and making that impossible thing possible. Such an act is a full expression of the dark dot at the center of masculinity and as such is a powerful integrator of shadow and ego -- two things that cannot be together are together and so the mind must expand to take in the new reality. This is the process of integration.

But why is it heroically important for male poets to dive into the dark spot of the collective male identity? Bly is explicit in discussing the implications:

“…a decision taken privately, as part of one’s inner life, to fight the dark side of oneself -- and this fight the Protestants particularly recommended -- can cause ‘the conscious’ and ‘the unconscious’ to take up adversary positions; and the adversary positions can quickly spread to foreign policy and influence decisions…(So) one of the things we need to do as Americans is to work hard individually at eating our shadows, and so make sure that we are not releasing energy that can then be picked up by the politicians, who can use it against Russia, China, or the South American countries.” (from A Little Book on the Human Shadow)

Bly’s heroism -- and he would hate to be called a hero; I can feel his curmudgeonly soul recoiling at the label -- is a kind of willingness to surrender the light and enter into the darkness at the center of the collective masculine psyche. In a curious way I would call this kind of heroism the “virgin mother” of virtues, for it is the strength to accept the call of the terrifying angel who asks if you will bring to birth a new world by saying yes to the god-seed that grows inside. A real man would have to be crazy to say yes to that! -- and yet some of them do agree, and so we have the enormous boons to society born of Walt Whitman and e.e.cummings and Wallace Stevens and Wendell Berry and Robinson Jeffers and Robert Bly and many others who drag us unwillingly to the reflecting pool where we can gaze at the monstrous face that is our national identity and try to learn to love the stranger that is us.

We cannot become better than we are unless we learn to recognize and love that face, so this is an essential task and one of the most thankless. You will not yet find this country offering congressional medals, lifelong pensions and government housing to its poets. This is still reserved for military heroes. Yet the work of the poet is every bit as harrowing and necessary, though the enemy is within rather than without and the wounds to the soul invisible though deadly. The heroic poet allows the shadow, the projected evil, to enter into himself, in order for it to be redeemed through love and language.

~ Rebecca Armstrong ~  2/15/10

 

Robert Bly, photo by Lynn Saville

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I’d like to dedicate this essay to my friend, poet and archetypal psychologist, George Viney, who was there at the festival in Notre Dame and will remember…. Also, to two dear friends who well understand the agonies of giving birth to words – Keith Cunningham and Phil Cousineau.

JANE ADDAMS

JANE ADDAMS 

#1 in the 100 Heroes Project

“…the voices of the chorus are lost in the unity of purpose

and in the fact that they are all human voices

lifted by a high motive…” ~ Jane Addams

Introduction to the Project

Along with millions of other Americans, I watched in fascinated horror, turning to tearful amazement and relief, as an entire planeload of passengers huddled on the wings of a sinking Airbus waiting for rescuers to ferry them to safety on the shores of the Hudson – and were saved. On the anniversary of this “miracle on the Hudson” I began to feel the stirrings of deeper reflections on the idea of heroism in the American mind. Captain Sullenberger has certainly been a gracious, articulate figure and deserving of the praise that’s been heaped upon him. Yet, there is something too Andy Warhol-ish about this being our ideal of heroism. It plays well on the news but lacks the long-term, rootedness, the long-playing symphony of the heroic life, not just the heroic moment. Where is our knowledge of and appreciation for the long term choices that build toward a lifetime of genuinely heroic contribution?

I decided then and there, on the anniversary of the Hudson River Miracle, to address myself to the task of re-discovering one hundred heroes of American life, and exploring in some detail the qualities of mind, heart and hand that make them heroic. The focus then is not so much on what they did, but the inner qualities or, to use an old fashioned word, the virtues that are manifest through their works. Other than once-a-month, the only other parameters for my project are that the heroes must be American, for my driving purpose is to try to understand something more about the “American experiment” – the deeper reason behind the grand, grueling enterprise which is the United States of America.

For my first hero I did not hesitate in selecting a woman and a Chicagoan. Whenever I am asked to name someone who serves in my imagination to stir the coals of courage, my reply is swift: Jane Addams of Hull House! For those who are only dimly aware of her accomplishments and are, perhaps, dubious about her placement here at the head of my list of One Hundred Heroes, let me give you a very brief overview of this remarkable lady:

· founder of Hull House, the first “settlement house” in Chicago

· created the first juvenile court in the nation

· successfully lobbied for federal child labor laws

· created first public playground in Chicago and the nation

· was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education

· became chairman of School Management Committee

· considered the creator of modern social work

· first woman elected to the National Conference of Social Work

· helped found Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy

· first woman president of National Conference of Charities and Corrections

· founding member of the American Sociological Society

· author of twenty books and hundreds of articles

· received first honorary degree given to a woman by Yale University

· organized the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women

· first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

· founding member of the NAACP

· founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union

· founding member of the American Association of University Women

· second woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

· called a friend by luminaries such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Senator Paul Douglas, President Teddy Roosevelt, and W.E.B. Du Bois

Jane Addams lived just under 75 years (1860 – 1935) and she needed every single one of them. The sheer volume and diversity of her accomplishments is what is particularly striking, and it is that diversity with which I want to begin our analysis. We have become very caught up with the notion of specialization in our era, mastering more and more about less and less. Jane Addams moved in a different direction, mastering the idea of being a generalist – that is finding the connections between disparate areas of human activities in urban community. But to call her a generalist does not quite get to the heart of her genius. There is another quality without which this capacity to generalize and perceive patterns, a meta-view if you will, could quickly deteriorate to something facile or shallow. Jane’s key virtue, I believe, is her capacity for discernment, the virtue which grounds and anchors the wider view; the lens that makes the patterns in the large picture reveal themselves in such a way that one knows how a single action will impact the rest. Without this virtue of discernment, one could be easily overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of political and social rancor, human misery, natural disaster and economic needs of the global village.

I liken this virtue of discernment to the skill of the master geophysicist who, after years of careful analysis of the soil and rocks and flora and fauna and weather patterns, etc. can describe the workings of a natural ecosystem – how each part is interdependent upon the others. In just such a way I believe Jane Addams to be the first scientific doctor of the democratic ecosystem.

In one of her first explications of the motivating factors behind the establishment of Hull House, Jane writes: “It (the settlement house) should demand of its residents a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that accumulation… They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole… bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against its over-differentiation…” (from “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”)

This demand that the mind and heart must continually work together and that even then they were useless if not augmented by the actual hands-on experience of doing, runs like a leit motif through Jane’s writings. Her fierce criticism of theories of charity divorced from the practice of living as equals among those one hoped to “serve” underscores that her philosophy was driven by lived experience, that for her intuitions were as valid as arguments and that the cycle of insight, action and reflection drove her mission. This combination of philosophical foundation, emotion born of experience and conviction resulting from insight is rarely pushed to such heights as in the life of Jane Addams. This holistic modus operandi is at the very core of her heroism.

In an essay entitled “The Subtle Problem of Charity” Jane unfolds a nuanced understanding which helped her make sense of the opposing views of the kindness-driven charity workers, motivated by the desire to immediately alleviate suffering at the individual level, and the intellectually-driven, long-range social planners to whom individuals were mere data bits. Seeing that these two groups often disagreed vehemently over policy, Jane suggested that both sides “may have to share these perplexities before they feel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, working outward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and uplift which come when the individual sympathy and intelligence are caught in the forward, intuitive movement of the mass.” This ‘principle of growth’ is one of those gems of insight that only comes when one has been working deep in the ecosystem of democracy for a very long time. I think it is this very same principle to which Jane is alluding in her astonishing and much-discussed conversation with John Dewey over the Pullman strike of 1894.

John Dewey was working at the University of Chicago during the time of the Pullman strike and having had many discussions with Jane about the deplorable conditions of the workers in Chicago assumed that Jane would be in complete sympathy with Eugene Debs, the strike organizer. He was astounded, therefore, when Jane criticized the strategy of the labor movement as well as the factory owners and pronounced: “The antagonism of institutions is always unreal.” Rejecting this apparently illogical statement, Dewey demanded that Jane explain herself, so she proceeded by saying that antagonisms never arose from real objective differences “but from a person’s mixing in his own personal reactions—the extra emphasis he gave the truth, the enjoyment he took in doing a thing because it was unpalatable to others, or the feeling that one must show his own colors.” Dewey was still mystified. They argued into the evening about the necessity of class struggle and the emancipation of the worker and the role of the capitalist owner within the Hegelian principle of dialectics. The next day, Dewey had an epiphany about which he wrote to his wife, Alice:

“Her (Jane’s) argument was the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual and moral faith I ever saw…When you think that Miss Addams does not think of this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses and muscles-- Great God... I guess I'll have to give it up and start over again… I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing... it seems so natural and commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so."

The key phrase is, of course, “the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth” and refers back to this “principle of growth” which Jane had uncovered in her work at Hull House. It is of particular note that Jane doesn’t say that antagonisms are “wrong” or “ineffective” or “evil” but rather that they are “unreal.” This suggests an understanding of reality that is at odds with most views of the world, but which clearly serves as the basis for all her lifework. The “principle of growth” is at the heart of that understanding.

Jane gave her own deeper interpretation of this principle when she was asked to give a talk about the Pullman Strike to the Chicago Woman’s Club in which she used, for analogy, the great Shakespearean tragedy of King Lear to represent the forces at work in the strike. George Pullman is cast in the role of the obstinate King and Eugene Debs (representing the workers) as daughter Cordelia. Against both of them she levels the charge that they “had lost the faculty of affectionate interpretation” and this loss had made them incapable of seeing their common ground. “Were not both so absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement that they failed to catch the great moral lesson which their times offered them? This is the crucial point to the tragedies…” These are the “personal reactions” and the flaunting of one’s own colors that Jane was referring to when she spoke with Dewey. This is the identification by the individual with only one side of the dialectic and the posing of the dialectic as a moral rather than as a physical force whose task it is to resolve the apparent differences into a new synthesis of accord. Jane sees the story of the Pullman strike as akin to the struggle within a family when the new values of a younger generation come into apparent conflict with the values of the elders:

“The virtues of one generation are not sufficient for the next, any more than the accumulations of knowledge possessed by one age are adequate to the needs of another. Of the virtues received from our fathers we can afford to lose none. We accept as a precious trust those principles and precepts which the race has worked out for its highest safeguard and protection. But merely to preserve those is not enough. A task is laid upon each generation to enlarge their application, to ennoble their conception, and, above all, to apply and adapt them to the peculiar problems presented to it for solution.” (All of the above quotes are from “A Modern Lear” by Jane Addams)

Here is the evolutionary energy which carries the dialectic momentum. To lose sight of the fact that it is the unfolding of the human race, and not the supremacy of one faction or another, which drives the story of the world, is where unreality sets in, for once it is perceived that this entire roiling, raving madness of human struggle is about the single enterprise of becoming human, that singularity of purpose gathers all discords up into an unassailable unity. It is this underlying unity of being which is, for Jane, foundation, conviction and intuited sense of the real.

“It is always easy to make all philosophy point to one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.” (“The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” by Jane Addams)

To return now to my task of laying out to view a particular virtue that I consider heroic, I would say that it is the holistic discernment, or the discernment that leads to holism, which is the most potent heroic characteristic of Jane Addams. It is also the characteristic which seems to lie at the heart of the democratic experiment, for with the dispersal of power among the many, it is imperative that the many begin from a standpoint of unity. If they do not, if they mistakenly hold to opposing sides, as if it is the antagonistic attitude that drives the dialectic (as so many political people believe today!) rather than the oppositional force being that growth principle which drives the forward momentum toward a higher resolution, then the project is doomed. Then the “personal plans of improvement,” the desire to be right, to show off one’s colors – as Jane suggested – will overtake the deeper inclination toward progress and pride of position will bring the momentum to a standstill. Does this not describe the current state of American politics?

Joseph Campbell, whose name is so closely associated with the idea of the hero in our generation, had a surprisingly dark statement to close his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He said,

“It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shared the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of personal despair.”

Here Campbell is echoing Jane Addams’s insistence that collective salvation is not to be found outside of individual salvation, but that they are one and the same, and the way towards it is always through the individual. I don’t believe she ever gave in to despair, though she often came close, but I love the photos of her in her last years, where the weight of wisdom and care has given her face the gravitas of wave-tossed stone. If the spirit of democracy requires the living breath of those who truly understand and believe in it, then Jane Addams filled its sail during her long and heroic struggle to bring us all a little closer toward a new synthesis of harmonious fellowship.

To my fellow citizens of all nations on this fragile planet 
Especially my friend and fellow progressive artist, Peggy Lipschutz ~
I dedicate this Hundred Heroes Project

~ Rebecca Armstrong

January 24, 2010