Robert Bly - Iron John: A Book About Men

PRAISE FOR ROBERT BLYS IRON JOHN

A remarkable thesis to address the frustrating dilemmas in our culture; relationships between men and women, rich and poor, young and old, the answers sought by leaping backwards into the ancient and sustaining collective unconscious.

Portland Oregonian

A serious, important, deeply moving work that has the power to change mens lives... full of compassion and great depth of feeling.

Toronto Globe & Mail

Iron John is an extraordinary book, one that explores the emotional geography of being a man with poetic insight and feeling, a book that takes the reader on an exceptional journey of discovery and re-discovery down through repressed and suppressed emotions to touch what is real and fundamental.

Rocky Mountain News

The story is so simple, so familiar and yet so profound that Bly steps into the background as interpreter and guide.

San Francisco Chronicle

Iron John is by turns scholarly, folksy, intimate, obscure and funny.

News-Tribune (Tacoma, Washington)

A groundbreaking book.

Publishers Weekly

We need... more books like Iron John... a way of emulating Blys generosity of spirit and willingness to risk truth-telling.

Jess Row, Slate.com

ALSO BY ROBERT BLY

Poetry

Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems

Reaching Out to the World: New and Selected Prose Poems

My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy

The Urge To Travel Long Distances

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War

Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems

Morning Poems

Meditations on the Insatiable Soul

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems

Angels of Pompeii (with Stephen Brigidi)

Selected Poems

Loving a Woman in Two Worlds

The Man in the Black Coat Turns

This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years

Old Man Rubbing His Eyes

This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood

Jumping Out of Bed

Sleepers Joining Hands

The Light Around the Body

Silence in the Snowy Fields

Prose

The Maiden King (with Marion Woodman)

The Sibling Society

Remembering James Wright

American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity

A Little Book on the Human Shadow (with William Booth)

Talking All Morning

Eight Stages of Translation

Copyright 1990, 2004 by Robert Bly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

Set in 10.75 point Bembo by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bly, Robert, author.

Iron John: a book about men / Robert Bly. -- 25th anniversary edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-306-82427-2 (e-book) 1. Men--United States. 2. Masculinity. 3. Men--United States--Psychology. I. Title.

HQ1090.3.B59 2015

305.310973--dc23

2015024336

Da Capo Press twenty-fifth anniversary edition 2015

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Noah, Micah, and Sam

CONTENTS

We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is or could be.

The hearth and fairy stories have passed, as water through fifty feet of soil, through generations of men and women, and we can trust their images more than, say, those invented by Hans Christian Andersen. The images the old stories givestealing the key from under the mothers pillow, picking up a golden feather fallen from the burning breast of the Firebird, finding the Wild Man under the lake water, following the tracks of ones own wound through the forest and finding that it resembles the tracks of a godthese are meant to be taken slowly into the body. They continue to unfold, once taken in.

It is in the old myths that we hear, for example, of Zeus energy, that positive leadership energy in men, which popular culture constantly declares does not exist; from King Arthur we learn the value of the male mentor in the lives of young men; we hear from the Iron John story the importance of moving from the mothers realm to the fathers realm; and from all initiation stories we learn how essential it is to leave our parental expectations entirely and find a second father or second King.

There is male initiation, female initiation, and human initiation. In this book I am talking about male initiation only. I want to make clear that this book does not seek to turn men against women, nor to return men to the domineering mode that has led to repression of women and their values for centuries. The thought in this book does not constitute a challenge to the womens movement. The two movements are related to each other, but each moves on a separate timetable. The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored.

The dark side of men is clear. Their mad exploitation of earth resources, devaluation and humiliation of women, and obsession with tribal warfare are undeniable. Genetic inheritance contributes to their obsessions, but also culture and environment. We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, work to keep men boys, and entangle both men and women in systems of industrial domination that exclude both matriarchy and patriarchy.

Most of the language in this book speaks to heterosexual men but does not exclude homosexual men. It wasnt until the eighteenth century that people ever used the term homosexual; before that time gay men were understood simply as a part of the large community of men. The mythology as I see it does not make a big distinction between homosexual and heterosexual men.

I speak of the Wild Man in this book, and the distinction between the savage man and the Wild Man is crucial throughout. The savage mode does great damage to soul, earth, and humankind; we can say that though the savage man is wounded he prefers not to examine it. The Wild Man, who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage.

The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating danceall of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the birds instinctual brain. But human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories. Stories, thenfairy stories, legends, myths, hearth storiesamount to a reservoir where we keep new ways of responding that we can adopt when the conventional and current ways wear out.