THAT DAY

I'm reading Robert Bly's IRON JOHN, but I'm getting annoyed with Bly. He labels men like me "flyers" or "Peter Pans", who avoid the earth, the depths, and probably commitment; and "soft men", who imitate women and limit themselves, instead of seeking male role models. Yet the warning signs he lists for these dysfunctional roles include very few few things I actually do. I did do many of them at one time--but that was just a cocoon. Now my wings have opened. What he calls "avoiding the earth" I would call shamanism or even just spirituality; what he sees as arrested development is something I won through to with effort and pain. I live well, given my horrible past. I definitely do lack mentors or guides, whether male or female. So what else is new?

I'd be more impressed if he'd list some objective criteria to distinguish his wise old male mentors who merely are out of style from sadly limited or pathological old men who never had a chance to grow up. Or from healthy old men who are just too simple to be of any help to me. Or from wise old conventional men who haven't had the particular, peculiar experiences I have had, who can't teach me how to live with who I am, though they may teach others.

I feel insulted by being told I CANNOT be an adult unless old men tell me how. Guess what--I define that.

I drop the book and go to bed. As I drift toward sleep, I think of another former mentor, my godmother Joan. Her letter said "Living as a loner is not so bad"... her whole message to me for years was to accept myself as I am--sounds innocuous enough but somehow she discourages me from trying to change things I really need to change. I am a loner, but plenty of loners can love. Or be loved. Or have sex. Or make phone calls or meet strangers without having anxiety fits, for that manner. I'm still crippled and all my achievements have been in spite of it.

I decide to incubate a dream about this issue, and whisper, "I'll dream of finding help, teachers, mentors I trust." Repeat it to myself a few times, and fall asleep.

THAT NIGHT

My parents' house. It's changed. I go there to meet with one of my sisters, then the other. Each brings up my godmother's advice to just accept being a loner. To my surprise, my sister Andrea, usually critical of me, says "Joanie never could SEE you." Erica phrases it differently but says much the same thing: Joan's not a mentor for me any more.

Driving down a steep slope from the isolated tract where my parents' house is, to the mall at the foot--from isolation to the social world. But big logs and a traffic jam slow me. I drag a log along, caught under my car? I drop it in the street and keep going stubbornly. Guilt says "You should go back and clean all that up! Don't leave a mess behind." But another part of me recognizes this as a trick. There'll always be something imperfect to clean up. I go on!

There's a horse in the house. Lanky, swaybacked, elderly, and CURIOUS. Pokes its nose into things. It reminds me vividly of Lincoln. I like the horse, and Lincoln too. I have role models! Make friends with this nosy horse.

I leave my old elementary school with a man. Plan to go somewhere with him. I spread my arms and try to fly. My arms have a ragged trailing fringe of cloth? Old feathers? Just tatters. No true wings. Yet I go on trying to fly, with torn wings.

And rise! At first I'm sure terrible flapping is needed. Slowly I realize I lift with my mind, not my arms.

I'm uncomfortable about leaving the man behind me, and that holds me back a while. Finally I face it: he'll either make an effort, and fly too, or he WON'T. I'd rather be an example of what he can achieve, than pretend I can't fly just to stay with him. Just so he won't be upset or envious.

If that's grounding, forget it.

Star Trek. A technologically sophisticated planet, not part of the Federation. Captain Picard is negotiating with the planetary director for the release of 27,000 imprisoned Federation citizens--including some from the Enterprise. One is Ryker, Picard's executive officer! They've all been shrunk to a couple of inches tall. This is a new punishment for criminals and political dissidents on this planet. And artists. And opposition candidates, and teenagers who show insufficient respect for the system.

In short, anyone with dangerous signs of energy and independence.

They're all run through the shrinking machine, then shipped to a reservation, so free people won't step on them. At first, the Director admits only that the 27,000 Picard knows of are there--in 3 square miles!--fending mostly for themselves. But it comes out--as they talk--that the true figure of LOCAL people ALSO in there is at LEAST two million! Maybe 3... That seems dense even for people that small... not enough land to feed them all, even if they organized perfectly--and they're prisoners, dumped there.

Picard and the Director previously quarreled over these Federation people. The Director got angry and stonewalled him. So this time Picard is carefully polite and friendly. The Director sounds more cooperative, but I don't see any concrete results. Picard is not getting anything for his courtesy but courtesy. He's being co-opted.

My point of view drifts across the room as they talk... into a large doll house in the corner. Float from room to room. Ryker is locked inside.

I listen to Picard and the Director as I watch Ryker pace. He's wearing government-issue gray coveralls. Looks alert. He stares out a half-opened window. I guess he's considering escape. But where can he go, two inches high? He stares... I finally follow his eyes.

There's a mousehole in the corner of the Planetary Director's office. A mousehole with a man in it. A guerrilla from the Midget Liberation Front, who got out of the reservation, crossed miles of giants' territory full of cars cats and feet, broke into the executive palace, made his way through the walls, and now is standing up inside the deepest chamber of the government's heart.

He is holding a pair of jeans, rolled up in a quarter-inch wad. He pulls back his arm, and pitches. The roll of denim flaps in the window, uncurling as it hits the floor. Ryker seems to understand. He strips off those gray coveralls, and puts on the jeans. He must feel cold, I think, but he looks happier. Maybe he knows something I don't.

While he's changing, I hear the Director nearing the doll house. I think "Of course the Director will interrupt him the moment he's changing." But Ryker finishes just before the front door bursts open and a huge face hovers outside. Ryker goes out to face the giant warden, grabbing a home-made megaphone by the door.

They begin negotiations. I'm hearing through shrunken size ears now, for sure: the Director is just a boom and a roar. I think Ryker's first demand better be to get a teletype or something; it's almost impossible to hear what the giant is saying.

The Director, it turns out, is offering Ryker a job. He wants him to investigate the very high incidence of hernias in the shrunken men. He claims the odds for a cure will thus improve from one in five to better than even.

But Ryker's no fool. He knows when he's being bought off. He's not here to be a do-gooder within the prison system. Improving the living conditions of the shrunken means nothing.

He wants them free.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

No women dissing men here! The old men do it. Bly says American culture hates fathers, and I too have been angered at the stereotypes (on TV especially: women always more competent than men in the same position). But Bly wants to rehabilitate the role of male elder without reconstructing it, or facing why these men are hated. For being absent? Industrialization did that, and it is a suppressed crime, our hidden apartheid--carting men off, away from their families, to a steel homeland. But is that the only reason older men are devalued?

My dream says there's a reason older American men are mistrusted, both those who repress all change, like the Director, and those who try to work within the system, like Picard. Too many men gave in to the death cult they were forced to join. Ground down, the flame dropping slowly inside like a wick getting shorter and shorter.

It's the shrunken men, made to feel two inches tall by the powers that be, it's the exiles from proper manhood, who are making a change--drilling thru the king's own walls! The artists, gays, geeks, daredevils and commitophobes and womanizers. Like Ryker. The real wild men. Living in their genes, not their government-issue cover alls. Of all the archetypes Bly talks of, the only one real to me is this. The wild man.

AFTERWORD: GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT

Like a masochist, I read MORE of Bly's "Iron John." My! Bly claims the warrior, the farmer, and the king are the three archetypes underlying Indo-European civilization (at least he's conceding some of us are outside his system). A man can't possibly meet God until he's met and made room for "the King"--a figure Bly calls an archetype, though many cultures never had one, and even those that did developed kings only in historical times. The primal image of men is only a few thousand years old? Silly. And the Father... can't meet God without that! Yet paternity's not much older than royalty--indeed, it probably sired royalty.

Bly goes on and on about the Warrior and the King, but not the farmer. Even to Bly, I guess it's just too obvious that "You can't meet God till you've met the Farmer" is stupid. Not enough guys will pay for THAT workshop.

I keep thinking of Emily Dickinson's sarcastic trinity: "Burglar, Banker, Father..."

Bly's archetypes, and the order men are supposed to meet them in, don't fit my life. I have no trouble meeting God. Any number of them! It's these wise old men I have trouble finding.

As a man excluded from the company of men, who was denied the male role of career, husband, provider... who lacked half the basic experiences Bly keeps taking for granted, and had so many others Bly says are meaningless or impossible... I feel insulted. That's the word, yes. I'm getting tired of being nonexistent. I think I'll exist for a while.

I miss mentors or role models--but Bly's just another enforcer of a norm of maturity that excludes me without knowing the first thing about me. He and men like him make things worse for me. Women will bitch about traditional men, yet look at me suspiciously as a Peter Pan, a "flyer" or "soft male" in Bly's words. When even progressive thought still makes me out to be an arrested, immature male-in-denial, what woman's going to take a chance on me? I'm a just a failed man, not a self-made new and unexpected... creature. Blyism excludes my California adulthood from his Heartland manhood and I resent this the way any self-respecting woman or gay man would resent a sensitive warm wise bigoted mentor... who by the virtue of their warmth hurts you deeper than any right-wing jerk. A stealth bomber, flying in under the radar of your heart.

Oh, I AM weak and often unsure. But I refuse to conclude like Bly that I'm no real adult. And let's not kid around here: when Bly says a "flyer" or "soft male" or "puer aeternus" is not a man, he means not adult. Such speech has consequences. Does Bly call black man "boys", or talk to women about the rights of "Man"? The pain I feel as a Peter Pan is mostly due to OTHER people's immaturity, their inability to see me without a grotesque encrustation of assumptions about my failed manhood. My successful animalhood and spirithood and sexhood and voicehood and the hundred other triumphs over those mute, blind, gray coveralls of tradition, doesn't matter; Bly's scorn and pity is merely a better-written echo of the unquestioning knee-jerk I've endured all my life from you conformists.

I feel angry enough about the second-class citizenship I suffer for being male. The violence I'm supposed to risk, endure, even enjoy. The assumptions I'm inarticulate, potentially criminal, dishonest, and socially stupid. The "nasty brutish and short" life I'm supposed to accept--eight years shorter than white females, comparable to black women, who at least know they're oppressed.

Bly is useless to me. Indigestible. The elders he finds essential aren't. I initiated myself. In shamanic dreams I've walked through death and out the other side. I have done--not fully, but irrevocably--the separation work. Not just from parents or tribe but from gender and species. You can ask if that was wise... but I did it. I am as multidimensional as a human being--as a "man"--but the axes of my depth are not at human angles. They must be measured differently. I'm only part-human, now as Bly defines humanity. But Bly and his kind of whole man are only part-shamans. A word I use only for brevity as I'm no traditional shaman either.

Still I feel sad. I saw a TV documentary on Bly's work with men. He radiated a spiritual power and solidity that I hoped would keep him from putting down others on paths he didn't know.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

But the other documentary, the one in the night, reminds me: whenever you're feeling two inches tall... maybe you're going where no man has gone before.

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