Dragons​

“…Let’s talk about dragons… Asia went through its dragon-fighting stage hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago. Krishna, who represents ancient Shaivite traditions, strangled dragons and giants when he was only one or two days old. He didn’t have much trouble with them. But we are still in the dragon-fighting stage; our dragons have not been defeated by any means… Beowulf’s first battle was with Grendel, a giant, and Grendel’s mother? And his last, from which he died, was with a dragon. That means we are not always victorious with dragons… Giants really won the Second World War in the sense that the Nazis got possessed by giant-energy and a tremendous cultural destruction followed.

… giants and dragons are very much alive inside us. The light tone of the new age often implies that all you need to do is to meditate twenty minutes a day and if something negative appears “bring it up and bathe it in the heart radiance.” I hear revolting statements like that every day delivered with full confidence. It’s very dangerous because if the dragon material is not dealt with, a man or woman can suffer a breakdown, and the longer the dealing is put off, the deeper the breakdown will be…

First… stop talking about enlightenment for a while. The soul is not born ready for light… years of mythology, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment. Some deal with dragon energy by telling stories: that is active and so belongs to dealing. To take rage, anger, jealousy, envy seriously, while watching them, is a way of dealing with dragons. Rather than getting a massage in order to remove tensions from your body, you could say, “What’s the matter with tensions in the body?” Rather than slandering your parents by taking an Asian name… Going back to your parents and trying to understand the grief in them, and in your relationship to them, is a good way. Dealing with dragons seems to involve moving backward or downward.

… we receive a deep wound from our parents before we can speak and we spend the rest of our lives pretending we had a happy childhood. When people can’t remember their childhood, or when they say, “Oh, it was very happy! I had wonderful parents,” that is, Alice Miller says, the mark of a really deep wound. I always answered things like that if someone asked me about my childhood. That our mothers and fathers gave us a wound stems from their being narcissistic… that would mean that they needed us for something, or they needed us to be something, or they needed something from us. They weren’t standing on all four legs in the world, they weren’t complete in themselves, they were needy. But who isn’t? Our parents too were born twelve years too early. What do they need us for? Well, my parents were second and third generation Norwegian immigrants, and felt, as many immigrants do, insecure, inferior, perhaps a little savage, and they needed my brother and me to be nice.

The nature we brought with us from the far reaches of the universe, and worked on in the womb, using the threads of dna, and the genetic cross threads, was our nature, and our gift. But our parents didn’t want it…we each live with this tremendous wound, which amounts to a rejection that is, because it is pre-verbal, not accessible to encounter group tellings nor to confession. And what do we do then, if we can’t express it? We can respond to this wound, acting it out and hiding it at the same time, in two possible ways: we can work things out as we reject someone deeply — that would keep us in unconscious touch with it — or we can work things out so that someone else rejects us deeply. Both ways are good. I’ve done both.

So one can live through post-verbally a rejection that one received pre-verbally. I suppose the important thing would be gaining consciousness of the procedure, so that one wouldn’t go on being angry and offering blame for the rest of one’s life. As the Buddhists say, when the pre-verbal is entered, blame disappears. But grief comes. The work of realizing what one has done is an example of what is described in the fairy tales as cutting off the head of the dragon in the solar plexus… some dragons don’t want to be lifted up into the heart area. That’s their place down where they are. You go down and meet them on their ground. “I’m going to lift you up and bathe you in the violet light of the heart.” What do they care about that?

…learning to think intuitively is something our ancestors knew how to do. Fairy tales move intuitively from one point to another; so do myths. We’ve lost our ability to do that, so we have to hire someone to teach us to think intuitively, which teaching we mistakenly call therapy.

…my therapy, or my instruction, came through reading Jung, alone, in a field, while also trying to write poems. The intuitive intelligence and language appears in all dreams, in true fairy tales, and in great poems. We have to struggle so much now to write poetry. I didn’t publish my first book until I was thirty-six, and I would say that the ten to fifteen years before that were spent trying to understand intuitive language and sound. Frost says, “A man is a writer if all his words are strung on definite recognizable sentence sounds. The voice of the imagination, the speaking voice, must know certainly how to behave, how to posture in every sentence he offers.”

I didn’t have an older male that I could apprentice to, physically, in this world, but I did have one in the other world —Yeats. And he is a superb intuitive thinker; he is still my master, and I read him every day. I mentioned last night that I think the male needs to be initiated into the world of male intuition, but the initiator needn’t be your father. He doesn’t need to be alive. And I suspect women need and long for a similar initiation. Many women poets have been initiated by Emily Dickinson or by Anna Akhmatova.

…it takes a lot of energy for a man and woman to have a relationship; you have to get it back from your parents… the dragons ate it. We’re going to suppose that an energy, invisible but potent, a sort of liquid fire, appears in us and with us at birth. Our body produces it naturally, even while in the womb. When we are tiny, we keep some for ourselves, but most of it we give to feed our mother’s thirst for it. We exchange it for a similar substance our mother gives us. We also, after we are two or three, give some, exchange some, with our father, but much less. Around twelve we begin to give more to the father.

… Most of a boy’s liquid fire, because his mother’s sexuality has tremendous magnetism, becomes pulled toward and committed to his mother. Another way of saying it is the dragons eat it. They become fat on it. Dragons are not idealistic or religious; they are usually guarding some materialistic treasure they can’t use themselves. So when the dragons eat the liquid fire, the stomach becomes home for a complicated interweaving family of energies: self-preservation, love of food, possessiveness of the mother, and beyond her, all women, the impulse for sexual union now confused with maternal receiving, fierce longing for comfort, for home, for not leaving home. The main image is that the dragons eat it, and we can’t get it back, because, fed by that fire, they get too fierce for us.

If we talk of early marriage, the young male doesn’t have enough of that invisible fire energy available to sustain and feed a relationship. He has twenty percent or so at the most. And the girl? What she has not fed to the mother, she has fed to the father. The father dragon in her stomach guards his useless treasure, and fights her off if she wants to get the fire back. So she too has no more than twenty percent to give to a man her own age. That’s a gloomy prospect. I remember in my first years of marriage a terrific loneliness. I think the loneliness appears because neither the man nor woman can give; what each is thirsty for the other has already committed somewhere else. The committing took place unconsciously, that is, without the conscious mind being utterly clear about it, and so the conscious mind feels helpless. It’s like a lawyer who can’t find the papers for a certain case — what can he do without them? Nothing.

So reversing that means making things conscious. Writing is very helpful, Jung and Marie Louise von Frony are very helpful, imagining witches and dragons is very helpful, moving toward the non-maternal is very helpful. Using food stamps means participating in the state-maternal so that is not helpful. Drifting is not helpful. Joining a spiritual group usually means joining a reconstituted family, so that is usually not helpful. For a man in this situation, adopting feminine values is dangerous. I’ve tried all of these. I know that all my remarks need qualification, but each person can do that for himself or herself.

In our culture now, the young male, being parted from positive masculine values by the collapse of mythology, and separated physically from his father by the Industrial Revolution, is often, in this new age, full of feminine values. Many of these values are marvelous, but their presence in his psyche are not well balanced by positive male values. It is the male, in both the man and in the woman, who fights the dragon — the dragon-fighter is not “a man” but the yang, whether that appears in a woman or in a man.

The young man in this decade, unable to get his fire energy away from the dragons, will find it difficult to support a relationship by the time he’s thirty-five. To some extent, the young man, each time he leaves a woman, feels it is a victory, because he has escaped from his mother. But the woman feels it is a defeat. I notice that men, when around thirty-five, begin to feel the whole sequence as a defeat too. Then the time has come to fight dragons, or as Iron John or Iron Hans (a Grimm Brothers’ story) says, “Get the key to the cage from under your mother’s pillow.”

I can’t speak for women, but I suspect they have some work to do in getting the key from under their father’s pillow. I think they do better on that in some ways than men do.

With men I understand the struggle a little better. During the struggle I think it’s important to stop imagining yourself as spiritual. Spiritual people don’t steal keys. You know that (laughs). I think the whole imagery of going down in the lower chakras and fighting the dragons has a certain quality in it that involves forgetting oneself as someone destined for higher consciousness. One doesn’t consider oneself as someone spiritual, or someone nice, but one just does what men and women have done for hundreds of thousands of years, which is to deal with that material. It’s good also to stop imagining oneself as part of the new age.”

~ “Robert Bly takes us down to the valley, and gets down with us in the dirt, and shows us this is where it starts —here in flesh, here in grief, here in memories we deny. His arms wave like big branches, as he tells us to face the dark in ourselves. His language runs like water over the dry bed, whether he’s talking about what it means to be a man or a woman, or acknowledging the pain of childhood, or warning against the siren call of Eastern mysticism. Full of eloquence and extraordinary energy, Bly is one of the most respected and widely read poets of the age, as fully human as anyone I’ve met.”

~ Interview by Sy Safransky

Images ~ Kitchen God - Zao Shen is one of the most important deities in Taoism and protects the hearth and family

             ~ Robert Bly