Going Too Far (53 page)

Tonight I dreamt that Blake and Hektor both came downstairs where we (K. and I) were sitting, to let us know that something was wrong upstairs: Hektor meowing an unearthly guttural
rowrl
and Blake standing frightened, balancing on one foot, on the stairs. We pooh-poohed it all, then went up to find the top floor dense with smoke. There was no sensation of heat. There seemed to be no fire.

K. asked me (shouting above the smoke as if it were a din), “What's causing it? Where is it coming from?” He rushed to open the window in Blake's room, I to the windows in the front. For some reason, in dream-logic, this seemed an imperative thing to do. But I found that there were layers to open first: drapes, then curtains, then shade, then shutters, then screens, then at last I could fling up the sash and let in fresh air. But what billowed through instead, was the sound of sirens, loud and frantic.

I woke up. The sirens were real. Men's voices shouting in the street. Megaphones.

From the downstairs window I could see all the police cars—more than the twelve I managed to count, as they one by one backed up from their circle in the middle of the street and drove off. A threatened corner mini-riot perhaps, the way for our neighbors in this slum of a great city to pass a summer night. Was the fight between the blacks and Puerto Ricans, over turf? Or between the dealers and the pimps, the junkies and the bums?
Death to the Pimps
read the sidewalk graffiti defiantly stencilled by prostitutes trying to organize. Was management union-busting? I could see no more. But August has arrived on that street, living nightmare outside and in. My heart pounds with it. I know all the political reasons. They merely clarify the fear.

Back in bed, I lit a cigarette, really hoping to wake K. He stirred, asking only half-awake if anything was wrong. I told him I'd had a nightmare which was real. But he was too tired, too full of his own griefs this time to want to listen. He turned over, pretending to be reassured and reassuring, back to sleep. Oh my dear.

Tomorrow—no, today, August 2, Elizabeth Gould Davis will be buried with no sheaf of wheat from me on her grave. She chose not to linger with lungs that would no longer breathe. But toward the end she had said that even the air was intelligible, could we but understand it. She cleaned her house. She found good homes for her cats. She had no children.

No sheaf of wheat from me on her grave. What have the child and the cat, saner animals than we, been trying to tell us about danger in this house, on this street, in this world?

Self-inflicted?

When I have a nightmare into whose bed can I crawl, like Blake, and be comforted? Into whose grail can I pour myself, if not my own? In what asylum can I seek to hide my fear, which will not lunify it? In whose grave can I rest except my own?

V: THE QUESTION

S
OONER OR LATER
we come to the question.

The question hides like a tick inside the casing of the most heavily armored of us, the most cynical, the most assured and embittered. It haunts those who know all the answers. Because sooner or later the rhetoric leaves one hungry for some truth, and in moments of crisis when the old wound runs and the adrenaline flows—then all the words like sexism and male supremacy and patriarchy and oppression compact into one word, as concisely felt as the shocked wail of a child:
unfair
.

What have we done to deserve this? The more radical a feminist one becomes, the less answerable the question appears—for if one believes that all other oppressions stemmed from the primary one, the subjugation of women by men, then the question becomes all the more imperative.

Some feminists reject theories of the existence of ancient matriarchal cultures (matriarchal in all senses, with women holding religious and secular power) mainly because it might then be required of them to explain what happened to
undo
such cultures? How did the “patriarchal revolution” come about? Or how did the matriarchies fall? What mistakes were made, and by whom? Why?

Some feminists may opt for a biologically deterministic analysis (which leads precariously toward a “final solution” of technologically induced mutation or the actual extermination of one sex by the other—whether the result be as gynocide or androcide). Others reassure themselves and one another that environment/culture is the sole culprit, and
that a restructuring of it will solve the whole problem. A few have tilted out toward science-fiction theories of interplanetary colonization way back when. Some of us pretend to know—but wouldn't be caught alive saying. Some even pretend not to care any longer, claiming that our solutions must be more drastic than any analysis of the situation could help us devise. Meanwhile the question still hides like a tick inside our armor. And each of us hunches secretly within herself, like a hurt child, not understanding.
Unfair. What have I done to deserve this? What have I ever done?

This is Wednesday. I was born on a Wednesday. Shall I give you the answer I sometimes think I know on Wednesdays?

VI: ANOTHER PARABLE

How can we love?
             

How can we
not
love?
        

—The Three Marias,

N
EW
P
ORTUGUESE
L
ETTERS

T
HE SEA ORGANISMS
crawled up onto the land to commit ecstatic suicide, to escape triumphantly from existing, to return to infinite pure energy, motionless.

But life forced itself to flow through even the gasps they drank in of what they assumed was death: air. Despite themselves, they became air-breathing organisms. Every step taken toward nonexisting brings us closer toward existing.

It is the fault of something Female.

Nature, we have heard, abhors a vacuum. Speaking then through male anguish at his own womb envy, Nature discovered existential despair. But male anguish expressed this despair as misogyny. What else to feel when faced with this female endless birthing, this repeated insistence on life and life-giving and life-re-creation? What
is
this maddening tendency to bear and bear and bear, as if each woman were somehow somewhere in herself singing “I never met a universe I didn't like”?

He only wants her to understand his wretchedness. He persecutes her to make her understand why death is the answer, he tortures her to raise her consciousness to the suicidal, to make her as truly aware as he is. She won't despair. She won't die. She creates agriculture, domesticates animals. Culture is born.

He appropriates her gods, her whole cosmic space, to the merciless, negative, bleak, terror-filled void in which he is trapped. She curses his gods—but does not die. She calls to him. She sees his beauty writhing,
contorted in pain. He sobs with longing to share what she is, sees, owns, the whole earth as female, the solar system female, the universe female, all that he smells and touches and which holds him and bore him and will outlive him—female, eternally rutting and conceiving and laughing and producing.

For what? What is there to celebrate here, in this dimension? Is there no way to kill her out of this gross procreation? Can none of his entropy conquer her energy? If he cannot stop her, can he at least successfully pretend that he
insists
she do precisely what she is doing? Can he tell himself he
demands
she conceive? Rape is born, his own parthenogenic child. Laws are written controlling her body's freedom. She creates pottery, baskets, songs. She investigates the power of herbs. Art and science are born.

Is there no way to stop her? Is there no way to evade this inexhaustible deathless pursuing consciousness? He devises nirvanas of escape, Oriental philosophies which pretend she is illusion, Occidental philosophies which pretend she is existentially meaningless. And all the while she smiles and conceives. Children. Grapefruits. The thimble. Barnacles. The printing press. City squirrels.

He is more and more trapped into his systems. He invents new and efficient ways of murdering what she produces—wars, chemicals, political systems which destroy her creations or treat them as products. He is consumed with self-loathing for having become the weapon of himself and never the victim in his global attempt to commit suicide. She weeps for him and gives birth to a new star, hoping its nova will divert him from his misery.

He invents names for her creatures, deliberately mixed around. He calls the human ones insects, vermin, pigs, cows. Then he kills them, and their animal namesakes, too. He forgets what and who and why he is killing. He knows only where he came from—that womb of earth, and where he is going—that same insatiable womb with its infinite capacity for orgasm and for creation as it sucks him in and spews him out and laughs lovingly
lovingly
at him as if he were her plaything.

Only when he has totally forgotten who he is and why he hates her so; only when she herself has almost forgotten herself; only when his pain has at last infected her so that she almost has begun to listen, almost understand his message of nonexistence, his longing for peace and death and the silence of a collapsed nonwomb whose energy and matter are once and for all time separated—only then does she slowly rouse herself to remind him.

That time is now.

¹
Dr. Mary Daly, both as a friend and a feminist philosopher, has been a cherished influence on me in general, but she is not to be held responsible in the slightest for the ideas I present here. In a different instance, no relationship, either of influence or idea, intentional or inadvertent, exists between Ti-Grace Atkinson's pejorative phrase “metaphysical cannibalism” and my construct, metaphysical feminism. (Although the first words in both cases are identical, the second words reflect the difference in our entire approach and emphasis.) I do not claim to be one of Ms. Atkinson's sources of inspiration, nor is she one of mine.

²
John Donne, “Sermon Preached to the King at White-Hall, the first Sunday in Lent (February, 1626/7),” in
The Sermons of John Donne
, selected and introduced by Theodore Gill, Living Age Books, published by Meridian Books, Inc., New York, 1958.

³
Selected and edited, with an essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1921.

⁴
In H. J. C. Grierson,
op. cit
.

⁵
Kenneth Pitchford, “On Carew's Elegie for Donne,” Oxford, 1956, unpublished essay; quoted by permission.

⁶
In
Selected Prose of
T.
S. Eliot
, edited with an Introduction by Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1975.

⁷
Bishop King's
Exequy
, an elegy of longing and love for his dead wife, is simply one of the finest poems in English.

⁸
In a splendid paragraph from which I cannot resist quoting, Eliot places at least the potential for a unified sensibility at the center of the creative process: “When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.” T. S. Eliot,
op. cit
.

⁹
J. B. Leishman,
The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne
, Hutchinson's University Library, London, 1955.

¹⁰
In
The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne
, Introduction and Notes by Theodore Redpath, Methuen, London, 1956.

¹¹
The Women Poets in English: An Anthology
, edited with an Introduction by Ann Stanford, A Herder and Herder Book, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1972.

¹²
“Song” (“Goe, and catche a falling starre”).

¹³
“Elegie XIX, Going To Bed.”

¹⁴
“Epithalamion Made at Lincolnes Inne.”

¹⁵
“The Canonization.”

¹⁶
All of the lines quoted in this paragraph are from
The Poems of John Donne
, edited from the old editions and numerous manuscripts, with Introduction and Commentary by Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, London, 1912.

¹⁷
Samuel Johnson,
Lives of the English Poets
, first published in 1779 and 1781. My reference edition is published in two volumes by Oxford University Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege), with an Introduction by Arthur Waugh, London 1906; 1952 edition.

¹⁸
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,”
op. cit
., note 10.

¹⁹
“Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”—from “Annunciation” in
The Holy Sonnets
, John Donne,
op. cit
., note 16. For an exhaustive and stimulating examination of such images I recommend to the reader Rosemond Tuve's
Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics
, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1947. Ms. Tuve's scholarship on this period is as thorough as it is creative.

²⁰
“Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:” XIX of
The Holy Sonnets, op. cit
., note 16.

²¹
From “The Second Anniversarie,” in
Of the Progresse of the Soule
, by John Donne,
op. cit
.

²²
This fondness extends itself to secular music of the Middle Ages, as well; nevertheless, I was gratified to learn that the structure of Gregorian chant is based on very old musical forms dating back to “pagan” matriarchal religious ritual. (See
Music in History
, McKinney and Anderson, American Book Company, New York, 1940). This comforts my conscience almost as much as the music delights my spirit.