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Morton Marcus: Hi, this is Morton Marcus again and we're in the famous dining room that has entertained some of the great's and near-greats of the 20th century. And today we're going to be talking with Michael Meade who has been described as a

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storyteller, pathologist, and drummer. And it's a great pleasure for me to have Michael here. He will be doing several events, by the way, in Santa Cruz this week, and I will be telling you about that very shortly. But he is the author of

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Michael Meade: For one thing, it's a book made by stories, Morton Marcus: about? It's not a book of poetry, and that's why I there are about eight or nine, mythic, fairy tale type stories from Africa, from Germany, from Ireland, from Russia, and

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want you to define it. universal stories found all over the world. On another level, it encompasses the stories of t ousands of men and women that I ve worked with and heard their l fe stories for about the past 1

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years. On another level, it h Morton Marcus: It's sort of like "The Golden Bo Michael Meade: It's like- it is just like "The Golden Bough" Morton Marcus: Oh, well, that would bring it down to the right

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without jargon. size. It‘s- it is a very beautifully printed book, obviously done with loving care by Harper, and you must be very proud of it. Michael, as people out there may know, you have

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been associated which- with what has been called the Men's Movement, and you don't particularly like that title. Why don't you tell us what you've been doing as a drummer, as a man who leads retreats and workshops?

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Michael Meade: I guess the first thing is, and I tell some of it in the introduction of the book for a couple of reasons, when I was 13, which was a pivotal year in my growing up, and I tell in there about brushes with death, but I also have brushes with

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bigger parts of life, especially the mythic parts. I started to hear mythic stories and I didn't realize it at the time, but that affected how I see everything. And so eventually, how having studied myth from that time on, from 13 on, I became a

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storyteller by reason of the fact of being full of stories, and I couldn't contain them anymore, I began telling stories. Since I had been studying ethnic music I wanted a blending of drumming with stories. Somehow in the process

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of doing that and trying to explain the stories, what- to people what myth was, what images were, how symbols work, why symbols were as necessary as food, that kind of thing, I got involved in what we call Men's Work. I don't call it the Men's

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Movement, because it seems a little monolithic, and it seems a little bit maybe even pretentious. It may become a movement. I think at this point, it's still moving around trying to figure out what it is, so I call it Men's Work. And to me,

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it's a matter of getting inside stories, and then taking people's personal stories and putting them in proximity of mythic stories, so that the life and death themes in a person own story is enhanced by the proximity of these mythic

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stories. And people start to realize we all live within the great themes of poetry, you could say. And so out of that has come this book trying to explain why I think those symbolic things, the language of poetry, language of story is

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critical in the 20th century, at the end of the 20th century, if we're going to get to have another century. Morton Marcus: And I- this is really a rhetorical question, but it just will give you an opening. We live in a culture in

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which we have forgotten a lot of the archetypes of the stages of life and we are becoming more and more a technological culture, look at how I‘m sitting here now with all of these wires and ropes and everything like that. And in fact, you and I

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have now come to talk about a common culture we hold, and that is New York. The New York of the gangs and youth of just trying to survive. What do you think your story telling and drumming away from, and maybe you can't take it away from the work of

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men, means to this- these last years of the 20th century, in a society that is becoming more and more violent, that really is falling apart at the seams where the relationship of the family as well as the relationship of men and women are

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disintegrating. Michael Meade: Well, I can't take it away from the milieu of just men easily, because I've worked with men and women as well as with children for many years. One way to understand the

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word "story" is storehouse. Inside, stories are stored, the things of human meaning, the things that we forget, things that we drop and overlook, fall into stories and that's where they found over again. To me, living storytelling is the

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remaking of community. Communities are remade through the stories that people participate in. Drum. Interestingly enough, the word "drum" in Ndembu -- I love to study tribal groups -- and in Ndembu, the word drum means

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ritual. So that when you say "drum," you're saying "ritual." When you say, if you've had a good ritual, which means a good community event really, it's called a big drum. So you can't separate drum from ritual, you can't set- separate ritual from

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community. If you find community you have found a ritual, or you have refound a ritual. So storytelling may be one of the few ways that people can feel part of something. Even the news which everybody has to watch, you know, in the morning when

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you get up you have to listen or watch, in the evening you have to check it out before you go to bed. The news is a series of stories, usually incomplete, usually not as deep as we want to go into the stories. But people connect to each other

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through story, personal and mythic. And so I think part of what's going on at the end of the 20th century is, can we find some stories to inhabit together long enough to get through this huge shedding that culture and nature are going through?

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Morton Marcus: Well, what do you see as this huge shedding? I'm- I said it was disintegrating. But you talk about it as though it's a renewal process. Michael Meade: Yeah, this is the hopeful part. I have four

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children who are going out into the world. And so because of them, perhaps I carry these glimmers of hope that we're going to get through this. And I picked up a phrase from John Layard once who said, "The wise person doesn't look for the, the

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cause of the symptom in the past, but at what the purpose- what purpose the symptom is aimed at." In other words, if we're going through a disintegration, one possibility is to say we've made a huge number of mistakes, and

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therefore we're destroying the world. You can turn it the other way and say something else is about to happen. And therefore we have to get rid of all the old skin like a snake in order to, you know, wiggle our way through the next threshold. So

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lately as I've gotten older, I'm leaning towards the second version. And also as I watch my children, I think I very much want to see them live a full life, and I don't mean full length, I mean full in depth. And so for that reason, I'm

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willing more so now to entertain the possibility of human life persisting than I was, say 10 years ago, when it seemed to me the whole thing should just go down. So, I call it a shedding. I think, one way I imagined it, we are walking through one of

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the great funerals of all times. As we're talking, you know, whatever, 24 animal species disappear per day? We are in a funeral. We are walking. One reason the world is so- feels chaotic and sorrowful is, it's an ongoing funeral. We know as

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we sit here that people are dying in the former Yugoslavia. We know that people are dying in the Horn of Africa. We know that people are dying downtown San Francisco, we have that knowledge cause of communication. And so I consider

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that an ongoing funeral, both a nature funeral and a cultural funeral. To me, it's an education, it's a chance to relearn the songs of funeral which have been long lost from this culture. And it's also a kind of unfortunate opportunity

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to reacquaint ourselves with death, which is one of the big denials in the culture. And almost all cultures until a few hundred years ago told stories of death, children heard stories that had death in them to remind everybody we are the group of

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animals, or whatever you want to call it, beings, who know we're going to die. And we're usually expected to act differently because of that. Morton Marcus: Do you know Steve Levine and his "Death and

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Dying"? Michael Meade: Yes, I know some of his work. Yes, yes. Morton Marcus: Interesting guy, if you ever get down to the South West you ought to see him. He really is a marvelous guy but

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he's- he was saying this years and years ago. Another Santa Cruz person who stayed here for a while. Great answers. Tell us some- a little bit now- I'm going to interpret for the people out there -- and tell me if I'm wrong -- when you say

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storytelling, I would like for the purposes of this show and what I do, say poetry. Michael Meade: Yes. Morton Marcus: Poetry enhancing all the Jungian art types of

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life and all- all of those stages we go through. Michael Meade: Yeah, I work out of the- I've been trying to learn the Irish Seanchaí tradition, that's the old tradition of storytelling in Ireland, similar to the gre-

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Morton Marcus: You are Irish. Michael Meade: Yeah, I‘m Irish American. Yeah. Similar to the Griot tradition in Africa, very similar, similar to the traditions in South American song. And- and it's not called

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‘‘storytelling,‘‘ it's called ‘‘poetry,‘‘ it's called- it's all part of the same thing. It's the use of words to capture images, to narrate the flow of life through people, and animals, and other things. So yeah, there's- the modern lines

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that separate storytelling from poetry, poetry from conversation, you know, are recent and permeable lines. Morton Marcus: Well, what we're talking about here is something that really involves the entire culture. I like to say the

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civilization because I think that's what's really happening. To me, it's a global civilization since those species are dying all over the globe, and ways of thought are changing, ways of economy and- are changing and things like

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that. What I want to do is make this quick shift to this event you're going to do and then I want to have you talk about the fact that you also work with women, and that you think women should have to know something about men. And maybe that's a

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little too strong and you wouldn't put it that way because women don't like to be told that they should know something but I would like to get into that and say that there is going to be an event for women and men with Michael Meade on September the

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11th, that is this Saturday, from 10am to 5pm at the Pacific Cultural Center in Santa Cruz. There is a charge which I am not allowed to say on this program, but you can call in the 408 area number 373-110, that is 373-110. Or if you are outside the area,

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1-800-779-1116. That was 1-800-779-1116, and if you didn't get it, I will be mentioning it again. So get yourself a pencil if you can tear yourself away from this interview. Michael, can you answer the question I just

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asked, which is, you know, where do women fit into this? And what do they need to know about men? Michael Meade: Well, let me just preface by saying there's a lot of things men need to know about women too. So it's not a one

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sided request or idea. The actual- the exchange, which is often called a relationship, that means men and women in one kind of relationship exchanging stories about each other. Interesting the word "relate" is from the Latin "relatare" to

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carry it back, and so a relationship is made from people caring back to each other their story of what's going on inside them and when- whenever they leave home. So I think the business of men and women talking to each other, even if

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it's across a great chasm, it's important to continue the conversation. The event is not so much about men and women talking to each other, although that's fine. It's about both men and women talking about what events have marked their lives

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ineradicablly that make them who they are, and it involves some teach- techniques that I've been working on for how people can become more familiar with initiatory events that have happened to them, even if no one else noticed it as an

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initiation. But to answer the question, what I think women need to know about men is that you can't judge a man's connection to emotions by his capacity to express it. Oftentimes men have difficulty getting the emotion to move from

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wherever it starts from and out the mouth into some kind of coherent language. And sometimes people make the- draw the conclusion then that the emotions are not there. But that is not the case, I‘ve worked with thousands and thousands of

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men and there's a tremendous pain in men when they can't find a way to express themselves. And one of the reasons poetry used to be taught to everyone was so that the emotions could find a language in each person, so that each person would have a way of

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making that expression of emotion, which makes them feel human, and sends a distinct message to everybody else as to the nature of their suffering and the nature of their joy. So I- the thing I always try to say to women, don't- if the man

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isn't saying anything, it doesn't mean he's not feeling anything. It means that he's lost somewhere in that territory between where the feelings arise, and the language to express that awakens.

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Morton Marcus: Do you think it's a cultural thing? Michael Meade: No, I think it goes all the way to biology. There's this fascinating thing they've done measuring the corpus callosum of women and men, that's the- it's like a

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little bridge at the- in the new brain that connects the two halves of the brain. And the idea is that this corpus callosum, that the feelings are on one side of the brain and the language to express it is on the other, and the feelings move

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across this little bridge of the corpus callosum. And women on average, have a corpus callosum that is 70% or something, I'm mythologist so I can't do figures, but it's- it's considerably larger than men's. So if you imagine women as

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having a four lane expressway that gets feelings into words and men having a two track with grass growing up in the middle, I think that's partly the issue and I think it goes all the way to biology. And so that men have to get involved in poetry, in

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art, in music in order to open this two track into a bigger road. Morton Marcus: Michael, if you're right, I'm gonna have to revise everything I've been writing.

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Michael Meade: Uh oh! Morton Marcus: Because my- my whole feeling has always been that we are trained to be laconic and to keep the feelings inside. We are trained to be the John Waynes and his heirs, the

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Clint Eastwoods, and we learned it even from the screen. I'm a film historian also. Michael Meade: I agree with that but I think that men have a- it's more effective, the training on men. It's very-

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well, especially certain emotions there's a- the culture's effective in repressing certain emotions in women too. But- but I think there's also- the repression is aided by this setup, you know, when boys reach adolescence, a

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strange things happens, this 30 times increase of testosterone. Well, they've now done these amazing studies, and one of- one of the good things about being alive the 20th century is the amount of information, if anybody can make any sense out

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of it. But one thing is that as testosterone increases, the inclination to weep decreases, and so boys, when they enter adolescence have a 30 times increase of testosterone. Could you- so you could almost say that there's a biological

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shutting off of the capacity to weep. And I write in a book about how painful and difficult it is for a man to relearn how to weep, which is connected with kind of opening his heart again at some later point in life. And so I agree about the cultural

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thing, but I think there's a biological setup that makes it effective. Morton Marcus: Because, again, my attitudes have been men- men really keep away from other men. I mean, there's the drunken

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bully boy cameraderie, the circumcision brothers, if you will, but it- but men never really let other men touch them, there is a basic distrust certainly in this culture. Which let's say that's why I think a lot of men like to go over to

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Greece, or Greece before it went into the economic- the European Economic Community because you could walk with your arms around men, you could dance with men, and you could express a real friendship with men there which was, you know, not homosexual,

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could become homosexual, but usually wasn't. And it was just totally absent over here in America, and it would astonish and then delight a lot of them, and I know that this could happen. So again, that was cultural.

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Michael Meade: No, I agree, what I- what I write in the book, which the work confirmed with groups have been for over a dozen years, it's astounding. If a man does not feel that he's been backed up and you know from- from New York background

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how serious that can get, if no one has ever taken your back then you can't trust anyone, including yourself. In other words, and a lot of men wind up in these isolated positions, they don't- I'm amazed how many American men have not been

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backed up under threat, and therefore they feel all men are a threat to them. And one of the beneficial things about this men's work that's been going on is you actually can create circumstances to have that experience again, not as much

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physically as you and I might have experienced it when we were growing up, but emotionally, having men back each other up emotionally, and having men later in life having these experiences that more typically would have happened in

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adolescence. But yeah, I think this culture has really denied people the opportunity to feel intimate and close in ways that are not simply sexual, or sentimental. Morton Marcus: Let me ask you this, something Robert Bly who

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you've worked with, we haven't mentioned actually on the show. Bly‘s concern really was that the father has been taken out of the household, and ever since the Industrial Revolution, let's say and- has not been there to raise the son. And it seems to

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me that men's work, that's what we're talking about, is really again this idea of getting men to relate to men and to realize that a lot of things that women want to teach them and ways women want men to behave -- I'm thinking right now of Tom

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Sawyer's aunt for example -- really goes against the grain of the way men would have men act. Can you comment on that? Michael Meade: Yes, I mean, I agree with that. You can't- you can't teach boys the feeling, tone and style of women and

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expect to get- get it to go all the way to the root of their awareness and their expression and feeling. At the same time the father can't really do all that either. The first part of the book is about the- the wounds between fathers and sons,

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and then the second section is the wounds between mothers and sons. And I make the argument that oftentimes we're attacking the parents for not doing something they weren't- never going to be doing anyway. I mean most cultures set it up so that

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you went on past the parents. Tom Sawyer gets involved with an unrelated older black man. Morton Marcus: That's Huck. Michael Meade: Oh excuse me. That‘s right, Huck. Yeah.

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Morton Marcus: Tom gets left. Michael Meade: That's right, Tom gets left. Morton Marcus: But he really is Huck. I mean- Michael Meade: It just changes.

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Morton Marcus: Between just [unidentified] much more to the Huck figure. Michael Meade: So besides the father missing in- in his kind of fullness as a physical being, and as an emotional being, and

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as a spiritual force, we also have the lack of the mentor. And so I talk a lot in the book about the need of young men and young women to find these mentoring elders. And it's interesting when we started chatting earlier, you were

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saying you didn't have the father present at all but you have filled in that space by hook and by crook, by begging, by stealing. Morton Marcus: And by imagination

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Michael Meade: And by picking up a poet here. Morton Marcus: Oh, yeah, right. A poet.- I mean, I remember I when I read Dave- David- when I met David Ignatow and it was already- I just about had my first book out and everything

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like that. And he came to the West Coast for the first time and he was over at George Hitchcock's house, Hitchcock's my first publisher, and I went up to him and I said- ‘‘I just want to thank you.‘‘ He said, ‘‘For what?‘‘ And I said, ‘‘For

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getting me through the airforce because they had a book of yours, you and Kenneth Patchen, they have books of yours in the Air Force library. And you are the people who allowed me, who guided me through this absolute hell of the end of the Korean

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War and, you know, just mass insanity all around me." And tears came to his eyes, you know. Michael Meade: Yeah. Morton Marcus: And he was just so touched by that, but there,

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that's it. Michael Meade: Yeah. Morton Marcus: I found it in poetry. I found it in the world of the imagination and making art. Now, that gets us into

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something else here, which is we are seeing a huge increase in violence and people are giving very, very different reasons for it, certainly within the black community, which is undergoing really what seems to be a death rattle in all the inner cities.

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What do you- what part do you think that art, let's say might play in- in stemming this violence or does it have anything to do with it whatsoever? I'd like to hear you say why you think the violence is happening? If you have ideas

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on that, and whether drumming, storytelling, poetry has anything to do with curtailing that, maybe even stopping it. Michael Meade: A couple things, first of all, I think the- the source of this violence is manifold. And in the big

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picture, it's the shedding I was talking about, we are in a period of huge transition, of ra tling of not just the inner city, but the whole cultu e and nature. But then when ou have groups within a cultu e that are denied parti

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ipation in the full possi ilities, who even after the 6 s when Martin Luther King had a dream, now realize that maybe we don't really have that dream Maybe that's the night are part, we're going to get t e experience, and they feel

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s you talk to gang membe s, and you say, how can you- ou know, do this kind of damag that you're doing? You know, don't you think about what' going to happen to you later in life? They say there is no la er in life, I'm not going to be

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here after, I'm 19. This is wh t's happening right now, that' all there is. And so that the- he shift that shifts all the v lues, and I call it a being initiated into the cult of death rather than into the cult of l fe. And so I think we have a

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andoned large groups of people i the culture, and it has been oing on long enough that it has eached a point of explosion. And the fire in LA is burning in every city in the country, and it didn't go out two years ago and it's not going to go out

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until we bring a bunch of w ter to it. But I also see the k nd of a white suicide in the suburbs is not as much attention paid on the media. But the rate of suicide among young people is up about three times in the last seven years, a 300 fold increase

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in seven years. And so in other words, there's violence going in both directions, some of it is exploding, and some of it is imploding, and you know, ou just call that suicide. An I think it's happening not j st to, to blacks at all, I th

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nk it's happening to every ne across the culture witnessed by the number of, I don't know hy it's always postal workers, ut the number of white middle a ed postal workers that sudde ly, after repressing all of t eir emotions for 40 years, sud

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enly go out and start blowing p ople away. I think we're in the idst of this incredible ratt ing. And- and I try to write abo t it in the book, something I l arned a few times which is ‘‘ he only alternative to vio ence is art.‘‘ Or you could s

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y ‘‘the only alternative to vio ence is beauty.‘‘ And there's a section in the book where I was in this prison in Panama and for various reasons we had tried thi prison breakout, it was lmost a humorous thing that didn t work. And it was a military

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prison, the next morning there w s going to be inspection by the general and his entire staff, a d we had to get backs, get ou some of our rage and outrage bout how we were being treated y guards and by the Vietn m War in general

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Morton Marcus: Were you in the military at this time? Michael Meade: Yes, yes, I had tried to not be in the military, but I wasn't successful in getting out because I didn't fit any of the categories. I wasn't a pacifist, I just didn't want

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to kill people for no reason. You know, I knew if someone attacked my family that I would probably do anything I did- had to do to protect them. But I- but I wasn't willing to just go any random place and begin killing people for reasons I

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didn't understand. Anyway, eventually I was in this prison. In there are a bunch of men of various educations, ethnic backgrounds, races, in there for various reasons: for theft, for- for fighting, for refusing to do this or that, whatever it was,

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everyone had their own story. The generals come in the next day and they're going to inspect the prison for military cleanliness, which is extreme kind of behavior on its own. One way or another we got a bunch of magic markers and matches, the

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way the prison was set up, the guards came through every half hour to make sure that you were in your bunk, so it was a big general cell. So in the half hour between the visits of the guards, we got up with the magic markers when it was dark and

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with these matches, and you would hold a match and you would write on the wall because we're sending messages to the general, we're sending them also to the army, we're sending them also to the government, we're sending them also to our parents, we're

00:26:47.310 - 00:27:02.220

sending them also to anybody who we can imagine could ever read this. And at the bottom level where everybody started, it was all of the language you usually read on bathroom walls, it was the great cursing graffiti of what this 40 men could think up.

00:27:02.250 - 00:27:16.770

It was very eloquent in its own kind of distorted way. Eventually that ran out. But we still had matches and we still had these markers so we began a second level of writing above that. And in that, strangely enough, some feelings other than

00:27:16.770 - 00:27:27.720

anger, outrage, and rage started to come in, and then men started to mention their hometown, a certain person, they were thinking of, maybe a family member, someone they loved, and a bunch of sorrows started to come in and that got inscribed,

00:27:28.020 - 00:27:41.490

you know, the way people do that on- on rocks and walls in different places. And we got through that stage and still we had markers and matches, but now the only place left was high up on the wall. And so if you wanted to write you had to get

00:27:41.490 - 00:27:54.300

on someone's shoulders. So now there's one man standing another man on his shoulders, the guy below is holding a match up, and the guy on top is writing. This third level of writing, there erupted spontaneous poetry from about everybody in there, and

00:27:54.300 - 00:28:10.080

I'm saying some of these guys had fourth grade education, some had a college education, it was great variety, but it had a bunch of spontaneous images in it. As we got to that point, some men began to cry and actually, now we're in the dark,

00:28:10.110 - 00:28:23.370

on each other's shoulders, holding these candles with magic markers, weeping, writing these poems on the top of the wall. Eventually that was over. The next morning, the general comes in with the whole staff, and they have to stand there and

00:28:23.370 - 00:28:36.690

read this and they read, they read it for hours. I was put in a cell nearby, by myself, and so I was actually the only one in there that got to hear their reaction to it. But they stood there for hours in front of this thing, reading it, reciting

00:28:36.690 - 00:28:54.870

parts over and over. The point for me was that behind the rage, there was a mixture of emotions, including loss, including sorrow, and behind that came the spon- spontaneous eruption of what can only be called poetry, symbols that were buried in each

00:28:54.870 - 00:29:10.890

of those men. And- and so ever since then I've understood that when you see rage, there's other stuff behind. And eventually, if there's the opportunity for it to come out back in there, maybe pushing the rage out first, is poetry and a sense of beauty.

00:29:11.280 - 00:29:25.260

And so, I also feel that when we deny the beauty of people in the culture, when we deny the beauty of young people, we deny the necessity of them to express who they are, whether it's through rap music or it's through poems or whatever, we're denying them

00:29:25.260 - 00:29:39.090

access to the essential human experience of existing as a full person. And when that happens, we're going to get destruction. So I think we have to get everybody involved in poetry, everybody involved in huge discussions that allow people to

00:29:39.090 - 00:29:53.610

speak out outrages and rages, allow people to paint it out, allow people to do graffiti, whatever it is to get it out, to get back to that common sense of humaneness that we find when the tears flow and when the- when the poetic expression comes out.

00:29:57.500 - 00:30:16.550

Morton Marcus: If you just tuned in, the story you heard was being told by Michael Meade about an experience he had in Panama, when he was in the old brig, I know it well, in the military and it was a fascinating story. To me, it did

00:30:16.550 - 00:30:27.990

several things, what was going on, I mean, this obviously moved you very much, didn't it? And it was totally unexpected that this would happen. Michael Meade: Every time I go back to it. I learned so much

00:30:27.990 - 00:30:41.370

about my own emotions. I learned so much about these men that- that I could be critical of this way or that, this guy hated over there. But all of a sudden, in the middle- middle- midst of that darkness with those little matches, and- and realizing that

00:30:41.370 - 00:30:56.340

all of us had something we had to express. And that in the midst of the prison, in the midst of the war, that what was deep down inside was this absolute need to express what's in there, to get it out, to put it on a wall, to have someone

00:30:56.340 - 00:31:10.190

else see it. Yeah, it moves me every time I think about Morton Marcus: Let me play this -- I'm sure Robert has probably done this with you -- but this is such an archetypal scene: You're in Plato's cave. And instead of being able to see the

00:31:10.190 - 00:31:25.280

light on the other side, you provide your own matches, and you paint on the cave, you remain in that way. But it's also the metaphor of what is low, in all aspects of that word in English, gets set immediately, the rage comes out,

00:31:25.280 - 00:31:39.440

and then as you rise, the metaphor is that the poetry comes up. And it is the metaphor of another metaphor, which is in the West the great chain of being, and we are pulled downward by our animal cells, you know, and upward by our

00:31:39.440 - 00:31:56.510

angelic cells. That's what's going on here, and I would take a guess that this was hidden in the Jungian unconscious of everyone in that cell when they started to go to the second level and into the third level. And we talked about male trust,

00:31:57.080 - 00:32:09.080

to do that all together was an act of male trust, therefore, to stand on one another's shoulders became the physical embodiment of that. It‘s a great scene. Why don't you write that analysis out? Or damn I‘ll do it

00:32:09.110 - 00:32:14.740

Michael Meade: No, it's in the middle of the book. Morton Marcus: Oh, good. But I mean, the analysis. Michael Meade: Oh, the analysis? Oh, no, you should do it. Morton Marcus: Okay. I'll do it.

00:32:14.690 - 00:32:21.040

Michael Meade: And of couse we have punishment too. Morton Marcus: Yeah. Michael Meade: You know, you had to get- that's- Morton Marcus: Did the generals understand?

00:32:21.310 - 00:32:30.360

Michael Meade: They were stunned. Morton Marcus: But did they understand? Michael Meade: They understood something of it. At first, their reaction was the same as the lowest part of the wall. They

00:32:30.360 - 00:32:42.180

started to curse themselves and say, you know, how could they do this, son's of- [sounds of disapproval] And then- and then they kind of got caught in it, and then they stood there reading it, and then they each read parts that moved them. And

00:32:42.180 - 00:32:52.730

from- yeah, for moments I think they all were not exactly generals or colonels or whatever they were, they momentarily got caught into the humanity of it too. Morton Marcus: Well okay, what did they do with punishment? Now

00:32:52.730 - 00:33:05.090

I know that the punishment -- knowing them and having been in so long -- I know that the punishment is not maybe what they even wanted to do, but what they felt they had to do for purposes of quotes unquotes, ‘‘discipline.‘‘

00:33:06.830 - 00:33:16.640

Michael Meade: Yeah, well, they had to lay the blame somewhere. And we had done an elaborate routine to make it evident that we had all done this together. Morton Marcus: And everyone steps forward together.

00:33:16.660 - 00:33:30.880

Michael Meade: Which would be a way of breaking down the whole military, you know, organization, you know, by saying, no, we're not going to give up one individual. But they just bypassed that and picked me out and put me in solitary

00:33:30.880 - 00:33:34.520

confinement. I did the rest of my time in the military in solitary confinement. Morton Marcus: And so that's how you got in solitary. Michael Meade: Yeah.

00:33:34.550 - 00:33:44.390

Morton Marcus: Okay. I was gonna ask that, Michael, between us and the 40,000 people listening, was it your idea? Michael Meade: Yeah. Morton Marcus: Good. Yeah, I got into a lot of trouble-

00:33:45.050 - 00:33:58.480

Michael Meade: Well see the alternative was to blow the wall out and we had been, some of us had been smuggling in pieces of a bomb to blow the wall. It was an insane time in the middle of Morton Marcus: Now we're talking about Vietnam for those people

00:33:55.070 - 00:34:06.900

the war. And- who are out there, I understood this, but we never mentioned Michael Meade: Yeah, the idea was to blow the wall out and escape. And so instead we woun up writing on the wall. It was-

00:34:08.040 - 00:34:23.130

yeah. So- had we blown a wall I don't- I don't know what would‘ve happened. It was a crazy, crazy situation but what did happen has just affected me forever, forever, I mean, I just cannot meet man, violent man, criminal man, quiet man, anyone

00:34:23.130 - 00:34:33.540

without realizing that any man that I ever meet could be that. standing at that wall, and maybe starting with those words of rage, but also carries this se se of distance, and loss, and

00:34:33.660 - 00:34:46.980

xile, and also carries this ca acity for poetry. And so I just efuse to admit that because s meone can't express it doesn' mean they're not feeling it. And I also refuse to admit b cause someone lives in the inner city, that they're not feeli

00:34:46.980 - 00:34:59.280

g the great passions of the human heart, or because someone has a different color, or someo e has been convicted or accuse of a crime, not to be foolish about it, you sometimes have o get people in dire circums ances before the humanity come

00:34:59.430 - 00:35:11.500

out. But I also cannot deny hat I haven't seen that in peopl that otherwise I would have udged very heavily m Morton Marcus: I undestand. The prison thing was actually since- since- why I asked this way, I asked if it was your idea, it

00:35:11.500 - 00:35:21.970

was actually your first event. Michael Meade: Yeah it was a- was the first event of- of- that's right, it was- it was a men's event, it was- it was a men's movement. [Laughs]

00:35:21.990 - 00:35:36.000

Morton Marcus: Look- is that- is something like that going to happen? I'm obviously- now you've refined it, you learn techniques that come out of that, truths have come out of it, what should one expect in what, you know, I just talked

00:35:36.000 - 00:35:44.340

about, which is called "The Fires Have Changed and The Water of Life," in this event that is going to happen this coming Saturday? Michael Meade: I have spent a lot of time figuring out what

00:35:44.340 - 00:36:03.480

happened to me in that situation. Not only that I spend the rest of my time there in solitary but in- in order to avoid worse penalties I stopped eating. So I went through radical experiences inside and outside. Afterwards, I started

00:36:03.480 - 00:36:16.290

to figure out, what was that, why did I act that way, why did that happen to me, that kind of stuff. And the only thing I could connect it to was the literature of initiation. So I began to re-study initiation in different cultures and

00:36:16.350 - 00:36:29.910

eventually I- and then I had the good fortune of working with thousands of men and women for many years. And I have not met a person over 22 years of age who has not- not had some radical experience that reorganized the way they see the world, that

00:36:29.910 - 00:36:44.100

pulled them deep into life, that changed the way they feel about themselves, that make them different from the child that their family raised. And so I started to want to know what would happen if people paid attention to these radical

00:36:44.100 - 00:36:59.460

experiences that often were painful or confusing, if- what we call a mental breakdown was not seen as a mental breakdown, but was seen as the dissolution of a certain organization of that person to make a new person come out. What would happen if

00:36:59.460 - 00:37:13.080

someone who has had a serious accident or surgery doesn't see that simply as a medical procedure but as something that cut all the way through this psyche and marks them and scars them the way you get a scar in an initiation, what would happen

00:37:13.080 - 00:37:28.050

if those experiences were revalued? And that led me into studying the origin of elders. And so in the end of the book, I'm talking about the idea that the elder in a person and the elder is not an old person, the elder is someone who has learned

00:37:28.080 - 00:37:42.720

how to survive the trials of their own life. And so in the workshop, what happens is trying to get people in touch with these experiences that other people may not- may not value as life changing, life shaping, but they know themselves [were] that

00:37:42.720 - 00:37:57.300

way, and then find out what allowed them to survive that, what in them, what is the character of this kind of source of inner authority and inner resources that gets them through brushes with death. And so it's a fairly intense experience

00:37:57.300 - 00:38:13.980

where people re-enter these difficult survival situations that we all have had, tragic, even, you know, wild successes are very dangerous to people. And then try to extract from that the character of life that's trying to come out

00:38:14.190 - 00:38:20.620

through that opening. Morton Marcus: Can you do this with a lot of people, you're going to try to get how many people at a time to Michael Meade: Yeah, I don‘t know. But yeah, I've worked with

00:38:20.620 - 00:38:33.910

large groups of people that's what I- for some reason that's how I understand stories, stories get inhabited by groups of people, and it takes at least 100 people to fill a story. And so the groups tend to be, you know, 100 or 150, or something

00:38:33.910 - 00:38:49.570

like that, and the anonymity helps people also. Morton Marcus: Well, let me ask you something else, this idea of the elders, you know, moving towards death. This interests me very much, but in talking about old people, because I think one

00:38:49.570 - 00:39:03.940

of the things we've lost here, one of the big things we've lost here is the value of old people in this culture. They are in other cultures, as I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new, the Wisdom figures, the people who hold that track, that clear

00:39:03.940 - 00:39:14.360

unity of soul. And we just discard them here. Michael Meade: Yes Morton Marcus: We- the government does not recognize them. I think it's very interesting that we have a- what

00:39:14.360 - 00:39:27.290

is it called? A birth-? Well, whatever a- you know, one of the birth explosion babies- Michael Meade: Oh, yes Morton Marcus: -as president and he's the first one who's going

00:39:27.290 - 00:39:43.340

to cut into Social Security. I think that really marks an attitude towards the elderly, which I think is extremely unfortunate, and really, again, lessens our ability to deal with the different stages of life and with a sense of our own culture

00:39:43.340 - 00:39:50.470

and who we are. Michael Meade: And we don't think that we're going to live to be elders, we don't value the earlier stages. Morton Marcus: Well that's right, that's great. Yeah.

00:39:50.750 - 00:40:03.320

Michael Meade: And I also think that we have a cultural Alzheimer's. In other words, when a culture forgets its old people, its old people begin to forget. And I don't mean to in anyway trivialize Alzheimer's but I mean to say that the

00:40:03.320 - 00:40:12.890

elderly feel forgotten, abandoned the way a lot of children feel, we have banned them at the edges, Morton Marcus: Right, and they're not wisdom figures anymore. You tell them often enough, you show them that

00:40:12.890 - 00:40:20.320

they're not wisdom figures, then they become exactly who you tell them they should be - the role. Michael Meade: They become infirm. Morton Marcus: Yeah, infirm

00:40:20.000 - 00:40:35.570

Michael Meade: Rather than the genuine firmness of the elders. And your little story about David Ignatow is a beauti ul one because you picked him ou of the, you know, the whatev r, the stream of poets as a fig re to help you survive in a sen

00:40:35.570 - 00:40:50.600

e and you throw a rope to him, hat's how I imagined it. And y u use him in times of diffi ulty, you anchor yourself by Da id Ignatow, or Georgia O'Keeffe, or whoever anybody chooses, we'r allowed to do that, that's call d a psychological level of ance

00:40:50.630 - 00:41:03.470

try and elders. And then when you tell him, tears comes to h s eyes, because it is so moving for all the people to realize t at they could have benefited someone else in their life an death struggles. And that's he normal state for human b

00:41:03.470 - 00:41:16.970

ings is to be doing that for eac other, it‘s called a mentor, c lled an elder. I think we have t relocate that capacity, there i no way that young people are s ddenly going to stop being v olent, there's no way that t ey're going to suddenly stop-

00:41:17.150 - 00:41:30.440

tart caring unless they are c red for, and it was the job o elders in old cultures to wel ome and embrace, especi lly the troubles that young eople are having. And so again, that's why I'm talking about eople re-finding this elder stuf

00:41:30.440 - 00:41:41.990

in themselves because only here we feel that in ourse ves, can we help anybody else. All this good Christian stuff about being helpful and- and a l that, it doesn't count unle s you're actually helping from the place where you learn some

00:41:41.990 - 00:41:49.190

hing, where you know some hing, where you feel the dep h of your own life, Morton Marcus: Which is the individual concrete instead of the abstract.

00:41:49.330 - 00:42:00.730

Michael Meade: Exactly, so I have to go into prisons and work with prisoners because I've been in prison, and I found out something about who I was in prison. If I don't go to prisons, than I'm ignoring an essential fact about how I

00:42:01.900 - 00:42:14.710

walked or stepped out of childhoond, and I think that's true for other people. I feel that people that have gone into 12 step programs, for instance, that have recovered from alcohol or substance abuse, when they get fully settled with

00:42:14.710 - 00:42:28.480

themselves, still have another step to go; there's steps after those 12. And I think those steps including going back into culture, and engaging young people who in the same kind of, you know, fire water problems that they had. And I think that

00:42:28.480 - 00:42:37.780

part of what personal psychology has been about, not about just getting all involved in me and what I need, but finding out who I am and then going back to culture and doing something about it

00:42:38.710 - 00:42:52.810

Morton Marcus: You use -- not wanting to use dichotomies as I realized early in this conversation when I said "Women need to know," one of my little slips there -- you do use a dichotomy of images though, which I'm sure can- you can

00:42:52.810 - 00:43:09.630

elaborate on. That is the idea of fire on one side and water on the other; one is death and the other is life. Why don't you Michael Meade: Well Rumi, the 14th century Persian mystic poet, whose incredible genius ha said, in one of his poems, fir

00:43:09.630 - 00:43:24.480

is what of God is worl destroying, and water is what o God is world preserving, so- s it's useful as in that sense Another way to imagine it is i you look at the last two year in America, it seems to me th two primary events in terms o

00:43:24.480 - 00:44:32.030

elements are the fires in LA and the flooding in th elaborate on that for us? Mississippi. And I think we'r in this kind of flood and fir Morton Marcus: And the waters of renewal which is baptism.

00:43:32.580 - 00:43:50.460

stage of- at the end of th century, at the end of th millennium. But also water show up in the in the eyes of Davi Ignatow when he weeps, an you're telling him how you sa him. Water is carried by th elders, fire is- fire includes

00:43:50.760 - 00:44:04.890

eople's ambitions, people's illingness to struggle in life, eople's conflicts with each ther, it includes, what would you say? It's- it's issues of the spirit, they used to say spirit is made of fire and water and it ascends, I mean fire and

00:44:04.890 - 00:44:23.160

ir and it ascends, and the so l is made of water and earth a d it descends. And so the subtit e of the book is ‘‘The Temperi g,‘‘ and by tempering I mean, t e phrase I've come to like i that we make who we are, or w uncover who we are, we do both

00:44:23.460 - 00:44:34.790

of those by immersions in the fires of desire and those- and he waters of Michael Meade: That's right, and- and often baptism has tears in it.

00:44:37.490 - 00:44:46.820

Morton Marcus: In a way you express this differently in the book. You talk, you bring the wasteland into it, the idea of abundance. Would you elaborate on that? Michael Meade: Well, the old idea was that when culture

00:44:46.820 - 00:45:03.680

starts to run into troubles, you have the development of the wasteland, it's the opposite of abundance. And nowadays, we see it as the homeless, but we also see it as- the wasteland is when the land cracks from dryness and from an excess of heat, and so

00:45:03.680 - 00:45:17.120

you get gaps. And so we have the gap between the genders, and yeah, we have the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and then we have the, again increasing gap between people of various colors and people of various ethnic backgrounds, and

00:45:17.120 - 00:45:31.910

the border, you know, between Mexico and the United States becomes a gap, and a battle and things like that, so mythologically, it's called a wasteland. The alternative is the water of life, which flows back into land, awakens the

00:45:31.910 - 00:45:47.060

seeds that grow back into abundance and also fills the gaps, the cracks are filled with water, which makes everything common or communal again. And so that's why I put it in the title, I think culture is on fire, and I think that it's

00:45:47.060 - 00:46:01.880

common water that's down below us that we have to find by descending back to ethnic roots, racial roots back into the old knowledge that's hidden in the seeds of culture that we have kind of ignored.

00:46:02.650 - 00:46:09.550

Morton Marcus: And let's say Hispanic Americans are doing this now, which they are. Michael Meade: Yeah. Morton Marcus: They go back and they find the water of their

00:46:09.550 - 00:46:28.720

inner life, the water, their history, okay, which they're doing. The problem is how does that get to the white person, say the Caucasian, the WASP American, if you will, so that he can react to that. And he can dissolve the barriers, you see,

00:46:28.750 - 00:46:43.180

with the water of understanding, if you will. Michael Meade: But I think what may be going on is that what is sick and ill in one ethnic group, the healing is found in the roots of the other. In other words, again, you could look at

00:46:43.180 - 00:46:55.540

America a couple of different ways: the old way was looking at it as the melting pot and everybody that was different was going to come here and get melted, it's kind of an industrial image really, into and- what was going to pop out

00:46:55.540 - 00:47:09.310

was these homogenized Americans. Well, fortunately, it never got hot enough. People didn't get melted, individuals got melted. But the old roots of culture that people brought up from the south, down from the north, over from Europe, over from Asia,

00:47:10.210 - 00:47:26.620

some of it's here willingly and some of it unwillingly, but it's these old roots of cultures that didn't melt. I think the healing for the ill is found in this great variety ; think America is an experiment to see if we can drag these kind of cures back up

00:47:26.620 - 00:47:39.040

from the ethnic roots. Right now that- it happens literally, they‘re down in the Brazilian rain forest, trying to get enough samples edited and find out if there are new medicines there before they cut it all down and make it into whatever

00:47:39.040 - 00:47:50.020

they're making out of it. And I think the same thing is happening with people, that like you say Hispanic Americans are going back into the roots saying, Wait a minute, what kind of people are we? What do we know about healing? What do we

00:47:50.020 - 00:48:03.670

know about dancing? What do we know about surviving life? And I think in the great experience I've had in these multicultural circumstances, seeing how each group carries healing capacity that is almost instinctive to them, which is- can be an

00:48:03.850 - 00:48:20.610

incredible cure for someone, like you say a white European, getting a curing from the quality of African drumming. Morton Marcus: Two years ago I brought in some Aboriginals from the central desert of Australia. And one of the things that we

00:48:20.610 - 00:48:36.000

did was, the partner on the show who is in every other week, Joe Stroud, and another poet named Anita Wilkins, and we had read and done readings in Australia. And now, we were bringing some Australian poets and Aboriginal painters and chanters doing

00:48:36.000 - 00:48:50.730

their song lines back. And these are people who really lived in the central desert. And one of the things that we arranged was to have them meet the Indians of the Southwest, including the Navajos. It was a living disaster because the Aboriginals

00:48:50.730 - 00:49:04.410

did not give a darn about the cultural information of the Navajos. And the Navajos did, the Navajos were enlightened, they know what this movement is and what's going on, but the Aboriginals, I mean, we almost had a massacre right down there,

00:49:04.740 - 00:49:20.250

it was unbelievable. So people are not ready for this, this is what I mean by, you know, the answer may be found in other ethnic events, but they may not be ready for it. I think that getting people ready, getting people receptive that is the

00:49:20.730 - 00:49:31.650

important thing. Michael Meade: Well, the one thing about both of those groups is they both know a lot about ritual preparation. And so anytime you're going to bring together the ancestral roots of

00:49:31.650 - 00:49:42.750

people, it's like being- bringing together spirits that don't know each other. So the preparation issue becomes incredibly important. You have to lay the ground down, you have to make it ritually appropriate because in looking for a cure,

00:49:42.750 - 00:49:54.630

sometimes you get a poison, and poison and cures are the same thing applied to different circumstances. And so yeah, it's always dangerous. Any healing can bring you close to death, it's always dangerous, but I don't think we have a choice.

00:49:54.870 - 00:50:07.050

Morton Marcus: And what I think was interesting it was sort of, as I looked at it later, a triangle. Once side was the Aborigines the other side was the Navajos and the people who were infected were the Caucasians but they- what was

00:50:07.050 - 00:50:19.050

going on between them was just, oh, it was amazing Michael Meade: It was like two huge spirits that don't know each other, meeting under circumstances neither was prepared for, but that's the nature of this modern time, but

00:50:19.050 - 00:50:35.490

it's also the true nature of America. America is made up of, what? Religious fanatics, criminals, and slaves, all trying to make it in the same land, and so yeah, the- we're always in a huge conflict here. But I imagine the Aboriginals

00:50:35.700 - 00:50:48.830

must have been extremely uneasy being off of their own land because they are a hearth people. Morton Marcus: Yeah, and so you got it right on the nose, two- two weeks out was the limit that they could really stand being

00:50:48.830 - 00:51:01.730

away from the land. The way we did it because there was a much longer tour, went everywhere even down to Jerry Rothenberg and Southern California was that we would build fires for them. As long as they have fires and could sit near the fire, and as

00:51:01.730 - 00:51:14.630

they were sitting right on that hearth over there, cross legged, this was the smoke of life. Their fire has another meaning. Michael Meade: Well, their fire, when- every time a person is born, a child is born into the Aboriginal culture, a fire has

00:51:14.630 - 00:51:27.830

to be made immediately because they're being born is like adding a flame in life. And so yeah, you would- it would be remembering their own birth as they sat at that fire. They would remind themselves, no, we're still alive even though we

00:51:27.830 - 00:51:38.280

can't see such and such rock. We are still in the world. Morton Marcus: They were amazing people. Michael Meade: That's great. That was a good American reckless attempt at bringing together cultures.

00:51:38.700 - 00:51:51.810

Morton Marcus: Sort of a Walt Disney idea. Michael Meade: That's kind of our job. Morton Marcus: Okay, wasteland and abundance, do you have some poems for us you'd like to read.

00:51:51.840 - 00:52:03.060

Michael Meade: We've been talking about all these heavy things and the difficulties and I know a lot of people say well, when you think about all the difficult things going on, and then when you watch the news or listen to the news, and you

00:52:03.060 - 00:52:16.440

realize just how much suffering is going on all the time, where do you find hope and all this, and I go back to poets. Poets, as you were saying earlier, they're the mentors, they're the people who are always poking at the roots of human existence. So

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this is an excerpt from Theodore Roethke. IN A DARK TIME and I think it's talking about the time we're in right now. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the

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deepening shade; and I hear my echo in the echoing wood - a lord of nature weeping to a tree. And I live between the heron and the wren, between the beasts of the hill and the serpents of the den. What is madness but nobility of soul at

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odds with circumstance? I think that could be the best line of modern poetry. "What is adness but nobility of soul t odds with circum Listen, the day is on fire and I know the purity of pure despair,

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my own shadow pinned against the sweating wall. And that place among the rocks - is it a cave or a winding path? In a dark time, the edge is what we have. I've altered the poem slightly there because of wanting to get

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across that idea that we're all in the dark time. In the dark time, the edge is what we have, we begin to see at the edge of darkness. So I'm hopeful in that sense that if we see wisdom as something that has a shadow already in it, as a darkened way

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of knowing, that we're in a time of relearning stuff Morton Marcus: That's great. I think what I'm going to do now is have you say some last words and then we are going to end the show which may seem early, but there are reasons for it because

00:53:53.200 - 00:54:11.980

this is- this half hour is going to be interrupted by my doing some PSAs off the tape, strange technological thing. Are we still running? So, Michael, it has been a huge pleasure having you here, meeting you, and talking with him. I hope you

00:54:12.010 - 00:54:20.950

certainly come again, I'm sure my partner Joe Stroud is going to be kicking himself that we didn't do this as a joint venture. Michael Meade: Well, I've really enjoyed being here. It is a very

00:54:21.100 - 00:54:35.290

generous space that you make. And- Morton Marcus: Thank you. From someone whose generosity is so great because you really are giving your life to other people and your wisdom to them, I take that as a great compliment.

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Michael, this Saturday, September 11, from 10am to 5pm you will be at Santa Cruz's Pacific Cultural Center, 1307 Seabright doing an event called "Fires of Change and the Water of Life," an event for women and men. I wish you the best of luck

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in that but before then you're selling your book, why don't you tell us where that's gonna be? It's going to be Friday at 7:30 at seven o'clock at the Capitola Book Cafe in 41st Avenue, they have wonderfully comfortable chairs there, people will be

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able to hear you say a few words. Come and buy this marvelous book, which, again, are the kinds of books really that are going to make us get through this cusp of this century and wherever the future will take us, hopefully whole,

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renewed and shining. Thank you very much, Michael. Michael Meade: Thank you Mort.