Word: keening
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Fire in the Belly is that rare thing: a literate and lyrical self-help book. Like Bly, who uses a Grimm brothers' myth as his framework, Keen takes up the ancient theme that each man is on a spiritual journey, a quest for the grail of manhood. Bly's book is an original song of the road, a literary Walkman piping background music for the journey. Keen attempts to provide a rough road map for the trip, advising the spiritual traveler how to avoid the dead ends of combative machismo and the blind alleys of romantic obsession...
...Keen's book arises from his belief that men have lost a unifying vision of masculinity, and are "involved in a night battle in a jungle against an unseen foe." That foe is not woman (or WOMAN, as Keen puts it, in one of the book's annoying New Age constructions), but man's unconscious bondage to women. Modern man, he suggests, easily won his Oedipal battle: the boy snags Mom because Dad is preoccupied at the office and she's hankering for a little affection. This Oedipal victory ties men to women in an unhealthy way, and Keen believes...
...women's movement helped create what now seems to be a vanishing species -- the Sensitive Guy. He's become scarce because most men could never emulate ^ Alan Alda, and most women -- oh, mercurial creatures! -- now seem to think they turned men into wimps. Keen, like Bly, suggests that men can be sensitive without becoming worm-boys. Whereas Bly sketches out how a man can be sensitive and fierce, Keen calls for a rebirth of wonder and empathy among...
...answering machine at his 60-acre ranch in Sonoma County, Calif., Keen sings Cole Porter's Don't Fence Me In. Keen grew up in Alabama, Tennessee and Delaware ("more Huck Finn than Holden Caulfield," he says in his high- pitched foghorn of a voice) and has a doctorate in philosophy of religion from Princeton. His thesis concerned the idea of mystery. "I've always been interested in talking clearly about things that can never really be known," he says...
...late 1960s, Keen left academia and eventually moved to Northern California, becoming a contributing editor to Psychology Today. Over the past 20 years he has been conducting seminars on personal mythology. Fire in the Belly is his 12th book, and he regards it as another effort in his lifelong exploration of modern mythology, in this case, the mythology of manhood...