by Robert Bly
* * *
As the story begins, the young boy lives alone with his grandmother and he has given her his love. When she suggests that he dig roots, he does that. It gets him out of his boredom and out of the house. Simultaneously, it allows him to see that there are precious discoveries to be made below the surface of life, and he soon develops the ability to recognize signs telling him where these precious things will appear. He is beginning to enjoy his work, to be good at it. He is happy to help the family, especially with the accumulation of this food. A digging task can be quite valuable.
Then one day his pile of roots is gone. His grandma says his dead father wants to contact him, so he will have to be done with accumulation and with digging. The boy is at an age of initiation, when a father can enter a boy’s emotional world in a new way. The boy will learn some important things from his male ancestors.
The grandmother is not wary of contact from the father, even though he abides in another world. Her heart is open to other wisdom besides her own. She knows that the boy’s father was killed by Stone Shirt, who has a fierce hostility to growth and warmth, and stays removed from ordinary people. Women suffer because of Stone Shirt’s coldness, which is unlike the coldness of the witch of most fairy stories, whose wild greed puts her in contact with humans. Her endless desiring can be somehow endearing; she wants what she wants and someone must give it to her. But Stone Shirt’s way is alienating. He steals feeling from the human community and takes it far away.
Stone Shirt has captured the feeling of the young male in this story. Most likely the feeling problem goes way back in the family’s history, and many forces will be needed to help get the feeling back. Even the creatures will be called on to bring their own species of wisdom. The boy’s father can’t be much help, except from the other world, where the story takes for granted that he is in touch with the teachings of many generations.
The family problem seems to have been a repression of feeling. The grandmother reveals to the boy that it is because of Stone Shirt that his mother is living far from him. At the same time that he learns this, he learns that there is covetousness and murder in the world. She instructs the boy to find his father’s bones under the roots of a tree. When he finds them, he falls into a deep sleep, and there his father teaches him many things that will help him to live in the world. Then the father says, “Dig down beneath my bones and find the stone ax my father gave to me, his father to him, his father’s father to him, and so on far back into the lineage,” perhaps as far back as the Neolithic stone ax, millennia ago. The boy finds the ax and tells his grandmother she is to use it to split him in two. She is reluctant, but he convinces her. The old fathers want the boy to have two different ways of knowing. They are to be separated, given different names.
As soon as he is split, he says, “I’m going to find Stone Shirt’s cave and bring back my mother.” In the midst of his learning about the world, by rescuing his mother he will become the defender of the male mode of feeling for the whole family. He will be in great danger; even his wild side is not equipped for that much danger. He will need help from sources he hasn’t yet encountered. We could say that the moon side—the moving, changing, ephemeral moon side—has to be split from the vigorous, unchanging consciousness belonging to the sun side. We know that as soon as the boy is split, there is going to be a reflective witness in him.
The split helps the boy see that a river has more than one source, the dawn has more than one morning, gods existed before monotheism, fire burns with more than one stick, and forest ecology has no one species dominant through all time. There is a time to know oneself as two beings, one on each side of the ax.
The man who has seen and recognized the split would not identify himself with one of the two sides. He would wonder, with each work of art he meets, whether it talks to both sides of himself—to the secretive moon side as well as the confident sun side. (I identified for years with my sun side. It seemed the right thing to do.)
I sense that the side of the male mode of feeling, if that is what the boy is learning about, has a strong component of longing—for what, we don’t know, but I think it has to do with something the German mystic Angelus Silesius said:
If you could turn your heart into a cow stall, Christ would be born again on earth!
The boy sets out to ask the animals to help him get his mother back. These animals are not so clearly instinctual as they might be in another story. They seem to be a version of the different ways people behave in the world he’ll enter as a man; but as animals, they are still innocent. Since this is a Native American story, the animals are also wise. We have to assume that they have contact with the eternal. He has known them from a lost, innocent time when he played together with them. He tells the animals he wants to kill Stone Shirt. They wisely say, “Don’t try it.”
We need to look briefly at the five beings, creatures, or faculties the boy meets in the forest. Two of the animals, the Mouse and the Snake, are hiding, retiring, secretive, introverted, nonverbal, private ground-huggers. Coyote is a talkative, pushy, aggressive, extroverted, public, and exhibitionistic ground-runner, while Wolf, another ground-runner, is isolated and wintry. The fifth, the Bighorn Sheep, is a mountain type. He likes heights. He is fierce in battles in spring, yet he possesses a reserve of calm. His gift is a horn of water that never runs dry. When he has given that, he returns to the mountains. I connect him with a fundamental courage that is sufficient for movement into the unknown. The mountain sheep inside us drives forward and gives us libido enough for our whole lives. A man finds this energy when he has been split by the father’s ax. That’s what the story says.
The Mouse is quite different. He belongs, along with the rats and squirrels, to the company of “gnawers,” whose master, “the Rat-Wife,” Ibsen describes in Little Eyolf. She can call the gnawers away from an island and, let’s say, into the sea and drown them. But it is not clear if we should get rid of all the gnawers. Certain things gnaw at us, and they exist at some sort of threshold between the conscious life and the unconscious life, so they can slip back down in a moment and be gone. They have almost no defense but hiding, and yet, when something is strung too tightly in us so that it’s impossible for us to unstring it, and it is dangerous to cut it with a knife, the gnawers do the work. The gnawers take fifteen years over a decision that we don’t have the clarity to solve quickly. The gnawers leave annoying nests in the backs of drawers and occasionally make their nests using the edges of our diaries or the centers of diplomas and real estate deeds; moreover, the fierce smell of their nests penetrates our nostrils whenever we open one of those drawers. But, at last in gratitude, one day we are gnawed free from what has bound us and we say: Blessed be the gnawers that chewed through the string of that bow.
The Snake is something else again. Snakes, too, as the story suggests, dislike a lot of verbiage; they withdraw, they hide, and yet they do not lose touch with the aim of it all. After all the meetings and discussions between the characters of this story, it is Snake that cuts through the talk and bites Stone Shirt on the ass and kills him. Does that suggest that after the boy spends so much time listening to others, he will strike out and kill his enemy just to wipe him off the map? Not so. The instincts are still alive in the interior world, too. And after the boy has seen his problem from the different angles the animals represent, he has to do something about it. He has to act. He has the courage of the Wolf to advise him, so he won’t be scared that what has happened once will happen always. He has the cunning of Coyote, so he can go around his own fears and the paralysis of his anger. And, like the Snake, he won’t take an elevated approach. He doesn’t have to stay on a higher plane.
This isn’t a hero’s story. It is a story about the development of consciousness. The father insists on it. From off in the other world he takes the first step; then the grandmother tells the story of the father’s death, and she’s the one who splits the boy in two. Something innate in the boy, something given at birth, h
as allowed him to recognize a helpful spirit in each of the different animals. Now the differences among them are clearer, and he spends a lot of time talking and listening and learning what they have to say so he can plan what to do. These are a series of acts of consciousness. He listens and listens, and though the animals don’t act together, as he’d expected, they cooperate in their own ways; and the work that needs to get done is done.
Snakes are royalty, as D. H. Lawrence noticed when he met a snake at a drinking trough, but quirkily obedient to his fears and to Christian snake-hatred, he threw a stick at it anyway:
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
The ancients guessed that because the Snake sheds his skin every year, he knows more about how to grow and how to avoid stagnation and how to refuse automatic patterns than the other creatures know. The Gnostics associated the Snake with the spinal cord, and this detail reminds us that the spinal intelligence, though physically below the brain, can intervene decisively if necessary. Here, the Snake is Lord of the Underworld. He makes his home in places lower than we go, and one would be foolish to embark on a deadly task without his decisiveness.
* * *
As we know, Stone Shirt has enclosed his heart and lungs in stone. The psychic arrows of shamans who might wish to harm him can’t penetrate the stone. And he has a gazelle Guardian—and each of its hairs has an eye on the end of it. The gazelle is famous for watchfulness and for swift reflexes in danger, so the story says that the psyche of the one who killed the boy’s father is extremely alert. Our human consciousness does not know how to deal with that alertness. The effort to kill Stone Shirt could end right there.
The boy and the animals have arguments, discussions, proposals, tangents, and they have a good time together. All their talk expresses their inability to deal with the invisible, or with that which becomes translucent or transparent to the light. For ages, human beings have imagined the eye with light coming out of it rather than going into it. The gazelle with all the eyes then would be virtually invisible or transparent from all the light. One day, the Snake gets tired of all the babble, slips out, and stings the one they all fear. In psychic terms, the spinal cord can put anything outside the reach of ordinary consciousness. Even our defensiveness can’t resist it; it can pull our alertness into oblivion. Neruda says:
If you ask where I come from I have to start talking with broken objects,
with kitchenware that has too much bitterness,
with animals quite often rotten,
and with my heavy soul.
What have met and crossed are not memories,
nor the yellow pigeon that sleeps in forgetfulness.
But even when oblivion has eaten the gazelle Guardian, Stone Shirt is still well guarded, for his two “daughters” own bows that are always strung, and the daughters shoot very well. If a male, aiming to reverse his father’s fate and keep his own soul alive, tries to move into the force field in which our young man’s father died, he will find a feminine power. That kind of feminine power is hostile to One-Two Man. It guards the father’s murderer instead. That is very strange, and yet it reminds us of the hostile psychic energy that many ancient cultures identified. It is as if Stone Shirt gives an approval to his daughters that allows the death of a young man’s soul, even if it ends all possibility for his true humanity.
The Wolf and the Coyote don’t know how to defeat that force field, and that is not surprising, because each is rather advanced in evolution and each has evaded nature’s conservative power sometime in the far past. Both Coyote and Wolf are highly intelligent, curious about all unusual sights and objects, devoted warmly to their families, good explorers of the earth’s surface, and capable of admiring human beings.
They differ also in many ways. The American Indians talk of a trickster embodied in Coyote. This trickster possesses unpredictability, which shows itself in juvenile pranks rather than sober judgments, in riddle mentality rather than the doctrinal, in ingenious escapes rather than resigned imprisonment, and in a love of all things low and outrageous rather than a longing for the higher consciousness. He farts to settle a question instead of appealing to higher principle. But he is not earthbound. He loves air, mentality, mental fight, intellectual playfulness, and good jokes.
The Wolf is something quite different. American Indians associated the Wolf with clear-eyed will and solitary, disciplined living. He holds darkness, winter, night, and unexpected destructiveness, but he can be tamed to a degree. He is far along on the evolutionary path. He is a good model for human intelligence in many ways, and when he and Coyote argue for days and weeks, they do represent some human way of approaching difficult problems. Wolf and Coyote lay out all contingencies to embrace the problem of the Hostile Daughters and their Two Strung Bows. They waste time, force time to pass, ignore body wisdom, forget to worship silence, forget to wait for the right moment. Instead, they fill the cave with excitable words, they stimulate the shallow, verbal part of the psyche, drink caffeinated beverages, eat chocolate, stay up late, call each other names, invent absurd schemes, and claim credit for everything good that has happened, up to and including Creation. Without all the babble, the Mouse and Snake in us will not do their work. We have to heat up the psyche, and this is something frequently forgotten by men and women who abruptly leave a university town to settle down alone in a bog. A man alone, a woman alone, or a man and wife together can live off the capital invested by Wolf and Coyote in their graduate school days for a while, but eventually the psyche cools down, and then no inner work gets done at all, though their lives now have a purity and wholesomeness lacking in the city.
In the story, Mouse, driven in exasperation out of his habitual and complacent nervousness, gets so heated that he slips out one night, runs all the way to the cave, and gnaws the two bowstrings nearly through, silently, in a way that doesn’t disturb the sleep of the objects.
* * *
When Mouse gets home and reports this, the rest of the psyche feels much better. That doesn’t prevent Wolf and Coyote from engaging in a ferocious verbal battle on the question of which of them had inspired the Mouse. At last they settle down to discuss the most effective way of penetrating the stone shirt, and they manage to do that for several weeks, no doubt discussing huge iron javelins, thousand-degree ovens that would burn up Stone Shirt and his vest, microbe colonies that might get under the shirt and cause inflammation so that Stone Shirt would have to remove it, and so on. They had a lot of fun, but it wasn’t fun for the Snake. It knew that the spinal cord goes all the way down to the ass, and that’s where the snake stung Stone Shirt as he was relieving himself, during what was probably his only human moment that day.
Somewhere along the way, One-Two Man, meeting his mother while she is out walking, tells her that when the final action starts, she should not take part, or even watch, but look out over the lake. Looking out over the lake, she will have her face toward eternity, and when our mother’s face is toward eternity, we can fight more freely.
* * *
Stone Shirt is male. He carries a hard shell around the heart area. (I sensed that shell around my father’s heart area and sense it around my own.) Maybe we see our fathers killed every day. Aren’t we all afraid of being killed? Sometimes we can watch a so-called meek man hesitate and finally give no opinion; and we can say he is afraid of being wrong; that may be, but he might also be afraid of being killed. We’re in complicated material here.
Stone Shirt confuses his desire for feeling with love for his captive, which caused him to steal the young man’s feeling as well. And something needs to be done about him, something in the male world. We need to sleep for three days on our father’s bones, however uncomfortable they may be underneath
us. We need to find our father’s ax and ask our grandmother to split us down the middle. She doesn’t want to do it; she represents unity. And if it is painful, we choose it anyway. Rumi speaks in favor of an open feeling around pain, and of not intellectualizing it:
A person hit a Worker a good strong blow from behind.
The Worker swung around to return it; and the man said:
“Before you hit me, I have a question for you.
Now this is it: that sound: was it made by my hand or your neck?”
“The pain I am feeling does not give me leave for speculation.
These things are all right to worry about if you are feeling no pain.”
In the urgency of removing power from the feeling life, it is probably wise to remain split for a longer period than our integrative culture tells us to. One part of us is educated and one is not, particularly the feeling side, for men. I want to write poems for each side that both parts can understand. I don’t want to leave one or the other isolated, unloved, disdained, and uncared for.
* * *
Could we say that a woman’s instinct is to heal wounds and a man’s to make them larger, to take on the painful tension of what has been left undone, what was never given, what was given that was never acknowledged, the thefts we’ve endured, the inheritance from family? No metaphor will do. At the end of the story we know that in trying to become a good man, we can close up our wounds too soon, allowing Stone Shirt to hold feeling prisoner in his cave. It is part of our work to free her.
