Reply #60: You might like this article about Robert Bly... [View All]

[myrna minx]

http://www.rakemag.com/stories/printable.aspx?itemID=4230&catID=146&SelectCatID=146

The Rake is a local independent weekly in Minneapolis. I loved this article...

Robert Bly: The Dude Abides
The Rake takes up a seat at the feet of the master.

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So Bly the religious writer got up on his pulpit and cofounded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. He was a fiery presence on college campuses throughout the decade, and his journal, The Sixties, was a wellspring of dissent. “My poem ‘Counting Small Boned Bodies’ became one of the most famous poems, I guess, of the war.”

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.

So saving our souls meant saving America’s soul. Bly has continued weaving that thread into his mantle to this day. Throughout the eighties and nineties, when he became more widely known for his work with men, Bly was a persistent political gadfly.

In 1997, Bly published the Sibling Society, a full-steam admonishment of a generation that had, in his mind, stopped growing up and stopped parenting its children. He said, “Culture is defined by what it says no to. Not by what it says yes to. So what’s happening in the sibling society is, we say no to almost nothing. We say yes to preteen sexuality, we say yes to watching television forty hours a day, we say yes to pot and smoking and drinking and spending your life in a stupor. We say yes to all those things. What do we say no to?”

Bly wrote sharply: “People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be; we human beings limp along, running after our own fantasy. Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents—seeing that—have no desire to become adults.…We are living among dispirited and agonized teenagers who can’t find any hope. Genuine work is disappearing, and we are becoming aware of a persistent infantilizing of men and women, a process already far advanced.

“The old tradition is that you cannot change a child into a grown-up without a lot of conversation with adults. In America, the typical time a man spends in conversation with the son or daughter is ten minutes a day. In Russia, the old Russia, it was two hours a day. So the question then is, who teaches the child how things get done in the world? Well, the answer is the television.”
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