A Little Book on the Human Shadow Read online

  A Little Book on the Human Shadow

  Robert Bly

  Edited by William Booth

  Contents

  Foreword by William Booth

  Part 1

  Problems in the Ark

  Part 2

  The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us

  Part 3

  Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow

  Part 4

  Honoring the Shadow: An Interview with William Booth

  Part 5

  Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  What Robert Bly’s poetry readings say in effect is, “You must change your life.” To hear serious poems and resist all change is worse than a waste of time; it is dangerous. We can remember the warning from Jacob Boehme: “Boehme has a note before one of his books in which he asks the reader not to go further and read the book unless he is willing to make practical changes as a result of the reading. Otherwise, Boehme says, the book will be bad for him….”

  The reference to Boehme’s unsettling words appears in Robert Bly’s brilliant essay on the poetry of Wallace Stevens (part five of this book). In “Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll,” Bly praises Steven’s extraordinary sensory intelligence, but says that his failure to “change his life” was disastrous to his later poetry. “Shadow” is the key word in Bly’s assessment of the poet: Stevens brought the shadow into his poetry but shut it out of his everyday life. Bly’s tough judgment of Steven’s work after he failed to “live the shadow” is that “the late poems are as weak as is possible for a genius to write.”

  “Shadow” is one of Carl Jung’s most useful terms for a part of the human psyche. Its advantage is that it conveys a visual image—we might call the shadow “the dark, unlit, and repressed side of the ego complex,” the Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz says in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. “But this is only partly true,” she adds, lest we get caught in the negative connotation of the image. She tells of an occasion when Jung, impatient as always with Jungians, dismissed a nit-picking discussion of the concept by protesting, “This is all nonsense! The shadow is simply the whole unconscious.” The definition Von Franz settles on is neutral and lucid: “…in the first stage of approach to the unconscious, the shadow is simply a ‘mythological’ name for all that within me of which I cannot directly know.”

  Robert Bly’s intense interest in the concept of the human shadow goes back to early years when he lived alone in New York City. He has often spoken of this bleak period of his life, recalling an awareness of his own relationship to the shadow as one of the first things he understood clearly for himself. He knew that “if any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.” The quotation is from the 1971 poetry reading where he first chose the shadow as a thematic image. He took up the theme in three subsequent readings, though the selection of poems changed and his accompanying commentary grew.

  In the present collection of Bly’s explorations of the shadow there is more poetry and storytelling than doctrinaire psychological discourse. He moves from image to image, and from image to anecdote and fairy tale. The shadow is “the long bag we drag behind us,” heavy with the parts of ourselves our parents or community didn’t approve of. The shadow is also imagined as a thin gray film rolled up in a can, out of sight, but ready to transfix us with lifelike images thrown onto a giant screen or played on a wife or husband’s face. The long-repressed shadow of Dr. Jekyll rises up in the shape of Mr. Hyde, deformed, an ape-like figure glimpsed against an alley wall. Bly goes beyond such vivid evocation of the shadow’s meaning in part three of this book (“Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow”), showing what one can do to change one’s life, call up the energy lost in the shadow, bring back the witch and the giant.

  Gathering the shadow readings into a book was a thought that came out of conversations I had with Roger Easson, who has done extensive bibliographical research into Bly’s publications and recorded readings. Initially it seemed a simple enough matter to transcribe two or three readings, do some editing for the sake of sharper focus, and make the readings available in print.

  When Bly saw the transcriptions that Easson and I had done, he was more distressed than we about what had been lost between the stage and the page—voice, music, gesture, interchange with the audience, all those nonverbal elements that convey meaning and feeling. Extensive revision followed. While the substance of the first three sections of this book is faithful to the original readings, Bly’s revisions have brought them closer to the essay form.

  The first part of this collection, “Problems in the Ark,” is based on a studio reading recorded for the series “Contemporary American Poets Read Their Works,” issued by Cassette Curriculum in 1971. Parts two and three are adapted from a reading given for a conference in San Francisco on “The Face of the Enemy,” January 30, 1983. Part four is a conversation that Bly and I had about the shadow a year or so later. Part five, where Bly lets go the reader’s hand and moves swiftly ahead into the shadowy forest of Wallace Steven’s poetry, first appeared in American Poetry in 1976, edited by William Heyen.

  —William Booth

  PART 1

  Problems in the Ark

  1

  Problems in the Ark

  We notice that when sunlight hits the body, the body turns bright, but it throws a shadow, which is dark. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Each of us has some part of our personality that is hidden from us. Parents, and teachers in general, urge us to develop the light side of the personality—move into well-lit subjects such as mathematics and geometry—and to become successful. The dark part then becomes starved. What do we do then? We send out a crow.

  The dove returns: it found no resting place;

  It was in flight all night above the shaken seas;

  Beneath dark eaves

  The dove shall magnify the tiger’s bed;

  Give the dove peace.

  The split-tailed swallow leaves the sill at dawn;

  At dusk, blue swallows shall return.

  On the third day the crow shall fly.

  The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,

  The crow shall find new mud to walk upon.

  The poem refers to the Noah story, though I drew the images from an earlier version composed by the Babylonians, in which three birds took part. The poem came two or three years after college, and it seems to say that if any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality. I remember this as one of the first things I understood clearly for myself. I felt that it was true also in politics—that is, what we needed to help us in the nation was not someone like Adlai Stevenson, who was too much like a swallow, or Bertrand Russell, who had too much light in his personality. Even Eugene McCarthy later on, who had a little more of the dark side, seemed to me a swallow, unable to find mud. Birds have become a problem for the United States. All we elect to the Presidency are doves or swallows, or white crows like Nixon.

  One afternoon, several years later, watching snow fall on some long grass, I felt the positive dark come in again.

  I

  The grass is half-covered with snow.

  It was the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon.

  And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.

  II

  If I reached my hands down, near the earth,

  I could take handfuls of darkness!

  A darkness was always there, which we never noticed.

  III<
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  As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away,

  And the barn moves nearer to the house.

  The barn moves all alone in the growing storm.

  IV

  The barn is full of corn, and moving toward us now,

  Like a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea;

  All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.

  Sometimes the first snow comes while the grass is still green, and if the grass is long, bends it over, making little houses underneath. The barn at our farm that year was empty of animals, but full of corn, sealed in a government program, and though the corn belonged to my father, it was a sort of treasure. The image “handfuls of darkness” does not by itself make this a shadow poem. The poem approaches the shadow at the end as the writer gets more darkness than he bargained for.

  The ancient Chinese culture emphasizes the Yin-Yang symbol, which shows us the white part of the personality and the black part of the personality united inside a circle. I wrote this poem one spring day.

  I

  Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!

  I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,

  As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

  II

  Rising from a bed where I dreamt

  Of long rides past castles and hot coals,

  The sun lies happily on my knees:

  I have suffered and survived the night,

  Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

  III

  The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,

  Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear

  Into the wilds of the universe,

  Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,

  And live forever, like the dust.

  One could speculate that because ancient Chinese poets, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, tried to reconcile the dark side and the light side, they preserved more feeling for plants and animals than we have preserved. Plants are asleep, and so they live always in the dark side, though their leaves reach out for the light. So we could say that each weed in our back yard unites dark and light as the rose window of Chartres does, and sitting by them is much cheaper than flying over to France.

  The Busy Man Speaks

  Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself

  Away, not to the mother of love, nor to the mother of conversation,

  Nor to the mother of art, nor the mother

  Of tears, nor the mother of the ocean;

  Not to the mother of sorrow, nor the mother

  Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the suffering of death;

  Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,

  Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

  But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the father

  of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,

  Who is also the father of perfect gestures;

  From the Chase National Bank

  An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn

  to the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeros;

  And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,

  The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of rocks.

  Our culture teaches us from early infancy to split and polarize dark and light, which I call here “mother” and “father.” So some people admire the right-thinking, well-lit side of the personality, and that group one can associate with the father, if one wants to; and some admire the left-thinking, poorly-lit side, and that group one can associate with the mother, if one wants to, and mythologically with the Great Mother. Most artists, poets, and musicians belong to the second group and love intuition, music, the feminine, owls, and the ocean. The right-thinking group loves action, commerce, and Empire. You see how my mind is split, so that my description of the world encourages polarization. I longed for a poem in which this split would be clear. The speaker in my poem would have to be an extraordinarily conscious father-type, I expect, but the poem reminds us that there are people who make a decision to cut themselves off from the darkness. I’ll read a poem about early Pilgrim villages in Massachusetts.

  It is a Pilgrim village; heavy rain is falling.

  Fish heads lie smiling at the corners of houses.

  Inside, words like “Samson” hang from the rafters.

  Outdoors the chickens squawk in woody hovels,

  yet the chickens are walking on Calvinist ground.

  The women move through the dark kitchen, their heavy

  skirts bear them down like drowning men.

  Upstairs beds are like thunderclouds on the bare floor,

  leaving the covers always moist by the rough wood.

  And the eggs! Strange, white, perfect eggs!

  Eggs that even the rain could not move,

  white, painless, with tails even in nightmares.

  And the Indian, damp, musky, asking for a bed.

  The Mattapoiset is in league with rotting wood,

  he has made a conspiracy with the salamander,

  he has made treaties with the cold heads of fishes.

  The Indian goes on living in the rain-soaked stumps.

  This is our enemy, this is the outcast,

  the one from whom we must protect our nation,

  the one whose dark hair hides us from the sun.

  I think one could say that most Puritans did not distinguish darkness from Satan. They feared swarthy Indians, probably were suspicious of dark-feathered turkeys, and walked uneasily in the pitchy pine woods of Massachusetts. For women they advised stockings, hoods, obedience, and silence. Hatred of the Yin side of the circle begins as a small thread in the first American cloth. Hatred of Yin at the start gave New England a fierce energy; but three hundred years later, the same hatred drains people and leads to some sort of spiritual death.

  Sitting in his dentist’s waiting room

  it seems to him his life has run out.

  One day, when he is forty-five,

  the threshing floor sinks from sight,

  and he can speak no longer.

  He sits in a chair beneath great trees.

  His wife gathers faggots in the woods.

  Some American men enter a witchlike mythical space after forty-five. Men in many primitive cultures by contrast remain spiritually alive until they are seventy or eighty years old, as Buddhist priests often do, but with us, some speechlessness takes over. That dead space inside older American men is connected somehow to the old men’s pursuit of the Vietnam War, and the way they pursued it, which was a numb, dead way. A perfect example of that numbness and deadness was the counting of the bodies.

  Let’s count the bodies over again.

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  The size of skulls,

  We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  Maybe we could get

  A whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk!

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  We could fit

  A body into a finger ring—for a keepsake—forever.

  If the American drama begins with the Puritans killing turkeys, then Kissinger’s and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia takes place in the third act. The South Asians, representing a civilization more reconciled to the moist dark than ours, merged with ghostly Cherokees or Crows far down in our psyche. During the Vietnam War we listened every day to brutalizing body tallies, and I felt, and still feel, that the dreamlike quality of the war represented a repetition of some earlier massacres, as Sisyphus cannot stop pushing the stone up the hill in the underworld.

  I hear voices praising Tshombe, and the Portuguese