by Robert Bly
We all understand how a woman who has given her hero to a man will later feel diminished, but giving the negative patriarch to a man or men is no better. When one gives the negative, one gives the positive also. Women who have projected the patriarch usually practice consensus in daily life: the talking solution, no one in authority, the circle in which everyone speaks, imagining that the matriarchy functioned this way. Consensus politics often works well in dealing with persons in daily life, but it doesn’t work inside. When a woman practices consensus among her interior beings, the interior critic or bluebeard may simply move in and dismember her. Consensus politics doesn’t work well inside men either, for the same reason. So by insisting that patriarchal authority is the primary evil in the world, and priding herself on having no part of such authority, a woman may condemn herself to brutalization by strong forces inside her, just as the soft male, because of his absent witch, lacks the strength to end a relationship that has turned into slavery, let alone end a relationship with interior beings that involve slavery.
If we have given away thirty parts of our self, we will then eventually feel ourselves diminished in thirty different ways. Men and women usually take back their spiritual guide from a guru when they feel sufficiently diminished. That doesn’t mean they were wrong to give it to him in the first place, but the idea suggests that each student should be as alert to his or her diminishment as to the initial elevation or empowerment.
Our friends play crucial roles in what we called the fourth stage. The sense of diminishment sets up strange situations. If we tell a friend of our feeling, it’s important that the friend not try to cheer us up at that point. “I don’t think you’ve really lost anything; you’re just a drip by nature.” If a woman retrieves her patriarch, or a man retrieves his witch, their respective friends may not like it. Our friends are used to us as we are.
And what about children? They may get used to being wickedly weak, or at least ambiguously weak, and so freeze us into a position of being ethically strong. When we feel diminished in relation to our children, it’s usually because we have given our child to them, and they, with the cunning of the child, dominate us. J. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats’s father, wrote to his son after living two years in the United States, “You know discipline is essential in every family. In Europe the children discipline themselves so that the parents can have a good time; in America the parents discipline themselves so the children can have a good time.” Many American parents don’t feel their diminishment in the presence of their children as diminishment, but feel it as a new way of parenting.
It’s clear how diminished Reagan feels by projecting madness, cunning, spy-genius, military superiority, and superhuman cleverness onto the Russians; and so we allow Russia, as we allow our children, to set the tone in the house, and determine our expenditures.
We don’t live wholly at any moment in the fourth stage or the fifth stage or any stage; we are in all five stages simultaneously, as we send out or receive back various rejected qualities, projected substances, abandoned powers, each absent in different degrees, or retrievable with different schedules.
It’s clear that the fifth stage in this long process amounts to the state of mind in which we retrieve the giant, retrieve the hero, retrieve the witch, retrieve the wicked child, retrieve our brutal national character; and the whole process of retrieval could be called eating the shadow.
Eating our shadow is a very slow process. It doesn’t happen once, but hundreds of times. Churchill said, “I have had to eat many of my own words, and I found the diet very nourishing.”
Puritanism by its insistence that the child is truly wicked prevented many seventeenth-century Americans from eating that part of their shadow, and some malnourishment is evident in their literature. The witch-burning craze, pushed along by ignorant monks who had forgottten how to think mythologically, caused immense suffering and injustice, and prevented the men administering it from eating their own witch, and the church is still undernourished there.
As a person grows older he or she becomes more wise about this stage. The mother feeds, after all, but the witch eats. So the witch has to be brought back, I think, for the person to eat a significant portion of his or her shadow. When the person begins to bring in rejected or projected authority, for example, and eat that, Saturn enters, and our passion deepens, and melancholy, always a mark of Saturn, and of retrieved shadow, brings its sorrow in, and its opening to the spirit. We sense limits, and limits begin to seem a part of us, a natural agency of life. This poem is called “Snowbanks North of the House.”
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.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe.
The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands.
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.
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.
One can feel some mood of the fifth stage in that poem, some melancholy. I have spoken of the anger I see: flying out toward my sons, probably an anger passed down from my grandfather to my father to me, and one aim I felt in raising my sons was not to let that anger get passed on any farther, at least unconsciously. Part of that struggle is in a poem called “For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old.”
Night and day arrive, and day after day goes by,
and what is old remains old, and what is young remains young remains young, and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness,
but the old tree goes on, the barn stands without help so many years;
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.
The horse steps up, swings on one leg, turns its body,
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost, its wings whelping and walloping,
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and 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 pass in undivided tenderness,
when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with messages to the world,
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together, calm and delighted.
The end of the poem suggests that spontaneity reappears in our relationship with our children when we live in the grief of the return. To hint more at the mood of the fifth stage, I’ll tell two stories, one brief and one long. Mulla Nasrudin one day was out walking with his students when a duck flying over shit in his eye. “Mulla,” said the students, “this is terrible! We must get some toilet paper!” “Oh, don’t bother,” Mulla said, “you couldn’t catch him now.”
The second story is a tale George Docsi, the architect and author of the book The Power of Limits, told me about his childhood in Hungary. His story went something like this: When I was a boy I loved dinner. I loved to go into the dining room and sit in front of the big plates, and have the maid come in and serve the soup. One evening I went downstairs, and the dining room was in an uproar. A pogrom had taken place in Russia, and many Jews were fleeing over the border into our town. My grandfather went down to the railway sta
tion and brought home Jews whom he found there. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could see old men with skull caps in the living room, mothers nursing babies in the corners of the dining room, and I threw a fit. I said, “I want my supper! I want my supper!” One of the maids offered me a piece of bread. I threw it on the floor and screamed, “I want my supper!” My grandfather happened to enter the room at that moment and heard me. He bent down and picked up the piece of bread, kissed it, and gave it to me. And I ate it.
Most fathers in such a scene are liable to get angry—I have done it so often with my children—and shout at the child and say, “Pick it up! Children are starving in Africa!” or some idiocy of that sort. George’s grandfather skipped that whole scene and himself bent down, yet the child in no way compelled that. Then the kissing of the bread is very beautiful, I’m not sure why. It doesn’t accuse the bread of being wicked, or the child, and the act is spontaneous, decisive, and full of true authority and genuine grief. George Docsi later said, “You know, I think there’s a little of my grandfather in me now.”
So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.
It is proper to ask then, “How does one go about eating the shadow or retrieving a projection, practically?”
In daily life one might suggest making the sense of smell, taste, touch, and hearing more acute, making holes in your habits, visiting primitive tribes, playing music, creating frightening figures in clay, playing the drum, being alone for a month, regarding yourself as a genial criminal. A woman might try being a patriarch at odd times of the day, to see how she likes it, but it has to be playful. A man might try being a witch at odd times of the day, and see how it feels, but it has to be done playfully. He might develop a witch laugh and tell fairy stories, as the woman might develop a giant laugh and tell fairy stories.
For the man, when he figures out which woman or women are holding his witch, he can go to that woman, greet her cordially, and say, “I want my witch back. Give it to me.” A curious smile will come over her face, and she may hand it back or she may not. If she does the man should excuse himself, turn to the left, facing the wall, and eat it. A woman might go to her mother with a similar request, for mothers often hold a daughter’s witch, as a form of power. A woman might go to her father and say, “You have my giant. I want it back.” Or she may go to an old teacher or ex-husband (or husband) and say, “You have my negative patriarch. I want him back.” Even if the person who carries the witch or giant or dwarf is dead, the encounter is often helpful.
There are many other ways to eat the shadow, or retrieve the projection, or lessen the length of the bag, and we all know dozens of them. I’ll mention the use of careful language, by which I mean language that is accurate and has a physical base. Using language consciously seems to be the most fruitful method of retrieving shadow substance scattered out on the world. Energy we have sent out is floating around beyond the psyche; and one way to pull it back into the psyche is by the rope of language. Certain kinds of language are nets, and we need to use the net actively, throwing it out. If we want our witch back we write about her; if we want our spiritual guide back we write about the spiritual guide rather than passively experience the guide in another person. Language contains retrieved shadow substance of all of our ancestors, as Isaac Bashevis Singer or Shakespeare makes clear. If language doesn’t seem right at the moment, painting or sculpture may be right, or making images with watercolors. When we paint the witch with conscious intention, we soon find out whose house she’s in. So the fifth stage involves activity, imagination, hunting, asking. “Always cry for what you want.”
People who are passive toward their projected material contribute to the danger of nuclear war, because every bit of energy that we don’t actively engage with language or art is floating somewhere in the air above the United States, and Reagan can use it. He has a big energy sweeper that pulls it in. No one should make you feel guilty for not keeping a journal, or creating art, but such activity helps the whole world. What did Blake say?—“No person who is not an artist can be a Christian.” He means that a person who refuses to approach his own life actively, using language, music, sculpture, painting, or drawing is a caterpillar dressed in Christian clothes, not a human being. Blake himself engaged his shadow substance with three disciplines: painting, music, and language. He illuminated his own poems, and set them to music. There was no energy around him that politicians could use to project onto another country. One of the things we need to do as Americans is to work hard individually at eating our shadows, and so make sure that we are not releasing energy which can then be picked up by the politicians, who can use it against Russia, China, or the South American countries.
PART 4
Honoring the Shadow: An Interview with William Booth
4
Honoring the Shadow: An Interview with William Booth
Booth: The shadow by definition is that part of ourselves that is hidden from us. How do you answer a person who is not aware of having a shadow and asks you where to look for it?
Bly: I asked that question myself of an experienced Jungian analyst at a public talk, passing on a question asked of me. I said, “Suppose that a woman about thirty-five years old living in a small town in Minnesota knows no psychology. How would that woman begin the process of absorbing her shadow?” His answer was this: unless she meets a teacher who understands the concept of the shadow, she doesn’t have a chance. “That’s a harsh answer!” I said. “Well,” he added, “there might be another way.” He observed that our psyche in daily life tries to give us a hint of where our shadow lies by picking out people to hate in an irrational way. Suppose there is a woman in the town who seems to her too loose and too sexually active, and she finds herself thinking of this other woman a lot. In that case, the psyche is suggesting that part of her shadow, at least, lies in the sexual area. She has to notice precisely whom she hates. That is the path of attention. Suppose that she hates the current president of the PTA; and if you ask her, she’ll say that the woman is fakey, can’t be trusted, is too successful, and so forth. The psyche might be telling her that part of her shadow lies in the power area. She has unused and unrecognized power impulses, which she has put into the bag. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such heavily emotional contact with that other person. So, following the path of attention, one notices where the anger goes, and precisely whom we become obsessed with. We become entangled with people who are virtually strangers. That’s odd. The metaphor is this: if we maintain eye contact with that person, we can damage him or her by our anger and hatred. If we break off eye contact and look down quickly to the right, we will see our own shadow. Hatred then is very helpful. The old tradition says that if a man loves God he can become holy in twenty years; but if he hates God he can do the same work in two years.
Paying attention to what one likes or hates in literature helps also. I’ve always been obsessed with certain eighteenth-century men, Pope and Johnson, for example. I grumble about them as neoclassical, haters of feeling, rationalistic sticks, followers of metrical rules, enemies of spontaneity, etc. I finally stopped attacking them, and looked down to the right: it’s obvious that I’ve had in me for years an unused and unrecognized classical side, and I have to readjust my view of my own openness to feeling. It’s possible I’m not romantic. Facing that had two effects: first, I wasn’t able to sustain my hatred for Samuel Johnson. As a matter of fact, I find his essay on Milton absolutely magnificent. And second, I have to realize that other people see in me the very thing I saw in Johnson, and who is to say they are wrong?
