The starting point of this blog is inspired by the poet Robert Bly and a workshop that I had with him. Bly has been writing for some 40 years now, and he totally fucking gets it. He was a major literary force behind the protest of the Vietnam, and later, Iraq Wars. But in my opinion, his contribution to American poetry lies most strongly in his cosmopolitan stance and his role in translating foreign poets from both the present as well as many centuries past and introducing them to an American audience.
He could really care less about many contemporary poets. He wrote one famous essay lambasting T.S. Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, and others of their tradition, who epitomize style without substance, and are akin to the hot girl you want to fuck but would be a fool to marry (the analogy is my own as his exact criticisms escape my memory. The essay is titled “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry”).
In short, the people Robert Bly introduces to his readers, and to those lucky enough to be his students, are those who became enlightened or died trying gathered from throughout the ages. People like Hafez, Rumi, Kabir, Mirabai, Japanese masters of the Haiku, the passionate and direct Latin poets such as Neruda and Machado, and the once unknown recluses of Europe such as Olav H. Hauge and Tomas Transtomer.
But again, this is not a blog about Robert Bly, although I would high recommend reading his books, collections, translations, as well as whatever snippets of biography on the man that you may come across. And from this recommendation, I return to his inspiration.
In class, he asked myself and a number of other Stanford Undergraduates what we knew about the darkness. About that time in our life when we start being real assholes to everybody else, when we rebel, test the limits of what we can get away with and stop believing what we once did. One student talked about smoking lots of pot for a couple years. I remembered thinking to myself: that’s the shallow end of the pool. Bly continued to ask, and other students talked about their fears of what they were doing with their lives, drinking, smoking, and so forth. Having sex. I meanwhile didn’t share–it wasn’t an NA or AA group, and there wasn’t the time for that sort of monologuing–but thought to myself about how far deep I had gone. A brilliant student who has taken every drug that came my way, from the usual marijuana, cocaine, heroin, booze, and pills to the whole swath of psychedelics, naturally harvested and used in indigenous spiritual contexts to research chemicals I ordered from China. And as I was graduating, the horrible regret of what I’d done to my brain, the ways I had deceived myself, squashed and rearranged and fried the eggs of my ambitions, and came out of it with memories of such incredible highs and loves to return only to my stable state of lows, isolation, and emptiness. My potential was such that it was realized only in dreaming and my ambition and motivation had become that of a lonely old man nearing retirement.
The darkness: the place, the metaphor, the emotional clothing, resonated with me all too harshly.
And most surprisingly, instead of any admonition about turning away from those things my classmates called the darkness, Bly recounted a story of being in New York, homeless and completely broke, having a dime to himself and not wondering what he was going to eat. And he said that the one should go as deep down into the darkness one can without dying.
He shared a poem with us by Kabir:
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
birds and animals and the ants—
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you
in your mother’s womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely
orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten
what you once knew,
and that’s why eveything you do has some weird
failure in it.
—–
In those final two sentences, I felt a pround sting, and for the first time in forever, since first leaving a Christian upbringing and pouncing into a bottomless well the depths of which I had been warned of, an immense existential shame that I can hardly verbalize. I saw a map that led me to where I had gotten lost without any direction of where I should lead myself back to a high and arduous mountain where I could once again see.
A couple weeks later, I found myself in the darkest moment of my life as my half-hearted plans to stay in school and do research for a couple more quarters fell through and I had been completely betrayed by the one person I loved fully, immensely, and irrationally. I have spent plenty of time recounting the story, so I will choose to except it here, not to mention that it has been made all the more trite and saccharine by the similarity in sentiment to Kanye West’s digitailized whining on his most recent 808s and Heartbreaks album.
During a break, I asked Bly if I could speak to him about the darkness. I recounted the resonance of the Kabir poem and of “The Darkness” as a metaphor that my life had seemingly found itself lost in its exploration. I told him about my predicament, my fear, and my overwhelming feeling of being lost in the darkness, and asked him what I can do about it.
He told me this:
“There is nothing to fear in the darkness. In fact, there is a part of you that you may not have known since you were a little boy, but it is in you, and that part of you is not afraid of the darkness.”
I asked what I should do about it. How do I escape the darkness?
“You must consume it,” he told me with absolute confidence. I nodded as if I understood. And in a sense, now I do, although I am not always present with that understanding. But everytime I turn I fumble through a hallway in the middle of the night, and find the switch, and see with immediate and natural apprehension the outlines of a room and its objects, and can easily walk amongst them, this same understanding is visualized. Light consumes darkness. And concerning the darkness, light has nothing to fear.
