The Shadow

There’s a small second-hand book store on Broadway between Fir and Granville in Vancouver called Tanglewood Books.  They take in trade paperbacks mostly, and hardcovers.  I was browsing the psychology books almost by accident and found a little book by the poet Robert Bly called The Little Book On The Human Shadow.

I rarely browse psychology or self-help books anymore, although there was a time I read everything from R.D. Laing to Jung to Carl Rogers to Abe Maslow to Roger Penrose.  I even have a degree in psychology, although I gave up on the field since exploring the theories of learning meant understanding the behavior of white rats, at least at the school where I went.

My reading habits at that time also migrated to the counter-culture and New Age end of the spectrum: Krishnamurti, William Irwin Thompson, Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.  I also read a lot about Buddhism and psychology.  In the end, what I was looking for couldn’t be found in any book, no matter how perceptive or well written.  And what was I looking for?  Still not quite sure, or not quite sure how to say.

But I found myself picking up this thin book in Tanglewood’s and eventually walking out the door with it (after purchasing of course).

Robert Bly is an interesting fellow.  In the mid-70s, I was on staff at a private conference for counter-cultural types in the Hamptons on Long Island where Bly was a participant.  This was one of many conferences held over the years by The Lindisfarne Association, founded by William Irwin Thompson.  Near the end of the conference, after presentations by people like Gregory Bateson, Jonas Salk, John Todd and Bill Thompson, Bly managed to make all the intellectual talk pale by comparison with his shamanistic performance.  This was before his Iron John days of the men’s movement where he helped instigate guys to march into the woods together, beat on drums and chant in order to get in touch with their masculinity.

On this occasion, using masks, music, movement and the chanting of his own poetry, he challenged the conference participants directly and indirectly about their cultural and psychological assumptions and their intellectual frame of reference.  He used his masks, changing his persona like a masterful actor each time to illustrate mythic points, including making real the notion of the shadow.

It started to get a little too spooky for me, especially the mask performances, and I went off to bed.  I remember waking up later in the small hours of the morning.  The music was still going and I thought I could still hear drumming.  I felt disoriented, as if I had woken up in the midst of a tribal ritual intent on changing my normal understanding of the world.  Eventually I went back to sleep and the conference concluded in a normal way the next day, with Mr. Bly off and running somewhere else early in the morning.

I should give you a sense of Bly’s poetry.  There’s a strong presence in it.  In addition to his own poetry he has published translations of poets from other cultures such as the Indian spiritual poet Kabir.  His translations, which he calls versions, have been challenged by some critics because he doesn’t translate from the original language but from other translations.  Nevertheless his versions have received acclaim.

Here is a sample of his own poetry, from a poem called Monet’s Haystacks:

It’s strange that our love of Beauty should lead us to hell.
I caught one glimpse of you, and a moment later
My house and books were all thrown into the fire. . . .

The horses of sorrow are always restless, breaking
Out of fences, trampling the neighbors’ garden.
The best odes are written by the pirates in the moonlight.

But back to the shadow…  What is it? This is originally Carl Jung’s conception: The shadow is all those parts of us we disown, which we keep beyond the threshold of our everyday consciousness.  It is a deep current of mind, where circulates, for instance, the rage which we refuse to acknowledge as well the energy that could express it, where we dispose the dark thoughts of depression, along with the sensitivity that perceives the darkness.

R.D. Laing had some lines about it:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

If we were to look for our shadow, it becomes almost comical.  In the bright sun of our attention we wheel about in vain, our shadow extending long behind us.  It is wherever we are unaccustomed to look.

In Bly’s book about the shadow, he calls it the long bag we drag behind us.  He describes the bag’s beginnings in childhood, when there are certain portions of the child’s globe of energy which meet with severe disapproval.  The “good” child has learned to stuff his bag after parental imperatives such as, “Can’t you be still,” and “It’s not nice to try and kill your brother.”  In school, the teachers say, “Good children don’t get angry over such things,” and the bag gets bigger.  In high school, what goes into the bag depends as much on peer pressure as on adult impositions.

Says Bly, “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”

And what do we find when we open the bag? “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.”

Where is this shadow, how can I know it, as we turn looking everywhere but not finding, but still called to know.  Bly passes on to us a comment from a Jungian analyst he found helpful: Our psyche in daily life tries to give us a hint about the shadow by picking out people to hate in an irrational way.  What we find in them may well be what we’ve put into that big bag.  There are some people we love to hate.  Why?

Bly also says that paying attention to what one likes or hates in literature helps too.  He gives for himself the examples of Pope and Johnson, eighteenth century men whom he calls “haters of feeling, rationalistic sticks, … enemies of spontaneity.”  This led him to see facets of himself he had denied.

Lately I’ve seen some hint of the shadow in myself this way: the arrival in social situations, where, almost idly, yet persistently, I cast about for some stranger to dislike on the basis of superficial characteristics.  I’m sure the perception of these characteristics has more to say about me than about them.

As Jung puts it:

A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.

[For a related post on the shadow, there’s this one.]

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