by Robert Bly
And what if after so much history, we succumb,
not to eternity,
but to these simple things, like being
at home, or starting to brood!
What if we discover later
all of a sudden, that we are living
to judge by the height of the stars
off a comb and off stains on a handkerchief!
It would be better, really,
if it were all swallowed up, right now!
We mustn’t assume from the jokey tone tellers of fairy tales use that there is little at stake here. Everything is at stake.
In the myth, the Bear King and the Awesome Lady of Vast Appetite, whom he almost marries, belong to a wild side of the universe. Greek tales around Dionysus spoke of a wildness beyond human beings that is capable of tearing and destroying them. Possibly in some preindustrial, pre-agricultural time, women and men may have been able to sustain a longer union with the wild energies of deities. But with a civilizing emphasis on intellect and light, we are separated from the Awesome Lady and the Bear King, who represent our instincts, as well as our ability to experience both the animal and the divine.
Turning to the story again, once the soul agrees to give the true self to the Divine (Saint John of the Cross did that as well), then we get to the Bear King’s castle, where the Divine lives. But what if it turns out that we can meet the Divine only at night? Everything is dark at night. We might be aware of a few moments of the ecstatic, but that’s all we know. What we do know for sure is that something happened with humans, something after Creation but before Egypt. The expulsion from the Garden, which the northern European artists in Dürer’s time painted so passionately, so brokenheartedly, so grievingly, probably touches that moment of lifting the candle, which seems to be one of the most important things that ever happened to human beings. One could say that before the lifting, we had Union; but after it, Union and Separation both. Hafez says:
Both union with you and separation from you
Confuse me. What can I do? You are not present
Nor are you utterly absent from my sight.
In another poem he says:
How blessed is the man who, like Hafez,
Has tasted in his heart the wine made before Adam.
So the wine made before Adam is the wine that is drunk in the castle when all is dark. Even though we are exiled from the castle, tramping alone through the woods, we are not exiled permanently. We move back and forth between Union and Separation. Hafez adds:
Your perch is on the lote tree in Paradise,
Oh wide-seeing hawk. What are you doing
Crouching in this mop-closet of calamity?
When we are in separation, we keep asking people if they have seen the Divine Bear go by; they always say they saw him last week, so the Divine is not far ahead. But the informants also warn that there’s grave danger of a lasting separation. “He’s about to be married!” When we are in separation, it is important to teach small children, feed the starving family of the blacksmith, to have metal claws in addition to dancing slippers; it is important to have something to trade, and start trading, and not be freaked out by the gross and enormous Greedy Soul—even if it is our own. Even in separation, we can recall the generosity of Union, its ecstatic energy. The magic tablecloth, flask, and scissors help us remember. They are reminders of the joy of Union.
Have we come now to the hut at the base of the Glass Mountain? The blacksmith’s children live there. They, unlike the three happy children she played with earlier, are starving. “Sometimes our mother puts stones in the boiling water and tells us they are apples, and it really does help.” These are the starving children inside us, and feeding them is like reading the poems of Keats, or adding brilliant colors to the painting we’ve begun of the apple orchard, or practicing a musical instrument for hours every day. While we do this, the blacksmith gives us iron claws that are like form in art, like discipline in spiritual life, like memorizations of holy texts. With the iron claws, we can engage teachers or artists who seemed too difficult to us before. Rilke gets fingers and metal so close together in these lines:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
With the help of iron, the soul eventually gets to the top of the Glass Mountain. To her amazement, a castle has been built up there. She knows she will soon meet the Master of Appetite, the Greedy Soul itself. Muslims are familiar with the nafs, their name for the Greedy Soul. The Muslim visualization of that force includes the dragon. Rumi says:
The nafs is the mother of idols! A common idol is a snake; this one is a dragon.
Abu Bakr, the early Sufi teacher, says of human greediness,
It is like fire: When at the point of being extinguished, it always flares up somewhere else. If the nafs is calmed in one area, it ignites in another.
Some say that infidelity is doing what the nafs wants.… In our story, it appears as the Lady of the Glass Mountain. The nafs is the Master of Demands, the King of Desires, the Queen of Unreasonable Insistence. Whoever knows his own nafs knows his god.
Our story offers some brilliant depictions of the nafs. The Queen of the Glass Mountain comes up to the table on which the Princess has spread the magic tablecloth; this table is now weighed down with roasted chicken, oysters in the half shell, gefilte fish, baby pigs, goose liver, Greek olives, lamb joints, and so on. She gobbles down a dozen roasted larks, feathers and all, and then mentions that she will need a wedding spread three days hence. She wants to know what she’ll have to pay for the magic cloth. “One night with the White Bear King” is the deal, but we are a little suspicious that the deal won’t go through. The nafs is famous for drugging human beings just before they come into the presence of the one they love. The Queen of the Glass Mountain does just that to the White Bear King, so he is asleep when the Princess arrives at his room. She tries all night to wake him; she shakes him; nothing works, and then the night is over.
The next morning, when she sets out the magic flask, capable of providing whatever liquid anyone could want, the fragrance of its contents attracts the wandering Monster of Greed, so a deal is made a second time—the magic flask for one more night with the White Bear King. This repeats, as we know, with much bargaining, frustration, and weeping, until carpenters from next door whisper to the King that they have heard a woman weeping, and he finally understands that his dear wife has come. He kept that welcome information in his heart all day and determined that the conversation with the Big-Toothed Queen would go differently that night.
We could say that the Princess who befriends the White Bear stands for each one of us. Each one of us feels lucky at the start, experiences a memory of the golden wreath, is chosen as a bride, goes to the White Bear’s palace, and knows the mysterious Love at Night. Experiencing the Bear’s love at night is like seeing poems written in one’s own handwriting that one cannot remember writing, poems that seem to take part in all the sweetness of the Divine.
Of course, our parents have many questions about our lover, and our ugly sisters are jealous, and soon all the ecstasy of early adolescence is gone and we are stumbling through the woods, ragged, deserted, and lost, like everyone else. That state can last for years, as we all know. It can be an unfortunate “marriage,” a “career,” an obsession.
All during the ecstatic time, and the stumbling abandonment, though we don’t know it, we are headed for the Glass Mountain. That is, we are headed toward a confrontation with the Greedy One, who wasn’t even mentioned until most of the action of the story has already happened. So where did She come from? Well, we can only proceed through our life by paying close attention to the psychic field of that nafs-ness, and by feeding it judiciously and tenderly out there on the terrace. Knowing about the Greedy One, as we know it by studying literature, will not be enough. She has to be attended to where she lives, inside
each of us. Her appetite grows more ferocious as she senses the shift to a more conscious attitude, since that will mean a diminishment of her power. You recognize her appetite and you feed her something. You can’t fill her enormous greediness, which is always eating, eating, eating as tigers eat deer, as whales eat plankton, as sharks eat sailors. She is in the last month of Ahab’s life, when nothing is left of life but the sharpened harpoons, the massive teeth of Moby Dick, and the whirling, insane greediness of the one-legged Puritan madman determined to be present at the wedding of death and eternity.
And while this is going on, your task and your delight is to fill your own cup with sweetness, “before it fills with dust.” In the poem “Stealing Sugar from the Castle” I have tried to say how that goes in my life.
STEALING SUGAR FROM THE CASTLE
We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.
The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s pan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!
Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again,
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.
I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.
I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.
“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my calloused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.
NOTE
TWO: THE FROG PRINCE
1. This image needs some explanation. In Minnesota in the old days we had straw piles that the cows would eat. Once in a while one would eat so far that the straw pile would collapse on top of it. The farmer would go out in the morning and the cow was gone. Actually, the cow was inside the straw pile. It would just keep eating and three months later come out the other side. Enough snow would melt to give it water. The farmers never worried; they always knew the cow would survive.
ALSO BY ROBERT BLY
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey
Reaching Out to the World: New & Selected Prose Poems
Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages
The Urge to Travel Long Distances
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy
Surprised by Evening
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems
Snowbanks North of the House
Morning Poems
Meditations on the Insatiable Soul
What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
Selected Poems
Mirabai Versions
The Man in the Black Coat Turns
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years
This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood
Old Man Rubbing His Eyes
Jumping Out of Bed
Sleepers Joining Hands
The Light Around the Body
The Lion’s Tail and Eyes
Silence in the Snowy Fields
Remembering James Wright
The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (Robert Bly and Marion Woodman)
The Sibling Society
The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity
Iron John: A Book About Men
A Little Book on the Human Shadow (Robert Bly and William Booth)
Eight Stages of Translation
Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT BLY is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Light Around the Body, winner of the National Book Award, and, most recently, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including Iron John: A Book About Men, which was an international bestseller and a pioneering work in the men’s movement. His awards include the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. He lives in Minneapolis. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
SIX STORIES
The Six Swans
The Frog Prince
The Lindworm
The Dark Man
One-Two Man
The White Bear Valemon
Note
Also by Robert Bly
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Robert Bly. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral Design
The pictures for More Than True are adaptations of vintage illustrations of the six stories included in this book (and, in the case of “One-Two Man,” related tales, due to the scarcity of such depictions). The artists who have been remixed into these new images include Anne Anderson, H.J. Ford, Fred Kabotie, Theodor Kittelsen, Kay Nielsen, Gustaf Tenggren, Otto Ubbelohde, and Hermann Vogel.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Bly, Robert, author.
Title: More than true: the wisdom of fairy tales / Robert Bly.
Other titles: Wisdom of fairy tales
Description: First edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024789 | ISBN 9781250158192 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781250158208 (electronic book)
Subjects: LCSH: Fairy tales—History and criticism. | Tales—History and criticism. | Wisdom in literature. | Truth in literature. | Conduct of life in literature. | Fairy tales—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC PN3437 .B59 2018 | DDC 398.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024789
First Edition: March 2018
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