Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  Wooing and using it, yes. Understanding it, again. Surely no artist would ignore it, or fail to try and document such colors, shapes, constructs—such a hypnotically alien cosmos. Surely no radical could dismiss the buried messages therein. Not I, at any rate. I refused to be ashamed of my hallucinatory journeys, even after they ceased being chemically induced (these “ticketless trips” were, in fact, the most vivid and fascinating of all). And while I found Laing and gang rather sophomoric, I also tried to remain on guard against the tempting cliché of the Mad Artist (Van Gogh, Smart, Schumann, Poe, Woolf, Sexton, and Plath, here we come). Yet I still intended to find out for myself as much as I could what these archeological digs in my own brain were unearthing. I could not have foreseen or said that any usefulness to feminists would lie in this search—although clearly none of the boys, from Fanon to Szasz to Laing to Cooper were much help, since none had seriously considered what Marxists so touchingly termed The Woman Problem. On the contrary, their male-supremacist assumptions were obnoxiously omnipresent. None of them appeared particularly interested in a political analysis of female paranoia. I—permanently a female and at least temporarily a paranoid—cared.

  If, consequently, the political explorations made in the first part of this essay are consciousness-raising to other women, I am grateful. I must confess though that they were done not for this reason, but rather to discover for myself, my own personal Everywoman, what my pain meant. For me, the access to that discovery lay through the page; this essay is part of the result.

  The Paradigm is a charting, a translation, of the state of paranoia itself. This is the section based on jottings made during the experience. I’ve never read or heard anything like it, including anyone else’s version of paranoia—yet when I’ve shared this version with others I have been met with an unsettlingly intense recognition, as if I had encountered another traveler who had also once happened on that rarely frequented tourist spot known only to a few of us. The political probing of the Paradigm, as I have said, came later, evolving slowly but with at least as much startling impact as the discovery of the state itself.

  The Parable is an account of a dream I had during my courtship of these states, although I was under no chemical’s influence while dreaming it. The dream-parable does use imagery from a movie which had been influential on both Kenneth and me, and I include a poem of his to further demonstrate the connection. Relating dreams can be the dreariest of genres, but I think it worth hazarding when the dream works solidly on the mytho-poetic level one demands of one’s waking creations, and when it resonates on a political level as well. Furthermore, if the Paradigm is an explanation of the experience and the political analysis is a meditation on the Paradigm, then the Parable is a confirmation of the political analysis. The dream is therefore essentially the metaphor for the experience itself.

  The point to keep in mind is that this is real. One does not believe in the hallucinations—one knows. Even as the culture which created the reasons for such horror is real. As the insights are real. As the symbolism of dreams is real, as it can make the heart pound and the skin sweat and the muscles jerk. As the choice facing every woman who has ever loved a man in the patriarchal world is agonizingly, frighteningly, recurringly real.

  I: THE PARADIGM

  THE FEAR OF FEAR—that is the only valid terror. Surely a wise mind allows itself that one cautionary alarm.

  But to admit even one fear is to admit the possibility of them all—to admit the potential for hostility, enmity, in everyone, everything, an expanding universe of They and Them against me.

  Once “within” the mature flowering of the paranoid state this reasonless fear is so encompassing that it must be explained. Yet all explanations reduce to two alternatives, each with a subdivision; only two possibilities from which to choose:

  1

  A) I’m perfectly sane. (This is reassuring.)

  B) In which case, since I fear Them, they truly must be out to destroy me. (This is terrifying.)

  1A + 1B = I’m not mad; They are evil.

  2

  A) “They” don’t exist, or if they do, they are not malicious or malignant. They are indifferent—or even possibly loving. (This is reassuring.)

  B) In which case, to have believed so strongly in possible harm from them—I must be paranoid, mad, actually insane. (This is terrifying.)

  2A + 2B = They’re not evil; I am mad.

  These states (1 and 2) alternate in one’s consciousness, each having a subdivision of reassurance and terror. It is between these subdivisions that the tension is stretched, and between the states themselves that the balance of continuity is maintained, for the subdivisions trigger each other off to begin the cycle of alternation again. Thus one has the choice of being sane at the expense of others (1), or mad at the expense of oneself (2). Is the first state an expression of a supreme sadism, the second a comparable expression of an ultimate masochism? Or is the first a demonstration of individual self-determination, the second a demonstration of collective co-influence? Or is the first state mere selfishness, the second pure altruism?

  Inevitably, when one is thoroughly “in” state 1, the other state does not exist; it cannot. The reverse is true. There is no coexistence in consciousness of the two states, only a ceding of place, one to the other, in turn. Indeed, when “in” one state, the captive seeks the reassurance of the other as a means of escape from the panic of the present state-only to find that the flight entails encountering “those evils that we know not of” as much or more than it does reaching a momentary breathing space. The rodent in Kafka’s trenchant story “The Burrow.”

  It’s revealing that the linkage of subdivision 1A with subdivision 2A equals what could be called “health.”

  1A) I’m perfectly sane. (Reassuring)

  2A) They don’t exist or, if they do, are indifferent or beneficent. (Reassuring)

  1A + 2A = “Health”

  (in the sense of relief and happiness).

  Furthermore, the linkage of 1B with 2B also equals “health” (a normal response to a threatening situation is fear).

  1B) They truly are out to destroy me. (Terrifying)

  2B) I believe in possible harm from them. (Terrifying)

  1B + 2B = “Health”

  (in the sense of self-preservation).

  Unfortunately, those subdivisions do not cross-relate this way in the process described here. If they did, we would have no problem.

  Interesting too, that one cannot cross-link 1A with 2B, or 1B with 2A—because that would be a linkage of direct opposites which would then each cancel the other out. Such a strategy is very Buddhist, but regrettably it does not appear available to the captive paranoid:

  1A) I’m perfectly sane.

  2B) I’m mad to believe in harm from Them.

  1A + 2B = Self-cancellation.

  1B) They are out to destroy me.

  2A) They don’t exist, or are indifferent or beneficent.

  1B + 2A = Other-cancellation.

  However, in reverse order, 2A and 1B can relate:

  2A) They don’t exist, or are indifferent or beneficent. (Reassuring)

  1B) They want me to think just that, to be reassured, drop my guard, be vulnerable again. (Terrifying)

  And 2B and 1A can relate in a parallel reversed order:

  2B) I’m paranoid, mad, insane. (Terrifying)

  1A) To even recognize my madness, let alone fear it, I must be sane. (Reassuring)

  This combination of subdivisions seems at first to break up the components more clearly. We get a less alloyed essence here: 2A and 1B combine to create a state of pure paranoia, unadulterated by thoughts about madness. But 2B and 1A seem to describe pure health, self-contained, even self-preoccupied, uncontaminated with threatening thoughts about “Them.” At least this is relative health, in that 1A accepts 2B (just as, above, 1B takes 2A into consideration), and by so doing seems to break the cycle.

  Is such a cross-linkage of subdivisions the solution,
then? In an obvious way, of course: one walks that line between health and madness all the time. Everyone does this, in fact, but only the intelligent realize it. Yet it hardly seems right that the only way to stay relatively sane is to live in terror of one’s madness. A peculiar sanity, that. The pat answer would be that one must stay aware of it, but not fear it—a smug, non-experiential logic. Go tell it to Kafka.

  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 indifference.

  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 conceivable—and sometimes mandatory—that 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 states—the 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 there—a 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 room—here 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 embodying—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 weapons—and 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. Disappo
inted 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 loved—are 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, selfhood—because all these hoods have in the past covered the faces of institutions we now see as oppressive.