Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  URANIA And how inevitable that, if they have not even any species-loyalty left, they should treat other creatures, other living matter, with still more contemptuous cruelty than they reserve for their own kind?

  MELPOMENE The Daughters know this better than anyone else at present. It is their burden. They have only begun to utter this burden aloud.

  POLYMNIA Let it be sung, this new word. For the word is miraculous. Not for nothing have all patriarchal religions realized this, locked the word into silence and then murdered any who tried to speak it aloud. The origins of poetry were religious and ecstatic. Poets were one with seers, the bard and the pythoness singing with a single voice. Think, Sisters. Think, Daughters: The power of spiritual frenzy is sufficiently threatening all unto itself, but think of the danger to every enforced system of order should such a mystery again be reunited with intelligent expression—and wake and stretch and move and come alive in a form that is intricate and beautiful, even as it was of old. There are worlds not even we can understand until they have been spoken. Not until we—any of us—recognize that we have said precisely what we mean do we know what we meant, after all.

  EUTERPE The dawn is trickling in at the window, Sisters. Castalia calls.

  TERPSICHORE Oh! We must fly. And we’re not finished.

  THALIA We never are, you know. It’s typical of us. But it’s kept us going for a thousand thousand thousand years.

  EUTERPE I’m glad we helped The Poet a little.

  THALIA More likely drove her frothy.

  CALLIOPE I’m glad we lodged some thoughts with her that might just help the Daughters.

  THALIA More likely make them commit her somewhere for being frothy.

  URANIA There was more business to conduct. We’ll have to take it up next time, I guess. Whether to open the group, for instance. Dogmata still wants awfully to join—

  (During this, THE MUSES are gathering up their veils, flutes, quills, harps, and other signs of office, and making ready to depart)

  ERATO (snarling sweetly) I don’t want to sound unloving, but if Dogmata comes, I go. The next thing, she’ll bring in Jargonē. Why don’t they start their own group?

  EUTERPE (patiently) Because, like everyone else, they want to be in the original Muses. You know how it is. I think we should consciousness-raise on it.

  THALIA Euterpe darling, you think we should consciousness-raise on everything. You thought we should consciousness-raise while Marsyas was being flayed, Arachne transanimated, and Orpheus torn limb from limb. I get dizzy from going “around the room” for fifty centuries.

  (Chattering and teasing, the Muses slowly fade to translucency, then transparency, then invisibility. MELPOMENE alone remains, standing, transparent, still watching THE POET. That human creature has typed her last key and now sits staring at the brightening window square. Finally she reaches out and turns off her desk light. As she does so, another POET stumbles in sleepily, in a bathrobe, rubbing his eyes. She senses his presence and smiles)

  THE POET I’ve had a good night’s work.

  (THALIA glimmers again faintly, glances over at the two poets, and grins. She takes MELPOMENE by the hand and tugs gently. They fade out together. And the Curtain of our consciousness

  FALLS.)

  METAPHYSICAL FEMINISM

  “This possibility: That you are God, and God is You.”

  —CHRISTINE DE PISANE, feminist poet

  and philosopher, c. 1364–1431

  I: APOLOGIA

  LET US STEP off the edge.

  “The basic demands”—they are never basic enough. Nor are we, yet, really demanding them. Which is not to say that they don’t exist, cannot be insisted upon, fought for, won. It’s just that they cannot be defined.

  We can recognize some of them, the most obvious ones: equality before the law, equal pay for equal work, the right to political representation, to education, decent jobs and credit, self-determination over our own bodies—which means access to safe contraception and abortion and the right of sexual preference, satisfactory and affordable child-care facilities which are controlled by the people (including children) who use them, freedom to walk down the street without fear of verbal and/or physical rape. Yet the basic demands include everything—an unpolluted planet, the end of all wars and the elimination of money; reverence for the very young and very old, indifference to pigmentation, height, or weight; no more poverty, ignorance, starvation, despair … the list is endless. And utterly insufficient. We must go beyond what we sense (I am assuming that we already are beyond what we know), and test our perceptions of reality. We must admit the entire cosmos as the ground on which such a search takes place. We must recognize the dissolution of the illusion of linear form. Yet we must go beyond, in effect, at the same time that we embrace the past, and act openly in the present. (Simultaneously to demand equal pay for equal work while questioning what is meant by “pay” and what is meant by “work.” But to demand and question at the same time.)

  How much this needs repeating: I fear being misunderstood, as if I were recommending a withdrawal from political action to some ivory tower of abstract thought. Such simplification has happened before, and the burnt witch fears the fire. Again and again “mass” thinking stops (or is carefully halted) at the patriarchal Either/Or border, and thus never attempts the third possibility, which is no destination in itself but a direction leading toward still further approaches. The third, the synthesis. That earned state of transition from thesis through antithesis. The dialectic. How dangerous to overlook it in others, and how exasperating to have it overlooked in oneself—to have one’s synthetical position on a given issue praised or denounced by thetical or antithetical minds as their own (or each other’s) position!

  Some feminists are disturbed by dialectical terms because Marx used them in his time, although the concepts behind those terms long pre-date Marx; they were used by Socrates, adapted advantageously by Firestone, and can still be helpful as tools with which to analyze the feminist process. For example:

  The Left views feminism as bourgeois, pacifist, and conservative. The Right views feminism as proletarian, violent, and rebellious. Individual feminists, when accused of any of these traits by whichever side their sympathies tend toward, can fall into the trap of denying and explaining: No, we’re really good radicals; No, we’re really respectable citizens. We can forget that the names are actually euphemisms for how both sides really perceive us—shrill, divisive, and threatening. True perceptions, for once.

  Furthermore, the Left is accurate in seeing conservative tendencies among feminists; childbearing and rearing are still so far the responsibility of women, and this responsibility is most easily borne in conditions of stability, where the quantities and qualities are known and the territory familiar. If we thus appear bourgeois in our values it is hardly because we have so much to lose, but because what we do have we cherish with a fierceness that betrays us oftimes into pacifism, particularly since the little we have is usually our children—which generals of red, white, and black armies feel no compunction about drafting, raping, and murdering.

  The Right is also correct in seeing feminism as the epitome of revolution. Indeed, of every NO uttered by an oppressed group to its rulers, there is none more earthshaking than the NO women as a people begin to say to men—across cultural, racial, national boundaries. We are proletarian, the essential proletariat, one might well argue, since we constitute not only the largest exploited group but have endured the model oppression for all other forms, and for the longest time. And our capacity for violence runs deep, surfacing mostly in defense of our children, but nonetheless possible on behalf of ourselves, if challenged beyond toleration.

  So we can see that both the Right and the Left are quite accurate in their analyses. We are what both of them say we are—but most important, we are something more, some third perception, an entirety and integrity which is greater than the sum of any parts they can understand, greater than we ourselves have yet recognized.r />
  This failure of recognition is due in part to our reluctance to examine the dialectical process in our own movement and our own selves. We have been impatient for simple solutions, a yearning which has afflicted all political groups most of the time. But if we do not understand the process, to paraphrase, we are doomed to repeat it (and have). We could, for example, track an individual on a typical dialectical course, remembering that an entire movement can go the same route, step by step:

  Let us say that one may begin by pleading for equality, which seems a logical, fair, and eminently attainable goal (thesis). When the reactions to this plea are not requitedly logical or fair, and when the goal appears less and less attainable, one takes refuge in justifiable anger. This leads to a desire for vengeance, and for power (no longer power equal to but power over). This in turn often expresses itself as separatism, which is a cleverly self-deluding name for collaboration with one’s rulers in their enforcement of one’s own enghettoed state. (“Who wants to be in your old clubhouse anyway! We want our!”—which is where the overlords have intended one to be and where, in fact, one has been all along.) To demand such a self-imposed ghetto is the sole power and source of pride available (see “The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies,” p. 239). Thus one denies being anything at all like one’s oppressors, all the while mirroring more precisely that very image (antithesis). But the ghetto still feels like a ghetto and in time other realizations are borne in upon one, such as the fact that one’s own people, while oppressed, are also human—and possess the capacity for misuse of power as much as any other group. Indeed, the same old grievances—not all attributable to the oppressor—are evident within the separatist ghetto. One becomes more interested in some entirely new definition of power, in exploring how it might be used differently, diversified. At the same time one begins to be less fire-and-brimstone condemnatory of imperfections in oneself and others (at no parallel loss of standards, incidentally), and gains a new respect for the individuality of persons and the composition of relationships. One begins to reject that arbitrary categorizing process which makes of each person a grass root (ready for mowing?). One even begins to be able to acknowledge change on the part of those who have power, when the change is real. This would constitute a synthesis; it is fragile, fraught with dangers of which one is aware, trepidatious, complex, and unclear—but worth it.

  So, one articulates this emerging synthetical position (in an experimental whisper) to one’s movement—and is promptly slammed. “Theticians” applaud one’s return to a rational position and “Antitheticians” denounce one accordingly as a lapsed heretic. Or “Theticians” close ranks suspiciously against this untrustable seeker while “Antitheticians” smile wisely to one another that they know one is being temporarily pragmatic and tactically manipulative. Or vice versa. Sometimes Either and Or unite long enough to accuse one of variance in the ranks, narrowing vision, desertion of the cause, and that old stand-by indictment, liberalism (omigod). Still others might glimpse what one really is implying; they are the ones who rush to declaim that one is, this time, really going too far. One binds up the wounds and proceeds, because every synthesis is only a new thesis, and the process must begin again.

  At this point, then, I am tempted to make a personal plea (knowing that it may do no good whatsoever and knowing, too, that I make it for the last time). A “Goodbye to All That,” saying farewell this time to simplification and intolerance, no matter the source? Perhaps. Like many other women (and even a few men), I’ve suffered my sea changes through art, motherhood, monosexuality, bisexuality, the Left, violence, etc. Some of us have gone at least enough rounds on the spiral, the dialectical turn of the screw, to earn the assumption that we just might be approaching a problem from a complex vantage point and not a Zinjanthropian one. I say earned and I mean that. If, for instance, two artists criticize the way political movements use (or misuse) art, but only one of those two artists has risked difficult years of life-endangering activism in a revolutionary cause, then these two do not criticize, in my opinion, with quite the same right. One has paid her dues and the other hasn’t. Which is another way of saying that criticism which doesn’t spring from commitment (and love?) is not criticism but judgment, arrogant and aloof. Its insights may even be valuable, but they certainly should be regarded with healthy skepticism.

  In certain areas I have earned my synthetical position. It has cost me dearly, and continues to do so whenever I see it being reduced backward to a thesis or antithesis. Nor are my halting attempts on any given subject to be envied, let alone lauded, denounced, or imitated. If recognized at all, they might be seen as steps in the journey of a woman whose peculiar private grief includes having found herself, as an artist, seized by her time and typecast into a political figure (this in a patriarchal culture, don’t forget, where Either/Or presides).

  Thoughts are living things, their movement an active process. To try freezing them so as to make them immortal is to miscomprehend totally their native deathless quality. To settle for two-fold thought when the third possibility shimmers just beyond is to lock oneself forever in the dual system of the paranoid’s tennis court, with oneself as the ball. Such a settlement also is to successfully avoid any ongoing and dismaying confrontation with what freedom might really mean.

  If we are to develop meta-midwifery then, and deliver ourselves and all life into new forms of freedom free even from the terror of freedom, we enter the realm of what I call metaphysical feminism.

  II: THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

  THE USUAL DICTIONARY definition of metaphysics or metaphysical will include such descriptions as: “a division of philosophy which includes ontology and cosmology … of or relating to what is conceived as transcendent, supersensible, or transcendental”—Webster’s III; and “Of or pertaining to ultimate reality or basic knowledge, beyond or above the laws of the physical; transcendental”—Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Webster’s further defines “metaphysical truth” as “the truth of ultimate reality as partly or wholly transcendent of perceived actuality and experiences.”

  Here I must alert the reader to some of the ways in which I do not intend to explore metaphysical concepts. I am not using the word in the Aristotelian sense, nor indeed in any traditional sense of strict philosophical terminology. Metaphysical feminism may or may not “work” on those levels; I welcome sisters better trained in such disciplines than I to pursue that subject.1 I am a poet and so have drawn on the traditions of my own discipline for the feminist purpose: I am using the word “metaphysical” as it pertains to “the metaphysical poets.” Again, it must be made clear that I am not discussing poetry written on metaphysical subjects (such as that of Lucretius, Dante, Blake, Christina Rossetti). Rather, I am referring to the work of those writers whom Dr. Samuel Johnson (of whom more later) termed “metaphysical”—as they have subsequently come to be called generally in English studies: various poets in seventeenth-century England, most notably John Donne, but including others, primarily Marvell, Crashaw, and Herbert. The work of this group, and of Donne in particular has, I think, special relevance for our exploration into the beginnings of metaphysical feminism.

  It should be noted, too, that I do not refer to this approach as a philosophical one (although it is), because for too many people the word “philosophy” is a signal that the issues have now been moved to some illusory higher ground—which means that we are safe from discussing who will take out the garbage, and happily are no longer threatened with anything so mundane as being arrested. Our seventeenth-century poetic template and our own nascent metaphysical feminism do not permit of such self-deluding twaddle. We are always reminded of the real world. “No metaphor … too high, none too low, too triviall.”2 Contrarily, I do not refer to this approach as a pragmatic one (although it is), because for too many people the phrase “practical politics” is tantamount to (1) a caucus meeting, (2) a telephone booth (where the payoff takes place), or (3) a “militant riot.” Again, these excuses a
re inadmissible to the metaphysical knowledge that the means and goals must justify each other—and that every gesture is capable of grace.

  Definitions

  Of metaphysical poetry, Webster’s III says, “highly intellectualized poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression.” But there are better definitions, both for our own purposes and in general.

  In his wise and beautifully written introductory essay to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poetry of the Seventeenth Century,3 H. J. C. Grierson points out that Donne, the “great master” of the metaphysical poets, “is metaphysical not only in virtue of his scholasticism, but by his deep reflective interest in the experiences of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity with which he writes of love and religion.” Grierson goes on to define the work of The Metaphysicals as containing “above all the peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination, which is their greatest achievement. Passionate thinking is always apt to become metaphysical, probing and investigating the experience from which it takes its rise” (italics mine). Still another distinguishing characteristic would be “the double motive, the desire to startle and the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconventional, colloquial speech.” (As Coleridge would later note, rather devastatingly: “The style of the ‘metaphysicals’ is the reverse of that which distinguished too many of our recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.”)