4 - Sunday, April 12, 1992 - North Shore News Stirring the Great Ape within MY SMART ass answer, when a friend asked me what I thought of Robert Bly’s book, Iron John, was that it was about guys who couldn't get in touch with the ‘‘Wild Man” inside them, ‘‘and that’s not exactly our probiem, is it? Har, har, har.’’ Yeah, we had a good, manly chortle over that one. It was sincere, too. | mean, this par- ticular buddy and I had done a few solidly wild and crazy things in our times, usually under the in- fluence of firewater, but never mind. We had indeed been wild to the point-of dangerous, not just to ourselves but to others around us. A couple of 9,000-pound goril- las run amok, getting into some good, hairy, gonzo bad acting. The kind of stuff writers like Er- nie Hemingway and Norm Mailer and Peter Trower would have lov- ed to hear about. We're talking gonads, cahones, balls of steel. The truth is there is a little bit of the berserker in us all — women as well as men, { might add. It’s just that men have the bulk and the muscle and maybe a slight edge in the aggressiveness department, due to having been programmed that way for a mil- lion years or so. { noticed when I ran with the bulls in Pamplona that out of the thousands of human beings jam- med into the narrow cobbled street, there were scarcely more than half a dozen females. : It was a male thing, no doubt about it, risking getting a horn plunged into your body. The irony was so profound I gave up trying to comprehend it. Bly’s book ‘‘about men’’ doesn’t address itself to the ultimate '‘why’’ about male behavior, which can only be an- swered, I guess, by coming to un- derstand the genetic code. And even then, the starting-point is always going to be lost in the mystery surrounding the beginning of life itself. We come back to the question of God's presumed purpose. Bly is a poet and therapist, not a preacher. So he contents himself with talking about the current dilemma of men in industrialized society who, he argues, have mostly lost touch with their fa- thers, and have been teft to fend for themselves when it came time Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL to grow up. By this, he doesn’t mean liter- ally those men who became alienated from their fathers because of divorces or power struggles in the home. He means all men. He is careful to avoid idealizing pre-industrial culture, but points out that the Industrial Revolution ‘*in its need for office and factory workers, pulled fathers away from their sons and, moreover, placed the sons in comp'tisory schools where the teachers (were) mostly women.’* In the generation after the In- dustrial Revolution, the split be- tween fathers and sons deepened, Fathers who worked in offices were unable to quite explain to their sons what it was they were doing. With the arrival of the Infor- mation Revolution, the father-son cond, according to Bly, has all but entirely disintegrated. “Uf the father inhabits the house only for an hour or two in the evenings, (hen women’s values, marvellous as they are, will be the only values in the house. One could say that the fa- ther now loses his son five minutes after birth.”’ Bly's contention is that “if the PARK ROYAL STORE ONLY - , see, “ . "i son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through ali the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.’’ One of the side-effects of this disruption of the ancient system of father teaching son and toiling with him has been the growth of a pervasive distrust of authority, principally male authority. There is a general assumption that every man in a position of power must have been corrupted or soon will be. Positive male energy — what the Greeks called the Zeus energy — has been disintegrating for de- cades. In North American culture, the dissipation could be seen in Mag- gie and Jiggs cartoons in the 1920s, and later Blondie and Dagwood, where the male was always weak and foolish. Today, you have only to look at idiotic and offensive sit-coms like Married With Children to see respect for the Zeus energy down to absolute zero. The combination of contempt for male authority and the absence of the father fron: the home guarantees that modern boys are introduced to ieeling through their mothers, and in- evitably acquire a female attitude toward masculinity. In retrospect, | think that’s what the underlying cause of the hippie phenomenon might have been: young men, alienated from their warrior fathers, growing their hair in order to look like the women whose ‘‘gentle, loving’’ view of the world they were trying so hard to adopt. Bly’s point is that the son often grows up with a wounded image of his father, as a guy who can’t help being unfeeling, obsessed, money- and power-mad, uptight, maybe even brutal. “Since the father and mother are in competition for the affec- tion of the son, you're not going to get a straight picture of your father out of your mother.’* A boy ends up seeing his father through his mother’s eyes — until much later in life, usually not un- til around the mid-30s, Bly sug- gests. The trouble with seeing one’s masculinity from a feminine point of view is that one can end up be- ing afraid of it, pitying it, maybe even wanting to reform it or, if that fails, kill it. Bly’s case is that there are too many polite, well-mannered, sen- sitive nice guys out there, and while it’s all very well for us to be civilized, there is a huge fragment of manhood that really is quite primitive, and needs to be allowed out into the open if not long enough to cause any serious dam- age, long enough for a guy to howl and pound his chest and sw- ing from a few vines. Having howled, pounded and swung rather more times than I care to count, I’ve still got some work to do on my Nice Guy routine before stirring up the Great Ape within. But if nice is your problem, Bly’s your guru. ¢ Royal Palms Inn PHOENIX, ARIZONA SPECIAL SPRING & SUMMER RATES QL OTED IN CANADIAN DOLLAR INC. 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