Going Too Far (50 page)

EUTERPE
I'm glad we helped The Poet a little.

THALIA
More likely drove her frothy.

CALLIOPE
I'm
glad we lodged some thoughts with her that might just help the Daughters.

THALIA
More likely make them commit her somewhere for being frothy.

URANIA
There
was
more business to conduct. We'll have to take it up next time, I guess. Whether to open the group, for instance. Dogmata still wants awfully to join—

(
During this
,
THE MUSES
are gathering up their veils, flutes, quills, harps, and other signs of office, and making ready to depart
)

ERATO
(
snarling sweetly
) I don't want to sound unloving, but if Dogmata comes, I go. The next thing, she'll bring in Jargonē. Why don't they start their own group?

EUTERPE
(
patiently
) Because, like everyone else, they want to be in the
original
Muses. You know how it is. I think we should consciousness-raise on it.

THALIA
Euterpe darling, you think we should consciousness-raise on everything. You thought we should consciousness-raise while Marsyas was being flayed, Arachne transanimated, and Orpheus torn limb from limb. I get dizzy from going “around the room” for fifty centuries.

(
Chattering and teasing, the Muses slowly fade to translucency, then transparency, then invisibility
.
MELPOMENE
alone remains, standing, transparent, still watching
THE POET.
That human creature has typed her last key and now sits staring at the brightening window square. Finally she reaches out and turns off her desk light. As she does so, another
POET
stumbles in sleepily, in a bathrobe, rubbing his eyes. She senses his presence and smiles
)

THE POET
I've had a good night's work.

(
THALIA
glimmers again faintly, glances over at the two poets, and grins. She takes
MELPOMENE
by the hand and tugs gently. They fade out together. And the Curtain of our consciousness

FALLS
.)

METAPHYSICAL FEMINISM

“
This possibility: That you are God, and God is You
.”

—C
HRISTINE DE
P
ISANE
, feminist poet

and philosopher, c. 1364–1431

I: APOLOGIA

L
ET US STEP
off the edge.

“The basic demands”—they are never basic enough. Nor are we, yet, really demanding them. Which is not to say that they don't exist, cannot be insisted upon, fought for, won. It's just that they cannot be defined.

We can recognize some of them, the most obvious ones: equality before the law, equal pay for equal work, the right to political representation, to education, decent jobs and credit, self-determination over our own bodies—which means access to safe contraception and abortion and the right of sexual preference, satisfactory and affordable child-care facilities which are controlled by the people (including children) who use them, freedom to walk down the street without fear of verbal and/or physical rape. Yet the
basic
demands include everything—an unpolluted planet, the end of all wars and the elimination of money; reverence for the very young and very old, indifference to pigmentation, height, or weight; no more poverty, ignorance, starvation, despair … the list is endless. And utterly insufficient. We must go beyond what we sense (I am assuming that we already are beyond what we
know
), and test our perceptions of reality. We must admit the entire cosmos as the ground on which such a search takes place. We must recognize the dissolution of the illusion of linear form. Yet we must go beyond, in effect, at the same time that we embrace the past, and act openly in the present. (Simultaneously to demand equal pay for equal work while questioning what is
meant
by
“pay” and what is
meant
by “work.” But to demand
and
question
at the same time
.)

How much this needs repeating: I fear being misunderstood, as if I were recommending a withdrawal from political action to some ivory tower of abstract thought. Such simplification has happened before, and the burnt witch fears the fire. Again and again “mass” thinking stops (or is carefully halted) at the patriarchal Either/Or border, and thus never attempts the third possibility, which is no destination in itself but a direction leading toward still further approaches. The third, the synthesis. That
earned state
of transition from thesis through antithesis. The dialectic. How dangerous to overlook it in others, and how exasperating to have it overlooked in oneself—to have one's synthetical position on a given issue praised or denounced by thetical or antithetical minds as their own (or each other's) position!

Some feminists are disturbed by dialectical terms because Marx used them in his time, although the concepts behind those terms long pre-date Marx; they were used by Socrates, adapted advantageously by Firestone, and can still be helpful as tools with which to analyze the feminist process. For example:

The Left views feminism as bourgeois, pacifist, and conservative. The Right views feminism as proletarian, violent, and rebellious. Individual feminists, when accused of any of these traits by whichever side their sympathies tend toward, can fall into the trap of denying and explaining: No, we're really good radicals; No, we're really respectable citizens. We can forget that the names are actually euphemisms for how both sides
really
perceive us—shrill, divisive, and threatening. True perceptions, for once.

Furthermore, the Left is accurate in seeing conservative tendencies among feminists; childbearing and rearing are still so far the responsibility of women, and this responsibility is most easily borne in conditions of stability, where the quantities and qualities are known and the territory familiar. If we thus appear bourgeois in our values it is hardly because we have so much to lose, but because what we do have we cherish with a fierceness that betrays us oftimes into pacifism, particularly since the little we have is usually our children—which generals of red, white, and black armies feel no compunction about drafting, raping, and murdering.

The Right is also correct in seeing feminism as the epitome of revolution. Indeed, of every
NO
uttered by an oppressed group to its rulers, there is none more earthshaking than the
NO
women as a people begin to say to men—across cultural, racial, national boundaries. We
are
proletarian, the essential proletariat, one might well argue, since we constitute not only the largest exploited group but have endured the model oppression for all other forms, and for the longest time. And
our capacity for violence runs deep, surfacing mostly in defense of our children, but nonetheless possible on behalf of ourselves, if challenged beyond toleration.

So we can see that both the Right and the Left are quite accurate in their analyses. We
are
what both of them say we are—but most important, we are something
more
, some third perception, an entirety and integrity which is greater than the sum of any parts they can understand, greater than we ourselves have yet recognized.

This failure of recognition is due in part to our reluctance to examine the dialectical process in our own movement and our own selves. We have been impatient for simple solutions, a yearning which has afflicted all political groups most of the time. But if we do not understand the process, to paraphrase, we are doomed to repeat it (and have). We could, for example, track an individual on a typical dialectical course, remembering that an entire movement can go the same route, step by step:

Let us say that one may begin by pleading for equality, which seems a logical, fair, and eminently attainable goal (
thesis
). When the reactions to this plea are not requitedly logical or fair, and when the goal appears less and less attainable, one takes refuge in justifiable anger. This leads to a desire for vengeance, and for power (no longer power
equal to
but power
over
). This in turn often expresses itself as separatism, which is a cleverly self-deluding name for collaboration with one's rulers in their enforcement of one's own enghettoed state. (“Who wants to be in your old clubhouse anyway! We want our!”—which is where the overlords have intended one to be and where, in fact, one has been all along.) To demand such a self-imposed ghetto is the sole power and source of pride available (see “The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies,” p. 239). Thus one denies being anything at all like one's oppressors, all the while mirroring more precisely that very image (
antithesis
). But the ghetto still feels like a ghetto and in time other realizations are borne in upon one, such as the fact that one's own people, while oppressed, are also human—and possess the capacity for misuse of power as much as any other group. Indeed, the same old grievances—not all attributable to the oppressor—are evident
within
the separatist ghetto. One becomes more interested in some entirely new definition of power, in exploring how it might be used differently, diversified. At the same time one begins to be less fire-and-brimstone condemnatory of imperfections in oneself and others (at no parallel loss of standards, incidentally), and gains a new respect for the individuality of persons and the composition of relationships. One begins to reject that arbitrary categorizing process which makes of each person a grass root (ready for mowing?). One even begins to be able to acknowledge change on the part of those who have power,
when
the change is real. This would constitute a
synthesis;
it is fragile, fraught with dangers
of which one is aware
, trepidatious, complex, and unclear—but worth it.

So, one articulates this emerging synthetical position (in an experimental whisper) to one's movement—and is promptly slammed. “Theticians” applaud one's return to a rational position and “Antitheticians” denounce one accordingly as a lapsed heretic. Or “Theticians” close ranks suspiciously against this untrustable seeker while “Antitheticians” smile wisely to one another that
they
know one is being temporarily pragmatic and tactically manipulative. Or vice versa. Sometimes Either
and
Or unite long enough to accuse one of variance in the ranks, narrowing vision, desertion of the cause, and that old stand-by indictment, liberalism (
omigod
). Still others might glimpse what one really is implying; they are the ones who rush to declaim that one is, this time, really going too far. One binds up the wounds and proceeds, because every synthesis is only a new thesis, and the process must begin again.

At this point, then, I am tempted to make a personal plea (knowing that it may do no good whatsoever and knowing, too, that I make it for the last time). A “Goodbye to All That,” saying farewell this time to simplification and intolerance, no matter the source? Perhaps. Like many other women (and even a few men), I've suffered my sea changes through art, motherhood, monosexuality, bisexuality, the Left, violence, etc. Some of us have gone at least enough rounds on the spiral, the dialectical turn of the screw, to earn the assumption that we just might be approaching a problem from a complex vantage point and not a Zinjanthropian one. I say
earned
and I mean that. If, for instance, two artists criticize the way political movements use (or misuse) art, but only one of those two artists has risked difficult years of life-endangering activism in a revolutionary cause, then these two do not criticize, in my opinion, with quite the same right. One has paid her dues and the other hasn't. Which is another way of saying that criticism which doesn't spring from commitment (and love?) is not criticism but judgment, arrogant and aloof. Its insights may even be valuable, but they certainly should be regarded with healthy skepticism.

In certain areas I have earned my synthetical position. It has cost me dearly, and continues to do so whenever I see it being reduced backward to a thesis or antithesis. Nor are my halting attempts on any given subject to be envied, let alone lauded, denounced, or imitated. If recognized at all, they might be seen as steps in the journey of a woman whose peculiar private grief includes having found herself, as an artist, seized by her time and typecast into a political figure (this in a patriarchal culture, don't forget, where Either/Or presides).

Thoughts are living things, their movement an active process. To try freezing them so as to make them immortal is to miscomprehend totally their native deathless quality. To settle for two-fold thought when the third possibility shimmers just beyond is to lock oneself forever in the dual system of the paranoid's tennis court, with oneself as the ball. Such a settlement also is to successfully avoid any ongoing and dismaying confrontation with what freedom might really mean.

If we are to develop meta-midwifery then, and deliver ourselves and all life into new forms of freedom free even from the terror of freedom, we enter the realm of what I call metaphysical feminism.

II: THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

T
HE USUAL DICTIONARY
definition of metaphysics or metaphysical will include such descriptions as: “a division of philosophy which includes ontology and cosmology … of or relating to what is conceived as transcendent, supersensible, or transcendental”—
Webster's III;
and “Of or pertaining to ultimate reality or basic knowledge, beyond or above the laws of the physical; transcendental”—
Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Webster's
further defines “metaphysical truth” as “the truth of ultimate reality as partly or wholly transcendent of perceived actuality and experiences.”