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Robert Bly's "Sleepers Joining Hands": Shadow and Self Michael Atkinson

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Robert Bly's Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 7 Article 42 Issue 4 Fall 1976 Robert Bly's "Sleepers Joining Hands": Shadow and Self Michael Atkinson Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Atkinson, Michael. "Robert Bly's "Sleepers Joining Hands": Shadow and Self." The Iowa Review 7.4 (1976): 135-153. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2134 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Falling intoHoles inOur Sentences its This body holds protective walls around us, it watches us whenever we walk out. Each we take in conversation our step with friends, moving or the watches us into is slowly flying, body us, calling what possible, into what is not into said, the shuckheap of ruined arrowheads, or the old man with missing fingers. We take our first in words each and a step day, instantly fall into hole in our sounds. sane afternoons in a room our Overly during twenties come back to us in the form of a son who is mad, every longing another person had that we failed to see the returns to us as a body squinting of the eyes when we and no the ruthless talk, sentimentality, only body performing its each of our confrontations into our magic, transforming energy, changing labors over white-haired books into and scholarly certainty healing power, and our cruelties into an old man with missing fingers. We talk all of the confusion in car morning of others, and daylight the slides off the I advice in as if I were road, give public mature, that night in a dream I see a a to the head a policeman holding gun of frightened girl, who is the talks of a blindfolded, priest easily death, and opening National sees an woman Geographic old lying with her mouth open. Robert Bly's Sleepers Joining Hands: Shadow and Self / Michael Atkinson In Sleepers Joining Hands, Robert Bly offers his readers a various weave of the and the the personal public, psychological and the political modes of Each mode illuminates the as I experience. other, though, hope to show, the collection is most and fundamentally formally psychological. The lay out of the book is indirect: two dozen pleasantly pages of poems, ranging from haiku-like meditation moments to longer poems of protest. Then there is the a short course in the Great an essay, Mother, analysis of the but of disturbing finally nourishing configuration feminine archetypes in the collective unconscious. we And finally have the oneiric title sequence: four and a written at different times poems coda, and published in differ ent but here as a a places, offered single structure, whole. The on either side of the seem to poems essay point back and forth to 135 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org so we is each other. And naturally ask: what the relation of the earlier poems to the later sequence? what is the final shape of the book? most to The essay points the way. Like poets who pause explain them His on selves, Bly works obliquely. essay focuses the work of Bachofen rests on a and Neumann; yet the pattern of the book firmly the thought of successor to the first and the teacher of the second?Carl Jung. The essay anima our coordinates the variety of archetypes which inhabit subcon us sciousness: the Good Mother who gives life, the Death Mother who muse or takes it away; the Ecstatic Mother, of joy, and the Stone Teeth us Mother who reduces to the stupor of psychic annihilation. But the title on sequence, which is the key to the book's integrity, focuses two other Jungian dream archetypes?the shadow and the Self. resonance con The symbols of the earlier poems gain in the schematic text of the later sequence: imagist poems move toward plotted action, I to oracles toward ritual, archetypes toward myth. Here, would like pre sent the scheme of the sequence and show its relation to the shorter poems, delineating the system of archetypes that coherently applies throughout the to con book, linking Biblical allusions contemporary consciousness and necting dream images with myth. in warns we After sketching the profiles of the Great Mother, Bly that should not examine his "poems for evidence of them, for most of [the] were to poems written without benefit of them." And further guide us, he it lifts the penultimate paragraph of his essay from Jung: virtually dia our at grams the concern and shape of the "Sleepers" sequence, shifting tention from "the woman within" to the shadow and the Self. our . It would be far better simply to admit spiritual poverty. The come . spirit has down from its fiery high places but when the spirit turns to water. in becomes heavy, it Therefore the way of the soul search of its lost father . leads to the water, to the dark mirror that lies at the bottom. Whoever has decided to move toward the state of . soul that leads to water. spiritual poverty goes the way of the the [Bly's ellipses] for full or In Jung's overall schema, the personality striving individuation are in our integration has four aspects, which personified dreams: (1) the we consider ourselves to be in ego (or persona), that person (or role) the that the same sex normal waking consciousness; (2) shadow, figure of as or the ego who embodies negative positive traits which might have been now woman conscious but which have been repressed; (3) the anima, the within the man, that feminine consciousness with which he has to come to man terms?or the animus, the within the woman, representing the male 136 woman must consciousness with which the reconcile herself; and finally, can (4) the Self, that perfect wholeness which the individual become, when he has reconciled himself with his shadow and anima (or she with own for her shadow and animus) and become his potentiality being. to The first poem of the "Sleepers" sequence hearkens back the time the is en ego became split from its shadow by repression, and appropriately titled "The Shadow Goes Away." It records the fragmentation of the ques must tor, chronicles his separation from that lost aspect which he again is come to recognize in himself. Until he incorporates his shadow, he pow to act as we him erless effectively. We feel his powerlessness gaze with upon "The woman chained to the shore," Andromeda-like, and hear him express ocean to to In his fear of going into the fight for her, liberate her. ( mythic woman compression, the is the ocean?la mer, la m?re?the womb from sea. which he must be reborn whole. ) He fears the Juxtaposed to his feel cause: ing of impotence is its his loss of the shadow. most in is a Often?perhaps frequently dream and art?the shadow figure that embodies the negative aspects of the personality; the negativity pro reason are Thus we Dim vides the they repressed. have JekylTs hidden Hyde, as mesdale's Chillingworth, Gatsby's Wolfsheim, and the like. But, Jung we as notes, may just easily deny parts of ourselves that?grown wiser?we would consider good. Because something about them threatens the fragile, or narrowly defined persona ego, they too may be repressed. But ultimately to our or they must be admitted consciousness and assimilated, the results will be disastrous. Ishmael's savage Queequeg, Willy Lowman's Charley, are Macbeth's Banquo: each contains "values that needed by consciousness, a but that exist in form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one's life." has a is consis The protagonist in Bly's poems shadow that protean but a tent. The dreamer first imagines himself brother (probably Judah) to Jos into eph of the many colored coat; he recalls selling his brother-shadow so to slavery. Joseph contains the qualities the dreamer desperately needs is sent complete his life. In Genesis (Chapters 37-50) Joseph into the moral consciousness the wilderness of Egypt, banished, repressed from the of Self who family (except the mind of the father, the wise old man, the yearns for Joseph's return). Despite (or because of) the banishment, Joseph over gains mastery the alien realm, understands its laws by understanding dreams both positive and negative, and eventually provides his brothers to at out. with what they need sustain their lives, when they last seek him Bly's shape-shifting protagonist repeatedly dreams of selling his brother, to into or out to sea notably be carried away the desert ( archetypal equiva which a and lents for the unconscious, may be realm of danger potential is into an death for the fragmented and brittle ego). Joseph transformed 137 is in American Indian: he "taken by travelling Sioux," and he learns to "glide about naked, drinking water from his hands, / to tether horses, fol the trail bent the low faint through grasses." The questor's shadow?and, poem suggests, ours?is the natural man, the primitive, at home in the nature the unconscious. world of and The pillagers of the tribal village and the Marines who appear late in the poem are intended to remind us how we our in have duplicated oppression of the Indian the bombing of Viet nam.
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