Iron John: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly. This was a book that Meghan gave me for my birthday after we found out we were pregnant. How do you buy a parenting book for a father-to-be who would absolutely love to read “related material” but who has next to zero interest in books on “parenting.” According to one bookstore clerk in Bozeman, Iron John was one possible answer.
This is a weird book. There’s almost nothing in it that escapes strangeness — not only from the Grimm fairly tale that Bly exposits but also clearly from Bly himself — but it’s a strangeness that grows on you. And, though it took until half-way through the book to appreciate it, the mysteries of masculinity that Bly points to are clearly, evidentially, sorely needed today.
Our obligation—and I include in “our” all the women and men writing about gender—is to describe masculine in such as way that it does not exclude the masculine in women, and yet hits a resonant string in the man’s heart. No one says that there aren’t resonating strings in women’s hearts too—but in the man’s heart there is a low string that makes his whole chest tremble when the qualities of the masculine are spoken of in the right way.
Our obligation is to describe the feminine in a way that does not exclude the feminine in men but makes a large string resonate in the woman’s heart. Some strings in the man’s heart will resonate as well, but I suspect that in the woman’s heart there is a low string that makes her whole chest tremble when the qualities of the feminine are spoken of in the right way.
Call that vague and circular if you wish. But what it tells us — and what we do ourselves no favors by trying to get around — is that masculine and feminine are words that describe ancient, very real (even if still flexible) qualities of human existence for biological men and women that evade apprehension and verbal description, let alone being reduced to definition. (And are further still from arbitrary redefinition.) To say that we are starving for participation in that ancient reality, that we in fact starve ourselves of it, is an understatement.
We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. [But] a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.
A joyful participation in the tensions of an ancient world that we have learned far too little from.
The turning point in the book for me was chapter 4, “The Hunger for the King in a Time with No Father.” Bly has picked up the question “Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” and here he offers one possible answer: the loss of background. It’s become all too true that fathers today stand alone, without any resonating background of meaning or value or virtue. There is a lack of kings and heroes, no greatness from which fathers “pick up radiance from above.” “As political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun.”
Charles Taylor put it similarly when he said that “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.” He goes on:
But the sense of emptiness, or non-resonance, … can come in the feeling that the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, arrange them, in order to live has no meaning, beauty, depth, sense. There can be a kind of “nausée” before this meaningless world.
This loss occurs under the guise of freedom — liberty at best; autonomy at worst — and surely there has been much genuine freedom and gain. (There is no hindsight bias here. Neither Bly nor Taylor is arguing for a return to the past.) And yet, who can deny that something is missing and that we are the ones who lost it? We act as though we have finally gained our wanted freedom, but we sense that we have multiplied our chains. As William Shakespeare put it, “All this world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
Here’s Bly again:
During the Middle Ages, kings would take tours of their earthly realms. Hundreds of people waited in English village lanes, for example, to see the king go by. They probably felt a blessing coming from the Sacred King as the physical one passed silently by.
The problem is that when the political king disappears from the lanes, even for good reason, we find it difficult to “see” or feel the eternal King. I am not saying that the king-killing was an error, nor that we should resurrect the king and send him out along the lanes again, but we need to notice that our visual imagination becomes confused when we can no longer see the physical king. Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination. Each person has to repair that imagination on his or her own.
Is that not the definition of loneliness? I found it immensely helpful to think of how fathers can lose their heroic image, not simply because they lack it themselves but because there is no bolstering value around them, because the culture behind them has no way of resonating the heroic image. The result, as Bly points out, is a profound lack of trust between generations: sons not only don’t look up to their fathers, they don’t trust them.
(With this sort of tearing down of hierarchies, I often think of C.S. Lewis: “a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”)
In any case, though I didn’t think I would like the book when I first started it, I’ve grown a little fond of its quirkiness. There is much in it to appreciate.
At his most plain, Bly is plainly inspiring:
If one appreciates the harmony of the strings, sunlight on a leaf, the grace of the wind, the folds of a curtain, then one can enter the garden of love at unexpected moments.
At other times, he can be more humorous:
If the therapist doesn’t dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.
A more serious tone is sometimes called for, as when he criticizes the chronological snobbery of modern man, à la animal sacrifice:
In our industrial system, we ignore the Great Mother, and we ignore the Lord of the Animals also. We are some of the first people in history who have tried to live without honoring him and his depth, his woundedness, and his knowledge of appropriate sacrifice. As a result, our sacrifices have become unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive, and massive.
By the end of the book, Bly has given us an anthropologically wide and mythological rich “book about men.” Weird as it often was, and idiosyncratic as it may sound, I am inspired by this:
We need to build a body, not on the parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body, strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires. The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art, and receiving the second heart.
Top that off with just a little more humor:
The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy.
Instead, the “Wild” that Bly has in mind, and that of the Grimm fairy story, is “the path that involves intensity, awareness of the wound, alertness to impulse, the possibility of a fall.” Equally important, the Wild Man is “part of a company or a community” in the head and the heart. “A whole community of beings is what is called a grown man.”
I can’t imagine there are many who would think this book has aged well. (It was published in 1990.) But I would say that, given the historical breadth and depth that he regards, it’s a safe bet that the things that Bly sees and writes about will age better than almost anything we “heedless parvenus” are doing today.