Healing Our Wounds

Robert Bly (1926-2021)

In 1988, the North Carolina Independent asked me to attend and write about a Robert Bly Day for Men, the first such event to take place in the Triangle.  I’m not much of one for workshops and other public events, so I probably wouldn’t have gone otherwise, but in many ways that day changed my life.  That year—my 40^th—was a turning point in a number of ways.

Sometime before that, a friend had given me an interview that someone had done with Bly, or maybe it was just billed as a conversation; it was published in some counter-culture publication like Whole Earth Review, and then—as we would say now—went viral, which in those days meant that men photocopied the article and passed it around among their friends.[1]  I no longer remember the specifics of what it said, but the general import was that men had emotional relationships with women but didn’t do that with men; with men they shot pool, drank at bars, watched ballgames, and disguised their feelings behind bragging and bullshit.  Many men didn’t have male friends at all (I at the time had only one, the man who had given me the article, but had close emotional friendships with a number of women).

What Bly pointed out was that, when we were emotional only with women, we left a part of ourselves out (the part we didn’t want women to see).  There was usually some sexual undertone to friendships with women, and that tinted it, even if we never acted on it.  There was a part of male emotional life that wasn’t getting expressed, and wasn’t much being noticed, even by the men who felt it.  We would find and express that only through friendship with other men.

At the workshop I saw any number of men I knew vaguely, from seeing them around.  Many of them had a deer-in-the-headlights look, as if to say, what the hell are we doing here?  Isn’t this something women do?  I’m sure that’s how I looked.  In the middle of the day we did an exercise where Bly, taking on the role of an ancient storyteller, rolled out a tale which came to a climactic point and ended with a question: would you kill the messenger or the King?  I chose to kill the messenger, and when that group gathered together, the leader told us that we were men who had been fixated on our fathers but had difficulty taking on a mentor.  I felt absolutely nailed by that exercise.  I’d had a couple of mentors early on (right after my father died, when I was sixteen), but since then I’d been reluctant to take any guidance at all.  I was sitting among a group of men who felt the same way.  Reluctantly, we began to talk.

That day marked a turning point in my life.  Out of a sign-up we did at the Day for Men, a number of us formed a men’s group in Durham to meet every couple of weeks and talk about our lives.  That group has continues to meet today, some 33 years later.  I met my friend Levi in that group, with whom I had one of the deepest friendships of my life.  I began writing about men’s issues, also began my most ambitious novel, published in 1990 as The Autobiography of My Body (and dedicated to the men in my life).  At an Independent celebration right after my article came out, I met the woman who would be my second wife.[2]  I’m not saying that all those things came out of that single day.  But my life took a new direction, and a major part of it was a new relationship to men.

It was easy to make fun of men’s groups as gatherings where men went off to the woods and pounded on drums and discovered their inner cave man, something like that.  Apparently there were even women who felt threatened by the men’s movement (though none that I knew.  They all saw it as a good thing).  But the thing Robert Bly saw before anyone else, that men were wounded in this modern world, they didn’t know how to be men because their fathers—often through no fault of their own—had been distant and never initiated them into manhood.  The guys around us who identified as “real men” were all front and all bluster; they hadn’t connected with their inner selves at all.  Bly also saw that, working together, we could make ourselves whole.  We could be fathers and brothers to each other.  We could initiate each other.[3]

I would also say that the current crop of men—the younger men I see everywhere—don’t have a clue about all that.  They’re more wounded and fatherless than we ever were, still basically adolescents, and there’s no one on the horizon to help.  They could do a lot worse than to go back and read Iron John, and understand that a major poet of the 20^th century was also a wisdom figure and a prophet.

[1] Going viral was more legitimate in those days.  You had to take the trouble to photocopy the article.  You had to find your friend and give it to him.

[2] A year later she would go to Harvard Divinity School; after waiting a year while my son graduated from high school, I subsequently joined her, and found in Cambridge the meditation practice that has been the most important discovery of my life.

[3] By some coincidence, I just finished reading a story that is all about male initiation.  If you think it isn’t important, or that it has never existed in our culture, read William Faulkner’s “The Bear.”