Iron John

...His book is structured around the tale "Iron John" (or "Iron Hans") recorded by the Brothers Grimm in the last century, but rooted in ancient pre-Christian motifs...

...Giving credence to the efficiency school allows Krugman to hide behind "normal" economic explanations instead of exam- ining more closely the grossly inequitable aspects of corporate finance that permitted the spending spree of 1980s, a tab picked REAL CtUICHE IRON JOHN: A Book about Men Robert Bly Addison-Wesley, $18.95, 268 pp...

...The Industrial Revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, disrupted this pattern and separated sons from their fathers...

...Iron John is more than "a book about men...

...His skill as a poet is evident throughout...

...Bly was astounded at the amount of grief and anguish that surfaced at these gatherings...

...Most fathers today have no work to share with their sons and cannot really explain to them what they are doing...

...Bly makes it clear that the figure of the "wild man" is not a celebration of the bru- tal, macho, irresponsible male...

...In his commentary on the story, Bly weaves in research from the social sciences, literature, and comparative mythology, as well as personal testimony, anecdotes of contemporary men, and poetry--including his own...

...The wild man encourages a trust of the lower half of the body, the place of sex- uality and contact with the earth...

...The awakening of the wild man restores a kin- ship with and care for the wildness in nature...

...The style is direct, free flowing, witty, and passionate...

...These stages are rep- resented by archetypal figures and situa- tions such as working among the ashes, meeting the sun king, bringing wild flowers to the king's daughter, becoming a warrior, and marrying the royal bride...

...Should the stretch of stag- nation before eventualperestroikabe a long one, we may as well read our Cassandras, heed their warnings, become informed and incensed, and be that much better prepared for the time when our leaders once again accept or are forced to accept the inevitabil- ity of an age of limits, i-5 largely been forgotten...

...7J 3 May 1991:299...

...Nor is it a popular self-help book for men...

...But without a bit of wildness, "theology," in the words of Lawrence Durrell, "is very old ice cream, very tame sausage...

...Iron John, a wild man covered with hair, is brought up from the depths of a forest pond and imprisoned in a cage in the king's courtyard...

...His intent is to help men develop a deeper emo- tional capacity for grief, ecstasy, and spirit, to find language and images for their desires...

...The wild man becomes a mentor to the boy, initiating him into successive stages of manhood...

...In preindustrial cultures young men were guided from boyhood to manhood through initiation rituals, stories, and a kind of"cel- lular attunement" to male energies that took place during long hours of living and work- ing in the physical presence of older men...

...But based on the evidence he himself presents in the book, the profits gained through improved productivity could not possibly compare to the profits earned through labor givebacks: the dif- ference is of several orders of magnitude...

...There is a low, resonating string in a man's heart, he writes, "that makes his whole chest tremble when the qualities of the masculine are spoken of in the right way...

...These men reinforced his conviction that the images of adult manhood offered by popular culture are worn out, and that a growing number of men are open to new visions of what a man is or could be...

...Irritating lapses aside, The Age of Dimi- nished Expectations remains a helpful guide to today's economic conundrums and a necessary tonic for any residual Reagan optimism that appears, as one or more points of light, in the current presidency...

...Bly is speaking to men in search of soul...

...Throw in the profits from government kick- backs, favorable tax policy, and outright criminality and the windfall earnings of the 1980s become even more suspect...

...The boy, fearful of punishment, flees with Iron John into the forest...

...Iron John eventually convinces the king's son to steal the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and release him...

...Theologians and pastoral ministers, for example, might find in it a model of how to retrieve an ancient story and allow it to speak to a wide range of contemporary concerns...

...In Bly's view, the state of the American male is a disaster...

...The road maps to male maturity contained in ancient stories, rituals, and poetry have up thank-you-very-much by taxpayers now and for many decades into the future...

...His choice of this image does not represent a reaction to feminism or an attempt to bring back male domination...

...James Neafsey I n Iron John: A Book about Men / Robert Bly explores male initia- tion, not as a cultural practice in some distant time or place, but as a pressing need for contemporary American men...

...We will, as Krugman suggests, be drifting for quite a while...

...The wild man is rather an image for the instinctive, spontaneous, vigorous energy within men that is capable of fierce resolve and life-giving action...

...For ten years now Bly has been addressing such issues in gatherings of men, most in midlife or beyond, who share his sense that something is askew in the soul of the American male...

...Bly's purpose is to set that string vibrating by expressing the richness and complexity of male experience with authenticity and power...

...Bly looks to the very old images con- tained in myths and fairy tales to ground his new vision...

...American men have lost connection to their emotional bodies, their distinctive mode of feeling...

...Some may find his approach too eclectic, too wild, to be of any use for seri- ous theology...

...Typically such events include story-telling, poetry, drumming, dancing, and a deep sharing of feeling and personal stories among participants...

...It is not a book aimed at the academic establishment...