Iron John: A Book About Men

by Robert Bly

“My mother had tripod rage – the irresistible urge to kick anything with three legs.”

metaphor 3

I am not I. I am this one Walking beside me, whom I do not see, Whom at times I manage to visit, And at other times I forget. The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate, The one who remains silent when I talk, The one who takes a walk when I am indoors, The one who will remain standing when I die.

The implication of the Pelasgian myth is that the “prodigious complexity” we all love depends both in nature and in culture on a love of distinctiveness.

for protective coloration, a longing to be the quail

In nature, the yang and the yin interweave everywhere; nature is inconceivable without the incessant and joyful intermingling of receptivity and initiative, curiously mingled in all snail shells and oak trees, all tigers, all mountains, all bees.

Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. His preeminence over them lies