Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  I have exaggerated the above correct-line formulae deliberately. Some (most?) may seem blatant cases of throwing out various babies with or without the bath water—a type of nonthought surely no one could advance seriously. Not so. From sufficient confusion just such non-thought can come, and frequently has, as in one notorious correct line which only a few decades ago conceived of transforming real babies into real soap, in which case throwing the baby out with the bath water appeared to the correct-liners as both sensible and sanitary.

  So we reject force adopted out of correctness, since such an adoptive parent is only an excuse. But what of the original parent, who gave her infant Force up for adoption because she felt incapable of raising it? Her name is Suffering, and she is unconcerned with expedience. She has chosen to be mad rather than to define any Other as evil (The Paradigm, state 2). Perhaps she is saintly, but then women have been saints for millennia, and it has not brought us grace. So we can mourn with her, for her, as for our own past. But still we must leave her choiceless martyrdom, as well, behind us.

  So. A good political movement could aim to imitate not the sand of a desert, but the sand of a beach:

  —which sifts through the fingers of anyone who would grab it in a fist, thus eluding possession;

  —which adapts itself with pillowing accommodation to any who would rest on it, including the shells of once-living creatures, thus risking the appearance of compassionate shapelessness, so confident is it of its own shape;

  —which irresistibly wears down stone into sand, grain by grain, adding to itself;

  —and which clings with ineradicable tenacity to any who have even remotely encountered or been touched by it.

  But the sand of a beach, not a Sahara. For it must permit of dunes but also the stubbed growth of prickly evergreens; it must fathom erosion but welcome children building castles.

  We must boil the paradigm down to its essence:

  1

  A) I’m sane.

  B) They are out to destroy me.

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

  Thus, 1 = Their malignancy protects me from my madness.

  2

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

  B) Then I must be insane.

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

  Thus, 2 = My madness protects me from their malignancy.

  So we can restate the Paradigm more succinctly:

  My madness protects me from their malignancy.

  Their malignancy protects me from my madness.

  From which would you rather be protected? And is it not somehow an overarchingly beneficent structure which provides such a carefully architectured protection? Or is it an encompassingly maleficent structure which can devise torture in such an airtight system?

  A stepping outside that circle, then. Or rather a plunge to the center of it, the heart of a mandala where the vertiginous distractions fade.

  No maps can be obtained for this place.

  She has moved from loving him at her own expense to loving herself at his expense. This is no solution, since she loves him still, he has not changed enough, or rather he has, but she has changed more, and she is weary of such expenses. What have correct lines then to do with her, as she hangs out her wash in Kansas, slides shut the file drawer in Sacramento, loads the station wagon in the Tennessee supermarket parking lot, shifts her feet on the welfare line, freaks out on acid, or sits at my typewriter?

  More: she has moved from loving (anyone—woman, man, child, the universe) at her own expense, to loving herself at anyone else’s expense—only to find that she detests herself for having done so. No grace here, merely hopelessness, although it takes a certain courage to admit it. Is this perhaps the reason some feminists who wrestled with theory (as opposed to sophomoric correct lines) in the sixties went quietly mad with despair in the seventies?

  The paradigm is that of Semiramis and the Petitioner, of Lear and the Fool. The paradigm is of Ariadne and Theseus, of Alcestis and Admētus, of Kore and Dis. The paradigm is in the mind of Antigone—who will settle for nothing if she cannot have everything. The paradigm is interknotted. Nor can it be sawed apart, in the style of patriarchy, with Alexander’s sword. No, it must be unraveled stealthily by night in the style of Penelope, while for the near future we all pretend it still exists by day.

  The female has ever been the one who spins, who weaves, who cuts the thread. She is the Norn, the Fate, the Spider. Now, like Saint Teresa’s silkworm, we must even spin our own freedom, out of no one—and no one’s expense, not even that—but ourselves.

  For if paranoia is the dread of seeing the undying horror behind each face, all the while being driven endlessly to expose face after face after face—then grace is the ecstacy of seeing the immortal joy behind each face, while possessing the exhaustionless energy required to uncover face after face after face.

  This would be the revolumination that passeth nonunderstanding.

  II: THE PARABLE

  THE PARABLE, while an actual dream, clearly borrowed and transformed one of its central images from a first-class “horror film” entitled The Island of Lost Souls. The movie was made in 1932 and it starred the incomparable Charles Laughton. It made an indelible impression on both K. and me when we first happened across it, and we still seek out the film every time it returns or is rerun on television. I don’t know if the religious metaphor of the movie staggers everyone as it does us, but I do know that this influence made itself felt not only in my dream-parable but in a poem of K.’s which so closely speaks to the paradigm and the parable both that I reprint it here, with his permission.

  TO THE MAD DOCTOR

  by Kenneth Pitchford

  (In the film The Island of Lost Souls, a doctor tries to recapitulate evolution by performing gruelling operations on living animals to raise them step by step to the human level.)

  “You made us in the House of Pain,”

  shouts one of your wretched parodies,

  now that these unbeasted creatures verge on riot,

  no longer servile to their master

  —an accusation salted by our almost human tears,

  and then one last rising up

  to tear apart our island, exploding

  into the solar sea your slaves and you.

  Made deaf to all of our complaints,

  you made us in the House of Pain.

  Yet you yourself, to all but the naive,

  are only the boiling of matter and energy

  endlessly up, hurled outward

  into galaxy, sun, and planet.

  One cinder more or less cannot put out your eyes

  in the billions of embers you have made.

  Us? Compassion for such creatures?

  No, for unlike that mad scientist, Charles Laughton,

  you made us in the House of Pain

  without even blinking back through such misguided

  good intentions at your handiwork,

  gone subtly awry in ways you hadn’t planned.

  But plan itself is the last naivete

  to credit to the forces that summoned us.

  In the instant between this galaxy’s decision

  to fling the largesse of its stars away

  and its inevitable extinction,

  you made us in the House of Pain

  for what? To mythologize you on the walls

  of caves, temples, and cathedrals?

  To slaughter each other in momentous disagreements

  about what garments to portray you in?

  The tools for drawing you have changed.

  Theology, logic, intuition, all give way

  to microscope and telescope. Indifferent destroyer,

  I call your boiling zeal the accident by which

  you made us in the House of Pain,

  that accident the great cause of our punishment

  —unless other forces we cannot see compel you.

  If so, forgive my “the.�
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  House, city, world have never held

  anyone in whom those forces

  written on the sky churned more at peace

  here than there. We’ve mostly simpered and killed

  and blanched the faces from other people’s children.

  You made us in the House of Pain

  to give and take that harm, to want and hunger,

  to shudder servile in that house.

  Of other ways to live, women

  speak every century or so.

  And, yes, your configurations have a beauty

  if seen abstractly. Yet how many civilizations

  wiser than ours wink out in the sudden nova

  quaking outward through Orion’s belt?

  You made us in the House of Pain;

  what beyond that is still worth speaking of?

  Pain has its patterns, its complexities

  worth studying for the perfection of their form.

  But to be born almost as stupid as your beasts,

  less wise than perishing systems in some cinder

  embittering our view?—unless any total knowing

  or unknowing as we bubbled up through cell and tissue

  is the one mercy you denied us when

  you made us in the House of Pain.

  Copyright © 1977 by Kenneth Pitchford

  It would do one well to keep in mind this poem, its subtle form, and its speaker, as if they constituted the threads of a guide-line, while entering the labyrinth of the parable.

  K. and I are honored visitors being given a tour through the grounds of a famous “model” asylum. There are beautiful buildings, spacious lawns. The inmates live in the cottage system—no wards, dormitories, fences, straitjackets. The tour is conducted by the Director, an attractive if slightly pretentious man, silver-haired, kindly, his Claude Rains manner a bit disquieting. He is accompanied by the Assistant Director, a middle-aged woman of nondescript appearance (naturally) in a dark dress. His manner is leisurely, hers efficient, yet both are pleasant enough. We four pass by a stone building somewhat out of character with the other structures on the grounds; it is all on one level, but stretches out squatly for a good city-block’s worth. I linger to squint at the barely decipherable legend carved above the main lintel. The words, cut deep into the stone, have been worn away by the elements or by some hand deliberately trying to rub them down, but to no avail, although they are much fainter than their carver intended them to be. The Director, the Assistant Director, and K., a bit ahead of me on the geranium-bordered path, drift back to stand near me while I slowly read aloud the words:

  “The House The People Fear.”

  There is a short silence before the woman attempts to bustle us on to the next display. But I have grown curious to tour the stone building, and despite the dissuasive attempts of our hosts and the reluctance of K., I become adamant. I am the one who insists. We four enter the building together and proceed through various rooms, all of them appearing to be outer offices of some sort, equipped with desks, chairs, filing cabinets, bulletin boards, and other gray standard office furniture, brightened here and there by a rhododendron on someone’s desk, a saved birthday card pinned to someone’s bulletin board, a framed print on a regulation wall. There is clearly nothing to see here, in these unpeopled offices. The Assistant Director explains that no one, of course, works on a holiday such as this one. K. and I nod in understanding.

  We come to a door which, when opened, reveals a vast laboratory, all chrome and white enamel and glass, scrupulously clean and, like the offices, completely empty. A peculiar odor, like ether mixed with gasoline and honey, seems to emanate from the laboratory. It sickens me, and I announce that I have seen enough of this building; the hosts were right, after all, there is really nothing to see here today. We begin to retrace our steps when K. suddenly stops, and declares that he now would like to tour the lab, having come this far. After all, what a pity to miss seeing the latest in lab techniques and instrumentation. Apprehensive, I waver at leaving without him, but then am convinced by the courteousness of the Director and his Assistant. They invite me to walk freely around the grounds while I wait for the three of them to complete their inspection of the stone building. There are no planned tours here, they smile, no censored sights, so I am at liberty to wander as I wish. They will join me shortly out on the wide lawn which looks like a college campus quad, grassy expanses marked out by gravel paths which cross and counter-cross from all points of the grounds. I am tempted to wander about by myself so I agree, and leave them to continue their tour.

  Out on the path, in the sunshine, any anxieties I felt earlier seem absurd. I saunter toward the middle of the quad, passing people walking in groups of twos and threes. They reply to my smile with smiles, to my nod with a gracious bend of their heads, but they don’t answer any of my verbal greetings. This seems odd, although under the influence of the hot sun and the fragrance of fresh-cut grass, I lazily dismiss such behavior as their shyness toward strangers. I find a pleasant spot in the center of the lawn, take off my jacket so as to enjoy the air’s warmth, and sit down to wait for K. and our hosts, my gaze sweeping across the serenity of the grounds, the distant cottages picturesquely built from logs, with thatched roofs and geraniums in the window boxes, the thick circle of trees and hedges far out at the edge of the grounds, protecting all within from the curiosity or censure of any without. My eye comes to rest on a huge woodpile off to my left a ways, almost at the limit of the tree circle. Someone has been chopping firewood valiantly in great quantities for the coming chill—a cozy task, since every cottage has its own wood-burning fireplace in the common living room which the “residents” share, each having her or his own private room upstairs, six to a cottage. Whoever had cut all that wood so energetically had flung down the axe at last, in exhaustion no doubt, where it remained, handle at right angles to the chopping-block root in which its blade was thrust. A bit careless, I think uneasily, leaving an axe around all these lunatics, and immediately chide myself for having less progressive attitudes than the Director himself, who always referred to the inmates as residents and who was renowned for his radical solutions to modern madness. Preoccupied with my own bigotry, I am surprised to notice a young woman—a girl, really—standing to one side of the woodpile. Has she been there all along, or has she only just come up?

  Certainly her appearance is sufficiently nymph-like to make credible her manifestation from thin air. She seems between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Her slender body is whimsically dressed in some kind of ankle-length puff-petticoated organdy gown. The light skirt, which gives itself to every invitation of the breeze, billows prettily as she stoops low by the woodpile for a second, then bounces upright and runs with unconscious grace toward where I sit. As she draws nearer, I can make out the delicate face, the onyx eyes, the long blond braids which swing in rhythm to her step. She is smiling at me. She really is a charming sight.

  I smile back, and she plumps down in a whoosh of petticoats beside me, her descent to the grass one motion consistent with her fleetness of a moment earlier. We laugh together. I seem to recognize her but cannot tell from where. Surely she looks too intelligent to be a resident, yet her costume is rather precious. Perhaps the child of a resident, here visiting? But my doubts about her sanity are quickly dispelled when, after looking intensely into my eyes for a moment, she ceases smiling, nods once, decisively, as if to herself, and places a frail hand on my arm.

  “Be alert,” she says. “It will be as you suspect, not as they reassure you. Remember that. And you will need this.”

  From the folds of her dress she produces the axe which, to my horror, she swiftly places in my hand. I can do little else but stare stupidly at the axe, then at her, then at the axe again, my mouth opening and closing on questions it cannot frame. Nor do I have the time to let anything sink in, because the girl, looking past me, winces in alarm and says in a rapid, hoarse whisper, “Quick! They’re coming! Hide it, quickly, so, under y
our jacket. Speak casually of me. My poor friend, when you have need, I can be found in the third cottage from the left, there, with the white shutters. Take care. Trust no one. Goodbye.”

  Then she is on her feet, light as a butterfly. She spins around once as if in a mad little dance, curtsies, smiles a big smile, and darts off in her flying gait toward the cottage she has pointed out.

  Before I can recover, the Director, his Assistant, and K. come up. I feel the need to give them some explanation of the child I know they’ve seen.

  “The most charming little girl was just here, Director. She sang a nursery rhyme for me, danced a bit, and fluttered off. But what about you?” I throw out, in my haste to change the subject, “Did you finish touring the building?”

  The Director and his associate stare after the girl, but K. sinks down on the grass with me. He seems strangely exhausted. He explains that they had gone on, yes, and seen all the laboratories which were, after all, just laboratories, and he is now very tired and wants merely to rest for a while on the grass. He has a terrific headache, he says, and lays his head in my lap. I carefully move my jacket with its frightful contents to one side to make room for him.

  The Director apologizes for having tired us out in his desire to be thorough, to give his visitors “the complete picture.” He has other pressing duties now, and has to leave us, but the Assistant Director is highly capable of guiding us through the remainder of our visit. We say goodbye to him, and give him our thanks for his candor and hospitality. He leaves us. The Assistant Director remains, however, and seeing that K. still seems to be pained with his headache, she offers him two aspirin. I grow suddenly stiff with suspicion, although of what I cannot tell. But the anxiety is so strong that I find the excuse of asking her to get some water to go with the pills, although K. seems perfectly willing to swallow them dry. She, too, leaves us, and I try to speak of my suspicions to K., who hears little, woozy as he is. I taste the pills—they are indeed plain aspirin, and I feel like a fool. The atmosphere of the loony bin must be contagious, I think, and when the woman returns with the paper cup of water, I permit K. to swallow the aspirin and lie down again.