09 - 10 August 2007

The Wild Man and His Qualities

The Wild Man, we could also say, represents the positive side of male sexuality. The hair that covers his whole body is natural like a deer's or a mammoth's. The native American has much Wild Man in him, and it comes out of love for ordinary things. The Wild Man is the door to the wilderness in nature, but we could also say the Wild Man is nature itself.

The Wild Man encourages a trust of the lower half of our body, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies, the "soles" of our feet, the animal ancestors, the earth itself, the treasures in the earth, the dead long buried there, the stubborn richness to which we decent.

We need to build a body, not on the parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires. The Wild Man doesn't come to full life through being "natural", going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. The Wild man then, through his disciplines, prepares an emotional body that can receive grief, ecstasy and spirit. The wild man leads the return we eventually have to make as adults back to the place of childhood abuse and abandonment.

The Wild Man's qualities, among them love of spontaneity, association with wilderness, honouring of grief, and respect for riskiness and recognise its link with what we've called the Wild man, become frightened, stop all wilderness, and recommend timidity and collective behaviour to others. Some of these men become high school principals, some sociologists, some businessmen, Protestant ministers, bureaucrats, therapists; some become poets and artists.

- Robert Bly

Indigo Boy, 9/10 August, Cape Town

www.chrisdiedericks.co.za/indigoboy/
copyright 2006/7

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