Bag Stuffing

"It’s an old Gnostic tradition that we don’t invent things, we just remember.  The Europeans I know of who remember the dark side best are Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Carl Jung.  I’ll call up a few of their ideas and add a few thoughts of my own.

Let’s talk about the personal shadow first.  When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality.  Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche.  A child running is a living globe of energy.  We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball.  They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.”  Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag.  By the time we go to school our bag is quite large.  Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.”  So we take our anger and put it in the bag.  By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as “the nice Bly boys.”  Our bags were already a mile long.

Then we do a lot of bag-stuffing in high school.  This time it’s no longer the evil grownups that pressure us, but people our own age.  So the student’s paranoia about grownups can be misplaced.  I lied all through high school automatically to try to be more like the basketball players.  Any part of myself that was a little slow went into the bag.  My sons are going through the process now; I watched my daughters, who were older, experience it.  I noticed with dismay how much they put into the bag, but there was nothing their mother or I could do about it.  Often my daughters seemed to make their decision on the issue of fashion and collective ideas of beauty, and they suffered as much damage from other girls as they did from men.

So I maintain that out of a round globe of energy the twenty-year-old ends up with a slice.  We’ll imagine a man who has a thin slice left-the rest is in the bag-and we’ll imagine that he meets a woman; let’s say they are both twenty-four.  She has a thin, elegant slice left.  They join each other in a ceremony, and this union of two slices is called marriage.  Even together the two do not make up one person!  Marriage when the bag is large entails loneliness during the honeymoon for that very reason.  Of course we all lie about it. “How is your honeymoon?” “Wonderful, how’s yours?”

Different cultures fill the bag with different contents.  In Christian culture sexuality usually goes into the bag.  With it goes much spontaneity.  Marie Louise von Franz warns us, on the other hand, not to sentimentalize primitive cultures by assuming that they have no bag at all.  She says in effect that they have a different but sometimes even larger bag.  They may put individuality into the bag, or inventiveness.  What anthropologists know as “participation mystique,” or “a mysterious communal mind,” sounds lovely, but it can mean that tribal members all know exactly the same thing and no one knows anything else.  It’s possible that bags for all human beings are about the same size.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.  Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed.  Suppose the bag remains sealed-what happens then?  A great nineteenth-century story has an idea about that.  One night Robert Louis Stevenson woke up and told his wife a bit of a dream he’d just had.  She urged him to write it down; he did, and it became “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”  The nice side of the personality becomes, in our idealistic culture, nicer and nicer.  The Western man may be a liberal doctor, for example, always thinking about the good of others.  Morally and ethically he is wonderful.  But the substance in the bag takes on a personality of its own; it can’t be ignored.  The story says that the substance locked in the bag appears one day somewhere else in the city.  The substance in the bag feels angry, and when you see it it is shaped like an ape, and moves like an ape.

The story says then that when we put a part of ourselves in the bag it regresses.  It de-evolves toward barbarism.  Suppose a young man seals a bag at twenty and then waits fifteen or twenty years before he opens it again.  What will he find?  Sadly, the sexuality, the wildness, the impulsiveness, the anger, the freedom he put in have all regressed; they are not only primitive in mood, they are hostile to the person who opens the bag.  The man who opens his bag at forty-five or the woman who opens her bag rightly feels fear.  She glances up and sees the shadow of an ape passing along the alley wall; anyone seeing that would be frightened.

I think we could say that most males in our culture put their feminine side or interior woman into the bag.  When they begin, perhaps around thirty-five or forty, trying to get in touch with their feminine side again, she may be by then truly hostile to them.  The same man may experience in the meantime much hostility from women in the outer world.  The rule seems to be: the outside has to be like the inside.  That’s the way it is on this globe.  If a woman, wanting to be approved for her femininity, has put her masculine side or her internal male into the bag, she may find that twenty years later he will be hostile to her.  Moreover he may be unfeeling and brutal in his criticism.  She’s in a spot.  Finding a hostile man to live with would give her someone to blame, and take away the pressure, but that wouldn’t help the problem of the closed bag.  In the meantime, she is liable to sense a double rejection, from the male inside and the male outside.  There’s a lot of grief in this whole thing.

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.  We could add that it may move to a distant place and begin a revolt against us as well.  A lot of the trouble Shakespeare’s kings experience blossoms in that sentence.  Hotspur “in Wales” rebels against the King.  Shakespeare’s poetry is marvelously sensitive to the danger of these inner revolts.  Always the king at the center is endangered.

When I visited Bali a few years ago, it became clear that their ancient Hindu culture works through mythology to bring shadow elements up into daily view.  The temples put on plays virtually every day from the Ramayana.  I saw some terrifying plays performed as a part of religious life, in a day by day way.  Almost every Balinese house has standing outside it a fierce, toothy, aggressive, hostile figure carved in stone.  This being doesn’t plan to do good.  I visited a mask maker, and noticed his nine-or ten-year old son sitting outside the house, making with his chisel a hostile, angry figure.  The person does not aim to act out the aggressive energies as we do in football or the Spanish in bullfighting, but each person aims to bring them upward into art: that is the ideal.  The Balinese can be violent and brutal in war, but in daily life they seem much less violent than we are.  What can this mean?  Southerners in the United States put figures of helpful little black men on the lawn, cast in iron, and we in the North do the same with serene deer.  We ask for roses in the wallpaper, Renoir above the sofa, and John Denver on the stereo.  Then the aggression escapes from the bag and attacks everyone.

We’ll have to let this contrast between Balinese and American cultures lie there and go on.  I want to talk about the connection between shadow energies and the moving picture projector.  Let’s suppose that we have miniaturized certain parts of ourselves, flattened them out, and put them inside a can, where it will be dark.  Then one night-always at night-the shapes reappear, huge, and we can’t take our eyes away from them.  We drive at night in the country and see a man and woman on an enormous outdoor movie screen; we shut off the car and watch.  Certain figures who have been rolled up inside a can, doubly invisible by being partially “developed” and by being kept always in the dark, exist during the day only as pale images on a thin gray strip of film.  When a certain light is ignited in the back or our heads, ghostly pictures appear on a wall in front of us.  They light cigarettes; they threaten others with guns.  Our psyches then are natural projection machines: images that we stored in a can we can bring out while still rolled up, and run them for others, or on others.  A man’s anger, rolled up inside the can for twenty years, he may see one night on his wife’s face.  A wife might see a hero every night on her husband’s face and then one night see a tyrant.  Nora in A Doll’s House saw the two images in turn."

~ Robert Bly, "The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us" (excerpt) A Little Book on the Shadow

Photo ~ An Indian Hindu holy man performs morning prayers for devotees at Sangam