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Woke up early this morning thinking of The Wild Guys, a play from the 1990s that (fairly gently, iirc) satirized mythopoetic men’s retreats, which were a Thing at the time. Eventually I had to go look up Iron John: A Book About Men and Women Who Run With the Wolves to see who’d written them (Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, respectively).
As someone in SFF fandom, I don’t know how to feel about Jung-based movements. I get that some stuff is hard to convey except by analogy, or by constructing some kind of initiation ritual that puts people into a context where the thing you’re trying to tell them is more likely to make experiential sense. And of course I’m likely being unfair to Bly and Estes, whose writings may well be more down-to-earth than their popular image. Bly, at any rate, seems to have had a sense of humour, if this poem is anything to go by.
The advantage of fiction, and art and music, is that you can explore and play with these same kind of potentially-useful ideas without asserting them.
Meanwhile in my own mythopoetic life, I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to figure out if I’m having those menopausal hot-flashes people talk about, or if it’s just the late-September weather—the temperature has been swinging between twelve and twenty-four degrees here. Either way, I’ve spent so much of my life too cold that this, whatever it is, kind of feels like unlocking superpowers. Flame On!
As someone in SFF fandom, I don’t know how to feel about Jung-based movements. I get that some stuff is hard to convey except by analogy, or by constructing some kind of initiation ritual that puts people into a context where the thing you’re trying to tell them is more likely to make experiential sense. And of course I’m likely being unfair to Bly and Estes, whose writings may well be more down-to-earth than their popular image. Bly, at any rate, seems to have had a sense of humour, if this poem is anything to go by.
The advantage of fiction, and art and music, is that you can explore and play with these same kind of potentially-useful ideas without asserting them.
Meanwhile in my own mythopoetic life, I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to figure out if I’m having those menopausal hot-flashes people talk about, or if it’s just the late-September weather—the temperature has been swinging between twelve and twenty-four degrees here. Either way, I’ve spent so much of my life too cold that this, whatever it is, kind of feels like unlocking superpowers. Flame On!
