Authors: Robin Morgan
Duality-thinking might posit: either we accept something (love, life, etc. would come under this “Yes” heading), or reject it (fear, hatred, war, the concept of “the Other,” etc.). Yin and Yang, simplistically put. And of course it is their interdependence, their unity, that creates harmony. This is a generally accepted definition of health, and of synthesis, as well.
The I/They dichotomy (or even the more universally practiced Us/Them so basic to most politics) is not necessary, of course. “Inner and outer are the same,” teaches the
Tao Te Ching
. The wise soul combines all differences in her Nirvanic
in
difference.
But how in bloody hell do you combine them when they've splintered off into two separate factions at total war with each other? By standing apart and trying to make peace between them? Or by entering into one, even arbitrarily chosen, so fully that the other is obliterated or rediscovered within its opposite? And can one force that choice? Force oneself toward health (or madness)? Force oneself toward caring (or indifference)? Unlikely, such a storming of heaven. (As unlikely as passively drifting there?)
Let us return to the possibility of standing apart objectively. This course appears reasonable, yet it is precisely the course that enthralled in the first place. One
does
have to take sides eventually, or at the very least allow a side to take one. Still, there must be a more honorable way to go about doing this.
The paralysis of indecision is no answer. It is a stand in itself, and not one of the indifference it pretends to, but of fright and passivity. On the other hand, the blind choice (a stand, any stand, gimme a stand) is less a brave act than a brutal one. Of course the notion that any choice is
not
blind is illusion. Besides, to choose at all is to exclude every other possible choice, thus denying the possibility of choosing.
Are we then reduced to talking about greed, merely wanting to have it all at once? No, I think we are really talking about freedom in philosophical and psychological terms, which we can perhaps clarify by placing the argument under a political grid.
By freedom, I mean a reaching past all known or imagined conditions: freedom from the state of being oppressed, freedom from the state of accommodation to oppression, and freedom as well even from the state of rebellion against oppression. Each of these states has its
relative frame of mind, political position, resultant emotion, and consequential act.
Thus,
the state of being oppressed
encompasses madness as the normal frame of mind, reaction as the normal political position, suffering as the resultant emotion, and fear informing all consequential acts.
The state of accommodation to oppression
encompasses indifference as the normal frame of mind, nonalignment as the normal political position, numbness as the prevailing emotion, and guilt coloring all acts of consequence.
The state of rebellion against oppression
encompasses a frame of mind enraged with sanity, and a political position stripped radical by deduction; the emotions are consumed by hostility and by an equally intense longing for a purgative of that hostility. The consequential acts are determined and sustained by that longing.
Naturally it is possible to travel back and forth between these states. Although the borders are fixed, each of us is equipped with passports honored by all three territories. In fact, it is even conceivableâand sometimes mandatoryâthat we are capable of occupying overlapping states in imperceptibly quick-shifting moments, actually the same moment. One may act, feel, think, and be at different stages of action, emotion, thought, and existence in all three categories. Perhaps it is possible that this compulsory virtuosity is the minimum condition of our current consciousness.
But to be free from
all
these statesâthe mere contemplation of such a freedom as actual, as imaginable beyond all existing forms, is so metaphysically dizzying, so all but incomprehensible that we discover a trap. What would we
do
with ourselves? The awe of a real if uncharted freedom is greater than the known terrors of our old existence.
Is this why revolutions have always settled for winning?
The oppressed have been forced to fear what is not there (the superiority of the oppressor) and even to be ashamed of this fear as the sign of inferiority. The radical must
choose
to fear what is not there, embracing the very insight of which she had been frightened in her former totally oppressed state, affirming it as the badge of a new-found vigilance, thus transforming fear into paranoia. (The liberal is generally preoccupied only with what
seems
to be thereâa narrow definition of reality which the liberal defends with a fierce lukewarmth.) But the victor who merely renames the former palace the Citadel of the People while moving into the throne roomâhere at last is the creature who has discovered what
is
there, and so has been destroyed for all rational purposes as one who could define it. Freedom has been eluded once again, this time triumphantly.
Still. There's almost nothing I'm not afraid of. So if I am this afraid, it must be that I have within me, inevitably, a courage specific to this moment, one which has been waiting all my life to be used just here, precisely now, a courage I am bravely resistant to encountering, much less embodyingâ
if
I am this afraid.
Why assume such a resource, however hidden?
Why not? Either I have discovered it because it exists or it exists because I have invented it. In any case, it now exists.
The point is to
change the terms
, to alter totally the landscape on which the battle is waged, to reject the failure of a past reluctance to use any weapons and reject as well the success of a past dependence on traditional weaponsâand to do this with
no
certainty, no assumption of “correctness.” To approach what could be called a metaphysical feminism. To be meta-midwives?
Multiplicity is a word with positive connotations.
It is strange that duplicity is a word with negative connotations.
It is strange that no word at all exists for a multifaceted uniplicity.
Yet if we each were multifacetedly uniplicitous we might even combine to transform nefarious duplicity into multiplicitude.
The Paradigm again, this time in terms of the personal anguish inherent in female-male relationships struggling to grow in patriarchal soil. It is clear that the woman has a most unsavory choice. She can believe either that she is justified in her demands and that he, in his refusal to meet them, is out to break and destroy her; or she can believe that he really does love her and would change if only her demands weren't so thoroughly unfair (in fact, crazy). Most women spend their life ricocheting between these polarities of equally chilling conviction, although the second is probably the most common of the two, given its emphasis on guilt and inner-directed violence. Early glimmerings of a simplex feminist consciousness make possible the first conviction, which may appear less painful than the second, until she comprehends that it reveals the destruction of part of her capacity to love: a high price, too high for most women so far, even if they do realize that at present it is almost always a price paid with false currency from a treasury long ago emptied.
For centuries men have criticized women for this curious tic of
wanting to love and be loved, for valuing this rather sentimental condition as one of True Emotion (up there on the level of Brotherhood, Ambition, Patriotism, Duty, and Other Adult Feelings as defined by men). The early phase of the current Feminist Movement saw women reacting against this patriarchal contempt with an answering flood of emotion, especially love, toward each other (so long denied us) and toward men (in that we demanded,
from
love, that they struggle to change). Naturally this flood did not accomplish an instantaneous breaking of the dam of resistance which had after all taken ten thousand years to build. Gradually it abated, dwindling to a trickle. Disappointed and impatient, some women began speaking about love in an eerily familiar tone of contempt. Numerous “corrective lines” ran out like cracks from this subtle parching at the heart. Women's oldest adversary, guilt, rose like a desert sandstorm, called up this time by other women:
You have no right to be concerned with the struggle of love; it is a bourgeois concern and people are starving. You have no right to want to love, or be lovedâare the workers concerned with such sentimental questions? (The answer is Yes, but some new socialists ignore this.) You have no right to waste time struggling in love with a man; the only serious feminist is a lesbian. You have no right to struggle in love with your lesbian lover; that is bourgeois monogamy. You have no right to love your children; you are only oppressing them and they are only oppressing you. You have no right to love your friends; that is elitism. You have no right to love yourself; that is individualism. You have no right to love your work; that is privilege. You have no right to love art; that is decadence. You have no right to love nature; that is romanticism. You have no right to love the past; that is nostalgia. You have no right to love the future; that is utopianism. You have no right to loverhood, wifehood, motherhood, selfhoodâbecause all these hoods have in the past covered the faces of institutions we now see as oppressive.
I have exaggerated the above correct-line formulae deliberately. Some (most?) may seem blatant cases of throwing out various babies with or without the bath waterâa type of nonthought surely no one could advance seriously. Not so. From sufficient confusion just such non-thought can come, and frequently has, as in one notorious correct line which only a few decades ago conceived of transforming real babies into real soap, in which case throwing the baby out with the bath water appeared to the correct-liners as both sensible and sanitary.
So we reject force adopted out of correctness, since such an adoptive parent is only an excuse. But what of the original parent, who gave her infant Force up for adoption because she felt incapable of
raising it? Her name is Suffering, and she is unconcerned with expedience. She has chosen to be mad rather than to define
any
Other as evil (The Paradigm, state 2). Perhaps she is saintly, but then women have been saints for millennia, and it has not brought us grace. So we can mourn with her, for her, as for our own past. But still we must leave her choiceless martyrdom, as well, behind us.
So. A good political movement could aim to imitate not the sand of a desert, but the sand of a beach:
âwhich sifts through the fingers of anyone who would grab it in a fist, thus eluding possession;
âwhich adapts itself with pillowing accommodation to any who would rest on it, including the shells of once-living creatures, thus risking the appearance of compassionate shapelessness, so confident is it of its own shape;
âwhich irresistibly wears down stone into sand, grain by grain, adding to itself;
âand which clings with ineradicable tenacity to any who have even remotely encountered or been touched by it.
But the sand of a beach, not a Sahara. For it must permit of dunes but also the stubbed growth of prickly evergreens; it must fathom erosion but welcome children building castles.
We must boil the paradigm down to its essence:
1
A) | I'm sane. |
B) | They are out to destroy me. |
1A + 1B = I'm not mad; They are evil. |
Thus, 1 = Their malignancy protects me from my madness.
2
A) | They don't exist, or are indifferent or beneficent. |
B) | Then I must be insane. |
2A + 2B = They're not evil; I am mad. |
Thus, 2 = My madness protects me from their malignancy.
So we can restate the Paradigm more succinctly:
My madness protects me from their malignancy
.
Their malignancy protects me from my madness
.
From which would you rather be protected? And is it not somehow an overarchingly beneficent structure which provides such a carefully architectured protection? Or is it an encompassingly maleficent structure which can devise torture in such an airtight system?
A stepping outside that circle, then. Or rather a plunge to the center of it, the heart of a mandala where the vertiginous distractions fade.
No maps can be obtained for this place.
She has moved from loving him at her own expense to loving herself at his expense. This is no solution, since she loves him still, he has not changed
enough
, or rather he has, but she has changed more, and she is weary of such expenses. What have correct lines then to do with her, as she hangs out her wash in Kansas, slides shut the file drawer in Sacramento, loads the station wagon in the Tennessee supermarket parking lot, shifts her feet on the welfare line, freaks out on acid, or sits at my typewriter?
More: she has moved from
loving
(anyoneâwoman, man, child, the universe) at her own expense, to loving herself at anyone else's expenseâonly to find that she detests herself for having done so. No grace here, merely hopelessness, although it takes a certain courage to admit it. Is this perhaps the reason some feminists who wrestled with theory (as opposed to sophomoric correct lines) in the sixties went quietly mad with despair in the seventies?
The paradigm is that of Semiramis and the Petitioner, of Lear and the Fool. The paradigm is of Ariadne and Theseus, of Alcestis and AdmÄtus, of Kore and Dis. The paradigm is in the mind of Antigoneâwho will settle for nothing if she cannot have everything. The paradigm is interknotted. Nor can it be sawed apart, in the style of patriarchy, with Alexander's sword. No, it must be unraveled stealthily by night in the style of Penelope, while for the near future we all pretend it still exists by day.
The female has ever been the one who spins, who weaves, who cuts the thread. She is the Norn, the Fate, the Spider. Now, like Saint Teresa's silkworm, we must even spin our own freedom, out of no oneâand no one's expense, not even thatâbut ourselves.