When I ride the city on the T, I sometimes here a message that comes over the loud speaker that tells me to notify T officials if I notice any suspicious packages or bags. In The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us, Robert Bly argues that we all carry with us bags that are full of parts ourselves that we have suppressed during the course of our lives. These bags don’t contain explosives or some sort of chemical agent like the bags the loudspeakers on the T are asking me to be vigilant about, but our bag’s contents have the potential to be destructive to society as any terrorist threat; in fact, “Bly’s Bags” as I will refer to them throughout this essay may have a connection to issues such as terrorism. In addition, later on in the essay I am going to make links between Bly’s Bags and Robert Pasick’s book Awaking From A Deep Sleep.  Many of Pasick’s ideas are related to Bly’s Bags but specifically how men are affected by the bags they must carry around with them.

            Now let’s get more specific about what a bag is. Anyone who has spent time around young children and lord knows in my profession I have, will be amazed at the amount of energy that they have. They seem to be in constant motion with the exceptions of when they crash during nap time. However, this energy that is emanating from all aspects of their psyche and emitting emotions without guard is soon restricted by societal factors. (It should be noted that this happens in every society) Bly describes a process where we first start putting things away in our bag when we find out that our parents or other important adults in our life do not like some of the things that we are expressing. They might tell us to hold still, be quiet, stop crying, don’t get angry over that, don’t hurt your friends, ext. Soon, we stuff all those emotions that from anger to fear into our bag because we are learning they are unacceptable. The bag gets filled even more in our teens when our peers more then anyone else force us to put parts of ourselves in our bag with comments like “only fags are into art.”

            In short, in our bag is everything that we end up refusing to acknowledge is part of ourselves. Bly goes further to suggest that we project what is in our bag onto others and it is usually the characteristics in others that we hate the most. An example of this is someone who is told from a young age by their parents to pursue a practical career and eventually learns to hide the part of them that likes to paint into their bag. When they grow up and become a successful business man like their parents and society had wanted them too, they may end up being the type of person who rants against the lazy bum, dirty, hippie, artist who is trying to sell their painting for a few dollars at the corner of Boylston and Clarendon St.

            In addition to our personal bags, nations and cultures can have things in their bags that they hide and then project onto and hate in others. This may come out in the form of Islamic Fascists trying to justify blowing up the west because of our hypocritical and decadent culture because they have stuffed that part of their culture into their bag and refuse to acknowledge it. Or on the reverse side, it could come from an American who rails against the subjugation of women in Islamic culture, while stuffing America’s history of subjugation of women into our own bag.

            The aspect of Bly’s bag that I found most interesting was the idea of projecting our shadowy unconscious bag onto others and thus hating those traits in others that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. I am going to look at this anecdotally for a little bit. Here is a list of traits that I hate and actual things that I associate with those traits that I hate: Conformity (Beer, Coffee, Disney), laziness  (every other Nas Album), whining (Paul O’Neil, half the Democrats), and ignorance (the 43^rd President).       

            For the sake of argument, let’s say that all of those traits are in me and in my bag. How would they have got there? I will examine the first trait that I listed which was conformity in detail. (I would talk about all of them but this is supposed to be a four page paper) From a young age I was taught that as a Greek I had to be independent and creative and blaze my own trail. Then as I got into my teen and even early twenties, I listened to a lot of music with an anti conformist message that had a profound impact on me from Kurt Cobain to Lupe Fiasco. Because of that, I on many occasions avoided doing things that I perceived everyone else was doing such as drink coffee every morning and drink beer at night. While I have mellowed on my stances as I have entered my early 20s, I for a while I perceived that anyone who drank coffee or beer regularly was a conformist zombie who was going along with society. My anti-conformist stance also came up in less trivial areas then beverage choice such as politics where I am borderline a socialist when it comes to tax policy/income distribution, but libertarian when it comes to most social policy (Pro-gun owner’s right, pro-choice, legalizing marijuana, against eminent domain in the vast majority of cases) ext.

            This hatred I have for conformity may be partly due to the lessons I got from my mom, my siblings, my culture, and the media that I was exposed too. On the other hand, when I rail against all the conformity in society with such virtual, it most likely means according to Bly that it is part of me that I am trying to suppress. In fact, looking at my life there are many times when I conform to the social norm because it is the easy thing to do.

            Doing what is the easy thing that society wants you to do is something that we all do and may have harmful affects on ourselves. This affects both men and women, but we hear more about how women our hurt by our culture then men. In Pasick’s Awakening From A Deep Sleep, he talks about how men our taught to distress most of their emotions and forced to conform to provider/warrior mode. This leads many men to put a large portion of their emotions into their bag which leads to disastrous effects because the full range of human emotions are less available to him. When asked by a spouse how they are feeling, they may literally not know because when they were younger, expressing an emotion was not an option. Their only option was what type of bag they wanted to put the emotion into, paper or plastic?