The Parents Poem

It ¢â‚¬â„¢s a good idea to figure what to do with parents.
One man I knew, after caring for them for years,
Led them across a busy street ¢â‚¬”two lines of traffic.
He started a lost colony for his parents.

He bought them big boots and pith helmets.
He sent his parents into battle. He dressed
Them in Austrian uniforms and gave them
Maps of Russia. No one ever saw them again.

Another man built a furnace and put his parents
Into it. He got some tincture, and tried to tran-
Substantiate his parents. It took a long time
And used a lot of heat, but there wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t much change.

A neighbor stored them in an empty cistern ¢â‚¬”the ladder
Is still sticking out. He took them to Kenya
And got his parents to take a walk with the elephants.
And they died all right . . . But by the end,

They knew for sure that they ¢â‚¬â„¢d had children.

~~

Interviewer: You’ve talked a lot about the looming cultural crisis, in which society is absent of authority and adolescene rules. How is violence tied into that?

Robert Bly:   So you’re asking about the amount of disrespect that’s happening in the book I’m doing called The Sibling Society. I say it’s one of the worst qualities of the sibling society that the disrespect towards women, towards adults, towards parents, towards teachers and it’s increasing. There are third graders now that say to their teachers,  ¢â‚¬Å“You’re nothing but a teacher and I don’t have to obey you. ¢â‚¬  I met, or I’ve heard of a man recently, his name was Ryke, it isn’t one of the well-known ones who says that a culture is defined by what it says no to. Not by what it says yes to. So, what’s happening in the sibling society is we say no to almost nothing. We say yes to pre-teen sexuality, we say yes to watching television twelve hours a day, we say yes to pot and smoking and drinking and spending your life, and we say yes to all those things. What do we say no to? So, one of the important things would be to learn to say no to disrespect. And when your child says something disrespectful you say,  ¢â‚¬Å“Sorry, but that’s not allowed. ¢â‚¬  We can’t do that. It has got to start early. I don’t know if that’s an answer to you but… It’s amazing that we as parents, who lost some kind of integrity in the 60s, started becoming perils of their children instead of someone who says no.

Well, the question is from whom does the child receive its knowledge of what’s proper to do? In talking with the parents. The old tradition is that you cannot change a child into a grown up without a lot of conversation with adults. In America, the typical time a man spends in conversation with the son or daughter is ten minutes a day. In Russia, the old Russia, it was two hours a day. Now the saddest thing the New York Times reported is that with women their time of conversation with the children is falling rapidly. It’s approaching that of men now. And the women who stay home do not spend any more time in conversation with their children than the women who work. That’s incredible. They’ll talk with a daughter or the son a few minutes and then they’d all sit down and watch television. So the question then is, who teaches the child how things get done in the world? Well, the answer is the television. And a capitalism has come in between the parent and the child. And for capitalism and action movies, the violence is obviously the way you make money. And they’re understanding it more and more. So, therefore, this poison is coming in all the time. It’s a pro-violence poison. And the idea of making someone like a Schwarzneger the head of the fitness movement in the United States — I mean Reagan did that and it was a totally insane idea. He stands for that kind of violence and, you know, it’s getting worse now because the video games withing six months are going to have such clean definition that you can hardly tell the difference between a living person, and so far they’re just cartoons. But what if it looks like it’s actually a person there, and then you kill that person in the same way you kill little puppets.

I think that it’s a primary job of parents now to realize what Neal Postman says that television is making childhood disappear. It’s giving children too much knowledge too quickly of all the corrupt sides of adult material. No one wants to become an adult, and it’s tying all that behavior into violence. So in my book, I’m going to say something like, if parents allow their children to watch television of that sort before they can read, they go to jail. I feel that it’s a real crisis. And that to allow that, if a person came into your house and started killing your cats and your dogs and throwing things against the wall, you tell them to get out. But we allow the television to remain. It’s as if we’re in a trance. We don’t understand. It’s an invader in the livingroom.

http://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/interv/bly.html

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In this deeply learned book (Iron John), poet and translator Robert Bly offers nothing less than a new vision of what it is to be a man.Bly’s vision is based on his ongoing work with men and reflections on his own life. He addresses the devastating effects of remote fathers and mourns the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture. Finding rich meaning in ancient stories and legends, Bly uses the Grimm fairy tale “Iron John,” in which the narrator, or “Wild Man,” guides a young man through eight stages of male growth, to remind us of archetypes long forgotten-images of vigorous masculinity, both protective and emotionally centered.Simultaneously poetic and down-to-earth, combining the grandeur of myth with the practical and often painful lessons of our own histories, Iron John is a rare work that will continue to guide and inspire men-and women-for years to come.

http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Iron_John.html?id=ELWA2YlAeUEC&redir_esc=y