The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last by Robert BlyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars (c) 2019, Wyndy J. Knox Carr
I was reading Robert Bly’s 1977-1996 The Sibling Society on my three-week train and plane trip to family and friends in the Midwest and South during June, and 35 years ago or more, Bly was hearing Joseph Chilton Pearce and others talk about Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, and the neuroplasticity of the brain. Pearce and Bly grasped onto these theories of a human brain which could indeed not only distance itself from the lowest order Reptilian way of savagely reacting, but actually move forward into the midbrain Mammalian (hear, “Women,” “mammaries,” “community,” “cooperative,” “feminist” etc.) and on into the measured Neo-cortex human(e) being self-awareness of the homo supposedly sapiens.
However, we need new stories that link to the biological makeup that is hundreds of thousands of years old.
A story on which we can act. And love. And survive. And live… As Joseph Campbell said, "Not stories about 'meaning,' but about THE RAPTURE OF BEING ALIVE."
Robert had just published The Teeth Mother Naked at Last when I moved to Minnesota, so I heard him read it several times, and got to know him a little through Bill Holm and Poetry Outloud. As I remember, his grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and he was steeped in the rhythms of the Bible as well as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Classical and Nordic mythology and sagas; the piercing winds of the Madison and Moose Lake prairies, their awesome, daunting and sometimes dreadful skies.
“In 1956, he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there, he found not only his relatives, but became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson.”[i][ii]
He was a brilliant and faithful lover of The Word to bring and translate their works for us here. For this, if nothing else, we must be filled with enormous gratitude.
He revolutionized the concepts of academic American poetry readings entirely by reading poems by other people than himself, striding around the stage instead of staying timidly behind the lectern; and by communicating with the audience directly, often roaring “Want to hear that one again?” and then launching into a repeat reading without waiting for a response from the startled audience used to sitting silent and bland, his other, bookless hand turning slowly like a pinwheel or wind turbine, pulling truth up from the ground.
He reached down into the bloodstream of the planet and brought up songs, symbols, skulls and Carl Jung. He may be the least “gentle” of the "Men's Movement" men, and many of us questioned his co-optation of the dualistic Death Mother “pole” of his interpretation of Great Mother myth and imagery to characterize the furious release of the CIA and our military-industrial complex on the peasant village communities and landscapes of Vietnam, Africa, Guatemala, Chile, Guernica and Palestine; even though he said
“All of my poems come from the Ecstatic Mother; everyone’s poems do…All men’s poems are written by men already flying toward the Ecstatic Mother.”[iii]
In 1966, he founded the American Writers against the Vietnam War with other writers, City Lights published his Teeth Mother in 1970, more poetry, and Iron John: A Book About Men and The Sibling Society followed in 1990 and 1996, respectively, co-edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology with James Hillman and Michael Meade, which came out in 1993.
He co-authored The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine with “mythopoetic” Jungian psychotherapist Prof. Marion Woodman in 1998, and his Collected Poems has recently been released by W. W. Norton (2018). I am sure Berkeley welcomed, drummed and debated with him whenever his book tours and men’s gatherings came here. He was everywhere!
“Old women watch the soldiers as they move.” Last line of Part I of Teeth Mother
He grasped the lightning. He tasted the drop of wisdom from the cauldron of Cerridwen. He spouted astrology.
When my fiancée and I entered the Minneapolis college amphitheater where he and several dozen drum-pounding men were preparing for a performance at a late 1980s men’s gathering, he sonorously shouted “Wendy!” across the room, strode up to me and delivered me a huge hug to his Indigenously-vested barrel chest (he was about 6’2” and I 5’4” at the most), which completely shocked the drum circle, who almost lost the beat. When I introduced him to Greg, he said not “How do you do?” but “And what was YOUR father like?” his snake-lidded, steely eyes peering down like a fascinated, otherworldly Inquisitor from Carlos Castaneda, Huichol dreams, hungry cobras or Odin hanging upside down from the cosmic World Tree.
Was he a poet and activist, or just mad? A messenger bearing shocking news from other lands wise enough to step sideways of the assassins’ poisons and disappear into the sand? Hope is really part of being human, too, and either hope or just curiosity drove him along to question the trajectory of humanity we are riding on 23 years later.
“All of us who have been angry at the fathers rejoiced at first when the fathers lost authority, but the picture becomes more somber when we realize that the forces that destroyed the father will not be satisfied, and are moving toward the mother. Mothers are discounted everywhere. (“Lock her up!” wc) When mothers and fathers are both dismembered, we will have a society of orphans, or, more exactly, a culture of adolescent orphans.
Adolescent elders who have not been initiated into adulthood by same-sex elders of a thriving and continuous community..."
but have been ignored by overwhelmed parents and “educated” into consumerism by cynical, violent, hopeless and shallow images of humanity and “reality” by TV and the consumptive, surveilled and “monetized” social media spawned by the once-idealistic Internet.
Impulse control and societal values have often been discarded along with the huge, unused potential of the human, emotive, intuitive, sensate body and brain working as one with our supportive environment and all the beings and spirits that entails.
Have we lost our souls? Was no one there in our periods of initiation to accompany and guide us out of bimbohood, narcissism, violence or obsessive drug and alcohol indulgence, random sexuality, virtual and actual violence?
Listen to this wisdom from Robert's "Notes" section of The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood about the elaborate adolescent initiations, "especially for males," that we have abandoned and must re-find.
"...now we see our past everywhere on television. This knowledge makes a potent stew of guilt and shame. There is a pervasive sense of unworthiness that is not completely accounted for by our private lives...
We used to look into the eyes of our mothers and fathers, and their eyes sometimes said that we were worthy. Now we look into the eyes of television, and the eyes reply almost always that we are unworthy....some educators encourage us to throw away all literature created by men and women who were alive at the time... ugly events occurred...
I am against that... the person's healing will have to be based on their accumulated history is genuine change is to take place...
Growth can proceed only if people honor that part of their soul that is turned toward the goodness, so to speak, of their ancestors, so that they know there is something essentially worthy in them, for whose sake they go through all this agony…
We have to swallow all the dark truths about the Conquistadores and Puritans, the enslaving and murdering of powerless people, and still preserve the common story, ...so that we do not lose touch with whatever good there was in our ancestors, and with that part of our own soul." [i]
Prophetic, written in 1996 at the latest, because it is deeply contemporary now. He now lies disabled by dementia, but as Margot McLean-Hillman told me, “He is very strong.”
May our hearts and minds be strong enough to learn from him and his followers, the human stories we all carry, and the unique story of each of us in the world that is to come...
[ i ] Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY. p. 257.
[ii] Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (8 February 2019) “Robert Bly,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bly (15 February 2019)
[iii] Bly, Robert, (1973) Sleepers Joining Hands, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, p. 40.
[iv] Op. Cit., (1997) The Sibling Society, Vintage Books, New York NY.
[v] Op. Cit., (1973) Sleepers Joining Hands, p. 40.
Bly, Robert, (2018), Collected Poems Robert Bly, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.
Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY.
Bly, Robert, editor with James Hillman and Michael Meade, (1992) The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.
Goodreads, (14 February 2019) Bly, Robert, () https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... The Sibling Society, (1997) Vintage Books, New York, NY.
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