Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

BILL SIEMERING: The first annual conference on the mother, is being organized by poet Robert Bly to be held in Colorado June 2 through 13. Mr. Bly, could you tell us a little bit about the background of this conference.

ROBERT BLY: I think that, in maybe the last 15 to 20 years, there's been an awareness that a new consciousness is coming. And this was apparent with the new interest in poetry, and in rock music, and in women's work in general, women's liberation, and in the consciousness of women. So I think that things are sometimes discussed well in pairs. So I have always found it useful to contrast, if you call the new consciousness a mother consciousness, then you can contrast it with what we have had for the last 2,000 years, which can be described as a father consciousness.

And we know that it's been male and patriarchal. So it's an attempt then to investigate what art would be like, what dance would be like, what poetry would be like, what daily life would be like, if we were living in the mother consciousness, instead of the father or industrial consciousness, in which we all have been living. We've reached a peak then in our society, in America, particularly in industrialized society of the patriarchal society, the authoritarian, the Father God.

Everyone seems to feel, as I know you do, that this patriarchal society is collapsing, and partly it's collapsing because, well, the males really in government haven't made a decent decision for about 100 years. I mean, the Versailles Treaty and every one of those has been a disaster. So from the point of view of consciousness, they make these errors because they actually are living in an unbalanced consciousness, with much too much of father consciousness, and too little of the mother consciousness.

So one is not saying that father consciousness is bad. Both consciousnesses are marvelous. But when you go as far as we have in despising of women, and despising of the female consciousness, which also means despising of the female part of a man, at that point you can't help but have an imbalance which would lead you to disasters.

BILL SIEMERING: And perhaps the Vietnam War is a culmination of that consciousness.

ROBERT BLY: I think it's becoming clearer and clearer. For example, if you look at it from the point of view of mother consciousness versus father, it's quite possible that Vietnam represents to us the mother consciousness. Those are gentle people, and they do a great deal of work with mother earth.

And it's possible that as father consciousness collapses, it becomes more and more desperate, and has a positive hatred in itself for all forms of mother consciousness. And as we know, the mother is associated with the South strangely, and the Father with the North. It's true in Europe and it seems to be true everywhere. So the fact that Vietnam would be at the South of Asia would not surprise us.

BILL SIEMERING: We have that notion, though, that the female is the soft, and gentle, and so on. And therefore, the male consciousness calls it weak.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

BILL SIEMERING: Rather in the Eastern thought, in the Dao, there's the idea of water as a symbol of gentleness, but also great strength.

ROBERT BLY: Historically, the whole contrast of mother and father can be stretched backward into time, with the mother coming first. Backofen in around 1850 is the first one who made the supposition that every patriarchy that we have was preceded by a matriarchy. And he didn't know at the time that the Indians living in the United States were in matriarchies, many of them. And our first anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, found out the Iroquois were in a matriarchy.

So he was the one who found out that the matriarchies perhaps existed 2 to 500,000 years, maybe a million years, before the coming of the patriarchy. At that time, women ran everything in religion, and politics, and especially in myth, and those evidently produced tremendous power of character. So that the female energy at that time was extremely powerful, and the very opposite of the weak view that we have of femininity. They had a feeling of more womanliness, or mother energy, or female energy.

So then he found out that the female mother consciousness is associated with the left side of your body, or with the left hand, and the Father with the right. So when it says Christ sits on the right hand of God, you know that you've entered into the patriarchy. And also the matriarch is associated with the circle, and the Father with the square. So when you have Christ then on a rectangular cross, then that's a culmination of the patriarchy and religion.

BILL SIEMERING: I wonder why this suppression of the woman, the mother in society? Why is it so feared in men?

ROBERT BLY: No one knows about that. There are several possibilities. One is that the historical view would be that under the matriarchy, the men themselves were oppressed. And in a way, they had a men's liberation society for 400,000 years. And maybe in 2000 BC, somewhere in there, the men finally became strong enough, and they organized and began to destroy the temples of the mother, and kill the mother.

And the Jews are very strong in that and and wiped out the mother completely in the Old Testament. Her name evidently was Deborah the B, the mother was always associated in many times with the queen bee. And Deborah was destroyed and nothing was left but Jehovah. Now, the Greeks also went very strongly, and they left Hera in, but put Zeus in charge. So therefore there is a feeling of vindictiveness here on the part of the men, and I think that's a part of it.

Another thing that's very interesting is that a lot of brain research has been done now, it's called split brain research, indicating that the right lobe of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. Now, a great difference has been found between the two lobes. The one controlling the right side of the body is found to be basically logical, and rational, and aggressive, and interest in restraint of emotion.

Now, the lobe that controls the left side of the body is found to be emotional in tone, intuitional, associational in its logic, and concerned with emotion, and the expression of emotion. So therefore, really everyone has two personalities inside of them. One, you can say the left side developed under the matriarchies, and the right under the patriarchies. Now, when you go into the patriarchy farther and farther, you become more and more afraid of emotion. In other words, you become more and more afraid of your left side.

So therefore you deal with restraint of emotion, until finally you end with men like McNamara or Roscoe, even Ford, whose emotion is completely under their control, under the patriarchal control. The result is, of course, that they can feel nothing for any peasant or any poor person that can be murdered anywhere, because compassion is also an emotion. And so I think there's a fear, on the men's part, of their own female side. And then we teach the women to be afraid of their male side, because we want them to have only the female and we'll have the male.

BILL SIEMERING: And the creative side is frequently suspect too then, that's part of the female side, isn't it.

ROBERT BLY: Well, poets like Rumi, for example, the Persian poet whom I just doing some work with, they feel fantastically that the creativity lies in the female. In the man, there's no question it lies in the female side. I found that out myself by being brought up in a typical patriarchal way in the middle west, which is heavily patriarchal, then I was a Lutheran for science. And then I went to college, and the college is of course, a completely father oriented on the whole, except for a rare teacher.

And then I tried to write poetry using only my right side, so to speak, using only my father consciousness. And it was totally impossible. And the poetry I wrote in my 20s was worthless. And I luckily didn't publish most of it. But finally, then long in the late 20s and early 30s, a man begins to come towards mother consciousness on his own, unless he's blocked. And the solitude is a great help in developing that.

So I found that to be the case. And I wasn't surprised then when Robert Graves discovered that the word muse, which all the male poets, even of patriarchal Greece, would address and ask them to help with their poems, the word muse is an old word for the moon. Therefore, it's an old word for the mother or for mother consciousness. So even the patriarchal Greeks would begin a poem by saying, mother consciousness, please come and help me finish this poem.

BILL SIEMERING: But we shouldn't have to deal in this either/or all the time. Isn't there chance for synthesis? We do have two sides of our brain, after all.

ROBERT BLY: Yes, I think so. And the point of the brain research is the discovery that the corpus callosum, as they call it, which goes back and forth between the two brains, is what adjusts those two. So there should be as much flow back and forth between these two sides of the brain as possible. But what happens if you have a completely father oriented educational system, there isn't much flow back and forth between them.

So obviously, what has to be brought up somehow for the males and also, women often feel, for example, that they do not have true womanliness now. They have a femininity which is imposed upon them by the patriarchy. So they find that they have to develop not only their male sides, but also their woman or mother consciousness side. And in any case, it seems necessary to bring to consciousness the mother as a balance.

And I think it's coming already. We all feel, it won't be a return to the matriarchy because that's impossible. But we now have developed for maybe 400 or 500,000 years, we developed a matriarchy. Now, we've had the patriarchy for 2,000 years. So what we'll have now is a union of the two of some unknown kind.

BILL SIEMERING: A new wholeness.

ROBERT BLY: Yes. And one way it can be described is that what'll happen as soon as the mother is brought back, as soon as the mother has returned sufficiently in order to have a child, so to speak, a spiritual child, we will move into the realm of the Son, which will be very interesting.

BILL SIEMERING: And what about men? Will they be less concerned about climbing the corporate ladder, the hierarchical kinds of--

ROBERT BLY: It will have to be. The whole competitiveness is a right-sided thing involving domination of the Earth instead of living with mother earth. Thoreau, of course, had a lot of mother consciousness in him, and he developed that by living with mother nature. So in religion, father consciousness shows itself usually in the form of morality and rules. When Moses comes down, he has a series of tablets given him by the father God, which says, don't do this, and don't do that, and don't do this, and don't do that.

Under the mother, the rules are often quite the opposite. They're not rules. What they say is do, do this, do make love, do make love often. Do go out, and kiss a tree. Do love snow. Do take long walks. So we understand that context and body motion. Father consciousness often shows itself in tremendous stiffness, inability to move the hands, holding the body stiff from the bottom, from down.

So we have a wonderful woman named Ann Eagle from Charleston, who is coming up to teach dance, since in the patriarchy you can worship the divine by sitting stiffly in a chair or in a Pew while a man up there gives you some rules to live by. Whereas in the matriarchy it was understood that you cannot worship the divine unless a body is moving. So therefore dance was always connected with it.

And I suppose in Father consciousness and art, you have academic art, or you have abstract expressionism. Art held off the father for a long time, but it finally gave in with true abstract art of Mondrian and so on, where you have nothing but straight lines and solid blocks of rectangular color. Well, we can all understand the other contrasts. You were thinking of it in terms of justice?

BILL SIEMERING: Right. What people say is a goal, frequently is totally reversed. That is, we really don't have justice. There isn't equal justice under the law. We talk about peace with honor in Vietnam. And I don't think there was either peace or much honor for the people there, or for ourselves. And so there's a crumbling of myth perhaps. David Halberstam has a recent article on the fall of Vietnam in new times, and he talks about the final end of this myth of supremacy that we have unlimited power, and the will to power, and so on. That we can do everything. And--

ROBERT BLY: That's a wonderful right hand obsession.

BILL SIEMERING: How is this going to affect Americans and their own self concept?

ROBERT BLY: The collapse of the patriarchies?

BILL SIEMERING: Right.

ROBERT BLY: It's going to destroy the self esteem tremendously.

BILL SIEMERING: The ego?

ROBERT BLY: The ego. But the ego can link itself to anything. The ego can reestablish. It's established itself now on the basis of America having a higher standard of living, having more automobiles, having more right angles, having more squares than anybody in the world. But it can also link itself with the universe. So therefore, when the universe is joyful, then the ego becomes joyful. And that was the hope under the matriarchies. And that was the experience, evidently there was considerable more ecstasy. Ecstasy can be considered a quality of mother consciousness.

Whereas, as Thomas Jefferson says, all of us have the right to the pursuit of happiness under the patriarchy. Nothing is said of ecstasy, whatever. So I think that isn't a part of this conference, really. What we're trying to do, really, is to study the background of the matriarchy and what was discovered in it. And so we're going to have a man from the University of Cincinnati named Robert Sadin, who does the courses, and he's going to talk about music and the unconscious, and have some singing.

And then I'll talk about poetry and fairy tales. Rudolf Schumacher will talk about dancing, I'm sorry, about painting and the mother. Then I want to introduce some ideas of a woman, I think is unbelievably intelligent, a woman named Marie-Louise Von Franz, who is 60 years old this year, lives in Zurich. And she believes that the fairy stories were composed maybe 3,000 to 4,000 years ago by women priests, or by the unconscious of women, and they are guides to the growth of women primarily.

Which is an amazing idea, and that the women priests understood a tremendous amount about the growth of the male side of women, and the growth of the womanly side of women, and how they can proceed with getting out of various traps that their mothers put them in, and so on. And that this knowledge was put in the form of fairy tales, so that after, before the invention of writing, before the invention of printed word.

And then also with the hope that in three or four centuries or five centuries, or 2000 years, whenever the women were returning again to their growth, that this material could be brought back out. And this is precisely what's happening in the last 20 years. Marie-Louise's Von Franz's staggering book called The Feminine in Fairy Tales is the greatest book that I've ever read on the growth of women. So I plan to try to introduce some of her ideas and have her books there, too. She's in Zurich and couldn't come, but I think that's tremendously valuable.

BILL SIEMERING: How will you go about having people become more aware of the mother consciousness.

ROBERT BLY: Inside of them?

BILL SIEMERING: Yeah.

ROBERT BLY: Well, one possibility, of course, is that as Lorca, Spain has a great deal of mother consciousness, still. The father consciousness is very brutal, but it has not destroyed the mother consciousness. So the mother consciousness comes up in the poets a great deal. Lorca always uses the word, I want, or the phrase I want, I desire. I want you, green. I want you to be more green. I like the ship on the sea, and the horse and the mountain and so on.

The whole idea of our desires, and our loves, and our affections, and our ecstasies lie really on the left side. And to help bring that out means that you forget the possibility that you may become rich or all of that, and return to the ancient idea of consulting yourself inside, as Blake says. And if you don't do that, you turn into standing water. And as Blake said, to expect poison from standing water.

So there's two things going on now, really, in which some of the younger people who are feeling the mother much stronger, more strongly than those who are 50, try to return to the mother through rock music or towards this drifting around and checking each thing every day, and so on, all of that's useful. But you can relate to the mother as an infant, which is not terrifically desirable. You're connected with her, but what the Tau Te Ching suggests is that the man goes ahead and becomes a male, an adult male, and then he returns.

The whole Dao talks about the return to the mother. And it says, you think that the top of the mountains are terrific, the top of the mountains are always connected with the father consciousness. But what really happens that's interesting, happens in the shadows at the base of the mountain. And he says, you think the spokes of the wheel are terrific, do you? And the wheel is only useful because of the hollow space at the center. And it says, know the male, but cling to the female, and be the River Valley of the world.

So how an adult male then goes back is another proposition. Meditation, of course, is very helpful in all return to the mother. Because once you sit down, you're sitting, among other things, in the fetal position, and your masculine consciousness is unable to go out and conquer Africa. So therefore, sometimes a person will find his mother consciousness, which he's been out of touch with since he's five or six years old, slowly began to rise. Women often find the same thing, that their male consciousness that they've been out of touch with since they were five or six years old begins to rise in meditation. So those are practical things that people do.

BILL SIEMERING: Are those ways that you've gotten in touch with the female side in yourself?

ROBERT BLY: Yes. In my case, it was a matter of desperation, I suppose, because I found myself unable to continue, unable to write really with my poetry, and all art is very useful in that way, because you'll come up against a stone wall. And you won't be able to develop unless you develop your female side. So in my sense, I felt a need for solitude, and then I felt a need for meditation, and I finally got some instructions from the Tibetans who are very good in the development of both sides.

And then of course, just as women are helped tremendously by men who respect their female and male consciousness, so then tremendous help has been given to me by my wife and other women who have been writers and poets like Emily Dickinson and so on, who understand that, and help to bring it out in men, both women living and women writers.

BILL SIEMERING: It's a fascinating prospect, and one that gets down to some of the root causes of some of the problems and really at some solutions perhaps too, because change will not take place unless there's a change inside people. Laws can only legislate to a degree equal rights for people.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

BILL SIEMERING: But unless people's hearts are changed, and minds are changed, why, yeah.

ROBERT BLY: Everyone feels a great longing, to live in a way with more depth.

BILL SIEMERING: And the wholeness too.

ROBERT BLY: So we don't have any money for this thing. We're disorganising ourselves because a foundation support would be far too much a father intrusion for the mother conference, and we don't plan to make any money out of it either. So we're having it about ten, 12 days, and people will be camping mostly, and we have a couple of buildings they can live in. But they'll pay $6 to $10 a day, perhaps for food, and lodging, and whatever money we have at the end will be redistributed again, which would be a principle of the mother, too.

BILL SIEMERING: Will there be a concern about the practical things of organization, and so on. That is, how do you translate this. Again, there's that stereotype that the artist is living in a dream world. Of course, the dream is in touch with the unconscious, and a very valuable tool too, but there is always that need for making things practical, and how do we apply this in our everyday life.

ROBERT BLY: I don't know. That's one of the things that we are thinking about here. I'm sure that I feel it myself. Some days I can live in tune with the mother, that is to say, with the deepest part of myself, which I don't try to interrupt the day and break it. Rainer Maria Rilke talks of that greatly, flowing with the day, and flowing with human relationships. And men stop dominating the women, the women stop trying to block the men who dominate them.

And in my experience, the greatest part of it has been the simple, practical uses of it in daily life. In ancient times, they had a great deal of speculation, which we will eventually come to. And I have the suspicion myself that the odyssey, one of the things we're going to study is the possibility of The Odyssey being a secret text from the late mother civilization. And far from being an epic about somebody wandering from island to island, the Odyssey actually describes how to deal with enormous concentrations of female energy, both negative and positive.

And every one of those islands is a concentration of powerful female energy, some of it destructive to males and to women, and others not. So again, this is a practical issue of daily life, really. And what has happened to us is that the whole mother energies around us have become completely invisible. And men are genuinely afraid of all women.

BILL SIEMERING: Why is that?

ROBERT BLY: I think because they don't separate out the negative and the positive. In ancient times, for example, in the ancient matriarchies, they would divide mother energy into good mother energy, let us say in death energy, death mothers. In India, where they've kept a great deal of the mother civilization, they still worship Kali. So therefore they would say that certain women do have death mother energies in them.

Hemmingway's mother, for example, was evidently a death mother, you probably know the story. When he was about 26, he got a letter from his mother, in a package, and it said in it, there was a pistol in the package, and a note saying, dear Ernest, this is a pistol your father shot himself with. I thought you'd like to have it.

Hedda Gabler describes this also. So one reason they were not as afraid in ancient life is that instead of considering all women to be like the Virgin Mary, they said no, there were negative. There were extremely destructive women, exactly as there were extremely destructive men, and you must learn to be sensitive to these.

And once you learn to be sensitive to them, you're not afraid in general of all women, you follow the idea. And so their visualization that they gave through their Great Mothers of negative elements and positive elements in women, made men able to see them much more clearly. Women see them clearly now, not as clearly as in ancient times, but they realize that some women are to be dealt with differently.

BILL SIEMERING: And men are vulnerable, and therefore are sometimes overly defensive.

ROBERT BLY: They are vulnerable because they've been standing on one leg for a long time, on their patriarchal leg. And here on one leg can easily be pushed over.

BILL SIEMERING: And so this conference, the first annual conference on the mother, which will be held out in Denver, we'll try to give support to both legs for both sexes, I guess.

ROBERT BLY: That's the intention. And we want the students, we're having a maximum of 100 students. And participants, really, we want people in their 20s as well as in their 30s, and 40s, there are a lot of people who know a lot about the mother and have been thinking about it for years, to come and share opinions and ideas for 10 days, is the idea of it.

BILL SIEMERING: And this will be June 2 through 13. And if people want more information, they should contact Peter Martin. That's post office box 18418. Post office box 18418. Capitol Hill Station. Denver, Colorado. Zip code 80218. Believe you have a new manuscript from biblical days.

ROBERT BLY: Thank you. I'd forgotten it for the moment. There's some speculation, a manuscript was found in the Hapsburg libraries, I think, some time ago, and a man in California did some work on it. There's a suspicion that Christ provided also a mother prayer, as well as the father of the Lord's prayer. And that the patriarchal Christians who came later, such as Saint Paul, suppressed much of this material. Christ himself is much interested in mother consciousness, as he shows with his refusal to stone the woman in adultery.

But Saint Paul and the patriarchs who follow, suppress, and chances are they're suppressing a great deal of Christ's own comments as well. So I'll read you the mother's prayer. So we all know the Lord's Prayer. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. And it all throws itself in the future, as father thinks always does, and leans heavily on will.

So here's the mother's prayer. Our mother, who art on Earth. Your name was always Holy. Your Kingdom has already arrived here in the body. May we sense what the whole universe wants to be, both in the body, and in the spirit. May we make our own bread every day. And may we forgive everyone, even those who have not transgressed against us. Do not lead us into sickness, and save us from the longing we have to damage ourselves. For the body is yours, and delight, and ecstasy forever and ever. Amen.

BILL SIEMERING: Thank you very much. Robert Bly, recipient of the National Book Award for poetry, whose books of poems include The Light Around the Body, Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Morning Glory, and The Teeth Mother Naked At Last. Mr. Bly's home is in Madison, Minnesota. I'm Bill Siemering, at Minnesota Public Radio Station KCCM, Moorhead.