Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  23 The New York Post of August 18, 1976, carried the Associated Press story of a twenty-three-year-old woman, Anneliese Michel of Klingenberg, Germany, who died after having undergone exorcism rites by two Catholic priests. Time magazine (September 6, 1976) also reported and expanded the story. It appears that civil authorities are now investigating the exorcism procedures, which were originally recommended by an eighty-one-year-old local priest who believed Ms. Michel was possessed of demons which sent her into violent seizures. With the permission of Bishop Josef Stangl, two exorcists—Fr. Arnold Renz and Fr. Ernst Alt—were called in. Fr. Renz, not one averse to publicity, claimed during a television appearance that Ms. Michel was possessed by six spirits, including Lucifer, Nero, Judas, Cain, and Adolf Hitler—a case of overkill, one would think. The exorcism rituals continued for ten months; Ms. Michel’s seizures grew more frequent and intense and her weight dropped to seventy pounds. The priests called in no medical assistance. Finally she died, “of malnutrition and dehydration,” according to the medical report. Bishop Stangl told the press that he was considering a church investigation into the “possible negligence” of the priests; he said his decision on this would be forthcoming upon his return from a health-resort holiday.

  Bishop Stangl’s diocese is Würzburg, where in one year alone during the seventeenth century, more than three hundred witches were burned alive for “trafficking with the devil.”

  Further medical background was uncovered about the dead woman, whose seizures had been diagnosed unmysteriously when she was in high school. Anneliese Michel suffered from epilepsy.

  24 The Associated Press recently reported from Istanbul that two orthodox Moslem villagers, Tahir Akcay and Mehmet Veysi, shot and killed their wives for their failure to uphold fasting traditions during the holy month of Ramadan. This was in September of 1976.

  25 Not as new as it might seem, perhaps. In a provocative paper entitled “Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Mystic,” Catherine F. Smith of Bucknell University suggests that the connections between feminism and a mystical tradition extend quite a way back, even though this linkage has been ridiculed, when recognized at all, by male-biased scholarship. She writes: “The patriarchal limitations of mystical thought are not the main point when women writers are concerned. Rather, mysticism has given women a voice, a literary form capable of describing both their reduced condition and their native powers. It has also provided them with an indirect language for protesting sexual politics.” Quoted by permission.

  26 This happened at the end of the keynote speech at the Lesbian Feminist Conference in Los Angeles. The text of that speech begins on page 170 of this book.

  27 “King Zero,” a meditation on patriarchy in Kenneth’s novel The Beholding, at this writing still awaiting publication.

  AFTERWORD: GOING

  “BUT THEN, is metaphysical feminism something we do, or know, or experience, or understand, or practice? Is it a strategy, a perception, an invention? You have scolded us for getting lost but you have given us no maps to go by except the memory of some dead male poets and these damned impenetrable parables.”

  How do I tell you, how do I count the ways? How can I show you, how can you touch it on this flat, inanimate page—black letters white paper block printing how can I curl through this page, this book in your hands, like smoke, and envelop you?

  Right now.

  Right now our spaces intersect, your eyes moving right now over this line there caught you! moving focusing and refocusing ah you touched me no don’t stop don’t falter don’t return to the start of the paragraph good do look and listen we are the woman in the mirror only you and I us private all alone you’ve always known that anyway haven’t you so have I there’s only ever been one of us and that’s sufficient even just one so beautiful is the power of all this grace now can you understand ah yes. Look.

  Far. No, farther. Simultaneously all at once and always happening in the same instant my lips cracking as I try to scream the flames have reached my ankles omigod my god somebody help me they’re burning me alive. She whispers, “Be alert. It will be as you suspect, not as they reassure you, remember that.” Freedom for everyone or freedom for no one. I must get to the bank before three tomorrow. I disown none of my transformations. The tree and the singing bird. Blake you are the honey in my life and K. the salt; he will explain this to you. The taste of coffee cartons and smell of plastic leaves at dawn. Why. Clara Wieck Schumann wrote some of his music but could not go mad for him. Wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voices keening. So it seems I am going to marry K. after all. They murdered her with a broom handle rammed into her vagina and the women didn’t do anything because no one was sure of her sexual preference. Elvira Shatayev died on the winter mountain with her all-woman team; her husband climbed in another storm to find her body. Elizabeth and Robert, Virginia and Leonard, Cathy and Heathcliff. Brigid, Beltane, Lughnassad, Samhain. To be female and conscious is to be in a continual state of rage. My bright hair braceleted about your bone. We are a class, we are a caste, we are a colony, we are a people, we are Vietnam, we are the oceans and forests, we are a world, we are an idea. It’s inherently female, there’s nothing to be done about it. Various failures of me. All lists are helpful. The cleaners are closed on Saturdays in August. What have they done to us? No sheaf of wheat from me on her grave. We are women in a circle, I have been here before. Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth, in childbirth. The faces the voices the meetings the planes. Waiting for a love that will not happen. I am a proud atheist priestess, put that in your cauldrons and smoke it. She says she is sixty years old and was raped every night of her marriage for thirty-five years. The dialectic of personal drama. A good political movement can wear down stone, grain by grain. What grits in my teeth? Sand and Chopin. Uniplicity, duplicity, multiplicity. The proper study of womankind. My cells remember this. We are Harlem and China and Galesburg. My mother is dying. Her sister died. To understand this pain. If only we had changed the paper’s name. Atalanta, Hippolyta, Medea, Clorinda. My madness protects me from their malignancy. We have been the model. Why. What have we done? Her endless proud laughing rutting. She will not die, she will not even cease giving birth to him, herself, worlds, universes, she will not even grant him that one mercy. My shoes are red; he is walking into the ocean. Kneccht. Growing older, knowing it wouldn’t have had to be this way. “Remember the dignity of your womanhood.” To rediscover the words. Self-inflicted. Into whose grave, whose grail can I pour myself if not my own? Good girls never get raped. Their malignancy protects me from my madness. Look, we have a conflict of lifestyles here. Different voices but they sing for all of us. We may as well trust each other, they’re going to try to burn us, anyway. Trust no one. No no no goodbye to all that. Getting ready to die. The hell with you, I’m going out for a walk. And ye shall be free from all slavery. Blake’s perfect mouth, perfectly satisfied, at my perfect breast. You have no right to love your children, it only oppresses them and you. “I incite this meeting to rebellion.” I shall never forget the leech’s hiss, or what he said. I bless this study, I bless our bed, I bless the anguish that proved we would endure. A real bullet look lodged in the podium. How do we avenge our children, our children, as well as ourselves? Entropy and growth. Contradiction. She lay dying in the midst of gray filing cabinets, she was bourgeois. What have I done, my son, my son, that you should hate me so? Each breath a contraction, each exhalation a galaxy. Some Amazon tribes took women as prisoners and enslaved or massacred them—do not buy the cheapest model offered you, my sisters. Greatness is simply a way of life, and it must become so for everyone; that is the meaning of revolution. Charlotte Brontë vomited to death in pregnancy. How his knife gleams in the sun. What if I cannot after all understand her? No wonder Teresa was so cranky, organizing a whole order and levitating at the same time. Her silkworm soul, my spiderwebs, Penelope’s revisions. We’re almost out of milk. The icy Saskatchewan morning and the sultry flat clot
s of air in a Florida noon. Redwood-filtered sunlight, feeling only you. Something beneficent in the universe? I stab him again and again and again. The audience, the questions, the hotel keys. They have self-fulfilling prophecies; we have prophecies fulfilling self. Far, go farther. Rape exists anytime intercourse without The right to a great love the woman’s initiation, initiated into madness, priestesshood. I can see the taxi waiting. A bomb is in the auditorium I’m afraid we must interrupt your speech. Understand me, know me. K. comes out of the bedroom in that dear summery sleep-potty way of his You may not love a man it is incorrect it is a contradiction. For godsake hold your tongue and let me love. And I love contradictions, they make life interesting, let all my contradictions blessedly be yoked by violence together. Together they bound such men with wood at the feet of the witch and called them faggots, only such faggots could kindle a fire foul enough to burn me in. We will be torn from one another and ourselves. The woman in the mirror. You gave me life and now I’ve lost you, something female, your fault, your fault. Susan B. Anthony’s death-bed, Elizabeth’s grave. Thou art the Proclamation and I am the Trumpet. She certainly is charming, with those yellow braids, but why does she carry that axe? The child and the cat understand. The Bach B-Minor Mass. As if the tears of women could save a world. Know me. She never mistakes it for the real thing and is therefore not degraded by it. She will not let him rest until he understands, beholding this, my one desire. He will torture her until she lets him die into rest. No no no. Love is more complex than theory, and all art is an act of frustrated love, all love an act of frustrated fear. I will find you, Little Kay. To be beyond freedom. If I love my people I owe them some truth, art being the harshest truth I can lovingly give them. Thesis. What are we becoming? Vengeance and patience. I never met a universe I didn’t like, because in the end my madness protects me, their malignancy protects me, something beneficent? Antithesis. Dear Blake, welcome to the universe, dear dear Blake, goodbye. Endlessly birthing will she never die enough in childbirth will she never learn. We only as women are alone escaped to tell. My hair going too far silvery my face almost good grief mature how did this happen why, what have I done to them, whose hair is burning? Whose are those faces are they men killing a witch are they revolutionaries executing a poet Why we may as well trust each other. Synthesis. Passionate thinking. Phoenix from its ashes, my ashes, the grains of mytho-poetic-history how can I reach you. Do you understand now. Breathe me in, I am the smoke of your own flesh, the bracelet of bright flame about the ankle. If women are the cosmic work of art then men are our divine fallacy, the gap to let the soul out don’t you see? Is not this the parable of love? If you are still afraid there must be within you a courage unique unto this moment. I love you, K. I am my people, I am come into my power, I am the mirror-blastula reflected in the newest nova. I love you, Blake. My son, my son. If you are this afraid then farther. Here is my hand. Breathe me in. We are dancing in the still-warm ashes of our burnt-away selves, endlessly birthing. Insurrection. Resurrection. Come along now, you too, don’t you think it’s time we started?

  GERMINAL READING LIST

  [Some of these books have been cited in the text; all of them have been important to the development of ideas expressed in Going Too Far.—R.M.]

  Abbott, Sidney, and Love, Barbara. Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. New York: Stein and Day; 1972.

  Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. by Robert Balick. New York: Random House; 1962.

  Bachofen, Johann Jakob. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. by Ralph Manheim, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series LXXXIV); 1967.

  Barrett, Elizabeth. The Complete Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (Cambridge Edition, which includes the complete “Aurora Leigh”); 1900.

  Beard, Mary R. Woman as Force in History. New York: Collier Books; 1962.

  Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. by H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1952. Vintage Books edition; 1974.

  . A Very Easy Death. New York: Warner Paperback Library; 1973.

  Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. New York: New American Library; 1959.

  Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950. New York: Vintage Books; 1974.

  Bird, Caroline, with Sara Welles Briller. Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down. New York: David McKay; 1968.

  Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. London and New York: Paddington Press; 1976.

  Briffault, Robert. The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan; London: Allen and Unwin; 1927.

  . The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins. Abridged to one volume. New York: Macmillan; 1931. Grosset and Dunlap Universal Library Edition, 1963.

  . The Troubadours, ed. by Lawrence F. Koons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1965.

  Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster; 1975.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York: Viking Press; 1969.

  Catt, Carrie Chapman, and Schuler, Nettie Rogers. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1923. Reissued with a new introduction by T. A. Larson; Seattle: University of Washington Press; 1969.

  Chaplin, Dorothea. Anthropological Bonds between East and West. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard; 1938.

  Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday; 1972.

  Cott, Nancy F., ed. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. New York: E. P. Dutton; 1972.

  Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers; 1968. Reissued “With a New Feminist Postchristian Introduction by the Author,” New York: Harper Colophon Books; 1975.

  . Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press; 1973.

  Davis, Elizabeth Gould. The First Sex. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1971.

  Diner, Helen. Mothers and Amazons, trans. and ed. by John Philip Lundin. New York: Julian Press; 1965.

  Donne, John. The Sermons of John Donne. Selected and introduced by Theodore Gill. New York: Living Age Books/Meridian Books; 1958.

  . The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. Introduction and notes by Theodore Redpath. London: Methuen; 1956.

  . The Poems of John Donne, edited, with commentary, by H. J. C. Grierson. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press; 1912.

  Ehrenreich, Barbara, and English, Deirdre. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press (Glass Mountain Pamphlet #2); 1973.

  Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose, edited, with an introduction, by Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1975.

  Ewen, C. L’Estrange, ed. Witch Hunting and Witch Trials. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; 1929.

  Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press; 1968.

  . Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by C. L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press; 1967.

  . A Dying Colonialism, trans. by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press; 1965.

  Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow; 1970.

  Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States. New York: Atheneum; 1970.

  Francoeur, Robert T. Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human Reproduction. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes (A Perpetua Book); 1973.

  Frazer, James G. The New Golden Bough, an abridgment, ed. by Dr. Theodor H. Gaster. New York: Criterion Books; 1959.

  Fritz, Leah. Thinking Like a Woman. Rifton, N.Y.: WIN Books; 1975.

  Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers. Reprinted, New York: Source Book Press; 1970.

  Gardner, Helen. Metaphysical
Poets. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin; 1957.

  Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Reprinted, Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press; 1973.

  . The Home: Its Work and Influence. A reprint of the 1903 edition. Chicago: University of Illinois Press; 1972.

  . The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton Co.; 1911. Reprinted, New York: Source Book Press; 1970.

  Goulianos, Joan, ed. By a Woman Writt: Literature from Six Centuries By and About Women. New York: Bobbs-Merrill; 1973.

  Gransden, K. W. John Donne. London: Longmans, Green; 1954.

  Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1974.

  . The Greek Myths. 2 vols. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin; 1955.

  Grierson, Herbert J. C, ed. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press; 1921.

  Grimstad, Kirsten, and Rennie, Susan, eds. The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (A Woman-Made Book). New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1975.

  Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York; New American Library; 1959.

  Harrison, Jane. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambidge University Press; 2nd edition 1922.

  Hays, H. R. The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1964.

  Herberger, Charles F. The Thread of Ariadne: The Labyrinth of the Calendar of Minos. New York: Philosophical Library; 1972.

  Howe, Florence, and Bass, Ellen, eds. No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Original; 1973.

  Iverson, Lucille, and Ruby, Kathryn. We Become New: Poems by Contemporary Women. New York: Bantam; 1975.

  Jeffers, Robinson. The Women at Point Sur. Boni and Liveright; 1927. Reissued, New York: W. W. Norton; 1976.

  Jenkins, Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Great. New York: Berkeley Medallion Books; 1972.

  Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. London, 1779 and 1781. Reissued in 2 vols. with an introduction by Arthur Waugh. London: Oxford University Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege); 1906 and 1952.