Who Came To The Wedding?

Young me, looking to break the ice and bucket the pond

(Last week I talking about the history of Robert Bly’s life and my initial resistance to reading Iron John: Where The Wild Things Are)

So I pick Iron John up. In fact, I didn't buy it from a store but withdrew it from a library, possibly the last book I ever did so.

I’m much younger than the target audience for Iron John (about twenty-four), but suitably miserable, so somehow the years don’t matter. This was the first stand out line for me: “The Wild Man, who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage,” (Bly 1990 p.x). Countless writers – including myself – have written words of that sentiment since, but at the moment in Twickenham library, on that Tuesday afternoon, I’d never read anything like it.

I knew nothing of Zen, shamans or woodsmen, but I knew I was in an awful lot of pain and somehow that one slim sentence had just thrown me a key. I hurried home to the men’s hostel I was living in and commenced to reading. Somewhere over the next few hours I glanced up from what had been a prison cell and found I was in a hermit’s hut. A few books, a rug, a kettle and a Rembrandt sketch of a lion tacked onto the wall.

I was astounded by what I was reading.

Bly gave religious weight to exactly the kind of story I’d devoured since childhood. Not only that, he was claiming that there was a kind of Jacob’s ladder out of the sorrow and chaos that my life had become. That if I was to attend to the conditions of my life through a poetic and patient lens, then everything would deepen. I didn’t say ‘make sense’ or ‘fix everything’, but deepen. These tales weren’t about changing the story necessarily, they were about understanding the story. That was the first step.

The woman I loved never came back, I continued to dwell amongst desperate men in the hostel, but I had this one lifeline, I had this book.

I used to examine Robert’s face on the back cover. He seemed a strange looking fellow. He’s in the trousers and striped shirt of an accountant but has a Guatemalan vest over the top and a burgundy scarf. He’s grinning broadly at the camera. It’s like he managed to get out of school early or something. He seemed free.