More Than True

by Robert Bly

  Our story says that being passive toward these beings is not the thing. One has to be active. Boil them. That requires that we listen to our “Dark Man” in an “underground” place with some pots, a lot of chopping, heat, and ashes. And there’s going to be soot. In other words, we explore our shadow and use all our faculties, both rational and feeling, our patience stretched to the extreme, to change the effect these inner commanding critics have in our lives.

  The boiling requires active disobedience to the orders our first boss, the “commanding critic,” gave us. To disobey his orders and to see the effect of that disobedience is to break the hold the critic has on us. But what is boiling like in daily life? Ask yourself hard questions. Learn the main influences in your father’s life that are now affecting yours, learn which people shamed him in his childhood and how they did it, and, harder still, notice who places shame on you—that’s one way of boiling. As adults it is our job to name the power we couldn’t name that worked on us when we were children. That helps get rid of naïveté. In piling on wood to add heat to the fire, the soldier is encouraging his own insights. That’s why the Dark Man won’t punish him. When the young man looks in the pots and piles wood on the fire, he is doing just what needs to be done.

  When Hans is about to go back up from the Underworld of the unconscious, the Dark Man warns him about the importance of language. When someone asks who he is, he is to say: “I am the Dark Man’s Sooty Brother and my King as well.” He is not to say, “I have spent six years getting my PhD in Brain Research, and six years teaching at the university, and I’m sure they’ll give me tenure at the next faculty meeting” or “I am a young poet who has already gained a certain following for my work.” Those would be naive answers that would call up inflation in the speaker and an urge to kill in the listeners. He is not to say, “I am the Dark Man’s Shiny Brother” but “I am the Dark Man’s Sooty Brother and my King as well.” That phrase makes no more sense in German than in English, but it suggests that the process of cooking has freed him from some reliance on outer authority and that he is giving honor to darkness and shadow in learning to live his life. That’s very good.

  Alas, when the young man openly shows his bag of gold to the innkeeper, it is clear that he is still naive, even after the seven years of boiling. The complicated experiences he’s had haven’t cured his naïveté. That quality in young men hangs on. So I think we could profitably spend a little time talking about it.

  “Naïveté,” according to the dictionary, is “natural simplicity or artlessness, ingenuousness.” But looked at from behind, it is a state of feeling that avoids the dark side of one’s own motives or the motives of others. Naïveté discounts anger, fear, or greed and assumes more goodness in the world than perhaps there is. The naive person often refuses confrontation or combat, and, if thrown into combat by circumstance, often fails to notice that he has in fact been defeated. Wearing a white suit, he rides about the field where the defeat took place, waving to the onlookers with a smug look.

  Naïveté was characteristic of American men around the middle and end of the last century, though realizations about the Vietnam War and the ugly effects of racism opened wounds that weren’t going to heal without major changes. Then there was September 11, 2001. People understood immediately that fearmongering and lies had led the country into the Iraq War. With this realization, some naïveté fell away. Now, with social media and worldwide conversations on every imaginable topic, more people are likely to recognize other people’s shadows and failures. Whether we can recognize our own is still in question.

  The naive individual who refuses to notice the workings of his or her own shadow will never make the steps necessary to create a life of meaning. Unconscious acts, dazzling the innkeeper with our bag of gold, for instance, simply inflame him to more and more thievery. As I’ve said, naïveté works hand in hand with betrayal.

  It takes concentration to notice the tricks of our own shadow. Let’s say we forget to pay attention to inner work with authority figures or, in terms of the story, forget to add wood to the fire. We could slip into dependency and denial. For an artist with no place for the dark and ugly or, contrarily, with only a place for the dark and ugly, the work is kitsch in one way or the other. And everyone who sees it knows that the full emotional body is not present in it. At men’s gatherings many complain that they grew up without any model of what an activated masculine emotional body is. They tell of robot-like fathers, playboys without depth, victims, fathers who won’t defend themselves or their children when they’re under attack. A man who is failing in this area might alternate between abusive behavior and a sheepish contrary softness. Robert Penn Warren said in the Saturday Review that the poem is a little myth of man’s capacity for making life meaningful. And in the end the poem is a light by which we may see life.

  * * *

  Sometimes sons will try to activate their own emotional bodies through music or poetry or any of the other arts. Practice of the arts alone doesn’t necessarily succeed in opening the emotional body. A woman who notices that a man’s emotional body is not activated will sometimes offer to help him express his feelings, or she might teach him to be more sensual. Though sex might deepen the integration of the physical and the emotional body for a woman, the same thing doesn’t seem to work for a man; his early experience of sex is so different from hers, and not necessarily connected with the feeling body.

  Instead, since the young man has a fantastic longing to find his place in the world, he needs to have help finding stories that describe aspects of life never mentioned in his family. This is why mentoring is so important. The old men in Australian aboriginal tribes, in New Guinea, and in Africa begin a complicated sequence of adventures, teachings, and trials with boys of the tribe in anticipation that they will learn enough to become men and not live their whole lives as children. They recite poems, act out myths, dance all night, and say outrageous things. An important feature of these ceremonies is the development of the connection with the earth and all its elements, so that the young men never forget that the earth is their home and gives birth to all things.

  The story doesn’t go into detail about how the emotional body is sustained after the seven years are up and the soldier returns to his life on the earth’s surface. The False Innkeeper, the one in him and in us who prefers the ease of living out of habit and greed, has stolen his “insights.” The old patterns have returned; apparently all his work has been for nothing. That’s a state of diminishment we’ve all experienced. All the details in the story are fascinating. The response to the theft is not resignation, beer drinking, or more talks on male mythology, but acceptance of the need to “go back down” and this time say exactly what he wants and deserves.

  At least this young Kettle Keeper, who tended the “fires of insight,” has kept his promise not to cut his hair and nails or wipe his tears, and though he wants those things done, through a dangerous inertness in his emotional body, he fails to ask for what he wants. He is too agreeable, too helpful, or perhaps too ambitious for whatever project he has in mind. One could say he keeps on giving to those parts of the psyche that are insatiable. “Take no time for your humanity,” he hears all day and night, “get on with my endeavor!” He might project his desires on the other characters in his drama—a wife, a boss, a son, a daughter, a guru—but he’s really serving a part of himself that absorbs and absorbs and is never satisfied.

  When the young man goes down the second time, he says to the Dark Man two things: “Give me more wages … cut my hair, trim my fingernails, wipe the tears from my eyes, and cut my toenails.” I love this part; it seems to me so brilliant. Jung remarked, “American marriages are the saddest in all the world because the man does all his fighting at the office.” Men live through years of a relationship secretly resentful, dimly enraged, passively hostile. And we are not talking only of marriage here or of other relationships in the outer world.

  Suppose the Dark Man inside is waiting for
an order. Some readers will remember Kafka’s unparalleled story “Before the Law,” about the doorkeeper and the suppliant. The suppliant sits by the door for months, for years, waiting for the moment when the door opens or when the doorkeeper falls asleep, or when he will be invited in. The years pass. Finally, when he’s old and dying, he calls the doorkeeper over and whispers to him about the injustice of it all. The doorkeeper says, “Oh, this was your door; you could have gone through at any moment.”

  Passivity like that can weigh down any portion of a person’s life—especially in the helpless disconnection from meaningful work. Many young people have seen themselves as functionaries only, whose job it is to slog along without dreams and only the mildest pleasure in what they do. They have adopted the belief that seems to be required of them: that they can never hope to live the life that best suits them. Now, however, the intricate connections among people all over the earth are encouraging both young and old to throw off emotional and mental stagnation. Then it happens that the mingling resentment, malice, and shame that is a natural response to living under despotic control is thrown off, too. No one knows what comes afterward.

  We come now to a new understanding of the meaning of the last phrase in the sentence: “I am the Dark Man’s Sooty Brother and my King as well.” Evidence of kingship is the ability to say to the Dark Man in a convincing voice: “Cut my hair.” He has come to the point where he will have to make up his own life. The inner King is the one in us to do this, to choose a good course for our life for the next six months, the next year, the next twenty years, without being overly contaminated by the ideas of others who think they know best. The story suggests we become our own Dark King (one including the shadow) and say, to ourselves in particular, what it is that we truly want.

  What else can one say about this marvelous story?

  We’ve found out that while the soldier was in the Underworld, he learned how to play music. He learned music through his emotional body. The poet Kabir mentioned several times hearing music coming from his own chest. When we learn how to play the musical instrument of our body, when the body itself makes music of its feeling, then a King’s daughter hears it, or birds hear it, or other men hear it. That’s when the man who left the tears in his eyes so he would remember his own grief, the Underworld worker, the citizen who now has to forge his own life, gains the entire kingdom for himself and for his bride. We should all be lucky enough to make that kind of music.

  FIVE

  ONE-TWO MAN

  Once upon a time there was a boy who was living with his grandmother, the father having died some years before, and his mother seemingly gone, perhaps living somewhere else. His grandmother, with whom he got along well, was raising him. But one early summer day when he was about fourteen, he said to his grandmother, “There’s absolutely nothing to do around here. I’m bored.” His grandmother replied, “Why not go out into the fields and dig some roots. Then we won’t be hungry in the winter.” The boy thought this was a good idea, and he soon began to enjoy it. He would leave every morning with his digging stick, and after a while he could guess where a big root was likely to be. Moreover, he discovered other roots he had never eaten before. Each evening, he’d add his new roots to the pile he had already gathered, and these roots were the first things he’d look at in the morning.

  Early one fall day, he got up, went out to look at the pile, and came running back. “All the roots are gone, Grandma,” he cried, and he wept. His grandmother replied, “The spirit of your father came last night and took away the roots. That means he wants to get in touch with you. If you sit down, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve never told you because I thought you were not quite old enough. It’s the story of Stone Shirt.

  “There was once a man who became a very powerful shaman and magician, but he used those gifts for his own gain; then he began to harm people. When he understood that people were angry at him, he made a stone shirt for himself that covered his whole heart and chest area, so that arrows and spears bounced off. People called him Stone Shirt.

  “Stone Shirt is the one who killed your father. He wanted to have your mother; and after he took her away, he tried to kill you also, but something happened, so his plan didn’t work. The story tells you why your mother is not living with you. Stone Shirt is keeping her in his wigwam. That’s how it happens that you are living with me. Tomorrow morning, I want you to walk to that oak tree over there and dig underneath it. You’ll find your father’s bones buried under its roots.”

  So the boy dug there, and several feet down he found his father’s bones. He lifted them carefully, brought them up, and put them on the grass. Right away he fell into a deep sleep. He slept for three days while the spirit of his father taught him all the things the father would have taught the boy if he were still alive—how to trail deer, how to find bear, how to know what sort of weather is coming, how to know where you are in the forest, how to sleep in the snow, as well as the names of certain rocks and trees. Then he taught the boy what it meant to be a warrior and what a warrior did and what he thought and how he walked. The father taught his son these things for three days and the boy listened well.

  Then, as the dream came to an end, he said to the boy, “I want you to go back to where my bones were buried. Dig down beneath and you’ll find the stone ax my father gave to me, his father gave to him, and his grandfather gave to his father. They were from the Crane Clan, known for bringing peace when there were quarrels. The stone ax belongs to the fathers. Take this ax home and tell your grandmother to hit you on the skull with it. She should split you in two all the way down the middle.”

  The boy dug farther down under the oak and found the stone ax. When he returned to the house and told his grandmother to hit him with it, she refused. “I love you too much for that. Such a blow would kill you. Please don’t ask me again.”

  The boy then told her that this request had come from his father’s spirit. At last, she agreed to it. She took up the ax, steadied herself, and split him all the way to the ground. After that day, the boy was known as One-Two Man because he was no longer one man but two who were just alike.

  One-Two Man now spoke their first sentence: “I’m going to find Stone Shirt’s cave and bring back my mother.” He understood he needed some help for that and so he went to the forest. During all the years he was growing up, he played in the forest alone, and he had made friends with a Snake, a Mouse, a Coyote, a Wolf, and a Bighorn Sheep. Now he went to consult them. They said, “Don’t try it. It’s too hard. No arrow or spear can pierce the stone shirt, and besides, he has a guard at his teepee. There’s a gazelle that guards the entrance. It has an eye on the end of every hair. Besides that, Stone Shirt has two daughters by an earlier marriage. They are expert at arrows and never miss. We think it’s best if you let the whole thing go and just forget about it.” One-Two Man said he planned to go ahead anyway, and so the creatures all agreed to help. That’s the way that went.

  The Bighorn Sheep brought his gift first, which was a horn of water that would never go empty, very valuable in such dry country. One-Two Man accepted that gift. The Bighorn Sheep went back to his place. Meanwhile, the others—the Snake, the Mouse, the Coyote, and the Wolf—would help plan the attack, which would have to proceed very carefully.

  All five of them, or really all six of them, since One-Two Man was now two, traveled toward Stone Shirt’s cave and made camp a mile or two away. They began planning the attack. Coyote and Wolf went on for hours. They talked over and over again about the gazelle with one eye at the end of each hair, how to deal with that, how many eyes it had, whether any of the eyes close during the day, and so on. They discussed the plans that people had made earlier in similar situations. They debated various strategies for weeks. The Mouse got to hating these discussions and the Snake was at his wit’s end; he couldn’t take it anymore. So one night while the Coyote and the Wolf were still arguing their strategies after midnight, the Snake slipped away, stung the gazelle to death, and r
eturned. When he reported this in the morning, the Wolf and the Coyote got into a disagreement about which of them had put the idea into the Snake’s head. They argued for many hours about it.

  When that was over, they began discussing the second problem, which was what to do with the two daughters. They were Stone Shirt’s daughters and very tough. When they slept, there were strong bows beside them and those bows were always strung. The daughters were excellent markswomen and could hit a mark even at a great distance. These two women would have to be approached with great care.

  Coyote and Wolf made up and threw away many ingenious ideas. They talked for days, for a week, for three weeks. Mouse finally had had enough, crawled near the bows on the ground, and gnawed until each string was almost severed. The instant one put pressure on the string it would snap. Mouse, when he returned, told everyone what he had done, and Coyote and Wolf got into a long argument over which one of them had dropped the hint that led to this solution; and a lot of talk went into the air that way. Finally, One-Two Man felt that the time had come.

  One-Two Man saw his mother out walking near the river and he managed to convey to her what they were going to do. Then he told her to stand with her back to the teepee and look out over the river while they did it. Meanwhile, Coyote and Wolf argued what to do about Stone Shirt himself, who had such marvelous protection against all weapons and arrows. This talk went on and on, day after day. Brave Wolf and wily Coyote kept arguing about the best way to proceed. Meanwhile, Snake had noticed that Stone Shirt went out early in the morning to answer the call of nature, and so Snake went to that place, waited underneath a big leaf before dawn, and stung him in the ass and killed him. That was the end of Stone Shirt! After that, what was left to do? All six of them went to Stone Shirt’s teepee together. One-Two Man rescued his mother, and everyone felt very good about the success of the effort. One-Two Man thanked all of the animals. The Snake, the Mouse, the Wolf, and the Coyote returned to the forest. That’s how One-Two Man did it all; he achieved what neither his grandmother nor the animals thought he could do, and by that effort he finished all the work that his father hadn’t been able to do. That’s how the story came to me. That’s how it ran and runs now, and I’m sending it back to the forest and to the place where it still lives.