Blood Simple
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Taking time out each month to unbox your shadow
Taken from the August 1996 bless-in interview with Rob Brezsny that forms the basis of "A Man For All Reasons."
"It requires mastering a certain understanding of the spiritual value of menstrual periods," says Brezsny. "It's a very complex subject, and I can't do it justice. But I will say that the male body does not enforce a time out for our psychic and physical growth.
"The male body--and therefore the psyche--can go on endlessly without having to check back in to the inner source. I don't want to glamourize the menstrual period for women," Brezsny chuckles, "but one of the values of that it could possibly have--I don't think that it necessarily does have--would require a retreat to a sanctuary and a return to a communion and a conversation with the subtle self, and those aspects that have been going unacknowledged or unrecognized--what [philosopher and therapist Carl] Jung called 'The Shadow.'
"In a perfect cultural context," he continues, "there would be menstrual huts on a very widespread basis where women, or--in this case, men--could retreat and enjoy that three or four days a month. I think that our time-driven, schedule-driven culture makes it difficult for women, let alone men, to be able to have that time."
Later, he says, "If you're embarrassed about things that you want to disown from your personality, qualities that you think are less lovely about yourself, elements of your past that you want to throw away--to me, that is exactly the point of having a privelege of having a monthly time away, four days in a menstrual hut where those things that you've been trying to put off and hold at bay are allowed to wash over you in a sacred setting, in a safe setting."
Brezsny has joked in the past that turning Radio Shack franchises across the nation into menstrual huts would make a nice anarchistic pasttime. He no longer necessarily advocates the emptying of one particular store to hunker down the menses.
"It's not for me to say," he shrugs. "That's something for the Menstrual Grail to do, I'm very low down on the echelon in terms of decisions that are made. My job right now is to create the poetry of the lesbian man, the macho feminist movement, and to stimulate the imagination about it and all the juicy possibilities. I'm not really a politician or an administrator or a bureaucrat. I'm an imaginist."
But back to being a male lesbian. "I don't mind calling myself that," he says, "it's just that I don't want to be overly presumptuous. I know that when [Brezsny's docufiction memoirThe Televisionary Oracle, which in part outlines his abduction by and initiation into the Menstrual Temple] comes out, that there are going to be some feminists that don't like it. It's not party-line enough. Some of it is very party-line, but my style is that even as I embrace something with full belief, I also make fun of it, and that quality is not going to go over with some people.
"Applied to a layman's astrology column that's one thing, but applied to something that's really important to people. . . . "he trails off.
"That's the whole point for me," Brezsny says, regaining his train of thought. "You have to make fun of the things that you believe in or they become rigid and sabotage you. I think that that will be coming through clear in the book.
"I have conversations with [feminists] Katherine McKinney and Andrea Dworkin in my head because, contrary to the big male father god that occupies the superego of many people, my superego looks like Katherine McKinney and Andrea Dworkin. It's this huge mommy goddess, so it's not that I'm flippant about arousing people's acrimony or condemnation, I'm not seeking that.
"I'm just the kind of screwball who thinks that I can make everyone love me, and vice versa. It's certainly given with a spirit of love."
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There is a seeming incongruity to such an oxymoron as the phrase "male lesbian." Rob Brezsny sees how others might find humor in it, but he's not laughing. As an active member of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, Brezsny has been among the 13 men who are initiated each year into this ancient mystery cult.