GRIEF

MOYERS: 

What’s the chief difference, as you see it, between male feeling and female feeling?

BLY: 

A strong part of the women’s mode of feeling has to do with Pain. 

Moving towards Pain 

and Help removing it, 

and also the pain of being devalued. 

I mean, women’s values have been rejected in this culture for 2,000 years or more, and women feel a strong pain in this devaluation. 

Men don’t feel devalued quite that much. 

With the men it’s more an area of Grief, as opposed to Pain. 

And —

MOYERS: 

You keep using that word, grief, in regard to men.

BLY: 

Yeah. You see, in my own case, I began as a poet, writing poetry, and poetry deals with feeling, but I felt that until I felt that 

Grief is a Door to Male Feeling. 

Until I had really tried to go into some of the grief around my father, I didn’t feel that I had access to the feeling.

MOYERS: 

Tell me about that.

BLY: 

Well, you know, 

As Men we’re taught not to feel pain and grief, as children. 

I remember seeing one of my boys, he was maybe about nine. 

He was hit in a basketball [game], maybe hit by the ball, and I saw him turn around and bend down and get control of his pain and his grief before he stood up again. 

That same boy would be so wonderful in being open to wounds and crying and so on when he was very small. 

But, you know, The Culture had said to him, 

“You cannot give way to that, you must turn around and when you must turn around; you must have a face without pain or grief in it,” 

right?

So therefore, as a son of an alcoholic, I received that. I mean, when you’re in an alcoholic family, you’re hired to be cheerful. 

That’s one of your jobs. 

You’re appointed that way. 

One is hired to be a Trickster, another I was hired to be cheerful, so that when anyone asked me about The Family. 

I’d have to lie in a cheerful way and say, 

“Oh, it’s wonderful, yes, indeed, we have sheep, you know, and we have chickens, and everything’s wonderful.”

Well, then if you can deny something so fundamental as the deep grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. 

So then how can you write poetry, then, if you’re involved in that much denial? 

So the word denial was very helpful to me.

MOYERS: 

Did you resent your father? 

Did you feel

BLY: 

No, I think that what happened was that as far as the grief goes, being appointed to be The Cheerful One in The Family, I would tend to follow a movement upward like this, hmm? 

More and more achievement, more and more and so on, hmm? 

That’s what you’d do. And finally you’d redeem the family’s name by doing this.

Well, I got to be about 46 or so, and then I realized how unsteady I was, and how my own poems didn’t have well, I didn’t even mention my father in my poems until I was 46. 

Not once. So I’d look at my poems they’re good poems but there’s something missing in there. 

And then I began to realize that in the ancient times, the movement for the man was downward, a descent into grief,  before you’re really a man that descent has to take place. 

It’s referred to in the fairy tales as the time of ashes and the time of descent.

So I wrote a poem at that time, and it’s the first poem — I must have been 46 or 47 — it is the first poem I had written in which there was some sort of grief. I’ll read it to you. Want to hear it?

MOYERS: 

Mm hmm.

BLY: 

It’s called Snowbanks North of the House. 

Maybe you know the poem. Snowbanks snow comes down from Alaska, you know, and then stops suddenly. 

And I’d noticed that little place there where something stops and doesn’t go further. 

So I wrote this line:

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly, six feet from the house …

I left it in the drawer for two or three months, to see what would happen, and finally the rest of the poem came.

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house …

Thoughts that go so far.

The boy gets out of high school and reads 110 more books; the son stops calling home. The mother puts down her rolling pill, and makes no more bread. And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party and loves him no more. The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church. It will not come closer the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe. And the father grieves for his son,

[This is Lincoln]

And the father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands. he turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone

And the sea lifts and falls all night; the moon goes on through the unattached heavens, alone. And the toe of the shoe pivots in the dust … The man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the hill. No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill.

MOYERS: 

What did that do for you?

BLY: Well, to me it was the first time that I had felt my words being involved not in the new age of sense, not in higher consciousness, but a movement down, when you break off the arc and you move down, and you go down towards your own. In that case, it had to do with the possibility that my life is not going to be a series of triumphs, that what is asked of me is not to ascend, but to descend.

MOYERS: But how about in relation

BLY: That meant that meant I had to start paying attention to my father.

MOYERS: Here.

BLY: There. In other words

MOYERS: But he was here. You didn’t have him out there.

BLY: He was out there, too. In other words, how shall I say it, oftentimes my father my mother and father were living on a farm a mile from where I was. I would go over and see them. My father had lost part of one lung and he would be lying in the bed, in the next to the living room. I would go and sit and talk with my mother for an hour, because I was probably in the conspiracy with her early on. And if I remembered it, I’d say goodbye to my father before I left.

Now, my father’s lying out there. How do you think he feels about my talking with my mother for an hour? What can he do? He thinks, “Well, that’s nice, they have a good relationship.” But how about him? So therefore, I realized that I had been in a conspiracy with my mother to push my father out since I was two or three years old. And I decided at this same time I wrote that poem, it’s time for this to end. I don’t want to be in this conspiracy anymore. So what I did was, I would go in and sit down with my father. And my mother would wait for me to come into the living room. And I didn’t. I’d sit down next to him. He’s not a great conversationalist, but we’d talk a little bit. And eventually my mother would have to come in and sit down on the bed. And then we all knew that some change had taken place.

MOYERS: It seems to me that you and your mother hadn’t pushed your father out. Your father had removed himself, like so many fathers do, either through alcoholism or through work or through obsession with the world, through ambition.

BLY: It’s possible.

BLY: [at gathering] When your father is away during the day and during the year, when he only comes home at five o’clock, you only get his temperament. What you used to get was his teaching and his temperament. The teaching would help you. You know how sweet it is when someone says, “Well, the way you make it is, you put your board, nail over here, you put your board over here, and you do that,” and those teachings are sweet.

Even mean men are often sweet when they’re teaching. And then we have that gratitude when someone has taught us something, that’s so wonderful. We used to receive that from our fathers. Now he goes to work, and all we get is his temperament when he gets home at five, and he’s tired. And what’s more, at work he has been humiliated by older men and other men, bosses. He’s been in competition with other men. He has he has he knows that his work he’s not going to be able to see the end of his work. It’s not like making a chest of drawers. He knows that his company is probably polluting Alaska. How do you think he feels when he gets home? And that’s all you’re going to get.

And I want to remind you that the same thing is true of women, that many people that we call angry feminists are women who have only experienced the temperament of their fathers. They have never experienced the teaching. And their attacks on the patriarchy are really a turned attack on the fact that they don’t believe that there is any older male that has anything but this irritable temperament. Is that clear, what I’m saying? So that has to be understood, too. The women only get the temperament of the father, and it’s usually irritable and angry. One thing I have to say to the men is that, your father is convinced that he is an inadequate human being. Women have been telling him that for 30 to 40 years.

He doesn’t know how to talk, he can’t express himself, he doesn’t know what his feelings are; People hear what they hear. Your father feels that he’s okay when he’s with a hammer, but in every other way he’s inadequate.

So you call up your home and you get your father, and he says, “Oh, John, this is just your father, here’s your mother.” And I was saying there are only two kinds of men. One kind of man is willing to go along with that, and the other kind of man says, “Wait a minute, I didn’t call here to talk to my mother, I want to talk to you.” “No, no, here’s your mother.” “No, no, that isn’t it, I want to talk with you.” “What about? You want to borrow money?” “No, that’s not it.” Huh?

The other day I was in Atcheson, Kansas, and I met a wonderful man there who was an economics teacher. And there’s a tiny little Catholic school in Atcheson, and this man came up to me, we started talking. His father was a car mechanic who worked very hard and knew beautifully the engines, just knew what was wrong and so on. The father got ill, eventually got his got the one leg cut off. He was lying in bed, trying to deal with the phantom pain. Rick calls him up on the phone, says “How are you doing, Dad?” Dad says, “What do you want?” Rick says, “I want to say something to you. I want to tell you how much I appreciated everything you did, how much I appreciated all the work that you had to do in order to send me to college. I’m a college teacher now, and I want to tell you how much I appreciate that, and how much I love you.” And the father said, “You been drinking?”

I thought that was wonderful. I said, “You just lived through the history of the last 80 years.” The father can’t imagine, that right. Right? There’s only two points. Because men don’t talk about feelings. So if you’re talking about feelings, probably you must be drunk. And you’ve got to get over that. You’ve just got to say, “No, I have not been drinking, I’m not on dope, and I love you. You get it?”

BLY: I’ll read you a poem. It is the first poem I did at all connected with my father. In fact, it is the first one in which I used the word father. It isn’t my father, but it’s a poem called Finding the Father.

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing. This body offers to carry us for nothing as the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door. Someone knocks on the door. We do not have time to dress. He wants us to go with him through the blowing rainy streets, to the dark house. We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born, and who then lost his memory, and has lived since longing for his child. Whom he saw only once … while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits there, behind the door … the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light … lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.

MOYERS: Looking for father?

BLY: Finding the Father, it’s called.

MOYERS: Did you find your father?

BLY: To some extent, I did. He died only a few months ago, but one of the things that did happen is this. I was living in Moose Lake, about five hours away. I get a call. My mother and father are both in the old people’s home, in Madison, Minnesota. I get a call saying my father was in the hospital with pneumonia. So I drove down especially to see him, and some change had taken place in me, so that when I walked in the room, he was alone there, and for the first time, I picked up a book, my book that I write in, and I wrote a poem in his presence. I had written so many poems in the presence of trees like these, so many poems in the presence of women, never a single line in the presence of my father. So this is the poem I wrote. It’s called, Sitting. No, it’s called My Father at 85.

His large ears hear

everything.

A hermit wakes

and sleeps

in a hut underneath

his gaunt cheeks.

His eyes, blue,

alert, dis-

appointed and suspicious

complain

I do not bring him

The same sort of jokes

the nurses do.

(Hmm? When the nurses come in. He’s right.)

He is a small bird

waiting to be fed,

mostly beak,

an eagle or a vulture

or the Pharaoh’s servant

just before death.

My arm on the bedrail

rests there,

relaxed, with new love.

All I know of the Troubadours

I bring

to this bed.

I do not want

or need

to be shamed

by him

any longer.

The general of shame.

has discharged him

(He’s probably Lou Gehrig.)

and left him in this small provincial

Egyptian town.

If I do not wish

to shame him, then

why not

love him?

His long hands,

large, veined, capable,

can still retain

hold of what he wanted.

But is that what he desired?

Some powerful

river of desire

foes on flowing

through him.

He never phrased

What he desired.

and I am

his son.

MOYERS: “He never phrased” your father never phrased.

BLY: He never put into language what he desired. In the United States, we put into language what we want. We want another television set, we want a VCR, we want a refrigerator, we want a good 3.2 beer. We want to have a cowboy hat and have some girl come along and touch it. That’s what we want. But in television, we never talk about what we desire. What you desire is something you’re never going to get, so that gives it a little fragrance.

MOYERS: Wait, what do you mean by that? We’re going to desire something that you’re not going to get?

BLY: Well, someone says, “I want to be as great a poet as Shakespeare.” You never I desire to be as great a poet; it’s not going to happen. But it’s sweet, the desiring. In the 13th and 14th century, they did desire. They desired God, they desired to have God as a lover, for example, with the Provencal poets. And all of those, and the Sufis, the Moslems, at the same time. You know that Moslem poem, a Rumi poem. “I want to kiss you.” Answer: “The price of kissing is your life.” “Now my loving is running towards my life, shouting, ‘What a bargain! Let’s take it!'” That’s a poem of desire, isn’t it? It’s a poem of [unintelligible].

So if our parents could have phrased what they desired, our lives would have been different.

MOYERS: Why do fathers have such a hard time talking to sons about desire, about what they really seek?

BLY: I don’t think the mothers phrase what they desire, either.

MOYERS: Yes, but–

BLY: The grownups don’t phrase what they desire.

MOYERS: why?

BLY: Well

MOYERS: Do they know? Do we know?

BLY: I think I think they brood about it a lot. You know, my father spent many hours — I saw him lying in bed, brooding. And he was brooding about something. And I think it was on what he had desired to do. He had to go onto the farm because his own father had a heart attack. He himself read a tremendous amount. One of his favorite people was the Prince of Wales. He read everything about the Prince of Wales. Now it must be, you see, that the Prince of Wales abdicated and I think my father felt that he had abdicated from what he desired in order to raise his family, and so on. I think so. That must be one of the connections.

MOYERS: 

But that’s–

BLY: 

So therefore, it was painful for him to talk about what he desired. Everyone comes into the world with a certain way he wants to be fathered. And every father comes into the world with a certain way that he wants to father. What if they don’t mix? What then?