by Robert Bly
What is meant by Rilke’s “You must change your life” is evidently something more subtle. I don’t understand it at all myself, so I can only speculate. Conrad evidently made use of the information the shadow gave him by ceasing to be a ship’s captain on the Congo, and so a low-level exploiter of Africa. Rilke, when he realized what his work was telling him, interrupted his writing of poetry, and spent months watching animals in the zoo, and blind men on the streets, and years alone. He began to ask less from the world, not more. The Taoists would probably say that changing your way of life means giving up having an effect upon the world. It involves “wu-wei,” not playing any role. Wu-wei is also translated as doing nothing. Wang Wei said once:
In the old days the serious man was not an important person.
He thought making decisions was too complicated for him.
He took whatever small job came along.
Essentially, he did nothing, like these walnut trees.
His friend P’ei Ti answered this way:
I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.
You see, here I am, keeping my ancient promise!
Let’s spend today just strolling around these walnut trees.
The two of us will nourish the ecstasies Chuang Tzu loved.
A man has an effect on “the world” mainly through institutions. So we could say that in the second half of life a man should sever his link with institutions. I think the problem is more complicated for women, but I don’t understand it. Conceivably for women the change might involve accepting more responsibility for affecting the world.
In any case severing ties with institutions is not a habit in the United States, where a man ordinarily becomes more deeply embedded in the institution, whether it be an insurance company or a university, during his forties and fifties than he ever was earlier. John Barth is a contemporary example of the American artist who tries to bring the shadow into his work, but refuses to live it. His work cannot help but follow the same path as Stevens’s—it is an ascent into vacuity, intellectualist complexity, a criticism of dry reason from inside the palace of dry reason.
If the shadow’s gifts are not acted upon, it evidently retreats and returns to the earth. It gives the writer or person ten or fifteen years to change his life, in response to the amazing visions the shadow has brought him—that change may involve only a deepening of the interior marriage of male and female within the man or woman—but if that does not happen, the shadow goes back down, abandoning him, and the last state of that man is evidently worse than the first. Rilke talks of the shadow retreating in this poem:
Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.
The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness—
he is an old man, it’s all over for him.
Nothing else will come; no more days will open;
and everything that does happen will cheat him—
even you, my God. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.
About the Author
ROBERT BLY is the author of many books, including The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Light Around the Body, and Iron John: A Book About Men. He frequently leads workshops for and about men.
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Copyright
A LITTLE BOOK ON THE HUMAN SHADOW: Copyright © 1988 by Robert Bly. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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