King Arthur

MOYERS: 

Who is telling us today that we are men? 

Who is in charge of the initiation?

BLY: 

One of the things it said, 

if you do not do the initiation consciously, 

you will do it unconsciously, 

’cause it’ll take place.

MOYERS: 

Aren’t we initiated as men 

by the sergeant in the army, by the–

BLY: 

No! No, no, no.

MOYERS: 

— corporate executive we take our first jobs from, by the professor at the university?

BLY: 

To some extent. 

But the sergeant is not the equal of the old male initiators, 

because he’s not interested in your soul.

MOYERS: 

In your soul?

BLY: In your soul. 

He’s interested in your not dying, or he’s interested in your physical health, or he’s interested in your obedience. 

But the old male initiators we’re talking about — King Arthur would be one — is interested in The Soul of The Young Man. That’s what The Young Men are missing, that there aren’t any Older Men who are interested in Their Souls.

MOYERS: And you mentioned King Arthur. He was a Mentor to The Knights, he was the one who stood at The Gate.

BLY: Yes. You could say that a beautiful thing see, one of the ways to think about a male initiation, it goes in this way, possibly. 

The first stage is bonding with The Mother, and separation from the mother. 

We do the bonding with The Mother pretty well in this country. 

We don’t do The Separation well at all. There’s no Ritual for it.

Secondly, bonding with the father and separation from the father. 

Now, we don’t do the bonding with the father well. 

What did Jeffrey Gore say in The Americans? He said, “In order to become an American, it’s necessary, first of all, to reject your father.” 

That’s about all that is necessary. 

You don’t even attack him, as in Freud; you just regard him as ridiculous, as in all those movies that we’re seeing, and all the filmstrips and all the situation comedies in which the men are the fathers are completely ridiculous. You know those?

MOYERS: Sure.

BLY: All over television. 

The father is a fool and the woman is a wonderful person and knows everything, and the father the man is in bad shape, you know, and the woman says, “You should have Comtrex.” And he says, “What is Comtrex?” She tells him what it is. You mean the man doesn’t know what Comtrex is? 

So there is this feeling in which, all over the situation comedy, the young males writing that are rejecting their fathers over again in order to become Real Americans.

Okay. So the second thing is bonding with the father and separation from the father. 

In a culture in which you reject the father automatically, as in America, oftentimes you don’t become bonded with your father until you’re 40 or 46. 

That’s what I told you in my story.

MOYERS: Well, how do you bond with a father who’s absent all the time, who goes off to the office eight, 10, 12, 15, 30 miles away?

BLY: Sometimes you have to wait until he’s 63 and he’s home. It’s not easy. 

The men that I know say they’re 50 years old, they’re 45 years old. They call up their father and he’s saying, “Here’s your mother,” and they say, “Wait a minute,” you know, “I’m going to take you down to New Mexico, we’re going to go down to New Mexico for five days.” “No, I don’t want to.” “Yes, you’re going to go, I’m going to pay for it and we’re going to go.” 

Well, that’s a bonding that sometimes takes place with their father there. The son has to do it. The son has to make the motion.

MOYERS: That’s the stage of bonding, that’s a part of it.

BLY: Bonding with the father. 

And after that you still have to do the separation. Then the third stage is called the appearance of the male mother.

MOYERS: The Male Mother?

BLY: 

The Male Mother. 

That is a Man who does nurturing in a similar way as a woman, only he’s not a woman. 

King Arthur acted that way for those young men.

MOYERS: 

What Does He Do?

BLY: 

Cuts his arm and gives them The Blood. 

He nourishes them and nourishes their souls. 

So this is like Pablo Casals was a wonderful male mother.

MOYERS: Yes.

BLY: Every jazz musician every black jazz musician in this century has had a great male mother. ‘Round Midnight was about that. You remember, the first scene of ‘Round Midnight, he walks into a hotel room in Paris, and you don’t know what’s going on. And the black musician stands there a long time. And finally someone says, “Is this where he died?” And he says, “Well, I guess so, but these rooms all look so much alike.” That was the room where his male mother, his mentor, his male mentor had died.

MOYERS: Well, you’re talking about a mentor, you’re just using–

BLY: We’re talking about a mentor.

MOYERS: You’re just using the phrase mother as a metaphor.

BLY: Male mother. I’m using it I mean a mentor. And so King Arthur was a mentor to those young men, and when the male mother or the mentor comes along and helps the young male to separate from his mother and from his father, because he has a man who is not his father who is acting to him both as a mother and a father. That’s the third stage.

MOYERS: Wordsworth has this wonderful poem in which he talks about the old man who sat under the tree.

BLY: You found that, too?

MOYERS: Yes, the old man sits under the tree, and he says, “He picked me out from all the rosy boys and I became a comrade for life.”

BLY: I couldn’t believe that passage when I read it. And he was in grammar school, and an old man there at the edge of town would talk with him every day. And Wordsworth, at the end, says, “I think he had the greatest mind in England.” Do you remember that? Because he had given that boy so much. So that’s a perfect example. That’s how you produce a Wordsworth.

MOYERS: Where do we get our mentors today?

BLY: I tell the men, you know, you have to look for it. Your father came to you, you didn’t have to look for your father, but you have to look for your mentor. If you want a mentor, you have to go look for him. That means that usually he’s in your field, but not always. If you’re an architect, you go and look for a male mentor.

You know, I met Szent Gyorgyi, I stopped to see Szent Gyorgyi one day, the one who invented vitamin C, got three Nobel prizes. And I said to him he was living alone in Woodstock, and he told me various things, and he said: “When I got out of graduate school, I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. I would have walked 150 miles to work with this man, and I did. I worked with him, I loved him.” And he said, “I’ve been here 30 years. Not a single American man has ever come and wanted to work with me.” I said, “Well, maybe they’re not interested in ideas.” “They’re not interested in ideas!” he said. “You know what they’re interested in? Retirement plans!” He was a wonderful old man. But he was waiting to be a mentor, a male mother, to young American scientists, and they didn’t know the tradition and they didn’t go to him.

MOYERS: But in these traditional cultures, when these older men played this role for young men, what were the older men? What were the male mothers doing for the boys?

BLY: When the male mother is there, and the mentor is there, one thing he does is bless the young men. And it’s so strange, that men need blessing from older men. Robert Moore, I heard him say in a tape, “If you’re a young man, and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt.” I like that a great deal.

So that many women bless young men, but the man still needs a blessing from an older man. You know, I heard Robert Moore say it to a group of men: “How many of you have admired a younger man in the last two weeks, and told him so?” Silence. “How many of you were admired by older men when you were young?” Silence. Then he said that sentence, “If you are a young man and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt.”