Our grief

The grief we carry is older than we are, and our circumstances and choices have made the burden heavier.

The defining emotion of modern man is grief. 

This is something the poet Robert Bly understood well. And so did poet Antonio Machado. He acutely captures it in his poem, The Wind, One Brilliant Day.

Grief seems like an odd choice, but I assure you that if you look into the masculine aspects of your psyche, it’s there in strength and numbers. It’s there in the hearts and words of even the most seemingly masculine. Grief is the minor-key undertone that drones through the halls of our lives.

What are we grieving? You could just as easily ask, what are we not grieving?

We grieve our solitude. Technology has connected us, but the connections are superficial. We can count the nodes of our network, but we have few friends we can count on. 

We grieve our loss of direction. No one showed us where to go. Our fathers were lost in this grief too and there were no elders to guide us. So we turned to the facsimiles of men in movies and books.

We grieve our struggles to provide. We work but our money is worth less. We look into the hungry eyes and hearts of our partners and our children and we grieve because we cannot give them what they need, let alone what they want.

We grieve our lost vitality. We sit in cars. We sit at desks. We sit to play video games. We sit and scroll. The body loses its light. None gets in, none escapes.

We grieve our lost wildness. We must conform. There’s no room for spontaneous song, dance, words. We used to flow and now we are bottled water. 

We grieve our impotence. We wanted the feminine to save us, but how could she? We were acting like little boys. We were laying our problems at her doorstep. We turned away from the sacred, found something more profane, and now nothing satisfies.

We grieve our inability to grieve. We bury our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. We’ve been encouraged to emote and that encouragement has been well-intended, but now it borders on performative. 

I remember the first time I felt this grief. I was 16 and sitting in on bass with my dad’s band at a local bar and restaurant. Too young to drink, I watched my dad and his friends down beers and pour their hearts and voices into the songs of their teenage years. 

The pathos was amplified by the men at the bar, who hung suspended in a haze of cigarette smoke and fryer grease. These were working-class men, mostly in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They were men with families. They presumably wanted more than what present circumstances were offering. Maybe they wanted better music, or maybe they wanted to be baseball players or to go to school in the city. None of that worked out, but at least they had a pretty good cover band, cold Bud, and a few friends. But looking into their faces, I could see that grief around their eyes. They had lost something before they were even born.

What was it? It’s something genetic, epigenetic, and unconscious. Archetypal. 

Have you ever been through a patch of woodland that feels sorrowful? I often felt it in the woods I haunted and hunted as a boy in northern New Jersey. There was a grief in the land that would seep into my boot soles. 

When it was on me, I felt like an intruder. Later I came to understand that this was the grief of history. The displacement of the Ramapo Munsee Lunaape from the hills by my family and others who came to the continent in the 17th century. 

But there was also a bass note of grief beneath that song. It was something that I’m all but certain the Ramapo Munsee Lunaape understand because they live and lived so closely to the land. It’s something I feel whenever I’m in a wild place.

There’s a wildlife management area that I hunt that feels downright traumatized. Every square inch that isn’t an agricultural plot is choked with thorns, brambles, and poison ivy. It’s near impenetrable and I have scars to prove it. In spring and summer, there are parts where it seems no light could get in. In the late fall and winter, the wind whistles through the barren branches and sometimes it sounds like a woman crying.

When I thread my way through that undergrowth, I feel the grief in the land. I can’t be certain of course, but I think I’m feeling the grief of every living thing that eats and has been eaten there, every killer and victim, myself included. Life eats life and the knife edge of that fact is never more keen than when you’re out trying to bring home food.

There are few old-growth trees on this plot. Many were logged, I think, and the rest were cleared for the agricultural plots. One morning I was following a game trail hoping to find a more promising place for deer. This one-hundred meter walk had taken me close to an hour as I tried to push through a thicket of razor-wire thorns. A fast-moving cloud swept over the sun and a dark shadow descended on me. I looked up and saw the tree that had cast the shadow: a towering oak that did not fit the landscape. Its trunk was so broad that it would take three or four men to encircle it.

I was awestruck by the giant, whose grief was palpable. Its solitude in this hard place. The death it had witnessed, and here I was, a two-legged killer passing beneath its naked autumn branches. I almost apologized, but that tree and I had an understanding. She and I knew that I was just an infinitesimal blip on the radar of time. The oak would have no memory of me in another 500 years. I’d be just another drop of grief, wicked up from the soil and into its leafy canopy.

How do we transmute grief? I think the masculine spirit has its unconscious methods. Maybe we improve our houses, create woodcraft, or paint abstracts. Maybe we write something.

Or maybe we turn to sex, substance abuse, or other self-destructive options. We have as many choices here as we do anywhere else. There is no right path to follow, just constructive and destructive paths. The trick is finding the right constructive path.

The universal truth, though, is that transmutation starts with acknowledging grief. To see it and feel it when it’s there. 

To call it what it is. Maybe to call it out of the dark. And then to do something with it.

We can define grief. Maybe we can choose to not be defined by grief.

Finding the Father

By Robert Bly

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs.

So on some days the body wails with its great energy;

it smashes up the boulders,

lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.

We do not have time to dress.

He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,

to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,

and there find the father whom we have never met,

who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,

and who then lost his memory,

and has lived since longing for his child,

whom he saw only once...

while he worked as a shoemaker,

as a cattle herder in Australia,

as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.

he sits there behind the door....

the eyebrows so heavy,

the forehead so light....

lonely in his whole body,

waiting for you.