by Robert Bly
The women, bravely, allowed rage, humiliation, jealousy, and anger to be expressed, but she concluded that expressing shadow material by itself doesn’t help. The act is more savage than wild.
The last thing I want to say about the shadow is an idea I’ve been thinking about more and more: the matter of honoring the shadow material. If we don’t live our animal side or our sexual side, that means we don’t honor those parts. It has been said that the greatest harm the Christian church has done is to make people mistrust instincts, but who taught us to mistrust our anger? How can we honor our anger and still not express it routinely? And if we have anger and do not make proper clothing for it, but make it live in the closet or else let it run around naked screaming at everybody, that means that we are failing to honor our anger.
Booth: I wish you would say more about how one can honor those negative emotions, including anger.
Bly: Three honorings come to mind. First of all, anger can happen when listening to others talk. If someone tells you, say, of some abuse that he or she has suffered, and describes it in a flat voice, one may feel anger, a kind of sympathetic anger. One could capture and honor that anger, and instinctively trust it, allowing it to take shape in words. “I feel some anger listening to this story.”
Secondly, Marie Louise suggests that we regard our anger as a person and talk to it. Rather than acting as a conduit for our own anger, and focusing it on another person, one turns one’s face and body to the anger itself, and asks: “What do you want from me? What do you want of me?” That is honoring the anger, just as we honor everyone whom we turn to face.
Booth: It seems to me that this would apply to anything in the shadow.
Bly: I think so. We can ask our sexuality: “What do you want from me?” We could ask of our infantilism: “What do you want me to do?”
Thirdly, it’s possible that we keep in touch with our anger only enough to make a shady deal with it, not out in the open. We relate to our anger the way Mafia bosses in New Jersey relate to petty mobsters. A guy comes slinking in and the bosses pay him fifty bucks to do a job for them. Then when he comes back they can’t even remember that they told him to do anything, and what’s worse, if anyone goes to the pen, he’s the one. I have, and we may all have, an underground, under-the-table, shady deal going with our anger, so that it does certain things for us. We ourselves look fine socially—we answer questions calmly, we adopt Robert’s rules of order—and yet all that time our anger is doing a lot of damage to people around us. I have mentioned that we lose energy whenever these shadow powers are allowed to operate under the table. But we would also have to say that the danger is not only the danger of losing energy; there is the question of the anger itself being angry at us. The anger is angry with us for not honoring it, for treating it shabbily, for getting out of it what we want without ever bringing it in and introducing it to our friends, saying, “This is my friend Anger here. He’s a lowly-paid assistant of mine.”
Booth: I try to keep him out of sight, but he does some damage to my friends once in a while.
Bly: The question is, what is the anger doing to you? When does he really plan to fix you? Now, what haven’t we said about the shadow?
Booth: We’ve talked little about the relationship between shadow and evil. It is clear that the shadow is not to be identified with evil, but how does evil fit in?
Bly: Well, let’s try to make a distinction. The shadow energies seem to be a part of the human psyche, a part of its 360-degree nature, and the shadow energies become destructive only when they are ignored. The shadow energies remain a part of or belong to the human community. But our ancestors, some of them, had a sense that evil is something quite different. It comes from beyond the human community; it flows in from an archaic principle that still exists in the universe—many Gnostics believed that—or from the dead, who have passed out of the human community. And from that point of view evil can be dealt with or recognized, but not absorbed. We know it’s dangerous to imagine that we could have friendly relationships with all forms of destructive energy. Such humanistic confidence is too optimistic. There may be powers in the universe outside the human community and hostile to the human community. But our conversation has been about shadow primarily.
Booth: We come back then to the idea that the shadow is what is hidden from us, and it is not something destructive in its very essence. I recall your poem “The Moon,” written some years ago, that carries this sense of the shadow.
Bly: It goes like this.
After writing poems all day,
I went off to see the moon on the piney hill.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
but the deep part of her house is in darkness.
PART 5
Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll
5
Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll
The literature of the American earth is many thousands of years old, and its rhythms are still rising from the serpents buried in Ohio, from the shells the Yakuts ate of and threw to the side. The literature of the American nation is only two hundred years old. How much of the darkness from under the earth has risen into poems and stories in that time?
All literature, both of the primitive and the modern peoples, can be thought of as creations by the “dark side” to enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness again. Many ancient religions, especially those of the matriarchies, evidently moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in the person’s life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the “dark personality” and the “light personality.” Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become more severe, century after century, we reach at last the state in which the psyche is split, and the two sides cannot find each other. We have “The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The dominant personality in the West tends to be idealistic, compassionate, civilized, orderly, as Dr. Jekyll’s, who is so caring with his patients; the shadow side is deformed, it moves fast, “like a monkey,” is younger than the major personality, has vast sources of energy near it, and no morality at all. It “feels” rage from centuries of suppression.
How did the two persons get separated? Evidently we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In general we can say that “the shadow” represents all that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the shadow. People in secular and Puritanical cultures tend to push sexual desire into the shape under our feet, and also fear of death; usually much ecstasy goes with them. Old cave impulses go there, longings to eat the whole world—if we put enough down there, the part left on top of the earth looks quite respectable.
Conrad is a great master of shadow literature; The Secret Sharer describes the healing of the same split that Stevenson could not heal. Conrad suspects that at times the shadow will not rejoin the consciousness unless the person has a serious task, which he accepts, such as captaining a ship. Heart of Darkness describes a failure in the same effort. Conrad noticed that the European solved his shadow problem less often after the invasion of Africa. The European now has a financial interest in the suppression of the shadow. Kurtz’s history suggests that for a white man to recover his shadow at the same time he is exploiting blacks is a task beyond the power of the human being.
This speculation sends reverberations through American fiction also, both North and South. Mark Twain makes a similar point in Huckleberry Finn, brilliantly, joyously. Sometimes in the United States the “decent man” is hidden in the shadow, along with a lot of other stuff, and, as Huckleberry
Finn finds out, the “decent man” will rejoin you only if you refuse to sell Jim.
Most of our literature describes efforts the shadow makes to rise, and efforts that fail. Ahab fails; it isn’t clear why; he has a strong connection with the “old ethic” through the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets. Dimmesdale’s shadow fails. Apparently his fear of women blocks his own shadow from rising. I prefer to use the term “shadow,” rather than “evil,” in talking of literature, because “evil” permanently places the energy out there, as a part of some powerful being other than ourselves. “Shadow” is clumsy, but it makes it clear that these energies are inside of us.
Alexandra David-Neel tells a disturbing story. When she was studying with some Tibetan teachers early in this century, they suggested she try to get a clearer experience of her life-energy or libido. They suggested that she put it outside herself, where she could see it more clearly, and not into objects, but into a thought-form, a figure she herself would visualize and which would not exist outside of her head. She decided not to choose a typical Tibetan visualization—some energetic dancing figure, with necklaces of skulls, and flames coming out of the hairs on his chest—on the grounds that she herself might consider it to be a simple transfer from a Tibetan unconscious. She decided instead to visualize an English monk of the Middle Ages. After a few weeks of visualization, which she did among some other duties, she noticed one day, while walking outside the monastery on the road, an English monk dressed in gray who approached and passed her. After several such meetings, he began to greet her when they met, and she could see his eyes. He would disappear if she “unthought” him. Soon, however, she noticed that he was growing bolder; he appeared to be drawing energy from her without her will, and to be taking on a life of his own. She became frightened then. Eventually she went to her Tibetan teacher, who taught her how to perform a rather long ritual to get rid of the monk. A man or woman who talks of evil in Moby Dick is the kind of person who would believe that monk was real.
The group of American poets born from 1875 to 1890, namely Wallace Stevens, Frost, Eliot, Williams, Marianne Moore, Pound, and Jeffers, are all shadow poets. They are not only shadow poets, but they did much shadow work. Most shadow work appeared in novel form in the last century; in this century it has tended to appear in poetry. Wallace Stevens is usually not thought of as a shadow writer, so we can take him; and his work will have to stand for the others in that marvelous group.
It is interesting to compare Wallace Stevens’s background with Kenneth Rexroth’s, as it appears in Rexroth’s autobiography. The Rexroms tended to live out their shadow. Stevens’s family, upper middle-class German Americans, appear to be successful repressors of the dark side. How the shadow returns in a complicated man like Wallace Stevens I don’t know; I don’t understand the return of the shadow at all well, and everything I say here is speculation. But it seems the shadow energies need special channels in order to return. Eliot’s sharp griefs, coming first in his marriage, and followed then by his wife’s insanity, are linked with the rising of much shadow energy in him, but none of that violent anguish appears in Stevens. In Stevens shadow material rises in perfect serenity, associated with the awakening of the senses, especially of hearing and smell. Our senses do form a natural bridge to our animal past, and so to the shadow. The senses of smell, shades of light and dark, the awareness of color and sound, so alive in the primitive man, for whom they can mean life or death, are still alive in us, but numbed. They are numbed by safety, and by years inside schoolrooms. Wallace Stevens, it seems, when he was working in insurance early on, would try to end the day at some New England town that had a museum. He would then spend a couple of hours looking at pictures. This is a practical way of reawakening the senses, as walks are. Both reawaken more of the senses than reading does.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
It is said that eyes in the West receive a disproportionate amount of psychic energy; all the other senses have become weakened to the degree that reading has laid emphasis on sight. The old harmony between the five senses has been destroyed. Stevens is careful of hearing:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
The last poem has the most marvelous and alert sense for changes of light, the deepening darkness, sensed with the body, as snow is about to fall. He pays more attention than most men to uniting the senses of color and smell:
The night is of the color
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
He works to join the eyes to the sense of touch:
The light is like a spider….
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
He works to become aware of weather, and its mergings with emotion:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
He begins to see how, if the senses are sharpened by labor, you begin to merge with the creatures and objects around you:
I am what is around me.
Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.
Curious and mysterious substances rise in the poems when he starts to glide out on the rays of his senses:
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
That describes a pure shadow instant, in which shadow material shoots up into the conscious mind. Often, when the shadow shoots up into consciousness for a split second, it brings with it the knowledge that we will die. Oddly, concentration on ants sometimes carries that information to the consciousness:
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
I would guess it would be difficult for readers who read Stevens in translation to understand the shadow energy moving so elegantly through the senses, because the extraordinary richness of his sensual intelligence appears as delicate auras surrounding the words in English, as a perfume surrounds each sort of metal and each tree. Readers brought up in English whose sense of language has been coarsened by too much newspaper reading probably don’t feel the complicated aura around Stevens’s words either.
By this light the salty fishes
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions
Up and down.
Senses intersect in those phrases. It is the opposite of academic poetry or philosophic diction. Stevens notices that:
It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks…
Basho said, listening in his garden to a temple bell:
; The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
Basho worked both as a Buddhist meditator and as a haiku poet in awakening the senses:
The sea grows dark.
