The Battle of the Sexes, Continued: Communiques From the Trenches : Poet Examines ‘Men and Women Now’ Through Looking Glass of Stories, Songs and Verse; Psychologist Uses the Fable of Porcupines and Moles to Illustrate Gender Differences

The male in the past 20 years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process he has not become more free. He’s a nice boy who now not only pleases his mother but also the young woman he is living with. --Robert Bly in a 1982 New Age Magazine interview

So, you think what the new woman wants is Phil Donahue? Alan Alda? A man who cries, embraces feminism and will listen to her endlessly?

Wrong. At least according to Robert Bly, a 58-year-old poet who came from his farm in Moose Lake, Minn., to speak on “Men and Women Now” at a daylong seminar Saturday at the Malibu Community Center.

What women want, Bly says, are men who are sensitive, yes, but men who have also dug deep into the pit of their primitive maleness, who have met the hairy, Wild Man of their ancient, collective past and know about male pain, male joy and male power.

A poet given to psychological analyses, Bly eschews jargon in favor of myths, fairy tales, stories and poems. Jargon, he says, is hard to remember. “You go to seminars and someone in there (a part of you) doesn’t even know you went. . . . Stories catch your attention, usually when they’re told and not read.”

Like a troubadour, he accompanied himself Saturday on a dulcimer, a bouzouki (Greek mandolin) or a drum. About 70 men and women came, including a college administrator, a city councilman, a doctor, a film director and several psychologists obviously already familiar with Bly. His ideas were often met with collective sighs of approval. He sometimes greeted their comments with approving grunts.

His hands stroked the bouzouki as he read one of his poems:

Every breath taken

by a man who loves

fills the water tank

where spirit horses drink.

He is tall, 6-foot-3, with a soft, ruddy complexion surrounded by unruly white hair. He speaks in a slight nasal tone--shifting dialect when it pleases him. His hands move in elegant gestures, sometimes as quickly as if he were translating for the deaf.

He is controversial, irreverent, metaphorical and vague, deflecting questions or criticism he deems irrelevant. “In a seminar I make about 4,000 generalizations. Five hundred of them must be off,” he said. He also exaggerates.

His hands beat a graceful cadence on the drum--stopping now and then for dramatic effect--as he reads another of his poems:

The ram and his cohorts enter the dark bridge and we all follow. Grieving men descend from the harvested hills and tell boys what can be told of the dragon turning in its spiral shell. God-taught men tell boys of the male turning dragon but the grief our fathers lived cannot be told. Bly is known for his crusading, sometimes cranky individualism. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the War in Vietnam. He translates Scandinavian, Spanish and German literature and has published a poetry journal as well as a dozen books of poems including “Out of the Rolling Ocean: A Book of Love Poems” and his most recent, “Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.” Bly’s “The Light Around the Body” won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1967.

Divorced, remarried and the father of five, Bly has achieved another sort of fame as a mediator in the ongoing battle of the sexes--focusing primarily on men. He said he travels five days a month, giving poetry concerts and seminars on such topics as “Love in the Western World.”

Men and women, Bly said, are in a disastrous situation, though it’s not much different than ever. “What we love is conflict between men and women first and self-pity second.”

‘This Curious Distance’

Central to the problem now, he says, is a lowered “consciousness” in American domestic life, which stems from a lack of observation and not “taking care of things.” He compared it to leaving a wool blanket outdoors in a damp Minnesota night and finding in the morning that crickets have eaten it. “It’s so subtle. You wake up in the morning and you feel this curious distance.”

Bly has culled his ideas from a variety of classic and modern psychologists, mythologists and poets.

Among the cultural defects that he says have estranged men and women are modern birthing practices that separate mother and child, preventing early bonding and encouraging attachment to objects. He also blames the proliferation of pornography, that he says has overstimulated men, encouraging them to make objects of women.

Additionally, he said, men and women enter relationships with totally different models to follow. While a woman’s first love relationship--with her mother--ended in merging, a man’s with his mother was abruptly severed by the incest taboo.

Lost Male Rites

Most significant, he believes, is the disintegration in America of male initiation rites. In primitive tribes, such as those in New Guinea today, older, respected men of the tribe teach boys about male roles and male feelings. Snatched by men in the middle of the night, the New Guinea boys, 8 to 12, are taken to an island, told--and asked to repeat--a Cain and Abel story to “take responsibility for a murderous quality inside,” he explained in a separate interview.

And they are also taught that a male “mode of feeling” is something extremely lively, connected with dancing and ecstasy, he said.

In agricultural societies, boys learned to be men by associating with their fathers in the fields every day, he said. But after the Industrial Revolution, fathers started leaving the home to spend their days working miles away and most forms of initiation broke down.

Sergeants in the old Army used to initiate men, but the spiritual dimension was lacking, said Bly. Today’s corporations are more involved in cloning than initiation, he said. “In our culture feelings are mainly taught by women in the home.”

Sometimes, some men want initiation from women--either their mothers, wives or girlfriends, he said. But women, he said, cannot initiate men. He advised single or divorced women raising sons to “find a man of some sort. You can’t do it alone.”

Leaving as a Victory

Women who try to comfort uninitiated men are dooming their relationships, he said. “Women give tremendous amounts of ‘leftover’ maternal energy to young males.” But whenever he accepts comfort, a man feels like more of a child than when he started. The incest block appears, and he resents that very much. He leaves and feels that leaving is a victory.

“Women at these conferences say, ‘You mean I shouldn’t comfort him?’ I say yes. If he says, ‘I have a headache,’ you say, ‘Well, big boy, you know where the aspirin are.’ It’s not a woman’s job to comfort the men.”

To try and compensate for what he sees as lost initiation rites, Bly has for the past five years held male-only weeklong or weekend retreats--nicknamed “wild man seminars” in which men try to decrease their dependency on women and find their “male energy” by learning to chant and play drums. They listen to poetry, music, ancient myths and fairy tales. They role-play with witch masks and join mock wrestling battles in the outdoors. They do not, say participants, complain about women.

Wilderness retreats for both men and women, co-hosted by Gioia Timpanelli, a storyteller from New York, have been discontinued, said Bly.

Growing Popularity

The retreats for men have grown in popularity through word of mouth, said Michael Ventura, a Los Angeles writer who has attended two retreats and introduced Bly on Saturday. Last May, at a group of 100 men at a men’s retreat in Mendocino, Ventura said “everything was heightened into a walking metaphor.”

Once, he said he found himself in the kitchen with Bly involved in a half real, half play duel with spoons. “He’s a big guy and strong. It was weird, I didn’t want to hit him back,” said Ventura. But when it was over, they both had blood on their hands.

“He (Bly) gives the gift of risk and that’s a precious thing,” Ventura said.

Before he knew Bly, Ventura, 40, said he was a frantic, lonely bachelor. Like other single people, he tended to wonder why the right woman didn’t come along as if it were coincidence and people were finished products, he said.

“What Robert articulated for me is that you can’t expect to concentrate on surfaces and still get gifts from the depths. If you are working on deep things, that work will draw someone to you. Months later when I was trying to change, zap! the woman appeared,” he said. He has been married to the woman he met then for three years, he said.

Volunteer Readers

Saturday, Bly asked for volunteers from the audience, alternating men and women, to read John Cheever’s “Chaste Clarissa,” a story of a young man devoted to a beautiful but unresponsive girl. In the end, the hero wins her over by adjusting his flattery to what she wants to believe about herself--that she is intelligent.

Switching to the style of an English literature teacher, Bly told his audience that “the only power she (Clarissa) has is to hook into the weak side of the man. He’s not dealing with his masculine side.

“If he had the slightest consciousness, he would say ‘Oh shut up’ instead of ‘What would she like to hear?’ ”

One man raised his hand and asked what he should do about his fear of hurting women by saying “the wrong thing.” “Don’t worry about the other person!” Bly exclaimed. “Henry Miller said you can’t break the heart of a person over 35. If they’ve lived this long, you can tell them anything.”