Bad People
by Robert Bly (1926 – 2021)
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
I have been reading about non-resistance as it pertains to our consciousness in my endeavors with Florence Scovel Shinn, and having discussions about place in my study group. It’s a fascinating concept and one that Robert Bly was already tuned in to: that from a higher perspective everything has its place. That the “hard-faced men in black coats” are the ones that get you to the shore. That the grist of life is what evolves us to the bloom.
It stands to reason that it is more of a spiral that we are moving on than a circle or chasing of our tail, and still we would indeed do well to be attentive to these cycles. The cycles of expansion and contraction, indeed they both have their place but if we are looking for evolution we may want to consider carrying our action from a different place. That indeed that different place comes from within.
Thoreau said in “Civil Disobedience”: The only obligation which I have the right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
I might now change the verb to feel, otherwise I agree. Notice he does not tell us to do what is right, but rather what is right for him and let the rest be. There is a great comfort and peace that comes in being in right action with oneself, perhaps easier to allow the bad people their place—the distinction of feeling perhaps is the harbinger of our time. I sometimes have trouble discerning what voice am I listening to (my empowered or my scared, my own or messaging of the masses), but my body never, lies. In fact, I would argue it is one aperture of inner communication.
We have done much with out accrual of external knowledge, look at you and I meeting here on this screen in the brushstrokes of thought; however, how do we stand in the comfort of our own knowing? In the depth of our intrinsic value and the rightness of our own knowing? Maybe it is not about learning more but about learning to go within, there we have waiting so many people we have been: the good, the bad, the abandoned and the empowered. There we have the wisdom of our lives and our knowing that everything, including ourselves has a place.
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so does a man. - Thoreau