Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there lived a witch. Her closest friend in all the village was a peasant woman who, alone among the others, knew she was a witch. They had good times together, and they helped each other out.

  But it was quite important that no one else around discern their friendship, in case, you see, the witch should be discovered and her friend, by their association, implicated. They both were very careful.

  But then, the witch was also lonely, for although it wasn’t known she was a witch, it was suspected. She wasn’t … “popular.” Now and then, when the townsfolk paid her any mind, she found she talked with pride about her friend.

  Horrified later, she would blurt out her error to the peasant woman, and together they would try to estimate the danger. Never in this talking of betrayal did they speak except in jest of how the peasant woman held within her hands a possible betrayal of the witch greater than any error the latter could commit. Nor did this strike them as peculiar.

  One day, the townsfolk noticed that the peasant woman had a cat who always followed her. They gossiped that she kept strange hours, and she could read and write. They came and took her, for to burn her as a witch.

  Someone remembered that the other woman (the real witch) once had claimed to be this witch’s friend—but they dismissed the notion that the other crazy ever could have had a friend, even a witch, and let her go.

  One version of this story ends that when the priest came in the morning to fetch the prisoner to the stake, he found both women—their stone-stiff hands clutching their ribs, and pools of salt tears gathered in the creases of their rigor-mortis grins.

  “Dead,” he gasped, “of laughter! They have eluded us,” he droned. The people marveled.

  The other version goes that they both disappeared on one or the other’s broom, and still circle the moon on dark nights, like two amused Sonja Henies coasting the sky.

  There are three morals to this story—fragments of a conversation overheard one night by village idiots who could comprehend no meaning in these words:

  Whisper One:

  All your betrayals of me, my dear,

  are somehow payments against what we both fear

  and never speak of: mine.

  Whisper Two:

  Friendship is mutual

  blackmail elevated to the level of love.

  Whisper Three:

  We may as well trust each other.

  They’re going to try to burn us, anyway.

  1974

  1 See Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, SDS, Random House, New York, 1973.

  PART FIVE

  Beyond the Seventh Veil: Recent Writings

  PART V:

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  Five years of traveling, lecturing, and giving poetry readings taught me much about my country and my movement, and not a little about myself. For one thing, I learned that the unavoidable course required by nature—entropy—and the inescapable process entailed in any serious politics or aesthetics—growth—are inseparable, congruent, and diametrically opposed. Which is a sobering realization.

  At the first, it was not only the physical, emotional, and intellectual “high” communicated by women which gave me such intense pleasure. It was also admittedly the glamor of travel, an activity which I had done to death in my theatrical working-childhood, but one which the intervening years had glossed over with nostalgic romance. All those airplanes! All that toy food served with toy-sized plastic knives and forks by competent human-size flight attendants who were treated by most passengers as toy women! All those podiums and phallic lavalier microphones! All those motels and hotels and all that room service! All those local communes hostessed by feminists! All those receptions at which one was in turn lionized, criticized, deified, and crucified.

  Except that, after a year of such questionable exoticisms, life began to appear a deadly round of airports echoing flight announcements, of deserted terminals at 11:00 P.M. or 6:00 A.M., of Holiday Inns and Ramada Inns and Travelodges and local motels, these last also often used by Big Men On Campus to celebrate their successful campaign against some other young woman who was finally “going too far,” whose emotions they were callously manipulating and whose reputation they were light-heartedly corroding. Life became never being able to sit at my desk for more than three days at a time without having to pack again. Life became long-distance phone calls with my husband and child, calls squeezed in after the afternoon guest-seminar and before the evening lecture, while I hunched over a room-service sandwich in my motel room and nursed a container of rapidly cooling tea for my ever-present cold. Life was trying to pack one small bag for a February trip which would span Canada and Arizona; life was revising old poems and trying to draft new ones on seat-back tray-tables in every airborne vehicle from a 747 to a two-seater helicopter; it was a chronic stiff neck from dozing off in trains and buses and waiting rooms and ladies’ rooms and backstage green rooms.

  Life was also learning that the at-first temptingly homey stay at the local feminist commune was to be avoided, if possible, and without giving offense, since, with a few rare and memorable exceptions, it usually meant some or all of the following: (1) Being kept awake through the night for the “intimate, exclusive lecture”—the unstated but equivalent price of room and board (after which the local sisters went to bed and their bleary guest lurched off to the airport for another round of same); (2) Being fed some gaggingly healthy gummy brown rice with a puddle of soy sauce thereon and a limp cabbage leaf thereunder, this repast suitably accompanied either by surprisingly abundant cans of beer (which I happen not to drink) or more likely by teensy cups of lukewarm tea which had the color of herbal shampoo but, I am certain, less flavor; (3) Feeling compelled to insist on washing up after dinner, because after all one did not wish to appear like a horrible New-York-type-star-leader who let other women wait on her forgodsake, and consequently doing dishes for ten people after having lectured and before the all-night private pump-her-for-information rap; (4) Finding that if one were permitted, reluctantly, a few hours of sleep, this relaxation was supposed to take place in a sleeping bag on the floor. To complain and be a rotten sport was out of the question. To reject these sisters, hurt the feelings of women who were, after all, genuinely and flatteringly hungry for whatever one had to share with them, women who really were trying to treat their guest as best they knew how—this rejection was also unthinkable. One grinned, talked, rasped cheerfully hoarse, sucked cough drops until one’s tongue glistened chartreuse, washed chopsticks, actually learned to enjoy it all—and tried to sleep on the plane.

  Later, to be sure, one rediscovered the miraculous luxury of privacy at hotels, except that such accommodations were rarely paid for by the school, and were cumulatively costly. In time, too, they began to appear hallucinatingly identical. The smell of plastic philodendrons in certain motel lobbies, particularly at dawn, when one is waiting half comatose for the town’s sole taxi, operated by the town’s sole surly taxi driver, to convey one to the single-runway airport which lacks even a coffee machine—that gangrenous fake green smell shall hover in my nostrils, I think, at my dying, especially if I have led a wicked life. As will return, in my worst nightmares, the apparition of those iridescently orange cabbage roses with which it seemed most of the motel-room walls were papered, the design carried through coyly in the bedspread fabric. Since the boreal air conditioner rarely could be turned off and an extra blanket was nowhere to be found, the luckless inhabitant would appropriate the bedspread as additional covering—only to find, once tucked in, that its matching pattern made her feel as if she had become subsumed into the wall and was now peeping out through a rip in the paper.

  There was in addition the educational experience of being a woman traveling alone. This subject requires a book in itself, which I yet may write, if I can quell the retching sensation that rises in my throat when I think of reliving those experiences in order to write at length about them: the hotel elevator at 2:00 A.M. filled with potbellied, boozy, bald
ing, cigar-chomping conventioneers—and me, replete with feminist buttons, returning from a late C-R session. There was the veritable parade of discharged soldiers flying the last lap home from Vietnam, to be met by wives, mothers, and girlfriends all unaware of how earlier, on the plane, their loyally awaited man had maneuvered the seat next to a single woman and then, despite discouragement, had launched into bragging about his exploits, sexual and military, in “Nam.” But there was also an unexpectedly quick trust and friendliness among the traveling women strangers, particularly where children were involved; oh, the whole vocabularies exchanged in a simple offer to hold her baby while the mother wipes the takeoff throw-up from the front of his three-year-old sister!

  I learned, too, that our current system of campaigning by public officials is not only as gross a ritual as I’d always thought, but an appallingly dangerous tradition as well, and least of all from the threat most articulated: assassination. Rather, the danger lies in one’s seeing too many faces, shaking too many hands, facing too many audiences, answering too many of the same questions, repeating too often what may once have been sincerely meant statements but which are reduced inevitably to platitudes. The danger is in watching complexities “of necessity” simplified (not enough time, not enough space, not enough attention), then oversimplified, then debased into the very kind of nonthought one fancied one was opposing. The degree of cynicism in this Gresham’s law school is horribly unavoidable, as is the exhaustion, the spiritual embitterment, the emotional megalomania (since one tries to use this meaningless aimed-at-the-celebrity “love” to fill that life’s personal loneliness), and the self-disgust at having let oneself be trapped in such a squirrel cage. Whoever has gone this round is unfit, for at least five years after, to hold public office. By that time some sense of the individual and of reality may have returned. (I hasten to add that I saw, met, spoke to and at and with only a fraction of what our so-called political leaders—those who wield power over our daily lives—face.) This process is a vile, corruptive one. It slackens the spirit and evokes contempt for the very people on whose behalf one is purportedly acting; they begin to appear as a faceless and manipulating mass. And one begins to feel like an equally faceless and manipulable demagogue.

  I ought to have feared this hypocrisy, ought to have recognized or rather remembered it from the almost twenty years of my life spent in the theater. But there is honor, at least, in that profession—one’s very job is to appear to be something other than who and what one really is; one’s skill, in fact, is bent toward that end. This is hardly comparable to the political candidate (or radical organizer) who claims to be her own self but learns not to expose authentic aspects of that self for fear of losing the attention or affection of the constituency. Because in our society the political message does depend to a lamentable degree on who delivers it, and how.1 The actor’s pretense is a translucent art, and is therefore decent. The politician’s pretense is an opaque charade, a deliberate deception.

  There were times when my own life seemed to curve back on itself and mockingly return me to the same progression of stages, cameras, and mikes I had fought so hard to escape as an adolescent. What child’s talent my family once had seen fit to exploit became an adult’s skill which my cause now saw fit to conscript. Plus ça change…, I would mutter, in my crabbier moments. Yet the responsibility for one’s life choice ultimately is one’s own—that is, after sexism, racism, and the other cage-bars of existence have set the boundaries within which that choice can be made, although sometimes it can be made bravely enough to bend the bars, or render them irrelevant.

  During this siege of disillusion, I learned that the forging of a public face, seemingly so necessary for the political activist (whether a senatorial candidate or an outside agitator) and perhaps even useful to the interpretive artist, can be quite destructive to the creative artist. How can it be otherwise, when one’s replies perforce become shortened, self-protective, and superficial in a question-and-answer session: it is neither the time nor place to be particularly confidential (although I found myself trying, and in consequence often sustained internal emotional bleeding). Yet the real answers, and more importantly the questions themselves, self-asked, are the stuff of the artist, in whose context the time and place are unimportant, and for whom length, self-exposure, and depth are all assumed prerequisites, givens. I chose this latter course a long time ago, and in 1975 I renewed that vow, never again to be quite so successfully diverted from these “orders.”

  But then that year saw the mid-decade shift in so many different ways. The war, that pustulating sore in the soul of America, had ended. Vietnam “fell” to those who lived there—the Vietnamese. The first piece of writing in this section, “Letter from a War,” speaks to the trauma of that trauma’s close. The seventies were, because of or despite this episode, turning on an inward-directed course: self-discovery, self-analysis, an approximation if not a return to the psychological world view so popular in the fifties. It is as if external political action must appear for the moment less necessary or possible or too frightening or exhausting—then people will reencounter the personal. But the motivation is too often retreat instead of risk, and sometimes it’s just too late—one has lost the whole world and not gained one’s soul, since the internal political action (and knowledge) has been repressed into nonexistence, even at the expense of that external politics for whose urgent sake it was supposedly sacrificed in the first place. What a pity, and how senseless, anyway, is this dichotomy! It sends so many straight from the street demonstration to the dropout farm, from the rhetoric of the central committee (or of the Nixon White House) to the jargon of the latest guru (or of new-found fundamentalist Christianity). This is change?

  Is it merely pride, then, which makes me feel that the Women’s Movement has weathered such a shift admirably well? And is that because we are founded on a belief that the personal is political, the insistence on a breakdown of patriarchal distinctions, neat categories, and linear thought? I hope so. I do notice that women seem bent on learning as much as possible about ourselves, each other, children, men, the world—and that most of us are no more willing to sacrifice internal psychological truths than we are to genuflect before the shrine of The One Truth According to Saint Freud. The essays on sado-masochistic fantasies and on paranoia in this section of Going Too Far describe a continuing attempt on my part to synchronize that same interior landscape with exterior “reality” and thus discover a synthesis which can teach us something about each, and about the third thing they constitute, anew, together.

  The mid-seventies saw yet another major development in the Women’s Movement, the birth of what we might call women’s culture. This trend, in tone as celebratory and in cost as excruciating as labor contractions, is explored in the last essays of this section, for it is as a feminist and an artist that I rejoice in the embrace of art and politics—and it is as an artist and a feminist that I am unnerved at the betimes lewd quality of that embrace.

  W. B. Yeats wrote, “All things can tempt me from this craft of verse,” as he schizophrenically endured one magnetic pull toward his art and another toward his vision of a transformed Ireland. There must be, for the artist who refuses to hide in the ivory tower or to serve as a door-mat propagandist, some wholly new approach, some synthesis, some rejection of these narrow extremes. Can the feminist artist create this space? Is she uniquely in a position to do so, since as a woman it has been more difficult for her all along—to be an artist, to be political, to be? Can her life-act of rebellion contain in itself the disparate forms of rebellion as well as clues to their harmony? Time and herstory will tell us. A terrible duty is born. But the last section of this book of personal documents is a reaching toward that goal. It contains writings which have not been published before, which were conceived away from (and sometimes in reaction against) the podium, and written behind all the rhetoric.

  I could tremble, if I let myself, that the reader who has generously accompanied me this far
might feel betrayed by or at least unprepared for some of the pieces in this last section. It is even possible, though less likely, that a rare reader in an excess of misinterpretation might suspect that I have finally made good a warning in one of my poems: “And I will speak … more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand …” That this is neither my intention nor my hope will be clear to those who comprehend the imperative of going beyond the confessional style to the analytical, beyond the philosophical to the poetic, beyond the aesthetic to the ecstatic. Or, to put it more plainly, these last essays are merely about the manner in which feminism can be defined as daring to constitute that forbidden junction of those three subjects all well-brought-up members of Western civilization were told never to discuss in polite company: sex, politics, and religion. Women face the difficulty of inventing the gesture through which we grasp our reality and thereby simultaneously invent ourselves. It is a life-and-death dance, and in this sense we are truly a new kind of movement. I have tried, in the later pieces in this section, to refuse a certain self-indulgent vulnerability in myself the refuge of mere confession without attempted conclusions. If my gestures in this endeavor appear unfamiliar or awkward, I am genuinely sorry—which is hardly meant as an apology but rather as an expression of real sorrow that we have been kept from making such gestures, or recognizing them, for so long. The dance is, after all, that progression of movements from gravity toward grace, in the midst of which, and almost by chance, the dancer finds herself discarding one veil of superfluous skin after another. That she is offered great rewards for this act—entire realms of material power and even the dedication of human sacrifice—is a consideration beneath contempt. Likewise, the certainty that she will be called upon to pay for this act with her own life is an eventuality unworthy of diverting her attention.