Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 18
There are old women—little old ladies, as people always say; little bits, fragments of the great dummy statue goddess A Woman. Nobody hears if old women say yes or no, nobody pays them sixty cents for anything. Old men run things. Old men run the show, press the buttons, make the wars, make the money. In the man’s world, the old man’s world, the young men run and run and run until they drop, and some of the young women run with them. But old women live in the cracks, between the walls, like roaches, like mice, a rustling sound, a squeaking. Better lock up the cheese, boys. It’s terrible, you turn up a corner of civilization and there are all these old women running around on the wrong side—
I say to you, you know, you’re going to get old. And you can’t hear me. I squeak between the walls. I’ve walked through the mirror and am on the other side, where things are all backwards. You may look with a good will and a generous heart, but you can’t see anything in the mirror but your own face; and I, looking from the dark side and seeing your beautiful young faces, see that that’s how it should be.
But when you look at yourself in the mirror, I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths. Not a failed man—a person who can never succeed because success is basically defined as being male—and not a failed goddess, a person desperately trying to hide herself in the dummy Woman, the image of men’s desires and fears. I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength. You’re going to need it. I hope you don’t try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you’ll take and make your own soul; that you’ll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy; that you’ll feed your life, eat, “eat as you go”—you who nourish, be nourished!
If being a cog in the machine or a puppet manipulated by others isn’t what you want, you can find out what you want, your needs, desires, truths, powers, by accepting your own experience as a woman, as this woman, this body, this person, your hungry self. On the maps drawn by men there is an immense white area, terra incognita, where most women live. That country is all yours to explore, to inhabit, to describe.
But none of us lives there alone. Being human isn’t something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.
If a woman sees other women as Medusa, fears them, turns a stone ear to them, these days, all her hair may begin to stand up on end hissing, Listen, listen, listen! Listen to other women, your sisters, your mothers, your grandmothers—if you don’t hear them how will you ever understand what your daughter says to you?
And the men who can talk, converse with you, not trying to talk through the dummy Yes-Woman, the men who can accept your experience as valid—when you find such a man love him, honor him! But don’t obey him. I don’t think we have any right to obedience. I think we have a responsibility to freedom.
And especially to freedom of speech. Obedience is silent. It does not answer. It is contained. Here is a disobedient woman speaking, Wendy Rose of the Hopi and Miwok people, saying in a poem called “The Parts of a Poet,”4
parts of me are pinned
to earth, parts of me
undermine song, parts
of me spread on the water,
parts of me form a rainbow
bridge, parts of me follow
the sandfish, parts of me
are a woman who judges.
Now this is what I want: I want to hear your judgments. I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth, talking about working, about making, about unmaking, about eating, about cooking, about feeding, about taking in seed and giving out life, about killing, about feeling, about thinking; about what women do; about what men do; about war, about peace; about who presses the buttons and what buttons get pressed and whether pressing buttons is in the long run a fit occupation for human beings. There’s a lot of things I want to hear you talk about.
This is what I don’t want: I don’t want what men have. I’m glad to let them do their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings. Let them not take our work, our words, from us. If they can, if they will, let them work with us and talk with us. We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no words but ours.
I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don’t let us sink back into silence. If we don’t tell our truth, who will? Who’ll speak for my children, and yours?
So I end with the end of a poem by Linda Hogan of the Chickasaw people, called “The Women Speaking.”5
Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distances
on perfect feet.
Daughters, I love you.
Notes
1. Sojourner Truth, in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985), pp. 255–56.
2. Joy Harjo, “The Blanket Around Her,” in That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, ed. Rayna Green (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 127.
3. Denise Levertov, “Stepping Westward,” in Norton Anthology, p. 1951.
4. Wendy Rose, “The Parts of a Poet,” in That’s What She Said, p. 204.
5. Linda Hogan, “The Women Speaking,” in ibid., p. 172.
WOMAN / WILDERNESS
(1986)
In June of 1986, Gary Snyder invited me to come talk to his class in Wilderness at the University of California at Davis. I told him I would say a little about woman and wilderness and read some poetry, mostly from my book Always Coming Home. What follows is what I said before getting into the reading. Highly tendentious, it was meant to, and did, provoke lively discussion.
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
To this, Civilized Woman, in the voice of Susan Griffin, replies as follows:
We say there is no way to see his dying as separate from her living, or what he had done to her, or what part of her he had used. We say if you change the course of this river you change the shape of the whole place. And we say that what she did then could not be separated from what she held sacred in herself, what she had felt when he did that to her, what we hold sacred to ourselves, what we feel we could not go on without, and we say if this river leaves this place, nothing will grow and the mountain will crumble away, and we say what he did to her could not be separated from the way that he looked at her, and what he felt was right to do to her, and what they do to us, we say, shapes how they see us. That once the trees are cut down, the water will wash the mountain away and the river be heavy with mud, and there will be a flood. And we say that what he did to her he did to all of us.
And that one fact cannot be separated from another. And had he seen more clearly, we say, he might have predicted his own death. How if the trees grew on that hillside there would be no flood. And you cannot divert this river. We say look how the water flows from this place and returns as rainfall, everything returns, we say, and one thing follows another, there are limits, we say, on what can be done and everything moves. We are all a part of this motion, we say, and the way of the river is sacred, and this grove of trees is sacred, and we ourselves, we tell you, are sacred.1
What is happening here is that the wilderness is answering. This has never happened before. We who live at this time are hearing news that has never been heard before. A new thing is happening.
Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distances
on perfect feet.
The women are speaking: so says Linda Hogan of the Chickasaw people.2 The women are speaking. Those who were identified as having nothing to say, as sweet silence or monkey-chatterers, those who were identified with Nature, which listens, as against Man, who speaks—those people are speaking. They speak for themselves and for the other people, the animals, the trees, the rivers, the rocks. And what they say is: We are sacred.
Listen: they do not say, “Nature is sacred.” Because they distrust that word, Nature. Nature as not including humanity, Nature as what is not human, that Nature is a construct made by Man, not a real thing; just as most of what Man says and knows about women is mere myth and construct. Where I live as woman is to men a wilderness. But to me it is home.
The anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ardener, talking about an African village culture, made a useful and interesting mental shape. They laid down two circles largely but not completely overlapping, so that the center of the figure is the tall oval of interlap, and on each side of it are facing crescents of non-overlap. One of the two circles is the Dominant element of the culture, that is, Men. The other is the Muted element of the culture, that is, Women. As Elaine Showalter explains the figure, “All of male consciousness is within the circle of the Dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language.” Both the crescent that belongs to men only and the crescent that belongs to women only, outside the shared, central, civilized area of overlap, may be called “the wilderness.” The men’s wilderness is real; it is where men can go hunting and exploring and having all-male adventures, away from the village, the shared center, and it is accessible to and structured by language. “In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of legend…. But men do not know what is in the wild,”3 that is, the no-man’s-land, the crescent that belongs to the Muted group, the silent group, the group within the culture that is not spoken, whose experience is not considered to be part of human experience, that is, the women.
Men live their whole lives within the Dominant area. When they go off hunting bears, they come back with bear stories, and these are listened to by all, they become the history or the mythology of that culture. So the men’s “wilderness” becomes Nature, considered as the property of Man.
But the experience of women as women, their experience unshared with men, that experience is the wilderness or the wildness that is utterly other—that is in fact, to Man, unnatural. That is what civilization has left out, what culture excludes, what the Dominants call animal, bestial, primitive, undeveloped, unauthentic—what has not been spoken, and when spoken, has not been heard—what we are just beginning to find words for, our words not their words: the experience of women. For dominance-identified men and women both, that is true wildness. Their fear of it is ancient, profound, and violent. The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
All we can do is try to speak it, try to say it, try to save it. Look, we say, this land is where your mother lived and where your daughter will live. This is your sister’s country. You lived there as a child, boy or girl, you lived there—have you forgotten? All children are wild. You lived in the wild country. Why are you afraid of it?
Notes
1. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Books, 1978), p. 186.
2. Linda Hogan, “The Women Speaking,” in That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, ed. Rayna Green (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 172.
3. Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 262. See also Shirley Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women (New York: Halsted Press, 1978).
THE CARRIER BAG THEORY OF FICTION
(1986)
In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn’t even work hard at it—much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else’s field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.
Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…. No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.
When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.
Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.
If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you—even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little
Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient…. Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Womens Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.