Bill Moyers Journal; 403; Poet at Large: A Conversation with Robert Bly

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. ROBERT BLY: I live my life in growing orbits, which move out over the things of the world. I have wandered in a phase for hours, passing through dark fires. And I am gone to the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zero. I can't tell if this joint is from the body or the soul or a third place. BILL MOYERS: Tonight, Robert Bly reads his poems and talks about his life.

I'm Bill Moyers. When I told Robert Blye that I would like to talk with him on his home ground, he replied, then meet me in the North Country. Here on the shore of Capacona Lake in Minnesota, and at a farm four hours further south, Robert Blye has grounded himself. He was born 52 years ago on the Minnesota prairie, three generations after his family arrived in America, Norwegian, Lutheran, pioneer stock. He left the family farm a maverick, bound for Harvard, where he studied poetry with Archibald McLeish. He first found solitude in New York City, where he spent three years living alone in a small room, working occasionally as a clerk or a house painter, eating one meal a day at the Automat, reading hours at a time in the public library.

In time, he came back to his father's farm. He could live frugally here, could think and write. His first book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, captured solitude in the Minnesota landscapes. By the time he won the National Book Award in 1968 for The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly was writing about the Vietnam War, contemporary values, and the unconscious. There's a rhythm to his life now. Two weeks a month, he spends with his four children near the family farm in southern Minnesota. Four or five days a month, he supports himself, barely, by giving portrait readings, at colleges and in community forums like Cooper Union in New York. The rest of his time is spent here among the lakes and ponds of the north country, where he translates poets from abroad and writes most of his poetry. Robert Bly thinks the best poets finally come home. MOYERS: Will you as creative in New York as you are here? BLY: Well, my own opinion is that no one is creative in their twenties, Because you're too neurotic and you're too confused. I tried to write in my twenties, but I didn't do much.

But how about you, who knew in Texas? The problem is that no one wants to go back to the place where they were born. You want to go to New York, right? You want to do something like that. So here, you're not in Texas. MOYERS: I'm not writing poetry. Have you spent a lot of time running from that northern Protestant Lutheranism, in which men are not supposed to be expressive, and which tears are not allowed? BLY: I don't know if the word running would be right. Fighting would be something like that. I tried for ten years to write poetry, using only that male, Protestant, patriarchal, -- Western European side, and there's a hopeless failure. I think my twenties are poems with nothing. And eventually, I came to realize that you have to have a feminine side to yourself also, the feeling side develop. And so I'm still involved in that.

The last five or six years, did you learn how to read for the first time? MOYERS: You've learned how to read. BLY: I learned how to read. MOYERS: Over what? BLY: Sometimes, out of thinking of the suffering of my own life, Instead of having a stiff upper lip, which is what you recommended, you weep. I remember there's a weeping when I'm doing a Vietnam War, over other people's suffering. And evidently, weeping is something that's done a lot in the world. You would know it to be in Minnesota, but evidently when people find something beautiful they weep. I listened to...one day I was listening to a symphony, an Schoenberg thing, and the snow was falling, I started to weep, I started to weep for an hour, I couldn't stop. MOYERS: Well, the best lines that appeal to me is that line where you talk about "the parts of us which grow when we're far from the centers of ambition." BLY: Far from the centers of ambition, right?

So, that's the kind of gift given you, if you move back to your comfy little place, at least you're far from New York or Los Angeles. And I understood that best when I was, I had been moved out to the farm after being in New York a while, and moved out to the farm and had a horse. We didn't have any money, so I didn't have any water in the house. So we had an old windmill. So, I went out to water my horse one day, and I had been reading the Buddhists. And the Buddhists say, I was told in college that I was forced to be ambitious as a poet, send my poems out, get in public, get in a New York or whatever, right? Buddhists say, no, yeah, that's all wrong. You know what I'm saying? That's completely wrong. If you want to be a poet, you have to merge with the trees and the animals and so on. Now, those things don't have any ambition. So, therefore, you can't merge with them. So, therefore, they try to teach not ambition. So, I wrote a little poem, "How marvelous to think of giving up all ambition. Suddenly, I see with such clear eyes the white flake of snow that is just fallen in the horse's mane." A Six Winter Privacy Poem.

Part one. About four, a few flakes. I empty the teapot out in the snow, feeling shoots of joy in the new cold. By nightfall wind, the curtains on the south sway softly. Part two. My shack has two rooms. I use one. The lamp light falls in my chair and table, and I fly into one of my own poems. I can't tell you where. It's if I appeared where I am now in a wet field. In snowfall. Third poem. More of the fathers are dying each day. It's time for the sons and the daughters. Bits of darkness are gathering around them, and the bits of darkness appear as flakes of light. A little meditation poem.

There is a solitude like black mud. Sitting in this darkness singing, I can't tell if this joy is from the body or the soul or a third place. A little poem listening to Bach. Inside this music there is someone who is not well described by the names of Jesus or Jehovah or the Lord of Hosts. Here's the last little one. The sixth one. When I awoke, new snow had fallen. I am alone, yet someone else is with me, drinking coffee, looking out at the snow. MOYERS: When did you know for sure that you wanted to write poetry for a living?

BLY: It was in college, and I was studying Yeats. MOYERS: At Harvard. BLY: And we started to work on Yeats, and I was astounded how much could be contained inside a single poem. Of the man's life, and of his opinions, and of the past, and of his occult work, and of his own private thought, I'd always thought of poetry as a sort of like a bird singing, something eccentric that happened at the edge of something. And suddenly reading Yeats, you realize that, as I realize since at the entire work in psychology, if you go into poetry and write it, you're drawn to the most amazing things that have happened in the last hundred years, which is psychology, the advances in psychology. You're also drawn into politics, and you're drawn into the whole question of nature. You're drawn into what is the collective you follow me? It was when I realized that inside a poem, you could find the entire world and work in it. MOYERS: So when someone asks you from where does a poem come, your answer is everywhere? BLY: Yes, everywhere.

But I suppose especially from, let's say, the dark side or something. Since human beings became civilized, they have a tremendous liking for the light side of themselves, the side in which the light falls, the civilized side, the polite side, the economic side. But actually, underneath all of that, there's a dark side, which is sometimes referred to as a shadow. So therefore, in the shadow is contained everything in yourself that you don't like, as well as your whole primitive self. So if someone says, where does the poem come from? In most cases, it comes up from the unnoticed side of every human being. It comes up from the primitive part of him. MOYERS: I read someone who said Robert Bly's poems are a journey into the interior. He's down there somewhere waiting for us. BLY: Maybe if I haven't left. But I like that idea very much. In myself, what I have been trying to do, I suppose, in the last, well, I'll read you a poem

which I wrote in New York. I'd been living in New York. And then I left and went down to, I was heading for Charleston. I went across the Chesapeake Bay. And I hadn't seen water for two or three years. And moreover, I felt while I was living in New York that I would probably never do anything, that my poems would probably be a failure, that I would never publish a book of poems. And yet, I received enough nourishment from simply writing and reading poems that that was all right with me. But so this is mentioned in a poem I'll read it to you. On a Ferry Across Chesapeake Bay. On the orchard of the sea, far out of whitecaps, water that answers questions no one has asked, silent speakers of the grave's rejoinders. Having accomplished nothing, I am traveling somewhere else. O deep green sea, it's not for you

that this smoking body plows toward death. And it's not for the strange blossoms of the sea that I drag my thin legs over the Chesapeake Bay. Though perhaps by your motions the body heals. For though on its road the body cannot march with gold and trumpets, it must march. And the sea gives up its answer as it falls into itself. MOYERS: You're fortunate to catch moments like that and hold them forever, what you call peak experiences. BLY: And I was glad to do that and feel it. To see it actually in the water. And usually that experience doesn't come until you're 29, maybe you're 30, maybe in your 30s. When finally you forget what the collective wants. Forget it. Forget what your parents want. And you slowly fall into yourself. MOYERS: You're off on your own.

BLY: And that's a wonderful moment. MOYERS: You said at the reading that, in one of your poems, that you aren't sure whether a man's feeling of joy comes from his body or his soul or a third place. What is that third place? BLY: Well, I was doing some meditation during that poem. There's a little poem that goes on, There's a solitude like black mud sitting in this darkness singing, I can't tell if this joy is from the body or the soul or a third place. And I suppose there's a little joke in there because we're told or either body or soul, there must be more possibilities than that. But what happens, I think, I'll just go back a little. We're at about the 70th or 80th anniversary now of Freud's first work in bringing the unconscious forward. And Freud said, you know, you have a conscious in light mind, and underneath that you have a dark unknown mind.

And Christianity did a great deal of harm in that it called the unconscious the devil. Therefore, it blocked access to that mind for centuries. So it's a very important thing that has happened when Freud and Jung, 80 years ago, and Adler and others began to give attention to the unconscious mind. That's exactly opposite in calling it Satan. Actually, what Freud did is say you have two minds, and the dark one may be the more intelligent of the two. The dark one is a one that makes up your dreams, and Jung later showed how incredibly intricate and complicated and spiritual actually the dreams are. So this is my idea. About 20 years ago, an important change occurred in the psyche, of at least a Western man. And that is that after human beings in the West, through Freud and Jung, started to pay attention to the unconscious, in a positive way, to be reguarded as something positive.

It began to get more confident, just as you pay attention to a child, it will start to blossom. So the unconscious is now responding by creating something, which was not here before. As if the unconscious is now objectified and is out there somewhere. Now, I don't know, I don't understand it very well, but it's something like this. For a thousand years now, there has only been in the West man against nature. Man is intelligent as Descartes says, and wonderful, and nature is stupid, and doesn't think, and is full of snakes, and alligators, and so on. A naked confrontation between man and nature. What I think has happened is that the attention to the unconscious has created a third being, which now stands between man and nature, and that's wonderfully joyous occurrence. MOYERS: But which joins them, doesn't it? BLY: It joins them. It can act as something between man and nature. As if the old unconscious of human beings now, which has been for thousands of years, millions of years, has agreed to come out and take a stand between man and nature.

So there isn't that naked split anymore. MOYERS: And this is that third place? BLY: I think so. I don't know what to call this. I call it like the third being, which is now present. One of the reasons that there's so much excitement and poetry now is because in the old days, let's say, in the 18th century, I either wrote a poem about man. Proper study man kind is man. And he stayed completely with a man. Or Keats would write a nature poem. And it was as if those were the only two choices. But now there's this third presence inside. And what is exciting about poetry since the 1920s is that sometimes the poem goes into this third being and comes directly out of it. And it's neither man nor nature. I can't explain it anymore. MOYERS: How do you draw it out? It's not like putting a bucket down into a well. BLY: I think that, of course, everyone who wants to get near it in a way would follow the road that Freud and Jung took, quite in other words, you pay attention to your dreams. If you have something by your bed, you write down your dreams.

Because the dreamer is entirely a part of this third place, or it's entirely part of the unconscious. And so you would pay attention to nature also a lot. All Chinese poetry, which has a lot of the third presence in it in ancient times, paid terrific attention to nature because this being is close to nature as well as to yourself. MOYERS: Is this how you write your poem? BLY: When I started writing, I was writing completely in my conscious mind. That's the way I was taught to write. And I wrote for 10 years without any success. And by being alone, I began to sink down a little bit into the unconscious, by being alone a long time. And now, I think of it differently, a little bit differently now. I'd say that there is one moment in which you fall into yourself. And that's a moment in which you feel the unconscious is going to hold you up. It's going to hold you up. It isn't necessary to be successful. You're already successful. You understand me?

MOYERS: Like swimming in the Dead Sea. Like swimming in the Dead Sea. BLY: Yes, you feel a support underneath you, made of your own feelings and so on. And that's a wonderful moment. MOYERS: But most of us don't trust our feelings that much. BLY: No. And that's a great problem of being a male in the West. We're is not taught to do that. So you could also say that you're being held up by the ocean. After all, the ocean, the name of the ocean is Maurei, which is the same word as Mary. So in a way, the ocean also stands for all the feelings and all the feminine parts inside a man, which one learns to trust and to help hold them up. So I'll give you a poem about a couple of my children. I have a two daughters, one 16, one 15. And they're called Mary and Bitty. And this is a poem which touches on them. And we don't have a television, never have. So when we get snowed in or something, then the girls. And I have a couple little boys too.

What happens is that they usually make up a play or something. And my daughter, Mary, usually casts herself as the princess. And the boys get to crummy parts, because they're little. And then they cast it and put on the costumes and put it on. And Sunday night, the grownups are invited up to watch it for a small fee. And so this describes one of those nights. Ah, it's lovely to follow paths in the snow made by human feet. The paths wind gaily around the ends of snow drifts they rise and fall. How amazed I am after working hard in the afternoon, that when I sit down at the table with my elbows touching the elbows of my children. So much love flows out and around in circles. Each child flares up as a small fire in the woods. Bitty chortles over her new hair, curled for the first time last night, over her new joke song. A Yankee doodle went to town, a riding on a turtle, turned the corner just in time to see

a ladies, girdle. That's the chorus. Mary knows the inscription she wants on her coffin if she dies young. And she says it's Where the bee sucks, there's a guy in a cowslips, bell, I lie. Couple lines from Shakespeare. She is obstinate and light at the same time. A heron who flies pulling long legs behind, or balances unsteadily on the stump, aware of all the small birds at the edge of the forest, where it's shattering, longing to capture the horse with only one hair from its mane. And Bitty can run over the, pick herself up and run over the muddy river bottom without sinking in. She already knows all about holding, and she kisses each grown up carefully before going to bed. At the table she faces you laughing, bent over slightly, towards you like a tree bent in wind, protective of this old shed she's leaning over. And all the books around in the walls are light as feathers

in a great feather bed. They weigh hardly anything. Only the encyclopedias who left lying on the floor by the chair contained the heaviness of the three million-year-old life of the oyster shellbreakers. Now all they were so long those dusks, ten thousand years long, where they fell over the valley from the cave mouth for reset. And the last man killed by flu, who knew how to weave a pot of river clay in the way that the wasps do. Now he's dead, and only the wasps know. And the marmoset curls its toes around the slippery branch, aware of the free chest of its mother, long since sunk into a hole that appeared in the afternoon. Well dinner's finished, and the children pass out invitations composed with felt pens. You are invited to The Thwarting of Captain Alphone. Princess Gardner: Mary Bly, Captain Alphonse: Wesley Ray, Aunt August: Bitty Blyh,

Railway track: Noah Blyh. Train: Sam Ray, Costumes and sets by Mary Bly and Wesley Ray, free real offering accepted. I'm going to give you a poem now. I'll give you a poem of my own, which is connected a little bit with grief. And it's a poem sort of on the 70s. It's called Snowbanks North of the House. And it's about those things that happen in Minnesota when snow comes down from the North and comes from Canada or somewhere. And it's everywhere except right around the house. Northside of the house there'll be a gap of five to six feet. And I'd noticed that since I was a boy. And finally I wrote this little poem about it. 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. And the energy leaves the wine. And the minister falls even to 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. And will not leave the room where the coffin stands . And the father grieves for his son. And will not leave the room for the coffin stands. He turns away from his wife and she sleeps alone. And the sea lifts and falls all night. And the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone. And the toe of the shoe pivots in the dust. And 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.

Well, that has a little soul. And he can feel a little soul in it because finally I myself am willing to accept a little grief. MOYERS: I want to be sure I understand what you mean when you are talking about Hades's grief and pain. Are you saying that in order to become human to discover that third place we have to admit, acknowledge the presence in our lives of evil? MOYERS: I don't think it's evil. It's connected with the pain and the grief we have in our own background. And as you know in America, especially the men and women are taught to be cheerful all the time. And pain is considered something bad that you ashamed of. You go to a Kiwanus meeting, you hear them insanely optimistic about everything. So therefore there is a movement in the other direction in which you move downward towards grief and acceptance of the side of yourself that you don't approve of, that your parents didn't approve of.

And in alchemy, this is described as lead. They say, don't begin with the spirit. That's the wrong place to begin. The problem with much charismatic Christianity is that they are going too fast into the spirit. They are going into the light. And alchemy says, no, the spiritual process begins with lead. It begins with the element lead, which is a part in you that's so heavy and so deep-lasting, you don't think it'll ever change. And so lead is connected with the grief in your family. It's connected with your alcoholic grandfathers and your insane grandmothers and the suicides in your family. The part in your family that always seems to get blocked. In generation after generation. That's called lead. And you go down there and begin with lead and live in lead. And you just remain down there for a while. That was the idea of alchemy. And then also the lead involves the grief of your own country. So therefore an alchemist should say, well, if you really want to be a poet, you're going to have to read a lot about American history. Because a lot of your lead is contained in all the suffering and grief

that America has caused. Well, do you understand me? MOYERS: But you're not saying that we ought to grovel in it. BLY: No, no. There's a, the opposite point of view is that many people are becoming addicts now. Addicts of anger. It's like being and addict of heroin. That's not the same process. The anger is taking them over. But the image of going into Hades, you go into grief down through Hades because you're going somewhere else. That whole process of slowly the making of the soul. You don't stop and become an addict of grief or an addict of anger. MOYERS: You move on. BLY: The point is that there's ancient things. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, they give you like a 25-year process. And they would slowly feed you through. And again, unconsciousness is not the same thing as grief. Unconsciousness, being unconscious, is connected with the rage. Okay, you're a father. One of the things I noticed is something like this. If you unconscious a lot, as I have been for many years, if you unconscious everything seems to go all right,

except you feel a lot of anger and rage. And that's all right until you become a father. When you become a father, you may notice that your rage will suddenly fly out at a child. And that child has done nothing to deserve that rage. Wham it goes. And you feel it leave you. And so, therefore, if you're a father, you realize that one should do something about that. And of course, if the rage is connected with being unconscious, and you only think to do is to try to become more conscious. And so I made a little progress there working on that, Especially in relation to a son of mine named Noah, who's about 12 now. And I'll give you a poem I wrote for him. A night and day arrive. Day after day goes. Night and day arrive. And day after day goes by. And what is young remains young and grows old. And the timber pile does not grow younger. Nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness. But the old tree stands so long.

The barn stands so long without help. The advocate of darkness and night is not lost. And the horse steps up turns on one leg, swings. And the chicken flopping, claws up onto the roost. Its wings, plumping and polluping. But what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night in the dark. And slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage, sits down at table. So I am proud only of those days that we pass in undivided tenderness. When you sit coloring a book, stapled with messages to the world, or coloring a drawing of a man with fire coming out of his hair, or we sit it a table with small tea carefully poured. So we pass our time together, calm and delighted.

MOYERS: And you are saying to your son, BLY: Yes, somehow the more conscious we become, which I feel is connected with eating our own shadow and eating our own grief, then the more we are able to be calm and quiet with our children, and be close to our children. MOYERS: What about male-female relationships? You have been thinking a lot about those, and at the reading the other night I heard you say that the pain men and women give each other is exactly what they need. BLY: Well, it is sort of a joke, but America has so much comfort in it now. And everything is centrally heated, and the cars have wonderful heaters in them. So where are you going to find pain, except in the relation between men and women. So it is the only suffering left to us. MOYERS: But you talk about developing the female side of our nature. When did you decide that is what you had to do? Was it with marriage? BLY: Before I was married, I was aware, living alone in New York,

that I was aware of how barren the personality is when only one half has developed. And I wrote a poem called, A Man Writes to a Part of Himself. Which gives that feeling in the 20s. When you go back to your room, and you are 26 years old, and the room is so barren and so lonely, you want to leave right away. And I realized that the feminine side of myself was living off somewhere. Actually, in the poem, I put her in a valley. And actually, she had regressed and was like living in a cave times. Probably that is true. My male side was 26 and living in a city. My female side was living two thousand years ago, and the problem is to bring those two together somehow. MOYERS: How do you do that? Well, again, the process of paying attention to dreams is helpful. I don't know, I find, as a male, a lot of my optimism in my male side and a lot of my grief and feeling in my female side. So therefore, one could say it has to do with feeling.

It's what Robert McNamara did not do. When you said to him, you know, they're burning children in Vietnam. Do you know that? They're burning them with napalm? McNamara? What answered with his male side completely. He said, OK, I'm pulling down the charts now. I want you to see these charts now. We're putting in 20,000 tons every week, and they're only putting in 18,000 tons we're bound to win. And that's not an answer to the question, because he's not answering with his feeling side at all. Well, I'm saying one thing that American can do is just to become the collective. That's a great solution. And especially, you want to become the male collective. So I'll give you a mask of a man who has done no development on the female side at all. It's a poem I wrote a long time ago called The Busy Man Speaks. And I'll give it to the mask. And I'll give it to the mother of solitude. Welcome.

Not to the mother of solitude, will I give myself away? Not to the mother of art. Nor the mother of conversation. Not to the mother of tears. Nor the mother of the suffering of death. Not to the mother of the night full of crickets. Nor the mother of the open field. Nor the mother of Christ. But I will give myself to the father of righteousness who is also the father of cheerfulness. Who is also the father of perfect gesture. From the Chase National Bank an arm of flame is come. And I am gone to the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zero. And I shall give myself to the father of righteousness

the stone of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of rocks. I'm going to get you. You think because you have a union I won't get you? I'll have you within five years. You know what I'm called? The industrial revolution. Every year since the industrial revolution, I am stronger. You think you can fool the machines and you won't look like me? Every time you drive your car, you look like me when you get out of it. When some labor-saving devices, half the women in the United States look like me now.

I've got your parents already. Go ahead laugh. You'll laugh at your funeral won't you? I'm not so easy to be gotten around. Television is my specialty. Including Channel 13. You know what I like about television? Cause you can be passive watching. You don't have to do anything. The programs are all educational. I love passive students. I can eat 'em. Eat 'em. Good. Good. Good. Good. Go ahead, laugh. You'll laugh at your funeral, won't you? I'm not so easy to be gotten around. Television is my specialty. Including channel 13. You know what I like about television? Because you can be passive watching it. You don't have to do anything. The programs are all educational.

I love passive students. I can eat them. Eat them. Go ahead. More rock records, more me. Get yourself an instrument I'm not so sure about you. But as long as you've got your records. Thank you. Thank you. MOYERS: Darkness comes early to your Minnesota winner? BLY: Yes.

The pines call it down. You want a poem them about that? MOYERS: Sure. BLY: There is unknown dust that is near us. Waves breaking on shores just over the hill. Trees full of birds that we have never seen. Nets drawn down with dark fish. The evening arrives. We look up. And it is new. It is come through the nets of the stars. Through the tissues of the grass. Walking quietly over the asylum of the water. The day shall never end we think. We have hair that seems born for the daylight. But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise. And our skin shall see far off as it does underwater.

I don't know if the dulcimer is any good with that or not. MOYERS: But you like the darkness don't you? Not exclusively, but naturally. BLY: It is the other half. I found almost all of the poems I had written in silence in the snowy fields of written at dusk. At the passage from day to night. And that is possibly the time when the unconscious opens. MOYERS: Do you think in the end the light persuades the darkness? BLY: No, I don't know. I read St. John, but I am not sure I agree. MOYERS: I know you have been doing a lot of work in fairy tales for modern men. Why? BLY: You know, in the last 10 years there has been talk about women's growth. And the stages of women's growth, which has been very helpful to everybody. But let's talk about the stages of men's growth. And it is possible that the fairy tales were composed some of them 10 to 20,000 years ago

by men and women of the nature of Jung and Freud and Karen Horney. Who found themselves not only having amazing insights on the growth processes in human beings, but they found the necessity to put it, because libraries were being burned, they couldn't simply print it. So they had to put it into a story, extremely vivid, that it would be remembered for a long time. In one example, well, I thought I might begin the book with Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack and the Beanstalk says that in the beginning, the mother tells the boy to sell the cow for money. And he starts out in his task. But he disobeys his mother. So the first movement of the boy, when the growth begins, the first act is to disobey the mother. It strange me, in this poem, the mother, in a way, represents the system. She asks him to buy into the system by selling the cow. And that was all going well, except that he met an old man, a wise old man,

in which brings in the whole area of magic and respect for intelligence in old men and things like that. And the old man offers him instead three magic beans. So the word magic suddenly appears. And so the second stage in the growth of a male is when he approaches the world of magic. And certain boys are open to magic still. MOYERS: His first stage is disobeying his mother. BLY: Yeah, apparently, according to this story. MOYERS: The second stage is accepting magic. BLY: Yes, now the growth can stop at any point. So therefore, in this case, the boy is open to magic. Don't know why. Maybe his parents read him fairy stories. We don't know why. But he's open to magic. And he accepts the three magic beans. Okay, then he comes home with the three magic beans. Right? His mother says, what are you doing? Look at your moron. You've got these three beans. What is this? And she's furious and throws them out the window. But that helped the beans to touch the earth. And the next day, the beans have grown up. And there's this large green thing outside the window. Which, you know, a Freudian might say it's his penis. But we hope not because later it's cut down.

Anyway, it's his manhood, perhaps. His manhood is now growing up with the help of the old man. And with the help of the anger of his mother. If the mother had not thrown the beans out of she said, well is your wonderful. We have a couple of beans now. You and I will just talk about them. We put them in the cupboard. We'll have something to talk about. It's important to want them to go through the anger too. She throws them out. So then he has three choices. One is to ignore it. Close the curtain. They were his mother. Second choice is to cut it down. Which was recommended in the 60s. Many males were recommended to get rid of their aggression and their anger. Cut it down. The third choice he has is to climb it. Jack decides to climb it. So he's now to climb his own manhood. So it turns out that if you start to climb your own manhood, when you get up on top, you know what you find? You find a really big male. And this is related to finding your own father, who looks down over there. What is this? My son is going to go out. He's going to be a male. In that area, he meets his father. In another area, what he just did was to meet a collective like IBM, like American Tellentel,

who are enormous giants, who specialize in eating young males. And the third possibility is that he's meeting some large male on some other plane. You know, on some spiritual plane, he's meeting a very large male. In any case, it's a dangerous business. And what this story says that's so wonderful is that the male will not survive his contest with IBM unless he has a feminine presence to help him inside the castle as a young girl at a spinning wheel. No one knows what that is. Very mysterious. But when the male comes, she hides him in the oven. Always hides him. There are many versions of Jack and the Beanstalk. But always, she hide him in a sewing basket in an oven in some feminine area. So he's protected by the feminine twice, first by the woman who protects him and second by being in a kitchen area. And then the giant can't get him. Then an interesting thing happens. Because he's gone through the confrontation with the father but he lived. With the great father, with the collective father, only with the help of a woman, or maybe his own feminine side. Then if the male does that, he receives energy.

In the fairy story, that's described oftentimes in fairy stories, when they're talking about energy, the increase of energy, they'll use gold coins. He steals gold coins from the old father. And then he runs down the tree and he has the gold coins, but it shows how difficult it is for the male to get away from the mother because as you know what happens, he and his mother spend the coins. And then he has to go back up the tree and make the confrontation the second time. This time he gets a goose who lays golden eggs. So the energy's becoming a little more organic now. More tied into his body. It's a mammal that's laying the eggs now. So he, again, succeeds with the help of the woman, goes down the tree, but again he can't get away from his mother. He and his mother actually get impatient and they kill the goose in order to get the golden egg. It's touching how hard it is to get away from the mother. And so then he goes out the third time, and remember the third time he brings down a golden lyre. And now it's much more integrated in the whole world of music and sound and all of those things. Now it's a self-containing energy that continues.

The goose is sort of the level of Balzac, who had a lot of energy. But the lyre is an area of tk and great religious singers who have endless supplies of energy. And then he comes down the ladder, and this time the lyre calls out and the great collective or the great father and follows him down the ladder and he cuts off, cuts it off, and the father is killed. Then he's free of his mother too. MOYERS: If you get us men to reading fairy tales, you may destroy the economic system. BLY: Well, I'm afraid it'll never happen. What did these aqua shaver singers say? You can't affect the system. You can't even make it worse. MOYERS: But why do you want us to read fairy tales? You think it does help us gain insight into the meaning of this? BLY: I think that in ancient life, for example, they knew much more about the stages of growth than we do. The whole idea of being saved instantly has been a great destructive power in understanding that our growth proceeds by stages. Yeats said it proceeds by spirals and we mustn't expect to go up in our 20s. That's a disaster.

We ask great creativity and great spirituality out of our people in our 20s. No, that's not where they are. Their job is to make a connection with the world and try to do something in the world and then as they get older, it'll be time for spirituality or for growth. It's important to do them in the right stages. And fairy tales are unbelievable, unbelievably succinct and daring in the way they lay out certain stages. And most fairy stories end with the prince and the princess as being married. That has nothing to do with marriage. The fairy stories proceed to the point in which the male inside the body and the female are married. That is the marriage that takes place in the castle. And at that point then, you're prepared to do something in life when the male and the female have been married, when the king and the queen have been married, MOYERS: When you're a whole. BLY: When you're a whole and hopefully, even for a minute or two, You'll probably fall back later. So that's why it's exciting now. There's the most wonderful,

wonderful Eskimo stories. And ancient stories about men's growth. MOYERS: Where are you at in what stage? BLY: Don't ask me, don't ask me. Probably at the bottom. Probably haven't even climbed the beanstalk yet. MOYERS: Move over, that makes two others. You were very popular with college students in the 60s. I know because I heard from them. I saw them. I met them. And part of it had to do with your very early opposition to the war in Vietnam. Was it just the war that offended you? Or did you see something else more deeply in the American psyche? BLY: Well, I had already, I had published Silence in the Snowy Fields, and I was thought of as a poet who was interested in trees and snow and stuff. But I had also written another book, which no one would publish. It was called Poems for the Ascension of JP Morgan. And no one wanted political poems at that time, and no one would print it. It was to take a poem about our whole capitalist and general situation, and then put it next to it an advertisement. Or you alternate between a poem and an advertisement.

Insane things out of Time Magazine and stuff like this. And so I was interested in the whole issue of what's it like when a nation tries to suppress and pretend that it hasn't done the murder of the Indians. And it was our manifest destiny. We got asked us to go to the West Coast and wipe out all the Indians. You know, really, he did. And when you read that stuff in history books, you realize that we're engaged in a vast forgetting mechanism. And from the point of view of psychology, we're refusing to eat our grief. We're refusing to eat our dark side. We won't absorb it. And therefore, what Jung says is absolutely terrifying. If you do not absorb, you know, the things that you have done in your life, like the murder of the Indians and bringing the Blacks in, if you don't do that, then you will have to repeat it. You continue to repeat it. There's a repetition compulsion which neurotics have. And America is neurotic. It has the compulsion to repeat the Indian Wars. So as soon as we started to go into Vietnam, it was perfectly clear to me that what was about to happen

is that the generals were going to fight the Indian War over again. And the Indians, I mean, the Vietnamese are poor in relation to us. They're Asian. Somehow they have this strange religion called Buddhism, which is not Christian. The best thing to do is just to kill them. The best thing to do is to get a good excuse and wipe them out. And so I felt it couldn't help the United States at all because all it would mean is we go deeper in, deeper in the neurosis. And Eisenhower, you give Eisenhower credit, Eisenhower saw that something like that was going to happen. He refused to send troops to Vietnam. That was the greatest thing he did as a president. And he said, no, what can we do over there? It's hopeless. And he said no to the French. And then Kennedy, who is kind of an idiot in many ways, just a wonderful intelligent idiot didn't see that at all. He was so crazy about the light side of life. He was so crazy about elegance and good humor and all of that. And he didn't see what he let America in for. I blame Kennedy most and after that Johnson. MOYERS: That was a very bitter time in your life. It seemed to some people you talked about the time when the ministers lie, the professors lie, the priests lie,

television lies. BLY: All of this is a longing for death. MOYERS: A longing for death? BLY: You think our society has a kind of death wish? Yes. If you don't eat grief and you don't face what happens is so strange. What happens is that the death longing, which is just as strong as the life longing in us, it's right there. As Freud at the end of his life said, I've overlooked something. I said that Eros ruled everything I was wrong about that. There's Eros and also the death instinct. So the death instinct then can become powerful in the human being. If it becomes more powerful than the life instinct, the death instinct will come forward and he'll commit suicide. If the death instinct becomes strong in a nation, as it was in us around, 1960 and 1963 and 1964, if the death instinct really becomes more powerful than life instinct, then it will do something absolutely destructive to itself as a nation. MOYERS: And how do you get it open? How do you get it out? How do you deal with it? BLY: I don't know. I don't know. I think America will do it again. I think the next world will probably be the Brazilian one, because we've learned something from the Vietnam War.

But as I say, I miss the grief. I don't see any real grief in the United States over that. The people that are suffering the most are the veterans who went and did what we asked them to do. Then they come back with their leg blown off and no one will even talk to them. You know, veterans, people talk to veterans and say, 'you're deserved it. You got rid of your deserved.' Well, that just shows we aren't facing it. We are still on seeing what we did. MOYERS: What legacy do you think the 60s and Vietnam left us? BLY: It left a wonderful legacy of the knowledge that we're quite insane. MOYERS: Insane? BLY: America is quite insane. And that was a gist of the whole thing. I mean, we had our best people, McNamara, Johnson, everybody. And then they couldn't figure out the most elementary thing namely that they were going to lose. You can't fight against the people who are actually fighting for independence and their own honor. So the fact is that we had our best brains working at it and it didn't work. So insanity is the only other possibility. MOYERS: What is it? BLY: America has a profound insanity. And it's all right. France is insane. I mean, why shouldn't we be insane? MOYERS: What is insanity? Denial?

BLY: I don't know. I don't know what insanity is. But I would say that if you ignore your dark side long enough, you can begin a man can ignore his dark side for 10 to 15 years. And then it begins to get strong out there itself. Everything you ignore in your personality is pushed out to the edge where it begins to gather strength and begins to be hostile to you. And eventually it'll come back in and bust up your whole serene life. And so I think that insanity is when the dark side has been ignored for years in a puritanical society and then suddenly it returns and smashes everything. And what does it cause us a depression? It causes us a depression, which is a wonderful thing. The unconscious knows that the invasion by the insane side produced B-52s taking off from Guam. What did they cost? $50,000 every one that took off. Some like 30 of them took off every day for five years. The result is an economic depression. But depression is wonderful because it's chosen by the unconscious to make you understand that the economic world and the psychic one are identical.

MOYERS: So what does poetry have to say to this kind of society? BLY: I don't know. It says the same thing. I don't know what it says. But I notice the wisdom of people like the Hopis for example who will have two to three days a year or even a season of mask work where everyone goes out and is insane. They're totally insane. All that's wonderful. And everybody's a little insane. And then in the end they're all sane from agreeing to be insane. Whereas you go to a Lutheran church. Do you notice anybody insane in the Lutheran church? A Baptist church? MOYERS: Not in a Baptist church. Lutherans may be, but not. Is that why you use masks? BLY: Yes, I use them for that purpose. MOYERS: Should we have a kind of national mask day? BLY: Yeah, that would be helpful. That would be helpful. Everyone agreed that they're partially insane. They would take a lot of load off the people in the insane aslyums who have to carry the whole weight of insanity. MOYERS:There's a point. One of the first poems you've published. Where's The Light Around the Body? Dealt with some of these themes. I remember one of the first poems I've yours I read in the 60s. Come With Me.

Remember that? BLY: Yes, I remember that. And I thought of it a minute ago when we were talking about around 1960 or 63 or 64. It began to be apparent that we were going into extremely dark areas. You know, without willing it. And I use the images here of an old tire who rolling down a hill and then drowning in some slough at the bottom. And to me, what happened then was that this darkness began to grow and then Kennedy was standing in the way. Because Kennedy had too much to do with light to a certain extent. And I remember the day the Kennedy was killed. It was perfectly apparent to me. I got this horrible feeling. Here we go. Here we go. Now we're going right down into the dark now. Going right down. And you know, it's as if the unconscious got Kennedy out of the way because I mean he was foolish, but he had wonderful connections with light and things. And if the country is going to suffer, you're going to have to get rid of a man like that. So it can suffer. So the poem is called, Come with me into those things that have felt this despair for so long. Those removed Chevrolet wheels that howl with a terrible loneliness

lying under backs in the cindry dirt. Like men drunk and naked, staggering off down a hill to down at last to drown in the pond. Or those shredded inner tubes abandoned on the shoulders of throughways, black and collapsed bodies who tried and burst and were left behind. Or those curly steel shavings scattered around the garage benches, sometimes still warm, gritty when we hold them, who have given up and blame everything on the government and those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness. MOYERS: You're a man of many paradoxes, Robert Bly. Light and darkness, love and death. Do you ever feel them tearing at you? BLY: Well, so what's wrong with little insanity?

I suppose if you feel it, yeah. Eventually, I don't know, I don't know anything about it, but if I ever became wise, they'd all make a harmony, a terrific harmony. And the wider the grasp out to the edges, the bigger the harmony would be. I'll give you a poem by a random way of welcome. On the idea of trying to go out as far as you can to the edges. I live my life in growing orbits, which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon or a storm or a great song. That's really is about 17 years old. The body is like a November birch facing the full moon,

and reaching into the cold heavens. In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves, nothing but bare trunks climbing like coal fire. My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn, I must return to the trapped fields, to the obedient earth. The trees shall be reaching all the winter. It's a joy to walk in the bare woods. The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves. The leaves are down in touching the silt earth, giving off the odour that partridges love.

MOYERS: From Kabekona Lake in Minnesota, and Cooper Union in New York, we've been listening to Robert Bly. I'm Bill Moyers. For a transcript of this program,

send two dollars to Bill Moyers' journal, Post Office Box 1527, Long Island City, New York 11101. This program was made possible by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Thank you.