Katabasis

Greetings folks,

Been re-reading an old favourite (albeit flawed) book that I found while unpacking: Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men. I’m sure some of you may remember what a phenomenon the book was in the early nineties, and its association with the so-called Men’s Movement.

I wanted to focus on one section of the book whose chapter is called “The Road of Ashes, Descent and Grief”. The first part of the book describes the need for boys to become men through a process of initiation. In this chapter, he focuses on the problem of “grandiosity” where these young men, “these flying people, giddily spiritual, do not inhabit their bodies well, and are open to terrible shocks of abandonment; they are unable to accept limitations, and are averse to a certain boring quality native to human life.” The grandiose young man can be represented by Peter Pan, or Saint-Exupery`s The Little Prince…above it all, uninvolved in the mundane.

Many of these young men are naïve or passive, in the sense that they never see their own dark side, or that of others. According to Bly “The naïve man often lacks what James Hillman has called ‘natural brutality’…But the ascender lets things go on too long. At the start of a relationship, a few harsh words of truth would have been helpful. Instead he waits and waits, and then a major wounding happens farther down the line.”

Enter “Katabasis”, the word the ancient Greeks used to describe the descent “the whirlpool, the sinking through the floor, the Drop”…”What I am saying, then, is that the next step in initiation for men is finding the rat’s hole…the way down and out…When ‘katabasis’ happens, a man no longer feels like a special person. He is not. One day he is in college, being fed and housed-often on someone else’s money-protected by brick walls…and the next day he is homeless, walking the streets, looking for some way to get a meal and a bed.”

Bly describes divorce as part of this need for katabasis: “Divorce feels for most men like a discharge, as if one had been fired from a task taken on the day of the wedding. And the agony of separation from a substitute mother figure, the sense of inadequacy among demands for more money, the lack of warmth or grace in the new apartment…the felt rejection and isolation as the community withdraws some of its approval and support, the self-doubt the change evokes-all these add up to a new sort of loneliness. If the man refuses to be cheered up, and considers all of the discomforts to be cunning expressions of an isolating wound received in early childhood, then the man can use the divorce-like any other serious collapse- as an invitation to go through the door, accept katabasis, immerse himself in the wound, and exit from his old life through it.”

Bly goes on to describe this descent as an opportunity to lose naiveté, to finally see the dark side in everyone, even those closest to us, even in one’s own self, that in marriage “the man and woman give each other ‘his or her nethermost beast’ to hold. Each holds the leash for the ‘nethermost beast of the other’. The naïve man who flies directly toward the sun will not be able to see his own shadow. It is far behind him. In katabasis, it catches up.”

And so, many of us here amongst the older set of married men, who are dissolving long-standing bad marriages, are learning also, in our katabasis, the experience of an angry woman “but something in the angry woman’s malice introduces him perhaps for the first time to the Rageful One, the Dark Side of the Moon, the Ogre who lives on the back side of the moon with bat wings and ripped-apart birds. Experiencing the Malicious One is a compensation for the earlier life ‘above the ground,’ being fed with fish and fowl, and dainty things.”

So, Bly goes on to say “The only solution to the power of the witch is for the young man to develop energy as great as hers, as harsh, as wild, as shrewd, as clear in its desire. When a young man arrives at her house, proves himself to be up to her level of intensity, purpose, and respect for the truth, she will sometimes say, ‘Okay, what do you want to know?’ ”

To all of you who have spouses who have shown an unusual acceptance of the end of their relationship with you (whether through divorce or acceptance of a new arrangement), I feel you should be cautious. You should perhaps be a little less naïve about how things will turn out.

Having gone through this katabasis, this loss of status, this going back to the way I lived while in my twenties, having seen the depths of malice in my own soon to be ex-wife, I have lost a great deal of naiveté. I hope that your emancipation and the difficulties of that necessary descent lead you also to a better and more appropriate understanding of yourself, your dark side and that of those closest to you…including those with whom you hope to meet in your new, more authentic lives.

 

As Bly would have said, these are very old myths, they have withstood the test of time and for that reason, he trusts them. As do I.

The dark sides he alludes to are inherent to both genders, the naïve man refuses to see these things both in himself and in others. Each naiveté almost requires its own katabasis, and hard lessons will be learned, the hard way too often.